In a video that fills me with wonder at being alive in 2025, someone in an inflatable Pikachu costume was seen loping down the street in Turkey alongside anti-Erdoğan protesters fleeing from the cops.

The protests—reportedly the largest mass movements in the region in decades—started last week, after Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu was arrested for alleged corruption. Ekrem is the main rival to the country's President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has attacked LGBTQ+ and women’s rights and democracy, and critics say is leading the country into authoritarianism and autocracy.

Early Thursday morning, as students tried to issue a statement outside of the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, security forces launched pepper spray, water cannons and plastic pellets at the demonstrators and arrested nearly 1,900. 

People are protesting in several major cities in Turkey, and Pikachu was at one in Antalya, according to local news outlets and social media. In the video, the person in the mascot suit hauls yellow nylon ass as fast as a pair of short, inflated legs can carry them—which is surprisingly fast, actually, considering how they’re keeping up with the people running all around them. The original video was captured by Ismail Koçeroğlu, a photojournalist at Akdeniz University in Antalya.  

On Instagram, Koçeroğlu posted another photo of Pikachu posing with protestors and security.

And because nothing good is safe from AI—not even Protest Pikachu, arguably one of the purest pieces of iconography to come out of the resistance to the worldwide creep of authoritarianism yet—an AI-generated image of Pikachu rushing through the streets alongside protestors went viral shortly after Koçeroğlu’s video. Several local outlets have debunked the image, which is made to look like a high-resolution photojournalism shot from the ground, as being generated with AI. 

The AI image of Pikachu has gone nearly as viral as the real video of the person in a Pikachu costume running away from the cops, and shows how people looking to take advantage of any widely covered news event are creating AI imagery in near real time with the event itself. 404 Media saw various people sharing the AI image of Pikachu as though it were real, and on first glance it was difficult for us to tell that it was fake, especially because the real video of Pikachu running away is blurry. But, as several news outlets in Turkey have already pointed out, things like mixed-up lettering on the police jackets, distorted details, and inconsistencies in the street lamps give it away as fake.  

Pikachu has always been for the people, showing up at rallies and protests around the world. 

Erdoğan recently called the demonstrations "street terrorism,” which technically makes Pikachu a terrorist in the eyes of the president of Turkey. In the midst of widespread turmoil, President Donald Trump praised Erdoğan, calling him a “good leader.” 

Protest Pikachu isn’t the first to show up to an anti-Erdoğan protest in an inflatable suit: A young woman came to a protest earlier this week in a dinosaur costume. 

Plane was over Pacific Ocean when pilot realized he didn’t have his document and headed back to switch out crew

Passengers heading to China aboard a recent United Airlines flight faced an unexpected travel headache after a pilot’s forgotten passport prompted their return to the United States.

Flight UA198 from Los Angeles to Shanghai was over the Pacific Ocean on Saturday afternoon when it made a U-turn and headed to San Francisco, tracking data showed.

Look, I have no particular problem with Jan Schakowsky, the congresswoman from IL-9, which is a super blue Chicago district. But like just about everyone else in the Democratic leadership, she is old as the hills. In fact, she is about to turn 81. She votes the right way, but almost anyone in that district would vote the right way. The question is this–can we do better in super blue districts? This campaign video by Kat Abughazaleh, a 26 year old lefty TikTok political yakker, announces her challenge of Schakowsky, who she does not mention by name.

I'm Kat Abughazaleh and I'm running for Congress.

[image or embed]

— Kat Abughazaleh (@katmabu.bsky.social) March 24, 2025 at 9:30 AM

I’m not going to lie–telling Democrats to “grow a fucking spine” is a campaign message that appeals to me. That Elon Musk already hates her appeals to me. Her ending the video by slamming the consultancy class that sends endless guilt-laden texts asking for money really appeals to me. That she can clearly speak to an audience of people not yet collecting Social Security appeals to me. I know next to nothing about her other that this video and a few things I looked up and of course I don’t live in Chicago.

But–people in their 80s should not be in office in super blue districts. We can do better. We can find Democrats who can speak to the masses. We can find Democrats who can function online as their natural home instead of finding it a scary place. We desperately need new generations of leadership and I say that as a plural since there’s like 3 generations lined up behind these geezers dominating the Democratic Party.

If you think this is “ageism,” well, the real ageism in politics is the olds holding power until the day they die and denying younger generations the chance to take over. Schakowsky can go make lobbying money if she wants to work.

The post What If We Didn’t Suck, or, Taking Out the Gerontocracy appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Over the course of his long career, magician and endurance performer David Blaine has taken on all kinds of death-defying feats: catching a bullet in his teeth, fasting for 44 days, or holding his breath for a record-breaking 17 minutes and 4 seconds, to name a few. Viewers will get to see a different side of Blaine as he travels the world to meet kindred spirits from a wide range of cultures in David Blaine Do Not Attempt, a new six-episode docuseries from National Geographic.

