• • • an aural noise • • •
word salad: This release is the concentrate of everything that I can do now in music. And I’m excited to finally share it with you!
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
For a Volcanologist Living on Mount Etna, the Latest Eruption Is a Delight
Boris Behncke is enjoying one of nature’s greatest displays from the comfort of home.
The eruption, seen here on February 23 from Catania, sent lava fountains more than half a mile in the air. Embiggenable. Explore at home. You can’t walk just anywhere, but Street View is really cool. And I ended up face to blurred-face of some guy in a red and black windbreaker. Kinda looks like this guy.
BORIS BEHNCKE WAS GROWING IMPATIENT. THE sun was setting, twilight was soaking the soil, and the sky was not yet on fire. For the past few days, Mount Etna’s almost preternatural displays of liquid hot rage had come along like clockwork, spaced roughly 30 hours apart on the 16th, 18th, and 19th of February 2021. It was unusual for one of the world’s most active volcanoes to be so punctual. But suddenly, on the 20th, it seemed to have broken its cycle. Behncke, a volcanologist at the Etna Observatory of Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), kept his vigil.
Then, as darkness arrived, tiny jets of incandescent material flung themselves out of the summit, high above eastern Sicily. A thin tongue of lava emerged a little later, and a jet of molten rock shot up few hundred feet. The real fun began at 1:30 a.m. Violent explosions threw volcanic bombs the size of fridges from the peak. Lava spouted up more than 3,300 feet, illuminating the volcano like a flare. A red-and-black shower of fresh volcanic matter rained down, partially obscured by the six-mile-high tower of ash piercing the inky blue sky. The volcano’s roars echoed among the houses of about a million people living on its slopes—Behncke included.
This scene seems frightening, but for most Sicilians, including those in the volcano’s shadow, this is just the volcano doing what it does best: building herself, paroxysm by paroxysm. And for volcanologists like Behncke, the recent eruptive tour de force has been one of the most spectacular sights they have ever seen.
Things kept getting better. On the night of the 22nd, an even more impressive episode sent lava fountains maybe 6,500 feet up, over twice the height of the world’s tallest skyscraper. Behncke says that his jaw hit the floor. …
RELATED: These Bronze Age Bog Beetles Look Like They Just Died Yesterday
Thanks to waterlogged ground, sturdy bodies, and a little luck.
They don’t look a day over 3,000. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
ONCE THEY REACH ADULTHOOD, GREAT capricorn beetles, Cerambyx cerdo, have only a brief time left on Earth. The bulk of their lives, which can span several years, is spent as larvae and pupae, boring through wood and nibbling as they go, then hunkering down beneath the bark of sun-warmed oaks until the weather invites them back out. As grownups, the beetles—a longhorn species slightly longer than a human thumb—have a month or so, which they fill with the drive to leave offspring behind. Adults hardly eat, unless they’re sampling the sap or twigs of trees where they will deposit their progeny. They rarely venture beyond those trunks and branches, where they will find a mate and consummate a fleeting union. The females lay eggs, then die. Adults never see multiple seasons melt into one another. One bloom is all they get.
But in England, one duo has seen many winters quiet into spring and summers cool into fall—thousands of them, in fact. Two beetles in the collection of the Natural History Museum in London were recently radiocarbon dated and found to be nearly 4,000 years old, meaning that their brief adulthood took place in the Bronze Age.
The beetles arrived at the museum in 1970s, when a farmer in East Anglia summoned museum staff to inspect some massive trunks extracted from the ground. The museum offers an inquiry service, in which experts can be called on to identify birds’ nests, possible fossils, anything that sparks questions such as “Is this going to hurt me? Is this interesting? Is this rare?” says Max Barclay, an entomologist and curator of beetles at the museum. The farmer worried that the beetles were pests wreaking contemporary havoc. “They were in such good condition,” Barclay says. “They don’t look like they’re that old.”
