On 59 occasions throughout 2025, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) silently tweaked vulnerability notices to reflect their use by ransomware crooks. Experts say that's a problem.…

Opinion Palantir had a whopper of a Q4, showing accelerating revenue growth, beating Wall Street's profit estimates, and enjoying a share price jump of as much as 11% during pre-market trading on Tuesday before coming back down to earth.…

Thousands of miles behind Waymo, whose self-driving taxi cabs are so prolific as to have already entered into the realm of public nuisance, Tesla can't even tell the truth about its "Robotaxi."

Musk recently promised investors that the Tesla self-driving taxi was entering "unsupervised" trials in Austin, Texas. — Read the rest

The post When will Tesla give up on cars? appeared first on Boing Boing.

Shartgate is a reminder that America's political media environment has two different standards, depending on who is in power and which network pretends to be concerned.

An online pearl clutch has rocked the social medias for the last few days. So much so that Snopes had to take a look into the situation. — Read the rest

The post Shartgate: Nothing to see here, please keep voting appeared first on Boing Boing.

A couple of history offerings that caught my eye, one of possible interest to RAW fans and one  that might interest Robert Shea fans.

RAW was a World War II revisionist, and I recent ran across an announcement from Thaddeus Russell for an online course, "World War II: The Great Blowback," scheduled for Feb. 9-12:

"To most Americans, World War II is the only 'good war'—the one conflict you're not allowed to question without being accused of bad faith or worse.

"But over the last two decades, a growing number of of scholars has been assembling a very different narrative: that U.S. policy under Franklin Roosevelt turned regional wars into a truly global war, guaranteed the realization of the Holocaust, and was principally responsible for producing the greatest catastrophe in human history.

"This is the new history of the Second World War that I'll be presenting in a 4-part live course at Unregistered Academy."

More information here.  

While I am open to World War II revisionism, I admit to being cool to the "Allies made Hitler did it" school. Speaking of which, Russell's Substack also has a recent interview with Darryl Cooper. 

Meanwhile, Tyler Cowen recently did a mini-review of Jack Weatherford's  Emperor of the Seas: Kublai Khan and the Making of China, which covers the period of history in Robert Shea's two Shike novels. Tyler wrote, "A fun and good book, think of it as explaining how Kublai Khan beat Song China but subsequently lost to Japan.  The Ainu play a role in a wide-ranging and still historically relevant story."

The Porsche Cayenne Electric is already in production, just two months after it was unveiled. It features faster charging than competitors.

The post Porsche Cayenne EV Production Begins As New Car Sales Tumble In Norway appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Without apology or ambiguity, the interim United States attorney for the District of Columbia has said that Second Amendment rights for citizens no longer apply in the nation's Capitol.

"You bring a gun into the District, you mark my words, you're going to jail.

— Read the rest

The post Trump DOJ decides the Second Amendment only counts when they have the guns appeared first on Boing Boing.

Elon is playing a shell game; every time he screws up a company, Musk folds it into another and tells his investors this is innovation. Dumping his CSAM-generating AI company into his space ship company feels like a fairytale intended to keep valuations alive. — Read the rest

The post Elon Musk rearranges the deck chairs on his personal Titanic appeared first on Boing Boing.

Keir Starmer has given evidence to the Met Police of Peter Mandelson leaking confidential government information to serial child rapist - and Mandelson's bestie - Jeffrey Epstein. The evidence includes original emails containing sensitive economic information. The emails released by the US justice department also show Mandelson engaging in insider trading that would enrich Epstein and his allies.

Now Starmer has. But his Downing Street officials - and therefore Starmer - were aware of Mandelson's emails to Epstein months before now, probably even longer.

Last September, Starmer's office said it had emails sent by Mandelson that exposed "the depth and extent" of Mandelson's relationship with Epstein. That sounds a lot more extensive than merely the pining adoration that the September Epstein file release exposed - and Mandelson had already been vetted for his appointment by Starmer as UK ambassador to the US.

SNP MP Stephen Flynn made the same point on social media - and others agreed:

Stephen:
10/09/2025 Gordon Brown reports Mandelson to Cab Sec re leaks.
11/09/2025 Mandelson is sacked.
I think the Cab Sec found the files then so Mandelson sacked.
They have covered this up until now when files released for public viewing.
No choice but to hand material to the…

— Ilkley John (@IlkleyJohn) February 3, 2026

Starmer said last September that he had full confidence in Mandelson. He knew, when he said it, about Mandelson's gushing emails to Epstein, sent after Epstein's first child rape conviction. If Starmer also knew that Mandelson was leaking sensitive information to the paedophile and Israeli spy and kept it secret, then he's toast.

Criminal toast.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

The US Department of Justice has released three million 'Epstein files', exposing horrific crimes against children by US, Israeli, and other elites. However the Department of Justice's deputy head has confirmed in a speech that his department is withholding much of the worst:

What has already been released from the Epstein files includes admissions of torture and witness statements about rape, murder and violence toward children, mostly girls.

And Blanche admits that it includes photographic evidence of maiming, torture, rape - and murder.

All perpetrators must be exposed. There isn't a punishment strong enough both for those who've carried out these heinous crimes, and those who've enabled them or looked the other way. The whole system that has enabled and protected them must be dismantled.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

FIFA President Gianni Infantino's statements regarding the possibility of reviewing the suspension of Russia's participation in international competitions have reignited a broad debate about the consistency of FIFA's standards in dealing with armed conflicts.

