The controversial white nationalist is coming for your stoner snacks. Rep. Miller's new bill would snuff out the legal cannabis delta-8 THC market.
In MAGA land, "freedom" is a politician's shorthand for "you are forbidden from doing anything I don't like." — Read the rest
The post Eight facts about hemp-hating, Hitler-heiling MAGA weirdo Mary Miller appeared first on Boing Boing.
Want to take a screenshot that looks like a photograph of a screen taken at a jaunty angle with extreme depth-of-field, like in stock art or whatever? Blurmatic has you covered.
Throwing my hat into the depth-of-field ring, here's a fun tilty blurry browser demo
You can select which part of the image is in focus, choose a high, medium or low blurring effect, drag it around to make different angles, and download the results as an image. — Read the rest
The post Blurmatic makes screenshots with a depth-of-field effect appeared first on Boing Boing.
In Southern California's Riverside County, a driver was racing down a residential street when they lost control and the car launched into the air.
It flew across a home's front lawn, over a pick-up truck in the driveway, and right into the garage. — Read the rest
The post Incredible video of car flying over a pickup truck right into home's garage appeared first on Boing Boing.
In a searing new satirical video, The Lincoln Project likens Donald Trump's numerous criminal indictments to a 1990s-style compilation album.
Titled "That's What I Call Conspiracy, Volume 3!" the video mimics the aesthetic and tone of television ads for song compilation LPs, presenting Trump's alleged crimes as if they were chart-topping hits. — Read the rest
We already covered the oral arguments in the Murthy v. Missouri case earlier this week, showing that the Supreme Court appears to be quite skeptical of the arguments by the states regarding the federal government “jawboning” to convince social media to take down certain content. For months now, we’ve been pointing out that the factual record in that case is a mess, driven by conspiracy theorists pushing nonsense. Unfortunately, a few Judges both believed the nonsense and then when they couldn’t rely on it to make their point had to misquote people, quote things out of context, or entirely fabricate parts of quotes in their rulings.
What became abundantly clear in the oral arguments Monday was that multiple justices, including Trump-appointed ones, found the factual record to be suspect and problematic. The crux of the case was effectively (1) the White House made a few public statements in which they were angry about how social media moderated, (2) the companies regularly met with government agencies about a variety of things (cybersecurity, COVID misinformation, election integrity), and (3) therefore we can assume that any content moderation that occurred on the platforms was at the government’s command.
It was a weak argument, and multiple justices pointed out how tenuous the connection was between the government and the actions of the companies.
Over the last few months, we’ve pointed out a few times how this and some related campaigns have been weaponized by proxies to try to stifle any effort to respond to (not block!) disinformation campaigns and election interference, including the misleading publication of “The Twitter Files,” by pretend journalists who didn’t understand what they were looking at (nor bother to speak to any experts who might have explained it to them).
The media is slowly, but surely, putting the underlying story together of how a bunch of nonsense peddlers concocted a full blown conspiracy theory full of disinformation, all targeted at destroying the ability of disinformation researchers to counter disinformation by attacking them as censors. Last September, the Washington Post had a big story on this:
Academics, universities and government agencies are overhauling or ending research programs designed to counter the spread of online misinformation amid a legal campaign from conservative politicians and activists who accuse them of colluding with tech companies to censor right-wing views.
The escalating campaign — led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other Republicans in Congress and state government — has cast a pall over programs that study not just political falsehoodsbut also the quality of medical information online.
In November, NBC had a big story that went a bit further in highlighting how this effort had basically killed off perfectly reasonable information sharing (of the nature that Justices Kagan and Kavanaugh noted happen all the time in government).
The most recent setback camewhen the FBI put an indefinite hold on most briefings to social media companies about Russian, Iranian and Chinese influence campaigns. Employees at two U.S. tech companies who used to receive regular briefings from the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force told NBC News that it has been months since the bureau reached out.
