This just in

[Pogo]

Matt Taibbi

Well, I can’t interview the gorilla.

If President Bartlet can take time out his busy schedule for a gorilla, I don't see what's stopping you, Mr Reporter.

[Constantine the Great]

Rats Are Us

In the late 1990s, Jaak Panksepp, the father of affective neuroscience, discovered that rats laugh. This fact had remained hidden because rats laugh in ultrasonic chirps that we can’t hear. It was only when Brian Knutson, a member of Panksepp’s lab, started to monitor their vocalisations during social play that he realised there was something that appeared unexpectedly similar to human laughter. Panksepp and his team began to systematically study this phenomenon by tickling the rats and measuring their response. They found that the rats’ vocalisations more than doubled during tickling, and that rats bonded with the ticklers, approaching them more frequently for social play. The rats were enjoying themselves. But the discovery was met with opposition from the scientific community. The world wasn’t ready for laughing rats.

[Diane Arbus]

The Kate Middleton Photo That Was Too Good to Be True

Stare at any meaningful image for too long and you will eventually end up in the back yard with Lee Harvey Oswald, taking measuring tape to shadows, trying to strike that strange backward-leaning pose, looking like somebody’s patsy.

[James Madison]

What Might the US Owe the World for Covid-19?

The sum of the evidence – and the absence of reliable evidence pointing to a natural origin – adds up to the possibility that the US funded and implemented a dangerous GoF research program that led to the creation of SARS-CoV-2 and then to a worldwide pandemic. A powerful recent assessment by mathematical biologist Alex Washburne reaches the conclusion “beyond reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a lab…” He also notes that the collaborators “proceeded to mount what can legitimately be called a disinformation campaign” to hide the laboratory origin.

[Allen Ginsberg]

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness and devotion to The Guardian, which ain't what it used to be.

Once upon a time, belonging to a group you reported on was considered a conflict of interest; now it’s a requirement. The fertile combination of postmodernism and social justice led to the idea that since true objectivity is a myth—or a tool of oppressive forces—lived experience trumps expertise. Everyone is biased, so the correct bias must be embedded. This leads to journalists scrutinizing the things they should accept, and accepting the things they should be scrutinizing.

[sam]

Still a hard no.

[sam]

https://newrepublic.com/article/133043/youve-got-hate-mail

In the opening swath of the last century, if a writer was luckless enough to arouse the disapproval of D.H. Lawrence, he could usually expect a poison-pen letter of soul-stomping vitriol. Trenchantly idealistic about literature—is there any other way to be for the artist and critic?—Lawrence had a talent for combining a maximum of good taste with a minimum of good tact. His 1923 book Studies in Classic American Literature remains a necessary take on our canon, and his essays and reviews come close to the songful discernment of Oscar Wilde’s, but you must turn to his letters if you want the undiluted Lawrence, the venom behind the vision.

https://harpers.org/archive/2024/12/the-painted-protest-dean-kissick-contemporary-art/

Obrist was known to his friends and colleagues as “Hurricane.” He circumnavigated the world relentlessly, meeting everyone he could and introducing them to one another, in person or over email on his two BlackBerries, insisting on the urgency of their conversation. If the role of the contemporary artist was to consume the world, Obrist believed the role of the curator was to connect it, to become the conduit through which all twenty-first-century creativity and thought might flow. In attempting this, he may well have lost parts of his mind, as one understandably will, getting too little sleep, passing through too many time zones too quickly, sending and receiving too many messages, hearing too many foolish ideas from too many crazy people. (At one point, he had small therapy magnets taped to his temples.) He almost destroyed himself, as a committed early-twenty-first-century citizen should, in an orgy of connectivity.

https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/censors-enforce-orthodoxy-the-problem-is-we-need-heretics-too-h6q5tjqkx / https://archive.ph/Sbvun

Now it would be easy to get into the weeds of this debate; to discuss, say, the overreach of the 2003 Communications Act, the prospect of the looming online safety bill banning “legal but harmful” content; perhaps even the risks of a formal definition of Islamophobia being used to bar criticism of this religion. But while I sympathise with these positions, I’d suggest our fundamental problem isn’t legislative; it's cultural. For what these debates represent is a steady diminution of faith in free speech in the digital age. Like the period after the invention of the printing press, we are losing our bearings.

So let me suggest that the true era of fake news wasn’t circa 2014-2024 but 500 to 1500. These were not called the Dark Ages for nothing (despite revisionist historians seeking to rehabilitate the period). And they were dark, let me suggest, for a simple reason: this is what happens when there is centralised control of speech. The church burnt those who challenged their assertions to the point where the people stopped asking questions, even in the privacy of their own minds.

https://albertstern.medium.com/jewish-sexuality-such-as-it-is-volume-one-464be8e7ea39

The Jews have a historic tradition of not knowing exactly what might be the right thing to do with their genitals, a confusion begun at the dawn of the faith as part of the Almighty’s covenant with Abraham. Following the example of Abraham, Jewish law commands that the foreskin of every male child’s homely golem be snipped eight days after his birth. In light of the treatment the male organ has received over the millennia, perhaps Jewish women have demurred on naming their organ in fear of calling unwanted attention to it.

https://thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com/2024/10/15/destabilizers-inc-nato-will-squeeze-ukraine-to-the-last-drop/

Another park, another Sunday;
Why is it life turns out that way?
Just when you think you got a good thing
It seems to slip away…
Another park, another Sunday;
It’s dark and empty thanks to you
I got to get myself together,
But it’s hard to do…
- The Doobie Brothers, from “Another Park, Another Sunday”

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
- Plato

For my money, the Doobie Brothers never delivered a finer performance than the one recorded at the Wolf Trap Center for the Performing Arts in Vienna, Virginia in July 2004, from which the lead-in track is excerpted. For one thing, the sound and cinematography were superb, as it was being recorded for a film; concert videos are frequently filmed on a cellphone with a speaker the size of Kamala Harris’s brain, which virtually guarantees the playback will fall far short of live sound’s richness of depth and tone. But also, the Doobies were a mature band here; not as old as they are now, obviously, but as far from their biker-band beginnings as a peanut from a peacock. The sax solo at the end of “Another Park, Another Sunday” is a standout, as well. Although this track does not feature Tom Johnson’s lead-guitar work, others – like “Clear as the Driven Snow” – showcase the lazy, syrupy bends, endless sustain and melodic mastery of a vastly-underrated guitarist. Although the band has never been embarrassed for originals, carefully curated performances of cover versions like Sonny Boy Williamson’s, “Don’t Start Me Talkin'” lend strut and polish to what was already a pretty good song. I highly recommend the whole performance. Alternatively, if you can get YouTube, most of the concert is available here for free, although the fidelity is hit and miss because the recordings are from different sources.

Johnson is plainly singing about a lost lover, but it occurred to me – yes, there’s the segue, you knew it was coming, I’m so predictable – that similar grief and dislocation might accompany the loss of power you might once have casually exercised, and that here it is allegorical with the west’s inability to bend Russia to its will. Just when you think you’ve got a good thing, it seems to slip away…I’ve got to get myself together, but it’s hard to do. Yes, I imagine it is, and just like in love, I imagine it is harder to get yourself together if what you lost was something you felt yourself entitled to, that it was yours by right...

To complete today's browsing history dump:
https://x.com/babybeginner/status/1872603134448804113