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A group that calls themselves The Republicans for the Rule of Law has a new TV ad campaign asking "Congress to stand up for the rule of law" and calls Trump's recent actions regarding Ukraine "unAmerican." They ask viewers to "call your Congressman and tell them to speak out against President Trump and his abusive power."Here is the ad in a tweet by @BillKristol:Mike Pence is right. Donald Trump is wrong. pic.twitter.com/JeYnRWikoG— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) October 17, 2019 According to HuffPost:The ads will air in the home states of a dozen Senate Republicans, including Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah), as well as in the districts of 15 House Republicans, such as Rep. Bill Flores (Texas) and Rep. Mark Amodei (Nev.).Republicans for the Rule of Law spokesman Chris Truax said Trump’s decision to seek dirt on his rivals from Ukraine and China was “fundamentally unAmerican.”“Congressional Republicans must speak out against President Trump’s abuse of power,” Truax said in a statement. “They need to do it publicly. They need to do it clearly. And they need to do it now.” Read the rest

Ryoichi Toya of Suzu, Japan harvests 3.5 tons of salt per year from the ocean. He starts by pouring buckets of seawater onto a bed of raked sand. After the sand has dried, it's collected in a large wooden box, to which additional seawater is added, to create a very salty liquid. This is boiled over a wood fire for six hours to remove the water. "Salt produced with the Agehama style is made from seawater and is mainly used for food," he says. "It's mild in taste and the texture is smooth. It's the perfect seasoning for a rice ball." Read the rest

Billionaire Elon Musk told lawyers representing the British cave diver who is suing him for defamation that he's financially illiquid. Musk's personal net worth of $23.6 billion makes him the 38th richest person on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, but he says his wealth is tied up in his equity stake in Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and shares in Tesla, and that he has no intention of selling his shares.via Bloomberg Photo: NORAD and USNORTHCOM Public Affairs Read the rest

A 64-year-old man went to the doctor complaining of pain in his tongue and mouth. Upon examination, doctors found the patient's tongue to be missing taste buds. He was diagnosed with pernicious anemia, which is caused by an inability to absorb vitamin B-12, needed to make red blood cells.The condition was reversed after weekly injections of B-12.[via New England Journal of Medicine]Image: National University of Singapore Read the rest

On August 8, 1974, President Richard Nixon delivered his resignation speech to the American public. Moments before this historical event, he was calmly joking around with the TV crew as if this was just any other presser. And then...."...I have felt it was my duty to persevere, to make every possible effort to complete the term of office to which you elected me. In the past few days, however, it has become evident to me that I no longer have a strong enough political base in the Congress to justify continuing that effort."(via r/ObscureMedia) Read the rest

A great American has passed away. US Representative for Maryland's 7th congressional district, Elijah Eugene Cummings has passed away at age 68.Elijah Cummings has been an inspiration for as long as I can remember. We have lost one of the last true statesmen in this broken US political system.Baltimore Sun:The U.S. congressman from Maryland, who died early Thursday morning at 68, was a long-time warrior for justice, truly a great man. He spoke truth to power even as a member of the power class. And the Democrat was not above pleading, with rival Republicans or constituents, for what he knew was right.He chose politics and public life because he wanted a better country, a better city. Immersed in the complex problems of both, he kept his eyes on the prize all through his career. As a member of Congress, with oversight of government operations at a range of levels, Cummings was in the role of examiner, and what he examined was usually bad — from incompetence by bureaucrats to price gouging by corporations to the abuses of power of the executive branch. And so his words were often aspirational, uttered while mired in mud, yet pointing us toward a mountaintop. Read the rest

The Lestina family of Bagley, Iowa were greeted with a wonderful Halloween surprise on the morning of October 3, when they awoke to find 5 inches of animal blood, fat, and bones flooding through the basement.Two weeks later, it's still blooding.The Lestinas have lived next door to a meat locker for the last decade. But the building was transferred to new ownership this past April 2019, and, well, something clearly went wrong., because the drainage from the kill room backed up and clogged the shared pipelines, which spilled over into the Lestinas' house.(It took two weeks for the meat locker to reach and offer to help pay for the mess, too, although they were cooperating with local health and sanitation services before that.)From the Des Moines Register:Two weeks later, the blood is still seeping into the basement and the Iowa Department of Public Health told the family it's not safe to live in the home.They are staying with relatives in Panora until the mess can be cleaned up."I've had a company come out for cleaning and sanitizing, but they can't start that process until it stops coming up the drain," Lestina said. "I've been talking to different excavation people. It hasn't been a promising deal. I need dry weather."According to KTIV, the family was hoping to put their house on the market soon, too. But that plan might hit some snags. Read the rest