Both FIFA and UEFA suspended the participation of Russian national teams and clubs in February 2022, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. At the time, FIFA said the move was aimed at protecting the integrity of competitions and ensuring the safety of participants. However, Infantino has spent the intervening years courting Donald Trump's hateful regime ahead of the next world cup in the US. Now, Infantino has claimed that banning Russia "achieved nothing" and instead contributed to increased "frustration and hatred." He went on to claim that allowing Russian children to play football outside their country could be "a positive thing."

Infantino's remarks were met with sharp criticism from Ukrainian Sports Minister Matvey Bidny, who argued that Infantino's remarks disconnected football from the reality of a war that continues to claim civilian lives, including children.

The Ukrainian minister pointed out that Russia is politicizing sports and using them to justify its aggression, emphasizing that his position aligns with that of the Ukrainian Football Federation, which also warns against Russia's return to international competitions.

He described Infantino's recent statements regarding the possibility of lifting the ban on Russia as "irresponsible" and "childish," given the ongoing Russian war on Ukraine, adding:

As long as the Russians continue to kill Ukrainians and politicize sports, there is no place for their flag or their national symbols among those who respect the values ​​of justice, integrity, and fair play.

These stances have brought to the forefront comparisons with FIFA's handling of Israel's genocide in Palestine. Just as with the above invasion, Israel have continued their settler colonial domination of Palestinian territory, and murdered footballers and other sports people. Passionate pleas from human rights organisations, players unions, and football fans calling for FIFA to ban Israel have gone ignored.

Critics argue that FIFA, which emphasizes its commitment to the principle of "not politicizing sport" in the case of Gaza, has adopted a different and more decisive stance in the case of Russia, raising questions about the application of the same standards in different conflicts.

Human rights reports indicate widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza, including sports facilities, in addition to a large number of casualties among athletes and children. Nevertheless, FIFA continues to assert that it is closely monitoring the situation and addressing it through internal mechanisms without resorting to suspensions or sanctions.

As calls for accountability for violations of international humanitarian law persist, FIFA's handling of the situations in Ukraine and Gaza is seen as a true test of its credibility as a global body that claims to uphold the values ​​of justice, integrity, and impartiality.

Based on its current showing, FIFA is a craven and corrupt organisation who values the lives of white people over and above the lives of Palestinians.

Featured image via the Canary

By Alaa Shamali

Anti-Zionist academic Professor Norman Finkelstein appears in the latest release of Epstein files - and comes out rejecting the paedophiles overtures.

Robert Trivers is an academic who defended Epstein as a "person of integrity" even after Epstein's conviction for child rape. He also took cash from Epstein. The Epstein files show Trivers was in the habit of 'cc-ing' Finkelstein into emails with Epstein on topics he thought might be interesting to both. Given his later provision to Epstein of personal information on Finkelstein, this may have been a way of trying to establish contact between the pair of them.

For example, Trivers wrote to Epstein describing Epstein's lawyer, Alan Dershowitz as a "Jewish Nazi" when Dershowitz was having dinner with "Narcissistic Psychopath" Donald Trump. Finkelstein was among the other addressees:

There is no indication in the files that Finkelstein ever asked for or welcomed the contacts. The opposite, in fact.

In 2015, Trivers received an email from academic and author Prof Joseph Chaney. Chaney castigated Trivers for not just endorsing Epstein, but blaming Epstein's victims for what they suffered. Chaney also shines for his humanity and readiness to speak out and call Epstein what he was - a rapist and paedophile:

I was shocked to read your statement yesterday in The Guardian. The paper reports:

At least two grant recipients in academia are standing by Epstein, saying he remains a friend: Krauss and Robert Trivers, a Rutgers University biologist.

Trivers said Epstein is a person of integrity who should be given credit for serving time in prison and for settling civil lawsuits brought by women who said they were abused.

"Did he get an easy deal? Did he buy himself a light sentence? Well, yes, probably, compared to what you or I would get, but he did get locked up," Trivers said. He said he got about $40,000 from Epstein to study the relationship between knee symmetry and sprinting ability.

Trivers also said he believes girls mature earlier than in the past. "By the time they're 14 or 15, they're like grown women were 60 years ago, so I don't see these acts as so heinous," he said.

The article in question can be read here.

Chaney takes Trivers obscene comments to task:

Is this claim regarding teenage girls your scientific opinion? If so, I'd like to see the research supporting your idea that a girl of 14 is as mature emotionally and psychologically as an adult woman in the 1950s. The real problem with the statement, though, is the way in which it places blame for child abuse on the child and excuses the criminal actions of an adult sexual predator, a man who was a serial rapist of children.

Your claim about 14- and 15-year-olds is clearly wrong in the legal sense; but it is also wrong, and dangerous, as a claim about maturity. Any parent of a teenager can tell you that teens are not like adults. They have not yet internalized a sense of authority. They still depend largely on the judgment and guidance of adults who praised them for their obedience more than for their independence of mind.

This means that they are too easily impressed by and manipulated by adults, especially those whom they view as important and powerful. Teenage girls, no matter how capable of sexual activity they may be, are not yet morally responsible persons. They are a vulnerable class of people that the law rightly protects from potential predators and abusers.

I believe that your affection for Jeffrey Epstein has led you to make light of his heinous crimes. Have you read the report of the original police investigation on him? If not, I urge you to read it before you make further public statements in defense of his reputation. The powerful consistency of the evidence in the Probable Cause Affidavit should give you pause.

The police record will reveal to you that Mr. Epstein is not a "person of integrity." Appearances can be deceiving!

I believe that your statement to the press was harmful. In a news report, once you are identified as a scientist from a prestigious university, people assume that you are speaking with the authority of a scientist and the backing of your institution and not simply as a private citizen. You represent Rutgers University, and also, by extension, academia. People (for instance, the parents of our students) are very sensitive to these issues.

