The Daily Beast: Has It Really ‘Gotten Better’ for Gay Kids?

In 2005, when GLSEN conducted its first “From Teasing to Torment” national survey, nearly 62 percent of U.S. middle and high schoolers reported that students at their schools were victimized based on sexual orientation. In 2015, when GLSEN collected data for this follow up report a decade later, that figure was still just shy of 50 percent.

Other decreases in anti-LGBT bullying were similarly gradual. From 2005 to 2015, the percentage of students who reported witnessing victimization based on gender expression fell from 60 to 49 percent, and the percentage who reported hearing the word “gay” used in a derogatory fashion dipped slightly from 89 percent to 75 percent.

Even more disturbing is the fact that race-based victimization remained flat, with nearly 38 percent of students reporting it 10 years apart. [...]

Fifteen percent of the students even said teachers and administrators were making homophobic comments. Nearly 13 percent reported hearing “negative remarks about transgender people” from school staff. And less than 20 percent said staff intervened “often” when they heard negative remarks about gender expression, which is especially concerning given that nearly a quarter of the students did not identify in a strictly gender-conforming way. [...]

“What our research shows is that [bullying] doesn’t toughen you up and get you ready for the ‘real world,’” said Villenas. “It actually leads to poor psychological outcomes. It leads to lower educational aspirations. It leads to more likely experiences with school discipline and higher absenteeism. We see no evidence here that it prepares students for the ‘real world’ or for college. Quite the opposite, actually.”

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The Jerusalem Post: Palestinians left wondering as Saudi paper takes Netanyahu’s side

The editorial, published Sunday in the Saudi Gazette, a daily published in Jeddah that has a woman editor-in-chief, seemed to depart in tone from the widely-held position in the Arab world that Israel is responsible for the impasse with the Palestinians. It likened Netanyahu’s proposal that the two leaders address each other’s parliaments, to Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s 1977 invitation to Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to visit Israel, and implied it could also lead to a breakthrough. Begin made the invitation “and the rest is history,’’ the editorial said. [...]

The editorial comes two months after a Saudi delegation of academics and businessmen, led by retired Saudi general Anwar Eshki, touched off criticism in the Arab world for openly visiting Israel and meeting with officials and MKs. There was speculation that the trip reflected a quiet development of discrete ties between the countries based largely on their having a common enemy, Iran.

Palestinians are wary that any normalization with Israel by Saudi Arabia or other Arab countries would represent a sellout of their cause and undermine their position vis-à-vis Israel.

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Vox: The head of Hezbollah has found someone he hates even more than Israelis

In other words, things have gotten so bad that Hezbollah, Israel’s mortal enemy, now considers Wahhabis — that is, fellow Muslims — to be worse than Israel. Bear in mind, this is coming from the same man who has described Israel as “a cancerous entity and the root of all the crises and wars” and pledged that Israel’s destiny “is manifested in our motto: 'Death to Israel.’” [...]

But despite how it may seem, Nasrallah’s statement is not, at its base, a conflict about religion. Though there are certainly strong religious disagreements between Sunni and Shia — and especially between extreme fundamentalist Sunnis and extreme fundamentalist Shia — the conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia has little to do with dogma. It’s actually about something far less exotic: power and influence. [...]

This proxy war plays out in conflicts all over the Middle East. For instance, Saudi Arabia, with US military assistance, is engaged in a brutal air war against Iranian-backed Houthi fighters inside Yemen that has sparked a massive humanitarian crisis in the impoverished country. The United Nations recently estimated that at least 10,000 civilians have died, and acknowledged that that number was almost certainly lower than the actual toll.

Saudi Arabia’s proxy fight with Iran is also helping to fuel the bloodshed in Syria, where an estimated 400,000 people have been killed over the past five years while millions more have fled the country and sparked the biggest refugee crisis in decades.

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Quartz: There’s no such thing as a protest vote

But it doesn’t matter what message you think you are sending, because no one will receive it. No one is listening. The system is set up so that every choice other than “Republican” or “Democrat” boils down to “I defer to the judgement of my fellow citizens.” It’s easy to argue that our system shouldn’t work like that. It’s impossible to argue it doesn’t work like that.

This is frustrating, of course, but that’s how our presidential elections are set up. Democracies alternate the coalition in power, but different systems do so in different ways. In multi-party systems, voters get the satisfaction of voting for smaller, ideologically purer factions—environmental parties, anti-immigrant parties, and so on. The impure compromises come when those factions are forced to form coalitions large enough to govern. The inevitable tradeoffs are part of the governing process, not the electoral process. [...]

Boycotts can work in countries where voting is mandatory, because not voting can be an act of civil disobedience. In the United States, however, voting is not and has never been required. (Our elites have always preferred minimal participation, and laziness is a cheaper tool than suppression.) In presidential elections, non-voters always outnumber voters who choose the winning candidate. With that much passive non-participation, active non-participation gets lost. [...]

