Hello, good morning, happy Friday. Lots going on this week! The biggest batch of Revolution Brewpub regulars yet got together at the pub last Friday, although I am worried that we may soon lose those opportunities because of people who selfishly and dangerously refuse to get vaccinated. Anyway after the brewpub shenanigans I went home and worked on preparations for the Minecraft server wedding I hosted on Saturday, we had a lovely ceremony and reception for the brides, it was tremendous.
Also a contestant on this season of The Bachelorette who we mistakenly added to my Twitter group chat about the show has actually shown up and chatted with us on multiple occasions, and he is just as awesome in real life (okay, online) as he was on television, which is refreshing and delightful.
I went to see Jungle Cruise last night, it was great, I would extremely watch a sequel of sorts. And then I got home and streamed the TECHNICAL PREVIEW OF HALO INFINITE THAT I GOT INVITED TO HOLY FUCKING SHIT. I have only been waiting, you know, decades, for a Halo game to release natively for PC at launch! And the alpha so far is downright satisfying! I still need to work on my handling, but whatever, practice makes perfect. I will be streaming more this weekend! Drop me a follow and hang out in chat, it will be fun!
Float like a butterfly
For the few weeks surrounding the conservative insurrection on our nation’s capital, Twitter was abuzz with the results of an exciting new idea - matching with insurrectionists on dating apps and sending tips about them to the FBI. There were a number of popular tweets about it, but this one became a story:
Six months ago, on a cold Wednesday night, a 20-something communications professional in Washington, D.C., was watching a remarkable and disturbing scene unfold on her television screen.
Supporters of outgoing President Donald Trump, who believed online conspiracy theories and the president’s lies about a stolen election, had breached the U.S. Capitol in a brutally violent attack that police officers would later describe as “medieval.” They brought bats. They brought hockey sticks. They brought Molotov cocktails. They brought stun guns. They brought firearms. They brought pepper spray. At least one Trump fanatic was carrying a metal whip.
A citywide curfew was in place, and she could hear the helicopters hovering in the sky. Outside her window, “Claire” could see Trump supporters streaming back from the Capitol to a hotel near her home, carrying their flags and wearing “Make America Great Again” hats.
“I was watching on the news and seeing everyone walk back,” Claire told HuffPost. “It felt kind of useless for me to be that close and not kind of do anything proactive about it.”
By that evening, before Congress had formally certified President Joe Biden’s win in the early morning hours of Jan. 7, the FBI was seeking information from the public. The bureau wanted Americans to identify the rioters.
“OK, fine,” Claire thought. “I will.”
Claire is an American hero, to be clear.
Nightcrawlers
This seems problematic for a number of reasons:
Want to make $200 a day in New York City? Rush to the scene of a murder, a three-alarm fire or a traffic accident — then pull out your phone and start filming.
That’s the pitch from Citizen, a controversial neighborhood watch app that’s quietly hiring New Yorkers to livestream crime scenes and other public emergencies in an apparent effort to encourage more ordinary citizens to do the same, The Post has learned.
Citizen has raised $133 million from high-profile backers like Peter Thiel, as well as the Silicon Valley venture firms Sequoia Capital and Greycroft, by promising real-time safety alerts for users right where they live and work.
The vast majority of those alerts, including videos, appear to come from volunteers who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. And that business model — which comes amid declining coverage of local news by journalists — saves the company money.
But the app that formerly called itself “Vigilante” — and which now boasts more than 7 million users across 30 cities — is also quietly recruiting “field team members” on journalism job sites to run around the city chasing emergencies.
Fake news
One obvious problem with our modern informational culture is that boomers went from “don’t believe everything you read on the internet” to “I’m putting myself and others at risk by refusing to get vaccinated because the internet says it lets the government control your brain.” A second and related problem is that powerful and rich conservative assholes are literally engaging in the kinds of conspiracy theories that they peddle on their websites:
As soon as Casie Tomlin found the FedEx envelope in her mailbox, she knew something looked fishy. Inside, a flyer from a group called Dallas Justice Now urged parents in Dallas’ wealthy — and largely white — Highland Park and University Park suburbs to not send their kids to Ivy League schools.
The parents needed to make space for students of color, the statement said. If they didn’t sign the pledge, Dallas Justice Now would publish their names online. The statement also appeared on PR Newswire, a pay-for-play press release service.
Then, she typed a few questions on Dallas Justice Now’s Facebook page. She donated money to the group to see if she could get more information. She tried to contact the people behind it.Before she knew it, Tomlin had been doxxed. Dallas Justice Now published a follow-up press release, accusing her of being a white supremacist. The group then wrote several posts about Tomlin on its Facebook page.
Later, Tomlin took to Twitter and wrote, “I knew it was fake and designed to draw a rise the first time I saw this nonsense.”
