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The Internet remains UNDEFEATED!
Look I don't know who made this or, far more importantly, for what purpose. I am simultaneously fascinated and delighted by the effort it took and not a little bit creeped out. But it is glorious and it made me laugh out loud when I saw it so I decided to throw it in here for some levity before we into the nitty gritty of an impending civil war.
As you can barely trust anything you find on the internet my nerd self did a spot check on this and as far as I saw this is totally accurate. Insane, but accurate.
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America
What Are We Doing Here?
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Mini mega thread of Capitol News and developments:
- Now it's sinking in: Wednesday's Capitol Hill riot was even more violent than it first appeared - CNN Something else that was even worse than we knew at the time: The attacks against members of the media. Erin Schaff of The New York Times later described what happened when the mob saw her Times ID. "They threw me to the floor, trying to take my cameras. I started screaming for help as loudly as I could," she said. "No one came. People just watched. At this point, I thought I could be killed and no one would stop them. They ripped one of my cameras away from me, broke a lens on the other and ran away." She fled and found a place to hide.
- Senior Trump Official: We Were Wrong, He’s a ‘Fascist’ - New York Magazine This adviser, who spoke to Trump on Wednesday amid the siege, said Trump watched the events on television intently. CNN reported that he was so excited by the action, it “freaked out” some staffers around him. The adviser told me that Trump expressed disgust on aesthetic grounds over how “low class” his supporters looked. “He doesn’t like low class things,” the adviser said, explaining that Trump had a similar reaction over the summer to a video of Brad Parscale, his former campaign manager, shirtless and drinking a beer in his driveway during a mental health emergency in which police tackled him and seized his weapons. “He kept mentioning, ‘Oh, did you see him in his beer shirt?’ He was annoyed. To him, it’s just low class, in other words.”
- The Capitol siege was planned online. Trump supporters are now planning the next one. - Boston.com This went far beyond the widely reported, angry talk about thronging Washington that day. Trump supporters exchanged detailed tactical advice about what to bring and what to do once they assembled at the Capitol to conduct “citizens arrests” of members of Congress. One poster said, “[expletive] zip ties. I’m bringing rope!”
- Tweet thread where a historian/veteran protestor and his wife attended the Capitol protests (as observers, as he's quick to point out) and he reports a number of notable and frightening observations re crowd makeup, general sentiment, wildly undermanned public safety presence, etc.: The most alarming part to me was the matter-of-fact, causal ways that people from all walks of life were talking about violence and even the execution of “traitors” in private conversations, like this was something normal that happened every day.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says she feared GOP lawmakers would lead rioters to her: ‘I thought I was going to die’ - Washington Post
Watching on live TV was bad. But the more we peel back the layers of the onion on this whole Capitol action, the worse and scarier it gets. There can be no "healing" or "unity" until we have truth and accountability and a clear-eyed view of the menace we're facing.
“I can tell you that I had a very close encounter where I thought I was going to die,” she said, noting she couldn’t get into specifics for security reasons. “I did not know if I was going to make it to the end of that day alive.”
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As the pro-Trump rioters streamed into the Capitol on Jan. 6, lawmakers were told to take refuge in a protected “extraction point.” But Ocasio-Cortez said she did not feel safe doing so “because there were QAnon and white-supremacist sympathizers and, frankly, white-supremacist members of Congress in that extraction point who I know and who I have felt would disclose my location and would create opportunities to allow me to be hurt, kidnapped, et cetera.”
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Several Democrats have also described facing a different kind of safety risk while sheltering from the mob in a cramped, windowless room: Republican lawmakers who refused to wear masks, potentially exposing colleagues to the coronavirus. Two Democrats who stayed in that room have since tested positive for the virus.
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Ocasio-Cortez told her Instagram Live viewers it was “not an exaggeration” to say many members of Congress were “nearly assassinated.” She described what she called “acts of betrayal” by some members of the U.S. Capitol Police who appeared to side with the mob, saying that to run for safety and “not know if an officer is there to help you or harm you is also quite traumatizing.”
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Present at the Destruction - Foreign Affairs
This article makes some excellent points re: the need for Americans to drop their sense of exceptionalism re: the possibility of a violent overthrow of the government or a long term soft civil war with sporadic outbreaks of serious violence. However it ends WAY too hopefully (in my opinion) with speculation that the events of January 6 may have been a reckoning akin to Pearl Harbor or 9/11 where the nation realizes how dangerous things have become and begins to make a dramatic about face and.....uh....no. As the subsequent week should show: this is only the beginning, it will get so much worse before it gets better...if it gets better at all.
