The Sacklers (previously) are a reclusive, super-secretive family of billionaires whose fortune comes from their pharmaceutical company, Purdue Pharmaceuticals, manufacturers of Oxycontin, the drug at the center of the opioid epidemic, which has claimed more American lives than the Vietnam war, with the death-toll still mounting. Read the rest
Kids are bigger bullies in counties that voted for the incoherent mobster.
NPR reports:
Read the restAfter the 2016 presidential election, teachers across the country reported they were seeing increased name-calling and bullying in their classrooms. Now, research shows that those stories — at least in one state — are confirmed by student surveys.
Francis Huang of the University of Missouri and Dewey Cornell of the University of Virginia used data from a school climate survey taken by over 150,000 students across Virginia. They looked at student responses to questions about bullying and teasing from 2015 and 2017. Their findings were published Wednesday in Educational Researcher, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association.
What Kids Think About Bullying And Kindness In The Trump Era In the 2017 responses, Huang and Cornell found higher rates of bullying and certain types of teasing in areas where voters favored Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
Seventh- and eighth-graders in areas that favored Trump reported bullying rates in spring 2017 that were 18 percent higher than students living in areas that went for Clinton. They were also 9 percent more likely to report that kids at their schools were teased because of their race or ethnicity.
In the 2015 data, there were "no meaningful differences" in those findings across communities, the researchers wrote.
Politico spoke to four former congressional staffers who'd been assigned to Rep. Tom Garrett [R-VA] who say that the Congressman and his wife treated the staff as "personal servants," demanding that they run personal errands for the Congressman and his family (including handling his dog's feces), and that they were expected to do these things at all hours. Read the rest
You know things are ugly in the Roy Moore camp when they start shoving journalists from Fox News, of all outlets. The camera crew was trying to get a shot of Moore as he entered through a side entrance at a rally in Alabama. Big bruisers came out to put an end to the publicity.
Video game company Atlus just sent a copyright takedown over the Patreon page for open source Playstation 3 emulator RPCS3, by invoking section 1201 of the DMCA, which makes it a felony punishable by 5 years in prison and a $500,000 fine to bypass DRM. Read the rest
U.S. Presidential candidate Ben Carson sure is one wacky guy. Read the rest
Larkin Jones is a hardcore Pokemon fan who loses money every year on his annual Pokemon PAX party; he makes up the shortfall from his wages managing a cafe. This year, Pokémon Company International sued him and told him that even though he'd cancelled this year's party, they'd take everything he had unless he paid them $5,400 in a lump sum (they wouldn't let him pay it in installments). Read the rest
Frank Wu writes, "Brianna Wu is a game developer and a frequent writer about gender issues in tech. As such, she frequently receives harassing, unpleasant emails. She got pissed off and wrote an awesome response to one here."
I got a harassing email today, and decided to respond with this letter.
(Thanks, Frank!) Read the rest
One of the operators of Doctor Who Media -- one of the oldest, most respected Doctor Who fansites -- had reps from the Federation Against Copyright Theft (who produce the awful "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" ads) and the BBC thunder at his door and tell him he'd be served with a warrant if he didn't shut down the site immediately and transfer his domain to FACT. Read the rest
King Games, makers of Candy Crush, have backed down from their insane campaign to trademark the use of "Candy" in connection with games, a gambit that brought them ridicule and opprobrium (for example, a game jam where all the games made use of "candy"), not least because the company bullied competitors who had created candy-themed games years before Candy Crush came to market. However, the company still asserts a trademark over the use of the word "saga" in connection with games, and is trying to shut down The Banner Saga. Read the rest
