She's good. She's really good.

When Donald Trump criticized Seattle's handling of the recent protests for Black Lives Matter and over the death of George Floyd, the mayor of Seattle had a response.

Make us all safe. Go back to your bunker. #BlackLivesMatter https://t.co/H3TXduhlY4

 Mayor Jenny Durkan (@MayorJenny) June 11, 2020

Said Jenny Durkan, mayor of Seattlem to Trump: “go back to your bunker.”

"Go back to your bunker," Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan tells Trump after he demands that she reclaim the city's streets.https://t.co/xEfJEJTx3E pic.twitter.com/ZqzUPsKimH

 Mike Baker (@ByMikeBaker) June 11, 2020

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https://boingboing.net/2020/06/11/seattle-mayor-to-trump-go-b.html

I once wrote a children's book (that I never actually published or did anything with) about the origin story of the emu, which I hypothesized as being the offspring of two ostriches who were each so heartbroken that they just became very emo — hence, emus. But never in my wildest imagination did I fathom that real-life fathom would be involved in something so much more twisted:

The emus are performing arcane summoning rituals in the backyard again. pic.twitter.com/801aQ9OnQE

 Foxfeather Zenkova (@foxfeather) June 9, 2020

Image: Michael / Flickr (CC 2.0) Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/11/these-emus-have-apparently-dis.html

I know it's summer, but this is getting odd.

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https://boingboing.net/2020/06/11/everyone-on-the-right-slowly-t.html

Popular Information published an article about three companies that publicly stated support for Black Lives Matter but at the same time advertised on dog whistling virtuoso Tucker Carlson's Fox News program: Disney, T-Mobile, and Papa John’s. But soon after the article ran, all three companies released statements saying they would no longer advertise on the program.

There's always the MyPillow guy.

(Image: Gage Skidmore, CC-BY-2.0) Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/10/three-companies-stopped-advert.html

Does anyone think Trump would ever leave the White House of his own accord, no matter what the results of the election? Vox interviewed Amherst College law professor Lawrence Douglas, who wrote a book called Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020.

I’m not trying to be an alarmist here, but it’s possible to imagine, come January 20, that we don’t have a president. By the terms of the 20th Amendment, Trump ceases to be president at noon on January 20 and [Mike] Pence likewise ceases to be vice president.

At this point, by the terms of the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, could become acting president, but only if she resigns her House seat. But what if Trump continues to insist that he has been reelected and is the rightful president? Imagine if, come January 20, Trump stages his own inauguration ceremony with Clarence Thomas issuing the oath of office.

Then we might have Nancy Pelosi and Trump both claiming to be the commander in chief. This is a world of hurt.

There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone.....

 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2020

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https://boingboing.net/2020/06/10/what-if-trump-loses-but-refuse.html

I like to walk around Cat Street and its intriguing side streets every time I go to Tokyo. It's full of eclectic little stores and cafes and there are surprises around every corner. Here's a video that was recently taken on Cat Street and Omotesando. I'm looking forward to returning.

Image: YouTube Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/10/watch-this-relaxing-walk-along.html

Perfect. A petition is being circulated on Change.org to replace Richmond, VA's Monument Avenue statue of Robert E. Lee with Oderus Urungus (aka the late Dave Brockie) of GWAR.

“Robert E. Lee is a failed war general that supported a racist cause. For too long, the city of Richmond has been displaying statues of him and other loser civil war veterans.

We the scumdogs of the universe call on the city of Richmond to erect a statue of great local leader Oderus Urungus in its place. While Oderus comes from the planet Scumdogia, he called Richmond his home, working with the local art community and employing local artists and ladies of the night.”

Apparently, the petition got started when GWAR dancer and backup vocalist, Slymenstra Hymen (aka Danielle Stampe), posted a Photoshopped image of Oderus in place of Robert E. Lee. A GWAR fan decided to post the idea as a real petition. The original goal was 500 signatures and a few laughs. They are currently up to 7,900 signatures and counting.

Image: Danielle Stampe on Facebook Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/10/petition-circulates-to-replace.html

NASCAR is an activity in which humans sit in wheeled, self-propelled boxes and hold contests to see who can roll the fastest. Other humans surround the rolling boxes and cheer for their favorite. The humans who run this lucrative enterprise have decreed that it is no longer acceptable for the wheeled boxes to display images of the Confederate flag, a banner that was used by enslavers who wanted to form a country that allowed ownership of people. They fought a war and lost, and a few of the losers are still sore about it, so they continue to display the flag on cars, shirts, and bikinis. The sore losers are now angry at NASCAR for banning their flag and have vowed to boycott it.

From Pensacola News Journal:

"The presence of the confederate flag at NASCAR events runs contrary to our commitment to providing a welcoming and inclusive environment for all fans, our competitors and our industry," a league statement read. "Bringing people together around a love for racing and the community that it creates is what makes our fans and sport special. The display of the confederate flag will be prohibited from all NASCAR events and properties."

