Official BBO Hijacked Thread Thread

[diana_eva]

 

WHY SHOULD YOU SIGN UP?

All these years your minorityness has just been sitting dormant with no possibility of being monetized. With the sharing economy opening up a whole new world in which everything can be monetized, we'd like to put your skin colour/gender/sexuality/religion to work!

 

 

 

ARE YOU ELIGIBLE?

Your minority-ness must be evident in photographs. So we're not interested in anyone who simply considers themselves to be from a disadvantaged socioeconomic background. When it comes to disabilities we are really only interested in good-looking people in wheelchairs. You must also be an "assimilated" minority who laughs sportingly along at offensive jokes rather than saying anything awkward -- remember who's paying you!

 

http://rentaminority.com/

[y66]

From Philip Galanes Feb 27 interview with Lupita Nyong'o and Trevor Noah:

 

http://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/02/28/fashion/28TABLE-SUB/28TABLE-SUB-master675-v5.jpg

 

LN: We’re at this interesting moment when prejudice is in the subconscious a lot of the time. Where prejudice occurs before you’ve even had a conscious thought. The laws have changed, but now the battle is with the mind. And that’s much harder to get to.

 

TN: Especially when people feel attacked. People are always asking me, “Why aren’t you angry?” Because I grew up in a world where being an angry black person got you nowhere. It got you shot or arrested. There’s a place for anger, but you can get so much further with diplomacy and empathy. You have to feel for the other person, even if you think they’re completely wrong. And they think the same about you.

 

PG: But it seems unfair: being discriminated against and having to point it out gently.

 

TN: Freedom is hard work.

 

LN: And change only comes when the conversation is happening in all forms at all times. Not just one tactic is going to do it. It’s got to be a convergence.

 

PG: Not like the way we only talk about #OscarsSoWhite in February? Or gun violence after a mass shooting?

 

TN: That’s a function of the way we consume information. The media needs to move on or people won’t click. When I talk to journalists about how they get rated now, it’s not how good they are, it’s how many people click on their stories. You can’t write about an important issue every day because people will click on it less and less. It’s, what’s next?

 

LN: And sensation sells.

 

TN: But you know the irony of #OscarsSoWhite? If you were talking with two white people, they would get to discuss their achievements, their hopes and dreams, maybe a passion project. But we can’t not talk about the Oscars, or we get, “Don’t you care?” But if we do, we get, “Is that all you talk about?” It’s a vicious cycle.

 

LN: I feel like clapping and singing right now! You said that just right. It cuts down on human experience.

 

PG: Then let’s turn to your work: In “12 Years” and “Eclipsed,” you played characters that were truly pitiable. But I never pitied them; you took me someplace else.

 

LN: What attracted me to both projects was the agency of those characters. At first glance, they look like victims. But the writing offers them complexity. They’re deep. They have likes, strong dislikes, needs, fears. And as an actor, I’m always looking for that. Those are the things I need to hook onto. Because sympathy is not nearly as interesting as empathy. There’s so much more to learn by stepping into someone’s shoes than by saying “poor you” from a safe distance.

 

PG: It’s the same in comedy. You say some awful things, but we’re right there with you. Is it the laughter?

 

TN: It’s the reason doctors use laughing gas. It’s your body protecting you.

 

LN: From the pain.

 

TN: You laugh until you cry. People understand that once you step into a comic space, there is complete honesty — without judgment. And there are fewer and fewer places where we can be honest without repercussion. People are afraid of being attacked for their opinions. But what comedy does is bring us together: “Here’s the truth. Here’s how I feel.” And all of a sudden, you feel the audience going: “Yes, yes. I thought I was the only one.”

 

PG: Growing up under apartheid, were you in a big rush to tell the truth?

 

TN: Not really. We just love making people laugh. It’s an African thing: sitting around, talking as much trash as you can, getting people to laugh hard.

 

PG: But, Trevor, you had an extreme setup: a black mother and a white father who weren’t allowed to mix — legally.

 

TN: My story isn’t a pity story. It wasn’t a world of pity. We were in our lives.

 

LN: That’s the way you preserve your dignity.

 

TN: I thought I was lucky because I knew who my dad was. I knew kids who didn’t know their dad. True, I didn’t have access to him, but I knew how he felt. My mom was like: “Jesus didn’t have his dad, either. You have a stepdad.” People always make it seem like there’s one experience that’s the gold standard to aim for. I didn’t grow up that way.

 

LN: Neither did I. I think it came from watching TV from around the world. I knew there was my way and all the other ways.

