The Insightful Troll

Rants and ruminations.

Why European Malls Are Thriving

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This video essay by Adam Kovacs on why European malls are doing better than their American counterparts. It’s not Amazon or the economy. Its urban planing.

Malls, hell, all commerce has to be an organic part of towns and cities. People should be able to get to them by means other than a car, and conveniently. Such integrated commercial spaces are far more resilient. If your commercial spaces aren’t resilient — if you just plop a big box outside the town — don’t be surprised when it goes bust in a few years. And then it’s bulldozed for the next thing to be put up for it to go bust the same way and then get bulldozed and then the next thing and the next and the next so on and so forth.

Steven Spielberg's Secret Ingredient

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Everything you need to understand the secret behind how the most commercially successful director who has ever lived sells wonder. Spielberg gets why we go to movies.

Trump Indicted - Charged for Conspiracy and Obstruction

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trump-indicted

A Washington DC grand jury indicted Donald Trump for “for conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding” or put simply, trying to steal the 2020 presidential election.

Heather Cox Richardson in a language that everybody here can easily understand:

The Trump team used lies about the election to justify organizing fraudulent slates of electors in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Allegedly with the help of Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel, they attempted to have the legitimate electors that accurately reflected the voters' choice of Biden replaced with fraudulent ones that claimed Trump had won in their states, first by convincing state legislators they had the power to make the switch, and then by convincing Vice President Mike Pence he could choose the Trump electors.

When Pence would not fraudulently alter the election results, Trump whipped up the crowd he had gathered in Washington, D.C., against Pence and then, according to the indictment, “attempted to exploit the violence and chaos at the Capitol” to overturn the election results. “As violence ensued,” the indictment reads, Trump and his co-conspirators “explained the disruption by redoubling efforts to levy false claims of election fraud and convince Members of Congress to further delay the certification based on those claims.” On the evening of January 6, 2021, the indictment alleges, Trump and Co-Conspirator 1 called seven senators and one representative and asked them to delay the certification of Biden’s election.

You can read the full 45-page indictment, annotated by the NY Times here. The two sections that are really troubling are:

On the afternoon of January 3, Co-Conspirator 4 spoke with a Deputy White House Counsel. The previous month, the Deputy White House Counsel had informed the Defendant that “there is no world, there is no option in which you do not leave the White House [o]n January 20th.” Now, the same Deputy White House Counsel tried to dissuade Co-Conspirator 4 from assuming the role of Acting Attorney General. The Deputy White House Counsel reiterated to Co-Conspirator 4 that there had not been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that if the Defendant remained in office nonetheless, there would be “riots in every major city in the United States.” Co-Conspirator 4 responded, “Well, [Deputy White House Counsel], that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”

And:

Also on January 4, when Co-Conspirator 2 acknowledged to the Defendant’s Senior Advisor that no court would support his proposal, the Senior Advisor told Co-Conspirator 2, “[Y]ou’re going to cause riots in the streets.” Co-Conspirator 2 responded that there had previously been points in the nation’s history where violence was necessary to protect the republic. After that conversation, the Senior Advisor notified the Defendant that Co-Conspirator 2 had conceded that his plan was not going to work.

It is pretty obvious that Donald Trump planned to seize power by force and then maintain that power through the mass murder of American citizens by their own military. The US needs to lock this traitor permanently behind bars if we are to be taken seriously as a functioning democracy that is governed by the rule of law.

Isolated Vocals for 'Nothing Compares 2 U'

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In this video, the recorded vocals to ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ are almost fully isolated so you can really hear the clarity and emotion in that wonderful voice of hers.

The amazing part is that the song was recorded in one take - delivered with conviction and a longing for lost love. No overdubs, compression, auto-tune or any of the crutches that modern artists rely on. Very few artists today could match Sinéad O'Connor on raw talent.

Richard Buskin writing for Sound on Sound:

“I actually think the intensity of Sinéad’s performance came from the breakup of her latest relationship,” opines Chris Birkett, who co-produced and engineered the track as well as the accompanying, Grammy Award-winning album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, which topped the Billboard 200 for six weeks and sold seven million copies worldwide. “She had been dating her manager, Fachtna O'Ceallaigh, who’s a really good guy and had been instrumental in getting her deal with Ensign Records. However, their relationship had gone pear-shaped and they were in the process of breaking up when we recorded ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, so that’s probably why she did such a good vocal. She came into the studio, did it in one take, double-tracked it straight away and it was perfect because she was totally into the song. It mirrored her situation.”

Europeans on American Life

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The complete befuddlement of Europeans on American life.

