“We should be cautious about putting too much faith or fear into elected officials,” said Snowden. “At the end of the day, this is just a president.”

Source: Big Think

It will not be enough, in the coming months, to say that Trump voters were simply angry. Cramer shows that there are nuances to political rage. To understand Trump’s success, she argues, we have to understand how he tapped into people’s sense of self.

Source: Jeff Guo, The Washington Post

Our technology has changed this election, and is now undermining our ability to empathize with each other

Source: Tobias Rose-Stockwell, Medium

“Once again, Bruce Schneier freaks me out“, says Gabe. Schneier writes:

The ultrasonic pitches are embedded into TV commercials or are played when a user encounters an ad displayed in a computer browser. While the sound can’t be heard by the human ear, nearby tablets and smartphones can detect it. When they do, browser cookies can now pair a single user to multiple devices and keep track of what TV commercials the person sees, how long the person watches the ads, and whether the person acts on the ads by doing a Web search or buying a product.

Source: Macdrifter

‘On the one side of this fight stands Bernie, plus his youthful followers, plus the progressive Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party (let’s finally say goodbye to the neoliberal, Wall Street-protecting, labor-union-ignoring, white-working-class-insulting global-elite Davos Clinton/Obama wing of the Democratic Party, who’ve handed our government to the GOP). On the other side lurks the army of resentful older white mater fornicators who voted for Trump.

The Trumpists will lose this fight, because our economy is about to be crippled by an unfettered GOP in charge of all three branches of government. The failure of the GOP’s discredited economic remedies will fire up the resentment of their white working class base to the highest heavens (a base who already believes that Washington’s Republicans have done sweet blow-all for them). By the end of his first term, Trump will face a maddened, resentful electorate, burning to stick long pointy needles in his obese effigy.

Get ready for 2020, when Elizabeth Warren will step into the arena and run against Trump. She will generate even more excitement than Bernie did. Trump cannot give his followers the satisfaction they seek — nobody can — and Elizabeth will bury him. In the end, this macho bully will meet his match at a woman’s hands. Maybe that damn Hillary bitch could not quite settle his hash, but this here Elizabeth witch will double-knot his jock strap.

If Trump is a white backlash against Obama, a total swing of the pendulum, Warren will be a progressive backlash against the Trump phenomenon, another total swing of the pendulum.Just you wait: the Donald Trump presidency is making an Elizabeth Warren presidency inevitable…’

Source: 3quarksdaily

‘In dark times, it’s tempting to give up on politics. The philosopher Charles Taylor explains why we shouldn’t.’

Source: The New Yorker

This bystander’s guide to Islamophobic harassment was created by a young illustrator and filmmaker who works in Paris and goes by Maeril. She made versions in both French and English.

Below the guide, Maeril wrote that this technique works for any kind of harassment in a public space, but she was specifically focusing on the Islamophobia she’s witnessed in Paris.

Source: Atrending.com

In the wave of reactions to Donald Trump’s election as the 45th president of the U.S., safety pins have taken on a new meaning in the country.

 

Some Americans are wearing safety pins as a symbol of solidarity with victims of racism, homophobia and religious discrimination. People have spoken out on Twitter to say that their safety pins show that they are an ally to marginalized groups.

Source: PBS NewsHour

We don’t get to make ourselves feel better by putting on safety pins and self-designating ourselves as allies.

Source: Huffington Post

How a man you’ve never heard of could be our last chance to stop Trump.

Source: Medium

Sounds like it may be worth supporting Jackson Cantrell’s Louisiana Senate bid. 

In the early hours of Nov. 9, 2016, the winner of the presidential election was declared. As the day unfolded, the extent to which a moral rhinoceritis had taken hold was apparent. People magazine had a giddy piece about the president-elect’s daughter and her family, a sequence of photos that they headlined “way too cute.” In The New York Times, one opinion piece suggested that the belligerent bigot’s supporters ought not be shamed. Another asked whether this president-elect could be a good president and found cause for optimism. Cable news anchors were able to express their surprise at the outcome of the election, but not in any way vocalize their fury. 
All around were the unmistakable signs of normalization in progress. So many were falling into line without being pushed. It was happening at tremendous speed, like a contagion. And it was catching even those whose plan was, like Dudard’s in “Rhinoceros,” to criticize “from the inside.”
Evil settles into everyday life when people are unable or unwilling to recognize it. It makes its home among us when we are keen to minimize it or describe it as something else. This is not a process that began a week or month or year ago. It did not begin with drone assassinations, or with the war on Iraq. Evil has always been here. But now it has taken on a totalitarian tone.
At the end of “Rhinoceros,” Daisy finds the call of the herd irresistible. Her skin goes green, she develops a horn, she’s gone. Berenger, imperfect, all alone, is racked by doubts. He is determined to keep his humanity, but looking in the mirror, he suddenly finds himself quite strange. He feels like a monster for being so out of step with the consensus. He is afraid of what this independence will cost him. But he keeps his resolve, and refuses to accept the horrible new normalcy. He’ll put up a fight, he says. “I’m not capitulating!”

Source: Teju Cole, NYTimes.com

Across Britain, the verb to trump is a euphemism for flatulence, especially malodorous flatulence. Are you familiar with the slightly scurrilous recommendation for coping with public speaking anxiety that one envision one’s audience as naked? Well, there may be a parallel here for dealing with the profound anxiety and dread so many, including myself, feel in contemplating the reality of Trump’s presidency. I am going to practice visualizing his dangerous and offensive blowhard pronouncements as offensive eruptions of a different sort out of his mouth, and malodorous ones at that.

Source: English Language & Usage Stack Exchange

Source: Boing Boing

Stephen Wolfram dishes about consulting on the science in Arrival. Fascinating.

Source: Medium

‘The election just ended and the new president doesn’t even take office until Jan. 20. But the transition planning starts now… Now that the news of Trump’s election has settled, speculation over how the president-elect will fill out his administration has consumed Washington….’

Source: NPR

More.dismal.news.all.around.

‘In characterizing the problem of intolerance within a republic, Rousseau wrote, “It is impossible to live in peace with people one believes to be damned.” Although Rousseau was arguing for (quite limited) religious toleration, the basic claim travels to a secular context: How can one live in peace with fellow citizens whom one believes to be, if not damned, then deplorable? In the wake of a desperately divisive, unpleasant election, how do we move forward as a nation?The challenge of ensuring that electoral outcomes are accepted is far from new. But when one side believes that a considerable number of the victorious candidate’s supporters are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it,” and the

The challenge of ensuring that electoral outcomes are accepted is far from new. But when one side believes that a considerable number of the victorious candidate’s supporters are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it,” and the other side believes the opponent is a vessel for the “’corrupt’ global establishment,” the problem becomes all the more vexing. Further, the surprise nature of this electoral outcome makes it all the more difficult for Trump and Clinton supporters alike to transcend the elation or devastation of the electoral results.Nonetheless, a few commitments should guide our thinking about democracy in the wake of bitter elections.

Nonetheless, a few commitments should guide our thinking about democracy in the wake of bitter elections…’

Source: How to coexist, after defeat, with citizens whose views you despise – Vox

‘…The top two contenders, typically a Democratic and a Republican, but occasionally a Whig, have danced closely around the 50-50 mark for nearly 100 years. Only four times since 1824 has the winner received more than 60 percent of the popular vote. Since 2000, the candidates have been separated by an average of 3.5 points. The median and average separations have been 8.2 and 9.5 points since 1824—a figure skewed upward due to a few outlying and not particularly close races. (The electoral tally doesn’t usually appear so close because the Electoral College tends to magnify differences in the popular vote.)