Meanwhile, Dallas Justice Now blew up in right-wing media. The story appeared at the Post Millennial, a far-right website based in Canada. The British Daily Mail tabloid ran a story about the saga. Conservative media figures had a field day. "Yes, this is real," wrote Matt Walsh, a conservative Twitter personality and columnist for the Daily Wire.
Except, surprise, it is not real.
Brain poison
Speaking of made-up bullshit:
Twelve days after Joe Biden was declared the winner in the 2020 Presidential race, Donald Trump’s legal team laid out its master theory of the election in a dramatic press conference at the Republican National Committee’s headquarters. “What we are really dealing with here, and uncovering more by the day, is the massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China, and the interference with our elections here in the United States,” Sidney Powell, one of the President’s lawyers, declared as she stood before a row of American flags. Powell said that a Colorado-based company called Dominion Voting Systems had secretly manipulated the vote count in machines that were used in at least two dozen states and helped sway the results in Democrats’ favor. In addition to foreign Marxists, the key conspirators included the Clinton Foundation and a large circle of élite business leaders. When Rudy Giuliani took his turn at the microphone, he added George Soros and big tech companies to the list. “Global interests,” Powell had explained, were behind the failure of major news outlets to report on the fraud.
The following week, Powell began filing lawsuits with affidavits purporting to back her claims. One of them was from an anonymous hacker who was identified as “Spyder,” or sometimes “Spider,” a pseudonym inspired by the web-like diagrams that filled his supporting documents. By examining Dominion’s network connections and finding vulnerabilities in its Web site, Spider alleged, he had uncovered “unambiguous evidence” that the company had allowed America’s foreign adversaries to manipulate election results. In early December, Spider was unmasked after his name appeared in a bookmark of a court document: he was Joshua Merritt, a forty-three-year-old military veteran and information-technology consultant living in Dallas with his wife and children.
Labor is entitled to all it creates
In 2019, Steven Spielberg called for a ban on Oscar eligibility for streaming films, claiming that “movie theaters need to be around forever” and that audiences had to be given “the motion picture theatrical experience” for a movie to be a movie. Spielberg’s fury was about not only the threat that streaming posed to the in-person viewing experience but the ways in which the streaming giant Netflix reported theatrical grosses and budgets, despite these not being the ways in which one evaluates whether a movie is good or not. Netflix held firm, saying that it stood for “everyone, everywhere [enjoying] releases at the same time,” and for “giving filmmakers more ways to share art.” Ultimately, Spielberg balked, and last month his company even signed a deal with Netflix, likely because he now sees the writing on the wall: Modern audiences enjoy watching movies at home.
In key ways, this fight resembles the current remote-work debate in industries such as technology and finance. Since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, this has often been cast as a battle between the old guard and its assumed necessities and a new guard that has found a better way to get things done. But the narrative is not that tidy. Netflix’s co-founder and CEO, Reed Hastings, one of the great “disruptors” of our age, deemed remote work “a pure negative” last fall. The 60-year-old Hastings is at the forefront of an existential crisis in the world of work, demanding that people return to the office despite not having an office himself. His criticism of remote work is that “not being able to get together in person” is bad.
It seems, to me, that these people are dead wrong, and also that they are hypocrites. As the article suggests, if you are in charge of determining workforce policies, you should maybe not be like them if you want to… retain your workforce.
No ketchup
Listen, a Chicago-style hot dog is one of the greatest pleasures in this life. So I am quite pleased to bring you a story about hot dogs and Chicago, featuring friend of the newsletter John Carruthers:
CHICAGO — When brothers Gus and Peter Romas bought Wolfy’s restaurant from original owner Mickey Becker in 1999, its founder had only one request: Don’t change the hot dogs.
“He said, ‘Listen, you guys bought the place now, you can do whatever you want with it, but do not touch our hot dogs.’ God bless Mickey,” Gus said. “He said, ‘You can do whatever you want, just don’t do that.’ We said, ‘OK, sir, we’ll listen to you.’”
Thus, the iconic establishment at 2734 W. Peterson Ave. in West Ridge — instantly recognizable by the enormous forked hot dog statue that doubles as the restaurant’s sign — has continued to serve its famous char-cooked, Chicago-style jumbo dog since 1967.
While Wolfy’s regular hot dog is available the traditional way — steamed — or charred on the grill, its plump jumbo dog is always flame-broiled over a grill with nuggets consisting of a mixture of charcoal and other elements.
You deserve some good animal content
Have a good weekend.
Addendums
Furry TikTok baking video. ‘Arthur’ Is Ending — But Its Memes Will Live on Forever. Who Owns My Name? Man Confronts Tucker Carlson At Montana Store. A Yale Student Who Makes and Teaches Black History. The teen tycoons of Depop. She’s nearly 100. He’s 2 and lives next door. Here’s how they became best friends. A Thousand Coal Miners Are Still On Strike After 4 Months. The Metaverse Has Always Been a Dystopian Idea. Why most Black office workers are dreading the return to offices.