Iran, you've been a cradle of civilization for over 10,000 years.
You are truly too old for this shit. #IranProtests
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) January 11, 2020
The government took the plane down "by accident".
Maybe the people should take the government down on purpose. #IranPlaneCrash #iranprotest— God (@TheTweetOfGod) January 12, 2020
• • • to set a mood • • •
• • • some of the things I read while eating breakfast • • •
Theodore Roosevelt supposedly carried a hip flask filled with gunpowder to impress foreign dignitaries
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 12, 2018
How a Japanese Family Jumpstarted Rice Farming, Deep in the Heart of Texas
It was eventually stifled by nativism and border anxiety.
The Japanese presence near Houston was commemorated in postcards.
HALF A CENTURY BEFORE THEY were home to the Johnson Space Center, the low-lying gulf prairies southeast of Houston, Texas, were fertile with opportunity. Specifically, it was wide open country for Japanese migrants, invited by the Houston Chamber of Commerce, who brought their ingenuity and effort to boost the American rice crop. And the state might have become America’s rice bowl (an honor that now belongs to Arkansas), if not for waves of nativism—full of sentiments that echo in today’s border politics.
In 1900, there were only 13 Japanese citizens living in the entire state of Texas. That number grew rapidly in the first decade of the new century, as immigration increased. Few states could offer as much space to grow as Texas. “Like other immigrant groups, Japanese migrants wanted to better their economic situation,” according to Scott Pett, a PhD candidate at Rice University and author of “Japanese Texas: On The Border of Belonging,” published in the interdisciplinary journal Transnational Asia. “Texas represented a chance for them to own and work land in a part of the country that was more welcoming toward them.” At least for a while.
The 3,500-acre Kishi farm, was among the Japanese farms in Texas at the turn of the 20th century.
One of the arrivals was Seito Saibara, who first came to Texas in 1904. Saibara, a former university president and the first Christian member of Japanese parliament, had been invited specifically by the city of Houston to improve the state’s rice industry. He immediately sent word to his wife, Taiko, and oldest son, Kiyoaki, and asked them to bring from Japan 300 pounds of shinriki rice, a strain never before seen in the United States.
“For the early rice colonies in Texas, this was a strategic migration on the part of the Japanese government and in collaboration with very prominent white rice farmers and the U.S. Department of Agriculture,” says Megan White, a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who is an expert on rice cultivation in Texas at the turn of the 20th century. “These first farmers aren’t farmers at all in their background.” …
Military researchers in 16th-century Spain attempted to summon divine extraterrestrials
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 11, 2018
History has never mattered more
The Civil War still haunts us. In our bloodiest conflict, we were confronted with dilemmas, which persist in today’s world — the scourge of racism, the conflict between authoritarianism and democracy, and the debate over inequality.
As Trump’s reckless acts propel us toward more death and destruction, we should examine what happened in the 1860s. When the slaveholders launched their attack on Fort Sumter, it is unlikely that they contemplated how unpredictable things could get. President Dwight Eisenhower once said that every war will surprise you. He stressed, “…war is going to astonish you in the way it occurred and the way it is carried out.”
War should be a last resort in a conflict but it is hard to imagine that slavery could have been abolished without a war. We got something more — a transformational social revolution. The world turned upside down. Since the country’s founding, the South had pretty much controlled the entire federal government (the presidency, Congress and the Supreme Court). Most of the richest families in the U.S. were slaveholders.
Remember that slaves were private property. One out of every three Southern residents was enslaved. In 1860, slaves represented about 16% of the nation’s total wealth. That is $10 trillion in today’s money. That’s trillion.
“In 1860, slaves as property were worth more than all the banks, factories and railroads in the country put together,” Civil War historian Eric Foner told Chris Hayes. “Think what would happen if you liquidated the banks, factories and railroads with no compensation.” …
If Trump Wins in 2020, Get Ready for President Don Jr.
In an excerpt from his new book, “Running Against the Devil,” Daily Beast columnist Rick Wilson conjures what a Trump dynasty would look like.
Eight years of Trump sucks, right? It’s terrible, isn’t it? I mean, it can’t get worse, right?
Right?
Oh, you cockeyed optimists.
As in all things Trump, it can get much, much worse. If he wins in 2020, we’re never getting rid of these dolts. Even if shit goes really, really off the rails, Immortan Don and the rest of his Mad Max crew will still be racing around the desert far into the future.
A second term guarantees the rise of the Imperial Trumps, a family cult built on the remains of the moldering corpse of the GOP, featuring all the warmth of North Korea’s Kim dynasty and a kind of Hapsburg-jawed je ne sais dumbfuck rien.
The fantasy self-image of Donald Trump has always been that of royalty, and as I wrote in Everything Trump Touches Dies, it’s just that pesky Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution that forbids titles of nobility. Since he’s not, you know, famously dedicated to the Constitution in most areas, why this one?
