"Vote for Bernie if you want Trump to win?"
No.
Vote for Bernie if you want Bernie to win.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) February 23, 2020
I should have left the elephants in charge.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) February 22, 2020
• • • google suggests • • •
• • • some of the things I read while eating breakfast • • •
If a bartender offers to serve you a Cossack Spirit Bludgeon, it would be wise to decline.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 23, 2019
How One Man and His Dog Rowed More Than 700 Kākāpōs to Safety
In the late 19th century, Richard Henry laid a blueprint for modern conservation in New Zealand.
The chubby, moss-colored, papaya-scented kākāpō.
IN 1893, IN AUCKLAND, NEW Zealand, 48-year-old Richard Henry was going through a peculiar midlife crisis. It wasn’t for any of the usual reasons, such as a failed marriage (though he had one) or a failed career (though he had been chasing a dream job for several years), but rather it was over his obsession with flightless, moss-colored parrots called kākāpōs. Henry had observed the birds’ steep decline after mustelids, such as ferrets and stoats, were introduced to the country, and had spent much of the previous decade trying to convince scientists that the birds were in real danger of going extinct, write Susanne and John Hill in the biography, Richard Henry of Resolution Island. But Henry, who did not have traditional scientific training, went unheard by scientists. On October 3, a deeply depressed Henry attempted to shoot himself twice. The first shot missed and the second misfired, and Henry checked himself into the hospital, where doctors removed the bullet from his skull.
Several months later, Henry got that dream job: caretaker of Resolution Island, an 80-square-mile, uninhabited hunk of rock off southern New Zealand that he hoped to turn into a predator-free sanctuary for kākāpōs and other native birds. For the next 14 years, he toiled away alone on the island in pursuit of this revolutionary conservation idea. He rowed hundreds native birds from the mainland, across choppy waters, to keep them safe from the snapping jaws of furry little predators.
Despite his pioneering vision, Henry was rarely taken seriously as a conservationist in his lifetime, and after he died, he became a tragic footnote in New Zealand’s archives of conservation. “He was a visionary, a bit of a recluse, and a hermit,” says Andrew Digby, a kākāpō conservation biologist with the New Zealand Department of Conservation. “But he was so far ahead of his time, and had a lot of things right that other people didn’t.”
Richard Henry had a vision.
Henry was the first to understand the kākāpōs’ erratic breeding patterns and behavior, and his scheme for Resolution Island laid the blueprint for one of the country’s major modern conservation initiatives. This year, New Zealand hopes to restart Henry’s long-abandoned project and actually turn Resolution Island into a kākāpō sanctuary. …
This Brazilian museum secretly outfitted four sets of armor with animatronic skeletons designed to terrify intruders.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 23, 2019
Bernie Sanders’ plans may be expensive but inaction would cost much more
Facing existential challenges, we must spend heavily on a Green New Deal, Medicare for All and similar plans.
Bernie Sanders speaks during a rally at Valley high school in Santa Ana, California.
In Wednesday night’s Democratic debate, the former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg charged that the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders’ policy proposals would cost $50tn. Holy Indiana.
Larry Summers, formerly chief White House economic adviser for Barack Obama, puts the price tag at $60tn. “We are in a kind of new era of radical proposal,” he told CNN.
Maya MacGuineas, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, claims Sanders’ agenda would at least double federal spending.
Putting aside the accuracy of these cost estimates, they omit the other side of the equation: what, by comparison, is the cost of doing nothing?
A Green New Deal might be expensive but doing nothing about climate change will almost certainly cost far more. California is already burning, the midwest and south are flooding, New England is eroding, Florida is sinking. If we don’t launch something as bold as a Green New Deal, we’ll spend trillions coping with the consequences of our failure to be bold.
Medicare for All will cost a lot, but the price of doing nothing about America’s increasingly dysfunctional healthcare system will soon be in the stratosphere. The nation already pays more for healthcare per person and has worse health outcomes than any other advanced country. …
Please Don’t Fall for Mike Bloomberg’s Twitter Posts
Ignore this man.
Mike Bloomberg is running for president. It took him awhile to admit it but he finally said it: He wants to be the big cheese. President Mike. The Bloomberg-in-Chief. Could he make it all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? Only the voters can say. For now, Bloomberg is content to do weird posts online. But why? That’s the million dollar question, or should I say billion? (Because Mike Bloomberg has billions of dollars.)
