SoylentNews

Millennial Couple Bikes Through ISIS Territory to Prove ‘Humans Are Kind’ and Gets Killed

"Evil is a make-believe concept we've invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans."

An idealistic young American couple was killed in an Islamic State-claimed terrorist attack last month while on a cycling trip around the world.

Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, who were both in their late 20s, last year quit their office jobs in Washington, DC, to embark on the journey. Austin, a vegan who worked for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Geoghegan, a vegetarian who worked in the Georgetown University admissions office, decided that they're were wasting their lives working.

"I’ve grown tired of spending the best hours of my day in front of a glowing rectangle, of coloring the best years of my life in swaths of grey and beige,” Austin wrote on his blog before he quit. “I’ve missed too many sunsets while my back was turned. Too many thunderstorms went unwatched, too many gentle breezes unnoticed.”

Read more here: https://www.pluralist.com/posts/1824-millennial-couple-bikes-through-isis-territory-to-prove-humans-are-kind-and-gets-killed

The couple's "joint blog" here: http://www.simplycycling.org/

Perhaps these two should have gone to Sunday School more often, where they might have learned the Lord's Prayer.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of death, I will fear no evil, for I am the evilest motherfucker in the valley!

Oh well - rest in pieces, you dumb fucks!

However, Austin and Geoghegan's dream trip came to a tragic and gruesome end when they got to Tajikistan, a country with a known terrorist presence. They were riding their bikes through the country on July 29 when a car rammed them, ​​according to CBS News. Five men got out of the car and stabbed the couple to death along with two other cyclists, one from Switzerland and the other from the Netherlands.

Two days later, ISIS released a video showing the same men sitting in front of the black ISIS flag. They looked at the camera and vowed to kill "disbelievers," ​according to The New York Times.

Some conservatives have framed the tragedy as a cautionary tale about not just the perils of travel but also naivete in general. In their telling, an overly generous understanding of human nature is behind much of today's progressive movement, including calls to radically scale back immigration enforcement and policing and support for socialism.

Some liberals, for their part, might view Austin and Geoghegan as martyrs in the struggle for a better world, or simply as unfortunate.

Coverage varies with other news outlets:

https://iotwreport.com/wapo-asks-if-murdered-pollyanna-millennial-couple-were-naive/

https://www.app.com/story/news/world/2018/08/08/jay-austin-lauren-geoghegan-isis-tajikistan-simply-cycling/935093002/

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/07/world/asia/islamic-state-tajikistan-bike-attack.html

Charles Darwin isn't commenting on this story.

Mrs Turgid and I went for a holiday in the USA this year. I've never been before, but she has, since she has an aunt who lives in Portland, Oregon.

Since we were going to the USA, I decided that we really must visit the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on the way, so we flew from London to Orlando via Dublin. The most stressful part of the trip was Dublin airport. You have to collect your boarding pass for the second leg of the flight in the airport and they're pretty laid back at the desk in spite of schedules and deadlines. Then you have to go through US immigration. That wouldn't be so bad if you hadn't waited an age to get your boarding pass.

I was lucky and got selected for extra security. Oh boy, did I get security. Luckily the fellow doing it was very jolly and Mrs Turgid remarked that he was now on more intimate terms with me than she was.

The immigration officer was very efficient and being an idiot and tired and flustered I forgot what day I was leaving the USA which did not impress him very much. When going to the USA the immigration officers are mostly interested in how and when you will be leaving the USA. Remember that to make your immigration experience as painless and quick as possible.

On the flight, as we landed I got an interesting earworm, "Living With a Hernia" by Weird Al. The first song on the radio in the taxi on the way from the airport to the hotel in Orlando was "Living In America!" Spooky?

The Kennedy Space Center was the coolest thing I have ever seen and I saw two alligators. We had lunch with an astronaut! That was a very pleasant surprise that Mrs Turgid had arranged. We saw space shuttle Atlantis and we did weep. We also had a long bus tour of the site, including many launch pads. We saw the VAB and pads 39A and 39B. I also noticed a building which said on the side "Home of the X37-B." The tour guide didn't mention that.

After the tours we wandered round until we saw the Saturn V. Now I can die a happy man.

After three nights in Orlando (which was very hot and humid, but with plentiful and cheap food) we went via Atlanta to Portland, Oregon to stay with auntie and her husband. Oregon, and the Pacific Northwest, is beautiful. On the plane we saw Mount Hood, Mt Ranier and Mt St Helens.