Unlike bog bodies—human remains preserved for millennia in damp peat—the beetles weren’t wrinkled or warped by time. And unlike the long-submerged dairy product known as bog butter, whose stretch is sometimes described as a godless mingling of cheese, puke, and rancid milk, they didn’t have a funky aroma. They looked and smelled “just like normal beetles,” Barclay adds. “Without context, you wouldn’t know they’re anything special.” …
How a Movie Revitalised Fascism in America and Got Trump Elected
The first rule of the alt-right is you do not talk about the alt-right.
By Miquel C. from Sant Boi, Catalunya — Welcome To Fight Club, CC BY 2.0.
What would you tell me if I asked you what movie has had the most influence on the 21st century so far? And I’m talking real, tangible influence. One we experience every day. The film I’m talking about came out in 1999. It tells the story of a man fatigued by the meaninglessness of the world, who finds solace in camaraderie and do-it-yourself cosmetics. I’m talking about Fight Club, of course.
As of this article’s writing, Fight Club ranks 11th on IMDB all-time favourite movies. When it was released, critics were highly divided, and the film failed to meet its public. Since then, it has gained cult status, mostly with young white males searching for a purpose.
To me, the movie always felt like fascist pseudo-intellectualism wrapped in useless violence. Roger Ebert best captured its vanity when he wrote that Fight Club is “a thrill ride masquerading as philosophy” and one of “the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie[s].” The film’s advocates claim it is a critique of fascism, consumerism, and toxic masculinity. They say that the narrator killing Tyler is proof of its ironic intent. It’s their way of saying “it was just a prank.” I whole-heartedly disagree.
Fight Club isn’t a critique. It is an unrelenting apology. The narrator killing Tyler does not absolve him from what he has done. It’s also not proof that he has learnt anything or become a better person. Where some see redemption in the murder-suicide, I see acceptance. The narrator doesn’t need an alter ego anymore. He has internalised what he first projected on Tyler. The final scene, in which he stares emotionlessly as his terrorist plot unfolds, is further proof that he has become Tyler.
This debate would be of little consequence if it were limited to discussing a movie’s artistic and philosophical merits. However, the issue is that Fight Club and the “philosophy” it supports have reached far beyond the film critics’ salons. The film played on a generational malaise and revitalised many toxic and dangerous movements that ultimately gave rise to the alt-right and got Donald Trump elected. …
He Pretended to Be Trump’s Family. Then Trump Fell for It.
For months, a 21-year-old Trump supporter impersonated Trump family members on Twitter, spreading conspiracy theories, asking for money and eventually drawing the attention of the president.
Last month, between tweets disputing his election loss, President Donald Trump posted an article from a conservative website that said his sister Elizabeth Trump Grau had just joined Twitter to publicly back her brother’s fight to overturn the vote.
“Thank you Elizabeth,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “LOVE!”
But the Twitter account that prompted the article was not his sister’s. It was a fake profile run by Josh Hall, a 21-year-old food-delivery driver in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.
“I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness. He actually thinks it’s his sister,’” Hall, a fervent Trump supporter, said in an interview last week.
It was a surreal coda to nearly a year of deception for Hall. Since February, he had posed as political figures and their families on Twitter, including five of the president’s relatives. He had pretended to be Robert Trump, the president’s brother; Barron Trump, the president’s 14-year-old son; and Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator. The accounts collectively amassed more than 160,000 followers.
Using their identities, he gained attention by mixing off-color political commentary with wild conspiracy theories, including one that the government wanted to implant Americans with microchips, and another that John F. Kennedy Jr., who died in a plane crash in 1999, was alive and about to replace Mike Pence as vice president. …
DEGREE OF OPTIMISM: “There was no nefarious intention behind it. I was just trying to rally up MAGA supporters and have fun.”
Misinformation-spewing cable companies come under scrutiny
If its services help deliver misinformation to your home, what responsibility does Comcast have for that?