The blob has no mouth, but I must scream.To be fair, it doesn't a stomach, or eyes, or feet, or anything resembling a brain, either (at least as far as modern science would define it). It's not technically a fungus, or an animal, or a planet. It is, quite simply, an incomprehensibly bizarre yellow slime mold that's also alive, and at least somewhat-sentient. Even its official scientific classification, physarum polycephalum, literally translates to "many-headed slime."And now it's held captive and displayed at the Zoo de Paris, starting October 19.Did I mention that this blob has some kind of intelligence, or at least the ability to remember things, and absorb knowledge from other slime mold blobs that it consumes? And that it's capable of moving independently, squishing along at a limbless rate of about 1.6 inches per hour? It also has 720 different sex organs, and will heal in two minutes if you cut it in half.It also, apparently, loves the taste of oatmeal, as well as Acacia trees, oak bark, and chestnut bark. So um, at least it's probably not going to eat us when it ultimately escapes and seeks its revenge for being caged and mocked by us lowly humans? Maybe. If we're lucky.From EuroNews:"The 'blob' is a living being that is [one] of nature's mysteries. We don't really know what it is," director of the Paris Museum of Natural History, Bruno David, said, adding that it lives and grows in damp forest undergrowth away from the light. Read the rest

Camden Paillot is on fire in McSweeney's: "Indeed, one may 'like' Sanders’ populist, pro-working-class ideology that has enticed  —  let me be clear  —  millions of struggling Americans, but being dragged too far left means losing the vote of cartoonish top-hat-wearing-villains, phrenology-practicing conservative centrists, and Democrat-leaning billionaires residing on secret sex-predator-islands, whose only apparent mission is to make the biosphere collapse faster." (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) (I am a donor to both Bernie Sanders' and Elizabeth Warren's campaigns) Read the rest

Guillermo del Toro was recently a guest on Visitations, the podcast hosted by Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah. During the two-part interview, del Toro briefly discussed his movies, but mostly focused on his upbringing, which reads like a Series of Unfortunate Events. Among the anecdotes:-He used to be skinny but put on weight to defend himself from bullies, including one who threatened to throw him over a railing.-His father was paranoid of being robbed, and would wake del Toro and his young brother in the middle of the night, telling them to watch for invaders.-After his uncle died and del Toro inherited his room, the uncle haunted him.But most disturbing of all was the abuse inflicted by his “grandmother.” Del Toro’s mother was frequently absent, and thus his maternal great aunt served as his primary caretaker. She was “very Catholic” and would tell del Toro that upon his death he literally would burn in hell for hundreds of years, if not longer. She believed mortifying the flesh was important as atonement. Accordingly, del Toro explained, “she used to put upside [down] bottle caps on my shoes for my feet to bleed. And I was a child, a little child. And she would say this would amortize your time in purgatory. So you get a sense of spiritual danger at all times.”During the interview, Del Toro also reflected on his brother's advice about needing to accept their father despite his flaws: “He’s not the flu. He's not going to get better.”You can listen to the entire interview, and many more in the series here. Read the rest

Who doesn't love a free meal?From Nautilus Live:During the final dive of this year’s Nautilus expedition season, our team discovered a whale fall while exploring Davidson Seamount off central California’s coast with researchers from Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. The skeletal remains of the whale lying on its back are estimated to be 4-5 meters long. The team is working to identify the species, but it is confirmed to be a baleen whale as indicated by baleen remaining along the whale’s jawbones. While evidence of whale falls have been observed to remain on the seafloor for several years, this appears to be a relatively recent fall with baleen, blubber, and some internal organs remaining. The site also exhibits an interesting mid-stage of ecological succession, as both large scavengers like eel pouts are still stripping the skeleton of blubber, and bone-eating Osedax worms are starting to consume lipids (fats) from the bones.There's no getting past how rare a sight this must be—just listen to the excitement in the voices of the scientists who came across this whale fall for the first time. Read the rest

President Donald Trump thinks this photo, of House Leader Nancy Pelosi berating him over his abandonment of America's Kurdish allies, will make her look bad. The BBC quotes Republican "leaders" as saying Pelosi—apparently one of two women at the table and five in the room—was behaving in an "unbecoming" manner. Pelosi set the photograph as her social media backdrop.A Democratic source told the Associated Press news agency that the meeting began with Mr Trump bragging about a "nasty" letter he had sent to Turkish President Recep Tayip Erdogan. ... Speaking to reporters following the meeting, Ms Pelosi described it as "most unsatisfactory"."Two-to-one, the Republicans voted to oppose what he was doing in Syria. He just couldn't handle it so he just kind of engaged in a meltdown," she said.Mr Schumer said the president had been "insulting, particularly to the speaker".After Pelosi said he had a "meltdown" during the meeting, Trump used the same term to describe Pelosi: one of the President's distinctive rhetorical habits. Read the rest

