I imagined a whole zombie-like group of cute girls with their ukelele, stambling towards me singing cutesy songs all at once with premeditated resolve...a group of harpies or sirens who rather than lure, repel their victims with their music, yet are able to bewitch them instead with some other witchery.

Girls with ukelele: Beware Their Vile trickery.

Houston here, and I probably help someone with car troubles on the average about 3 times a month. Went home and got a gas can for a single dad out with his kids (one an infant, the other a 4-yr-old) after overhearing his frustration at the gas station's convenient lack of shelf space for gas cans.

When I rode a motorcycle I assisted more peeps it seemed them being easier to see and me having much more maneuverability...

Common courtesy lost to the pace and lure of society's self-centered programming.

Still, upload a video of myself helping another person out while wearing meine helmkamera from my cam footage of my day on my motorcycle in my daily ramblings??
Is this about him and this mission to teach people manners in another narcissistic chapter of "watch me", perhaps?

Random porcupine fact: Porcupines naturally secrete antibiotics from their skin.

Fresh leaf buds lure them out to the end of branches that cannot support their weight. They end up falling and their own quills stick them when they land. The antibiotics help to ward off infections.

Right again, Mr. Chomsky. Then after the rubes have been softened up, enter the smarmy, two-faced Barack Obama, whose plan to save us from global warming is a such a hack job that it's hardly worth the industry shills (like the ones taking up so much space commenting here) to bother with. Like his gift to the insurance industry -- America's sad excuse for "universal health care" -- Obama's environmental "program" is just another load of pretty B.S. thrown up to cover his real agenda, which in this case is to hand over the keys to America's energy industry to people like Dick Cheney, whose hands might as well be guiding the marionette strings coming out of his back. The "president" really doesn't have a choice about pushing natural gas; he sold out to the oiligarchs while still a do-nothing Senator. But that doesn't mean the few of us who are awake and aware shouldn't scream at him about it and do everything in our dwindling power to make him and the rest of the gasoholic cabal wish they'd never been born. Indeed, part of what the moribund U.S. environmental movement needs -- and in particular the fractured and chronically outclassed anti-fracking movement -- is a significantly angrier soundtrack, not bogged down with insipid musical baggage from old, hippy-dippy environmental campaigns. Pete Seeger and his sweet, smiling ilk don't cut through all the background noise any more. With that in mind, here's a new American anthem guaranteed to stir the soul of any red-blooded environmentalist, as well as lure a few emotionally sensitive people over from the dark side. Feel free to use it. Scream your anger! soundcloud.com/biff-thuringer/to-america

I know it was just an instant reaction and they were thinking about the photos and stuff, but they probably just killed that little whale. I highly doubt it's digestive system can handle lures and spinners and weights and stuff.

Turtles do have ears, just not external ones, and they can hear.
The 200 year lifespan is absurd any species that the TMNT's might conceivably be derived from.
Only a few turtle species have worm-like portions of their tongues (used to lure prey).
Rats and turtles are vectors of disease. So are humans.
Transmission of bubonic plague from rat to turtle is not going to happen.
It's "salmonella" no "samonella".
Turtle penises don't really look like that, nor will they reach the same animal's mouth (they are impressive though).

There is more incorrect than correct about this video. It's like they googled "turtle fun facts" and decided to call that "scientifically accurate".
These animals are amazing!.. Stop being lazy; you don't need to make stuff up.

They're down on abuse of power, however it rearsit's head:
Personally, their nude protest not only represent the attention and powerful lure of the first-circuit orality of humans in general and the collectively unconcious effect is has in any culture, but when they protest like Lann says, in countries where the males of that culture already treat women like complete dogs, they are speaking to the ingrained, cultural bullshit that has evolved within that particular culture. These are brave women representing a snapshot of the inevitable collapse of cultures and societies whose so-called leaders are determined to keep the BULK of humanity, in the fucking dark ages.....

These women are GOD, I don't care how they align themselves on particular issues, the message is crystal clear for me.

Governments with entrenched cunts at their helms, SUCK BALLS!

I confess. I watched this video just to see the clips of T&A promised by the thumbnail.

They effectively lured me in. Intentional irony perhaps?

If anyone wants to read more about Stephen and LGBTQIA youth, here is the NYT article.