Some self-awareness is called for. The United States is not nearly as unique as many Americans believe, including when it comes to the threat of democratic backsliding. What has happened should put an end to the notion of American exceptionalism, of an eternal shining city on a hill.
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But much of what is necessary demands longer-term effort. The country must address inequality, which has grown substantially worse in the pandemic-induced recession, in both income and access to education and other opportunities; such conditions give rise to understandable frustration and fuel populism and radicalism, of left and right. One particular challenge is the direction of the Republican Party. American democracy cannot work if one of its major parties rejects the notion of loyal opposition and defines itself not in terms of what it can do but only in terms of what it can prevent.
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Changing American political culture demands an ambitious and wide-ranging agenda. It requires countering the pernicious elements of social media, which has the tendency to drive people to voices and information that conform to their own views. It calls for reinvesting in civic education—democracy’s DNA is not automatically transmitted from generation to generation. And it requires revisiting the notion of national service. The United States is increasingly a country of multiple nations, divided by geography, race, experience, education—and political leanings. National service does not mean just military service, nor does it have to be mandatory. But if America’s differences are not to be the country’s undoing, more young Americans must meet and work together with those of other classes, colors, religions, and backgrounds.
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Queen Elizabeth was a senior citizen when I was a young child and she's still kickin it. It is just wild to see how many world leader's she's seen come and go in her time. Also, stability is not the Italian government's forte.
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COVID Corner
Findings in Plagueland
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Vaccine nationalism and the Global South - Green Left
This. Is. A. Crime.
Australia, Canada and Japan have less than 1% of the world's coronavirus cases. Still, they have pre-ordered more doses of vaccines than all of Latin America and the Caribbean — a region with more than 17% of global coronavirus cases.
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In the US, many vaccines are set to expire even before being distributed.
More than 12 million doses of vaccines have been distributed so far in 33 countries worldwide, but none of those countries are in Africa.
South Africa, the most badly hit country on the African continent, has been unable to procure vaccine from Moderna. The country’s government says it was unable to persuade the company to submit its vaccine to the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (SAHPRA), the agency that approves vaccines.
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Most people in poor countries will be waiting until 2024 for vaccinations if high-income countries keep engaging in monopolistic practices. In a report by Northeastern University, researchers said that this monopolisation of vaccines by wealthy nations could cause almost twice as many deaths as distributing them equally.
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No one should be blocked from getting a life-saving vaccine just because they live in a country subject to the forces of imperialism. All countries of the Global South need to come together to challenge the exploitative dominance of the Global North and support an agenda for a people’s vaccine.
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Of all of the pandemic/lockdown related comedy I've seen this was one of the most immediate laughs I've had.
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Race & Policing
Towards The Reduction Of Harm
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Yet another great resource to share with others in your life who perceive the brutality, ineffectiveness, racism, classism, and inhumanity of the American Prison Industrial Complex but who are perhaps hesitant/disbelieving about the possibility or efficacy of abolishing the whole thing. If that person is you, then I'd say def give it a read. As I will always admit, the idea once sounded ludicrous and impossible to me. That's kind of what happens when something is an unexamined pillar of your society, you come to feel like a fish swimming in the ocean of it - it's all around you and you can't imagine life without it, and you don't fully comprehend the degree of your immersion. We have lungs though, so this is all really drowning us in actuality. Thankfully can breathe free if choose to. This zine is a solid first step out of the depths.
I will at some point compile a newsletter supplemental/Medium article compiling all of the amazing Abolition 101 resources I've come across. In the meantime I'll keep sharing them here.
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🎵To The Left! To The Left!🎵
On That Commie Pinko Tip
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Social Security for All - The American Prospect
Just. Give. People. Money.
Universal basic income. Negative income tax. Social Security for all. Whatever you want to call it just guarantee everyone a modest steady income that they get regardless of education, training, past work history (or lack thereof), immigration status, criminal convictions, etc.
This piece is great in that it strongly advocates for social security for all (an expansion of an already existing system with wide support across demographic and political divisions) while also acknowledging flaws and potential dangers that would need to be addressed such as the fact that fiscal conservatives would try to use it as an excuse to roll back every other government support policy and that Social Security, as currently constituted, is less equitable to ethnic minorities (who tend to die younger and thus reap fewer of the benefits that they are technically due). An unlike the current system what's being argued here is decoupling benefits from a prior work history.
