Monthly Archives: August 2021

Its interesting whenever Elon Musks name comes up and people begin discussing his accomplishments, such as the reinvention of money, automobiles and space travel, theres always someone who says: Yeah, but I hear he can be a real dick.

Take that, Elon.

So then, lets be totally honest here, because in your heart, you know, and I know, dear reader, that you can be a real dick, too. So can I, and, if were being truly honest, so can, say, the Queen. She probably has to be a dick 10 times a week. So since when does being a dick somehow invalidate you as a person? It doesnt. Thats just stupid. And whats in it for you to dis someone you dont know, anyway? Being negative is a stupid persons way of trying to appear smart without actually being smart. And lets also be certain about something else: we all hate a goody two-shoes, so come on, what kind of perfect behaviour is it you expect from a person, any person, let alone Elon Musk?

Elon Musk is actually terrible at publicity. His Cybertruck launch was a disaster, and the Tesla in space thing was cringey. When being interviewed hes opaque, overly techy and difficult to connect with Richard Branson is a million times better with publicity, but theres something about Musk that makes Branson seem a thousand years old.

Hes terrible at that, too. After the deplatforming of Donald Trump, Musk is undebateably the planets alpha tweeter. One of those Kardashian people can make a line of armpit hair remover go viral, but Musk can generate or destroy billions of dollars of wealth in three or four words. Why on earth would he bother wasting three brain cells trying to manipulate the media? As well, his often-lame tweets frequently backfire, as hes the first to attest with his all too true tweet: Tweeting on Ambien isnt wise. Musk doesnt need to manipulate the media because what he does is fantastically interesting. He isnt someone who needs to fish for press.

a) So, what if he is? But, b) He isnt. Hes just doing what he does. Hes also, at the time of writing, the second richest person on Earth. He probably got used to going to the candy store and buying 10 of everything a long time ago. He lives modestly. He always reinvests in his own ideas and his ideas are good.

Grow up.

Musk didnt just generate a few fundamental patents and move to Santa Barbara to golf for the rest of his life. Every day he tries to reinvent the wheel and its working. Shopped online lately? Ever wanted to visit the International Space Station? Want a new car? With cars alone, Musk pretty much single-handedly shamed and forced the global auto industry to accelerate the electric car rollout by seven to 10 years. Yet people kvetch, and it makes me wonder if there is something fundamentally flawed about our era that it is almost impossible to get people to say something nice about pretty much anyone else. A like given to someone else is a like that could have instead gone to oneself, which I suppose indicates that theres something fundamentally different about selfhood than, say, 25 years ago. I pick 1996 because it seems to me to have been the acme of the celebrity profile remember them? In Vanity Fair, say. The glossy cover. The fawning. The expectation of dirt revealed. Will they backstab? Even the interviewers were famous for interviewing, and it all feels like a million years ago. Are there any celebrity interviewers left? Oprah, I guess, but her heart doesnt seem to really be in it, and she now seems to be merely an enabling conduit for the Megan-and-Harry feelings politics that blights our era.

First, we already discussed this: he can be a dick, so dont be surprised when he is. Second, people know theyre going to be working with Elon Musk, so they cant play woe is me if he goes Elon on them. And third, hes incredibly smart and is used to working with the worlds smartest and most accomplished people, so if you dont cut the mustard then you didnt cut the mustard. And heres something funny he actually said to someone who was pissing him off in the Tesla factory: You know, I could be drinking mai tais with naked supermodels, but instead Im here with you. He has a point.

Dear God, is this what our society has been reduced to?

Hes a good father with six sons: triplets, twins and one solo. A first son died of Sids at the age of 10 weeks.

He has been married to two women (his second wife twice).

He is famous for his need to be in love and for being unable to sleep alone.

He spent his 47th birthday in his factory fixing robots for 24 hours.

He loves his mother, who is a top global fashion model at 73.

He sees no future in fossil fuels.

He hates visible seams on his products.

He swears a lot.

In 2018 his tunnel-drilling company, the Boring Company, sold 20,000 novelty flamethrowers as a publicity stunt. They now sell on eBay at an average of $3,000.

No, hes not. The left doesnt like him because he doesnt fund them or show interest in their causes. And the right doesnt like him because he messes around with the stock market and doesnt take classical capitalism seriously. For example, he thinks short selling the stock market should be banned. Musk donates to Democrats and Republicans only because its the cost of having a voice in government. He seems to see left versus right as an obsolete binary and instead focuses his altruistic energies on ecology and invention. He seems to be more about the systems that create signals rather than the signals themselves.

I know, saving the world could anything be more Megan-and-Harry? But Musk isnt trying to save the world, only to make it better. Musk has created three multibillion-dollar companies in four profoundly difficult fields in which to create anything. And these companies are successful, usually without help from the people we once considered gatekeepers. Like lots of people who do lots of things, hes too busy for elaborate introspection.

This is actually the most baffling thing about Musk: whats his deal with Mars? He loves discussing the creation of new platforms for humans elsewhere in the cosmos. He wants humans to be multiplanetary, telling Rolling Stone: There have been five mass-extinction events in the fossil record. People have no comprehension of these things. Unless youre a cockroach or a mushroom or a sponge youre fucked. So, I guess hes expecting a mass extinction event soon, but really though, arent we all? *Nervous chuckle* Well, maybe not. But his Martian plans will probably happen soon enough, and if nothing else have spurred great general discussion on just what sort of person it takes to go to Mars on what is most likely a one-way trip. I know nothing about therapy, but it strikes me that perhaps Musk sees himself as a prime candidate. This is maybe reading too much into it. Maybe he simply thinks its a cool idea. Sometimes its that simple.

This is true. But Zowie Bowie turned out just fine, so why shouldnt X AE A-XII Musk?