And, just before the Murthy hearing, the NY Times put out a big piece tying together some of the loose ends about all this, and detailing the nature of the campaign. The whole effort was, in short, a made up conspiracy theory by a group of operatives seeking to kneecap any research into disinformation or how to counter it, perhaps recognizing how such efforts would harm Donald Trump. As the article notes, much of it seems to have been orchestrated by Trump advisor Stephen Miller:
The counteroffensive was led by former Trump aides and allies who had also pushed to overturn the 2020 election. They include Stephen Miller, the White House policy adviser; the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, both Republicans; and lawmakers in Congress like Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, who since last year has led a House subcommittee to investigate what it calls “the weaponization of government.”
Those involved draw financial support from conservative donors who have backed groups that promoted lies about voting in 2020. They have worked alongside an eclectic cast of characters, including Elon Musk, the billionaire who bought Twitter and vowed to make it a bastion of free speech, and Mike Benz, a former Trump administration official who previously produced content for a social media account that trafficked in posts about “white ethnic displacement.” (More recently, Mr. Benz originated the false assertion that Taylor Swift was a “psychological operation” asset for the Pentagon.)
Benz is a bizarre character. As an anonymous troll online, he pushed blatantly bigoted nonsense about the “great replacement theory” and “white genocide.” Now he presents himself as a former State Department official and a cybersecurity expert. His name shows up repeatedly in all of this, including in efforts by Jim Jordan to attack disinformation research. The reality was that he was a low-level speechwriter in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, who then helped Stephen Miller as a speechwriter, and only joined the State Department in November of 2020 after Trump lost the election.
It was only then that he suddenly remade himself as a “cyber expert,” despite having no real qualifications or experience in the space. And he continued to leverage that brief couple of months in the State Department to suggest he has some sort of deep knowledge or expertise of government censorship. The NY Times notes how Benz’s conspiracy theory nonsense (in which he’s either never actually understood, or deliberately misunderstands, the nature of disinformation research) became the fuel that powered both the Missouri case and Jim Jordan’s weaponization committee:
In late November 2020, Mr. Benz was abruptly moved to the State Department as a deputy assistant secretary for international communications and information policy. It is unclear precisely what he did in the role. Mr. Benz has since claimed that the job, which he held for less than two months, gave him his expertise in cyberpolicy.
Mr. Benz’s report gained national attention when a conservative website, Just the News, wrote about it in September 2022. Four days later, Mr. Schmitt’s office sent requests for records to the University of Washington and others demanding information about their contacts with the government.
Mr. Schmitt soon amended his lawsuit to include nearly five pages detailing Mr. Benz’s work and asserting a new, broader claim: Not only was the government exerting pressure on the platforms, but it was also effectively deputizing the private researchers “to evade First Amendment and other legal restrictions.”
Benz was also one of the originators of the bogus “22 million tweets” claims that completely tripped up Matt Taibbi (the number was how many tweets the Election Integrity Partnership reviewed as discussing the mis- and disinfo topics they covered after the election, and had nothing to do with how many tweets the EIP reported to Twitter: just a few thousand). As the NY Times details, Taibbi’s partner in the Twitter Files, Mike Shellenberger, credits Benz with helping him understand what he had “uncovered” with the Twitter Files:
In March 2023, Mr. Benz joined the fray. Both Mr. Taibbi and Mr. Benz participated in a live discussion on Twitter, which was co-hosted by Jennifer Lynn Lawrence, an organizer of the Trump rally that preceded the riot on Jan. 6.
As Mr. Taibbi described his work, Mr. Benz jumped in: “I believe I have all of the missing pieces of the puzzle.”
There was a far broader “scale of censorship the world has never experienced before,” he told Mr. Taibbi, who made plans to follow up.
Later, Mr. Shellenberger said that connecting with Mr. Benz had led to “a big aha moment.”
“The clouds parted, and the sunlight burst through the sky,” he said on a podcast. “It’s like, oh, my gosh, this guy is way, way farther down the rabbit hole than we even knew the rabbit hole went.”