Portland is a lovely place, and Oregon is full of Pentiums such as Willamette, Yamhill, Deschutes, you name it. They also make lots of very excellent wine and beer. There are lagers, wheat beers, amber ales, stouts, porters... and they all taste of something good. The food's great too. I made the mistake of ordering side orders in the pub. There was enough to feed a family of four.

We went to the beach at Lincoln City for a few nights. I put my feet in the Pacific Ocean and it was cold (Scotland cold).

On the way back from Lincoln City we stopped at the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum where I saw the Spruce Goose, an SR-71B, X-15, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo 16, V1, V2, Goddard's rocket, all kinds of weird helicopters...

We drove along the Columbia river, went to Timberline Lodge on Mt Hood, went to Multnomah Falls, went into Washington State etc.

Mrs Turgid and I also went to Seattle by train for a couple of nights. I know people like to berate American trains, but by modern British standards they are sheer luxury.

Seattle is pretty cool. We stayed in a hotel near the Space Needle and very close by was a pub called the Teku Tavern which had hundreds of kinds of excellent beers and ciders. We went on a tour about the old town called Beneath the Streets. We also found a really cool shop called Utilikilts which is a gentlemen's outfitters specialising in kilts for the physically active and strident working man. Unfortunately I did not have enough money left to buy a Utilikilt, having just bought a laptop. They don't seem to have invented the Buiness Kilt yet. I think I might send them an email.

We didn't go up the Space Needle, but we went up the Smith Tower, which made me seasick and I had to take a pint of ale to steady my nerves.

There was also a long-haired dude wearing a bandana driving a Pontiac Firebird with the roof off, with tiger skin seat covers and loud music.

Conclusion: American beer is good, American food is not too bad if you choose wisely, the weather's hot, sometimes hot and humid, and no one tried to shoot me. And they went to the Moon, in peace, for all mankind.

As they say in Portland, Oregon, "In our America love wins."

A Long-Lost Marilyn Monroe Nude Scene Was Just Discovered

It’s taken decades, but researchers have finally found Marilyn Monroe‘s long-lost nude scene from the 1961 film The Misfits. [...] In the lost scene, Monroe and Clark Gable kiss, and he leaves. Then, things get particularly racy when Monroe drops the bedsheet covering her naked body. According to Deadline, this scene is historic: if left in the film, it would have been the first nude scene by an American actress in a major motion picture. Director John Huston later cut the nude scene because he believed that it wasn’t necessary to the story, but Frank Taylor saved the footage because of its importance (or maybe for, uh, personal reasons).

[...] Taylor has not yet decided what to do with the lost footage, so don’t expect Monroe’s nude scene to end up on YouTube any time soon.

Submit it to the Library of Sexual Congress for "preservation" or GTFO.

New tape shows Trump campaign aides discussing possibility of N-word tape

The use of "dog" to describe Manigault Newman, who was the highest ranking African-American in Trump's White House during her tenure, did little to dampen the renewed allegations of racism against the President.

Some of his top aides rushed to defend him, claiming they'd never witnessed him use racist language in their interactions.

"I've been around @realDonaldTrump publicly & privately for 25yrs. I've NEVER ONCE - EVER - have heard him say the disgusting & terrible word that the Opportunistic Wacky Omarosa claims," wrote Dan Scavino, Trump's longtime social media director.

Breakthrough: Trump close to calling his critics "bitch-ni**as".

Jack Whitehall faces backlash as Disney's 'first gay man'

Jack Whitehall has received backlash online after news broke that he'd been cast as Disney's first major gay character in Jungle Cruise.

The comedian wrote that he was "honoured" to be a part of the 2019 film, and it was later reported that he would be playing an openly gay man.

The news has led some people to ask why a gay actor wasn't cast for the role.

"Could they seriously not pick someone actually gay?" one person tweeted.

Others have argued that hiring gay actors to exclusively play gay roles is "typecasting".

15 years ago, or maybe last year, this headline would have had a very different meaning. But it's 2018.

Related: ScarJo Cast as a Transgender Man, Outrage Ensues

A recent (off-topic?) discussion touching on Sci-Fi revealed to me that some people see hope and promise in science fiction stories. Those people don't see the warnings, it would seem. To me, science fiction has always been filled with dire warnings.

