Last year, longtime Men's Health editor Dave Zinczenko was let go, reportedly because bosses tired of his "relentless self-promotion." Zinczenko was hired by AMI to revamp its smaller Men's Health rival, Men's Fitness. And now, former colleagues are grumbling that Zinczenko is doing little more than ripping off Men's Health for his new venture.

That would not be totally out of character, considering the fact that Zinczenko was outed a couple of years ago for plagiarizing his own writers, and Men's Health routinely repurposed cover lines while he was at the helm. He clearly has a flexible sense of journalistic ethics, as they apply to glossy guy magazines. The current issue of Men's Fitness is the first with Zinczenko at the helm. In a note in the front of the magazine, AMI boss David Pecker writes that MF "has a fresh, new attitude we think you'll find both very exciting and totally familiar." Well... familiar, definitely.

A former Men's Health staffer says that Zinczenko's former colleagues are irked, and calls Zinczenko "shameless" for the way he's appropriating MH features for his new magazine. "Kudos to Dave for building Men's Health into a powerhouse; nobody can deny his success there," says the former staffer. "But how embarrassing for him that, given the chance to reinvent another magazine, all he could do is copy what he's done before."

Is this just a figment of the collective Men's Health imagination? Let's go to the evidence!

1. Men's Health's advice column, "Jimmy the Bartender," has become Men's Fitness's advice column, "Lenny the Barber." (The names of these two blue collar advice-givers even rhyme.)

2. The Men's Health section "Ask MH," which answers reader questions, has become the Men's Fitness section "Ask Men's Fitness," which answers reader questions.

3. The Men's Health section "Metrogrades," which ranks cities based on some vapid criteria ("It's a play for local press, basically," says the former staffer) has become the Men's Fitness section "Live Well," which ranks cities based on some vapid criteria.

4. The Men's Health section "Bulletins," which rounds up the latest dude-centric scientific findings into bite-sized nuggets, is identical to the Men's Fitness "Breakthroughs" section, which rounds up the latest dude-centric scientific findings into bite-sized nuggets.

5. The Men's Health Grooming Awards have become the Men's Fitness Look Great Awards: both glorified product shot sections.

6. They even both answer questions in the current issue about whether it's okay to hit on women in the gym, for fuck's sake. (Men's Fitness says yes, which is another strike against them.)

7. They are basically the exact same stupid magazine.

The world doesn't even need one magazine that sprung from the ab-obsessed brain of Dave Zinczenko. Much less two.

Garcia was holding on to her dog when the winds came, but after the walls fell down the two separated, and she had been unable to locate him since.

Then, in the middle of the interview, little "Toto" suddenly emerged from the rubble, and the two were reunited in the most tearjerking of fashions.

"Well I got God to answer one prayer to let me be okay, but he answered both of them," Garcia said.

[video via CBS News]

At least 24 people are reported dead after Monday afternoon's huge tornado, which destroyed whole neighborhoods of an Oklahoma City suburb. Authorities have released conflicting information about the death toll as survivors emerge from the rubble, moving away from earlier accounts of between 50 to more than 90 fatalities.

The search for survivors continues on Tuesday morning around the suburb of Moore, and rescuers are desperately digging through the rubble of Plaza Towers Elementary School, where several children are still missing, believed to be trapped under the wrecked building. At least seven students have been confirmed to be killed by the storm.

Oklahoma Lt. Gov. Todd Lamb told CNN Tuesday morning that, "My understanding, this school ... Plaza Towers, they had a basement. Quite frankly, don't mean to be graphic, but that's why some of the children drowned, because they were in the basement area," he said.

Entire neighborhoods were completely leveled as the tornado registered as a category 4 on the Fujita scale, the second most powerful classification of tornado. Only sixteen minutes passed between the first tornado warning and when the tornado touched ground. During the forty minuted it was on the ground, it traveled over ten miles to Moore.

On Tuesday morning, residents still in shock wandered near their wrecked former homes, looking through the flattened structures for missing neighbors. After emerging from her home on Monday, Kelcy Trowbridge described to the Times her husband coming across the body of a young girl.

“He knew she was already gone,” Ms. Trowbridge told the Times. “When the police got there, he just bawled.” She continued, “My neighborhood is gone. It’s flattened. Demolished. The street is gone. The next block over, it’s in pieces.”

"People are wandering around like zombies," KFOR reporter Scott Hines told CNN. "It's like they're not realizing how to process what had just happened."

The president has declared Oklahoma a major disaster area and is set to address the nation at 10 AM.

More updates to come.

Updates:

10:50 AM EST: "Our prayers are with the people of Oklahoma." President Obama addressed the disaster in Oklahoma from the White House:

10:20 AM EST: More storms are moving towards Moore.

911am-occasional cloud to ground lightning heading into disaster relief areas of Newcastle/Moore. Additional storms next 2hrs. #okwx

— NWS Norman (@NWSNorman) May 21, 2013

10:10 AM EST: The Associated Press has posted some outstanding graphics that show the path of the tornado.

9:25 AM EST: Twenty-four seems to be the number of deaths confirmed so far.

BREAKING: Medical examiner's office revises death toll from Oklahoma tornado to at least 24.

— The Associated Press (@AP) May 21, 2013

9:20 AM EST: Reuters writes that the original 51 deaths reported is actually 24.

"We have got good news. The number right now is 24," said Amy Elliott, chief administrative officer at the Oklahoma City Medical Examiner's Office. The prior figure of 51 dead may have included some double-reported casualties, Elliott said.

"There was a lot of chaos," Elliott said.

It's unclear whether this number includes the 40 more bodies expected to be delivered to the medical examiner's office. No other news source has reported on this new number.

9:05 AM EST: This aerial photo shows the path of the tornado through a development. Houses only two blocks away from the tornado were spared, while those in the path were completely destroyed.

8:45 AM EST: Today is reporting that rescuers were able to help more than 100 people escape from debris.

"We heard overnight, they rescued 101 people...alive." -@kfor reporter @lancewest

— TODAY(@todayshow) May 21, 2013

8:30 AM EST: A remarkable find amid the destruction — while being interviewed by CBS, tornado survivor Barbara Garcia finds her dog buried alive under the rubble.

8:05 AM EST: Severe weather in the area continues to hamper rescue efforts and threaten already devastated areas with further destruction. It's been raining in Moore this morning, but forecasters believe it will be spared a second tornado.

[New York Times | CNN | AP | The Oklahoman]

A massive, mile-wide tornado touched down in Moore, Oklahoma Monday afternoon, killing at least 51 people, including 20 children. A reporter from local news station KFOR supposedly called it "the biggest, most destructive tornado in the history of the world," and estimated it was two to three times the magnitude of the massive tornados that hit Oklahoma in 1999.

Updates to come.

Updates:

12:51 AM EST: CNN is reporting that 40 additional bodies are being taken to the Oklahoma state medical examiner's office, bringing the death toll to 91.

12:20 AM EST: A video showing the devastation in Moore after the tornado.

11:40 PM EST: President Obama has signed a major disaster declaration for Oklahoma.

11:23 PM EST: This is reportedly video of a family emerging from their storm cellar after the tornado.

11:07 PM EST: Here's video of the tornado as it lands near Moore, Oklahoma.

10:40 PM EST: CNN is now reporting that 20 children were killed in the storm.

10:33 PM EST: Local hospitals report at least 145 injuries, 70 of them children. Of the 51 confirmed deaths, seven were children, according to an Oklahoma City police spokesperson. Those numbers are, unfortunately, expected to rise. A spokesperson for the Oklahoma City medical examiner reportedly told Fox News that she's expecting the bodies of 20 children.

Below: a photo of volunteers searching for survivors.

10:02 PM EST: This is reportedly a photo of the tornado as it hit Moore.

A photo students being led to safety from Briarwood Elementary.

9:22 PM EST: Another photo of the damage, from ABC News' Ginger Lee.

9:09 PM EST: The Oklahoma state medical examiner's office is reporting at least 51 killed, including several children, according to the Associated Press.

Below a woman is rescued from the debris at Plaza Towers School.

And a teacher hugs a student outside of Briarwood Elementary School.

8:55 PM EST: KFOR footage shows entire neighborhoods rendered unrecognizable.

8:53 PM EST: The AP is reporting that more than 120 tornado victims, including around 70 children, are being treated in local hospitals.

8:49 PM EST: Interested in knowing why the American Midwest gets so many tornadoes? Here's the science.

8:36 PM EST: KFOR meteorologist Mike Morgan called today's storm a "worst-case scenario," saying it "went from nothing to an F-5 in less than an hour." Morgan calling this an F-5, the largest kind of tornado, goes against the National Weather Service's classification of it as an F-4. Morgan also said the storm was two and a quarter miles wide.

8:30 PM EST: President Obama has told FEMA to ready itself to assist Oklahoma with its recovery.

8:25 PM EST: The Oklahoma City medical examiner is reporting at least 37 killed, according to NBC. Glenn Lewis, mayor of Moore, Oklahoma, described his city as looking like "a debris field."

8:15 PM EST: The Red Cross has a shelter opening for those in need:

Please RT:Shelter opening at:St. Andrews Church, SW 119 & S May. Location will also serve as reunification site.

— Red Cross Oklahoma (@redcrossokc) May 20, 2013

8:00 PM EST: KFOR reports that seven children have been found drowned in Plaza Towers Elementary School and as many as 30 others are elsewhere in the rubble.

7:55 PM EST: The National Weather Service has issued an early finding that today's tornado was an EF-4, the second most powerful classification on the enhanced Fujita scale. CBS News has put together a rundown of history's largest tornadoes to give some context to that rating.

7:53 PM EST: Authorities are racing to complete as much of their recovery efforts as possible before night falls, which will severely impede their abilities.

7:46 PM EST: KFOR's meteorologist estimates that today's storm was roughly three times the size of the May 3, 1999, storm that previously damaged swaths of Oklahoma.

7:39 PM EST: KFOR reports that authorities are now looking for two dozen children amid the wreckage at Plaza Towers Elementary School. The mission has changed from "search and rescue" to "search and recover."

7:37 PM EST: A horrifying 28 seconds of amateur footage:

7:32 PM EST: Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin has reportedly dispatched 80 National Guard service members to assist with rescue efforts.

7:29 PM EST: KFOR reports that "dozens" are currently seeking medical attention in area hospitals. There are still only six confirmed deaths, but that number is expected to rise.

7:27 PM EST: Image of the damage via the Oklahoma County Sheriff's Department:

7:20 PM EST: An unidentified child is lifted from the rubble at Plaza Towers:

7:13 PM EST: A heroic teacher at Plaza Towers Elementary School reportedly threw her body over several children in an effort to protect them as the storm struck a direct blow on the school.

7:12 PM EST: CNN is reporting at least six fatalities:

#BREAKING: At least six dead in Oklahoma City tornado: CNN

— Agence France-Presse (@AFP) May 20, 2013

7:07 PM EST: More neighborhood devastation from David Massey:

7:05 PM EST: The National Weather Service has confirmed that winds in Moore this afternoon got up to 200 miles per hour, according to KFOR.

