A postcard mailer that went out all American homes to highlight President Donald Trump’s role in the stimulus check program cost the government $28 million.

Which means it cost us $28 million.

The taxpayers.

Trump's coronavirus postcard was mailed to every single American home, and prominently featured his name in an election year.

We paid for a campaign ad.

Nothing matters.

Read more at USA Today:

Coronavirus post card that featured Trump's name cost struggling Postal Service $28 million

Neither the White House nor the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention immediately responded to a request for comment. The post card, which was dated March 16, carried logos of both the CDC and the White House.

 USA TODAY Politics (@usatodayDC) May 28, 2020

Remember that coronavirus post card the government sent to every American household back in March that prominently featured Trump's name?

It cost $28 million. https://t.co/2GAPSo1y01

 John Fritze (@jfritze) May 28, 2020

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/28/postcard-mailed-to-americans-t.html

Teen Vogue posted a useful guide for what to do and what not to do when videotaping police. 5. Try to provide evidence that your footage is real In an era of fake news and rampant misinformation online, you want to make sure that your footage is as verifiable as possible. To do this:

Film street signs, landmarks, or exteriors of buildings to help determine the location. Film a clock, phone home screen, newspaper, or something that helps verify the time and date. It could be helpful to also state the time, date, and location out loud on camera, or write it down on a piece of paper and hold it up to the screen. You can turn on GPS location services to help verify your location. Film continuously instead of stopping and starting your camera; this will help fight against claims that footage was edited or manipulated.

Image: Jumpstory / CC0 Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/28/teen-vogue-how-to-safely-and.html

Three years after "I Have a Dream" and the March on Washington, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King spoke with Mike Wallace of CBS News about change within the Civil Rights movement.

Excerpt:

I contend that the cry of "black power" is, at bottom, a reaction to the reluctance of white power to make the kind of changes necessary to make justice a reality for the Negro. I think that we've got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard.

FULL VIDEO at CBS News: September 27, 1966: MLK—A riot is the language of the unheard [more here]

“In the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear?” pic.twitter.com/Als3jhxaGH

 The King Center (@TheKingCenter) May 28, 2020

IMAGE, top: via Flickr, courtesy @rumorweaver, Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/28/a-riot-is-the-language-of-th.html

I felt sorry for this fellow, whose minor forklift mishap creates a domino effect that sends everything sprawling to the floor. But the perfect cartoon-farmer hat-stomping reaction deserves full marks for form and execution. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/28/forklift-mishap-annoys-man.html

It's been four years since Cory posted a supercut of video game bathrooms, but the industry hasn't been slacking since. Curious Reviewers posted a series collecting the typically revolting, sometimes deluxe, always weirdly spacious virtual pissoirs of videogaming.

Here are the three episodes, in reverse chronological order. Note that many of the clips show nudity, violence, grossness and other things you might expect to find going on in ludological lavatories. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/28/exhaustive-tour-of-video-game.html

Donald Trump is threatening a Twitter employee, on Twitter, just after Jack Dorsey tweeted to leave his employees out of this. The drama continues.

Here's the tweet.

Quite a twofer. Disinformation about a civic event, voting, and also using the power of the presidency to harness mob wrath against a single employee of a platform that had the audacity to point out that a lie about "voter fraud" is a lie.

This tweet by part-time Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey last night wasn't very effective against a professional troll.

Fact check: there is someone ultimately accountable for our actions as a company, and that’s me. Please leave our employees out of this. We’ll continue to point out incorrect or disputed information about elections globally. And we will admit to and own any mistakes we make.

 jack (@jack) May 28, 2020

PREVIOUSLY on Boing Boing:

• Twitter fact-checks Trump tweet for first time • Trump flips out on Twitter, right after Twitter fact-checked him for the first time • Trump to sign social media executive order, after lashing out at Twitter • Here's what's in Trump's executive order against social media companies • Read the text of Trump's draft Executive Order about Social Media

Just a reminder that Twitter didn’t censor or limit Trump’s tweet.

They just added a little note saying “here’s some more information.”

The nuclear response from WH should tell you something about Trump’s campaign strategy.

