Plastic Jesus, the Los Angeles-based street artist behind the "Future Internment Camp" signs and other cool stunts, is back with a new piece. For his latest work, he's droplifted specially-tagged bulletproof vests in the kids' back-to-school section of three Target stores and one Macy’s in Los Angeles. He writes:

The last time former Journey frontman Steve Perry released a solo album, Bill Clinton was President, True Lies was #1 at the box office and Major League Baseball was a month away from going on strike. After 24 long years, the wait is over. Perry announced his new album, Traces, on his new website and explained the reason for his return.

Alice Potts engages in what she calls "human body design," creating bioplastics by soaking materials in body fluids to embed them with crystals. (more…)

Steve Roe is a street photographer who specializes in stylized shots of Asian cities at night. He's been experimenting with some crowdfunded fractal lenses that add neat effects. (more…)

In January 2015 Alex Jones said on a video that "Sandy Hook is a synthetic completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured. I couldn’t believe it at first. I knew they had actors there, clearly, but I thought they killed some real kids. And it just shows how bold they are, that they clearly used actors. I mean they even ended up using photos of kids killed in mass shootings here in a fake mass shooting in Turkey -- so yeah, or Pakistan. The sky is now the limit."In December 2014, Jones claimed that the mass shooting was "a giant hoax."Today, Alex Jones posted a threat to the parents of Sandy Hook who dare to repeat what Jones has said: "At a certain point," he says, "do cease and desist letters have to go out? With a letter and videos and everything so it's all on record? ... You see, *I'm* the one whose under assault, *I'm* the one whose being misrepresented."

Little Pyongyang made the festival rounds and his been picked up by The Guardian. It tells the story of how one soldier made his way to Europe's largest community of North Korean nationals after escaping the brutal regime.

NYPD officer Michael Reynolds is under investigation after allegedly breaking into a Nashville home and drunkenly terrorizing its occupants, threatening youngsters and shouting racial slurs. He thought it was his AirBnB, supposedly.

Disney is being sued by the Michael Jackson estate for using fair-use clips in a biopic called "The Last Days of Michael Jackson" -- in its brief, the company decries "overzealous copyright holders" whose unwillingness to consider fair use harms "the right of free speech under the First Amendment." (more…)

Qanon (previously) is an eye-wateringly stupid far-right conspiracy theory whose proponents spend hours trying to decode alleged ciphertexts created by the cult's leader or leaders. (more…)

Dan Gillmor (previously) writes that journalism is at a crisis point, as authoritarian politicians (including, but not limited to, Trump) step up their attacks on the free press, even assassinating their sharpest critics. (more…)

For dinner, the Varchetti family ordered a pepperoni pizza from Hungry Howie’s.When the 18 year old delivery man arrived at their home, he gave them the pizza, saw the piano in the foyer, and asked if he could play it.For the next ninety seconds, he played the third movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” sonata from memory.

Mariano Pascual has created a delightful nod to classic desktop layouts for his new site, but it's updated with all kinds of colorful bells, whistles, and Easter eggs. (more…)

Brush pens are fun for drawing and lettering because you can vary the line thickness. And unlike a brush, which requires frequent dipping into an inkwell, a brush pen is always loaded with ink (until the barrel runs out, that it.) This Tombow Fudenosuke Brush Pen includes one hard tip and one soft tip. I bought them last year for $7 but they are on sale on Amazon right now for just $4 for both pens. My set is still good but at this price I bought another.

When scammers get inside of the networks of financial institutions, they sometimes stage "cashouts" where they recruit confederates around the world to all hit ATMs at the same time with cards tied to hacked accounts and withdraw the maximum the ATMs will allow; but the wilier criminals first disable the anti-fraud and withdrawal maximum features in the banks' systems, enabling confederates to drain ATMs of all the cash they contain. This is called an "unlimited cashout." (more…)

T.K. of the AskAKorean Twitter account says: "Genius at work. E-mart in Korea is now selling the 'One a Day Banana' pack, containing several bananas of different ripeness so that you can eat them over several days.