This is a feature of U.S. politics that many of us have become accustomed to. So is it unsurprising? Not really. “Considering all of the factors that go into what would make an election close or not close—incumbency, the brand of the parties—my perspective is that there’s a surprising rate of close elections,” Eitan Hersh, a Yale political scientist and the author of Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters, told me.

The question is, why? …’

Keep reading: Nautilus

‘Exit polls show 53 percent of white women voted for Trump — compared to only 43 percent for Clinton….’

Source: Huffington Post

‘We need to feel that pain of this moment. And we need to take care of each other….’

Source: Huffington Post

‘Hillary Clinton gave her concession speech today, but Black America will not….’

Source: Cyrus Aaron, Huffington Post

‘We should be appalled, but we should not be surprised….’

Source: Huffington Post

‘Donald Trump has been a vocal advocate of sexual assault, Islamophobia, xenophobia, and violent racism. Early Wednesday morning, America voted to elect him our president.Here are a few organizations that work to fight for the rights of our most vulnerable populations, and ways you can volunteer or donate to make sure they are able to work harder than ever.’

Source: Jezebel

Of course, Donald Trump didn’t create misogyny, bullying, racism, warmongering and bigotry, but they have now crawled out of the slimy rocks under which they were (imperfectly) hidden and have permission to revel in the daylight. In another social media interchange recently, a friend warned me about indulging in the ‘ecstasy of sanctimony,’ a point well-taken and quite a nice turn of phrase I thought. Well, it looks like I may be pretty ecstatic for the next four years.

‘The US Navy’s brand new $4 billion warship is an incredible technological feat. The futuristic DDG 1000 Zumwalt-class destroyer is equipped with two guns that can hit targets from a stunning 80 miles away. The only problem? Rounds for the guns cost over $800,000 each. And the Navy has now decided that it can’t justify spending that much…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘On Sunday, the New York Times published a seemingly routine report about Obama’s cyber offensive strategy. Hiding halfway down the page, however, there are some fascinating details about the decision-making process behind a potential US cyber retaliation against Russia…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘A commercial diver working near Haida Gwaii off Canada’s west coast has spotted a strange object on the seafloor that bears a striking resemblance to a nuclear device lost from a US B-36 bomber that crashed in the area 66 years ago. The Canadian government is sending naval ships to investigate.

Sean Smyrichinsky was diving for sea cucumbers when he noticed an object that looked like a flying saucer. “I came up telling all my buddies on the boat ‘Hey, I found a UFO. It’s really bizarre.’ And I drew a picture of it, because I didn’t have a camera,” he is quoted as saying in the Vancouver Sun. He recounted the story a few days later to some fisherman, prompting one of them to say, “Oh, you might have found that bomb.”

That “bomb” could very well be a lost nuclear device from a US B-36 bomber that crashed near the Haida Gwaii archipelago on February 13, 1950. The plane was traveling from Alaska to Carswell Air Force Base in Texas during a military exercise to simulate a nuclear strike on the city of San Francisco. For added realism, the plane was equipped with a real Mark IV nuclear bomb, but instead of being packed with plutonium, the bomb was loaded with lead and TNT (to be clear, the bomb did not contain any nuclear material)…’

Source: ‘Gizmodo

“Now, you may have heard that — this was just announced, I just read it, so I can’t confirm it’s true, but — this campaign has taken away [Trump’s] Twitter. In the last two days, they had so little confidence in his self-control, they said ‘We’re just gonna take away your Twitter.’ Now, if somebody can’t handle a Twitter account, they can’t handle the nuclear codes. If somebody starts tweeting at 3 in the morning because SNL made fun of you, you can’t handle the nuclear codes.”

Source: Vox

‘…[W]e are wasting a lot of time just looking for something to watch…’

Source: Gizmodo

During this election season, we have something very much in common with woodpeckers. Many of us want to bang our heads against the wall. But the birds fare better; they have some clever adaptations to keep their noggins safe.

Source: National Geographic

‘The full moon on November 14 will look like an extra-bright spotlight in the sky— that’s because it will be a notable “supermoon” that won’t be this close to Earth again for another 18 years. In fact, the last time it looked this big was 1948, according to Space.com.

…[S]ince the moon’s orbit has an elliptical shape, sometimes it is closer to Earth than other times. Astronomers call the closest-to-the-Earth moment the perigee. What makes November 14 special is that the moon “becomes full within about two hours of perigee—arguably making it an extra-super moon,” NASA explained.This year actually has three supermoons. Besides November’s, there was one on October 16 and will be another on December 14, although neither are as close as this

This year actually has three supermoons. Besides November’s, there was one on October 16 and will be another on December 14, although neither are as close as this month’s.The November 14 supermoon is not only the closest full moon of the century so far, it won’t be matched until 2034. So if you miss this one, mark your calendar for November 25 of that year.

The November 14 supermoon is not only the closest full moon of the century so far, it won’t be matched until 2034. So if you miss this one, mark your calendar for November 25 of that year…’

Source: BGR

‘In a new Fan Theories clip posted on its official channel, Netflix explained that Walter White’s Blue Sky meth may be the chemical component that turned the first humans into zombies.

The video shows various elements and references that appear in both TV series, which is how this fan theory was born. Fans looked at various Easter Eggs in Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead and made several plausible connections. And some of them are extremely interesting.

For example, Daryl’s stash of drugs contains something that looks just like Blue Sky. He even made a reference to a “janky little white guy,” who sold drugs to his brother Merle. At one point, that dealer said “I’m gonna kill you, bitch.” Do you know anyone who speaks like that?Moreover, Glenn might be the car dealer who had to deal with Walter’s tantrum when returning a particularly red Dodge Challenger. The same car was then seen in The Walking Dead, and Glenn was driving it.

Check out Netflix’s entire explanation below, complete with a detail about the Breaking Bad person who could be one of the first Blue Sky-enabled walkers…’

Source: BGR

‘Mattthew Luckhurst, a 5-year veteran of San Antionio Police Department, was fired after feeding shit to a homeless person. Josh Baugh reports that he “placed fecal matter between two pieces of bread” and placed it in a styrofoam container next to his victim. It’s not clear if they ate it…’

Source: Boing Boing

‘Misogyny, racism and bigotry won’t go away if Donald Trump loses next week’s election; it was already here before he drew it out into the mainstream…’

Source: Jessica Valenti, The Guardian

Was Trump being prophetic — and menacing — when he insisted that the election was rigged?

‘These last-minute false leaks come after decades of animosity toward both Clintons from inside the bureau.’

Source: The Daily Beast

Why We Should All Fear the Rot Within the FBI

‘What James Comey did was bad enough, but now he’s clearly at the mercy of a right-wing faction of his own agents. Who can stop them?’

Source: The Daily Beast

‘This week, an HIV epidemic has been officially declared in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg, where the health department estimates 1 out of every 50 residents is a carrier of the virus. The government has been hesitant to recognize that Russia is experiencing one of the world’s fastest-growing HIV epidemics. In May, the head of the state AIDS center said that the country hit a tragic milestone of one million diagnosed HIV cases; it’s estimated that three million people will be infected by 2020.

In Yekaterinburg, and elsewhere in the country, an estimated half of HIV infections were contracted through intravenous drug use. And yet, no one seems to be prepared to deal with heroin dependency effectively or ethically. There are few addiction treatment centers, harm-reduction services are virtually non-existent, and methadone therapy is illegal. The alternatives are very grim.