Image; The eBay Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/10/nascar-banned-the-confederate.html

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/10/encode-your-data-with-emoji.html

Mtsyry: Octobriana 1976 is a new book from Jim Rugg featuring Octobriana, the Russian superhero star of cult 70s comics which themselves have a strange and confusing history. Rugg's incarnation will be printed in fluorescent blacklight inks by AdHouse Books, which is apparently the first time this has been done: "It should look incredible and appeal to fans of weird comics, printed matter, unique zines, 70s counter-culture."

The kickstarter has 8 days left and has already blasted past its target. Rugg writes:

The story is set in the 1970s, the period when blacklight posters were most popular (also the period of Rugg’s graphic novel, Afrodisiac). In 1971, the west learned about Octobriana - the outlaw Russian superhero comic in Petr Sadecky’s expose, Octobriana and the Russian Underground. Octobriana is part Barbarella, part Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds. She’s an unusual cult character with a storied history. David Bowie tried to make a movie about her. Billy Idol has her likeness tattooed on his arm. As a child of the Cold War and fan of underground comix, Rugg identified Octobriana as the perfect character for his psychedelic outlaw comic!

The concept of Mtsyry: Octobriana 1976 is that underground American cartoonists made their own Octobriana comic book after reading Sadecky’s book. It was an effort to show solidarity with their Russian cartoonist comrades. Robot Stalin's got a new doomsday bomb! Can the Devil-Woman stop him before he destroys us all? Siberian labor camps, PPP secret orgies, motorcycle gunship train chases - this one has it all!

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/10/fluorescent-blacklight-comic-b.html

The US government announced funding clinical trials on three COVID-19 vaccine candidates. According to Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, we're still on track for a vaccine at scale by the end of this year or early 2021. From CNN:

Phase 3 trials, which typically involve tens of thousands of people and measure whether a vaccine is safe and effective, will begin with one by Moderna in July, then an Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine in August and one by Johnson & Johnson in September...

Last week, Fauci said the US should have 100 million doses of one candidate coronavirus vaccine by the beginning of 2021, but many doctors caution that is an ambitious goal. He has also said there will be "more than one winner" in the Covid-19 vaccine field on Tuesday.

Who will get first dibs? (And who wants first dibs?)

image: "Respiratory droplets produced when a man sneezes, visualised using Tyndall scattering" by James Gathany/CDC (public domain) Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/10/fauci-us-government-announced.html

COPS has glorified police since 1989, riding along as officers chase down, interview and arrest people. It crafted a reality-TV aesthetic of shaky cameras, counterfeit danger and harsh lighting, cruel in its presentation of suspects and fawning in its identification with officers. And now it's been cancelled, a conspicuous casualty of the American revolt against police brutality.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/10/cops-cancelled-after-33-season.html

Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do? In 1994, Atari released COPS, a LaserDisc-based videogame based on the now-cancelled "reality" TV series. Above is rare footage of the gameplay.

According to the International Arcade Museum description, "You play a cop who must either shoot armed criminals while protecting the innocent or chase after escaping criminals in your patrol car."

As usual, it would have been more fun to play the bad guys.

Below are shots of a COPS Operator's Manual currently for sale on eBay.

More about COPS and other LaserDisc arcade games at the Dragon's Lair Project.

(via r/ObscureMedia) Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/10/cops-the-atari-arcade-videoga.html

Writer Gerry Conway has been vocal for years about the misappropriation of the Punisher, a vigilante murderer superhero he created in 1974 when he wrote Amazing Spider-Man #129:

It's disturbing whenever I see authority figures embracing Punisher iconography because the Punisher represents a failure of the Justice system. He's supposed to indict the collapse of social moral authority and the reality some people can't depend on institutions like the police or the military to act in a just and capable way. […] Whether you think the Punisher is justified or not, whether you admire his code of ethics, he is an outlaw. He is a criminal. Police should not be embracing a criminal as their symbol.

Unfortunately, Conway's insistence on what's plainly obvious for anyone who's actually familiar with the Punisher has not stopped the character from becoming a symbol of fascism, proudly worn by law enforcement agents who probably shouldn't be boasting about their love of fascism.

Here are some photos of Detroit police apparently from today. Can anyone explain the skull? Given the use of the totenkopf by the SS, doesn’t it seem just a little bit inappropriate?? pic.twitter.com/j3KES75kcb

 Nick Krieger (@nckrieger) June 3, 2020

Now, with protests against police brutality raging across the country, Conway is taking another approach:

To be clear, this little project is open to anyone who wants to contribute their time and effort. It's not a paying gig, it's intended to raise funds to support BLM. I hope to use multiple artists with a variety of styles and artistic approaches.