The New York Time's

Generation LGBTQIA

By MICHAEL SCHULMAN

Published: January 10, 2013

STEPHEN IRA, a junior at Sarah Lawrence College, uploaded a video last March on We Happy Trans, a site that shares "positive perspectives" on being transgender.

In the breakneck six-and-a-half-minute monologue - hair tousled, sitting in a wood-paneled dorm room - Stephen exuberantly declared himself "a queer, a nerd fighter, a writer, an artist and a guy who needs a haircut," and held forth on everything from his style icons (Truman Capote and "any male-identified person who wears thigh-highs or garters") to his toy zebra.

Because Stephen, who was born Kathlyn, is the 21-year-old child of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, the video went viral, garnering nearly half a million views. But that was not the only reason for its appeal. With its adrenalized, freewheeling eloquence, the video seemed like a battle cry for a new generation of post-gay gender activists, for whom Stephen represents a rare public face.

Armed with the millennial generation's defining traits - Web savvy, boundless confidence and social networks that extend online and off - Stephen and his peers are forging a political identity all their own, often at odds with mainstream gay culture.

If the gay-rights movement today seems to revolve around same-sex marriage, this generation is seeking something more radical: an upending of gender roles beyond the binary of male/female. The core question isn't whom they love, but who they are - that is, identity as distinct from sexual orientation.

But what to call this movement? Whereas "gay and lesbian" was once used to lump together various sexual minorities - and more recently "L.G.B.T." to include bisexual and transgender - the new vanguard wants a broader, more inclusive abbreviation. "Youth today do not define themselves on the spectrum of L.G.B.T.," said Shane Windmeyer, a founder of Campus Pride, a national student advocacy group based in Charlotte, N.C.

Part of the solution has been to add more letters, and in recent years the post-post-post-gay-rights banner has gotten significantly longer, some might say unwieldy. The emerging rubric is "L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," which stands for different things, depending on whom you ask.

"Q" can mean "questioning" or "queer," an umbrella term itself, formerly derogatory before it was appropriated by gay activists in the 1990s. "I" is for "intersex," someone whose anatomy is not exclusively male or female. And "A" stands for "ally" (a friend of the cause) or "asexual," characterized by the absence of sexual attraction.

It may be a mouthful, but it's catching on, especially on liberal-arts campuses.

The University of Missouri, Kansas City, for example, has an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Resource Center that, among other things, helps student locate "gender-neutral" restrooms on campus. Vassar College offers an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Discussion Group on Thursday afternoons. Lehigh University will be hosting its second annual L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Intercollegiate Conference next month, followed by a Queer Prom. Amherst College even has an L.G.B.T.Q.Q.I.A.A. center, where every group gets its own letter.

The term is also gaining traction on social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr, where posts tagged with "lgbtqia" suggest a younger, more progressive outlook than posts that are merely labeled "lgbt."

"There's a very different generation of people coming of age, with completely different conceptions of gender and sexuality," said Jack Halberstam (formerly Judith), a transgender professor at the University of Southern California and the author, most recently, of "Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal."

"When you see terms like L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," Professor Halberstam added, "it's because people are seeing all the things that fall out of the binary, and demanding that a name come into being."

And with a plethora of ever-expanding categories like "genderqueer" and "androgyne" to choose from, each with an online subculture, piecing together a gender identity can be as D.I.Y. as making a Pinterest board.

BUT sometimes L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. is not enough. At the University of Pennsylvania last fall, eight freshmen united in the frustration that no campus group represented them.

Sure, Penn already had some two dozen gay student groups, including Queer People of Color, Lambda Alliance and J-Bagel, which bills itself as the university's "Jewish L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Community." But none focused on gender identity (the closest, Trans Penn, mostly catered to faculty members and graduate students).

Richard Parsons, an 18-year-old transgender male, discovered that when he attended a student mixer called the Gay Affair, sponsored by Penn's L.G.B.T. Center. "I left thoroughly disappointed," said Richard, a garrulous freshman with close-cropped hair, wire-framed glasses and preppy clothes, who added, "This is the L.G.B.T. Center, and it's all gay guys."

Through Facebook, Richard and others started a group called Penn Non-Cis, which is short for "non-cisgender." For those not fluent in gender-studies speak, "cis" means "on the same side as" and "cisgender" denotes someone whose gender identity matches his or her biology, which describes most of the student body. The group seeks to represent everyone else. "This is a freshman uprising," Richard said.