As Americans we promote obesity, eat cancer brownies, discourage poor people from having babies, have zero guaranteed paid maternity leave, drive our students into servitude with university debt, refuse to provide affordable health care, and are infatuated with guns and the proliferation of them.

But look on the bright side - we are happy, friendly, and optimistically blissful in our ignorance of how the rest of the world functions.

The Deadly Effects of Politicising a Pandemic

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After covid vaccines were readily available in the US, the excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters. You read that right. 43% higher excess death rate - the Republicans were literally a death cult.

Bill Chapel reporting for NPR:

In late 2021, an NPR analysis found that after May of that year — a timeframe that overlaps the vaccine availability cited in the new study — people in counties that voted strongly for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election were “nearly three times as likely to die from COVID-19” as people in pro-Biden counties.

“An unvaccinated person is three times as likely to lean Republican as they are to lean Democrat,” as Liz Hamel, vice president of public opinion and survey research at the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, told NPR.

Even before vaccines were widely accessible, researchers were working to quantify the > effects of vastly divergent COVID-19 policies across U.S. states.

A widely cited study from early 2021 found that in the early months of the pandemic’s official start date in March 2020, states with Republican governors saw lower COVID-19 case numbers and death rates than Democratic-led states. But the trend reversed around the middle of 2020, as Republican governors were less likely to institute controls such as stay-at-home orders and face mask requirements.

Biden to Make Insurers Cover Mental Health Care

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mental health

The Biden administration on Tuesday announced a proposal to force health insurers to cover mental health and addiction care as comprehensively as they cover treatment for physical health conditions.

Levy Facher writing for Stat:

The new proposal, which will soon be published as a joint proposed rule from the Treasury, Labor, and Health and Human Services departments, comes as cost concerns force countless Americans to go without much-needed mental health or addiction care.

One study cited by White House aides showed people with health insurance are more than twice as likely to seek out-of-network care for mental health conditions than for physical health conditions.

The new rule would attempt to crack down on some health insurers’ more subtle tactics, too, like offering lower rates to out-of-network mental health providers or imposing prior authorization requirements for mental health care at a higher rate than for most physical health services or procedures.

Beyond seeking more accountability from insurers, the rule also closes a loophole that currently allows health insurance plans offered by state or local governments to opt out of mental health parity requirements. The change could lead to more comprehensive coverage for roughly 90,000 government employees insured by those plans, according to Biden administration officials.

Sinéad O’Connor Dies Aged 56

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Sinead O' Connor

The Irish singer-songwriter has died at the age of 56. The cause and date of her death were not made public. The statement released by her family:

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Sinéad. Her family and friends are devastated and have requested privacy at this very difficult time.

Neda Ulaby and Anastasia Tsioulcas writing for NPR:

O'Connor came to the attention of U2’s guitarist The Edge, and she got herself signed to the Ensign/Chrysalis label. Her second studio album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, went double platinum in 1990, partly because of a hit love song written by Prince: “Nothing Compares 2 U.”

I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got was a distillation of O'Connor’s prayerful sense of music and her fury over social injustice. She rejected its four Grammy nominations as being too commercial — and, in her words, “for destroying the human race.” She was banned from a New Jersey arena when she refused to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” for its lyrics glorifying bombs bursting in air.

O'Connor was best known for her second studio album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, went double platinum in 1990, partly because of a hit love song written by Prince: “Nothing Compares 2 U”. The video released to promote the single catapulted it to #1 in January of 1990.


Prime Minister of Ireland, Leo Varadkar:

Really sorry to hear of the passing of Sinéad O'Connor. Her music was loved around the world and her talent was unmatched and beyond compare. Condolences to her family, her friends and all who loved her music. Ar dheis Dé go Raibh a hAnam.

The Remote Lounge NYC

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remote lounge NYC

Intersting post published a decade ago by Doc Pop:

The Remote Lounge was a high tech bar in NYC’s Bowery District from 10/2001 to 11/2007. The bar’s gimmick was that it was packed full of monitors and closed circuit television cameras. Each CCTV camera was mounted on a servo and could be controlled by anyone in the bar via any of the terminals throughout the bar. Each terminal had a joystick (for controlling a camera), a camera button (which would capture an image and upload it to the RemoteLounge.com), a next button (for switching to another camera), a chat button, and a land line phone. So you could cycle through the bar until you found someone sitting near a camera, then you could request to chat with them via the phone. Sometimes as you were watching a scene your camera would start to move and you’d realize someone else was watching and controlling the same camera that you were.

