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Apple TV+ is streaming an 8-hour remix of the Severance theme by ODESZA that is perfect music for your innie to refine macrodata to. The workday-long video is a 23-minute mix that’s looped and set to footage from the show. Legit adding this to the work music rotation. (via @margarita.bsky.social)
A Robert Frost poem from 1918, ironically entitled “Nothing New”, has been published for the first time in the New Yorker’s 100th anniversary issue.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen this photo before, of artist Amy Sherald and former First Lady Michelle Obama sharing a hug during a session for Sherald’s iconic portrait of Obama. What a different time that was, huh?
“Egyptologists have discovered the first tomb of a pharaoh since Tutankhamun’s was uncovered over a century ago.”
This is an amazingly realistic 3D model of San Francisco’s Sutro Tower that you can zoom, pan, fly through, and interact with. This model was made using a technique called Gaussian splatting; creator Vincent Woo explains:
This scan is made possible by recent advances in Gaussian Splatting. This is an emerging technology that lets us quickly create very detailed models just from photographs. For this model (or splat, as we call them), my friend Daylen and I flew our drones around Sutro Tower at a respectful distance for an afternoon until we had collected a few thousand photographs.
I then aligned these pictures in free software called RealityCapture. Alignment is the process that teaches the computer that a bunch of points in different images all actually correspond with the same point in real life. Then I used another piece of free software called gsplat to produce the 3D model itself.
The model looks amazing…I can’t believe it’s just stitched-together photos. (via @biddul.ph)
Craig Mod on how “leave no trace” and “pack it in, pack it out” is not just for campers and backpackers in Japan. “The Japanese way is the correct way. Be an adult. Own your garbage.”
Here’s what it’s like watching all 24 hours of Christian Marclay’s The Clock at MoMA. “Although I’m literally sitting in a clock, time is meaningless. One hour flies by and the next is like spending an afternoon at the DMV.”
I can already tell this is going to be my favorite thing of the day: Doechii singing and rapping about anxiety over Gotye’s Somebody That I Used To Know from 2019. If you didn’t know she could sing, well you do now.
If my math is right, Doechii was 21 in this video, living in NYC, vlogging about going to thrift stores (on her old YouTube channel that only has a little over 9,000 subscribers), and working hard on her music. I think it paid off?
P.S. This video from 2015 of Doechii in high school singing Do You Want to Build a Snowman? with her friends is super sweet.
Betty White is getting a stamp from the USPS that commemorates her “warmth, wit and charisma”. The first-day-of-issue event is being held at the LA Zoo on March 27 and is open to the public (RSVP info here).
I saw Paddington in Peru last weekend and so it’s been difficult to take Ben Whishaw seriously as a hitman in Black Doves.
Edith Zimmerman imagines books written by fairy tale and Disney princesses in their 40s, incl. “A Whole New World: Life With Bifocals” by Jasmine & “Where’s That Sea Witch When You Need Her? Turning Back Into a Mermaid Once the Kids Are Grown” by Ariel.
Reflections on 25 years of Interconnected. Big congratulations to Matt Webb on his blogging silver jubilee. His is one of the most active & creative minds on the internet.
Hi. I’ve gotten a few notes recently about the shift in direction here at KDO, so I wanted to quickly point back to this post from a few weeks ago that explains what’s going on with the site:
As you might have noticed (and if my inbox is any indication, you have), I have pivoted to posting almost exclusively about the coup happening in the United States right now. My focus will be on this crisis for the foreseeable future. I don’t yet know to what extent other things will make it back into the mix. I still very much believe that we need art and beauty and laughter and distraction and all of that, but I also believe very strongly that this situation is too important and potentially dangerous to ignore.
And again, no hard feelings if that’s not what you’re here for and you need to step away or cancel your membership. Thank you to those of you who have written in with support, including folks who work for the government or for companies & organizations who are already being affected by the purges and illegal funding cuts. Hearing that my efforts here are useful in some way keeps me going.
That said, we’re doing Foolishness Friday again today. I miss this place as a source of creativity, a chronicle of the best that humanity is capable of, and somewhere folks can come to have a bit of a laugh. I don’t know if this is going to be a weekly thing or if some of this is going to be working its way back into the site on a regular basis — I guess we’ll find out together!
