Blasphemers!!!

This halibut is good enough for Jehovah

The owners of the most prominent vegan restaurant chain in Los Angeles were found to be raising and “harvesting” animals at their Northern California farm. Now Hollywood’s vegan community is angry, and death threats have been made. “People have taken up the mob mentality,” says Cafe Gratitude owner Matthew Engelhart.

L.A.’s vegan vortex has angrily turned on the most prominent vegan restaurant group in town this week as word has spread that its owners are not just eating meat but raising and slaughtering animals at the working farm where they live in Northern California.

…The trouble began last week when animal rights activists discovered and then widely circulated a 14-month-old blog post written by Terces on the Engelharts’ Be Love Farm website, which mixed an announcement of their transition back into a meat diet again after nearly 40 years of vegetarianism (they had been vegan since 2003) with posted pictures of strained beef broth and a freezer full of pastured beef from their own dairy cows. Matthew tells THR they have kept chickens on the farm for seven years “for eggs only,” along with the cows for five years for milk, cheese and butter that’s for sale. (He claims they’ve “harvested,” or slaughtered, several cows in total and never sold the meat, only shared it with “our friends, neighbors and community.”)

The news has come as a shock to many vegans, who have been regular customers of the restaurants and claim the Engelharts have built their brand on not just serving vegan food but clearly wrapping themselves in the righteousness of the vegan cause — which they argue has now been undermined. “The reason we’re so upset is that veganism is a belief system,” says Carrie Christianson, who started the Facebook boycott group. “You are patronizing a restaurant that you think has that philosophy, and it turns out it doesn’t. Vegans should know that this restaurant has a farm that slaughters animals.”

Be Cheerful, Enjoy Your Life

Words to live by.

A 2,400 year-old mosaic featuring a wine-drinking skeleton and the ancient equivalent of a self-help message has been uncovered in Turkey.

Reclining on a cushion, the skeleton holds a wine cup in one hand while bread and an amphora of wine sit close to hand. Above it, in Greek, is written the phrase, “be cheerful, enjoy your life”.

The mosaic was found in the Turkish province of Hatay near the Syrian border and was part of a richly-decorated floor of what was most likely a wealthy family’s dining room.

My All Time Favorite Video

…of his. Well. Crap.

And the shame is so many of today’s generation will have no idea what they missed because he embargoed his music and videos.

And now Prince

damn

Vox Took a Look in the Liberal Mirror This Morning

I’m not sure why, but they ~ to their credit ~ pretty honestly reported what they saw.

The smug style in American liberalism

…The consequence was a shift in liberalism’s center of intellectual gravity. A movement once fleshed out in union halls and little magazines shifted into universities and major press, from the center of the country to its cities and elite enclaves. Minority voters remained, but bereft of the material and social capital required to dominate elite decision-making, they were largely excluded from an agenda driven by the new Democratic core: the educated, the coastal, and the professional.

It is not that these forces captured the party so much as it fell to them. When the laborer left, they remained.

…Suffice it to say, by the 1990s the better part of the working class wanted nothing to do with the word liberal. What remained of the American progressive elite was left to puzzle: What happened to our coalition?

Why did they abandon us?

What’s the matter with Kansas?

The smug style arose to answer these questions. It provided an answer so simple and so emotionally satisfying that its success was perhaps inevitable: the theory that conservatism, and particularly the kind embraced by those out there in the country, was not a political ideology at all.

The trouble is that stupid hicks don’t know what’s good for them. They’re getting conned by right-wingers and tent revivalists until they believe all the lies that’ve made them so wrong. They don’t know any better. That’s why they’re voting against their own self-interest.

To Bloomberg, Everything Is Either Climate Change Or Racism

God, they get annoying. This morning’s example is this long, highly researched, data-packed article on Amazon’s Prime Same-Day Delivery service

For residents of minority urban neighborhoods, access to Amazon.com’s vast array of products—from Dawn dish soap and Huggies diapers to Samsung flatscreen TVs—can be a godsend. Unlike whiter ZIP codes, these parts of town often lack well-stocked stores and quality supermarkets. White areas get organic grocers and designer boutiques. Black ones get minimarts and dollar stores. People in neighborhoods that retailers avoid must travel farther and sometimes pay more to obtain household necessities. “I don’t have a car, so I love to have stuff delivered,” says Tamara Rasberry, a human resources professional in Washington, D.C., who spends about $2,000 a year on Amazon Prime, the online retailer’s premium service that guarantees two-day delivery of tens of millions of items (along with digital music, e-books, streaming movies, and TV shows) for a yearly $99 membership fee. Rasberry, whose neighborhood of Congress Heights is more than 90 percent black, says shopping on Amazon lets her bypass the poor selection and high prices of nearby shops.

As Amazon has expanded rapidly to become “the everything store,” it’s offered the promise of an egalitarian shopping experience. On Amazon and other online retailers, a black customer isn’t viewed with suspicion, much less followed around by store security. Most of Amazon’s services are available to almost every address in the U.S. “We don’t know what you look like when you come into our store, which is vastly different than physical retail,” says Craig Berman, Amazon’s vice president for global communications. “We are ridiculously prideful about that. We offer every customer the same price. It doesn’t matter where you live.”

All well and good, right?

