Vice profiled Boing Boing pal and contributor Maja D'Aoust, co-author of The Secret Source: The Law of Attraction and Its Hermetic Influence Throughout the Ages. (more…)

https://youtu.be/KDc-M4dHr0s?list=PLSKUhDnoJjYmeW6nNasZSaVAGh4u91pEkI'm enjoying James Veitch's weekly video series where he has fun with email scammers. In this episode, James has an exchange with a US soldier named Mary Gary who discovered a buried safe while on a routine patrol and wants to share the $15 million booty with James.

It's a lucky day for KTVU reporter Alex Savidge and camera operator Vaughan Chip. The two were covering a train derailment east of San Francisco when a car was hit and came barreling right toward them. (via KTVU)

Are they Alligator leads or Crocodile clips? This $4 set certainly comes in handy when playing with our Makey Makey, and unsurprisingly have become standard kit when trouble-shooting electrical gremlins on my motorcycle.Also useful for extending the reach of a multi-meter.Set of 10 multi-colored 14" Test Leads via Amazon

They have got ape drapes, yes they do!

Anna Rothschild says, "See the tiny creatures living in a pond or puddle using your smartphone, poster tack, and a laser pointer."Build a microscope stand for your laser pointer lens scope.Create a 1000x smartphone microscope with a glass bead.Don’t have a smartphone? Try this water drop microscope from Mr. Wizard.[via]

How to have fun by turning friends into foes. Bonus points for the cameraman's Muttley laugh.

The Arizona bark scorpion is the deadliest scorpion in the continental United States. But the Southern grasshopper mouse happily munches on the scorpions. How? The scorpion's venom actually triggers the mouse to numb itself to pain. From KQED Science:The scorpion venom contains neurotoxins that target sodium and potassium ion channels, proteins embedded within the surface of the nerve and muscle cells that play an important role in regulating the sensation of pain. Activating these channels sends signals down the nerves to the brain. That’s what causes the excruciating pain that human victims have described as the feeling like getting jabbed with a hot needle. Others compare the pain to an electric shock. But the grasshopper mouse has an entirely different reaction when stung.Within the mouse, a special protein in one of the sodium ion channels binds to the scorpion’s neurotoxin. Once bound, the neurotoxin is unable to activate the sodium ion channel and send the pain signal. Instead it has the entirely opposite effect. It shuts down the channel, keeping it from sending any signals, which has a numbing effect for the mouse."Stinging Scorpion vs. Pain-Defying Mouse"

Last month I blogged about Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles, a pair of artists who released a high-resolution scan of a looted Egyptian bust of Nefertiti in the collection of Berlin's Neues Museum, which has a reputation for refusing to make data from its collection (including 3D scans) public. (more…)

Boing Boing is proud to welcome Wikileaf.com as as sponsor. When you want to book a flight or a hotel online, if you're bargain-conscious you probably don't go directly to each airline or hotel's direct website, but rather shop on price comparison websites to see who's offering the best rate for what you want. Wikileaf.com applies this same familiar concept to legal and medical cannabis.Wikileaf is the first price comparison website of its kind, empowering marijuana consumers to name their preferred price for pot--then watch as recreational and/or medical dispensaries compete for their bud business.The website operates as a “reverse auction” model for weed. You, the consumer, set the price you intend to spend. Dispensaries in your area offer their best deal (in grams) to match what you're willing to spend.As cannabis laws and regulations ease throughout the U.S., exuberant ganja-preneurs are opening dispensaries faster than ever. All the competition may be good for the market, but it creates a lot of noise for cannabis connoisseurs who just want really high-quality herb at the best possible price.Cruise along the urban streets of Denver, Seattle, Portland, and other weed-friendly American cities, and you’ll notice dispensaries and cannabis shops popping up faster than Starbucks spots. There is fierce competition between dispensaries, and that incentive to compete for your business grows as more shops enter the market.“The problem for the consumer is that there is no transparency in pricing,” says Dan Nelson, CEO of Wikileaf. “What you can get for $40 at one shop might get you nearly double that amount in another shop, depending on the dispensaries current inventory levels.”That the problem Wikileaf is trying to solve for savvy cannabis shoppers. With Wikileaf, you can rise above the noise, and quickly find dispensaries offering the best deals and prices in your neighborhood.In a highly anticipated update coming this spring, the price comparison model will also be applied to individual strains and products. So for example, if you’re looking for the best deals on Blue Dream, you could quickly hop onto Wikileaf.com and find dispensaries currently stocking Blue Dream in your neighborhood--and then compare their offers, to see who’s willing to sell this strain to you at the lowest price.Check out WikiLeaf.com.