As we’ve detailed, Taibbi and Shellenberger never seemed to understand what they were looking at and flailed around embarrassingly for months. They needed help from someone who actually understood stuff to pull together the pieces (which would have shown the mostly boring, ho-hum nature of what Twitter’s trust & safety team was actually doing). Instead, they got suckered in by a nonsense-peddling conspiracy theorist who told a story that played right into the confirmation bias they needed to convince themselves that they had been gifted a huge story of government censorship (which is just not supported by any of the evidence).
The Times report also suggests that Jim Jordan’s “Weaponization” subcommittee appears to have leaked private deposition information to Stephen Miller to help him file even more sketchy lawsuits.
Mr. Miller followed with his own federal lawsuit on behalf of private plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden, filing with D. John Sauer, the former solicitor general of Missouri who had led that case. (More recently, Mr. Sauer has represented Mr. Trump at the Supreme Court.)
Democrats in the House and legal experts questioned the collaboration as potentially unethical. Lawyers involved in the case have claimed that the subcommittee leaked selective parts of interviews conducted behind closed doors to America First Legal for use in its private lawsuits.
An amicus brief filed by the committee misrepresented facts and omitted evidence in ways that may have violated the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York wrote in a 46-page letter to Mr. Jordan.
However, all of this adds up to a pretty straightforward path: a bunch of Trumpist operatives in the form of Stephen Miller, Jim Jordan, Mike Benz and some others have plotted out a nonsense conspiracy theory — either deliberately or by simply misunderstanding what they were looking at — to present an entirely fictional story of a “censorship industrial complex,” and the only real purpose of this effort is to kneecap researchers and experts in disinformation from studying how disinformation flows and how to best counter it.
The organizations involved in the Election Integrity Partnership faced an avalanche of requests and, if they balked, subpoenas for any emails, text messages or other information involving the government or social media companies dating to 2015.
Complying consumed time and money. The threat of legal action dried up funding from donors — which had included philanthropies, corporations and the government — and struck fear in researchers worried about facing legal action and political threats online for the work.
“You had a lot of organizations doing this research,” a senior analyst at one of them said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of fear of legal retribution. “Now, there are none.”
Having watched all of this play out over the past two years, and feeling like I was yelling into the wind about it (especially as someone who has actually spent years calling out actual attempts by the government to censor content), it was at least comforting to see multiple Justices (mainly Kavanaugh, Barrett, Sotomayor and Kagan) see through all of this and recognize the emptiness at the heart of the Murthy lawsuit, which almost entirely consists of sand being deliberately thrown around by a bunch of bullshit peddlers.
Try as they may, violence will likely not solve this disagreement. Perhaps it was solved by Vodka.
Not the Three Stooges pic.twitter.com/lQbpNXjUOC
— Outspoken™️ (@Out5p0ken) September 21, 2022
Via Sean M.
Image: Tribalium/shuttershock
This startling footage was recently captured by a security camera outside a Dallas, Texas home. While some might think that the video simply depicts extraterrestrial visitors or even birds, we all know they are DMT machine elves that have broken through the extra-dimensional barrier to frolic on our driveways. — Read the rest
Soon after Christine Blasey Ford, a Palo Alto University professor, came forward to speak publicly about an allegation that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in high school, senators, including Republicans, urged that the confirmation vote be delayed until the Senate Judiciary Committee heard from Ford. With the possibility that Ford will testify, it’s hard to avoid comparing Kavanaugh to the other modern Supreme Court nominee accused of sexual misconduct during his nomination: Clarence Thomas, who was nominated by George H.W. Bush in 1991.
The two cases have many differences, not least among them the cultural context in which they did and are taking place. But looking back, how did the public respond to Anita Hill’s sexual harassment allegations against Thomas in 1991, and what might that tell us about how the public might respond to Kavanaugh now?
First, Thomas’s nomination was extremely popular among the public. In a July Gallup poll taken soon after Thomas’s nomination, 52 percent of Americans supported his confirmation, while just 17 percent were against it. Just after he was nominated, Thomas polled better than just about any other modern Supreme Court nominee.
What’s more, after Hill came forward to testify against him in early October of 1991, Thomas’s support only rose, eventually peaking at 58 percent in Gallup’s historical tracking.
