to set a mood • • •
Where young people all over the world marched for action on climate change
#FRIDAYSFORFUTURE
Students protest to demand action on climate change in Lisbon.
Young people skipped school and took the streets in more than 100 countries today (March 15), begging leaders for action on climate change.
Reuters reported that the protests were inspired by Greta Thunberg, the 15-year-old Swede who has been just been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her climate activism. For the past year she has skipped school on Fridays to protested inaction on climate change in front of the Swedish parliament. The teen also had a notable appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this year, urging leaders to increase their understanding of the existential consequences of climate change. “I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And act as if your house is on fire. Because it is,” she said.
Inspired by her example, students around the world left school and made their voices heard. Here is a selection of showcasing their energy and urgency:
Sweden
Greta Thunberg and her sister Beata participate in the “Global Strike for Future” demonstration in central Stockholm.
Protestors gather in central Stockholm.
…
Social Media Are a Mass Shooter’s Best Friend
A terrorist attack in New Zealand cast new blame on how technology platforms police content. But global internet services were designed to work this way, and there might be no escape from their grip.
Forty-nine people are dead and 20 more injured after terrorist attacks on two New Zealand mosques Friday. One of the alleged shooters is a white man who appears to have announced the attack on the anonymous-troll message board 8chan. There, he posted images of the weapons days before the attack, and an announcement an hour before. On 8chan and Twitter, he also posted links to a 74-page manifesto, titled “The Great Replacement,” blaming immigration for the displacement of whites in Oceania and elsewhere. The manifesto cites “white genocide” as a motive for the attack, and calls for “a future for white children” as its goal.
The person who wrote the manifesto, identified by authorities as a 28-year-old Australian named Brenton Tarrant, also live-streamed one of the attacks on Facebook; Tarrant appears to have posted a link to the stream on 8chan before carrying out the attack.
It’s terrifying stuff, especially since 8chan is one of a handful of sites where disaffected internet misfits create memes and other messages to provoke dismay and sow chaos among the “normies” outside their ranks, whom they often see as suckers at best, oppressors at worst. “It’s time to stop shitposting,” the alleged shooter’s 8chan post reads, “and time to make a real-life effort post.” Many of the responses, anonymous by 8chan’s nature, celebrate the attack, with some posting congratulatory Nazi memes. A few seem to decry it, even if just for logistical quibbles. Still others lament that the whole affair might destroy the site, a concern that betrays its users’ priorities.
Social-media companies scrambled to take action as the news—and the video—of the attack spread. Facebook finally managed to pull down Tarrant’s profiles and the video, but only after New Zealand police brought the live-stream to the company’s attention. Twitter also suspended Tarrant’s account, where he had posted links to the manifesto from several file-sharing sites.
The chaotic aftermath mostly took place while many North Americans slept unaware, waking up to the news and its associated confusion. By morning on the East Coast, news outlets had already weighed in on whether technology companies might be partly to blame for catastrophes such as the New Zealand massacre because they have failed to catch offensive content before it spreads. But the internet was designed to resist the efforts of any central authority to control its content—even when a few large, wealthy companies control the channels by which most users access information. …
Online activists are silencing us, scientists say
Scientists researching treatments for chronic fatigue syndrome say they face online abuse and harassment. Some are leaving the field. It’s a ‘new normal,’ they say, and patients may lose out.
TARGET: Oxford University professor Michael Sharpe says he is subjected to almost daily, often anonymous, intimidation because of his research into treatments for chronic fatigue syndrome.
The emails, tweets and blog posts in the “abuse” folder that Michael Sharpe keeps on his computer continue to pile up. Eight years after he published results of a clinical trial that found some patients with chronic fatigue syndrome can get a little better with the right talking and exercise therapies, the Oxford University professor is subjected to almost daily, often anonymous, intimidation.
A Twitter user who identifies himself as a patient called Paul Watton (@thegodofpleasur) wrote: “I really am looking forward to his professional demise and his much-deserved public humiliation.” Another, Anton Mayer (@MECFSNews), likened Sharpe’s behaviour to “that of an abuser.”
Watton and Mayer have never been treated by Sharpe for their chronic fatigue syndrome, a little-understood condition that can bring crushing tiredness and pain. Nor have they met him, they told Reuters. They object to his work, they said, because they think it suggests their illness is psychological. Sharpe, a professor of psychological medicine, says that isn’t the case. He believes that chronic fatigue syndrome is a biological condition that can be perpetuated by social and psychological factors.
Sharpe is one of around a dozen researchers in this field worldwide who are on the receiving end of a campaign to discredit their work. For many scientists, it’s a new normal: From climate change to vaccines, activism and science are fighting it out online. Social media platforms are supercharging the battle.
