Quote:On a cold wet day in January 1961, Lt. Jack ReVelle climbed out of a muddy hole in the ground, holding a rough, gray sphere the size of a volleyball against his chest. For the better part of a week, he and his crew had been digging in the swampy ground outside of Goldsboro, North Carolina. It had been raining and snowing, and the hole had grown to be larger than a football field. Jack was just 25 years old, but he was in charge. When he and his men finally found what they were looking for, Jack was the one who got to climb up the ladder and bring it out.

Almost immediately, Jack flew back to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. He landed in the late afternoon, and went to bed early. The next morning, he took a shower, sat down at a table in his apartment, and started to write a letter to his parents, who hadn’t heard from him for more than a week. It was only then that the magnitude of what he’d done started to set in. His hands started to shake.

Lt. Jack ReVelle had just located and defused two nuclear bombs that accidentally fell out of a B-52 bomber over Eastern North Carolina.

It sounds like hyperbole, but the story of the Goldsboro Broken Arrow has now been well documented. Over the last decade, more and more of it has been declassified, thanks in large part to the work of an Air Force veteran named Joel Dobson of Greensboro who first heard the story years ago and just knew he had to write a book about it. I talked to Joel when I started working on an episode of Away Message back in 2018, and he put me in touch with Jack. Over the course of a few days, Jack and I traded emails and talked on the phone for hours. He was soft spoken and kind, but also precise. He grumbled about other tellings of the story that had gotten details wrong. He made jokes, including one about how a superior had offhandedly “dropped the bomb on me” by casually relating important information. Our conversation veered from the incredible to the personal, and it left me thinking about the consequences of life and the steady approach of death in a way that has stayed with me ever since.

....

A Life Lived in the Future

Years ago, on the phone from California, Jack ReVelle told me he was “crazy” as a 25-year-old. He drove a 1959 MGA convertible with a car phone in it, so he’d be reachable in the case of a nuclear accident. (I asked him if the car phone was impressive whenever he went on dates. “That goes without saying,” he told me.) He later met his wife Brenda on a computer dating service. In the late 1960s. Jack was different than the other guys she’d met through that service. “He was always an up front, honest guy,” she says.

....

The Cost of His Career

When I talked to him in 2018, Jack was going in for a blood transfusion every two weeks because his body wasn’t making enough red blood cells. He was also taking expensive prescription medication to control his disease. During an appointment not long before I called him, Jack asked his doctor about how much time he had left:

Quote:I said “Doc, look, I'm a very realistic kind of person. How much longer do I have?” She says, “Well, I can't say for sure, but based on the statistics of previous patients, I would estimate that you get about three years. That's not an exact number, but that's a ballpark guess.” I said, “Thank you. I have one more question for you. I've never had any pain associated with any of this. Will I ever experience any?” She says, “Not that I know of.” I asked, “How do I pass away?” She says, “Probably in your sleep.” So that's my future.

On January 26, 2020, a caretaker came into his room. “Good morning, Jack,” she said. She got no response.

He’d died in his sleep.

Jack’s passing didn’t get much attention. But the film about his life and the Goldsboro Broken Arrow is starting to materialize. Brenda is consulting with the producer, who also made the movie Hacksaw Ridge. A script is finished. The director Gavin Hood has signed on to the project. Before long, it seems, the world will become well acquainted with Jack ReVelle.

Quote:The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, is seeking to retract six scientific studies and correct 31 others that were published by the institute’s top researchers, including its CEO. The researchers are accused of manipulating data images with simple methods, primarily with copy-and-paste in image editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop.
Ars Technica

Quote:The fuselage panel that blew off an Alaska Airlines jet earlier this month was removed for repair then reinstalled improperly by Boeing mechanics on the Renton final assembly line, a person familiar with the details of the work told The Seattle Times.

If verified by the National Transportation Safety Board investigation, this would leave Boeing primarily at fault for the accident, rather than its supplier Spirit AeroSystems, which originally installed the panel into the 737 MAX 9 fuselage in Wichita, Kan.

That panel, a door plug used to seal a hole in the fuselage sometimes used to accommodate an emergency exit, blew out of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 as it climbed out of Portland on Jan. 5. The hair-raising incident drew fresh and sharp criticism of Boeing’s quality control systems and safety culture, which has been under the microscope since two fatal 737 MAX crashes five years ago.

Seattle Times

Quote:I say that “Dick Tuck” is a legend because the stories of many of Dick Tuck’s tricks have been exaggerated and embellished over the years (often with Tuck’s help), and some that never happened or that were perpetrated by others have been attributed to him.