The makers of the Coleco Chameleon retro console wanted $2m to manufacture it—and raised more than $80,000 in an Indiegogo campaign. Their prototypes turned out to be unsettlingly reminiscent of a) a piece of cardboard, b) a video capture card in a not-quite translucent box, and c) SNES parts wrapped in duct tape. The axe is falling: Coleco, which licensed its brand to the team, has demanded to inspect a working prototype. (more…)

Phenomena like the Harlem Cryptoparty demonstrate the connection between racial justice and cryptography -- civil rights organizers remember that the FBI spied on and blackmailed Martin Luther King, sending him vile notes encouraging him to kill himself. (more…)

Going to the movies is awesome. You get to sit back and watch action, adventure and romance unfold on a gigantic screen. Everything is big and exciting. But you know what else is awesome? Sitting on your couch. At last you can combine these two highly pleasurable activities thanks to the RIF6 Cube Projector that’s now 16% off. Watch movies as they were meant to be seen - large and in charge - right from the comfort of your own living room.This tiny box packs a big punch. It’s super lightweight so you can tote it for an outdoor movie marathon or prop it up anywhere in your house, dim the lights and let the movie magic begin. Via Bluetooth it streams anything you want to watch right from your smart device: movies, videos, TV shows and even games, projecting them at a whopping 120” onto any wall or screen. The LED light source lasts an amazing 20,000 hours so you can pretty much watch every sequel in every movie franchise. It’s super easy to set up so you can relax while the show rolls.You can even use it to make big presentations at work or show of your latest photo slideshow from a trip. No more slide projectors from elementary school, this is the big leagues of cinema and show, right in your house for 16% off. If you have a phone or tablet, you can now operate a movie theatre. Check out the link below for even more details.Get 16% Off the RIF6 Cube Projector in the Boing Boing Store.[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLHIP4Lyn_U[/embed]

Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York City, has decided not to run for president on an independent ticket. (more…)

Some bad guys steal your lunch money. Some rob banks, others use guns and swords or blow things up. But today, out on the wild west of the internet superhighway, bad guys hack your data. And there are only a few things you can do about it to protect yourself and exact justice. One is never use your computer or the web. And because that’s not going to happen, you need to back up everything you’ve got. With a lifetime subscription to SkyHub Cloud 2TB Backup that you can nab now for 90% off, you’re safer than ever, backed by the good guys.SkyHub gives you 2TB of data storage right off the bat, which is enough for all your texts, photos, emails and cat videos galore, but if you want even more they can add it right on. With the advanced encryption security you can sleep easy knowing that every last piece of your personal data is super safe and sound. And any time you want to view it, simply login to the easy to use online dashboard to check out everything you’re storing long term, using SkyHub’s unique hybrid storage system.No catch. It’s this easy to backup all your data and keep it exactly where you want: locked up in a super secure e-vault for eternity. Your lifetime subscription is now 90% off and you can stop worrying about the ever-growing threat of cyber hackers, or even the more simple issues or losing or breaking your computer or any smart device. Check out the link below for more details.Take 90% Off a Lifetime Subscription to SkyHub Cloud 2TB Backup in the Boing Boing Store.

