Patrick Kennedy

The Trump administration’s policy of separating immigrant children from their families has been credited primarily to the strenuous efforts of White House adviser Stephen Miller. Perhaps you would like to call him about it.

Read more...

Burger King’s Russian division has come under fire yet again for a misogynistic ad campaign.

Burger King’s Russian division took down and apologized for an ad on social media promising 3 million rubles (about $47,000 USD) and a lifetime supply of Whoppers to women who could get impregnated by World Cup team members.

Read Full Story

As the atrocities of the Trump administration continue to pile up, let’s remember to keep Jimmy Fallon in our thoughts and prayers. In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Fallon admits that playfully stroking Donald Trump’s hair (and ego) on The Tonight Show in the run-up to the November 2016 presidential…

Read more...

Chiefs offensive lineman Laurent Duvernay-Tardif graduated from medical school at McGill University in Montreal last month, becoming Dr. Laurent Duvernay-Tardif, M.D. But Duvernay-Tardif won’t be able to show off his new title during the Chiefs’ games next season. According to TVA Sports’ Andy Mailly-Pressoir, the NFL…

Read more...

Justin Peters takes stock photos and combines them into fantastical and mind-bending scenes. I’ve seen lots of this sort of thing, but these are particularly well done. The one with the umbrella and the road is a straight-up optical illusion and broke my brain for awhile. (via colossal, which has been a real source of joy & possibility these days)

Tags: art   Justin Peters   remix

Last night, a group of culture jammers called Indecline improved a "1-800-GOT-JUNK?" billboard on a highway in Emeryville, California, just east of San Francisco. The billboard previously said "We make junk disappear" and they fixed it to read "We make kids disappear - ICE."

In a statement sent to the media, Indecline stated that the modification was a response to "President Trump's handling of the current immigration crisis, particularly, the separation of young children from their families."

Indecline also posted the following documentation of their work:

https://vimeo.com/276240430

(SFGate)

At Ursula, an immigration facility in McAllen, TX, 500 children separated from their families are crammed 20 to a cage. It's home to kids of all ages, from toddlers to young teens (once a teen turns 18, they are magically converted into a criminal and moved to the adult facility). (more…)

Cristiano Ronaldo just played one of the best games of his life. He was outstanding throughout today’s Portugal-Spain match, holding up play like a champ, giving life to numerous counterattacks with ingenious flicks and passes, and, oh yeah, scoring three goddamn goals in what ended as a 3-3 tie. His best goal by far…

Read more...

Here we have a highlight reel brimming with the exploits of Olivier Rioux, a 12-year-old basketball player who is said to stand at 6 feet and 9 inches. Since most 12-year-olds are not 6-foot-9, you can probably guess how this is going to go for Rioux’s poor opponents:

Read more...

During his visit with brutal North Korean dictator—and wearer of one of the tightest Asian-man high-top fades, Kim Jong Un—President NuNu von SherbetSkin saluted a uniformed North Korean military officer because he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing.

Read more...

Microsoft has submerged an entire data center 100 feet below the surface of the ocean near the UK’s Orkney islands. It is powered by wind, solar, and tidal sources, and will be keep cool by using the frigid ocean water as a heat sink.

From Quartz:

The logic is sound: Bringing data centers close to hubs of computing power benefits customers, enabling smoother web surfing or game playing by cutting down the back-and-forth between users and servers. Microsoft says nearly half the world’s population lives within 150 km (120 miles) of the ocean. And because oceans are uniformly cool below a certain depth, keeping the machines under the sea would cut down the cooling costs that make up a large chunk of the operating budget of data centers.

The Project Natick data center is made up of 864 servers packed in a 40 foot container that now sits about 22 km (14 miles) from the coast. That’s a tiny fraction of some of the huge servers—covering hundreds of thousands of square feet—that tech companies like Microsoft operate. But it may be enough to do a pilot test, and prove that the server could be deployed at commercial scale.

For this pilot project, Microsoft says it will operate the data center for 12 months. First it’ll put the servers through a battery of tests to check on power consumption, humidity levels, noise creation, and temperatures. Then the company will let some customers use the data center. If successful, Microsoft will keep operating the servers, and allow its customers to use it to run their own computations. Currently, Project Natick sits on sea bottom owned by the Scottish government, but the data center is designed such that it could fit into standard shipping containers and delivered where it’s most wanted.

Image: YouTube/Microsoft

Klopp welcomes a new member to the backroom staff, Philipp Jacobsen

Footballers, pushing themselves to the edge of their capabilities, sometimes push a little too far. Whether it is a series of niggling injuries, such as Adam Lallana and Nathaniel Clyne faced this year, a major injury, as befell Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, or more nefarious varieties, as the ones Mohamed Salah and Loris Karius suffered, injuries and rehabilitation are part of the game. Perhaps even more so under Jürgen Klopp’s preferred variety of Heavy Metal Football™.