[…]

12 years later, it’s funny to think how this novelty bar in NYC would so closely mirror our modern experience. Just replace the always connected security cameras with smart phones and opt-in social media. Sometimes I’m shocked at how my experiences at the Remote Lounge would be recreated time and time again by following a hashtag on twitter, to a photo on instagram, to a small conversation online, and finally with meeting someone face to face… all over the course of ten or twenty minutes on my iPhone at a local bar.

Its only gotten more surreal.

Insane in the Membrane

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The latest NPR studios’s Tiny Desk Concert celebrates 50 years of hip-hop with a performance by Cypress Hill.

While the term “pioneer” is used loosely in pop culture today, few terms describe Cypress Hill’s impact over the past three decades more adequately. They are the first Latino hip-hop group to achieve platinum and multi-platinum status. B Real, Sen and producer DJ Muggs crafted a sound in the ‘90s that stretched beyond regional boundaries. It was dark, psychedelic and at times directly addressed mental health before the topic was commonplace. Many dismissed the group as “stoner rappers,” yet the members were fervent advocates for the legalization of weed long before it came to fruition.

Still not a fan of hip-hop, but I did enjoy this if only as a historical account of a pioneering band.

The American Diner

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Architect Michael Wyetzner for Architectural Digest runs us through why American diners look the way they do:

So let’s take a look at a typical American diner. So the outside has a shape that’s reminiscent of a train. In fact, that’s how diners got their name. They’re named after the dining car on a train.

Many of the design elements in a diner are based on the necessities of dining on a train in a railroad car, like booth seating and counter seating, and an open kitchen.

So I like these two photos because they show all the elements that go into the classic American diner. On the exterior, you have that stainless steel smooth curvature, you’ve got that Art Deco typography. And then on the interior you have the checkered floor, you have the booths, you have the globes, and you have the jukebox.

In the early part of the 20th century, trains were the dominant form of travel. If you look at some of the earliest diners, they were in fact, actual train cars that were placed permanently on the ground.

Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangster

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Tatum Hunter reporting for The Washington Post:

Three grown men against one printer wasn’t a fair fight. But Armando Islas and his friends didn’t care. The three gathered around a defunct HP printer, brandishing giant hammers and standing in the smashed-up remnants of dead electronics.

Islas and two classmates were celebrating the end of their law school exams at Bay Area Smash Room, a basement unit where customers pay $120 or more to break stuff for 30 minutes. Smashing the printer would feel good, they said, like revenge on the shoddy campus printers that plagued them through the past six semesters of graduate school.

That sort of rage against the machine has spawned an entire industry. Across the United States, customers can book sessions at a smash rooms and pay anything from dozens to hundreds of dollars to smash dishes, furniture and — most of all — printers.

Who would ever think a scene from the cult Mike Judge movie “Office Space,” in which frustrated office workers take a printer to a field and smash it to pieces with baseball bats, could be turned into a lucrative business model known as smash rooms. Since 2016 or so, smash rooms have provided a space where regular people can live their “Office Space” fantasies.

1776 Gastonia - Patriots Only 55 and Above

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Victoria Bouloubasis reporting for The Gaurdian:

In the launch event’s recap video on the company’s YouTube channel, men in kilts play bagpipes, and bikers slowly cruise a parade route. Fankhauser delivered a speech that becomes a voiceover to the tune of the national anthem. His remarks end with this signoff: “God bless this community, and God bless this great nation.”

Fankhauser’s nonspecific brand leans into what American studies professor Ben Railton refers to as mythic patriotism, which “creates and celebrates a mythologized, white supremacist vision of American history and identity”. Railton, author of Of Thee I Sing: The Contested History of American Patriotism, argues that such thinking led to the January 6 insurrection and the Trump-initiated 1776 Commission that targeted professors and other educators.

Railton said this ideology “very often has meant agreeing with that white-centered vision”. And “a lot of the time, that also defines someone who doesn’t agree with that vision, who is entirely outside of it and not a part of it. When I was looking at the [1776 Gastonia] website, it’s this undercurrent of, if one doesn’t share this perspective, then there’s not a place for you here.”

Bingo. Just look at their own official ad (in the YouTube video above) - notice that there is only a particular subset of Americans represented.

Enforced patriotism is not freedom. Its tyranny.

Hillary Clinton Was Spot On

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MeidasTouch Contributor Tennessee Brando recently went megaviral after handing truth to the Republicans and MAGA. We need more of this.

We Are Officially 'Free' of Chemical Weapons.

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Chemical Weapons

As of July 7, 2023 - the world is officially free of chemical weapons. The US destroyed its last chemical weapon Friday at the Bluegrass Chemical Agent-Destruction Pilot Plant in Kentucky.

