The Pizza Funeral

On March 5, 1973, 30 people headed out to a farm in Ossineke, Michigan, to witness an unusual event: the burial of an estimated 30K frozen, family-size mushroom pizzas. The mood was somber, and a little cheesy. The Governor of Michigan gave a brief homily “on courage in the face of tragedy,” before bulldozers began shoving pizzas into an 6m hole.

Lion King

Wow, quite the story

The group of conspirators was so close with Francis that they all nicknames, according to the indictment. The team called Fat Leonard Lion King, L.K. or Boss. “Defendants referred to themselves collectively … by terms such as ‘the Cool Kids,’ ‘the Band of Brothers,’ ‘the Brotherhood,’ ‘the Wolfpack,’ the ‘familia’ and ‘the Lion King’s Harem,’” the indictment added. For a few years, the Lion King’s Harem tore up the Pacific like a group of rowdy teenagers. The 7th Fleet’s Judge Advocate General sent an ethics message to the 7th’s leadership warning them to remember that taking gifts, especially gifts from contractors, was a no-no. The Cool Kids forwarded the message to the Lion King so he knew to keep their relationship a secret. “The next day,” the indictment stated. “During the [command ship] USS Blue Ridge’s port visit to Hong Kong, [the Cool Kids] and others dined and drank at Francis’s expense at the Petrus Restaurant in Hong Kong at a cost to Francis of $20435.”

Automating Populism

Here’s how quickly populism can be automated:

  1. Trump or Bannon picks an issue: the narrower and more inflammatory the better. Make the vote a yes or no.
  2. Trump asks his supporters to tell him what they want.
  3. His supporters download the app to their smartphones and vote.
  4. A little programming and marketing magic radically improves the number of Trump supporters using the app and reduces spammers/non-supporters attempting to skew the vote down to a trickle.
  5. Millions of Trump supporters download the app and vote.
  6. Once the decision is in, the app makes it easy to call or spam message to the user’s Congressional representatives. Millions of calls roll in.
  7. A bill that codifies that issue is fast tracked in Congress. Massive pressure via the app and the White House gets it passed quickly.
  8. Connecting action and results quickly generates buzz. Repeat. This time with 10 m downloads.
  9. The app evolves. The pressure from the network increases. It consumes the Republican party.

Voice uncanny valley

there are a set of reasons why people want voice to be the new thing. One more that I didn’t mention is that, now that Mobile is no longer the hyper-growth sector, the tech industry is casting around looking for the Next Big Thing. I suspect that voice is certainly a big thing, but we’ll have to wait a bit longer for the next platform shift.

What will the future call us?

Even more can be packed in if you use a historical name which—like Late Antiquity or Early Industrial Revolution—implies that our centuries are mostly important for their relation to some even more important neighboring era. If this is the Prepandemic Age, then 2100+ are going to be very bad centuries; if this is the Late Pandemic Age, they’re going to be great centuries. The Early Unification. The Late National Era. The Late Surface Era. The Interimperium. The Truce. The Early Digital Ages. The Late Digital Ages. Comparative labels with a strong judgment—positive labels, negative labels—can also imply enormous amounts about what comes after the 21st century. Are we the Dark Digital Age? Or the Golden Digital Age? Are we the Dark Interracial Age? The Golden Interracial Age? Entire future histories spin out in the imagination from each one.

Trump Dirt

It should be trivial to find dirt on Trump. This is very plausible. Then why was the oppo research so incompetent? You have a guy with decades of mafia activity, probably the most of anyone who ever ran for office, and you can’t find it? More fuel for my thesis that the Democrats suck at fighting.

So, okay.

Let’s say that you’re Trump. You’ve spent your entire career in the vaguely mobbed-up world of New York real estate developers, and after being forcibly ejected from that by a series of bankruptcies, you enter the even more mobbed-up world of international financing for hotels intended for Saudi princelings and Russian oligarchs in countries with a lot of natural-resource wealth.

No one will lend you money through normal channels because, again, whenever anyone lends you money you piss it all away on gold toilets and giant shit-fights with subcontractors, so you have to rely on things like Bayrock Group, headquartered in Trump tower, which developers describe as just a weird giant money pipeline from Kazakhstan and Russia to New York. And in the midst of all of this, you decide that you’re just going to stop paying taxes, not pay your contractors, and basically act like a sexual-harassing parody of a 1970s boss.

It’s not that Trump can’t stand up to an investigation of his Russia ties, although that will produce an embarrassment of minor revelations immediately — Felix Sater, for instance, who’s a minor Russian mafioso who provided financing for Trump projects in the 1990s. It’s that Trump can’t stand up to literally any investigation whatsoever. Turn over literally any rock in Trump’s life, and you’ll find a weird squirming nest of maggots underneath it.

There might be not much to the Russia story: the worst of it might be that Roger Stone was scheduling document dumps with Wikileaks. (He has already strongly implied that he was doing this.) But if you start pulling on any loose thread in that sweater, the entire thing is going to come unraveled and a giant pile of borderline criminality is going to come spilling out.

I would be surprised if even Trump has a strict accounting of where all the bodies he’s buried in his career are. Which means that he has to prevent an investigation of Russia ties whether or not he’s guilty.

A magnetic shield for Mars

An inflatable structure can generate a magnetic dipole field at a level of perhaps 1 or 2 Teslas an active shield against the solar wind and allow the Martian atmosphere to thicken overtime. Mars atmosphere would naturally thicken over time, which lead to many new possibilities for human exploration and colonization. These would include an average increase of 4 °C, which would be enough to melt the carbon dioxide ice in the northern polar ice cap. This would trigger a greenhouse effect, warming the atmosphere further and causing the water ice in the polar caps to melt.

Comic Sans

Yet despite the fact that Comic Sans is recommended for those with dyslexia, the gatekeepers of graphic-design decency routinely mock those who use it as artistically stunted and uneducated. It turns out the ongoing joke about the idiocy of Comic Sans is ableist. Microsoft font designer Vincent Connare created Comic Sans — based on the lettering by John Costanza in the comic book The Dark Knight Returns — to be used for speech bubbles in place of the unacceptably formal Times New Roman. The font was released in 1994. “Comic Sans was NOT designed as a typeface but as a solution to a problem with the often overlooked part of a computer program’s interface, the typeface used to communicate the message,” Connare says on his website. “The inspiration came at the shock of seeing Times New Roman used in an inappropriate way.”