Roky Erickson, the pioneering psychedelic musician behind the 13th Floor Elevators, has died at age 71. A brilliant legend of Texas garage rock who struggled with schizophrenia and drug abuse, Erickson's far out lyrics, songs, and life had a tremendous influence on countless punk, psych, experimental, and avant-garde bands. Erickson moved culture. In 1966, Erickson unleashed the quintessential psych classic "You're Gonna Miss Me." He was right. RIP, Roky.
(Variety)
Wild Earth is a dog food start-up in Berkeley, California. It specializes in dog food made from the Aspergillus oryzae fungus, known as koji in Japan. Koji is used to make "soy sauce and fermented bean paste (including miso), and also to saccharify rice, other grains, and potatoes in the making of alcoholic beverages such as sake and shōchū." [Wikipedia]. Chemical & Engineering News reports that Wild Earth recently secured $11 million in VC funding from "VegInvest, Mars Petcare, and other backers." This looks like a great snack for people, too.
Image: Wild Earth
Again with the military and the sky penises. Last time I posted about this, it was Navy pilots pulling a prank over the state of Washington. This week, it was Air Force fighter jets over Arizona's Luke Air Force Base and the official statement is that it was an "accident." From CNN:
"We've seen the photos that have been circulating online from Tuesday afternoon. 56th Fighter Wing senior leadership reviewed the training tapes from the flight and confirmed that F-35s conducting standard fighter training maneuvers ... resulted in the creation of the contrails," an Air Force spokesperson told CNN. "There was no nefarious or inappropriate behavior during the training flight."
Friends, don't eat slugs and snails you find on trails in Hawaii. And while you're at it, make sure to wash lettuce leaves thoroughly to get rid of slug and snail excretions. Failure to heed these warnings could result in rat lungworms that dig into your brain and cause "neurological problems, severe pain and long-term disability."
From Ars Technica:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed three new cases in unrelated adults visiting Hawaii Island from the US mainland, the health department announced. The latest known victims—who became infected at different times—bring the state’s 2018 case total to 10 and the 2019 total to five.
While there were 17 confirmed cases in 2017, the state counted only two cases total in the prior decade. The new case counts indicate a sustained boom in the parasite’s population and spread.The parasitic worm in these cases is the rat lungworm, aka Angiostrongylus cantonensis. As its common name suggests, the wandering worm primarily takes up residence in rats’ lungs, where female worms lay their eggs. Young worms leave the nest early to find their own windy homes, though. Larvae get coughed up into rats’ throats then swallowed. The hosting rat eventually poops out the young parasites, which then get gobbled up by feces-feasting snails and slugs (intermediate hosts). When other rodents come along and eat those infected mollusks, the prepubescent parasites migrate to the rats’ brains to mature before settling into the lungs and reproducing. The cycle then starts again.
Image: Punlop Anusonpornperm - Own work, CC BY 4.0, Link
Who needs V'ger? This scene of Kirk and Scotty made the entire movie for me.
In 1965, two years before Nico made the Warhol/Factory scene with the Velvet Underground and released her first solo LP "Chelsea Girl," she recorded this cover of Gordon Lightfoot's "I'm Not Sayin'." According to Wikipedia, "This version of the song features Jimmy Page, then a studio musician, on the 12-string guitar. Nico's version was produced by Rolling Stones multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones and the promo film was shot at West India Docks in London." Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham released the track as a 7" backed with "The Last Mile," written by Oldham and Page.
I put a collar emblazoned with owls on my Cavalier King Charles spaniel, thus combining two things I love.
I can't get a good shot of said owl collar on Zuul, cause she is too fuzzy. They come in sizes for many, if not all, dogs.
The Pyrenees got some gingham bs my kid choose, but it looks good on him.
dogs
Buckle-Down Plastic Clip Collar - Owls Striped w/Swirls Purple via Amazon
This 1950s era Wonder lamp was purchased at a flea market in France. It's fun to watch this guy restore it to sparkling condition, but now I really want a sandblaster.
Image: my mechanics/YouTube
This fantastic documentary must be watched. I love these guys.
Ken Cuccinelli is probably going to be confirmed soon as Donald Trump's new head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. He once praised and amplified a racist rant attacking Muslims by Brigitte Tudor, aka Brigitte Gabriel, a prominent anti-Muslim organizer based in the United States.
That's not good.
Cuccinelli was a former Attorney General in my home state of Virginia. Progressive voters in Virginia know all about him.
Brigitte Tudor — aka Brigitte Gabriel — is the founder of ACT for America, the largest grassroots anti-Muslim group in the country.
Cuccinelli's a big fan.
Cuccinelli is a right-wing commentator and former Virginia attorney general who will reportedly be appointed as the new director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is part of DHS. Cuccinelli has a history of anti-LGBTQ and anti-immigrant rhetoric and positions.
Gabriel is the head of the anti-Muslim group ACT for America. Media outlets have called her “the most influential leader in America’s increasingly influential anti-Islam lobby” and “America's most prominent anti-Muslim activist.” Gabriel has a long history of anti-Muslim statements, including claiming that “a practicing Muslim … cannot be a loyal citizen to the United States,” and saying that Muslims in Europe “started multiplying” after World War II and did not assimilate and that Europe is now “paying the price” because it “ignored the cancer growing within its body when it was at Stage Two.”
The Heritage Foundation hosted a June 16, 2014, panel event about the 2012 Benghazi attacks featuring Gabriel and fellow anti-Muslim commentators Frank Gaffney and Clare Lopez. During that event, Gabriel attacked a Muslim questioner for noting that there are many peaceful Muslims, stating that while the “majority of them are peaceful people,” the “peaceful majority” is irrelevant because “radicals are estimated to be between 15 to 25%” and “it is the radicals that kill. ... When you look throughout history, when you look at all the lessons of history, most Germans were peaceful. Yet the Nazis drove the agenda and as a result, 60 million people died.” From the event:
BRIGITTE GABRIEL: There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world today. Of course, not all of them are radicals. The majority of them are peaceful people. The radicals are estimated to be between 15 to 25% according to all intelligence services around the world. That leaves 75% of them peaceful people. But when you look at 15 to 25% of the world Muslim population, you’re looking at 180 million to 300 million people dedicated to the destruction of Western civilization. That is as big of the United States.
So why should we worry about the radical 15 to 25%? Because it is the radicals that kill. Because it is the radicals that behead and massacre. When you look throughout history, when you look at all the lessons of history, most Germans were peaceful. Yet the Nazis drove the agenda and as a result, 60 million people died. Almost 14 million in concentration camps. Six million were Jews. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. When you look at Russia, most Russians were peaceful as well. Yet, the Russians were able to kill 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. When you look at China, for example, most Chinese were peaceful as well. Yet the Chinese were able to kill 70 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. When you look at Japan prior to World War II, most Japanese were peaceful as well. Yet Japan was able to butcher its way across Southeast Asia, killing 12 million people, mostly killed with bayonets and shovels. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. On September 11 in the United States, we had 2.3 million Arab Muslims living in the United States. It took 19 hijackers, 19 radicals, to bring America down to its knees, destroy the World Trade Center, attack the Pentagon, and kill almost 3,000 Americans that day. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. So for all our powers of reasons and us talking about moderate and peaceful Muslims, I’m glad you’re here. But where are the others speaking out?
