Patrick Kennedy

Man, it really does seem like people start putting up Christmas decorations earlier and earlier every year. Don’t believe us? Check out this latest bit of preemptive holiday horror cheer—a 22-foot tall, 2,000-pound baby Jesus statue that, for some reason perhaps known only to God Himself, looks a hell of a lot like…

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In wake of shooting in El Paso, retailer hides violent imagery

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How David Bazan’s music inspired a generation of young, questioning Christians.

The white power hour on Fox will be in other hands for a short while: host Tucker Carlson is headed off on an improptu "vacation" the day after claiming America didn't have a white supremacy problem and that concerns it did were a "hoax".

There is, of course, a long history of Fox hosts heading out on vacation as they become engulfed in controversy for inflammatory comments.
-- Laura Ingraham announced she was going on vacation in March 2018 after mocking Parkland survivor and gun control activist David Hogg...
-- Sean Hannity went on vacation in May 2017 after losing advertisers for promoting the Seth Rich conspiracy theory...
-- Jesse Watters headed out on vacation in April 2017 after making a comment widely criticized as lewd about Ivanka Trump...
-- Bill O'Reilly went -- and never returned from -- a vacation in April 2017 after NYT reported he had settled five sexual harassment allegations for millions of dollars...

The backlash is intense even by these standards, what with memories of the latest white supremacist mass shooting as fresh as the corpses. But Carlson has been here before, is indispensible to the movement, and will not likely be going anywhere.

Brian Kozlowski poisoned his wife repeatedly by pouring massive amounts of diphenhydramine into her coffee when he she wasn't looking. But the woman installed a hidden camera in the kitchen and recorded him in the act. With the tape as evidence, Kozlowski was found guilty and the judge sentenced him to spend weekends in jail for the next several months. When the prosecuting attorney complained about the sentence being a slap in the face to the victim, the judge told her "Counsel, I do not let anybody speak after I've issued a judgment."

From Oddity Central:

“Brian was trying to kill me to keep his comfortable life from slipping away,” Therese told WDIV. “I felt a horrible coldness in the air, but in this nightmare the predator was Brian. I fell to my knees and cried. I could barely move.”

Therese moved out and notified her divorce attorney about the grim discovery as soon as she saw the video of Brian mixing the pills with her coffee. Authorities were able to seize the last coffee he made for her and found that it contained 127 millilitres of diphenhydramine, about eight pills-worth. The woman said that she got suspicious after experiencing weird symptoms after drinking her husband’s coffee, symptoms like tiredness, nausea and blurred vision.

Faced with irrefutable proof of his crime, Brian Kozlowski pleaded no contest to charges of poisoning a drink, which carries a maximum sentence of 15 years, instead settling for excuses, as the fact that he was going though a rough time when he committed the act. Prosecutor Eric Smith sought the minimum sentence of 19 months in jail, which Kozlowski would have probably been satisfied with, but he got an unexpected gift from the judge.

Image: YouTube/Inside Edition

If you were looking for one single moment to represent the bottomless misery of the last, oh, two years of Orioles baseball, you could do a lot worse than D.J. Stewart’s ill-fated play on a fourth-inning fly ball in Tuesday’s game against the Yankees in Baltimore. Stewart, chugging in on the play, appeared to badly…

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It's been a year since Chinese social media giant Bytedance relaunched its super-popular app Musica.ly as Tiktok; the company is now valued at $75b, and in the USA it has become a serious challenge to US-based social media companies, courting a young audience (so young that it's getting into legal hot water over it).

Tiktok spend $1b last year advertising in the USA, and this year it's on track to surpass that figure, with $3m/day in US ad spending. It has the power to change music trends, and has been credited with the record-breaking success of Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road," the longest run at the top of the Billboard single chart in history.

The company is aggressively hiring US execs, too.

But Tiktok's US rise has geopolitical implications. In China, Tiktok has been suborned to serve as a state propaganda outlet, serving anti-Hong-Kong-uprising memes to Chinese users, including conspiracy theories blaming the Hong Kong protests on US agitators (other Chinese social media companies have been serving similar content). The propaganda efforts are also intense in Xinjiang, a region where the Uighur ethnic minority have been subject to mass surveillance and torture in "re-education" camps.