6:59 PM EST: Storm chaser footage from the ground this afternoon:

6:55 PM EST: KFOR is reporting just four fatalities right now: Three adults and an infant reporter Meg Alexander saw pulled from the rubble of a building.

6:52 PM EST: This time-lapse video of the storm's progression is terrifying:

6:50 PM EST: Local CBS affiliate KWTV reports that all the children at the second elementary school hit by today's tornado have been accounted for:

UPDATE:All kids accounted for at Briarwood Elementary school in Moore, OK.Minor injuries reported at the school.news9.com

— News 9 (@NEWS9) May 20, 2013

6:45 PM EST: KFOR is now reporting that the storm could have been more than two miles wide at its largest.

6:41 PM EST: Oklahoma City police tell the AP that downed power lines and open gas lines pose risks in the storm's aftermath.

6:35 PM EST: KFOR reporter Lance West got choked up while reporting in the wake of the twister, describing it as "absolute chaos" and "the most horrific I've ever seen":

6:30 PM EST: KFOR footage of Plaza Towers Elementary School, which reportedly had 75 children and faculty members in it prior to the storm, shows that the building is now ruined:

6:15 PM EST: The main entrance to the local hospital is a mess:

6:10 PM EST: CBS News now says that the tornado was a full mile-wide and that local hospitals are reporting "multiple deaths."

6:07 PM EST: KFOR's Lance West reports that the storm laid to waste at least two schools, a movie theater, and a mobile home park. One of the schools, Plaza Towers, was said to be housing 75 students in its south wing when the storm hit. Emergency teams are now digging through the debris looking for survivors.

6:03 PM EST: Resident David Massey's Vine gives just a glimpse of some of the total devastation:

[Image via KFOR]

More than 100 mourners turned up on Saturday night to a candlelight vigil for Mark Carson, the 32-year-old gay man shot and killed by a homophobe early Saturday morning in New York City. Carson's murder, which is being treated as a hate crime, is the latest and most violent in a recent string of anti-gay attacks in the city, a place whose progressive leanings have yet to fully overpower a resilient streak of homophobia.

Carson's alleged killer, 33-year-old Elliot Morales, had been harassing numerous people in the West Village with two friends on Friday night before coming across Carson, who was walking with a friend. "Look at you faggots," Morales said to Carson, reports the New York Daily News. "You look like gay wrestlers."

Carson and his friend briefly confronted Morales before thinking better of it and walking away, according to court records, but Morales followed them and confronted them again, which is when things went from bad to worse. This from the Wall Street Journal:

[Carson's] friend told police that Mr. Morales asked the two, "You all want problems?" and then followed them to Eighth Street, where he confronted them again, asking, "Do you want to die right now?" the official said.

The friend told police he told Mr. Morales, "Do you want to shoot us in front of all these people?" and had taken his phone out, the official said.

Mr. Morales allegedly then asked, "Are you with him?" court records said. Mr. Carson replied, "Yes," at which point Mr. Morales allegedly shot him in the head, the court records said.

Carson was rushed to Beth Israel Hospital, but doctors were unable to save him, and he was pronounced dead at 1:40 AM.

Police say Morales, who had recently been staying with friends in the Rockaways, only got a few blocks from the scene of the crime before they caught up to him, at which point he reportedly threw down his gun and bragged about what he'd done, saying, "I shot him in the face."

Morales is now being charged with second-degree murder as a hate crime. The two men who had been hanging out with him on Friday night were questioned and released.

The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center is holding another vigil and march in response to Carson's attack—and the ones recently preceding it—this afternoon in Manhattan.

[Photos of vigil by Victor Jeffreys]

Seamless and GrubHub, two nearly identical online food-ordering companies whose business model consists of providing a service that is already available for free, announced Monday that they would be merging into one giant online food-ordering hydra. The new company, which has not yet settled on a name, will enable and promote social anxiety in 500 U.S. cities by eliminating the traumatic element of "human verbal interaction" from pizza delivery. The co-founder and CEO of GrubHub will serve as the CEO of the new Sterling Cooper Draper Seamless Grubhub. The CEO of Seamless will serve as president. If your cat dies, the new organization will probably start a twitter fight with you about it.

Yesterday my cat died.

His name was Houdini because I thought a black cat should have a magical name. We adopted him from the Humane Society when I was 11. My family always said he was lucky because when he was very young, he was hit (and badly injured) by a car, and subsequently disappeared for three days. I suppose you could also say he was unlucky, because when he was very young, he was hit by a car, and subsequently disappeared for three days. A late night emergency surgery left him with a slightly off-kilter gait, but he remained agile and affectionate for the next thirteen years.

Last night, I mentioned his death on Twitter to @Seamless. @Seamless and I had already been chatting because I was trying to game them out of a $7 friend-referral fee. (If you invite a friend to join Seamless using a unique referral code, you can get a $7 coupon. I was trying to get the coupon retroactively, without the code. I didn't particularly expect my petition to be successful, but I had 20 minutes to kill before Mad Men started and they had $7 coups to give away.)

I told @Seamless I was dying and that the only thing that could save me was $7, which wasn't true.

Then I mentioned that my cat had died a few hours prior, which was true. In retrospect, I see how this could read as a lie.

@seamless Don't want 2 put you in an awk position but my cat died today (RIP Houdini) so please be sensitive to that & don't burn me on this

— Caity Weaver (@caityweaver) May 20, 2013

Upon hearing this news, @Seamless did an irreverent little dance on the grave of my cat (which, incidentally, was dug by my mom yesterday in the backyard of our home in Pennsylvania).

@caityweaver RIP Houdini :(. Was it his dying wish that you get a $7 coupon?

— Seamless (@Seamless) May 20, 2013

I expressed my surprise at this.

@seamless HOLY FUCKING BALLS ARE YOU REALLY MAKING A JOKE ABOUT MY DEAD CAT RIGHT NOW

— Caity Weaver (@caityweaver) May 20, 2013

And @Seamless continued to dance, a wild, dizzy tarantella.

@caityweaver Yeah, did you like it?

— Seamless (@Seamless) May 20, 2013

This...upset me.

@seamless No, I didn't like it.

— Caity Weaver (@caityweaver) May 20, 2013

@seamless MY MOM CALLED ME ON.THE PHONE CRYING EARLIER AND HELD HIM WHILE HE DIED

— Caity Weaver (@caityweaver) May 20, 2013

@seamless HIS DYING WISH WAS PROBABLY NOT TO BE IN PAIN. THAT WOULD BE MY GUESS.

— Caity Weaver (@caityweaver) May 20, 2013

@seamless PENULTIMATE DYING WISH: NOT TO BECOME A PUNCHLINE FOR AN INTERNET FOOD ORDERING COMPANY ON THEIR CORPORATE TWITTER ACCOUNT

— Caity Weaver (@caityweaver) May 20, 2013

@seamless RIP HOUDINI. HE DIED AS HE LIVED. HATING SEAMLESS.

— Caity Weaver (@caityweaver) May 20, 2013

But @Seamless, was in too deep to ever stop making jokes about my dead cat. It had, by this point, ceased to be a popular internet food ordering company. Its revised mission statement read simply: The dead cat — make fun of it.

@caityweaver That's an oddly specific penultimate dying wish for a cat to have imho

— Seamless (@Seamless) May 20, 2013

@caityweaver Sorry. Not all of our jokes are purrfect. Our thoughts and prayers are with you right meow in this trying time.

— Seamless (@Seamless) May 20, 2013

@Seamless was being a dick.

@seamless MY. CAT. DIED. STOP BEING A DICK.

— Caity Weaver (@caityweaver) May 20, 2013

A few minutes after the exchange concluded, I received a DM from @Seamless inviting me to reply with my email address because "You deserve a $7 discount for putting up with me :)"

I declined.

@seamless I would rather you build a time machine, travel back, and un-make fun of my cat's death. Put your $7 toward funding the research.

— Caity Weaver (@caityweaver) May 20, 2013

Congrats to Seamless and GrubHub, two companies that POSSIBLY (I mean, I don't know — we have no way of knowing — but it seems incredibly likely) serve chopped up dead cats inside the carne asada tacos you order from them, on their merger.

Update: Before writing this post, I sent an email to Seamless to let them know that my cat REALLY DID DIE yesterday. I've just received a kind apology ("We here at Seamless are deeply sorry for your loss") and an offer of two free meals. Hopefully this lavishly catered memorial buffet will fill the cat-shaped hole in my heart.

To contact the author of this post, email caity@gawker.com.

[Shutterstock/photo by Jim Cooke.]

In most states, the unemployment rate is coming down, ever so slowly. Still, nearly 12 million Americans are officially unemployed, and millions more have dropped out of the labor force entirely. Each week, we bring you true stories of unemployment, straight from the unemployed. This is what's happening out there.

I hate myself

I am unemployed and I hate it. Even worse, I hate myself. I am one of over 12 million people (based on the January 2013 BLS stats) in this country that does not have a job but wants one. I never ever wanted to be unemployed. I never thought I could have my job taken away from me (I despise the phrase “lost my job” since it implies it was entirely my fault, like my job was a set of car keys). Sure, like many people, I found my job to be frustrating at times. When the time was right and the opportunity arose, I took a new position. Sometimes it was within the same company and sometimes it was with a different company. The point is that when I was employed and I wanted a new job, I was in a good position. I am unemployed. I want a job but I am in a terrible position.

Since 2003, I have endured at least 3 layoffs/downsizings/re-organizations. In the first instance, the company reduced its workforce. In the second, the company went out of business. In the third, the company used (or rather abused) it’s right of “at will” employment and cut me loose. Each instance was painful. Each instance was humiliating. It’s something that cannot be quantified in a BLS report, unless you measure it in terms of things like friendships lost or alcohol consumed. Before I mention what’s happening (or not happening) in my life now, I’ll take you back to 1996. That was when I got my first full-time job since graduating from college a year before. It was an entry-level position with a major cable television provider In Colorado... An internship at a nearby television production company enabled me to get a full-time job in 1999 with a premium movie network...Then in November of 2003, my employer decided to layoff 10 to 15 percent of staff to offset a sudden increase in programming costs in the wake of a bitter dispute with one of the biggest cable television providers...

So, I officially started my job search in January 2004 and honestly, it feels like I haven’t stopped searching since then. Unable to find full-time work in my field, I took a part-time job at an independent movie theater chain. Unfortunately, the company went out of business in June of that year. After telling the staff that they would lose their jobs, one of the theater managers had the audacity ask everyone to help clean up before the doors were locked. By July, both my severance and unemployment had run out. I began asking my parents for monthly loans, something I hoped I would never have to do. Still unable to get any meaningful work in my career field, I tried other low paying jobs: package handler, door-to-door sales, restaurant server, market researcher and office assistant...

