February 8, 2020 in 3,191 words

_{• • • to set a mood • • •}

After the Orbit launch skillfully performed by “Tengri and Friends”, at the helm of our ship is now the turn of one of the most respected young producers in the “alternative” festival scene: Decomposer, born Agostino Maria Ticino from Italy. We asked the Roman producer to confront himself with the works of some of the major exponents of the Parvati roster and to use his proverbial eclecticism and long experience as a remixer to draw the guidelines of a new musical forest universe. This is the result.

_{^{• • • some of the things I read while eating breakfast • • •}}

Harborus of Persia, an educator from 600 BC, is often pictured bearing a torch. Long-assumed to represent the light of knowledge, historians now suspect it represents an episode where he theorized that his house was sentient and attempted to set fire to it.

— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) February 8, 2019

The Artist Trying to Explain Kentucky’s ‘Meat Shower’ of 1876

_{A historical head-scratcher inspired the world’s worst jelly bean flavor.}

_{The meat shower, here shown falling on Mrs. Crouch, caused confusion across the nation.}

EVERY OCTOBER, AROUND 200,000 PEOPLE gather in Kentucky for Court Days, the largest outdoor event in the state. Ever since 1794, locals have bought, traded, or sold various goods at the festival, held in the city of Mount Sterling. But in one of the strangest offerings in Court Days history, Kurt Gohde, professor of art at Transylvania University, handed out meat-flavored jelly beans in 2007 to anyone who would eat them.

Some people said the flavor of the dark red jelly beans reminded them of raw bacon. Another pair agreed with each other that they tasted like “strawberry pork chop.” Gohde, who commissioned the jelly beans with their specific flavor profile, describes them as tasting like “a heavily sugared bacon, with a metal aftertaste.”

The jelly beans were flavored like the 1876 meat shower, a mysterious event where chunks of flesh rained down over nearby Olympia Springs, one early March day. Gohde had hoped that meat connoisseurs at Court Days might help him determine the true identity of the mysterious substance.

Gohde, likely the foremost expert on meat rain, first learned about the incident in a book about strange weather phenomena over 20 years ago. He had just moved to Kentucky from upstate New York, and was keen on asking his students more details about the unusual event. To his surprise, none of them knew what he was talking about.

_{Kurt Gohde has been fascinated by the meat shower for decades.}

…

DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: “I have a tremendous appetite for wonder. “I believe people need wonder in their lives. I know I do.”

_{Ed. This is my faborite kind of story. After this brief intro, I had absolutely no idea where it was going to go.}

The world’s largest pipe organ has a biome more diverse than that of the human body

— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) December 11, 2017

The Great Affordability Crisis Breaking America

_{In one of the best decades the American economy has ever recorded, families were bled dry.}

In the 2010s, the national unemployment rate dropped from a high of 9.9 percent to its current rate of just 3.5 percent. The economy expanded each and every year. Wages picked up for high-income workers as soon as the Great Recession ended, and picked up for lower-income workers in the second half of the decade. Americans’ confidence in the economy hit its highest point since 2000, right before the dot-com bubble burst. The headline economic numbers looked good, if not great.

But beyond the headline economic numbers, a multifarious and strangely invisible economic crisis metastasized: Let’s call it the Great Affordability Crisis. This crisis involved not just what families earned but the other half of the ledger, too—how they spent their earnings. In one of the best decades the American economy has ever recorded, families were bled dry by landlords, hospital administrators, university bursars, and child-care centers. For millions, a roaring economy felt precarious or downright terrible.

Viewing the economy through a cost-of-living paradigm helps explain why roughly two in five American adults would struggle to come up with $400 in an emergency so many years after the Great Recession ended. It helps explain why one in five adults is unable to pay the current month’s bills in full. It demonstrates why a surprise furnace-repair bill, parking ticket, court fee, or medical expense remains ruinous for so many American families, despite all the wealth this country has generated. Fully one in three households is classified as “financially fragile.”