After days of crunch negotiations with the European Union, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson finally announced his Brexit deal. It solves the problem of the Irish backstop—the need to avoid a hard border between northern Ireland (which is part of the U.K.) and the Irish republic—by leaving Northern Ireland in the EU in all but name. Northern Ireland's ultra-conservative Democratic Unionist Party, upon whose votes the deal depends, already say they will be voting against this deal, and Britain's hardcore brexiteers hate it too. The pressure's on: the October 31 deadline threatens to trigger a no-deal Brexit which most experts say would be economically disastrous, but appears to be the Conservative right's barely-hidden agenda.Most of the deal is the same as the one agreed by Theresa May last year - the main change is the Northern Ireland proposals. What's changed?Northern Ireland will be aligned to the EU single market.The controversial "backstop" - that critics feared could have kept the UK in a customs union with the EU indefinitely - has been removed.Northern Ireland will instead remain a part of the UK's customs territory, so it will be included in any future trade deals struck by the government after Brexit.But Northern Ireland will also remain an entry point into the EU's customs zone. The UK will apply tariffs to products entering Northern Ireland as long as they are not destined for onward transportation across the border. Read the rest

I downloaded Untitled Goose Game to my Nintendo Switch a few days ago. It's the most self-abusive fun that I've had (with a video game, I mean we're all friends here) since I owned an NES back in the day. If you're not familiar with the game's premise and don't care to watch the video, here's the short of it: You are a goose. You're kind of a dick (becasue goose). You fuck people's shit up. Constantly.Or if you're me, you try to.The controls of this game are simple. The laundry list of objectives the goose must fulfill before moving on to each new area are simple too. Completing said list to-do list? That's often more difficult. Some tasks are a breeze: scaring a kid so badly that he locks himself into a phone booth to get away from you was a piece of cake. Attempting to steal multiple items from the same person, collecting them at a single drop point? Kind of a pain. If the person you're stealing from sees you take their stuff, they'll give chase. The best policy is to drop whatever you had in your bill as soon as you're noticed: run too far towards your stash of swag and your hard-won loot will be found and returned from whence it came, forcing you to start all over again, often with your loot stashed in slightly more difficult locales than where you first snagged them from. I didn't expect a goose-related game to take careful planning or involve stealth. Read the rest

Analogue Pocket is a forthcoming handheld game console that runs old Nintendo carts and offers a built-in synthesizer and sequencer. A multi-video-game-system portable handheld. A digital audio workstation with a built-in synthesizer and sequencer. A tribute to portable gaming. Out of the box, Pocket is compatible with the 2,780+ Game Boy, Game Boy Color & Game Boy Advance game cartridge library. Pocket works with cartridge adapters for other handheld systems, too. Like Game Gear. Neo Geo Pocket Color. Atari Lynx & more. Completely engineered in *two FPGAs. ... Pocket has a digital audio workstation built in called Nanoloop. It’s a synthesizer and a sequencer. Designed for music creation and live performance. Shape, stretch and morph sounds. Capture music or play and sculpt live. From the spec sheet, the 3.5” 1600x1440 display—615 ppi!—and a dock with USB and HDMI connections stand out. It ships "in 2020 for $199". Read the rest

For a little over $1500, you can own a machine that will cut vinyl records in the comfort of your own home. This machine, the Phonocut Home Vinyl Recorder, is being promoted as a way to make your own analog "mixtapes," for musicians to record on demand, and for "people in love" to woo their beloved. But, primarily, they think pro studios will want it to "produce unlimited amounts of super affordable test cuts of recording sessions." From the look of their already-funded Kickstarter campaign, they're probably right on all accounts.Fast Company:The Phonocut’s interface is as simple as possible by design. You plug into the device via an audio cable, connecting it to a music source like your computer or your phone’s headphone jack... Then you hit play, and the 18-pound vinyl lathe uses a diamond-tipped needle to cut 10-inch records in real time to the music. These records are small and are only able to hold about 15 minutes of music per side...The idea of creating custom vinyl at home might sound too good to be true, but its founder, Flo Kaufmann, is a record specialist with over two decades in the business. He’s partnered with Florian “Doc” Kaps, who has already successfully brought back another analog technology thought lost to the ages—Polaroid film—with his Impossible Project. So if anyone can pull off the Phonocut, it’s probably this team. Read the rest

We have a theory about those throw blankets that are barely big enough to cover your legs. The only people who seem to make them or use them are grandmothers, and the blankets are only that small because Nana got bored halfway through the sewing job.Look, we're sure she means well. But if you want a cozy blanket that's sizeable enough to actually use, the Big Blanketâ„¢ is here.In case you haven't caught up to the high concept yet, allow us to sum up the primary asset of the Big Blanketâ„¢: It is big. Like, really big.How big? Oh, about 10' x 10'. That's four times the size of your typical throw. It's big enough for you, your significant other, two decent-sized dogs and your Nana. And needless to add, it will cover all of your legs just fine, plus at least two bonus limbs. It's built for maximum snuggliness, made from premium, ultra-soft fibers that are machine washable and stretchy. (Not like you need to make it any bigger.)Pick up the Big Blanketâ„¢ plus a polybag now for almost a few hundred dollars off. Read the rest

One of the great moments of my adulthood was my discovery -- courtesy of Mark's posts here on Boing Boing -- of the incredible work that Ernie Bushmiller did on Nancy from 1933 until his death in 1982. He was succeeded by a series of station-keeping cartoonists, some of whom were very adept at aping his unique comic timing, sense of the absurd, and confident draftmanship, but none of whom every made me have that aha moment -- until 2018, when the mysterious, pseudonymous Olivia Jaimes took over, kicking off a run of astoundingly great new Nancys that have been collected into one of the greatest new comic-strip collections I've read in a decade.

