In defense of fear

When Jeremy woke up Wednesday morning, I told him Trump had won. He didn't swear or rant or curse. He just put his arms around me and held me.
It was cold and rainy in Ohio. Everyone at work was walking around looking shell-shocked, like they couldn't believe it had come to this; even the people who voted for this travesty were somber, like they were at a funeral. I felt like I was on the verge of tears all day. It reminded me of the mood on 9/11. I felt gutted, devastated. Guilty because I hadn't done enough, enraged at the people who were too lazy to get off their couch and vote, but mostly just helpless and scared.
After a couple days, cooler heads on social media began to emerge. It is what it is, they said. There's nothing we can do about it now. We have to roll with it. It will be all right. Fear won't solve anything. We should not be afraid.
I beg to differ. When white supremacists are literally out celebrating in the streets, we should  all be afraid. 
Fear's an underrated emotion. Fear is what tells the zebra to run from the lion. Fear keeps us from playing in traffic or setting our hair on fire. And fear is what's gonna keep us from rolling over and letting a racist demagogue and his army of hateful drones have their way with our country.
I'm afraid because Trump won't take office for months but already racists feel emboldened and empowered. They've crawled out of the holes where they've been hiding, started acting out their hatred. Social media is overflowing with stories from people of color telling stories of violence and harassment. Black people being told that Trump's going to send them back to Africa, Latinos/as report being physically intimidated. Muslim women report having their hijabs violently ripped from their heads.
Folks will say that these stories are made up, are exaggerations. But we have pictures, videos, corroboration. Schools admitting, against their own interests, to racist incidents in the hallways. People of color, non-Christians, queer folks are threatened and those of us with privilege don't get to tell them how to feel about it. 

I'm afraid because the Southern Poverty Law Center reports that leaders of racial hate groups are actively encouraging their members to harass minorities. As Neo-Nazi leader Andrew Anglin has said, “Our Glorious Leader has ascended to God Emperor. Make no mistake about it: we did this.” 
I'm afraid because women I care about depend on Planned Parenthood for their health care. I'm afraid because if Trump and congressional Republicans succeed in de-funding Planned Parenthood, it will mean fewer women with access to affordable birth control, fewer women with access to STD testing, fewer women with access to cancer screenings, fewer women with access to low-cost prenatal care. 
I'm afraid for my queer friends, who feel less safe, who are already being harassed by bigots. I'm afraid because the the vice president and many of the folks whose names Trump has dropped for cabinet positions are rabidly anti-gay, have promised to strip away every right queer folk have fought and died for. I don't know how much success they'll have, but I do know that our country will be in the hands of folks who want to strip our rights away and that's reason to be afraid.
I'm afraid for the planet. Trump probably doesn't have the power to dismantle the EPA, but he can sure as hell appoint people who will try to tear it apart from the inside, who will fight environmental regulations as long as they have breath.

I am afraid. But fear is a call to action, after all. Fear is useless if we don't run from the lion, if we play in traffic anyway, if we do nothing in the face of a government conceived in hate and dedicated to the proposition that that some people's rights are more important than others. 

Consider checking here for Planned Parenthood volunteer opportunities, or calling your local Planned Parenthood to thank them for what they do and ask how you can help. Preventing pregnancy is the best way to prevent abortion. If you don't have time to volunteer, maybe donate? Fun fact: you can make your donation in honor of Mike Pence and they'll send him a lovely certificate :).
Consider visiting the RAINN website to look in to volunteer opportunities; you could volunteer to work sexual assault hotlines or help the organization educate folks in your community about sexual assaults.
You could become a member of the Sierra Club, in hopes of helping combat the rising tide of motivated climate change deniers who will fight tooth and nail to prevent further research into renewable/sustainable energy.
Here's a list of other anti-hate, pro-planet charities you can give to or volunteer for if you want to harness your fear.
But mostly, listen. Listen to folks who say they're scared and let them know you've got their back. An artist called Maeril has made some awesome comics describing how you can be an ally without making a bad situation worse. You should share them all the hell over social media. Follow folks like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Feminista Jones, and Kimberly Ellis on social media, and answer their calls to action. 
I am scared for my country. I'm more scared than I can ever remember being. I'm scared because racists are out in the open and they're less afraid than ever to preach their message of hate. I'm afraid. And I'm not going to stop being afraid. And it's that fear that's going to keep me from just sitting by while bigots and demagogues try to tear our country away from us.
And for the love of God, people, please don't call it "Trump's America." This is our America. We have to fight to keep it.

