to set a mood • • •
How to sell a massacre: NRA’s playbook revealed
Three-year undercover sting reveals how US’ National Rifle Association handles public opinion after deadly gun attacks.
How should you respond to a deadly mass shooting if you are a gun rights advocate?
First, “Say nothing.” If media queries persist, go on the “offence, offence, offence”. Smear gun-control groups. “Shame them” with statements such as – “How dare you stand on the graves of those children to put forward your political agenda?”
This was the advice the US’s most powerful gun lobby gave Australia’s One Nation party, according to an Al Jazeera investigation, when representatives of the Australian far-right group sought guidance from the National Rifle Association (NRA) on loosening the Pacific country’s strict gun laws.
The NRA’s playbook on mass shootings came to light during the course of a three-year undercover sting by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit. Rodger Muller, an Australian undercover reporter who infiltrated the gun lobbies in the US and Australia, used a hidden camera to record a series of meetings between representatives of the NRA and One Nation in Washington, DC in September last year.
The secretly filmed footage provides a rare inside view of how the NRA deliberates over mass shootings and seeks to manipulate media coverage to push its pro-gun agenda. …
Prosecutions for death threats against US politicians spiked last year
IT’S NO JOKE
You can’t always see the Secret Service watching.
Arrests for violent threats against high-profile US politicians spiked in 2018.
There were 23 prosecutions for threats against Donald Trump or those in the presidential line of succession last year, a 130% increase over 2017, when there were 10, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). The uptick came after five years of steady decline.
The number of prosecutions, which don’t necessarily correspond with actual threats, can represent the government’s willingness to press cases at any given time. Researchers say the vast majority of threats overall in the US tend to come from white men who support right-wing causes.
Three cases of defendants who threatened the life of political figures came to various stages of resolution in federal courtrooms last week.
In one, an upstate New York man was convicted of threatening to kill former president Barack Obama and congresswoman Maxine Waters, the California Democrat. In another, a California man was sentenced for threatening the lives of Obama, former presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, and Trump. In the third, Cesar Sayoc, the Florida man charged with mailing 16 package bombs to more than a dozen political figures and media outlets seen as critical of Trump—including Obama, Waters, Hillary Clinton, and CNN—pleaded guilty to 65 counts. (On March 22, Waters issued a statement noting that four men have been convicted of threatening to kill her since Trump took office in 2017.) …
Smart talking: are our devices threatening our privacy?
Millions of us now have virtual assistants, in our homes and our pockets. Even children’s toys are getting smart. But when we talk to them, who is listening?
On 21 November 2015, James Bates had three friends over to watch the Arkansas Razorbacks play the Mississippi State Bulldogs. Bates, who lived in Bentonville, Arkansas, and his friends drank beer and did vodka shots as a tight football game unfolded. After the Razorbacks lost 51–50, one of the men went home; the others went out to Bates’s hot tub and continued to drink. Bates would later say that he went to bed around 1am and that the other two men – one of whom was named Victor Collins – planned to crash at his house for the night. When Bates got up the next morning, he didn’t see either of his friends. But when he opened his back door, he saw a body floating face-down in the hot tub. It was Collins.
A grim local affair, the death of Victor Collins would never have attracted international attention if it were not for a facet of the investigation that pitted the Bentonville authorities against one of the world’s most powerful companies – Amazon. Collins’ death triggered a broad debate about privacy in the voice-computing era, a discussion that makes the big tech companies squirm.
The police, summoned by Bates the morning after the football game, became suspicious when they found signs of a struggle. Headrests and knobs from the hot tub, as well as two broken bottles, lay on the ground. Collins had a black eye and swollen lips, and the water was darkened with blood. Bates said that he didn’t know what had happened, but the police officers were dubious. On 22 February 2016 they arrested him for murder.
Searching the crime scene, investigators noticed an Amazon Echo. Since the police believed that Bates might not be telling the truth, officers wondered if the Echo might have inadvertently recorded anything revealing. In December 2015, investigators served Amazon with a search warrant that requested “electronic data in the form of audio recordings, transcribed records or other text records”.
