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We’re careening toward climate collapse. Wage stagnation means, in 2018, that the average American had the same purchasing power as they did in 1978. And Donald Trump is president. Yet we continue to respond to civilizational challenges with personal solutions that simply aren’t up to the task. Desperate to do right and get ahead, we opt for vegan meals, stay late for no overtime pay, and post only milquetoast tweets. We end up looking smart, strategic, optimized — and feeling very, very small.

We probably shouldn’t be telling children that who they are determines what they do. --- This admittedly fine point is not just a matter of language; it also carries an ethical implication. The coward can’t really be blamed for doing cowardly stuff, because that’s his nature — the same way you can’t blame the kitchen table for being hard and heavy when you stub your toe. But the difference between human beings and objects is that we do not have fixed natures that determine our behavior. When I say I didn’t do the dishes because I’m lazy, I’m talking around the fact that I could have done them but chose not to. The illusion of a fixed nature gives us an excuse to repeat bad behavior. To insist that what we do determines who we are — and not the other way around — is to make freedom and therefore responsibility a part of our worldview at the most basic level. Freedom is scary, though, because it is the freedom to become something other than what you are now — something you cannot predict. It’s easier to think of yourself as a type of person, riding along with yourself and playing out the behaviors your type does. It’s comforting to think that you did what you did because of who you are, even if who you are is bad, because nothing is more frightening than the feeling that you are about to change into someone else. Ask any 12 year-old.

Anti-fascists keep showing up, because ignoring hate doesn’t make it go away. --- When the police form a line to separate one side from the other at these events, they always stand with their backs to the alt-right and their weapons facing the anti-fascist counterprotesters. Dispersal orders and crowd-control weapons like tear gas and stun grenades (“flashbangs”) go only one way, often deployed against the anti-fascists to allow Patriot Prayer to leave the area. Nonviolent protesters have been struck and seriously injured by flashbangs fired directly into the crowd by the police. So why do we keep showing up to protest Patriot Prayer and their white supremacist friends? Why did we come together last Saturday to protest the KKK? Critics often tell us, “Stop giving them the attention they’re looking for!” We keep showing up, because ignoring hate doesn’t make it go away; it only allows it to spread further. If we permit white supremacists to march through our city, they’ll grow bolder. If we don’t show up each time and prove that we outnumber them, their numbers will swell. Imagine the recruiting power of an artfully edited video of white supremacists marching unchallenged through the streets of a major US city like Washington. On August 17, 2019, Patriot Prayer, the Proud Boys, and other extremists came back to Portland. Anti-fascist protesters recognized that videos of clashes have been used as right-wing propaganda, and so the anti-fascist group PopMob organized the Spectacle, an event designed to shut that down. PopMob encouraged Portlanders to wear whimsical costumes to an anti-fascist outdoor dance party adjacent to the far-right rally. That resulted in the confrontation of about 300 far-right demonstrators with roughly 1,500 unicorns, cats, witches, and bananas (the Banana Bloc, of course), joined by a contingent of protesters in a black bloc forming a front line to protect us. It was a very Portland protest, and it was also very effective. The far right called it quits after 30 minutes, retreated to their rental buses, and went home. This past Saturday, the KKK wanted to test Portland, and once again we organized and claimed victory. Portland leftist organizations including PopMob, Rose City Antifa, Portland DSA, Jobs with Justice, Banana Bloc, the Direct Action Alliance, and others have formed a community to face down right-wing extremists. When we counterprotest white supremacists in Portland, we’re working to cut off white nationalists’ recruitment and radicalization tools as early as possible. If you are opposed to fascism, you are an anti-fascist, and our fight is your fight. As a favorite chant at these anti-fascist rallies goes, “We are many! They are few!” We need to prove that nationwide.

The movie is the latest South Korean film to pit the haves against the have-nots: see this year’s No. 1 movie there, “Extreme Job,” as well as recent titles like “Burning” and 2013’s “Snowpiercer.” It’s no coincidence that income inequality is a recurring theme in the nation’s cinema. Experts say the films, for the most part big hits at home, capture the essence of Korean sentiments at a time when the country’s income gap continues to widen. South Korea’s income distribution is remarkably lopsided. In 2015, the top 10 percent of South Koreans held 66 percent of the nation’s wealth, while the poorer half of the population held only 2 percent.