Also, can I just say that preparing and singing Hallelujah live with literally a day's notice when you're not a professional musician is just ridiculous? Is there anything Kate McKinnon can't do?

Head in the clouds

You may have read recently that scientists have uncovered new evidence in Amelia Earhart. Scientists have compared an arm bone from a skeleton found on the tiny island of Nikumaroro with a photograph of Earhart's arm and determined they match. 
This adds more evidence to the compelling case that Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan got off course and crash landed on Nikumaroro where one or both survived for a few days. A distress signal emanated from the island immediately following Earhart's disappearance, but rescuers were unable to locate the pair. However, just three years after the disappearance, a partial skeleton belonging to a woman of European descent, about Earhart's height. Found nearby were a buck knife, a woman's shoe, a sextant box, and bits of an airplane. All signs point to this being Earhart's fate, and CNN, the Discovery Channel, and tons of major news outlets are reporting this all as fact. 
But not so fast. Back when the skeleton was found in 1940, Dr. David Hoodless, principal of the Central Medical School of the South Pacific on Fiji, examined it. He stated that the pelvis "definitely" belonged to a man. The skeleton then promptly disappeared, and all subsequent study of it has been based on Hoodless' notes and drawings of it. 
As for the detritus found on the island? There's no good reason to believe that the stuff belonged to Earhart. Pearl divers frequently used the island as a base of operations, and the island was home to a British colony just a couple years after Earhart's disappearance. The assorted bits and bobs floating around the island could easily have come from any of those individuals, or have washed up on shore from nearby islands and ships.
Then there's the matter of the distance. Shortly before the disappearance, Earhart was in radio contact with the island she meant to land on, Howland. We know she was very close to Howland because the radio wasn't that strong. It is almost certain that as of her last transmission, she was in the immediate vicinity of Howland, but unable to land due to equipment malfunction.
Nikumaroro is 400 some miles from Howland, and Earhart's last transmission mentioned they were nearly out of fuel. She simply would not have had enough fuel to make fly that distance; in fact, to make it from Lae in Papua New Guinea, where they last took off, to Nikumaroro would have taken every last drop of fuel her plane could hold, and she'd have had to fly directly there - she could not have flown to within radio contact of Howland, then taken a sharp turn and flown hundreds of miles in the wrong direction - there simply was not enough fuel. 
As for the radio transmissions? The last transmission anyone is sure of came at 8:43 AM. There were subsequent signals, some of which came from near Nikumaroro, but there's no evidence those signals came from Earhart or Noonan. In fact, the captain of the USS Colorado, one of the battleships out looking for Earhart, says "There was no doubt many stations were calling the Earhart plane on the plane's frequency, some by voice and others by signals. All of these added to the confusion and doubtfulness of the authenticity of the reports."
On top of which, in order for the plane to transmit signal from Nikumaroro, the radio couldn't be submerged, meaning that the plane would have to have crash landed on the island, and the Navy didn't find any plane when they searched the island just days after the disappearance. 
Nature abhors a vacuum and humans abhor loose ends. That's why it's so much easier to believe the Nikumaroro theory than to believe what the vast majority of researchers do: that Earhart and Noonan ran out of gas and ditched at sea. But that conclusion is well supported by her last transitions alone - she knew she was on the island, she knew there was an equipment failure, she knew they were almost out of gas. Where's the plane now? At the bottom of the ocean somewhere near Howland. It's not a satisfying theory, to be sure. And searches for the plane in the area have turned up nothing. But the plane is small and the ocean is big and the ocean is deep, and the fact that the plane isn't easily found in one place doesn't mean it's somewhere else hundreds of miles away.
The Nikumororo theory is championed primarily by one guy, Ric Gillespie, principal of the The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery. And he really, really wants his theory to be true. Gillespie's really good at taking a few scraps of evidence that aren't very strong and weaving this really satisfying story, one he wholeheartedly believes. Every couple of years, he'll put out press releases or do an interview with "new" evidence, such as this whole arm bone thing, but the evidence isn't new at all. Gillespie, or one of his adherents, found a picture of Earhart in which her arm looks like it might possibly be the same length as the sketch of the arm of a skeleton that probably belonged to a man and has been missing for three quarters of a century. 

