Category: The World We Live In

Short News, Tinfoil Hat Edition

~ Jackson ~ Leave a comment

I’m a member of my town’s CERT chapter. One of the priorities of our team leadership has been countering the misinformation and conspiracy theories that are circulating. These days, it’s a noble ambition: I myself have heard the most crackpot utterances from people whom I otherwise consider to be sane and rational human beings. If we’re going to get through this, it’s because we washed our hands, not because we derailed trains into 5G towers.

So to that end, here’s a quick list of articles useful in debunking those folks in your life who’ve taken one too many bong hits around the lava lamp.

No, people are not hoarding toilet paper. The disappearance of TP from store shelves is due to more of it being used at home than at work. Commercial TP is a very different product than consumer TP and cannot easily be repurposed for home use. [Marker]

No, COVID-19 is a not an engineered bioweapon. Analysis of the spikes on the coronavirus has shown they’re so effective at penetrating human cells that their intentional creation is beyond modern technology — only Mother Nature is capable of it. COVID-19 is very similar to viruses that infect bats and pangolins, and it probably passed to humans through an unknown third-party vector. [Forbes]

No, we can’t just isolate the elderly or vulnerable. Not only is it logistically impossible, but concentrating at-risk populations would just make it easier for a contagion like COVID-19 to burn through them. Also, the fact that seniors and people with existing ailments are usually cared for by younger, healthier people makes strict isolation unworkable. [Washington Post]

No, it’s not too late for social distancing. This particularly irrational theory posits that because we didn’t begin social distancing back in January, it doesn’t matter what we do now and therefore the disease should take its natural course. The incubation stage for COVID-19 is 2 to 14 days and a carrier infects an average (the R0) of 2 to 2.5 people 5 to 6 people (updated by the CDC). If you can’t figure out that math, I can’t help you. So yes, regardless of what happened months ago, what we do right now has a large effect on how quickly we get through this and how many wind up dead. [CDC, Business Insider]

Update, 8 April: After further reading, I now realize the above is part of a bigger misrepresentation which supposes that COVID-19 has been present in the United States for months and therefore has largely saturated the population, and because a majority of people are asymptomatic, social distancing and quarantines are pointless since most of us already have the virus. If this was true, however, we would expect to see antibodies present in a majority of the populace, which we’re not finding. Complicating matters is a new study out of Shanghai that counted low levels or even no levels of antibodies in recovered patients, suggesting they could be re-infected. Update, 9 April: The Shanghai study looked for an unreliable marker. Other studies searching for better markers suggest a strong presence of antibodies in recovered patients.

No, Lamont did not lie about an infant dying of COVID-19. During one of his daily press conferences last week, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont stated that a six-week-old infant in the Hartford area died of the virus. This may or may not be true: the unresponsive infant was brought to a hospital, where he/she died. Currently, anyone dying in a hospital is tested for COVID-19 and the infant tested positive. Was it causation or coincidence? We won’t know until the medical examiner announces the autopsy results, but if we don’t assume that all deaths of positive people were caused by the virus, then we risk under-reporting the number of deaths and throwing off calculations of the disease’s mortality rate (among other things). Some anti-vaxxers/pandemic disbelievers, spurred by conspiracy theorist and all-around wingnut Candace Owens, have accused Lamont of lying about the death in an attempt to scare the public, introduce Communism, establish UN concentration camps, etc. While announcing the infant’s death by COVID-19 may have been premature, there’s zero evidence that Lamont or other officials lied or misled the public. Until the autopsy results contradict the cause of death, the infant is being tallied as a casualty of the virus. [Hartford Courant]

Take the Next Chance, and the Next

~ Jackson ~ Leave a comment

This Is the Noise That Keeps Me AwakeFor Christmas I received the memoir This Is the Noise That Keeps Me Awake, a big coffee-table book about Garbage, probably my all-time favorite band.

Incredibly Mrs. Kuhl and I saw them live for the first time this past summer when they toured with Blondie, and it’s strange to think I’d never seen them in the twenty-plus years of my fandom; but then I remember that in the 90s I was ramen-noodles poor and by the time we had money and were doing well enough to afford concert tickets and big nights on the town, we had babies and toddlers.