I did have some luck getting television work, but it was only temporary gigs. A couple of hours at a sports television network. A couple of days at a regional cable network. I even got a couple of weeks at my old movie network. But nothing was full-time. Even taking a Final Cut Pro editing class in the summer of 2004 failed to impress any potential employers. Hands-on training is not the same as hands-on experience. In an effort to pull my financial weight and avoid asking my parents for money again, I cashed out most of my retirement savings. I figured I’d make up the balance some time later down the road. I assumed “later” wouldn’t be too many years away. I’m still hoping that’s the case. After a couple of months working part-time at a market research company and moonlighting as a mobile disc jockey at weddings, I landed a full-time job at a company in 2006 that owned and operated several lifestyle television channels. I spend my days viewing American hunting shows and European fashion programming for quality and content standards. The job certainly had it’s drawbacks and I was getting paid less than three years before, but it felt good to be working full-time (with benefits) at an innovative media company. I felt there was a good chance to move up the ranks. That feeling died quickly in July of 2007. The company was in a battle with a major satellite provider. In an effort to save its existence, the company slashed payroll before filing Chapter 11. Lots of people were let go on a Monday afternoon, including me. Another day of shock. Another night spent drinking heavily. Once again, I got severance, but this time, the check bounced. Due to the filing of Chapter 11, the company did not have to pay all its financial obligations. Eventually, the courts decided my former employer was not worthy of Chapter 11 protection and the company liquidated its assets. I had to do a lot of research to find out where the head honchos had run off to before sending them a letter regarding their act of check fraud. Fortunately, they paid my severance plus some interest. It was vindication, but it was an exhausting experience and took nearly 4 months to get closure.

So in August 2007, I was looking for work yet again. I did have a new unemployment claim and some mobile disc jockey gigs to cover some of my expenses, but once again, I was borrowing from mom and dad. In addition, I was cutting back on my expenses, including my social costs. I wasn’t going to happy hours or dinners as often. I was reluctant to discuss my work situation with people, especially women. Unemployment is not a relationship builder, especially in this country where the first question you ask someone new is, “What do you do for a living?” In October, I found a temp job with an area film festival. The hours were long and the perks were limited. Still, I got to work with a great bunch of people through November. After that, things got quiet. Tons of resumes sent out and applications filled out. Still, no job offers. Not in television production. Not in anything. By the end of March 2008, the unemployment checks ran out. Then in April, things changed for, what seemed at the time, the better.

I got a full-time job with a field sports production company. Hunting and fishing shows. I was handling the logistics for 4 different television series. I built production schedules. I got plane tickets. I acquired hunting and filming permits. Plus, I got full health benefits. It was a fast-paced, ever-changing, always-challenging job... I was let go [in 2010] on a Monday at 5pm and management was able to recruit, interview, hire and place someone in my old position by 8am the next day. Another layoff. Another day of shock. This time, I didn’t get any severance after 2 years of dedication. Colorado is an “at will” state, which means an employer can terminate the employment of any employee regardless of reason. No severance required.

That was my last full-time job to date. That was also my last job in my career field. The only other work I have landed since then was some occasional wedding disc jockey work, a part-time market research job at a start-up company (which went through a downsizing in 2012) and a seasonal event staff position that ended in October of last year. My unemployment benefits, what little is left from my last downsizing, are almost gone. I’m looking for work, but every day seems to be an exercise in futility. I network and pass along business cards. Everyone’s posting a resume online and most of them are viewed by computers rather than people. I’m tired. I’m exhausted. It’s hard to compete with both technological innovation and a global workforce. I’m living alone and embarrassed to discuss my situation with friends and family. I’ve considered getting therapy, but it’s a costly option. Most single-payer heath plans don’t cover outpatient mental health (like mine) or they only cover it after the large deductible has been met.

I recently turned 40 and I’m at a crossroads: continue to find work in my career field or choose to learn something else and start at the bottom. Not an easy choice. Regardless of the path I take, I decided to write this in an effort to give the lucky (yes, I do say lucky, since there are no guarantees in life) millions of people in this country who are currently employed a glimmer of what is means, for me anyway, to be unemployed. I hope the people running both small and big businesses take these tales of adversity into consideration before flat-out refusing to consider anyone who’s got employment gaps on their resume. By the way Wall Street: your recent Dow Jones gains from October 2007 won’t mean much unless there’s a equally impressive recoup of about 5 million jobs (or 3.2% unemployment rate decrease) as well. Lastly, I hope that the leaders in Washington D.C. will make a genuine bipartisan effort to help over 12 million people (especially Hispanics, African-Americans and anyone under 25 years old) get their lives back on track. Of course, that last wish might just get lost in all the partisan yelling.

The contract worker

I have been officially unemployed since April of 2010. I am in my mid 50's and female. Let's talk about how many ways an employer can discriminate!

In the beginning of my job search I decided to open up to the idea of contracting. I decided that this was a perfect way to stay current in my chosen profession. Plus, if I like the employer and the employer likes me than, BINGO, I could be offered a regular position. Contracting is a way to stay off of unemployment and allow me to pay the bills. I have had good contract experiences and terrible experiences. Still, I am lucky to have this work. The down side is, regardless of how much I try, I am unable to save enough money to put into my IRA or savings account for emergencies. In addition, now when employers look at my resume, they don't think that I want a permanent job. They think I prefer contracting to a regular job. Many employers expect you to work until the job is "done". This may mean expecting you to work over 40 hours but not intending to pay you for that work. This of course is illegal. I refuse to work over 40 hours unless I am paid to do so. I know a few contractors who do work longer hours, with out pay. They work hoping that they will be hired full time. Then the contract ends. No job, and you are exhausted from all of that work! I did not mind working long hours and when I was employed, I usually did work longer hours. I found as a contractor, employers will take advantage of you if you do. Don't ever expect to hear the employer say thank you! They either turn a blind eye or expect you to keep on working those hours.

Some employers treat contractors as second class citizens. I have learned to ignore this. Still, I have to say that it bothers me. It bothers me the way contractors can be mistreated by some employers. Sometimes I feel that our work culture is moving backwards into the industrial age. Contract workers or, as some call us, contingent workers, do not have paid holidays, vacations, bonuses or health insurance. Sometimes the agency offers insurance after you have met a certain waiting period. The insurance is usually not worth the money. Typically you will see high deductibles, no prescription drug coverage. Often by the time you are eligible to receive coverage, your contract ends, leaving you to pay high COBRA fees. In addition, those of you who have contracted may have had the experience of being given the worst computer in the department, and often find that you are working with limited lighting, and don't even bother asking for an erognomics evaluation.

Lately I find myself feeling that I should start a momentum about contractor rights. I hear the workforce is quickly moving towards the direction of using more "contingent workers" in the future. If that is the case, contractors need to make sure we are treated fairly and well. Contracting may be a necessary evil for an individual who is trying to be productive. However, the evil ways that employers can miss-treat contractors make this a "hard row to hoe".

What is an unemployed person suppose to do? Stay home and sit on our "butts" waiting for the phone to ring or, get out there and let people know you are ready to work? I say we keep this moving forward. Everyone who is out of work and looking, needs to find some kind of work. The right contract work can be a way to empower you again. In the end, all of us, who are looking for a decent job, deserve to find something that provides us with a feeling of pride and an sense of empowerment.

Hail as large as baseballs were reported from Georgia to Minnesota, as the powerful storm produced as many as two-dozen tornadoes. One person has been reported dead as a result of the storms, a man in Shawnee, Oklahoma. Oklahoma, the hardest-hit state, reported sixteen counties as disaster areas.

Meteorologists had forecast the severe weather for days, as the weather system stretched from Texas to Minnesota.

The central region of the National Weather Service sent out blunt advisories in the hours preceding the storms: "You could be killed if not underground or in a tornado shelter," the advisory said. "Complete destruction of neighborhoods, businesses and vehicles will occur. Flying debris will be deadly to people and animals."

These kind of warnings have been common since the May 2011 tornadoes that struck Joplin, Missouri, killing 158 people.

[AP]

As you may have heard, Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto, smokes crack cocaine. We've seen a video of him smoking crack cocaine, and the people who have the video would like to sell it. Through the miracle of crowdfunding, you can help. Please consider donating to the Rob Ford Crackstarter.

How Much Do We Need? $200,000. That's what the owners of the video want. That sounds like a lot of money. The good people at Indiegogo believe that, with the appropriate amount of virality, that goal is achievable.

Christ, That's a Lot of Money. Yes, it is. But they've got the video! And it's not all about greed, though of course most of it is. The owners of this video fear for their safety, and want enough money to pay for a chance to get out of Toronto and set up in a new town. Their fear is not entirely unwarranted. Rob Ford is a powerful if buffoonish man, and he was wrapped up in a drug scene that purportedly involved many other prominent Toronto figures.

What Will We Get? A crystal clear, well-lit video of the mayor of Toronto smoking crack cocaine, published on Gawker for the world to see. We will also be throwing in some perks, for specific donation amounts. But the main thing is the video of the mayor of Toronto smoking crack cocaine.

How Does This Work, Exactly? We're using Indiegogo. We've set a target of $200,000, to be reached within 10 days. If we reach the target, we get the money. If we don't reach the target, you get your money back. If we do reach the target, we will pay the money to the people who have the video. They will give us the video. We will publish the video. You will watch the video.

What If This Whole Thing Goes South? We are mindful that people who hang out with and surreptitiously record crack-smoking mayors may not always be reliable. The people we've been dealing with have so far honored every commitment they've made. And they have pledged to sell it to us for $200,000 if this Crackstarter works. But if they disappear, or sell it elsewhere, we will donate every penny we receive to a Canadian non-profit that helps people suffering from addiction and its consequences.

So go here and sign up. Be a part of (Canadian) history! And I promise you—this is a pretty great video of a mayor smoking crack cocaine.

Update: The Crackstarter has just reached $19,000 and is steadily climbing to our goal. Be part of the dream.

Update: Make that $45,000. Don't do crack.

Update: As of the morning of Sunday, May 19, with nine days to go, we've raised $63,500.

Update: This is an exciting one. We have just updated the Crackstarter to include some new perks, depending on how generous you're feeling. They are:

For $75: A Public Thank You. We'll publicly thank you from the Gawker Twitter account, unless you'd like to remain anonymous. All your friends will know how cool you are!

For $150: Signed Canadian Flag. Every $150 donor gets a Canadian flag defiled by Gawker owner Nick Denton's signature. Own a piece of history. (Only available if the video purchase is consummated.)

[Image by Jim Cooke.]

Rob Ford, Toronto's conservative mayor, is a wild lunatic given to making bizarre racist pronouncements and randomly slapping refrigerator magnets on cars. One reason for this is that he smokes crack cocaine. I know this because I watched him do it, on a videotape. He was fucking hiiiiigh. It's for sale if you've got six figures.

It began like this: We've made fun of Ford before for his bizarre pronouncements and nude pictures. Last week, we got a tip from someone claiming to have a videotape of Ford smoking crack. Would we like to buy it?

Update: Go here to contribute to the Rob Ford Crackstarter. We are crowdsourcing $200,000 to buy and publish the video.

The tipster made the following claims:

• Toronto Mayor Rob Ford smokes crack cocaine.

• There is a video of Rob Ford smoking crack cocaine, taken within the last six months.

