Month: March 2016

Scarfolk

the Most Spectacular Dystopia of the 1970s

The term most often applied to Scarfolk is hauntology. Hauntology recycles aesthetic forms and reflects the clash between the dreams we had of the future in the 1960s through the 1980s versus where we actually are now. But it also looks back, as did 1970s culture, to earlier periods, like pre-Christian paganism and Victoriana, for example.

10K Public Domain Genomes

A leading genetic testing company is putting genetic information from the people it has tested into the public domain, a move that could make a large trove of data available to researchers looking for genes linked to various diseases. Ambry Genetics will put information from 10K of its customers into a publicly available database called AmbryShare.

Powerlifting World Record

On July 2, 2015, a video was uploaded to YouTube that began with a teenage girl in a gym wrapping a weightlifting belt around her waist. Her hair was nested atop her head in a messy bun, and headphones covered her ears. A straight bar with 6 plates on each side, totalling 190 kg, rested on the ground next to her. She huffed and puffed, paced from one end of the gym to the other, and clapped her hands. Small clouds of chalk wafted from her palms. Then she walked up to the bar, howled, bent down, and lifted the weight to her mid-thigh, in what is called a deadlift. She exhaled, arched her back, and dropped the bar and the plates to the floor. “Yes!” she screamed. “Fucking shit! I did it!”

Pseudolaw

Would you like to stop paying taxes? Just renounce your 14th Amendment United States citizenship and claim ownership of the secret cestui que (beneficiary) trust that the US government created in your name on the day that you were born. Credit card debt? No problem, the trust is flush with millions or billions of dollars that you can use, just as soon as you establish ownership of your verified birth certificate and the corporate entity that has your name – but in all-capital letters. These are some of the claims advanced by the self-styled experts who insist that everything you know about the legal system is wrong. These days, we are distressingly familiar with alternative, conspiracy-theory versions of science and medicine. Less well-known is the legal version of this phenomenon, not as visible as creationism or anti-vaccine activism but in many ways as destructive. Just ask the residents of Harney County, Oregon, who recently saw militants occupying the Malheur Wildlife Refuge emboldened by ‘judges’ and ‘citizen grand juries’ who had less to do with actual law than fantasy football does with the US National Football League.