In July 2014 Facebook post, Cuccinelli responded to video of Gabriel’s diatribe by writing that “this panelist's point about irrelevance of the peaceful - BUT UNENGAGED - majority is extremely important and powerful. I.e., if the ‘agenda’ is driven by the radical minority, then the peaceful majority doesn't affect the course of history.”
Right-wing media figures have frequently demanded that Muslims speak out against or atone for terrorist attacks -- a rigged and disingenuous game that ignores that Muslim groups and leaders do roundly condemn them.
Cuccinelli has also associated with Gabriel in other settings. He has signed letters with her and numerous other right-wing leaders supporting funding for the southern border wall, expressing concern about the supposed social media censorship of conservatives, and opposing the House Democrats’ bill “to expand Americans' access to the ballot box, reduce the influence of big money in politics, and strengthen ethics rules for public servants, and for other purposes.” He also attended an August 2018 Media Research Center cruise with Gabriel, according to promotional information.
These guys are monsters and they're getting all the power they need to do bad things on a massive scale against people and kids who have no way of defending themselves. They must be stopped.
We must organize and vote them out.
On May 21, the American Law Institute -- a kind of star chamber of 4,000 judges, law professors, and lawyers -- was scheduled to pass a "restatement" of the law of consumer contracts, with the plan being to codify case-law to ensure that terms of service would be treated as enforceable obligations by US courts.
This would have led to a virtual ban on class action suits, and would have severely curtailed the role of courts in hearing legal complaints brought by members of the public who had been harmed or lied to by corporations, replacing them with binding arbitration kangaroo courts where the "judge" is working for the company that wronged you.
The normally obscure workings of the ALI drew unprecedented attention over the move, with a bipartisan coalition of 23 states' Attorneys General publicly denouncing the plan, along with consumer rights groups and other campaigners.
The pressure worked! When the ALI sat down to finalize it at their meeting on the 21st, virtually the entire four-hour debate slot was taken up with a debate over the first of nine sections; debate began on the second section but time ran out before it could come to a vote.
A year from now, the ALI will sit again and could take up the matter once more.
Although the meeting agenda had assigned a four-hour session for consideration of the Restatement, only the first of the Restatement’s nine sections reached a vote. Section One contains the Restatement’s definitions and describes its scope. ALI’s members voted to approve an amendment to Section One to clarify that to the extent the Uniform Commercial Code applies to a transaction and provides a rule, the Restatement does not apply. While not objectionable, the amendment seems unnecessary since to the extent the Restatement sets forth the common law, common law cannot override statutory law such as the UCC.
The remainder of the session was devoted to debate on Section Two, which deals with how a consumer manifests consent to a transaction. No vote was taken on Section Two. A motion to convert the Restatement into a “principles project” was deferred until the 2020 annual meeting.
While the Restatement technically remains alive, its future is unclear. Instead of becoming a principles project, the Restatement could continue as such but with redrafting. Possible next steps could include a meeting of ALI’s Council or a meeting of the Restatement’s Advisers (of which I am one) and/or ALI’s Members Consultative Group.
ALI annual meeting ends with uncertain future for Restatement of the Law, Consumer Contracts [Alan S. Kaplinsky/Consumer Finance Monitor]
Consumer Contracts Restatement Delayed: Consumers Win...For Now [Jerri-Lynn Scofield/Naked Capitalism]
If Donald Trump's bag man Bill Barr weren't such a malevolent son of a bitch, this wild quote of his from a CBS News interview would sound something like wisdom.
“Everyone dies and I am not, you know, I don't believe in the Homeric idea that you know, immortality comes by, you know, having odes sung about you over the centuries, you know?"
They're some soul-less bastards, these Trump administration slimeballs.
Asked by CBS News' Jan Crawford about concerns over his reputation for defending the president amid ongoing probes into the administration's alleged ties to the Russian government and claims that Mr. Trump obstructed justice, Barr appeared indifferent.
"I am at the end of my career," Barr said. "Everyone dies and I am not, you know, I don't believe in the Homeric idea that you know, immortality comes by, you know, having odes sung about you over the centuries, you know?"
Barr, who previously served in the George H.W. Bush administration, is only the second attorney general in history who's served in that capacity twice. The first was back in 1850.
He said he knew it would "only be a matter of time" that he would be attacked for what he considers is "behaving responsibly and calling them as I see them." He argued "nowadays, people don't care about the merits and the substance."
"They only care about who it helps, who benefits, whether my side benefits or the other side benefits, everything is gauged by politics. And as I say that's antithetical to the way the department runs and any attorney general in this period is going to end up losing a lot of political capital and I realize that and that's one of the reasons that I ultimately was persuaded that I should take it on because I think at my stage in life, it really doesn't make any difference."
When asked if he had any regrets for taking the job, Barr told Crawford: "No."
Yuck.
Watch a preview here, and read the rest of the transcript.
Joe Stiglitz (previously) holds a Nobel Prize in Economics (not an actual Nobel Prize), and has been an outspoken critic of the rigged economy and austerity.
Now, in a new editorial for Common Dreams, Stiglitz calls neoliberalism "an ideology that has clearly failed" and goes on to try to rescue capitalism from neoliberalism, calling for support for "progressive capitalism...which prescribes a radically different economic agenda,"
Stiglitz's progressive capitalism calls for a stronger role for the state in subjecting markets to democratic oversight; an emphasis on science-led, evidence-based policies that favor benefits for the many over enriching the few; breaking up monopolies; and shielding politics from financial corruption.
It's a platform very similar to Elizabeth Warren's 2020 election playbook, and can be seen as an attempt to establish a new centrism that's far to the left of the likes of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, sitting between their positions and the positions of Sanders, AOC, and other socialists who are skeptical of markets entirely.
A comprehensive agenda must focus on education, research, and the other true sources of wealth. It must protect the environment and fight climate change with the same vigilance as the Green New Dealers in the US and Extinction Rebellion in the United Kingdom. And it must provide public programs to ensure that no citizen is denied the basic requisites of a decent life. These include economic security, access to work and a living wage, health care and adequate housing, a secure retirement, and a quality education for one’s children.
This agenda is eminently affordable; in fact, we cannot afford not to enact it. The alternatives offered by nationalists and neoliberals would guarantee more stagnation, inequality, environmental degradation, and political acrimony, potentially leading to outcomes we do not even want to imagine.