Among the “Dick Tuck” performances:

    During one of Nixon’s “whistle-stop” train tours, at a stop in San Luis Obispo, California, Tuck dressed up in a brakeman’s uniform and signalled the engineer to start moving the train in the middle of Nixon’s speech.

    After the Nixon/Kennedy television debate, Tuck coached an grandmotherly woman to go up to Nixon in front of the press with a Nixon campaign button on, and give him a hug, saying “That’s all right, Mr. Nixon. Kennedy beat you last night, but don’t worry, you’ll get him next time!”

    At an appearance Nixon made in the Chinatown of Los Angeles, Tuck had a banner made that read “Welcome Nixon” in English, but in Chinese “What about the Hughes loan?” (referring to a potential scandal involving a loan that Howard Hughes had made to Nixon’s brother). None of the Nixon representatives could read Chinese, so the banner stayed as a backdrop to the photo-op. (Fortune cookies in the meal that followed also included the Chinese question).

    Before he became well-known to Nixon’s campaign team, Tuck once took charge of organizing a rally for Nixon at a large venue, but he carefully failed to publicize it. Nixon ended up speaking to a mostly-empty auditorium. Introducing the candidate, Tuck said, “Richard Nixon will now tell us about the World Monetary Fund,” which of course, was not the subject Nixon was planning to address.

    Tuck hired a number of very pregnant women to carry signs at Nixon rallies that bore the Nixon campaign slogan “Nixon’s the One.”

    Tuck would masquerade as a fire marshall, tallying up the number of people in the audience at Nixon’s indoor rallies. When members of the press asked for his numbers, he gave the lowest plausible figure.

Sniggle.net

Quote:

As the campaign progressed, Tuck would pose as a Republican operative, and convince bandleaders hired to provide music for campaign stops that Nixon's walk-on should be his favorite song - “Mack The Knife”. Needless to say, it was not Nixon's favorite song. Posing as a fire marshal to the local press, Tuck would low ball turnout estimates for Republican rallies. Wearing a stolen conductor's cap, Tuck signaled the engineer to pull out of whistle stop, while Nixon (above) was still speaking from the rear of the last car.

And then there was famous “Chinatown Caper” - so legendary it is now unclear if it occurred in 1956 or 1962, when Nixon was running for Governor of California. The story is ascribed to both campaigns, but it was in 1956 that a newspaper first broke the story that Richard Nixon's brother Donald had received an unsecured $205,000 loan from Hughs Tool Company, owned by Howard Hughs. Tuck thought it was a great story, but the national press was not talking about it. So Tuck decided to fix that.

NIXON AND TUCK

Quote:I asked him, "What's a hoax?" And he was talking about this world, this place. He said it was all an illusion. I thought he was just confused. But he was not confused. He wasn't visiting heaven, not the way we think of heaven. He described it as a vastness that you can't even imagine. It was a place where the past, present, and future were happening all at once.

Esquire magazine

Quote:As for that strong sense of right and wrong? Feraci said that was instilled in her during Sunday school at the Salvation Army: "I was a member of the Army of Christ on the planet. And it was my duty to protect people and to help as much as I could. And I did. Any friend of mine didn't have to worry about being beat up, going or coming from school. Because I protected everybody. I was a mean little kid. I could beat anybody up!"
CBS news (article/transcript)

Quote:At 9 PM on a snowy January night a year ago, a man and a woman stood bundled against the cold on the south lawn of the White House. Suddenly, a Marine helicopter appeared in the dark sky, struggling against the blustery winds, near the force of a gale.

Startled by the chopper's unscheduled arrival, the Secret Service guards on the White House grounds scrambled, but before they could react, the man and woman hurried across the lawn, boarded the chopper and flew off into the dark.

The two principals in this James Bond scene were Zbigniew Brzezinski, the President's adviser for national security, and A secretary from Mr. Brzezinski's office.

Their sudden flight, which had not been made public and brought loud protests from the startled, Secret Service, was part of the first of a series of surprise alerts that President Carter and Mr. Brzezinski have sprung over the past year to test the responsiveness of emergency procedures for evacuation in the event of a nuclear attack.

White House Springs Surprise Evacuation Alerts (Feb 13, 1978)

Quote:Why is the alien in Covington?

Clive is just one of a dozen art installations brought about thanks to Covington’s Quality of Place grant program, which seeks to support public art ventures and enhance the appearance of the city's business districts.

