#flamethrower is a magnificent author

[watching-pictures-move]

Movie Review | 1990: The Bronx Warriors (Castellari, 1990)

Not quite the wall to wall sleazefest I was expecting going in, but I nonetheless had a good time with this. Enzo G. Castellari seems less interested in piling on the thrills than in basking in post-apocalyptic imagery, and in that sense he gets a lot of mileage out of shooting in the most crumbling, dilapidated, bombed out looking locations he can find in the Bronx. This is obviously inspired by The Warriors and Escape From New York, and unlike the latter, all of New York City hasn’t been allowed to collapse into violent decay, just the Bronx. So by actually shooting there and having bystanders in full view in many scenes and having the authorities voice their naked contempt for the inhabitants, there is something of a political charge to this.

You do get your share of colourful characters, like Mark Gregory, who has magnificent enough hair to lead a glam metal band. Unfortunately he seems to have traded any semblance of charisma for said hair, but thankfully we also have Fred Williamson, who has enough charisma for the entire cast, and leads a gang where everybody wears really shiny clothes (he himself wears a puffy shirt like a stage magician). He has a girlfriend who wears a cape and gets some pretty good kills with a whip, so she was my favourite character. There’s also a gang of roller skating hockey players led by George Eastman with a topknot, a gang of zombies, two guys who look like Eric Roberts, and many, many more fun characters I’m too lazy to rattle off. You also get the Hell’s Angels playing extras, which probably explains some of the more, uh, questionable regalia worn by the biker gang.

The execution can be described as low energy, but the movie looks great thanks to the cinematography by Sergio Salvati and the deft use of locations. There is enough blood and gore to keep you entertained, and towards the end it starts piling on the violence, peaking with a climax that involves jackbooted goons on horseback firing flamethrowers.

[jahaliel]

Hello Mother, How are you?

this pull at my bones where you carved me out aches despite it all but when the world is crashing down around me, well i'll still call because you were never mine; and yet and still the fragile lines between us are a debt owed protect yourself and farewell - survive we will and go back to strangers in the same world so i will speak a relationship; exchange calm words of hidden truth then i'll run with hell at my heels and hope the warning was enough

(for @deadcatwithaflamethrower because I'm still in love with Ashlesha and always will be - title's a line from the book scene that inspired the piece <3)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Pluralistic: 23 Mar 2020 (Free Tacocat game, Adafruit's open source PPE, coronavirus jubilee, Private Kit, Italian mayors enforce quarantine)

Today's links

Tacocat, a free print-and-play game from the Exploding Kittens team: Super smart endgame!

Adafruit offers open source PPE manufacturing: They're retooling and available to help

It's time for a coronavirus jubilee: Debts that can't be paid won't be.

Medicare for All is an economic stabilizer: Private health insurance turns recessions into depressions.

Private Kit, a free/open app to give you control over your location history: Doing contact tracing without invading privacy.

Italy's mayors berate quarantine-breaking citizens: "Does your dog have an inflamed prostate?"

This day in history: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2019

Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming appearances, current reading

Tacocat, a free print-and-play game from the Exploding Kittens team (permalink)

Need a game to play while stuck at home? Elan Lee and Matthew Inman, creators of Exploding Kittens, have just released a free, print-and-play game called Tacocat, which we just played at home, and it's fun!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/15UT6cElLNpxHG4er68DLxXwSrqbOTq2JFNFYzrmfO8I/edit#heading=h.8osmzd2mkump

It's a card game that's a bit like War, but with tons of little strategic gracenotes, including a totally brilliant endgame that makes the win up for grabs all the way to the very end. It took a couple of hands to figure out this complexity, but once we did, — wow!

Adafruit offers open source PPE manufacturing (permalink)

Some of the all-time heroes of the open source hardware revolution are the folks at Adafruit, a woman-owned, 150-person OSHW company in lower Manhattan. They've been deemed an essential industry and are retooling to make PPEs.

https://blog.adafruit.com/2020/03/22/covid/

They're VC-free, debt-free and profitable, and they're paying their 150+ employees through the crisis. They're manufacturing open source hardware face shields, ventilator components and electronics.

If you need manufacturing, design, logistics, or production support for PPE projects, contact covid19@adafruit.com.

