In his editorial New Rule, Bill tells Democrats it’s time to fight dirty and offers up some unscrupulous material to get them started.
THANKS to HBO and Real Time with Bill Maher for making this program available on YouTube.
• • • erectile dysfunction to the masses! • • •
Ed. Because Elon Musk wanted to do this. Keep it playing as you browse through the first two entries in today’s errant ramblings barely uninteresting at all things.
Elon Musk’s new EDM single reviewed – ‘Bringing erectile dysfunction to the masses!’
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO has dropped Don’t Doubt Ur Vibe on Soundcloud – a wannabe dancefloor banger that somehow manages to doubt its own vibe.
The tech billionaire’s track received 270,000 plays in four hours … Elon Musk.
LIKE CHARLES FOSTER KANE splashing his millions on promoting his mistress’s disastrous opera career, very rich men have, in recent years, displayed a certain tendency to come to grief when dabbling in the field of music. First, the now-incarcerated pharma bro Martin Shkreli bought the only extant copy of the Wu-Tang Clan’s album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin and, as a result, was first called “a shithead”, “the Michael Jackson nose kid”, “the man with the 12-year-old body” and “a fake super-villain” by the group’s Ghostface Killah, and then became the subject of a Wu-Tang Clan diss track. Not, one suspects, the response he expected when he ponied up $2m for their CD. Now Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk – net worth $34.4bn – has launched a parallel career as an EDM artist, posting a track called Don’t Doubt Ur Vibe on Soundcloud.
It’s bootless to point out that if it wasn’t by a tech billionaire, no one would give Don’t Doubt Ur Vibe a second thought, indistinguishable as it is from umpteen competent but unthrilling bits of bedroom electronica posted elsewhere on Soundcloud. But it is by a tech billionaire, so it racked up 270,000 plays in four hours. What they’ve heard is a vocal – apparently by Musk himself – that repeats a dreadful little motivational-poster homily ad infinitum through a vocorder over wafty mid-tempo Euro-trance. There’s a kind of rounded-edged take on an old-fashioned 303 acid line that appears about two minutes in and reappears at the track’s conclusion, and the occasional pitch-bent racing-car-speeding-past drone, but it’s been made by someone with what you might charitably describe as a shaky grasp of musical dynamics. It keeps going in for lengthy buildups that don’t actually build up to anything: the drums roll, the tension mounts, then the track just picks up where it left off. Curiously, something about the way the vocal is placed over the backing track makes it feel oddly hesitant: “Don’t doubt your vibe”, it keeps insisting, doubtfully. …
…
IN RELATED NEWS: Elon Musk’s New EDM Single Is, Thankfully, Terrible
As experts in profanity, we can confidently affirm that the words “Elon Musk’s new EDM single” are some of the most offensive sounds a person can make. And every single detail about the song the Tesla cult leader released on Friday only deepens that conviction. It’s bad enough that a 48-year-old billionaire is indulging his mid-life crisis through Satan’s prank of a music genre — but to promote the single, he changed his name to “E ‘D’ M” on Twitter. He also tweeted pictures of himself in the recording studio, looking as confidently incompetent as a toddler with a light-up guitar. The song is named “Don’t Doubt Ur Vibe.” Wouldn’t it be the worst thing if it were good?
Vibbbe pic.twitter.com/21WKNOnMXZ
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 31, 2020
After all, this isn’t the first time we’ve gotten a cringeworthy glimpse into Elon Musk’s musical ambitions. If you, too, spent a few deeply uncomfortable days of spring 2019 singing “RIP Harambe, sippin’ on some Bombay” to yourself, you can rest assured that will not happen this time. The devastating possibility that Elon Musk might be a musical genius will not occur to you. …
• • • some of the things I read while eating breakfast • • •
Thomas W. Morse, the Missouri postmaster known for his legendary dislike of living creatures, was also an author who invented the literary genre of “villainoir”, in which monstrous people were romanticized as dark, underestimated antiheros.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) February 1, 2019
How Finnish Skywatchers Discovered a Strange New Aurora
The mysterious phenomenon resembles green sand dunes in the sky.