OK, but what if hes right? The radio gave us Hitler. The internet gave us the past five years. Maybe AI will happily surprise us, but Musk only foresees a 5-10% chance of humans being able to contain AI and make it safe. It will possibly do this using the systems devised by his non-profit, Neuralink, which aims to create mind/machine interfaces. So combatting potential AI enslavement down the road may seem quixotic, but frankly, why not give it a go?

Hes done more than his share down here, if nothing else, making great leaps at reducing fossil fuel consumption, but I have no idea if he recycles rubbish at his house wherever he lives. What if he didnt? Thats right: that would make him a terrible human being. We could go jump on him and beat him with sticks.

If you search for Musk online comment threads on, say, Reddit, youll quickly sense the presence of teenage male body sprays and stained gym socks. Its incel heaven. Adult voices discussing Musk are rare, and it seems the vast bulk of Musk commentary centres on bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and yes, I can hear you stifling a yawn, but were stuck with these things, so wed better cobble together some sort of peace deal with them. Cryptocurrency does seem to be the one topic where Musk genuinely enjoys messing with peoples minds as well as with stock market regulators. I suspect that he doesnt have a stand on crypto at all my guess is that he sees cryptocurrencies as being interesting simply because they exist at all, like Klein bottles or those Japanese Kit-Kats in flavours such as pumpkin or green tea. Regardless, Musks public toxic trolls included seem to adore his ongoing dance of taunts and teases and hints and theyd have it no other way, especially with a crypto called dogecoin, which is like Daffy Duck to b itcoins Bugs Bunny, and the two are locked in an eternal battle for relevance, and even onlooking Belarusian troll farmers must be thinking: Wow. We were going to fabricate a pseudo-conflict between these two things, but it looks like the real world is already doing it for us. Moi slezy ne soderzhat antibiotikov! *

Its also interesting to note that when Musk posts big events in his life on Twitter, successful experimental space launches, say, his detractors will post things like a photo of a Tesla Model 3 whose real wheels went off a suburban garden ledge a photo appended by vitriolic meta-commentary along the lines of: My moms Roomba has better edge detection than a Tesla. #VeryDisappointed.

PS: Musk is already worth $185bn.

* My teardrops contain no antibiotics!

*Cringe* Hearing this makes it feel like its the 1920s and were comparing Vanderbilts with Rockefellers. But, having said this, I will admit that there is a deeply concealed dark part of my soul that aches for Bezos and Musk to even somewhat resemble that blank-eyed, walrus-mustached plutocrat who haunts the Monopoly game board, but alas, that is not going to happen. Both men seem to dress exclusively from Tommy Hilfiger shops at outlet malls. Maybe Lauren Snchez buys Bezoss shirts in those hotel lobby stores in coastal resort towns but honestly, even if youre the two richest unmarried guys on Earth, whose job is it to pull your wardrobe anyway? Your girlfriends? No. So who? A personal assistant? Your mum? Its actually kind of a miracle that new clothing ever even appear in these guys dressing rooms to begin with. But this doesnt directly address the Bezos/Musk rivalry, which I dont think actually exists. It technically seems like it could be a good rivalry, but they both made their money in such different ways (and remember, money is a primary lens through which we view them) that it feels wrong to lump them together. Bezos is like your mums leathery third boyfriend after her divorce, while Musk is your maths tutor who won the Powerball lottery. Zero overlap.

People want to believe that, but heres the thing: Musk has a huge IQ. He is measurably, scientifically, clinically and demonstrably the smartest person in any room anywhere. He can tell you the square root of your Amex card number at a glance. He can tell you, I dont know the square root of zinc. He has mild Aspergers, which prevents him from snagging on details and talking himself out of trying new things. Hes a perfect storm who comes from about as middle class a family as was possible in the late 20th century, so you cant beat him with sticks. His family was like scores of millions and then he became one of the richest people on Earth.

I think the biggest difference between the 20th century and the 21st is that in the 20th century you were able to see the future in your head. There were new ways of envisioning, say, an information utopia or an ecological harmonisation of humans with everything non-human. But here in the 21st century were only able to possibly glimpse a small workable future, and even then only if we work at it incredibly hard. Thats a huge difference in looking at what lies down the road. Musks appeal is that he still sees both the future as well as a future albeit a future on Mars, which has 38% of the gravity of Earth and about 1% of its atmosphere. And wifi back and forth to Earth would take six-and-a-half minutes each way. Hardly smoking hot, so good luck watching random episodes of The Big Bang Theory while real-time wisecracking with your former cubicle mates back in Palo Alto.

On 28 June, Musk turned 50. He has at least three more high-functioning decades to go. More likely five or six, so were not even halfway through his movie. Pundits who think hell soon be over are either naive or assassins.

Douglas Couplands Binge: 60 Stories to Make Your Head Feel Different will be available in the UK in October via Amazon

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'The smartest person in any room anywhere': in defence of Elon Musk, by Douglas Coupland - The Guardian

"When it comes to development, when you do it right, it really is a rising-tide-lift-all-boats type of scenario," said Stef Halmos, the artist and developer who, in 2017, began transforming three abandoned mills in the Village of Catskill into an 85,000 square-foot arts campus called Foreland that opened this month.

"I feel like the ripple effect of Foreland will be very positive just by the nature of who occupies these buildings and what the mission is of their new use."

These three buildings, two of which are now connected by a floating glass pedestrian bridge, were constructed in the mid-1800s and originally used to produce uniforms for Union Soldiers during the Civil War. They were empty for decades before Halmos re-imagined and revitalized them to house 30 artists' studios, three art galleries, two event spaces, and two eateries one cafe that is already open, and a restaurant that will follow.

Related: Exploring the mellow mountain village of Catskill

"The Foreland building has been under construction by multiple contractors for the past 15 years, Patrick McCulloch, Village of Catskill Planning Board Chairman told Times Union: Hudson Valley via email. Stef Halmos had the right vision to take over this project and see it to completion.

