Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 1h

Maybe we all misunderstood what Trump meant when he said Portland was on fire because he didn't pronounce "fire" as a three-syllable word punctuated with zig-zagging finger snaps at the end of each syllable.

Jeff VanderMeer @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social · 10d

Portland enacts emergency powers of nudity to check federal overreach.

Emergency World Naked Bike Ride planned in Portland, with blurred photi of naked bicyclists.

R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 4h

And, in a lot of cases, benefitting from just luckily happening to be the ones who managed to establish first-mover advantage.

Jared Yates Sexton @jysexton.bsky.social · 4h

It’s endlessly depressing watching all these tech oligarchs try and convince themselves they’re geniuses instead of people who just happened to benefit from capitalism requiring their products and then the entire political and banking system gassing them up with with free money and tireless support.

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 4h

I like OneDrive *a lot* for what it does well. Which, for me, is about having an always-available digital library and being able to work across devices, not about rifling through my photos. (Indeed, I wish the phone app version didn't prioritize photos/screenshots *at all*).

This totally sucks.

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Reposted by R. Eric VanNewkirk

the babahuck @tylerhuckabee.bsky.social · 7h

In 2004, Parisian police were conducting a training exercise in the french catacombs and found, after moving past a desk and a tape playing audio of snarling dogs, a fully functional movie theater and bar. When they returned 3 days later, the equipment was gone, with a note: “Do not try to find us.”

Members of the force's sports squad, responsible
- among other tasks - for policing the 170 miles of tunnels, caves, galleries and catacombs that underlie large parts of Paris, stumbled on the complex while on a training exercise beneath the Palais de Chaillot, across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower.
After entering the network through a drain next to the Trocadero, the officers came across a tarpaulin marked: Building site, No access.
Behind that, a tunnel held a desk and a closed-circuit TV camera set to automatically record images of anyone passing. The mechanism also triggered a tape of dogs barking, "clearly designed to frighten people off," the spokesman said.
Further along, the tunnel opened into a vast 400 sq metre cave some 18m underground, "like an underground amphitheatre, with terraces cut into the rock and chairs".

There the police found a full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment, and tapes of a wide variety of films, including 1950s film noir classics and more recent thrillers. None of the films were banned or even offensive, the spokesman said.
A smaller cave next door had been turned into an informal restaurant and bar. "There were bottles of whisky and other spirits behind a bar, tables and chairs, a pressure-cooker for making couscous," the spokesman said.
"The whole thing ran off a professionally installed electricity system and there were at least three phone lines down there."
Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor: "Do not," it said, "try to find us."

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 4h

I have a hard time imagining Moore returning Thiel's phone calls.

And I think if Moore did, it would probably be just to troll the hell out of him.

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 4h

Thiel's... interpretation... of Ozymandias and what Moore is trying to say about power in Watchmen doesn't even manage to be interestingly wrong. (I love Moore, but he's not exactly subtle.)

He does the same shit with Tolkien. It's Otto and apes reading philosophy all over again.

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Reposted by R. Eric VanNewkirk

Old White Nepo Hat @kenwhite.bsky.social · 5h

Every time someone makes me read something Peter Thiel said it’s like “Scrooge McDuck is Jesus Christ and Huey, Dewey, and Louie are Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel and Daisy is Mary Magdalene and that’s why women voting has lowered American sperm count.”

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 5h

I would say they were already crazy, but Obama's election certainly inflamed them and amplified their senses of grievance and entitlement.

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 5h

Tried adding it to my Bookshop.org wishlist and it was already there, whaddyaknow? 🤣

Bookshop: Buy books online. Support local bookstores.

An online bookstore that financially supports local independent bookstores and gives back to the book community.

Bookshop.org

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 5h

I'm always a little shocked whenever I remember James Whale's Frankenstein is only 70 minutes long. He packed about twice as much story into Bride and it's only five minutes longer.

Efficient storytelling!

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 5h

While people are likely to still be quoting William Goldman fifty years from now.

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 5h

I mean, actually? Yeah. It's part of their malice and obsession over the Clintons, and their seeming bewilderment that most left-of-center reactions to "what if Clinton is in the Epstein files?" are along the lines of "then he and Trump can share a cell".

They think he's a god with worshippers.