I love reading James Blaylock's novels. His take on humanity, and the super natural, always thrill me. This collection of short stories made my rainy weekend.This collection of 16 stories is wonderful. Blaylock often tells tales where hope is covered in a dark sheen of barely contained evil, hiding in everyday California. I'm addicted! Included in this, his only collection of shorts, is Blaylock's award winning 13 Phantasms, the story of a man who follows an ad back into the golden age of science fiction. Steampunk, classic sci-fi, and a few new Langdon St. Ives adventures (one of Blaylock's best known characters,) are gripping!Thirteen Phantasms and Other Stories by James P. Blaylock via Amazon

In 2014, Verizon was caught sneaking "supercookies" onto its customers' computers -- these are tracking cookies that bypassed the normal cookie system to surveil Verizon users and target ads to them. (more…)

The ACLU deposed Judge Jack H Weil, a senior judge responsible for training other immigration judges, in a case over whether 3- and 4-year-olds needed legal representation during deportation hearings. Judge Weil insisted that children as young as three could be taught the basics of immigration law and didn't need taxpayer-funded lawyers in order to get a fair hearing. (more…)

Moving into the house we just bought, I found to my delight a mysterious locked safe at the back of a closet. I've asked a few people how to get into it, and the consensus is either to use powerful microphones to listen in on the tumblers (apparently stethoscopes don't really cut it) or to see if the hinges are weakened by time and can be removed by force without damaging the door or the mechanisms. Before I get cracking, though, what do you think? I asked the previous owners for the code, but they don't know. They just assumed it was empty. It's a Yale safe.I know that it's probably full of air, but you never know.

"Satanic Panic over Dungeons & Dragons" is one of my favorite genres of journalism, and Eric Grundhauser's article about it is a goodun, with all the right YouTube clips.By 1984, fantasy roleplaying had evolved from thretening the innocent minds of America’s youth to threatening their eternal salvation. Religious mini-comic author Jack Chick published one of his “Chick Tracts”—those extreme religious comic book pamphlets you find on the bus—about the issue, tying fantasy roleplaying directly to the occult. Called Dark Dungeons, the thin pamphlet tells the story of Debbie, a young woman who gets seduced by a witchy dungeon master who teaches her to embrace evil through the game. Through the course of the story, Debbie uses a “mind bondage” spell on her father to get spending money and finds the body of a friend who committed suicide after losing her game character.They're still going on about it, too.

You may have caught Funny or Die's "Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal: The Movie," starring Johnny Depp as Trump. But even stranger is this clip of Depp peeling off his Trump face. Now I'd like to see Depp peel off the next layer to reveal his true identity, Richard Grieco!

VFX pioneer Phil Tippett, creator of Jabba the Hutt's pet Rancor, dropped acid during the production of Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi:“I took LSD when I was working on Return of the Jedi. I could communicate with my cat Brian, and Brian took me on a journey.“I crawled into this cupboard with Brian the cat and we went to the centre of the Earth for like three billion years and I was just in this world of molecules. It was fine, it was very calming.“I decided to go back to work and I was at ILM (Industrial Light & Magic) and I walked into the blue screen stage and it’s huge - everything’s just super illuminated bright blue - and it was just like ‘Aaaah, I took like way too much.’’More in this VICE video: "My Life in Monsters" (via The Independent)

Jeff Heimbuch writes, "Return Home is a serialized audio drama, done in the style of radio shows of ages past. It is fully produced, in stereo sound, to make you feel like you are part of the action. Though you can listen however you'd like, it's recommended you do so with headphones. Alone. In a darkened room." (more…)

Daily Grail posted this nightmarish excerpt from the 2014 book Preparing the Ghost, by Matthew Gavin Frank.Squid corpses, even when cooked, retain their sexual reflexes and have been known to inseminate our mouths. After eating calamari...a South Korean woman reported experiencing "severe pain" and a "pricking foreign-body sensation" in her mouth. From her tongue, inner cheeks, gums, throat, her doctor exscised "twelve small, white, spindle-shaped, bug-like organisms." These were spermatophores, which possess seriously tenacious ejaculatory apparati, and a cementlike body, which allows for their attachment to materials like the tongue, inner cheeks, gums...