Along with the rise of inequality, the slowdown in productivity growth, and the shrinking of the middle class, the spiraling cost of living has become a central facet of American economic life. It is a crisis amenable to policy solutions at the state, local, and federal levels—with all of the 2020 candidates, President Donald Trump included, teasing or pushing sweeping solutions for the problem. But absent those solutions, it looks certain to get worse for the foreseeable future—leaving households fragile, exacerbating the country’s inequality, slowing down growth, smothering productivity, and putting families’ dreams of security out of reach. …

Mayor Pete’s message is connecting with the unemployed https://t.co/IluFaddj1o

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) February 8, 2020

The time I sabotaged my editor with ransomware from the dark web.

As you may be aware, there’s money to be made on the internet. The question, of course, is how. Not everyone has the reality-distortion skills to start their own tech unicorn, or the Stanford connections to become an early employee there, or the indifference to sunlight necessary to become a world-class Fortnite gamer. Not everyone lives in the relatively few places where software engineering jobs are well-paying and plentiful.

If you’re willing to break the law—or at least the laws of the U.S., a country you may not yourself call home—your options expand. You can steal credit card numbers, or just buy them in bulk. You can hijack bank accounts and wire yourself money, or you can hijack email accounts and fool someone else into wiring you money. You can scam the lonely on dating sites. All of these ventures, though, require resources of one kind or another: a way to sell the stuff you buy with other people’s plastic, a “mule” willing to cash out your purloined funds, or a talent for persuasion and patience for the long con. And, usually, some programming skill. But if you have none of these, there’s always ransomware.

Malicious software that encrypts data on a computer or a server, ransomware allows an attacker to extort a payment in exchange for the decryption key. Over the past year in the U.S., hackers hit the governments of Baltimore, New Orleans, and a raft of smaller municipalities, taking down city email servers and databases, police incident-report systems, in some cases even 911 dispatch centers. Hospitals, dependent on the flow of vital, time-sensitive data, have proved particularly tempting targets. So have companies that specialize in remotely managing the IT infrastructure of smaller businesses and towns—hacking them means effectively hacking all their clients.

As the number of attacks has grown, so has the scale of the victims and ransoms. “Ransomware really started as something that targeted individuals,” says Herb Stapleton, a section chief in the FBI’s cyber division. “Then it started targeting smaller companies without strong internet security protections, and now it’s evolved to larger companies and municipalities.” In 2019 the Weather Channel, the French media group M6, and the shipping services firm Pitney Bowes Inc. were all hit. Last summer two small Florida towns paid $1.1 million between them to unlock their data. According to the BBC, the European forensics firm Eurofins Scientific also paid off attackers, though it hasn’t confirmed this. Travelex Ltd. also won’t say whether it paid its multimillion-dollar ransom, though as I write this the global currency exchanger’s website remains down, a month after it was attacked. …

POINT OF REFLECTION: It may not have been responsible to post this article. Perhaps someone might be tempted to try this out. And, perhaps, I may be unprepared for the karmic collateral damage that will certainly befall everyone involved.

The Controversial Actress Whose Invention Changed The World

If you could have dinner with any Hollywood celebrity from history, alive or dead, who would it be? And before you answer, remember that most of these people are probably insufferable and/or incoherent. So can I suggest Hedy Lamarr? In the course of her life, she made an erotic movie that pushed the envelope so hard it immediately got banned, married an evil arms dealer, then helped invent the technology you’re probably using to read this article. It definitely seems like she’d have some stories to tell.

4. It Started With The First Movie Orgasm

Hedwig Kiesler was born in Austria in 1914. As a child of privilege, she did all the absurdly fancy shit wealthy kids did back in the day. She studied ballet and piano, and probably also did the kind of weird stuff with horses that I picture rich people back then liked to do. You know, how they inexplicably got off on making horses trot in ridiculous ways in front of about nine other uber-wealthy people who were politely clapping, but whispering that their own horse trots way weirder and dumber. They’ve got the ultimate weird-ass horse, goddammit.

Anyway, Hedwig grew up to be stunningly gorgeous and started a career as an actress, going by “Hedy” and immediately getting naked. That’s unremarkable now, but we’re talking the late ’30s, when nudity in film would send audiences into a frenzy. Such panic can only be matched today when a rare non-Disney movie sneaks through the cracks. In the 1933 film Ecstasy, Kiesler plays the sexually frustrated young bride of a much older man who spices things up a bit with a hot young guy in town. What made this particularly noteworthy was that it featured what’s believed to be the first onscreen orgasm (outside pornography, that is).