Now that it is finally complete, the challenge will be to keep the entire operation afloat especially in a mellow little river town like Catskill. And yet, Halmos has more than high hopes. She has real estate development in her blood, an artistic vision that celebrates both old and new, and a vested interest in improving the village where she set down roots with her wife and toddler.

"It's a complex eco-system with a lot going on to make these old buildings be alive," Halmos noted. "Multiple revenue streams keep the project stable." The galleries and caf will give the public access to the space, bringing life into Foreland after four years of development. And this coming weekend, Saturday, August 28 and Sunday, August 29 from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., Foreland is partnering with Upstate Art Weekendand New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA)on an exhibition featuring artists working in Upstate New York.

"There are over 100 artists that are exhibiting and just by the nature of the exhibition, you'll be able to walk through two of our three buildings," Halmos said.

Caitlin MacBride is among the artists who have rented out one of Foreland's 30 artist studios. "I love the historical details of it being an old mill because so many of my paintings are about history and design, so this environment really inspires me, she said. Pictured is her painting, Mill," 2021, oil on panel, that will be included in Foreland and NADA Art's exhibition during Upstate Art Weekend.

Visitors can also check out Foreland's inaugural show in the ground floor gallery, a joint exhibition between Rachel Uffnerand Mrs.

While there's definitely an element of pie-in-the-sky artistic-utopia vibe built into the Foreland's vision board, there's also a business sensibility behind the project, too. Those visiting Foreland's campus could potentially become future studio renters, or they may keep Foreland in mind for future weddings and parties, or at the very least they might support their in-house caf, Willa's, by grabbing a coffee and a snack.

Foreland's heart and soul is in its affordable art studios, which Halmos recognized were in short supply when she lived in Brooklyn and was seeking a workspace for her own art. Halmos's studio work includes sculptures, photographs, and objects. While she doesn't have any of her on art on display at Foreland at the moment, she is in the process of creating a new body of work, with some forthcoming exhibitions in the pipeline. Halmos's own Foreland studio is a 1,500-square-foot space, which is partly used for her studio work and partly used for the Foreland staff headquarters.

"The prices were so extravagant for crappy [Brooklyn] studios. People were paying prime money for [a] subpar product," Halmos said of the studios. "I thought, 'I can do it better. I'm an artist and I want to build a studio that I want to use.'"

As she and her wife started spending more time upstate, her dream studio site appeared. "Just by a total fluke, I was having an ice cream across the creek from [what is now] Foreland and I was staring at that beautiful building," Halmosrecalled. "I fell in love with it immediately and said, 'That's my building. That's it.'"

"Just by a total fluke, I was having an ice cream across the creek from [what is now] Foreland and I was staring at that beautiful building, Halmos, pictured here, recalled. "I fell in love with it immediately and said, 'That's my building. That's it."

Halmos says the Foreland studios are affordable pricing is available upon request, following an application process that shows proof of work but this isn't a non-profit organization. The artists' rent helps sustain the project. "My rule of thumb is that you're going to pay 30 percent less for 100 percent better of a product. You get it all with these studios everybody has a lot of light, big, beautiful, tall windows," Halmos said.

Caitlin MacBride,a painter who recently relocated to Hudson and rented a studio at Foreland, agrees the new space is an upgrade.

"I spent 15 years living in Brooklyn and this studio would have been way out of my price zone there. Its large and has wide floorboards and exposed beams. I love the historical details of it being an old mill because so many of my paintings are about history and design so this environment really inspires me, she said. "Also as someone who is still relatively new to the area its been such a gift I feel like the studio has already provided me with new friends and an amazing community of makers."

Ninety percent of the studios have been rented to date by an array of artists and makers, including painter Shara Hughes, multidisciplinary artist Lyle Ashton Harris, filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh, and sculptor Marc Swanson.

Since Halmos first laid eyes on the trio of buildings in 2017, she also started a family. Now the mother of an 18-month-old child, she joked, "Restoring these old buildings took longer and was more draining that growing and giving birth to an human."

Two of the 1800s-era buildings are connected by a floating glass pedestrian bridge.

Though Halmos is somewhat new to Catskill and new real estate development, her work on Foreland shows reverence for the buildings' past. Halmos began the project with a focus on preservation, spending a year and a half on structural remediation that is, dealing with all the engineering elements to stabilize the buildings and improve their health, safety and longevity. Her respect for the buildings' history shines through her artistic vision.

"We don't patina new things to look old and we didn't let the old things look new. We let them live together to show that there are a lot of people who have done work on this building before me and there will be many here after me," Halmos explained. "If we had to replace a beam or a floor system, we would use new wood wide planks, tongue and groove and let it show that it's new against some of the old things. You might see one column that is this big chunky piece of fresh timber, but the old one next to it has that patina of age."

Clearly, Halmos is looking to build on the good bones that already exist in Foreland and in the Village of Catskill, too. She mentioned the kindness and support of the town boards, the Department of Public Works, and the local police throughout her project.

"It's really bad for a town when giant footprints sit empty, she said. Statistically, it keeps growth stagnant. And so, just from the most basic standpoint, having these buildings full and increasing the amount of bodies that are coming in and out will be really positive. All these people want places to eat, they want places to go they want to enjoy life in such a beautiful little town."

Others are also looking forward to the role Foreland will play in the community. "Foreland is in the heart of our village, said McCulloch. We cant wait to see what their future holds."

Hudson Valley Art, Music and Culture

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Abandoned mills become massive new art space in Catskill - Times Union

Three months after touching down on the Martian surface, Chinas Zhurong rover has completed its primary mission and is still going strong.

The ambitious robotic exploration vehicle launched on a Long March-5 rocket from Wenchang, China back in July 2020, along with an accompanying Mars orbiter. After a 6.5 month journey, the spacecraft arrived at Mars in February.

