Posts Tagged ‘hoax’
“Lord, what fools these mortals be!”*…
Readers sometimes ask me where I find the items featured in (Roughly) Daily. The answer is that they are sifted out of the reading (politely put, “broad”; less politely put, “undisciplined”) that I do on a relatively continuous basis. I’m going to take today– April Fools Day– to spotlight the source of an occasional post, but of very regular enlightment and entertainment: Today in Tabs, from Rusty Foster.
Following, a lift of a single section of a recent issue…
Today in Scientists: Human brain cells on a chip learned to play Doom in a week. “Should we be worried?” asks The Guardian’s Rich Pelley in a rare anti-Betteridge [see here]. A Billionaire-Backed Startup Wants to Grow ‘Organ Sacks’ to Replace Animal Testing, reports Wired’s Emily Mullin. At last, we’ve created ChickieNobs from the famous Margaret Atwood novel “Don’t Create ChickieNobs.” “If we can create a nonsentient, headless bodyoid for a human being, that will be a great source of organs.” Should we be worried? Scientists put 792 ants in a particle accelerator. They found out ants are all full of even littler stuff inside them. I already believed that, but it was just a superstition. Now we know it’s true. Should we be worried? Robert Hart in The Verge: No, ChatGPT did not cure a dog’s cancer. Apparently it’s relatively easy to make a genetically customized mRNA vaccine that does not cure cancer. Who knew! Becky Ferreira in 404: Why It’s Good to Jack Off Frequently, According to Science. Should we be worried (complimentary)?
Today in Headlines: “Quadruple amputee and cornhole pro accused of fatally shooting man while driving” is the craziest headline since “Charlie Kirk’s Mentor Jeff Webb, the Father of Modern Cheerleading, Dies in Freak Pickleball Accident,” which itself was the craziest headline since “Vaginal weightlifter sex coach charged with assaulting census taker who knocked at door.”
There’s so very much more where that came from: Today in Tabs, from @rusty.todayintabs.com— one the subscriptions for which I’m happiest to pay.
For the history of today’s distinction, see : “How Did April Fools’ Day Get Started?” (source of the image above)
* Shakespeare (Puck, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Scene II)
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As we smirk, we might recall that it was on this date in 1957 that Britain’s premiere documentary public affairs television show, the BBC’s Panorama, aired a segment, reported by host Richard Dimbleby, featuring a family in Ticino, Switzerland picking spaghetti from a “spaghetti tree.” About 8 million people were tuned in. The next day, hundreds of people called the BBC to ask if spaghetti trees were real and how to grow them. The BBC told callers to put some spaghetti in a can of tomato sauce and “hope for the best.”
“We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex”*…
The world is a turbulent and sometimes dangerous place. No one knew that better than Dwight D. Eisenhower, who led Allied Forces in Europe during World War II and later served as President…
As President of the United States for two terms, Eisenhower had slowed the push for increased defense spending despite pressure to build more military equipment during the Cold War’s arms race. Nonetheless, the American military services and the defense industry had expanded a great deal in the 1950s. Eisenhower thought this growth was needed to counter the Soviet Union, but it confounded him. Though he did not say so explicitly, his standing as a military leader helped give him the credibility to stand up to the pressures of this new, powerful interest group. He eventually described it as a necessary evil.
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. . . . American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. . . . This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. . . .Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
As Samuel Geddes argues, the dilemma has only ripened. Western defense giants tout cutting-edge tech, but their “state-of-the-art” systems often fall short in asymmetrical warfare. From faulty missile defense systems to overpriced carriers, the only thing that consistently works is the profit machine…
The ineffectiveness of “cutting-edge” military technology shown in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the spillover conflicts undermines the notion that the military-industrial complex aims to win wars. Instead, it reveals its true objective: profiting from ongoing conflicts.
Since its crushing victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, one of Israel’s primary functions as a US-European client state has been that of a weapons laboratory. Throughout eight decades of repressing, invading, and annexing the territory of regional countries, it has served as a proving ground for arms manufacturers.