We recently discussed Ms. Le Guin, when she passed away. https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=18/01/25/011250
More about her here: http://www.ursulakleguin.com/UKL_info.html

I must admit that I wasn't a "fan" - that is, I didn't read everything she wrote, and wait impatiently for her to write more. But, yes, I did read some of her work. I've been reading a little more of her work, since her death. And, that work is filled with dire warnings!

The Diary of the Rose tells about a psychiatric doctor (Rosa), with access to some really marvelous technology, which helps her to see into the minds of her patients. Rosa spends her early career working with children, and people with truly disabling problems. Rosa is engrossed in psychiatric problems, diagnosis, and prognosis. She is the doctor's doctor - everything is about making people healthy, or at least as healthy as possible.

Then, Rosa is brought her first political prisoner. Of course, Rosa isn't aware that he IS a political prisoner. She is only told that he has to be "fixed". Unaware that the diagnosis and prognosis has already been determined, Rosa gets into Sorde's (the patient) head. She is shocked to learn that there is really nothing wrong with Sorde. But, as she learns more, both she and Sorde know exactly where "therapy" will lead, and where it will end. The patient's mind must be destroyed!

The story is scary, in that, it doesn't so much "predict" real life in some future dystopia, as it reports on real life in the modern world. In much of the world in the past few hundred years, it would be political suicide to imprison, then execute a political dissident. But, having that same dissident "hospitalized" for some form of "insanity" can be expedient.

Oh, there is indeed some "science" in this fiction. The tools that Rosa has to work with are amazing. But, the story would be much the same with or without those tools. The psychiatric doctor is being used to effectively euthanize a potential political dissident.

I do invite people to get acquainted with Le Guin. Further, I invite those people to extrapolate some of today's technology into her stories. 24/7 surveillance? Genetic mapping? Digital mapping of the brain? The deeper we dig into who and what we are, as people, the closer Rosa's diagnostic tools come to reality.

I haven't been a Le Guin fan in the past, but I am becoming one.

For those who might search for this story - it is part of Volume 1 of the 'Where on Earth' collection of short stories. It may or may not be published in other anthologies, but this is where I found it.

Enjoy!

Charlottesville remembered: 'A battle for the soul of America'

It could only happen in the birthplace of Christian Weston Chandler.

I bought a laptop with an AMD Ryzen 7 2700U CPU incorporating a Vega 10 GPU, an Acer Swift 3. It has 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. Unfortunately the RAM is not upgradable but when the SSD breaks I will be able to remove it and replace it with spinning rust.

I've got Slackware-current running on it with kernel 4.17.14. It came with Windows 10 but that has been removed. In fact I managed to set it up without ever booting into Windows. When you power it up, you must press F2 to get into the BIOS. Obviously, you can avoid ever starting Windows if you press F2 quickly enough on first power up.

I made a USB boot stick for installing Slackware-current, It's actually not that hard. I began by using Alien Bob's local Slackware mirror script on my main PC to get the latest Slackware-current and to create the installation DVD .iso image. It downloaded many gigabytes of data, so took quite a while even on my reasonable (80Mbit) Internet connection.

I found some useful instructions and some boot files for making a Slackware UEFI USB boot stick. Short story: use gdisk to partition the stick with two partitions, the first being 100M in size, the second being the rest of the stick. The first has to has a type of 0xEF00 and the second 0x8300. Then you put a vfat filesystem on the first. It tells you to put an ext4 FS on the second but I'm not sure that's necessary. You need to create a directory in the first partition called EFI and under it a subdirectory called something like Slackware. Copy the files as directed at the above link into the EFI/Slackware subdir and sync the disks. You can also have a subdir called Boot which the firmware recognises specially as a default, and there is a naming convention for the files that go in there. Google is your friend.

When making a USB boot stick for a pre-UEFI system you need to run isohybrid on the .iso installation image. I did that here too. (Is this necessary for UEFI? It didn't do any harm.) dd the slackware-current .iso into the second partition of the USB stick.

Plug the stick into the laptop and power cycle, pressing F2 quickly to avoid booting any existing OS.

The firmware (BIOS) is UEFI and has Secure Boot. Before you can tell it to boot something other than Windows, you have to set a master password in the firmware. When you have done that you can change the priority of the boot devices and add the new boot loaders to the menu, after deleting the existing Windows ones.

Make sure that the USB stick is the first preference of boot device in the UEFI menus and remove the hard disk if possible so you can't accidentally boot Windows.

Reboot the machine, and hit F12 for a boot menu. Hopefully, the USB stick should be there. Select it and the familiar Slackware installation should start.