And while Americans were by and large in favor of delaying the confirmation vote until Hill had a chance to testify before the committee, her testimony didn’t shift opinions. Forty-seven percent of Americans thought the accusations against Thomas were not true, while 21 percent thought they were, according to a CBS News/New York Times poll conducted days before Hill testified. After her testimony was broadcast on live TV, another CBS News/New York Times poll found that an even greater share doubted Hill’s accusations; 54 percent said they thought her charges were untrue, and 27 percent thought they were true. According to a Times article on the poll, “there was little difference” in the responses from men and women.
Thomas, of course, was confirmed 52-48, and senators indicated that the polling was, in part, what convinced them to vote for him. According to a 1991 USA Today article, when asked about his vote in favor of Thomas, Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama (who was a Democrat at the time) highlighted that polls from his state showed support for the nominee. The article said that Bob Dole, then the Senate minority leader, “acknowledged Thomas would have been rejected if the polls had not swung in his favor.”
It’s difficult to imagine the Thomas confirmation hearings playing out the same way now. Even just one year after Thomas’s confirmation, surveys found that Americans had shifted their perspective in favor of Hill. By a margin of 43 percent to 39 percent, Americans believed the law professor over Thomas, according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll conducted in October of 1992. In June of 1994, an ABC News poll found 34 percent of Americans thought Hill was sexually harassed by Thomas, while 31 percent thought she was not. The rest either said they didn’t know or didn’t have an opinion.
What changed? Women. Specifically, how they viewed sexual harassment in the wake of Hill’s testimony. In 1986, long before Thomas was nominated to the court, 17 percent of Americans said sexual harassment was a “big problem” for women in the workplace, according to a Time/Yankelovich Clancy Shulman poll. The majority — 67 percent — said it was “somewhat of a problem.” Once Hill’s allegations surfaced in 1991, polls showed increased sensitivity to sexual harassment. A poll conducted by the same pollster the day before Hill testified found that the share of people who said sexual harassment was a “big problem” had more than doubled. Months after Hill’s testimony, 44 percent of Americans in a Life Magazine poll said sexual harassment in the workplace for women was a “very serious” problem.
Kavanaugh’s confirmation, meanwhile, is playing out during the #MeToo era, and public opinion of what is and isn’t appropriate behavior by men toward women has changed dramatically. In a 2018 poll by ABC News and The Washington Post, 72 percent of Americans said sexual harassment was a serious problem for women in the workplace — far higher than the share who felt that way before and just after Hill’s testimony. Recognition of sexual misconduct as a problem has substantially shifted even compared with just a few years ago. In 2011, an ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 47 percent of Americans said sexual harassment was a serious problem.
Another big difference: Kavanaugh is far less popular than Thomas was. Kavanaugh entered the nomination process with one of the lowest approval scores for a nominee. And while Thomas’s support increased throughout the nomination process, Kavanaugh’s hasn’t changed much since he entered the arena. The most recent Gallup poll, conducted in August, found that support for the Trump nominee stands at a net 4 point approval, the same as it was in July. A more current poll, conducted in September by CNN, found slightly less support for his confirmation.
So, while Thomas was boosted by his high approval marks in the polls, Kavanaugh is not likely to get the same political advantage, considering his low level of public support. His poll numbers may change in the coming days and weeks as the story develops, but it’s difficult to say which factors will affect them more.
Again, the Thomas and Kavanaugh cases might have more differences than similarities:
We can’t really know how Americans will weigh the various factors involved in Kavanaugh’s case just yet, or if ultimately they’ll default to party lines. But given how views on sexual misconduct have changed, it’s difficult to imagine the public responding to the allegations against Kavanaugh as they did to Hill — even if he’s eventually confirmed.
 |
submitted by /u/GeneLatifah [link] [comments] |
Two cats facing each other on a narrow ledge want to pass each other, but it isn't easy.
In fact, it looks impossible. But after a lot of backing up by one cat and looks of confusion by both, they finally come to a humorous arrangement that gets the job done.
