• • • to set a mood • • •
• • • some of the things I read while eating breakfast • • •
Hjálmar, the Icelandic space program’s first and only probe, inspired an animated cartoon series in which the anthropomorphized spacecraft dispensed social advice, cooking suggestions, and helpful tips on how to handle madmen.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 25, 2019
The French Missionary and the English Duke Who Saved a Chinese Deer From Extinction
A conservation tale 120 years in the telling.
Today nearly 7,000 Père David’s deer roam the wetlands of China.
WHEN VISITORS ENTER BEIJING’S NANHAIZI Milu Park, they step onto a long wooden bridge that stretches over a marsh. It’s the perfect place to see a herd of odd-looking deer in the distance—large and tawny, with big hooves, branched antlers, long tails, and shaggy coats. On a gray and blustery November afternoon, the deer are spending their time leisurely, placidly kneeling near feeders stocked with grass
It’s a sight that wouldn’t have been possible 120 years ago. Though nearly 7,000 Père David’s deer roam the wetlands of China today, the species was declared extinct in the wild in 1900. Its resurrection is due to an unusual event in the annals of conservation—an accidental tag-team collaboration between a French missionary-cum-zoologist and an English duke.
Fossil evidence shows that Elaphurus davidianus were prevalent in China some 2,000 years ago. But by the time Father (Père) Armand David, the deer’s French namesake, visited China in 1861, hunting had reduced the population to a single herd—the one kept under armed guard on the imperial hunting grounds near Beijing.
Unlikely conservation heroes: Father Armand David, a French missionary, explorer, zoologist, and botanist, in 1884 (left); Herbrand Russell, the 11th Duke of Bedford, in 1913.
David—also credited as the first European to see a giant panda—had been sent to China to spread Catholicism, but he ended up spending much of his time there collecting biological specimens that were new to Western science. …
Pipelayers in some parts of Scotland still use specially trained mice, called “tunnel-bugs”, to explore and identify flaws in the system.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 25, 2019
Dictators Without Borders
Living in a democracy is no longer protection from authoritarianism.
President Donald Trump poses with world leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders’ summit in Danang, Vietnam, on Nov. 11, 2017.
Donald Trump’s election in 2016 sparked a veritable cottage industry of commentary about the decline of democracy and the rise of authoritarian forces. Essays like Masha Gessen’s “Autocracy: Rules for Survival” and books like Steven Levitsky’s How Democracies Die made the rounds among jittery Americans suddenly wondering if they would recognize the end of American democracy when it came. Three years later, it’s clear that, if there’s a tipping point where a country goes from “free” to “not free,” the U.S. is still far from it. That House Democrats were able to impeach Trump without fearing for their lives demonstrates that reality. And yet, the impeachment inquiry also highlights the degree to which this president has managed to carry out brazen displays of authoritarian behavior with no consequences thus far.
Much of the early handwringing focused on whether the United States could ever transition from a democratic republic to an authoritarian regime. It downplayed the degree to which authoritarianism is not just a political system but a type of political behavior that can happen in democratic systems as well. Commentators also missed that authoritarianism is increasingly global: The U.S. hasn’t gone from being a “free” to a “not free” country so much as the distinction between those has blurred.
The impeachment inquiry focuses on Trump’s apparent effort to leverage state power to discredit and undermine a political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden. A leader targeting political opponents with trumped-up charges or selective investigations is textbook authoritarian behavior. When Vladimir Putin’s chief opposition rival, Alexei Navalny, is targeted with embezzlement charges, or when thousands of potential rivals of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan are imprisoned based on conspiracy theories, we recognize this sort of abuse of power for what it is. But there’s a wrinkle in Trump’s case: He tried and failed to wield the American justice system against other enemies (James Comey and Hillary Clinton) and so resorted to leaning on the mechanisms of power of a foreign nation—one much more vulnerable to corruption and influence. Tellingly, he has also called on China, an authoritarian state, to investigate the Bidens.
This isn’t quite what we thought the age of Trumpian authoritarianism would look like. We are accustomed to thinking of authoritarianism vs. democracy as a team sport: the Axis against the Allies, the Soviets against the West. But that traditional understanding might not make sense anymore, as governments reach beyond their borders to inflict state pressure and violence.
Leaders of authoritarian countries are increasingly able to pressure and silence critics in the “free” world. Leaders of democracies can enlist authoritarian governments against their own critics. Globalization may once have been thought of as a force that undermined authoritarianism, but lately it seems to be the democrats who are playing catch-up. …
‘Why haven’t you shut down the border?’: inside Trump’s White House
How the president’s reckless fixation on immigration threatened to shatter democracy.