Flipping through the book at random I was immediately struck by a quote from Shirley Manson. In 2005 the band took a seven-year hiatus, and during that time Manson acted as a killer robot on the show Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. It’s not as weird a transition as you might think; Manson had been a print model in her teenage years and intended to segue into acting before, as she said, she “stumbled into music.” She took acting lessons with instructor Sharon Chatten, and although she hasn’t acted much since the show was cancelled, Manson considers it a positive experience:

“She completely changed my attitude to being an artist and my approach to making music,” says Manson. “She taught me how not to focus on results but instead to focus on ideas and taking creative detours and risks; how to cut the strings of who I thought I was and instead be in the moment, completely free of external appraisal.”

No musician, I suppose, begins her career with anything more than a vague idea about playing music. Then one day she may say, I want to record an album, but she has little idea of how the final product will sound, perhaps only a blurry notion at best. There can be no real understanding of the result; she can only understand what she is doing in that day, only in that moment.

She can only record one song, one idea, then another, and another, until she has enough to fill an album. Then later she does the whole process again, then maybe again. Eventually she has albums and albums of music and can look back and see a career and a trajectory which was completely opaque at the beginning.

Having two sons, our family is not immune to periodic Star Wars excitement whenever a new installment appears, and Manson’s sentiment dovetails with a line that hooked me while recently rewatching Rogue One. Toward the story’s climax the heroine Jyn Erso explains her strategy for infiltrating the Empire’s top-secret base. “They’ve no idea we’re coming,” she tells her misfit team. “No reason to expect us. If we can make it to the ground, we’ll take the next chance, and the next, on and on, until we win or the chances are spent.”

Take creative detours, take risks. Take chances. That, I think, is the best new year’s advice I can provide, to myself and to everybody.

What Matters Is What You Believe

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As an epilogue to my last post about Twin Peaks (among other things), director and cowriter David Lynch recently made some comments about the series and the nature of ambiguity itself, both in art and real life:

When it comes to the final moments of this season, he said, “What matters is what you believe happened. Many things in life just happen and we have to come to our own conclusions. You can, for example, read a book that raises a series of questions, and you want to talk to the author, but he died a hundred years ago. That’s why everything is up to you.”

If Robert Aickman was to be resurrected as a filmmaker, he would be Lynch.

Short News, Post-Election Post Edition

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In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely.

— Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt

We can’t stop here, this is bat country. Are you experiencing anxiety, depression, and terror after last week’s election? Congratulations! Now you know how it feels to be a libertarian after every election! As a veteran of such emotional swings, might I suggest a period of self-reflection? During this time you could consider the libertarian idea of opposing government’s — and specifically, the executive’s — possession of far-reaching powers; as well as the possibility that blaming white people for all the world’s ills is unproductive, and that better ends might result from outreach toward America’s rural working classes. Following that, I propose sampling my daily medicine. Work out. Run. Read. Write. Help settlements. Don’t assume someone else will fix a problem. Keep a sense of humor. You’re not alone.

Let us not have such a machine any longer. Earlier this week LitHub published a list of 25 books for resisting the coming Trump junta. Notably absent was Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience. Thoreau’s full-throated cry has been out of favor with some on the left ever since Ronald Reagan (who was raised a Democrat) co-opted the radicalist idea that government is the problem and not the solution, but maybe it’s due for a comeback. Open Culture has a nice backgrounder on Civil Disobedience, an essay I find supremely inspirational and evergreen.

Truth is weirder than any fiction. If instead of nonfiction you’re in need of a politically relevant novel, I really enjoyed Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country.

By the all-seeing Eye of Agamotto. Doctor Strange was a fun but fairly mediocre experience with its main strength being the excellent interpretation of Steve Ditko’s vertiginous artwork from the character’s early days. While not a 1:1 translation, the visuals conveyed that same MC Escher sense of distortion and confusion that disconcerted this young reader. Over at Vulture, Abraham Riesman has a great piece about stalking Ditko (still alive — who knew?), and along the way details Ditko’s feud with Stan Lee and his gradual withdrawal from the world in anger and bitterness. It’s a fascinating and yet scary CT scan of an incredible talent consumed by mental illness.