FAN MAIL: A tweet attacking Oxford University professor Michael Sharpe.
Reuters contacted a dozen professors, doctors and researchers with experience of analysing or testing potential treatments for chronic fatigue syndrome. All said they had been the target of online harassment because activists objected to their findings. Only two had definite plans to continue researching treatments. With as many as 17 million people worldwide suffering this disabling illness, scientific research into possible therapies should be growing, these experts said, not dwindling. What concerns them most, they said, is that patients could lose out if treatment research stalls. …
5 Hilarious Ways Ads Tried To Make Boring Products Cool
Just because a product isn’t exciting doesn’t mean it’s useless. But it does mean that advertisers have a tough job ahead when it comes time to sell it. Do they acknowledge that their product isn’t particularly sexy, and instead focus on the ways it can improve the consumer’s life? Or do they surround it with slick special effects and Snoop Dogg, hoping no one will notice? These companies chose the latter, to everyone’s benefit.
5. You Can Control Your Land Rover’s Seats From The Sky If You Need To (You Won’t)
Land Rover suggests that wealthy people who buy luxury vehicles are much more adventurous than they actually are, so when the time came to let the market know about their new remote seat-folding technology, they did it the only way the know how: by dropping a dude out of the sky.
The commercial takes place at an ambiguous “military testing facility,” to cement its association with the macho armed forces types, even though this brand is mostly driven by people whose only combat experience is with various retail employees.
Can’t get any more military than a small prop plane with hashtags written on the wings.
Then Bear Grylls pops up, shouts that it’s his job to test Land Rover products “in extreme situations,” and manufactures one such (wholly unnecessary) situation.
It seems like testing under extreme passive-aggressive silence would be more customer-focused, but we guess that doesn’t move as many cars.
He’s testing Land Rover’s new “intelligent seat fold technology,” which appears to be a simple smartphone app. It can purportedly reconfigure your Land Rover’s seats from anywhere in the world, in case you find yourself so bored on a tropical beach or whatever that you decide to fiddle with your car seats. This could theoretically be demonstrated by using the app from, say, across a large parking lot — easily the longest distance anyone would practically need to lower their seats. Instead, seven people jump out of the plane while one of them reprograms the seats of their waiting Land Rover to accommodate them. …
another mood • • •
Ed. Thanks Moby, I’m feeling a little more hopeful now. I’ve had a horrible week inexorably settled by the knowledge that next week will be just has horrible. Except, maybe, I won’t have to shut a busy restaurant down after the power went out during a blizzard while the boss was enjoying a snow-day with his kids. Groundhog Day, all the while continuing to ponder the pointlessness of it all.
And my toilet is currently a Homer Bucket. right now. My front lawn is due to be dug up in a few hours.
Improvised toilet, lid sold separately.
This isn’t a cry for help. Honest. I’m just overworked, overtired and frustrated that it’s nearly impossible to find intelligent, friendly, pleasant and honest entry-level workers… willing to work for $11.10 an hour.
In the age of screens, families are spending more time “alone-together”
CALLING MACAULAY CULKIN
Not alone, not together.
We fret a lot about what smartphones are doing to kids (and, let’s be honest, parents). A pair of researchers asked a different question: how are the devices changing the time families spend together?
Turns out, families are spending more time together than before. But not together-together. Alone-together.
Killian Mullan from Oxford University and Stella Chatzitheochari from the University of Warwick looked at time-use data from a nationally representative UK sample of around 5,000 children and their parents.
They found that between 2000 and 2015, parents with kids aged 8-16 spent 9% more time together: 379 minutes per day in 2015, versus 347 minutes per day in 2000. The families also spent roughly the same amount of time on “shared activities,” like eating meals and watching TV.
But the biggest change was the rise in “alone-together” time—that is, in the same house but not in the presence of one another. So called alone-together time jumped by 43% over the period of study, to 136 minutes per day in 2015. …
Ed. Last evening, after all the plumbing people left, I went out to dinner at the restaurant where I work. I observed a father and son at a booth not far from me. I became increasingly concerned overhearing the absolute destruction of this kid’s sense of self-worth through the horrible words of his father. Seems he’d gotten his kid a new smart phone. The kid downloaded a bunch of apps that he hadn’t asked his father he could buy and then managed to completely remove the phone from the face of the Internet. The restaurant owner called child protective services, saying “hell, I want to take hime home with me so he can have a better life.”
I spend a lot of time observing the baffling world around me. It’s no wonder people end up killing each other.
Finally, lately I’m not spending enough alone-time alone doing the things that I do to block out the horribleness of all. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll get to ride my bike.
Note to self: Remember to write my statement of what I observed last evening for child protective services.