Not for the Québécois are such mundane sexual preferences as "lesbians" or "hentai" or "facesitting." No, the French-speaking Canadians search for themselves. [via Vice Canada]

While our family is lucky to get our kids in their shoes every morning, Melbourne, Australia stylist Shelley Gifford creates these insanely intricate braids in her daughter's hair before school. See more at her Instagram feed, @prettylittlebraids. (Whenever I see wild braids, I always think of bOING bOING co-founder Carla Sinclair's wonderful 2003 book, Braid Crazy!) From Gifford's post at Bored Panda:I braid Grace’s hair most days and take the photo of the style in the morning before Grace leaves for school. I only have approx 15-20 minutes on a school morning so if it can’t be done in this time I leave it for weekend. Grace is fantastic, I’ve been styling her hair since she was a toddler so she doesn’t know any different. It’s her quiet time for TV after she is ready for school so she is more than happy to sit there. I love doing something that I’m so passionate about and that Grace gets to be a part of it. She’s sweet, affectionate and beautiful little girl. Grace is everyone’s friend. …I love learning new styles, advancing my skills and challenging myself to create something new and unique.(via Laughing Squid)

Kevin Mao, a designer in Shanghai, recently had two of his photos placed on Apple billboards to promote the iPhone 6S camera. He told Mashable how he edited the photos.For this photo, he used TouchRetouch ($1.99, which "lets you remove unwanted content or objects from your photo"), Snapseed (Free, general purpose photo retouching), and VSCO (Free, general purpose photo retouching).For this one, he used SKRWT (keystone- and lens-correction), Snapseed, and VSCO.

I like that this activity is called "excavation." From Wikipedia:(The woodpecker) is noted for its ability to acquire wood-boring grubs using their bills for hammering, but overall the family is characterized by its dietary flexibility, with many species being both highly omnivorous and opportunistic with a diet including ants, bird eggs, cactus fruits, lizards, nestlings, and insects. The insect prey most commonly taken are those found inside tree trunks, whether they are alive or rotten, and in crevices in the bark. These include beetles and their grubs, ants, termites, spiders, and caterpillars. These may be obtained either by gleaning or, more famously, by excavating wood. Having hammered a hole into the wood, the prey is excavated by a long barbed tongue. Woodpeckers consume beetles that burrow into trees, removing as many as 85 percent of emerald ash borer larvae from individual ash trees.The ability to excavate allows woodpeckers to obtain tree sap, an important source of food for some species. (via r/gifs)

Pricenomics analyzed the frequency of the final words spoken by death row inmates before being executed.Used by 63% of all speakers, “love” is the most common word in death row inmates’ last statements. At 689 total instances, that works out to an average of 1.7 times per inmate. Other words that insinuate affection — “heart” (14%), “care” (11%), “loved” (10%) — also rank high on this list.In most cases, the word is used to address family members who are present at the execution, on the other side of the glass window. But it is also used to express feelings toward the victim’s family members, lawyers, the court, and even the warden/prison staff.

Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson's Transmetropolitan is nearly 20 years old, and the science fiction story of a journalist who wages truth-war on scumbag politicians 200 years from now could not be more relevant than it is today. (more…)

John Mininno is an ex-malpractice lawyer who raised money from a Wall Street angel and founded the National Healthcare Analysis Group, which uses public data sources to uncover Medicare fraud, then does further data-mining to predict which current or ex-employees will turn whistleblower, cold calls them, and splits the bounty the government offers for whistleblowing with them. (more…)

My late father-in-law, Joe, was born and raised in Los Angeles, growing up during the heyday of hot rod culture. When I knew him he drove Corvettes and Camaros. In high school, Joe and his brother built Soap Box Derby racers. I recently came across an essay about Soap Box Derby racing that Joe wrote in 1957 when he was a student at Los Angeles High School. His teacher wrote, "This is one of the most *interesting* reports I've ever read!" He received a C+, though, because his spelling was atrocious (It was bad when I knew him, too - I think he had undiagnosed dyslexia) and he neglected to add footnotes or a bibliography. Here's a PDF scan of the essay.