Anyway, how are things going with you all? I’ve grown tired of winter. We have so much snow here…last weekend it took me an hour and 15 min to shovel a path to my car and then to dig the car out. I’m reading Timothy Ryback’s book about Hitler’s rise to power (no reason), watching Black Doves on Amazon, and playing a lot of Fortnite (I think the new season is out soon/today?). This weekend, I’m hoping to spend some time with my daughter and going wild ice skating again.
Trump expected to take control of USPS, fire postal board. “This is something that does not belong to the president or the White House. It belongs to the American people.” That goes for everything else they’re trying to steal too.
An essay on the role of music in political change, with example from Belgium, Chile, the Baltic states, Russia, and the USA.
How to Organize Our Way Out of the Trump-Musk Putsch. “The one thing we know from historical fights against authoritarians is that success depends on a persistent, courageous, broad-based, and unified opposition.”
Surviving Fascism: Lessons from Jim Crow. “Accept that this is happening. Denial won’t change the outcome.”
Thing I should not be surprised by but I am somehow surprised by: a gold-framed photo of Trump’s mug shot on the cover of the NY Post hangs in an office near the Oval Office.
How Democracy Supporters Can Still Beat Back the Rising Tide of Fascism. “We are (still) in the majority. They are divided. Extreme levels of material inequality are eroding democracy. Knowledge is power. Organization matters.”
“Masses of enraged, terrified people are looking at the analog, slow-motion leadership of Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer and the zero-calorie rhetoric of House leader Hakeem Jeffries and want them replaced by people who know how to fight.”
My Open Letter to Elon Musk. “I will use every tool at my disposal to protect this country from Trump. I will litigate to defend voting rights until there are no cases left to bring. I will speak out against authoritarianism until my last breath.”
A bunch of libertarians took over a small NH town and couldn’t stop the bear attacks. “Several of the town residents had taken to feeding the bears, more or less just because they could.” Ah, FAFO strikes again.
Judith Butler: To Imagine a World After This, Democracy Needs the Humanities (and imagination). “The world we have known is the world that is bound up with the movement toward greater destruction. What about a world we are yet to know?”
Political scientist Adam Przeworski (born in Nazi-occupied Poland) is keeping a diary. “I am trying to find categories in which to place the current situation and historical precedents from which one could draw some enlightenment. I fail in both.”
“If you’re looking for some great databases of the ongoing resistance (as well as some other useful resources) here’s a thread of where to start.”
87% Of Loud Crashing Noises Are Nothing, Report Top Experts From Other Room. “Despite initially reporting ‘Dammit!’ and ‘God dammit!’ separated by several seconds…”
Microsoft claims they’ve made a significant breakthrough in quantum computing involving Majorana quasiparticles. “It’s theoretically possible for an electron to hide itself, with each half hiding at either end of the wire.” 😳
Where Do Trans Kids Go from Here? “I never thought that my country would want to disappear my child, and would want to essentially deny her existence as a person.” Heartbreaking, infuriating, cruel, immoral.
In the most recent issue of Garbage Day, Ryan Broderick writes about how Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” has been embraced by the Trump administration in both governance and in messaging.
The brain-breaking feeling you get watching something like the ASMR video or the time you waste trying to determine whether the image Musk shared is real or not is, like with Project 2025 and the executive orders, by design. It’s meant to initially trigger you and ultimately wear you down.
Stuff like this always makes me think of Hannah Arendt’s comments in this 1974 interview, particularly the last line (emphasis mine):
The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie — a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days — but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
And of Toni Morrison on the true function of racism:
It’s important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says that you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.
Timothy Snyder writing in the aftermath of January 6th:
When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions.
“Firing civil servants and dismantling government departments is how aspiring strongmen consolidate personal power”. Here’s how that has played out recently in Türkiye, Benin, Hungary, and Venezuela.
“The odds of a city-killer asteroid impact in 2032 keep rising. Should we be worried?” If the JWST can’t rule out an impact in the next few months, we may have to wait until 2028 to know for sure. “Bit awkward, if so.”
Timothy Snyder recaps what he heard at the Munich Security Conference about the new foreign policy strategy being pursued by the Trump administration. He calls it “affirmative action for dictators” (of Russia and China).
Russell Vought is a Christian nationalist, a significant contributor to Project 2025, the policy director of the RNC’s platform committee for the 2024 election, and is currently the director of the Office of Management and Budget and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
In 2023, he gave a private speech at a meeting of his Center for Renewing America think tank in which he describes the goal of the purge of governmental employees that’s happening right now. A short clip of the speech obtained by ProPublica:
A transcript:
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.