She committed completely to the scene, possibly because the director was allegedly poking her in the butt with a pin. (There is perhaps no better portrait of most men’s understanding of the female orgasm.) The film would go on to be about as controversial as you’d expect for a movie with a female orgasm in it at a time when most people would head to confession after touching their genitals while pissing. Hedy became known as “Ecstasy Girl,” which would bring the worst kind of man into her life. …

Lawrence Brorman eases his pickup through plowed farmland in Deaf Smith County, an impossibly flat stretch of the Texas Panhandle where cattle outnumber people 40 to 1. The 67-year-old farmer and rancher brings the vehicle to a stop at the field’s southern edge. Just across the fence line, Brorman eyes a mess of cattle standing sentinel upon a mound of dirt and compacted manure. They peer back at him, chewing cud, mooing, and, of course, pooping.

Though Brorman grazes 80 or so cattle on his land in Hereford, Deaf Smith’s county seat, the animals he’s currently staring down aren’t his. They’re held by Southwest Feedyard, one of the oldest cattle feedlots in the county. This place holds 45,000 head of cattle in bare-dirt pens for months at a time, fattening the animals on flaked corn before sending them to slaughter. It’s part of a vast constellation of feeding operations that dot the western Panhandle, which accounts for one-fifth of the entire U.S. beef supply. If you’ve ever eaten a hamburger, there’s a good chance the meat came from here.

Brorman rolls down the driver’s side window, and a rank odor wafts in from the Southwest feedlot. While good fences make good neighbors, they do nothing to stop the wind from sweeping up tiny fragments of dried manure from the feedlot surface and spreading them across Brorman’s farm. Some summer days, especially during droughts, the particles—which scientists call “fecal dust”—form dense plumes that blot out the sun. When the wind is high, a wall of dust churns through the town of 15,000, coating homes and businesses and limiting visibility on U.S. Highway 60 so severely that motorists must switch on their headlights well before sunset.

“You go outside and it’ll just burn your nose and your eyes,” Brorman says. The dust brings foul odors so pervasive that they can penetrate the Brormans’ farmhouse even when the doors and windows are closed. Lawrence and his wife, Jaime, use a more explicit term for the fecal dust: “shust,” a portmanteau of “shit” and “dust.” (Other folks who live here are partial to “shog,” a mashup of the same first word and “fog.”) …

This Week's Onion Magazine: https://t.co/lzBilp40RL pic.twitter.com/Sgf1AHxvwP

— The Onion (@TheOnion) February 7, 2020

Inside the mind of Dominic Cummings

_{He is now the country’s de facto project manager, but what does he actually believe? In a bid to find out, I read (almost) everything Cummings has written in the last decade.}

When the prime minister of the day describes you as a “career psychopath”, your chances of preferment in the political world may not seem rosy. When associates of a leading minister refer to you as “that jumped-up oik”, you may sense you’re not winning friends in high places. When a senior official in the department where you are employed calls you “a mutant virus”, you may feel less than wholly accepted. And when a prominent MP in the party you work for denounces you as “an unelected foul-mouthed oaf”, it may seem that the game is up. Furnished with these testimonials, some downsizing of career ambitions may appear to be in order.

But Dominic Cummings has never played by the rules, and now, as Boris Johnson’s de facto chief-of-staff, he has become perhaps the most powerful unelected political figure in the country. He thus has an exceptional opportunity to put his ideas into practice. But what are his ideas? Commentators seem vaguely aware that, although he studied history at university, he has dabbled in more than one scientific discipline over the years, but no one, it appears, has really tried to take the measure of Cummings as a serious thinker.

There has, of course, been no shortage of comment on the various roles he has played in British political life in the last couple of decades. He came to the fore as a special adviser to the Tory politician Michael Gove between 2007 and 2013 (ie both before and during Gove’s tumultuous years as secretary of state for education); he attracted further attention as the chief administrative mastermind behind the successful leave campaign in the 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU; and when Boris Johnson became prime minister in July 2019, Cummings was installed as his chief aide, directing operations from within Downing Street.