 Nick Confessore (@nickconfessore) May 28, 2020

Wow. Trump is now calling out the same Twitter employee that Kellyanne Conway called out yesterday.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/28/trump-targets-individual-twitt.html

“Test counts inflated, death tolls deflated, metrics shifted.”

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/28/they-lie-we-die-2.html

Enjoy Daniel de Bruin's wonderfully-produced video of a miniature marble machine being made from a) exactingly precise stuff from the workshop parts drawer, b) a Pruser Mini 3D printer, and c) a lot of patient work with soldering irons, glues and fiddly lengths of wire.

In this video I'm using a ball bearing of only 5mm wide. The track is made of 0.6mm wire. It took me waaaay longer to construct than anticipated, because a small mistake and the ball wouldn't stay on the track. It took me 5 days to shoot, make and edit.

Below, de Bruin offers a more general look at this incredible hobby. You don't need fancy equipment to get started, but you do need a wee soldering iron (I like the TS100 [Amazon] a lot), a variable-speed power drill for the wire-coiling magic, and precision calipers. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/28/miniature-magnetic-marble-trac.html

The LA Times has observed that COVID-19 infection rates are falling in wealthier enclaves while gaining traction in poorer communities.

Denser living conditions, higher populations of 'essential' workers, and historic difficulty accessing health care force folks in a position to be infected.

LA Times:

The Times compared neighborhoods in which more than 25% of the population was living below the poverty line — defined by the Census Bureau as a family of four making less than $26,000 a year — to those in which the poverty rate was lower than 5%.

The shift shows the surge feared by public health officials did come to pass, but was largely concentrated in the poorest, most crowded neighborhoods — areas with a lot of essential workers, more crowded housing and higher rates of underlying health conditions such as asthma, diabetes and heart disease.

Early in the outbreak, health officials and experts warned that numbers showing higher infection rates on the Westside in predominately white, affluent neighborhoods such as Bel-Air, Beverly Crest and Brentwood were skewed by uneven testing that masked the true spread of COVID-19. Those areas have seen their fortunes improve after months of social distancing and economic disruption.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/28/covid-19-grows-in-los-angeles.html

“You don’t want to wear a mask fine, but you don’t have a right to go into that store if that store owner doesn’t want you to.” — NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/28/cuomo-to-sign-law-allowing-ny.html

In this Cool Tools video, Sean Michael Ragan reviews a wall-mounted thread-checker - a handy thread verifier for nuts and bolts.

It measures 3" wide by 39" tall, and, like the original version, features both male and female reference threads in a range of standard SAE and metric sizes. It's mounted on a half-inch thick plastic composite board, and the printing is both grease- and waterproof. It has three 5/16” diameter mounting holes for attaching it to the wall, and it is made in the USA, by the same folks who make the original thread checker: S&W Manufacturing of Chicago.

Unlike the original, the wall-mounted version can be used one-handed, which lets you quickly find a particular size in a bin of unsorted fasteners, or identify an unknown thread with one hand while you hold an assembly in the other.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/28/useful-wall-mount-thread-check.html

The Action Lab Man introduces binary arithmetic when demonstrating the cool Turning Tumble marble-powered computer. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/28/good-demonstration-of-a-comput.html

Stop-and-go waves of dense freeway traffic can flow backward for miles. This TED-Ed video explains the phenomenon of "phantom traffic jams" and shows how self-driving cars that are aware of the traffic conditions ahead can adjust their behavior to prevent phantom traffic jams. Interestingly, models have shown had just one self-driving vehicle for every 20 human-driven vehicles can dampen a stop-and-go phantom traffic jam wave.

Image: YouTube Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/28/what-are-phantom-traffic-jam.html

After Trump threw a tantrum over Twitter doing the bare-minimum to fact-check his deliberately misleading tweets, Trump announced plans to sign an Executive Order that forces social media to "protect" "free speech." Because government-approved top-down authoritarian control of private companies is apparently now a central tenet of the Republican Party.

Content Moderation expert Kate Klonick shared a draft of the order.

Section 230 doesn't protect editorial conductTwitters labels on tweets regarding falsity = editorial conduct

Therefore, this EO places such platforms outside scope of Sec. 230 protection2/

 Kate Klonick (@Klonick) May 28, 2020

This is all in the name of the commitment and concern for free and diverse speech online.

"So say we all."