After a run-in with Chinese state regulators, Bytedance has pledged to hire 10,000 censors to identify and block anti-government content.

But the company also faces some real risks in the near future. Here are four:

One, TikTok has to fix its funnel. Too many people try TikTok, use it a few times, and never return. We saw something happen similar with Twitter years ago. The app developed universal awareness among Americans, but most who downloaded Twitter abandoned it shortly thereafter. With TikTok spending $3 million a day on ads in the United States, it could become a household name in short order. But if it can’t sustain users’ interest, it could find itself mired in the same trough of despair that Twitter has been in for most of its life.

Two, TikTok has to keep shipping hits. Every social app is, on some level, a fad, and those that don’t evolve are doomed to fade away. (See Vine or, more recently, HQ Trivia.) Any novel social app can have a good year — it remains to be seen to what extent TikTok’s video feed has staying power. Something to watch closely: what new features does TikTok launch in the next 12 months? Both Vine and HQ felt novel at launch but never meaningfully iterated on their core experience; Snapchat survived by following up its original hit (disappearing messages) with something even bigger (ephemeral stories.) If TikTok is going to survive, it has to be less like Vine and more like Snap.

How TikTok could fail [Casey Newton/The Verge]

The Lock Picking Lawyer is one of my favorite YouTubers, and he's spreading his wings beyond the usual fare of dreadful padlocks and crap safes. Here he shows how to use a $2 generic remote control to "blind" SimpliSafe, a security gadget that's getting rave reviews from product testers.

This however is a little 433 megahertz remote you can get them on Amazon or Ebay for about $2, and even though it's
not very powerful, it's powerful enough. Let's demonstrate using this entry sensor. I'm going to arm the system, and you can see if I were to open whatever
this was attached to—let's say the frontdoor—the keypad starts starts beeping telling me to enter the pin or the alarm will be triggered. Okay let's try that one more time. But before I open the front door, I'm going to press and hold the button on this remote.

As you can see, I opened and closed the front door and SimpliSafe had no idea

Here's a $2 one, shipping included, on eBay. Amazon matches the price. If we can't review the security of security devices, we shouldn't be reviewing them at all, should we?

Former Ohio University standout Donell “D.J.” Cooper was trying to catch on with a team overseas when a drug test revealed that he was pregnant.

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Several years ago, Jordan Guthmann, a VP at Edelman PR, interviewed for a job at Amazon. While he was on the company campus chatting with folks, someone asked to take his photo and he kindly obliged. Guthmann didn't get the gig, but apparently he at least looked like the right person for the job: Until a few days ago his photo appeared on Amazon's Talent Acquisition website. After Guthmann tweeted about it, Amazon quickly swapped out the photo. As Petapixel commented, hopefully the person in the current photo actually got the job!

Years ago I went to Amazon for a job interview that I did NOT get but they were taking photos and the kind person taking photos asked me if she could snap my picture and I was like sure why not anywho that's why I'm on their jobs website today... https://t.co/ehhRvnYaC6

— Jordan Guthmann (@JGuthmann) July 24, 2019

The Sackler family got richer than the Rockefellers by marketing Oxycontin in ways that kickstarted the global opioid epidemic, whose body count continues to rise -- more than 200,000 dead in the US alone, which is more Americans than died in the Vietnam war.

The Sacklers aren't just as rich as a Gilded Age looter, they've also absorbed the Gilded Age tactic of fractioning off relatively piddling sums and giving them to cultural institutions as Exhibit A in the modern practice of looter reputation-laundering.

But given the incredible death toll from opioids and leaks of sealed court documents that show the Sacklers' complicity in those deaths, institutions are starting to break ties with the family, helped along by artists like opioid survivor Nan Goldin, whose massive, mediagenic protest actions inside of galleries and museums have gone a long way to showing institutions that their Sackler wing is a very bad look indeed.