After mixed showings in the primaries and a sense that the Democratic Party's profoundly undemocratic "superdelegates" will hand Hillary the nomination no matter what, the press has all but declared Bernie Sanders out of the race. (more…)

The New York Public Library's spectacular Digital Public Library challenged designers to create new covers for some of the public domain's greatest books, which had been previously doomed to an undeserved dullness thanks to the auto-generated covers that book-scanning projects stuck them with. (more…)

Statistician Patrick Ball runs an NGO called the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, which uses extremely rigorous, well-documented statistical techniques to provide evidence of war crimes and genocides; HRDAG's work has been used in the official investigations of atrocities in Kosovo, Guatemala, Peru, Colombia, Syria and elsewhere. (more…)

Wonkblog runs the numbers on the counties with the strongest support for Trump and finds that the typical Trump supporter is likely to live in a place with higher-than-normal mortality for whites (middle-aged white mortality has been increasing since the 1990s at a rate unseen in the developed world since the collapse of the Soviet Union), lower-than-usual rates of university eduction, higher-than-normal rates of unemployment, where manufacturing jobs have vanished due to offshoring. (more…)

The ethics of torturing robots is not a new question, but it's becoming more important as robots and AI becomes more lifelike. Author Ted Chiang explored it in his 2010 novella, The Lifecycle of Software Objects. In 1998 I wrote an article for Wired Online called "Virtual Sadism" about people who liked to torture artificial life forms called "norns" (and a movement of norn lovers who tried to stop them). In 1977 Terrel Miedaner wrote a philosophical science fiction novel called The Soul of Anna Klan, which featured a little Roomba like creature that seems to be afraid to "die" when someone tries to crush it with a hammer. (An excerpt from the novel appears in the excellent book, The Mind's I: Fantasies And Reflections On Self & Soul, edited by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett.)Dylan Love of Inverse revisits the idea of robot abuse in his article for Inverse, "Is it OK to torture a robot?"Consider the latest robot to be unveiled by Google’s Boston Dynamics. When the collective internet saw a bearded scientist abuse the robot with a hockey stick, weird pangs of empathy went out everywhere. Why do we feel so bad when we watch the robot fall down, we wonder? There’s no soul or force of life to empathize with, and yet: This robot is just trying to lift a box, why does that guy have to bully it?The Boston Dynamics video reminded me of the inflatable Bozo men, meant to be abused:https://youtu.be/F2DRyWJgYO0

https://youtu.be/CwetMm33UnIDo you like spoilers as much as I do? Then watch this video that ruins the surprise endings of 47 and 1/2 movies.

Oona Tempest is an apprentice sushi chef at New York City's Tanoshi Sushi. I do love my sushi, but I definitely wouldn't have the fortitude or filleting-skills to be trained as a chef. (Eater)

These PSAs from Project Consent (a non-profit that “aims to combat and deconstruct rape culture”) star anthropomorphic body parts. (more…)

The folks at Biolite sent me a PowerLight Mini. It's a rechargeable LED lantern with a 1350 mAh battery. It has a burn time of over 50 hours in low light mode, and 5 hours in high mode. It can also be used to charge your phone. My favorite thing about it is the design. It's very cute - it has a retro feel that reminds me of a Japanese transistor radio and a Star Trek communicator. The body is stainless steel and it feels solid. I've been using it to read books at night. In the video above, the Biolite team shows how they designed the PowerLight Mini.