Unlike recent NASA missions to Mars, which perform their Entry, Descent, and Landing procedures immediately, Zhurong stayed in orbit for several months before landing. The wait allowed the team to gather data about the health of the vehicle, move it into the most advantageous orbit, and decide on a landing zone.

The decision to take their time with the landing makes sense: Mars is a notoriously difficult place to land safely. About half of all historical Mars landing attempts have ended in failure, and until Zhurong, only the United States had ever succeeded (it might be argued that the Soviet Unions Mars 3 and the United Kingdoms Beagle 2 landers both soft-landed successfully, but both vehicles also broke down seconds after landing).

In any case, Zhurongs cautious approach paid off, and it successfully touched down on May 14th, 2021. Its landing site is in the region known as Utopia Planitia, a wide rocky plain, parts of which were previously explored by the Viking 2 Lander in 1976. Utopia Planitia is a desirable landing site because its flat, open terrain makes for an easier touchdown, but also because it is believed to be an ancient lakebed, giving the region scientific value to researchers hoping to learn about water, or even life, on ancient Mars.

Since landing, Zhurong has traveled 886 meters, stopping to take scientific measurements, and some selfies, along the way. The rover carries a ground-penetrating radar system which, along with a similar system onboard NASAs new Perseverance rover, is the first of its kind on Mars. Several other instruments will enable it to carry out geological investigations.

As Zhurong is Chinas first Martian rover, part of the primary mission involved testing the vehicles design and engineering: learning how to land on Mars and navigate a robotic rover there is a feat in itself. As part of this technology demonstration campaign, one of the rovers first targets was its own discarded parachute and backshell, which were intentionally detached as part of the landing procedure. The rover drove up to the backshell and inspected it, taking photos to send back to the team.

This week, the China National Space Administration announced that both the scientific and engineering goals of Zhurongs 90-day primary mission had been achieved. So far, Zhurong seems to have been a resounding success. The rover appears healthy and will continue to explore the surrounding region in the months to come. It has returned 10 gigabytes of scientific data so far. Hopefully, this and future data collected by the rover can help broaden our understanding of the red planet.

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Chinas Rover Completes its Primary 90-day Mission, but it Still has More Science to do - Universe Today

Picture a surfer. You probably imagine someone blonde and blue eyeda classic Southern California type, The Beach Boys playing in the background. Maybe you think of Elvis and one of his many surfmovies. Heck, youre more apt to see Scooby Doo on a board than a person of color.

Like many sports in the US, surfing has been actively non-inclusivea stark reality that Selema Masekela came to understand as a teenager surfing in Southern California in the 1980s.

There were no other [Black] kids doing it, Masekela says. And the kids in my school were very much informative in making sure I knew that. Everything from You people dont swim, how are you gonna learn to surf, to outright usage of the n-word and harassment about my color and being in the water, everywhere I went.

Ironically, Masekelanow a TV host, musician, and surf enthusiastfaced similar tensions when he visited South Africa, the home of his ancestors and some of the worlds most sought-after waves. It was the early 90s and he was accompanying his father, the musician and apartheid activist Hugh Masekela. Though apartheid had just ended, it was still very much the law of the land... and the water. Beaches were segregated, and the high price of entry for surfing meant that many indigenous South Africans couldntand still cantafford to try it.

I walked out of an elevator in a hotel in Durban with a surfboard in my hand and the whole lobby stopped, like a movie, recalls Masekela. When I walked out on the street to go to the beach, cars hit the brakes and you could hear the screeching of tires. People were looking like, what is happening? This is the new South Africa that theyre talking about on the radiois this what it is?

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When I ask Masekela why he chose surfing as the lens for his new book about Africa, the question pretty much contained the answer.

When [travelers] think about Africa its like we went, we landed, they drove us into a safari, he says. Or I volunteered and worked in this village or we went and taught people about Jesus and we saved them. Thats how weespecially in the Westlook at the richest, most vibrant, culturally diverse continent on the planet.

What people dont typically associate with the Africadespite 18,950 miles of coastlineis its waves. Masekela wants to change that with his new book AFROSURF. Itdelves into the history of surf culture in Africa, challenging stereotypes and popular ideas of provenance. Compiled with Mami Wata, a surf company based in Cape Town that Masekela co-founded, the collection features some 200 photos and over 50 essays, plus illustrations, profiles, even poems and recipes that span Africas shores from Morocco to Ghana to Somalia, and even landlocked countries like Congo.

There are thrilling tales of navigating shark-infested waters in Madagascar, and the surfable (and less terrifying) Skeleton Coast in Angola. Read about the tiny surfing utopia of Gabon, known to water-lovers for centuries, as yet undiscovered by much of the outside world. An essay by Kevin Dawson, history professor and author of the award-winning Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora, traces the origins of surfing not to Hawaii, but to what is now Ghana, in 1640, with fishermen foregoing canoes for longboards and using them to paddle across lakes.

The book also emphasizes the reverence of water throughout the continent. Before [my father] left South Africa, my grandmother would always ask him to bring her back seawater from the beach, Masekela said. She believed in its spiritual power. His father told him this story when they were sitting on a beach in 2010, working on an ESPN documentary together. It was the first time that he ever really helped me to see that my love for the ocean water isnt foreignits actually native to us. To our family and to our culture.

Charities like South Africas Waves for Changewhich receives some of the proceeds from sales of AFROSURFlooks to the sea for therapy, helping kids heal trauma and gain exposure to the sport. Were creating a space where kids can be kids, says founder Chemica Blouw in the book. Because they dont always get to be kids in the communities they come from.

Decades later, the experience of surfing in South Africa has changed for the better for Masekela. But not enough. Its a start that South Africa now has its first Black championship surfer in Michael Mikey February, who is also profiled in AFROSURF. Were stoked on Mikey February, but we have a long way to go, he says. It needs to get to the point where its no longer notable, but the norm.