At this point you can make a backup of your Windows image in case you ever need to take the machine back for a warranty repair or sell it on to someone who needs Windows. I backed up my pristine uninstalled Windows image using dd from the command line and dumping the data onto an external USB hard disk. Piped through gzip the 256GB disk image compressed down to about 12GB. (There was a stuck pixel on the screen and I was glad I did this since I had to take it back to the store for a replacement).

Installing Slackware-current was very simple. I partitioned the SSD with gdisk to have three partitions, a 100MB UEFI boot partition (vfat), a Linux swap partition (8GB) and a Linux partition (the rest of the disk ext4). The installer said "Slackware 14.1" but that's because of the root disk image on the boot disk. I installed the complete distribution and rebooted. It worked, with eight penguins at the top of the screen.

When I say "it worked" it did, keyboard, touchpad and built-in WiFi. The kernel (4.14.56) that came with Slackware-current wasn't new enough to see the Vega GPU, so X would not run.

I downloaded the latest (at the time) stable kernel (4.17.8) and did a "make oldconfig" using the kernel configuration file from the slackware-current that I had installed. There were hundreds of new options and most of them were mysterious or irrelevant, so I just selected things as modules where I was unsure. I selected the support for the new AMD GPUs. Through poking around in /sys I noted that the touchpad was an Elan something and the WiFi chip was an Atheros 10k (driver ath10k_pci). I rebuilt the kernel and modules, but the new bzImage in /boot/EFI/Slackware and put a new entry in /boot/EFI/Slackware/elilo.conf for it and did a make modules_install. On rebooting the machine, I hit TAB to get the elilo menu and selected my new kernel. I was then able to get X up and running with a UK keyboard and the touchpad.

It turns out that to do a middle button click on the touchpad you have to put the tips of three fingers down and then push down to click. It takes a bit of practise...

By the way, I've been using it for three weeks and it's never swapped yet. It also has a fingerprint reader. I believe they are useless and will not even try to get it working.

There are a couple of problems, though. It intermittently hangs on boot when the kernel tries to switch from UEFI VGA to the AMD GPU driver (the open source one) and the machine locked up hard when watching a video in Palemoon. It wasn't on the network so I couldn't try to ssh. I had to power cycle it.

Next we shall see how SETI@Home runs on it.

She’s the world’s top empathy researcher. But colleagues say she bullied and intimidated them

Tania Singer, a celebrated neuroscientist and director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, is known as one of the world’s foremost experts on empathy. In her research, she has sought to demonstrate that meditation can make people more kind and caring. The title of a profile of Singer written by this reporter in 2013 summed up her public image: Concentrating on Kindness.

But inside her lab, it was a very different story, eight former and current colleagues say in interviews with Science. The researchers, all but one of whom insisted on remaining anonymous because they feared for their careers, describe a group gripped by fear of their boss. “Whenever anyone had a meeting with her there was at least an even chance they would come out in tears,” one colleague says.

Singer, one of the most high-profile female researchers in the Max Planck Society (MPG), sometimes made harsh comments to women who became pregnant, multiple lab members told Science. “People were terrified. They were really, really afraid of telling her about their pregnancies,” one former colleague says. “For her, having a baby was basically you being irresponsible and letting down the team,” says another, who became a mother while working in Singer’s department.

[...] In a plan presented to the researchers on 25 July, MPG said it would separate Singer from her current colleagues and allow her to set up a new, smaller research group in Berlin for 2 to 3 years while the postdocs and Ph.D. students in Leipzig finish their projects and move on. (The Leipzig group, which once numbered more than 20 scientists, has dwindled to just five.) She would then return to her lab.

“It appears the Max Planck Society decided it would rather sacrifice another generation of students than risk a scandal,” says one former colleague. Asked how MPG would ensure that future students are treated better, a spokesperson says details of the plan are still being discussed.

[...] [Colleagues] say working with Singer was always difficult. She wanted to be in control of even the most minute research details but was often not available to discuss them. In-person meetings could quickly turn into a nightmare, one colleague says: “She gets extremely emotional and when that turns dark it is terrifying.” Another co-worker describes what happened after he told Singer some people in her group were unhappy: “She was very hurt by this and started crying and screaming,” he says. “It escalated to the extent that she left the room and went door to door in the institute in our department, crying, yelling to the people in the room ‘Are you happy here?’ When she came back, she said: ‘I just asked and everyone said they’re happy so it’s obviously you that’s the problem.’” (A colleague who says he was present corroborates the story.)