Sources
https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4295
https://skeptoid.com/blog/2012/03/20/more-amelia-earhart-nonsense/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Earhart

We all float down here

I'm sorry it has been so crazy long since I posted - turns out this whole grad school thing is kind of a time-suck. I'm so happy I'm in school, though. I mean, so happy. It's the weirdest thing - I was the world's worst procrastinator all through my undergrad, and now I don't procrastinate at all. I want to be reading and writing and interacting with my class, and I wasn't quite expecting that. But it's good news, as I'm way too old for last-minute all-nighters. 
Since Halloween's coming up, monsters, ghouls, and blood-suckers are out in force. But enough about Donald Trump. And just in case you're sick of being kept up at night by thoughts of a Trump presidency, here's some different nightmare fuel.
Creepypasta is a neologism describing scary myths and urban legends shared and re-shared online, often being passed off as true. The term is related to the term copypasta, a general term used to refer to stores shared and re-shared on social media - the term's a portmanteau of copy and paste. Here are some of my favorite examples:

• In 1922, citizens in a small German farming town noticed the Gruber family seemed to be missing. When they went to the Gruber house to investigate, they made a ghastly discovery. The entire family had been hacked to death with an ax, and the killer had lined their bodies up neatly in the barn.
  But that's not the most terrifying part. A few days before the murder, Mr. Gruber mentioned to his neighbor that he'd found a set of footprints in the snow leading from the woods to his house, but no footprints leading away. For months things had been going missing from the home, and more disturbingly, things that didn't belong to the family had been showing up. The family had been hearing noises in the attic that they were sure were just the house settling, but sounded for all the world like footsteps.
  Investigators believe the killer, who was never caught, had been lurking in the house for weeks or even months, unbeknownst to the family.
• Ten years earlier and a thousand kilometers to the southeast, there lived a man called Béla Kiss. Kiss was a tin smith in a town near Budapest, quiet, but well-liked. He seemed a lonely man, and in fact had placed marriage ads in some local papers, but he never seemed to hit it off with the ladies he met through the ads, and they never stayed around long.
  In 1914 Kiss was conscripted to fight in the Great War. A couple of years after that, Kiss' landlord came upon several large metal drums. Remembering that Kiss had said he was using the barrels to store gasoline in case of war rationing, the landlord alerted the constable who offered the barrels to some soldiers stationed locally. What the soldiers found when they opened the first drum, however, wasn't gasoline.
  After finding the first drum to contain the rotting corpse of a young woman who had been strangled, police searched the barrels and the house, a search which yielded the bodies of 24 women in total. All had been strangled, all had been exsanguinated, and all had two puncture wounds - bite marks - on their necks.
  Police began a massive man hunt for Kiss, and in October of 1916 received word that Kiss could be found in a Serbian hospital. The detective investigating the case rushed to Kiss' bedside, only to find the corpse of a different man entirely. The real Kiss was never found.
• The Cecil Hotel was a palace of marble, alabaster, and stained glass when it was built back in 1924, but it didn't remain the home away from home of the rich and famous for long. During the Great Depression, the Los Angeles neighborhood in which it was located went all to hell - a hell that soon became known as Skid Row.
  In the 1950s and 1960s, the hotel saw a rash of suicides. One woman who threw herself from the 9th floor window landed on a man, killing him as well. In the mid-1960s, a transient woman was murdered in her room. In the 1980s, the Cecil became home to the Nightstalker serial killer. In the 1990s, a Cecil guest killed three local sex workers.
  But the strangest thing to take place in the Cecil Hotel happened in just 2013. For days, hotel residents had been complaining about water pressure - and about the fact that the water that did come out was discolored and funny tasting. When a maintenance worker finally went to the rooftop water tanks to see what was the matter, he found the body of Elisa Lam, who had apparently been rotting there for weeks. Surveillance camera video from the elevator showed Lam behaving strangely the day she went missing, glancing around nervously while pressing all the buttons on the panel, flailing her arms, and eventually apparently trying to hide in a corner. No one knows how she got through the locked door to the roof, or why the alarm on the door didn't sound. They don't know how she climbed to the top of the tank, and they don't know how she got the lid open. They only know she drowned and was, as near as anyone can tell, alone. 
• And here's the creepiest of all the pasta so far. All of the stories above are true. No legends here.