Dinner parties used to be where you avoided politics. Now talking about politics at dinner parties is the norm.Years ago, we avoided politics because we assumed the people at our table had diverse political identities, and we didn’t want to introduce a topic that might lead to an argument. Today, we assume our guests share a single identity, after all, why else would we have invited them?Something has changed in the United States, and for many of us, it’s only at Thanksgiving dinner, a gathering where we don’t get to sort ourselves by political tribe, that we must face people who see the world differently than ourselves.In this episode, we spend time with political scientist Lilliana Mason who discusses this in her new book, Uncivil Agreement, in which she says we actually agree about most things, and strangely, “our conflicts are over who we think we are, rather than reasoned differences of opinion.”As Mason explains, “Our opinions can be very fluid, so fluid that if we wanted to come to a compromise we could, if there were not these pesky identities in the way. We can’t come to a compromise because our identities are making us want to take positions as far away from the other side as possible. What that means is that we are trying to look like we disagree in order to defend our identity and our sense of difference from other people.”As an example, Mason says that six months ago 99 percent of Americans would have said that, of course, children should not be separated from their parents. Now that the issue is politicized, people claim to feel differently, but in reality, it’s only tribal signaling at play. If their party were to ask them to express their true feelings, they would. They’ve become trapped by tribe.“Our actual opinions, our levels of agreement, are different than what we are willing to accept our government to do because we don’t want to feel like our party is losing,” explains Mason in the show.Lilliana Mason is professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland where she researches partisan identity, partisan bias, social sorting, and American social polarization. She is the author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, and her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and National Public Radio.Her book outlines how we’ve moved away from issue-based polarization and entered a new realm of identity-based polarization. As long as the identity divide is maintained, we will behave more like warring tribes than a unified nation of people who have different values and ideas about what policies should be enacted.According to Mason, “Right now, we’re telling ourselves a story about a war that’s going on in our country, and it’s only making the war worse.”Links and SourcesTranscript – Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – SoundcloudPrevious EpisodesLilliana Mason on TwitterPapers mentioned:

Kensuke Koike demonstrates a cool visual trick involving an evenly-punched hard copy of an image turned into a regognizable avatar. (more…)

Get the popcorn.The Trump campaign organization has filed for arbitration against Omarosa Manigault-Newman, claiming she violated a 2016 non-disclosure agreement. The former reality show contestant/White House staffer has been blanketing the media with secret recordings she made during the 2016 campaign and while she worked in the Oval Office.From The Washington Examiner:

Inside the Fake Science Factory (German/English subtitles) documents Svea Eckert and team's years of investigation into predatory journals and the criminals behind them. (more…)

Vomit fraud is when a Lyft or Uber driver fraudulently charges a passenger $100 or more to clean up puke (or other body fluids). Lyft and Uber have a low burden of proof a driver -- they only require a photo of the vomit, which is easily faked with some kind of gloppy food.WDAY AM radio in North Dakota has a story about a man who was scammed by a vomit fraud Lyft driver and how his wife did some amateur sleuthing to prove the driver was crooked.Ricky Marquart took a 13-minute Lyft ride home early one morning. The bill was for $9.01, plus $150 for "Lyft Damage." There was no other explanation. Marquart assured his wife, Tiffany, that he didn't cause any damage to the car. She contacted Lyft, which sent her three photos of what the driver claimed was vomit.She told WDAY: "I looked at the pictures closely and said, 'That looks like nacho cheese sauce on the outside and puff popcorn and something else on the inside,'"Tiffany said. "I asked Ricky again, 'Are you sure you didn't eat anything on the ride home?' He said he didn't."Tiffany studied the photos and recognized the part of town where the photos were taken. It was a Holiday Stationstore. She called the manager and asked if he could view the security video at 2:50 a.m. Sunday morning, and tell her what he saw. The manager told WDAY what he saw on the video:

Look, I'm as delighted as you are to see Alex Jones' ability to spread hatred curtailed -- because in a world where all the important speech takes place online, and where online speech is owned by four or five companies, being kicked off of Big Tech's services is likely to be an extinction-level event. (more…)

Carving and reshaping coins, often called hobo nickels, is a classic art form that is getting an update by Russian artisan Roman Booteen. Some even have mechanisms added: (more…)

https://youtu.be/W2PMQOk7oDUAndy from How to Make Everything is on a mission to make a photograph from scratch. What that means is that he is going to make a camera and a photographic plate from raw materials (like wood, minerals, and ore) that he's gathered. In this video, Andy extracts five grams of silver from ore he collected, which can be used as the light-sensitive coating for a photographic plate.

Bulgarian-Canadian actress Nina Dobrev, who was born in Sofia, Bulgaria and moved to Canada at age two, stars in the most recent episode of Vanity Fair's Slang School video series.

Good God. We should have listened to Dave Foley. He knew the score for YEARS before election tampering and a compromised government were even glints in Vladimir Putin's eye. Aside from the fact that the Russians are no longer Communists? Dead. On.I guess that means we should start preparing for a killer bee attack.

Gavin Chait is an "economist, engineer, data scientist and author" who created a website called Pikhaya where UK entrepreneurs can get lists of vacant commercial properties, their advertised rents, and the history of the businesses that had previously been located in those spaces -- whether they thrived, grew and moved on, or went bust (maybe because they had a terrible location). (more…)

Can we please have paper ballots nationwide?Last week at DEFCON 26 in Las Vegas, eleven-year-old Emmett Brewer hacked into a replica of Florida's state election site and changed the voting results. That's scary enough. What's even scarier is that it took him less than ten minutes. An eleven-year-old girl was able to hack into the same site in about fifteen minutes. And more than THIRTY kids were able to hack into replicas of other states' sites in less than half an hour. That is straight up alarming and you'd think the folks in charge of our state and federal elections would be concerned about this and want to take immediate action. That would be the normal reaction. But we're a long way from normal.

