This planned riot, with its destruction of property and looting in protest of an oppressive government, is celebrated by the same people who think the people who caused this riot need to be shot dead in the street like mad dogs.

Same sex marriage isn't gay privilege. It's equal rights. Privilege would be something like gay people not paying tax. Like churches don't.

Source: Ricky Gervais, on Facebook

I'll stick with Chicken Of The Sea.

Bumble Bee Foods and two managers were charged by Los Angeles prosecutors Monday with violating safety regulations in the death of a worker who was cooked in an industrial oven with tons of tuna.

Jose Melena was performing maintenance in a 35-foot-long oven at the company's Santa Fe Springs plant before dawn Oct. 11, 2012, when a co-worker, who mistakenly believed Melena was in the bathroom, filled the pressure cooker with 12,000 pounds of canned tuna and it was turned on.

https://twitter.com/TonyMiano/status/591971536870871041

Give this pretty song a quick listen.

If you go to YouTube and look at the related videos, you'll see that it has generated a bunch of YouTube covers by school choirs. For obvious reasons, it's popular with choirs - even though all those harmonies in the song are the same person, multi-tracked.

OK, but what's the song about?

Here are the lyrics:

Somebody hears you. you know that. you know that.
Somebody hears you. you know that inside.
Someone is learning the colors of all your moods, to
(say just the right thing and) show that you’re understood.
Here you’re known.

Leave your life open. you don’t have. you don’t have.
Leave your life open. you don’t have to hide.
Someone is gathering every crumb you drop, these
(mindless decisions and) moments you long forgot.
Keep them all.

Let our formulas find your soul.
We’ll divine your artesian source (in your mind),
Marshal feed and force (our machines will)
To design you a perfect love—
Or (better still) a perfect lust.
O how glorious, glorious: a brand new need is born.

Now we possess you. you’ll own that. you’ll own that.
Now we possess you. you’ll own that in time.
Now we will build you an endlessly upward world,
(reach in your pocket) embrace you for all you’re worth.

Is that wrong?
Isn’t this what you want?
Amen.

It starts out like a pretty standard sappy love song. But once you get past the first couple of verses, you might suspect that this might not be a song about hope and love and your precious fragile soul. It gets a lot darker: sounds almost jealous, possessive, sinister. But there's something else in there: formulas, design, need, lust, pocket, your worth. What's all that about?

It's a song about data mining and targeted advertising. Axicom makes software that reads your online email and figures out what you like so that advertisers can show you ads. This song was written by a former Axicom employee.

So, is the joke on the choirs who maybe don't know what they're singing about - they just think it's a love song with pretty harmonies? Or is the joke on audiences who don't have time to figure out what the lyrics are really about and think they're just hearing a pretty love song? Or is the joke on Axicon? Or is it on all of us who are willing to put our correspondence through Axicom's algorithms?

via David Byrne.

When we first tested dietary supplements in animal models we found that the results were promising," says Byers. "Eventually we were able to move on to the human populations. We studied thousands of patients for ten years who were taking dietary supplements and placebos."

The results were not what they expected.

"We found that the supplements were actually not beneficial for their health. In fact, some people actually got more cancer while on the vitamins," explains Byers.

Gillian Welch explains how April 14^th came to be "Ruination Day" - the song in the post below.

Atrios:

But, Back In My Day, nobody got paid minimum working for fast food restaurants, at least in my location (Philly burbs). Nobody I knew in high school, at age 16, had any problem finding a job which paid $6-7/hour, including working at fast food restaurants and call survey centers. That's about $12-14, adjusting for inflation.

All of my high-school jobs were minimum wage, or pennies above. Which, at the time was $4.35 or thereabouts. Upstate NY, late 80s. I worked in retail clothing, department stores, fast food places, a mall sit-down restaurant, the local amusement park, mowed lawns, was an under the table janitor, and finally at an ice factory.

It wasn't until college that I got a job that paid more than minimum wage: working as an aide in the RIT computer labs.

The scientific name for the sugar glider (a possum that can glide like a flying squirrel) is petaurus breviceps. It means "short-headed rope-dancer".

Which is my new favorite phrase.