Nearly everyone who accuses others of having a radical leftist agenda belongs to a religion founded by a man with a radical leftist agenda.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) January 22, 2021
• • • an aural noise • • •
word salad: The producer of Tetarise is Eugenii Dolgikh from Kursk, Russia. He has been composing electronic music in trance, progressive, chillout, psybient since 2003. Tetarise project has become well-loved among fans of psychedelic music. In 2013 it took part in A State of Mind, a popular trance music radio show.
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
Welcome to the Venn Diagram of Cartoon Characters, Geometric Patterns, and Crunchy Rice
Baker Varta Melon treats tahdig as a blank canvas.
To make the dragon, the baker-artist stenciled the shape out of a tortilla. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
WHAT DO STAR WARS, THE Last Airbender, and Super Mario have in common? According to Varta Melon, they all belong on tahdig.
Melon is a Chicago-based baker and blogger. But what started as a food blog to introduce followers to Persian cuisine has transformed into an Instagram account that documents just how innovation and artistic tahdig—a traditional Iranian dish made of slightly burnt rice—can be.
“At the end of the day, it’s a fried carb, and fried carbs will always do well,” says Melon. “You take any sort of comfort food and you fry it, it’s going to be good.”
One of Melon’s beautiful tahdigs.
Born and raised in Virginia to Persian parents, Melon grew up in a household that revered Persian delicacies such as barbari, an lranian flatbread; gheymeh, an Iranian stew filled with cubed meat and veggies; and ghormeh sabzi, an herb and beef stew. Though tahdig was also omnipresent in her home, she was surprised at how quickly the dish gained popularity in Western culture. …
The bleak and confusing history of the Peterbilt Trashgoblin 1200, the world’s only carnivorous garbage truck.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 22, 2021
RELATED: The Secrets of the White House Reflect Its History of Constancy and Change
A sturdy desk, an empty pool, and—maybe—secret passages.
The sun rises behind the White House in 2005. Embiggenable. Explore at home. Oddly, Google Earth didn’t suggest the residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Northwest in it’s results. However, if one types 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest, you may be taken to a places called The White Whouse, a palace in Washington, DC. You’re welcome for having me clear that up for you.
FOR MORE THAN TWO CENTURIES, the White House has stood as a symbol of democracy and resilience in the face of change—a symbolism that carries particular poignance following the turmoil of the 2020 election and its aftermath. The stories embedded in its decor, artwork, hallways, and chambers capture colorful moments and occasional upheavals in American history. Known as the “Executive Mansion” or “President’s House” during its first century, the building has been burned, rebuilt, shored up (after a tinkling chandelier warned of some structural instability), renovated, and expanded into the complex we know today.
John Adams was the first resident of the house in 1800 (George Washington lived in Philadelphia most of his presidency, while staying heavily involved in the design and construction of the new federal home). Thomas Jefferson had his office in what is now part of the State Dining Room. In 1886 Grover Cleveland was married in the Blue Room, the same space where James Monroe had tea and cake with Native American leaders from the Great Plains some six decades earlier.
View of the White House by William Strickland after it was attacked in 1814.
Under Chester A. Arthur, the White House was a trove of Louis Comfort Tiffany decor (a magnificent colored-glass screen that the famed designer made for the entrance hall is one of many relics lost to history). Then, in 1902, Theodore Roosevelt ordered a complete renovation by McKim, Mead & White that created the West Wing and compound as it mostly stands today. He also officially christened it the “White House.”
Throughout shifting eras and presidents, the essence of the White House and its mission have endured, even if the trappings change. President Biden has placed a portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt above the Oval Office mantel, and brought in other historic portraits and busts that signal his vision for the country. He has, of course, kept the storied Resolute Desk, hewn from the timbers of a 19th-century British exploration ship. Its unique history and other unusual aspects of the White House offer a peek at how the working residence embodies both consistency and change. …
Don’t Move On Just Yet
Could a truth and reconciliation commission help the country heal?
Until the day that a violent mob stormed the Capitol building, it seemed possible that Donald Trump would be able to shuffle into postpresidential life without facing any real consequences. President-elect Joe Biden had indicated his anxiety over a potential prosecution of the former president. Commentators muttered about the political divisiveness of pursuing Trump after he left office. Better, perhaps, to look forward, not backward, as President Barack Obama famously said of potential lawbreaking under the Bush administration.