As a professor, I also am sensitive to this issue. Your statement, with its suggestion that the girl victims are partly to blame for the abuse they received at the hands of your friend, reflects badly on all of us. I hope you will issue a public apology and retraction.

Trivers was not impressed. He forwarded Chaney's message to Epstein - and included Finkelstein - quipping:

damn, i thought a "heinous crime" was the US invasion of Iraq 2003 or at least murder, rape and pillage?

Finkelstein fired back with a damning quote from one of Epstein's child victims. He added that, rather than defend Epstein and Dershowitz, they deserve to be 'throttled':

Sworn testimony of Jane Doe #3
24. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz was around Epstein frequently. Dershowitz was so comfortable with the sex that was going on that he would even come and chat with Epstein while I was giving oral sex to Epstein.

My guess is, if Epstein put your daughter at age 15 in such a position, you wouldn't publicly describe him as a "friend" and person of "integrity." In fact, I would hope that you'd promptly throttle both Epstein and Dershowitz.

Ever uncompromising, Finkelstein copied the child-rapist Epstein in on his reply:

Finkelstein is famous for his refusal to back down in his analysis of Israel's genocide, apartheid, colonialism, arrogance and the sickness of its society. Because of it, he is hated and targeted by the Israel lobby.

He should now also be rightly famous for his refusal to compromise with perverts and paedophiles and their enablers. There is little doubt, given the prevalence of paedophilia in Israel and among its supporters, and Epstein's now-confirmed status as an Israeli 'kompromat' operative, that Finkelstein will be hated and targeted even more by the Israel lobby.

Featured image via YouTube screenshot/Media Education Foundation 

By Skwawkbox

New fast EV chargers will be installed along Interstate 90 and US routes 97, 195, and 395 in the state of Washington. Almost 100 fast charging ports will be installed at 14 different locations in about two years. Funding will come from the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, although President ... [continued]

The post 96 New Fast EV Chargers Planned For Washington State appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Stop me if you've heard this one before. Disney has announced a successor to outgoing CEO Bob Iger, effective in March. Josh D'Amaro, current chairman of Disney Experiences, was tapped for the role in a unanimous vote by the company's board of directors.

D'Amaro has been at Disney for 28 years, where he oversaw theme parks, cruises and consumer products including video games. The company had previously appointed Bob Chapek, the Disney Parks chairman at the time, as successor to Bob Iger in 2020. At the time, Iger had served as CEO since 2005. But Chapek only lasted until 2022, when Bob Iger returned to take the helm once again amid company struggles. Disney formed a committee to find an appropriate successor in 2023, with Iger mentoring potential candidates along the way.

Iger's time at the helm saw the media giant make a number of significant moves such as launching the Disney+ streaming service, buying Hulu and acquiring 20th Century Fox's film and television studios. Iger will continue to serve as a board member and senior advisor until his retirement at the end of the year.

Microsoft has revealed the first wave of Xbox Game Pass additions for February, and it feels like there's a bit of something for everyone this time around. Two of the titles land on the service today across the Game Pass Ultimate, Premium and PC Game Pass tiers: Final Fantasy II (cloud, Xbox Series X/S and PC) and Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii (cloud, console, handheld and PC). Final Fantasy II is a "remodeled 2D take" on the classic 1988 RPG, while Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is a wild-looking spin-off of the main Like a Dragon series with pirates and naval combat.

Madden NFL 26 is hitting Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass across cloud, console and PC on February 5, so subscribers will be able to get in a few virtual downs before the Super Bowl on Sunday at no extra cost. Paw Patrol Rescue Wheels: Championship will join the Game Pass Ultimate, Premium and PC Game Pass lineups on the same day across cloud, console, handheld and PC.

On February 10, a game I've been looking forward to, Relooted, joins Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass on cloud, Xbox Series X/S and PC. I really enjoyed the demo of this heist game, in which the goal is to recover African artifacts from Western museums. Two days later, you can check out BlazBlue Entropy Effect X, which is a 2D roguelite action game set in the BlazBlue universe, on Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass (cloud, Xbox Series X/S and PC).

Also on February 12, Roadside Research will become available in game preview on cloud, Xbox Series X/S and PC on Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass. This is a co-op (or solo) game for up to four players in which you run a gas station as a group of aliens. You'll examine humans and try to gather as much data as you can without raising suspicion and a potential visit from the feds. The aliens' disguises, as shown in the trailer, are pretty funny.

A third game is on the docket for February 12, with life sim Starsand Island arriving on Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass (cloud, Xbox Series X/S, and PC). A day later, High on Life 2 lands on the same tiers and platforms with a whole new bunch of strange, talking weapons. That's a day-one addition to the line up. Also on February 13, Kingdom Come Deliverance will become delivered to Game Pass Ultimate, Premium and PC Game Pass across cloud, console and PC. 

On February 17, you can embrace your inner Na'vi in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora on cloud, Xbox Series X/S, handheld and PC on Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass. I quite enjoyed my initial hands-on with the game, but I haven't jumped into the full version as yet. 

Last, but not least, Avowed will join the lower Game Pass Premium tier on February 17 across cloud, Xbox Series X/S and PC. It will do so almost exactly a year after its debut and on the same day it hits PlayStation 5 and a major update goes live. Avowed was one of our favorite games of 2025.

The Dyson PencilVac stick vacuum is finally available for purchase in the US after being revealed in the first half of last year. It costs $600. The company says this is the "world's slimmest vacuum cleaner." We haven't broken out any rulers to confirm that statement, but it's certainly a ridiculously thin stick vac.

