The error, which the administration admitted first to The Associated Press, prompted health analysts to question how many of the Republican administration's sweeping anti-fraud efforts around the country were based on faulty findings.
WASHINGTON—In an effort to refute what she described as utterly vile attacks on her character, Melania Trump slammed baseless reports this week that linked her to the wrong wealthy pedophile. “Let me clear: While I have deep ties to a certain affluent individual and secret societies involved in pedophilia, I never once sexually harmed children anywhere near Jeffrey Epstein,” said the outraged first lady, adding that it was nothing more than groundless rumormongering to suggest that she had ever violated a child with that specific rich child molester. “This once again shows the media’s complete ignorance about the pedophile community. These are just errant speculations by so-called reporters who were never in the the room during the molestation of minors. I would ask them to do their research before linking me to any depraved sexual deviants except for my husband.” Trump went on to state that she remained focused on healing and justice for Epstein’s victims but no one else’s.
A new study revealed that sharks in the Bahamas tested positive for cocaine, caffeine, painkillers, and other substances, with such contaminants increasingly found in tourism-driven marine environments. What do you think?
“And to think my kid looks up to these sharks.”
Tristan Weiss, Dividend Calculator
“So that’s why they never stop swimming.”
Sierra Ibarra, Cloak Retailer
“If sharks need to reach out for some help I’m always available to talk.”
More artists are banning phones at their shows. The Onion examines the pros and cons of phone-free concerts.
PRO
Phone finally gets some alone time
Get to give full attention to jumbotron screen
Brings back thousands of professional bootlegger jobs
Plenty of other ways to make not-invited friend feel excluded
Need both hands for Nintendo Switch anyway
CON
History affords us but one chance to document May 29’s Beach Boys concert at Atlantic City’s Hard Rock Hotel and Casino from the specific viewing angle of Section 206, Row O, Seat 8
Might miss an important ad
Somehow becomes reason for Ticketmaster to charge more
Checking TikTok only way to get the shaking to stop
“Dani California” doesn’t hit as hard without Google Maps pulled up
NEW YORK—Saying that it was truly sinking in that he had finally made it to the big leagues, New York Mets rookie Carson Benge told reporters Friday he still couldn’t believe the sunflower seeds in the dugout were free. “It’s honestly insane—you can just take them. As many as you want. Nobody says a word, even if you grab the flavored ones,” said the first-year outfielder, shaking his head in disbelief as he stuffed several fistfuls of ranch-flavored seeds into his uniform pockets and marveled that “these would’ve cost six or seven bucks at the gas station.” “Back in the minors, if you wanted sunflower seeds, that was your problem. Here, they’ve got boxes of them just sitting out like some kind of king’s banquet. Every day, I still find myself asking, ‘You sure these are for us? You sure I don’t have to pay anyone?’ But we don’t have to pay a cent. I’m truly living the dream.” According to sources, Benge’s awe at the perks of major league life was tempered somewhat after he received a $130 clubhouse invoice for the Gatorade he drank last month.
Object permanence: Bidenomics needs to be bigger; Al Franken's balanced war budget; Bernie x The Pope; Art is a money-laundry; UK government condemns copyright trolls; Howard Dean's genocidal pharma sellout.
Last year, I ran a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign to pre-sell my ebooks, audiobooks and hardcovers of my book Enshittification, which went on to be an international bestseller, selling out 10 printings in the first 11 weeks:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I've done many of these Kickstarter campaigns now, and I always try to come up with something special for backers – some limited edition book or tchotchke that lets me scratch my own itch for making beautiful physical things, and also lets a few backers splash out on a truly special item. I've come up with some doozies, like:
A hand-copied manuscript for the original, never-before-seen ending for my novel Little Brother
A leather bound, extremely limited edition copy of Red Team Blues, with a secret miniature bound copy of the unedited manuscript for The Bezzle in a hidden cavity:
And, for Enshittification, Canny Valley, a limited edition book of my collage illustrations from Pluralistic, made from Creative Commons and public domain sources, with an introduction by Bruce Sterling:
I put 100 copies of Canny Valley up for sale in the Enshittification Kickstarter and all of them sold out in a matter of days. However, as promised at the time, there is a second chance to get a copy of the book, through the Creative Commons 25th anniversary fundraiser, which has just kicked off:
The whole print run for Canny Valley was limited to 500 copies, and it is the only run I will do for the book. 100 copies were sold to Kickstarter backers, I kept 25 for myself, and the remaining 375 are now available as a thank-you gift for people who make tax-deductible gifts to CC.