Would some young healthy people who would otherwise be able to find employment use such a system to just collect a check and sit on the couch all day? Yes. And to that I say, WHO CARES??? Most people, if all of their basic needs are provided for, desire to do meaningful work that enriches them, helps them grow, and makes a positive contribution to those around them. Meaningful work is great. Bullshit jobs on the other are the soul sucking invention of Satan and no one should ever have to do them but as of now millions of people do because if they don't they'll die. That's a bad system, and as more and more robots and AI eliminate BS jobs over the coming decades I'd much rather see the people that lose them fed, housed, and happy playing HALO (or learning calligraphy or getting really into DJing) than living in their cars in a society that treats them like human trash.
We have the money. We just need the will...and the vision.
The time is right for one of those epochal revolutions in American social policy where we start over and build anew. Relying just on small improvements cannot fix the separate and unequal systems that provide minimal relief to people who need more. The systems are too corroded by racism and sexism, too friendly to corporate exploiters. They are too abusive to purported beneficiaries—and their bureaucracies too often harass and police rather than help. Many who seek government help are intimidated and surveilled, forced to navigate an obstacle course to get paltry levels of support, or simply turned away. These are not glitches but rather defining features of the operating software of the system.
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Crises often lead people to break with old orthodoxies. The assumptions of the past 40 years—that inequality motivates hard work, that government spending is always bad, that “color blindness” produces racially just outcomes, and that “personal responsibility” determines people’s fate—are crumbling. Even before the pandemic, proposals for a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, universal child care, and paid family leave gained considerable traction.
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The basic findings from the experiments should shock no one: Poor people prefer no-strings cash to complex programs that seek to modify or control their behavior; they are less poor after getting the cash; and they put the money to good, practical use.
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Social Security currently lifts more people out of poverty than any other program; without Social Security, 40 percent of older adults would be poor (in 2018, only 9.7 percent were). It is also our most efficient program: 99 cents of every dollar goes to benefits. The infrastructure of Social Security distributes checks through the mail, or makes direct deposits, to millions of people, and without stigma.
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Social Security for All recognizes that the ups and downs of life are experienced by everyone living and working in modern society. Today’s safety net is supposed to be called upon when people experience personal failings or the economy hits bumps in the road. Social Security for All locates the problem in the inherent defects of a capitalist economy which, at any given time, has no way of providing huge numbers of people with the jobs, income, and services that they need.
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Here's an excellent thread (with links to policy studies, opinion pieces, borrower profiles, and more) about why student loan debt cancellation, for undergraduate and graduate loans, is a good idea that will benefit not just borrowers but communities across the country and the national economy.
Biden wants to move on student debt. $10k of relief is not enough. This could be accomplished by executive order and will have immediate benefit for millions and eventual benefit for so many more.
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Things Read
Worthwhile Words
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"They Got the Wrong Envelope!": The Oral History of Oscar's Epic Best Picture Fiasco - The Hollywood Reporter
Sometimes you need to take a break from news of rebellion, pandemic, economic devastation, and climate collapse to take a deep dive into a 3 year old oral history of a 4 year old Academy Awards broadcast. If you love a good autopsy of catastrophe and backstage drama fascinates you then you really can't do much better than this.
It's about 50-50 whether I watch the Oscars in a given year but I definitely remember being tuned in during the 2017 broadcast when La La Land was announced by Faye Dunaway after a long and confused pause by Warren Beatty. The La La Land team went on stage, there were cheers and tears, they had statues in hand and then.... everything descended into chaos as the show producers realized the wrong title had been announced and the rightful winners, from Moonlight, were brought on stage to take their rightful awards. It was a clusterf*&k of the highest order and you have to wonder how the Academy, who'd been doing this for damn near a century could have screwed up the pinnacle of their biggest event of the year in front of a global audience?
Glad you asked. Read this for the nitty gritty (it's great and has comments from Steve Harvey who felt an immense amount of relief watching the whole thing go down because it meant there was an ever bigger and more public announcing-the-wrong-winner blunder out there to take the heat off of him for his own hosting fiasco at the 2015 Miss Universe pageant.
The article is great for all of the minutiae it reveals about how the Oscars broadcast is run backstage and what a giant room full of Hollywood egos will do when someone had messed up BAD and no one wants to be blamed for it. But if you want to just cut to the chase then fine, I'll tell you: One of the agents for Price Waterhouse Cooper (the firm that has guaranteed the accuracy/secrecy/integrity of the Oscar balloting for decades) was too busy taking pics of Emma Stone backstage to realize that he'd handed the wrong envelope to Warren Beatty. You KNOW he felt stupid and ashamed (he also got death threats but that's a different story).
My fav line was this from Steve Harvey talking about whatever vitriol that guy had to endure being nothing compared to what he faced after Miss Universe:
HARVEY Oh nah, the dude at Pricewaterhouse — he ain't endured nothing. See, the mistake I made was against a country named Colombia. They have some people down there — they are in a different business — so when you get threats, you gotta take it a little bit differently.