It achieves this thinness by using a motor inspired by the company's Supersonic hair dryer. This is a small motor that can actually rest in the shaft, so there's not a noticeable bulge where the components have been placed. This stick vacuum is actually, well, a stick. Just take a look at it.

It does come with attachments that increase the size a bit. For instance, the conical brush bar cleaner head makes it resemble a traditional stick vacuum. However, everything else is in the long cylinder. This includes the bin, filter and motor.

Other attachments include something called the "Fluffycones" cleaner head. This has four cones in two brush bars that rotate in opposite directions to "strip and eject even long hair, preventing hair tangling around the brush bar." There are also lights at both ends to help illuminate any lingering dust particles.

It weighs nearly four pounds and features the same diameter throughout. This makes it easy to grip anywhere along the body, which can help with overhead cleaning. It ships with a swappable battery pack that lasts for around an hour and there's a magnetic charging dock to get things juiced up.

The vacuum works with the MyDyson app, which lets users check on battery life and adjust settings. Some of this information is also displayed on the LCD screen at the top of the handle.

We got a chance to try it out last year and came away impressed. The motor is plenty powerful, despite the diminished size, and the device was easy to maneuver. If you have $600 to spare and a dirty home, this could be a good purchase.

MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ is a surprisingly powerful ultraportable held back by a clunky trackpad. It's a shame, really, because it's very well-designed and thanks to Intel's Panther Lake CPU, it can even run games like Arc Raiders without breaking a sweat. It also has more ports than most thin and light machines, its OLED screen is great for productivity work and at three pounds it's easy to carry around all day. But curse its mechanical trackpad — why does it even exist when Apple, Microsoft and others have been able to implement excellent haptic touchpads for years? Come on now.

With its grey case, subdued design and somewhat chunky bezels, the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ doesn't exactly make a striking impression. From afar, you can tell it's certainly thin, and it's also clear that MSI made the most of its slim case by shoving in two USB-A ports, two USB-C connections, a single HDMI port and a headphone jack. It would have been nice to have some sort of SD card slot too, but at least the Prestige 14 can connect to older accessories, monitors and TVs without a USB-C hub. 

Once you pick it up, though, the Prestige 14's three-pound frame feels downright remarkable. It's just a tad heavier than the 2.7-pound MacBook Air, but its screen size directly competes with the 3.4- to 3.6-pound 14-inchMacBook Pro. The "Flip" in its name also means it's versatile, with the ability to rotate its screen into a tablet mode, or a variety of tent configurations.

What makes the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ truly interesting is its Intel Core Ultra X7 358H processor, which features 16 cores and a maximum speed of 4.8GHz. Specifically, it features four P-cores for speedy performance, eight efficient E-cores and four low-power E-cores. The Ultra X7 is also one of the new Panther Lake chips with gobs of graphics power in Intel's Arc B390 GPU, giving them far more gaming chops than previous ultraportable chips. The laptop also sports 32GB of RAM, which is the ideal amount for serious productivity work, and a roomy 1TB SSD. 

The Prestige 14's stylus-friendly 14-inch OLED screen helps to distract from its mundane case design, with the typical deep black levels and excellent contrast I appreciate from OLED, together with bold 100 percent DCI-P3 color coverage. It makes just about everything look great, though I wish MSI offered more than a 60Hz refresh rate — a 90Hz or 120Hz screen would make scrolling through web pages look far smoother. 

And speaking of the stylus, that's tucked away at the bottom of the Prestige 14. I didn't find it particularly useful for notetaking, but for those who do it's easy to stow away. It's just too thin for extended handwriting, and anyone doing serious notetaking or digital art would be better off with a larger stylus or dedicated drawing pad. 

After seeing a relatively slim Lenovo Panther Lake laptop reaching 190 fps in Battlefield 6, using only Intel's built-in Arc B390 GPU, I was eager to see how that new hardware would perform in the real world. Simply put, the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ didn't disappoint. It scored 10,169 points in PCMark 10, the highest score we've seen yet on a Windows PC. 

And yes, that includes plenty of powerful gaming systems like the Alienware 16 Area 51 (8,245 points) and the Razer Blade 18 (7,703), both of which were running Intel's last-gen Core Ultra 9 275HX chip. Of course, those systems have faster GPUs, like NVIDIA's RTX 5080, but PCMark 10 doesn't lean too heavily on graphics performance. The Prestige 14 edged close to the M5 MacBook Pro in Geekbench 6's multi-threaded CPU test, scoring 16,633 points compared to Apple's 18,003. But the MacBook Pro reigned supreme in the single-threaded test, scoring 4,310 points compared to the MSI's 2,864. 

Computer

PCMark 10

Geekbench 6

Geekbench 6 GPU

Cinebench 2024

MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ (Intel Core Ultra X7 358H)

10,169

2,864/16,633

56,425

117/719

Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch (M5, 2025)

N/A

4,310/18,003

48,840

197/1,034 | GPU: 6,143

Dell 16 Premium (Core Ultra 7 255H, NVIDIA RTX 5070)

7,780

2,711/15,919

109,443

127/1,104

When it came to games, the Prestige 14 reached a surprisingly high 80-95 fps in Arc Raiders while playing in 1080p with medium graphics settings, as well as AMD's FSR3 upscaling and 2x frame generation. Without those AMD features, Arc Raiders ran at 45-50 fps, which is still respectable for an ultraportable. To my surprise, Intel's XeSS upscaling technology wasn't available in Arc Raiders during my testing, but there's a good chance that tool would eke out even more performance. (I've asked Intel about XeSS's omission, and will update when I hear back.)