• Rob Ford purchases his crack cocaine from a crew of Toronto drug dealers that service a veritable who's who of A-list...Torontonians? Torontites? Anyway, a lot of prominent people in Toronto purchase and enjoy crack and powder cocaine, and they all buy it from the same folks. The same folks Ford buys it from. Ford's longtime friend, people on his staff, his brother, a prominent hockey analyst, and more.

As evidence of his claims, our tipster provided the photo above. It shows Ford hanging out with a number of people. The gentleman standing to his right, flipping the camera the bird, is Anthony Smith. Smith, a 21-year-old college student, was killed two months ago outside a Toronto nightclub in a gangland-style shooting. A photo, from a CBC story on his murder, is at left. Smith was, according to our tipster, a kid from the same neighborhood as the dealers who service Ford, and the photo was taken while Ford was going to the neighborhood to purchase and smoke crack cocaine.

If you're curious about the photo's veracity, at left is another photo, from the National Post, of Ford wearing the same sweatshirt.

Needless to say, the story intrigued me. I asked the tipster for a screengrab of the video to verify that he had what he claimed to have. He refused. If I wanted to see the video, I was going to have to go to Toronto. He sounded confident enough. Certain things that he told me checked out. So off I went.

Toronto is lovely. Our first effort to meet up, at a Toronto bus station at night, fizzled. The tipster was there, but the person who actually had possession of the video was a no-show. The tipster and I retired to a coffee shop to talk Toronto politics and Rob Ford's curious history—his rise as a sort of oddly drunken, brazenly honest conservative voice in a decidedly liberal and polite city. It was a nice night, but I was beginning to worry I'd been had.

The next morning, I connected again with the tipster. He was going to locate the owner of the video, he told me. Last night, there had been a mix-up. The video was being stored in a safe place, but the person who had access to the safe place had briefly disappeared, and so the owner couldn't get access to the safe place to get the device on which the video was stored. By the morning, however, the tipster and the owner had located the person who had access to the safe place. This was going to happen.

Checkout time was at noon. My flight was at 7:30 p.m. I loitered around downtown Toronto, checking out the mall, until I got the text: We were to meet up at a chain restaurant near the airport. The tipster picked me up from the restaurant and drove me to a housing development. The owner of the video would meet us there.

We sit idling in his car, making small talk. The tipster calls the owner and talks in language other than English. "He'll be right down," he says. Fifteen minutes pass. "Waiting for the elevator," he says. Ten minutes pass. A young gentleman opens the rear door of the car and gets in. The two men speak in a language other than English. The young gentleman immediately exits the vehicle. No video.

The tipster looks at me: "The battery is dead." The young gentleman—the owner of the video—needed to go back upstairs to charge the battery on the device that contained the video. We wait. More small talk.

The owner of the video returns. He thrusts a device, a phone with a touchscreen, in my face. "Can I hold it?" I ask.

"No."

I crane my neck. It plays.

Here is what the video shows: Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto, is the only person visible in the frame. Prior to the trip, I spent a lot of time looking at photographs of Rob Ford. The man in the video is Rob Ford. It is well-lit, clear. Ford is seated, in a room in a house. In one hand is a a clear, glass pipe. The kind with a big globe and two glass cylinders sticking out of it. In the other hand is a lighter. A slurred voice off-camera is ranting about Canadian politics in what sounds like an attempt to goad Ford. "Pierre Trudeau was a faggot!" is the one phrase the lodges in my mind. Ford, pipe in one hand and lighter in the other, is laughing, and mildly protesting at the sacrilege. He seems to keep trying to light the pipe, but keeps stopping to laugh. He is red-faced and sweaty, heaving with each breath. Finally, he finds his moment and lights up. He inhales.

Update: The Toronto Star, whose reporters have also seen the video, say that it's Justin Trudeau—Pierre's son and the leader of the Liberal Party in Canada—and not Pierre getting called a "faggot." It's hard to keep all these Canadians apart. The Star also has Ford himself, and not the voice off-screen, making the "faggot" remark, though that's not how I remember it.

In one move, the owner stops the video and draws the device back into his pocket.

"You took this?" I ask.

"Yes."

"When?"

"Within the last six months."

"You're sure it's crack?"

"Yes."

"You've seen him smoke crack before?"

"Yes. Gotta jet."

And he is gone.

So: That was a video of the mayor of Toronto smoking crack. The trouble is, the owner wants money. More money than I am willing to pay. The tipster has already reached out to one other news outlet, a Canadian organization that he refused to name, which offered $40,000. The owner rejected that. He thinks he can get six figures. It's unlikely he's going to get six figures.

But I am going to try. The tipster wants this video out. Rob Ford needs to be held to account. The owner just wants money—preferably enough to get out of town after this blows up, since he doesn't think it will be safe for him. The tipster and I both fear that the owner will try to sell the video back to Ford. That would be a shame.

So if Gawker can't come up with enough money to ring this owner's bell, perhaps we can find a partner. This isn't just the mayor of Toronto smoking crack cocaine, after all: This is Toronto Confidential. There are a host of important local officials wrapped up in this drug ring. 60 Minutes? No. Dateline NBC? No. Inside Edition? No. National Enquirer? No. CNN? Maybe!

Well, no. But when I emailed an acquaintance at CNN this afternoon, laying out much the same information I've offered above and asking for discretion and confidentiality lest we screw up a pretty fucking great story about the mayor of the fifth-largest city in North America smoking crack cocaine on camera, he forwarded the email to his producer. The producer, in turn, asked CNN's Canada reporter about it. The Canada reporter—and this was a pretty fucking big mistake—called a source who used to work in Ford's office. Within 40 minutes, word had gotten back to me that "CNN called Ford's office asking about a crack tape."

And so here we are. The owner still hasn't found a buyer with pockets deep enough to meet his demands. But word is out around Toronto now that the tape exist, and Ford's circle knows about it courtesy a CNN reporter. So, with permission, I am laying out everything I know about the Rob Ford Crack Tape in the hopes that a) everyone knows that Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto, smokes crack, and b) this knowledge might hasten the arrival of the Rob Ford Crack Tape on the internet or broadcast television, because really, it is something to behold.

If you want to buy it, let me know. I can put you in touch with a guy.

Ford's office did not immediately respond to an email.

Update: We've received an email from Dennis Morris, a gentleman with a hotmail.com email address purporting to be Ford's attorney. Here is the message. We haven't corrected its formatting.

Greetings;I am a lawyer,and have been contacted by Mayor Ford's office in reference to your indicating you will post a photo of Mayor Ford smoking crack cocaine. Mayor Ford denies such took place,and if such posting occurs,it is false and defamatory,and you will be held legally accountable.In reference to the photo,you wish to publish, Mayor Ford has his photo taken daily,sometimes with others.

If the person you mention is now deceased,it is sad,regardless of his alleged background.

Please govern yourself accordingly.

Dennis Morris.

To contact the author of this post, email john@gawker.com.

[Images via National Post and CBC]

Welcome to Thatz Not Okay, a regular column in which I school inquiring readers on what is and is not okay. Please send your questions (max: 200 words) to caity@gawker.com with the subject "Thatz Not Okay."

I have a small shop and 2 shop dogs. There's a local lady with a dog who walks by daily. I recognize her from the pet store as being every shop owner's nightmare aka a time suck who doesn't buy anything. My dogs are great shop dogs, friendly and outgoing to customers. They will bark at another dog thru the window though make friends once the other dog is in the shop. I want to pretend my dogs are not dog friendly to deter this woman from entering my shop and wasting my time. Is that okay?

Thatz not okay.

What exactly is the plan here? For you to brace yourself in the doorway and scream, “AWAY, AWAY INNOCENTS! O THAT MY STORE WERE NOT GUARDED BY SUCH CERBERUSES! NOT REALLY SURE WHY I KEEP THEM IN A RETAIL SPACE, TO BE HONEST. WHO KNOWS WHY I DO WHAT I DO?”

Why would you keep unfriendly dogs in a store?

After receiving your email, I looked up the Yelp reviews for your shop, as this woman might, upon hearing that your business is home to vicious street curs. Many of the write-ups mentioned the “very sweet," “friendly” dogs who are only working at the store part-time to put themselves through cooking school. While these reviews reflect wonderfully on you, a responsible pet owner with well-socialized dogs, they hinder your harebrained scheme.

Phase I of preventing this one random woman from entering your shop because you hate her for no clear reason is to write a bunch of fake Yelp reviews for your boutique.

"The only thing more terrifying than the dogs was the terrifyingly excellent service.”

“The dogs are SO CUTE but I think one of them is a coyote and gave my Samoyed rabies.”

But! What if the woman wants to come back on her own, without her puppy chaperone? The dog in question is presumably not a guide dog. (If it is: you are the devil; your shop's scented candles burn with the eternal flames of hell.) How will you keep her out of the store once the (pretend) hell hounds are no longer an issue? Just stand on the sidewalk and yell "EVERYTHING I SELL IS BAD! I PROMISE YOU DON’T WANT IT"?

Not that logic or rational thinking is really a factor here, but I'm curious as to how, from merely watching this woman in a pet store, you deduced that she would not buy anything from your store. Do you own a pet store? Is the pet store you own the one in which you saw her not buying anything? How does she feed her dog if she doesn’t buy it food from the pet store?

Generally speaking, it is bad business practice to keep potential customers away from your store on the chance they MIGHT not buy anything. (This is why one rarely sees signs reading “Store is for customers only” and “You SEE it, you BUY it" hung outside souvenir shops.) If you must, a surefire way to keep this lady (and others like her) off your property is to throw a “closed” sign up anytime someone walks by; that way no customers will ever come in and waste your time.

Incidentally, everything I've just said is irrelevant, as this woman has given no indication she WANTS to enter your store. She walks by daily and yet has never set foot inside. It sounds like you’re already doing a great job of keeping her away.

At work, I get half-day Fridays in during our Summer Hours schedule. Husband decided to take half-Fridays off from work this summer, too. Problem is: I don't want to be obligated to spend this time with him; I like the 4-hour afternoon freedom & personal time. In fact, it annoys me that he intruded. Is that okay?

Thatz not okay.

If you don’t want to spend time with your husband, "Husband," on your summer Fridays, I would tell him what you just told me. Word-for-word. Print out the email and give it to him.

Just because your job gives you summer Fridays doesn’t mean your husband doesn’t deserve summer Fridays. See how that sentence doesn’t exactly make sense? That’s because your complaint doesn’t exactly make sense.

You’re fortunate that you have a job that gives its employees half-day Fridays. Your husband is fortunate that he has a job that allows him to decide out of the blue that maybe instead of working on Friday afternoons, he will just not do that. (What is his job? A neighborhood lemonade stand?)

“Summer Fridays” are not a concept invented by you for the enjoyment of you and no one else.

Yes, it is possible that your husband is hoping to spend time with you while you’re both off work. I can understand how this guy would have gotten the impression you wanted to hang out with him; it probably happened at or around your wedding. (Little did he know you were marrying him only to escape him. Keeping your enemies closer, etc.)

Does he come on vacations with you? Invite himself to breakfast when you’re having cereal A-L-O-N-E? When’s he gonna get a clue that you are a lone wolf: private; independent; crepuscular, becoming particularly active on Fridays?