The latest casualty seems to be the Louvre in Paris. Shortly after Goldin staged an action outside of the museum, the museum's board of directors suddenly remembered that they have a policy of removing endowment thank-yous after 20 years, and it had been 22 years since the Sacklers paid to have their names plastered all over the place. Now, every mention of the Sackler name has been purged from the institution, down to the smallest signs, which have been covered over with tape.

The Louvre officially says that it was just enforcing its policies and it's nothing personal about the Sacklers, but they couldn't explain why they only remembered that they had these policies after Goldin called them to account in a public, showy way.

The Louvre museum's president, Jean-Luc Martinez, told French radio station RTL that there is a 20-year limit on naming rights and the Sackler donation for the wing was in 1997. He did not explain why it had taken more than two years to remove the signs.

Martinez would also not reveal exactly when the name had been removed. However, it is thought to have been covered up when the wing was closed to visitors for a few days in the second week of July.

The move follows protests on July 1 led by the activist Nan Goldin, a former opioid addict, demanding the Sackler name be removed from the Louvre over accusations the family has profited from their company's highly addictive painkiller Oxycontin.

Louvre Removes Sackler Family Name From Its Walls [Alex Marshall/New York Times]

Louvre removes Sackler name amid controversy over opioid crisis [Sophie Gorman/France 24]

(via Naked Capitalism)

For your records, the hook was sampled from Andrea's disco hit More More More. It happens all of a sudden at about 2:19 in this video:

Isolated for your repeat pleasure:

You can buy Steal my Sunshine on tape cassette from Alcopop! records.

An arson attack on the Kyoto Animation studio in Japan has left at least 33 people dead and another 36 injured. The attack occurred Thursday morning after a 41-year-old man walked into Kyoto’s 1st Studio Building in Fujimi Ward, Kyoto City and doused the building with gasoline. It is believed to be the country’s…

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1) Earlier on Tuesday, humor website The Onion ran a spoof story titled '82-Year-Old New Jersey Congressman Bill Pascrell Quietly Asks Ilhan Omar If He Can Be Part Of The Squad.'

2) Then, Congressman Bill Pascrell Quietly Asked Ilhan Omar If He Can Be Part Of The Squad.

3) AOC said “you're in!”

4) Speaker Nancy Pelosi, this is how it's done.

FaceApp is a wildly popular smartphone app that alters people's faces with various filters. Its most popular filter is one that ages the person in the photo. It turns out when you upload your photos to FaceApp, the Russian company that made the app gets a perpetual license to your photos. In other words, your photo could end up on a billboard or online advertisement for any imaginable product or service and you can't do anything about it.

From Fox 29:

Small business lawyer Elizabeth Potts Weinstein tweeted out the “User Content” section of FaceApp’s terms, saying “if you use #FaceApp you are giving them a license to use your photos, your name, your username and your likeness for any purpose including commercial purposes (like on a billboard or internet ad).”

“You grant FaceApp a perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully-paid, transferable sub-licensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate... distribute, publicly perform and display your User Content,” the FaceApp terms read.

If you use #FaceApp you are giving them a license to use your photos, your name, your username, and your likeness for any purpose including commercial purposes (like on a billboard or internet ad) -- see their Terms: https://t.co/e0sTgzowoN pic.twitter.com/XzYxRdXZ9q

— Elizabeth Potts Weinstein (@ElizabethPW) July 17, 2019

(Image: Adam J. Manley, CC-BY,
modified (cropping))

When you’re a child, it’s surely cool to have the New Jersey Devils’ mascot show up to your birthday shindig, but what’s much more impressive is when NJ Devil gets overwhelmed by the play parachute, starts running around, and shatters a glass window. How many kids get to say that happened at their party?

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Most of the time the world can seem like one big dumpster heap, but not today, friends—no, not today. For today we celebrate the revival of A.P. Bio, which was picked up, dusted off, and cozily embraced by the powers-that-be at NBC. More specifically, per The Hollywood Reporter, the beloved series has found a new home…

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putyouinabettermood:

Growing up with your magical best friend. via http://bit.ly/2Roe1rt putyouinabettermood.com

Running for your gate, carry-on in hand to make your flight on-time is the worst. Sliding to your flight's gate? That's the best.

