War is hell. But this is just stupid.
Welcome to DUMBKIRK. pic.twitter.com/wOlMC6559k
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) May 15, 2020
• • • google suggested • • •
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
How One Outsider Artist Reclaimed Her Drab Indoor World
Suddenly confined in a small space, Afia Zecharia painted every wall.
Inside the vibrant home of late outsider artist Afia Zecharia. Embiggenable.
IN A SMALL HOUSING PROJECT apartment within the town of Shlomi, Israel, an 80-year-old woman stood and painted Yemenite embroidery patterns on the walls and ceiling. Neighbors claim they heard the woman talking—to herself or to her paintings. After her death, the project apartment and its concealed treasure began attracting hundreds of visitors every year.
The woman, Afia Zecharia, passed away in 2002. She was born in the early 20th century in Southern Yemen. Her parents married her off when she was 10 to prevent her from being kidnapped and married outside the faith, and during her youth she used to paint on the walls of affluent houses. In 1950, she immigrated to Israel with her jeweler husband. Along with their six children, they settled in a house in the ruins of the Palestinian village al-Bassa. Zecharia wanted to paint on the walls of their house, but her husband forbade it.
Shlomi was founded in 1950 along with an immigrant absorption camp on the remains of the Palestinian village. The town officials decided to expand and build an industrial park on the camp grounds. In 1980, Zecharia, a widow, received an official document and was asked to sign it. She was illiterate and signed with her fingerprint. Only after signing did she realize she had been relocated into a housing project. She suddenly found herself confined by white walls. She bought pigments and began to paint again, at night, covering the walls with Yemenite embroidery motifs, which traditionally signify social and financial status, as well as the expression of emotion and fantasy.
Every inch of the formerly white walls has been painted with Yemenite patterns. Embiggenable.
Dr. Amit Alon, a scholar of Jewish thought, remembers well the day he visited Zecharia with some of her relatives, back in the 1990s. “Shlomi is a desert-like town,” he says, “but this was a particularly yellow day.” The relatives, including his wife, told him about Zecharia. “My cultural conditioning kicked in: I imagined an elderly woman weaving Yemenite baskets.” Then Alon walked in and, seeing the floor-to-ceiling patterns in vivid colors, felt a strong sense of vertigo. “I couldn’t tell up from down. It was a total shock.” Zecharia made Yemenite soup for the family. “We sat and ate soup inside a painting, the small kitchen was entirely covered with patterns,” Alon remembers. …
‘It eats him alive inside’: Trump’s latest attack shows endless obsession with Obama
The president seems more interested in blaming his predecessor than tackling the coronavirus – so what’s driving Trump’s fixation?
Donald Trump with Barack Obama at Trump’s inauguration ceremony at the Capitol in Washington, USA on January 20, 2017.
President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump once sat together in the Oval Office. “I was immediately struck by Trump’s body language,” wrote journalist Jon Karl in his memoir Front Row at The Trump Show. “I was seeing a side of him I had never seen. He seemed, believe it or not, humbled.”
It was November 2016 and, just for once, Trump was not in charge of the room, Karl recalls. Obama was still president, directing the action and setting the tone. His successor “seemed a little dazed” and “a little freaked out”. What the two men discussed in their meeting that day, only they know.
But what became clear in the next three and a half years is that Obama remains something of an obsession for Trump; the subject of a political and personal inferiority complex.
Observers point to a mix of anti-intellectualism, racism, vengeance and primitive envy over everything from Obama’s Nobel peace prize to the scale of his inauguration crowd and social media following.
Ben Rhodes, a former Obama national security aide, tweeted this week: “Trump’s fact-free fixation on Obama dating back to birtherism is so absurd and stupid that it would be comic if it wasn’t so tragic.” …
UNRELATED: ‘The past six weeks have been unlike anything I’ve known’: a GP on how the pandemic has changed his work
Following his previous in-depth account of the early days of the outbreak, Edinburgh GP Gavin Francis reports on how he and his practice have dealt with the escalating crisis since lockdown.
By the time the schools closed in late March, my GP consulting room in Edinburgh had been emptied of clutter, its surfaces rendered easy to wipe down with disinfectant. It felt as if the decks had been cleared. There are almost 4,000 patients at my practice on the south side of the city, close to the university. As the lockdown began, my colleagues and I were spending our time phoning two or three hundred of the frailest, as well as the 30 or so who had been advised by the government to “shield” from the virus until July at least. On the phone we made sure they understood the advice to stay in and that they had arranged food deliveries for the coming weeks. We checked they had a “key information summary” – an electronic précis of their principal medical issues – available for paramedics, A&E and hospital staff to access should they become unwell.