(Some spoilers below.)

The series was shot over three calendar years (2022-2024) in nine different countries, and features Blaine interacting with, and learning from, all manner of daredevils, athletes, street performers, and magicians. In Southeast Asia, for instance, he watches practitioners of an Indonesian martial art called Debus manipulate razor blades in their mouths and eat nails. (There is no trick to this, just conditioned endurance to pain, as Blaine discovers when he attempts to eat nails: his throat was sore for days.) He braves placing scorpions on his body, breaks a bottle with his head, and sets himself on fire in Brazil while jumping off a high bridge.

One of the elements that sets this series apart from Blaine's previous magical specials is his willingness to be filmed practicing and training to do the various featured stunts, including early failed attempts. This makes him seem more vulnerable and immensely likable—even if it made him personally uncomfortable during filming.

"I've always kept that part hidden," Blaine told Ars. "Normally I work for a few years and I develop [a stunt] until I feel pretty good about it, and then I go and do the stunt and push myself as far as possible. But in this scenario, it was so many places, so many people, so many events, so many feats, so many things to learn so fast. So it was me in a way that I never liked to show myself: awkward and uncomfortable and screaming and laughing. It's the things that as a magician, I always hide. As a magician, I try to be very monotone and let the audience react, but I was in that audience reacting. So for this series, I was the spectator to the magic, and it was for me very uncomfortable. But I was watching these amazing performers—what I consider to be magicians."

Safety first

The task of keeping Blaine and the entire crew safe in what are unquestionably dangerous situations falls to safety expert Sebastian "Bas" Pot. "I joke that my title is Glorifed Nanny," Pot told Ars. "I specialize in taking people to very remote locations where they want to do insane things. I have three basic rules: no one dies, everyone gets paid, and we all smile and laugh every day. If I achieve those three things, my job is done." He deliberately keeps himself out of the shot; there is only one scene in Do Not Attempt where we see Pot's face as he's discussing the risks of a stunt with Blaine.

Blaine has always taken on risks, but because he has historically hidden his preparation from public view, viewers might not realize how cautious he really is. "What people tend to forget about guys like David is that they're very calculated," said Pot. The biggest difference between working with Blaine and other clients? "Normally I'll do everything, I will never ask anyone to do anything that I wouldn't do myself," said Pot. "David is taking huge risks and there's a lot that he does that I wouldn't do."

Like Blaine, Pot also emphasized the importance of repetition to safety. In addition, "A huge amount of it is keeping the calm on set, listening and observing and not getting caught up in the excitement of what's going on," he said" While he uses some basic technology for tasks like measuring wind speed, checking for concussion, or monitoring vital signs, for the most part keeping the set safe "is very much about switching off from the technology," he said.

And when everyone else on set  is watching Blaine, "I'm looking outwards, because I've got enough eyes on him," said Pot. There was only one bad accident during filming, involving a skydiving crew member during the Arctic Circle episode who suffered a spinal fracture after a bad landing. The crew member recuperated and was back in the wind tunnel practicing within a month.

This is the episode where Blaine attempts a Viking "death dive" into a snow drift under the tutelage of a Norwegian man named Ken Stornes, with one key difference: Stornes jumps from much greater heights. He also participates in a sky dive. But the episode mostly focuses on Blaine's training with free divers under the ice to prepare for a stunt in which Blaine swims from one point under Finnish ice to another, pulling himself along with a rope while holding his breath. A large part of his motivation for attempting it was his failed 2006 "Drowned Alive" seven-day stunt in front of Lincoln Center in New York. (He sustained liver and kidney damage as a result.)

"One of my favorite quotes is Churchill, when he says, 'Success is the ability to go from one failure to the next failure with enthusiasm,'" said Blaine. "That's what this entire series is. It's these incredible artists and performers and conservationists and people that do these incredible feats, but it's the thousands of hours of work, training, failure, repeat that you don't see that makes what they do seem magical. There's no guidebook for what they're doing. But they've developed these things to the point that when I was watching them, I'm crying with joy. I can't believe that what I'm seeing is really happening in front of my eyes. It is magical. And it's because of the amount of repetition, work, failure, repeat that they put in behind the curtain that you don't see."

This time, Blaine succeeded. "It was an incredible experience with these artists that have taken this harsh environment and turned it into a wonderland," said Blaine of his Arctic experience. "The free divers go under three and a half feet of ice, hold their breath. There's no way out. They have to find the exit point."

"When you stop and look, you forget that you're in this extreme environment and suddenly it's the most beautiful surroundings, unlike anything that I've ever seen," he said. "It's almost like being in outer space. And when you're in that extreme and dangerous situation, there's this camaraderie, they're all in it together. At the same time, they're all very alert. There's no distractions. Nobody's thinking about messages, phones, bills. Everybody's right there in that moment. And you're very aware of everything around you in a way that normally in the real world doesn't exist."