This four floor-high slide located in Singapore's Changi Airport is designed to get you to your departure gate with the smallest number of steps possible. The only catch is that you have to spend S$10 at one of the airport's many restaurants or businesses. Seems like a reasonable price to me.

Image via Changi Airport

If you're a fan of Kentucky bourbon, get ready to cry: According to a number of reports, 45,000 barrels of Jim Beam just went up in flames.

From The New York Times:

The fire started around 11 p.m. in Woodford County on Tuesday and was still burning at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, fire officials said. They expected the warehouse to burn for five more hours. No injuries were reported.

“The biggest issue we are dealing with is the environmental aspect,” said Drew Chandler, the Woodford County emergency management director. “If we put the fire out, we are going to dump a lot of water on it and that water will be contaminated.”

He said that fire officials did not know what had caused the fire, but a spokeswoman for Jim Beam said she believed lightning had sparked it.

Because of the fear that water in the area around the fire could be contaminated with ethanol if firefighters turned their hoses on it, 'let is burn' was the order of the day. The good news for Jimmy B aficionados is that the barrels that burned were full of relatively young hooch. As such, there shouldn't be any interruption in the amount of the bourbon available to the public for the foreseeable future--the burnt out warehouse is one of many. The bad news is that the lost alcohol was worth a small fortune. According to the New York Times, each barrel contains enough bourbon to fill between 150 and 200 750 milliliter bottles. Each of those bottles sells for just under $20. 45,000 barrels were lost in the blaze. That means that the booze lost puts Jim Beam's people in the hole for upwards of $162 million.

It's a tragedy, but if nothing else, all of those aged barrels full of booze would smell freaking amazing as they burned.

Image via YouTube

Instead of shocking animals, and people, with the loud booms of fireworks the city of Banff took a kinder and gentler path.

The Globe and Mail:

Canada Day fireworks in Banff this weekend went off without a bang.

The town switched to a pyrotechnics display like you might see at a rock concert over fireworks for its holiday celebrations going forward, so as not to terrify the thousands of animals, wild and domestic, that live in the area.

“We wanted to minimize the impact on wildlife in the townsite and obviously the surrounding national park, as loud fireworks can be stressful to them,” Deputy Mayor Corrie DiManno said. “And for us, moving to special-effect pyrotechnics helps us to walk the talk, so to speak. We consider ourselves leaders in this area of environmental preservation so we wanted to make sure that we were doing all we can.”

In southern India, the four main water reservoirs for the city of Chennai (once known as Madras) have reportedly run completely dry. Chennai is the sixth largest city in India.

"Only rain can save Chennai from this situation," a Chennai city official told BBC Tamil:

The acute water shortage has forced the city to scramble for urgent solutions, including drilling new boreholes.

Residents have had to stand in line for hours to get water from government tanks, and restaurants have closed due to the lack of water.

(...)

Officials are trying to find alternative sources of water, with the city's water department starting to identify and extract water from quarries.

But the big concern is the dry reservoirs and low groundwater levels.

BBC News: Chennai water crisis: City's reservoirs run dry

PHOTO: The city of Chennai, India, as seen in the early morning from the rooftop of the Hilton Chennai. Many of the Indian city's hotels and restaurants have limited services, some have shut down, as a result of the water crisis. [source: pxhere.com, CC Public Domain]

The high temperature on Saturday in Guadalajara, Mexico was 86 °F. On Sunday morning, up to three feet of hail fell on the city and it looked like this:

Enrique Alfaro, the governor of Jalisco, wrote on Twitter that he had never seen anything like it.

“I witnessed scenes that I had never seen before: hail more than a meter high,” he tweeted, “and then we ask ourselves if climate change exists.”

Weather is not climate, but our warmer atmosphere is going to make extreme weather events like this more likely and frequent. As the Times says with characteristic understatement:

Experts say it is not unusual to have a hailstorm at this time of year in western Mexico, but the amount of hail was extreme.

Queens is the most populous district in the USA, with a population (2.359m) larger than many states; the District Attorney of Queens wields incredible power, and now that power has shifted dramatically.