Wanting time alone is fine. The newsflash here is that your husband probably does not plan to spend every one of his (equally precious) summer Friday hours Velcro'd to your side. What were you planning on doing with those four-hour breaks? Banging a stranger in your marriage bed? If it’s anything other than that, it probably won’t be adversely affected by his being home (or even more broadly: not being at work) at the same time as you. He’s probably got some plans too.

If you’re really desperate to avoid him, I’m sure your employer can find some work for you to do during what would have been your summer Fridays.

But my advice is to keep your chin up and muscle through it. Summer only lasts for a few months and you won’t be married much longer.

Submit your "Thatz Not Okay" questions (max: 200 words) here. Art by Jim Cooke. Source photo via Shutterstock.

If you are an influential user of a Bloomberg terminal—the $24,000-per-year glorified computers that the company sells to Wall Street trading firms, politicians, and banks—there's a chance the company's news division has a file on you that's chock full of personal information about your family, your predilections, and your 24-hour contact information. And it's accessible to all 2,400 journalists at Bloomberg News.

Bloomberg has been facing down a maelstrom this week, ever since it emerged that the company's news division has for years encouraged its reporters to access internal company information to snoop on how the subjects of their reporting use Bloomberg terminals. Reporters could see when people logged on and off, read transcripts of their chats with customer service, even see when they were checking job listings. When Goldman Sachs learned that its executives had been surveilled, the New York Post got word and all hell broke loose.

In the wake of those disclosures, several former Bloomberg reporters reached out to Gawker to point out another way the company uses its terminals to capture and share personal information about customers: the "reporter's note" function.

Every Bloomberg subscriber has a bio page with the user's photograph, employment status, and office telephone number. At the bottom of each page is a link called REPN, accessible to any of the 2,400 journalists Bloomberg employs worldwide.

REPN, which is also searchable by name, is like an internal data dump where Bloomberg journalists share intel on sources. That's where reporters are encouraged to leave private cellphone and home phone numbers, email addresses, interests and hobbies, best time of day to call, whether the source is married or has a girlfriend or has recently separated, and details on how to get them to start talking—try to bring up his two daughters, hates the cost of private school tuition—all concerning highly-influential, market-moving bankers and politicians.

Many newsrooms keep shared internal files on sources—how to reach a deputy mayor after hours, etc.—and any reporter would love to get her hands on those dossiers. Information-sharing, whether formal or informal, is sort of the point of journalism. Banks also keep similar files on reporters.

But the extensive use of REPN at Bloomberg is notable for three reasons: 1) It's just one of many, many ways the company—where "stalking is simply part of the culture"—obsessively logs data about its employees and customers. It's another watch tower in the Bloomberg panopticon. 2) While most power players wouldn't be surprised to find that a private cell phone number they gave to a reporter was shared around a newsroom, they might not expect that personal details they divulged about, say the status of their marriage were being systematically recorded for corporate use.

And, most importantly, 3) former Bloomberg sources say they REPN information was sometimes misused or shared outside the newsroom.

One former Bloomberg reporter told Gawker:

I will give you an example how this was abused by me. My parents had an issue with an airline booking, and I wrote to the CEO of that airline (without mentioning I was from Bloomberg or how I got that email) and the issues was resolved. I have been told that many reporters also abuse that function for different reasons like asking for jobs.

"If someone did that, it's a clear violation of our policies," said Bloomberg spokesman Ty Trippet.

As journalism professor Chris Roush, a former Bloomberg News reporter, noted in Talking Biz News, Bloomberg's notoriously autocratic news chief Matthew Winkler once shared a source's REPN page with her:

(Editor in chief Matt Winkler once showed this feature to one of my beverage sources, who was incensed that I had entered into the system that she was sometimes difficult to work with.)

Added the former reporter:

The terminal gives blatant opportunities to pry into other people's affairs. And its not just clients. If I think Betty Liu is someone that I may be interested in knowing, I can check if she is married, her home address, spouse name, phone number, etc. I can give out the info to others [to] capitalise in whatever they see fit. It's eerie. There is no privacy for anyone, staff, clients, personalities.

That includes Bloomberg reporters themselves, whose keystrokes are also being logged. If the REPN data was used so cavalierly by Bloomberg News staffers, it's an open question whether it was ever accessed to help grease sales, which is of course the company's bread and butter. “It’s only available in the newsroom and not to any other part of the compay. Period," stressed a Bloomberg News spokesperson.

But as Bloomberg quietly starts to compete with its clients as a brokerage operation, "motivated in part by a slowdown in the core terminals business," that data only becomes more lucrative.

Update: A Bloomberg News spokesperson clarified that the REPN database covered heads of state and newsmakers, beyond just clients of its terminal service.

To contact the author of this post, please email nitasha@gawker.com.

[Image by Jim Cooke]

Let's just say for argument's sake that you enter a New York City subway station and step onto an escalator that's headed down towards the train tracks. At that moment, you must choose one of two clear courses of action: walk down the escalator, or stand still. Put more precisely, you can either walk down the escalator, or you deserve to be pushed down the escalator.

We live in a society here. We don't live in an imaginary Candyland which revolves solely around your personal needs, where the needs of every other human are completely irrelevant unless they coincide with your own. In this world, we all have to pitch in for the good of the whole. We all have to do our part to help ensure the smooth functioning of society. We all have to consider the needs of others when making our daily decisions.

We all have to walk down the escalator. All together, now. There you are.

You don't want to walk down the escalator? Counterpoint: The dozens and dozens of people behind you do not want to miss their train. That train— do you hear it?— yes, that train that you can hear, approaching the station, right this moment. The train that will be pulling in and opening its doors in just seconds. What makes this train so tantalizing is that we can all hear it approaching; we're all so close to the train that we're aware of its impending arrival; we all want to get on the train, in order to reach our destinations; and yet we can't get to the train. Why can't we get there? It's so close. Why not just make our way to the platform in a hasty but orderly fashion and get on the train?

Because this motherfucker up here wants to stand still on the escalator.

You're too tired to walk? Counterpoint: no you're not. How did you get in this subway station to begin with? Were you hauled here in a wheelbarrow? How do you move about the city? Are you carried by the scruff of your neck in your mother's mouth like a wayward puppy? I suspect that, no, you walk. You walked here. You can walk down the escalator. All of us are tired, you see. That is why we don't want to spend any more time in this train station than is absolutely necessary. That is why we want to catch the first available train— the train that is about to pull in now. Which we will miss. Because we are stuck on this escalator.

Behind your relaxing ass.

You're standing "to one side" of the escalator and we can go around you? Counterpoint: really? I'm not here to call you a liar, but have you taken note of the average width of the average escalator in the average urban transportation hub? Even the escalators that are designed to be wide enough to fit two people were clearly not designed with the girth of the average American tourist in mind. Nor were they designed to accommodate two people when those people are carrying bags and backpacks and briefcases and art portfolios and all the other detritus that modern subway riders transport in their daily travels. Acting as if all escalators are wide enough to render your own personal decision to stand still unmeaningful to those behind you is little more than a convenient fiction. And, of course, a good number of escalators are only built to be wide enough for a single person, in which case walking down should be understood to be mandatory, under the assumption that you are not a graceless savage.

If you are so old and decrepit that walking down the escalator would literally put your physical health in peril, then fine. And I'm even willing to give the laziest among us the gift of being able to stand on the upwards escalator that is leaving the station, when there is no risk of missing a train (although the negative karma you accrue from your escalator blockage will still be yours to deal with). But do not, under any circumstances, stand still on the downward escalator, enjoying the sensation of sloth, oblivious to the increasingly desperate and frustrated crowd of commuters piling up behind you.

Keep it moving, people.

Previously in Urban Transportation Etiquette: Please, Don't Stand in the Walkway

[Image by Jim Cooke.]

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one-half of the alleged Boston marathon bombers, left a note in the boat he was hiding in during the final hours of the April 19th manhunt, CBS News is reporting.

CBS News correspondent John Miller says sources tell him that the note was written by Dzhokhar on the interior wall of the boat's cabin, as Dzhokhar was bleeding from a gunshot wound he received earlier that morning.

The note stated that the bombings were in retribution for what the United States had done to Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq, and calling the bombing victims "collateral damage," much in the way that many Muslims have died during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

"When you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims," the note said.

Dzhokhar also revealed that he wasn't mourning his brother, Tamerlan, who died earlier that morning, because Tamerlan was already a martyr in paradise by then. Dzhokhar wrote that he soon expected to join him as a martyr.

[AP]

Future gag-gift-giving uncle Prince Harry is wrapping up his Spring Break tour of the U.S. with a polo match in Connecticut today, because nothing says "I am a man of the people and I 'get' America" quite like a spirited polo event in the rough-and-tumble Nutmeg State.

Harry made a lot of friends on the six-day trip, charming the nation by gamely showing up to all of his scheduled events and taking off his suit jacket when it was time to get real. Many people even forgot why the United States fought so hard to free itself from British rule in the first place.

Everywhere he went, the prince was showered with truly adequate stocking stuffers and it was like ohmygodAmerica, please stop embarrassing me in front of Harry.

Here's a list of everything America gave to Prince Harry while he was here:

A voodoo doll to use on himself.

A fleece.

A shirt.

A shirt.

A shirt.

A bus pass.

An ass whuppin'.

Some skin.

Toys.


A gambling addiction.

The mic.

The ball.

The creeps.


Horns, if you squint.

Our attention.

Our undivided attention.

A deeper comprehension of the horrors and devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy.

A hat.

An 18-year-old girl in peak physical condition.


An idea for a weird sex thing.

Sneaks.

A good stern talking-to.

Vittles.

A crapper.

[Images via AP, Getty, and Twitter/Top image by Jim Cooke/@GovChristie]

To contact the author of this post, email caity@gawker.com.

Last Tuesday, Maria Melendez witnessed a half-dozen sheriff's deputies fatally beating 33-year-old David Sal Silva—hitting him with clubs and kicking him— in Bakersfield, California outside Kern Medical Center. She began to film the scene on her phone, yelling to the cops that she was filming them.

Melendez, who had been visiting her son at the hospital, reported that the deputies beat Silva for eight minutes as he screamed and cried for help. He was "basically pleading for his life," said Laura Vasquez, another witness with Melendez. “Then we couldn’t see him anymore. That’s how many cops were on top of him.”

Then Silva went silent. A group of witnesses report the deputies "hogtied" the beaten man, lifted him up, and dropped him on the ground, twice. When he didn't respond, they began CPR.

Melendez said she had the entire episode recorded on her phone, as did her daughter's boyfriend. But before they could send the videos to media outlets, detectives from the sheriff's office took their phones, before warrants had arrived.

The seizure of the phones is sparking accusations of a cover up. A lawyer representing the family of David Sal Silva, says they want to file a federal civil rights complaint. He added that this "smacks of collusion."

The six deputies and the sergeant present for the encounter have been returned to full duty while the episode is investigated. A spokesman for the sheriff's office said the phones were taken with proper search warrants, so the Bakersfield Police Department can use these phones as part of the investigation.