This continuous opportunity for such demonstration has enabled Israel, starting in the 1980s, to develop its own highly globalized military-industrial complex. From tanks to drones, “Israel” became a byword for the technical superiority and unbeatable effectiveness of western hard power over those on its receiving end.
Since the turn of the millennium, however, and especially since the Hamas-led Palestinian offensive against Israel on October 7, the region has become a weapons lab of a very different kind. It now showcases the armaments of its enemies and their ability, for a fraction of the cost and technical complexity, to render its space-age technology uneconomical and, by extension, obsolete.
The spread of cheap, cost-effective arms among asymmetric opponents of the West has significantly blunted the power of conventional weapons systems. The rational thing to do is accept this and redirect these hundreds of billions of wasted dollars to social programs and infrastructure. Almost anything would be more defensible than the status quo…
[Geddes unpacks the history of the last several decades and examines a number of troubled defense programs…]
… The most notorious example of wastefulness in military spending is undoubtedly the Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jet. From the program’s inception in 2006 to the present, the F-35 was projected to cost over $1.7 trillion over its lifetime. Persistent cost overruns and development woes have angered even the Pentagon itself, which opened the program up to competitive bidding in 2012. More than a decade later, the rapid spread of drone technology has made it possible for unmanned craft, sometimes referred to as “loitering munitions,” to perform many of the tasks traditionally handled by fighter jets — with little overengineering and none of the risk to an actual pilot. That the total budget of this program could eradicate all American student loan debt or cover half the cost of a national health system only adds to the obscenity of it all.
It is well-known that the military-industrial economy is dependent on public subsidy. The technology in mobile phones, computers, and the internet — essential to modern life —was not “invented” by figures like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, but was instead developed by public investment. The initial funding came from decades of American taxpayer dollars.
Capitalism is not designed to be ethically consistent, but if it were, companies whose business model depends on state supports would be paying out dividends to every single American as a return on their initial investment.
In 2024, the US military budget reached an incredible $841 billion. If even a fraction of these funds were to be spent on restoring the education system to a level befitting the richest country on earth, canceling university tuition debt, or creating a national health system, it would achieve far greater benefits. While $1 trillion might not result in effective missile shields, it is very likely capable of creating a functioning health or educational system…
“The Incompetence of Masters of War,” from @SamuelGeddes in @jacobin.
Further to his point on the effectiveness of U.S. defense spending, see “America is not ready for a major war, says a bipartisan commission” and “The US might lose a war with China.”
And for more on the arguments for alternatives, see “The military-industrial complex as a variety of capitalism and threat to democracy: rethinking the political economy of guns versus butter.”
* Dwight D. Eisenhower
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As we contemplate conflict, we might pause to contrast the rigorously serious with the frivolously venal: it was on this date in 1835 that the New York Sun began a series of six articles detailing the discovery of civilized life on the moon; circulation soared. Now known as “The Great Moon Hoax,” the articles attributed the “discovery” to Sir John Herschel (who figured in last Monday’s post), the greatest living astronomer of the day. Herschel was initially amused, wryly noting that his own real observations could never be as exciting. But ultimately he tired of having to answer questioners who believed the story. The series was not discovered to be a hoax for several weeks after its publication and, even then, while the paper did admit (on September 16, 1835) that the whole thing was a “satire,” it never issued a retraction (and didn’t suffer a drop in sales).
“The real war will never get in the books”*…
Still, historians try. And as Anton Jäger argues in his consideration of Charles S. Maier‘s The Project-State and Its Rivals- A New History of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, that’s a challenging, frustrating, but ultimately very useful thing…
“We thought we knew the story of the twentieth century,” Charles Maier notes in an announcement for his new book The Project State and Its Rivals. Both haunting and tantalizing, the sentence’s past tense speaks to a profoundly contemporary mood. As the twenty-first century progresses, confident visions about the previous century conceived from the vantage point of the 1990s—the “age of extremes” resolved by a set of liberal settlements—no longer seem safe and secure. In 2023, the European extreme Right is establishing itself as a force of government, populism is going global, and inter-imperial tensions have ushered in a new arms race. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland is currently polling above 20 percent, while Modi is set to win another term in India with an approval rating near 80 percent. To the desperation of liberals nostalgic for the 1990s, the “end of the end of history” has arrived.