The newly described auroral dunes. Embiggenable.
ON OCTOBER 5, 2018, MINNA Palmroth published Revontulibongarin opas*, a guide to help anyone spot and identify auroras in Finland’s skies. The book is exhaustive, and profiles 30 distinct kinds of auroras, with photos taken by members of a local Facebook group of enthusiasts of the polar atmospheric phenomenon. On October 7, just two days after the guide was published, the Facebook group pinged Palmroth with an update: They were pretty sure they’d discovered an entirely new aurora.
“It was funny timing, but an incredible coincidence,” says Palmroth, who is a computational space physicist at the University of Helsinki. As it turns out, the group was right. The new aurora, nicknamed “the dunes,” is described in a new paper in the journal AGU Advances.
It all started five years ago, when Palmroth received a message to join the Facebook group Revontulikyttääjät, or Auroral Stalkers. “They sent me this very polite invitation,” she says. “Could you please join our group and answer our questions about auroras?” Palmroth obliged. Several years in, she noticed the same types of questions popped up, about when and where to spot certain auroras. Palmroth compiled a list of all the different types of auroras known to science and posed a challenge to the group, most of whom are photographers: to photograph every aurora they saw. The images began piling up, at much higher resolution than the kinds of photos scientists had traditionally taken, and Palmroth compiled them into the book. She imagined it in the style of a birdwatching guide for non-scientists, all for spotting glowing waves (most commonly but not exclusively green) in the night sky.
“Auroras are like fingerprints,” Palmroth says, adding that the form, orientation, and motion of each allow scientists to identify them. The lights are conjured by the solar wind, or charged particles flowing out from the Sun. When they collide with Earth’s magnetic field and upper atmosphere, the brilliantly colored lights can result.
The auroral dunes, captured by an all-sky camera in Hankasalmi, Finland, are indicated with a white arrow.
“If you see a specific form in the sky, you can deduce what is happening further out in space,” she says. Most of the aurora snapshots in the Facebook group were easily categorizable, except for a strange, recurring form that appeared as a greenish, even pattern of waves. …
* If you’re using Chrome, Google Translate won’t turn this into an unpolished turd, mostly.
Joseph Stalin hoped to have Morse write his biography, and was greatly disappointed to learn Morse had died earlier, remarking that “a skilled writer sees the good in a wicked man, and makes it visible; Morse sees the wicked, and makes it great.”
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) February 1, 2019
Terror on all sides: inside a firestorm tearing through the Australian bush
Guardian Australia reporter Christopher Knaus and photographer Mike Bowers join the Cowie family defending their property about 100km from Canberra.
• Bushfires menace homes and lives – and firefighters warn winds will create new threats
• Thomas Keneally: ‘These fires have changed us’
Horses flee as flames close in at Tallabrook Lodge, a property south of Canberra. Bushfires are raging around Australia’s capital.
The fear in the eyes of Claire and Laurence Cowie’s horses is unsettling.
On all sides of their paddock, flames are dancing in the distance.
The mountains looming above Tallabrook Lodge, about an hour’s drive south on the highway from Canberra, are glowing an angry red.
Behind a small hill to the south, a patch of native tea trees has exploded, sending flames and thick black smoke high above the ridgeline and igniting a grassfire that races northwards at breakneck speed.
The panicked horses are pacing circles along the paddock’s edge. They’re on edge. Everyone in this region is.
Fires around Australia’s capital have been raging for days, enveloping the city in smoke and threatening towns and suburbs on its outer edges.
But Laurence Cowie is calm. He’s been watching the fire since it broached the hilltops at 6.30am. The house is prepared. There’s little fuel around and a clear break between the home and the old, dried-out gums and pines that line parts of the property.