In an attempt to improve the recoveries of our fallen Reds, Klopp has hired Philipp Jacobsen as the club’s medical rehabilitation and performance manager. Jacobsen worked previously with Greek club Panathinaikos between 2001-2004, Portsmouth in 2005, and more recently with the Qatari national team from 2015-17. In between footballing gigs, he established himself as a senior physio at Aspetar, a Qatar-based orthopaedic and sports medicine hospital. And wouldn’t you know it? He’s German.

This will not be Jacobsen’s first time working with Liverpool players. He oversaw the rehabilitation of Adam Lallana twice this season. Hopefully that is not the best example of Jacobsen’s abilities. Regardless, Kloppo must have seen something he liked about Jacobsen in his attempts to fix Lallana’s menagerie of injuries, and now he’s a full-time member of the backroom staff.

Welcome to Liverpool, Philipp! I hope you have some experience in rehabilitating victims of Sergio Ramos thuggery. And hamstrings.

California judge Aaron Persky, who in 2016 sentenced former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner to only six months in prison after he was convicted on three counts of felony sexual assault, was recalled from office after Californians voted Tuesday to remove him from the bench. He is the first California judge to be…

Read more...

In what might be arguably the weirdest story to come out of the Trump administration, it turns out that North Korea has no intention of giving up nuclear weapons, but it will consider adding a Western-style burger joint in Pyongyang as a show of good faith.

Read more...

According to the excellent wunderkammer of Twitter accounts, We Like To Learn, "Throughout history, sailors have mistaken Beluga Wales for mermaids because of their human-like knees."

(As our helpful commenters point out, those aren't literally "knees" in the image but rather love handles that help the whales steer as they swim. More here.)

(via Daily Grail)

Donald Trump’s hastily arranged replacement for the Super Bowl champion Eagles’ White House visit featured the president making a very brief appearance to talk about how great the economy is and, then, stand awkwardly while mouthing maybe half the words to “God Bless America” like a Yankees fan in right field who…

Read more...

The Redwood Falls (Minn.) Gazette published the above paid obituary on Monday, both online and in print. Sometime Tuesday, the paper deleted the obit from its website. The Schunk and Dehmlow families seem to have some unsettled business, though I suppose this is one step toward a resolution.

Read more...

What Went Wrong? is a citizen journalism project started in sub-Saharan Africa to document all the unsustainable aid projects started by Westerners who fail to follow through after their PR blitz. Journalist Peter DeCampo spoke with BRIGHT magazine about the project, where Africans can text reports on local fiascoes and boondoggles: (more…)

An FBI agent was showing off his dance moves at a Denver bar on Saturday, but when he did a backflip, his gun flew out of his holster. When he grabbed it off the ground, it fired into the crowd that was watching him and hit a patron in the leg.

According to CNN:

One person was struck in the lower leg but is expected to survive, Denver police said.

Authorities have not identified the agent because he was not arrested, Denver police community resource officer Marika Putnam said.

Denver police will continue investigating the incident, and the district attorney's office will determine whether charges will be filed against the agent.

A 51-year-old woman was arrested after she drove her car on a little league baseball field Friday night in Sanford, Maine, leading to one person dead. Carol Sharrow was charged with manslaughter in the death of 68-year-old Douglas Parkhurst, but it turned out that this tragedy was somehow even darker than it already…

Read more...

These posters designed by the NSA emphasizing the importance of security and secrecy to their employees are amazing. Declassified in mid-April 2018, most of the posters were produced in the 50s, 60s, and 70s and look as though they were cooked up by Salvador Dali or the Dadaists. Or even Mad Magazine. I mean:

What fantastic design artifacts of that era. Many of them appear to be remixes/riffs of contemporary ad campaigns and messaging…you could easily imagine a security-themed distracted boyfriend or American Chopper poster hanging in today’s NSA offices.

I had a difficult time choosing just a few of these…many more are available in this PDF. (via hn)

Tags: design   NSA

I’m starting a petition to have Arkady Babchenko henceforth referred to as "Journalism Jesus," Because holy shit, he just returned from the grave. Less than 24 hours after it was reported that the vehemently anti-Putin journalist had died on the way to hospital after being shot in the back outside of his apartment in Kiev, Ukraine, Babchenko strolled into a press conference being thrown by the Ukrainian government, like a boss of all bosses. It seems that a hitman, hired by the Russian government to permanently silence Babchenko for the sum of $40,000, decided that instead of pulling a trigger on the contract, he’d let Ukraine’s security intelligence people in on what was supposed to be happening. I say "supposed to," because things definitely did not go down the way that Mother Russia allegedly wanted them to. From the New York Times:

Mr. Babchenko created a sensation in Kiev on Wednesday by appearing at a news conference, billed as a police briefing about his assassination, at which he was greeted by whoops of surprise and scattered applause. It came less than 24 hours after his wife said she had found him bleeding to death on the floor of their apartment, shot in the back. “First of all, I would like to apologize that all of you had to live through this, because I know the horrible feeling when you have to bury your colleagues,” Mr. Babchenko, 41, told the stunned room. “Separately, I want to apologize to my wife for all the hell she had to go through.”

