• • • google suggested • • •
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
These Farmers Are Delivering Veggies From a Fleet of Adult Ice-Cream Trucks
During the pandemic, arugula is just as exciting as a Choco Taco.
One truck has become a fleet.
WHEN THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC ESCALATED in early March and Colorado’s governor ordered all restaurants to end on-site dining, Eric Skokan prepared to watch his life’s work slip away. Instead, he’s delivering carrots and arugula to his neighbors like a vegetable-slinging ice-cream-truck driver.
Skokan and his wife, Jill, own two restaurants and a farm in Boulder, Colorado. After closing their restaurants Black Cat and Bramble & Hare, the duo scrambled to come up with new ideas to keep the business afloat, including a roadside farmstand and meals for delivery or pickup.
But their biggest experiment also turned out to be the most successful. They cleaned up an old ice cream-esque box truck sitting on their property, installed some bells above the windshield, gave it a fresh coat of paint, and started selling vegetables around town. Mabel the farm truck, as she’s affectionately known around Boulder, is a runaway success.
Safety calls for masks and good judgment.
The Skokans came up with the idea after a particularly harrowing family shopping trip to the local grocery store in March. People were coughing all around them, the shelves were bare, and the aisles were crowded. So the Skokans brainstormed better ways to get food to people.
They had a steady supply of fresh produce, meat, and flour from their 425-acre organic farm, after all. And people were questioning their usual food sources and looking for local alternatives. …
Civil Rights Law Protects Gay and Transgender Workers, Supreme Court Rules
The court said the language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits sex discrimination, applies to discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Tiffany Munroe waving a Pride flag during a rally to call attention to violence against transgender people of color in Brooklyn on Sunday.
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a landmark civil rights law protects gay and transgender workers from workplace discrimination, handing the movement for L.G.B.T. equality a stunning victory.
The vote was 6 to 3, with Justice Neil M. Gorsuch writing the majority opinion. He was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
The case concerned Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars employment discrimination based on race, religion, national origin and sex. The question for the justices was whether that last prohibition — discrimination “because of sex”— applies to many millions of gay and transgender workers.
The decision, covering two cases, was the court’s first on L.G.B.T. rights since the retirement in 2018 of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinions in all four of the court’s major gay rights decisions.
Those decisions were grounded in constitutional law. The new cases, by contrast, concerned statutory interpretation. …
IN SOLIDARITY
The Path to Autocracy
A second Trump term will leave America’s political system and culture looking even more like Orbán’s Hungary.
OVER THE PAST DECADE, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz Party have transformed a democracy into something close to an autocracy. Shortly after his first reelection in 2014, Orbán gave a speech outlining his political project. Citing globalization’s economic and social failures, Orbán defended the course he had set by noting that those nations best prepared for the future were “not liberal, not liberal democracies, maybe not even democracies.” Drawing on that message, he defined a form of regime change. “The Hungarian,” he said, “is not a simple sum of individuals, but a community that needs to be organized, strengthened, and developed, and in this sense, the new state that we are building is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state.”
Hungary had to be anchored in a sense of nationalism, Orbán believed, and that nationalism required an autocratic hand, and that hand belonged only to him and Fidesz. The identity of the Hungarian nation and Viktor Orbán’s politics would be one and the same.
Orbán had spent years softening up his nation for this turn. In his first term, he systematically worked to remold Hungary’s democratic institutions. Parliamentary districts were redrawn to benefit Fidesz. Ethnic Hungarians outside the country were given the right to vote. The courts were methodically packed with right-wing judges. Fidesz’s cronies were enriched and, in turn, members of the business elite funded Orbán’s politics. The government constructed a massive propaganda machine, as independent media were bullied and bought out and right-wing media were transformed into quasi state-media. Whereas Fidesz once had a foreign policy formed in opposition to Russian dominance, Orbán embraced Vladimir Putin and courted Russian investment and the corruption that went along with it.
In the United States, the Republican Party has plowed similar ground for a decade. The grievances of the 2008 financial crisis were marshaled into the Tea Party, a right-wing populist movement that offered a traditional form of belonging to largely white and Christian voters. Republican officeholders have weaponized redistricting to protect themselves. Half of American states have put in place restrictive voting laws over the past decade. In post–Citizens United America, Republican policies have enriched an elite donor class that has spent billions on right-wing politics. Fox News serves as the linchpin of a sprawling right-wing propaganda machine, which includes television, radio, websites, and social-media platforms. The GOP has focused methodically on the courts—from obstructing Obama appointees to accelerating a transformation of the judiciary under Trump. And like Fidesz, the Republican Party has shifted from a foreign policy rooted in opposition to Russia to a cynical mix of courtship and denialism with respect to Russian interference in our democracy. …
RELATED: The gap between Trump’s world and reality is widening. It’s disturbing to watch.