“I’ve got the beer on ice,” Laurence jokes to the Guardian. “Power’s always the first thing to go. Warm beer: it’s deadly.” …
TRAPPED IN IRAN
In July 2019 Nicolas Pelham, The Economist’s Middle East correspondent, received a rare journalist’s visa to Iran. On the day he was due to fly home, he was detained.
I was paying my bill at the hotel when they came. There were seven of them, stiff and formal in plain-clothes. “Mr Pelham?” asked the shortest one and presented me with a hand-written document in Farsi. “It’s been signed by a judge,” he said. “It entitles us to detain you for 48 hours.” He paused to allow the information to register on my face. “It might be less,” he added. “We just need you to answer a few questions.”
He gave me a choice. Either I could be questioned in the hotel or in their car on the way to the airport. “You might even make the plane,” he said. Almost automatically, I asked to see a lawyer or a diplomatic representative. He flicked his wrist, indicating that this was unnecessary. “All we want to know is a little bit more about your trip. There’s no need to delay or complicate things.”
It was 7.30pm. My plane left in four hours and the airport was over an hour’s drive from Tehran. The officials ushered me into a small office in the hotel and crowded around my chair.
“Your mobile phone and laptop, please.”
I pointed to the bag lying against the opposite wall.
“Are there more?”
I took a second phone out of my pocket.
The shortest man was in charge. He wore a dark, oversized jacket and trousers. His wavy hair was greasy and his face was lined. He bobbed up and down on a chair and patted my knee, though it was unclear whether he meant to reassure or threaten me.
The guards rifled through my books and notes. They held up a piece of paper with jottings on it from a previous trip and asked me to explain what I had written. I tried to hide my alarm when I saw that my eight-year-old son had stencilled large Hebrew letters on the back. How could I have brought that with me? I asked myself. But if they noticed the Hebrew, they said nothing. …
Why Fear-Based Democracies Aren’t Free (with Jason Pargin)
Freedom sucks…and that is why we have to defend it. Because our democracy involves doing a lot of stuff that takes energy, takes time, and lacks that Michael Bay Quality that only a surprise missile launch can provide. So on this episode of The Cracked Podcast, Alex Schmidt and special guest Jason Pargin (who writes for Cracked as David Wong) are exploring the ways being afraid of everything (an easy action) can stop us from being free. Discover the decades-long tradition of some Americans wanting to give up everything in exchange for not needing to think, the centuries-long tradition of people inciting fake panics, and the extremely reasonable ways you can help change things for the better. …
Leaked Documents Expose the Secretive Market for Your Web Browsing Data
An Avast antivirus subsidiary sells ‘Every search. Every click. Every buy. On every site.’ Its clients have included Home Depot, Google, Microsoft, Pepsi, and McKinsey.
Update: On Thursday and after this investigation, Avast announced it will stop the Jumpshot data collection and wind down Jumpshot’s operations with immediate effect. You can find the original story below.
An antivirus program used by hundreds of millions of people around the world is selling highly sensitive web browsing data to many of the world’s biggest companies, a joint investigation by Motherboard and PCMag has found. Our report relies on leaked user data, contracts, and other company documents that show the sale of this data is both highly sensitive and is in many cases supposed to remain confidential between the company selling the data and the clients purchasing it.
The documents, from a subsidiary of the antivirus giant Avast called Jumpshot, shine new light on the secretive sale and supply chain of peoples’ internet browsing histories. They show that the Avast antivirus program installed on a person’s computer collects data, and that Jumpshot repackages it into various different products that are then sold to many of the largest companies in the world. Some past, present, and potential clients include Google, Yelp, Microsoft, McKinsey, Pepsi, Home Depot, Condé Nast, Intuit, and many others. Some clients paid millions of dollars for products that include a so-called “All Clicks Feed,” which can track user behavior, clicks, and movement across websites in highly precise detail.