Looking at political violence in the U.S., a New Jersey state legislator sent a text message to an executive of cable television giant Comcast: “You feed this garbage, lies and all.” The cable channels Fox News and Newsmax were “complicit” in the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection, the lawmaker, Assemblyman Paul Moriarty, said. Like other cable companies, Comcast brings those channels into American homes. What, Moriarty asked, was Comcast going to do about them in the wake of the assault on democracy?
A few days later, Washington Post columnist Max Boot suggested Comcast might soon “need to step in and kick Fox News off,” as a consequence of its assistance to Trump’s incitement of insurrection. A similar suggestion by Democratic members of Congress ignited considerable controversy and became a subject of contention at a subsequent hearing on “disinformation and extremism in the media.”
A CNN media reporter, Oliver Darcy, observed that Facebook, Twitter and Google have faced significant pressure to curb disinformation on their platforms – especially since Jan. 6. But, Darcy said, “somehow [cable providers] have escaped scrutiny and entirely dodged this conversation,” even though they are also “lending their platforms to dishonest companies that profit off of disinformation and conspiracy theories.”
As a researcher who studies both television news distribution and how profit motivates the spread of falsehoods, I’m curious about whether it’s feasible – or wise – for cable companies to play moderator to the channels they carry. …
Ed. Scampers off to write angry missive to my television provider.
Disney Installs Animatronic Christian Missionaries To Convert Natives On Jungle Cruise Ride https://t.co/AAhYIzWT2L pic.twitter.com/vi00YReZyP
— The Onion (@TheOnion) February 27, 2021
RELATED: The Secret War Against Reddit’s PowerMods
With its decentralized forum system and hands-off approach by the company’s administrators, Reddit is often seen as one of the last bastions of internet freedom that hasn’t been (completely) trampled by alt-right bronies. But in the past year, a secret war has been fought between the karma haves, and the karma have nots, one they feel will decide the fate of internet democracy. Or, at least, the fate of r/awww.
If there are two things that Reddit loves, it’s inside baseball (not actual baseball, though) and conspiracy theories. So when a conspiracy story about Reddit surfaced on Reddit on March 19th, 2020, all online hell broke loose. Originally submitted by former user u/rootin-tootin_putin, the posts showed an overview chart highlighting how five very powerful moderators were in charge of 92 out of the 500 most popular subreddits. That these PowerMods are also some of the most upvoted users on the platform, and that these posts were removed almost as quickly as they popped up, further enforcing the fear that there’s this shadowy cabal of karma one-percenters who gather on the hidden r/illuminati every evening and decide how to guide/permaban the electronic sheep to benefit their internet dominating schemes.
Unlike other social media platforms, Reddit relies almost exclusively on unpaid volunteers to moderate their vast ocean of puppy fail GIFs and dank earthporn memes. As the actual boots on the ground, Reddit admins treat their volunteer admins like a retiring police captain treats a loose canon: as long as they don’t show up on the evening news, they don’t care how they get results. And it’s not that uncommon for Reddit superusers to have a hand in actual meatspace events. Reddit mods have been observed helping organize political coups and actively recruiting minors into white supremacy terrorism. Only recently, the subreddit r/wallstreetbets managed to shitpost the stock market into submission, leading to the massive enrichment of several mods and power-struggles that wouldn’t look out of place in a Silicon Valley boardroom.
So how scared should people be of the unlimited power of PowerMods destroying the last bastion of internet democratic information transfer? Not very. Like a scheming PTA mom or oppressive HOA cabal, PowerMods only have any clout in the pettiest way possible. A quick glance at the kind of subreddits these five mods lord over shows not a single political, financial, or news subreddit in the bunch. The only iron-fisted oligarchy they have is over the Very Online Industry, leaving karma billionaires like u/Awkwardtheturtle to harness their Orwellian powers over oddly wholesome memes and animals being derps. …
New Bomb Capable Of Creating 1,500 New Terrorists In Single Blast – https://t.co/FoOcjCIDo6 pic.twitter.com/ztcifS0vxA
— The Onion (@TheOnion) February 26, 2021
RELATED: 5 Facts About That Enigmatic Object That Invaded Our Solar System
A couple years ago, a big hunk of something flew into our solar system. It took a bit longer for the world to really stand up and pay attention to it, and we’re still keeping an eye on it, even though it’s now billions of miles away now. So, what’s the deal with this thing? Here’s a quick primer for you, starting with …
5. First, The Most Important Part: What’s With That Name?
Just kidding, the name isn’t the most important part, but let us set this thing up for you.