Progressive capitalism is not an oxymoron. Rather, it is the most viable and vibrant alternative to an ideology that has clearly failed. As such, it represents the best chance we have of escaping our current economic and political malaise.
After Neoliberalism [Joseph Stiglitz/Common Dreams]
(Image: FDL Library, CC-BY)
Since January, Google has been pushing for a change to its extensions handling in Chrome; one casualty of that change is ability to block unwanted content before its loads, something that would effectively kill privacy tools and ad-blockers.
After a public outcry, Google has tweaked the change, but only for enterprise customers, who will have access to an API that will allow this kind of blocking. That means that corporations will be able to develop internal-use plugins that do the kind of screening that adblockers do for the rest of us today.
Google has warned investors that "New and existing technologies could affect our ability to customize ads and/or could block ads online, which would harm our business," and ad blocker developers like Raymond Hill of Ublock Origin have speculated that "Google’s primary business is incompatible with unimpeded content blocking. Now that Google Chrome product has achieve high market share, the content blocking concerns as stated in its 10K filing are being tackled."
Google denies this, and says "We’re actively working with the developer community to get feedback and iterate on the design of a privacy-preserving content filtering system that limits the amount of sensitive browser data shared with third parties."
Chrome is the dominant browser on the web today, and even though it is nominally open source, Google has used a suite of tricks to ensure that it gets to decide who can adapt it and what features those adaptations can have.
Firefox is available for virtually every OS -- mobile and desktop -- and supports full ad-blocking.
Chrome is deprecating the blocking capabilities of the webRequest API in Manifest V3, not the entire webRequest API (though blocking will still be available to enterprise deployments).
Google is essentially saying that Chrome will still have the capability to block unwanted content, but this will be restricted to only paid, enterprise users of Chrome. This is likely to allow enterprise customers to develop in-house Chrome extensions, not for ad blocking usage.
For the rest of us, Google hasn’t budged on their changes to content blockers, meaning that ad blockers will need to switch to a less effective, rules-based system, called “declarativeNetRequest.”
Chrome to limit full ad blocking extensions to enterprise users [Kyle Bradshaw/9to5Google]
(via /.)
Binding arbitration is a way for corporations to force you to surrender your legal rights as a condition of doing business, relegating you to seeking redress for breaches and harms by going before a paid arbitrator who is in the employ of the company that harmed you, and who almost always sides with their employer.
Ten years ago, Chase did away with binding arbitration in its credit-card agreements (after settling a class action suit accusing the company of conspiring with its competitors to force customers into binding arbitration), but two days ago, the company sent customers holding Chase Slate cards a notice informing them that their new contract includes arbitration: "This arbitration agreement provides that all disputes between you and Chase must be resolved by BINDING ARBITRATION whenever you or we choose to submit or refer a dispute to arbitration. By accepting this arbitration agreement you GIVE UP YOUR RIGHT TO GO TO COURT (except for matters that may be taken to a small claims court). Arbitration will proceed on an INDIVIDUAL BASIS, so class actions and similar proceedings will NOT be available to you."
Chase Slate customers have until August 7 to opt out, but they must do so in writing by postal mail.
This should send shivers down consumers’ spines. It’s unclear if Chase plans to extend binding arbitration to all of its cards, but that wouldn’t be surprising. And Chase is not alone. A 2016 study from the Pew Charitable Trusts found that forced arbitration clauses are on the rise among financial institutions.
As revelations come to light about individual contracts quietly forcing individuals to give up their right to sue in court, Chase’s move shows that financial institutions are growing more emboldened to force these terms on their customers. For now, all Chase Slate cardholders can do is voluntarily opt out. Be sure to buy the right stamp.
Chase bank is quietly adding a forced arbitration clause to some credit cards [Cale Guthrie Weissman/Fast Company]
"In this video I'm restoring an old French Wonder lamp," writes MyMechanics (Patreon). "My good friend TysyTube Restoration bought this Wonder lamp on a flea market in Paris. He asked me if I want to restore it and obviously I said yes. He already restored two of them himself, I link his videos and channel below. These Wonder lamps are very well known in France, they're used on railroads mostly as far as I know."
I want to put a Raspberry Pi in one of these and I don't know why.
Last year, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez successfully challenged establishment Dem Joe Crowley for his seat in the Bronx; now Crowley works as a lobbyist, skirting the restrictions on lobbying by Congress by styling himself a "strategic consultant."
AOC publicly proposed a lifetime ban on any Congressman ever lobbying, under any guise, and, when Ted Cruz endorsed her proposal, she seized the opportunity, tweeting ".@tedcruz if you’re serious about a clean bill, then I’m down. Let’s make a deal. If we can agree on a bill with no partisan snuck-in clauses, no poison pills, etc - just a straight, clean ban on members of Congress becoming paid lobbyists - then I’ll co-lead the bill with you."
The Democratic Congress has already passed an omnibus bill, HR1, the "For the People Act," that bans former members of the executive branch as well as former Congresspeople from lobbying or serving as "strategic consultants" to lobbyists.
But, as Ocasio-Cortez pointed out in a series of tweets, there’s more to consider than just banning—or at the least delaying—lawmaker entrance into lobbying firms. The nature of congressional pay and the necessities of the work, Ocasio-Cortez said, make the easy money of lobbying very attractive to members of Congress.
“Keeping it real,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, “the elephant in the room with passing a lobbying ban on members requires a nearly-impossible discussion about congressional pay.”
AOC Calls for Ban on Revolving Door as Study Shows 2/3 of Recently Departed Lawmakers Now Lobbyists [Jerri-Lynn Scofield/Naked Capitalism]
There's no one way to solve the plastic waste problem, but in the packaged goods sector, an enormous amount of plastic is used in order to surround and protect simple solutions of some agent dissolved in water, from toothpaste to window cleaner to shampoo.
Treehugger's Katherine Martinko surveys a slate of companies that are shipping dehydrated, solid products that outperform their pre-mixed cousins, while costing less and using far less plastic, like Blueland, whose Windex-beating window cleaner ships as a $2 tablet that you add to a spray-bottle (the bottle comes in a starter kit and you only have to buy one).
Obviously, this won't solve the problem, but it represents a substantial advance on the status quo.
When you stop to think about it, much of what we're shipping around the world is water. Whether it's cleaning products or personal care products, these are mostly made up of water, with ingredients mixed in to clean, moisturize, color, or do whatever task you need.
Now imagine if we could remove the water and only ship the additive. It could come in dry tablet or bar form and, depending on its use, could be dissolved in water to create a product just as strong as anything you'd buy at the store, or used in bar form directly on your body. This would save money, hassle (who loves lugging heavy jugs of detergent home from the store?), and environmental impact (think of the carbon emissions required to get that jug from its manufacturer to your home).
