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The record on "active shooter" fatalities is fragmented; as a result, the AMA researchers who published Lethality of Civilian Active Shooter Incidents With and Without Semiautomatic Rifles in the United States in JAMA (Sci-Hub Mirror) had to piece together their own data from disparate sources. (more…)

The revelation that Google had been secretly creating a censored, surveilling search product (codenamed Project Dragonfly) in order to re-enter the Chinese market prompted more than 1,000 googlers to sign a letter of protest and a high-ranking resignation from the one of company's top scientists. (more…)

Even before the election of Donald Trump, America's pearl-clutching class has been invoking James Madison and his fear of "impetuous majorities" and his desire for "majority rule based on reason rather than passion," worried that the "adults" in the political halls were losing their grip and being forced into "extremism" by mob rule. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Emn-UF4ArWkDaniel writes, "An obsessive programmer, frustrated with not only the inefficiencies of mainstream OSes like Windows, but what he sees as their 'imperialistic oppression,' built an entire operating system using a subleq architecture. Subleq is a OISC, a language with only a single command. It lacks the most basic features of programming languages, and yet is Turing Complete. (more…)

There's no shortage of apps available for your Mac, and, while it's great to have options, this overabundance makes it difficult to find the apps worth installing on your computer. Thankfully, there's the Pay What You Want: The Ultimate Mac Bundle ft. 2Do to simplify the process, which boasts 10 of the best Mac apps out there for a price you get to choose.Here's how the deal works: Simply pay what you want, and you'll instantly get one of the collection's 10 apps. Beat the average price paid, and you'll take the entire collection home for no extra charge.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9wpm_GZKM8This collection comes loaded with tools to help you get the most out of your Mac. Featured in the bundle is 2Do, a highly-rated task manager that helps you streamline your to-dos and get things done with color-coded lists, quick entries, and even location-based reminders. Inside the bundle, you'll also find Airy Youtube Downloader, RoboForm password manager, and much more.Simply choose your price, and you can upgrade your Mac's potential with 10 top-tier apps from the Pay What You Want: The Ultimate Mac Bundle ft. 2Do.

Chris Hampshire of Georgetown, TX was driving through Cedar Breaks Park near Lake Georgetown when he took a wrong turn. He backed up and turned towards the exit when a park attendant stopped him. And that's when all hell broke loose. Hampshire describes what happened:

WTF is wrong with this idiot?

Not only did Barry rule my parents radio/tape deck on long road trips, back in the 80s, but Mr. Manilow is also a master of writing commercial jingles.

OFFF Milan is known for putting together great promotional work for their annual digital design event, and this year's trailer sets a remarkable tone. (more…)

This is my 58mm espresso tamper of choice! (more…)

Internal emails show that the Berkeley, California Police Department (BPD) talked of building a “counter-narrative” on social media against anti-fascist protesters as BPD tweeted out their names and mugshots, then boasted of retweets and “engagement” metrics when mugshots went viral. This amounts to cops doxxing protesters and high-fiving each other over it. That's creepy, and seems like an obvious abuse of power, if not also an abuse of the law. (more…)

In the 1950s, Soviet zoologist Dmitry Belyayev began selectively breeding wild foxes based on how friendly they were. The result is a semi-domesticated red fox, five of which now live in California. (more…)

Hungarian pianist Peter Bence covers popular songs by performers like Sia, Queen (check out his "Don't Stop Me Now"), and The Beatles. His latest cover is "Beat It" by Michael Jackson and it might well be the most chipper version of it I've ever heard. Absolutely delightful!(The Awesomer)

Discovering how Salty Road makes their freaking delicious taffy has weakened my resolve to stick to my diet. The only thing saving me is that I'm currently in Canada, putting the company's confections well out of reach.

White Supremacist grifter Steve Bannon, formerly of Donald Trump's Presidential administration, has made quite the new career for himself as a lucrative speaker on the journalism and big thinker circuit. (more…)

If you've ever tried to buy online eyeglasses, you'll understand why this $1.99 ruler from Eyeque is a godsend. They also sell a $29.99 kit to check your vision using your smartphone.