I just bought this hanging wallet shelf because it's just $11 when you use the promo code AGKZWGAV. I'm using it to store my shoes and boots. It will replace a falling-apart shoe rack contraption the previous owner added to my closet.
Russian band Leningrad's "Kolshik" is a reversed video of multiple disasters in and around a circus.
Someone reversed the reverse: https://youtu.be/YPtl9pUI8cM
[via]
Announced today: So It Is, a new album of Cuban-inspired jazz from the monumentally amazing Preservation Hall Jazz Band (previously), due out on April 21. Available today: Santiago, an instrumental track from the album that will MAKE YOU DANCE.
Art-rock mastermind Dave Sitek (TV on the Radio) produced the album, their second featuring all original material. In a statement, bandleader-bassist Ben Jaffe explained that the sessions were invigorated by a 2015 trip to Cuba, where they came "face to face with [their] musical counterparts."
"There's been a connection between Cuba and New Orleans since day one – we're family," he said. "A gigantic light bulb went off, and we realized that New Orleans music is not just a thing by itself; it's part of something much bigger. It was almost like having a religious epiphany."
Sitek recalled that, after arriving in New Orleans to meet the long-running band, he and Jaffe accidentally stumbled into one of the city's renowned second-line parades. "I was struck by the visceral energy of the live music all around, this spontaneous joy, everything so immediate," he said. "I knew I had to make sure that feeling came out of the studio. It needed to be alive. It needed to sound dangerous."
So It Is [Preservation Hall Jazz Band/Legacy]
Preservation Hall Jazz Band Plot Cuban-Inspired LP 'So It Is' [Ryan Reed/Rolling Stone
The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is NVIDIA's newest, most powerful graphics card for gamers not only on Windows but also under Linux. I only received the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti this morning so here are my initial Linux performance figures for this new high-end Pascal graphics card compared to other NVIDIA and AMD Radeon graphics cards. Linux VR tests, CUDA/OpenCL compute benchmarks, and additional GeForce GTX 1080 Ti results will be published in the days ahead when having more time to spend with this graphics card.
Educator/musician Annie Bosler and peak performance coach/author Don Greene provide simple tips to optimize the practice of practicing. (TEDEd)
Follow @RubenBolling on Twitter and Facebook.
Please join Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the INNER HIVE, for early access to comics, and more.
And/or buy Ruben Bolling’s new book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures. Book One here. Book Two here.
The Family Acid is my favorite Instagram feed. It's a stream of photographer/author/explorer Roger Steffens's vintage snapshots of his psychedelic dynamic, inspiring, and psychedelic life in the counterculture since the early 1960s. Roger's children Kate and Devon are the editors and curators of their dad's hundreds of thousands of slides and negatives.
Kate has just issued these fantastic enamel pins for just $10/each. The "LSD did this to me" design is based on her dad's original pin from 1960s. As Boing Boing patron saint Timothy Leary once said, "You have to go out of your mind to use your head!"
As performed by Viva Vox in May 2011. The arrangement is by Boris Balunović, and it is conducted by Jasmina Lorin. Ivan Propadović is the soloist. [via r/videos]
Heather says it sounds vaguely like something from Spongebob Squarepants.
Here's the original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzGKsXPBILw
Tight scheduling and months of preparation are hallmarks of modern movie production. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, moments of genuine authenticity arise from ad-libs, disobedience and outright on-set screwups. Screenrant collected 10 of the best, from Tom Cruise's crazy-violent stunts to David Duchovny rambling perfectly through forgotten lines in Zoolander.
And, yes, Midnight Cowboy is walkin' here.
But first, E.O. Wilson explains why he believes extraterrestrial life is out there:
Many readers counter Linker’s doubts that monotheistic faiths could cope with the discovery of E.T.:
There is no problem here. It’s called the scandal of particularity. God revealed himself to the Jews and not to other nations. Nevertheless, it became incumbent upon the chosen people to spread the good news to the other nations. “It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.” Isaiah 49:6
The nations were the aliens of their day.