What may be less well known is that for much of this period Cummings has maintained an unusual blog, where he has posted extensive ruminations on his reading, enthusiastic reports about breakthroughs in science and pungent contributions to debates about education, spicing the mix with some notably unbuttoned ad hominem side-swipes – for example, describing David Davis, then the Brexit minister, as “thick as mince”. Several of these posts have an intrinsic intellectual interest, but, given his current role at the heart of power, they may also yield insights into the thinking of someone whose ideas could soon have consequences for all of us. …

PREPARE TO SPEND A WHILE; It’s The Long Read.

Video Goodnesses
_{and not-so-goodnesses}

Mike Nayna thought he was exposing a racist and sexist monster for the good of society. Then, the narrative got out of his hands.

Former White House Chief Strategist Stephen K. Bannon joins Bill to discuss President Trump’s “best week so far.”

_{THANKS to HBO and Real Time with Bill Maher for making this program available on YouTube.}

Bill shares a few fun “facts” about President Trump’s son-in-law and White House Senior Advisor Jared Kushner.

In his editorial New Rule, Bill calls out Republicans over their undemocratic behavior and warns that when republics fall, they do so quietly.

Former VP Joe Biden remains optimistic about his chances despite taking a “gut punch” in the Iowa caucus. Who stands to gain the most? Mike Bloomberg’s campaign thinks their candidate is the real winner coming out of Iowa.

_{THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.}

CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.

Here’s me review of drunk animals. So glad us humans aren’t like this ey.

The story we know as Robinson Crusoe began as a public service message against corrupt hypnotists

— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) December 15, 2017

FINALLY . . .

The Uncertain Future of a Border-Straddling Liquor

_{Sotol could bring Texans and Mexicans together, or divide them.}

_{A traditional spirit stirs up fresh debate among craft distillers living along the U.S.–Mexico border.}

BRENT LOOBY OF DESERT DOOR Distillery wants to share sotol with the world. “It’s a gateway to West Texas,” he writes, “that tastes unquestionably of the Texas land.” The spirit is distilled from dasylirion, a spiky succulent that dots the arid terrain of the Chihuahuan Desert, which spans the U.S.–Mexico border. Desert Door is the first commercial sotol distillery in the United States.

The venture has some detractors.

“It’s an appropriation that should be dealt with,” says Jacob Jacquez, the sixth-generation sotolero, or sotol distiller, behind Sotol Don Celso in Janos, Mexico. The company is named for his late father, a sotolero and politician who defended the niche spirit which, for much of the 1900s, was outlawed and violently suppressed. “I think they should take a step back and respect the families that were persecuted, that fought for that word: ‘sotol.’”This transnational debate within the craft community now has advocates in the U.S. and Mexican governments. The USMCA, a trade deal signed by President Trump last week to replace NAFTA, includes a provision that may classify sotol as distinctively Mexican. In other words, Texan sotol distillers like Looby could be—like Californians who must make “sparkling wine” rather than champagne—barred from using the word.

On a deeply fraught border, a storied spirit stands to either bridge the divide or deepen it. …

@God, care to elaborate? https://t.co/2hHPIesJd2

— Jef Norton (@BirdJanitor) February 8, 2020

FOLLOW-UP: Elon Musk boasts that his EDM track is the “8th hottest song on SoundCloud!”

_{And now it’s climbed to number 7!}

As you may have heard, tech entrepreneur Elon Music has followed-up his first foray into the world of electronic music with Don’t Doubt ur Vibe, a remarkably unremarkable EDM track that features (we think) the Tesla CEO on heavily-processed vocals.

However, despite its lack of distinguishing features – other than the fact that it’s produced by Elon Musk, of course – the song quickly raced to number 8 in SoundCloud’s most-played chart, and it seems that the SpaceX founder was pretty jazzed about it. In fact, he took to Twitter to boast about his achievement. …

_{Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Not? Yeah… it could happen, maybe.}