Jesse Michaels is back! — Turned Out A Punk
Link: https://overcast.fm/+Dx0jHYwqc
Film, longreads, books, TV, podcasts, gaming, live events.
Threats of violence have become commonplace among a significant part of the party, as historians and those who study democracy warn of a dark shift in American politics.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/12/us/politics/republican-violent-rhetoric.html
“When do we get to use the guns?” he said as the audience applauded. “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” The local state representative, a Republican, later called it a “fair” question.
Documents show how the conservative group worked with lawyers to gauge how far its deceptive reporting practices could go before running afoul of federal laws.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/us/politics/project-veritas-journalism-political-spying.html
Mr. O’Keefe and his lawyer, Paul Calli, revealed new details about the diary investigation and F.B.I. search to Sean Hannity on Fox News on Monday. During the interview, Mr. Calli said that Project Veritas had paid for the right to publish the diary but was unable to confirm it belonged to Ms. Biden and ultimately decided not to go ahead with a story about its contents. Excerpts from the diary were later published by another conservative website.
There’s no way to confirm that a crop was grown organically. Randy Constant exploited our trust in the labels—and made a fortune.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/15/the-great-organic-food-fraud
That year, Constant had planted a large crop of organic soybeans on the grounds of a federal prison in Forrest City, Arkansas, after agreeing to share the profits from the crop, fifty-fifty, with the prison. A man that he had hired to help run the operation, Dave Block, soon felt confused about his mandate. “He didn’t really push the organics so much,” Block told me. Constant supplied non-organic seeds, and then “put on whatever fertilizer he wanted.”
The long read: An intrepid expert with dozens of books to his name, Stéphane Bourgoin was a bestselling author, famous in France for having interviewed more than 70 notorious murderers. Then an anonymous collective began to investigate his past
via the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/nov/09/secrets-of-top-serial-killer-expert-france-stephane-bourgoin
Bourgoin was a lover of cinema, and the walls of his apartment were lined with an immense collection of VHS cassettes. Among these was a hand-labelled series of recorded newscasts, showing all manner of accidents and natural disasters. He kept a trove of photographs of cadavers in various states of mutilation, which he liked to show around, and also delighted in telling the story of his mother’s first husband, a German who had been decapitated by the Nazis. “He was a charming young man,” a friend from that period told me, “who had an extreme attraction to the macabre.”
The struggles of the first century of Communist Party rule are being buried by the need to cohere around what Xi calls “the great rejuvenation” of China.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/does-xi-jinpings-seizure-of-history-threaten-his-future
The full self-portrait won’t be released until after the meeting—which consists of four days of closed sessions—but it’s been clear for months that Xi is determined to eradicate what he calls “historical nihilism,” the corrosive doubt that could threaten the dominance of his party. During the summer, China’s official online Rumor Refutation Platform, a Web site that collects public tips and reports levels of purportedly false content online, warned of attempts to “smear Party history” through what it called efforts to “slander and discredit revolutionary leaders.” Under Chinese law, a person found to have spread a rumor faces up to fifteen years in prison. A list of the “top-ten” most-circulated “rumors” ranged from deep strategic questions—“Did the Communist Party avoid confronting the Japanese army directly?”—to sensitive details, such as the suggestion that Chairman Mao’s son died during the Korean War because he gave away his battlefield position by “cooking egg fried rice.” (Mao Anying died in an air strike in 1950. The fried-rice story, which has never been confirmed, outrages nationalists and Party agencies.)
Try martial arts (to wrestle the phone away), a game of jacks, or a time-travel journey to confront the young Steve Jobs.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/15/want-to-get-junior-away-from-that-screen
2. Find a quiet moment with your son, preferably when he is not live-streaming a video game for an audience of perfect strangers. Explain to him how, when Grandpa was a boy, he occupied his spare time by playing jacks.
NFT.NYC, a gathering for nonfungible token enthusiasts, offered a taste of a crypto-filled future.
Instead of selling normal tickets to the party — which featured a performance by the Russian punk-protest group Pussy Riot — Friends With Benefits required attendees to scan their crypto wallets at the door. If you owned at least five $FWB — the group’s membership tokens, which cost about $140 apiece as of party time — you got in. Bringing a plus-one required having 75 $FWB, or about $10,000. (There was a way to skip the line altogether: win an auction for the party’s official NFT, although that ended up selling for more than $50,000, making it a poor choice for the budget-conscious raver.)