The most famous Bloomberg weird post is the meatball tweet. If you already know what the meatball tweet is, great. If you don’t, I’m sorry to have to show it to you. Here it is.
Test your political knowledge:
SPOT THE MEATBALL THAT LOOKS LIKE MIKE. pic.twitter.com/CkzdgwpzdI— Team Bloomberg (@Mike2020) January 15, 2020
Let’s be clear: The meatball that looks like Mike is front and center. Not a difficult challenge, in my opinion. Michael Bloomberg’s team (Team Bloomberg, boring name) tweeted the meatball thing during one of the six bajillion Democratic debates that have happened this season as some sort of counterprogramming. If he wasn’t going to be onstage, he was gonna be in everyone’s feeds.
It’s not the only weird Bloomberg tweet. This week, his team posted video of Trump’s impeachment-acquittal speech overdubbed with the word lie and a dancing gingerbread man from Shrek superimposed on the frame.
Trump was in rare form during his post-acquittal speech. pic.twitter.com/jq8NTTn5yd
— Team Bloomberg (@Mike2020) February 6, 2020
Extremely stupid. There are other silly posts. Like one about Gerald Ford eating a calzone, or him using a stamp that says “OMG NO” to veto bills, or one with the “This is fine” meme. During the State of the Union, Bloomberg’s team was imploring potential voters to check out the new Fast & Furious trailer. …
Uh, You’re Eating More Plastic Than You Realize
When they first burst onto the scene, people thought that plastics were the way of the future. And they weren’t wrong. There’s a plastic version of almost everything, and there’s no denying that it’s highly useful and convenient. Trouble is, plastic is now everywhere. Including inside our bodies.
A recent study determined that humans consume, on average, a credit card’s worth of plastic … every single week. In six months, we eat the equivalent of a cereal bowl full of the stuff. In a lifetime, we ingest an estimated 44 pounds of plastic. That’s more than six Yorkshire Terriers. How on Earth are we able to swallow that much and not know it? Well, one reason our grandparents thought plastic was hot shit is the fact that it doesn’t biodegrade; it just breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces. These “microplastic particles” (anything less than 5 mm in diameter) then make their way into waterways and soil, entering the food chain, and eventually us.
The sad truth is that every piece of plastic ever made still exists. Our bodies today contain bits of our parents’ and grandparents’ toothbrush bristles, plastic bags, and used condoms. Don’t say Nana never gave you anything.
But their waste is a drop in the bucket compared to what we generate today. In 2015, humans produced 420 million tons of plastic, compared to a mere 2 million pounds back in 1950. Worse still, in that span of 65 years, we managed to use and trash 6 billion tons, which is now in landfills or nature, where it’s degrading into nanoparticles. In 2019, scientists determined that even in remote portions of the Pyrenees, microplastic falls from the sky at a rate of 365 particles per square meter, every single day. Even in the furthest corners of the world, it’s literally raining plastic. …
UNRELATED: Panic-Inducing Things You’re Hearing About Coronavirus (That Are Total B.S.)
The coronavirus isn’t even as old as the milk in some people’s fridges, and already it’s among the top three sources of everyday panic on the internet. And predictably, the whole subject was immediately infested with half-truths, disinformation, and 110% bullshit lies. We can’t have nice things, and we can’t have terrible things either. The result is that the media and government have had to spend time disavowing myths that should never have gotten started in the first place. Like how …
Why the lights are going out for fireflies
Fireflies face a dim future because of habitat loss and light pollution. How can conservationists help?
Fireflies in a cedar forest in Tamba, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan.
At dusk, graduate student Sara Lewis was sitting on her back porch in North Carolina with her dog. “We were supposed to be mowing our grass, but we never did, so we had long grass in our yard,” she recalls. “Suddenly this cloud of sparks rose up out of the grass and started flying around me.”
Each spark was a firefly: a beetle that glows in the dark. Hundreds of fireflies had gathered in Lewis’s back yard and were soaring around her. “It was this incredible spectacle,” says Lewis, “and I just sort of gasped.” Then she became fascinated. “I started wondering what the heck was going on here, what were these bugs doing, what were they talking about?” She has spent much of the past three decades studying fireflies.