The State Board of Education in Texas has proposed some rather interesting cuts to the their social studies curriculum. (more…)

For 500,000 KRW (443 USD), an Uncle Service will send a rough-looking, hulking man to your bullied kid's school to warn the bullies to stop picking on them -- or else. This is called the "Uncle Package." (more…)

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the political opposition who showed up in Russia's streets was old and grey: people who had lived through the Soviet era and then watched as their state industries and national wealth were looted by oligarchs, and who wanted an equitable system with broadly shared prosperity. (more…)

Sleek, minimalist, and convenient, Apple's AirPods are a popular pick for those looking to upgrade to Bluetooth audio, but not everyone can afford the hefty $160 price tag. Whether you're on a budget or just want something a little different, we've rounded up four pieces of audio gear that make for convenient Bluetooth listening, and they're all on sale today. Read on for details:1. Cresuer Touchwave True Wireless Bluetooth EarbudsSome of us just want a pair of earbuds that won't dislodge from our ears when we're out and about. Ditching unnecessary buttons and bulk, the Touchwave earbuds are lightweight, comfortable, and even come with three different silicone ear tips to give you the perfect fit. What's more, the Touchwaves leverage CVC Noise Cancellation technology and total noise isolation from silicone ear tips to help you get the most from your music.Buy now: $44.99 (55% off)2. FRESHeBUDS Pro Magnetic Bluetooth EarbudsWith a six-hour battery life and water-resistant design, FRESHeBUDS are the perfect pick for those who want Bluetooth gear they can count on. In addition to their durable design, these earbuds are also magnetic, automatically pairing when you pull them apart and shutting off when you stick them back together.Buy now: $29.95 (75% off)3. 1Voice Bluetooth 100% Wirefree EarbudsCombining cutting-edge Bluetooth 4.2 tech with a completely wireless design, these earbuds deliver top-notch audio quality while eliminating the hassle of dealing with wires. They're ergonomically designed to sit comfortably in your ears, and each earbud contains a speaker, Bluetooth chip, battery, and mic, so they can work independently or paired.Buy now: $32 (73% off)4. TREBLAB Z2 Wireless Noise-Cancelling HeadphonesThe TREBLAB Z2s are best for those looking to enjoy their playlists free from outside distractions. They come engineered with Sound2.0â„¢ technology with aptX and active noise-cancellation, allowing them to filter exterior noise while delivering crisp Bluetooth audio from their neodymium-backed 40mm speakers. Plus, these headphones are rated to last up to 35 hours, making them a great travel companion.Buy now: $78.99 (69% off)

From Ribot's album Songs Of Resistance 1942 - 2018.Waits is a national treasure.

Apple has always talked a good game where recycling and environmentalism are concerned. They're quick to point out that they recycle what they can and are always on the hunt for new, sustainable manufacturing practices to adopt. They've got robots named Liam that take old stuff apart to make new stuff! While the company's PR machine is spinning that it's Apple's dream to one day make all of their products out of completely recycled materials, they're presently shitting the bed on the most basic of sustainability practices.From Motherboard:

Pennsylvania's Department of Corrections is planning to ban free book donations to inmates by mail, claiming that this is a "primary avenue for drugs" to enter prisons. But the move coincides with a renewed push to get prisoners buying into a pricey prison eBook system that offers low-end tablets for $150 and eBooks no cheaper than $3 a read."Effective immediately, the DOC will begin to transition to ebooks coupled with bolstered DOC library system featuring centralized purchasing and ordering process," the DOC announced at its website. "No books or publications will be shipped directly to an inmate. ... [we] will no longer accept books donated directly to individual inmates.”Presented as evidence by the DOC was a letter from a prisoner it said "describes how to smuggle drugs through a popular book donation program." As the Prisoners Lit Project and others pointed out, though, the letter didn't say anything at all about drugs: "the poor guy just wanted a dictionary!"The project describes itself as an all-volunteer grassroots group that sends free books to prisoners in the United States. It sends 30-40 packages a week to prisoners—no drugs included—and plans to fight what it sees as an "unfair and shortsighted change" that will effectively end the program."Banning books from 'books to prisoners' organizations is inhumane," it wrote.Another similar organization, Book' Em, said it mails hundreds of book packages to prisoners and would push back against the policy.A third, Books to Prisoners, said that Pennsylvania prisons' libraries are underfunded and often inaccessible and challenged the DOC's claims otherwise. The Amistad Law Project described the new policy as "horrible" and "dehumanizing."The tablet devices hawked by the DOC are bulky and low-end, with tiny low-definition color displays not intended for reading at length, rudimentary hardware and translucent materials to prevent them being used to hide contraband. They cost $147 plus tax, about three times the price of the only extant consumer device, the $50 Amazon Fire, with similar specifications. There is no repair service: any problems with the device and you have to buy a new one.Then prisoners must pay a minimum of $3 each per eBook from the same state-contracted vendor, which offers a list of only 8,500 titles.The Philadephia Inquirer's Samantha Melamed writes that other states are embarking on similar plans, and they're likely to meet stiff court challenges.

Google's Project Dragonfly was a secret prototype search engine intended to pave the way for the company's return to China; it featured censored search results that complied with Chinese state rules banning searches for topics like "human rights," "student protest" and "Nobel prize." (more…)

“Hiding behind fake profiles, a group linked to Pyongyang solicited technology work to send hard currency back home.” (more…)

The first two deaths from Hurricane Florence are confirmed. A mother and her baby have died after a tree fell on their home in Wilmington, NC. (more…)

Care about your data privacy? Here's a good reason to stop using the Google Chrome browser, and use Firefox or Safari instead on your desktop, laptop, and mobile devices. (more…)

When Magic Erasers were introduced years ago, they cost a couple of dollars each, which was unfortunate because they don't last long. But they were worth it because they do a great job of removing scuffs and marks from walls, stovetops, tile grout, car bodies, vinyl upholstery, label residue from glass jars, and lots more. Today, you can buy knockoffs for as little as 5 cents apiece.I use them to keep my Native Jeffersons in tiptop condition (shoe on left has not yet been cleaned to show the difference):There's even a Magic Eraser ASMR video with 1.6 million views:https://youtu.be/OeI9YSejIKc

Dear Boing Boing readers,If you have an iPhone 6 or newer, and your battery is wearing thin, Apple will still replace it for a mere $29. You have til the end of December.My iPhone 7 plus was holding around 85% and had around 600 cycles on it. Apple replaced it no problem. My daughter's iPhone 6 was showing a max charge of around 88% possible, but her phone was dying over and over. Apple replaced her battery as well.We've yet to see any real features or reasons to upgrade phones. I only went 7 plus so as to give my daughter a perfectly fine 6, and to give my eyes a break with the bigger screen. Replacing the batteries gets us at least another year.Good luck!

Photographer Michelle Gerard created a fantastic series of photographs that recreate the favorite meals of famous artists and writers as if they were in their actual workspace. You can see F. Scott Fitzgerald's meal of canned meat and apples and oranges next to his typewriter in a cheap North Carolina hotel, David Lynch's preferred meal of a chocolate milkshake and "lots of coffee with lots of sugar at Bob's Big Boy at precisely 2:30pm," and more at Designboom.[via Nag on the Lake]

If you've ever seen what a poultry farm looks like you would not believe chicken that has been slaughtered, frozen, shipped to China for processing, and then shipped back to the US to be sold to consumers was still edible.I can believe it is cheap, or no one would have thought to put other people at risk to make it happen.Real Farmacy:

Earlier this year a young basketball enthusiast showed the Harlem Globetrotters how it is done!Worthy of the great Meadowlark Lemon himself.https://youtu.be/P9GMHk9Bh04

Over 41 years ago The Sex Pistols held a boat concert on the Thames in London to publicize their second single, "God Save the Queen." They got a few numbers in before the bobbies spoiled the fun.From Open Culture:

Get your red-blue 3D glasses out. NASA today shares a stunning stereo anaglyph 3-D image of Hurricane Florence, captured from the MISR instrument flying on-board the Terra satellite, which carries nine cameras that observe Earth at different angles. (more…)

One of Trump's border officials told Politico that the administration is planning to permanently bar Canadians who invest in or start legal cannabis businesses in the US or Canada from entering the USA. (more…)

Chicago's tourism sector is booming, with a record 55,000,000 visitors to the city last year, and revenue up this year by 10.4% to $1.45B: but workers aren't seeing those gains. (more…)

Nathan Matthias, 35, may have been inebriated when he fired a shotgun inside his apartment to defend himself against imaginary clowns who had illegally entered his residence. The Pennsylvanian gentleman will now spend five years in prison.From the police report:

Nobody covered the Wall Street collapse, bailout, and corrupt resurgence better than Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, from giving Goldman Sachs its unforgettable epithet to covering the hearings on the bailouts to documenting the foreclosure mills, to deep dives into the sweetheart deals the banks got; to the revolving door between finance regulators and the finance sector to the rise of Occupy; to the consolidation of financial primacy after the collapse; to the double-standard for criminal justice revealed by the collapse; to the frauds that surfaced after the crash; to the tiny bright spots where bankers were brought to justice; all capped by an incandescent, outstanding book about the crisis and the systematic racial and economic justice it revealed. (more…)

Gabrielle Blair posted a long Twitter thread about abortion. Here are all her tweets presented as a single essay. She makes a good case that men are 100% to blame for all unwanted pregnancies, and that abortions could be eliminated without making them illegal if they would simply wear condoms (or at least pull out before ejaculating). The entire essay is worth reading. Here's an excerpt:

These old advertisements are creepy and as annoying as many of the online ads you'll find over at /r/assholedesign.[via Book Curious newsletter]

President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, is pleading guilty to two criminal charges under plea deal terms to include his cooperation as a witness in the investigation led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. (more…)

I wished this video had existed before my first (and, ahem, second) marriage. Live and learn, live and learn.

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that the UK spy agency GCHQ acted illegally when it engaged in mass-scale domestic surveillance of every Briton's electronic communications, a programme that was revealed by documents supplied to journalists by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. (more…)

In the years during which the new EU Copyright Directive was being drafted, a variety of proposals were considered and rejected by the EU's own experts, and purged from the draft text, but two of these proposals were reintroduced, slipped back into the Directive on the day the GDPR came into effect, while everyone's attention was elsewhere. (more…)

Our tech collections are growing, and with most of us packing more than just our smartphone in our everyday carry, keeping your devices energized when you're out and about isn't easy. Therein lies the value of this PowerUP 11,000mAh Triple USB Battery, which can power up to three devices on the go.Boasting a massive 11,000mAh capacity, this portable battery packs enough juice to charge your devices several times over. It's engineered with grade-A cells for quick, reliable charging; and, thanks to its triple-USB port design, you can power up your phone while having enough room to charge a tablet and your friend's phone as well.With a PowerUP 11,000mAh Triple USB Battery on your person, you can stop hunting for outlets when you're out and juice your devices without skipping a beat. While it normally retails for $79.99, you can get it in the Boing Boing Store today for $27.99, saving more than 60% off the usual price.