From the accompanying article:
In his 2024 speech, Vought said he was spending the majority of his time helping lead Project 2025 and drafting an agenda for a future Trump presidency. “We have detailed agency plans,” he said. “We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on.”
Vought laid out how his think tank is crafting the legal rationale for invoking the Insurrection Act, a law that gives the president broad power to use the military for domestic law enforcement. The Washington Post previously reported the issue was at the top of the Center for Renewing America’s priorities.
“We want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defense community come in and say, ‘That’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do,’” he said. Vought held up the summer 2020 unrest following George Floyd’s murder as an example of when Trump ought to have had the ability to deploy the armed forces but was stymied.
In another video, Vought stated that the “entire apparatus” of the US government was vulnerable and “exposed to our strategy”. And in this one, he talks about the president’s need to be able to ignore laws.
Over at Vox, Zack Beauchamp wrote about Vought today too: The obscure manifesto that explains the Trump-Musk power grab.
In 2022, Vought published an essay in the American Mind, a publication of the arch-Trumpist Claremont Institution, that provides an answer to some of these questions. Read properly, it serves as kind of a Rosetta stone for the early days of the Trump administration — explaining the logic behind the contemptuous lawbreaking that has become its trademark.
Beauchamp continues:
Vought believes that executive agencies have, with Congress and the courts’ blessing, usurped so much power that the Constitution is no longer in effect. He believes that presidents have a duty to try and enforce the true constitution, using whatever novel arguments they can dream up, even if the rest of the government might reject them. And he believes that threatening to ignore the Supreme Court isn’t a lawless abuse of power, but rather the very means by which the separation of powers is defended.
Russell Vought can call this whatever he wants, but it’s fairly clear what it amounts to: a recipe for a constitutional crisis. And it’s one the president currently appears to be following to a tee.
You should read both articles in their entirety.
Part of what this underscores for me is that this is not just Elon Musk’s coup. Musk seems to be following his own playbook but it’s clear that there are multiple, intersecting, mutually beneficial things going on there with Trump, Musk, Vought, and many Republican members of Congress. As Osita Nwanevu wrote recently in the Guardian:
Democratic republican governance will never be secured in America without turning our attention to the structure of our economic system as well. Dismantling the federal government to prevent that from happening was a key object of the conservative project before Trump. It has remained so with him at the head of the Republican party and will remain so whenever his time is up.
Not sure what else to say about this…their plan is all laid out in Vought’s remarks and in Project 2025. They’ve crossed some of this stuff off of the checklist already, so I guess we should be on the lookout for the rest of it, e.g. when/if protesting ramps up as the weather warms, we should expect Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and attempt to use the US military to quell dissent.
If you’re wondering “where are all the protests?!”, they are happening all over the place. “From Stonewall to Tesla dealerships, protesters are pioneering a form of opposition that doesn’t necessarily center on Washington, D.C.”
Wokeness Is Not to Blame for Trump. “I believe that it’s we elites, who do not enjoy getting dogpiled on social media or having college students yell at us about settler colonialism, who are the most put off by the hyperwokeness of our era.”
Lizzie Wade’s forthcoming book is about human resilience in the face of cataclysm. “For millennia, the rich & powerful have conspired to conceal how resourceful, creative, and resilient humans beings are, and always have been, when the worst befalls us.”
This afternoon on Twitter, the official White House account posted an ASMR video of an immigrant deportation flight. Elon Musk quoted-tweeted the video with “Haha wow 🧌🏅”. Here’s a screen recording I made of the video & tweet:
A popular genre on YouTube, ASMR videos are designed to trigger feelings of relaxation and low-grade euphoria through sounds and imagery. In this video, the Trump White House invites us to relax to the clinking of handcuffs, the rattling of chains, and other sounds of immigrants being shackled like criminals and placed on flights out of the country. Some of those being deported are not criminals, are being imprisoned in countries other than their own, could be sent to a detention center in Guantanamo Bay, or might be sent back to countries with autocratic regimes to face persecution or death.
This is unfathomably cruel and monstrous. Vile. Evil. The stuff of sadistic dictators and terrorists. Nazis. People who killed cats for fun when they were kids. From the top down, the people serving in the Trump administration are sick, inhuman, heartless. This video absolutely gutted me. I am so very ashamed to be an American today. (via @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social)
Over the past 20 years, archaeologists working in the Amazon have found evidence of an ancient civilization that reached a peak population of 1 million around 150 CE.
