The first step in overcoming stupidity is admitting you're stupid.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) May 5, 2020
• • • google suggested • • •
Out next on Iono-Lounge is this two-tracker release from Morrisound called ‘Sound of Peace’. The title track is a harmonious floaty blissed out song with a gorgeous celestial vocal. The second track is ‘Gaia’ – a stunning chill number with sweet tranquil lines, epic risers and mesmerising vocals. This release is guaranteed to help you weather the storm in these troubled times – the music is pure nectar for the soul!
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
How Island Evolution Forged a Bizarre Mammal in Ancient Madagascar
Back when reptiles were all the rage, Adalatherium really stood out.
The skeleton of Adalatherium, the oldest mammal that’s been found south of the equator.
IN JULY 1999, DAVID KRAUSE was enjoying the balmy winter weather of Madagascar as he dug in the dirt for dinosaurs. The island’s soil was fertile ground for life in ancient times. At the end of the Cretaceous period, 66 million years ago, Madagascar—already an island at that point, having chipped off of a drifting India some 20 million years prior—crawled with the legendary reptiles of the age, from meat-eating theropods to a 20-foot-long constrictor snake.
Which is why three years later, when Krause opened a plaster jacket that contained the fossils from the dig, the last thing he expected to find was a mammal.
Yet there it was. Tucked into the mold, along with a small, ancient crocodilian, was Adalatherium hui—a stubby-tailed mammal from the Cretaceous, preserved exquisitely after its demise in a mudslide. The oldest mammal yet found south of the equator, Adalatherium had a unique set of characteristics that set it apart from all other living animals at the time, as well as Gondwanatheria—the mysterious mammals that evolved as the supercontinent Gondwana broke apart.
David Krause and his team haul a plaster containing Adalatherium hui from the field site in 1999. He wouldn’t find what was inside for three more years.
“Once the jacket was open, I recognized an elbow joint and knew it was mammalian,” says Krause, a paleontologist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and lead author of the paper. “ I didn’t sleep for two days, I was that excited.” …
UNRELATED: Shanghart Supermarket
This supermarket in Shanghai appears to be a typical Chinese convenience store, but all of the bottles are empty and all the containers are filled with nothing but air.
XU ZHEN IS A YOUNG, contemporary Chinese artist who looks to combine conceptual art with social critique. Critical of global consumerism, he created an empty supermarket that sells absolutely nothing.
Shanghart Supermarket, which currently is showing in Shanghai, looks like any typical convenience store from the outside. Chinese shoppers often walk inside in search of actual supermarket goods, without the slightest clue that they won’t find any content inside of the packaging.
For the first few seconds, everything looks normal. Products like toothbrushes, sodas, and shampoos are fully stocked along the aisles of the store. But, after a few seconds, the customers become befuddled as they realize that there is no liquid in any of the bottles, and all the containers are light as a feather, filled with nothing but air. This was made possible with the painstaking process of buying thousands of real products, delicately opening them, emptying them of all content, and then sealing the packaging back up. …
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: Sorry, Shanghart Supermarket is permanently closed.
The President Is Unraveling
The country is witnessing the steady, uninterrupted intellectual and psychological decomposition of Donald Trump.
IN CASE THERE WAS ANY DOUBT, the past dozen days have proved we’re at the point in his presidency where Donald Trump has become his own caricature, a figure impossible to parody, a man whose words and actions are indistinguishable from an Alec Baldwin skit on Saturday Night Live.
President Trump’s pièce de résistance came during a late April coronavirus task-force briefing, when he floated using “just very powerful light” inside the body as a potential treatment for COVID-19 and then, for good measure, contemplated injecting disinfectant as a way to combat the effects of the virus “because you see it gets in the lungs and does a tremendous number on them, so it’d be interesting to check that.”
But the burlesque show just keeps rolling on.
Take this past weekend, when former President George W. Bush delivered a three-minute video as part of The Call to Unite, a 24-hour live-stream benefiting COVID-19 relief.
Bush joined other past presidents, spiritual and community leaders, front-line workers, artists, musicians, psychologists, and Academy Award winning actors. They offered advice, stories, and meditations, poetry, prayers, and performances. The purpose of The Call to Unite (which I played a very minor role in helping organize) was to offer practical ways to support others, to provide hope, encouragement, empathy, and unity.
In his video, which went viral, Bush—in whose White House I worked—never mentioned Trump. Instead, he expressed gratitude to health-care workers, encouraged Americans to abide by social-distancing rules, and reminded his fellow Americans that we have faced trying times before.