Remember when the default state of your online presence was anonymity? That's not so clear-cut anymore, and the worst part is you may not even know who is using your data or what they're using it for.Small wonder that so many people are choosing to surf through virtual private networks. VPNs filter web access through international servers to make sure your private identity stays private, and that just the beginning of their benefits.Looking to try out a service? Here are three top options that just happen to have subscriptions on sale.Disconnect VPN PremiumThe malware blockers on Disconnect don't just keep you safe, they also free up bandwidth, allowing you to surf up to 44% faster. And you can do more while you're online too, with the ability to access sites normally blocked by provincial restrictions while your own data stays hidden behind top-of-the-line encryption. Take your pick of subscription plans, all of which are at least 93% off the MSRP.Disconnect VPN Premium: Lifetime Subscription (1 Device) - 93% offDisconnect VPN Premium: Lifetime Subscription (3 Devices) - 94% offDisconnect VPN Premium: Lifetime Subscription (5 Devices) - 94% offFastestVPNTrue to its name, you can count on 99.9% uptime on one of FastestVPN's 200 servers. Their 256-bit AES encryption is enhanced by a host of anti-malware protocols including a NAT firewall and ad blocker. And their strict no-logs policy means no one is keeping track of your digital footprint - not even the company itself. Read the rest

Isn't 13 one less than 14?People reports:Felicity Huffman‘s release from prison for her role in the college admissions scandal has already been set.According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons inmate locator, Huffman, 56, will finish her sentencing on Oct. 27 — exactly 13 days after she reported to the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, Calif. on Oct. 15.The FCI in Dublin is a low security correctional institution for female offenders which currently holds 1,227 total inmates. It’s located just under 5 and a half hours from the Los Angeles area, where Huffman lives with her family.In May, Huffman pleaded guilty to paying disgraced admissions consultant Rick Singer $15,000 to have a proctor change her 19-year-old daughter Sophia’s SAT answers after she took the test. On Sept. 13, the Emmy-winning actress was sentenced to 14 days in federal prison, plus a $30,000 fine, 250 hours of community service and a year of supervised release.Huffman reported to FCI Dublin on Tuesday morning to begin serving her sentence.Go figure! Read the rest

Amazing parenting and crafting here.“I was asked to build this by Fatherly.com after they saw the tree I built in my daughter's bedroom.” “I used my own garage workshop and had help from a buddy who taught me the basics of fiberglass.”“Here's the finished product after about 90 hours and $1,250.00 in materials.”“I plan to auction this to raise money for Seattle Children's Hospital later this year.”Step-by-step gallery with some cool video below.I turned a regular crib into a submarine crib Read the rest

They named her SarahDee.Because they found her on a Saturday night.So cute.This is my mom and her squirrel that she found. Aren't they cute. Read the rest

The oldest leftovers in world history have been discovered, stashed inside Israel's Qesem Cave You'll never guess what they preserved for posterity.Bone marrow. From deer.Researchers have discovered the earliest evidence for storage and delayed consumption of food, deer bone marrow, at Qesem Cave in Israel. The deer bones show clear signs that people were cracking them open to get to the marrow inside.This previously unidentified behavior "offers insights into the socio-economy of the human groups who lived at Qesem and may mark a threshold to new modes of Palaeolithic human adaptation," the research said.The discovery is believed to be between 200,000 and 420,000 years old, which suggests that people have been storing food as leftovers for about that long in human history.Bone marrow storage and delayed consumption at Middle Pleistocene Qesem Cave, Israel (420 to 200 ka) [advances.sciencemag.org]The world's oldest leftovers stashed at Israel's Qesem Cave [CNN]PHOTO, TOP: Archaeological (Qesem Cave) and experimental [outdoor scenarios (SC 1 and SC 2)] damage on metapodials.Chop marks, cortical scars, and chipped marks on the anterior (C and G) and posterior (A, B, D, E, and F) surface of metapodial shafts. Note the short and slight chop marks combined with flat incisions/sawing marks in (F) and the inclination angle in the mark section almost parallel to the bone on posterior surfaces of metapodials in (A), (F), and (G). Experimental bones in the image are labeled as “EXP” followed by the abbreviation of scenario (SC 1 or SC 2) and exposure week. Read the rest

Folks have been protesting about our species' slow turning of the knife deeper into the belly of Mother Earth for a long time now. However, once it became evident that it was a killing wound we inflicted on the environment, leaving us well and truly fucked, the protests escalated in size and numbers. Quickly.Kids have been walking out of class, taking to the streets by the thousands. The pillaging of the Amazon, which has been going on for decades, is suddenly on the agenda in a big way with the United Nations and popping up in news broadcasts around the world. The climate activist group Extinction Rebellion is all up in everyone's grills around the globe, too. Recently, members of the group took to the streets to block traffic and generally fuck shit up (in a good way!) in major cities around the globe. London was on their hit list and man, did they hit it: shutting down streets in the city's downtown core, primarily in Trafalgar Square. Flights out of Heathrow Airport were disrupted. Over an eight-day period, London's Metropolitan Police Service threw over 1,300 of the protesters in the clink. It seems that the MPS was so sick of filling out paperwork for the arrests that they opted to make it illegal for Extinction Rebelling to do their thing within the city's borders... which, when you think about it will likely result in more paperwork. But hey: I am but a simple writer.From The Guardian:The Metropolitan police issued a revised section 14 order on Monday night that said “any assembly linked to the Extinction Rebellion ‘Autumn Uprising’ ... Read the rest

“This is like the Gold Rush in the 1840s.”