“The public attitude is very hostile and the government doesn’t want to seem too humane towards drug users,” HIV activist Anya Sarang tells me. Sarang is the director of the Andrey Rylkov Foundation for Health and Social Justice, a grassroots organization for HIV and overdose prevention. It is the only group offering free needle exchanges in Moscow. The government’s primary strategy for dealing with people struggling with addiction is “making them feel miserable,” Sarang says. “As if the social pressure will make them stop using drugs.”

…According to the World Health Organization, opioid substitution therapy (OST), albeit imperfect, is still the most promising method of reducing heroin dependence. By being prescribed orally administrated medicine such as methadone or buprenorphine, patients can substitute illicit intravenous drug use with withdrawal relief in a supervised clinical setting. In developed countries, OST is recognized to counter overdoses, criminal behavior and public health risks such as HIV. But among Russian authorities, it’s a despised “narcoliberal” idea.

In a country with the largest population of injection drug users, methadone therapy is illegal. Methadone distribution is punishable with up to 20 years in prison. Heroin addicts— “anti-social elements,” as they’re called—are expected to quit cold-turkey, perhaps in one of the jail-like “treatment” centers…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘Former Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency chief Michael Hayden, now a private security consultant and George Mason University professor, writes in the Washington Post that a Trump presidency would be tantamount to handing America over to Russian power interests:

• “We have really never seen anything like this. Former acting CIA director Michael Morell says that Putin has cleverly recruited Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.I’d prefer another term drawn from the arcana of the Soviet era: polezni durak. That’s the useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited.That’s a pretty harsh term, and Trump supporters will no doubt be offended. But, frankly, it’s the most benign interpretation of all this that I can come up with right now.” …’

Source: Boing Boing

‘Amyloid beta plaques are gooey globs that clump together, stick to neurons inside the brain and kill them off, outright. The slow but steady accumulation of these plaques leads to Alzheimer’s disease. Tau protein tangles aid them by cutting off the brain’s supply lines, as the plaques march across white and gray matter, taking out the memory and cognitive ability, and wreaking havoc on the patient and their family. No treatment can halt this invasion once it occurs. But now, a small trial for an experimental drug is lending patients and loved ones hope.This drug inhibits the production of these plaques, according to a small study. Scientists at Merck Research Laboratories have announced the drug Verubecestat. In a small, phase I trial it “switched off” the production of the amyloid proteins that form these plaques. This in turn slowed the progression of the disease…’

Source: Big Think

‘The US Centers for Disease Control has released a report in which it identifies over a dozen cases of a deadly, antibiotic-resistant fungus called Candida auris. It’s the first time this super-strain has been found in the US, and disturbingly, four of the first seven patients infected with it have died…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘Understanding what is happening in the brain during hallucinations reveals how we’re having them all the time and how they shape our perception of reality…’

Source: New Scientist

‘…[T]he metadata indicat[es] something that appears to be a highly secretive dialog between a politically connected Russian bank and the Trump organization…’

Source: Boing Boing

‘Pain is a fundamental fact of life for many organisms on our planet; a crucial mechanism for identifying what kinds of actions pose serious threats to our physical and mental health. As robots become more sophisticated and interactive, should they also be programmed to experience pain to prevent injuries to themselves or others, and if so, to what extent? …’

Source: Motherboard

‘Two Deep Brain scientists, Martín Abadi and David Andersen, recently tasked two neural nets with keeping a secret from a third. What they found was that “neural networks can learn to protect the confidentiality of their data from other neural networks: they discover forms of encryption and decryption, without being taught specific algorithms for these purposes.” Neural nets — artificial-neuron-based systems — aren’t designed for cryptography, so Abadi and Andersen had been curious to see if neural nets could teach themselves to master it…’

Source: Big Think

‘The FBI got permission on Sunday to look through 650,000 emails discovered on a laptop used by (current target of an underage-sexting investigation) Anthony Weiner and his estranged wife/Hillary Clinton confidante Huma Abedin, to see if any of those emails might be relevant to its investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server. The investigation will probably not be done before the election. But it remains extremely unlikely that Clinton actually violated US law.

Instead, the question in the days since FBI Director James Comey sent Congress a letter alluding to the existence of the new emails is: Why the hell did Comey do that? Comey has come under fire from former Department of Justice officials (including ex-Attorney General Eric Holder) for violating standard DOJ practice of not releasing information that could affect a campaign within 60 days of the election. Some of that criticism has even come from Republican officials like Alberto Gonzales, who was attorney general under George W. Bush (though Gonzales might have been acting on a grudge against Comey dating back to the Bush years).

Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid all but accused Comey and the FBI of deliberately airing the Clinton news while sitting on information about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia — behavior on the bureau’s part that Reid says could violate the Hatch Act, which prevents federal employees from electioneering. Nothing’s leaked out to back up Reid’s claim per se. But on Monday, officials confirmed to the press that Comey had resisted saying anything in public about Russia’s efforts to influence the elections by hacking into Democratic email accounts, because he was concerned about the 60-day window — which makes his decision to write the letter about the Weiner computer all the less defensible.

Comey was in an impossible situation. There were very good arguments both for and against writing the letter. And he couldn’t guarantee that if he didn’t say anything about the new computer, information wouldn’t leak out about it anyway. But that’s exactly the problem. This entire news story has been driven by leaks from different factions of the DOJ and FBI. It’s clear that no one has enough control of the nation’s leading law enforcement agency — one that is currently engaged in an investigation into the security of important government information — to control leaks of important government information….’

Source: What the hell is going on at the FBI? – Vox

‘For just 60 hours, researchers had the opportunity to examine the holiest site in Christianity. Here’s what they found.’

Source: National Geographic

Giving a talk on how to take revenge in Sydney Australia in 2011, Strumpf decides to illustrate by summoning up to the stage a former Miss Universe who he feels had rebuffed him in the past. Degrades her and attempts an unwanted kiss. Source: <a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-jennifer-hawkins-video_us_58137b85e4b0390e69cfbbba“>Huffington Post</a>

I no longer make these posts in incredulity about how Strumpf acts, but in incredulity and outrage that 40% of the electorate could still vote for the misogynistic bullying pig. I feel confident in saying that, after his he is drummed off the public stage in a satisfying and I hope overwhelming defeat next Tuesday, any embarrassing individual foolish enough to admit that s/he was a Strumpf supporter will find it impossible to be treated with respect by any thinking person.

Extremely scary firsthand look inside America’s resurgent paramilitary movement.

Source: Mother Jones

‘Reid says the FBI has “explosive information” about Trump’s ties to Russia — but it’s sitting on it to help Trump win.’

Source: Vox

Host With a Ghoulish Perspective Dies at 98

‘Fear continues to saturate our lives: fear of nuclear destruction, fear of climate change, fear of the subversive, and fear of foreigners.

But a recent Rolling Stone article about our “age of fear” notes that most Americans are living “in the safest place at the safest time in human history.” …So why are we still so afraid?…’

Source: The Conversation

‘Earlier this year, the horror movie genre was pronounced dead. None of the six horror films released before September managed to break $20 million on opening weekend at the box office, and none ended up earning over $32 million total domestically… It’s doubtful anyone truly believed the genre wouldn’t eventually bounce back, but peak scary movie season comes just once a year.