In the first few weeks of the year, the pandemic had been a dreaded but distant anxiety. I had little sense of how severely it would hit us, and how much planning would be enough. The speed of its arrival was startling, and the past six or seven weeks have been unlike anything I’ve known in general practice.
Everything about the way we work has been transformed. The number of face-to-face encounters with patients has dropped by 90%. Home visiting is both more time-consuming (because of the requirement for personal protective equipment, or PPE), and perfunctory (to cut contact time). Dread has given way to fatigue, but not to complacency. I’m worried that too few people are being tested, that the test itself is often inaccurate and that our PPE provision is inadequate. The health gap between rich and poor, already wide from a decade of cuts to councils and benefits, is being stretched wider.
Now that restrictive lockdown measures are starting to be eased, cases will surely climb. My GP colleagues and I have all seen some patients with Covid-19, but because of the effectiveness of the lockdown, fewer than forecast in those dark days of March. Two of our patients have died of it – about the same proportion, 1 in 2,000, as have so far died of the virus nationwide. …
PREPARE TO SPEND A WHILE; it’s The Long Read.
Invisible deaths: from nursing homes to prisons, the corona toll is out of sight – and out of mind?
There are few images of the 86,000 deaths and many of the Covid-19 hotspots – prisons, nursing homes, meat packing plants – are off limits. What is the impact of this hidden toll?
A cremation box sits in a room at a funeral home in Queens, New York, on 29 April.
John Delano was six years old when the contagion struck his neighborhood in New Haven, Connecticut. There was a morgue just down the road. Coffins began spilling on to the sidewalk. It made the perfect stage for an exciting new game.
“We thought, ‘Boy, this is great,’” he recalled. “‘It’s like climbing the pyramids.’ Then one day, I slipped and broke my nose on one of the coffins. My mother was very upset. She said, didn’t I realize there were people in those boxes who had died?”
Delano’s account, recorded in Catharine Arnold’s history of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, encapsulates a crucial aspect of that disaster: the public nature of death. Coffins became a feature of daily life, stacked on sidewalks and in people’s front rooms. Roads were jammed dawn to dusk with horse-drawn hearses, heading for the cemeteries.
A century on, death has disappeared from the streets of America. The 2020 pandemic is memorable not for coffins piled high but for data modeling and statistics. For most Americans, the figure of 85,901 deaths in the US is as visceral as it gets.
A virus that is in itself invisible has spawned a nationwide response in which the most extreme manifestation of the disease, loss of life, is invisible too. You can’t play coffin pyramids when funerals have been transferred to that great resting place in the cyber-sky: Zoom. …
Our Brains Can’t Handle This Without A Villain
Somewhere between an armed militia threatening to shoot police officers if they tried forcing a barbershop to close, the murder of a dollar store security guard who asked a customer to wear a mask, and the conspiracy theorists rallying to tell us that this is all fake, I began to suspect that not everyone is handling quarantine super well.
As of writing, that Michigan barbershop is open and serving customers who are declaring haircuts essential despite a statewide stay-at-home order, although its owner has so far only been given misdemeanor tickets because no one, understandably, wants to give the closure order that risks them having to announce “An officer was murdered in the line of duty by some selfish dipshit who couldn’t figure out how to use a pair of scissors and a mirror.” One of the militiamen, who’s bravely protecting his sovereign right to risk a stranger dying alone and in agony so that he won’t have to live in minor discomfort for a few months, commented, “Hopefully the police decide that fucking with pissed off armed men is a bad idea.”
Putting aside the fact that the kind of people who casually threaten murder always have the ugliest hairstyles anyway, who are they pissed off at? The universe? No one is thrilled at our current circumstances, and political leaders are certainly not above reproach given that the Insane Clown Posse has offered a more robust response than the White House, but threatening to shoot your way out of a viral outbreak is like threatening to shoot someone who offers you a bottle of sunscreen at the beach because your arms are turning red.