Far from the gonzo antics and heavy-handed satire of the KLF’s early work, Chill Out is subtle, hypnotic, and mysterious, with nary a shred of smugness or snark. The baaing sheep might once have been purely farcical, but here their purpose is more ambiguous—a subliminally pastoral chorus barely perceptible within the overall mix. From Chill Out’s very opening moments, the listener descends into an unfamiliar swirl of sensations—by turns lulling, lyrical, and deeply unsettling—and doesn’t come up for air until nearly 45 minutes later.

beluga is open-source software for creating your own ecommerce site Built with React + Node.js, and using Stripe for payment processing. - Design your own Store - Create Products and Collections - Cart and Checkout Pages - Order Admin View - Email Confirmation and Shipping Updates

Create beautiful patterns with near-magical ease. A powerful yet playful design tool.

A little-known start-up helps law enforcement match photos of unknown people to their online images — and “might lead to a dystopian future or something,” a backer says. --- “It’s creepy what they’re doing, but there will be many more of these companies. There is no monopoly on math,” said Al Gidari, a privacy professor at Stanford Law School. “Absent a very strong federal privacy law, we’re all screwed.” Mr. Ton-That said his company used only publicly available images. If you change a privacy setting in Facebook so that search engines can’t link to your profile, your Facebook photos won’t be included in the database, he said. But if your profile has already been scraped, it is too late. The company keeps all the images it has scraped even if they are later deleted or taken down, though Mr. Ton-That said the company was working on a tool that would let people request that images be removed if they had been taken down from the website of origin. Woodrow Hartzog, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University in Boston, sees Clearview as the latest proof that facial recognition should be banned in the United States. “We’ve relied on industry efforts to self-police and not embrace such a risky technology, but now those dams are breaking because there is so much money on the table,” Mr. Hartzog said. “I don’t see a future where we harness the benefits of face recognition technology without the crippling abuse of the surveillance that comes with it. The only way to stop it is to ban it.”

This is one of the most interesting-to-me things I’ve ever heard. All kinds of songs get stuck in your head. Famous pop tunes from when you were a kid, album cuts you’ve listened to over and over again. And then there’s a category of memorable songs—the ones that we all just kind of know. Songs that somehow, without anyone’s permission, sneak their way into the collective unconscious and are now just lingering there for eternity. There’s one song that best exemplifies this phenomenon— “Who Let The Dogs Out” by the Baha Men.

By Robin Carnahan, Randy Hart, and Waldo Jaquith. Only 13% of large government software projects are successful.1 State IT projects, in particular, are often challenged because states lack basic knowledge about modern software development, relying on outdated procurement processes. Every year, the federal government matches billions of dollars in funding to state and local governments to maintain and modernize IT systems used to implement federal programs such as Medicaid, child welfare benefits, housing, and unemployment insurance. Efforts to modernize those legacy systems fail at an alarmingly high rate and at great cost to the federal budget. […] This handbook is designed for executives, budget specialists, legislators, and other "non-technical" decision-makers who fund or oversee state government technology projects that receive federal funding and implement the necessary technology to support federal programs. It can help you set these projects up for success by asking the right questions, identifying the right outcomes, and equally important, empowering you with a basic knowledge of the fundamental principles of modern software design.

I saw that I had absorbed from my family and my upbringing a specific brand of individualism, valorizing and transmitting it unknowingly. I’d done this throughout my entire life, but especially in How to Do Nothing. Around my favored versions of contemplative solitude, so similar to Emerson’s, a whole suite of circumstances appeared in full relief, like something coming into focus. The women in the kitchen made the mens’ conversation possible, just as my trip to the mountain—and really all of my time spent walking, observing, and courting the “over-soul”—rested upon a long list of privileges, from the specific (owning a car, having the time), to the general (able-bodied, upper-middle-class, half white and half “model minority,” a walkable neighborhood in a desirable city, and more). There was an entire infrastructure around my experience of freedom, and I’d been so busy chasing it that I hadn’t seen it.

The Portland woman died in July, a victim of the "cleanup" policy the city is doubling down on. --- Why then, hasn’t the problem been solved? The answer, it seems, is the public has yet to take up universal housing — alongside universal health care — as a policy recommendation and rallying cry that would benefit everyone but the wealthy, corporations, banks and mortgage investment companies. Universal housing would provide a basic threshold that would immeasurably enhance the security, health and wellbeing of not simply people like Scott and Debbie, but the dwindling middle class as well. It would provide a safety net and a threshold that would allow workers to negotiate in the absence of the ever-present threat of becoming homeless, of falling through the floorboards of our domestic economies and landing on the streets and sidewalks. As it is now, the suffering of our homeless neighbors, the endless shuffling of their bodies, moving them along to nowhere, is little more than a public ritual of scapegoating. It’s a rite designed to convince us, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that they are somehow guilty of causing their own condition and that we will not share their fate, as we knuckle under to the boss and scramble for scraps in the gig economy. It is a rite that endangers us all.