In recent years Lewis’s work has taken on a new urgency. All around the world, the lights of fireflies are going out. The dazzling beetles are disappearing from long-established habitats. Often it is not clear why, but it seems likely that light pollution and the destruction of habitats are crucial factors. Biologists are racing to understand what is happening to fireflies so we can save them before their lights fade permanently.
Different species of firefly on display at the Forest Research Institute in Kuala Lumpur.
There have been fireflies since the dinosaur era, says evolutionary geneticist Sarah Lower, an assistant professor of biology at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. “The estimates we have currently are that fireflies are over 100m years old,” she says. Early in their history, they split into two groups, one of which spread throughout the Americas while the other colonised Europe and Asia. …
This Is How Kleptocracies Work
Trump’s pardons were shocking to some, but to me they were eerily familiar—straight out of the kleptocratic playbook I’ve studied in a dozen other countries.
Donald Trump’s decision this week to pardon several Americans convicted of fraud or corruption has garnered condemnation from many in the political establishment. The pardons were shocking to some, but to me they were eerily familiar—straight out of the kleptocratic playbook I’ve experienced and studied in a dozen other countries.
I was immediately reminded, for instance, of an episode from August 2010. I had been living and working in Afghanistan for the better part of a decade, and was participating in an effort to push anti-corruption toward the center of the U.S. mission there. A long, carefully designed, and meticulously executed investigation culminated in the arrest of a palace aide on charges of extorting a bribe. But the man did not spend a single night in jail. Afghan President Hamid Karzai made a call; the aide was released; and the case was dropped.
Karzai later bragged about interfering, in terms akin to the “horribles” and “unfairs” we now hear emanating from the White House. He likened the operation to the way people under Soviet rule were wrenched from their homes.
Corruption, I realized with a start, is not simply a matter of individual greed. It is more like a sophisticated operating system, employed by networks whose objective is to maximize their members’ riches. And a bargain holds that system together: Money and favors flow upward (from aides to presidents, for instance) and downward in return. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Are you a failed presidential candidate with nowhere to go? Try Fading Dreams, the candidate reintegration center.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
With the help of historian Douglas Brinkley, this “Slow Burn” parody unpacks in painstaking detail what it was like to live through Barack Obama’s “Latte Salute,” the greatest scandal in presidential history.
Introducing The Daily Show Podcast Universe, a five-episode miniseries, each episode a parody of a popular podcast or podcast genre. Subscribe here or search for “The Daily Show Podcast Universe” to hear them all: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast…
Deven Green appears as Mrs. Betty Bowers, America’s Best Christian
. Betty was created and is written by Andrew Bradley.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Yeah nah dodgy planet.
Gentleman assassins in 17th-century Paris often used tiny, specially bred vipers to eliminate their targets
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 23, 2018
FINALLY . . .
The Devilishly Difficult Locks of Dindigul
These unique handcrafted mechanisms are designed to protect homes, confound cashiers, and outthink thieves.
The mango button lock opens only when you turn the key after pressing a hidden button.
A.N.S PRADEEP KUMAR PICKS UP a shiny silver key the size of his forearm. He inserts it into a huge lock placed on the counter of his store. Every time he twists the massive key, a ring reverberates throughout the shop.
“This is the bell lock,” he says. “A skilled locksmith in these parts would take two weeks to craft this by hand.”
Surrounded by a sea of shimmering silver and brass, this 42-year-old lock manufacturer and retailer has spent his life and career in Dindigul, a city of two million people in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. For the past 75 years his family has been part of, and privy to, the secrets of an ancient lock-making industry.
A.N.S Pradeep Kumar’s family has been involved in the manufacture, wholesale, and retail of Dindigul locks for 75 years.
Last August, Dindigul locks received a GI (Geographical Indication) tag, given to unique and authentic indigenous Indian products that can be traced to a specific geographical area and are famed for their quality.
In Dindigul’s case, that geography has always been key. “People turned to making locks [here] because there was an abundance of iron in this region, but water for agriculture was scarce,” says Pradeep Kumar. …
This 19th-century pocket watch came with a concealed pistol, a stamp for wax seals, and four poisonous darts
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 23, 2018
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Not? Perhaps, perhaps.