" "The woman who will marry me should not be afraid that I would kill her." Now there's a true romantic.

'I won't kill number 3', says Turkish double wife killer (Yahoo News)

A Turkish man who was kicked out of a TV dating show after revealing he had killed his two previous partners made a stirring romantic pitch by vowing not to kill a third wife.

The audience of the "Luck of the Draw" game show was gobsmacked Thursday when Sefer Calinak, a bald 62-year-old contestant sporting a heart-framed name tag, calmly explained he was a convicted double murderer.

Interesting. Now, given that "traditional" running shoes seem to increase the risk of injury, when will we see Nike get destroyed?

Adidas is facing a similar suit over its minimal running shoe.

A barefoot runner's take is here.

(I'm still doing my running in PF Fliers with drug-store padded inserts for a little extra shock absorption and a brace on the injured ankle.)

Vibram Agrees to Settle Class Action Lawsuit (Runner's World & Running Times)

Vibram USA, the company that makes FiveFingers running shoes, has agreed to settle a lawsuit that alleged the company made false and unsubstantiated claims about the health benefits of its glove-like footwear. According to the court filings, Vibram settled to put the matter to rest and avoid any additional legal expenses. “Vibram expressly denied and continues to deny any wrongdoing alleged in the Actions, and neither admits nor concedes any actual or potential fault, wrongdoing or liability,” read the court brief.

A wee bit cheaper than Six Million Dollars...

WUSTL students ‘print’ pink prosthetic arm for teen girl | Newsroom | Washington University in St. Louis

Thirteen-year-old Sydney Kendall had one request for the Washington University in St. Louis students building her a robotic prosthetic arm: Make it pink.

Kendall Gretsch, Henry Lather and Kranti Peddada, seniors studying biomedical engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, accomplished that and more. Using a 3-D printer, they created a robotic prosthetic arm out of bright-pink plastic. Total cost: $200, a fraction of the price of standard prosthetics, which start at $6,000.

According to the FTC -- part of the U.S government -- If you receive merchandise that you didn’t order, you have a legal right to keep it as a free gift.

The Feds Accidentally Mailed Their $350K Drone to Some College Kid (Motherboard)

A Redditor got more than he bargained for in the mail today: He was accidentally mailed parts to a $350,000 environment and wildlife monitoring drone owned by the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration.

David Miller, a spokesperson for NOAA, told me he’s not sure how the wings and control panel to a NOAA Puma drone, which the agency uses to measure ocean debris, conduct seabird surveys, and monitor ocean habitats, ended up in the hands of the Redditor, but believes that UPS somehow erred and delivered it to the college student.

In a rare two-fer, the Supreme Court managed to disregard two-tenths of the Bill of Rights in one day. It allowed the town of Greece, New York, to continue its unconstitutional establishment of religion via prayers at public meetings:

U.S. Supreme Court backs prayer before government meetings (Yahoo News)

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday gave local government officials across the United States more leeway to begin public meetings with a prayer, ruling that sectarian invocations do not automatically violate the U.S. Constitution. The court said on a 5-4 vote that the town of Greece in New York state did not violate the Constitution's ban on government endorsement of religion by allowing Christian prayers before monthly meetings.

and it allowed the state of New Jersey to continue to arbitrarily deny people's right to keep and bear arms. (I'm not opposed to setting objective standards for CCW permits for public safety purposes -- though those same standards must apply to cops -- but allowing the opinion of a local police chief as to whether someone has a "justifiable need" to determine whether someone has access to the tools of self-defense is unconscionable.)

Strict N.J. rule on gun permits stands, as Supreme Court refuses case (Yahoo News)

The challenged New Jersey statute prohibits state residents from obtaining a permit to carry a handgun in public unless they can demonstrate a “justifiable need” for such a weapon.

...

Under the New Jersey law, an application must be submitted to the local police chief. If the chief approves the application, it is then forwarded to a state judge, who also must approve the application.

"Netanyahu said...the move was vital at a time when aspects of Israel's legitimacy were "under a constant and increasing assault from abroad and at home". Well, gee, Bibi, why do you think that legitimacy is in question? You just go ahead and keep pouring gasoline on that fire, I'm sure that will put it out.

A nation that defines itself as being "the nation state of one people only", ipso facto does not guarantee equal rights for all citizens. We tried that "separate but equal" thing here, as you may recall. Israel is trapped in a double bind of its own making.

Netanyahu pushes to define Israel as nation state of Jewish people only (the Guardian)

Binyamin Netanyahu will push ahead with a rare change to Israel's basic laws – which amount to the country's constitution – to insist Israel is "the nation state of one people only – the Jewish people – and of no other people".