The history of anti-government attitudes in America needs about 500,000 more words to go over than we have space for, but equating “We’re technically ordering you to stay at home so people don’t die, but ultimately we’re just working on the honor system here because some of you are fucking nuts” with Orwellian tyranny is the culmination of treating every issue as having two equally viable and diametrically opposed viewpoints. At a time when the deletion of a horny tweet promoting a video game can be decried as “cultural Marxism,” there has to be a pro-virus side. If there are heroes tolerating the death of loved ones, financial ruin or, most horrifying of all, hair that looks a little shaggy, some villain, however improbably, has to be benefitting from, and encouraging more of, all this human misery. …
UNRELATED: Weird Places Your Old Crap Ended Up
If there’s one thing humans are good at, it’s generating trash. In the United States alone, humans throw away an estimated 267.8 million tons of stuff every single year. That works out to a whopping four and a half pounds of trash per person, per day. While we’re doing a bang-up job of chucking stuff in the can, we probably don’t think too long or hard about what happens to all that junk we recycle or throw away. Some of it, obviously, ends up in the ground. But some of our trash goes on to an awesomely bizarre post-consumer afterlife. Such as …
5. Your Old Cell Phone Could End Up Around the Neck of an Olympic Medalist
Due to … reasons … we’re currently planning to hold the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in July 2021. And while we agree that postponing the games was absolutely the right decision, we do have lots of questions. Will it be safe? Will it still be the 2020 Olympics if it’s 2021? Why are all the winning athletes wearing discarded cell phones around their necks instead of traditional medals? Wait — what?
That’s right. If you lived in Japan (or just discarded a cell phone there) in 2019, there’s an excellent chance it was melted down to make medals for the 2020 2021 next Olympics. To make the games more sustainable, some 78,985 tons of discarded electronic devices were collected, classified, dismantled, and melted down to create the 5,000 gold, silver, and bronze awards that will (eventually) adorn the necks of Olympians. And it wasn’t just phones that got in on the action. The program also dismantled digital cameras, handheld games, and laptops to reach their materials target, which was a cool 71 pounds of gold, 7,700 pounds of silver, and 4,850 pounds of bronze. And no, we didn’t leave off zeros. Olympic gold medals are actually made from silver and plated with gold. (We’d just use chocolate centers, but what do we know?)
Now before you get all depressed that you didn’t throw away a cell phone in Japan, chin up! Even though the athletes won’t be wearing your discarded electronics around their necks, there’s a chance your trash could end up under their feet. For the first time, the Tokyo Olympics will have medal podiums made entirely of plastic. Program organizers amassed 45 tons of plastic, both from recycled items and plastic ocean waste, and used it to create the 100 podiums needed for the games. Here’s hoping they don’t end up right back in the trash at the end of the games. …
Naomi Klein: How big tech plans to profit from the pandemic
As the coronavirus continues to kill thousands each day, tech companies are seizing the opportunity to extend their reach and power.
Eric Schmidt, Google’s former executive chair, left, with the New York governor Andrew Cuomo.
For a few fleeting moments during the New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s daily coronavirus briefing on Wednesday 6 May, the sombre grimace that has filled our screens for weeks was briefly replaced by something resembling a smile.
“We are ready, we’re all-in,” the governor gushed. “We are New Yorkers, so we’re aggressive about it, we’re ambitious about it … We realise that change is not only imminent, but it can actually be a friend if done the right way.”
The inspiration for these uncharacteristically good vibes was a video visit from the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who joined the governor’s briefing to announce that he will be heading up a panel to reimagine New York state’s post-Covid reality, with an emphasis on permanently integrating technology into every aspect of civic life.
“The first priorities of what we’re trying to do,” Schmidt said, “are focused on telehealth, remote learning, and broadband … We need to look for solutions that can be presented now, and accelerated, and use technology to make things better.” Lest there be any doubt that the former Google chair’s goals were purely benevolent, his video background featured a framed pair of golden angel wings.
Just one day earlier, Cuomo had announced a similar partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop “a smarter education system”. Calling Gates a “visionary”, Cuomo said the pandemic has created “a moment in history when we can actually incorporate and advance [Gates’s] ideas … all these buildings, all these physical classrooms – why, with all the technology you have?” he asked, apparently rhetorically. …
PREPARE TO SPEND A WHILE; it’s The Long Read.
Don’t Fear the Robot
I invented Roomba and assure you, robots won’t take over the world.
You probably know my robot. I’ve been inventing autonomous machines for over 30 years and one of them, Roomba from iRobot, is quite popular. During my career, I’ve learned a lot about what makes robots valuable, and formed some strong opinions about what we can expect from them in the future. I can also tell you why, contrary to popular apocalyptic Hollywood images, robots won’t be taking over the world anytime soon. But that’s getting ahead of myself. Let me back up.
My love affair with robots began in the early 1980s when I joined the research staff at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. Physics was my college major but after a short time at the lab the potential of the developing technology seduced me. I became a roboticist.
Such an exhilarating place to work! A host of brilliant people were researching deep problems and fascinating algorithms. Amazingly clever mechanisms were being developed, and it was all converging in clever and capable mobile robots. The future seemed obvious. So, I made a bold prediction and told all my friends, “In three to five years, robots will be everywhere doing all sorts of jobs.”