Bryony Dalefield pasted up the London Review of Books in the early 1980s. In this video she shows how she did it back in the the good old days of rubber cement and X-Acto knives. I laid out the first issue of bOING bOING in 1987 this way.Image: YouTube[via Open Culture] Read the rest

One can always use some good life advice, no matter the source!“Let's work out a good deal!”“Don't let the world down.”“Don't be a tough guy. Don't be a fool!”“I will call you later.”Don't be a fool. Read the rest

Donald Trump, nominally the President of the United States of America, recently withdrew U.S. troops from Kurdish-held lands and greenlit a Turkish invasion of same, at Turkish president Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan's request. As soon as the humiliations of this outcome became clear to Trump, we now learn, he began sending threats to ErdoÄŸan instead. ErdoÄŸan ignored them, began his attack, and now those formerly-American bases are occupied by Syrian and Russian forces called in by the desperate Kurds. The New York Times' Katie Rogers pointed out that she "felt the need to ask" the White House for confirmation that this letter is "real". It is. Read the rest

Donald Trump to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, on the occasion of his slaughtering of Kurds and Syria power-grab with Russia:“Don't be a tough guy. Don't be a fool.”Here's a scan of the White House letter first tweeted by Fox Business Channel's Trish Regan. “Let's work out a good deal!”“Don't let the world down.”“Don't be a tough guy. Don't be a fool!”“I will call you later.”This is real.Basically he stuck some tweets on White House letterhead.... "let's work out a good deal!""don't let the world down.""don't be a tough guy. don't be a fool!""i will call you later."@katierogers of the @nytimes has confirmed this letter is authentic. pic.twitter.com/S6EJRojr4F— fake nick ramsey (@nick_ramsey) October 16, 2019Felt the need to ask WH if this is actually real and it is. pic.twitter.com/bHyIFw6cvO— Katie Rogers (@katierogers) October 16, 2019Question then becomes - was it actually sent that day (3 days after Erdogan call)?— Katie Rogers (@katierogers) October 16, 2019So the letter is dated October 9, which is days after the phone call where he gives the greenlight. Then he tweets about destroying the economy as the backlash builds, and this appears to be an attempt to save face/get a re-do on the call.— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) October 16, 2019everybody out here clutching their pearls that they basically just printed his tweets on a WH letterhead— David Mack (@davidmackau) October 16, 2019The letter from Trump is dated three days after the White House released a late night statement announcing Turkey’s imminent invasion of Syria and stating that US troops would steer clear of it. Read the rest

Spotted today in my Lyft app: a new set of terms and conditions that require you to "agree" to binding arbitration (an onerous condition heretofore reserved for downtrodden drivers), through which you agree to waive your right to join class action suits or pursue legal redress through the courts should Lyft, through its deliberate actions or negligence, cause you to be killed, maimed, raped or cheated -- something that, not coincidentally, Lyft is in a lot of trouble over at the moment. Read the rest

Beginning with the end of things, the premiere episode of The Life Cycle asks: is there going to be a future to speak of at all? Why is it that the apocalypse is no longer just the reserve of religion, but now dominates everything from our Netflix viewing to our conversations with friends and family? And what can we learn from global climate strikes? Featuring Joshua Tan, Ph.D. in Computer Science, Oxford.Subscribe to The Life Cycle on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.Follow The Life Cycle on Twitter and Instagram. Read the rest

Burning Man announced that its theme for 2020 is The Multiverse, which seems appropriate for this week’s crop of truth-defying tabloids, which in an infinite number of possible universes might actually be accurate in one of them.