Good read. “Dismantling the federal government to prevent that from happening was a key object of the conservative project before Trump. It has remained so with him at the head of the Republican party and will remain so whenever his time is up.”
The War on DEI Is a Smoke Screen. “MAGA’s attacks on ‘wokeness’ and diversity, equity, and inclusion are a thinly veiled attack on the Civil Rights Movement itself.”
Ethan Marcotte resigned from his job at 18F (a GSA subsidiary) rather than participate in the Trump/Musk purge of gov’t employees. “I didn’t want to sit down with anyone involved in that, and pretend like any part of their work was lawful, legitimate, or moral.”
Musk and the Trump Administration are lying about not purging anyone from the FAA involved in safety. A fired FAA employee: “The danger to the national airspace can’t be understated. This is a very real threat to the American flying public.”
In case you need a new t-shirt: READ BOOKS PUNCH NAZIS. “All proceeds from this campaign are going to SafePlace International in Oakland.”
Elon Musk has claimed that his “DOGE” team has found evidence of “massive fraud” at the Social Security Administration, alleging that 150-year-old Americans were receiving benefit checks. I saw this claim easily debunked over the weekend, but Wired has a good writeup of it. Basically, the programming language that these systems are written in (COBOL) often uses an arbitrary date as a baseline…most commonly a date from 150 years ago.
Computer programmers quickly claimed that the 150 figure was not evidence of fraud, but rather the result of a weird quirk of the Social Security Administration’s benefits system, which was largely written in COBOL, a 60-year-old programming language that undergirds SSA’s databases as well as systems from many other US government agencies.
COBOL is rarely used today, and as such, Musk’s cadre of young engineers may well be unfamiliar with it.
Because COBOL does not have a date type, some implementations rely instead on a system whereby all dates are coded to a reference point. The most commonly used is May 20, 1875, as this was the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the “Convention du Mètre.”
These systems default to the reference point when a birth date is missing or incomplete, meaning all of those entries in 2025 would show an age of 150.
The SSA also automatically stops benefit payments whenever someone reaches the age of 115.
Marisa Kabas: Elon Musk & his young acolytes are actual, open Nazis. “Whatever comes to mind when you think of a Nazi, that is for whom this country is currently being run.”
Brian Merchant, author of the excellent Blood in the Machine (about the Luddites), talked to a bunch of federal tech workers about the illegal purge of federal employees and shuttering of entire government agencies (also illegal): “what’s happening, how they’re processing it, and how they’re pushing back”.
“I will also say that as the Thursday deadline [for the initial fork in the road offers] approached OPM sent out these increasingly desperate emails that felt like nothing so much as a Democratic candidate at a fundraising deadline,” one worker told me. He says his team of over a dozen will soon be down to just a handful of employees. Another tells me that people of color are disproportionately being targeted for layoffs in their department. But DOGE is also trying to winnow staff through other means, too: Demanding a return to office, even for those hired as remote workers and who have never stepped foot in a government office, while at the same time, instructing the GSA to sell off or close federal buildings — making it even harder for employees to find an office to come into.
It all underlies the callousness at the heart of DOGE’s campaign, and the fact that this is an effort to hollow out the state, the firings unfurling often regardless of what a person or department really does.
“I am not a career-long gov employee by any means but even I can feel how the bedrock assumptions of what we do are being swept away,” a federal technologist told me. “Like clearly the people in charge have no interest in the missions of the agencies and there isn’t any recourse to stay the courts, as far as we can tell.”
“If they even sweep away USAID, the velvet glove of US imperialism, because they occasionally piss off Putin and Orban,” he adds, “then it’s not clear how much hope there is for things like clean air and food stamps.”
“I had BigBalls in a meeting,” another worker told me. “When I saw him I balked, and I thought ‘Oh hey, someone brought their teenaged son to work today.’ He showed up along with some others, and was not introduced as anything but an advisor.” In fact, that was one of the leading DOGE officials, wielding significant power over the US government.
(via the morning news)
“The future of the Department of Education — and of the students with disabilities who depend on it — will likely hinge […] on the world views of two billionaires who abhor what they perceive as weakness and waste.”
NBA star Victor Wembanyama brought a book with him to the All-Star Game and said that he reads before every game. My new favorite player! 📗❤️
The Global Economic Policy Uncertainty Index is at an all-time high right now, besting even the economic uncertainty at the start of the pandemic (May 2020).
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