In Cyberpunk 2077, The Prestige 14 hit 35 fps while playing in 1080p with default settings. Flipping on Intel's XeSS frame generation bumped that to 45 fps. If you're used to the 30 fps performance of consoles, those numbers are still vaguely playable, but they certainly fall short of the 60 fps PC players typically look for. It's best to think of the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ as a laptop where you can play games sometimes, perhaps while you're away from your gaming desktop. It's certainly not a replacement for a dedicated gaming laptop.

For more prosaic productivity tasks, like juggling dozens of browser tabs and editing large images, the Prestige 14 didn't break a sweat. Its healthy 32GB of RAM gave it plenty of breathing room for multi-tasking, and unlike other ultraportables, I didn't notice any serious performance dips while running on battery. On that note, the Prestige 14 also lasted a whopping 22 hours and 15 minutes in PCMark 10's battery benchmark. That's the highest figure we've ever seen from a laptop, and it's a promising sign of what we can expect from other Panther Lake systems. 

While there's clearly plenty to love about the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+, I was less impressed with its mechanical trackpad and keyboard. Perhaps I've been spoiled by the more responsive haptic trackpads from the competition, but the Prestige 14's old-school trackpad kept slowing me down with missed clicks and other annoyances. The laptop's keyboard felt similarly cheap, with a lack of depth and comfort that I've come to expect from other ultraportables in the $1,299 price range. Even after hours of testing, I had a hard time typing on the Prestige 14 at full speed without errors. It's a shame that MSI gets so much right, but is hindered by these weak components.

As one of the earliest Panther Lake laptops on the market, the $1,299 Prestige 14 Flip AI+ is a solid machine, if you're willing to overlook its touchpad flaws. More than anything though, the Prestige 14 makes me excited to see what other PC makers offer with Intel's new chips. It's taken a while, but now Intel finally has some decent competition against Apple's M-series hardware. The era of gaming with ultralight machines is finally here.

Microsoft has reported two Azure service wobbles in as many days, including a disruption affecting Virtual Machine management ops yesterday and a Managed Identity for Azure resources outage in East US and West US regions today.…

Partner Content Physical AI and robotics are moving from the lab to the real world— and the cost of getting it wrong is no longer theoretical. With robots deployed in factories, warehouses, and public settings, large-scale simulation has become tightly coupled with real-world operations.…

TL;DR: Grab Two Dozen Long-Stem Roses for just $24.99 (reg. $98.00). 

Valentine's Day is just around the corner, so flowers are simply a must. That being said… have you seen the price of roses these days?! And unfortunately, nothing screams 'lack of effort' like a sad bouquet. — Read the rest

The post Get 24 long-stem roses at 75% off appeared first on Boing Boing.

Despite the availability of the Switch 2, Nintendo's original Switch portable game console is still on offer. It's now the company's best-selling game console, according to Nintendo's own figures, having sold 155,370,000 units. The Nintendo DS, which sold 154m million units since 2004, is now in second place. — Read the rest

The post Switch becomes the best-selling Nintendo console ever appeared first on Boing Boing.

The offices of X, formerly known as Twitter, were raided this morning by police in Paris. French authorities haven't announced what they're looking for, but the officers are from a cyber-crime unit investigating "unlawful data extraction and complicity in the possession of child pornography," so it presumably concerns Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok generating CSAM and deepfake pornography of real people for users of the platform. — Read the rest

The post Paris cops raid offices of Elon Musk's X in child porn investigation appeared first on Boing Boing.

With masked paramilitary forces grabbing nonwhite people from the streets and shooting civilians with impunity, it can be difficult to keep focus on all the other ways Republicans are entrenching a fascist status quo nationwide. For trans people, however, the legislative and policy assaults, which have been escalating red states for nearly a decade, are only getting worse — and, as ever, drawing all too little concern from Democratic leaders.

Just last week, the Kansas legislature passed some of the most far-reaching measures to push trans and gender-nonconforming people out of public life to date. Bathroom bans that bar trans people from restrooms aligned with their gender identity have become grimly common; over 20 states have such a law on the books. But Kansas's new anti-trans bathroom bill adds a dangerous twist: a bounty hunter provision.

The law would permit private citizens to sue and seek monetary reward based on claiming to encounter a trans person in the bathroom. That's on top of some of the harshest punishments of any existing bathroom bans, such as criminal charges, steep fines and even jail time.

As journalist and trans rights advocate Erin Reed first reported, the bill's vague language means that its reach could extend beyond public buildings — the remit of most bathroom bans around the country.

"As written, it would not only be the first bathroom bounty law to target transgender people directly, but also the first to extend a bathroom ban into private spaces," noted Reed, "effectively creating the nation's first private bathroom ban if enacted by empowering bounty hunters to search for trans people in bathrooms."

The language of the bill, while vague, says that any person who alleges to be "aggrieved" by the presence of a trans person they encounter in a restroom facility can file a civil suit against that individual for "damages" of at least $1,000.

Kansas Republicans rushed through the bathroom ban, skirting public comment by essentially sneaking the bill into another piece of legislation aimed at denying trans people correct government IDs. The ID legislation is in and of itself extreme: it would invalidate driver's licenses, government IDs, and even birth certificates that don't list a person's sex as assigned at birth.

The bill would require trans people to surrender their correctly identifying driver's license or risk a misdemeanor offense for driving with a invalid license. Trans Kansans would thus have to choose between carrying identification with their assigned sex at birth — inviting potentially further harassment and violence in public — or forgoing aspects of public life entirely. It's a policy in line with the Trump administration's move to stop issuing accurate passports to trans Americans.

The aim is to produce a climate of distrust and terror.

The bathroom bounty hunter ban was then layered on top of the ID law in a so-called "gut and go" maneuver.