The sea change is most felt on the water. When you get an opportunity to surf with people who look like you, its very hard to explain what that feels like, the ease and the safety, Masekela says. Its so much fun to paddle out in Durban and be surrounded by tons of kids that look like me, and are rabid surfers. Its incredible to go up and down the coast and have it not be strange.

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Dive into the Untold Story of Surf Culture in Africa - Thrillist

FILE - This Oct. 16, 2017, file photo shows the black al-Qaida flag is sprayed on the wall of a damaged school that was turned into a religious court, in Taiz, Yemen.

By David Brooks | The New York Times

| Aug. 28, 2021, 7:00 p.m.

Certain years leap out as turning points in world history: 1517, 1776 and 1917. These are years when powerful ideas strode onto the world stage: the Reformation, democratic capitalism and revolutionary Communism.

The period around 1979 was another such dawn. Political Islam burst onto global consciousness with the Iranian revolution, the rise of the mujahedeen after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Islamization program in Pakistan and the popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood across the Arab world.

The ideas that seized the imagination of millions had deep and diverse intellectual roots. For example, mid-20th century thinker Sayyid Qutb mounted a comprehensive critique of the soulless materialism of America, tracing it in part to the separation of church and state the fatal error, he believed, that divided the spirit from the flesh. In the Muslim world, he argued, body and soul should not be split asunder, but should live united in a resurrected caliphate, governed by Shariah law.

This vision could manifest in more temperate ways, as clerics seeking to exercise political power, or in more violent ways, as jihadis trying to overthrow Arab regimes.

By 2006, in an essay called The Master Plan, Lawrence Wright could report in The New Yorker how al-Qaida had operationalized these dreams into a set of sweeping, violent strategies. The plans were epic in scope: expel the U.S. from Iraq, establish a caliphate, overthrow Arab regimes, initiate a clash with Israel, undermine Western economies, create total confrontation between believers and nonbelievers, and achieve definitive victory by 2020, transforming world history.

These were the sorts of bold dreams that drove Islamist terrorism in the first part of the 21st century.

To the terrorists behind Thursdays bombing outside the Kabul airport, the murder of more than a dozen Americans and scores of Afghans may seem like a step toward that utopia. The humbling U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan may to them seem like a catastrophic defeat for Western democracy and a great leap toward the dream of a unified Muslim community.

But something has changed over the past several years. The magnetic ideas at the heart of so many of these movements have lost their luster.

If extremists thought they could mobilize Muslim opinion through acts of clarifying violence, they have failed. Across 11 lands in which Pew surveyed Muslims in 2013, a median of only 13% had a favorable opinion of al-Qaida.

In his 2011 book, The Missing Martyrs, Charles Kurzman showed that fewer than 1 in every 100,000 Muslims had become an Islamist terrorist in the years since 9/11. The vast majority rejected the enterprise.

When political Islamists tried to establish theocratically influenced rule in actual nations, their movements reputation was badly hurt. In one of extremisms most violent, radical manifestations, the Islamic States caliphate in Iraq and Syria became a blood-drenched nightmare.

But even in more moderate places, political Islam is losing favor. In 2019, The Economist surveyed the data and concluded, Across the Arab world people are turning against religious political parties and the clerics who helped bring them to power. Many appear to be giving up on Islam, too. Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah Yazdi of Iran noticed the trend in his own country: Iranians are evading religious teachings and turning to secularism.

Globally, terrorism is down. Deaths from attacks fell by 59% between 2014 and 2019. Al-Qaidas core members havent successfully attacked the U.S. homeland since 9/11. In 2017, the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, began a process of marginalizing radical Wahhabism.

Experts see Islamic extremisms fortunes slipping away. The past two decades, Nelly Lahoud writes in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, have made clear just how little jihadi groups can hope to accomplish. They stand a far better chance of achieving eternal life in paradise than of bringing the United States to its knees.

In The Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria notes that most Islamist terrorism today tends to be local the Taliban in Afghanistan, Boko Haram in Nigeria, al-Shabab in the Horn of Africa. Thats a major reversal from the glory days of al-Qaida, when its leaders insisted that the focus must be not on the near enemy (the local regimes) but rather the far enemy (the United States and the West more broadly).

In this humiliating month, as the Taliban takes power in Afghanistan and ISIS still spreads mayhem, its obvious that even local conflicts can create incredible danger. But the idea of global glory a fundamental shaking of the world order that burst on the world stage roughly 40 years ago has been brought low.

The problem has not been eliminated by any means, but it has shrunk.

We blundered when we sought to defeat a powerful idea through some decisive military victory. But much is achieved when we keep up the pressure, guard the homeland, promote liberal ideas and allow theocracy to shrivel under the weight of its own flaws.

The men and women, in and out of uniform, who have done this work over the past 40 years, and are still giving their lives to it, deserve our gratitude and admiration.

(Nam Y. Huh | AP photo)New York Times columnist David Brooks at the University of Chicago, Jan. 19, 2012.

David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times.

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David Brooks: Islamic theocracy shrivels under its own flaws - Salt Lake Tribune

The bhakti radical Ravidas (c 1450-1520), calling himself a tanner now set free, was the first to envision an Indian utopia in his song Begumpura a modern casteless, classless, tax-free city without sorrow. This was in contrast to the dystopia of the brahmanic Kaliyuga.

Rejecting Orientalist, nationalist and hindutva impulses to reinvent India, Gail Omvedt threads together the worldviews of subaltern visionaries spanning five centuries Chokhamela, Janabai, Kabir, Ravidas, Tukaram, the Kartabhajas, Phule, Iyothee Thass, Pandita Ramabai, Periyar, and Ambedkar. These are contrasted with Gandhis village utopia of Ram Rajya, Nehrus hindutva-laced brahmanic socialism and Savarkars territorialist Hindu Rashtra. Reason and ecstasy dnyan and bhakti pave the road that leads to the promised land.