The #RedForEd movement swept America in 2018 and 2019 as teachers in both "red states" and "blue states" staged massive -- sometimes illegal -- strikes, demanding a fair deal for themselves, their students, and their colleagues who drive buses, clean classrooms, and do other related work.The incredible, hard-won victories of the teachers' strikes are a harbringer of a profound shift in the American view of public services, after 40 years of Reagan-derived, neoliberal contempt of any state-provided service and a concerted effort by billionaires dilettantes to hollow out the public education system and replace it with underperforming charter schools that allow for public money to be funneled into the pockets of educational charlatans and religious maniacs.Chicago's teachers have struck before, fighting pitched battles against austerity in a notionally Democratic stronghold that is dominated by a neoliberal, scheming, corrupt establishment epitomized by Rahm Emmanuel and Rod Blagojevich.Now, Chicago's teachers are back on the line, 26,000 of them, striking alongside "special-ed classroom assistants, security guards, bus aides, custodians, and parent workers" and 2,500 parks workers -- 45,000 workers in all.Their demands: help housing 20,000 homeless students, a nurse in every school, smaller class sizes, fully staffed schools, better pay and benefits, and restorative justice. “We feel it is our responsibility to figure out how to get the nearly 20,000 homeless students in our schools housed,” says Stacy Davis Gates, a high school social studies teacher and the current vice president of the union. “There is no way in the world you can expect the students to keep it together in a classroom, to take a test in a classroom, to complete homework in a classroom, if they don’t have what they need in terms of a stable home environment.” Although Lightfoot likes to point out she’s “not Rahm,” she’s actually retained the same chief contract negotiator as Rahm and many mayors before him. Read the rest

Emily Wilson is the author of a new "lean, fleet-footed translation" of Homer's Odyssey that "recaptures Homer's 'nimble gallop.'"To celebrate the publication, Wilson has converted the Odyssey to an epic series of limericks ("A majestical goddess, Athena/swooped down from the sky -- you'd have seen her") that she's posted to Twitter.This is my favorite text-to-verse translation since Seth Schoen risked felony prosecution by converting the DVD-descrambling code to a series of haiku.There was a young man called Telemachuswho was bullied and in a dilemma 'causehe missed his lost dadand his mom made him madand he almost got killed by Eurymachus.A majestical goddess, Athena,swooped down from the sky -- you'd have seen heras some kind of bird ¬–when she gave the word,men's yearning for fighting got keener.A man who lived all on his own-somewas invaded by someone called no-one,who gave him some wineand then made him blindso he called to his father, Poseidon.There was a young man called Telemachuswho was bullied and in a dilemma 'causehe missed his lost dadand his mom made him madand he almost got killed by Eurymachus. https://t.co/F4AZ5dDmjT— Emily Nekyia Wilson (@EmilyRCWilson) October 9, 2019(via Kottke) Read the rest

Modern Monetary Theory is an economic paradigm that treats money as a utility that governments issue and tax in order to mobilize resources needed to provide the services that the public wants; it explains why some kinds of government spending leads to inflation while other kinds do not, and how sovereign states use different levers to control inflation, even when they're spending extraordinary sums, as in WWII.MMT is key to understanding how bold and vital social programs -- from Medicare for All to a federal jobs guarantee to the Green New Deal -- can be enacted, and why austerity and its absurd comparisons between sovereign nations' spending and household or small business budgets are cruelty dressed up as prudence.In The People's Money, MMT theorist JD Alt takes a swing at a comprehensive explanation of what we mean when we say "money" -- and what the difference is between "money" in the national bank, "money" in your local commercial bank, and "money" you have in your pocket right now.It's a crisp and comprehensive explanation, blissfully easy to follow and light on finance or accounting jargon. This is only part one, and Alt has promised a sequel dealing with the relationship between the public and private sectors.Reserves, then—even though they are the “real” U.S. fiat dollars—are not the “money” American citizens and business borrow and spend every day. That money comes in two other forms: Federal Reserve Notes (the cash dollars we have tucked in our wallets) and bank-dollars which is the money we have on balance in our demand bank-accounts (checking and money-market accounts). Read the rest

Companies that make successful Mac apps live in constant fear of being sherlocked -- having Apple release a feature-for-feature clone to compete with your product, bundling it in with Macos.In June 2019, Astropad got sherlocked when Apple cloned its successful Astropad Studio and Luna Display apps in a new Macos feature that Apple called "Sidecar."Astropad marketing director Savannah Reising describes how Apple had lionized their company and its products prior to cloning them, during a "false romance" that in which Apple "routinely invited us to demo our products at their headquarters, and offered to help us out with whatever business and engineering challenges we faced. They also ordered thousands of dollars’ worth of our hardware, and we naively thought it was because they were interested in our product. It turns out that they were… just not in the way we were thinking."What's more, Apple had bound over Astropad with nondisclosure agreements that limited how they could speak about their sherlocking, though Reising doesn't describe what happened to those NDAs now, she's pretty frank about the experience.As Reising puts it, in platform capitalism, your main competitors aren't "other companies creating similar products to yours" -- it's the platform itself: "if your platform provider decides to step into your domain, it’s a tough battle to position your product against a free, native feature."Reising has some advice for surviving a sherlocking (manage the PR carefully, have other products to fall back on, go cross-platform and don't get locked in with proprietary toolchains like Apple's APIs and Objective C). Read the rest