“I have no doubt, none at all, that this spirit of service and sacrifice is alive and well in America,” Bush said. He emphasized that “empathy and simple kindness are essential, powerful tools of national recovery.” And America’s 43rd president asked us to “remember how small our differences are in the face of this shared threat.” …
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: George W. Bush made a moving, eloquent plea for empathy and national unity, which enraged Donald Trump enough that he felt the need to go on the attack.
RELATED: Under Trump, America has gone a bit late Weimar. We know how that ended.
Life and death are on the line and the president and his minions appear reluctant to grasp the reality.
Welcome to the US in the age of coronavirus. Faces and fists pounded the windows of Ohio’s capitol like a zombie apocalypse. In Michigan, an armed crowd stormed the state house. Then, history repeated itself.
Taking a page from his Charlottesville playbook, Donald Trump called the protesters “good people” and urged Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan, to “make a deal” over the shutdown. The president tweeted that Whitmer should “give a little, and put out the fire”. In other words, negotiate over the barrel of a gun. After all, his base was “angry”.
One state over, in Illinois, an anti-shutdown protester waived a poster aimed at the state’s Jewish governor, JB Pritzker: “Arbeit macht frei, JB.” The words that hung over the gates of Auschwitz.
A Trump administration insider conveyed that it was all a “bit” reminiscent of the “late” Weimar Republic. We know how that ended.
Society’s guardrails crashed, the volk demanded its pound of flesh and democracy made the frighteningly unimaginable possible. Hell became part of the here and now. …
To exist at this moment is to navigate (or try to fend off) the flood of grief that threatens to submerge even our rare, buoyant moments. We mourn the death of friends and relatives, the absence of human contact and the everyday pleasures we once took for granted. We can’t stop thinking about the tens of thousands of families facing hunger, bankruptcy and homelessness even as they struggle to endure the loss of someone they dearly loved.
What’s striking, if not surprising, is that this deluge of sorrow has run dry at the door to the Oval Office.
One’s heart goes out to the reporters who have sifted through the Donald Trump’s press briefings on the current pandemic – hour after hour of bombast, self-promotion, vitriol, lies and recklessly unscientific speculation – for any evidence of sympathy for those who are in pain. It’s hardly a shock to learn that our president’s expressions of care and compassion have occupied a total of less than five minutes, out of all that time.
After all, a man who mocked a disabled journalist and boasted about grabbing women wasn’t elected for the depths of his kindness and the purity of his moral conscience. And it seems unrealistically optimistic to have hoped that the extremity of this crisis should have inspired, in our leader, a deep and essential change of heart. …
The Trumpist Right Just Cannot Let Go of the Russia Investigation
In a world with only one hoax—the hoax intended to slime Trump—all of the president’s problems have the same source.
It’s been a busy week for Michael Flynn, the disgraced former national security adviser who in February 2017 resigned from President Donald Trump’s White House after less than a month in his role. In December 2017, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States—a narrative thread that featured prominently in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian election interference. This week, however, Flynn’s lawyers kicked off a frenzy of speculation within the right-wing press that their client is about to be exonerated. They released FBI records documenting conversations within the bureau about how to handle Flynn’s case, which have led many Trump supporters to argue anew that Flynn’s—and Trump’s—woes have been fabricated by malicious agents of the “deep state.”
On Fox News, the pro-Trump host Maria Bartiromo argued that Flynn is set to be “completely exonerated.” The National Review’s editorial board insisted that Flynn has been “treated unjustly” by the FBI. And the president has joined in the fun, writing on Twitter, “What happened to General Michael Flynn, a war hero, should never be allowed to happen to a citizen of the United States again!” and suggesting in a press briefing that he might consider granting Flynn a pardon or even rehiring him.
That the internal FBI documents that have generated this hubbub don’t provide anything close to an exoneration of Flynn is immaterial. This is another instance of a familiar pattern for Trump and his supporters: searching for a shred of new material on the Russia investigation, then insisting that this latest crumb is part of a trail that will eventually, somehow, lead to the vindication of Trump and his associates. What Trump once called “complete and total exoneration” is not just his framing of the result of Mueller’s investigation. It is also a prediction, the anticipated conclusion of coming revelations as the investigations into the Russia investigators continue.
