Trump spoke at the Economic Club of New York today and surprised attendees with the good news that his daughter Ivanka has created "created 14 million jobs" in the United States. That's almost 10% of the US workforce. Thanks, Ivanka!
From The Intelligencer:
At a speech to the Economic Club of New York today, President Trump declared that his daughter, Ivanka, has personally created 14 million new jobs. The president announced this figure — so astonishingly ludicrous it would embarrass a Stalin-era pronouncement — and then repeated it twice more as the crowd applauded politely.
The entire U.S. economy has created fewer than 6 million new jobs since Trump took office. So Trump is crediting his daughter with having personally created more than 200 percent of all new jobs in the United States. This is like supply-side economics but for authoritarian nepotism.
Image: Mark Frauenfelder. Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) Read the rest
If you have a lot of books at home, a cheap book safe like this is a good way to hide small things. The inside storage area is 2" x 5.625" x 9" and the book looks like a dictionary. (Crooks already know to scan bookshelves for The New English Dictionary, so you should put a jacket from another book on it.)
It has a lock and two keys to discourage snooping if someone pulls the book off the shelf. Read the rest
Rising tides and rain in Venice are flooding the city, and hotels are giving guests knee-high rubber boots so they can slosh their way from one tourist attraction to another.
From Yahoo News:
The high water, known locally as “acqua alta”, was amusing for tourists and a nuisance for residents going about their business, but levels were far lower than the 1.94 meters (6ft 4in) in the devastating November 1966 flood.
But even lower levels of the salty high water over the years take their toll on the city, eroding foundations of homes, businesses and city buildings.
Bad weather is continuing to dog Italy, with no real let-up forecast for several days.
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This little bear got stuck in a tree and was about to fall. Fortunately, three men with a blanket just happened to be there to break its fall.
To catch a falling bear
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A species of mouse deer called the silver-backed chevrotain was thought to be lost to science after 30 years of no sightings, but a video camera in a Vietnam forest captured one as it foraged for food.
From The Guardian:
The pictures of the rabbit-sized animal, also known as the silver-backed chevrotain, are the first to be taken in the wild and come nearly 30 years after the last confirmed sighting.
“We had no idea what to expect, so I was surprised and overjoyed when we checked the camera traps and saw photographs of a chevrotain with silver flanks,” said An Nguyen, a scientist and expedition team leader at Global Wildlife Conservation (GWC).
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The New York Times reports that girls as young as 12 have been stripped searched at music festival by Australian police eager to make drug arrests. Australia's zero-tolerance drug policy is “the only form of legislation that allows an adult to tell a young child to take off all their clothes,” Samantha Lee, the head of the Police Accountability Practice at the Redfern Legal Center, told the Times
From the article:
“It’s highly likely the vast majority of strip searches are being conducted unlawfully,” said Vicki Sentas, a senior law lecturer at the University of New South Wales who has researched strip-searching statistics.
In an inquiry conducted last month by the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission, a 16-year-old girl who attended a festival said she was asked to squat and cough in front of a police officer. She had no drugs.
“I could not stop crying. I was completely humiliated,” she said, according to her complaint. An officer who worked at the festival admitted that some of the searches he conducted may have been unlawful.
Mark Speakman, the state’s attorney general, said that strip searches in general were an “important investigative tool” but that the police needed to “get the balance right.”
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A Hong Kong motorcycle cop drove into a group of people were already running away. After hitting some people in the crowd, he circled back and hit them again. He's been suspended.
From Channel News Asia:
"We understand that this is a serious matter, we place high priority on this case," said Tse, adding that the case is under investigation.
Hong Kong saw one of its worst days of violence on Monday with a police officer shooting a 21-year-old protester and a man being set on fire.