AN IRISH SODA BREAD RECIPE AS INAUTHENTIC AS IT’S DELICIOUS
BUCK TRADITION
Basically a scone.
Growing up in Vermont, my mom always made the same thing for St. Patrick’s Day—corned beef with cabbage, carrots, and potatoes, and a loaf of Irish soda bread on the side. The bread was crumbly and rich, slightly sweet, and delicious spread with butter. Since she only made it once a year, it took on a special significance in my mind’s catalogue of childhood treats.
I was surprised when I realized that what I had been calling Irish soda bread all those years is actually far from traditional. As a household staple eaten in Ireland, soda bread was simple affair, made without butter or sugar, common additions in modern versions. As the Society for the Preservation of Irish Soda Bread says on their website:
All recipes for traditional soda bread contain flour, baking soda, sour milk (buttermilk) and salt. That’s it!!!
This was a daily bread that didn’t keep long and had to be baked every few days. It was not a festive “cake” and did not contain whisky, candied fruit, caraway seeds, raisins (add raisins and it becomes “spotted dog” not to be confused with the pudding made with suet of the same name), or any other ingredient.
Writing for Smithsonian.com, Abigail Tucker describes a similar shift in soda bread perception. Her Irish-born great-grandmother was famous for her white, crumbly loaves of raisin-studded bread. Yet, when Tucker went to Ireland to visit her ancestral home, the soda bread she ate was quite different. “[T]he soda bread served in her native village and elsewhere bore little resemblance to our family’s festive specialty,” she writes. “The standard Irish version is brown and coarse, with nary a raisin or caraway seed in site.”
Tucker says that she now enjoys both kinds, her grandmother’s celebratory loaf, and the plainer everyday version, preferably slathered with butter and marmalade. But she points out that there’s a common thread between the loaves—the crumbly texture that comes from leavening flour with baking soda rather than yeast. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
THANKS to HBO and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
Bill recaps the top stories of the week, including a college admissions scandal and Beto O’Rourke’s foray into the 2020 presidential race.
In his editorial New Rule, Bill calls on Democrats to engage with people they disagree with, even if it means appearing on Fox News.
THANKS to HBO and Real Time with Bill Maher for making this program available on YouTube.
Historian Rutger Bregman, whose speech at the Davos World Economic Forum went viral, explains why often-dismissed plans to correct inequality can actually work.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
Michael Cohen kept receipts of a backchannel with Trump’s team in which a possible pardon may have been dangled.
The President used dangerous rhetoric to imply that his supporters could get violent if they were pushed to ‘a certain point.’
THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
浴槽の中で遊ぶのが好きなまる。Maru likes to play in the bathtub.
FINALLY . . .
The last names on the wall
The strange and terrible tale of the Mayaguez incident.
As I wind my way north on the narrow two-lane road, I realize Wyoming can’t be far off. I squint over the steering wheel into the hazy distance, at a cone-shaped mountain creeping over the horizon. I assume it must be Hahns Peak. I’m getting close.
This strange journey — to meet a Vietnam veteran who fought in the last battle of that terrible war, a survivor of the infamous “Mayaguez incident” of 1975 — was not one I could have anticipated coming across in the Rocky Mountains. But in this business sometimes the stories pick you. So when this tale of captured ships, island combat, terrorist freedom fighters, American hostages, Marine casualties and Cambodian luxury resorts came my way, I felt compelled to follow it down the rabbit hole.
It’s one of those tales that begins at its end, with the 2012 funeral of a Colorado Marine, Private First-Class James Joseph Jacques. Jacques died almost half a century ago, half a world away on the island of Koh Tang, on a chaotic half-baked rescue mission that ended in disaster.
Jacques’ remains were abandoned on the island during a hasty retreat, after an ugly encounter with Cambodian Khmer Rouge soldiers. Jacques, along with 12 other deceased Marines, was returned stateside in 1995, but he wasn’t laid to rest until 2012 after DNA testing finally made it possible to identify him. He had been 19 at the time of his death and would have been 56 when he was buried in Denver’s Fort Logan National Cemetery, surrounded by family members he’d never met, and his sister Deloise Guerra, who hadn’t seen him since he left for duty in October 1974 — shortly after his 18th birthday.
“We always wondered what happened to him,” Guerra told Denver’s local CBS news affiliate in 2012. “We didn’t ever lose hope that someday we would hear something.”
Jacques’ Colorado burial may have closed a chapter in American history, but it surely didn’t finish the story. While the identification of Jacques and several other previously missing in action American soldiers offered at least partial closure, there were still missing Marines who had been left behind. Some were known to have been killed in the battle, but others had been left behind alive, never to be heard from again. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not? Maybe a bike ride.