And then there was Annabelle, the spinoff from last year’s The Conjuring. Critics thought it might break 2014’s horror slump, but the film far exceeded those expectations: It earned $37 million on opening weekend, a higher draw than any horror movie in years, and one of the largest openings for a horror movie ever.Its financial success does not mean, however, that Annabelle is well-liked. The movie has a dismal three-percent critic rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. At Grantland, Wesley Morris wrote that Annabelle is emblematic of the genre’s recent tendency toward the “passive-aggressive and hilariously, lazily vague.” Audience reviews have been somewhat more generous (on Rotten Tomatoes, 45-percent of viewers said they liked it), but it seems unlikely the movie has a future as even a cult classic. I have a small group of trusty horror fans whom I can consult when I want to know if any of the genre’s new releases are worth a $20 trip to the theater, and the answer for Annabelle has been a resounding “Nah.”

So why did so many people pay to go see it? It had a strong social media presence, for one thing, and for another, people love a freaky doll. But there’s a deeper motive that likely propelled Annabelle beyond its merits: People who wanted to be terrified at some point this year just got tired of waiting. As movie analyst Phil Contrino told the Washington Post, “As a genre, it’s never completely dead, because people always want to be scared.”…’

Source: Pacific Standard

‘Forty-six percent of Americans who said they plan to celebrate Halloween will be wearing costumes, with an average outlay per buyer of $43.43…’

Source: Pacific Standard

‘…[T]he terrible truth about Trump’s alleged crimes is that sexual misconduct is so common — so routine — that a lot of people don’t even know it when they see it….’

Source: Vox

A reprise of my traditional Hallowe’en post of past years:

It is that time of year again. What has become a time of disinhibited hijinx and mayhem, and a growing marketing bonanza for the kitsch-manufacturers and -importers, has primeval origins as the Celtic New Year’s Eve, Samhain (pronounced “sow-en”). The harvest is over, summer ends and winter begins, the Old God dies and returns to the Land of the Dead to await his rebirth at Yule, and the land is cast into darkness. The veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead becomes frayed and thin, and dispossessed dead mingle with the living, perhaps seeking a body to possess for the next year as their only chance to remain connected with the living, who hope to scare them away with ghoulish costumes and behavior, escape their menace by masquerading as one of them, or placate them with offerings of food, in hopes that they will go away before the new year comes. For those prepared, a journey to the other side could be made at this time.

With Christianity, perhaps because with calendar reform it was no longer the last day of the year, All Hallows’ Eve became decathected, a day for innocent masquerading and fun, taking its name Hallowe’en as a contraction and corruption of All Hallows’ Eve.

All Saints’ Day may have originated in its modern form with the 8th century Pope Gregory III. Hallowe’en customs reputedly came to the New World with the Irish immigrants of the 1840’s. The prominence of trick-or-treating has a slightly different origin, however.

The custom of trick-or-treating is thought to have originated not with the Irish Celts, but with a ninth-century European custom called souling. On November 2, All Souls Day, early Christians would walk from village to village begging for “soul cakes,” made out of square pieces of bread with currants. The more soul cakes the beggars would receive, the more prayers they would promise to say on behalf of the dead relatives of the donors. At the time, it was believed that the dead remained in limbo for a time after death, and that prayer, even by strangers, could expedite a soul’s passage to heaven.

English: A traditional Irish turnip Jack-o’-lantern from the early 20th century.

Jack-o’-lanterns were reportedly originally turnips; the Irish began using pumpkins after they immigrated to North America, given how plentiful they were here. The Jack-o-lantern custom probably comes from Irish folklore. As the tale is told, a man named Jack, who was notorious as a drunkard and trickster, tricked Satan into climbing a tree. Jack then carved an image of a cross in the tree’s trunk, trapping the devil up the tree. Jack made a deal with the devil that, if he would never tempt him again, he would promise to let him down the tree.

According to the folk tale, after Jack died, he was denied entrance to Heaven because of his evil ways, but he was also denied access to Hell because he had tricked the devil. Instead, the devil gave him a single ember to light his way through the frigid darkness. The ember was placed inside a hollowed-out turnip to keep it glowing longer.

Nowadays, a reported 99% of cultivated pumpkin sales in the US go for jack-o-lanterns.

Folk traditions that were in the past associated with All Hallows’ Eve took much of their power, as with the New Year’s customs about which I write here every Dec. 31st, from the magic of boundary states, transition, and liminality.

The idea behind ducking, dooking or bobbing for apples seems to have been that snatching a bite from the apple enables the person to grasp good fortune. Samhain is a time for getting rid of weakness, as pagans once slaughtered weak animals which were unlikely to survive the winter. A common ritual calls for writing down weaknesses on a piece of paper or parchment, and tossing it into the fire. There used to be a custom of placing a stone in the hot ashes of the bonfire. If in the morning a person found that the stone had been removed or had cracked, it was a sign of bad fortune. Nuts have been used for divination: whether they burned quietly or exploded indicated good or bad luck. Peeling an apple and throwing the peel over one’s shoulder was supposed to reveal the initial of one’s future spouse. One way of looking for omens of death was for peope to visit churchyards

The Witches’ Sabbath aspect of Hallowe’en seems to result from Germanic influence and fusion with the notion of Walpurgisnacht. (You may be familiar with the magnificent musical evocation of this, Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain.)

Although probably not yet in a position to shape mainstream American Hallowe’en traditions, Mexican Dia de los Muertos observances have started to contribute some delightful and whimsical iconography to our encounter with the eerie and unearthly as well. As this article in The Smithsonian reviews, ‘In the United States, Halloween is mostly about candy, but elsewhere in the world celebrations honoring the departed have a spiritual meaning…’

Reportedly, more than 80% of American families decorate their homes, at least minimally, for Hallowe’en. What was the holiday like forty or fifty years ago in the U.S. when, bastardized as it has now become with respect to its pagan origins, it retained a much more traditional flair? Before the era of the pay-per-view ’spooky-world’ type haunted attractions and its Martha Stewart yuppification with, as this irreverent Salon article from several years ago [via walker] put it, monogrammed jack-o’-lanterns and the like? One issue may be that, as NPR observed,

‘“Adults have hijacked Halloween… Two in three adults feel Halloween is a holiday for them and not just kids,” Forbes opined in 2012, citing a public relations survey. True that when the holiday was imported from Celtic nations in the mid-19th century — along with a wave of immigrants fleeing Irelands potato famine — it was essentially a younger persons’ game. But a little research reveals that adults have long enjoyed Halloween — right alongside young spooks and spirits.’

Is that necessarily a bad thing? A 1984 essay by Richard Seltzer, frequently referenced in other sources, entitled “Why Bother to Save Hallowe’en?”, argues as I do that reverence for Hallowe’en is good for the soul, young or old.

“Maybe at one time Hallowe’en helped exorcise fears of death and ghosts and goblins by making fun of them. Maybe, too, in a time of rigidly prescribed social behavior, Hallowe’en was the occasion for socially condoned mischief — a time for misrule and letting loose. Although such elements still remain, the emphasis has shifted and the importance of the day and its rituals has actually grown.…(D)on’t just abandon a tradition that you yourself loved as a child, that your own children look forward to months in advance, and that helps preserve our sense of fellowship and community with our neighbors in the midst of all this madness.”

That would be anathema to certain segments of society, however. Hallowe’en certainly inspires a backlash by fundamentalists who consider it a blasphemous abomination. ‘Amateur scholar’ Isaac Bonewits details academically the Hallowe’en errors and lies he feels contribute to its being reviled. Some of the panic over Hallowe’en is akin to the hysteria, fortunately now debunked, over the supposed epidemic of ‘ritual Satanic abuse’ that swept the Western world in the ’90’s.