(that last bit was me)

4/4

 Kate Klonick (@Klonick) May 28, 2020

You can read the full document here, which hinges on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (as well as the continued wolf-crying fantasy of "conservative censorship"). If you want the sparknotes, Vice has a pretty comprehensive breakdown:

As far as legislation goes, the first subsection of 230 is concise and powerful: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

In the order, Trump also makes the argument that social media companies' actions should not "infringe on protected speech," which would be a massive change from Section 230 as it's currently worded, which makes an explicit carve-out for restricting protected speech. This will, unequivocally, change the internet as a whole and make it worse.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/28/read-an-early-draft-of-trump.html

The Lincoln Project has dedicated a video to Kentucky's US Senator Mitch McConnell. They highlight his history of self-enrichment and failure to help Kentucky out much.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/28/the-lincoln-project-targets.html

During Passover last month, I posted about The Ten Commandments, Cecil B. DeMille's 1923 epic silent film version of the biblical Exodus story (plus a related modern story that I never bothered to watch.) As part of tomorrow night's DAWN online celebration of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, Steven Drozd of the Flaming Lips, Steve Berlin of Los Lobos, and drummer Scott Amendola are premiering a far out new score for the film! Watch the excerpt above. Organized by the Jewish arts and culture organization Reboot, DAWN is sure to be a wild program of music, conversations, comedy, and performances. My pal and Boing Boing contributor David Katznelson, the head of Reboot, orchestrated the new Ten Commandments musical collaboration. From Rolling Stone:

Reboot CEO David Katznelson — who signed the Flaming Lips to Warner Bros. years ago — said of the project: “Watching this film score come together, with three amazing artists forced to work remotely and yet completely in flow with each other as they composed such an incredible piece of music was inspirational. Using the greatest artists of the day to bring something like The Ten Commandments to life for new generations to connect with… that is exactly what Reboot was created to do.”

Along with Drozd, Berlin and Amendola, the DAWN lineup will feature appearances from Carl Reiner, Norman Lear, Michaela Watkins, Gaby Moskowitz, Tiffany Shlain and Kasher vs. Kasher, a new podcast from comedian Moshe Kasher and his brother Rabbi David Kasher. The event kicks off May 28th at 10 p.m.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/27/members-of-flaming-lips-and-lo.html

The U.S. death toll of those killed by Covid19 passed 100,000 today, according to The New York Times. Johns Hopkins' tracker, which does not include U.S. deaths aboard cruise ships, placed the death toll at 99,783 on Wednesday.

The toll is short of the true total, say experts, but the milestone, arbitrary as it is, is a reminder of the severity and persistence of the coronavirus pandemic even as lockdowns are lifted.

The toll exceeds the number of U.S. military combat fatalities in every conflict since the Korean War. It matches the toll in the United States of the 1968 flu pandemic, and it is approaching the 116,000 killed in another flu outbreak a decade before that. The pandemic is on track to be the country’s deadliest public health disaster since the 1918 flu pandemic, in which about 675,000 Americans died. Though the numbers of new cases and deaths have begun trending downward, health experts warn of a possible resurgence as lockdowns are lifted.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/27/u-s-covid-19-death-toll-passe.html

Charles Platt's growing series of electronics books are the best I've come across. He explains concepts very clearly, and his illustrations are excellent. His latest book in the series is called Easy Electronics. It covers voltage, resistance, capacitors, transistors, integrated circuits, and more. No tools are needed to complete the projects in this book.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/27/easy-electronics-book-is-an-ex.html

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/27/white-venture-capitalist-sees.html

In Chayanta, Bolivia, three brothers, ages 12, 10 and 8, came upon a black widow spider while herding goats. They poked at the spider until it bit each of them. Why? They hoped to become Spider-Man. According to a report in Telemundo, their mom found them very upset and took them to a health center that moved them to a hospital. From the New York Post:

The would-be Peter Parkers were transferred a third time, taken to the Children’s Hospital in La Paz the next day with fevers, tremors and muscle pains, according to the report.

There, they were treated and discharged last Wednesday, almost a week after they were bitten, the report says.

No word on whether they can now sling webs.

(Thanks, Rick Pescovitz!)

image: Chepyle (CC BY-SA 3.0) Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/27/three-young-brothers-made-a-bl.html