The twin bills passed both the state House and Senate with over two-thirds of the vote, given the significant Republican majority — enough to override a veto from Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly.

"Transgender people are already vulnerable to violence, especially in restrooms, and this bill layers prospective physical violence on top of the existing privacy violation of forced changes to identification documents," said Logan DeMond, director of policy and research at the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas, in a statement.

Related The First "Wrongful Death" Case for Helping a Friend Get an Abortion

The fondness of Trumpian Republicans for bounty hunter laws comes as no surprise, recalling the dark legacies of Fugitive Slave Act laws and Jim Crow civilian surveillance. Now, whether criminalizing abortions, rounding up immigrants, or policing gender expression, far-right leaders and think tanks embrace vigilante violence as a key mechanism of enforcement. The aim is to produce a climate of distrust and terror.

Anti-trans zealots have been harassing people they believe to be trans — including multiple incidents involving cis women — even without the promise of financial payoff. The Kansas legislation only "turbocharges," as Reed put it, the violent policing of access to public life.

"I have sat here for five and a half hours and listened to this entire room debate my humanity and my ability to participate in the most basic functions of society," said Kansas Democratic state Rep. Abi Boatman, who is the only trans lawmaker in the state, when the new legislation was debated. "I hope none of you have to ever sit through something like that."

It should not need repeating that it is trans people who overwhelmingly face harassment and violence in bathroom facilities; the framing of bathroom bills as a question of cis women's safety has always been a bunk excuse to enforce gender conformism. It should also be obvious that any laws encouraging the surveillance and control of our bodies, particularly with women's bodies as the site of paranoiac anti-trans obsession, make all women less safe. And as with any such laws, it is always Black trans and cis women who face the worst scrutiny.

We should not forget that just one decade ago, the Christian far-right groups that pushed the first round of model bathroom bills into statehouses largely failed. Politicians faced huge public backlash; the state of North Carolina faced massive boycotts in response to its 2016 bathroom bill. But conservative think tanks got to work, refocused manipulative messaging around children and women's sports, and astroturfed the issue to activate the right-wing base. In the following years, anti-trans legislation swept through statehouses.

All the while, far too many Democratic leaders, like the serpentine California Gov. Gavin Newsom, have been willing to throw trans people under the bus. While bathroom bills have been the preserve of Republican-led states, Democrats with national standing have roundly failed in supporting the sort of pressure campaigns that gave state lawmakers pause for thought 10 years ago. Bathroom bans now abound, and ​27 states have enacted laws or policies restricting or banning gender-affirming medical care for trans youth.

Within such a context, there's little wonder that legislation is only becoming harsher and crueler. And while the attack on trans existence is part of a longer history of Christian right pro-natalism and attacks on bodily autonomy, it is not so long ago that public pressure made attacks on trans rights a political liability.

Related How to Keep Providing Gender-Affirming Care Despite Anti-Trans Attacks

It is our responsibility to make it so again — particularly for Democrats claiming to represent a united anti-fascist front. And, above all, to ensure we support community-based networks working in solidarity with trans adults and children around the country so that they can have health care, work, learn, socialize, and share in public life without scrutiny or challenge. These are the minimal conditions for freedom — apparently too much to ask for some Democrats.

The post An Anti-Trans Bathroom Bill With a Cruel New Twist appeared first on The Intercept.

Wherever You Go
by Pat Zietlow Miller (author) and Eliza Wheeler (artist)
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
2015, 32 pages, 10.2 x 10.2 x 0.5 inches

Buy on Amazon

A hare packs its bags and takes a bicycle tour in this lovely rhyming picture book. Donning its jaunty chapeau and dapper pea coat, a hare cycles through forests and a covered bridge, past a paddlewheeled seaside inn, and into the evening lights of the big city. Exploring the neon-lit metropolis, it rides atop a trolley, pedals past a jolly carnival, and cruises over Seussian suspension bridges. Continuing on its way, it journeys through an arid desert, over indigo mountains, and back home again.

Utilizing pale yellows, greens, and pinks, and drawn with an incredibly thin line, Wherever You Go's deep focus art fills every page with an expansive landscape. Little eyes could get lost for hours searching out minute details. Owls ride in baskets, mice chug along on tugboats, and alligators fish near ponds, and lazy afternoons can be spent examining the intricate scenery. A liltingly poetic storyline about traveling and new experiences is a delightful metaphor for life's journey. - S. Deathrage

After Dinner Games: 40 of the Greatest After Dinner Games
by Jenny Lynch (editor)
Lagoon Books
1998, 96 pages, 4.8 x 6 x 0.5 inches

Buy on Amazon

This pocket-sized book is for that time when things get awkward. That time when conversation has dried up. When you have new friends over for dinner and you're stuck sitting there, clearing your throat, having used up all of your conversation starters. That's when you need a book like this.

As the tagline explains, After Dinner Games offers 40 of the best games for these post-dinner situations. It's great to either break the ice or to break out with old friends! For example, if you really want to get personal with your guests, try the game Head To Head, which is when two players carry an orange placed between their foreheads. But if acquaintances are involved, you could start with the game Botticelli. Essentially, one player thinks of a famous person (dead or alive), announces the first letter of their name, and everyone else tries to guess who it is. Safe, fun, and no moving involved.

This book is packed with old-fashioned graphics that make you want to drink an Old Fashioned while playing the games. And the simple explanations of the rules allow a smooth transition from dinner to fun. To avoid a dinner party drought, keep this book handy. Not only will the ideas in this book keep your party alive, they will make it thrive. Calling all dinner partiers, this is your book! - Caleb Murphy

Books That Belong On Paper first appeared on the web as Wink Books and was edited by Carla Sinclair. Sign up here to get the issues a week early in your inbox.