In Greek mythology, Cerberus – angry and snarling – stood at the gates to hell. Trump and his inner circle are our Cerberus.
‘Is it possible that a president who has spent four years lying to the American people now assumes that everyone is lying? Or can he no longer distinguish between fact and fiction?’
Given busy most Americans are these days – home-schooling their kids, dealing with unemployment, waiting on line at food banks, protesting systemic racism, worrying about our economy and our educational system – few of us have the time, the energy or inclination to wonder what it’s like to be Donald Trump, to imagine how his mind works, what he really thinks and believes. But over the past few weeks, the increasingly strange, intentionally provocative, inappropriate and frankly delusional tweets and pronouncements issuing from the Oval Office have once again caused us to reflect on the president’s inner life. We’ve grown accustomed to his shortcomings, the regular failures of decency, common sense, and good taste. Yet the gap between what the president is saying – and the reality we observe around us – appears to be widening.
Does Trump truly believe that Martin Gugino, the 75-year-old protester shoved to the ground by Buffalo police officers, was an Antifa insurrectionist plotting to block the communications equipment of the officers who shoved him and left him bleeding from the ear? Does the courtly, somewhat hesitant Gugino really look to anyone like a dangerous thug? How could someone have watched that video and floated the idea that the attack on Gugino, still hospitalized with a brain injury, “could be a set-up?”
Is it possible that a president who has spent four years lying to the American people now assumes that everyone is lying? Or can he simply no longer distinguish between fact and fiction, between conspiracy theories spread by fringe “news” outlets such as the One America News Network and observable reality? What sane human being could imagine that America wanted to hear that George Floyd was smiling down from heaven at the day’s modestly improved job reports?
Lately, I’ve been thinking of the 8,000 word “long telegram” that George Kennan, then the American chargé d’affaires in Moscow and later an architect of the Cold War, sent to the State Department in 1946 – a document in which Kennan described the methods of an authoritarian dictatorship, “so strange to our form of thought”. Under Stalin, wrote Kennan, “The very disrespect of Russians for objective truth – indeed, their disbelief in its existence – leads them to view all stated facts as instruments for furtherance of one ulterior purpose or another.” …
The Central Park Birdwatcher Worked At Marvel (And Put Dr. Strange In A Thong)
A few weeks (and several thousand news cycles) ago, a man named Chris Cooper went viral after he asked a white woman to put a leash on her dog in Central Park and she reacted by telling the cops “there’s an African American man threatening [her] life.” Most news stories described Cooper as a “black birdwatcher” but, believe it or not, it’s possible for someone to be more than two things at once. In Cooper’s case, he’s also 3) gay, and 4) a former Marvel Comics editor and writer.
Why should you care? Because he’s not just any Marvel editor. He’s the one who put Doctor Strange in a thong and made Captain America flaunt his “national treasures”:
Yes, Cooper was behind a couple of issues of the Marvel Swimsuit Special series we’ve mentioned before and will no doubt bring up again, and you don’t need to be very observant to figure out which ones. At first, Marvel’s swimsuit specials were just a flimsy excuse to print pages and pages of mega-boobed ’90s superheroines in spine-destroying poses while a lot of the dudes were relegated to the backgrounds or to gags.
But then Cooper became the main editor for the last two specials, and you could immediately tell there was a more … egalitarian approach to them. Or, as his former colleague, Transmetropolitan writer Warren Ellis, described in his newsletter: “Anyone who beheld that book from a distance of twenty feet became, by genetic testing, 3% gayer.” …
I DID NOT CLICK THIS BAIT to see Dr. Strange in a thong. But you might’ve.
RELATED: 5 Doomsday Scenarios (Hollywood Totally Screwed Up)
Even now, people still love movies about the end of civilization as we know it. There’s something perversely thrilling about getting to witness the world fall apart in a forum other than cable news. But as much fun as some of these stories might be, they’re often riddled with inaccuracies. Yes, it turns out Armageddon may look very different than what we’ve seen in movies and TV shows such as how …
5. The Matrix — If The Machines Took Over, They’d Probably Just Let Us All Die
One apocalyptic movie scenario we may be already living through without realizing it: The Matrix. Are we all just stuck inside an elaborate simulation? Do human beings exist purely as living AA batteries to power our robot overlords? If we manage to somehow break free of this virtual reality prison can we, um, skip the Fraggle Rock-themed raves?