In October 2017, astronomers were looking up at the sky, which is their favorite thing to do. They thought they spotted a comet, so they named it, using the standard comet designation protocol. Then they looked closer, saw no hint of a tail, and figured it had to be an asteroid, which meant they instead needed the asteroid designation protocol. But as they got out their notepads and tried to trace its path, they realized it had to have come from outside the solar system. It was the first ever identified interstellar object, which was very exciting, because it meant they had to create a NEW designation protocol.
From that point on, interstellar objects would receive names staring with the letter “I,” and since this was the first, it would be I1. Which is an awful name. An unreadable name, even, depending on what font you use. So they also came up with a cooler name: ‘Oumuamua. ‘Oumuamua (try sounding it out, it’s fun) came from a Hawaiian word for “scout,” as though this is a messenger sent to us from a different galaxy or from billions of years in the past.
Zoom in on the name, so you can see that little curly bit in front, and something may look strange to you:
“Hey, that’s not how an apostrophe is supposed to work,” pedants among you might note. “Apostrophes are supposed to curl the other way, to look like a 9 instead of a 6.” Right, but that mark isn’t an apostrophe. That’s an ‘okina, a Hawaiian punctuation mark that tells you how to say the word. It’s pronounced OUH-mua-mua, rather than oh-MOO-ah-MOO-ah.
We wanted to tell you this upfront because 1) the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua, like the ‘okina in its name, curls in a weird way, and 2) we thought it would be nice to zoom in on the name for you, as there’s no way to zoom in on the object itself. You see …
Parliamentarian Cuts Minimum Wage From Stimulus Due To Obscure Rule Requiring Poor Citizens To Needlessly Suffer https://t.co/7OJChqPwGJ pic.twitter.com/5wsFSWWU9y
— The Onion (@TheOnion) February 26, 2021
Mars Is a Hellhole
Colonizing the red planet is a ridiculous way to help humanity.
There’s no place like home—unless you’re Elon Musk. A prototype of SpaceX’s Starship, which may someday send humans to Mars, is, according to Musk, likely to launch soon, possibly within the coming days. But what motivates Musk? Why bother with Mars? A video clip from an interview Musk gave in 2019 seems to sum up Musk’s vision—and everything that’s wrong with it.
In the video, Musk is seen reading a passage from Carl Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot. The book, published in 1994, was Sagan’s response to the famous image of Earth as a tiny speck of light floating in a sunbeam—a shot he’d begged NASA to have the Voyager 1 spacecraft take in 1990 as it sailed into space, 3.7 billion miles from Earth. Sagan believed that if we had a photo of ourselves from this distance, it would forever alter our perspective of our place in the cosmos.
The Pale Blue Dot photograph that inspired Carl Sagan’s book of the same name.
Musk reads from Sagan’s book: “Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate.”
But there Musk cuts himself off and begins to laugh. He says with incredulity, “This is not true. This is false––Mars.”
He couldn’t be more wrong. Mars? Mars is a hellhole. The central thing about Mars is that it is not Earth, not even close. In fact, the only things our planet and Mars really have in common is that both are rocky planets with some water ice and both have robots (and Mars doesn’t even have that many). …
It's a fixer-upper. https://t.co/leb5sN5vzD
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) February 25, 2021
The Horrifying Study That Predicted Human Extinction
How utopia went to hell
Image from John B. Calhoun, a picture of Calhoun in a mouse utopia in 1970.
A sparse, gray landscape and ash slowly flowing down from the sky. Smoke everywhere. Sounds of multiple explosions. Perhaps an asteroid strike, or a nuclear war.