When confronted with dogma-threatening, worldview-menacing ideas, your knee-jerk response is usually to lash out and try to bat them away, but thanks to a nearly unavoidable mistake in reasoning, you often end up doing battle with arguments of your own creation.Your lazy brain is always trying to make sense of the world on ever-simpler terms. Just as you wouldn’t use a topographical map to navigate your way to Wendy’s, you tend to navigate reality using a sort of Google Maps interpretation of events and ideas. It’s less accurate, sure, but much easier to understand when details aren’t a priority. But thanks to this heuristical habit, you sometimes create mental men of straw that stand in for the propositions put forth by people who see the world a bit differently than you. In addition to being easy to grasp, they are easy to knock down and hack apart, which wouldn’t be a problem if only you noticed the switcheroo.This is the essence of the straw man fallacy, probably the most common of all logical fallacies. Setting up and knocking down straw men is so easy to do while arguing that you might not even notice that you are doing it.In this episode, you’ll learn from three experts in logic and arguing why human brains tend not to realize they are constructing artificial versions of the arguments they wish to defeat. Once you’ve wrapped your mind around that idea, you’ll then learn how to spot the straw man fallacy, how to avoid committing it, and how to defend against it.This episode of the You Are Not So Smart Podcast is the second in a full season of episodes exploring logical fallacies. The first episode is here.Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – SoundcloudThis episode is brought to you by Trunk Club. Like Netflix for clothes, a professional stylist helps you define your new look, and then your new clothes arrive at your doorstep in a special trunk. Keep what you want, return the rest. Get started today and Trunk Club will style you for FREE. Plus FREE SHIPPING both ways! Click here for this special offer.This episode is brought to you by The Great Courses Plus. Get unlimited access to a huge library of The Great Courses lecture series on many fascinating subjects. Start FOR FREE with The Fundamentals of Photography filmed in partnership with The National Geographic and taught by professional photographer Joel Sartore. Click here for a FREE TRIAL.This episode of You Are Not So Smart is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website or online portfolio. For a free trial and ten percent off go to Squarespace.com and use the offer code SOSMART.Support the show directly by becoming a patron! Get episodes one-day-early and ad-free. Head over to the YANSS Patreon Page for more details.Barbara Drescher is a cognitive psychologist and skeptical activist who lectured at California State University and currently serves as educational programs consultant for the James Randi Educational Foundation. Her website is ICBSEverywhere.com.Jesse Richardson is the founder of YourLogicalFallacyIs.com, a fantastic website where you can learn about fallacies and critical thinking and easily share what you discover. He is an award-winning creative lead on a number of other projects including School Of Thought.Mike Rugnetta is the writer and host of PBS Idea Channel produced by PBS Digital Studios. On Idea Channel he applies philosophical and critical concepts to pop-culture ideas and other more-familiar topics in an effort to better explain to a general, internet-savvy audience the strange and abstract propositions he explores in wonderful detail.In every episode, after I read a bit of self delusion news, I taste a cookie baked from a recipe sent in by a listener/reader. That listener/reader wins a signed copy of my new book, “You Are Now Less Dumb,” and I post the recipe on the YANSS Pinterest page. This episode’s winner is Andrew Leman who sent in a recipe for Chinese New Year Cookies. Send your own recipes to david {at} youarenotsosmart.com.Links and SourcesDownload – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – SoundcloudPrevious EpisodesBoing Boing PodcastsCookie RecipesICBSEverywhereYour Logical Fallacy IsPBS Idea ChannelA Guide to Logical FallaciesOrigins of Straw Man FallacyImage Source – CC BY-SA 3.0

Today we travel to a future where your microbiome becomes a key part of your identity. From health to your child’s kindergarten, here are all the ways knowing about your microbiome might impact your life. Flash Forward: RSS | iTunes | Twitter | Facebook | Web | PatreonIn this episode we talk about the possibilities and limitations of the microbiome — the trillions of bacterial cells that live in and on your body. There’s a lot of money going towards microbiome research right now, and a whole lot of claims about what the microbiome can do. We break down what we actually know, and where we’re probably going.▹▹ Full show notes

My new Guardian column, Forget Apple's fight with the FBI – our privacy catastrophe has only just begun, explains how surveillance advocates have changed their arguments: 20 years ago, they argued that the lack of commercial success for privacy tools showed that the public didn't mind surveillance; today, they dismiss Apple's use of cryptographic tools as a "marketing stunt" and treat the proportionality of surveillance as a settled question. (more…)

Don’t pin yourself down and limit your career to one niche. Be a Renaissance person. These days on the tech and startup scene, it’s helpful to have a wide professional range and for 97% off, the eduCBA Tech Training Bundle can help you develop and master all the skills you could ever want. Working in tech is hardly all about tech, it’s about combining the right elements of management, organization, design, and yes, a crazy amount of coding.There are more than five hundred courses currently offered on eduCBA and this gives you a lifetime subscription so that you can revisit, rewatch and relearn this material any time you want from the comfort of your own couch. You can ask the expert teachers questions any time and you’ll even take mock tests and quizzes to ensure you know your stuff. The lessons include software development, networking, 3D design, CAD, and way more, plus you can create web apps using HTML, CSS, Javascript and even more coding languages you’ll come to master. It’s the perfect combination of the technical, visual and managerial skills you need to make things happen in the real world.Your resume is about to start popping with bullet points once you add all these skills and certifications on. And any time you want to revisit the material or learn something new, simply log back on because it’s yours for life for 97% off. Start building that background to become the tech and startup allstar you’re meant to be by checking out the link below for more details.Get 97% Off the eduCBA Tech Training Bundle in the Boing Boing Store.