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How wood shaped human history, from spears to boats to books - Washington Post
It's time again for one of my favorite kinds of WesRecs items: the book review of a book I have not read but want to. This is a sweet write up for a book about the history of wood and its integral role in the development of human civilization. The book is both a history and a paean to wood and it makes the case that we should be paying more attention as a material well suited to help us navigate the massive changes we need to make in order to combat climate change. In the 21st century when we think of construction and building and urbanization we probably think of steel and glass and concrete (and silicon), but wood is still all around us, even if most of us (myself most definitely included) can't distinguish a pine plank from one made of birch or cedar or oak). Our species came down from the trees, the same trees which allow us to breathe, the same trees that allowed us to write, the same trees that are likely holding up your abode if you live in a house (even if you've slapped a bunch of vinyl siding on top of it.) Wood still has much to teach us and it just may save us if we're wise enough. Can't wait to read this when I have a chance. [P.S. I took a stroll through The Internet Archive and looked at more vintage lumber catalogs than I can say, some interesting stuff there...]
In a world where wood is, if not absent, increasingly out of sight, British biologist Roland Ennos suggests we may not be paying enough attention to its importance. He contends that wood is not merely useful but central to human history. “It is the one material,” Ennos writes in “The Age of Wood,” “that has provided continuity in our long evolutionary and cultural story, from apes moving about the forest, through spear-throwing hunter-gatherers and ax-wielding farmers to roof-building carpenters and paper-reading scholars.”
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Wood’s countless varieties have diverse, useful properties. It grows naturally in sizes large enough for building construction. Yet it splits into slivers thin and strong enough to clean between our teeth. It carries loads as well as concrete and can outperform steel for supporting spans between pillars. Wood can be turned, planed, finely carved, bent and woven. It burns as well, competing against fossil fuels for home heat. It transmutes into charcoal when burned in the absence of oxygen and is a fuel still used by millions around the world for cooking and feeding the fires of some iron smelters.
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Ennos offers ideas for slowing deforestation and making more use of wood’s superior properties to combat climate change. For instance, new laminating techniques make stronger beams in shapes and sizes never possible before. And they can be constructed from small pieces that might otherwise be wasted. In 2019, Norway built the world’s tallest building made of wood, an 18-story low-rise, using these light laminate beams. It weighs only one-fifth of an equivalent building of steel and concrete and required only half as much energy in its construction.
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Come on a journey with me:
Sometimes you fall down the rabbit hole of the internet into knowledge. Often it's despair. And sometimes you find cosmic poetry. This was one of those times.
First: A quick rundown of how I even got here:
Wednesday night I enjoyed a random chuckle remembering how funny Iron Man 3 was (truly hilarious, Ben Kinglsey especially). >>>
That made me think of the comic book villain The Mandarin (who Kinglsey plays in the movie, kinda). >>>
The Mandarin's whole deal is he wears these alien rings on all 10 of his fingers that give him assorted powers. I was never really into Iron Man during my childhood comic book phase but I remembered once getting hold of an issue and seeing an image where The Mandarin's hands had been vaporized down to stumps due to too much power flowing through his rings...or something. When your entire superpower is wearing jewelry on your hands it's kind of a big deal to have them blown off so seeing him bandaged and beaten in that issue just kind of stuck with me. (You can read the whole thing, Iron Man 275, right here if you're interested). >>>
This made me wonder how that had all worked out for the character. Given that his hands were like his main thing I was curious to see what plot devices they had used to inevitably return him to normal since, like that time Superman was made out of blue electricity or that time that Wolverine went feral and had no nose, those kinds of major changes to classic characters pretty much always get reversed. >>>
The character Wikipedia mentioned that he somehow temporarily got reptile/dragon claws in place of his hands. I wanted to see what that looked like so I googled "Mandarin hand claws". And while there was a (pretty cool) pic of the character with scaly green appendages on that results page it was relatively far down. What caught my attention FIRST was this product photo for "ninja hand claws". Which are as glorious as they are absurd.
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These are available at KarateMart.com, a "ninja supply" retailer and once I was on their website I stayed around for a while having a looksie at their assortment of grappling hooks, blowguns, and nunchuks. I know you're wondering: do they have have samurai swords too???
You bet your ass they do.
Among all of the blades, tactical stun batons, and martial arts books I couldn't help but notice their Hidden Weapons section and that led me to the product page of the travelers sword cane above and, most importantly the absolute poetry of the ad copy that I found which I share with you below. I don't know what intern wrote this but they were not paid enough! Truly epic, so many surprises. I've been thinking about it for days.