This may be how the hypothetical end of the human race is often put on display in post-apocalyptic films but what if human extinction was less a cinematic scene, and instead, a looming reality?
“Universe 25” was a study carried out from 1954 to 1972 by John B. Calhoun, an American ethologist and behavioral researcher who claimed bleak effects of overpopulation on rodents were a grim model for the future of the human race.
Working with NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health), Calhoun created the perfect Mouse Universe to conduct his study. What looked like a rat utopia and mouse paradise — unlimited food and water, multiple levels and private nesting areas— quickly spiraled into turbulent congestion that lead to a population subside followed by disturbing and pathological behaviors of the members.
Calhoun spent years perfecting his methods and repeated his experiment 25 times — hence “Universe 25″ — in different scales and noted ominously identical results every time.
The design of these habitats was simple. The layout was a rectangle measuring ten feet by fourteen feet divided into four equal sections by electric fences. Each section was equipped identically with the food hopper, water and nesting areas. (Displayed in the image below)
Image from John B. Calhoun, sketched layout of a Mouse Universe Designed by Calhoun. Embiggenable.
In his final experiment, the space he designed could potentially hold 3,840 mice but population peaked at 2,200 mice and began to decline from there while exhibiting a variety of abnormal, often destructive behaviors. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Bill recaps the top stories of the week, including the upcoming CPAC convention and Sen. Ted Cruz’s much-maligned trip to Cancún.
THANKS to HBO and Real Time with Bill Maher for making this program available on YouTube.
Bill calls on liberals to “stand their ground” when the woke mob comes for them over a ridiculous past offence.
Ted Cruz has a disastrous photo op, the GOP tries to restrict voting in Georgia, and a bomb squad finds… *gasp* kittens!
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
パトロールに励むまるさん。本日も平和なり。Maru works hard on patrols!
The machine of death continues to roll on
Participatory art project Hostile Terrain 94 connects community with U.S. border policies and migrant fatalities.
Embiggenable. Explore at home.
“THE COLD WEATHER IS TERRIBLE HERE,” BERTHA Bermúdez Tapia says over Zoom from a refugee camp in Matamoros, a city in Mexico just across the border from Brownsville, Texas. “I was supposed to be at home today to have this interview, but I needed to come here because the temperatures are going down and down and we came here to bring some blankets, jackets, hand warmers, et cetera.”
During the bitter winter storm that brought below-freezing temperatures to the region and rendered most of Texas without power the week of Feb. 14, Bermúdez says the camp, where some 2,000 people have been living in tents close to two years, only has one gas heater in a common area. There are many elderly people living there, she adds, as well as six infants under 8 months old, at least one of whom was born in the makeshift conditions.
Bermúdez, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at CU Boulder, researches the violent effects of U.S. immigration policies, specifically deportations to violent areas and the Trump administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), which forced asylum seekers to wait in Mexico, often in dangerous conditions and camps, like the one described above, along the border. President Biden rescinded MPP in mid-February, promising to process 25,000 migrants with active claims in the coming weeks, but the future for many migrants remains unclear.
This photo was taken as part of Bermúdez’ field work in the Matamoros migrant camp in Mexico just south of Brownsville, Texas.
“It is good that these people are not going to be living here anymore, hopefully, but that’s not going to solve the problem,” Bermúdez says. “The problem goes way beyond that. … This is very intrinsic in the U.S government and goes beyond who is the president of the United States.”
The tragic results of U.S. border policy can be traced back decades at least, she says, back to a Border Patrol strategy from the 1990s — known as “prevention through deterrence” — that has transcended Republican and Democratic administrations and coincided with thousands of migrant fatalities. It’s the deaths of some 3,200 people in the Sonoran Desert since 2000 in particular that are the subject of Hostile Terrain 94, an international participatory art project designed by anthropologist Jason De León and co-facilitated at CU Boulder by Bermúdez and Arielle Milkman, whose Ph.D. work in anthropology focuses on migration and labor. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
ONE MORE THING: The New Colossus
The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Emma Lazarus
November 2, 1883
