US Sen. Elizabeth Warren announced today that she will hold a press conference Thursday on Capitol Hill to unveil a marijuana legalization bill she is co-sponsoring with Sen. Cory Gardner (R-CO).(more…)

A former executive from the data-mining dark operator Cambridge Analytica 'visited Julian Assange in February last year and told friends it was to discuss what happened during the US election,' the Guardian reported today.Brittany Kaiser worked as a director there until not long ago, and is reported “to have channelled cryptocurrency payments and donations to WikiLeaks.”Excerpt:

Incredibly Interesting Authors: RSS | iTunes | Download this episode | Email | AndroidPlease rate or review Incredibly Interesting Authors on iTunes.How did Trump manage to become president of the United States? There's no simple answer. It involves fear, racism, nationalism, populism, hatred, dirty tricks, manipulation, and more. But the one thing I never suspected was that occult beliefs and practices played a part in Trump's surprising victory. In Gary Lachman's new book, Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump, I learned that occult and esoteric thinking permeates the alt-right, Putin's inner circle, and even Trump himself.Before I read Dark Star Rising, I had no idea that Trump was a devoted follower of the New Thought movement, which has it roots in 19th century mysticism. Trump's family attended Marble Collegiate Church in New York, which was ministered by a pro-Christian nationalist named Norman Vincent Peale, who promulgated a doctrine of "positive thinking" -- the idea that you can use your mind to cure yourself of disease, get rich, or even become president ("Change your thoughts and you can change the world"). I also didn't know that the alt-right bases much of its ideology on an Italian philosopher and mystic born in 1889 named Julius Evola, who thought the problem with Mussolini was that he wasn't a big enough fascist. And then there's Aleksandr Dugin, a very influential Russian fascist philosopher who is a kind of Rasputin figure for Putin and who pushes the idea that the only way to return Russia to greatness is by wiping liberal democracy off the face of the earth. Dugin is relatively unknown in the West, except among members of the alt-right and the dark enlightenment, who would love to install the kind of fascist regime Dugin is advocating in their own countries. Dark Star Rising introduced me to all of these phenomena, along with many other related concepts, such as using Pepe memes as a form of chaos magick - a postmodern magical practice that stresses achieving desired outcomes through applied experimentation as opposed to rituals and symbols of traditional mystic practices.Lachman is an erudite scholar of occult history, and he combines his encyclopedic knowledge of esotericism with his ability to clearly explain complex ideas to good use in Dark Star Rising. He wisely avoids ascribing any kind of paranormal efficacy to occult practices, and instead presents what can, and often does, happen when zealous people apply occult-influenced ideologies to the real world.Here's my interview with Lachman about Dark Star Rising.Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Patrick Kelley.

Brace yourself for abundant Avenatti on the telly.(more…)

Voters elected to recall Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky, who held the position since 2003. In 2016 Persky sentenced Stanford University swimmer Brock Turner to six months in prison for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman behind a dumpster in Palo Alto after a fraternity party. This is the first time a California judge was recalled in 87 years.During Turner's sentencing hearing, the victim read a heart-rending impact statement about how Turner's sexual assault caused lasting damage:“You have dragged me through this hell with you, dipped me back into that night again and again. You knocked down both our towers. I collapsed at the same time you did. Your damage was concrete, stripped of titles, degrees, enrollment. My damage was internal, unseen. I carry it with me.”Persky said he took her statement into account when he sentenced Turner to the six-month term, even though prosecutors asked for six years. (Turner ended up being released after serving just three months. He appealed the conviction in late 2017, but the California Attorney General's office called his argument "unavailing" and "baseless.")From Washington Post:

The United Nations General Assembly has a new President: Ecuador’s Foreign Minister, Maria Fernanda Espinosa Garces. Every year, the U.N. votes to choose a new ramrod for its General Assembly. Potential candidates for the position are chosen, partially, based on a regional rotation. This time around, the U.N. was looking for someone from Latin America or the Caribbean. As such, Espinosa Garces stepped up to the plate and whacked it right out of the park: of the 192 nations voting on the matter, 128 gave the thumbs up to her taking the position.As Yahoo News points out, the position of President in the General Assembly is largely ceremonial, especially given that a large percentage of what the General Assembly does is create non-binding resolutions. But still, a win is a win, and the newly-minted President Espinosa Garces is definitely a winner.In her home nation of Ecuador, Maria Fernanda Espinosa Garces is a frigging HUGE political noise. She worked as the nation’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Commerce and Integration from January 2007 to December 2007, before moving on to a new position as Special Adviser to the President of the Constituent Assembly, Alberto Acosta, from December 2007 to February 2008, before moving on, in October 2009, to become Ecuador’s Coordinating Minister of Heritage – a post she held until 2012. In November of that same year, Espinosa Garces was called upon to become the country’s Minister of National Defense. In October 2014, she was named Permanent Representative of Ecuador to the United Nations in Geneva. That’s an impressive resume, by any standard. What’s more, as part of her responsibility as Ecuador’s Permanent Representative she defended Ecuador’s stance on Julian Assange during a discussion by the General Assembly on what to do with the weasel, back in 2016 – so we partially have her to thank for the fact that he’s remained beyond the reach of the authorities, who’d love to have a long, protracted chat with him for oh-so-many reasons.If you’ve bothered to read this far into what’s admittedly a pretty dry post on international politics, you’re likely wondering why I give a shit about Espinosa Garces, or why you should, for that matter. So, here it is: In the U.N. General Assembly’s 73 year history, she’s only the fourth woman to have taken the Assembly’s helm.192 countries.73 years.Four women.That is a terrible track record, looked at through the eyes of gender equality, especially for an organization that purports to represent the world’s people – not just men, but its women, too. Hopefully, Espinosa Garces' turn as President will be the first in a long line of women who’ll hold the position.Image via Flickr, courtesy of Cancillería del Ecuador

You’ve likely heard of Vancouver, British Columbia. Surrey? Maybe not: it’s a city in its own right and a part of the Greater Vancouver Regional District. Surrey’s got an unfortunate reputation for crime due largely to occasional targeted daytime gang hits and the omnipresent narcotics trade. I lived across the bridge from Surrey for close to a decade. I always felt safe there and enjoyed the food, culture and good times that Surrey had to offer.But now that I know that it’s infested with feral peacocks, I may not be back.According to the CBC, Surrey city officials believe that Surrey residents living between 150 Street and 62 Avenue are being forced to cope with the presence of between 40 and 150 feral peacocks roaming the streets. Yeah, peacocks are gorgeous when seen in a zoo and hilarious when used as an alarm system by Hunter S. Thompson. But for a bunch of renters and homeowners who just want to live their lives with a minimal amount of bullshit, they’re sort of a nightmare. Peacocks are loud, aggressive and, like most large birds, leave massive amounts of greasy shit everywhere they go. The problem with the birds has gotten so bad that some residents have started taking matters into their own hands.Shit has gone down, friends.This past May, in a fit of peacock-induced rage, a man cut down a tree where an ostentation of dozens of the birds had decided to nest, every night. There was just one problem: BC’s kinda touchy about preserving nature. As such, the axeman was forced to pay a $1,000 fine for turning his lawn into a lumber yard. No matter what the city thought of the tree’s felling, the man’s neighbors were in favor of the act. One member of the neighborhood complained that the peacocks were “…messing up his property, pooping all over the place, making a terrible racket and destroying his garden.”The birds are driving Surrey residents to other crimes, too. According to the CBC, a Surrey By-Law officer was called out in response to a complaint that some mad bastard was feeding the mean but beautiful birds. When the By-Law officers confronted the purported bird-feeder, he was assaulted and, as a result, ended up calling the cops for backup.From the CBC:

Thanks to the always-excellent Instagram feed of intrepid musicologists Dust To Digital for introducing me to guitarist Hannes Coetzee of South Africa's Karoo region. His spoon-in-mouth slide guitar technique is called "optel and knyp," Afrikaans for "picking up and pinching."Coetzee was featured in David Kramer's 2004 documentary Karoo Kitaar Blues about the history of folk music traditions across South Africa.

In this 2009 short film, Nick Cave plays the part of a writer, who resides in a city populated entirely by cats. Yep, that's weird, but it's Nick Cave, so it works.When a madman starts snatching up the city's most musical residents, including Cave's muse, to give voice to his own dark symphony, Cave-Cat leads the rescue mission to bring the kidnapped kitties back home.Named for an insidious musical instrument that dates back to the 1500s, The Cat Piano is just under nine minutes long. Watch it on your coffee break, or as part of your daily procrastination routine. It's got a cat that looks like Nick Cave! This alone makes the film more than worthwhile.

Five years ago, my artist/engineer pal Kal Spelletich drew at crowd at an Institute for the Future conference by demonstrating his "Huggerer," a pneumatic robot that delivers free hugs. Now robot hugs are the subject of new scientific research! At a recent human-robot interaction conference, researchers from Stuttgart, Germany's Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems presented their efforts to explore "how robots can be more effectively designed and taught to give the kinds of hugs that humans will love." From Evan Ackerman's fascinating interview with lead researcher Alexis Block in IEEE Spectrum:

The Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) posted this video of a batshit driver near Canal Winchester, Ohio. Amazingly, there were no collisions. "Don't be that driver," says ODOT.