Get ready for Donald Trump Jr., a man who speaks the fluent asshole dialogue of the own-the-libs Trump Party, to rise to the top of the 2024 GOP primary ranks. The dynastic talk that was once treated as a joke (even by me) is already growing around both Don Jr. and Ivanka. Poor Eric is left out, but then again, he always has been. …
Why Corporations Love Making Movies About Evil Corporations
A good sequel to The Matrix would be one in which it turns out the movie The Matrix was itself part of the illusion, inserted into our world by the machines. What better way to lull people to sleep than to feed them dreams of rebellion? The only problem is that it’d be a little too on the nose.
Corporations today love selling stories about fighting back against big business. Superhero satire The Boys makes a big deal about Vought International being an evil irresponsible corporation that manipulates the public. The Outer Worlds, a video game released this past October, tasks the player with righting centuries of corporate greed and mismanagement with giant hammers and shrink rays. The sitcom Superstore has spent the better part of two seasons showing its retail workers being exploited by their parent company and fighting to unionize.
Even Disney is on board. The villain of The Incredibles 2 is an evil billionaire controlling people via ubiquitous screens that hypnotize them (yeah, the symbolism isn’t exactly subtle). As trends go, this is about as insidious as they get.
1. Corporations Can Profit From Anything, Even Anti-Corporate Rebellion
The Boys is an Amazon show — it’s co-produced by the very same kind of monolithic company it’s satirizing. Obsidian, the company behind The Outer Worlds, was recently acquired by Microsoft, a company that was once sued by the federal government over its monopolistic practices (there are rumors that future games are going to be Xbox exclusives). NBCUniversal, home of not just Superstore but Rachel Maddow, is actively fighting to keep its news division from unionizing. Disney, of course, is openly on a crusade to own every profitable film franchise.
So why exactly are so many giant megacorporations willing to produce media with strong anti-corporate sentiment? Why put something on the air that specifically promotes actions to be taken against them?
Let’s take Superstore. The show follows the employees of fictional Walmart knockoff Cloud 9 as they learn to laugh, love, and live despite minimum-wage paychecks and the fact that they all call Missouri home. It highlights the human costs of inadequate maternity leave, shit insurance, and no paid sick days, all of which prompt the workers to start organizing. After the evil corporate higher-ups get wind of these efforts, they sic a team of ICE agents on the store and undocumented employee Mateo is arrested — a testament to the depths corporations are willing to sink. The Season 4 finale ends with a declaration of unionization, clearly presented as a victory.
All of that seems somewhat antithetical to NBCUniversal, a company that really doesn’t seem to hold unions in the highest regard. Aren’t the suits at 30 Rock worried that their own employees might get ideas? No! Not at all! …
Bernie Sanders Has Something New to Talk About
The Iran crisis is giving him a chance to differentiate himself—just in time for the Iowa caucuses.
Bernie Sanders has been making the same pitch for a long time.
During his first presidential bid, in 2016, the senator from Vermont’s trademark policy proposals were Medicare for All and free college. This time around, those two ideas are still positioned front and center in his presidential platform. Four years ago, Sanders was shouting himself hoarse about Wall Street and the 1 percent, and his 2020 bid features the same language: oligarchy, income inequality, billionaires. Even his 2020 logo—the white BERNIE on a blue background with swooshes and a star dotting the i—is identical to the one he used in 2016.
To critics who have called him a broken record, Sanders has countered that of course he’s repeating himself: His message is the same because America’s problems are the same. But unlike in 2016, Sanders is no longer the only candidate running on ambitious, left-wing ideas. Six of the 14 remaining Democratic candidates support some version of Medicare for All, and four support a form of free college. As his ideas have permeated the rest of the field, Sanders’s own candidacy appears less radical—or at least less exceptional.
But with the Iran crisis, Sanders has found something new to talk about. Last Thursday, U.S. forces killed Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s top military general, raising the possibility of a military conflict and thrusting another aspect of Sanders’s platform into the spotlight: his staunch anti-war position. The stance could give him another way to differentiate himself from his 2020 rivals, just in time for the Iowa caucuses a few weeks away. …
THE MOLE MAN & ME
He didn’t realise I had millions of pounds stuffed down my knickers’: artist Sue Webster on her fight to buy her new house.
Just inside the artist Sue Webster’s front door, crafted from grey cardboard, is the architect’s model of her house. On top is a pyramid roof that Webster lifts up. “This bit we haven’t done yet,” she confesses. “We’d been building for five years: I needed the project to stop.” Tucked under the roof on the top floor of the model is a set of keys that belonged to the previous owner. On the cheap plastic key fob is the name “Lyttle”.
William Lyttle lived in De Beauvoir Town, east London, for more than four decades. He was known locally as the Mole Man because, since the early 60s, he had been digging beneath his double-fronted Victorian villa. He broke through the foundations, creating a series of tunnels and caverns – some up to 8 metres deep and travelling as far as 20 metres from his house – shored up by handmade concrete pillars. When he was eventually evicted in 2006, he told the press: “I just have a big basement.” The council removed more than 30 tonnes of waste from the grounds of his house, including three cars and a boat, before filling the tunnels with 2,000 tonnes of aerated concrete and erecting a corrugated iron fence around the site. Lyttle died in 2010, leaving the decrepit property in the hands of a company of heir hunters. In the years that followed, the roof collapsed and buddleia began to grow from the brickwork.
