(satire) *The Best Books To Motivate And Inspire You.*

Magats claim that taking acetaminophen during pregnancy can cause autism. A large empirical study has found that it doesn't.

Never trust what magats say about medicine. They don't have a commitment to making sure it is true.

*Africa's forests transformed from carbon sink to carbon source, study finds.*

The same has happened to the Amazon forest and in South-East Asia. We have gone over a tipping point and are sliding down to global disaster.

Indigenous Americans face racial profiling by deportation thugs, who demand proof of citizenship because of their appearance.

Various US states are working on laws to regulate or prohibit the construction of new data centers. The constructors try to evade public regulation and even public awareness until it is too late. At that time, the data center typically has the right to demand all the electricity and water it needs, which can far exceed what is actually available in the place. That can be catastrophic.

Note how plutocratists threaten states with being labeled as "closed to new business" if they take any steps to stop businesses from wiping the floor with the public there. The public needs to learn to laugh in the face of anyone who advocates that plutocratist view.

Robert Reich argues that general public hatred of the bully might pressure some Republican senators to vote to remove the bully from office.

Maybe so, but if that makes Vance president, will it really be better?

Be skeptical about claims that specific products will improve your microbiome. Science doesn't yet know enough to predict what interventions might be helpful, so those who try to sell you products to intervene in your microbiome are likely to be exceeding actual knowledge.

US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to block war with Cuba, and end the humanitarian crisis there.

See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.

US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.

To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.

Please spread the word.

US citizens: call on the EPA to stop trying to weaken coal ash protections.

See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.

Many countries' legal systems take no cognizance of the violent abuse that drives women to kill their husbands as an act of self defense.

District 4 shaping up to be San Francisco's loudest and silliest race:

This level of turmoil befitting a Latin American junta is, again, incongruous for a nice, quiet little beach community. But, again, don't believe it -- this is a place where odd stuff happens. District 4 voters have managed to elect two representatives who later spent time in federal prison -- Leland Yee and Ed Jew. Other than Dan White, who murdered Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the only supes to be incarcerated have been from District 4. And, for what it's worth, both of them went down for on-the-job crimes. [...] In the era of district elections, no D4 supervisor has served two full terms. No district has run through more representatives than District 4. [...]

And yet these are the issues getting the most play in this race: hand-waving about a done-deal zoning plan, calling for the installation of a Great Highway on top of Great Highway and pushing distorted and hyperbolic crime narratives during a time of citywide and nationwide crime reductions. But it gets better: All of this is being undertaken via a tsunami of third-party cash. Vast sums of money are flowing into the sleepy Sunset to further rile everyone up.

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And about 1 time in 100, the customer draws a little picture for us instead. So I thought I should share some of those.

If you're thinking, "they're all dicks, aren't they"...

...you are a smart person.

Of the drawings, I'd say that it's 90% dongs; the rest are a mixture of smilies, pentagrams and cats, in about that order.

(I especially like the ones that just wrote out the word "PENIS", which is like, the Philip K. Dick of dicks.)

To generate this gallery, I had to place eyeballs on hundreds of thousands of signatures, going back to 2021. That's right, I just white-knuckled it, you're welcome. (If you're about to start replying with "Why Didn't You Just", I am begging you to Not.)

Now, if you're thinking, "Wait, why do you even still have that 5-year-old data"... you are, again, a smart person.

Even though the payment processors won't let you issue a refund or a chargeback on a transaction older than 6 months, our point-of-sale saves every bit of information it has about every transaction forever. "Oh geez, you should delete that" you might be thinking. There literally is not a delete button.

After a year, one might want to look at daily graphs, but there's no way you'd care about individual transactions, or anything of higher aggregate resolution than "hourly". Maybe "10 minutes" if you're a complete maniac. But nope, we still have the full PDF of the receipt, including name, last-four, scrawled signature and exactly what products were purchased.

(Though, the customer name isn't included most of the time, only sometimes. I'm not sure what the difference is.)

Anyway that means that when -- not if, when -- this vendor gets popped, all of that data will be stolen, sold, laundered, mixed, and purchased by a data broker who will annotate their profile about you with how much you drink and what, how many nights a week, and whether you attend gay parties. Some of it might even be true! That profile will then be purchased by your car insurance company, your health insurance company, the recruiters used by every future employer, Google, Amazon, Instagram, ICE, TSA, FBI, CIA, all of the "AI" companies, and Deputy Dewey of the East Cowfuck, Texas Police Department.

Oh no, what started off as a juvenile story about poorly-drawn dicks turned into a dystopian nightmare. Welp.

This is different from classic narcissism, in which a grandiose but fragile self-image can mask deep insecurity. What I'm talking about is a self-definition in which the individual grows to the size of the universe, and the universe vanishes. [...]

Decades of research in developmental psychology have shown that moral reasoning develops through consequences -- not punishment, necessarily, but experiencing the effects of your actions on others, receiving honest feedback, having to accommodate reality as it actually is rather than as you wish it to be. It's not that the wealthy become evil; it's that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark.