Local leaders and the city of Covington are leaning into public art as a means of exceeding pre-pandemic tourism levels.

“We have put a stake in the ground as the ‘bold side of the river,’ and investing in our public art portfolio with additions like Clive is how we assert that claim," said city of Covington Economic Development Director Tom West.

But why an alien?

Given the wealth of diverse public art featured across Northern Kentucky, residents might be asking: Why an alien sculpture, of all things?

Believe it or not, the region has a rich UFO history.

For example, Cincinnati's Linwood neighborhood houses the headquarters of the Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON, self described as the "world's oldest and largest civilian UFO investigation and research organization."

The group moved back to Cincinnati from Irvine, California, in 2021. At the time, it had close to 600 investigators in all 50 states and in 46 countries around the world, according to Executive Director David MacDonald.

"Clive the Alien"

Quote:The Repairer of Reputations

The story is set in New York City in the year 1920, 25 years after the story's publication. It is told from the view of Hildred Castaigne, a man whose personality changes drastically following a head injury sustained by falling from his horse. He is subsequently committed to an asylum for treatment of insanity by Dr. Archer. Due to his accident, Hildred is a prime example of an unreliable narrator.

As related by Hildred, the United States has apparently prospered in the meantime, significantly improving its infrastructure. The rise of a new aristocratic elite in the United States has passed laws that reduce the influence and immigration of those considered foreign, including exclusion of all foreign-born Jews and the establishment of a state for those of African descent. Further forced assimilation of Native populations has also been implemented to resemble the use of Cossacks in the military (Chambers belies the extent to which this "solves" the "Indian problem" by also noting the installation of an equestrian statue of Philip Sheridan). Suicide has been legalized, and has been made generally and readily accessible in the newly established government "Lethal Chambers" being rapidly rolled out across every town and city.

Quote:Last year, I coined the term 'enshittification,' to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers, it really hit the zeitgeist. I mean, the American Dialect Society made it their Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I'm definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone).

So what's enshittification and why did it catch fire? It's my theory explaining how the internet was colonized by platforms, and why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, and why it matters – and what we can do about it.

We're all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit.

It's frustrating. It's demoralizing. It's even terrifying.

I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the 'great forces of history,' and into the material world of specific decisions made by named people – decisions we can reverse and people whose addresses and pitchfork sizes we can learn.

Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It's not just a way to say 'things are getting worse' (though of course, it's fine with me if you want to use it that way. It's an English word. We don't have der Rat für englische Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).

But in case you want to use enshittification in a more precise, technical way, let's examine how enshittification works.

Pluralistic: My McLuhan lecture on enshittification (30 Jan 2024)

Quote:Lee Tien, a "staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that programs like ADVISE "are about connecting" the dots of the "traces" we leave behind everywhere, "analyzing and aggregating them - in a way that we haven't thought about, ... as we live our lives and make little choices, like buying groceries, buying on Amazon, Googling," Clayton said.

"A major part of ADVISE involves data-mining - or 'dataveillance,' as some call it. It means sifting through data to look for patterns. If a supermarket finds that customers who buy cider also tend to buy fresh-baked bread, it might group the two together. To prevent fraud, credit-card issuers use data-mining to look for patterns of suspicious activity.

ADVISE is "a system that is under 'spiral' development (meaning that it is being deployed simultaneously with development) and will provide a common platform that supports scalable knowledge management across multiple missions."

SourceWatch

• Laid down (date unknown) at Boston Navy Yard, Boston, MA.
  
• Launched, 22 November 1858
  
• Commissioned, USS Hartford, 27 May 1859
  
• Decommissioned, 13 December 1864, at New York
  
• Recommissioned in July 1865
  
• Decommissioned in 1868, at New York
  
• Recommissioned, 9 October 1872
  
• Decommissioned, 14 January 1887, at Mare Island Navy Yard, Vallejo, CA.
  
• Laid up at Mare Island while being rebuilt
  
• Recommissioned, 2 October 1899
  
• Designated Miscellaneous Unclassified (IX-13), 17 July 1920
  
• Decommissioned, 20 August 1928, at Charleston Navy Yard, Charleston, S.C.
  
• Moved to Washington D.C. Navy Yard, 18 October 1938
  
• Towed to Norfolk Navy Yard, Portsmouth, VA., 19 October 1945
  
• Reclassified as a relic
  
• Final Disposition, sank at her berth, 20 November 1956, and subsequently dismantled at Portsmouth, VA. in 1957.
  