Amazon turned over a record of transactions made via the Echo but not any audio data. “Given the important first amendment and privacy implications at stake,” an Amazon court filing stated, “the warrant should be quashed.” Bates’s attorney, Kimberly Weber, framed the argument in more colloquial terms. “I have a problem that a Christmas gift that is supposed to better your life can be used against you,” she told a reporter. “It’s almost like a police state.” …
PREPARE TO SPEND A WHILE; it’s The Long Read.
5 Forgotten Moments That Almost Changed History Forever
We love us some alternate history, but it always comes down to the same tired old ideas. What if the South had won the Civil War? What if the Nazis had won World War II? What if the Nazis had won World War II and then somehow the Civil War? But history almost went in some much weirder directions. We demand to see the following scenarios inspire some fresh movies and video games. And we would also like some somber reflection on the fragility of human progress, if there’s time. But mostly new Bioshock, please.
5. The USSR Was In Serious Talks To Join The Axis
At the start of World War II, the Soviet Union signed a neutrality pact with the Nazis, and then both carved up Poland. Then in June of 1941, the Germans went back on their word, because Hitler was definitely the kid on the playground who calls takebacksies. The two superpowers hated each other, so it was going to end in blood sooner or later, right?
Maybe not! Nazi-Soviet relations were complicated. They were never going to take a summer vacation together, but each knew that war would be devastating, and saw the world as big enough for the both of them. As late as May 1941, the Soviets were in serious talks to join the Tripartite Pact, Hitler’s dictator fantasy league that already included Italy and Japan.
Stalin was so serious about staying on Hitler’s good side that the Soviet Union helped Germany survive Britain’s economic blockade by providing millions of tons of food, oil, metal, and other essentials. Those supplies gave the Germans the confidence to invade France, and then the Soviets saw their own resources used against them. So they didn’t really swoop in to save the day so much as fix what they helped break, after which any mention of cooperation with the Nazis was quietly scrubbed from official Soviet history.
So why did the dream team collapse? …
Acid test: how psychedelic virtual reality can help end society’s mass bad trip
Cyberdelic VR is being used to treat trauma and even simulate near-death experiences.
A shot from Crystal Vibes, a psychedelic virtual reality experience that induces a kind of synaesthesia using music.
Human beings have become nothing more than data in flesh suits. That’s the gist of Team Human, the 2018 TED Talk from media theorist Douglas Rushkoff. Certainly, there could be few people who use social media now who don’t feel a sense of captivity.
That makes cybernauts the freedom fighters. The VR artists, academics and scientists gathered in this Brunswick warehouse have contributed to Melbourne’s first “cyberdelic incubator”, hosted by the Australian Psychedelic Society.
In line with Rushkoff’s call for technology built on pre-digital era values of connection, creativity and respect, cyberdelia promotes a renaissance of a more conscious approach to technology – one of self-transformation and a connection to other people more genuine than you might find on Instagram.
There’s often a gentle spiritual component to such initiatives; take the simple example that the Australian Psychedelic Society’s Melissa Warner gives Guardian Australia, of a meditation app that creates a flower that grows ever-more beautiful and complex, based on biofeedback that relays how relaxed the user is.
So tonight there’s the opportunity to try out virtual reality and augmented reality experiences that go beyond recreational use – there’s no diving with sharks or rollercoaster rides here. But users should strap in tightly anyway: these experiences are designed to expedite a different kind of journey. …
Could ‘alcosynth’ provide all the joy of booze – without the dangers?
Scientist David Nutt memorably said alcohol is more dangerous than crack. Now, he is trying to invent a healthy synthetic alternative, and the race is on to get it to market.
David Nutt … ‘The safe limit of alcohol would be one glass of wine a year.’
“This is what my brain looks like,” says David Nutt, showing me an intense abstract painting by a friend of his that is sitting on the windowsill in his office. Nutt’s base at Hammersmith hospital has a cosy, lived-in feel – a stark contrast to the gleaming white laboratory he oversees as director of the neuropsychopharmacology unit at Imperial College London. Lab coats hang on a hook by the door, an ancient kettle sits in the corner and next to the painting is an unruly collection of objects that offer clues to his research interests: brain-shaped awards, an atomic model of Nutt’s invention for detecting inflammation in the brain of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s patients, a poster for the 1967 film LSD Flesh of Devil and two carved wooden mushrooms – the final items hinting at his role at Imperial’s psychedelic research group.