Here's an incredibly simple solution to plastic packaging waste [Katherine Martinko/Treehugger]
(via Naked Capitalism)
(Image: Cheryl, CC-BY-SA)
Chernobyl, the five-part HBO/Sky dramatization of the 1986 nuclear disaster, is filled with more dread, tension and horror than any Hollywood movie I've seen in years. The most unsettling part of it is knowing that it adheres closely to the truth, right down to the details. Yet I'm still startled to see just how exacting the production design is, as demonstrated by this footage from one of the plant roofs where "liquidators" struggled to remove irradiated debris by hurling it back into the open core of the reactor. Jump to about 7:45 for the roof work.
Compare to the "roof" scene from the show, which integrates the true footage so cleverly you wouldn't know it if you hadn't seen it for yourself:
If you still need convincing that you should check out this amazing show, here's the scene from Ep. 1 where three young plant workers inspect the reactor hall after the explosion. They know what they're afraid of finding, but they don't know that it's going to be... well, you watch it and see for yourself.
Embedded below, a hapless engineer is ordered onto the roof so that managers can debunk fears that the reactor is exposed to the open air. He knows he's dead as soon as he sees the satanic cloud of smoke billowing from the ruin. He knows the guard escorting him up there is dead, too—and that guy doesn't even have to go up to the edge and look down into it. They don't have to go back to the managers and be told they're lying, either.
There isn't single county in the nation where a minimum-wage worker can afford to rent a two-bedroom home; and although LA has the worst homelessness crisis in the country, New York state is catching up, with homelessness growing by 46% since the financial crisis -- the fastest rate in the nation.
Surging housing prices have a multitude of causes, but they mostly come down to increased inequality and the drive to put money into the pockets of the rich at the expense of working people: basically, it's one part post-2008 evictions, one part wage stagnation, and one part private equity buying-frenzy.
Or, to put it another way: the banks destroyed the economy, their investors cut wages, working people lost their homes while banks got taxpayer bailouts, and then the rich used the tax subsidy to buy the houses that the working people who paid for it had lost, moved those people back into their old homes, and hiked rents while slashing maintenance.
Shelter is a basic human need, right there on Maslow's hierarchy, one step above food and air. When shelter is captured by the finance sector and turned into "an ATM for Wall Street," everybody suffers.
In New York State, things have reached a breaking point, at a statewide coalition stretching from Lake Ontario to the Bronx is promising a huge shakeup in the state's protection for tenants, with rent stabilization and rules prohibiting eviction without cause enshrined in a set of eight interlocking bills that are being carried forward by a slate of state Democratic legislators who won elections last year by refusing to take real-estate industry money.
The activists are girding for a fight: a more modest rent control ballot proposal in California attracted record-breaking amounts of money from the landlord lobby, who threatened to hike rents and evict tenants if the measure passed.
The proposed rules are based on New York City's existing tenancy protections, but stripped of the loopholes that have been poked in them since they were enshrined in the 1970s.
“When people think about rent regulation, they often think of it only as a way to limit rent increases, but it does much more than that. It also protects people from arbitrary evictions, because it requires a landlord to have a good reason before they evict someone, and that is huge,” said Judith Goldiner, an attorney at the Legal Aid Society in New York. “Length of tenure is what rent regulation really gives you. It allows you to really be in a neighborhood, to have connections there. It allows your kids to go to neighborhood schools, it allows you to go to local hospitals, and it allows you to have neighbors and friends to help you out. It provides a sense of security that those without rent regulations don’t have, and this is hugely important, not just for tenants but for the city as a whole.”
Yet New York’s rent-stabilization system is under siege, and it has been for decades. From the very beginning, New York City landlords were allowed to largely self-police compliance with the regulations and, according to McKee, worked constantly to undermine the system. In the 1990s, the real-estate industry mobilized to gut rent stabilization, scoring their first hit in 1993, when Senate Republicans engineered several amendments weakening the rent laws. In 1997, they successfully pushed for a loophole called the vacancy bonus, which lets landlords raise rents by 20 percent (sometimes even more) every time a tenant moves out of a rent-stabilized unit.
Such loopholes have been devastating to the state’s rent-stabilization system. Aaron Carr of the Housing Rights Initiative said the flaws in the system have led to widespread fraud and predatory speculation. “For landlords, the name of the game is to buy up a building and push out as many tenants as possible in the shortest time period possible and remove the apartments from rent stabilization,” he said. In recent years, Carr’s organization has filed dozens of class-action lawsuits against landlords in New York, arguing that they have fraudulently inflated construction costs or otherwise exploited loopholes to illegally raise prices on tenants. A recent state audit of 1,100 landlords found that in as many as 40 percent of cases, landlords could not legally justify past rent increases at their stabilized units.
In the Heart of Real-Estate Power, a Housing Movement Nears Victory [Jimmy Tobias/The Nation]
(via Naked Capitalism)
(Image: The All-Nite Images from NY, NY, USA, CC-BY-SA)
The ClockworkPi Gameshell is a portable game console you make yourself, coming as a modular kit and assembling to form a GameBoy-like gadget with a quad-core CPU, 2.7-inch color display, WiFi and Bluetooth, 1GB of RAM, HDMI output and a 16GB MicroSD card holding its Linux-based OS: "a powerful computing platform that lets you begin creating immediately."
It smoothly runs various dev environments/engines (including PICO 8, LOVE2D, PyGame and Phaser), comes with Cave Story, Doom and RetroArch for folks who just want to dive in, and clearly has its stuff together both as a creative tool and entertainment device. Mike Fahey reports that it runs 16-bit classics perfectly.
Looks like a very serious effort to create a hackable-from-the-ground-up handheld, and a perfect competitor to the recently-announced PlayDate. Yellow is in!
The GameShell is available on Amazon for $159 in red or white; yellow is exclusive to the official website, at the same price.
Passwords are necessary. Passwords are also a pain - especially when you've got multiple ones to remember for your email, subscriptions, bills and work sites.
The problem is keeping all those passwords stored and ready, yet still secure from hackers and malware. The solution? A subscription to the RememBear Password Manager.
Brought to you by the same company that built the TunnelBear VPN, RememBear already comes with a pedigree of security. The seconds you spend entering your info into the app will likely be the last time you have to do it anywhere. RememBear saves your passwords, ID and credit card info and can autofill the appropriate websites, letting you log in with a single click. And since this is this most sensitive information you have, it's all protected with AES256 encryption. It can even store notes, and you can retreieve all this data on a number of devices.
Pick up a two-year subscription to RememBear for $39.99, a full 33% off the original price of $60.
Following a run of New Year’s concerts at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore, Patti Smith finds herself tramping the coast of Santa Cruz, about to embark on a year of solitary wandering. Unfettered by logic or time, she draws us into her private wonderland with no design, yet heeding signs–including a talking sign that looms above her, prodding and sparring like the Cheshire Cat. In February, a surreal lunar year begins, bringing with it unexpected turns, heightened mischief, and inescapable sorrow. In a stranger’s words, “Anything is possible: after all, it’s the Year of the Monkey.” For Smith – inveterately curious, always exploring, tracking thoughts, writing – the year evolves as one of reckoning with the changes in life’s gyre: with loss, aging, and a dramatic shift in the political landscape of America.