I have been a great supporter of Creative Commons since its inception – literally, I was around when Aaron Swartz, Matt Haughey and Lisa Rein worked with Larry Lessig to design the data scheme and user interface to create, use and re-use Creative Commons licenses. My debut novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was the first book ever released under a CC license:
Creative Commons arose out of the copyright wars of the early 2000s, in which the severe deficiencies of using copyright as the primary form of internet regulation were becoming ever clearer. Then – as now – the internet was filling up with material that everyday people produced together, incorporating one another's work, as well as popular works that had meaning to them. Virtually all of this material violated copyright law, and bringing it into compliance would cost hundreds of billions of dollars in billable lawyer hours to draft, negotiate and sign all the licenses needed to avoid both criminal and civil liability.
That's where CC came in: a team of international lawyers standardized a set of legal licenses that did something new and necessary: facilitated sharing and remix, rather than restricting them. Simply apply a CC license to your work – say, a Wikipedia contribution, a Flickr photo, or a story on AO3 – and others would be able to reproduce, adapt and recombine that work with other CC licensed works. What's more, thanks to the heroic efforts of the international CC team, these licenses were able to span borders, languages and legal systems, meaning that a Japanese animator can create a short based on a French story, using Australian 3D assets and a Croatian soundtrack:
It's hard to overstate what a heroic feat of lawyering this is. Making a set of documents that allows creativity to spread freely across 45+ (often very different) legal systems is arguably the most ambitious piece of applied IP legal research ever undertaken. Today, tens of billions of works are CC licensed, including (to name just one example), all of Wikipedia.
I rely heavily on CC licensed works to make the images that run over my posts on Pluralistic, my CC-licensed newsletter. I combine these with public domain images in the GIMP (a powerful free/open Photoshop replacement that runs GNU/Linux, MacOS and Windows) to make my collages, which you can download in high-rez (and freely re-use, thanks to the CC licenses I apply to each of them) from this Flickr set of 350+ items:
Canny Valley collects 80 of my favorite collages in a beautiful book that was printed on 100lb Mohawk paper on an Indigo digital offset printer and bound with PVA glue that will last a century, at Pasadena's Typecraft, a family-owned print shop that's been in business for more than 100 years:
I published a long post that explained my creative process last year, including Bruce's intro (which is also CC licensed). I'm going to reproduce Bruce's intro below, but you can read the whole post here:
I love these little books and I love that there's a chance for a few more people to lay hands on their own – and I especially love that this will support Creative Commons, an organization that produces digital public goods for a new, good internet:
In 1970 a robotics professor named Masahiro Mori discovered a new problem in aesthetics. He called this "bukimi no tani genshō."
The Japanese robots he built were functional, so the "bukimi no tani" situation was not an engineering problem. It was a deep and basic problem in the human perception of humanlike androids.
Humble assembly robots, with their claws and swivels, those looked okay to most people. Dolls, puppets and mannequins, those also looked okay.
Living people had always aesthetically looked okay to people. Especially, the pretty ones.
However, between these two realms that the late Dr Mori was gamely attempting to weld together — the world of living mankind and of the pseudo-man-like machine– there was an artistic crevasse. Anything in this "Uncanny Valley" looked, and felt, severely not-okay. These overdressed robots looked and felt so eerie that their creator's skills became actively disgusting. The robots got prettier, but only up to a steep verge. Then they slid down the precipice and became zombie doppelgangers.