Holy crap. At the press conference, Vasily Gritsak, who heads up Ukraine's security service, announced that his agency had faked Babchenko’s death to catch people who were trying to kill him, using the intelligence gleaned from the Babchenko's would-be hitman. According to Al Jazeera, Ukrainian authorities arrested an individual they believe was responsible for planning the plot against Babchenko earlier today. Babchenko had been aware of threats to his life for some time. The operation with Ukraine's security service had been going on for close to two months. Babchenko is a former Russian solider who saw, most likely, some pretty horrific action in Chechnya during the 1990s. After leaving the military, he became one of Russia's most renowned war correspondents. All that changed when he came out against the Russian military's policies on social media in recent years. In 2017, afraid for his life, he left Russia to set up shop in Kiev. Apparently, he didn't run quite far enough. There's been a rash of murdered journalists in Kiev in recent years that have gone unsolved. Happily, for the time being, at least, Babchenko isn't among them. Image via Wikipedia Commons

I'm obsessed with Manhattanhenge, the two nights a year when the sunset aligns with the prevailing east-west streets of the New York City grid, a phenomenon that Neil deGrasse Tyson named in 1992. (more…)

I was looking for a pair of Duluth Trading Company fire hose pants. They are awesome. They are made of the same heavy canvas a fire hose outer insulation is. They are soft, but massively over stitched and have a popular with the nuggets 'crotch gusset.'

None of these things should have led to Zmart Men's Sexy Collared Bow Tie Bodysuit/Thong/Butler Teddy Costume Underwear showing up in my recommendations.

The Duluth Trading Company has a number of styles of pant. I wear the regular firehose pant over my Bohn spandex armor when motorcycling around my home county or into the awful dodge'em game that is San Francisco. I ordered a pair of the Ultimate, because more is better when covering motorcycle armor.

The Zmart option looks like it offers minimal abrasion resistance, and will not cover the leg armor to my satisfaction.

Zmart Men's Sexy Collared Bow Tie Bodysuit Thong Butler Teddy Costume Underwear via Amazon

When Sony announced in 2014 that support was ending for Aibo, their pioneering line of robotic dogs, former Sony employee Nobuyuki Norimatsu launched A-Fun, a repair service in Japan, to take care of any ailing Aibos. Things progressed from there. Video below. From National Geographic:

Norimatsu came to regard the broken AIBOs his company received as “organ donors.” Out of respect for the owners’ emotional connection to the “deceased” devices, Norimatsu and his colleagues decided to hold funerals.

A-Fun approached Bungen Oi, head priest of Kōfuku-ji, a Buddhist temple in Chiba Prefecture's city of Isumi. Oi agreed to take on the duty of honoring the sacrifice of donor AIBOs before their disassembly. In 2015, the centuries-old temple held its first robot funeral for 17 decommissioned AIBOs. Just as with the repairs, demand for funeral ceremonies quickly grew...

According to Head Priest Oi, honoring inanimate objects is consistent with Buddhist thought. Nippon.com quotes the priest: “Even though AIBO is a machine and doesn’t have feelings, it acts as a mirror for human emotions.”

For exclusive videos, pictures, and more, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram. Send us your confidential tips at tips@deadspin.com, call our confidential tips hotline at (347) 746-8471, contact our writers directly, or use our anonymous SecureDrop system.

Read more...

It’s 3 p.m.! Let The A.V. Club briefly make use of the waning hours of your productivity with some pop culture ephemera pulled from the depths of YouTube.

Read more...

I'm fascinated by painting of an extrasolar planet, credited to "Beau.TheConsortium" and apparently first posted to this SF Wiki. They're called "eyeball planets" -- similar to Earth, but tidally locked with their star, creating a vast polar ice cap on the dark side, a scorching desert facing the sun, and a band around the center where water melts from one side to the other and life happens. The extremes involved have made them a hot topic among those searching for life.

The sweet spot—let’s call it the “ring of life”—is at the terminator, the boundary between night and day. The ring of life is bounded by deserts on one side and ice on the other. There is a constant flow of water from the night side to the day side—a series of rivers, all flowing in the same direction. The Sun is fixed in the sky right at the horizon, and the area is in permanent light. Conditions are pretty much the same all the way across the ring of life. One can imagine vegetation following the rivers onto the day side until they dry up, with different ecosystems interspersed along the way. There could be mountains at the edge of the ice sheets, since the ice-covered continents would be heavily weighed down

On Wednesday during a White House meeting with mayors, sheriffs and other local leaders from California who oppose the state’s “sanctuary” immigration policies, President Donald Trump referred to some people who cross the borders illegally as “animals,” and that’s exactly what he meant.

Read more...

Speaking of great magazine covers, for their issue on plastic, National Geographic put artist Jorge Gamboa’s arresting plastic bag iceberg image on the cover. A simple yet powerful concept, perfectly executed.

Update: The iceberg plastic bag is not an original concept. Prior art includes a 2015 ad campaign for Tesco and a pair of stock images on Getty (date not listed). It’s unclear whether Gamboa created his image after seeing these images or if multiple people had this same idea. (via @krjohn01/status/997198395189223424)

Tags: art   design   Jorge Gamboa   magazines   National Geographic