Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed “to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.” — Read on heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-29-2023

Fascism, the U.S. government document explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.” 

“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said. 

Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.” 

CERN celebrates 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web • The Register:

On April 30, 1993, CERN signed off on a decision that the World Wide Web – a client, server, and library of code created under its roof – belonged to humanity (the letter was duly stamped on May 3).

"CERN relinquishes all intellectual property rights to this code, both source and binary form, and permission is granted for anyone to use, duplicate, modify and redistribute it" states a letter signed on that day by Walter Hoogland and Helmut Weber – at the time respectively CERN's director of research and director of administration.

Gun Violence Is Actually Worse in Red States. It’s Not Even Close. - POLITICO:

This is, by far the smartest analysis of gun violence I’ve ever seen, breaking it down by major cultural influence rather than geography, and derives some really useful data from that.

In reality, the region the Big Apple comprises most of is far and away the safest part of the U.S. mainland when it comes to gun violence, while the regions Florida and Texas belong to have per capita firearm death rates (homicides and suicides) three to four times higher than New York’s. On a regional basis it’s the southern swath of the country — in cities and rural areas alike — where the rate of deadly gun violence is most acute, regions where Republicans have dominated state governments for decades.

The reasons for these disparities go beyond modern policy differences and extend back to events that predate not only the American party system but the advent of shotguns, revolvers, ammunition cartridges, breach-loaded rifles and the American republic itself. The geography of gun violence — and public and elite ideas about how it should be addressed — is the result of differences at once regional, cultural and historical. Once you understand how the country was colonized — and by whom — a number of insights into the problem are revealed.

The Deep South is the most deadly of the large regions at 15.6 per 100,000 residents followed by Greater Appalachia at 13.5. That’s triple and quadruple the rate of New Netherland — the most densely populated part of the continent — which has a rate of 3.8, which is comparable to that of Switzerland. Yankeedom is the next safest at 8.6, which is about half that of Deep South, and Left Coast follows closely behind at 9. El Norte, the Midlands, Tidewater and Far West fall in between.

A Brief Compendium of Vintage Opium Underworlds:

I don’t want to make anyone feel uncomfortable, so if you’re reluctant to step inside the world of 19th century junkies, I suggest you close the door and choose something a little lighter and brighter from our menu. I’m not quite sure how I ended up here myself, stockpiling antique photographs that have survived from the Opium Age and ended up on the internet. In my years of hunting and gathering in the far corners of the web, I’ve always been stopped in my tracks by these images because they seem like such rare and almost unreal insights into late 19th century society.

How America Embraced Aspics With Threatening Auras - Gastro Obscura:

As with so many things considered cutting-edge from the early to mid-1900s, this former food of the future is now a subject of derision and morbid fascination. Facebook groups like “Crimes against jello and vegetables and other mid-century transgressions” and “Aspics with threatening auras” collectively have tens of thousands of members, all of whom revel in the weirdest examples of the genre.

Whether it’s a whole turkey in aspic from the 1920s or a gelatin loaf portrait of Queen Elizabeth, the appeal lies in juxtapositions that feel, well, wrong. It’s what Freud would have called unheimlich, but in today’s internet parlance is known as “cursed.” Like an eyeball with a set of human teeth protruding under the lashes, the cursed aesthetic hinges on an image’s ability to make the viewer squirm.

Sony Group Portal - Gallery | Sony Design | History of Sony Design:

On this page you can see a wide range of products and services created by Sony designers. Please take a look at the history of Sony Design.

One item I’d never seen before is the HB-101, which was actually a pretty sexy looking MSX1 Compatible home computer that never went anywhere.

– via Daring Fireball

50 Years Later, We’re Still Living in the Xerox Alto’s World - IEEE Spectrum:

As should now be apparent, how the Alto came to shape our lives with computers a half century later isn’t the story of any one individual. In our culture, however, the history of technology is habitually presented as a sequence of remarkable individual achievements. But this is wrong. Innovation is the work of groups, of communities. These provide the context and the medium for the actions of the individual. Leadership is a meaningless concept outside of a group.

The remarkable story of the Alto is the story of such communities. It is a story of how a broad research community developed a shared vision for interactive, networked, graphical, personal computing. It is a story of how a smaller group of talented individuals came together in a new laboratory to realize that vision and to experiment with it. And it is a story of this group moving on, finding new colleagues and organizations in the rapidly expanding personal computer industry, and working for decades to bring the Alto way of computing to the world.

This is a under-recognized part of the history of the tech we use… Xerox and Bell Labs gave a lot of people room to play and figure out much of the foundations of what we see around us, but also didn’t know what to do with any of it until the right people took those balls and ran.

Why Is There an Empty Picture Frame in Joe Biden’s Oval Office?:

Fascinating - but the real tidbit I didn’t realize was that President Biden has a bust of Caesar Chavez in the Oval Office…

The Case For Shunning - by A.R. Moxon - The Reframe:

There has to come a point when we finally insist to take the evidence before us and to draw moral conclusions—because unless we do, we won’t ever be able to address the problems before us. If we don’t make moral judgments about speech, we’ll find ourselves on a treadmill of discourse, always running but never getting anywhere, endlessly compelled to apply an indestructible skepticism to the evidence, and an indestructible credulity to specious conjecture and lies.