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/10/creator-of-the-punisher-is-org.html

Chris Watts killed his pregnant wife and two young children and buried them in a tank. This mini-documentary by Jim Can't Swim (patreon) takes us through the bodycam footage of a cop called to his house after Shannon Watts failed to turn up to a rendezvous with a friend, and subsequent interview with detectives. It's detailed and striking work, pointing out the subtle (and not so subtle) tells in his calm behavior that led the police to suspect he was the culprit. You can tell why no-one knew what he'd done, but can readily see they felt it from the outset.

We are rightfully armed by reason against such feelings as they are often wrong. Nonetheless, there's a moment in the bodycam video where Shanann Watts' friend makes a certain facial expression after Chris arrives home but doesn't call for his wife. You can't say it's realization, but she's sinking fast.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/10/psychology-of-a-killer.html

In March of 2019 — about a year after the Parkland shooting at Marjory Stoneham Douglas High School — the ACLU released a report titled "Cops and No Counselors: How the Lack of School Mental Health Staff Is Harming Students." Based on publicly available federal civil rights data from 2015-2016, this report offered a comprehensive analysis of the school support resources, breaking it down by state and demographic, to get a better look at how we're serving students in America.

The results were not good:

The ACLU’s report found over 90 percent of students nationwide attend schools that fail to meet the nationally recommended ratios for student-to-counselors, psychologists, nurses, and social workers. Over 14 million of these students were in schools that reported having law enforcement present despite lacking critical mental and physical health personnel. The report cites research indicating that students would benefit more from increased access to mental health professionals than the increased school hardening the commission recommends.

[…]

The average number of students each school counselor serves is 444 — nearly double the already limited recommended student-counselor ratio of 250:1 At least 43 percent of our nation's students attend schools with onsite police, and in some states more than 68 percent of schools have police 31 percent of the nation's students attend schools that have school police, but no psychologist, nurse, social worker, and/or counselor Black girls account for 16 percent of girls enrolled nationwide, but account for 39 percent of the girls arrested in school Native American and Pacific Islander students were more than twice as likely to be arrested as white students nationwide Black and Latino boys with disabilities are 3 percent of students, but were 12 percent of school arrests.

What I personally found most staggering was that 94 percent of "serious offenses" by students involved threats or actual physical fights … without a weapon. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/10/the-aclu-analyzed-the-number-o.html

On April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, Riceville, Iowa schoolteacher Jane Elliott ran an incredible social experiment in her third grade classroom. Her "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" exercise identified the kids "as inferior or superior based solely upon the color of their eyes and exposes them to the experience of being a minority." The exercise had a tremendous, and lasting, impact on those children and countless others, and sparked Elliott's lifelong role as a an anti-racism activist and educator.

Above is a 1985 episode of Frontline about Elliott. Below is her appearance last week on The Tonight Show:

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/10/after-mlks-assassination-th.html

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/10/fed-up-cobbler-fashions-extra.html

More than 64,000 endangered sea turtles are gathered in the world's largest nesting area near Raine Island, Australia, but who's counting? The Great Barrier Reef Foundation, that's who. Their researchers used harmless white paint to mark around 2,000 turtles and then flew a drone overhead. By determining the ratio of marked to unmarked turtles, they could then accurately estimate the total population. From BarrierReef.org:

“We’re taking action to improve and rebuild the island’s nesting beaches and building fences to prevent turtle deaths, all working to strengthen the island’s resilience and ensure the survival of our northern green turtles and many other species," [said Great Barrier Reef Foundation Managing Director Anna Marsden...]

The research paper’s lead author Dr Andrew Dunstan from the Queensland Department of Environment and Science is excited to share his work.

“Trying to accurately count thousands of painted and unpainted turtles from a small boat in rough weather was difficult,” Dr Dunstan said.

“Using a drone is easier, safer, much more accurate, and the data can be immediately and permanently stored[...]”

“In the future, we will be able to automate these counts from video footage using artificial intelligence so the computer does the counting for us.”

"Use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for mark-resight nesting population estimation of adult female green sea turtles at Raine Island" (PLOS ONE) Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/10/how-do-you-count-more-than-60.html

Sarah Grossman, 22, died after being tear-gassed by police in Columbus, Ohio, reports the Dayton Daily News. Two days passed between her exposure to the gas and pepper spray and her death, but both family and investigators suspect a connection. Local authorities aren't denying it, adds the New York Post.

Grossman’s body showed no signs of lethal trauma and the only medical condition mentioned in the preliminary records is an allergy to peanuts, the paper reported.

“Police did use gasses to disperse crowds that night. We haven’t received an official complaint, nor have investigators in Montgomery County talked to (Columbus police),” city spokeswoman Robin Davis told the Dayton Daily News.

“Again, we encourage anyone who was with her at the protest or on May 29 or 30 before she went to Sycamore to talk to Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office or (Columbus police),” she added.

https://boingboing.net/2020/06/10/sdgasdg.html