Samaritans, then the Greeks, then the Romans, …. the Irish and the Native Americans we all aliens to the promise, yet God preaches peace to those who are far off and to those who are near. Eph 2:17 The Irish took to the Gospel like ducks to water. So much so that there were no Irish martyrs. Why would we assume that ET wouldn’t be receptive to the good news as well?
Damon Linker says, “the discovery of advanced life on other planets would imply that human beings are just one of any number of intelligent creatures in the universe.” And that is a problem how? Indeed, the would need to be intelligent in order to receive the gospel. He seems to think that God speaks to us because were better than others.
Not so. The LORD did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any of the peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but because the LORD loved you and kept the oath which He swore to your forefathers” Deuteronomy 7:7-8
Finally, does Linker think created in God image means body shape? Surely, he can’t be that naïve!
Another notes “one obvious flaw” with Linker’s position:
The monotheistic religions I know of all believe in “Angels”, who are not human, nor are of earth (also Devils/Demons, fallen versions of the same). To adapt to finding a THIRD group of intelligent beings, is different than if they believed we were unique in our intelligence and will.
Another reader:
Has Damon Linker communicated with all of the space aliens out there? If not, how can he write the line that you quote: “Did God create those other intelligent creatures, too, but without an interest in revealing himself to them? Or did they, unlike human beings, evolve all on their own without divine origins and guidance?”
If he doesn’t chat with them, how does he know that they have no divine origins and guidance, that they do not have religion? How does he know that God has not revealed himself to them? If they are out there, maybe some space people live in far greater harmony with God than we do on earth.
Another notes:
Seventh-Day Adventists, the denomination of my youth that I no longer claim, believe quite readily in aliens. The story is that other worlds do in fact exist, that god created a universe of many inhabited planets with unique beings, that each had a Tree of Life and a temptation and that we are the only planet that fell. So life on this planet is part of a “Great Controversy” between God and Satan to determine who’s right about everything, and the other planets are simply waiting and watching for the outcome. Adventism came out of the mid 1800s, I’m sure there are some cultural contributions to the SF narrative in their eschatology. But I’ve never seen anyone really pick it apart.
One more reader:
For a decade or so, all the subjects surrounding these questions have been discussed in conferences held by the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley and in its journal, Theology and Science. So Christian, Jewish and Moslem theologians are involved and will not be caught unaware. Both CTNS and the Vatican (with an observatory in Arizona) are active participants in SETI – the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
A reader serves up the first candidate for our “Best Cover Song Ever” contest:
With all the anxiety and tumult in the news, I figure we need a good metal song for some catharsis. Better yet, a metal song play with a bit fey musical instrument! I therefore nominate Rob Scallon’s ukelele cover of “War Ensemble” by thrash metal legends Slayer.
Our selection committee is giving more weight to covers that blend genres like that. Email your submissions to contest@andrewsullivan.com.
At the subscription-only Beautiful Agony site, people submit videos of themselves having an orgasm, shot from the shoulders up; Vice interviewed the founders. Read the rest
Here's a great history of English mispronunciations that became the received pronunciations. The piece makes the important point that English has no canon, no unequivocal right way or wrong way of speaking -- a point that is often lost in Internet linguistic pedantry and literacy privilege.
I'm as guilty as anyone of thinking that my English is the best English, but the next time I wince at "nukular," I'll remind myself that "bird" started out as "brid" and "wasp" started out as "waps," but were mispronounced into common usage.
Adder, apron and umpire all used to start with an "n". Constructions like "A nadder" or "Mine napron" were so common the first letter was assumed to be part of the preceding word. Linguists call this kind of thing reanalysis or rebracketing.
Wasp used to be waps; bird used to be brid and horse used to be hros. Remember this when the next time you hear someone complaining about aks for ask or nucular for nuclear, or even perscription. It's called metathesis, and it's a very common, perfectly natural process.
8 pronunciation errors that made the English language what it is today [David Shariatmadari/Guardian]
(via Hacker News)
(Image: Double bitted felling axe, Wikimedia Commons/Luigizanasi CC-BY-SA)
    
|