Smith melds the western landscape with her own dreamscape. Taking us from California to the Arizona desert; to a Kentucky farm as the amanuensis of a friend in crisis; to the hospital room of a valued mentor; and by turns to remembered and imagined places, this haunting memoir blends fact and fiction with poetic mastery. The unexpected happens; grief and disillusionment set in. But as Smith heads toward a new decade in her own life, she offers this balm to the reader: her wisdom, wit, gimlet eye, and above all, a rugged hope for a better world.
"Year of the Monkey" by Patti Smith (Amazon)
image at top: Patti Smith performing at Haldern Pop 2014, smial (FAL)
Anar writes, "Writer and scholar Rubén Gallo sheds light on a fascinating, obscure bit of history: After the press reported Freud’s troubles in Nazi Austria — his daughter was briefly detained by the Gestapo and he was under pressure by friends to flee — several activists and Mexican labor unions (including the Union of Workers in the Graphic Arts, the Union of Education Workers, the Union of Metal Miners, and the Union of Mexican Electricians) urged then-Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas to bring Freud to Mexico."
Though the campaign to bring Freud to Mexico came to nothing, Cárdenas expressed his outrage at Germany’s takeover of Austria: he instructed his representative at the Society of Nations in Geneva to file a formal protest against the Anschluss. Mexico was the only country to do so — an expression of solidarity postwar Austria recognized by naming a small plaza by the Danube canal “Mexikoplatz.”
The Red Aid campaign was not the last time Mexico would be considered a potential haven for Austrian Jews. In November 1938, after Freud had finally left Vienna and settled in London, Princess Marie Bonaparte came up with a plan to save European Jews. She wrote to Bullitt and proposed that the United States government purchase Baja California from Mexico and establish a Jewish state on that territory. Freud, she added, liked the idea. Bullitt sent her a polite, evasive reply, but the princess — accustomed to having the last word — wrote directly to Roosevelt, urging him to consider her proposal. Freud was bemused by this fantastic campaign, but told the princess he could not take her “colonial plans” seriously.
Mexico's Little-Known Attempt to Save Freud From the Nazis [Rubén Gallo/MIT Press Reader]
There's a wealth of psychological research that correlates wealthy people in the real world with negative traits like rudeness (people driving fancier cars are less considerate of pedestrians and their likelihood of cutting off another driver is correlated to the cost of the driver's car); greed (rich people take more candies out of dishes set aside for kids than poor people); generalized unethical behavior; cheating at games of chance; and overall stinginess.
One possible explanation for all this is that getting rich is easier if you're dishonest, lack empathy, and cheat whenever you think you can get away with it.
But consider that in a rigged Monopoly game, players who won due to an obviously unfair advantage (being given twice as much starting money and twice as many dice-rolls) acted like dicks throughout the whole game, and then boasted about their "brilliant tactics, their finesse at the game of monopoly and their daring moves."
So maybe the causation goes the other way: maybe getting rich is mostly a matter of dumb luck, which we justify for ourselves by convincing ourselves of our superiority, which leads to us treating others as inferiors.
But why are they more likely to cheat, lie and to cut off pedestrians? And why are they less likely to give to charity?
It may be in part because they are cut off from the reality of poverty – living in an upper-class bubble. But primarily the researchers found that greed is actually viewed more favourably in upper-class communities.
“We reason that increased resources and independence from others cause people to prioritise self-interest over others’ welfare and perceive greed as positive and beneficial, which in turn gives rise to increased unethical behaviour,” the researchers concluded.
Opinion: Why do rich people lie, cheat and steal more than those on low incomes? [Diarmuid Pepper/The Journal]
(via Naked Capitalism)
You know what's better than a smartwatch? Literally everything else. But especially: the centuries' worth of wrist-mounted paint palettes worn by some artists.
Some of these are humble affairs (a bit of masonite with a thumb-hole) while others are super-elaborate, mounted on watch-straps, with hinged bodies, unfolding trays, and even high-end, $1225 brass or silver Sketcher boxes with foldaway thumb-rings, water reservoirs, and up to 14 paint wells.
As Rain Noe notes on Core 77 these things are at the nexus of DIY and design, relentlessly functional, and extremely beautiful. They would make for great design school projects:
- The object has clear utility for the end user, and very specific practical requirements
- It requires some human factors work for the interface (i.e. how do you securely hold it?)
- It's small enough that a student could manufacture a prototype in the school's shop
- The extant examples of this object span from $15 plastic Wal-Mart objects up to $1,000-plus luxury items, giving the students a wide range in how they want to execute
- At most design schools, there are nearby Painting majors who could be interviewed and used for testing different designs, providing important feedback
Unusual Product Design: Functional, Technology-Free Wearables for Fine Artists [Rain Noe/Core 77]
(Image: House of Hoffman)
When you talk to Alexa and other voice assistants, you have to phrase your requests by starting with their "wakeword" ("Alexa" "OK Google" "Siri" etc).
This means that if you issue an instruction like "Order me a 55 gallon drum of Clearglide lubricant, Alexa," it will fail and you will have to repeat yourself in the form of "Alexa, order me a 55 gallon drum of Clearglide lubricant."
Amazon has applied for a patent to resolve this problem by the simple (and obvious and thus unpatentable) measure of having Alexa record everything, all the time, and when it hears its wakeword, it can wind back its buffer and figure out what it just missed.
"The [proposed] system is configured to capture speech that precedes and/or follows a wakeword," the application explains, "such that the speech associated with the command and wakeword can be included together and considered part of a single utterance that may be processed by a system."
Newly Released Amazon Patent Shows Just How Much Creepier Alexa Can Get [Peter Dockrill/Science Alert]
(via /.)
(Image: Cryteria, CC-BY)
Veteran transportation economics Hubert Horan has consistently published the best-informed, deepest critiques of Uber and Lyft, explaining how the companies can never, ever be profitable, and warning investors away from becoming the "greater fools" that allow Uber/Lyft's early investors to cash out at their expenses, while cataloging the many ways that Uber and Lyft's legislative strategy, coupled with predatory pricing, is destroying the cities they operate in.
Now, three weeks after Uber's disastrous IPO, which has left more than 80% of the $25.9B pumped in by Uber's pre-IPO investors underwater (over a period when the S&P 500 rose by 50%!), Horan is back with a sobering reckoning for the sector's future profits.
As Horan writes, there's no way that Uber and Lyft "can produce their service at costs consumers are willing to pay" and there's "no evidence that they can ever profitably expand to any other markets (food delivery, driverless cars, etc.)." Uber and Lyft are losing money faster than any Silicon Valley startup in history, and they have "none of the economic characteristics that allowed companies like Amazon or Facebook to quickly grow into profitability and drive strong public equity appreciation."