But I was wrong.
Again and again in those early years, news stories teased: “Big Company X has demonstrated a prototype of Consumer Robot Y. X says Y will be available for sale next year.” But somehow next year didn’t arrive. Through the 1980s and 1990s, robots never managed to find their way out of the laboratory. This was distressing to a committed robot enthusiast. Why hadn’t all the journal papers, clever prototypes, and breathless news stories culminated in a robot I could buy in a store?
Let me answer with the story of the first consumer robot that did achieve marketplace stardom. …
Quarantining With a Ghost? It’s Scary
For those who believe they’re locked down with spectral roommates, the pandemic has been less isolating than they bargained for.
The staircase in Will Cowan’s home gets noisy at night.
It started with the front door.
Adrian Gomez lives with his partner in Los Angeles, where their first few days of sheltering in place for the coronavirus pandemic proved uneventful. They worked remotely, baked, took a two-mile walk each morning and refinished their porcelain kitchen sink. But then, one night, the doorknob began to rattle “vigorously,” so loud he could hear it from across the apartment. Yet no one was there.
In mid-April, Mr. Gomez was in bed when a nearby window shade began shaking against the window frame so intensely — despite the fact that the window was closed, an adjacent window shade remained perfectly still, the cats were all accounted for, and no bug nor bird nor any other small creature had gotten stuck there — that Mr. Gomez thought it was an earthquake.
“I very seriously hid myself under the comforter, like you see in horror movies, because it really did freak me out,” he said.
Now, though neither he nor his partner noticed any unexplained activity at home before this, the couple can “distinctly” make out footsteps above their heads. No one lives above them. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Over 100 dead, no running water and the worst infection rate in the country, Navajo Nation’s crisis is out of control.
THANKS to SHOWTIME and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
War is hell. But this is just stupid. Welcome to DUMBKIRK.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
Oklahoma Farmers Union President Scott Blubaugh summarizes the state of America’s farming industry and how coronavirus is affecting the food supply.
FINALLY . . .
How the 1896 Bombay Plague Changed Mumbai Forever
It reshaped the city and inspired a revolutionary vaccine.
Workers clean a house in a neighborhood affected by the 1896 bubonic plague. Embiggenable.
ALONG THE WINDING LANES OF Bandra, a coastal suburb of Mumbai with a history of Catholicism, lime-washed crosses can be found near busy intersections. They are markers of a plague that ravaged the city more than a century ago, when this metropolis was still known as Bombay. Mumbai was shaped by a catastrophe it has largely forgotten.
At the turn of the 20th century, the bubonic plague killed 10 million people in India. It was carried on ships from Hong Kong and spread easily in the cramped and damp conditions of Bombay. Soon the port city became an epicenter of a pandemic. When the British colonial government tried to contain the disease, using ruthless tactics such as forced evictions and detention camps, some residents fled; the plague ultimately spread across the country. History was made when a Jewish doctor from Odessa, Dr. Waldemar Haffkine, arrived in Bombay and invented the world’s first vaccine against the plague.
The past seems to be repeating itself during the current pandemic. Eerily similar images have come out of Mumbai, showing an exodus of migrant workers at the start of a citywide lockdown. In response to COVID-19, the current government has invoked the 123-year-old law, which gave the British colonial government absolute control over Indians during the bubonic plague. To Alisha Sadikot, a public historian who specializes in Mumbai’s urban histories and culture, the parallels between 1896 and the present-day are striking. Atlas Obscura asked her about this forgotten past, and how it resonates with the history we are currently living through.
What was Bombay like in the 1890s?
The British wanted Bombay to become the first city of India, and the second-largest city of the British Empire, after London. In the mid-19th century, a period of early modernity and industrialization, Bombay was moving from trading port to world city, defined by its Gothic architecture and impressive monuments. A small, elite group of Englishmen and rich Indians were suddenly living in a place that was grand and awe-inspiring. But this was a facade. It was a showcase city, built on a tiny sliver of land facing the sea, to impress visitors. The vast majority of people who were migrating to Bombay, in response to industrialization, were the poor working class. They moved to the city to work in the mills and the docks, and their standard of living actually declined in those years. The city was not theirs. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
— Jef Hall (@jef4wi) May 15, 2020
Ed. On Twitter, I follow Jef and Jef follows me. We’ve never directly communicated directly, but I feel like I know this guy. I feel like I really like this guy. Back at the launch of the now-defunct social media network Google+, I put out a request for everyone named Jef to form a social circle. Several hundred Jef’s joined the circle, and it served no purpose. Mostly errant ramblings.