Christopher Robin is a Stockholm designer who makes realistic miniature models of aged Tokyo storefronts. He's got an Instagram account with photos of his work. View this post on Instagram Panic working here, lots of stuff left to do and aprox one week left until deadline. Working on the vending machine, added the glass and did some weathering. A real mental workout to figure out how to build this one in the best way, and I can only blame my self since it is I who designed the kit... Also been working on adding more wiring and electric stuff. Also did the roof. Used a very fine grit sandpaper cut into strips and glued and folder. Think it worked out ok. These flat roofs are tricky to get interesting. Now back to work. Stay tuned. #artwork #art #artist #sculpture #mini #miniature #miniartmodels #tokyo #tokyohouse #japanhouse #instaart #pic #picoftheday #progress #scratchbuild #scalemodel #modelhouse #modelhouses #aircondition #rust #hobby #workshop #handmade #handtool #weatheredmodels #weatheringA post shared by TokyoBuild (@tokyobuild) on Sep 29, 2019 at 8:14am PDT[via Nag on the Lake] Read the rest

Dynasties is the latest special series from Canadaland Commons, a podcast that deeply investigates the sleazy, dysfunctional wealthy dynasties that dominate Canadian politics, media and business.In the latest episode (MP3), host Arshy Mann takes a deep dive into Ontario's Ford family (previously), which includes Rob Ford -- the wildly corrupt, crack-addicted former mayor of Toronto -- and Doug Ford (often billed as "the smart one") who is now the second-most powerful politician in Canada.The Ford family isn't just grifty, though: Rob Ford's widow is standing as a candidate for a white nationalist party in the upcoming national elections, and the Ford siblings themselves have been implicated in violent crimes, major drug trafficking, sexual misconduct, and connections to organized criminal white supremacist organisationsFor this episode, Mann leans heavily on Jonathan Goldsbie, co-host of the outstanding Wag the Doug podcast, who is encyclopedic in his knowledge of the Ford family's violence, corruption, racism, and long history of gaffes, blunders and catastrophes. The call themselves the Canadian Kennedys. And they’re one of the most famous political dynasties to ever exist in this country. But the rise of the Ford family has been marred by violence and self-destruction at almost every turn. The story of the Fords is tragic — for them, for everyone who falls into their orbit, and for the people of Toronto.DYNASTIES #3 – The Fords [Commons/Dynasties] Read the rest

Blizzard has suspended Casey Chambers, Corwin Dark, and TJammer -- American University Hearthstone team players -- for six months after the trio displayed a "Free Hong Kong, Boycott Blizz" sign in a streamed competition.The players were following in the footsteps of Blitzchung, a Taiwanese Hearthstone champ who was stripped of his title and denied his winnings after he expressed solidarity with Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement during a tournament.It's just another way in which Blizzard's own customers are exerting pressure on the company, and the company is clearly feeling the heat. “We knew exactly what we were doing,” said Chambers to me over Discord this morning. “No regrets.”As teased in a piece with VICE Games last week, this incident resulted in Chambers starting to play God’s Unchained, a Hearthstone competitor that openly criticized Blizzard after taking action against Blitzchung. Chambers said the team behind God’s Unchained reached out after the three players took their public stand, saying they “support” them and wouldn’t have a problem if, in the future, they decided to talk about the Hong Kong protests in public.Blizzard Bans Three College ‘Hearthstone’ Protesters For Six Months [Patrick Klepek/Vice](via The Verge) Read the rest

In this beginner's guide to whetstone sharpening you'll learn how to give a cheap knife an edge so fine you can split atoms with it (or at least slice paper). The idea is to have different whetstones of varying grit (size of abrasive particles) and start from the coarse stones and move to finer ones. It's important to keep a fairly consistent angle as you draw the knife over the stones -- you can do this by matching the edge that the manufacturer put on the knife to begin with.This is the knife used in the video, and these are the two whetstones. Read the rest

Blizzard's cowardly decision to appease Chinese authoritarians by ejecting a champion player who expressed support for the pro-democracy struggle in Hong Kong has kicked off a global rebellion by the company's customers, who are furious that the firm has put its profits over an entire nation's right to self-determination and basic democratic freedoms.The decision to capitulate to China continues to exact a price from Blizzard: now, the company has canceled a much-ballyhooed Overwatch event scheduled for NYC today, and while the company hasn't explained the last-minute cancellation, it's obvious that they fear more bad publicity from players, press and attendees.Blizzard, which didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, has been struggling to contain a backlash after it punished the gamer Chung Ng Wai, known as Blitzchung. The player wore a gas mask and chanted a pro-Hong Kong slogan in a post-tournament interview, leading Blizzard to ban him from events for a year and strip him of $10,000 in prize money.Blizzard Cancels Overwatch Event as It Tries to Contain Backlash [John J Edwards III/Bloomberg](via /.) Read the rest