Blaine admits that his attitude towards risk has changed somewhat with age. "I'm older and I have a daughter, and therefore I don't want to do something where, oh, it went wrong and it's the worst case scenario," he said. "So I have been very careful. If something seemed like the risk wasn't worth it, I backed away. For some of these things, I would just have to watch, study, learn, take time off, come back. I wouldn't do it unless I felt that the master who was sharing their skillset with me felt that I could pull it off. There was a trust and I was able to listen and follow exactly. That ability to listen to directions and commit to something is a very necessary part to pulling something off like this."

Granted, he didn't always listen. When he deliberately attracted a swarm of bees to make a "bee beard," he was advised to wear a white tee shirt to avoid getting stung. But black is Blaine's signature color and he decided to stick with it. He did indeed get stung about a dozen times but took the pain in stride. "He takes responsibility for him," Pot (who is a beekeeper) said of that decision. "I'd tell a crew member to go change their tee shirt and they would."

The dedication to proper preparation and training is evident throughout Do Not Attempt, but particularly in the Southeast Asia-centric episode where Blaine attempts to kiss a venomous King Cobra—what Pot considers to be the most dangerous stunt in the series. "The one person I've ever had die was a snake expert in Venezuela years ago, who got bitten by his own snake because he chose not to follow the safety protocols we had put in place," said Pot.

Kissing a cobra

So there were weeks of preparation before Blaine even attempted the stunt, guided by an Indonesian Debus practitioner named Fiitz, who can read the creatures' body language so effortlessly he seems to be dancing with the snakes. The final shot (see clip below) took ten days to film. Anti-venom was naturally on hand, but while anti-venom might save your life if you're bitten by a King Cobra, "the journey you're going to on will be hell," Pol said. "You can still have massive necrosis, lose a limb, it might take weeks—there's no guarantees at all. [to recover]." And administering anti-venom can induce cardiac shock if it's not done correctly. "You don't want some random set medic reading instructions off Google on how to give anti-venom" said Pot.

Blaine's genuine appreciation for the many performers he encounters in his journey is evident in every frame. "[The experience] changed me in a way that you can't simply explain," Blaine said. "It was incredible to discover these kindred spirits all around the world, people who had these amazing passions. Many of them had to go against what everybody said was possible. Many of them had to fail, repeat, embarrass themselves, risk everything, and learn. That was one of the greatest experiences: discovering this unification of all these people from all different parts of the world that I felt had that theme in common. It was nice to be there firsthand, getting a glimpse into their world or seeing what drives them."

 "The other part that was really special: I became a person that gets to watch real magic happening in front of my eyes," Blaine continued. "When I'm up in the sky watching [a skydiver named] Inka, I'm actually crying tears of joy because it's so compelling and so beautiful. So many of these places around the world had these amazing performers. Across the board, each place, every continent, every person, every performer has given me a gift that I'll cherish for the rest of my life."

David Blaine Do Not Attempt premieres tonight on National Geographic and starts streaming tomorrow on Disney+ and Hulu.

Read full article

Comments

spaceboythirst-deactivated20250:

The Giza Pyramids and Milky Way by Manjik

The Federal Communications Commission is making it easier for telcos to turn off old copper phone and DSL networks with four changes that relax requirements related to copper shutoffs. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr—who is also pushing a "Delete, Delete, Delete" initiative to get rid of as many rules as possible—said in an announcement today that agency rules have prevented providers from upgrading to faster networks.

"Outdated FCC rules have left Americans sitting in the slow lane for far too long," Carr said. "Those FCC rules have forced providers to pour resources into maintaining aging and expensive copper line networks instead of investing in the modern, high-speed infrastructure that Americans want and deserve."

The key question for people using old copper service is whether they will ever get a big upgrade to fiber lines for phone and Internet access or if they'll have to make do with wireless replacements that vary greatly in quality and speed. As we previously reported, AT&T is aiming to eliminate copper phone and DSL lines from its 21-state wireline network but will not deploy fiber in the more sparsely populated half of that territory.

An AT&T executive said in December that a Republican-led FCC will help the carrier "make even more progress in simplifying our networks and migrating our customers over the next several years." The FCC changes touted by Carr today can help AT&T replace copper with wireless in most states, but not necessarily in California, where the state Public Utilities Commission rejected AT&T's request to end its landline phone obligations in a June 2024 ruling. AT&T has obtained its requested deregulation in the other 20 states.

Hoping for fiber? Expect more wireless

Carr did not say whether he expects today's actions to spur more deployment of fiber, and it's clear the FCC is making it easier for carriers to use only wireless in areas where they don't want to spend the money needed for fiber. Carr's press release said "the FCC is keeping consumer protections in place, including requiring interoperability and guarding against price hikes by ensuring that consumers transitioning to new networks get access to services at similar or lower price points."