The impeachment trial didn’t change any minds. Here’s why. --- The press ideally should sift fact from fiction and give the public the information it needs to make enlightened political choices. If you short-circuit that process by saturating the ecosystem with misinformation and overwhelm the media’s ability to mediate, then you can disrupt the democratic process. What we’re facing is a new form of propaganda that wasn’t really possible until the digital age. And it works not by creating a consensus around any particular narrative but by muddying the waters so that consensus isn’t achievable. […] Trump can dictate an entire news cycle with a few unhinged tweets or an absurd press conference. The media cycle is easily commandeered by misinformation, innuendo, and outrageous content. These are problems because of the norms that govern journalism and because the political economy of media makes it very hard to ignore or dispel bullshit stories. This is at the root of our nihilism problem, and a solution is nowhere in sight.

Peart’s time was closer to what a drum machine would do than a human. I’m not saying that made for “good” style in and of itself, as real groove is almost never right on the beat. But, it was unusual (not to mention difficult), and in the context of how technologically powered popular music would become in the 80s and beyond, oddly prescient. Of course, progressive drummers like Can’s Jaki Leibezeit or Neu!’s Klaus Dinger had already been compared to machines, emphasizing either metronomic precision, mechanical repetition or both. But Peart’s factory-grade perfectionism was applied to decidedly non-minimalist, highly-structured music; night after night, to arena crowds. Rock critics called Rush “dinosaurs”, but they were on far better terms with the digital age than many cared to admit, if they realized it at all.

Putting climate change in perspective. When people say "The climate has changed before," these are the kinds of changes they're talking about.

The internet is built to highlight the dumb stuff famous people say. --- But when no part of our context-collapsing feedback loop is built to accommodate stakes, and considering the speed and vitriol with which Eilish was attacked, I can further understand why artists choose to distance themselves from the press in favor of doing their own. There is almost no upside to being ensnared into a controversy like this, even if it’s manufactured.

I prefer ‘enslaved person’ not just because of that nod to humanization, but because of its closer proximity to the verb enslave. Especially in Pulido’s case—absent the generational and legal context of African American slavery—slavery is not a fixed state. Enslavement is not a single action, either. Rather, like emancipation, enslavement is a process. Enslaved people are made over decades by the process of enslavement, they are broken and bent, their persons warped against their wills. Calling Pulido a slave obscures the work that individuals did to assign that status.

I recognize in Tizon’s descriptions of his mother and “Lola” a pattern I have seen in my reporting: how one exhausted, single immigrant mother turns all her fury and shame into abuse of another, weaker woman in her emotional and physical bondage. They remind me of a Filipina woman I met in a shelter here, who told me how her madam had starved her, threatened to turn her over to the police, and beat her so badly she jumped out of an upstairs window, injuring her hip and spine, to survive. I wrote all of that in an article, but couldn’t fit what she told me about her madam: that she was also a lawyer, single mother, and bulimic. That she used to cry, binge, and throw up at home every day, and that the worst beatings usually came after angry, screaming phone calls with her estranged husband. For months, I’ve been watching and wrestling with how to articulate this specifically cruel way that women can dehumanize and harm other women. I’ve often wished I could include a footnote to these stories: Sometimes the victimizers are victims themselves.

Darius Kazemi believes social networks should be run like small communities rather than massive businesses --- After speaking at a conference recently, Kazemi was approached by a group of Twitter designers who asked him how they could apply his principles to the platform. He said he didn’t think it was possible. “As long as [big social media companies] are operating in the same way—harvesting eyeballs, working on advertising revenue, and needing venture capital investment—I don’t have a lot of advice for them,” he says. What Kazemi’s proposing is something structurally different than how social media giants operate. They can scramble to change their privacy policies and try to combat hate speech, but really, they’re just too big. “I feel like they’re doing what they can at this point, but they’re almost at a dead end,” he says.

The NBC afterlife comedy ended Thursday after four seasons, and it did so in a rich, emotionally satisfying, provocative fashion. --- Fragility and preciousness are not paired out of some regrettable irony; they are reliant on each other. It's because we know our time with people will end that we can find ourselves flooded with gratitude for their presence. The friction of our limitations is what necessitates effort (of all kinds), and effort — rewarded and not — is where we find meaning. Surround yourself with friends who love you and love them deeply, and you will grow. It's worth applying every part of yourself, including your intellect, to the question of how to do the right thing.