New research suggests that dentists may unconsciously smell fear and that their patients' anxiety can hurt their performance. How did the scientists control for the fact that a patient's anxiety in the dental chair is pretty obvious? First, Valentina Parma and her colleagues at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy collected t-shirts worn by students who had sat for a difficult exam or a calm lecture.From New Scientist:

According to the excellent wunderkammer of Twitter accounts, We Like To Learn, "Throughout history, sailors have mistaken Beluga Wales for mermaids because of their human-like knees."(As our helpful commenters point out, those aren't literally "knees" in the image but rather love handles that help the whales steer as they swim. More here.)(via Daily Grail)

Techdirt is in the throes of a two-part revelation: 1. the US government's works are public domain and can be freely commercialized, and; 2. many of the weird things that spy agencies make can be turned into ironic, cool, and sometimes fun and/or beautiful objects of commerce. (more…)

https://youtu.be/f155BH2MErEGumshoe sneakers are made with rubber derived in part from gum chewed by residents of Amsterdam, made jointly with Gumdrop, whose gum recycling bins are used to collect feedstock for processes that create plastics and rubbers. (more…)

Microsoft Excel is undoubtedly one of the most important tools in any business environment, and it's home to a myriad of time-saving tools and functions that can dramatically improve your efficiency—if you know how to use them. The eLearnExcel: Microsoft Excel Master Certification Bundle can show you its ins and outs, and it's available in the Boing Boing Store for $39.Featuring more than 28 hours of training, this 9-course collection will take you from beginner to certified expert in Excel's most popular tools and techniques. From leveraging time-saving functions and macros to visualizing data with graphs and charts, you'll cultivate a host of marketable skills while earning several CPD-backed certifications along the way. And, with lifetime access, you can work through the collection at your own pace, so you'll never feel overwhelmed by the curriculum.The eLearnExcel: Microsoft Excel Master Certification Bundle is available in the Boing Boing Store for $39.

Unionized UPS Teamsters -- 260,000 of them -- are set to strike in the biggest American strike since UPS's unionized drivers walked out in 1997. (more…)

This video accompanies National Geographic's terrific reporting on the global plastic waste crisis. it shows how America became a plastic-addicted throwaway culture, and how the earth is now paying for humanity's short-sighted sin. (more…)

Ethan Persoff is currently working on a daily comic book/audio series called The Bureau.Scott Marshall is currently working on a comics adaptation of Nietzsche's Zarathustra.

Scientific American created this helpful explainer of how the chain of Hawai'ian Islands formed. The tectonic plate is moving northwest over a magma hot spot in the earth's mantle. In fact, there's a new Hawai'ian island named Loihi forming underwater right now. (more…)

FOR THE KIDS IN YOUR LIFE, AND THEIR SUMMER READING: Get Ruben Bolling’s hit book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures."The EMU Club inhabits exactly the world I always hoped to live in when I was 12, when the answer to questions like 'Where did I put my toy' led inevitably to alien conspiracies and secret underground tunnels. A book for the curious and adventurous!" -Cory Doctorow, author of "For the Win" and "Little Brother""The type of non-stop action and improbably hilarious fun that only a kid could dream up. ... The EMU Club's adventures perfectly capture the intersection of imagination and wonder - the crossroad that's so often found in cardboard boxes, pillow forts and backyards everywhere." -GeekDadGet Book the First, "Alien Invasion in My Backyard," here.Get Book the Second, "Ghostly Thief of Time," here.--JOIN Tom the Dancing Bug's INNER HIVE right now.More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

The Heinz condiment Salad Cream—a homogenous beige slime similar to Miracle Whip that has become a traditional staple of British home cuisine—is to be renamed Sandwich Cream to keep with the times.