As Maier surmises, there might be a connection between this sense of surprise and the comfortable judgments we tend to make about humanity’s last hundred years. “If the twentieth century meant the triumph of liberalism,” he asks, “why have the era’s darker impulses—ethnic nationalism, racist violence, and populist authoritarianism—revived?” The question provides the working hypothesis for Maier’s new monograph, a self-described “rethinking of the long twentieth century,” which aims to “explain the fraying of our own civic culture” while also “allowing hope for its recovery.” Provocatively, Maier’s focus is on “both democracies and dictatorships that sought not just to retain power but to transform their societies,” next to “new forms of imperial domination,” “global networks of finance,” and “international associations” that both challenged and shaped the state. The ambition is nothing less than a new general theory of the twentieth century, one that would allow us to deal with an unmastered past, but also to gain proper self-understanding in a new and confusing century.
Readers would be hard-pressed to find a more suitable candidate for the task than Charles S. Maier. At eighty-four, Maier—still teaching European and international history at Harvard—remains a scholar with panoramic disciplinary reach. His 1975 debut, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I, swiftly established itself a masterpiece of comparative political history. Based on a prior Harvard dissertation complemented with a decade of additional archival research, it examined the fraught resolution of the crises of liberalism after 1918, and what factors determined the potential emergence and stymieing of authoritarian regimes. After works on Germany’s collective memory of the Holocaust and an elite-driven account of the fall of East Germany, he waded into historical political science with Leviathan 2.0: Inventing Modern Statehood in 2014, followed by Once within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging since 1500 in 2016. Clearly a product of a buoyant Cold War academe, Maier has always been locked in an uneasy pas-à-deux with Marxism: attentive to the class content of political life, but never taken to monolithic views of business interests and overly abstract notions of capital. His work on political economy looked closely at the class coalitions that gave way to divergent corporatist settlements in the 1920s and ’30s, and how these national blocs interlocked with differing international arrangements—a Marxist historiography despite itself. He also took the force of ideas seriously, weaving a tapestry of conceptual, political, and economic history, which explains the unique force of his writing. Yet unlike cultural historians, Maier has retained an interest in causality through the construction of comparative counterfactuals—what Britain and Germany shared in 1918, for instance, or why English Tories did not need a Duce and why the American South was different from the Mezzogiorno—a sensibility that also informed his consistently transnational approach to the twentieth century.
The Project State and Its Rivals exudes a similarly boundless ambition. As the book’s announcements make clear, Maier is on the lookout for a unifying category to cohere our historical experience of the twentieth century—or, more specifically, the forms of statehood that emerged in the interwar period, and that still present such vexing challenges to our intellectual imagination…
A critical account of Maier’s hypothesis, eminently worth reading in full: “The Rise and Fall of the Project State: Rethinking the Twentieth Century,” from @AntonJaegermm in @AmericanAffrs. Via Adam Tooze/@adam_tooze.
* Walt Whitman
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As we keep searching, we might pause to contrast the rigorously serious with the frivolously venal: it was on this date in 1835 that the New York Sun began a series of six articles detailing the discovery of civilized life on the moon; circulation soared. Now known as “The Great Moon Hoax,” the articles attributed the “discovery” to Sir John Herschel, the greatest living astronomer of the day. Herschel was initially amused, wryly noting that his own real observations could never be as exciting. But ultimately he tired of having to answer questioners who believed the story. The series was not discovered to be a hoax for several weeks after its publication and, even then, while the paper did admit (on September 16, 1835) that the whole thing was a “satire,” it never issued a retraction (and didn’t suffer a drop in sales).