All that is missing is something to do with the demon drink, to reflect Nutt’s ambitious plan to bring a safe synthetic alcohol substitute called Alcarelle to the masses. Nutt has long been developing a holy grail of molecules – also referred to as “alcosynth” – that will provide the relaxing and socially lubricating qualities of alcohol, but without the hangovers, health issues and the risk of getting paralytic. It sounds too good to be true, and when I discuss the notion with two alcohol industry experts, they independently draw parallels with plans to colonise Mars.
Yet Alcarelle finding its way into bars and shops is starting to look like a possibility. Seed funding was raised in November 2018, allowing Nutt and his business partner, David Orren, to attempt to raise £20m from investors to bring Alcarelle to market. “The industry knows alcohol is a toxic substance,” says Nutt. “If it were discovered today, it would be illegal as a foodstuff. The safe limit of alcohol, if you apply food standards criteria, would be one glass of wine a year.”
As a psychiatrist, he says, “most of my professional life I’ve been treating people for whom alcohol is a problem, and a lot of my professional research relates to that”. A decade ago, Nutt was sacked from his position as a government drugs adviser after questioning the skewed moral standards by which we judge drug and alcohol use (he memorably said that horse riding was more dangerous than taking ecstasy). Shortly after this, he presented data in the Lancet showing that booze is more harmful to society than heroin or crack. Yet Nutt is no prohibitionist. He enjoys a “very small” single malt before bed, and even co-owns a bar, the irony of which causes him to erupt into one of his frequent and endearing guffaws. “My daughter and I own a wine bar in Ealing,” he says, after he has recovered his composure. “I’m not against alcohol. I like it, but it would be nice to have an alternative.” One day, he hopes to add Alcarelle to the menu at his bar. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Teanke Tarwai fled Liberia’s second civil war in the late 1990s and has lived in the Twin Cities metro area of Minnesota ever since, raising three children with her husband. But she — and nearly 4,000 other Liberian immigrants — could soon face a hard choice: leave before the end of the month or face the threat of deportation.
That’s why she’s been knocking on doors in D.C.
“Going back to Liberia is like going back to the civil war,” Tarwai, 51, said. “I’m not going to go back because that is not my home. Minnesota is home.”
THANKS to HBO and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
President Trump claims legal victory and complete exoneration after Robert Mueller’s investigation finds no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, but Attorney General William Barr says the report does not exonerate Trump from obstruction of justice.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
With prosecutable collusion with Russia off the table after Mueller’s report was delivered to the AG, Stephen updates the ‘Reasons Trump is a Bad President’ board.
Michael Avenatti has gone from a 2020 presidential hopeful to a 2019 alleged Nike extorter.
THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
もちろん入ってます！ Of course, Maru is in the box!
After becoming bored with chess, Dutch scientist Christian Huygens tinkered with the game and eventually created “Onaanie”, a game so complex that playing past the first eight moves required computing technology that wouldn’t exist for centuries.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 2, 2019
FINALLY . . .
Ouarzazate Solar Power Station
The world’s largest concentrated solar power plant.
If you drive near Ouarzazate, Morocco, on a typical sunny day it’s nearly impossible to miss the gigantic tower glinting in the horizon. The shiny structure, surrounded by massive rays of sunlight, looks like a Moroccan version of the Eye of Sauron.
The tower belongs to the Ouarzazate Solar Power Station (OSPS), which began emerging in the desert in 2013. The first step of the project, Noor 1, was completed in 2015. This part covers 1,111 acres (450 hectares) and is made of half a million cylindro-parabolic mirrors that reflect sunlight.
Noor 2 was built in 2016. It uses the same kind of mirrors as Noor 1and occupies 1,680 acres (680 hectares). The most impressive part of the enormous construction is the third power plant, Noor 3. It consists of 7,400 huge mirrors that reflect sunlight toward an 820-foot-high (250 meters) tower to produce up to 500 gigawatt hours of annual power.
A fourth installation, Noor 4 will consist of a field of photovoltaic panels. Once complete, the OSPS will cover an area of 6177 acres (2,500 hectares). …
This unassuming manhole cover is actually the lid to an underground shrine celebrating the world’s subterranean workers. Visiting hours are infrequent, but memorable.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 2, 2019
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Maybe. Probably Not. Groundhog Day.