As such, the frenzy of excitement over some very unexciting documents isn’t all that strange in and of itself. The strange thing is that, a full year after the release of the Mueller report, Trump and the media ecosystem around him are still following that bread-crumb trail toward an ever-elusive climactic moment—even in the midst of a pandemic that is killing more than 1,000 Americans every day. Trump’s supporters like to complain that Democrats are “obsessed” with the Russia probe, but in fact it’s the Trumpist right that just can’t seem to give the investigation up. …
Deeply Cursed Los Angeles Places (You Know From Movies)
Los Angeles, the city that inspired such films as Chinatown and Pulp Fiction and fellates itself several times a year with glitzy awards galas, has long been a cinematic backdrop. After all, movies are made there (or were, until Vancouver offered better tax breaks). But the city is chock full of weird locations home to creepy-ass stories, such as …
4. The Cecil Hotel Housed Serial Killers, Plural
Located in Los Angeles’s Skid Row, the Cecil Hotel inspired Barton Fink, whatever season of American Horror Story it was that jumpstarted Lady Gaga’s acting career, and even had Blink-182 and U2 play there.
The real hotel is far eerier than Ryan Murphy’s menage-a-plots could ever manage to be, having housed serial killer Richard Ramirez during his murder spree in the 1980s. During the summer of 1985 while the rest of the country was enjoying a trip to the 1950s with Marty McFly, Ramirez, a snaggle-toothed Satan worshipper, spread a swath of terror across the city of Los Angeles. Ramirez, worse than a dozen Biff Tannens, broke into homes, raping, beating, and killing whomever happened to be home at the time, which put the police on his trail. During this time, he called the Cecil home and used it as a changing spot in between human hunts.
Skid Row, which had always been the spot in LA for the down-and-out crowd, had its status made permanent when the city, in a move for “containment” centralized all the shelters and needle drops in the area. Once crack hit the scene, Skid Row, with the Cecil Hotel in the heart of it, made a perfect stomping ground for a monster like Ramirez. It was the type of place where a crazy, dirty guy splattered with blood wouldn’t stand out that much. Ramirez would strip off behind the hotel, dump his bloody rags in the dumpster, and plod to his room naked, hopscotching his way around the junkies.
But the seedy Cecil wasn’t just home to one serial killer. In 1991, an Austrian named Jack Unterweger made it his home base as well. He’d gotten a life sentence in his home country for the murder of a prostitute in 1976, but after learning to read and write in prison, he became a cultural darling for his writing in the Austrian literary community. He was released as a model of rehabilitation, but it turns out that old murderous habits die hard, and the guy killed nine more prostitutes before U.S. authorities got him for good. (After he got sentenced here, he used the string from his prison pants to hang himself.)
You’d think being the home to two serial killers within less than a decade of each other would be enough for any place, but the Cecil made headlines again when it became the final resting place of a woman named Elisa Lam. Lam was a 21-year-old woman who was seen in security footage seemingly yelling and running from someone, until finally ending up in the hotel’s water tank. Guests bathed in and drank that water for over two weeks before her body was finally discovered. …
UNRELATED: China’s Propaganda Video Is So Weird It’s Frightening
President Trump has been doing everything in his power to place the blame of coronavirus and its subsequent effects on China, opting, for example, to refer to SARS-CoV-2 as “the Chinese virus.” On Friday, China looked to counter that narrative by releasing this:
No, that’s not a promotional video for an upcoming LEGO WWIII play-set. It’s a bizarre propaganda video (and we’ve seen our fair share) that uses LEGO stylings of a Terracotta Warrior and the Statue of Liberty arguing to escalate the most childish, yet dangerous battle of words in the history of the world.
The video is titled “Once Upon A Virus” as if to frame the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people around the world as some sort of nursery rhyme. And while the title could be taken facetiously, we can’t help but wonder if the Chinese Government is self-aware enough to be in on the joke. It’s no secret that Trump has greatly mismanaged the virus, as the United States leads the world in COVID-19 deaths, but it’s also well documented that China silenced the initial whistleblower. The video makes no mention of that fact but instead takes the time to create a LEGO rendering of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which leans so dramatically that we can’t help but feel it’s a random dig at Italy for some reason. …
UNRELATED: Lazy Messaging Plus Bad Stats Equals Lazy, Bad Policy
As the country’s daily death toll from the coronavirus hit a new high, the Senate is set to meet Monday despite Capitol Hill’s physician not having enough tests for all the senators. Meanwhile, states, left to their own devices, are facing mounting pressure to “reopen the economy,” and even governors who have handled things well up to this point are starting to slip. Surely they wouldn’t allow things to just go back to normal, not without some kind of evidence that things would be fine? Right?