Sources: Lore Podcast, the Cracked.com "Urban Legends That Happen to be True" series.

Just hear me out

This isn't for people who've already made up their minds to vote for Trump. If you're for Trump, you're either a bigot or you're willing to throw minorities under a bus, and I don't even know what to say to you.
This is for people planning to vote third party. This is for people who are thinking of sitting this election out. Please, please hear me out.
-
The doomsday clock read seven minutes to midnight, but in October of 1962 it seemed we were in the final countdown. The Soviets were deploying ballistic missiles to Cuba, just 90 miles south of the US. The only thing standing in the way of nuclear annihilation were a couple of red buttons. But "Kennedy didn’t see the Cuban crisis as a test of his manhood," as Chris Matthews put it. He brokered a deal with Khrushchev, and that's likely the reason we're alive.
This could have been Manhattan. 

Hiroshima before and after

This could have been your mom or my dad.

This could have been the new face of humanity.

Trump wants to know why we have nuclear weapons if we don't plan to use them. Trump thinks it's important to be "unpredictable" when it comes to nuclear weapons. He's not going to rule out using nuclear weapons in Europe. He says "the devastation is very important to me."
Prominent Republican leaders say that the thought of Donald Trump with the nuclear launch codes keeps them up at night. The thought of Donald Trump with the nuclear launch codes keeps me up at night. The thought of Donald Trump with the nuclear launch codes should terrify you too.
Who do you think is more likely to bring about a nuclear holocaust? It's Trump. You know it's Trump. He couldn't stop himself going on a three AM Twitter rampage about Alicia Machado even though all of his advisers warned him to cut it out. He couldn't stop himself badgering and badmouthing Khizr and Ghazala Khan even when his employees and members of his own camp publicly disavowed his statements. The man has no impulse control, no ability to drop his own petty grudges for the sake of his campaign; he cannot stand to have his power challenged, his manhood questioned. We cannot allow him to be the man with his finger on the button.

As odious as the thought of a Clinton presidency might be to you, you know, you know, Clinton's not gonna hit the red button on some psychopathic whim. 
-
It's 1963 and Lyndon Johnson has inherited a mess in Vietnam. "The battle against communism," he said "must be joined ... with strength and determination." Maybe he was right and maybe he was wrong, but he sent troops to Vietnam without a declaration of war from Congress. 58,000 of our men died, and hundreds of thousands more were injured or missing or prisoners for god knows how long. If not for that war, which Congress never fully supported, there wouldn't be Vietnam vets sleeping on grates in the freezing cold and begging for pennies because they came home from Vietnam, but they didn't come home the same. I don't know if LBJ might the right call or the wrong call, but I do know that this one man's actions changed the face of America and Congress couldn't stop him.

Of course, after Vietnam, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution, which was meant to limit the president's ability to send troops into battle, but there are loopholes, plenty of loopholes for a charismatic psychopath to exploit. Can we really afford to take a risk on a man that Holocaust survivors have compared to Hitler?
The president is responsible for preparing the US budget; Trump has run more businesses into the ground than we can count. The president appoints Supreme Court judges, and although Congress probably won't confirm whatever Neo-Nazi flat-earther Trump wants to appoint to the job, you can bet whoever does get confirmed won't be friendly to women, minorities, or the poor. 
The man surrounds himself with Holocaust deniers, Neo-Nazis, climate change deniers, racists, misogynists, and criminals. Which is a problem because as president he'd have the power to unilaterally appoint over 300 people to various positions in the federal government. 

Look, I know I'm not gonna convince you that Hillary Clinton is a good choice for president. But I really hope I can convince you that America can't afford a Trump presidency, that the stakes are too high to sit this election out or vote for a candidate who cannot win. Vote for Clinton on November 8th and start demanding her impeachment on November 9th if you've got to. But please, please vote for Hillary Clinton for president of the United States of America. 
Please re-post if you're so moved.