Font Pair helps designers pair Google Fonts together. Beautiful Google Font combinations and pairs.

You can also just put this on an old iPad! MagicMirror² is an open source modular smart mirror platform. With a growing list of installable modules, the MagicMirror² allows you to convert your hallway or bathroom mirror into your personal assistant.

Zimoun is a Swiss artist, composer and musician who's most known for his sound sculptures, sound architectures and installation art that combine raw, industrial materials with mechanical elements.

Syrmor interviews DJ Soto, a Christian pastor who is looking to redefine what faith looks like. As Soto tells it, part of his interest in taking up a virtual house of prayer is that it opens up the experience to people who might otherwise be excluded from real-world congregations, such as folks in wheelchairs and recovering drug addicts. Soto describes one instance where he baptized a woman who couldn’t leave her home, and the experience was so intense that she started “bawling,” as she never thought she’d have the opportunity to do it given her condition. His service also allows him to reach people he couldn’t if he preached solely through typical avenues. He has been performing virtual reality baptisms for a year now.

I made this blog. The irreverent “Unnamed Temporary Sports Blog Dot Com” is underwritten by a password-security company and features not-so-subtle digs at Deadspin’s bosses.

Bookshop is an online bookstore with a mission to financially support independent bookstores and give back to the book community. […] Bookshop will support indies in two ways: • 10% of sales on Bookshop.org support participating independent bookstores in an overall earnings pool that is evenly divided and distributed to stores every six months. • Stores that are affiliates, who sell books online using Bookshop (by sharing links their Bookshop link on social media, email newsletters, or on their websites) will earn 25% commission directly on any sales they generate, without having to do the work of keeping inventory, picking, packing, shipping or handling complaints and returns.

gathio is a quick and easy way to make and share events which respects your privacy. You don't need to sign up for an account - we just use your email to send you a secret link you can use to edit or delete your event. Send all your guests the public link, and all your co-hosts the editing link. A week after the event finishes, it's deleted from our servers for ever, and your email goes with it.

If you’re a fan of wildflowers, I’m sure you’ve noticed the same thing I have – all the field guides out there have one massive flaw. They’re designed for people who are slowly ambling about in prairies and other natural areas with nothing better to do than stop and stare closely at the minute details of flowers. […] But what about the silent majority who prefer to experience wildflowers the way General Motors intended – by whizzing past them in a fast, comfortable automobile? How are nature-loving-from-a-distance drivers supposed to learn the names and habits of the wildflowers as they speed blissfully past them at 65 (85?) miles per hour?

yap is an ephemeral, real-time chat room with up to six participants. your messages appear and disappear as quickly as you type them, which means unless you pay attention to what everyone says (for once), you’ll miss it. after creating a room, you can embed a piece of media (a video, a website, or something else) for your group to discuss or just shoot the sh*t.

I would hope that, should Sanders lose the nomination, I’d avoid the emotional lethargy that followed his defeat in 2016, when I assumed Clinton was a foregone conclusion and thus didn’t need my focused support. (Somehow working up enthusiasm for Joe Biden would, I think, be the most magnificent personal development of my lifetime — but then again, what’s the alternative in that situation?) I would hope that, should Sanders become president and fail to enact any of his ideas, I wouldn’t take this as evidence that his leftist ideology was completely inapplicable to American society. I would hope that, should Sanders win the nomination and lose against Trump, that I wouldn’t swing back to the “actually, we need to get more racist” of electoral pragmatists. I’d hope to put aside my own saltiness about feeling like a giant dumbass, and continue support and search for the politics that would lead to the best outcome for everyone, not just the one that would satisfy my own ego. In short, I’d hope that my beliefs would not be centered in any need to be right, which is probably the worst motivation for believing in anything. Of course, this desire is the animating factor behind a lot of human behavior, political or otherwise, which is partly what makes following election coverage such a nightmare. Across all the websites and all the cable channels, in the pages of newspaper op-eds and glossy magazines, on social media platforms and obscure blogs, we find hundreds and hundreds of incurious, selfish jerkoffs extolling their wrongness as if it is a virtue, confident in the conclusions they’ve arrived at through assumption and ignorance. This is not only because of that human tendency toward adopting confidence despite the opposing evidence, but a more pernicious truth: that the financial and professional incentives for doggedly pursuing this wrongness are, in fact, quite immense. You can build an entire career on wrongness, staggering from one idiotic position to the next with no consistency or morality, and just… keep doing it. Nothing is going to stop you.