Well, no. There are tons of cliched phrases out there about how anyone can cherry-pick statistics, but what’s going on is that there’s a ton of really lazy messaging, and it’s starting to influence policy. It’s coming from our government, and it’s out there in the media now too. It has been perpetuated hard enough that it’s actually impacting lives, and we need to talk about it.
I deliberately threw the phrase “reopen the economy” up there in quotes because it’s a phrase with zero substance to it. You can’t just unlock the door at your local Economy and yell, “COME ON IN! WE’RE BACK BAY-BEE!” COVID has rapidly shifted the economy and highlighted its cracks. Rich folks are sequestered away in their mansions, presenting some false veneer of empathy with the millions of people out of a job, and using their influence to tell politicians how to handle things. As many have pointed out, these people don’t want to go back to work themselves; they want you to put yourself in harm’s way for them, and for what? A haircut? Spoiler: Stylist or no stylist, you’re never gonna pull off bangs. What really sucks is that we’ve now indelibly tied together “opening the economy” with “opening America,” and that’s a potentially catastrophic pairing.
So while Georgia governor Brian Kemp is claiming to want to use data to make his decisions on allowing businesses to reopen, California governor Gavin Newsom is saying he’s using available data to keep businesses closed. Granted, these two states are different in a lot of ways, but how are two governors using the things we know about the spread of this coronavirus to come to opposite conclusions about what to do? …
Coronavirus: US to borrow record $3tn as spending soars
The US has said it wants to borrow a record $3tn (£2.4tn) in the second quarter, as coronavirus-related rescue packages blow up the budget.
The sum is more than five times the previous quarterly record, set at the height of the 2008 financial crisis.
In all of 2019, the country borrowed $1.28tn. The US has approved about $3tn in virus-related relief, including health funding and direct payouts.
Total US government debt is now near $25tn.
‘We used to donate to this food bank, now we rely on it’
The latest spending packages are estimated to be worth about 14% of the country’s economy. The government has also extended the annual 15 April deadline for tax payments, adding to the cash crunch.
The new borrowing estimate is more than $3tn above the government’s previous estimate, a sign of the impact of the new programmes.
Discussions are under way over further assistance, though some Republicans have expressed concerns about the impact of more spending on the country’s skyrocketing national debt. …
UNRELATED: Trump administration pushing to rip global supply chains from China: officials
The Trump administration is “turbocharging” an initiative to remove global industrial supply chains from China as it weighs new tariffs to punish Beijing for its handling of the coronavirus outbreak, according to officials familiar with U.S. planning.
President Donald Trump, who has stepped up recent attacks on China ahead of the Nov. 3 U.S. presidential election, has long pledged to bring manufacturing back from overseas.
Now, economic destruction and the U.S. coronavirus death toll are driving a government-wide push to move U.S. production and supply chain dependency away from China, even if it goes to other more friendly nations instead, current and former senior U.S. administration officials said.
“We’ve been working on (reducing the reliance of our supply chains in China) over the last few years but we are now turbo-charging that initiative,” Keith Krach, undersecretary for Economic Growth, Energy and the Environment at the State Department told Reuters.
“I think it is essential to understand where the critical areas are and where critical bottlenecks exist,” Krach said, adding that the matter was key to U.S. security and one the government could announce new action on soon. …
‘Focus on right now’: how to mentally prepare for more Covid-19 uncertainty
There will be no quick return to our lives after the pandemic. Some realistic pessimism might help us curb disappointment.
Volunteer delivery cyclist Moné Makkawi shops for groceries to give to a neighbor in need on 16 April 2020 in New York City.
Time is humanity’s ultimate organizing principle, and many, myself included, have longed for a neat finale during this pandemic – a day we can patiently wait for, when this will all be over.
At first, political authorities in many countries spoke of societal lockdown in terms of weeks – a challenge, yes, but a manageable one; there are even those who treated it as a rather novel adventure. More recently, as understanding of the pandemic develops, that metric is shifting, discouragingly, to months – even years.
Last week, Chris Whitty, the UK chief medical adviser, said that social distancing would have to continue at least all year, while Canadians have been told to expect limits on travel and gatherings for likely around a year and a half. Donald Trump recently admitted that America’s pandemic guidelines – which he initially claimed would be null by Easter – would likely remain into summer and, enigmatically, “beyond that”. Some regions are considering how to gradually reopen their economies, yet the experiences of Asian countries where infections surged as restrictions eased serve as cautionary tales. Dozens of experts have attested there will be no quick return to our previous lives.