In reality, The Matrix would probably never happen. For one thing, if people can escape the Matrix via telephone, wouldn’t the robots set the simulation in, like, the 1700s or something? But there’s a more science-y flaw too; it makes zero sense for the robots to use human beings as a power source, which is probably why no one jumpstarts their stalled cars using loved ones.
When Morpehus fills Neo in on, well, what happened in The Animatrix, he claims that with humans, the machines found “all the energy they would ever need.” Humans are now grown like slimy naked Christmas trees. But that sure looks like a lot of work.
While the brain would produce energy, it would still take way more energy for the machines to keep everybody alive in Gigertown, U.S.A. than they would be able to extract. And even if we forgive how much effort would be required to house all of those people, feed them, and run an elaborate computer game 24/7 so they think it’s still the ’90s, the amount of energy you can get from a human brain isn’t all that much. It would take three whole days just to “charge an iPhone.” The machines would be better off letting us all die and just building their own nuclear plant. Which, admittedly, would have made for a worse movie with far-less black leather and kung-fu. …
Why a small town in Washington is printing its own currency during the pandemic
In a bid to lessen the blow of COVID-19, the town of Tenino has started issuing its own wooden dollars that can only be spent at local businesses. Will it work?
Wayne Fournier was sitting in a town meeting when he had his big idea.
As the mayor of Tenino, Washington (population: 1,884), he’d watched the pandemic rake local businesses. Residents couldn’t afford groceries. Long lines snaked outside the local food bank. For more than a month, the downtown area looked almost abandoned.
To bring back the economy, Fournier needed to act. “We were talking about grants for business, microloans, trying to team up with a bunch of different banks,” he tells The Hustle. “The big concern was, ‘How do we directly help families and individuals?’”
And then it hit him: “Why not start our own currency?”
The plan came together fast. Fournier decided that Tenino would set aside $10k to give out to low-income residents hurt by the pandemic. But instead of using federal dollars, he’d print the money on thin sheets of wood designed exclusively for use in Tenino. His mint? A 130-year-old newspaper printer from a local museum.
Fournier’s central idea is pulled straight from Tenino’s own history. During the Great Depression, the city printed sets of wooden dollars using that exact same 1890 newspaper printer. Within a year, the wooden currency had helped bring the economy back from the dead. …
DEGREE OF OPPORTUNITY: When in doubt, print your own money.
Ed. Hmmm… I have a printer that can handle a big job. I’ve been printing double-sided menus by the thousands since we reopened the restaurant. I’m going to print some money, spendable only in my own hometown to help keep the economy afloat. I totally got this.
My streaming gem: why you should watch The Point
The latest in a series of writers highlighting underappreciated films available to stream is a recommendation for a trippy early-70s animation.
The Point: the whole thing feels infused by stoned mysticism, about everything and nothing, that’s deliriously of its time.
The glorious thing about streaming, at this point in its history, is the sense that eventually everything that was lost will be eventually found somewhere, on some platform, at some point, as long as the rights holders can be traced. That is basically the idea of this series, about streaming gems, right? It’s like we’re pointing out for you, dear reader, the pretty fish and brightly coloured bits of flotsam that are swirling by in the mighty, ever-swelling, almost menacingly vast river of online content that’s gushing by our feet, threatening to pull us in, drowning us in the oblivion of inexhaustible narrative noise.
Perhaps that overwhelmed feeling we have when facing this onslaught of content is what draws us to familiar tokens from childhood, shonky old stories and celluloid-scratched images that set the hippocampus tingling. Animated feature The Point from 1971, a trippy parable about a round-headed boy born into in a world where everyone else has a pointy noggin, is an instant stimulus to the semi-conscious nostalgia centres for Americans of my generation. Anyone born Stateside in the 1960s may dimly late 1950s will fondly remember this as an early evening bedtime TV treat.
Fittingly, given its spooky self-referentiality, the film’s own framing device posits a father reading a bedtime story to his son, who would initially rather watch TV on the chubby little set in his bedroom. I’m not entirely sure if The Point was on at bedtime, come to think of it, but that might explain why its first 30 minutes are so vivid in the memory, and the rest more gauzy, as if remembered through a haze of sleepiness. Or that might just because the best bits are in first 30 minutes.