The following is an excerpt from the concluding chapter of Seeking Begumpura: The Social Vision of Anticaste Intellectuals.

From Namdev, Kabir, Ravidas and Tukaram through Phule, Ramabai and Ambedkar, dalit-bahujan and many women intellectuals have evoked an ideal of a casteless, classless society, and have increasingly outlined its characteristics as a prosperous, democratic, socialist, development-oriented society. This study has traced the varying expressions of the ideal and the concrete forms in which it was envisaged.

In the form of utopian values they upheld, the anticaste intellectuals differed significantly from those who are taken today as nationalist leaders. As G Aloysius (1997) has pointed out in describing a nationalism without a nation in India, Congress as well as Hindu Mahasabha leaders had aimed for cultural nationalism that is a transfer of power without a change in the basic culture (as they saw it) of the Indian people. In doing so, they explicitly or implicitly endorsed its brahmanic elements, and in doing so laid the foundations for a more virulent Hindutva.

Nehrus ideal was a vague socialism, but he associated it with a managed economy, an updated version of what he saw as the traditional brahmanic ideal of service, taking the values of collectivity in family, caste and village as positive and somehow socialistic. This connected him ideologically with Gandhi, though in many respects his marxist emphasis on economic development puts him in the same camp as Ambedkar.

In contrast to the tendency of the elites to seek an independence ideal in the recreation of past values located in an imagined vedic golden age, with many of them idealising varnsashrama dharma, and without much change in the hegemonic structures of society the subaltern intellectuals sought what Aloysius calls a political nationalism, that emphasised equality with solidarity. Theirs was a vision that sought the reconstruction of Indian society, the creation of a new society that would flourish under independence.

Its prosperity is also stressed. This was to remain a themethe ideal, whether Begumpura or an imagined Pandhari, was a city of dancing, of merchants, of prosperity. Its anticaste vision may be contrasted with Gandhis Ram Rajya which indeed focused on village India, with Ram as a supposedly ideal king. Ravidas, even in the fifteenth century, was more secular and certainly more socialistic than Gandhi.

With independence, the creativity of dalit-bahujan intellectuals seemingly died away. Ambedkar died in 1956; he left behind a political party, a policy of a broad Left alliance, a new religion, and a heritage of pride. But the Republican party, though conceived of as a party for all the oppressed (and named after the US Republican Party, seen as the party of Lincoln and the ending of slavery), turned out to be only for dalits and more or less limited to being a powerful pressure group in Maharashtra.

A later, greater effort by Kanshi Ram to recreate the alliance of dalits and OBCs with the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) has had limited success: for a time it seemed to arouse a thunder all over India. For some time it remained confined to Uttar Pradesh and the northern, chamar belt of the state though Mayawatis resounding victory in the 2007 assembly elections brought new hope and new questioning, especially regarding the alliance with brahmans.

When the Dalit Panther was formed in 1972 by some of the leading writers of Maharashtra, it emerged as a militant organisation but quickly became split over marxism versus ambedkarism, and died within a year. Much of the dalit movement in the following years appeared to be under the hegemony of the Left, and this sapped its creativity.

After 1990, with the new globalisation, and propelled by the internet, a new dalit intelligentsia seized the opportunity to take their cause to the world arena, and in 2001 put caste on the agenda as a form of racism at the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. This new form of mobilisation has found it difficult to connect in an organic way with the dalit masses; it was too often based on NGO activity rather than strong mass movements. Yet the many initiatives heralded the beginning of a new era.

Looking a bit like the Statue of Liberty with a floppy hippy hat, the goddess was standing on a computer, with book and pen in hand, springing from the map of India as if to move on to the world. Claims Prasad, who hosted the party, English the Dalit Goddess is a world power today; it is about emancipation; it is a mass movement against the caste order. Over a century ago, Savitribai Phule, wife of social revolutionary Jotirao Phule, had written the same thing, saying in a poem that sudras and ati-sudras (dalits) now have the right to education; and through English, casteism can be destroyed and brahmanical teaching can be hurled away. But it remains to be seen how much the subaltern castes will be able to use the weapons of global connections, computer, and English skills.

In fact, the ups and downs of the emergence of anticaste intellectuals were probably not accidental. The two main eras of creativity were the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries when the great poet-saints and wandering minstrels known as leaders of the bhakti movement sang their songs to arouse the people against priestly dominance and caste exclusiveness and the colonial period. Both represented forms of globalisation.

In the first case, Muslim rule brought a wide commercialism and an era of order to the subcontinent, broke through the stagnation of brahmanic regionalised states, and brought a connection with global trends, both in terms of mysticism and broader stirrings of assertion. In the second case, it was British colonial rule that linked India to a wider heritage. These linkages, and the resources they offered, benefited the anticaste intellectuals who emerged to try to give a telling blow to ritualism and hierarchy.

Similarly, other bhakti poets rejected many of the brahmanic symbols choosing Pandhari over Vaikuntha, often rejecting the avatar theory or turning it upside down, to hail the goodness of Bali, Sibi and the like. Even where names such as Rama were used by poets like Kabir, he made it clear that this was not the avatar Ramchandra and at times combined Allah-Ram: Every man and woman born are forms of you, so says Kabir: Im Ram and Allahs foolish baby, hes my guru and my pir (shabd 97).

Similarly, during the colonial period the initial response of the subaltern Kartabhajas was to hail the prosperity of the kompani, a king bringing wealth and prosperity from oversees. Intellectuals like Phule drew upon missionary research and propagandising to help them provide a full-fledged theory of brahmanism, created by Aryans and maintained through keeping the masses in ignorance. And he turned the avatar theory on its head, again, to hail the rakshasas (connoting demons in Sanskrit) as defenders of the people and Bali Raja as the good king, both powerful and sacrificial.