I'm not making this up: Crayola is making makeup.Yep, in a partnership with young adult retail brand ASOS, Crayola now has a line of 58 vegan and cruelty-free beauty products, which includes "face crayons," mascara, highlighters, and eyeshadow palettes. Shades, such as Tumbleweed and Dandelion, match the names of actual Crayola crayons.Elle notes the collection is "gender fluid," citing a press release about the line from ASOS. They also note that both men and women are shown wearing the product in the campaign's photos.And no, you can't just use real crayons as makeup. They're not "designed, tested, or approved" for that purpose, according to the crayon giant's website.(Mashable)

Just over two years ago I posted a video here titled “I Will Always Remember You.” Among the many pieces I’ve done for Boing Boing both before and after, it remains the piece most read, and the video most watched.The subject is the poaching of elephants and the orphaned young elephants who are then left alone. Elephants are extremely smart and social creatures, and the young stay with their mothers, for whom they depend on food, for three to four years. When the mother is killed, the youngster often dies.The poaching of elephants for their tusks is no closer to being stopped than it was two years ago. Few want to look at horrible photographs of slaughtered animals, which is what makes this piece of animation so important and powerful.Please watch this and consider donating to the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, an organization which cares for young elephants whose mothers have been slain. https://youtu.be/yopa2wvHqhQIf the video doesn’t move you, then you have a heart of stone. For a mere $50 you can foster an orphan elephant.From The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust:

EFF co-founder, Grateful Dead lyricist and mayor of the internet John Perry Barlow died in February and left an unfillable hole. (more…)

Pretty logical place to hide, if you ask me.Secret Service agents grabbed Martese Maurice Edwards today when he showed up for work at the White House, where he worked as a private contractor for the WH National Security Council.A man by that same name is wanted for attempted first-degree murder in Prince George’s County, Maryland.(more…)

A security breach affected the MyHeritage website, and leaked the personal information of over 92 million users, the Israeli company said Tuesday.(more…)

I've been hooked on hard-boiled crime novels and Film Noir since I picked up my first copy (there have been many) of Dashiel Hammett's Red Harvest back in the mid-1990s. It's bleak, entertaining stuff that I find to be a hell of a lot more honest in its portrayal of human desperation, motivation, rage and lust than most of the drivel that's spoon-fed to us in films, television and a whole lot of books these days. My personal tastes lean towards stories where the bad guy, or at least, a pretty lousy guy, wins. Richard Stark's (a pen name of the late, great Donald E. Westlake) Parker series, anything written by Lawrence Block or Raymond Chandler, and movies like The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye or more recently, The Drop scratch my need for fatalistic media. Despite their being a glut of crime and detective films out there, set in the city, country or even the future (I'm looking at you, Looper), finding new books to read or movies to veg out to can be a daunting task. Fortunately, the good people at Open Culture have made the latter a whole lot easier.Open Culture's curated a fine collection of 60 Film Noir gems that are free to watch online, and in some cases, free to download. I won't lie to you, there's a number of stinkers in the movies that they've included on their list, but even a bad film can be worth watching. If nothing else, it'll make you appreciate a good movie that much more.Image via Maxpixel

Despite Mark Zuckerberg's internal war on transparency, the Facebook data abuse reveals just keep on coming.(more…)

Playing a vinyl album at 45 or 78 instead of 33.33 is always fun, but what happens at several thousand times that rpm? Let's just say it's record-shattering. (more…)

Shinrashinge created this fantastic one-shot animation entirely out of paper. Below is another classic. (via Waxy)

Water & Light contains astonishing images of waves. Last year, Armand Dijcks turned some of Ray Collins' shots into cinemagraphs. The two collaborated again in Elemental, a languid meditation on the power and beauty of water. (more…)

In 1957, Danish architect Arne Jacobson designed a exquisite set of minimalist cutlery that Stanley Kubrick personally selected as the flatware aboard the Discovery One in “2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968). Now you can buy it on Amazon.com for $100/set. This is the future, baby! From the New York Times:

Brian De Palma is writing “a horror film" inspired by the downfall of Harvey Weinstein. The movie is about “a sexual aggressor" and takes place "within the context of sexual harassment in Hollywood," he says. It's titled Predator. Shooting will begin next year.From Deadline Hollywood:

Tokyo based artist Yuni Yoshida created her Layered series by manually cutting out cubed "pixels" of foods that recreate the gestalt of the original. (more…)

Last year, C.J. Duron and parents attended O.C. Pride, prompting various trolls to mock the family online. This year, C.J. is the youngest grand marshal in Pride Month’s 48-year history. (more…)

From a chemistry standpoint, your body isn't worth a lot, but from an organ standpoint, it can be. AsapSCIENCE does the back-of-the-envelope calculations.It turns out the question comprises a subgenre with wildly varying quality:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vl3rf-2HHg0https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNOsoe44c40https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSlz7nIeQUk• How much is your body worth? (YouTube / AsapSCIENCE)

BigTyPB: "I saw the installation process, an icon appear on the home screen, the police ran the application and then the icon hid itself. Not sure if it rooted my phone or what. I know something was running on my phone because they used a handheld device to confirm our phones were communicating with their system before letting us go." (more…)