 

TN: Did you ever see kids running upstairs in sitcoms and wonder what that was like?

 

LN: What I loved was when they walked in the front door and took off their coats. I loved those coats.

 

TN: Coats and stairs. I couldn’t believe a second floor was a real thing.

 

TN: One of the best things I ever learned was boxing. My trainer kept drilling into me: “Understand that I’m going to hit you in the face. You can’t get angry about it because then you’ll stop thinking rationally. I’m not trying to hurt you; I’m trying to win.” It’s a fantastic mind game. You have to think.

 

LN: You can’t let your emotions get the better of you. And if you’re on a winning streak, the last thing you want to do is pat yourself on the back.

 

TN: Not too happy, not too sad.

 

PG: But you’re both describing a world where you control your emotions. How about when your feelings get hurt or you feel jealous?

 

TN: Then you work harder.

 

PG: Let’s end with something surreal: You were not considered beautiful as children.

 

TN: God, no! I was the most nerdy, strange-looking kid. Big feet, ears sticking out. No question of girls. There was no question of asking one to the prom.

 

LN: I got stood up at my prom. He didn’t show up.

 

PG: And not beautiful?

 

LN: I was always confident, but I shed my tears. They told me I was too dark for TV. But I came to accept myself. And a lot of that had to do with Alek Wek, the way she was embraced by the modeling industry. Oprah telling her how beautiful she was. I was like, “What is going on here?” It was very powerful. Something in my subconscious shifted. That’s why this conversation is so important — because it burns possibility into people’s minds.

 

TN: I wish I could rewrite “The Ugly Duckling.” Because after the ugly duckling becomes a swan, people go around dumping on the swan, saying, “Oh, you swan, you don’t know what it’s like to be an ugly duckling.”

 

LN: I used to be teased and teased. They called me black mamba, awful names.

 

TN: Now they act like we’ve had it easy all our lives. I can’t help that my face fixed itself.

 

LN: You know what I gained? Compliments never grow old. They’re delightful every time.

[Winstonm]

It is not Islam that is the enemy but the belief systems the give rise to superstition. The real difference between Christianity and Islam is that the culture in which Christianity thrives no longer tolerates Christian terrorism. Islam, to a larger degree, is still trapped in an ancient culture that has not yet grown weary of outrage.

[y66]

From Angela Merkel’s Unpopular Goodness

 

Berlin — WHEN I returned to Berlin recently after a few months away, a friend asked me to try a new Chinese restaurant in Kreuzberg, a hip multiethnic neighborhood in the city. “It’s close to the subway station Kottbusser Tor,” he texted. “But take a cab, otherwise it’s too dangerous.”

 

I would have thought he was joking, but he is not the type. I asked the cabdriver, a young man of Turkish origin. Had Kottbusser Tor suddenly become a no-go zone? To my shock, he replied, “Yes, now that all these people from North Africa are here it has become really dangerous.”

 

I got out of the cab and looked around. Tourists strolling, a few people on bicycles in spite of the cold, women in head scarves pushing strollers. Had the city changed? It looked the same to me. But my friend is not prone to hysteria, and the cabdriver didn’t seem as if he was either, so the friendly scene suddenly seemed ominous.

 

That’s how one often feels in Germany these days. One tries to constantly make sense of the latest news and the seemingly contradictory reality.

[y66]

[Winstonm]

 

Unless it is on Fox News.

[y66]

In California, Marijuana Is Smelling More Like Big Business

 

“All I want it to do is bring some jobs,” Ms. Harris-Johnson said.

Don't we all.

[y66]

Dennis Skinner, a Labour member of Parliament, was ejected from a Panama Papers discussion with Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain for referring to him as Dodgy Dave.

 

“Aspiration and wealth creation are not dirty words,” said Mr. Cameron, a Conservative, attacking the Labour Party for “wanting to tax” anyone who wanted to pass on their home or their wealth while still alive to their children, calling that “the real lesson of today.”

 

The Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, assailed Mr. Cameron for presenting “a master class in the art of distraction,” and accused him of “losing the trust” of ordinary Britons.

[Winstonm]

My home state, Oklahoma, pays out 100 million dollars a year as subsidies to businesses under a law that was supposed to encourage job creation. Due to a budget crisis, the state recently cut 100 million dollars from its education budget, but Gov. Mary Fallon's new budget does not trim any of the corporate giveaways.

[jjbrr]

to be fair, the state of education in america is pretty hopeless, so that seems pretty reasonable.

[Aberlour10]

Please restrain yourself and try to keep off topic.