Artist Sue Webster in her hallway at Mole House.
At the time Webster was living and working with her then husband and creative partner, Tim Noble, in Dirty House – the architect David Adjaye’s second commission, completed in 2002. Noble and Webster’s work had recently appeared in Apocalypse at the Royal Academy and in MoMa in New York. When she wasn’t hard at it, she would cycle from Shoreditch to De Beauvoir for lunch with friends. “I lived in this hardcore designer studio with a living pad on the top,” she explains, “then I’d go to my friend’s family house and it was like a comfort zone – just lovely.” She asked her friends to give her first refusal on the property if they ever sold. “When it came to it, though, I just couldn’t buy it. Something within me couldn’t deal with normality.”
Cycling back from their house one evening, Webster saw the Mole Man’s house. “It had ‘Danger, keep out’ stickers all over it. I pulled up and I rang Hackney council immediately.” The voice on the end of the phone told Webster to search for “Mole Man” online, which she did, there and then. “The lid just came off,” she recalls. “I thought: ‘Wow, there’s a project.’”
Webster tracked down the heir hunter and registered her interest in the property, but she had a hard time convincing him she was serious. “Of course, he didn’t take a blind bit of notice of me,” she says. “I was a woman on a push bike: he didn’t realise I had millions of pounds stuffed down my knickers.” Undeterred, when the property was finally auctioned, Webster took her art dealer (“a man in a suit”) with her to do the bidding. Lyttle’s keys with the cheap plastic fob were handed to her in 2012. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Trevor recaps new laws going into effect in 2020, including a fine on human cloning, a move toward more honest nutrition labels and an effort to battle the wage gap.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Here’s me second Random Vlog set in Los Cabos, Mexico! Shot in late November/December 2019.
お手入れはなの番！Hana’s turn!
Kansas newspaper reporters once did the “gallop dance” to intimidate journalists from competing publications
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 11, 2018
FINALLY . . .
When Trippy Black-Light Murals Brought the Cosmos Down to Earth
The paintings once dazzled and enlightened mid-century planetarium-goers.
The Abrams Planetarium’s black light gallery, pictured here in 1964, still excites.
ONE DAY IN THE 1950S, homas Voter pulled a mask over his nose and mouth, reached for an airbrush, and attempted to make the aurora borealis dance across a darkened sky. The particular paint he was using contained ingredients that would fluoresce under ultraviolet light, also known as black light. These lights near the mural would be designed to sweep across the image, making the aurora shimmy, quiver, and astound.
Along with his team, Voter, an artist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, was finalizing 14 astronomical murals for the first floor of the museum’s Hayden Planetarium. Long before scientists could use reams of data to digitally reconstruct planetary surfaces or send someone virtually soaring through a distant constellation, these paintings were mainly based on photographs, drawings, and written reports. They depicted, among other things, Mars, Saturn, the 1833 Leonid meteor shower, the Horsehead Nebula, and a solar eclipse, Sky and Telescope reported in May 1953. The murals’ designer, Joseph M. Guerry, told the magazine that the fluorescent-paint technique was “like painting with fire.”
At the Abrams Planetarium in Michigan, the black light gallery is still going strong.
The Hayden’s black-light gallery debuted in the ’50s, “before the hippies figured out they had something to get stoned to,” says Carter Emmart, now the museum’s director of astrovisualization. A space nerd since a toddler-age trip to the futuristic 1964 World’s Fair, Emmart began taking classes at the planetarium at age 10, by which time rock bands and poster-makers had embraced the black-light aesthetic, leading to its long association with psychedelics. The young Emmart found himself especially mesmerized by the lyrical mural of the Horsehead Nebula, which sits on the belt of the constellation Orion. “I lusted after getting a black light, but mainly I was interested in astronomy,” he says. “I wanted to have my own black-light hall in my room at home.”
It was the heyday of black-light galleries in planetariums across America. The space race was heating up, and the time saw a boom in “space art.” In her book Destined for the Stars: Faith, the Future, and the Final Frontier, University of Miami historian Catherine Newell traces the work of Chesley Bonestell, a godfather of modern space art, back to the longer tradition of swoon-worthy-but-relatively-accurate landscape art. Bonestell’s paintings have the feel futuristic versions of New Deal–era posters of America’s National Parks, with sweeping vistas and craggy rock formations. Bonestell’s work “sells a vision of outer space not necessarily as utopic, but a the natural next step humanity was going to take,” Newell says. Newell sees obvious traces of Bonestell’s artistic DNA in the black-light paintings that appeared in the Hayden and beyond—they all encouraged viewers to get excited about discovery, exploration, and a future among the stars. …
This Chinese amusement park’s army of animatronic toads was responsible for one of the greatest mass panics of 2013
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 11, 2018
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Not? Maybe.