On a brisk Tuesday night in November, about 40 students crowded into the L.G.B.T. Center, a converted 19th-century carriage house, for the group's inaugural open mike. The organizers had lured students by handing out fliers on campus while barking: "Free condoms! Free ChapStick!"

"There's a really vibrant L.G.B.T. scene," Kate Campbell, one of the M.C.'s, began. "However, that mostly encompasses the L.G.B. and not too much of the T. So we're aiming to change that."

Students read poems and diary entries, and sang guitar ballads. Then Britt Gilbert - a punky-looking freshman with a blond bob, chunky glasses and a rock band T-shirt - took the stage. She wanted to talk about the concept of "bi-gender."

"Does anyone want to share what they think it is?"

Silence.

She explained that being bi-gender is like manifesting both masculine and feminine personas, almost as if one had a "detachable penis." "Some days I wake up and think, 'Why am I in this body?' " she said. "Most days I wake up and think, 'What was I thinking yesterday?' 

"Britt's grunginess belies a warm matter-of-factness, at least when describing her journey. As she elaborated afterward, she first heard the term "bi-gender" from Kate, who found it on Tumblr. The two met at freshman orientation and bonded. In high school, Kate identified as "agender" and used the singular pronoun "they"; she now sees her gender as an "amorphous blob."

By contrast, Britt's evolution was more linear. She grew up in suburban Pennsylvania and never took to gender norms. As a child, she worshiped Cher and thought boy bands were icky. Playing video games, she dreaded having to choose male or female avatars.

In middle school, she started calling herself bisexual and dated boys. By 10th grade, she had come out as a lesbian. Her parents thought it was a phase - until she brought home a girlfriend, Ash. But she still wasn't settled.

"While I definitely knew that I liked girls, I didn't know that I was one," Britt said. Sometimes she would leave the house in a dress and feel uncomfortable, as if she were wearing a Halloween costume. Other days, she felt fine. She wasn't "trapped in the wrong body," as the cliché has it - she just didn't know which body she wanted.

When Kate told her about the term "bi-gender," it clicked instantly. "I knew what it was, before I knew what it was," Britt said, adding that it is more fluid than "transgender" but less vague than "genderqueer" - a catchall term for nontraditional gender identities.

At first, the only person she told was Ash, who responded, "It took you this long to figure it out?" For others, the concept was not so easy to grasp. Coming out as a lesbian had been relatively simple, Britt said, "since people know what that is." But when she got to Penn, she was relieved to find a small community of freshmen who had gone through similar awakenings.

Among them was Richard Parsons, the group's most politically lucid member. Raised female, Richard grew up in Orlando, Fla., and realized he was transgender in high school. One summer, he wanted to room with a transgender friend at camp, but his mother objected. "She's like, 'Well, if you say that he's a guy, then I don't want you rooming with a guy,' " he recalled. "We were in a car and I basically blurted out, 'I think I might be a guy, too!' "

After much door-slamming and tears, Richard and his mother reconciled. But when she asked what to call him, he had no idea. He chose "Richard" on a whim, and later added a middle name, Matthew, because it means "gift of God."

By the time he got to Penn, he had been binding his breasts for more than two years and had developed back pain. At the open mike, he told a harrowing story about visiting the university health center for numbness and having a panic attack when he was escorted into a women's changing room.

Nevertheless, he praised the university for offering gender-neutral housing. The college's medical program also covers sexual reassignment surgery, which, he added, "has heavily influenced my decision to probably go under the Penn insurance plan next year."

PENN has not always been so forward-thinking; a decade ago, the L.G.B.T. Center (nestled amid fraternity houses) was barely used. But in 2010, the university began reaching out to applicants whose essays raised gay themes. Last year, the gay newsmagazine The Advocate ranked Penn among the top 10 trans-friendly universities, alongside liberal standbys like New York University.

More and more colleges, mostly in the Northeast, are catering to gender-nonconforming students. According to a survey by Campus Pride, at least 203 campuses now allow transgender students to room with their preferred gender; 49 have a process to change one's name and gender in university records; and 57 cover hormone therapy. In December, the University of Iowa became the first to add a "transgender" checkbox to its college application.

"I wrote about an experience I had with a drag queen as my application essay for all the Ivy Leagues I applied to," said Santiago Cortes, one of the Penn students. "And I got into a few of the Ivy Leagues - Dartmouth, Columbia and Penn. Strangely not Brown.