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Cops can take your stuff without charging you for a crime. They can take fast cars they like and add them to the pool of police vehicles. They can take cash and use it to buy a foosball table for the break room. Good luck getting your stuff back. It's called civil asset forfeiture and is often used to swipe the life savings of migrant workers. Lee Adams of Vice explains how it works. Read the rest
The Sakura Pigma Manga Basic Set comes with 5 pens: 4 Pigma Microns (sizes 005, 01, 05, 08) a black brush pen, and a white ink gel pen (for highlights and to correct mistakes). Amazon has a good prices for the set: Read the rest
"You're eating. It's against the law." That's what this white police officer told a black man who was eating a sandwich while waiting for a train in Contra Costa, California. The man purchased the sandwich in the station, and was eating it outside in the platform while waiting for a BART train. According to the person who shot the video, there are no signs stating that it is forbidden to eat food on train platforms.
The officer grabbed the man's backpack and asked him for his identification. The man eating the sandwich calmly told the officer that he was doing nothing wrong and refused to show the cop his ID. The cop called for backup and four other officers arrived to handcuff the man and take him away.
“Four cops for eating a sandwich?,” says the man.
BART said it is investigating the incident, says The San Francisco Examiner. Read the rest
Myanmar is being sued the by 57-nation Organisation of Islamic Cooperation at the UN's International Court of Justice for allegedly conducting genocide against the Rohingya minority, reports ABC News. The lawsuit, filed by Gambia, alleges that:
Starting in October 2016 and then again in August 2017, Myanmar’s security forces engaged in so-called “clearance operations” against the Rohingya, a distinct Muslim ethnic minority, in Rakhine State, Myanmar. The operations, in particular those that started in August 2017, were characterized by brutal violence and serious human rights violations on a mass scale. Survivors report indiscriminate killings, rape and sexual violence, arbitrary detention, torture, beatings, and forced displacement. Reports have also shown that security forces were systematically planning for such an operation against the Rohingya even before the purported reason for the violence — retaliation for small scale attacks committed by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) — occurred. As a result, an estimated 745,000 people — mostly ethnic Rohingya — were forced to flee to Bangladesh.
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Self-made entrepreneur and noted thought-leader Donald Trump Jr. disappointed fans at his UCLA book-signing event when he refused to answer questions from the audience. The event, organized by a conservative student organization called Turning Point USA, was meant to last two hours, but the young philanthropic genius left the stage after 20 minutes when it became clear that his girlfriend's angry scolding of the audience wasn't going to pacify them.
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One of my family's favorite things to do is wander the neighborhoods of Tokyo. The narrow streets, filled with colorful visual, olfactory, and aural details, never fail to fill me with a sense of wonder. Yesterday one of my daughters showed me a YouTube Channel called Nippon Wandering TV. The person who runs the channel uses a high resolution GoPro (strapped to his chest or head, I guess) and walks through different Tokyo neighborhoods at different times of the day. He doesn't narrate the videos, and I'm glad he doesn't, because it's nice to hear the sounds of the streets -- talking, cars, music, etc. Each video is about 30 minutes long.
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My kids and I like to draw. We sometimes go to the weekly figure drawings sessions at the Art Directors Guild in LA, or we just sit at the dining room table and draw. As an amateur sketcher, I'm in awe of illustrator Mark Crilley's skill with a pencil, and with his instructional books and videos. His videos are enjoyable and useful -- he explains what he is doing with a calm, soothing voice, and the tips he offers are often just what I need to gain new understanding about drawing. In his latest video, Mark shows how to add shading to faces.
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The most recent episode of Last Week Tonight is John Oliver's celebratory victory lap over the end of coal giant Bob Murray's lawsuit against the show. Murray was suing for a 2017 episode calling Murray a "geriatric Dr. Evil" and for running a scene of a man in a squirrel costume holding a large bank check that said "Eat Shit Bob."
Oliver said the lawsuit was a "bullshit effort to silence us" -- in other words, a SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation), which is a way for rich creeps to abuse the legal system to silence anyone who says anything negative about them. (In 2010 Boing Boing was hit with a SLAPP and the plaintiff ended up having to pay us more than $50,000 in legal costs.) Read the rest
A worker at what appears to be an art studio scolded her co-workers for tricking her with an ersatz doorknob and a phony computer display.
What's wrong with my computer from r/Unexpected
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