It’s time for us to understand people for what they insist on being. To understand that participation with the popularized genocidal urges gripping our country is an unacceptable moral failing, as is support for the politicians and pundits who are pursing it, as is membership in the political party around which it is organized and energized. To understand that unforgivable moral failings deserve not our ears, but our backs.

Believe people when they tell us who they are - If we did that sooner, Scott Adams finally saying the quiet part out loud wouldn’t really be a surprise.

RPS Time Capsule: the games worth saving from 2006 | Rock Paper Shotgun:

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Developer:Bethesda Game Studios Publisher: Bethesda Softworks From: Steam, GOG, Humble, Game Pass

Ed: I am convinced Oblivion’s fantasy setting of Cyrodiil is the closest you can get to a waking lucid dream. Break out of jail and you’re in this lush landscape, with golden hues and soft textures and warm strings that accompany your wanderings. I like how it frames its world through its mundane, little details, too. Dirt paths may simply lead to quaint huts in the middle of the woods or moss-covered ruins pocked with red mushrooms. There’s a sense that you’re exploring somewhere that makes sense for its inhabitants, rather than a showroom for achievement hunters.

Skyrim is in many ways more fun to jump in and play, its certainly more stable, but of the 5 mainline Elder Scrolls entries I think Oblivion was the one that most found the perfect balance of narrative, customization, and control… At the expense of being a bit buggy and wierd.

The real problem with our national debt is nothing like what Republican debt scolds say it is:

In the 1950s, wealthy families had an effective tax rate (what they actually paid, after deductions, etc.) of around 50%. The rich paid about half of what they made. Since Ronald Reagan, and then George W. Bush, and then Trump enacted one Rich Man’s Tax Cut after another, what the wealthiest pay has shrunk drastically, to an average effective tax rate of 8.2% over recent years, less than many middle-class Americans. What does this have to do with the debt ceiling, or the federal debt in general? I’m glad you asked.

Lessons on How to Draw by Hokusai:

In 1812, Japanese woodblock print artist Katsushika Hokusai, who would later become famous for his iconic Great Wave off Kanagawa prints, published a three-volume series called Quick Lessons in Simplified Drawing. All three volumes are available online: one, two, three. Even if you’re not in the market for drawing lessons, the pages are wonderful to flip through.

Ermagerd I love him even more. Great Wave and the series it comes from are possibly my favorite art in existence, but he was such a cool artist in general…

The Lisa: Apple’s Most Influential Failure - CHM:

Despite the Lisa’s failure in the marketplace, it holds a key place in the history of the GUI and PCs more generally as the first GUI-based computer to be released by a personal computer company.

The world’s oldest narrative art has been discovered. It’s a picture of a guy jerking off to horny leopards | Boing Boing:

• via Boing Boing

jwz: Ignaz Semmelweis:

The doctor who discovered that hand-washing saved lives, especially in obstetrics care, was ridiculed and discredited, and it looks 30 years from that discovery before it was really accepted as maybe a good idea.

The Steve Jobs Archive:

From: Steve Jobs, sjobs@apple.com

To: Steve Jobs, sjobs@apple.com

Date: Thursday, September 2, 2010 at 11:08PM

I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds.

I do not make any of my own clothing.

I speak a language I did not invent or refine.

I did not discover the mathematics I use.

I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate.

I am moved by music I did not create myself.

When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive.

I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with.

I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being.

Sent from my iPad

Steve Jobs is one of my heroes… Not a saint by any means, but someone who really, truly, worked to make it easier for everyone to create and inspire others. I look forward to exploring the archives more.

The Apple Store Time Machine:

It’s where you bought your first iPod. It’s where you camped at 5 a.m. It’s where the iPhone came to life. It’s where the magic of technology made your world glow a bit brighter, if only for a moment.

There is magic involved here, time travel… None of “my” stores are here, but they’re close enough to feel like home in a way I couldn’t have imagined.

via Daring Fireball

jwz: There Is No Constitutional Right to Eat Dinner:

Antonin Scalia relied upon this time period in his majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, as did Justice Samuel Alito in his majority opinion in Dobbs. There is surely no better way to decide the scope of rights enjoyed by Americans living in 2022 than by surveying the works of legal thinkers from a different country, most of whom died well before the first shot was fired at Lexington and Concord.

In medieval England, Parliament occasionally passed what are known as “sumptuary laws” to regulate private consumption of goods and services. […] “But, as to excess in diet, there still remains one ancient statute unrepealed, which ordains that no man shall be served at dinner or supper, with more than two courses; except upon some great holy days there specified, in which he may be served with three,” he wrote. Kavanaugh himself conceded that the supposed right to dinner did not extend to every course by allegedly skipping out on dessert.

Not linking to the original New Republic article - It’s read-count paywalled.

jwz: Playing old PS3 games:

About once a year I think, "Hey, maybe I'll play that old video game that I used to enjoy." It never ends well.