These early eras of globalisation in many ways benefited the anticaste movement.Yet just as theorists today stress that globalisation has both dangers and opportunities, so it did earlier. The ruling classes and ethnic groups during these early periods also were not interested in promoting mass welfare; outsiders themselves, they often made alliances with brahmans and worked to maintain caste. Muslims themselves absorbed much of caste hierarchy, defining their elite as ashraf descendents of Turks and Persians, Sayyids and Shahs and treating the subaltern caste converts as inferior.

In both cases, in spite of challenges from below, a brahmanic recuperation occurred: the bhakti movement was absorbed, and the anticaste intellectuals of the colonial period were deflected as the call for national independence took on a powerful aura. And with independence, most of the issues raised by subaltern groups were buried.

The way affirmative action was handled was typical: through the policy of reservation that absorbed all the rigidities of the public sector bureaucracy, renouncing any trust in broader policy decisions, and institutionalising an ideological split between merit and reservation candidates. The global forces have been used, in the end, more effectively by the elites, and rather than revolutionary moves towards abolition of caste, an updating and restructuring of caste inequality has occurred.

Excerpted with permission from Seeking Begumpura: The Social Vision of Anticaste Intellectuals, Gail Omvedt, Navayana.

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Neither Ram Rajya nor golden Vedic age: Gail Omvedt (1941-2021) on the history of a casteless future - Scroll.in

Its weird, right? says David Farrier, who knows all about the unusual. I dont quite know how it happened, and I find the whole thing bizarre too its outrageous.

A year ago, Farrier the former TV3 journalist who found fame with his film Tickled and the Netflix series Dark Tourist had never heard of a podcast called Armchair Expert.

Actually, he sheepishly admits, he hadnt heard of its host, a Hollywood actor named Dax Shepard.

But now Farrier is living in Los Angeles, has become great mates with Shepard (and his even better-known wife, Kristen Bell of Frozen, Bad Moms and The Good Place), and is cemented with Shepards following as their authority on conspiracy theorists.

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Hes carved quite the niche with two distinct audiences: the 20 million, mainly American audience of passionate Arm Cherries that tune into Shepard, and the smaller, but equally enthusiastic Kiwi crowd following his online newsletter Webworm, where he has unmasked anti-vax doctors and charted the red-pilling of Billy Te Kahika Jr.

Farrier grew up admiring Louis Theroux, was obsessed with making documentaries, and his goal was to deliver one for the big screen, which he did in 2016 with Tickled - the sordid tale of the darkness behind televised competitive tickling.

But the world has changed, and Farrier is quite comfortable in what once would have been considered two obscure mediums: a podcast, and a newsletter. While the world is chaotic, he says, it feels like a nice place to be.

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David Farrier recording the Armchaired and Dangerous podcast at Dax Shepards home in LA.

The attraction was immediate. After 29 minutes into Farriers appearance on Armchair Expert last September, Shepard declared: Im so sad you live in New Zealand: I want to hang out with David so bad. Im on the next plane to the f...... North Island.

Farrier was mainly meant to talk Tickled and Dark Tourist, which Shepard had just watched, but was quickly and enthusiastically diverted into explaining the origins of the QAnon movement and the bizarre Pizzagate and Wayfairgate conspiracies (google them) to an enthralled Shepard.

Soon afterwards, Farrier was, rather appropriately, walking past the Auckland headquarters of the Church of Scientology when his phone rang: it was Shepard, wanting to FaceTime for a yarn.

Then Shepard emailed with the invitation to do a weekly spin-off podcast, Armchaired and Dangerous, in which Farrier would explore conspiracists and other oddities (theyve since recorded episodes on cannibals, cryptozoology and serial killers).

Shepard, who acted in films like Employee of the Month, the CHiPS remake he also wrote and directed, and the Candid Camera-style TV show Punk'd, began the podcast on a whim.

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Dax Shepard records Armchair Expert from a converted space above his garage.

In the past three years, it has featured guests such as Jason Bateman, Amy Schumer, Gwyneth Paltrow, Norah Jones, Will Ferrell, Monica Lewinsky, Richard Dawkins and Judd Apatow, and Forbes magazine declared it the fourth-highest earning podcast in the United States, estimating its annual earnings at $US9 million (NZ$13 million).

It dawned on me how big his network is [and] how powerful and global a podcast can be, says Farrier. Youve got these big personality podcasts, where Joe Rogan is at one end of things, and Dax and [co-host] Monica [Padman] are at the other.

By May this year, Farrier had decided to travel up to Los Angeles, with the knowledge I may not be able to get back, to work on some unspecified projects he wont talk about, but principally, it seems the podcast, which is recorded in an improvised studio above Shepards garage in Los Angeles.

Shepard offered him a spare room (politely declined; he didnt want to be an imposition), while Padman offered the loan of her car (gratefully accepted). Hes just very friendly, and for whatever reason, I dont know why, he likes me! Its like this incredible little family that Ive lucked into its deeply unusual, but I am deeply into it.

Shepards producer Rob Holysz says they trust Farriers storytelling and research work and the intellectual clout he brings to our show.

Holysz says one reason why Armchaired and Dangerous is launching a series of live shows is that the audience love Farrier. So next month, Farrier, Shepard and Padman will record before a live theatre audience in, of all places, Salt Lake City, Utah. Given his interest in evangelical movements, Farrier is duly excited to get some education on Mormonism in the world home of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints.

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Farrier filming Tickled.

The last time he was in the mid-West state was to launch Tickled at the Sundance Film Festival. The five years since, he says, have been a blur, shuffling between New Zealand and the US, with a year touring the well-received Tickled, then a year making Dark Tourist, the Netflix-commissioned series about visiting places like Chernobyl. (Hes equivocal about a second series: I feel dark tourism is stepping out of the front door of the house these days.)