Like many of New York City's elected offices, the real race for DA is decided by the local Democratic Party machine, as the electorate is overwhelmingly Democrate-voting. In the case of the DA's office, the retirement (and subsequent death) of 30-year DA Dick Brown created an opportunity for one of Brown's proteges to step in and continue Brown's legacy of incarceration for minor offenses. A predictable crop of usual suspects presented themselves and one, Queens borough president Melinda Katz, got the establishment endorsement, including the blessing of Joe Crowley, the finance-friendly "Democrat" who lost a primary race to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez last year.

Enter Tiffany Cabán: a 31 year old, Democratic Socialist, queer, Latinx public defender in New York City who stepped up to run against Katz and the other establishment candidates. Billed as a long-shot, Cabán won the endorsements of AOC, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and ran a grassroots campaign that saw her raising money from three times as many local supporters as any of the other candidates (the other candidates still outraised Cabán, by bringing in big checks from wealthy out-of-district donors).

Cabán's campaign was also popular outside of Queens. I -- along with many other leftists and members of the Democratic Socialists -- donated small sums to her.

When Joe Crowley lost his primary race to AOC, the Democratic establishment claimed that it had been taken by surprise -- and denied that the upset represented any deeper structural shift in the American mood or the Democratic Party's base. They can't make such a claim this time around: the Democratic establishment pulled out all the stops to crush Cabán's campaign -- and last night, Cabán declared victory.

Cabán’s apparent victory is a show of force in New York for the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which worked hard for Cabán early, as well as for the Working Families Party and Real Justice PAC. Larry Krasner, the Philadelphia district attorney elected with the help of Real Justice on a similarly radical platform, was in attendance at Cabán’s election night party.

The most significant endorsement, however, likely came from Bronx and Queens Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The district attorney has jurisdiction over all of Queens and its some 2.4 million residents, but Cabán put up huge margins in portions of Queens represented by Ocasio-Cortez, which is both a reflection of their aligned politics and the influence of Ocasio-Cortez. A year ago, the party establishment could claim — whether it was true or not — to have been caught off guard by Ocasio-Cortez. That rationale is absent in Tuesday’s race. The eyes of the country were on Queens, and the machine was as prepared as it could be. It simply couldn’t muscle out the vote.

“Take nothing for granted,” said Daeha Ko, who spent his day canvassing for Cabán in Astoria, early in the night to a fellow supporter. By the end of the night, he might have been talking to Queens Borough President Melinda Katz.

Tiffany Cabán Stuns Queens Machine, Holds Solid Lead in Race for Queens District Attorney [Akela Lacya and Nausicaa Renner/The Intercept]

Given all of the problems with the Rays—and there are many—dire situations call for nontraditional thinking. Like hanging out with your friends and smoking a ton of weed and wondering aloud Dude. What if a team could play in two cities? That is probably not how this proposed solution to the Rays’ attendance woes came…

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A woman in England named Siobhan asked her colleagues to put pop star Mariah Carey's image on her birthday cake. Instead, she got French physicist Marie Curie on it.

Lye writes, "They misunderstood, and [this] is the cake they made her instead. It’s Marie Curie, looking very festive."

Mariah Carey, Marie Curie. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.

Siobhan's cousin, author Harriet Alida Lye of Toronto, shared the funny mix-up on Twitter:

To which Mariah Carey, not Marie Curie (who's been dead for nearly 85 years), replied:

Can we all just agree that female Nobel Prize winners should be the new normal for birthday cake decorations?

(Mashable)

The topic of reparations has been on the tip of everyone’s tongues as of late, culminating in a House hearing on Wednesday that will explore the subject and “examine, through open and constructive discourse, the legacy of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, its continuing impact on the community and the path to…

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Soon-to-be-former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told a reporter on Tuesday how she hopes to be remembered, “I hope that it will be that I showed up every day and I did the very best job that I could to put forward the president’s message ... to do the best job that I could to answer questions. To be transparent and honest throughout that process and do everything I could to make America a little better that day than it was the day before.”

"The miserable have no other medicine but only hope." -- Shakespeare

Image: Michael Candelori/Shutterstock

[via The Hill]