Quote:1. Interdespise: to loathe someone as much as they loathe you.

Admittedly it’s not the most positive of words, but there is some pleasure to be had in knowing that there is a term for mutual dislike. Best to get it out in the open.

2. Constult: to act stupidly together.

Whether it’s a night out, the office awayday, or a government cabinet meeting, ‘constulting’ is a pithy way of describing a joint exercise in idiocy. The word goes nicely with another unfairly jettisoned word: ‘unasinous’, meaning ‘united in stupidity’.



3. Latibulate: to find a corner and hide in it.

There are days when it all gets too much and we long to dive back under the covers whence we reluctantly emerged that morning. If no bed is available, then latibulating is the next best option. A ‘latibule’, put simply, is a hiding place, and ‘latibulate’ has just one record in the Oxford English Dictionary, where it is defined as ‘privily to hide one’s self in a corner’.

4. Paracme: the point at which one’s prime is past.

In German, they have Torschlusspanik, ‘shut door panic’, for the fear in middle age that life is passing you by and its opportunities are dwindling. A useful adjunct from the English lexicon is ‘paracme’, which represents the period when, as the Dictionary puts it, ‘the highest vigour is past’. Make of that what you will.

5. Quisquilious: of the nature of rubbish

Quisquiliae, for the Romans, described waste matter or refuse. English happily accepted the adjective quisquilious, which has the advantage of sounding beautiful whilst describing something that is total rubbish.

6. Sitzfleisch: the ability to endure something.

Back to German, and while ‘sitting meat’ doesn’t sound very pleasant, it does provide a useful descriptor for the ability to sit patiently for a long period of time, particularly through something unpleasant or annoying. This is the kind of ‘sitting stamina’ you might require when a friend is showing you a hundred of their best holiday snaps, or at the office meeting when people just don’t know when to stop.

7. Sialoquent ‘that spits much in their speech’.

Not much more needs to be said about this word, which helpfully describes anyone who at times can be a total snoozefest. The first and last recipient of this undesirable epithet appears in a letter by the 19th-century poet Robert Southey, who writes of ‘the rector, a humdrum somnificator’.

8. Somnificator: one who induces sleep in others.

At some point, we have all stoically ignored the fact that the person talking to us has accidentally spat on us in conversation. For those who commit this sin non-stop, the adjective ‘sialoquent’, from the 1700s, may at least reassure you that such individuals have existed for centuries.

9. Finifugal

The box set that has kept you gripped for weeks; the book that is so good you never want to close it, or the holiday that takes you away from it all: any one of these might leave you feeling ‘finifugal’, a Latin-based word that means ‘shunning the end’ of something because you want it to go on forever.

10. Yepsen: the amount that can be held in two hands cupped together.

Measurements in the past tended to involve the capacity or length of a particular body part. Horses were measured in hands, distances in feet (a mile represented a thousand, or mille, paces by a Roman soldier), and ocean depths in fathoms: originally the span of a pair of outstretched arms. We can add to this list the ‘yepsen’, which once described the capacity of two cupped hands, i.e. a ‘double handful’. A potentially convenient means of measuring biscuit intake.

Susie Dent’s Top 10s

Quote:8. Realize

For some inexplicable reason British (or Twitter’s) hackles are never so raised as when someone uses the American -ize in verbs such as ‘realize’. In fact, this is the house style of Oxford Dictionaries, not least because the z is closer to the Greek origin of such verbs. It seems the Americans even know a thing about etymology.

Susie Dent’s Top Tens: 10 ‘Americanisms’ that aren’t actually American

Quote:This new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image shows ESO 185-IG013, a luminous blue compact galaxy (BCG). BCGs are nearby galaxies that show an intense burst of star formation. They are unusually blue in visible light, which sets them apart from other high-starburst galaxies that emit more infrared light. Astrophysicists study BCGs because they provide a relatively close-by equivalent for galaxies from the early universe. This means that BCGs can help scientists learn about galaxy formation and evolution that may have been happening billions of years ago.

Hubble imaged ESO 185-IG013 in ultraviolet, visible, and infrared wavelengths to reveal details about its past. Hundreds of young star clusters, many of which are younger than 100 million years, populate the galaxy. A large number of star clusters are only 3.5 million years old – relative infants compared to the timescale of our universe.