But that's not to say that the company failed its (early) investors. The company currently has a market cap of $80B, "corporate value [created] out of thin air," and Horan's educated guess is that the investors in Uber forced founder Travis Kalanick out not over sexual assault scandals, but because Kalanick wanted to remain a private company for as long as possible, keeping the company's finances shrouded in mystery so that critics couldn't see what was really going on behind the closed doors. In Kalanick's place, the investors installed a CEO who said the right things about transparency, but who also worked toward the $120B IPO value that would let them all realize a profit on their investments.
Horan lays much of the blame for Uber and Lyft's sustained existence at the feet of a credulous, cash-starved press who repeated the companies' claims that they could someday be profitable if only self-driving cars arrived, if only they could become intermediaries between every restaurant and every diner, if only, if only.
The decline of Uber and Lyft "seems inevitable." The companies are "actually higher cost and less efficient than the operators [they] had driven out of business." They survived and grew not due to technological advantage but because of "massive subsidies, regulatory arbitrage and other factors."
In the meantime, the shorts are betting big on Uber's collapse.
Few, if any of Uber’s narrative claims were objectively true. Hype about powerful, cutting edge technological innovations that could overwhelm incumbents in any market worldwide helped hide the fact that Uber was actually higher cost and less efficient than the operators it had driven out of business. Stories about customers freely choosing its superior products in competitive markets helped hide Uber’s use of massive subsidies to subvert market price signals and mislead investors about its growth economics. Misleading accounts about driver pay and working conditions helped hide the fact that most margin improvement was due to driving driver take-home pay down to minimum wage levels.
Uber was never going to dominate driverless cars and displace private car ownership, but these tales created false impressions about robust long-term growth. But all of these claims were uncritically repeated in the mainstream media, and over time they shaped the powerful general perception that Uber was “successful, efficient and highly valuable.”
The formula Uber used to build powerful, effective narratives was copied directly from what is widely used in partisan political battles. It combines significant resources (money and communication channels), the emotive, us-versus-them propaganda-style techniques demonstrated to be effective, and (Travis Kalanick’s contribution,) the willingness to deploy them in a ruthless, monomaniacal manner. The formula is especially effective when the interests that might disagree or challenge those claims were significantly less organized or funded.[11]
Will the “Train Wreck” Uber/Lyft IPOs Finally Change the Public Narrative About Ridesharing? [Hubert Horan/Naked Capitalism]
Abby Smith, a graduating senior at West Virginia's Parkersburg High School, claims that her principal, Kenneth DeMoss, plagiarized his commencement speech from Ashton Kutcher's monologue at the 2013 Teen Choice Awards. She originally posted the video above on her Facebook page.
According to Yahoo Lifestyle, "the principal directed Yahoo Lifestyle to the district's superintendent, who did not immediately respond to requests for comment, A Google search for "best motivational speech for teens" yields Kutcher's 2013 speech as the second video result."
From Yahoo:
"So first, the opportunity," principal DeMoss said in the graduation ceremony video. "I believe that opportunity looks a lot like hard work. When I was a kid growing up, I didn't get paid to do chores. I had to do 'em. I had to run the vacuum cleaner, dust the house, clean my room, cut the grass. When I became 15, I had to get my first paid job working as a busboy, so I could pay for my own insurance to help drive my family car. I didn't have my own car, nor was I given one; the family had to share it. Then I got a job working as a waiter; then I got a job selling shoes at the mall, then I got a job being a laborer for a construction company carrying shingles up and down a ladder to a roof and cleaning up job sites. Sometimes I even did two jobs at once. At one point, I was juggling four part-time jobs, like going to college."
"And the greatest thing about that is that I never had a job, in my life that I was better than, that I was too good for," the principal continued in the speech delivered to graduates. "I was lucky to just have a job, and every job I had was a stepping stone to my next job. I never quit my job until I had my next job. And so opportunities, for me, looked like hard work."
Kutcher's speech in 2013 is relatively the same:
"So first opportunity. I believe that opportunity looks a lot like hard work. When I was 13, I had my first job with my dad carrying shingles up to the roof. And then I got a job washing dishes at a restaurant, and then I got a job at a grocery store deli, and then I got a job at a factory sweeping Cheerio dust off the ground. I never had a job in my life that I was better than. I was always just lucky to have a job, and every job I had was just a stepping stone to my next job. I never quit my job until I had my next job. And so, opportunities, look a lot like work."
This dual-set (US and metric) set of Bondhus ball-end allen wrenches are on sale for 
The 1990s nanotechnology dream of tiny robots swimming through our blood stream to treat disease is moving (verrrry) slowly but surely toward reality. In a new milestone, researchers used an external magnetic field to steer microbots through a live mouse's body carrying therapeutic stem cells. From IEEE Spectrum:
..Delivering stem cells typically requires an injection with a needle, which lowers the survival rate of the stem cells, and limits their reach in the body. Microrobots, however, have the potential to deliver stem cells to precise, hard-to-reach areas, with less damage to surrounding tissue, and better survival rates, says Jin-young Kim, a principle investigator at DGIST-ETH Microrobotics Research Center, and an author on the paper.... The team fabricated the robots with 3D laser lithography, and designed them in two shapes: spherical and helical. Using a rotating magnetic field, the scientists navigated the spherical-shaped bots with a rolling motion, and the helical bots with a corkscrew motion. These styles of locomotion proved more efficient than that from a simple pulling force, and were more suitable for use in biological fluids, the scientists reported....
Kim says he and his colleagues are developing imaging systems that will enable them to view in real time the locomotion of their microrobots in live animals.
From The Pudding: a zoomable people map that shows the name of the person with the most Wikipedia traffic for any given city. I looked at Golden, CO (where I lived as a kid) and learned that actor Greg Germann is the Wikipedia champ of that little town.
Last night, The Cure celebrated the 30th anniversary of their Disintegration LP by playing the entire album at the Sydney Opera House. They opened with an array of b-sides and demo tracks, moved into Disintegration, and encored with "Burn" from The Crow soundtrack, "Three Imaginary Boys" from their 1979 debut album, and a cover of Wendy Waldman's "Pirate Ships." Here's the full setlist.
In 1904 a Manhattan church outing descended into horror when a passenger steamboat caught fire on the East River. More than a thousand people struggled to survive as the captain raced to reach land. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll describe the burning of the General Slocum, the worst maritime disaster in the history of New York City.
We'll also chase some marathon cheaters and puzzle over a confusing speeding ticket.
Yesterday, a guest on the 28th floor at the Tidewater Resort on Panama City Beach caught this video of a big shark circling a lone woman who had no idea the animal was nearby. Eventually people on the beach noticed the shark and yelled to the woman to return to shore. I don't know what kind of shark it was, or whether it was hungry, but I am certain that this video would be more interesting with the soundtrack below. (News Herald)
This morning, Trump went on a rant about special counsel Bob Mueller, who reiterated yesterday that his investigation did not clear the President. He then tweeted that Russia helped him get elected—a first admission that the Putin regime's interference in the 2016 campaign helped put him in the White House.