"But even these measures cannot keep pace with the demands of incoming students, who are challenging the curriculum much as gay activists did in the '80s and '90s. Rather than protest the lack of gay studies classes, they are critiquing existing ones for being too narrow.

Several members of Penn Non-Cis had been complaining among themselves about a writing seminar they were taking called "Beyond 'Will & Grace,' " which examined gay characters on shows like "Ellen," "Glee" and "Modern Family." The professor, Gail Shister, who is a lesbian, had criticized several students for using "L.G.B.T.Q." in their essays, saying it was clunky, and proposed using "queer" instead. Some students found the suggestion offensive, including Britt Gilbert, who described Ms. Shister as "unaccepting of things that she doesn't understand."

Ms. Shister, reached by phone, said the criticism was strictly grammatical. "I am all about economy of expression," she said. "L.G.B.T.Q. doesn't exactly flow off the tongue. So I tell the students, 'Don't put in an acronym with five or six letters.' "

One thing is clear. Ms. Shister, who is 60 and in 1979 became The Philadelphia Inquirer's first female sportswriter, is of a different generation, a fact she acknowledges freely, even gratefully. "Frankly, I'm both proud and envious that these young people are growing up in an age where they're free to love who they want," she said.

If history is any guide, the age gap won't be so easy to overcome. As liberated gay men in the 1970s once baffled their pre-Stonewall forebears, the new gender outlaws, to borrow a phrase from the transgender writer Kate Bornstein, may soon be running ideological circles around their elders.

Still, the alphabet soup of L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. may be difficult to sustain. "In the next 10 or 20 years, the various categories heaped under the umbrella of L.G.B.T. will become quite quotidian," Professor Halberstam said.

Even at the open mike, as students picked at potato chips and pineapple slices, the bounds of identity politics were spilling over and becoming blurry.

At one point, Santiago, a curly-haired freshman from Colombia, stood before the crowd. He and a friend had been pondering the limits of what he calls "L.G.B.T.Q. plus."

"Why do only certain letters get to be in the full acronym?" he asked.

Then he rattled off a list of gender identities, many culled from Wikipedia. "We have our lesbians, our gays," he said, before adding, "bisexual, transsexual, queer, homosexual, asexual." He took a breath and continued. "Pansexual. Omnisexual. Trisexual. Agender. Bi-gender. Third gender. Transgender. Transvestite. Intersexual. Two-spirit. Hijra. Polyamorous."

By now, the list had turned into free verse. He ended: "Undecided. Questioning. Other. Human."

The room burst into applause.

Correction: January 10, 2013, Thursday

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of this article and a picture caption referred incorrectly to a Sarah Lawrence College student who uploaded a video online about being transgender. He says he is Stephen Ira, not Stephen Ira Beatty.

Source NYT

Fair Use

I get this. I think I have gotten it since the changes were first implemented.

It is why I have been on board with the rotating Promote feature. I was even on board with limiting Promotes to three at a time. I just had a major issue with the mechanics of the original "fix" -- it took much work to be a responsible promoter, if you cared about your fellow Sifters getting value for their promote.

And I noticed how, if I had a string of successes, I would get more views on my vids -- because folks knew I tended to post good stuff. When I posted stuff that was more ... particular... to me, my success rate would go down. Which was fine -- I post what I like. This is just an observation that success breeds success.

So I get it.

I also know how hooked I got on the Sift quickly because of the rewards for doing well. Moving up in the ranks, getting my next star level, my first Golden One!

I wonder if by limiting the power points like you have, and so drastically, you aren't shooting yourself in the foot. Where are your new stars going to come from? Will they get hooked? Have you instead winnowed down your stars to those who have been here for a long time, and now can promote at will?

I think that Talent Scout badge is a great idea -- give incentive to all Sifters to look at the unsifted vids.

I think limiting Promoted vids to three is also just fine -- just do it automatically with software, rather than that horrible convoluted thing that was so deuced difficult to use by a responsible Sifter (meaning, a Sifter would have to 1-identify a vid they wanted to promote 2-go to the front page and open the oldest vid 3-scroll thru ALL the comments, looking for the LAST promote 4-decide if it had been there long enough.

I am so glad that promote system is gone.

I appreciate the reasons for limiting the number of promotes on the front page (although there being 9-10 promotes really didn't happen that much.) I think limiting to three is just fine.