That's also the issue with the aptly-titled "Canny Valley" art collection here. People already know how to react aesthetically to traditional graphic images. Diagrams are okay. Hand-drawn sketches and cartoons are also okay. Brush-made paintings are mostly fine. Photographs, those can get kind of dodgy.
Digital collages that slice up and weld highly disparate elements like diagrams, cartoons, sketches and also photos and paintings, those trend toward the uncanny.
The pixel-juggling means of digital image-manipulation are not art-traditional pencils or brushes. They do not involve the human hand, or maybe not even the human eye, or the human will. They're not fixed on paper or canvas; they're a Frankenstein mash-up landscape of tiny colored screen-dots where images can become so fried that they look and feel "cursed." They're conceptually gooey congelations, stuck in the valley mire of that which is and must be neither this-nor-that.
A modern digital artist has billions of jpegs in files, folders, clouds and buckets. He's never gonna run out of weightless grist from that mill.
Why would Cory Doctorow — novelist, journalist, activist, opinion columnist and so on — want to lift his typing fingers from his lettered keyboard, so as to create graphics with cut-and-paste and "lasso tools"?
Cory Doctorow also has some remarkably tangled, scandalous and precarious issues to contemplate, summarize and discuss. They're not his scandalous private intrigues, though. Instead, they're scandalous public intrigues. Or, at least Cory struggles to rouse some public indignation about these intrigues, because his core topics are the tangled penthouse/slash/underground machinations of billionaire web moguls.
Cory really knows really a deep dank lot about this uncanny nexus of arcane situations. He explains the shameful disasters there, but they're difficult to capture without torrents of unwieldy tech jargon.
I think there are two basic reasons for this.
The important motivation is his own need to express himself by some method other than words.
I'm reminded here of the example of H. G. Wells, another science fiction writer turned internationally famous political pundit. HG Wells was quite a tireless and ambitious writer — so much so that he almost matched the torrential output of Cory Doctorow.
But HG Wells nevertheless felt a compelling need to hand-draw cartoons. He called them "picshuas." These hundreds of "picshuas" were rarely made public. They were usually sketched in the margins of his hand-written letters. Commonly the picshuas were aimed at his second wife, the woman he had renamed "Jane." These picshuas were caricatures, or maybe rapid pen-and-ink conceptual outlines, of passing conflicts, events and situations in the life of Wells. They seemed to carry tender messages to Jane that the writer was unable or unwilling to speak aloud to her. Wells being Wells, there were always issues in his private life that might well pose a challenge to bluntly state aloud: "Oh by the way, darling, I've built a second house in the South of France where I spend my summers with a comely KGB asset, the Baroness Budberg." Even a famously glib and charming writer might feel the need to finesse that.
Cory Doctorow also has some remarkably tangled, scandalous and precarious issues to contemplate, summarize and discuss. They're not his scandalous private intrigues, though. Instead, they're scandalous public intrigues. Or, at least Cory struggles to rouse some public indignation about these intrigues, because his core topics are the tangled penthouse/slash/underground machinations of billionaire web moguls.
Cory really knows really a deep dank lot about this uncanny nexus of arcane situations. He explains the shameful disasters there, but they're difficult to capture without torrents of unwieldy tech jargon.
So instead, he diligently clips, cuts, pastes, lassos, collages and pastiches. He might, plausibly, hire a professional artist to design his editorial cartoons for him. However, then Cory would have to verbally explain all his political analysis to this innocent graphics guy. Then Cory would also have to double-check the results of the artist and fix the inevitable newbie errors and grave misunderstandings. That effort would be three times the labor for a dogged crusader who is already working like sixty.
It's more practical for him to mash-up images that resemble editorial cartoons.