Anyway, all of this, from Iron Man 3 to the sublime literature below took maybe 9 minutes and is a perfect example of they type of thing my mind does about 20 times a day.
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Things Seen
Watched Recently By Wes
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How It's Made | Farmed Shrimp
I've eaten so many shrimp in my life but I never really learned about the process by which their farmed for wholesale until watching this. Here are some things about shrimp and shrimp farming that I now know:
- Fish can jump pretty high, not gracefully, but high (relative to their body size). When half of your body is tail you can really generate some force by flipping it.
- Fish (at least those farmed in Asia) are fed a LOT of garlic and tamarind.
- Tilapia will naturally purify sea water by eating thee plankton in it. They will of course poop a lot into that same water so you're not out of the woods yet on that front.
If you've been with the newsletter a while you know I love me a good How It's Made video. My God, what a resource, hit after hit after it. I think I'd actually be starstruck if I ever met the narrator.
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Why There's a Single, Tiny Wire Encircling Manhattan
What an interesting piece of NYC architectural/spiritual information that I had absolutely no idea about. Very glad to have watched this and the next time I'm in Manhattan along the waterfront I will definitely look out for it.
I've long known that Orthodox Jewish regulations regarding prohibited activities on the Sabbath are pretty strict. So for example those who observe Shabbat can't operate a motor vehicle on the sabbath because starting the ignition and burning the fuel constitutes igniting a spark/fire which is prohibited. And the Shabbat elevator (installed in many NYC buildings) automatically stops at every floor on the sabbath so that Jewish riders are not required to push a button for their desired floor as operating electrical switches is similarly prohibit on Shabbat.
Another prohibition on the sabbath is Hotzaah, which says you can't carry things from your private domain (your house) to the public domain (outside) and vice versa. Strictly interpreted this includes yourself, food, pets, anything. Which in the modern world is...difficult to adhere to for an entire day. In an elegant solution rabbinic law allows for the deployment of an eruv, which is basically a wire that you string around a large area like a neighborhood....or the island of Manhattan, that creates a symbolic "enclosed" space such that everything inside of it can be considered the same domain, which allows the observant Jews of Manhattan to leave their homes on the Sabbath. Every week before the Sabbath rabbis drive around the island to check on the line and replace it if necessary. Absolutely fascinating
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I've seen this making the rounds on social media and it seems to be eternally solid advice to share (both for those looking to give to the food insecure in thheir area and those ::cough:: who've been hoarding 3 weeks of non-perishable food in their closets since March ::cough::
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Things Made
By My Own Hand
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10 Archaic Medical Terms from the Oxford English Dictionary That are Perfect for the COVID-19 Pandemic (Medium)
Creators of any kind put their time, labor, passions,& interest into making stuff that they hope will find an audience that digs it and....sometimes you miss.
I wont tell you how many hours I put into the art and research for this collage/etymology project about obscure medical vocabulary back during the early Tiger King days of the pandemic but when I was done I felt it was worth it. I still do. But with the exception of the r/words subreddit that gave it a lil' bit of love this piece went over like a fart in church in terms of interest. Straight up crickets.
That's OK though. It wasn't my first time getting that that response to a minor passion project and it certainly won't be my last. But here in the new year I thought I'd throw this against the wall again just for old time's sake.
And I like the format so I'll prob do it again before long, who knows?!
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It's only a minute long but this thing I did for a virtual show on IG live over the summer was maybe the most fun storytelling performance I did all year. it was certainly my best backdrop.
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Word of The Week
Up That Vocab Game
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Arbitrium, n
[ ahr - BIH - tree - uhm ]
Meaning: Power or ability to act, decide, or judge; will; authority.
Origin: classical Latin arbitrium arbitration, legal settlement of dispute, action of deciding, decision, power of judging or deciding, authority, control, judgement, verdict, wishes, inclinations < arbiter arbiter n. + -ium , suffix forming nouns (compare -y suffix4).
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Fun Facts
Trivia To Bend Your Brain
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- Globally more than 10% of marriages are from first or second cousins.
- A duck is called a duck because the animal ducks its head under water to feed.
- In Disney's 1937 animated classic the character of Snow White, despite ending up with Prince Charming, never interacts with him or even talks with him and he is seen for just slightly over 2 minutes in the entire film.
- Cheese is the most stolen food in the world with as much as 4% of it being stolen annually.
- “Kushim”, inscribed on an ancient clay tablet in Sumerian, is the oldest name ever recorded in history.
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