Caveat Donor

So breast cancer awareness month is upon us, and the pink explosion has begun. I'm a cancer communist myself - I prefer to donate to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and let them distribute funds where they're needed. There are lots of types of cancer, and it seems unfair to me that research into men's cancers receives so little funding comparatively. But if you do want to donate to a breast cancer charity, here are some things to know:

• We tend to assume that products that go pink for breast cancer during October donate a portion of their proceeds to cancer research, but that isn't necessarily so. Anybody can slap a pink ribbon or label on their product. 
• It's also worth noting that companies that do send a portion of their proceeds off to charity make a whole lot of money doing this and only give a tiny percentage of that to charity. 
• Susan G. Komen is the largest and best funded breast cancer charity in the United States. However, your donation dollars might not fund what you think.
• Only 21% of proceeds go to fund breast cancer research, and only 13% go to fund health screenings. 40% goes to "awareness," which seems like a lot of money for a disease that pretty much the entire population of the country is already aware of. 
• The CEO makes a ton - well over $600,000. This is rated as extremely high by Charity Navigator, which gives the organization only 2 out of 4 stars.

On boobs and booth babes

Sorry for the long delay, kids. Turns out going to school and working full time is way harder without the benefit of mania. 
So I just had my first big assignment, and man, grad school is weird - I finished the thing, and if I'd had time, I would have scrapped everything and started all over. It's not that I hate what I wrote, it's just that I'm much better qualified to write the thing now that I've already written it. 
So the piece was about misogyny in the comics community, a subject I've got a hard time getting my brain around because first, I've personally never once felt anything but embraced by the geek community. And second, most of us geeks have been bullied and excluded for being weird; we should damn well have some empathy.
One of the most mind-boggling things i found in my research was all the men, including writers and industry insiders, bitching about female cosplayers. I read this CNN article where some wanker called Joe Peacock complained about fake geek women prancing around in sexy costumes to "satisfy their hollow egos." He's not objecting to real geek girls dressing sexy, he says, "I'm talking about an attention addict trying to satisfy her ego and feel pretty by infiltrating a community to seek the attention of guys she wouldn't give the time of day on the street."
This guy, and the many, many guys who agree with him, are so the center of their own universes that they believe that women who aren't interested in geek culture would spend hundreds of hours and hundreds of dollars crafting a dreadfully uncomfortable costume, then pay to get into a con and be surrounded by men they don't like, all for some attention. Even the picture that accompanies Peacock's article demonstrates his complete lack of logic. The woman on the right dressed as a gender swapped Loki? Check out her helmet. Loki's horned helmet was clearly designed with a total disregard for physics - it's way too front-heavy to exist in real life. I literally don't know how that woman is keeping that thing on her head. But I can tell you this - no woman makes or buys a two-foot tall migraine-inducing, physics-defying big ass helmet just to get some attention from dudes they're not actually interested in.
Peacock refers to these supposed fake geek girls as "6 of 9s" - in the real world they'd be sixes, but at cons they seem like nines. Here's the thing, Cock. Do you mind if I call you Cock? You don't need a multi-hundred dollar costume to get male attention. You just need to put on a short skirt and walk into a bar. If you think the ladies in your picture are sixes, then you'd probably consider me a three on my best day. And I have never wanted for male attention. The attention might not come from the kind of men from whom I'd ever want attention (once when I was 15 some old guy told me that if I came to his house he'd let me drink wine as long as I promised not to tell my mother), but Cock says himself that these fake geek girls don't actually want to date convention geeks. According to him, they're just dressing sexy to satisfy their hollow egos. (In related news, what the holy hell does "hollow ego" even mean?)
Anyway, it just depresses the crap out of me that some men in the community that has always shown me so much love have such a disdain for women that they complain bitterly, and at length, about being forced to be in the presence of attractive, scantily clad women. I just... I grew up believing that the end of racism and sexism were inexorable. I grew up believing that all the bigots I met were an endangered species bound for extinction, that society was now on the right track. And now geek women who speak their minds are victims of literal terror campaigns. A comics editor named Janelle Asselin wrote a review of a Teen Titans cover and pointed out that maybe having a teenage character with barely covered boobs the size of her head was inappropriate. And she was literally driven from her home by very graphic and specific rape threats. 
  And now half the damn country is rallying behind an openly bigoted misogynist because they're sick of "political correctness." Half the country. Half of the state I live in. Half of my neighbors and half of the people I meet each day and half of my coworkers. And a significant number of members of the community that taught me I wasn't alone, that women could be strong.