The deputies say that they responded to a call and found Silva on the pavement. When they tried to wake him, there was the resulting altercation. He was pronounced dead in less than an hour.

Legal proceedings regarding the power to take phones and recording devices are still being sorted out as the new technology emerges. Jody Armour, a professor at the University of Southern California's Gould School of Law, told the Times that following filmed beating of Rodney King, videos became agents of change. If recordings are confiscated, Armour said, "It could have a chilling effect on the willingness of bystanders to make these recordings, if they worry that they could be accosted by law enforcement.”

UPDATE: Kurt Ferguson added the link to surveillance footage of the incident in the notes below.

[Image via Carl Ballou/Shutterstock]

Artist John Currin painted this portrait (which Bea didn't model for) of the late, great Golden Girl in 1991. The New Yorker referred to it as part of a series by Currin that featured "acrid fantasy portraits of menopausal women." I think it's quite beautiful.

The painting is up for auction today and is expected to go for between $1.8-2.5 million... unless of course it's used as part of hostage negotiations with these airheads.

John Currin (B. 1962) "Bea Arthur Naked," oil on canvas, Painted in 1991.

So, how much would you pay?

Remember last week, when ABC News caught the Obama administration red-handed, manipulating its talking points about last year's fatal attack in Benghazi? In that account of the editing chain, ABC's Jonathan Karl reported that one email had specifically asked for the State Department to be protected. According to the orthodox theory of Benghazi-as-Watergate, this demonstrated that the White House was more interested in spinning things to protect the Obama 2012/Hillary 2016 presidential campaigns than it was in presenting the truth.

Here's the ABC account of the email:

In an email dated 9/14/12 at 9:34 p.m. —three days after the attack and two days before Ambassador Rice appeared on the Sunday shows—Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes wrote an email saying the State Department’s concerns needed to be addressed.

“We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don’t want to undermine the FBI investigation. We thus will work through the talking points tomorrow morning at the Deputies Committee meeting.”

But today, CNN's Jake Tapper obtained and published the original email:

From: Rhodes, Benjamin J.

Sent: Friday, September 14, 2012 9:34 PM

Subject: Re: Revised HPSCI Talking Points for Review

Sorry to be late to this discussion. We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation.

There is a ton of wrong information getting out into the public domain from Congress and people who are not particularly informed. Insofar as we have firmed up assessments that don't compromise intel or the investigation, we need to have the capability to correct the record, as there are significant policy and messaging ramifications that would flow from a hardened mis-impression.

We can take this up tomorrow morning at deputies.

The words "including those of the State Department," which established the motive behind the revisions—and which ABC put in quotation marks, to indicate that they were the actual text of the email—were not in the email at all. If Tapper's email is legitimate, ABC took a fabricated quote from its source and published it as real.

(So, obviously, the next question is: Who is feeding Jake Tapper forged emails?)

Oh, and now ABC is telling the Washington Post's Erik Wemple that there's no contradiction between Karl's made-up version of the email and the actual text:

ABC News spox in re: CNN: Tapper email, if accurate, is "consistent with the summary quoted by Jon Karl." wapo.st/129hadD

— ErikWemple (@ErikWemple) May 14, 2013

Well, that sounds fine, as long as you don't care about the conventional meanings of "summary" (which doesn't usually mean "extra stuff added") or "quoted" (which usually means "quoted"). Not that ABC originally identified the passage as a summary. Who edited the ABC spokesperson's talking points?

[Image by Jim Cooke]

Holy shit. This Bey is pregnant.

On Monday, rumors of Beyoncé’s second pregnancy burst forth into the world, in much the same way a child will burst forth from Beyoncé approximately seven months from today because, holy shit, this lady is pregnant (allegedly).

The New York Post cited “multiple sources” confirming the singer’s mid-tour pregnancy after last week's Met Gala. Blogs noted her uncharacteristic protruding belly in a recent fan photo snapped of her onstage in London. On Tuesday, she canceled a Belgium concert due to “dehydration and exhaustion” and suddenly, everything clicked.

This. Bitch. Is. Pregnant.

However, while Beyoncé is obviously probably maybe definitely pregnant, not everyone is convinced she actually is. Us Weekly published an item from a Beyoncé source—most likely Beyoncé in a wig and glasses (My name? ...Beyoncé. She loves her name too much to change it)—dismissing the rumor as "silly."

Reports have placed her pregnancy at about the two-month mark, which means it would be a little early to reveal the big news even if she weren’t a famously secretive megastar with a proclivity to bold pregnancy-revealing stunts.

Here’s a breakdown of the popular conspiracy theories regarding the gestation of the destiny child. Figure out where you stand and then accept that Beyoncé is pregnant because she is.

Conspiracé Theoré: I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant

Theoré: Beyoncé accidentally became pregnant a month before her world tour kicked off in Belgrade on April 15 and is now just rolling with the punches. [N.B. If Beyoncé is pregnant, this is almost certainly the story she will present.]

Counter-theoré: Beyoncé doesn’t roll with punches. This is a woman who maintains temperature-controlled archives of footage of every show she’s ever performed, every interview she’s ever conducted, and “virtually every existing photograph of her, starting with the very first frames taken of Destiny's Child.” She’s one of those people who buys a We make plans and God laughs decorative throw pillow, not to remind herself that some things are beyond her control, but as a reminder that God is a plan-ruining enemy who must be defeated. There is no way Beyoncé would become—let alone remain—pregnant unless the decision had been meticulously planned out. Especially in the middle of a world tour.

Conspiracé Theoré: Beyoncé Is Not Pregnant

Theoré: Beyoncé is not pregnant. She is a grown woman, like she says in the Pepsi song, with beautiful natural curves that sometimes reveal themselves in the skintight purple glitter jumpsuits she dons for your amusement. She is too responsible to become pregnant in the middle of a world tour.

Counter-Theoré: Beyoncé does not paunch unless there is a human growing inside her. Here are some pictures taken of Beyoncé when she wasn’t working out every day as part of a grueling tour regimen. You could cook a crêpe on those abs but if you did Beyoncé would not eat it unless it's a Sunday which is her "cheat day."

Even if—and that's a big if—Beyoncé somehow managed to put on weight while tirelessly doing the "Single Ladies" dance across the European continent, she employs a team of people whose job it is to conceal that fact (if she wants to). She’s not buying her catsuits off the rack and hoping for the best. She watches video of her performance after every show. She knows how she looks in those clothes.

As for the tour timeline, assuming she has a normal pregnancy (Beyoncé is probably planning on having a stellar pregnancy, but we’ll downgrade her to normal for the sake of argument), the going reports would place her in the middle of her second trimester (5 months pregnant) by the time she performs her final Brooklyn date in August. She might not be crabwalking all over the stage in stilettos, but she would certainly still be able to dance a little and sing. She would be pregnant enough that people could admire her for continuing to work while pregnant, but not so pregnant that people could chide her for putting her child at risk. Beyoncé gets to be a hero for women and, in August, the entire neighborhood of Park Slope as a push present from Jay-Z.

Conspiracé Theoré: Beyoncé Is Pregnant at Us

Theoré: The Mrs. Carter Show world tour was constructed around Beyoncé’s pregnancy, to prove to Beyoncé Birthers that she can, in fact, carry and bear a human child. Professional photographers were banned from the shows so that no high quality unapproved pregnancy shots could circulate. Beyoncé will acknowledge her obvious pregnancy either at an awards show (MediaTakeOut predicts BET) or at the first of her three Brooklyn performances.

Supplemental Theoré: Beyoncé’s method of announcing her pregnancy will grow more ostentatious with each additional child.

Supplemental Theoré: In 2016, Beyoncé will run for and win the office of President of the United States of Americaa. At her inauguration, she will reveal once more, and for the final time, that she is pregnant. Having come full circle to redeem herself at the site of her shame, Beyoncé will graciously decline the presidency, sending America into a tailspin.

Destiny's Advocate: Beyoncé might not be pregnant. But she has said publicly that she intends to have more children. Also, she is probably pregnant.

[Image by Jim Cooke, photo from Getty.]

To contact the author of this post, email caity@gawker.com.

Russia's Federal Security Service has detained an American citizen who is being accused of trying to recruit a Russian intelligence officer to work for the CIA.

Ryan Fogle, who was working at the American Embassy, was also supposedly an undercover CIA operative, who, according to the Russians, was detained while carrying a great deal of money, and a letter filled with instructions for the Russian he was trying to flip to the CIA.

The U.S. Embassy has yet to comment on the situation.

The Russians claim that Fogle also was in possession of "special technical equipment" and the "means for changing one's appearance" (pictured below). He was detained Monday night and then handed over to U.S. officials Tuesday morning.

Update

9:15 PM: The New York Times is reporting that "Russia’s foreign ministry has summoned United States Ambassador Michael A. McFaul to appear on Wednesday to respond to the allegation."

Also, translations of the note that was being carried by Fogle, to be given to the Russian he wanted to work for the CIA, have begun to appear. The note offers $100,000 to the anonymous Russian “to discuss your experience, expertise and cooperation.” It also hints at even larger rewards if the spy answers “specific questions.”

The note also asks the would-be informant to open a Gmail account.

“This is a down-payment from someone who is very impressed with your professionalism and who would greatly appreciate your cooperation in the future,” the letter says. “Your security means a lot to us. This is why we chose this way of contacting you.”

[Photos RT]

It's quaint how people still manage to get outraged about surveillance. You are being monitored, right now, just like everybody else with a phone or a computer or a bank account or a pressure cooker, because Total Information Awareness is real. ‘Welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not." Who said that, maybe Alex Jones?

No, it was former FBI counterterrorism agent Tim Clemente, in a prime-time interview on CNN about the Boston Marathon bombers. Clemente made an offhand admission that government prosecutors could get recordings of past phone calls from or to anyone.

CNN hostess Erin Burnett, usually a reliable law-and-order stooge, suddenly sounded like an Occupy Wall Streeter:

"So they can actually get that? People are saying, 'Look, that is incredible.'"

Associated Press reporters were spied upon after breaking an embarrassing story about a CIA operation in Yemen. Bloomberg reporters helped themselves to supposedly private information about wealthy and powerful Bloomberg customers. IRS agents investigated new non-profits with names that sounded like Republican campaign groups.

Today's scandals are only scandals because we have yet to acknowledge that we carry tracking beacons wherever we go—whether a smart phone or Google Glass or inside our car's navigation system—and that all of our communications are collected and saved, just in case. Some of it is given voluntarily, like the Tea Party groups self-declaring as tax-deductible non-profits, and some of it is collected by everything from traffic cameras keeping timestamped license plate numbers to Apple or Google keeping years worth of location data collected as you go from home to work to liquor store to strip club to home again.

You know how a 100MB hard drive was a pretty big deal a decade ago, and today for that price you can buy a couple of extra terabytes just to be safe with your porn collection or family photos? The government gets even better prices for data storage.