Geoff Brumfiel reporting for NPR:

There are still nations who have used covertly produced chemical weapons in recent years. Most notably, Syria deployed chlorine and nerve agents in its civil war with horrible effects. Russia has used some chemicals for targeted assassination attempts, and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un used nerve agent to kill his half brother.

But those are isolated cases. More broadly, vast quantities of chemical weapons have been disposed of by nations all over the world. And Reif says that overall that’s something to celebrate.

“These are awful weapons,” he says. “The world is a safer and more secure place without them.”

With all of the doom & gloom in the news today, this is surely something that we can all celebrate.

SCOTUS Takes Up Case to Limit Gun Ownership Involving Domestic Violence

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US Guns Jill Filipovic or writes for CNN:

In the midst of this massive gun crisis, the Supreme Court has taken up a case challenging a law that bars people under domestic violence restraining orders from possessing firearms.

Should the court deem that the law violates the Second Amendment, it could exacerbate an already appalling problem: While mass public shootings are indeed a scourge, mass shootings that happen in private and target family members are a much bigger killer. One study found that nearly 60% of mass shootings between 2014 and 2019 were domestic-violence-related and killers in nearly 70% of mass shootings either had a history of domestic violence, or targeted a family member or former partner in the shooting.

This court has proven itself a bastion of right-wing ideology, including on guns. Last year, the court struck down a common-sense New York gun law and held that any state attempt to regulate guns must be “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” In other words, if there wasn’t an analogous law when the Second Amendment was ratified in 1791, the current day law may fail.

In 1791, women were essentially the property of their husbands and fathers and domestic violence wasn’t a crime. The modern military-style weapons often popular with gun enthusiasts today were not on the market.

As Ian Millhiser wrote in Vox, the court’s recent gun decisions mean that that “the fate of American guns laws is likely to come down to individual judges’ and justices’ arbitrary conclusions about which modern laws are sufficiently similar to laws from two or three centuries ago to justify the modern law’s continued existence.”

The current SCOTUS and right wing fanatics won’t be happy until America looks like 1776. Guns, women as second class citizens, slavery and all. America is a scary place.

Why Modern Movies Suck

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Notice how modern movies suck? Okay, maybe I am turning into an old man and just screaming at clouds. The Critical Drinker sums up the problem with the current state of cinema perfectly:

People hired to actually write this stuff - I’ve said it before that character is only ever as smart, capable and resourceful as the person writing them. And well you don’t need me to tell you that holywood creatives these days aren’t exactly paragons of tough stoic confident self-reliance. They are the kind of people who consider mean tweets to be on par with mass murder. In fact most of them have lived the kind of safe comfortable sheltered lives that previous generations could only dream of. Never experiencing anything resembling hardship, adversity, or danger. The kind of stuff that actually builds character, self confidence, life experience and generally makes you a more interesting and capable person. The end result of all this is a generation of writers that are weak, fragile, spoiled, narcissistic, emotional, and insecure - completely unable to handle adversity, conflict, masculinity or anything that challenges their own self image. In short they are basically children inhabiting adult bodies. As a result they lack the experience and maturity needed to write smart confident capable adult characters. Look at the results.

Want proof - just take a look at the new Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Even the title is sophomoric. Actual dialog:

Indiana Jones: You Stole it!

Jurgen Voller: Then you stole it.

Helena: And then I stole it. It’s called capitalism.

Um. Okay.

Anyway - thats all I have for today. Go away now.

Harvard Admits First White Student

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Harvard

Leave it to The Onion to point out the absurdity of the SCOTUS’s ruling to strike down affirmative action:

After nearly four centuries in existence, we are finally able to leave behind our woeful legacy of discrimination and accept our first student of Caucasian descent.

Twitter 2.0 - Sound-on Video Ads

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Twitter’s new CEO Linda Yaccarino solution to lure back the advertisers who abandoned the platform under Elon Musk’s ownership? Populate the site with annoying video ads.

From the Ars Technica:

Twitter’s new chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, is preparing a series of measures to bring back advertisers who had abandoned the platform under Elon Musk’s ownership, including introducing a video ads service, wooing more celebrities, and raising headcount.

The former NBCUniversal advertising head, who started as chief executive on June 5, is seeking to launch full-screen, sound-on video ads that would be shown to users scrolling through Twitter’s new short-video feed, according to three people familiar with the situation.

Yea - lets annoy users even more by bombarding them with loud obnoxious videos. That’ll work. How do these people get hired? At least they are going to hire more people (after the 80% reduction in staff had disastrous results) to keep the ads flowing.