The horror film has become inextricably linked to Hallowe’en tradition, although the holiday itself did not figure in the movies until John Carpenter took the slasher genre singlehandedly by storm. Googling “scariest films”, you will, grimly, reap a mother lode of opinions about how to pierce the veil to journey to the netherworld and reconnect with that magical, eerie creepiness in the dark (if not the over-the-top blood and gore that has largely replaced the subtlety of earlier horror films).

The Carfax Abbey Horror Films and Movies Database includes best-ever-horror-films lists from Entertainment Weekly, Mr. Showbiz and Hollywood.com. I’ve seen most of these; some of their choices are not that scary, some are just plain silly, and they give extremely short shrift to my real favorites, the evocative classics of the ’30’s and ’40’s when most eeriness was allusive and not explicit. And here’s what claims to be a compilation of links to the darkest and most gruesome sites on the web. “Hours and hours of fun for morbidity lovers.”

Boing Boing does homage to a morbid masterpiece of wretched existential horror, two of the tensest, scariest hours of my life repeated every time I watch it:

‘…The Thing starts. It had been 9 years since The Exorcist scared the living shit out of audiences in New York and sent people fleeing into the street. Really … up the aisle and out the door at full gallop. You would think that people had calmed down a bit since then. No…’

Meanwhile, what could be creepier in the movies than the phenomenon of evil children? Gawker knows what shadows lurk in the hearts of the cinematic young:

‘In celebration of Halloween, we took a shallow dive into the horror subgenre of evil-child horror movies. Weird-kid cinema stretches back at least to 1956’s The Bad Seed, and has experienced a resurgence recently via movies like The Babadook, Goodnight Mommy, and Cooties. You could look at this trend as a natural extension of the focus on domesticity seen in horror via the wave of haunted-house movies that 2009’s Paranormal Activity helped usher in. Or maybe we’re just wizening up as a culture and realizing that children are evil and that film is a great way to warn people of this truth. Happy Halloween. Hope you don’t get killed by trick-or-treaters.’

In any case: trick or treat! …And may your Hallowe’en soothe your soul.

Related:

• Tricks, Treats and Traditions – Some Useful Tips for Hallowe’en (southeasttourguides.co.uk)
• Weighing In on Hallowe’en (4mothers1blog.wordpress.com)
• Preparing for All Hallow’s Eve (sporeflections.wordpress.com)
• OCTOBER FINALE! Hallowe’en! (pm27.wordpress.com)
• Tricksey Treats (jasperlocalfood.wordpress.com)
• Hallowe’en Night divination game. (jenniferlinton.com)
• Hallowe’en Weekend (sporeflections.wordpress.com)
• All Hallows’ Eve (ramblingratz.wordpress.com)
• About Samhain or ‘All Hallows’ (bethtrissel.wordpress.com)
• Halloween: A Brief History (lakeside.com)
• 13 Facts You Never Knew About Halloween (businessinsider.com)
• A Tarot Circle Game/Encounter for Samhain (jameswells.wordpress.com)
• Hallowe’en; The Do’s And The Don’ts (jackcollier7.com)
• Get ye gone, ye evil spirits (annabelfrage.wordpress.com)
• ‘It was a dark and stormy night…’ – Resources for Hallowe’en (davidbradshawenglish.org)
• Hallowe’en! (thepiepatch.wordpress.com)

‘…On countless priorities – issues that matter to people across the country, regardless of their politics – Republicans in Washington have traded progress for partisanship.Their obstruction underscores a fundamental misunderstanding of the way our government should work. Sure, they’re blocking Merrick Garland – and maybe scoring a political point or two – but in doing so they are failing the American people. By hobbling the Supreme Court for what could be a year or longer, Republicans are eroding one of the core institutions of American democracy.

This cannot be the new normal. Let’s disagree on the issues, but let’s work together to protect a system of government that has stood strong for 240 years and made us the greatest country on Earth. We must expect better. You must demand better.

That’s why it’s so important that you make your voice heard. Call your representative. Tweet your Senator. Tell them what matters to you. And in November go vote. Then do it again in the next election, even when the presidency isn’t at stake. Send a clear message that Congress, at the very least, needs to perform its basic, Constitutional responsibilities – and should do much more.’

Source: Proudemocrat

…The number of wild animals living on Earth is set to fall by two-thirds by 2020, according to a new report, part of a mass extinction that is destroying the natural world upon which humanity depends. The analysis, the most comprehensive to date, indicates that animal populations plummeted by 58% between 1970 and 2012, with losses on track to reach 67% by 2020. Researchers from WWF and the Zoological Society of London compiled the report from scientific data and found that the destruction of wild habitats, hunting and pollution were to blame….’

Source: The Guardian

This is what your ignorant insensitive way of life will do for your children, and mine.

‘… Let’s settle it, once and for all—with the truth. Here, listed in no particular order, is definitive evidence that Milk Chocolate Is Superior to Dark Chocolate and If You Do Not Agree You Are Wrong Both Factually and Morally The End…’

Source: The Atlantic 

‘As we head into the end of October, parents should be prepared. Everyone knows that Halloween is peak season for occult behavior. Local Satanists will be combing America for unattended children to abuse in their rituals. Without the suffering of innocent babies, their whole devil-worshipping infrastructure falls apart. Good moms and dads must maintain vigilance lest their kids be snatched.

In 2016, this kind of Satanic panic rhetoric sounds totally absurd. Few Americans would jump to believe that devilish cults are operating in a typical suburb, kidnapping and abusing children. Despite what Alex Jones may be hearing, devilish conspiracies no longer hold the powerful cultural allure they once did. But it wasn’t so long ago that many Americans were eager to believe the most outlandish tales of ritual abuse. Some of our contemporary ideas about kids (and Satanists) are still based in morbid fantasy…’

Source: Pacific Standard

Book review: How Our Pursuit of Happiness Is Creating a Nation of Nervous Wrecks, By Ruth Whippman

Source: The New York Times

‘For nearly eight years, the presidency has been Mr. Obama’s science and technology playground, a place where he sought to become the advocate in chief for industries pushing advanced batteries, powerful medical devices and cutting-edge research.

“I’m a nerd, and I don’t make any apologies for it… It’s cool stuff. And it is that thing that sets us apart, that ability to imagine and hypothesize, and then test and figure stuff out, and tinker and make things and make them better, and then break them down and rework them.”

With less than three months left in his presidency, Mr. Obama is preparing for a life after the White House that will most likely include a close relationship with Silicon Valley. Officials running Mr. Obama’s presidential foundation have made about 10 trips to tech strongholds in California in the past year as they help him plot his next steps.

Source: The New York Times

‘Oxford University Press’ new edition of William Shakespeare’s works will credit Christopher Marlowe as co-author of the three Henry VI plays, underscoring that the playwright collaborated with others on some of his most famous works. Marlowe, a playwright, poet and spy, will share billing in the latest version of the New Oxford Shakespeare being published this week. While scholars have long suspected that Shakespeare’s plays included the work of others, new analytical methods helped researchers conclude that sections bore the hallmarks of Marlowe’s hand…’

Source: Associated Press

‘Members of the media quickly seized on the event, calling it a test drive for Trump TV, the post-election television network that Trump is rumored to be considering in the event he loses in November. Despite reports that his son-in-law has been talking to media dealmakers about Trump TV, Trump himself has denied he has any interest in such a thing…’

Source: WIRED

‘California’s ballot measure to legalize recreational marijuana could be a beacon of hope for anyone with a criminal record for using or possessing weed.Proposition 64 would legalize marijuana for adults 21 and older. But it would also allow judges to resentence individuals convicted of weed-related crimes, and for the destruction of records for prior marijuana convictions. That’s important because about 15,000 to 20,000 people in California are arrested every year for misdemeanor and felony marijuana crimes, according to an August report by the Drug Policy Alliance, a national advocacy non-profit…’

Source: Motherboard

‘I’m from a country whose democracy is actually collapsing. Stop saying Trump threatens US democracy.’