When the pandemic came, Farrier was finishing another dark tale of the unusual - a feature-length piece derived from a 2017 series of articles he did on the bizarre antics of Grey Lynn antique salesman Michael Organ, who would clamp anything illegally parked in his car park and charge release fees of up to $760 in cash.

Typical of Farrier, the final film, due early next year, has morphed into a whole other thing. Tickleds focus, the late David DAmato, was very much a non-participatory (and litigious) star. Is Organ, who once claimed he was a prince, a willing protagonist? A very good question, he laughs. And I hate to do this and be a real a..hole and answer that by not answering it ... but his presence is felt.

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Billy Te Kahika being arrested at an anti-lockdown protest in Aotea Square.

Farrier had always been fascinated by conspiracy theories, but his interest was reignited by last years worldwide wave of vandalism of 5G cellphone towers (driven by the belief that 5G spread coronavirus).

Such theories had been around well before someone decided Stanley Kubrick had faked the moon landing, but now, Farrier says, we are surrounded by ever-more-crazy variants, and the current crop are a life-or-death thing. For that reason, people are incredibly interested.

In turn, he finds it absurd, ridiculous, frustrating, angering, but always intriguing; a rabbit hole hes happy to keep digging down into. Anyone getting into storytelling, he says, needs to double down on that strange little thing you find interesting, because there is no better person to chase it.

He thinks he now understands their adherents - he likens them to the followers of a cult: something is missing in your life, and you find this belief system that fills everything in and gives you a really passionate purpose it helps the world make sense.

Red-pilling the process of becoming a believer happens quickly, he says, and its hard to unwind. If you try to argue with a friend on that path, you are dismissed as a shill. The only way is to ask questions how did they plant all those explosives in the World Trade Center when the building was fully functional? and hope a slow-growing seed of doubt has been planted.

Farrier is optimistic that as our lockdown lengthens, the conspiracists will be shown up. Look, he says, at Te Kahika, from when he was trying to be considered a serious political figure during the election campaign, to his arrest in Aucklands Aotea Square during anti-lockdown protests at the start of Level Four restrictions.

It is a fall, an embarrassing fall, and I think he will be embarrassed at how much he has fallen, he says. People with extreme views will yell and scream and like the attention, but increasingly, what I hope, is the rest of New Zealand will see it is all a bit embarrassing and pathetic.

As soon as I saw Te Kahika and another well-known conspiracy theorist, Vinny Eastwood, being arrested, I thought of Farrier.

Hes written extensively about both; he produced a study of Te Kahikas social media posts, to diagnose his red-pilling, and he also wrote a piece mainly composed of abusive emails he had received from Eastwoods followers.

In his line of work, he says, abuse is constant, and tonally very similar it feels like the same archetype has written each one.

Hes entirely unruffled by it: Anyone getting intense abuse, I tell them this: if you were on K Rd pre-lockdown at 2am, and some drunk a-.hole is screaming at me from the gutter, saying youre a piece of s..., you dont stop and engage, and say no sir, I need to give you my side of it, and make you understand Im not a piece of s.... You just walk on, because its just a guy whos had a terrible night, who is drunk.

The counter to that is the devotees of Webworm, which began during the first New Zealand lockdown when Farrier was bored and had a few unfinished stories he could polish up.

David White/Stuff

Farrier outside the Auckland HQ of the Church of Scientology.

The invitation came from Hamish McKenzie, the Kiwi founder of the $US650m (NZ$937m) start-up Substack, which recruits writers with followings, offering sign-up fees worth $3,000 to $100,000, to produce online subscription-based newsletters. Substack reportedly has somewhere around 500,000 subscribers and its top ten writers collectively bring in $US7m (NZ$10m) in revenue.

Farrier quickly found the format suited his trademark storytelling style, of starting with some oddity, then taking a weird, personal journey to end up somewhere else. Hes spending increasing amounts of time on it, its begun to pay its way, tips are flooding in, and among his subscribers is one D. Shepard. Hes cracked some significant tales, including exposing the conspiracy theorist beliefs of the founders of Kiwi lingerie firm Lonely. Last week, it was writing about how the giant Auckland evangelical church City Impact had preached an anti-vax sermon to its faithful.

Farrier runs a paywall model which functions in reverse to most media companies: he gives away his biggest, investigative stories, stuff I would say is public interest [journalism], but subscribers, paying $US6.99 a month, get the lighter, more personal stories, like a piece he wrote about would be included in a putative second season of Dark Tourist.

It has led, he says, to a little community who have a really nice time. Its weird how pleasant it is its a utopia of a comments section Ive not seen since maybe in 2000, when I first got on the internet.

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Shepard, left, and Farrier, right, have become close friends.

Farrier isnt sure when he will be home. He routinely refreshes the MIQ waiting list, but admits its more from journalistic curiosity, having written about the flaws in the system, than a desperation to come home. Its a moral question because if I get a spot in MIQ, because I would like to come back and see my family and my country, there are people who need to come back infinitely more than I do that then cant.

He can work from anywhere, and he likes being here when Trump isnt.

And hes been made welcome in California. Hes been recognised by his voice a few times. The Arm Cherries have even made some attempts to pair him off with Padman.

Dax and Monica have a really special chemistry and their fans love and adore them and if they OK someone, give you the thumbs up, then I am cleared, everything is OK, he concludes.

Its a very warm environment: their fans are not like what the f... is this New Zealand journalist doing on the show? Theyve warmed to me, and its a very nice environment to step into.

And behind it is this unusual, but deep friendship. They are weirdly friendly, he jokes. Maybe they are a cult?

After the offers of car and couch, theres one hurdle left to leap in the relationship: an opening to a network of celebrity friends. I keep hinting to Dax: where are the big parties? The part of town they live in, I can sense other famous people around I am angling for it, I am waiting for my invite to the big parties. I think Taikas got that sealed up.

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David Farrier's new life: An audience of 20 million, Hollywood mates and an obsession with conspiracy nuts - Stuff.co.nz