How a drifter from Milwaukee became the chief executioner of the Cuban revolution and a test case for U.S. civil rights.
via The Atavist Magazine: https://magazine.atavist.com/the-butcher-of-havana-cuba-che-castro-aclu/
But if his origins were humble, at El Floridita the man needed no introduction. His image had appeared on the front pages of newspapers across the United States. In fact, after Hemingway, he was probably the most notorious American in the Caribbean. His name was Herman Marks, and he had risen through the ranks of Castro’s rebel army to command the revolution’s firing squads. Around Havana, there were rumors that he had a sadistic streak; his version of a coup de grâce, it was said, was to empty his pistol into a condemned man’s face, so relatives could not recognize the corpse. Marks’s brutal work had earned him a nickname: He was El Carnicero—the Butcher.
In an age of rising populism, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists is exposing the hypocrisy behind the hidden wealth.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/uncovering-the-secret-offshore-accounts-of-the-global-elite
“Some stories are too big, too complex, and too global for lone-wolf muckrakers or even individual news organizations to tackle,” Ryle has said. “We believe collaboration is the wave of the future in global journalism.”
In Scott Kimball, the FBI thought it had found a high-value informant who could help solve big cases. What it got instead was lies, betrayal, and murder.
via The Atavist Magazine: https://magazine.atavist.com/the-snitch-fbi-scott-kimball-informant-killer-colorado/
On June 20, 2003, Kimball was released from jail. He told Lori McLeod that the arrest had been a ruse, part of his cover as an FBI agent. Because he was released so quickly, she had little reason to question the story. Once again Kimball began working as an informant. He wouldn’t last long.
What brought the teenager and so many others to the streets of Kenosha, Wis., equipped for war?
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/magazine/kyle-rittenhouse-kenosha-wisconsin.html
“I didn’t recognize Kenosha,” Alvin D. Owens told me, recalling the scene at the Civic Center that night. More to the point, he said, “I didn’t recognize Kenoshans.” Owens, a 53-year-old local barber and prominent figure in Kenosha’s Black community, had helped plan the city’s first Kneel for Nine in June. When the crowd marched on the public-safety building after the Blake shooting, he rushed to the scene and tried unsuccessfully to persuade them to engage in a similar kneeling protest. Later outside the museum, he watched, dumbfounded, as a white woman handed out gasoline bombs fashioned out of aluminum foil.
Company documents show that the social network’s employees repeatedly raised red flags about the spread of misinformation and conspiracies before and after the contested November vote.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/22/technology/facebook-election-misinformation.html
Sixteen months before last November’s presidential election, a researcher at Facebook described an alarming development. She was getting content about the conspiracy theory QAnon within a week of opening an experimental account, she wrote in an internal report.
Scare stories on “left-wing illiberalism” display a familiar pattern.
Link: https://michaelhobbes.substack.com/p/moral-panic-journalism
The media has tremendous power to shape public opinion. Reporters and editors should not just be aware of their ability to spread moral panics. They should be terrified of it.
The chaotic American withdrawal forced individual soldiers, aid workers, and journalists to decide which Afghans would be saved.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/who-gets-to-escape-the-taliban
What became apparent at the gates of the Baron is that there was no American strategy for leaving Afghanistan—none that considered the future of the Afghans left behind. President Biden asserted to the press for months, at times angrily, that Kabul was not Saigon. Based on what I witnessed, he was right. It was worse.
Critics say an Indian state’s campaign to expel longtime residents on government land marks the ruling party’s latest campaign against Muslims.
They swarmed into his village, wielding sticks, to beat up participants in what local residents described as a peaceful protest against forced evictions. When the protesters fought back, they opened fire, killing two people, including a 12-year-old boy. Then the police began burning local homes and the possessions inside: a bed, a quilt, hay for feeding their cattle.
A high-flying German media giant is ahead on digital media but seems stuck in the past when it comes to the workplace and deal-making.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/17/business/media/axel-springer-bild-julian-reichelt.html
Mr. Döpfner, who once described himself “a mixture of aesthete and carpet salesman,” is an enthusiastic deal-maker who stands 6-foot-7. Under his leadership, Axel Springer has had elaborate holiday parties, including a disco night in 2018 that included 10 D.J.s, 512 disco balls and a joint performance by the Village People and company board members. His dance moves at one party left an impression on the company’s slacks-wearing partners at Politico. He also owns one of Germany’s leading collection of female nude paintings.