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Reposted by R. Eric VanNewkirk

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 7h

a key thing about vought — and all of these guys — is that they have a totally top down and hierarchical vision of the world. they believe that the cultural changes they hate can be turned off by destroying the federal government because they can’t imagine that they emerged bottom-up in society

Thomas Zimmer @thomaszimmer.bsky.social · 7h

What he’s railing against is a profound shift in culture, status… He’s obsessed with the idea that America is controlled by a leftist “ruling elite” - but “elite” isn’t defined socio-economically or by political power, it means something like: Getting to define “real America” and who gets to belong.

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 5h

I dunno. Before TV pushed the studios towards longer and more "cinematic" movies to get audiences out of the house, lots of pretty great movies came in at the 60-80 minute range and 90 minutes was a sweet spot. And pacing may be a subjective call, or a genre issue.

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 5h

And I just seem to see this all the time. I get the sense that people making stuff in the '80s read lots of different things during the Golden Age of Publishing and consumed lots of diverse media, and the people making them now have only read Save the Cat.

It just depresses me.

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 5h

Melville to casually drop references and viewers will get it. Not even that they've read Moby Dick or Tale of Two Cities, but they've at least ingested them by cultural osmosis.

And then I think of Star Trek Into Darkness, which assumes the audience is aware of... Star Trek II.

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 5h

Could be. I think there's also just a diminished sense of literacy in a cultural sense.

I find myself thinking too much about Star Trek II in this context: here's this kinda cheesy space battle movie based on an often silly TV show, yet it just assumes the audience is aware enough of Dickens and

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Reposted by R. Eric VanNewkirk

Thomas Zimmer @thomaszimmer.bsky.social · 8h

Sunday reading:

I wrote about the aggrieved extremist who is currently firing thousands of federal workers and ravaging state capacity based on conspiratorial nonsense - and about mainstream media’s infuriating tendency to sanitize Russell Vought and the regime he serves.

This week’s piece:

We need to talk about Russell Vought – But Properly

Why certain mainstream outlets insist on sanitizing Vought as a devout “small government” conservative – and what actually animates his war against pluralistic democracy

steady.page

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 6h

I'm constantly getting the feeling from a lot of mainstream stuff these days that it's just pastiches of things from my youth that I'm supposed to enjoy now because I liked them then, and nobody making them now is interrogating how and why the stuff then actually worked.

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 6h

I have a bad feeling part of this is that a lot of people making movies now learned how to make movies from watching 80s movies, while people making 80s movies learned how to make movies from consuming a ton of midcentury culture that included books and plays (and movies based on books and plays).

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 6h

Wait, kids don't love museums? I mean, okay, maybe not art galleries so much, and history museums can be hit or miss depending on focus and exhibits, fair. But I've neither been nor met a child who didn't love a natural history museum.

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 8h

Gee, wonder who takes care of the kiddos if there's no daycare? Guess one of the parents will have to stay home. I wonder which parent they want it to be...? 🤔

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Reposted by R. Eric VanNewkirk

Jacqueline Antonovich @jackiantonovich.bsky.social · 8h

The thing is: if you study what I study, this makes complete sense. Many eugenicists of the early 20th C. wanted the “right” people to have more babies! Limit or prohibit contraception to ensure more of the “right” babies, and use targeted sterilizations to ensure fewer of the “wrong” babies.

Clara Jeffery @clarajeffery.bsky.social · 17h

Ah yes, cutting teen pregnancy prevention while ending federal right to an abortion…

Catherine Rampell @crampell.bsky.social · 18h

An HHS source says admin also RIFed entire Office of Population Affairs last night.
“Not a single staff person to run our nation's family planning program or the evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention program. The Office of Adolescent Health which nested within OPA functionally ceases to exist”

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 8h

Because the alternative to fixing it in the air, unfortunately, is landing for repairs, and we do not have the ground conditions for a soft landing and a reliable, cooperative repair team. We're looking at a crash and rebuild for the survivors scenario, and that's utterly bad.

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R. Eric VanNewkirk @sotsogm.bsky.social · 8h

The US's original design only lasted about 80 years and has been implicitly (not explicitly, textually) reconfigured at least once since then.

It's a bad design. The question is really have we run out of ways to fix the plane in the air if two subsystems have failed and the third is failing?

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