Mea culpa

Lots of folks are saying the world has gotten "too PC." Lots of folks are saying that you can't say anything at all these days without being accused of racism. Lots of folks are saying that the pendulum has swung too far and lots of folks are saying that accusing white people of racism is "reverse racism," whatever that means.
Well I've got a long and storied history of saying stupid, hurtful things without even thinking about it. I've got a long history of hurting people's feelings and doubling down, or weaseling, or getting mad when confronted about it. And it took me a long time, but I have learned some things.
It's okay to apologize for saying something stupid.
No one will be impressed by my excuses or my denials.
It's okay to say something dumb, realize that was a dumb thing to say, and then admit that it was a dumb thing to say.
It's okay to apologize even if I think someone's being oversensitive.
It's even okay to apologize for hurting someone's feelings, even if I don't think what I said was wrong. 
It's not up to me to decide whether someone else's feelings are hurt.  
It doesn't make sense for me to assert my right to say something by telling others that they're wrong for asserting their right to disagree with what I've said. 
I'm not gonna convince anyone I'm not being insensitive by insisting I'm not insensitive. 
If I get accused of being insensitive, I'm not a persecuted victim of the PC police; I'm a person who got accused of being insensitive.
It's better to ask what's wrong with what I said than to argue that nothing's wrong with what I said; sometimes I don't know I've said something dumb because I didn't know the whole story.

It's okay to have an opinion and keep it to myself.
It's okay to have an opinion and not blast social media with it 9 times a day.

It's okay to shut up and listen.

Look, I recognize that policing language for political correctness can stymie the flow of constructive dialogue. And I do acknowledge that it really sucks to be called racist even when you know you're not. But someone once said "when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression." 
And if none of that flies for you, chew on this. White people have spent centuries taking away the voices of people of color, often using whips and knives and nooses. And that's not my fault and that's not your fault, but I think it's time we made peace with the fact that we don't always get to have the floor. 

Damages

Answer: 

• The amount of time Ice Ice Baby remained on the charts.
  
• Every one of Elizabeth Taylor's 8 marriages.
• William Hung's music career.
  
• The amount of time Joanie Loves Chachi remained on the air.
• The amount of time Home Alone remained #1 at the box office.
  
• Theatrical run of Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark.
• Lifespan of Mike the Headless Chicken - after his head was removed. 
  

Question: 
What are some things that go on longer than Brock Turner's jail stay?

Question:
What crimes are worse, in the eyes of the justice system, than dragging an unconscious woman behind a dumpster and digitally raping her?

Answer:

• Dropping acid - possession of a gram (that's half the weight of a dime) comes with a mandatory minimum of 5 years on the first offense.
• Conspiracy to deal coke - Sharanda Purlette Jones is currently serving life without parole for conspiracy - her first offense - despite a lack of any physical evidence.
• Stealing $100 - Roy Brown, a homeless man, felt so guilty for stealing a single $100 bill from the bank that he turned himself in the next day. He got 15 years.
• Having a crack pipe, acting as the go between in the sale of a dime bag, attempting to cash a stolen check, shoplifting three belts - there are folks serving life in prison for each of those offenses.

Question: 

What's the difference between the following three folks and Brock Turner?

• On the other hand, there's Frank Lee Smith. One woman's eye-witness testimony put him in jail for a rape he didn't commit. DNA evidence exonerated him 15 years later, but it was too late; he was dead. The eyewitness later stated that she'd told police she wasn't sure he was the right guy, but she'd been pressured not to mention that at trial.
• There's also Habib Wahir Abdal. In the 1980s, a woman was raped by a black man about 5'9" with a gap between his teeth. Habib Wahir Abdal was 6'2" with no gap, but he was convicted of the crime after a forensic analyst gave inaccurate testimony on the stand. Abdal served 16 years before being exonerated.
• Paula Gray made a false confession under duress when she was accused of being involved in the kidnapping, rape, and murder of a young couple in 1978. She recanted her confession, but still spent 24 years in prison for the crime before DNA exonerated her.

Answer:

They were probably lousy swimmers. 
Just kidding. Race. It's race. 