Avast claims to have more than 435 million active users per month, and Jumpshot says it has data from 100 million devices. Avast collects data from users that opt-in and then provides that to Jumpshot, but multiple Avast users told Motherboard they were not aware Avast sold browsing data, raising questions about how informed that consent is. …
‘It was like a movie’: the high school students who uncovered a toxic waste scandal
In the 1990s, an inspirational teacher and his students uncovered corruption and illegal dumping in their backyard. Nearly 30 years on, is Middletown still at risk?
tudents taking Fred Isseks’ ‘Electronic English’ course uncovered environmental crimes.
In the summer of 1991, Middletown high school, roughly 70 miles north of Manhattan in New York’s verdant Orange County, acquired a handful of video cameras. The goal was to train the school’s teenage students in film-making and media production, using local subjects as a starting point – perhaps a documentary about the city’s sports teams or an amateur talkshow. Instead, under the tutelage of Middletown high’s popular English teacher, Fred Isseks, a rowdy and diverse group of teenagers organised themselves into an investigative journalism unit.
Officially, Isseks’ class was open only to the school’s oldest students, aged 16 to 18 – but, unofficially, it welcomed everyone. Kids not even enrolled in the course joined Isseks’ students in shooting short films. The teenagers alternated between grungy early-90s flannel and choker necklaces and awkward attempts at business attire as they honed their reporting skills. They invited local representatives into the school’s new media studio for a political debate, and covered topics such as the city’s curfew for teens. One former student joked to me that the class became a surreal mix of “rap videos and corrupt politicians”.
Over the next six years, culminating in 1997, students passing through Isseks’ high school class would film, edit, and release a feature-length documentary that exposed a generation’s worth of illegal, mob-connected dumping of toxic materials in their part of New York state. Industrial solvents, liquid refrigerants, crushed battery casings, petroleum additives, printing inks and untreated medical waste, including radioactive isotopes: it all flooded the landfills of Middletown, constructed without ground liners, atop freshwater aquifers that fed the region’s drinking wells. As a retired compactor operator explains to Isseks’ students in the film, sometimes there was so much bloody hospital waste on the ground, it looked as if he had run someone over. Another interviewee, a former driver for a mafia-owned waste-hauling firm, described tipping fuming truckloads of paint sludge from a nearby automobile factory straight into the dump. Middletown residents were told it was all just certified municipal waste.
Isseks’ course, known as Electronic English, would propel many of its students into careers in media production and environmental law, but at the time their work did not receive universal approval. There were warnings of arrest from the county sheriff; near-total disinterest from the city’s local newspaper; public frustration from regional politicians; and at least one death threat. …
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: “I thought it was too fantastical to be true – that all these politicians I saw on TV were actually covering something up.”
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
This election, vote for Joe Biden… or don’t. You f*ck.
THANKS to Comedy Central3and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
Things sure are getting strange on the campaign trail as the first contest in the Democratic presidential primary approaches. Did you see Mike Bloomberg shake that dog’s snout?
THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
The Swiss Watchmakers Guild began as a loose association of roustabouts who freelanced as security guards
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 31, 2018
FINALLY . . .
An Ancient Australian Volcano Is a Haven for Giant Pink Slugs
Just because they’re huge and garish doesn’t mean they’re easy to find.
The sizable slugs are bright, but good at hiding.
THE MOUNT KAPUTAR PINK SLUG is marvelously unsubtle. A screeching, fluorescent pink and up to eight inches long, it looks like an enormous tongue stained with Kool-Aid.
Despite its loud appearance, the slug typically leads a pretty chill life, marooned at least 3,280 feet up, on the remains of an ancient volcano near Narrabri in the Australian state of New South Wales. On misty nights or mornings, when it slides out from a rocky hideout or blanket of leaf litter to forage, the slug inches up rock faces or the trunks of snow gum trees or other eucalypts, hankering for lichen, algae, and fungi. Then, as day breaks, it usually disappears again to avoid finding itself in the beak of a laughing kookaburra or pied currawong. This penchant for retreat probably helped the flamboyant introvert survive when fires tore through parts of its habitat in Mount Kaputar National Park at the end of last year.