He can't draw. Also, although he definitely has a pronounced sense of aesthetics, it's not a aesthetic most people would consider tasteful. Cory Doctorow, from his very youth, has always had a "craphound" aesthetic. As an aesthete, Cory is the kind of guy who would collect rain-drenched punk-band flyers that had fallen off telephone poles and store them inside a 1950s cardboard kid-cereal box. I am not scolding him for this. He's always been like that.
As Wells used to say about his unique "picshuas," they seemed like eccentric scribblings, but over the years, when massed-up as an oeuvre, they formed a comic burlesque of an actual life. Similarly, one isolated Doctorow collage can seem rather what-the-hell. It's trying to be "canny." If you get it, you get it. If you don't get the first one, then you can page through all of these, and at the end you will probably get it. En masse, it forms the comic burlesque of a digital left-wing cyberspatial world-of-hell. A monster-teeming Silicon Uncanny Valley of extensively raked muck.
There are a lot of web-comix people who like to make comic fun of the Internet, and to mock "the Industry." However, there's no other social and analytical record quite like this one. It has something of the dark affect of the hundred-year-old satirical Dada collages of Georg Schultz or Hannah Hoch. Those Dada collages look dank and horrible because they're "Dada" and pulling a stunt. These images look dank and horrible because they're analytical, revelatory and make sense.
If you do not enjoy contemporary electronic politics, and instead you have somehow obtained an art degree, I might still be able to help you with my learned and well-meaning intro here. I can recommend a swell art-critical book titled "Memesthetics" by Valentina Tanni. I happen to know Dr. Tanni personally, and her book is the cat's pyjamas when it comes to semi-digital, semi-collage, appropriated, Situationiste-detournement, net.art "meme aesthetics." I promise that I could robotically mimic her, and write uncannily like her, if I somehow had to do that. I could even firmly link the graphic works of Cory Doctorow to the digital avant-garde and/or digital folk-art traditions that Valentina Tanni is eruditely and humanely discussing. Like with a lot of robots, the hard part would be getting me to stop.
Cory works with care on his political meme-cartoons — because he is using them to further his own personal analysis, and to personally convince himself. They're not merely sharp and partisan memes, there to rouse one distinct viewer-emotion and make one single point. They're like digital jigsaw-puzzle landscape-sketches — unstable, semi-stolen and digital, because the realm he portrays is itself also unstable, semi-stolen and digital. The cartoons are dirty and messy because the situations he tackles are so dirty and messy. That's the grain of his lampoon material, like the damaged amps in a punk song. A punk song that was licensed by some billionaire and then used to spy on hapless fans with surveillance-capitalism.
Since that's how it goes, that's also what you're in for. You have been warned, and these collages will warn you a whole lot more.
If you want to aesthetically experience some elegant, time-tested collage art that was created by a major world artist, then you should gaze in wonder at the Max Ernst masterpiece, "Une semaine de bonté" ("A Week of Kindness"). This indefinable "collage novel" aka "artist's book" was created in the troubled time of 1934. It's very uncanny rather than "canny, "and it's also capital-A great Art. As an art critic, I could balloon this essay to dreadful robotic proportions while I explain to you in detail why this weirdo mess is a lasting monument to the expressive power of collage. However, Cory Doctorow is not doing Max Ernst's dreamy, oneiric, enchanting Surrealist art. He would never do that and it wouldn't make any sense if he did.
Cory did this instead. It is art, though. It is what it is, and there's nothing else like it. It's artistic expression as Cory Doctorow has a sincere need to perform that, and in twenty years it will be even more rare and interesting. It's journalism ahead of its time (a little) and with a passage of time, it will become testimonial.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway.
"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.
"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
Some vocal Texas voters say they want to get rid of politicians who’ve served the state for decades. Much of that sentiment can be boiled down to a preference for younger candidates with new energy — or even older ones who bulk long-held status quo.