~ SLOE GIN ~
English gin-based fruit liqueur / 25-28% ABV / c£20-£32 for 700ml
Friends with: gin, naturally enough. Also Scotch, calvados, dark rum, rye. Honey is a great sweetener and Drambuie a nice partner. Apricot brandy and other stone fruits. Lemon, lime, orange. Champagne.

The blackthorn tree is a common sight across rural England — common for a particularly English reason. As the rural reformer William Cobbett noted in The Woodlands: A Treatise (1825), in addition to making fine walking sticks, flail swingles and shillelaghs, the blackthorn is an excellent hedge. It's hardy, it's spiky, and it's dense, a kind of natural barbed wire — formidable enough to discourage trespassers, be they animal, human or even machine. Blackthorns can apparently puncture tractor tyres. "Better the bramble than the blackthorn, but better the blackthorn than the devil," says the proverb. It grows fast, too, entangling in upon itself by means of voracious suckers. It's nature's way of saying: "Get the fuck off my land."

The blackthorn was therefore a popular choice among the new class of "landowners" (ponder the word for a moment) created the Enclosure Acts of the 18th and 19th century. From mediaeval times, much of our landscape had been held in common; peasant farmers had the customary right to gather firewood and graize their cows more or less where they pleased. After the enclosures, this way of life was no more: larger tenant farmers, local gentry and urban speculators acquired the legal means to keep them all out. As the great poet of the Enclosures, John Clare, wrote in The Mores:

Mulberry-bushes where the boy would run
To fill his hands with fruit are grubbed and done
And hedgrow-briars - flower-lovers overjoyed
Came and got flower-pots - these are all destroyed
And sky-bound mores in mangled garbs are left
Like mighty giants of their limbs bereft
Fence now meets fence in owners' little bounds
Of field and meadow large as garden grounds
In little parcels little minds to please
With men and flocks imprisoned ill at ease

Even with the benefit of two and a half centuries, I still don't think it's widely enough appreciated that the classic English landscape, with its little parcels of fields, its hedgerows and fences dry stone walls — the landscape that for Stevens, the butler in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, "possesses a quality that the landscapes of other nations, however more superficially dramatic, inevitably fail to possess" — is not some age-old arrangement. It is the fairly recent result of internal colonisation by deed, title and Parliamentary act; avarice mandated by force; the original enshittification. Blackthorn is merely the scar tissue.

Still, nature has its ways of giving back. The blackthorn bush acknowledges its part in this war on the commons in the form of its melancholy blossom, a pretty white spray of white flowers that usually appear in the cold of late March when they're easily mistaken for snow. Hence the term "blackthorn winter"; a final reprise of coldness before the spring arrives. It's always darkest before the dawn.

And then, come Autumn, the blackthorn bush bears its bitter fruit, the sloe — a kind of plum. Indeed, the ancestor of all plums. It's not much to eat; it's no mulberry and no boys ever ran to fill their hands with them. Should you bloody your smock with its juice, it will stain for ever. But if you leave these bare-black bullets macerating in gin with sugar, you're rewarded with a lovely rich, woodsy liqueur that has been an English mainstay since, well, since the time that landowners started planting blackthorn bushes everywhere. It's dark and sweet and bitter, almost a native amaro — though from what I can make out, it seems to have been prized as a domestic alternate to port (a drupe dupe, no less!). Port would have been heavily taxed; whereas gin was cheap and sloes were just there for the scrumping. Indeed, it's really not that hard, still, to make your own sloe gin — though I'm afraid you'll have to revisit this post with the first frosts, which is the time to harvest sloes.

And I can't help wondering if sloe gin represents a small draft of compensation — however meagre — to the enclosed. The slow strangulation of the rural poor during the Enclosures created a new class of wage labourers, pushed off their native soil and forced to look for work elsewhere — either in the cities, or further away in the New World. The families whod stayed would become the new proletariat, easy prey for the owners of the new factories and mills. And it's a historical coincidence that this internal migration coincided, more or less, with the London gin craze, the mother of all moral panics (and a great episode of In Our Time). It's probably a bit ahistorical to say that the one influenced the other; but it's not such a stretch to imagine a disgruntled wage labourer arriving in London from his enshittified village and finding consolation in gin, the harsh new urban stimulant. Maybe he had a couple of sloes in his pocket; maybe the lightning zag of opportunity struck; maybe he made it taste a little more like home.

For there is a weird alchemy in the fact that this barbed wire fruit should have such an affinity with gin, the spirit of melancholy and mayhem. Indeed, what those early landowners may not have realised is the blackthorn is magic. The blackthorn was, supposedly, where the fairies lived; blackthorns were haunted by the ghosts of witches; it was a blackthorn that pricked Sleeping Beauty; blackthorn helps you see beyond negatives to opportunity; blackthorns that marked the boundaries not merely of property but of worlds.

To think! All this is there in the principle ingredient of the Alabama Slammer. But the poets have long been alive to these mysteries. Here is a poem about sloe by the Cumbrian poet and sea trout fisherman, Tom Rawling — sometimes referred to as the "John Clare of the Lakes". It's a response to Seamus Heaney's own poem about sloe gin, equally stirring — though I feel this one suits our mood a little better. I like how the blackthorn pierces the skin of the narrator; and the narrator then pierces the skin of the fruit; and I suppose in turn, the elixir of this bloody transfusion pierces the consciousness of the poet and time is distilled for a moment or two.

Sloe Gin
by Tom Rawling (1916-1996)
for Seamus Heaney

Let the first hard frost
expose the spiny twigs,
reveal the bare-black fruit.