When Peter Thiel said, "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible," he wasn't talking about your freedom. He was talking about his own. You don't exist.

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Good, good...

I guess the matryoshka doll of shell companies begins with 340-350 11th Street LLC. The realtor on that sign does not acknowledge it existing. Zillow has a listing for it, which might be entirely fiction, but it does have this banger of a photo of the property that they lifted from street view. What's not to love!

He called Gamble's husband as a witness to testify that he had withdrawn bail money before they attended the protest, as if she knew she was going to break the law in advance.

"I always make sure we got bail money on us," Larry Fletcher responded, to laughter from the gallery. "I have bail money on me now. Whenever there are this many cops around I have bail money on me."

There were no fewer than 16 uniformed police officers standing around the perimeter of the courtroom. [...]

Outside the courtroom, Mary Kay Smith was dressed up in an eggplant costume waving a "NO KINGS - NO DICK-TATORS" sign. "I am here for the Constitution," she said. "The arrest was violent, abusive and uncalled for. It was not even civilized behavior."

Shelly Welch was standing alongside Smith, with a sign depicting a half-peeled banana with a bite taken. "FREE SPEECH SHOULDN'T BE HARD TO SWALLOW," it read.

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Imagine a roaring arena packed to the rafters with pathological liars. High above you in the nosebleeds are podcasters, screaming that you'll die if you don't buy their skincare products. Below, on the floor, imagine demonic battalions of super-influencers physically forcing people into home fitness devices designed to dismantle their bodies bone by bone and reassemble them into a grotesque statue of yourself. Out of the throngs, an extremely sick looking man approaches you. He puts his hands on your shoulders. He explains that he is your life coach and that you owe him $800.

Such is the InfoWars I envision: An infinite virtual surface teeming with ads. Not just ads, but scams! Not just scams, but lies with no object, free radical misinformation, sentences and images so poorly thought out that they are unhealthy even to view for just a few seconds. The InfoWars of old was only the prototype for the hell I know we can build together: A digital platform where, every day, visitors sacrifice themselves at altars of delusion and misery, their minds fully disintegrating on contact.

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At The Pound, Carracci, Cardinal and Cipriano carved out a pivotal and mostly unsung revolution in San Francisco's legendary music scene. The Pound was born on Feb. 8, 2001 with Jerry Cantrell from Alice in Chains playing the venue's first show. Its short-but-influential run lasted just five years; the Port Authority pulled the plug on their lease in fall 2006.

Along the way, The Pound hosted a blizzard of early 2000s bands that would go on to become household names [...] "Back then, no one wanted to touch these bands. The powers that be did not believe that these bands had any kind of draw, staying power. They're playing stadiums now," Cipriano tells KQED. "I was right. My big prize for being right is all the bands eventually go on to Live Nation and suddenly there's no room for the independent venues."

Cip is our booker here at DNA Lounge, so if you've enjoyed live music here in recent years, that has almost certainly been thanks to him!

Speaking of independent venues... About a year ago Yolo, the bottle service club that replaced Slim's in 2020 closed. (Oh no.) Then in January it was announced that some Oakland rapper bought it and named it after himself. Well The Budda seems to be closed already. The sign is painted over and everything. As far as I can tell they only did like a dozen events there total. They didn't even have a web site for the first month, only Instagram.

So I'm sure that's all going really well.

I've heard that Thee Parkside's last live show will be this weekend, and they're closing for good in July. And Bottom of the Hill is still planning to close at the end of the year.

Will the last band to play San Francisco please turn out the lights?

In the meantime here at DNA Lounge, we're still pushing that boulder up the hill. Same liver different eagles, as I often say. Come see some shows.

"Without this action it is impossible to control them," said Colombia's environment minister Irene Vélez at a press conference on Monday. Citing estimates that the population could reach at least 500 individuals by 2030, "affecting our ecosystems and native species," she added that "it is our responsibility to take this action." [...]

In 2022 the government launched a sterilization program to slow reproduction of the hippos, which could number up to 200 individuals. At the same time, officials opened talks with seven countries and two international zoo and aquarium associations to relocate the animals. To date, no country has agreed to take even a single hippo, according to the Colombian government, which ultimately led its Ministry of Environment to opt for euthanasia.

Widespread sterilization is not a viable option because it is a "cumbersome, costly and dangerous procedure that progresses at a very slow pace," says Jorge Moreno Bernal, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of the North in Barranquilla, Colombia. A single sterilization requires cranes and puts human lives at risk, he says. "It is not like sterilizing a dog or a cat."

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Viral video handed to insurers as evidence seemed to show a bear in a 2010 Rolls-Royce Ghost in Lake Arrowhead on 28 January 2024. Similar claims were filed on the same date and location for two high-end Mercedes models. But biologists with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife reviewed the footage and determined it showed a human in a bear suit.

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