Almost every current or former lab member brought up Singer’s treatment of pregnant women; the issue was also on a list of grievances, shared with Science, that lab members say they drew up after a meeting with the scientific advisory board in February 2017 to record what was said. “Pregnancy and parental leave are received badly and denied/turned into accusations,” the notes say.

How Goop's Haters Made Gwyneth Paltrow's Company Worth $250 Million: Inside the growth of the most controversial brand in the wellness industry. (archive)

On a Monday morning in November, students at Harvard Business School convened in their classroom to find Gwyneth Paltrow. She was sitting at one of their desks, fitting in not at all, using her phone, as they took their seats along with guests they brought to class that day — wives, mothers, boyfriends. Each seat filled, and some guests had to stand along the back wall and sit on the steps. The class was called the Business of Entertainment, Media and Sports. The students were there to interrogate Paltrow about Goop, her lifestyle-and-wellness e-commerce business, and to learn how to create a "sustainable competitive advantage," according to the class catalog.

She moved to the teacher's desk, where she sat down and crossed her legs. She talked about why she started the business, how she only ever wanted to be someone who recommended things. When she was in Italy, on the set of "The Talented Mr. Ripley," she'd ask someone on the crew about, say, where the best gelato was. When she was in London, on the set of "Shakespeare in Love," she asked a crew member where to find the best coffee; in Paris, she asked an extra where to find the best bikini wax; in Berlin, the massage you can't miss. She wasn't just curious. She was planning this the whole time. The first iteration of the company was only these lists — where to go and what to buy once you get there — via a newsletter she emailed out of her kitchen, the first one with recipes for turkey ragù and banana-nut muffins. One evening, at a party in London, one of the newsletter's recipients, a venture capitalist named Juliet de Baubigny, told her, "I love what you're doing with Goop." G.P., as she is called by nearly everyone in her employ, didn't even know what a venture capitalist was. She was using off-the-shelf newsletter software. But De Baubigny became a "godmother" to Paltrow, she said. She encouraged her vision and "gave permission" to start thinking about how to monetize it.

[...] G.P. didn't want to go broad. She wanted you to have what she had: the $795 G. Label trench coat and the $1,505 Betony Vernon S&M chain set. Why mass-market a lifestyle that lives in definitional opposition to the mass market? Goop's ethic was this: that having beautiful things sometimes costs money; finding beautiful things was sometimes a result of an immense privilege; but a lack of that privilege didn't mean you shouldn't have those things. Besides, just because some people cannot afford it doesn't mean that no one can and that no one should want it. If this bothered anyone, well, the newsletter content was free, and so were the recipes for turkey ragù and banana-nut muffins.

[...] A gynecologist and obstetrician in San Francisco named Jen Gunter, who also writes a column on reproductive health for The Times, has criticized Goop in about 30 blog posts on her website since 2015. A post she wrote last May — an open letter that she signed on behalf of "Science" — generated more than 800,000 page views. She was angry about all the bad advice she had seen from Goop in the last few years. She was angry that her own patients were worried they'd given themselves breast cancer by wearing underwire bras, thanks to an article by an osteopath who cited a much-debunked book published in 1995. Gunter cited many of Goop's greatest hits: "Tampons are not vaginal death sticks, vegetables with lectins are not killing us, vaginas don't need steaming, Epstein Barr virus (E.B.V.) does not cause every thyroid disease and for [expletive] sake no one needs to know their latex farmer; what they need to know is that the only thing between them and H.I.V. or gonorrhea is a few millimeters of latex, so glove that [expletive] up."

But something strange happened. Each of these pronouncements set off a series of blog posts and articles and tweets that linked directly to the site, driving up traffic. At Harvard, G.P. called these moments "cultural firestorms." "I can monetize those eyeballs," she told the students. Goop had learned to do a special kind of dark art: to corral the vitriol of the internet and the ever-present shall we call it cultural ambivalence about G.P. herself and turn them into cash. It's never clickbait, she told the class. "It's a cultural firestorm when it's about a woman's vagina." The room was silent. She then cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled, "VAGINA! VAGINA! VAGINA!" as if she were yodeling.

Who would hate on a pseudoscientific goop-peddling succubus with steam-cleaned nether regions (and an egg)?

Previously: NASA Disputes Origins of Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop "Healing Stickers"

Original Submission