National and local governments, credit bureaus, foreign governments, Web services, utility companies, cell providers, supermarkets, Web retailers, insurance groups, banks and ATMs, shipping services, airlines and Disneyland are some of the data collectors with files on you, right now. Of course they're not physical files, in most cases. They're just data, copied and backed up and archived all over the world and probably in space, too.

The logo for the Total Information Awareness Office shows a pyramid orbiting the Earth with its All Seeing Eye gazing over the Arab world. When people freaked out about that logo in the Patriot Act days, it was more about the creepy Big Brother concept rather than fear that all this potentially incriminating data might even be preserved off-world. But it probably is. Most American space missions are classified. There's a robot space shuttle replacement that flies for months and months at a time, and you can't get anyone in the American government to say what it's doing up there. An entire town has sprung up in the Utah desert to monitor and store data tracking the lives of Americans. Not far away, the private backup company Mozy has its own underground city. Maybe you use the service. It's very convenient.

All the Big Brother stuff you've been hearing about and fretting about or possibly dismissing as no big deal, it's all real. It's operational. The phone companies opened their data spigots to America's domestic and (supposedly) foreign intelligence agencies after 9/11. Email, Google searches and Web history are all available to law enforcement. New regulations pushed by Eric Holder last year would let the government legally keep all information on all Americans for five years, regardless of any suspicion of terrorism or criminal activity. And by the time they're asking permission to do something, they've already got it mastered.

For now, it's still too much to detain anyone who might potentially commit a crime because humans still have to do the rounding up and arresting and trials and sentences. But just as drones have proven far more effective than high-school dropout soldiers who are homesick and traumatized, robocops will shortly be handling the detaining part of police work.

Is that nuts? Ask your local police force's bomb robot. It won't answer, because it doesn't care. It was made to safely destroy threatening packages, not to talk to you about how life is so weird it's like a Philip K. Dick story, etc.

[Photo via Getty Images.]

A high-ranking newsroom official for Bloomberg News was ordered last year to cut off reporters' access to information about how clients used the company's information terminals, according to a former Bloomberg reporter, but the spying continued anyway. The order followed complaints from JPMorgan Chase that Bloomberg reporters had used JPMorgan's terminal-use records to break stories about the "London Whale” trading debacle, which led to more than $6 billion in losses for the company.

At the time, Bloomberg anchor Erik Shatzker had openly commented on-air about using terminal data to track subjects in the story, as Buzzfeed reported Saturday. But unlike Bloomberg's surveillance of Goldman Sachs, which blew up into a scandal last week, the JPMorgan episode passed quietly.

"JPMChase raised it with Bloomberg," the former reporter wrote to Gawker, "but unlike Goldman, did not make a big deal out of it. (They had other problems at the time[.])"

A JPMorgan source clarified that the bank never lodged a formal complaint with Bloomberg’s business side at the time. Rather, they complained to the reporters directly. The source said that for the past year, Bloomberg News journalists had been “very openly telling us how often someone had logged in, and trying to track disciplinary actions based on that.”

“They would call us and say Bruno [Iskil, the so-called “London Whale”] hasn’t logged in and a few days.” It wasn’t just regarding the chief investment office, the unit responsible for the disastrous trades. Reporters were also tipped off to potential departures in JPMorgan’s fixed income and equity divisions by tracking the last time an executive logged in.

According to the JPMorgan source, the response from reporters was that they were “allowed to do that.” Only after the news broke Friday did JPMorgan realize reporters had enjoyed access to data beyond just whether someone logged into the terminal.

The former Bloomberg reporter, who requested anonymity, said that some executive editors had condoned the use of clients' terminal data as part of the reporting process, driven by editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler's "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! directive." It "was ongoing for a long time," the source wrote. "Some people there frowned on it, others thought it was needed to keep Winkler happy."

The order to cut off the terminal access came from an unknown higher-up authority, according to the ex-reporter, and was given to Bloomberg News chief of staff Reto Gregori. Gregori, the source wrote, "was supposed to take care of it and he fucked up. He fucked up by not taking care of it once it was brought to his (and Winkler's) attention."

Bloomberg reporters had also used terminal data, the ex-reporter said, to discover that former UBS trader Kweku M. Adoboli—who was sentenced to seven years in prison last year for fraud that prompted a multibillion trading loss—had left UBS.

Another source familiar with Bloomberg News said that Winkler himself would encourage reporters to use the function on the terminal to see when certain senior executives were frequently checking job listings.

“This practice was not new at all and I am surprised it took this long for an issue to be raised,” a former Bloomberg News editor told Gawker.

The ex-reporter called Bloomberg's official response to the Goldman Sachs controversy "crafty," for implying that executives had cut off the spying as soon as they'd become aware of any customer complaint. And one part of the statement from Bloomberg LP CEO Dan Doctoroff, a deputy mayor under Michael Bloomberg, was particularly misleading, the source said: "Doctoroff claimed that reporters were unable to see which news stories clients read. It's true that a reporter couldn't go through a client's profile to check an individual's reading list."

"BUT," the source added, "the 2 function allows editors to look at a particular story and see how many people, and who read or emailed it. So you couldn't search to see what Steve Cohen read, but you could pick a story and see who read it."

Neither Bloomberg News nor Gregori returned request for comment.

Update 7.12pm: Bloomberg News spokesperson Ty Trippet said that the order to cut off reporter access was made after Erik Shatzker mentioned the practice on on-air. But Trippet placed the responsibility with the business side, rather than with Bloomberg News' chief-of-staff:

Reto Gregori was not responsible for making this change. Executives on the business side were asked to change reporter access but the request fell through the cracks.

Trippet later added: "Bloomberg has no record of a complaint from JPMorgan on this issue."

To contact the author of this post, please email nitasha@gawker.com.

Officially, 11.7 million Americans are unemployed, including 4.4 million who've been jobless for more than six months. Millions more have dropped out of the labor force entirely. Each week, we bring you true stories of unemployment, straight from the unemployed. This is what's happening out there.

Not even a statistic

My story could sound like any of the others, and yet it has its own quirks. Where my story differs, is at first, I was unemployed by choice. I would receive no benefits, and quickly thereafter I realized those benefits extend to sympathy, and understanding when applying for new jobs.

I lived somewhere in the rustbelt, and just prior to everything collapsing around us, my wife lost her job. Her job had been a pretty decent engineering job, but over time the quality of the employer had degraded. Layoffs were announced, work was increased, pay and benefits were cut. She lasted through the first and second round of layoffs, but by the third round she was among those walking out with a box on a Friday afternoon.

We quickly exhausted our savings as I continued to work and she was collecting unemployment while looking for something, anything. It took some time and even a brief work-induced separation as she landed a job out of state. I stayed behind as I was still employed and trying to sell the house. Selling the house took an inordinate amount of time and I continued to work in one state, and my wife had an apartment in another.

The house finally sold, and luckily for only a minor loss. Probably the last real bit of luck I had.

I quit my job, packed up the last of the belongings and moved to join my wife. I was naive; I moved from a smallish rustbelt town (that was only getting smaller), to a much larger city without any job. I had thought quitting voluntarily, a solid work history, and an employer who was happy to provide a recommendation were all I needed. I was wrong. I had spent the past decade working my first real job out of college. I had grown while working there, from just another office jockey, to a department manager. I was someone who was able to have a voice, even if a small one, in the company. My history didn't matter. My record of saving money for the company, of increasing revenue, of increased responsibility didn't matter. What mattered was the term unemployed, and that my social network was now in a state nearing 2,000 miles away.

At first I had a couple of job interviews as I placed my resume online, searched out local companies that I thought were a good match of my skills. I spent time online reading articles on job hunting, interviewing and the like. I had a few promising interviews and then after about three months the calls just stopped. I've been unemployed since. It has been over three years now.

I still look, I still apply. I have had three interviews since those first three months. One position was with a Fortune 500 company, and I thought I had a chance. I had an email interview, a phone interview and two in-person interviews. After the two week flurry of activity it was silence. I still think about what I said or did that was enough to kill my reentry into the workplace. Was it something I said? Was it something I DIDN'T say?

And just this month I had a phone interview. A brief phone interview. The person screening the resumes was setting up appointments for another person. We spoke for twenty minutes, and the screener on the other end asked for a few final questions as they were "filling out the appointment calendar", and I was asked why I was looking to leave my employer. I answered honestly, that I was unemployed. The screener said "Oh, I see..." and the line clicked dead moments later.

I was quizzed on my experience, my education, and even about the pay range. I had called back from a different phone trying not to hyperventilate. Was it just my cell phone, was it a glitch on the phone system? I was transferred to the person, and before I was finished saying "Hello" the line clicked dead again. I never got a chance to interview for the job because someone sneered over the word unemployed. I was acceptable to interview for the job just minutes prior.

I know I'm one of the lucky ones. I KNOW IT! My wife is employed, I have a roof over my head, and we can pay our bills. Yet I'm still bitter.

I don't show up on a government report. I'm not even a statistic. I don't matter to the numbers that come out from the government every month. I did everything I was supposed to growing up. I worked hard, went to college and earned a degree. Supported my spouse, and we made the best decisions we knew along the way. Yet I sit in front of a computer typing away about how now three, no shit, now four years later I'm among the ranks of the long term unemployed.

What has four years of unemployment done?

My motivation is decimated. I still search for a job, and send out countless resumes but the rejection is a forgone conclusion. It has to be since receiving a rejection notice is not part of the process anymore. I think I now search and apply out of a sense of obligation.

I'm far more introspective. Analyzing and overthinking everything, and carrying around a degree of skepticism that I have never known before.

I feel guilty. I left a middle class job without a plan, and without a new job. It is my fault for not preparing for the future? It is difficult to enjoy the same activities I did before. Starting any new hobby or activity is nearly as difficult because part of me doesn't feel I should do well or enjoy it after a very brief time. It reaches even beyond hobbies and exercise...I want to believe my wife when she tells me that I'm doing everything I can, that it isn't my fault, but I don't believe it. Even if she does.

I'm more isolated than ever before. It is a combination of factors: I'm far away from where I grew up and went to school, I don't have coworkers, and going out is difficult when spending even an extra dollar brings about feelings of shame. Even phone calls with old friends and family are terse, and a bit tense. I invariably hear suggestions, or an offhand comment about “the lazy unemployed moochers” and I end up feeling like a liability even in conversations with old friends.

I've done some concrete things. Beyond saying that I search for jobs and apply for jobs. I learned new software packages. I've done personal projects. I've attempted to freelance by networking with friends and family. I've attempted to volunteer. All to no avail.

I want to scream at the world, to vent, to rant, and have someone look at me when I finish, and say, "You know, you're right. Be ready to start Monday." It hasn't happened for several years, and I'm not sure when, or if, it will again.

A hopeful story

Over the past ten years, after a number of IT manager jobs, I knew a dead end was approaching. I was assigned to our company's first Sarbanes-Oxley project for financial controls in 2003/2004. While I met a number of smart, good people, I saw a chasm of failure for my company's getting to compliance. I was hopeful we wold pass muster with our external auditor (Big 3), but worked recklessly long hours to be sure my (public) company wouldn't get a black eye from the SEC.