 

AGREE.

 

Bacon Cocktails

 

Is everything really better with bacon? We headed over to NYC's Beauty & Essex, a local hotspot that is infusing liquors with the pork product and mixing up the end result into some interesting cocktails

 

https://www.youtube....h?v=p0ZGMgQYtYw

[gwnn]

I've probably done more than my fair share of hijacking lately so let me put this video in its proper place:

[y66]

The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru

 

The nerve center for the selling of the Iran deal to Congress, which took place in a concentrated three-month period between July and September of last year, was located inside the White House, and is referred to by its former denizens as “the war room.” Chad Kreikemeier, a Nebraskan who had worked in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs, helped run the team, which included three to six people from each of several agencies, he says, which were the State Department, Treasury, the American delegation to the United Nations (i.e., Samantha Power), “at times D.O.D.” (the Department of Defense) and also the Department of Energy and the National Security Council. Rhodes “was kind of like the quarterback,” running the daily video conferences and coming up with lines of attack and parry. “He was extremely good about immediately getting to a phrase or a way of getting the message out that just made more sense,” Kreikemeier remembers. Framing the deal as a choice between peace and war was Rhodes’s go-to move — and proved to be a winning argument.

 

The person whom Kreikemeier credits with running the digital side of the campaign was Tanya Somanader, 31, the director of digital response for the White House Office of Digital Strategy, who became known in the war room and on Twitter as @TheIranDeal. Early on, Rhodes asked her to create a rapid-response account that fact-checked everything related to the Iran deal. “So, we developed a plan that was like: The Iran deal is literally going to be the tip of everything that we stand up online,” Somanader says. “And we’re going to map it onto what we know about the different audiences we’re dealing with: the public, pundits, experts, the right wing, Congress.” By applying 21st-century data and networking tools to the white-glove world of foreign affairs, the White House was able to track what United States senators and the people who worked for them, and influenced them, were seeing online — and make sure that no potential negative comment passed without a tweet.

 

Rhodes’s messaging campaign was so effective not simply because it was a perfectly planned and executed example of digital strategy, but also because he was personally involved in guiding the deal itself. In July 2012, Jake Sullivan, a close aide to Hillary Clinton, traveled to Muscat, Oman, for the first meeting with the Iranians, taking a message from the White House. “It was, ‘We’re prepared to open a direct channel to resolve the nuclear agreement if you are prepared to do the same thing and authorize it at the highest levels and engage in a serious discussion on these issues,’ ” Sullivan remembers. “Once that was agreed to, it was quickly decided that we resolve the nuclear agreement in two steps, the interim agreement and the final agreement.” Subsequent meetings with the Iranians followed, during which he was joined by Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns. “Bill and I had a huge amount of license to explore what the terms would look like, within the negotiating parameters,” Sullivan says. “What the precise trade-offs would be, between forms of sanctions relief and forms of restraints on their programs, that was left to us to feel out.”

 

The fact that the president largely let his surrogates do the talking and the selling of the Iran deal — and even now, rarely talks about it in public — does not reflect his level of direct engagement. Sullivan and Burns spent hours before and after every session in Oman with the president and his closest advisers in the White House. When the president wasn’t present, Rhodes always was. “Ben and I, in particular, the two of us, spent a lot of time thinking through all the angles,” Sullivan says. “We spent three, four, five hours together in Washington talking things through before the meetings.” In March 2013, a full three months before the elections that elevated Hassan Rouhani to the office of president, Sullivan and Burns finalized their proposal for an interim agreement, which became the basis for the J.C.P.O.A.

 

The White House point person during the later stage of the negotiations was Rob Malley, a favored troubleshooter who is currently running negotiations that could keep the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in power. During the course of the Iran talks, Malley told me, he always kept in close contact with Rhodes. “I would often just call him and say, ‘Give me a reality check,’ ” Malley explained. “He could say, ‘Here is where I think the president is, and here is where I think he will be.’ ” He continued, “Ben would try to anticipate: Does it make sense policywise? But then he would also ask himself: How do we sell it to Congress? How do we sell it to the public? What is it going to do to our narrative?”

 

Malley is a particularly keen observer of the changing art of political communication; his father, Simon Malley, who was born in Cairo, edited the politics magazine Afrique Asie and proudly provided a platform for Fidel Castro and Yasir Arafat, in the days when the leaders’ words might take weeks to travel from Cuba or Cairo to Paris. “The Iran experience was the place where I saw firsthand how policy, politics and messaging all had to be brought together, and I think that Ben is really at the intersection of all three,” Malley says. “He reflects and he shapes at the same time.”