Walgreens has had a long and complicated relationship with Houston. Today, we’re taking a brief look at that relationship and one of the many impacts it had on our retail scene via a store at 5002 Bellaire Blvd, Bellaire, TX 77401. First, a bit of history: Walgreens has been in Houston since 1929. They expanded here by buying a local chain, and immediately became a recognizable brand. Their endeavors in Houston outpaced those of just ...
In brief: Daily rain chances will remain for Houston over the next several days, but admittedly on most of those days it seems unlikely we’ll cash in. While there will be a couple opportunities for legitimate rain chances over the next 6 to 7 days, Central and West Texas may end up in a much better spot than Houston for now.
Side note: We wish the Artemis II crew a safe return, as they splash down this evening (just after 7 PM CT) off the coast of Southern California. The weather looks good.
We hear you, reader. We talk about rain chances more often than we actually seem to get them. It seems true. It feels true. And I don’t disagree. We’ve been in a shaky pattern for several months now where rain chances, especially out around days 3 to 7 look promising, only to disappoint when the bill comes due. Is it drought or a model bias? Both? I’m not totally sure. But I do know that fading the rain chances has worked more often than not lately.
Now, we did see just shy of an inch of rain yesterday near Eagle Lake at a CenterPoint gauge. But that’s way out there in Colorado County. Still, that helps (especially for farmers that are struggling with this constant battle of stress that’s been with us for a few growing seasons now). But for most of us in Houston seeking rain, it’s just been a frustrating go of it. Let’s walk through things based on what we know this morning.
Today
We will see at least isolated to scattered downpours across the area today. Many of you probably won’t see much rain, but some neighborhoods could pick up a quick inch or two. The HRRR model forecast below shows isolated pockets of heavier rain in between a lot of nothing. Don’t focus on the specific locations here, but that’s the general gist of what to expect.
HRRR model forecast precipitation for today, showing a smattering of rain across the area but also plenty of dry spots. (Pivotal Weather)
Other than that, expect clouds, some sun, and highs in the lower 80s.
Saturday
Rain chances will probably favor Central Texas over East Texas on Saturday. Still, a few showers are possible west of Houston tomorrow. Highs will be a touch warmer, into the low or mid-80s.
Sunday
More substantial rain chances will creep closer on Sunday, but they may still remain primarily west of Houston. I would expect to see some sort of thunderstorm cluster or line of storms enter the Brazos Valley during the afternoon hours. However, the trajectory of a disturbance in the upper atmosphere and the general southwest to northeast movement of things across Texas this weekend may lead to most of the storm activity passing northwest and north of Houston. I would set my expectations low for Sunday in terms of rainfall, unless you live in College Station or perhaps Huntsville or Lake Livingston.
Those that do see rain could see hefty rain, however, as the atmosphere will be pretty juiced up this weekend. So if you hit a persistent area of rain, just be wary of some street flooding.
Monday
The pattern shifts a bit more eastward on Sunday night and Monday. We should again at least see a smattering of activity around the area, but I would once again set my expectations fairly low. Highs on Monday will be in the mid-80s with lows in the 70s.
7-day rainfall forecast shown here. While rain chances will be several in the days ahead, the total amount of rain most of us see will be minimal. (Pivotal Weather)
Tuesday through Thursday
Houston will be caught between a building upper-level ridge in the Southeast that’s going to lead to some impressive, record warmth next week in the Eastern U.S. and a deepening trough in the West. These situations don’t typically lead to us seeing the rain we otherwise could, and it could be a situation where there are daily thunderstorms impacting West and Central Texas, while the Houston area gets the shaft. Obviously, this could change, but again, the theme today is to keep the expectations low. And maybe go wash your car. Yeah. That should do the trick.
Temperatures will remain well into the 80s next week.
Following their historic moon flyby, the Artemis II crew will return to Earth on Friday. The Onion looks at the key facts and figures behind the lunar mission.