“I ALONE CAN FIX IT.” On 21 July 2016, as he accepted the Republican presidential nomination in Cleveland, Ohio, Donald John Trump spoke more than 4,000 words, but these five would soon become the tenet by which he would lead the nation.
That night, Trump stood by himself at the centre of Quicken Loans Arena on an elevated stage, which he had helped to design. A massive screen framed in gold soared behind him, projecting a magnified picture of himself along with 36 American flags. This was a masculine, LED manifestation of his own self-image. His speech was dark and dystopian. He offered himself to the American people as their sole hope for renewal and redemption. Past presidential nominees had expressed humility, extolled shared values and summoned their countrymen to unite to accomplish what they could only achieve together. But Trump spoke, instead, of “I”.
“I am your voice.”
“I will be a champion – your champion.”
“Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”
It would be all too easy to mistake Trump’s first term for pure, uninhibited chaos. His presidency would be powered by solipsism. From the moment Trump swore an oath to defend the constitution and commit to serve the nation, he governed largely to protect and promote himself. Yet, while he lived day to day, struggling to survive, surfing news cycles to stay afloat, there was a pattern and meaning to the disorder. Trump’s north star was the perpetuation of his own power, even when it meant imperiling the US’s shaky democracy. Public trust in American government, already weakened through years of polarising political dysfunction, took a body blow. …
PREPARE TO SPEND A WHILE; it’s the The Long Read.
Inside the Base: America’s neo-Nazi terror network laid bare
Chats, audio and video obtained by the Guardian give a rare insight into the workings of a disturbing white supremacist group.
Members of the Base at a gathering. The materials show how the group has planned terror campaigns, vandalized synagogues and recruited new members.
The Base, a US-based white supremacist “social network” that has recently been targeted by the FBI in raids leading to the arrest of several members, was active, growing and continuing to prepare for large-scale violence.
The Guardian has obtained chat records, audio recordings and videos provided by an anti-fascist whistleblower who spent more than a year charting the inside workings of the Base.
The Guardian studied leaked materials relayed by the whistleblower and pursued other lines of inquiry to exclusively reveal the real identity of the Base’s secretive leader as Rinaldo Nazzaro, 46, from New Jersey.
Nazzaro is currently living in Russia with his Russian wife. Until the Guardian’s exposé little was known about his background and he was only known by the alias “Norman Spear”.
The exclusive materials show how the group has planned terror campaigns; vandalized synagogues; organised armed training camps; and recruited new members who extolled an ideology of all-out race war. The cache of documents and recordings gives a rare insight into how such neo-Nazi terror groups operate. …
4 Storied American Institutions (With Screwed-Up Origins)
Look, on some level, anything older than, like, nine months probably has a questionable past. You don’t even want to know the horrible shit toddlers have hiding in their closet/diapers. So maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised to learn some of our oldest institutions have extremely questionable pasts. But on the other hand, holy shit you guys …
4. Aetna (And Basically Every Old Insurance Company) Sold Slave Policies
As much as we all hate insurance companies like Aetna, they do provide a certain peace of mind. In theory, they protect us from financial ruin following disasters like house fires, medical emergencies, or when your sex dungeon floods (with water, hopefully). Insurance protects customers’ most valuable assets and property. And back in America’s early days, that meant many insurance companies profited by insuring human property, i.e. enslaved people.
Slaveowners would take out policies on their slaves should they happen to die or somehow be murdered for no reason and without repercussion. For example, in 1781, a slaver ship headed for Jamaica called the Zong had a disease outbreak, and many of the prisoners got sick. Insurance didn’t cover slaves dying from illness, and sick slaves didn’t tend to sell so well, but insurance did cover drowning. So to save money, the crew threw 132 people overboard to their deaths, most of them chained together so they couldn’t keep afloat. As soon as the ship hit the shore, the crew filed an insurance claim on their “lost product.” The only reason the insurance company wasn’t forced to pay was that they won an appeal claiming you can’t intentionally kill the very things you insured. This was after the jury in the first case was like, “No, it’s totally cool to murder over a hundred people for insurance money.”
