Welcome to Reality Farm.
CONTENT CROP 🌾
A photo from the summit of Mt. Everest earlier this year prefaced one of the deadliest days in the mountain’s recent history: “It was one of the most arresting viral photos of the year: a horde of climbers clogged atop Mount Everest.But it only begins to capture the deadly realities of what transpired that day at 29,000 feet. These are the untold accounts of the people who were there.”
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A immersive and mesmerizing anatomy of a suicide bombing: “A helmet camera — worn by the US soldier assigned to protect [Savage] on the patrol between a scheduled meeting and the base — shows us what really happened. That includes the signs that were observed but then disregarded before the blast.”
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An indictment of how bad things are, and have always been, in Afghanistan: the Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers. “Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations . . . added: ‘What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking. If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction . . . 2,400 lives lost.’”
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An Infowars video editor quits and pens a mea culpa in the New York Times. The important takeaway? Alex Jones’s persona, like many in media, is fabricated in many ways: “Two nights later, I received a call from Jones: ‘Let me tell you a little secret,’ he said in his gravelly voice. ‘I don’t like it anymore, either.’”
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After a Nevada man receives a bone marrow transplant, he becomes a chimera — the technical term for a person with two sets of DNA: “Swabs collected from his lip, cheek and tongue showed that these also contained his donor’s DNA, with the percentages rising and falling over the years. Of the samples collected, only his chest and head hair were unaffected. The most unexpected part was that four years after the procedure, the DNA in his semen had been entirely replaced by his donor’s.”
SUGAR CUBES 📷
RADIO FREE REALITY 🎙
house
electronic
UFOs IN THE COW FIELD 🛸
A new book claims Albert Camus, the French author, philosopher, and Nobel Prize laureate was assassinated by the KGB. Not only that, but the book also claims that the French state ITSELF may have abetted the KGB in murdering Camus because his anti-Soviet rhetoric made relations with the Soviet Union awkward.
It doesn’t appear that many reputable people support this theory, which marks it as a good ☑️ conspiracy theory in my book. Now, all this might be a lot more alarming to me if I had ever read any of Camus’ books, which I haven’t, except for the one time I tried to read The Stranger when I was younger because I thought I was getting into noir film and had read that The Stranger was one of the best noir films of the 20th Century. It turned out that I had confused Camus’ The Stranger (1942) with the Orson Welles’ movie The Stranger (1946), a mistake I didn’t discover until several years later, long after I’d given up trying to understand what Camus’ indifferent French protagonist had to do with hardboiled detective stories and Nazis living under false identities.
THE GOVERNMENT OBSERVATORY ON THE HILL ABOVE MY FARM 👁
Pantone just released their Color of the Year for 2020, Classic Blue:
I am fascinated by Pantone’s Color of the Year scheme. Sure, it’s a big marketing gimmick, but the very idea that a company could definitively lay claim to deciding a color of the year for everyone else is thrilling. Imagine sitting in a conference room and arguing about colors for a living. Imagine walking around with a briefcase full of color swatches, brokering deals between the shadowy color underworld and the establishment color firms. Imagine telling your friend who likes yellow to pound sand because you’re the Color Guy and Classic Blue is the big kahuna in 2020.
Color is one of those weird hyperconcepts — just a little bit of electromagnetic radiation tied up with history, sociology, biology. For centuries there have been theories that the ancient Greeks had a cultural color blindness or lacked a word for the color blue, because Homer inexplicably kept referring to the Aegean Sea as “wine-dark.”
Anyways, the point here is that Pantone pissed off a lot of people with Classic Blue. And I’ll admit, I was a little surprised. The picks for the past three years have been Living Coral (2019), Ultra Violet (2018), and Greenery (2017), all of which I’m sure you’ve seen in extensive marketing campaigns for mattress start-ups, CBD oils, and direct-to-consumer erectile dysfunction pills.
Classic Blue lacked vision, hence the “classic.” It wasn’t forward-looking, it was backward-looking. And indeed, here’s what Pantone wrote for the big reveal: “Instilling calm, confidence, and connection, this enduring blue hue highlights our desire for a dependable and stable foundation on which to build as we cross the threshold into a new era.”
I don’t know about you, but that sure reads like Pantone, the color people, are deeply unsettled about the coming decade. Which just makes you wonder. If we’ve lost the color people to fear and pessimism, have we lost everyone? Is there any hope at all?
I like to think about a very stressed Pantone employee sitting in a big room, chewing his nails. The scientists in lab coats press a button, and the room floods with Mimosa Yellow (2009) — too disorienting. Then Tangerine Tango (2012) — terrifying flashbacks. Then… Classic Blue (2020) — Ah. Instant relief. All is well. Nothing hurts.
THE BOOK BARN 📖
“Attending Marvels: A Patagonian Journal” by George Gaylord Simpson
(Travelogue, 1931. Six dollars.)
Manuel is extremely depressed because we have no garlic.
I found this memoir in a pile of free books outside a used book store. This account of a 1930 fossil-hunting expedition to Patagonia begins with the accidental involvement of the author in an Argentine coup, and meanders from there. The author is a bit of a prick, the subject matter alternatively bleak, darkly comic, and detailed on matters of paleontology.
After I passed it to my brother to read a few years ago, he recently remarked: “I never knew there were so many different ways of describing the wind.” I cannot recommend enough.
THE RIGHT’S WING 🦇
A conservative blogger set off a firestorm on Twitter with this take:
Notwithstanding criticism of this from the left, responses from the right fall into two camps:
Libertarians who believe porn is protected by free speech and attempts to restrict it constitutes a slippery slope of big-government censorship.
Social conservatives who believe that porn so obviously harmful to children, women, and society that the government has a duty to restrict, heavily regulate, or ban it.
Without getting into the argument itself, the split in responses illustrates a main source of tension on the right. Sometime in 1980s, social conservatives and free-market libertarians formed an uneasy coalition, dubbed “fusionism,” where both groups vote for right-leaning candidates and advance (or tolerate) each other’s policy goals.
Only now, social conservatives, who have arguably put up the lion’s share of votes in the fusionist coalition, feel like their priorities have been ignored or defeated while free-market libertarians lowered taxes, opened up immigration, and secured free trade agreements.
As factions jockey for control of the post-Trump right, social conservatives, led by Catholics (interesting in itself given how American social conservatives are, by population, overwhelmingly evangelical), are flexing their muscles — willing to make arguments that government can and should make laws to compel behavior toward a “common good.” Libertarians, skeptical of the state’s ability to do anything productive, have predictably reacted to this poorly.
Add in the ability of social conservatives like Matt Walsh to dunk on libertarians as porn-addicted losers dedicated to “muh right to watch porn” while middle schoolers readily access hardcore porn, and, well, you’ve got all the makings of a nice little internet spat.
As a related aside, I’ve noticed that in parts of right-wing Twitter, tweeting “execute pornographers” acts as a similar shock public commitment to the cause of social conservatism (anti-degeneracy?) as left-wing Twitter’s “eat the rich.” Same energy, no?