Phenomenal woman

We should all be appalled, but should not be surprised by the hate campaign being waged against Comedian Leslie Jones. Jones, who has been making racist man-children cry bitter white tears over her role in the all female Ghostbusters reboot, has faced an organized campaign of cyber-terror in recent weeks. This week, hackers took psychopathy to a whole new level when they hacked her website and iCloud account. They got into her personal photos and published the most intimate ones. They flooded her page with racist memes comparing her to a gorilla. They even posted screen grabs of her passport and driver's license. 
And we shouldn't be surprised. Leslie Jones is everything sexist douchbags want women to be ashamed of, and she is beautifully unapologetic. She is big in a culture in which women are ordered to take up as little space as possible. She doesn't hide her size by slumping or slouching or wearing flats. She doesn't hide her figure under mumsy gowns that scream flattering and sensible - she slays in custom Christian Siriano.

Leslie Jones is a loud voice coming through the televisions of men who think women should sit down and shut up. Her hilariousness makes liars of men who insist that women just aren't as funny as men. She's older in an industry that worships youth, she's openly opinionated in a society that prefers its women, and its people of color, meek and mild. And worst of all, she doesn't care what you think about it.
Leslie Jones doesn't care if you think she's pretty. Leslie Jones doesn't care if you think she's funny. She doesn't care how many bitter white tears you cry over a damn movie remake. She's busy going to movie premiers and covering the Olympics for NBC and performing at feminist events. Leslie Jones is busy being Leslie Jones and the racist, woman-hating weasels of the Internet can't handle it. 
So they tried to chase her off Twitter, even succeeded for a moment, but then she came back to tweet the Olympics - and so well, apparently, that NBC flew her down to cover it live. But the sniveling man children could have that - it was no fun hating her when she couldn't be bothered to care. So they got her attention - and they did it in the most cruel, dehumanizing, and menacing way they could. Congrats, trolls, you've got the news media to stand behind her. Got half of Hollywood standing up for her. Gotten people who didn't even know about her to care about her.
I can't even imagine what holy hell Jones is going through right now. I can't imagine how sick and devastated and violated she is feeling. It is an incredibly shitty time to be Leslie Jones, but I've got a feeling she's gonna rise up and when she does, the whole world's gonna be cheering her on.

and your unpunchable face

Well, it's back to school time, and you know what that means! Time to teach our nation's young girls how to keep from distracting the boys and getting themselves raped and sexually harassed! Recently, a Facebook friend shared a social media post about a school that recently got in hot water when it was found that boys were taking intimate photos of their female classmates without their consent, and then posting those photos on social media. Luckily, the school took quick and decisive action, placing the blame right where it belongs - on the girls, of course!
The school introduced a new dress code policy that requires female students to cover up their filthy bodies so as not to tempt boys into photographing them. Everybody knows that teen boys are completely unable to control their behavior with a shoulder or a thigh in plain view - and it's unfair to ask them to. Girls who wear skirts that don't come down to their knees are a distraction to boys - and male teachers - and it's just not fair. 
I know there will be those among you who think this is "victim blaming" or "body shaming," but this is the safety and integrity of our girls we're talking about. I for one don't think the school's policies go far enough. 

Might this also be a great solution to the problem of bullying? Schools could pull all the unpopular kids aside and give them some guidelines on how to not get beaten up by the popular kids. Everybody knows that popular kids just can't help themselves in the presence of a nerd or a loser, and having to look at nerds and losers is really an unfair distraction. These social lepers can help solve this problem by simply having less punchable faces. 

No one beats this guy up anymore!

Yes, I believe schools should amend their dress codes to require that freaks and geeks hide their faces at all times. I know it seems "cool" and "fun" to go flaunting one's face in public, but honestly, these losers need to have a little self respect and pull on a nice respectable ski mask. Or maybe a snazzy balaklava. Heck, even a clown mask! Sure, it seems unfair that a kid should have to go to such lengths to not get punched in the face, but it's really the only option. You can't exactly expect popular kids to be responsible for their own actions, can you? Preposterous!

Schools need to take a stance against bullying. That's why they should pull the unpopulars aside and measure the eye holes on their masks, just to make sure they're not showing off too much nose or forehead. Losers who don't conform to this dress code can go home or they can wear a school-supplied plastic garbage bag over their faces for the day. Their choice! Everybody wins!

I never leave home without
my purrtection!