It’s clear why third-party candidates want votes, but it’s not clear why voters would want third parties. The Green Party, for example, hasn’t elected so much as a member of Congress, much less fielded a credible presidential candidate, and their organization does no actual environmental work. Greenpeace helps the environment more in any given week than the Green Party has in its entire existence—a problem common to third parties generally. If you’re a Libertarian, you’re better off donating to Cato than voting for Gary Johnson. If you’re a paleoconservative, you’re better off donating to the Rockford Institute than voting for Darrell Castle.

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CityLab: A Peek Inside Brazilian 'Love Motels'

In Brazil, where young people tend to live in pretty close quarters with mom, dad, and other members of their families until they get married, it isn’t easy to get some privacy with a romantic partner. But it’s possible—at “love motels.” These are sometimes-seedy, sometimes hilariously lavish sanctuaries for the sex-deprived.

The Dutch art director Vera van de Sandt had heard of these motels during her travels to Brazil. She was intrigued by all the shapes and sizes they came in, and wanted to see what they were like from the inside. In 2014, she read that some in Rio de Janeiro were being converted into boring old regular hotels for the 2016 Olympics. Before they were all gone, she and the photographer Jur Oster set off to document them.

They visited Rio and many other areas in the country in two trips in 2014 and 2015. With locals’ help, they found some really wacky motels that weren’t listed online. “You find motels everywhere, even in the smallest village,” van de Sandt says. ”They are easy to spot—mainly because of their names, which are often quite suggestive,” she adds. “We thought they were only meant for cheating and prostitution, but along the way we found out that the love motels meet a social need.” She and Oster posed as a couple to gain entry, and then captured the architecture and the interior decor of these buildings. They’ve compiled their images into a series called “Love Land Stop Time.”

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Reader Supported News: Over Eight Years, President Barack Obama Has Created the Most Intrusive Surveillance Apparatus in the World. To What End?

In a sense, this was a fitting tribute to President Barack Obama as his administration entered its last six months in the White House. Over his two terms, Obama has created the most powerful surveillance state the world has ever seen. Although other leaders may have created more oppressive spying regimes, none has come close to constructing one of equivalent size, breadth, cost, and intrusiveness. From 22,300 miles in space, where seven Advanced Orion crafts now orbit; to a 1-million-square-foot building in the Utah desert that stores data intercepted from personal phones, emails, and social media accounts; to taps along the millions of miles of undersea cables that encircle the Earth like yarn, U.S. surveillance has expanded exponentially since Obama’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2009.

The effort to wire the world — or to achieve “extreme reach,” in the NRO’s parlance — has cost American taxpayers more than $100 billion. Obama has justified the gargantuan expense by arguing that “there are some trade-offs involved” in keeping the country safe. “I think it’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” he said in June 2013, shortly after Edward Snowden, a former contractor with the National Security Agency (NSA), revealed widespread government spying on Americans’ phone calls. [...]

The foundations of Obama’s shadow state date back to the immediate post-9/11 period. Six weeks after the attacks, the Patriot Act, which greatly expanded the government’s surveillance powers, was rushed through Congress and signed by President George W. Bush. A few months later, the Bush administration created the Information Awareness Office, part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). That led to the development of the Total Information Awareness program, designed to vacuum up vast amounts of private electronic data — banking transactions, travel documents, medical files, and more — from citizens. After the media exposed and criticized the program, which didn’t use warrants, Congress shut it down in late 2003. Much of the operation, though, was simply transferred to the NSA. [...]

On Oct. 2, 2013, when called to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the general backtracked. Alexander cited only one instance when an intercept detected a potential threat: a Somali taxi driver living in San Diego who sent $8,500 to al-Shabab, his home country’s notorious terrorist group. That winter, a panel set up by Obama to review the NSA’s operations concluded that the agency had stopped no terrorist attacks. “We found none,” Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor and one of five panel members, bluntly told NBC News in December 2013. Since then, despite mass surveillance both at home and abroad, shootings or bombings have occurred in San Bernardino, California; Orlando, Florida; Paris; Brussels; and Istanbul — to name just a few places.

Beyond failures to create security, there is the matter of misuse or abuse of U.S. spying, the effects of which extend well beyond violations of Americans’ constitutional liberties. In 2014, I met with Snowden in Moscow for a magazine assignment. Over pizza in a hotel room not far from Red Square, he told me that the NSA puts innocent people in danger. In his experience, for instance, the agency routinely had passed raw, unredacted intercepts of millions of phone calls and emails from Arab- and Palestinian-Americans to its Israeli counterpart, Unit 8200. Once in Israeli hands, Snowden feared, this information might be used to extort information or otherwise harm relatives of the individuals being spied upon.

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Al Jazeera: Boko Haram refugees in Niger find safety, but lack aid

As Nigerian forces have progressed against Boko Haram, the cornered terror group has been carrying out more attacks in neighbouring countries. In Niger's Diffa region on the northeastern border of Nigeria, more than 280,000 people have been displaced.