But I think you are focusing on the wrong thing. You say there is a promote club. It has been here for forever. Since my first days here, I have gotten messages, asking to do the promote trade. It has indeed happened a lot more in the past few months as folks have finally "gotten" it -- promote someone else, it costs 1 PP. Promote yourself, it costs 2 PP. So trade promotes, at a cost of 1 PP.

To fix this, all you have to do is get rid of the incentive to trade. Make all promotes cost 2 PPs.

That does two things -- makes it more expensive to promote, so promotes go down. And gets rid of the incentive to trade promotes, which makes the promotes go down. Add that to limiting promotes through software changes to a max of three, go back to the old look, and bob's your uncle. "Problem" solved. Yeah?

Related to this... If you stay with the limited power points, it will be interesting to see if you get folks hooked on sifting again. As I have said in other places, we are like rats in a lab experiment, pushing the bar to get our pellets. Some of us are already hooked. Will there be new folks lured in? Time will tell.

>> ^hpqp:

>> ^Reefie:
I've often found myself alienated from other men... I think differently, I behave differently, I'm not into typical 'guy' things. Generally I find I understand women relatively well but am totally clueless when it comes to how guys' minds work. At one point in my life I was giving serious thought to the prospect of gender change but there was one obstacle I hadn't counted on - private medical insurance companies and the NHS won't contemplate gender change unless the individual is attracted to those of the same sex. The idea of creating a lesbian didn't go down well with those who have the authority to make such decisions on my behalf.

Wow, that's an extremely bizarre and arbitrary line to draw on the part of the NHS. Maybe they suppose that people like you will have an easier life as a "feminine" heterosexual man (or "male lesbian") than as a transsexual lesbian (and vice-versa for women)?
One thing I've heard from an acquaintance who works with trans people though is that sometimes men and women who are uncomfortable with their gender (often because of childhood trauma) become convinced they are the wrong sex as a means of avoiding tackling those issues. That's one reason why having to go through psychotherapy (the woman I cite is a therapist specialised in this issue) before being allowed to begin hrt/grs is not a bad idea. But refusing gender reassignment just because it'd render you "homosexual", that's pretty absurd.


Despite the absurdity of the denial, in a way I'm glad that option was denied me. It allowed me to come to terms with who I am regardless of my gender. Nowadays I accept that I'm a guy, just not a stereotypical guy. Now the only dilemma I face regularly is the rejection by women who I find attractive (talking both personality and physically, I'm rarely lured by physical attraction alone) since I don't conform to their expectations of the male of the species. Can't blame people for wanting to avoid a fucked-up individual

There's another reason I'm glad the option wasn't available to me... I have two friends who have both gone through the transformation (both are/were guys) and seeing first-hand the emotional anguish they dealt with made me realise I might not have been strong enough to handle the pressures that are imposed on any individual who goes through that process.

>> ^csnel3:

I cant believe the family man ran away and let a nutcase get between him and his family! He didnt even run away from his family, as if to lure the nut away. He almost hid behind his family! The sucker puncher had to act, the nut was too close to the woman and child. Ohh Canada


It's wierd, my guess is that he isn't the family man, maybe a teenager?

I cant believe the family man ran away and let a nutcase get between him and his family! He didnt even run away from his family, as if to lure the nut away. He almost hid behind his family! The sucker puncher had to act, the nut was too close to the woman and child. Ohh Canada

Ahh. Gotcha.

Almost all TYT content is just "talking heads" and the odd graphic, so they use topical thumbnails to make them different and easier to search through.>> ^bareboards2:

I've never noticed that about TYT before. Interesting.
Siftie wouldn't kill the vid, Siftie would take away your ability to fix thumbnails. And since you aren't choosing the thumbnail, then there is no violation.
The rule, I think, is to prevent luring in viewers with a bait and switch. Which I think is why I have never noticed before -- there may have been bait, but there was no switch.
>> ^messenger:
If that's a rule, then most TYT videos should be removed from the Sift because almost none of their thumbnails are part of the content. The thumbs, FWIW, are somehow encoded in the video itself or are part of the embed when fetched from YouTube. Either way, they're chosen and placed by TYT. Think of them as dust jackets. I'd call that part of the original content. I don't add them later.
If Sifty still thinks that's a violation, then I guess he can go around killing them all. I'm not going to fix them. I've sifted so many.>> ^bareboards2:
PS your thumbnail doesn't appear anywhere in the vid. Siftbot says it must....