 

As Malley and representatives of the State Department, including Wendy Sherman and Secretary of State John Kerry, engaged in formal negotiations with the Iranians, to ratify details of a framework that had already been agreed upon, Rhodes’s war room did its work on Capitol Hill and with reporters. In the spring of last year, legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. “We created an echo chamber,” he admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”

 

When I suggested that all this dark metafictional play seemed a bit removed from rational debate over America’s future role in the world, Rhodes nodded. “In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this,” he said. “We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked.” He is proud of the way he sold the Iran deal. “We drove them crazy,” he said of the deal’s opponents.

 

Yet Rhodes bridled at the suggestion that there has been anything deceptive about the way that the agreement itself was sold. “Look, with Iran, in a weird way, these are state-to-state issues. They’re agreements between governments. Yes, I would prefer that it turns out that Rouhani and Zarif” — Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister — “are real reformers who are going to be steering this country into the direction that I believe it can go in, because their public is educated and, in some respects, pro-American. But we are not betting on that.”

 

In fact, Rhodes’s passion seems to derive not from any investment in the technical specifics of sanctions or centrifuge arrays, or any particular optimism about the future course of Iranian politics and society. Those are matters for the negotiators and area specialists. Rather, it derived from his own sense of the urgency of radically reorienting American policy in the Middle East in order to make the prospect of American involvement in the region’s future wars a lot less likely. When I asked whether the prospect of this same kind of far-reaching spin campaign being run by a different administration is something that scares him, he admitted that it does. “I mean, I’d prefer a sober, reasoned public debate, after which members of Congress reflect and take a vote,” he said, shrugging. “But that’s impossible.”

[PassedOut]

Just want to say that we're thinking about the folks in Alberta today, hoping for containment of the fires and for successful convoys to safety.

[Al_U_Card]

Nice sentiment. We live in a "forested" area and expect to have insurance rates hiked next year.

Back in 2012, the Alberta government commissioned a study to evaluate their fire suppression practices. The conclusion? Too much fire suppression, inadequate controlled burns of "congested" areas. Imminent disaster looming if they did not change their practices.

Results? We are seeing them now.

[Zelandakh]

Nice sentiment. We live in a "forested" area and expect to have insurance rates hiked next year.

I guess the insurance companies believe in the big climate change conspiracy too. Perhaps you should move to their forums to educate them properly on why there will not be warmer summers in the future.

[Al_U_Card]

I guess the insurance companies believe in the big climate change conspiracy too. Perhaps you should move to their forums to educate them properly on why there will not be warmer summers in the future.

Oh dear, perhaps 9-11 didn't have any effect on insurance rates either?

As for Mr. Buffet, he did come out and refuse to knuckle-under to that attempt to install the other kind of green (non-monetary) in his insurance biz, correct?

Other than the observed fact that warmer is wetter (droughts are caused in cooler climate times) fire losses are trending lower in the US over the last couple of decades as the weather patterns got warmer.

Oh the inconvenient truth of it all.

[Aberlour10]

Strong advice:: Dont solve differential equations on board of the US airplanes. You may be treated as a terrorist.

 

 

http://www.dailymail...-terrorist.html

[Al_U_Card]

Strong advice:: Dont solve differential equations on board of the US airplanes. You may be treated as a terrorist.

 

 

http://www.dailymail...-terrorist.html

Back during my school daze, diffy-q's certainly terrorized me...lol

[gwnn]

I feel like I chose the wrong design for my new Amazon credit card. (for hackers, sorry, that's a photo of a similar card, not mine, but I hope you find some money on it nonetheless)

 

http://www.kreditkarte-forum.de/files/2011/04/thumbs/t_13042011145_2.jpg

[kenberg]

My wife had shown me an article in the Wash Post describing the same event. I find it hilarious. In the comments there was a discussion of the dangers of al-qualculus.

 

I imagine that the other passengers did not see the humor in the two hour delay.

[y66]

Yo Yotam! The dude abides.

[y66]

Good dawning to thee, friends. (That's Oswald saying, "sup," in Shakespeare's "King Lear." What's your favorite greeting?

From Sam Sifton's What to Cook This Week. Fun read.

[gwnn]

A reasonably heartwarming story about a Romanian cop's Facebook following:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/an-honest-cop-and-his-facebook-celebrity-take-romania-by-surprise-1463934539

[gwnn]

700 dots on a map:

 

http://www.clickhole.com/article/we-put-700-red-dots-map-947