Then, after being egged on by the president on January 6, pro-Trump rioters broke into the Capitol and terrorized staffers and members of Congress. The House of Representatives impeached Trump a second time—setting in motion a process that, if successful, could bar him from seeking the presidency in 2024. According to The New York Times, the overwhelming mood of Democratic politicians and activists lurched toward support for investigations, prosecutions, and other forms of accountability. As law enforcement continued searching for rioters, the very same Republican politicians who had earlier been stoking chaos frantically backpedaled, issuing statements calling for “unity” and “healing.”
The country does deserve unity and healing following the Trump presidency, but they won’t come from ignoring the destruction that has transpired. Accountability—a public reckoning for Trump and those who enabled his abuses—is the way forward. One path is prosecution, which can provide punishment to perpetrators. But another, complementary approach is truth commissions, which center on the voices and experiences of victims.
Imagine a commission convened to investigate family separations and the administration’s policies forcing people seeking asylum in the United States to wait in dangerous, squalid conditions in Mexico. This investigation could seek not only to hear testimony from the victims, but also to understand how the recent history of American immigration law and policy enabled these horrors. The value of a truth commission, in part, would be in establishing a common public understanding of the Trump administration and the damage it caused, without which the nation will not be able to move in a new direction. Other potential subjects for such a commission include the administration’s embrace of lies about the integrity of American elections, leading to the attack on the Capitol, and its catastrophic mishandling of the pandemic. …
China Sanctions Mike Pompeo Along With 27 Other Trump Administration Officials #WhatDoYouThink? https://t.co/d56DvjIjhd pic.twitter.com/598PbCxupH
— The Onion (@TheOnion) January 22, 2021
Courtrooms and creditors likely to loom large in Trump’s post-presidency life
Carter campaigned for human rights, Bush painted … but Trump faces several criminal investigations and a mountain of debt.
Ex-president. Removed from office by over 71 millon of his employers.
Each US president has charted a unique course after leaving the White House, taking up vocations from philanthropy to human rights to oil painting.
Donald Trump’s post-presidency appears likely to be taken up by meetings with lawyers and creditors, possible sworn depositions about tax practices or sexual assault allegations and, in some long-tail scenarios, fines, criminal charges, bankruptcy or other legal sanction.
Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, is reportedly a major figure in two of the investigations, over more than $700,000 in “consulting fees” she allegedly received from the Trump Organization, which then allegedly claimed those fees as tax-deductible business expenses.
“This is harassment pure and simple,” Ivanka Trump tweeted in November, denying the allegations.
Donald Trump has long conducted himself, as a businessman and as president, as if the law did not apply to him or his cronies, dozens of whom he pardoned for crimes on the eve of his departure from office. …
Biden’s Plans For His First 100 Days https://t.co/WxIpkOL315 pic.twitter.com/U2EbO4w6G5
— The Onion (@TheOnion) January 22, 2021
5 Reasons That Normal-Looking Free Newspaper (In Your Hometown) Is Anything But
Maybe you’ve noticed in your hometown newspaper boxes offering free copies of the Epoch Times, or maybe you’ve seen their ubiquitous online presence. At a glance, they look a lot like any other publication. They lean conservative, and they don’t like the Chinese Communist Party, but hey, who does? But dig a little deeper and you’ll find they offer the kind of brain-melting hot takes that make the politics of Fox News look normal by comparison.
5. They Look Innocent Enough, At First
Compared to the OANs and Breitbarts of the world, the Epoch Times has a bland, professional homepage with a bland, professional slogan (“Truth and Tradition”). Many headlines are bland too; “Biden Picks Warren Allies to Head Financial Sector Oversight Agencies, SEC and CFPB” and “How to Stay Positive When the News Cycle is Negative” aren’t going to raise any hackles, although the latter, much like their slogan, will soon look deeply ironic.
There’s a lot of entertainment and history and culture, a lot of inoffensive stories taken from the Associated Press, a lot of reasonable shots at China’s human rights violations. But then there are the headlines like “A New Leninism Is Gripping America,” and the columns that declare “We watched the theft of this election take place right before our eyes,” and then you start to wonder how many grandmas are being duped.