Much like Yellow Submarine three years prior, which takes up a contiguous portion of my primordial memory bank, The Point evolved out of a musical project, in this case a concept album of the same name written, narrated and performed by Harry Nilsson. These days, Nilsson is probably best known for his cover of the power ballad Without You, which was itself later covered by Mariah Carey, as well as his rendition of Everybody’s Talkin’, a tune featured in Midnight Cowboy, oddly both of them songs he didn’t write himself.
But Nilsson was a prolific songwriter as well as a melodious tenor, and a major figure in the hipster-ocracy in Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon neighbourhood in the late 1960s/early 70s where he palled around with the Beatles and the Monkees, Frank Zappa and Timothy Leary, among many others. Reportedly, like so many goofy ideas that ended up getting marketed at children in those days, The Point was inspired by an acid trip in the middle of the night. …
THE POINT is available to stream on Amazon Prime in the US and UK.
POINT OF INFORMATION: Pairs well with pot.
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Defund the Police is a movement that’s gaining momentum in the aftermath of the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. A number of city leaders have embraced it, including legislators in Seattle, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles — although they concede they aren’t quite sure how to make it work. Vitale says the way to start is to figure out what jobs have been given to cops that would be better served by people without guns.
THANKS to SHOWTIME and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
John Oliver takes a look at facial recognition technology, how it’s used by private companies and law enforcement, and why it can be dangerous.
THANKS to HBO and Last Week Tonight for making this program available on YouTube.
Hasan explores how universities became corporatized over the past few decades and if the rising costs of college are still worth it in a post-pandemic world.
THANKS to NETFLIX and Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj for making this program available on YouTube.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Here’s me commentary on magic being not so magical at times ay. What tricks have legends mastered in ya lives? Cordially, Ozzy Man.
FINALLY . . .
Inside Ethiopia’s Endangered Wild-Coffee Forests
The demise of Arabica’s birthplace would be a catastrophe for the industry.
An Ethiopian collector picks coffee from a wild Arabica tree in the Mankira Forest, Kafa.
WALKING INTO THE MONTANE CLOUD forests with a small group of coffee collectors, ducking under mossy, low-hanging branches, ropey lianas, and slender wild coffee trees broken by baboons trying to reach their sweet fruit, is like returning to a time when rivers ran unimpeded and great forests ruled the land. Hazy sunlight pierces the dense canopy. Black-and-white colobus monkeys sit quietly observing from above, heavy silvery-cheeked hornbills lift off from treetops with the deep whooshing of wingbeats, and electric-green mambas slither unseen. The steady drip of water from the morning rain plops down on coffee trees that are merely one part of the rich, biodiverse understory.
These coffee forests, in Ethiopia’s Kafa region, some 300 miles southwest of Addis Ababa, are the heart of coffee’s birthplace, and one of the few places where it still exists in the wild. Growing spontaneously under the canopy of trees, forest coffee is neither cultivated nor maintained, and a complex system of ancestral entitlements regulates who can gather the coffee berries when they ripen in autumn.
While these fruits look similar to their cultivated cousins, the trees themselves appear different. Ferns, colorful epiphytic orchids, and leafy climbers wrap around the tall, slender trees that reach up towards the available light. Bearded festoons of silvery-green moss hang from their slender branches. Leaves are sparse, and coffee fruits few. With most of their energy going into simply surviving, they grow slow and produce just enough for the species to continue.
Once the collectors arrive at the part of the forest whose coffee they can gather, they reach up and double over nimble branches, spinning the berries between thumb and fingers to separate them from the short stem and dropping them into buckets that hang around their necks. They take perfect, deep-red coffee fruits, but also unripe green and yellow ones and the overripe purple ones, which might be claimed by baboons, birds, or rainstorms if left for later.
I first journeyed into these isolated forests when writing a book: Where the Wild Coffee Grows. I came to see coffee in its original home, to see wild Arabica trees which, I learned, are at risk of disappearing entirely within 60 years. That would be devastating to the communities that live in and around Ethiopia’s coffee forests. It also sends fear into the coffee-soaked hearts of aficionados, breeders, and farmers around the globe. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
Listen:
Sunday is the President's birthday, and I was wondering if you'd chip in on a gift for him.
The gift is the hashtag #TrumpWearsAdultDiapers.
I can't tell you what it would to Me and him to have that trend on his special day.
Plus it's true. Trump wears adult diapers.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) June 14, 2020
Ed. I hope this trends in Trump’s favorite shit pit Twitter. How about we all re-tweet this and ask all those linked to us to do the same.
