• “This story is part of the Cory Doctorow collection Radicalized, published by Macmillan in 2019. You can find more information on the entire book at the Macmillan website. It is being republished with permission for reasons that will become clear if you read it.”
Doctorow’s story is prescient — although I’m not sure it takes a great deal of prescience to realize that desperate people sometimes do desperate things.
A good accompaniment to that story is this, from Doktor Zoom, “Despite Obvious Popular Appeal, Murdering CEOs May Not Bring Universal Healthcare.” Dok’s comments toward the end there, about the implausibility of the climate terrorism in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry of the Future, made me suspicious of the ending of Doctorow’s story too.
• Holly Berkeley Fletcher has written many insightful posts reflecting on her years as part of a white Christian missionary family in Africa, noting the parts of that which were good, and the parts which were bad, and the parts where it’s too soon to tell which. Here she offers similar reflections on the 16 years she spent working as an analyst at the CIA.
The CIA hiring former missionaries is, I suppose, better than mission agencies hiring former CIA agents.
• Undine on the rise and fall (and rise) of Alice Thomas, “America’s First Madam.”
• Digby on Mar-a-Lago magazine and “the Mar-a-Lago look.”
Everybody at Mar-a-Lago seems so authentic. And happily serene with their life choices. And not at all weird.
• Hemant Mehta updates us on the saga of Johan’s Ark, which is now up for auction.
Dutch carpenter Johan Huibers built his replica of Noah’s ark back in the early 2000s — so long ago that when I first wrote about it here I mentioned the classic Bill Cosby Noah routine without worrying that a Cosby reference was just going to creep us all out.
Huibers has built two Noah’s arks, neither of which seems to be completely seaworthy. I feel bad for the guy. He’s the sort of obsessive crackpot who, in different circumstances, might have wound up living a long, happy life running some roadside attraction museum and gift shop somewhere off Route 66 — kind of place with giant fiberglass dinosaurs or the world’s largest collection of coasters or some such. But instead he went this route, spending decades of his life building set dressing for a Bible story he’s never carefully read or understood. And now it’s all leaking and slowly sinking.
• Our neighbors at Lawyers, Guns & Money have been looking at the recent boom in sports betting. Paul Campos grapples with the $11 billion — with a ‘B’ — in revenue for online sports gambling outfits this year. Scott Lemieux discusses an alternative, in which: “sports gambling is legal, but only in-person, cash, at a relatively small number of designated sites.”
That $11 billion is money transferred from Group A to Group B. Group B is big corporations and their wealthy investors. Group A is a mostly young, mostly male population that didn’t have a spare $11 billion sitting around that they could afford to lose. This is, I think, a factor in what has recently been discussed as a vague “crisis” for young men in the 21st century — the kind of thing that fuels authoritarian politics and the popularity of bro-gurus like Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson.
• The title of this post comes from Todd Snider’s “D.B. Cooper.”
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