Unlike Trump Jr. using Twitter to scream that he’s being censored on Twitter, or Ben Shapiro whining that the libs at Rotten Tomatoes didn’t like his shitty Die Hard In a Columbine movie, Epoch manages to make denying reality sound downright mundane. Even a piece that complained about Macaulay Culkin’s “ridiculous virtue-signaling” (that infamous Marxist liked a joke tweet about removing Trump from Home Alone 2), and accused Trump critics who spent four years going by the admittedly cringeworthy nickname “the Resistance” anti-Semitic because they — and this is a real argument — culturally appropriated World War II’s French Resistance, is a dry read.
But if you read Epoch for long enough, as I’ve had the misfortune of doing, clear narratives emerge. The Democrats commit voter fraud as easily and as often as they breathe. Trump’s electoral defeat was illegitimate. True patriots should rally at the Capitol in defense of Trump, but all the violence they committed was the fault of shadowy left-wing provocateurs. The “CCP virus” is a rogue bioweapon that’s running rampant through China, but instead of trusting nefarious vaccines try condemning Communism, which has led to miraculous cures. Oh, and that QAnon fellow sure seems to have some good ideas.
The dryness is the point — they’re making the most insidious bullshit of our day look like the reasonable ideas of stilted but well-meaning intellectuals. If much of their news is mundane, and if they don’t like those darn Communists, then maybe this guy who’s calmly saying that leftists are transforming America into a terrifying dictatorship knows what he’s talking about too, right? …
RELATED: ’30 Rock’s Gay Bomb Was A Real Thing
American sitcoms use government incompetence as a punching bag more often than Rocky whales on slabs of meat. It’s a tradition that dates back to even before television when early settlers would put on one-act plays mocking John Smith for his tiny balls. (citation needed) So with a new administration in place, I decided to revisit one of the goofiest gags at the expense of Uncle Sam, and it comes to us, like so many others, courtesy of 30 Rock:
Again, it’s a good bit, highlighting the military-industrial complex’s need to spend frivolously on convoluted solutions while also poking fun at the level of unease so many government officials have with homosexuality. Still, outside of it being funny, there’s nothing seemingly remarkable about it. 30 Rock is packed with so many absurdist jokes that you’d be forgiven for not having given this one another thought. I know I didn’t, at least upon first viewing, but … the “Gay Bomb” was a totally real thing.
The newspaper clipping that Matthew Broderick was reading from is pretty much spot-on. In 1994, a laboratory commissioned by the U.S. Air force experimented with the use of pheromones and aphrodisiacs as a weapon. The idea was to douse enemy combatants en masse with female pheromones in the hopes that it would cause a biological reaction among the troops and basically, as Broderick put it, make them “totally gay-bones” for each other. The project, unsurprisingly, never received the required funding and the “gay bomb” never got off the ground. …
RELATED: How An Urban Legend Became Cracked’s Cousin (And Maybe Mailed Us Anthrax?)
According to legend, the half-bat, half-boy known as Bat Boy crawled out of the West Virginia caves sometime in the 1970s, only to be discovered and plastered on the front cover of Weekly World News in 1992. But the adventures of Bat Boy don’t stop there. He became a musical, he bit Santa Claus, and eventually he, uh, maybe mailed anthrax to Cracked? Join us as Melissa spelunkers down the bat cave to determine just how the Bat Boy became Cracked’s freaky, vengeful pseudo-cousin.
Sigh. I miss leafing through Weekly World News while waiting in the checkout line at the grocery store. I can’t do that anymore because I always use the self-check because I hate being judged based on what I’m buying. Then again, there is that mega-corporation that seems to have my phone number.
Trump leaves QAnon and the online MAGA world crushed and confused
The prophecies did not come true. And people are fuming about it.
Taken together, the reactions across MAGA internet reveal a mosaic of anger, denial and disappointment that the former president let them down in his final days.
The pardons went to Democrats, lobbyists and rappers, with nary a “patriot” among them. The mass arrests of Antifa campaigners never came. The inauguration stage at the Capitol, full of America’s most powerful politicians, was not purged of Satan-worshipping pedophiles under a shower of gunfire. Even the electricity stayed on.
The moment the clock struck noon on Wednesday, Jan. 20, it was over — and the extreme factions of Trump’s diehard base were left reeling.