Why bother? "Breaking: Paul Manafort's team will not present a case nor call any witnesses in his defense. The defense rested at 11:53 am"https://twitter.com/jimsciutto/status/1029396756180750337

Artist and designer Rus Khasanov (previously) has created a bright and highly-detailed montage of colors colliding. What really sets this apart is the beautiful music by Dmitry Evgrafov. (more…)

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An American woman (44) and a Dutch womman (19) started fighting over a prime selfie spot at Rome's Trevi Fountain. Their families sooned joined the melee, battering and screaming at one another in outraged indignation. Police intervened but as you can see in this video, were unable to control the louts.From the KOOT NITI news channel:

Cocos Island, in the eastern Pacific, was rumored to hold buried treasure worth millions of dollars, but centuries of treasure seekers had failed to find it. That didn’t deter August Gissler, who arrived in 1889 with a borrowed map and an iron determination. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow Gissler’s obsessive hunt for the Treasure of Lima.We’ll also marvel at the complexity of names and puzzle over an undead corpse.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

One million ethnic Uigurs are being held in a "massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy" by the Chinese government, says a United Nations Human Rights panel that has received multiple credible reports to back up their claim (this story has been percolating all summer long). According to Gay McDougall of the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, you can tack an additional million people on to that initial figure: it’s estimated that another one million Muslims living in China’s western Xinjiang autonomous region have also been sent to similar camps for political indoctrination. The reasoning for this, according to Reuters, is that China’s sovereignty in the western Xinjiang autonomous region is being threatened by separatists and Islamic militants. The Uigurs mostly identify as Muslim, so there you go.At the meeting in Geneva, McDougall was quoted as saying:

Last month, I used up a good chunk of text talking about how much I’ve come to enjoy using Android-powered smartphones. Unfortunately, a story I ran across over at Wired has convinced me that, at least for the time being, spending significantly more time with my iPhone 6 Plus might be a good idea. According to the report, for many Android users, it’s not necessary to download an altered .APK file from a shady torrenting website or click an email link that’ll fill your handset up with malware in order to compromise your smartphone’s security. Twenty-five different Android smartphone models, made by well-known manufacturers and available across North America, have been found to be full of security flaws and other exploitable nightmares baked into them. The most frustrating part of it all: none of the exploits detailed in the story would be there if the manufacturers had their shit togetherFrom Wired:

Brazilian artist Butcher Billy was commissioned by STATE bags to create #FlintsFantasticFive, a series of images depicting several key voices in addressing the Flint water crisis. (more…)

The Raigad Movie captures the stunning light and windswepts cliffs of a 17th century fort, shot entirely on a phone by Sanket Khuntale.. (more…)

Is there anyone who isn't familiar with this pattern? I ran estate sales for a while and came across it a lot in the homes I was prepping. Now, an updated version of CorningWare's Cornflower Blue pattern is back for a limited time.The Daily Meal:

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After a long day of driving for Uber and Lyft, this fella decided to work out exactly how much money he'd be taking home after paying taxes and expenses on his income as an independent contractor. While there's certainly a number of tax loopholes and write-offs that he could be taking advantage of, it looks like, for most people, driving for Uber or Lyft isn't worth the time.

Jason Henderson and Adam Foshko have authored California Tiki: A History of Polynesian Idols, Pineapple Cocktails and Coconut Palm Trees, a new paperback which "explore the state's midcentury fascination with all things Tiki":

This whimsical series of images by Filtre Studio imagines Queen Elizabeth straightening paintings and vacuuming up after her dogs. What's most interesting is that the entire room was created digitally. (more…)

After hitting the mute button (YouTube should have a terrible music reporting option), check out this delightful Malaysian selfie museum with lots of trompe-l'œil paintings and optical illusions. (more…)

Colored sand, a Chladni plate, and a little Bach make for a very soothing demonstration of cymatics. (more…)

Well, it's about time. "Weird Al" Yankovic is getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He writes:

A piece of American rock 'n' roll history was discovered in western Massachusetts: the original Aerosmith tour van. Boston.com:

PolyGlu is used by aid workers to force impurities in water to settle at the bottom of a container, making the water safer for drinking in areas where water is scarce or polluted. (more…)

Steve West, an anti-semitic conspiracy theorist who said Hitler did nothing wrong, defeated three other GOP candidates in the party's primary election for Missouri's 15th district. He now faces Democratic incumbent Jon Carpenter in November.

Enjoying the current state of Republican party politics?

Anker's excellent Anker PowerCore Speed 20000 usually costs $56 on Amazon, but today it's a Gold Box deal on sale for $42. It can fully recharge an iPhone 7 seven times, and can charge two USB devices at once. It can even charge the power-hungry Nintendo Switch. I gave one to my nephew and he said it can charge his Switch even while he's playing it. (If you're looking for smaller less expensive battery that will charge the Switch, consider the $29 Anker PowerCore 13000.)

My pal Aaron Muszalski has just announced Burning Wish, a wonderful new nonprofit that grants Burning Man tickets to cancer patients or survivors. He writes: