1972 saw the birth of the ILF (Infant Liberation Front), a terrorist organisation for the under-10s. The anarchic underground group was slow to make an impact because many of its younger members had not yet developed the literacy skills required to understand the group's manifesto.
The breakthrough came in 1973 when the ILF published a more accessible colouring book. It outlined the group's aims and depicted recommended acts of terror which could be easily carried out before bedtime. The book was an instant hit and widely distributed in school playgrounds.
The ILF's goal was to create a paedocracy, but not only; it also wanted "the freedom to eradicate all grownups (without having to get their permission first)". To this end the group would go to any lengths. Hordes of children roamed the streets (after they had completed their homework) hunting stray adults, and in 1976 alone 250 grownups disappeared or met their fates.
In 1978 the ILF disbanded when Arthur Grubbe, a 50 year old investigative journalist, infiltrated the group by posing as a 3 year old girl. Grubbe revealed that the ILF was secretly funded by local government who intended to groom sociopaths for positions in the civil service once they reached the age of majority.
Grubbe became something of a celebrity and Arthur was the most popular baby girl name of 1979.
Below, an ILF leaflet. ILF members regularly held dirty protests, especially those under the age of one. They doggedly maintained around-the-clock demonstrations which were only interrupted by feeding time and naps.
You can learn more about infant civil disobedience HERE and HERE and HERE.
Technology has always been intimately linked to the human body. From sharpened flint to smartphones, we've been carrying our inventions for millennia—but the relationship is about to get even closer. The next generation of electronic devices might not just be near our bodies, they could be powered by them.
Staying alive guzzles energy. In order to keep us ticking, our bodies need to burn between 2,000 and 2,500 calories per day, which is conveniently enough to power a modestly used smart phone. So if just a fraction of that energy could be siphoned, our bodies could in theory be used to run any number of electronic devices, from medical implants to electronic contact lenses—all without a battery in sight. Recently, researchers have taken important strides toward unlocking this electric potential.
Untapped potential
To start, the energy in our bodies exists in various forms. Most of them need some manipulation before they can be used to power an electronic device. But not all do.
Yesssss... your body will do nicely for the young ones.
How do you like YOUR eggs? Introducing the Splorch! It is an ovipositor designed for all those xenomorph fans out there who like the idea of alien eggs and impregnation. Made of soft platinum silicone, the Splorch is stretchy enough to handle chicken egg-sized gelatin eggs. Although we do not supply these directly, all Splorch orders will include a free 6-egg mold.
Thank you for being such an excellent host.
Krubera:
A new version of our popular Splorch ovipositor, the Krubera is sure to make you squirm! Feel it's tube-like member bulge with eggs as it slides its way up into you, eager to implant it's offspring deep inside.
The Krubera features a subtly textured 11" shaft, and a 12' overall length. When gelatin eggs are squeezed through, it distends, rippling and writhing, the eggs sliding upward until they gently pop out the end.
As with the Splorch, the Krubera does not come with eggs. A free mold is provided for making your own.
Proof that she’s a force to be reckoned all on her own, the track is a blaring number boasting barrages of bullet-like synthesizers and percussion. It’s as though something’s finally been unleashed in Glass — some kind of hungry and powerful beast, and one that’s more than ready to stand apart from her Crystal Castles past.
The track was written by Glass and Jupiter Keyes in their basement; it was co-produced and mixed by Lars Stalfors, known for his work with The Mars Volta, Matt & Kim, and Cold War Kids.
Glass posted the song on Facebook alongside a lengthy note regarding a past abusive relationship. She notes the emotional damage of said relationship and says that all proceeds from the song will “benefit organizations that help survivors of domestic abuse, sexual violence, and incest.”
Read her full message below.
“Years ago I began the process of trying to remove myself from an abusive relationship that started when I was a teenager. Over the course of that relationship I was systematically cut off from anyone and everyone that I could truly be close to. I was talked down to, yelled at, locked into rooms and criticized daily about my abilities, my weight, my looks, my intelligence and almost every move I made. When I couldn’t take it anymore and I wanted to end the relationship I was threatened, then I was told I was loved, and the cycle would begin again.
“I want young women and young men to understand that this kind of treatment of others can happen where it might be least expected. Even in environments that thrive on creativity and open-mindedness, that advocate artistic and counter-culture ideals. Sometimes people will use these things to camouflage themselves so that their abuse might go unnoticed. So that you wouldn’t think to consider it could be happening right in front of you.
“The clarity I’ve gained since getting out of that situation has opened up my life in a way that I didn’t imagine was possible. Although some of the pain and anger still lingers, my life finally feels as though it has value and meaning. I speak out now hoping that I can encourage other young women and young men to affirm their value within their relationships or get out. Abuse isn’t always obvious and it doesn’t have to involve black eyes, blood and broken bones. Emotional and psychological abuse can be just as damaging, and it is extremely difficult to remove yourself from.
“Those that have known me throughout my career might be surprised that someone who publicly gave the impression of being fearless and seemed as though they didn’t take shit from anyone could find themselves being severely mistreated and manipulated by someone they were close to. This person nearly stripped me of myself. And for years I felt as though they were waiting for my life to end.
“‘Stillbirth’ was written by myself and Jupiter Keyes in our basement. There is no label involved. It will be available through iTunes, Spotify, etc. beginning July 18. All proceeds for digital purchases of this song will benefit organizations (like the nonprofit RAINN) that help survivors of domestic abuse, sexual violence and incest. You can donate directly to them at https://donate.rainn.org or via the link on my website at http://www.alice-glass.com/
“There is a sister song to ‘Stillbirth’ that I hope to release soon, she is a lullaby and she can’t wait to meet you.”
Faith No More’s Mike Patton, Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio, and rapper Doseone have spent the last half decade recording under the alias of The Nevermen. On January 29th, they’ll release their self-titled debut through Patton’s label Ipecac Recordings.
Work on the album, which consists of 10 tracks, started in 2008 when Adebimpe and Doseone linked up in a Brooklyn warehouse. Doseone sent their demos to Patton, who he recorded with two years prior for Patton’s Peeping Tom album. The trio then spent the next few years reconfiguring and recording each track.
In anticipation, The Nevermen have unveiled the album’s lead single, “Tough Towns”, dedicated to “anyone remotely young, feeling inexplicably inspired in the ‘nowhere’ they are from. May you soon escape with style into elsewhere.” Listen below.
This week in insect villainy: this parasitic wasp sucks the blood of a spider, hacks into its nervous system, and forces its zombie body to build a strong web that it can use as a cocoon.
by Ashley Feinberg on Weird Internet, shared by Meg Neal to Gizmodo
Shockingly, 4chan—the cherished home of aspiring internet vigilantes and/or racist piles of garbage everywhere—isn’t quite as cunning as it might have you believe. When a whistleblower published a highly sensitive (and highly legitimate) report from an Australian spy agency to its profanity-laden forums, 4chan users didn’t waste any time in analyzing the potential goldmine at their fingertips: “Fake and gay.”
Sicily, Italy based artist Sasha Vinci creates haunting sculptures and installations that contemplate the nature of man's existence. While his works can be morbid and a bit terrifying, as in his series of fleshy seated subjects waiting for eternity, Vinci also finds beauty and sexuality in the human figure. Known for his captivating and carnal sculptures, Vinci is a true multimedia artist, also exploring drawing, painting, writing, sound design and performance art.
Enypniastes is a deep sea cucumber that lives at depths of up to 16,400 feet. The red area is the animals mouth. Around it are tentacles, which scoop up edible mud from the seafloor. From there, it enters the creatures gut. (Source)
A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that a probable-cause warrant under the Fourth Amendment is required for the police to obtain a suspect's cell-site data.
The decision by the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals gives the Supreme Court, which has never ruled on the issue, ammunition to resolve a modern-day privacy controversy affecting the tens of millions of American mobile phone users. Until Wednesday, all the federal appellate courts that have decided the issue have ruled for the government's proposition that cell-site records are not constitutionally protected.
I know that sounds like a clickbait headline, but this guy believes Starbucks uses the ol' "man milk" in their lattes, and he seems generally okay with it (not that he drinks it, of course). According to Pastor Manning, spunk is another kind of milk, because, much like regular milk comes from mammary glands, dude juice comes from the "testicle gland" and is just another body fluid. Starbucks, apparently, has figured out that people like the taste, and added it to their milk blend.
Unions that represent American police officers are often complicit in keeping bad cops on the street. This is a story about one of those unions flagrantly allying itself with misbehaving cops who are trying to suppress hard evidence of indefensible behavior.
Even the backstory is jaw-dropping.
Earlier this year, Santa Ana, California, decided that it had too many pot dispensaries operating in the city without a permit. Officials decided to crack down. Police could have quietly served a search warrant or padlocked a front door.
Instead, they opted for a raid during business hours with guns drawn.
As a result, customers at Sky High Holistic marijuana dispensary had a terrifying experience: While browsing the pot shop’s products, they suddenly heard someone busting in the door. Seconds later, men were rushing into the room with guns drawn. Some wore masks. Frightened patrons quickly lay face down on the ground.
All by itself, this potentially dangerous, totally unnecessary show of force was troubling. The pot business was accused of a mere misdemeanor. There was no need to surprise patrons—some of whom were ill—with guns in their faces. But needlessly endangering the public was just the beginning of the dubious conduct. A surveillance camera recorded officers disconnecting the shop’s surveillance cameras. Under the impression that they’d got them all and were only accountable to fellow police officers, the cops discredited themselves in footage destined for YouTube:
On-duty police officers appear to be eating edible pot products—OC Weeklytranscribes words they spoke while egging one another on. (“Those candy bars are pretty good,” one said. “I kinda feel light-headed though.”) Other dialogue offers a number of insights into the subculture of this narcotics unit. Take the woman with an amputated leg that police encountered on entering the dispensary. “Did you punch that one-legged old benita?” one police officer asks another. The other cop laughingly replied, “I was about to kick her in her fucking nub.” These are people Santa Ana taxpayers empower to use lethal force at their discretion.
Later, OC Weekly got access to a fuller version of the footage. They marvel at what it contains:
Hon. Jonathan Fish has been an Orange County Superior Court Judge since 2008, but before that he was a prosecutor with the district attorney’s office who specialized in narcotics cases.
In the footage, an unidentified Santa Ana Police officer is talking to another cop as they wrap up their raid on the marijuana dispensary.
“You ever work with John Fish, the DA?” the officer asks.
“He was just in when I got there,” his partner responds.
“He's the judge that signed our warrant,” the first officer continues, adding that he had just spoken with Judge Fish and had enjoyed a good laugh with him about their old times together. “He's the fucker that pulled into a gas station on our way to the Staples Center and goes, ‘Let's buy some beers and drink 'em out of a red cup.’ I go, ‘That’s not going to be obvious.’ There we are at an am/pm getting styrofoam cups and pouring our beers into them. That fucking blew me away.”
That is all part of the backstory.
What’s new is the way that the cops caught misbehaving on camera and the police union that represents them have responded to an internal police investigation—not with embarrassment, contrition, and public apologies, as would befit trustworthy people of good character, but with shameless, discrediting chutzpah: They’ve sued to keep now public video of their indefensible behavior from their overseers!
“A lawsuit, filed last week in Orange County Superior Court by three unidentified police officers and the Santa Ana Police Officers Association, seeks to prevent Santa Ana Police Department internal-affairs investigators from using the video as they sort out what happened during the May 26 raid of Sky High Collective,” the Orange County Registerreports. The article goes on to characterize the lawsuit’s claims:
The lawsuit argues that the video doesn’t paint a fair version of events. The suit also claims the video shouldn’t be used as evidence because, among other things, the police didn’t know they were on camera. “All police personnel present had a reasonable expectation that their conversations were no longer being recorded and the undercover officers, feeling that they were safe to do so, removed their masks,” says the suit.
The dispensary also did not obtain consent of any officer to record them, the suit says. “Without the illegal recordings, there would have been no internal investigation of any officer,” the suit says.
To sum up: These police officers are complaining that after rushing into this business with guns drawn, forcing employees outside, and using a crowbar to pry visible surveillance cameras off the walls, they were not warned—by the same employees they forced out—that their efforts to disable all surveillance cameras failed, rendering their decision to eat the business’s products visible to its owners. As well, they’re arguing that, though on-duty cops, they had a reasonable expectation of privacy, having failed to account for their own incompetence at disabling surveillance.
But even more galling is that last bit about how “without the illegal recordings, there would have been no internal investigation of any officer,” as that’s only true if one assumes that all cops present would cover for one another’s egregious misbehavior and sign off on a police report that misrepresented the raid. That isn’t a bad assumption, given that police subculture is rife with cops who fail to report on the misconduct of fellow police officers, but it’s really something to see police officers invoke that reality, even implicitly, in an attempt to wriggle out of accountability.
And most galling of all is the fact that this tactic is going to work temporarily. “A Superior Court judge indicated Tuesday that he plans to issue a temporary restraining order that would prevent the Santa Ana Police Department from using video of officers misbehaving during a pot-shop raid as the department investigates the officers’ actions,” the Voice of OCreports. “According to court documents, Judge Ronald Bauer so far agrees with officers’ claims that they would suffer ‘irreparable harm’ if the department is allowed to use video that the Santa Ana Police Association argues was obtained in an illegal eavesdropping operation.”
The reprieve is likely temporary.
As Larry Rosenthal, a law professor of law at Chapman University, told the Orange County Register, “When you are on duty as a public official you have no expectation that what you do will not be subject to public scrutiny. I don’t think it matters whether cameras were destroyed or not. They were doing the public’s business.”
The website of the police union declares that over five decades, it “has grown from a good idea amongst a couple friends to one of the most respected organizations of its kind.” Its police-officer members are now funding a legal defense strategy that aims to prevent Santa Ana internal-affairs cops from reviewing the best available evidence in a police investigation of what appears to be illegal behavior. Any loss in respect that this organization now suffers is well deserved.
That didn't take long. The world's oldest Internet hobby is resuming in India, days after the country virtually banned Internet porn. Indians took to Twitter and other social-media sites blasting this weekend's anti-porn move, and the government has listened.
IT and Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said Tuesday that websites that don't display child pornography may resume streaming, according to local media reports. On Saturday, the Indian government initially ordered Internet providers to filter about 857 websites said to render pornographic material in a bid to protect morality. The government said the sites' content was "immoral and indecent," sites including things like Pornhub and Playboy.
"A new notification will be issued shortly. The ban will be partially withdrawn. Sites that do not promote child porn will be unbanned," Prasad told India Today TV.
Over the last few days, biologists, ecologists, and other scientists have been sharing mistakes and mishaps they’ve made in the wilderness: in other words, their #fieldworkfails. They are wonderful. I’ve posted some below, but I also emailed some of the participants to find out more about their misadventures.
“I glued my finger to the croc while attaching a transmitter with an instant glue,” Staniewicz, now a Ph.D. student at the University of Bristol, told me. “And then [I] spent a couple of minutes carefully detaching my finger from the croc and trying to keep the transmitter fastened while the local fishermen watched and laughed.”
Set padded leghold trap near house for jackal. Catch lion. #fieldworkfail
“I had a new student, a vet-turned-ecologist who was just starting her Ph.D.,” she wrote to me in an email. “I thought it was time for my student to try handling the animals without me present—she was a qualified vet after all—so the team set some padded leghold traps in among the houses at our research centre in Kenya, hoping to catch some jackals.”
At the time, her team was researching whether African wild dogs—an endangered species that had been suffering mass die-offs—were contracting rabies and canine distemper from local domestic dog populations. “We set out to take blood samples from a range of different carnivore species to see what diseases they had,” she said. Thus the jackal traps. Woodroffe continued:
I made sure [the new student] had the equipment she needed—including a catch pole to hold the jackals and sacks to put them in—then suggested she check the traps every three hours, starting straight after dinner.