Source: German Lopez, Vox

It is quite easy to portray Trump as an “anti-constitutional” candidate. It can well be doubted that he has ever seriously read or thought about the document, and he exhibits dangerously dictatorial tendencies that we hope are precluded by the Constitution. But we should realize that his candidacy also tells us things we might not wish to hear about the Constitution and its political order in the 21st century. In his own way, he may be the canary in the coal mine, and the question is whether we will draw the right lessons from his improbable candidacy and his apparent ability to garner the votes of at least 40 percent of the American public…’

Source: Sanford V. Levinson, professor of law and government at the University of Texas Austin, Vox

‘Donald Trump’s campaign seems to be going down in flames — but it’s still far from clear how much that will help Democratic candidates in their effort to retake the Senate. Democrats would need a net gain of four seats to retake the chamber if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency. And right now, they’re already likely to win two Republican-held seats, with five more looking like toss-ups. Then there is just one Democratic seat that appears to be up for grabs. So depending on how those six toss-up races go, Democrats seem likely to end up with a net gain of anywhere between one and seven seats. And the difference between 47 Democratic Senate seats and 53 could be enormously consequential for a Clinton administration’s agenda and the balance of power on the Supreme Court…’

Source:  Vox

‘Everyone interested in philosophy must occasionally face the question of how, exactly, to define philosophy itself. You can always label as philosophy whatever philosophers do — but what, exactly, do philosophers do? Here the English comedians John Cleese of Monty Python and Jonathan Miller of Beyond the Fringe offer an interpretation of the life of modern philosophers in the form of a five-minute sketch set in “a senior common room somewhere in Oxford (or Cambridge).”

There, Cleese and Miller’s philosophers have a wide-ranging talk about Ludwig Wittgenstein, senses of the word “yes,” whether an “unfetched slab” can be said to exist, and the very role of the philosopher in this “heterogeneous, confusing, and confused jumble of political, social, and economic relations we call society.” …’

Source: Open Culture

‘There are many ways to celebrate a new album from a band you admire. You can have a listening party alone. You can have a listening party with friends. You can learn the title track in a couple days and play it onstage while the band you admire sits in the audience. That last one might be overkill. Unless you’re Jimi Hendrix.

Hendrix was so excited after the UK release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967 that he opened a set at London’s Saville Theater with his own, Hendrix-ified rendition of the album’s McCartney-penned title song. In the audience: McCartney and George Harrison.

It’s a loose, good-natured tribute that, as you might imagine, made quite an impression on the Beatles in attendance. “It’s still obviously a shining memory for me,” McCartney recalled many years later, “because I admired him so much anyway, he was so accomplished. To think that that album had meant so much to him as to actually do it by the Sunday night, three days after the release. He must have been so into it, because normally it might take a day for rehearsal and then you might wonder whether you’d put it in, but he just opened with it. It’s a pretty major compliment in anyone’s book. I put that down as one of the great honours of my career.” …’

Source: Open Culture

‘Poe reviewed the first four chapters of Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge for Graham’s Magazine, predicting the end of the novel and finding out later he was correct when he reviewed it again upon completion. He was particularly taken with one character: a chatty raven named Grip who accompanies the simple-minded Barnaby. Poe described the bird as “intensely amusing,” points out Atlas Obscura, and also wrote that Grip’s “croaking might have been prophetically heard in the course of the drama.”

It chanced the following year the two literary greats would meet, when Poe learned of Dickens’ trip to the U.S.; he wrote to the novelist, and the two briefly exchanged letters (which you can read here). Along with Dickens on his six-month journey were his wife Catherine, his children, and Grip, his pet raven. When the two writers met in person, writes Lucinda Hawksley at the BBC, Poe “was enchanted to discover [Grip, the character] was based on Dickens’s own bird.” …’

Source: Open Culture

‘New York radio station WQXR used to inflict this pronunciation test on prospective announcers — try reading it aloud:

The old man with the flaccid face and dour expression grimaced when asked if he were conversant with zoology, mineralogy, or the culinary arts. ‘Not to be secretive,’ he said, ‘I may tell you that I’d given precedence to the study of genealogy. But since my father’s demise, it has been my vagary to remain incognito because of an inexplicable, lamentable, and irreparable family schism. It resulted from a heinous crime, committed at our domicile by an impious scoundrel. To err is human … but this affair was so grievous that only my inherent acumen and consummate tact saved me.’

It’s a minefield. In Another Almanac of Words at Play, Willard R. Espy lists the pronunciations that were considered correct:

• flaccid FLACK-sid
• inexplicable in-EX-plic-able
• dour DOO-er
• lamentable LAM-entable
• grimaced gri-MACED
• irreparable ear-REP-arable
• conversant KON-ver-sant
• schism SIZ-m
• zoology zoh-OL-o-ji
• heinous HAY-nus
• mineralogy miner-AL-o-ji
• domicile DOMM-i-sil
• culinary KEW-li-ner-y
• impious IM-pee-yus
• secretive see-KEE-tiv
• precedence pre-SEED-ens
• grievous GREEV-us
• genealogy jan-e-AL-o-ji
• inherent in-HERE-ent
• demise de-MIZE
• acumen a-KEW-men
• vagary va-GAIR-y
• consummate (adj.) kon-SUMM-it
• incognito in-KOG-ni-toe

Getting 20 of the 25 “stumpers” right was considered excellent. But that was 40 years ago, and even at the time Espy found 21 dictionary listings that accepted different pronunciations. “So not to worry when you don’t sound like WQXR,” he wrote. “One man’s AB-do-men is another man’s ab-DOUGH-men.”

Source: Futility Closet

I certainly would not have cut the mus-TARD at WQXR! I would have pronounced at least 12 of them differently:

• flaccid FLA-sid
• inexplicable in-ex-PLIC-able
• lamentable lam-ENT-able
• grimaced GRI-maced
• conversant con-VER-sant
• secretive SEE-kre-tiv
• precedence PRE-sed-ens
• vagary VEY-gar-y
• consummate KON-summ-it
• incognito in-kog-NI-toe

A printable version for you to use:

The article collects other such works of activist art, some ruder than others. Source: Design You Trust

‘This strange region, that lies in the North Atlantic Ocean between Bermuda, Miami and San Juan, Puerto Rico, has been the presumed cause of dozens and dozens of mind-boggling disappearances of ships and planes. The Bermuda Triangle lore includes such stories as that of Flight 19, a group of 5 U.S. torpedo bombers that vanished in the Triangle in 1945. A rescue plane sent to look for them also disappeared. Other stories include the mystery of USS Cyclops, resulting in the largest non-combat loss of life in U.S. Navy’s history. The ship with a crew of 309 went missing in 1918. Even as recently as 2015, El Faro, a cargo ship with 33 on board vanished in the area.

Altogether, as far as we know, 75 planes and hundreds of ships met their demise in the Bermuda Triangle. Possible causes for the catastrophes have been proposed over time, ranging from the paranormal, electromagnetic interference that causes compass problems, bad weather, the gulf stream, and large undersea fields of methane.