With more recent consoles, PS3 and Wii U onwards, it can be a nightmare to keep access to old games working… A tide of Bit Rot is wiping away a ton of art in the form of games from this era.

Catwoman vs. the White House:

n 1968, singer, actress, and activist Eartha Kitt was invited to a “Women Doers” luncheon at the White House by Lady Bird Johnson, the First Lady. Kitt’s focus on actual problems and solutions didn’t jibe well with the self-congratulatory platitudes of a DC working luncheon. First she pointedly questioned a caught-off-guard President Johnson about childcare for working parents after he stopped by to gladhand a little bit. Then, after remarks from several other women in the room, Kitt rose and spoke out against the war in Vietnam:

The children of America are not rebelling for no reason. They are not hippies for no reason at all. We don’t have what we have on Sunset Blvd. for no reason. They are rebelling against something. There are so many things burning the people of this country, particularly mothers. They feel they are going to raise sons — and I know what it’s like, and you have children of your own, Mrs. Johnson — we raise children and send them to war.

After the luncheon, Kitt’s career in the United States took a turn for the worse.

DNA Lounge: 9-Feb-2022 (Wed): Wherein nobody’s boosted, and nobody believes that Long COVID exists:

Cholera cases are declining in our community. Now's the time for everyone to resume drinking fecal contaminated water from the Broad Street pump! #FecalUrgencyOfNormal

William Gibson’s Neuromancer: Does the Edge Still Bleed? | Tor.com:

Fiction, even science fiction, is not about the future: I think everybody knows that. So what is the “future” that Gibson describes here? It’s a future that in some ways looks remarkably like the present: the US hegemony is fading, the poor have gotten even poorer than they were in 1984, and the truly rich have power that the rest of us can’t even imagine. Although often described as glorifying computer programmers as a cohort of romantically wild console cowboys, Neuromancer pushes back at the idea that technical advance always results in progress. This book is still surprising, still relevant, and it still deals with unanswered questions.

The History of Blue Jeans:

Daina Berry, Historian: In fact we know the names of all the enslaved people that were owned by the Lucas and Pinckney family. These are generations of families. We’re not just talking about a husband and a wife, or a mom and a dad. We see grandparents on this list. They’re the ones that came from communities that dyed all kinds of cloth beautiful colors. They’re the ones that had the knowledge of indigo; they’re the ones that created generations of wealth for these white slave-holding families.

Pixel art commercial from Japan traces a century of changing work habits | Boing Boing:

Toni Morrison’s Ten Steps Towards Fascism:

In a convocation address delivered at Howard University in March 1995, Toni Morrison noted that before fascist movements arrive at a “final solution” (the euphemism used by Nazi leaders to refer to the mass murder of Jews), there are preceding steps that they use to advance their agenda. From an excerpt of that speech published in The Journal of Negro Education:

Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.

Morrison then continued, listing the pathway to fascism in ten steps:

1. Construct an internal enemy, as both focus and diversion.
2. Isolate and demonize that enemy by unleashing and protecting the utterance of overt and coded name-calling and verbal abuse. Employ ad hominem attacks as legitimate charges against that enemy.
3. Enlist and create sources and distributors of information who are willing to reinforce the demonizing process because it is profitable, because it grants power and because it works.
4. Palisade all art forms; monitor, discredit or expel those that challenge or destabilize processes of demonization and deification.
5. Subvert and malign all representatives of and sympathizers with this constructed enemy.
6. Solicit, from among the enemy, collaborators who agree with and can sanitize the dispossession process.
7. Pathologize the enemy in scholarly and popular mediums; recycle, for example, scientific racism and the myths of racial superiority in order to naturalize the pathology.
8. Criminalize the enemy. Then prepare, budget for and rationalize the building of holding arenas for the enemy — especially its males and absolutely its children.
9. Reward mindlessness and apathy with monumentalized entertainments and with little pleasures, tiny seductions, a few minutes on television, a few lines in the press, a little pseudo-success, the illusion of power and influence, a little fun, a little style, a little consequence.
10. Maintain, at all costs, silence.

As I have said before, you can see many of these steps playing out right now in America, orchestrated by a revitalized and emboldened right-wing movement that has captured the Republican Party. Jason Stanley, a scholar of fascism, recently wrote of Morrison’s speech:

Morrison’s interest was not in fascist demagogues or fascist regimes. It was rather in “forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems”. The procedures she described were methods to normalize such solutions, to “construct an internal enemy”, isolate, demonize and criminalize it and sympathizers to its ideology and their allies, and, using the media, provide the illusion of power and influence to one’s supporters.

Morrison saw, in the history of US racism, fascist practices — ones that could enable a fascist social and political movement in the United States.

Writing in the era of the “super-predator” myth (a Newsweek headline the next year read, “Superpredators: Should we cage the new breed of vicious kids?”), Morrison unflinchingly read fascism into the practices of US racism. Twenty-five years later, those “forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems” are closer than ever to winning a multi-decade national fight.

See also Umberto Eco’s 14 Features of Eternal Fascism and Fighting Authoritarianism: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century. (via jason stanley)

Tags: lists   politics   racism   Toni Morrison   USA