"I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected."
Then he denied it. The New York Times:
“No, Russia did not help me get elected,” Mr. Trump told reporters as he departed the White House for Colorado Springs. “I got me elected.” He spoke less than an hour after his Twitter post.
The original comment, a clause in one of several Twitter posts this morning, is an extraordinary admission from Mr. Trump, who has avoided saying publicly that Russia helped him win the presidency in 2016 through its election interference. American intelligence agencies and federal prosecutors have long concluded that Russia tried to influence voters.
Chills. I get chills and I'm on the edge of tears.
The "prosperity gospel" (previously) is a religious doctrine that encourages poor people to send specific amounts of cash (usually in the hundreds of dollars) to charismatic preachers, an act the preachers characterizes as "seed giving" -- and the preachers promise that God will reward these gifts by making the givers rich.
It's arguably the most predatory form of mainstream religion in practice today, and it benefits from the US tax code, which enables churches to accept donations without paying taxes on them, like nonprofits do, but unlike nonprofits, the preachers who exhort their followers to send them their millions never have to account for the money they raise, nor disclose how much of it lands in their own pockets and the pockets of their inner circles.
The BBC follows some prosperity gospel donors who gave to preachers (notably the convicted fraudster Todd Coontz, who is out of jail pending appeal and giving Periscope sermons from the front seat of his Mazzerati) out of desperation as their finances were hitting rock bottom -- often through a combination of catastrophic health bills, layoffs, and mortgage or rent increases -- and then ended up even poorer, sometimes homeless. Then, when they wrote to the preachers they'd sent so much money to, asking for help, the preachers either ignored them, or their flunkies told them to fuck off ("You know we get six or seven of these calls a week and if we help you, we are going to have to help everyone").
One factor that has galvanized opposition to these grifters is an excellent John Oliver report on the incredible personal wealth they have accumulated. Oliver got much of his research through the Trinity Foundation, a scrappy religious organization devoted to exposing the con-artists at the top of these evangelical pyramid schemes.
The Trinity Foundation and its founder, Ole Anthony, have been at it since the 1970s, keeping detailed dossiers on the net worth of the top prosperity gospel preachers and sharing them with journalists. Anthony even went undercover, helping Diane Sawyer expose Robert Tilton, leading to Tilton losing his TV show and being reduced to a shoestring operation.
Anthony sounds like an incredible character, stymied by the GOP's unwillingness to cross the super-rich preachers and the flocks they command. In the meantime, the believers are lambs to slaughter, and the preachers are sitting on millions.
During a four-year investigation, prosecutors dug up all sorts of irregularities, ruling that Coontz had been underreporting his income and exploiting expenses claims.
He had developed various ploys, such as flying economy but sending fake first-class invoices to the ministries he was freelancing for, so he could pocket the difference. He would also claim expenses twice, once from his own ministry and once from his client. He claimed for thousands of dollars spent on clothes (suits are not a permitted business expense) and for 400 cinema tickets, which the IRS also considered unreasonable.
On 26 January 2019, Coontz was sentenced to five years in prison for failing to pay taxes and assisting in the filing of false tax returns. He was also ordered to pay $755,669 in restitution.
He reported to jail in early April, but was freed by the judges, pending appeal.
Coontz did not respond to the BBC's request for comment, but he has previously denied wrongdoing. On his website, he also claims to have given more than $1m to charity.
His Twitter account is still posting daily (with no reference to his jail sentence) and he has taken to preaching - via the Periscope app - from the front seat of his Maserati.
"Are you calling to sow your $219 seed today?" was the immediate response when the BBC called Rockwealth's hotline. The operator was not able to share the significance of that figure and would not answer questions about how many people had called to pledge. "Not so many today, but there are several of us answering calls," she said. It is not clear whether the switchboard was serving only Rockwealth or other churches too.
The Trinity Foundation has recently filed a long report to the IRS, calling for Rockwealth to lose its status as a tax-exempt church. As always, it feels like a shot in the dark and it does not expect to hear back.
The preachers getting rich from poor Americans [Vicky Baker/BBC]
(via Naked Capitalism)
While famed singer and songwriter Leon Redbone has passed away at the age of 69, the official announcement of his death claims he was 127.
Singer-songwriter Leon Redbone, who specialized in old-school vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley-style music, died earlier today, his family confirmed. He was 69 — although, in characteristically whimsical fashion, the official statement announcing his death gave his age as 127.
Redbone had officially retired in 2015, with a representative then citing unspecified health concerns as the reason for his being unable to continue performing or recording.
A post on Redbone’s website confirming his death contained enough deadpan humor and whimsical fiction that it was almost certainly prepared in advance by the singer himself. “It is with heavy hearts we announce that early this morning, May 30th, 2019, Leon Redbone crossed the delta for that beautiful shore at the age of 127,” it read. “He departed our world with his guitar, his trusty companion Rover, and a simple tip of his hat. He’s interested to see what Blind Blake, Emmett, and Jelly Roll have been up to in his absence, and has plans for a rousing sing along number with Sári Barabás. An eternity of pouring through texts in the Library of Ashurbanipal will be a welcome repose, perhaps followed by a shot or two of whiskey with Lee Morse, and some long overdue discussions with his favorite Uncle, Suppiluliuma I of the Hittites. To his fans, friends, and loving family who have already been missing him so in this realm he says, ‘Oh behave yourselves. Thank you…. and good evening everybody.'”
Countless times I have frantically rummaged through my camping gear, digging for toilet paper as I madly need to go. My daughter never, ever, EVER returns toilet supplies to the same place. The Booty Duty bag is a handy, one-stop kit for all your excretory waste management supplies.
Camping for me involves a Volkswagen Camper. My bus starts most trips out as a well organized and carefully arranged environment. Everything from the solar panel to the BBQ is in its assigned place! I have tools, back-ups for the tools, cables, batteries, fuel, blankets, hats, sunscreen, bug repellant, you name it and someplace in that VW van you can probably find it. Zero thought ever goes into the toilet paper and supplies. They get stuffed into whatever space looks good at the moment. Then the TP is lost.
Most State and Federally designated/managed camping sites have bathrooms. Government TP is like sandpaper, but it is there. When camping even a tiny bit more off the grid, you better have your own shovel and paper. Finding that shovel and paper in the middle of the night, or really any time you are in a hurry always turns into a comedy of errors.
The Booty Duty is a purpose built bag that carries your roll of toilet paper and all your bathroom supplies! The bag handily affixes to your shovel and becomes a dispenser! It is thoughtfully designed to also house wet wipes, and have space for other hygiene products that may be required based on the composition of your camping party. With MOLLE straps the bag will integrate with almost all modern tactical/survival gear, so you can take the Booty Duty on a long hike, or leave it in your campsite.