Now that we are no longer at the beginning of this pandemic but in the seemingly interminable middle, the more relevant question to ask is not “when will this end?” but “how can we cope with this dragging on?” …
Facebook uses 1.5bn Reddit posts to create chatbot
Facebook has launched a new chatbot to rival Google’s own.
Facebook has launched a new chatbot that it claims is able to demonstrate empathy, knowledge and personality.
“Blender” was trained using available public domain conversations which included 1.5 billion examples of human exchanges.
The social media giant said 49% of people preferred interactions with the chatbot, compared with another human.
But experts say training the artificial intelligence (AI) using a platform such as Reddit has its drawbacks.
Numerous issues arose during longer conversations. Blender would sometimes respond with offensive language, and at other times it would make up facts altogether. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
THANKS to SHOWTIME and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
A 101-year-old woman survives coronavirus, Italy starts to come out of quarantine, and a Japanese aquarium urges people to videochat with its eels.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
7.34M subscribers
Though America’s coronavirus deaths keep climbing past his predictions of the total death toll, Trump keeps moving the goalposts and redefining what success would look like.
At Trump’s Town Hall at the Lincoln Memorial, Honest Abe cannot sit idly by as Trump talks about the poor treatment he’s received as President.
THANKS to CBS All Access and Tooning Out The News for making this program available on YouTube.
Ignoring his administration’s own models showing the coronavirus crisis worsening in June, President Trump used his Lincoln Memorial Town Hall to encourage Americans to hit the beach and get back to work.
THANKS to CBS and A Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
Seth takes a closer look at President Trump participating in an unhinged town hall on Fox News as a damning new report details how he’s wasted time he could have been using to develop a strategy for safely reopening the economy.
THANKS to NBC and Late Night with Seth Meyers for making this program available on YouTube.
Mother Earth herself is giving out awards on the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day.
Created by Ze Frank in collaboration with PBS NATURE and KQED’s Deep Look.
THANKS to PBS and Nature for making this program available on YouTube.
まだ夕方にはだいぶ早い時間ですが、まると一緒に寝たくて押しかけちゃったはな。念願かなって、濃密なお昼寝時間。Maru & Hana’s nap time!
GOOGLE’S TRANSLATION: It’s still early in the evening, but when I was there, I wanted to sleep together and rushed. It was a long-cherished desire, and a dense nap time.
FINALLY . . .
The Life and Fiery Death of the World’s Biggest Treehouse
ts dedicated, sagelike maker isn’t at all upset.
Horace Burgess’s treehouse in Crossville, Tennessee, in 2015.
FOR THE THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE AROUND the world who’d once visited and admired the world’s largest treehouse in Crossville, Tennessee, the news came as an awful shock. In October 2019, a blaze consumed the singular construction. But for Horace Burgess, the treehouse’s architect, this is just how things go. He was well acquainted with how it feels to lose your own, self-built treehouse in an angry conflagration. Heck, he’d already burned one down himself.
“It was just evil,” says Burgess of the older treehouse he built and then razed back in the 1980s. There was “no good about it.” The house had ended up serving as Burgess’s hideaway for doing drugs, which he committed to quitting after the deaths of some friends. Trouble was, the house itself had become part of the habit. A voice came to Burgess, saying that he had to burn the house down if he was going to rebuild his life. And it wasn’t just any voice.
People typically think “you’re a little bit crazy when you say that God spoke to you,” Burgess admits, “but really he’s the one that tells us to put our pants on in the morning.” Looking back, Burgess says that burning that first treehouse down—on God’s advice—was “probably the most sane moment in my life.”
The fire that claimed the singular construction.
Having freed himself from the demons trapped in that treehouse, Burgess, a pastor who grew up in Crossville, set about dedicating his life to religion and his community. Ironically, those commitments quickly brought him right back to building treehouses. After all, he knew he could do it well, and he understood that if he could share it with others it could serve as a positive force in the community rather than as a destructive force in his private life. “It was just something I enjoyed doing,” he says, seemingly uninterested in understanding why. As an aside, he mentions casually that he’d actually completed five or six treehouses in total by that point in time—even if people only ever seem to talk about the one that was about to come. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
Good times!
Need something more barely uninteresting at all to do?
Right now there’s one bird sitting on what appears to be a bunch of eggs. The other bird seems to be away, probably looking for something tasty to kill.
Ed. Yes, that’s a cut-and-paste of another day.