15 mph
Speed limit in moon zone
49 million
Fewer streams than a British guy playing League Of Legends
4
Times mission specialist Jeremy Hansen has suggested playing charades
$12
Cost of single can of Coke from space capsule’s onboard minibar
4.2 billion
People on Earth who accidentally blinked during the taking of new planetary photos
15
Crimes committed in capsule not subject to Earth laws
2
Stoves left on back on Earth
695,081
Miles earned
3
Returning crew members who will come back…different
A Caribbean Airlines passenger went into labor while traveling to New York from Jamaica, giving birth as the flight was in its final descent to JFK Airport. What do you think?
“Then, by law, that child is a citizen of that plane.”
NEW YORK—BTS appeared Thursday in an unconventionally tense episode of the YouTube series Hot Wings during which host Sean Evans was reportedly forced to beg members of the boy band to stop dancing and “just try the damn wings.” “Boys, please!” said Evans, raising his voice and clapping his hands in a futile effort to get the attention of the K-pop group, whose seven members remained far away from the table lined with hot sauces as they executed the choreography for their new song “Swim.” “Please come sit down at the table. I’m trying to conduct an interview here. Stop jumping around and come try this sauce. We’re contractually obligated to promote it. Suga, I know you can hear me. Just one bite. Boys? Hey! Stop that!” The episode was cut short after Jimin knocked several plates of wings to the floor and started grinding on the table.
INDIO, CA—Stressing that they had to act quickly before the situation further deteriorated, medical staff working the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival reportedly rushed overly lucid 23-year-old Zach Hillman into an emergency psychedelics tent Friday. “Thank God for the good Samaritans who alerted us as soon as they noticed him standing up straight and watching the musicians perform—this could have gotten ugly fast,” said EMT Jordan Keeley, who ushered the excessively conscious Hillman through the beaded curtains of one of many hallucinogen aid centers strategically stationed across the festival grounds to administer patients urgent doses of psilocybin, acid, and DMT. “Holy shit, he’s making coherent small talk! I’m gonna need 10 cc’s of toad venom, stat—let’s get his blood pressure way up. Quick! Before Moby goes on!” At press time, Coachella medical staff were shouting, “Fuck, we’re losing him!” as Hillman stated that it was great to meet everyone, but it was time for him to go hydrate and reapply his sunscreen.
WASHINGTON—In a surprising collective announcement that left the American public hugging and crying tears of joy, the nation’s women declared Wednesday that they were pregnant, confirming en masse that “it’s yours.” “Our little blessing is due in October,” the chorus of approximately 78 million women of reproductive age said in perfect unison, each gently placing a hand on her abdomen to call attention to the tiny baby bump just beginning to form. “Isn’t it wonderful? You’re going to be such a great dad!” At press time, sources confirmed the nation’s women had begun mentioning different names they liked and detailing plans to turn the spare room into a nursery.
WASHINGTON, DC – Following criticism that he has reneged on his promise to end “a whole civilization,” as detailed in one of his many irate posts about the Iran war, US President Donald Trump has taken to social media to clarify that the post has been taken out of context and that America itself was […]
“I can’t think of a single more dangerous food to have in zero gravity.” Guest host Ian MacIntyre is joined by panellist Nile Séguin along with special guests Kyah Green (The Fandom Show) and Andrew Ivimey (new standup special “Let’s Go” online now!) They discuss Big Tech finally getting big sued, what’s good in Manitoba, […]
Lottie and Claire are in their own way just as (if not more so) intimidating as Cathey, but it’s important to emphasise: at heart they’re extremely nice people. You’d like them if you knew them.
I’m having a real “am I doing a net positive with my work?” kind of day. Is the tragedy of the commons inevitable? Is there a way to let anyone who wants to forage, while making sure they all are future-focused and reciprocity driven? Will humans in this globalized, fast paced world eventually muck up everything we touch?
ALT
