Wednesday 2 November 2016

stuffing the ballot

The crack investigative team of one (Matt Novak) writing for Paleofuture and employing his usual methods of freedom of information request filings serves us a brilliant retelling of the largest bio-terror attack heretofore perpetrated on US soil was a mass food-poisoning calculated to influence the turn-out of a local election back in the autumn of 1984 in rural Oregon.
An outpost of a utopian cult movement (although there was more than a touch of hedonism allowable to the members as well as business acumen with discos, hotels and restaurants owned and run by the community) called Rajneeshpuram established itself in rural Oregon. Members managed to purchase thousands of hectares of forest and even an entire village and campaigned to get themselves elected to town boards to ensure that zoning and building permits were favorable to their cause. The Sannyasins, as followers are known, became more aggressive in their politics, however, including bussing in some four thousand homeless veterans to pad the voter rolls (who were summarily dismissed from Nirvana after registration and abandoned in Portland) and most infamously making over seven hundred residents violently ill with salmonella that’d been pilfered from a university laboratory. It’s thought that this outbreak in September was a trial-run for a bigger attack to be launched in November to make sure their opposition was indisposed and couldn’t make it to the polls.  Be sure to visit the link up top for all the salacious details of this voter-intimidation stunt.

happy place

Actor David Tennant (the tenth avatar of Doctor Who) lends his soothing and dulcet voice to narrate a pair of video composed specifically to calm dogs and cats and their humans who are distressed by loud noises. As Laughing Squid informs, these shorts, created by an insurance company (that offers pet-coverage) take into account dog and cat psychology and colour vision spectrum. In Germany, there are generally no fireworks except on New Year’s Eve, but that celebratory war-zone makes up for the rest of the year.

ferryman or necropolis junction

Via the always intriguing Nag on the Lake, we learn about a morbidly strange but practical rail line in operation from November 1854 until bombed during the London Blitz in World War II that was in the exclusive service of transporting the departed and their mourners to a sprawling necropolis, a convenient journey from central London but also not close enough that the graves might pose a public health hazard.
Conceived as a way to alleviate severe overcrowding in ancient urban cemeteries, the living population having doubled from the beginning to the mid seventeenth century and an outbreak of cholera completely overwhelmed the struggling funeral system, the trains going to Necropolis Junction were segregated by animate/inanimate, class and confession and travel along a picturesque route daily. After the war, the railway was not rebuilt, the scheme proving less palatable (not in keeping with due solemnity) and profitable than the backers had hoped, and the motorised hearse had already fulfilled that need.

Tuesday 1 November 2016

synthehol

Vice Magazine interviews neuropharmacologist and addiction expert David Nutt who has spent the past two years developing a “chaperone” drug to introduce to the public that will replace alcohol, by imparting the good effects of drinking without the most delirious ones.
Dr Nutt had been pondering the idea for some time previously but did not have the medicinal tools at his disposal until a recreational chemist accidentally created what’s being called alcosynth and subsequently donated the formula to science. Dr Nutt predicts the demise of traditional booze within decades and will have his first field trials in Germany soon—due to the UK’s drug protection laws stymie research and distort social harms.  What do you think?  Will this catch on or become the disdain of purists?

hand jive or out of the park

Little did we know that not only is the origin of the high five as a congratulatory greeting well documented, it is also a fairly recent one and was conceived (on 2 October, 1977 to be precise—although there are antecedent anecdotes and competing stories) by a largely forgotten professional athlete called Glenn Burke, who just happens was and remains the only major league baseball player in the US to come out as a homosexual during his career. Visit ร†on magazine at the link above to watch a documentary on the Burke, his struggle with prejudice and his salute.

journeyman

For those nomadic souls that could set up shop and work from anywhere or need to be at hand for a particular gig or assignment one automotive company with a significant manufacturing presence in the UK has created a fully electric mobile office space, housed in a minivan. Although not as impressive or committed, in my opinion, as the gentleman that shared his custom project to live on the road, the portable, pop-up office looks really clever and conducive to productivity. Designing the interior to look like a coffee shop is also a nice touch. Click on the link up top to get a full tour of the features and watch a demonstration video.

oppdemmingspolitikk

I was a bit floored by the by posturing and threats that Russia had for Norway over plans to host a rotational detachment of some three hundred US Marines in Vรฆrnes near Trondheim, not so much for the way plenipotentiaries are want to escalate anything to do with the perception of NATO expansion, but that Norway wasn’t already host—or considered host to US troops. I didn’t think the small but continued presence at Stavanger was a secret (or had closed shop)—we even passed by it, and maybe the locations are secret but the US is known also to store vast amounts of materiel and munitions in tunnels and bunkers in the fjords and mountains as forward supply in case tensions were to rise. Who would have guessed that policies and plans implemented back during the Cold War era, and sustained out of inertia, would now be the object of scrutiny and contention?