Reach through jutting thorns
for the blue-hazed sloes,
ignore the blood on your wrist.

Needle prick to the hard stone,
watch their transfusion seep
through the gin. Each day

an agitation of the jar,
and after many days of alchemy,
decant this ruby in your glass

to taste silk-sliding fire
of frost and thorns
and bitter fruit.

The Spirits is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY:

Netflix is back with another livestream production guaranteed to excite K-POP fans worldwide. The streamer has announced that BTS will be performing live on Netflix. It marks the band's first performance after almost four years — the members took a hiatus to complete South Korea's mandatory military service. 

The live concert will air on Saturday, March 21, one day after BTS releases their new album Arirang and will be aptly titled BTS The Comeback Live | Arirang. The show will physically take place in Seoul's Gwanghwamun Square and stream live at 8PM KST/7 AM ET/4 AM ET. Yes, viewers in the US will have to choose between a really early Saturday or a very late Friday night. Alternatively, you can skip out on any potential livestream glitches and likely watch it later (or catch the K-Pop group on their upcoming world tour). 

Plus, come Friday, March 27, Netflix will be releasing BTS: The Return, a documentary all about the making of Arirang. As Netflix puts it: "The film offers rare behind-the-scenes access as the group comes back together and charts an unprecedented path forward together after a nearly four-year hiatus."

Netflix has leaned further into livestreaming over the last few years — though the BTS concert is arguably their biggest coup. Livestreams have included everything from reality shows to sports, with some serious infrastructure issues along the way. Here's hoping the BTS concert goes off without a hitch. 

So for years we pointed out how the trend of news websites killing off their comment section (usually because they were too cheap or lazy to creatively manage them) was counterproductive.

One, it killed off a lot of local community value and engagement created within your own properties. Two, it outsourced anything vaguely resembling functional conversation with your community — and a lot of additional impressions and engagement — to generally shitty and badly run companies like Facebook.

That not only made public discourse worse, it ignored that the public comment section (and the correction and accountability for errors that sometimes appeared there) were helpful for the journalistic process and ultimately, the public interest.

Anyway, more than a decade later and Ben Whitelaw from Everything in Moderation (and Mike's co-host on the Ctrl-Alt-Speech podcast as well as a former editor at the Times of London in charge of the paper's user comment section) notes that many websites and editors have had second thoughts.

A growing number of websites, burned from an unhealthy relationship with Facebook (a company too large and incompetent to function), are restoring their online comment sections, looking to automation to help with moderation, and are trying to rekindle functional, online discourse.

He does a nice job pointing out many of the benefits of on-site public comment sections that were ignored by editors a decade ago as they rushed to relieve themselves of the responsibility of trying:

"Most journalists whose articles face criticism below the line may be surprised by the following statement: people who post a comment are more likely to return to the site and be loyal to the brand, even if the comment isn't glowing praise."

When editors, circa 2010-2015, announced they were killing their comment sections, it was usually accompanied with some form of gibberish about how the decision was made because they just really "valued conversation" or wanted to "build better relationships."

Sometimes newsroom managers would be slightly more candid in acknowledging they just didn't give enough of a shit to try very hard, in part because they felt news comments were just wild, untamable beasts, outside of the laws of physics and man, and irredeemable at best. Often, this assault on the comment section went hand in hand with editors hostile to the public generally (see: the New York Times' still criticized 2017 decision to eliminate the role of Public Editor.)

The rush to vilify and eliminate the comment section ignored, as Ben notes, that a subscription to news outlets doesn't just have to provide access to journalism, it can feature participation in journalism. As an online writer for decades, I've seen every insult known to man; at the same time I've routinely seen comment insight that either taught me something new or helped me correct errors in my reporting that both I and my editors missed.

The obliteration of the comment section threw that baby out with the bath water. Facebook comments are, if you haven't noticed, a homogenized shit hole full of bots, rage, and bile that undermines connection and any effort at real conversation. These sorts of badly run systems are also more easily gamed by bad actors (like, say, authoritarians using culture war agitprop to confuse the electorate and take power).

More localized on-site comments are, as Ben notes, potentially part of our path out of the modern information dark ages:

"Within the shifting environment that digital publishers have found themselves in, it's vital to reckon with the needs of news-consuming audiences beyond timely information. People are eager to connect and have real dialogue about topics that inform their lives. Comment sections need to change, but I think they can serve a vital role."

Of course, it's hard to repair ye olde comment section when modern journalism itself is suffering from so much institutional rot. But you've got to start somewhere. And rekindling a smaller, highly localized relationship with your regular visitors is as good of a place to start as any.

Trump has prioritized fossil fuel companies over consumers, hitting the lowest-income families hardest

Donald Trump promised to cut energy prices by 50%. Instead, average electricity prices over the past year have risen by about 6.7%, while natural gas prices have increased by 10.8%. Energy prices are influenced by many factors beyond any president's direct control, including market conditions, weather-driven demand, regional infrastructure constraints, and the rapid growth of energy-intensive data centers that are driving new system costs. Policy choices do not determine prices on their own, but they do shape market outcomes, and the direction of this administration's energy policy has been clear.

From his first days in office, President Trump made clear that his energy agenda would prioritize fossil fuel producers over consumers. His administration moved to expand US liquefied natural gas exports, increasing exposure to volatile global markets. At the same time, it froze wind power projects that provide some of the cheapest new electricity, intervened to keep costly coal plants running, and backed the elimination of energy-efficiency tax credits that lower household energy bills.

Mark Wolfe is executive director of National Energy Assistance Directors Association, co-director of the Center on Energy Poverty and Climate and adjunct faculty at the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy at George Washington University