“Oh the places you’ll go”*…
The amazing life of “Gudrid the Far-Traveled” has, Frank Jacobs argues, been unjustly overshadowed by her in-laws, Erik the Red and Leif Erikson…
She’s been called “the greatest female explorer of all time,” and the “best-traveled woman of the Middle Ages.” Just after the year 1000 AD, she gave birth to the first European baby in North America. And she concluded her global odyssey with a pilgrimage on foot to Rome. Yet few today can name this extraordinary Viking lady, even if they have heard of Erik the Red and Leif Erikson, her father- and brother-in-law…
An extraordinary story: “The Viking woman who sailed to America and walked to Rome,” from @VeryStrangeMaps in @bigthink.
* Dr. Seuss
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As we tag along, we might recall that this date in 2014 was purportedly the date of the final battle in Ragnarök, a series of events (many natural disasters) culminating in a catastrophic battle and the end of the world-as-we-know-it: giants and demons approach from all points of the compass and attack the gods (Odin, Thor, Týr, Freyr, Heimdall, Loki, et al.), who meet them and face death like heroes. At the conflict’s end, the sun darkens, the stars vanish, and the earth sinks into the sea. (Happily, afterward, the earth rises again, the innocent Balder returns from the dead, and leads hosts of the just to a life in a hall roofed with gold.)
In the event, of course, the world did not end that day. The prediction had been promoted by the Jorvik Viking Centre in York, England, intended to draw attention to an event that the institution was to hold on that date. In an obvious lift from the 2012 Mayan Prophecy frenzy, the Centre attributed the claim to a “Viking Calendar,” though no such calendar is known to have existed. Authentic scholars were predictably (and understandably) irked, though as philologist Joseph Hopkins noted, the media response was an example of a broad revival of interest in the Viking Age and ancient Germanic topics.
(Historians believe that Gudrid did in fact exist and did make the journeys discussed above.)
“My fake plants died because I didn’t pretend to water them”*…
Your correspondent treasures Wikipedia, and uses it often. But as Marco Silva points out, it has its vulnerabilities…
“I read through Wikipedia a lot when I’m bored in class,” says Adam, aged 15, who studies photography and ICT at a school in Kent. One day last July, one of his teachers mentioned the online encyclopaedia’s entry about Alan MacMasters, who it said was a Scottish scientist from the late 1800s and had invented “the first electric bread toaster”.
At the top of the page was a picture of a man with a pronounced quiff and long sideburns, gazing contemplatively into the distance – apparently a relic of the 19th Century, the photograph appeared to have been torn at the bottom.
But Adam was suspicious. “It didn’t look like a normal photo,” he tells me. “It looked like it was edited.”
After he went home, he decided to post about his suspicions on a forum devoted to Wikipedia vandalism.
…
Until recently, if you had searched for “Alan MacMasters” on Wikipedia, you would have found the same article that Adam did. And who would have doubted it?
After all, like most Wikipedia articles, this one was peppered with references: news articles, books and websites that supposedly provided evidence of MacMasters’ life and legacy. As a result, lots of people accepted that MacMasters had been real.
More than a dozen books, published in various languages, named him as the inventor of the toaster. And, until recently, even the Scottish government’s Brand Scotland website listed the electric toaster as an example of the nation’s “innovative and inventive spirit”…
All the while, as the world got to know the supposed Scottish inventor, there was someone in London who could not avoid a smirk as the name “Alan MacMasters” popped up – again and again – on his screen…
For more than a decade, a prankster spun a web of deception about the inventor of the electric toaster: “Alan MacMasters: How the great online toaster hoax was exposed,” from @MarcoLSilva at @BBCNews.
* Mitch Hedberg
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As we consider the source’s source, we might recall that it was on this date in 1972 that Atari introduced its first product, Pong, which became the world’s first commercially successful video game. Indeed, Pong sparked the beginning of the video game industry, and positioned Atari as its leader (in both arcade and home video gaming) through the early 1980s.
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