Just say nyet. Probably because the Russians and Chinese are inside all of our servers these days, I’ve been flooded with spam through the phonetically rendered e-mail address that used to be on this site’s About page. I’ve removed the address until I can determine a better way to present it. In the meantime, if you want to contact me the best way is either @ing or DMing me through Twitter.

Antisocial Media

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Diogenes by Jean-Leon Gerome, 1860
Diogenes by Jean-Leon Gerome, 1860

It’s not unusual to hate LinkedIn.

The biggest complaint, of course, is the endless tidal surge of e-mails and notices it vomits into your in-box, a result of LinkedIn’s strange blacksmithery wherein a CV-posting site has been hammered into a shape wanted by nobody except management consultants and listicle-writing malarkey gurus. What started as a competitor to Monster.com and HotJobs has mutated into a kind of business-centric Facebook, a misshapen chimera of a job site too incompetent to help users actually find a job but well placed to poke you into sending pre-scripted junk mail about work anniversaries. In that sense I hate LinkedIn as much as the next person.

But what really frustrates me is its structural prejudice against freelance and gig-oriented careers.

LinkedIn is made for nine-to-fivers, for people who have regular jobs with HR departments and second interviews and responsibilities that can be reduced to bullet points and executive summaries. It’s complete shit for writers and artists and other project-based doers and makers (we’re called “creatives,” apparently). Sure, you can list articles you’ve written, only to learn LinkedIn automatically orders them by date of publication. This means that book you wrote a few years ago will be buried by all the little stuff you’ve written since, whereas you might actually want to showcase the book at the top of the column.

Worse, you cannot add an image to accompany that publication, so you can’t even post, you know, the fucking cover of the fucking book you wrote. Contrast that with the Work Experience areas where clock-punchers can input all sorts of pictures and videos and presentations to describe their duties at Acme Widget.

I know freelancers who have completely deleted their LinkedIn accounts in frustration. I haven’t gone that far yet; instead, exasperated and angry, I have stripped my profile to the basics and walked away.

As an alternative, last week I established a profile on Contently, which is a marketing company that advertises access to 55,000 creatives to generate content for said marketing. I suspect the 55,000 freelancers are actually mannequins in the shop window and any real work is performed by in-house staffers, but regardless Contently does have a nice GUI for displaying freelance work. You can add URLs, edit the headlines and story descriptions, add images, and rank stories however you please. You can even upload PDF scans of print clips, which is good for me since many of my favorite clips are no longer online (and the PDFs download and display quickly too). The easiness and attractiveness of the site is definitely a rabbit-hole: I wrote more than a hundred articles for Dig and Calliope alone, all of which I could scan and upload. For now I’ve added 14 greatest hits, with more to come as I jump-start my writing career once again. Forward always.

Recently my buddy Eric and I were discussing why the culture of Instagram tends to be generally nicer and more kid-friendly than, say, Twitter. He pointed out that Twitter weighs all input, whether it’s a piece of original news or an insulting response, as equal whereas IG demands that users contribute unique content, with commentary on that content being secondary. This means it’s easy to fire off an insult on IG but it’s also easy to control and destroy it, while the process of posting an image is itself a barrier (albeit not insurmountable) to trolls and haters, who add nothing. And yet that same hierarchy of content means you would never use IG as a go-to source in a breaking-news situation as you would with Twitter.

I have no idea what good will come of making my Contently profile; there’s no networking element like most social media so it sits there, cold and isolated.

That’s all social media in a nutshell: imperfect. Facebook is 10 percent pictures of your nephews and nieces and 90 percent “I can’t believe so-and-so posted that;” Goodreads a madhouse where contact between authors and readers is resented; and Twitter a news service and public forum co-owned by a Saudi prince that likes to ban women’s rights groups. Each platform is capricious and opaque, useful in some senses and completely unreliable in others. A best-case scenario would be an assignment from Contently; but it’s probably better to expect nothing because all of the promises of social media are empty.