...

The proposed law would be in addition to Israel's declaration of independence of May 1948 – the anniversary of which is celebrated on Tuesday – which defines Israel as a Jewish state.

So apparently Chase has been shutting down the bank accounts of porn actors. Why would a company that's kind of notorious for wanting your money, turn down customers? Seems the feds may be to blame.

DOJ Morality Police May Be Behind Chase Closing Bank Accounts Of Adult Film Actors | Techdirt (Techdirt.)

Well, the latest is that this may be a part of the US Department of Justice's "Operation Choke Point" program, in which the government has apparently decided that some extremely legal businesses don't get to exist anymore, but since they can't just disappear companies...they've decided to route around the whole "freedom" thing and get the financial industry to act as contract hitmen.

...

...The way it works is that the DOJ informs financial institutions that certain industries are more likely than others to be involved in unauthorized charges of consumer credit and bank cards. They likewise inform the banks that the DOJ is going to keep a special super-awesome close-eye on these industries, with the implication being that there will be a great deal of prosecutorial action, subpoenas, and scrutiny on those industries, not mention penalties on the institutions that work with them. The intention of the government, it would seem, is to make the banks unwilling to deal with the government harassment and simply cut anyone in those industries off from the financial institutions.

If you want to see where "Law of Attraction" BS gets you, look at the dead bodies in James Arthur Ray's bogus sweatlodge.

The Powerlessness of Positive Thinking (The New Yorker)

...It’s just as hard to believe that the heroes in Byrne’s books—let alone a feverishly productive polymath like Goethe or the notoriously irritable Beethoven—succeeded because they cultivated good thoughts. Moreover, as the journalist Oliver Burkeman noted in “The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking,” “Ceaseless optimism about the future only makes for a greater shock when things go wrong; by fighting to maintain only positive beliefs about the future, the positive thinker ends up being less prepared, and more acutely distressed, when things eventually happen that he can’t persuade himself to believe are good.”

Burkeman is onto something. According to a great deal of research, positive fantasies may lessen your chances of succeeding. In one experiment, the social psychologists Gabriele Oettingen and Doris Mayer asked eighty-three German students to rate the extent to which they “experienced positive thoughts, images, or fantasies on the subject of transition into work life, graduating from university, looking for and finding a job.” Two years later, they approached the same students and asked about their post-college job experiences. Those who harbored positive fantasies put in fewer job applications, received fewer job offers, and ultimately earned lower salaries. The same was true in other contexts, too. Students who fantasized were less likely to ask their romantic crushes on a date and more likely to struggle academically. Hip-surgery patients also recovered more slowly when they dwelled on positive fantasies of walking without pain.

Continuing the efforts among the misogynist wing of the GOP to make The Handmaid's Tale a blueprint for society.

Tennessee just became the first state that will jail women for their pregnancy outcomes

Tennessee has become the first state in the nation to pass a law criminalizing women for their pregnancy outcomes. Republican Gov. Bill Haslam took the 10 days allotted to him to consider the advice of doctors, addiction experts and reproductive health groups urging him to veto the punitive and dangerous measure that allows prosecutors to charge a woman with criminal assault if she uses illegal drugs during her pregnancy and her fetus or newborn is considered harmed as a result. Haslam ignored these recommendations — and the recommendations of nearly every major medical association, including the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy — and signed the measure anyway.

...

The law does nothing to expand treatment options for women in Tennessee...

The AMA, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists are among the major medical associations opposing such bills, which will only discourage them from seeking medical care.

W. T. F.? My immediate gut reaction is that we need a two part plan here: 1) find the Boko Haram kidnappers and shoot them in the face, and 2) find every reporter who should have reported on this and put them in the stocks for public humiliation for a month. Because, have you heard a single word about this?

Harsh Reality Break: 234 Girls Kidnapped from Physics Test (Space)

The scientists-in-training were loaded into a truck at gunpoint, and taken into the forest. It is assumed that the kidnappers were Boko Haram, an extremist group whose name means, "Western education is sinful." The idea of allowing girls to get an education, and, worse, yet, a science education, is everything they hate. They have a local history of doing crazy, horrible things, like assassinating clerics who criticize their extremism, bombing schools, murdering students, and kidnapping girls to use as sex slaves. At the time of the kidnapping, every other school in the area was shut down due to security concerns, but this school was kept open specifically to take final exams, with over 100 taking a physics test.

The world has a lot of terrible, horrible things happening in it, but this is insane, crazy, and heart-breaking.