Now, a new theory has been proposed by meteorologists…’

Source: Big Think

‘…Passing on the plane-crash candidate doesn’t mean ignoring the dangers of his rival…’

Source: NYTimes.com

‘…When did clowns become scary? It turns out that even asking that question is evidence of a short cultural memory. Dark clowns go back centuries before Stephen King. As Benjamin Radford, author of the recent book “Bad Clowns,” points out, “It’s misleading to ask when clowns turned bad, for they were never really good.” …’

Source: NYTimes

‘In theory, a sufficiently powerful energy event could push a tiny region of the universe into a true vacuum state. This would kickstart a domino effect, spawning a bubble of existential despair that could spread outwards at the speed of light and destroy the entire universe in the process…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet. These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down. We don’t know who is doing this, but it feels like a large nation state. China or Russia would be my first guesses…’

Source: Schneier on Security

‘A concession is not required from the loser for the winning candidate to be sworn into office. Instead, they’re merely a political norm that provide a sense of closure for both campaigns. A concession is nothing more than a means to foster a peaceful end to a months-long (and often, as in this case, bitter) campaign. However, that doesn’t mean concessions aren’t important. Not making a concession speech could still have serious repercussions…’

Source: Lifehacker

‘At the third presidential debate…, Donald Trump indicated he will refuse to accept the election results, ranted about ninth-month abortions, and generally went full conspiracy-theorist. But the punchline to his freakshow performance was muttering “she’s such a nasty woman” as Clinton talked of raising taxes on the richest Americans. The t-shirt is already yours to buy, with half the proceeds going to charity…’

Source: Boing Boing

‘This was supposed to be the election where climate change really mattered. Only, anyone watching the presidential debates wouldn’t have a clue that 1) 2016 has been history’s hottest year on record, and 2) our future leaders give any sort of crap about it. Climate change was mostly ignored during the last three debates, mentioned only in passing, and never discussed directly or at length. In fact, I’m fairly sure that Americans know more about Donald Trump’s sexual proclivities than his environmental policies (hint, hint: he doesn’t have any)…’

Source: Motherboard

I love me a good astronomical mystery:

‘In 2005, a very strange event was observed. An unknown object, not detectable through visible light, released an intense flare of X-rays. It took about a minute for the flare to reach its full brightness, about 90 times brighter than its resting output and about a million times as bright as the Sun. The flare lasted for about an hour before petering out. Four years later, it flared up again.

X-ray flares are not unheard of, but this event defied classification. Astronomers normally look at the length of the flares as well as how often they occur to determine what kinds of processes produce them. These flares don’t match any known mechanism, making them mysterious indeed.

To find out more, a team of researchers decided to look over archival data from the Chandra and XMM-Newton space observatories. They wondered if similar phenomena are taking place anywhere else in the Universe. If so, it might provide clues about the nature of these strange flares. And the researchers weren’t disappointed. Their search, which included 70 nearby galaxies, turned up two more such flares…’

Source: Ars Technica

‘When Edward Snowden first came forward in 2013 as the leaker of the biggest trove of National Security Agency secrets ever spilled, he ended his first interview by noting that his greatest concern was about the agency’s future. He feared that a less scrupulous commander-in-chief would take charge of the executive branch and with it, the most highly resourced surveillance agency in the world, ready to be exploited in new and troubling ways. “There will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it,” Snowden warned. “And it will be turnkey tyranny.”

Three years later, America has watched Donald Trump praise foreign dictators from Kim Jong Un to Vladimir Putin, vow to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate his opponent, Hillary Clinton, if he’s elected, and call for Russian hackers to dig up Clinton’s emails. “I wish I had that power,” he later said in a campaign speech. “Man, that would be power.” If that statement didn’t sufficiently reveal Trump’s lust for surveillance capabilities, he reportedly listened in on phone calls between staff and guests at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach in the mid-2000s.

…NSA alumni as well as critics are concerned that Trump may be exactly the turnkey tyrant Snowden had in mind.“This is someone who displays a kind of personal vindictiveness that makes Nixon look Christlike,” says Julian Sanchez, a privacy-focused research fellow for the Cato Institute. “There’s every reason to be worried about those instincts and how they’d lead him to attempt to abuse this surveillance power.”

The only way to tyrant-proof the White House is to not elect a tyrant. To be sure, Trump appears to have a very slim chance of winning November’s election. But setting aside lopsided poll numbers and imagining what a President Trump might do with the NSA raises the broader question of how tyrant-proof the agency really is: whether its vast surveillance powers are held in check by law or simply by the discretion of the people who control it…’

Source: WIRED

‘Now, a single tweet from Trump (see, for example, his tweets about Alicia Machado’s supposed sex tape) can dominate the news cycle for weeks. If a conspiracy like birtherism could take root and metastasize back then, what sort of power will Trump have now that millions of people voted to make him the most powerful man in the world? And now that a web of niche media outlets like Breitbart, whose former executive chairman Steve Bannon now runs the Trump campaign, will be there to validate and disseminate his every utterance?..’

Source: WIRED

‘Asgardia: Mythical home to Norse gods like Thor and Loki. But also a future space nation for mere mortals. Igor Ashurbeyli, a Russian businessman and scientists, announced plans earlier this week to create a new country in space, Asgardia. He’s accepting applications for citizenship…’

Source: Motherboard

‘Bicycle lanes can be a boon for cyclists but they can also land riders in the “door zone,” a dangerous area sandwiched between primary vehicle lanes and parked cars. In the long term, cities may need to continue designing better solutions to accommodate bicyclists, but in the meantime: drivers could learn a thing or two from a practice found in Europe. Retired doctor Michael Charney calls it the “Dutch Reach” and it addresses a serious problem on the streets of America.

The phenomenon of bikers getting hit by an opening car door is so common it has its own term: dooring. According to a study in Chicago, as many as 1 in 5 bicycle accidents involve car doors – in total, there is an average of nearly one dooring per day in the Windy City. Even when bikers swerve to avoid doors, they can end up getting hit by cars. Separating bike lanes can work but it also takes time and money. In the meantime, there may be another path toward curbing this danger.

For decades now in the Netherlands, many drivers have been trained (and tested for their licenses) on a behavior that dramatically reduces the risk of doorings…

“The Dutch Reach is a practice where instead of using your near hand — usually the driver’s left hand — to open your car door, you use your far hand. Your right hand,” Charney told The World. “In doing that, you automatically swivel your body. And you position your head and shoulders so you are looking directly out. First, past the rearview mirror. And then, you are very easily able to look back and see if there are oncoming bicycles or cars or whatever.”The simplicity of the approach is part of its genius. It trades one basic habit for an easy alternative, a cheaper and faster fix than pricey and prolonged infrastructural overhauls.’

Source: 99% Invisible

‘Half of American adults are in a face-recognition database, according to a Georgetown University study released Tuesday. That means there’s about 117 million adults in a law enforcement facial-recognition database, the study by Georgetown’s Center on Privacy & Technology says.”We are not aware of any agency that requires warrants for searches or limits them to serious crimes,” the study says.The report (PDF), titled “The Perpetual Line-up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America,” shows that one-fourth of the nation’s law enforcement agencies have access to face-recognition databases, and their use by those agencies is virtually unregulated…’

Source: Ars Technica

‘No person should have to be subjected to what Clinton dealt with on Sunday and, more important, no great democratic nation should be subjected to it either…’

Source: Michael Cohen, The Boston Globe op-ed

‘The Florida Supreme Court ruled that the state’s death penalty sentencing procedures were unconstitutional, effectively ending the death penalty, for now…’

Source: Pacific Standard

‘…Unfortunately, the record was hit right before the Alcator C-Mod reactor, the world’s only compact, high-magnetic field fusion reactor of the tokamak design, was pulled offline for good. After 23 years of operation, the Department of Energy has canceled its support for MIT’s record-smashing device due to the fact that a gigantic, $30 billion superconducting reactor in France, called ITER, is now devouring the lion’s share of our fusion research dollars. Depending on who you talk to, ITER is either the future of fusion energy, or a bloated, bureaucratic mess that’ll stall progress in the field for the next twenty years. Either way, MIT’s fusion program, which has over the years attracted some of the most brilliant minds in plasma physics, has effectively been castrated…’

Source: Gizmodo

Via Upworthy:

‘People across the political spectrum condemned the attack.’