The four changes were adopted by the FCC's Wireline Competition Bureau on its own authority, so there was no vote by the commissioners. The FCC has a 2-2 split between Democrats and Republicans but will gain a Republican majority soon as one of the Democratic commissioners is resigning. When the FCC is at its five-member maximum, the party controlling the White House maintains a 3-2 advantage.

One order clarifies how telcos can turn off copper lines without conducting performance tests as part of the "adequate replacement test" designed to prove that replacement services offer equivalent network performance, service availability, and geographic coverage.

The order said:

We clarify that a technology transition discontinuance applicant that elects to "show[], based on the totality of the circumstances," that a replacement service has substantially similar network performance and availability as the service being discontinued need not conduct the performance testing described in the 2016 Technology Transitions Order and its Technical Appendix. By contrast, an applicant that elects to "certify[]"—rather than "show[]"—that a replacement service has substantially similar network performance and availability must follow the testing described in the 2016 Technology Transitions Order and its Technical Appendix.

Today's order said this should have already been an option under the old rules but that a "clarification is necessary in light of apparent confusion regarding the specific testing methodology and parameters permitted by the two separate options that carriers may use to satisfy the Adequate Replacement Test's first prong. We believe that confusion, in turn, has prevented carriers from pursuing technology transition discontinuances under the Adequate Replacement Test."

In July 2024, AT&T became the first carrier to apply for a technology transition discontinuance "under the Adequate Replacement Test relying on the applicant's own replacement service," the order said. "AT&T indicated in this application that it was relying on a totality of the circumstances showing to establish the adequacy of its replacement service, but also committed to the performance testing methodology and parameters established in the 2016 Technology Transitions Order Technical Appendix." This "delay[ed] the filing of its discontinuance application for several months," the FCC said.

Harold Feld, senior VP of consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge, said the FCC clarification that carriers don't need to perform testing, "combined with elimination of most of the remaining notice requirements, means that you don't have to worry about actually proving anything. Just say 'totality of the circumstances' and by the time anyone who cares finds out, the application will be granted."

"The one positive thing is that some states (such as California) still have carrier of last resort rules to protect consumers," Feld told Ars. "In some states, at least, consumers will not suddenly find themselves cut off from 911 or other important services."

Telco lobby loves FCC moves

The bureau separately approved a petition for a waiver filed last month by USTelecom, a lobby group that represents telcos such as AT&T, Verizon, and CenturyLink (aka Lumen). The group sought a waiver of a requirement that replacement voice services be offered on a stand-alone basis instead of only in a bundle with broadband.

While bundles cost more than single services for consumers who only want phone access, USTelecom said that "inefficiencies of offering stand-alone voice can raise costs for consumers and reduce capital available for investment and innovation."

The FCC said granting the waiver will allow providers "to retire copper networks, not only in cases where replacement voice services are available on a stand-alone basis, but in cases where those services are available on a bundled basis." The waiver is approved for two years and can be extended.

USTelecom President and CEO Jonathan Spalter praised the FCC actions in a statement. "Broadband providers appreciate Chairman Carr's laser focus on cutting through red tape and outdated mindsets to accelerate the work of connecting all Americans," Spalter said.

Just like Carr's statement, Spalter did not use the word "fiber" when discussing replacements for copper service. He said vaguely that "today's decision marks a significant step forward in transitioning outdated copper telephone lines to next-generation networks that better meet the needs of American consumers," and "will help turbocharge investment in advanced broadband infrastructure, sustain and grow a skilled broadband workforce, bring countless new choices and services to more families and communities, and fuel our innovation economy."

Carr promises to ditch many more rules

A third action today waives what Carr's office called "unnecessary requirements that kicked in whenever a provider 'grandfathered' a legacy service—meaning, they stopped offering it to new customers." The waiver means carriers will be allowed to grandfather a legacy service without "the associated requirement to file an application with the Commission under our discontinuance rules," the order said.

Another order issued today gives a two-year waiver of filing requirements in the FCC's network change disclosure rules. This action also "eliminates the associated Bureau public notice process, along with the objection process for interconnected service providers," the FCC said. The bureau said the change is "consistent with the Commission's goal of eliminating unnecessary and burdensome regulations... particularly in light of the extraordinary developments in the communications marketplace and the lack of oppositions to the more than 1,100 network change disclosures filed with the Commission since 2021."

Carr said today's changes will be followed by many more that ease requirements imposed on telcos. "There is much more work ahead for the FCC, and our goal through additional actions is to ultimately free up billions of dollars for new networks that otherwise would have been diverted into costly and outdated copper lines," he said. "This initial set of actions gets things moving in the right direction and creates the right incentives for providers to invest and build new networks in communities across the country."

Read full article

Comments