I never worked so hard to ultimately take a cannonball for my company - six material deficiencies out of hundreds of financial controls. It was truthful but not well-received by people who, a year earlier, were convinced the SEC would find nothing. In short, I committed career suicide.

At the time (2005), I had paltry call options, a decent 401(k), and had been divorced for several years, with large bills and debt. In my exit interview, through what I can only say was divine intervention, I received a 17-week severance by not being vengeful or vindictive, but by stating my accomplishments and how I didn't earn a rating that would get me fired.

I was left with a tough choice: try to find work in New York City, close to my kids, or to move elsewhere, lose 30% of my salary, and mercilessly target people and companies who (still) needed securities and IT analysis personnel. Luckily I got the job - at at 30% discount.

Forward five years - the analysis work I'd done, as well as customer retention and project management, served my company well. I was (luckily) able to help fund my kids' college education. Then, the bottom fell out when I was no longer needed by our CEO. Again, I was fortunate to get a severance (13 weeks this time) and in late summer, 2010, I had given up on networking and resumes. The market was dead.

In late August I found my dad had a relapse of colorectal cancer. I stopped looking for work. My brothers and I stayed with him for many weeks until his death on November 19th.

Job searching at this time was fruitless. My brothers and I settled my dad's estate (not huge, but able to keep us going another year) and we all went to our homes after Christmas. For me, the next three months elapsed like many of the stories here: not enough food, desperation, hopelessness.

I tweaked my LinkedIn profile (went Pro for $39/month) and larded it with every legitimate accomplishment I could substantiate.

Two months later, I interviewed with a good company. They offered, I accepted.

I am not sure whether you'll find this a hopeful story, but it is for me. Thank You.

Prayer for the non-religious

I was the valedictorian in my high school. I was the sort of kid that wanted to be a whole bunch of different professions, everything from archaeologist to veterinarian to the President of the U.S. I had not yet decided what direction I wanted to go when I graduated high school, so my plan was to "go to college and decide", I would surely be able to figure out where my true passion was while in college, right? Besides, with my parents and family and teachers and guidance counselors, I felt like I had no choice. Of course the valedictorian goes on to college. Not going to college was not an option for me (at least, at 18 I felt that way). I was a people-pleaser with no genuine career ambitions. Here I am with a liberal arts degree, Human Development with an emphasis on Gender Studies. I took classes that interested me, this is where it landed me. I wish I had known that I had an option to not go to college. I am working an internship with a website development company now, because my life partner works here and was able to convince his boss to let me intern.

I am living in an expensive city. Sometimes we can't afford food. We are living off of my partner's income, which is not enough to cover our basics. My student loans take a huge chunk of money from us every month. I know I would qualify for deferment, but at this point, I don't think that I will be in a better place career-wise in six months, a year, five years. Why defer the loans when it just means we will be scraping by for even longer? I would rather pay for student loans now and get out of debt as soon as we can so that this weight is not hanging over me.

I was a student that did everything "right". In high school, I got straight A's. I joined every club my school offered so that I had enough extra-curriculars to get into a "good college". I got scholarships (not enough to cover all of my tuition, though). I went to college. I was told these things were the keys to financial success, to being able to provide for my loved ones. I really want to adopt kids, own a house and let go of the constant worry I feel currently. I don't think I will be able to live the type of life I want to live.

I don't have insurance because my partner and I are not legally married. Right now, when I get sick or injured, I pray. I am not even religious, but that is what I do. I pray that my simple home remedies and self-healing methods will be enough. I dread the day that they aren't.

I am just taking each day as it comes at this point, trying to be present and grateful for what I do have. I wish I had known that I didn't need to go to college. If I had not gone to college, we would be much better off financially, because we wouldn't have the expense of my student loans every month for the next ten years. I am angry that a choice I made when I was 17 can have such an impact on the rest of my life. I am angry that every adult in my life made me feel like I HAD to go to college, that I had no choice in the matter. I had no boundaries when I was 17, I didn't think for myself. I did what adults told me to. I was a "good" kid. I listened to my parents, I got perfect grades, I was told that for all of my being "good" there would be a reward at the end: I would get into a good college, so that I could get a good job, so I could be financially stable. I should have been a bad kid and not cared about my grades and just focused on having fun, because I am actually worse-off because of my conformity to "the rules".
I wish I had gone to a trade school. If I had learned to be a hair stylist, a nurse, a mechanic.... At least I would have a useful set of skills. I still might not be able to land a job or have a career but at least I could help my friends and family in a concrete way. Right now I am just a useless mooch.

Tragic comedy

I left my job back in February 2012 to administer an estate of a family member (my mother) who had died unexpectedly and left a collective mess. I wanted to do both, job and estate but the company I worked for suddenly demanded that I relocate across the country to their home office. Against my better judgement I decided to answer the wishes of my family and resigned my FTE position to fulfill the legal requirements of the estate.

I was highly sought after while I was employed with calls from recruiters coming almost daily. I have a double degree with twenty-plus years of experience working for healthcare manufacturers. When I resigned I thought I would finish my estate work and get back into the game. Not! I have hit wall after wall with one common reason for rejection, I am unemployed. As stupid as it sounds, I am now poison for any open FTE position. My enemy is the HR department who doesn't know what they need to fill the position so they make their decision based on my present employment status. I see less experienced people get hired at higher salaries for the positions I applied and there is no platform for rebuttal. The stories I can tell about the interviews I am granted could fill a book. Sadly, it would be a tragic comedy.

So in the real world today it is not what you know or who you know, it comes down to where you are in employment status that will land you your next job.

I don't fault them

Sic of it

Previously

The full archive of our "Unemployment Stories" series can be found here.

[Thanks to everyone who wrote in. You can send your own unemployment stories to: Hamilton@Gawker.com.]

The shooting of nineteen innocent people, including two children, at a Mother's Day celebration in New Orleans yesterday was an act of violence only gaudy enough to hold the nation's attention momentarily. Shortly after the bodies were cleared, the FBI said they "have no indication the shooting was an act of terrorism. 'It’s strictly an act of street violence in New Orleans.'" At that, we were free to let our attention drift. In America, all villainy is not created equal.

A couple of disaffected young men in search of meaning drift into radical Islam and become violent. A couple of disaffected young men in search of meaning drift into street crime and become violent. A crowd of innocent people attending the Boston marathon are maimed by flying shrapnel from homemade bombs. A crowd of innocent people attending a Mother's Day celebration in New Orleans are maimed by flying bullets. Two public events. Two terrible tragedies. One act of violence becomes a huge news story, transfixing the media's attention for months and drawing outraged proclamations from politicians and pundits. Another act of violence is dismissed as the normal way of the world and quickly forgotten. The victims bleeding on the ground may be forgiven for failing to see the distinction between the two acts. For those on the receiving end, violence is violence. For the rest of us, it is a rhetorical tool, to be deployed when it fits a narrative of American triumphalism. Otherwise it will be forgotten, by everyone except the victims.

Besides countless deaths abroad and a staggering debt at home, the primary legacy of America's "War on Terror" is our profoundly warped sense of the dangers of the world we live in, and of who our "enemies" are. As a rule, the rare violence committed by Muslims, with some political or religious motivation, is "terrorism," and deserving of the attention of the public and of our stern-faced leaders. The far more common and destructive acts of violence committed every single day on the streets of America due to poverty and the drug war and lack of education and simple human viciousness are "street violence," which is treated as some timeless aspect of the human condition. This violence, which kills many more Americans each year than any Muslim terrorist could dream of, is unworthy of our brain space. (Black-on-black crime— whether 19 people shot in New Orleans, or 12 people shot at a Baltimore cookout, or 54 people shot in a single weekend in Chicago— is considered least newsworthy of all.) We shake our heads, perhaps, but we do not allow it to occupy us, if we are fortunate enough not to be touched by it personally. Our leaders may bemoan it, but they do not make it a national priority. The media reports on it, but it does not dwell on it.

The Boston bombing was, undoubtedly, a horrific event, and a big story. We don't call for some exact equivalence in minutes of TV time devoted to each crime event. But no reasonable person can say that the tidal wave of news coverage that accompanied it was a rational and proportional response to its importance for our nation, when taken in the context of "things that might actually hurt you." The average American knows who Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is, but has no idea how the gun crime rate has changed in the past 20 years. (It's gone down. And it still kills far, far more people than 9/11 did, which itself killed hundreds of times more people than the Boston bombing did.) That is not the product of balanced journalism. That is the product of ideology in action.

We do not actually care about "terror" as it is commonly defined. If we did, we would be transfixed by daily handgun homicides, and by the unemployment rate, and by the lack of public health care, and by public schools that are neither safe nor effective— the things that terrorize everyday Americans. We would be more concerned by real auto accidents than by theoretical airplane bombings. We would invest in helping the poor at home, rather than in killing the poor abroad. We would be far more absorbed by violence in Chicago than in Boston, because it is so much more common. Simple math would guide our assessment of life's risks. The reality, of course, is the opposite.

The public has always loved sensational things, and the media has always been happy to serve sensationalism above prudence. But this modern age of Terror That Matters vs. forgettable violence is not simply a matter of ratings. It is a direct outgrowth of a deliberate post-9/11 political strategy to create a world in which the vague specter of "Terrorism" could fill the role of The Big Bad "Other" that had been empty since the end of the Cold War. That strategy was wildly successful. It helped to cow the nation's news media enough to pave the way for the war in Iraq. It made patriotism synonymous with suspicion. And it persists today, in our reflexes that cause us to instinctively and unquestioningly expect an act of violence inspired by Muslim zealotry to mean something more than an act of violence inspired by any other cause.

How do you make a terrorist? You just label him a terrorist. You move your attention away from the things that actually matter in your life, and you focus it on The Terror. You participate in becoming terrorized. You allow a small sliver of violent people to warp your entire society's perspective on reality. And you eventually arrive at a place where it seems perfectly reasonable to forget about children being shot at a Mother's Day party, because our leaders and our media and our minds are still occupied with Muslims with pressure cookers.

There will be more terrorism, because terrorism works. The American imagination can't seem to get enough of it.

[Photo: AP]

Police are looking for three suspects who were seen to be fleeing the scene of a shooting that left 19 injured, including two children, yesterday afternoon.

The shooting happened in New Orleans's 7th ward, during the second-line section of a Mother's Day parade. Second-lines are a traditional part of a New Orleans parade, where parade-goers dance and follow the band on the parade route.

Police said 10 adult men, seven adult women, and both a 10-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl were struck by bullets, with both a man and woman needing surgery because of their injuries. The 10-year-olds were in good condition, with only graze wounds from the shooting.

"Detectives are conducting interviews, retrieving any surveillance video in the area and, of course, collecting all evidence. This is an extremely unusual occurrence, and we're confident that we will make swift arrests," New Orleans Police Department spokesman Remi Braden told the Times-Picayune.

"It's sad that people can't gather together and celebrate," a 59-year-old woman said. "You don't just go into a crowd and fire into a group of innocent people."

Update: The New Orleans Police Department released video of one of the suspects.

[Times-Picayune] | [CNN] | [BBC]