Inauguration Day 2021 was supposed to be a culminating moment for the legion of online conspiracy theorists and extremists who have rallied around the now former president. But the lengthy list of prophecies they’d been told would eventually happen under Trump’s watch never came.
In the days leading up to Trump’s departure from office, his online followers watched with horror as his pardons that were supposed to go to allies and supporters instead went to people who were inherently swampy: white-collar criminals convicted of tax fraud, family friends, Steve Bannon, even Democrat Kwame Kirkpatrick.
“So just to recap: Trump will pardon Lil Wayne, Kodak Black, high profile Jewish fraudsters … No pardons for middle class whites who risked their livelihoods by going to ‘war’ for Trump,” fumed a user in a white supremacist channel on Telegram, the encrypted messaging service that has gained thousands of new subscribers since the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. …
Rumors Confirmed: IO Interactive Confirms Agent 47’s Barcode Brings Up Del Monte Whole Green Beans When Scanned https://t.co/0pD9aQQjpV pic.twitter.com/GWy7IXgmT6
— The Onion (@TheOnion) January 22, 2021
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
In the past, 1 in 5 Americans suffered with mental illness–now due to the pandemic, the CDC worries that number could increase as high as 1 in 2.
THANKS to SHOWTIME and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
Bill recaps the top stories of the week, including America’s semi-peaceful transition of power, President Biden’s first days in office and QAnon confusion.
THANKS to HBO and Real Time with Bill Maher for making this program available on YouTube.
Donald Trump may be gone, but there’s a new generation of right-wing Republican nutjobs that you’ll be cursing out for years to come.
Trump begrudgingly leaves the White House, Biden takes the oath, and Pablo Escobar’s hippos are breeding like rabbits.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
まるとはなにとっては見慣れた雪、みりにとっては初めての雪。Maru&Hana are accustomed to seeing snow. But the kitten sees snow for the first time.
FINALLY . . .
Have We Already Been Visited By Aliens?
An eminent astrophysicist argues that signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life have appeared in our skies. What’s the evidence for his extraordinary claim?
Encountering aliens would be surprising; the fact that we haven’t yet heard from any is perhaps even more so.
ON OCTOBER 19, 2017, A CANADIAN astronomer named Robert Weryk was reviewing images captured by a telescope known as Pan-starrs1 when he noticed something strange. The telescope is situated atop Haleakalā, a ten-thousand-foot volcanic peak on the island of Maui, and it scans the sky each night, recording the results with the world’s highest-definition camera. It’s designed to hunt for “near-Earth objects,” which are mostly asteroids whose paths bring them into our planet’s astronomical neighborhood and which travel at an average velocity of some forty thousand miles an hour. The dot of light that caught Weryk’s attention was moving more than four times that speed, at almost two hundred thousand miles per hour.
Weryk alerted colleagues, who began tracking the dot from other observatories. The more they looked, the more puzzling its behavior seemed. The object was small, with an area roughly that of a city block. As it tumbled through space, its brightness varied so much—by a factor of ten—that it had to have a very odd shape. Either it was long and skinny, like a cosmic cigar, or flat and round, like a celestial pizza. Instead of swinging around the sun on an elliptical path, it was zipping away more or less in a straight line. The bright dot, astronomers concluded, was something never before seen. It was an “interstellar object”—a visitor from far beyond the solar system that was just passing through. In the dry nomenclature of the International Astronomical Union, it became known as 1I/2017 U1. More evocatively, it was dubbed ‘Oumuamua (pronounced “oh-mooah-mooah”), from the Hawaiian, meaning, roughly, “scout.”
Even interstellar objects have to obey the law of gravity, but ‘Oumuamua raced along as if propelled by an extra force. Comets get an added kick thanks to the gases they throw off, which form their signature tails. ‘Oumuamua, though, didn’t have a tail. Nor did the telescopes trained on it find evidence of any of the by-products normally associated with outgassing, like water vapor or dust.
“This is definitely an unusual object,” a video produced by nasa observed. “And, unfortunately, no more new observations of ‘Oumuamua are possible because it’s already too dim and far away.” …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
ONE MORE THING:
5 Things To Know About MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell pic.twitter.com/YVLHQJNUC4
— The Onion (@TheOnion) January 23, 2021