Asher Burke died in March after a helicopter he'd chartered to visit the Kenyan ranch he'd invested in as an "entrepreneur playground" crashed in high winds; his stateside obits called the 27-year-old deputy political director of the Republican Party of San Diego as an entrepreneur, the founder and CEO of Ads, Inc, "on a mission to disrupt the lifestyle industry with our advanced approach to product creation and marketing."But Ads, Inc was a huge con, a sophisticated and elaborate Facebook hustle that combined ever trick in the Republican-affiliated grift playbook: it was a pyramid scheme recruiting stay-at-home moms, a quack remedy company that used celebrity endorsements to market to low-information boomers with pages that were dolled up to look like Fox News, an offshored con that used low-waged workers in the Philippines to manage the dull, repetitive aspects of the con. Here's how it worked: Ads, Inc, pitched itself to stay-at-home Facebook moms as a multi-level marketing scheme and payed them to recruit their friends to "rent their Facebook accounts." Recruits were sent a Raspberry Pi-based gadget to plug into their routers that would impersonate them on Facebook and plant millions of deceptive ads.The ads would feature a photo of a celebrity along with a false claim of some scandal they were embroiled in (internally, the company called these "jail bait" since ads that falsely claimed that beloved celebs were in jail generated tons of clicks).People who clicked the links were automatically vetted through Facebook's own query system to weed out Facebook employees who were checking on these ads -- the Facebook version of Uber's illegal greyball system that wouldn't accept bookings from transit regulators checking up on the service. Read the rest

How much untreated sewage spilled from Tijuana to California as the result of a human body clogging a screen? The International Boundary Water Commission was quite specific: 14,497,873 gallons. The body was discovered by a cleanup crew at a pump station. An investigation is underway to identify the body and find out how it ended up in the pumping station wastewater.Photo by Ivan Bandura on Unsplash Read the rest

Visit Merriam-Webster's "Time Traveler" and select a year from the drop-down menu. Instantly you'll see the English words that were first used in print that year! More specifically, "the date is for the earliest written or printed use that the (dictionary) editors have been able to discover."Above are the words first used in print in 1989, the year of the very first bOING bOING print 'zine! Cybernaut! Nanobot! Cyberporn! Those sure were the good ol' daze... Read the rest

John Darnielle, the singer/guitarist of the acclaimed indie band the Mountain Goats, has never hidden his nerdy inclinations. Even his 2014 novel debut, Wolf in White Van, was a mesmerizing downward-spiral descent into the maddening mind of a disfigured man who runs mail-order tabletop RPG games from his bedroom. As a musician, his band had previously released "concept albums" (of a sort) loosely themed around such things Biblical verses, Goth bands, and professional wrestling—so it was only a matter of time before the Mountain Goats put out a self-proclaimed "dragon noir" record, in the form of 2019's "In League With Dragons."(Or, as the ever-delightful Hard Times put it, "Mountain Goats Make Second Album In a Row About People Who Don’t Get Enough Sun.")To celebrate the new album (which is excellent, by the way), Darnielle sat down with Vice to play a Dungeons & Dragons campaign loosely inspired by his own album, including a a red dragon and a wizard king who craves clemency. (The album also features songs about Ozzy Osbourne and cadaver-sniffing dogs, but alas, these are absent from the game). Along the way, Darnielle shares his thoughts on storytelling and D&D in general, and the catharsis we can find through communal fantasy gaming.During the video, Darnielle is also gifted a custom figurine which is so eerily accurate that I'm pretty sure it's actually a voodoo doll. I fully plan to steal this artifact to force him to cover more Fall Out Boy songs for me. Read the rest

NASA is "committed" to landing the first woman and the "next man" on the moon by 2024 as part of the Artemis program (next stop Mars!). And as part of that program, unveiled two new spacesuits.The orange suit is the Orion Crew Survival System suit, also commonly called a flight suit or a launch and entry suit. New features include a helmet that comes in more than one size, and suits that are custom fit. The color is intended to make astronauts easy to spot if they end up in the ocean, and the suit itself includes a "suite of survival gear":Even though it’s primarily designed for launch and reentry, the Orion suit can keep astronauts alive if Orion were to lose cabin pressure during the journey out to the Moon, while adjusting orbits in Gateway, or on the way back home. Astronauts could survive inside the suit for up to six days as they make their way back to Earth. The suits are also equipped with a suite of survival gear in the event they have to exit Orion after splashdown before recovery personnel arrive. Each suit will carry its own life preserver that contains a personal locator beacon, a rescue knife, and a signaling kit with a mirror, strobe light, flashlight, whistle, and light sticks.The white suit is the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit or xEMU. The xEMU provides dramatically superior range of movement to the suits worn on previous missions:You can learn more about the Artemis Program at the official site and see a bit more of the suits in action below: Read the rest

In the Netherlands province of Drenth, a family of seven adults were found living inside a hidden room in their farmhouse for nine years "waiting for the end of time." The family included a father, 58, and six male children, aged 18 to 25. Apparently one of the young men had enough and visited a nearby pub. After drinking five beers, he told the bar owner that he had run away and needed help. From the BBC News:Officers visited the remote farmhouse and carried out a search. They discovered a hidden staircase behind a cupboard in the living room that led down to a secret room where the family were housed...The farm is outside the village and is accessible by a bridge over a canal.The farm, which is part-hidden behind a row of trees, also has a large vegetable plot and a goat...The local postman said he had never delivered a letter there. "It's actually pretty strange, now I come to think about it," he told Algemeen Dagblad news website....Police in Drenthe confirmed that a 58-year-old man had been arrested and was under investigation after refusing to co-operate. Read the rest