Across the country, scientists are still taking stock of the impact of the ongoing, devastating bushfires—which have burned tens of millions of acres—and animals. Certain species, including the platypus and the Mount Kaputar slug, pose particularly maddening challenges for study, because they can be elusive even under normal circumstances. Scientists aren’t entirely sure exactly how many of the slugs there were before the fires.
Mount Kaputar National Park is craggy, lush, and home to many mollusks.
Researchers have fanned out to survey Mount Kaputar’s hot pink denizens several times over the past 13 years, but counts can vary widely depending on the weather. “Mollusks generally like it rather wet,” says Frank Köhler, a malacologist at the Australian Museum in Sydney. …
UNRELATED: This documentary on cooking slugs for dinner
This bridge can turn itself inside out
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 30, 2018
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Perhaps, maybe.
OOPS, ONE MORE TAB STILL OPEN . . .
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT YOUR CRANIOTOMY
Embiggenable.
If you’re reading this page, chances are you’ve recently heard that you need to have a craniotomy. Try not to worry. Although, yes, this is brain surgery, you’re more likely to die from the underlying condition itself, such as a malignant tumour or subdural hematoma. Think of it this way: insomuch as being alive is safe, which it is not, having a craniotomy is safe. We fill our days with doing laundry, replacing our brake pads at the auto shop, or making a teeth-cleaning appointment with the dentist, in the expectation that everything will be fine. But it won’t. There will be a day that kills you or someone you love. Such a perspective is actually quite comforting. Taken in that light, a craniotomy can be a relaxing experience, rather than one of abject terror.
WHAT HAPPENS DURING A CRANIOTOMY?
Nearly all operations begin with the creation of a bone flap so the doctor has an opening into your brain. This opening will be sealed shut at the end with wire or titanium plates and screws. Beneath the bone are the three meninges, connective membranes also known as the mothers: the dura mater (hard mother), arachnoid mater (spidery mother), and pia mater (soft mother). After we’re past that triple embrace — like the Moirai crones of myth that spin, measure, and cut the thread of life — we’re at the precious substance of thought. The blush of living brain has been described as resembling the inside of a conch shell or a crumbling marble quarry. To me, it’s like the revelation of brine and meat after shucking an oyster. Beyond that, what happens during a craniotomy depends on the type of surgery. A translabyrinthine craniotomy, for example, involves cutting away the whole of the mastoid bone and some of the tunnels of your inner ear.
IS IT TRUE I WILL HAVE TO BE AWAKE DURING MY CRANIOTOMY?
Some craniotomies require you to be conscious. When a tumour makes itself comfortable with a good book and a blanket in front of the fire of your eloquent cortex, which controls language or motor functions, we give you prompts indistinguishable from online banking security questions. Certain surgeons fancy themselves as early explorers, sketching out crude cartographies of the thunderous Badlands, the twists of the Amazon, the jagged coasts of Jutland brainscapes. I like to think of the organ as an ancient manor or primordial motel and myself a plumber, electrician, or stonemason reading a blueprint of where to find the stairways, hidden chambers, fuse boxes, boiler, septic tank. It’s a Versailles of the id and ego with a fleshy, well manicured hedge maze. …
Ed. Prepare to spend a while. It is, actually, barely uninteresting.
IS THERE A PIECE OF HOPE YOU CAN IMPART TO READERS OF THESE FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS, SOMETHING YOU’VE LEARNED FROM STARING DOWN THE NAKED OCCIPITAL LOBE OR LOSING A PATIENT TO A RANDOM BASILAR ANEURYSM OR HEARING THE NURSES AND RESIDENTS CHANGE SHIFTS FOR THE NIGHT, THE VARIOUS RHYTHMS OF THE HOSPITAL, OR THE SUICIDE OF YOUR HUSBAND, OR TRYING TO REACH YOUR SONS BY RUINING YOUR BELONGINGS IN THE POOL?
Read these answers once again, but very slowly. Recite to yourself, “I am alive.”