You’ll either believe that Dems came to the aid of the firebombed Republican office out of a fierce devotion to democratic principles or because they saw a tremendous P.R. opportunity.

In fact, wouldn’t Trump, suffused with conspiracy theory rhetoric about the rigging of the election, insist that the point of the firebombing was to provide Clinton’s forces with just such an opportunity to save the day?

‘In Pale Fire, Nabokov notes an “absolutely extraordinary, unbelievably elegant” verbal curiosity: “A newspaper account of a Russian tsar’s coronation had, instead of korona (crown), the misprint vorona (crow), and when next day this was apologetically ‘corrected,’ it got misprinted a second time as korova (cow). “

The artistic correlation between the crown-crow-cow series and the Russian korona–vorona–korova series is something that would have, I am sure, enraptured my poet,” he wrote. “I have seen nothing like it on lexical playfields and the odds against the double coincidence defy computation.” ‘

Source: Futility Closet

‘For the first time in more than 125 years, the Arizona Republic endorsed a Democrat: Hillary Clinton. Some of the paper’s readers responded with death threats — and worse. Editor Mi-Ai Parrish’s response is as classy a civics lesson as you could ask for.’

Source: Boing Boing

‘One of Julian Assange’s only ways of communicating with the outside world from within the Ecuadorian Embassy in London has been disconnected, according to WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks claims that a “state actor” has cut off Assange’s internet access, with the group’s Twitter account confirming on the morning of October 17 that Assange’s connection has been “intentionally severed” and contingency plans are being activated. It’s unclear what those contingency plans may be and Motherboard was unable to verify Wikileaks’ claim. The Ecuadorian Embassy also did not immediately provide Motherboard with any more information.

WikiLeaks’ tweet came after the organisation posted on Sunday night what were rumored to be the “dead man keys” to documents; encryption keys that would allow for the publication of leaked documents. Users on Twitter and Reddit suggested that these tweets indicated Assange had been killed, and that these documents should be revealed in the wake of his death.

But these rumors were shut down by WikiLeaks’ Kelly Kolisnik. “Julian Assange is alive and well,” Kolisnik tweeted. “Rumors circulating that he tweeted out a ‘Dead Mans’ switch are completely false and baseless.”

And as Gizmodo points out, these 64-character codes are likely for “pre-commitment,” a way to prove that when documents are released in the future, their content has not been tampered with.

The flurry of rumors surrounding the state of Assange come as WikiLeaks continues to release documents related to hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign advisor, John Podesta. Assange, speaking earlier in October, said that he would aim to publish documents on a weekly basis in the run up to Election Day on November 8…’

Source: Motherboard

As Trump puffs “We can’t let them get away with it, folks” in incitement, his followers are increasingly calling for “revolution” and “bloodshed”.

Source: Pacific Standard

‘This week, an emergency room in the Pacific Northwest was briefly quarantined after five people—including two police officers and a hospital worker—experienced mysterious hallucinations from an unidentified illness believed to be spread by touch. According to Oregon Live, the enigmatic incident began early Wednesday morning when a 54-year-old caregiver in North Bend, Oregon, called police to report seven or eight people “trying to take the roof off her vehicle.” Police say they found nothing, but after the caregiver reported the unseen vandals a second time, sheriff’s deputies escorted her to a nearby hospital for suspected hallucinations.

Shortly afterward, however, one of the deputies began experiencing similar symptoms and returned to the hospital. Soon after that, the other deputy, a hospital worker and the caregiver’s 78-year-old patient also began hallucinating and were hospitalized. A hazmat team was subsequently deployed to both the hospital and the initial residence, but was unable to locate a common source of contamination. Blood tests also failed to find anything unusual. “The vehicles, equipment and uniforms have been checked with no contaminates identified or located on or about them.” Authorities say the investigation is ongoing…’

Source: Gizmodo

Mysterious environmental contaminant or mass hysteria?

‘Last month, a frog died in an Atlanta botanical garden. With it went an entire species never to hop along the Earth again. Biologists at Zoo Atlanta who’d looked after the frog for the past 12 years called him “Toughie.” He was a charismatic, glossy-eyed specimen and the very last Rabbs’ fringe-limbed tree frog in the world.

…Frog like the Rabbs’ and other amphibians are dying off at an alarming rate. It’s estimated that 200 species of frogs have gone extinct since the 1970s, and many fear it’s a harbinger of greater biodiversity loss that will come for birds, fish, and mammals too. Ecologists fear that the planet is in the midst of a mass extinction — the sixth in the long history of life on Earth. And it’s looking like amphibians are the most at-risk class of vertebrates.This is particularly disturbing because amphibians — which include frogs, salamanders, and caecilians (they look like worms crossed with snakes) — have been around for hundreds of millions of years…’

Source: Vox

‘The United States has, for more than a year now, been quietly participating in a Saudi-led war against the Houthis, providing valuable logistical support for Saudi Arabia’s airstrikes. So this missile exchange isn’t something out of the blue. It’s an escalation of current US policy, moving from indirect to direct participation in the Saudi offensive. The problem, though, is that the Saudi campaign is utterly vicious…’

Source:  Vox

‘After a summer marked by record temperatures around the globe, the world wrapped up beach season with a particularly distressing bit of climate news last month: atmospheric carbon levels have reached 400 ppm, a dreaded climate milestone from which there’s no going back.

Fortunately, this bummer of a development was almost immediately followed by announcements detailing the launch or finalization of a host of landmark climate deals around the globe over the last two weeks. Many of these agreements have been in negotiation for years and are notable for their fundamentally international scope, a necessary facet of effective climate legislation.The question, of course, is whether these historic deals are too little too late, but in the absence of a crystal ball, here’s a rundown of the importance (and limitations) of these agreements and what to expect in the future.

Fortunately, this bummer of a development was almost immediately followed by announcements detailing the launch or finalization of a host of landmark climate deals around the globe over the last two weeks. Many of these agreements have been in negotiation for years and are notable for their fundamentally international scope, a necessary facet of effective climate legislation.The question, of course, is whether these historic deals are too little too late, but in the absence of a crystal ball, here’s a rundown of the importance (and limitations) of these agreements and what to expect in the future.

The question, of course, is whether these historic deals are too little too late, but in the absence of a crystal ball, here’s a rundown of the importance (and limitations) of these agreements and what to expect in the future…’

Source: Motherboard

‘No one argues that the American addiction treatment system is anywhere near optimal — even its cheerleaders recognize that there’s miles to go before all people with addiction have access to respectful, ethical, effective, and evidence-based care. Worse, the past year has seen myriad media exposes and financial, sexual, and maltreatment scandals.

Of course, done right, addiction treatment can transform lives, with a hugely positive impact on society. It is often the difference between life and death, or between a productive recovery and a life of despair. Yet all too often that opportunity is being blown.So what is the best way forward? And what are the biggest steps the industry itself can take to improve?

So what is the best way forward? And what are the biggest steps the industry itself can take to improve? …’

Source: Pacific Standard