Quote:Feed takes place in a world where children get brain implants to create a permanent layer of augmented reality called “the feed.” In doing so, they become so engrossed by endless opportunities to buy stuff that they ignore their polluted environment, political tumult, and anything beyond their own material gratification. In the 20 years since its publication, Feed has grown into a contemporary classic, a classroom staple frequently subjected to book-banning campaigns but often beloved by its readers, who marvel at how unnervingly predictive Anderson’s dystopia turned out to be.

...
This is an abrasive book, full of ugly, deliberately irritating dialog and characters who consistently make the worst choice presented to them. Anderson’s vision of our extremely stupid future is not subtle. Sometimes reading Feed feels like getting thwacked in the eyes by an anvil with the phrase “TECHNOLOGY SUCKS” engraved on it.

Quote:Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel is throwing his financial muscle behind an “Olympics on steroids” — whose organizer boasts that athletes will dope “out in the open and honestly.”

Thiel, who made his fortune as an early investor in tech startups like PayPal and Facebook, is backing the Enhanced Games, which will actively encourage athletes to use performance-enhancing drugs.

The venture — aimed at aiding research into nutritional supplements and biohacks that push the boundaries of human performance — is the brainchild of Dr. Aron D’Souza, a lawyer by training who famously conceived Thiel’s lawsuit against Gawker Media.

He plans to provide more details on April 17 and promote the controversial concept in Paris during the Summer Olympics, which begin in July.

Thiel is among several high-profile venture capitalists who have backed the project, including billionaire Christian Angermayer of Apeiron Investment Group and Balaji Srinivasan, the former chief technology officer of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.

D’Souza would not reveal how much money was raised, telling The Post it was in the “high single-digit millions” — a sum that is “enough to produce the first games.”

D’Souza said that Enhanced Games are negotiating with several host cities “that have requisite infrastructure” though he declined to specify which venue will host the inaugural competition, which he expects to get underway by the middle of next year.

The competition will feature five events — swimming, gymnastics, weightlifting, track and field, and combat — and will be held once a year at already-existing venues.

He told The Post that the idea behind Enhanced Games is to allow athletes to use whatever substances they wish “out in the open and honestly” — unlike at the Olympics, where “44% of Olympians admit to using banned substance while only 1% get caught.”

“My body, my choice, your body, your choice,” D’Souza told The Post when asked about the philosophy behind allowing athletes to juice.

“Individuals should be able to make choices about your body and no one — whether it’s a sports federation or the government — should be able to tell them what to do about it,” he said.

He said that the events are open to any athletes — current and former professionals and amateurs — and that allowing them to enhance their performance with substances will enable researchers to get a better idea of what technologies are out there that can boost longevity and “healthy aging.”

He said that the data would be “very useful to determining compounds and therapies to extending human life.”

D’Souza predicted that Enhanced Games would do for anti-aging what “ChatGPT did for AI.”

The 56-year-old Thiel is among several Silicon Valley moguls who have invested millions in funding research aimed at helping people live longer.

Thiel himself takes human growth hormone to help maintain muscle mass as well as anti-diabetes drug metformin, which has grown popular in the anti-aging community.

Thiel told media outlets that he adheres to the paleo diet — which eschews processed foods in favor of unprocessed fruits, vegetables and lean meat — and that he aims to one day have his body cryogenically frozen so that he can be posthumously revived if and when technology allows for it.

So far, 900 athletes have expressed interest in participating in the Enhanced Games, according to D’Souza.

He said Enhanced Games’ free-for-all philosophy will allow athletes who “didn’t win the genetic lottery” to experiment with supplementation that could boost their performance.

“Anyone who wants to compete and can do so,” D’Souza said.

Enhanced Games will also pay athletes a base salary in addition to prize winnings.

The idea is to avoid an Olympics-style competition in which countries and municipalities compete for the right to host the games by building taxpayer-funded stadiums and venues — only for those same venues to stand unused after the event is over.

Economists at Oxford University conducted an analysis which found that every Olympics since 1960 has run over budget.

D’Souza told The Post that the Enhanced Games will be entirely funded with private money.

“The Olympics wastes tens of billions of dollars building stadiums and then throwing them away after two weeks,” D’Souza said.

Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, the Russian anti-doping whistleblower who exposed the country’s state-sponsored doping program, called the idea a “danger to health, to sport.”

Anna Meares, a former Olympic gold medalist who serves as Australia’s Olympic chef de mission for the Paris Summer Games, told The Guardian: “It’s a joke, to be honest.

“Unfair, unsafe — I just don’t think this is the right way to go about sport,” she said.

NY Post

Quote:What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us.

Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.