Weirdly, as the example of the Zong demonstrates, insuring slaves wasn’t actually lucrative for these companies. The assholes who took out such policies also tended to be the type of assholes who killed their own slaves. To make things worse, it’s not like great records existed of which slave was which, so policyholders often cashed in when any of their slaves died, whether or not they were the specific person on the insurance form. But the practice still continued right up until the Civil War, with even longstanding insurance companies offering policies until as late as 1856. In 2002, a lawsuit was filed against Aetna, along with other companies, claiming they should pay reparations for their part in slavery. It was dismissed two years later. …
UNRELATED: 5 Scientific Reasons People Still Believe In Astrology
If you’ve noticed a whole lot of “That’s what you get for dating a Scorpio Capricorn!” memes on social media lately, there’s a reason for that. Astrology is suddenly everywhere. It’s now as popular among my fellow millennials as succulents, high-waisted jeans, and crippling depression. The question is: Why? Actually, if you answer that question, you’ll understand a lot about how humans work in general. You see …
The Mysterious Lawyer X
On the morning of June 22, 2007, when officers from the Victoria Police arrived at Faruk Orman’s suburban Melbourne home to arrest him for murder, he promptly asked to speak to his attorney. Orman was no stranger to legal trouble, and he happened to have a lawyer’s cell number handy. Not just any lawyer, but one of the preeminent defense attorneys in the city, a swashbuckling criminal barrister named Nicola Gobbo. She was, as one newspaper described her, “almost as big a celebrity as the gangland toughs she represented,” a figure alternately cherished and loathed for her ability to argue her clients out of seemingly dead-end charges.
The veteran investigator handling Orman’s arrest, Boris Buick, saw no reason to dissuade Orman from placing the call. “It was his request, not my decision or instigation,” Buick testified at a 2019 public hearing. Buick acknowledged that with the benefit of hindsight, he could see that he’d held “a naïve view” of the call’s implications.
The call went to voicemail. Orman then phoned a solicitor who sometimes worked with Gobbo. (Under the Australian justice system, solicitors are generally the attorneys who handle client relations; barristers like Gobbo are those who make arguments in court.) The 25-year-old Orman had never faced an accusation as serious as murder. His past scrapes with the law included a punch-up at a bar, a shooting in which no one was hurt and he was acquitted, and a conviction for heroin possession. He’d never spent time in prison, partly due to the efforts of Nicola Gobbo. But for years, he’d associated with some of the most feared underworld figures in Melbourne. Many of them had also been represented by Gobbo.
The murder Orman was charged with occurred on the night of May 1, 2002. According to police, at around 9:10 p.m., a notorious Australian criminal named Victor Peirce was sitting in a parked car outside a mobile-phone shop in Port Melbourne, along the city’s southern waterfront. (Peirce and his family’s life would later inspire the film and TV series Animal Kingdom.) A stolen blue-gray Holden Commodore pulled up beside him. A hit man named Benji Veniamin jumped out, approached the car, and shot Peirce three times through the driver’s side window. At the wheel of the Commodore, the police alleged, was Faruk Orman. …
Cats, Once YouTube Stars, Are Now an ‘Emerging Audience’
They’re addicted to channels like Little Kitty & Family, Handsome Nature, and Videos for Your Cat—provided their owners switch on the iPad first.
Cats want to watch YouTube, including videos of squirrels and tiny birds scurrying about.
Whenever Courtney Cirone grabs her iPad, her cat Cooper runs over as though a bag of treats had just been shaken. He wants to watch YouTubeBeyond all the content for humans, there’s a growing world on YouTube specifically for our feline friends. Loved by certain cat owners and occasionally championed by veterinarians and animal scientists, these videos tap into cats’ instincts to stalk, chase, and hunt. Cat-targeted footage of small animals is particularly popular on the platform, posted by channels like Little Kitty & Family, Handsome Nature, and Videos for Your Cat. One of the most prolific creators, Paul Dinning, has posted hundreds of videos for cats, including an eight-hour “Bird Bonanza” that’s amassed almost 7 million views. According to YouTube’s Trends and Insights team, Dinning created eight of the 10 most-viewed videos for cats in 2019.
Animated videos formatted like games are also popular. One channel, Cat Games, has videos that entice cats to paw at everything from goldfish and lady bugs to leprechaun mice and gingerbread men. There’s also a Quidditch game and others based on Pac-Man, Minecraft, Star Wars, and Game of Thrones., specifically videos of squirrels and tiny birds scurrying about. “His eyes get super big, and he moves his head back and forth following the animals,” Cirone says. “He ducks his head down low like he’s hiding. One time he looked at me, meowing, like, ‘HELP ME CATCH THIS BASTARD.’”