Stephen Kohn, a highpowered whistleblower lawyer (he repped both Linda Tripp and the UBS Leaks whistleblower) showed Wired his heretofore confidential SEC complaint against Facebook, which details the undercover sting operations undertaken by his clients to investigate Facebook's role as a platform for the illegal trade in the remains of endangered species, such as rhino horn, elephant tusks, and lion claws. (more…)

If you've seen Hamilton (and I haven't, not live anyway... I've only seen a bootleg on YouTube of it), you've probably marveled at its incredible stage and how they used it to propel the story. I was particularly impressed with the staging in the "Satisfied" scene when the floor's "turntables" started rotating -- in coordination with the actors and music -- to relay that the character's are "rewinding" to another place and time. Well, in anticipation of the show's run at the Kennedy Center, The Washington Post talked with the Hamilton set designer David Korins to learn some secrets of its stage, including what inspired the circular, moving "turntables":

Dianna Cowern, aka YouTube's Physics Girl, recruited skateboarding legend Rodney Mullen and a couple of friends with a high-speed camera for this look at the physics of skateboarding. (more…)

Last Monday, David Sedaris was granted an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Oberlin College in Ohio. Then, he gave the keynote address for the school's 2018 commencement ceremony. It was, of course, perfectly hilarious and full of spot-on, no-holds-barred advice for the new grads.On May 24, just prior to giving the speech, the humorist and essayist appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (video above) and discussed how he picked the advice he was going to share, "Well, it kind of makes you wonder, 'What do I know? What wisdom do I have?' So I started keeping a list of my wisdom. Part of it is, you have to be really careful about scented candles. There's really only two kinds worth having... Diptyque or Trudon."That was the first piece of advice he shared with Oberlin's graduating class. There are seven more, all gems, including "Be yourself. Unless 'yourself' is an asshole." Watch.Also, Sedaris has a new book. It's called Calypso. [vimeo 273356233]

Natalie Wynn, creator of the Contrapoints YouTube channel, is a lapsed academic well-versed in the lingo of both 4chan and Tumblr, making her the perfect person to construct an entertaining takedown of Jordan Peterson. (more…)

In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll explore some more curiosities and unanswered questions from Greg's research, including a misplaced elephant, a momentous biscuit failure, a peripatetic ax murderer, and the importance of the 9 of diamonds.We'll also revisit Michael Malloy's resilience and puzzle over an uncommonly casual prison break.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

The $63 billion takeover of Monsanto by Bayer prompted a thorny branding question: what to call the new company? The company's management has announced its decision: the new company will be called "Bayer," despite the name's longtime association with Nazi slave labor camps, fatal human subjects experiments conducted on prisoners supplied by the Nazis, and complicity in the production of Zyklon B, the lethal poison used in concentration camp gas-chambers. (more…)

Wherein a motorcyclist strikes a vehicle in Canada. Polite apologies and handshakes ensue.

Sealing wax is fun to play with. This weekend my daughter and I had a blast learning to use my signet ring to seal envelopes.We ordered this 230 bead sealing wax kit last week, to fancy up some letters I had to send the kid at summer camp. The kit also came with a spoon and some tea candles. Unsurprisingly, there is not much more to sealing an envelope than that. Heat up the wax over a little tea candle, pour it on to the surface you want it affixed to, then seal away!I found that waiting until the wax is just melted, when you can still see a bit of unmelted shape at the top of the puddle, was the right time to pour. I would then give the wax a five count or so before squishing in my ring. A count to ten and the ring would remove cleanly, without ruining the seal.Two beads is the right amount of wax for my ring.Mixing colors is really cool.Hestya 230 Pieces Octagon Sealing Wax Beads Sticks with 2 Pieces Tea Candles and 1 Piece Wax Melting Spoon for Wax Stamp Sealing (12 Colors) via Amazom

There's only two days to go until the Ontario election, which pits a know-nothing, far-right, failed businessman born with a silver spoon in his mouth (who is too cowardly to talk to a real reporter so he hired his own) against the vastly unpopular incumbent Liberal Premiere Kathleen Wynne and a newly progressive NDP led by Andrea Horwath, who has abandoned the party's failed foray into centrism and returned to its Democratic Socialist roots. (more…)

https://youtu.be/rq3QXIVR0bsAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a community organizer from the Bronx who is challenging New York Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley for the party nomination; she's a Bernie Sanders-affiliated left-wing Democrat who raised $200,000 to challenge Crowley's $1.6m war-chest. (more…)