I planned an early night, but around 9 p.m. there was a knocking at my door. It was my student asking me to come and help because we’d caught a lion. We drove up to the trap, and there it was, a big male, barely 50 meters from the nearest house. I was worried because he was caught in such a small trap and might get himself out or injure himself if we couldn't free him quickly. We had to work fast—fortunately we were equipped to trap hyaenas as well as jackals, and I had worked on lions previously, so we had both the experience and the dart gun needed to immobilise it and get it out of the trap. A problem was that the drugs we had were not concentrated enough for lions—after all, we were trying to catch animals about one-twentieth the size of a lion—so it took three darts to hold enough drugs to anaesthetise him.
I felt bad about it, and he was pretty grumpy by the time the third dart hit, but it was the only way to get him out of the trap. Having previously worked on lions in the same area, I knew how hard they usually were to catch, so I cannibalised two of our wild dog radio collars to make a collar for our friends at the lion project to follow him.
I am fond of these stories. Each one, even just in tweet form, provides a little shard of expert experience, and a reminder of how broad, globe-spanning, and sometimes farcical scientific work is. People named and observed large aquatic reptiles; biologists and zoologists studied how they live and how their bodies work. Then somebody accidentally glued herself to one.
What happened to Staniewicz’s crocodile, by the way?
“Sadly it seems like the glue was generally much better at attaching fingers than transmitters,” she said. “The croc lost it within 24 hours.”
Woodroffe’s lion, meanwhile, proved much harder to lose.
“The next day I could hear from his radio-signal that he was still hanging around the research station—indeed this turned out to be part of his regular range,” she said. “Many of the researchers liked to go running around the research station in the early morning and evening. I stopped doing this myself when I learned there was a lion in the area, but I never did convince my colleagues to do the same.”
I’ve posted some of my favorite tweets from the hashtag below. After years in the field, said Woodroffe, “we all have loads of stories like this.”
Lick tiny object to discern if fossil/rock. Fossil. Sticks to tongue. Coughing fit from dust. Sharp inhale. Swallow fossil. #fieldworkfail
If you're looking to install a new sound system in your house, consider burying a horse skull in the floor.
According to the Irish Archaeological Consultancy, the widespread discovery of "buried horse skulls within medieval and early modern clay floors" has led to the speculation that they might have been placed there for acoustic reasons—in other words, "skulls were placed under floors to create an echo," we read.
Ethnographic data from Ireland, Britain and Southern Scandinavia attests to this practice in relation to floors that were in use for dancing. The voids within the skull cavities would have produced a particular sound underfoot. The acoustic skulls were also placed in churches, houses and, in Scandinavia especially, in threshing-barns... It was considered important that the sound of threshing carried far across the land.
They were osteological subwoofers, bringing the bass to medieval villages.
It's hard to believe, but this was apparently a common practice: "the retrieval of horse skulls from clay floors, beneath flagstones and within niches in house foundations, is a reasonably widespread phenomenon. This practice is well attested on a wider European scale," as well, even though the ultimate explanation for its occurrence is still open to debate (the Irish Archaeological Consultancy post describes other interpretations, as well).
Either way, it's interesting to wonder if the thanato-acoustic use of horse skulls as resonating gourds in medieval architectural design might have any implications for how natural history museums could reimagine their own internal sound profiles—that is, if the vastly increased reverberation space presented by skulls and animal skeletons could be deliberately cultivated to affect what a museum's interior sounds like.
Like David Byrne's well-known project Playing the Building—"a sound installation in which the infrastructure, the physical plant of the building, is converted into a giant musical instrument"—you could subtly instrumentalize the bones on display for the world's most macabre architectural acoustics.
Splorch:
Sicily, Italy based artist Sasha Vinci creates haunting sculptures and installations that contemplate the nature of man's existence. While his works can be morbid and a bit terrifying, as in his series of fleshy seated subjects waiting for eternity, Vinci also finds beauty and sexuality in the human figure. Known for his captivating and carnal sculptures, Vinci is a true multimedia artist, also exploring drawing, painting, writing, sound design and performance art.
[Image: Horse skull via Wikimedia].
[Image: Inside the Paris Natural History Museum; photo by Nicola Twilley].