Political pranksters extrodinaire the Yes Men (previously) have printed a satirical edition of the Washington Post announcing that Donald Trump has abdicated and volunteers have fanned out across DC (where Trump is universally loathed) to distribute copies to all and sundry: you can follow their adventures at the #ByeBye45 hashtag.

In 2016, the Yes Men (previously), everyone's favorite political pranksters, hoaxed the NRA: today, they've released their short documentary, which lays bare the NRA's internal culture of racist-driven fear and gun-humping murderous fantasies.

"Guerrilla theatre is a form of intervention where acts of spontaneous, surprise performance in unlikely public spaces rupture the boring-as-shit, day-to-day reality for an unsuspecting audience," writes artist/instigator/author Bill Posters (aka Barnaby Francis) in his new book The Street Art Manual. — Read the rest

Chris Hughes co-founded Facebook with Mark Zukerberg, and describes Zuckerberg in warm terms as a friend, but in a long op-ed for the New York Times, Hughes calls for the breakup of Facebook and identifies Zuckerberg's shortsighted prioritization of "clicks" instead of "security and civility" for the platform's toxicity, blaming the company's unusual share structure (which gives Zuckerberg an absolute veto over all matters of company policy despite holding a minority of its shares) for a situation in which Zuckerberg is surrounded by yes-men who never check his worst impulses.

Jerry Falwell, Sr founded the Moral Majority, brought evangelicals into the voting booth, elected Ronald Reagan, and changed the face of American politics forever; his son, Jerry Jr now commands the Falwell empire, including Liberty University, which now has $3b in assets.

"'Disobedient Electronics' is a zine-oriented publishing project that seeks submissions from industrial designers, electronic artists, hackers and makers that disobey conventions, especially work that is used to highlight injustices, discrimination or abuses of power."

"Quick question," I asked the newly-minted University of Iowa President Bruce Harreld during his job talk. "Are you a performance artist?" As I watched Harreld's lackluster presentation -- filled with the kind of empty business jargon often used by prankster-activists The Yes Men, who had just visited campus -- I wondered if it could possibly be real, if it was a put-on.

At "Share the Safety," you can buy one of three Smith & Wesson guns, and the good folks at the NRA will send another one just like it to a lucky person in a low income, inner-city neighborhood, "law-abiding urbanites who will for the first time be able to defend themselves against those who prey on the urban poor." — Read the rest

A law enforcement official says he sent the infamous elevator video of football player Ray Rice delivering a knockout punch to his fiancee's face back in April. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has previously insisted that no one in the NFL was aware of the video until TMZ posted it on Monday. — Read the rest

Watch comedian Sam Hyde take the piss out of TED talks at Drexel University's TEDxDrexelU. From Philadelphia Magazine:

The event concluded with Sam Hyde, billed as a "video documentary filmmaker and journalist from Brooklyn" who "recently returned from Mogadishu, the most dangerous city on earth, where he shadowed the heroic al-Mahamud women on their quest to clean up their streets and restore humanity to their war-torn country."

2600 Magazine's Emmanuel Goldstein writes, "One of the keynote addresses at this year's HOPE conference (July 13-15, NYC) will be given by The Yes Men. They're a natural fit at the biennial hacker conference which will be featuring highly technical along with socially relevant talks. — Read the rest

US Trade Ambassador Ron Kirk was in Dallas to kick off a corporate power-event to drum up support for the foundering, secretive Transpacific Partnership, a secret treaty that builds on the work of ACTA to establishing punishing copyright laws that include mandatory surveillance and censorship. — Read the rest

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Maira Sutton has a long, engrossing account of the popular protest at the Dallas session of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a secretive treaty negotiation that includes a set of copyright rules that leave SOPA and ACTA in the dust. — Read the rest

Emmanuel Goldstein writes, "The coordinators of this year's Hackers On Planet Earth conference in New York have joined forces with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and have designated April as the month where 10 percent of all ticket sales will be donated to EFF. — Read the rest

The group of merry populist pranksters The Yes Men have a Kickstarter going to raise funds for Occupy Wall Street Journal, "a four-page broadsheet about the 99% represented at Liberty Plaza." (NYO)

Update: Alert readers point that that this gentleman isn't a trader, he's a self-described "attention-seeker"

Update 2: The Yes Men deny responsibility: "If you'd like to see the human face of the human perspective—the perspective of the 99% victimized by our demented and out-of-control financial system—come join the occupation of Wall Street"

In this telling BBC clip, a news presenter is rendered virtually speechless as a stock-trader explains that for traders like him, a Eurozone crash would be a godsend, since someone always makes money in crashes; he then goes on to state that it doesn't matter whether governments intervene in the Euro or not, because "governments don't rule the world, Goldman-Sachs does." — Read the rest

The Guardian profiles the Deterritorial Support Group, a secretive guerrilla humour protest group whose goals include "full communism, with lulz as a transitional demand." They're an interesting blend of radical politics, po-faced irony, sectarian haters, and media pranksters — The Yes Men by way of the Weather Underground. — Read the rest

Prankster activists The Yes Men are sick of having the videos depicting their shenanigans taken down through copyright complaints, so they've put the latest video, a full-length doc called The Yes Men Fix the World up as a torrent file through VODO, resistant to censorship and easy to get. — Read the rest

Nicholas sez,

The Open Video Conference in New York City is a two-day powwow for open web geeks, independent filmmakers, and everyone else.

This year's OVC takes place October 1-2 2010. With 60+ sessions on open source, HTML5, and participatory culture, the conference is bigger and better than before.

"Captain Salas graduated from the Air Force Academy and spent seven years in active duty from 1964 to 1971. He also held positions at Martin Marietta and Rockwell and spent 21 years at the FAA."

Caleb alerted me to the news that the "National Press Club hosted some retired military/FAA people who calmly stated that a UFO shut down their missile silo and they were told never to talk about it. — Read the rest