Cooper paws relentlessly at the screen, sometimes lunging at it head-first in an attempt to catch his digital prey. He loves these videos (along with clips of Dr. Phil). He’s so obsessed that Cirone limits his viewing to three times per week, because he sits very close and she’s cautious about protecting his eyes. When she turns her iPad off, he even sulks. If this sounds strange, it is and it’s not: Cats, famously the subjects of online videos, now sit on the other side, watching. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Bill recaps the top stories of the week, including President Trump’s appearance at the March for Life rally, the Senate impeachment trial, and panic over the coronavirus.
THANKS to HBO and Real Time with Bill Maher for making this program available on YouTube.
Bill warns Democrats to prepare for President Trump’s inevitable refusal to relinquish the White House.
he new coronavirus has health officials on high alert, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince allegedly hacks Jeff Bezos’s phone, and Pete Buttigieg urges a crowd to cheer for him.
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.
Me critical analysis of a cat stuck in a bloody pipe. Poor little bugger.
入り損ねてなどいない！by まる。 I haven’t failed to enter the box! by Maru.
Andrew Jackson was fired from his job as police officer for committing “aggrievous smuggery”. This is still a crime in seven states
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 25, 2018
FINALLY . . .
How a Massive Fatberg Went From Sewer to Science Museum
The underground menace is now a reminder that people should be kinder to their pipes.
This is not want you want to see in a sewer.
TRACIE BAKER WASN’T SURE WHAT tools she would need for the dissection. Baker, an environmental toxicologist at Wayne State University in Detroit, studies the presence and effects of toxins and endocrine-disrupting compounds in water. She’d cut up fish before, but never anything quite like the tangled mess of fats, oils, grease, and trash that had arrived in her lab. It was two 10-pound chunks of fatberg, taken from a massive sewer-clogging bolus. Baker figured she’d need gloves, probably the thick rubber kind people use for washing dishes, and elbow-length seemed safest. Beyond that, she says, “We weren’t exactly sure what was going to work.”
Baker and her colleagues were trying to learn as much as they could about the fatberg, which had been hauled from a sewer in Clinton Township, a suburban Michigan community about 25 miles northeast of Detroit in Macomb County, while it was still fetid and fairly fresh. When they were done, it would be enshrined in a new exhibit at the Michigan Science Center.
Crews from Macomb County Public Works encountered the fatberg during a routine survey. The situation wasn’t critical, but officials knew it needed to come out, says Dan Heaton, the office’s communications manager. Fatbergs are always unwelcome guests, and this one had really made itself at home. The 50-year-old sewer pipes are about 11 feet in diameter, and the fatberg was almost exactly as wide, six feet deep, and a startling 100 feet in length—same as two school buses. Its 19-ton bulk occluded the sewage pipe enough that officials worried it would mean a backup of hydrogen sulfide—“sewer gas”—that could corrode the pipes’ cement interiors.
The removal of the fatberg cost $100,000.
It’s dangerous to send humans down into narrow, dark, gas-filled sewers, so crews generally enlist high-powered water jets first. These can be enough to get things flowing again—but they didn’t do much against the Macomb County monster. The public works team dispatched crews down into the belly of the system to attack it with hacksaws and axes. Little by little, the crew carved up the material and fed it into a wet-vac truck at street level. Extraction wrapped in September 2018, and in the light of day, Heaton says, the sopping slurry looked like an exceptionally unappetizing and “very thick stew.” The liquid portion of the blockage was sent on its “merry way to the treatment plant,” Heaton says, while the solids traveled to a storage area. A sample was calved for Wayne State researchers, and ultimately, traveled to the Science Center. …
DEGREE OF OPPORTUNITY: Pieces of the fatberg were worth keeping around for analysis because “so few fatbergs have been characterized.”
The Leachmere Home for the Uninhabited provides support for people without souls
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 25, 2018
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Not? Probably, maybe.
[My thought process when realizing I’m in the women’s bathroom]
1) Why is this scowling woman here?
2) Where are the urinals?
3) Oh god.— Jesse Fernandez (@JesseFernandez) January 24, 2020
Ed. At work, the first time someone gave me a funny look after I came out of the women’s bathroom, I exhilarated I saw a bearded lady in there!
Ed. I’m an hour and 28 minutes into setting a mood, and will probably finish by the time I correct my typos. Anyway, two simultaneous music streams, adding the added distraction of the video goodnesses was kinda cool. I call it funk for children. Also, many thanks to Youtube for suggesting this mix.