Most of the displaced, do not live in refugee camps, but in ramshackle settlements next to a national highway. The situation continues to deteriorate and new families arrive on a daily basis, fleeing violence and hunger in the Lake Chad Basin. Humanitarian aid organisations struggle to reach everyone in need of assistance. [...]

According to the United Nations, the people of Diffa are arguably the poorest on earth, living in the least developed region in the least developed country of the world. Meanwhile, one refugee for every four residents has arrived in their communities as a result of the conflict. [...]

Some of the displaced received basic tents from humanitarian actors, but the vast majority built improvised shacks with whatever materials they could find: straw, tarpaulins or wooden twigs. Some of the recent arrivals still live in the open. [...]

Of the 20 million people living in the Lake Chad Basin, a region stretched over Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroun, at least 9.2 million are in urgent need of life-saving assistance and more than five million people are severely food insecure [PDF]. At least four million people have no access to aid, say humanitarian organizations.

According to UNICEF, an estimated 475,000 children across Lake Chad will suffer from severe acute malnutrition this year. In the northeast of Nigeria, where Boko Haram has been seeking to carve out a hardline Islamist state since 2009, the military confirmed that three to four people a day are dying due to malnutrition. However, humanitarian organisations say this figure is probably much higher as many areas remain unreachable.

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The Intercept: Donald Trump Leads the War on Truth — but He Didn’t Start It

Where was all this hard-nosed skepticism in 2002 and early 2003, during the Bush administration’s run-up to the Iraq War? In Kristof’s column, he presents himself as a prescient Cassandra during this period. Indeed, he did warn his readers that governing Iraq after Saddam Hussein would be difficult. But several weeks after the invasion of Iraq began, Kristof still wasn’t ready to call George W. Bush out on his lies about Iraqi connections to al Qaeda and the mythical weapons of mass destruction. He still wanted to believe in the administration’s good intentions. “I don’t want to believe that top administration officials tried to win support for the war with a campaign of wholesale deceit,” he wrote, in May 2003, and then gingerly pointed out “indications that the U.S. government souped up intelligence.” Three months before, his paper’s editorial board wrote that the Bush-Cheney WMD allegations were different from their “unproved assertions” about al Qaeda. For the WMDs, the Times wrote, there was “ample evidence.”

The backlash against Trump isn’t really about his lying. It’s that he is lying too clumsily, too openly, and in the service of the wrong causes. Earlier this month, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a summary of their report on Edward Snowden’s disclosures. They wrote that Snowden washed out of the Army because of “shin splints,” “doctored his performance evaluations,” and never received a high school degree. All three of these claims are lies, as spelled out by Barton Gellman. These lies came from 24 sitting members of Congress who are charged with overseeing the intelligence community. But there has been little outcry, no correction, and no demands that these assertions be backed up by evidence. This may be because our political culture has come to accept certain abuses of the truth as normal, and the lack of accountability for those officials behind the Bush-era deceptions has not improved matters. [...]

Trump’s lies are an essential part of his candidacy. Debunking them is crucial. But the attention given to logging Trump’s lies often comes at the expense of addressing the deeper truths that run through his “rigged system” rhetoric. Trump, more than Clinton, has played to the growing sense that the country is run by an elite network of self-dealing oligarchs. Economic frustration is what allows Trump to convincingly set himself up as a worthy outsider, the champion of the people, the guy who can fix the broken system because he was so skilled at exploiting it for his own benefit. This is an almost messianic image. It has and will continue to survive barrages of fact-checking.

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Atlas Obscura: The Strange Victorian Computer That Generated Latin Verse

In July 1845, British curiosity-seekers headed to London’s Egyptian Hall to try out the novelty of the summer. For the price of one shilling, they could stand in front of a wooden bureau, pull a lever, and look behind a panel where six drums, bristling with metal spokes, revolved. At the end of its “grinding,” what it produced was not a numeric computation or a row of fruit symbols, but something quite different: a polished line of Latin poetry. [...]

The Eureka was the brainchild, and obsession, of a man in southwest England named John Clark. The eccentric Clark was a cousin of Cyrus and James Clark, founders of the Clarks shoes empire (which went on to popularize the Desert Boot in the 1950s and is still going strong). Clark built the Eureka at a time when such devices were all the rage. As literature scholar Jason David Hall explains in an academic article on the Eureka, the machine joined other proto-computers like the Polyharmonicon, a machine that composed polkas, and the Euphonia, which “spoke” when a person played an attached keyboard. [...]

The number of possible permutations the Eureka can run through is a dizzying 26 million. “If we had it running continuously, it would take 74 years for it to do its full tour before it started repeating itself,” says Karina Virahsawmy, a curator at the Alfred Gillett Trust, the nonprofit that preserves the history of the Clark family and their company. “Every time I think about it, I’m still mind-boggled as to how somebody did that in the early 19th century.”

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