This morning Mitt Romney spoke at the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah. He said "Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He's playing the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat.”Romney's right, of course. The problem is, Rubio and Cruz (and Clinton, to a large degree) are also phonies and frauds. But Rubio, Cruz, and Clinton are attached to choke chains under control of the power elite, making them much more desirable to Romney and his ilk.ABC News: Mitt Romney Slams Donald Trump's 'Absurd 3rd-Grade Theatrics'Trump reacted by saying, "Mitt Romney was a failed candidate; should have beaten Barack Obama easily."

Does this sound like anyone you know who is running for president in 2016?He is credibly credited with being actuated by lofty, unselfish patriotism. He probably does not know himself just what he wants to accomplish. The keynote of his propaganda in speaking and writing is violent anti-Semitism. His followers are nicknamed the "Hakenkreuzler." So violent are Hitler's fulminations against the Jews that a number of prominent Jewish citizens are reported to have sought safe asylums in the Bavarian highlands, easily reached by fast motor cars, whence they could hurry their women and children when forewarned of an anti-Semitic St. Bartholomew's night.But several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler's anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic, and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes.A sophisticated politician credited Hitler with peculiar political cleverness for laying emphasis and over-emphasis on anti-Semitism, saying: "You can't expect the masses to understand or appreciate your finer real aims. You must feed the masses with cruder morsels and ideas like anti-Semitism. It would be politically all wrong to tell them the truth about where you really are leading them."Vox: The New York Times' first article about Hitler's rise is absolutely stunning

Vice today published a 5-part, deeply reported and researched science fiction series about what happens after the a massive earthquake hits an American city. (more…)

Pop surrealist pioneer Camille Rose Garcia returns to Seattle's Roq La Rue Gallery tonight, March 3, with a magnificent new show of phantasmagoric paintings! This remarkable exhibition, titled "Animus Chrysalis Mortis," hangs until April 2. Garcia says:For this body of work I was inspired by the surrealist and deeply symbolic films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Jungian archetypes, and Greek mythology. I created a personal language of symbols, then made a card set and selected at random a different set for each new painting. This method taps into the elements of subconscious influence and chance, as well as mirrors the cut-up method of writing created by one of my favorite authors William Burroughs.From these subconscious suggestions I created a lush and layered symbolic world that explores the realm of childhood, memory and longing. Ghosts and gardens, snakes and skulls frame fever-dream scenes of wounded goddesses slayed open, fecund gardens growing from their wounds. Vibrant strange gardens populated with insects and dream imagery portray a psychedelic dance between life and death.

https://youtu.be/7xNnRBksvOU"Be nice, know your shit, but don't take any shit." That's web producer Hannah Birch's advice for getting what is rightfully your from a government bureaucracy that thinks of you as an annoyance with an number attached to it. She did't use those exact words (they were written by Reason's Anthony L. Fisher), but they sum up her hard fought lesson in getting a driver license from the NY Department of Motor Vehicles. From Reason: Birch suffers from oculocutaneous albinism, an eye condition which allows her to see well enough to drive safely but which prevents her from making out the small-printed text of an eye exam. She writes, "even though I can’t read those tiny little letters on the sheet of paper they hold up, doctors in three states now have concluded my vision is good enough for me to safely drive."The NY DMV provides a form which allows a person to submit a doctor's evaluation of their ability to drive. Even though Birch had that form, as well as a doctor's thumb's up, she knew she was in for a long hard slog at the most loathed of state bureaucracies because as she notes, "government workers can still make it difficult for you to get what you’re qualified for under the law."Here's Birch's advice:Know As Much As You Can in AdvanceFigure Out As Much As You Can QuicklyUse KeywordsSpeak Directly and Stand Your GroundFollow Up With the People Who Helped You Out ProPublica: My Story as a DMV Edge Case: How to Battle Bureaucracy and Win