An interesting to subplot to the drama at CBS and the firing/resignation of its president Les Moonves after more sexual misconduct allegations is how his wife, Julie Chen co-host of the CBS series The Talk and host of Big Brother would handle her on-air roles. After announcing that she'd be taking time off from her daily group talk show, she returned to the air tonight as the host of the long-running reality competition Big Brother. As the episode wrapped up, Chen said "...from outside the Big Brother House with Brent, I'm Julie Chen Moonves. Goodnight.” [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIcMgVik2GM&w=560&h=315]It is believed to be the first time Chen has used her married name on the show she's hosted since 2000. When allegations of Moonves' misconduct first surfaced, Chen released a statement saying, "I have known my husband, Leslie Moonves, since the late ’90s, and I have been married to him for almost 14 years. Leslie is a good man and a loving father, devoted husband and inspiring corporate leader. He has always been a kind, decent and moral human being. I fully support my husband and stand behind him and his statement.” The most recent allegations revealed in yet another blockbuster by Ronan Farrow include Moonves attempting to buy the silence of a woman accusing him of sexual misconduct by offering her a job at the network.The backlash to Chen's signoff was swift. Publicist Danny Deraney, whose clients include Illeana Douglas (one of Moonves' victims), Roseanna Arquette, and Laura Benanti said he would no longer book any of his clients on The Talk.

At least 1 person is dead and 80 homes and businesses burned across three Boston suburbs - Lawrence, North Andover, and Andover this afternoon after a high-pressure gas main explosion rocked the area shortly after 3:00 PM EST. (more…)

Angelenos! Bring your teens to the Pasadena Loves YA festival this Saturday; I'm chairing a panel on graphic novels with Mairghread Scott and Tillie Walden; other panels and events go on all day, from 11-4PM, at the Central Branch of Pasadena Public Library, 285 E Walnut St, Pasadena CA 91101. Admission is free!

In 2015, Scott Westerfeld, Margo Lanagan and Deborah Biancotti published Zeroes, a wonderful, intricately plotted YA thriller about the discovery by a group of teens (all born in the year 2000) that they have a variety of extremely millennial supernatural powers, which grow in strength in social situations; in the years since, the authors have finished the trilogy with two more excellent volumes: 2016's Swarm, which introduces out-of-town powered teens and raises the stakes to life or death for the Zeroes' whole hometown; and 2018's Nexus, which sends the Zeroes off into conflict with the US government, and a massive army of not-exactly-but-sorta-evil powered teens who have all the crowd magic of Mardi Gras to work with, in a battle over the fate of the human race itself. (more…)

On the 170th anniversary of the publication of Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto, British graphic novelist Martin Rowson has produced an illustrated adaptation. Apart from a few pages of prose, the whole work is presented in the style of a graphic novel.The preface describes how the middle-aged Rowson became smitten by Marx and Engels' exciting prose when he was only 16. Aside from expressing his great admiration for Marx’s writing, as well as his own critical stance, he furnishes the reader with some historical backdrop to the completion of The Manifesto. Marx had been commissioned to write it by a socialist group in the summer of 1847, but, under pressure, succeeded in producing it at the beginning of 1848. Significantly, that was before the outbreak of revolutionary movements in Europe later on in 1848. Rowson goes on to explain that the initial publication failed to attract the attention of many people. Only after the events of the Paris Commune in 1871 did the pamphlet receive a wide audience and a publication renewal.The illustrations create an atmospheric accompaniment to the Marx figures whose speaking balloons relay the text of The Manifesto. The graphics pair nicely with the text with dense images that impart the feeling of the clashes of historical forces (classes) or with the dramatic rendering of the first lines of The Manifesto in which a spectre appears, so Hamlet-like in two dark and foreboding images to haunt the reader’s mind. There is plenty of theatricality too: images of Marx interacting from a stage with a hostile audience (Rowson’s added flourishes added to enhance the exposition in a stimulating theatrical way).As a literary work, the illustrations do justice to the marvelously compressed, yet sweeping, literary quality of Marx’s verbal imagery and present readers. Though I had read The Manifesto years ago, I found the adaptation to be both a refresher and newly insightful.The Communist Manifesto: A Graphic Novel [Martin Rowson/SelfMadeHero]