But WAIT

Yet as Amazon rolls out its upgrade to the Prime service, Prime Free Same-Day Delivery, that promise is proving harder to deliver on. The ambitious goal of Prime Free Same-Day is to eliminate one of the last advantages local retailers have over the e-commerce giant: instant gratification. In cities where the service is available, Amazon offers Prime members same-day delivery of more than a million products for no extra fee on orders over $35. Eleven months after it started, the service includes 27 metropolitan areas. In most of them, it provides broad coverage within the city limits. Take Amazon’s home town of Seattle, where every ZIP code within the city limits is eligible for same-day delivery and coverage extends well into the surrounding suburbs.

In six major same-day delivery cities, however, the service area excludes predominantly black ZIP codes to varying degrees, according to a Bloomberg analysis that compared Amazon same-day delivery areas with U.S. Census Bureau data.

In Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, and Washington, cities still struggling to overcome generations of racial segregation and economic inequality, black citizens are about half as likely to live in neighborhoods with access to Amazon same-day delivery as white residents.

The disparity in two other big cities is significant, too. In New York City, same-day delivery is available throughout Manhattan, Staten Island, and Brooklyn, but not in the Bronx and some majority-black neighborhoods in Queens. In some cities, Amazon same-day delivery extends many miles into the surrounding suburbs but isn’t available in some ZIP codes within the city limits.

Bloomberg then goes on and on with this implication that there is some nefarious plot afoot to specifically deny black Prime members the delivery service, this “right” they are yet again having stolen from them.

Because, you see, if you specifically go out of your way to not make decisions based on racial data you are, naturally, a racist:

Amazon, he says, has a “radical sensitivity” to any suggestion that neighborhoods are being singled out by race. “Demographics play no role in it. Zero.”

Amazon says its plan is to focus its same-day service on ZIP codes where there’s a high concentration of Prime members, and then expand the offering to fill in the gaps over time. “If you ever look at a map of service for Amazon, it will start out small and end up getting big,” he says.

This is a logical approach from a cost and efficiency perspective: Give areas with the most existing paying members priority access to a new product. Yet in cities where most of those paying members are concentrated in predominantly white parts of town, a solely data-driven calculation that looks at numbers instead of people can reinforce long-entrenched inequality in access to retail services. For people who live in black neighborhoods not served by Amazon, the fact that it’s not deliberate doesn’t make much practical difference. “They are offering different services to other people who don’t look like you but live in the same city,” says Rasberry.

No, they are not, because THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU LOOK LIKE. Sorry; in fact, they don’t even CARE what you look like.

And that is their unpardonable sin.

What Have The Romans Ever Done For Us?

Stanford students reject Western Civ

An effort by a group of Stanford University students to restore a Western civilization class requirement has been decisively rejected by the student body, with voting results released Monday showing it mustering less than 15 percent support.

A Guy With Street Cred Who Turned His Life Around Speaks Out

…which now renders him an “Uncle Thomas ass nigga,” among the nicer things being said.

So, Been a Little While Since the Attack

…and they’re JUST asking for the public’s help NOW?!?!

Brussels police appeal for help finding “the man with the hat”, releasing new videohttps://t.co/m3VXNeY2KL https://t.co/oSHIu7oFic

— BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) April 7, 2016

Johannes on the spot there, Belgium.

Sweeney Todd Production Gets A Little Too Realistic

I wonder if one of the kids was named “Nick?”

More likely “Slash”

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — A high school musical in New Zealand got a little too real this week when a prop razor used in a throat-slitting scene ended up cutting the necks of two boys and sending them to a local hospital overnight.

Students at Saint Kentigern College in Auckland were performing the opening night of Sweeney Todd before parents and other audience members Wednesday when things went badly wrong. Set in Victorian London, the musical depicts a barber who slits his customer’s throats with a razor and uses the bodies to make meat pies.

The head of Saint Kentigern College, Steve Cole, told radio station Newstalk ZB the razor used in the show was real but had been bound in duct tape. He said he has no idea what went wrong during a scene midway through the Second Act.

Now, mind you, someone needs to explain how TWO kids cut cut.

One, that I can understand.

But the Second??

Labster Fishing

Happy Feet

…Lind recently looked up from her work to see an elderly couple walking through the studio door.

“And she’s like, ‘I’m Carol and this is Arne and it is on his bucket list to take tap dance lessons.’”

😀

Leaks Are Okay Right Up to Where

…they show the peasants the MONEY.

Panama Papers: Offshore Assets of World Leaders Revealed by Leak

An extensive investigation into the offshore financial dealings of the rich and famous was published by an international coalition of media outlets Sunday, based on a vast trove of documents said to have been leaked by an anonymous source.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalism, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, said the cache of 11.5 million records detailed the offshore holdings of a dozen current and former world leaders, as well as businessmen, criminals, celebrities and sports stars.

…The ICIJ said the documents included emails, financial spreadsheets, passports and corporate records detailing how powerful figures used banks, law firms and offshore shell companies to hide their assets. The data spanned a time frame of nearly 40 years, from 1977 through the end of 2015, it said.

Of course, some governments are interested in how/how MUCH dough got there as well…

Tax Authorities to Investigate Some People Named in ‘Panama Papers’

Tax authorities in Australia and New Zealand are probing local clients of a Panama-based law firm at the center of a massive data leak for possible tax evasion.

…Britain’s Guardian newspaper said the documents showed a network of secret offshore deals and loans worth $2 billion led to close friends of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Reuters couldn’t independently confirm those details.

…while others? Maybe not so much.