Meet The Original Camping Toilet Paper Bag; the Booty Dooty Bag from Desert Rat Tactical. This bag helps bring the comforts of home when using the restroom, or the woodline, in the wilderness. The Booty Dooty Bag is not only a toilet paper carrier; it also dispenses the toilet paper straight from the bag itself. The Booty Dooty Bag features the following:
- 1. Dual Zippered on one handle Toilet Paper compartment [full size roll]
- 2. Zippered Wippee Compartment with elastic strapping inside - can also store other items such as a pocket/rescue knife, PTT Radio, small first aid kit, hand sanitizer, feminine products.
- 3. Side pouches on the toilet paper compartment for quick access for feminine product dispense during use
- 4. General Purpose quick release strap that can be used to hang around your neck while you are handling your business, strapped to your leg or slung across your back during your hike to the woodline.
- 5. Sleeved pocket in the back for a shovel handle for dispensing the toilet paper when you pitch the shovel into the ground
- 6. MOLLE Strapping on the back [Modular Lightweight Load-carrying Equipment] for extra compartments or for a holster for shooters and hunters. Designed to fit Blackhawk and Safariland platforms
- 7. Carry handle on top
- 8. Dispensing feature can be used with the Toilet Paper and the Wippee.
The bag comes in serveral colors/styles of camo or just plain black.
Desert Rat Tactical is offering 15% off if your use their code: 4dad2019 at checkout.
5MadMovieMakers shows us the perfect way to ruin a xylophone: "A total of 374 black-and-white '65 Ford Mustangs hit some black-and-white xylophone keys to play the world's first die-cast song. ... Yes this video is edited on the computer but it would've been difficult to film otherwise. Filmed with a Sony VG30H camcorder and edited with Adobe Premiere Pro 2019."
Ahead of this week's EU elections, the popular German Youtuber Rezo published a 55-minute video explaining the missteps of the ruling CDU party and other establishment parties in addressing climate change, inequality, rising militarism, and internet freedom (notably, the German support for the wildly unpopular Copyright Directive), a statement he backed up with hundreds of references.
The video caught the German public's mood, attracting 12,000,000+ views and inspiring a coalition of German Youtubers who released a joint statement co-signed by 90 people denouncing the ruling parties and calling on Germans to back minority parties with better track records on these issues, like the German Greens (the statements warned Germans away from the far-right AfD party and its right wing allies as well as the centrist parties).
Then came the EU elections, in which the CDU and other mainstream parties took a horrible pasting, while the Greens surged.
This so infuriated CDU leader Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer that she publicly denounced the Youtubers and promised a "very aggressive discussion" about what sort of measures could prevent people from complaining about their political masters in the future. In service to this mission, Kramp-Karrenbauer faxed the party's board to invite them to a seminar on dealing with "asymmetric campaign leadership" in the future.
Here's what Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, leader of the CDU, said about those YouTubers who offered their views on which party people should vote for:
What would actually have happened in this country, if a group of 70 newspaper editorials had made a joint appeal two days before the election: "please do not vote for the CDU or the SPD". That would have been a clear case of spin before the election, and would have led to heated debates in this country. And the question arises with regard to the issue of spin: what exactly are the rules from the analog domain, and which rules apply to the digital sector, yes or no? That's a question we will discuss. And that's why this discussion will be very aggressive.
In other words, how dare these impertinent youngsters criticize what their elders and betters are doing? Let's bring in some new rules for the Internet to stop that happening again.
German Political Leader Questions YouTubers' Right To Tell Fans Not To Vote For Her Party, Urgently Summons Her Advisers In Response -- By Fax [Glyn Moody/Techdirt]
Hey everyone, let us all take a Victory Poison Pill!
ABC News:
Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy Steven Winberg, who signed the export order and also attended the Clean Energy Ministerial, said he was "pleased that the Department of Energy is doing what it can to promote an efficient regulatory system that allows for molecules of U.S. freedom to be exported to the world."
Phenomenal maker Simone Giertz shares some of her battle with her brain tumor and makes a great lamp out of her radiation mask.
Julian Assange, imprisoned at Belmarsh on a 50-week sentence for jumping bail, was said by his lawyer to be too ill to appear by video link at a court hearing Thursday. The WikiLeaks founder is fighting extradition to the United States over the site's publication of classified U.S. government information.
According to WikiLeaks, Assange has been moved to the medical ward in jail.
A spokesman for the whistleblowing website said it had "grave concerns" about Assange's health. "During the seven weeks in Belmarsh his health has continued to deteriorate and he has dramatically lost weight," the spokesman said.
"Defence lawyer for Assange, Per Samuelson, said that Julian Assange's health state last Friday was such 'that it was not possible to conduct a normal conversation with him'."
Has anyone ever conducted a normal conversation with him?
AdAge reports that North Face successfully placed advertising into articles at Wikipedia, without other editors of the publicly-editable encyclopedia noticing. This effectively allowed North Face to co-opt the site's enormous influence in Google search results.
According to the agency, the biggest obstacle of the campaign was updating the photos without attracting attention of Wikipedia moderators to sustain the brand’s presence for as long as possible, as site editors could change them at any time.
The "hack" worked, at least for a while, evident in a quick Google search of some of the places mentioned in the campaign's case study video.
Soon after the North Face campaign was featured on AdAge, Wikipedia’s volunteer editors were quick to remove North Face’s photos, noting that the effort breached the site’s user terms for paid advocacy.
North Face claimed to have "worked with" the Wikimedia Foundation, which immediately denied it and issued a damning statement of its own: Let’s talk about The North Face defacing Wikipedia.
Yesterday, we were disappointed to learn that The North Face, an outdoor recreation product company, and Leo Burnett Tailor Made, an ad agency retained by The North Face, unethically manipulated Wikipedia. They have risked your trust in our mission for a short-lived marketing stunt.
In a video about the campaign, Leo Burnett and The North Face boasted that they “did what no one has done before … we switched the Wikipedia photos for ours” and “[paid] absolutely nothing just by collaborating with Wikipedia.”
The video was later published by AdAge, which said that the agency’s “biggest obstacle” was in manipulating the site “without attracting attention [from] Wikipedia moderators.”
Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation did not collaborate on this stunt, as The North Face falsely claims. In fact, what they did was akin to defacing public property, which is a surprising direction from The North Face. Their stated mission, “unchanged since 1966,” is to “support the preservation of the outdoors”—a public good held in trust for all of us.
The photo embedded above is of Aigüestortes i Estany de Sant Maurici National Park in Catalonia, Spain. Taken by David Iliff, a volunteer Wikimedia editor, "It was removed from Wikipedia by The North Face last month as part of its marketing stunt."
Here's a terrible deal on a mug at Amazon:
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