It's time for a coronavirus jubilee (permalink)

The word "jubilee" comes from Hebrew for "trumpet," because every 50 years, the trumpet would be blown to signal the forgiveness of all personal debts. New kings once routinely announced debt forgiveness upon their ascending to the throne.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/21/debt-jubilee-is-only-way-avoid-depression/

Forgiving debts meant that the workforce stayed intact and productive, instead of falling into debt-bondage or mass migrating (think of Greece and its mass exodus after the recent imposition of debt austerity by the EU).

2008 represented a chance to write off bad mortgages. Instead, we evicted. Today, wealth inequality is far worse than during the last crisis. The new crisis has the potential to make inequality go supercritical.

The decision of Germany's creditors to force the country to pay war debts after WWI caused mass immiseration and paved the way for fascism. After WWII, the allies wiped 90% of Germany's debts off the books, triggering the nation's "economic miracle" and soaring prosperity.

As Michael Hudson writes in the Washington Post, if the US can afford a $4.5T quantitative easing package, it can afford jubilee for student debt. And private creditors who wipe out bad loans – ballooned by fees and penalties – will long have been made whole on the principal.

Leaving the "accruals" (fees, etc) in place, "actually subsidizes bad lending."

"Debts that can't be paid won't be. A debt jubilee may be the best way out."

(Image: Paul Miller, CC BY)

Medicare for All is an economic stabilizer (permalink)

The pandemic is revealing the extent to which private health insurance makes a bad situation worse. At the exact moment that we need more coverage, people are losing their jobs (and their coverage).

As Nathan Tankus writes, Medicare for All would be a great, countercyclic automatic stabilizer – buffering economic shocks for faster recovery. The current US system is an accelerant, making bad situations worse.

https://nathantankus.substack.com/p/medicare-for-all-is-a-great-automatic

Losing your job (and coverage) due to coronavirus, then losing your savings due to a broken ankle or a kitchen-knife slip? That's a recipe for turning deep recession into a new depression.

In discussion with Matt Taibbi this week, Noam Chomsky makes the point that private health care treats excess capacity as uneconomical and inefficient: "You should have just enough beds for what you need tomorrow. You shouldn't prepare for the future."

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/noam-chomsky-covid-19-useful-idiots-podcast-970047/

Under the finance sector's theory of shareholder capitalism, maintaining an extra hospital bed is a form of theft from your investors.

Neoliberalism treats all redundancy and resilience as "waste" and neoliberal raiders delight in selling it off.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/05/warner-chappell-copyfraud/#righttoresilience

Whether that's the corporate raiders who bought up newspapers and restaurant chains and sold off their real-estate and rented it back – leaving them grievously vulnerable to rent shocks – or the airlines' hub-and-spoke system that means one airport outage tanks the system.

Our supply chains – offshore, dependent on single points of failure – and the use of DMCA 1201 anticircumvention rules and other dirty tricks to suppress independent repair and third-party parts manufacture turn the devices we rely on brittle, making emergencies into crises.

What's worse than having your only computer go down at the start of a pandemic lockdown? Having your only repair depot shut down for the duration with no way to retrieve it.

https://9to5mac.com/2020/03/21/apple-store-repairs-coronavirus/

As Chomsky says, neoliberalism leaves us totally unprepared for a crisis. "What we're good at, what our leaders are good at, and have been very good at for 40 years, is pouring money into the pockets of the rich and corporate executives while everything else crashes."

(Image: Elvert Barnes, CC BY-SA)

Private Kit, a free/open app to give you control over your location history (permalink)

Private Kit is a free/open location-tracking app that does not expose your location data to third parties (including the app's authors) until you explicitly authorize it.

https://github.com/tripleblindmarket/private-kit

It's intemded for use in pandemic mitigation, "allowing you to share information with health officials accurately and quickly," but only when you explicitly opt in, and only for as long as you remain opted in. The authors' paper on this is "Apps Gone Rogue: Maintaining Personal Privacy in an Epidemic," which digs into the reasons that potential (or confirmed) carriers might be reluctant to participate in contact-tracking, and how privacy tools can help.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nwOR4drE3YdkCkyy_HBd6giQPPhLEkRc/view

It also discusses the rise of blackmail scams in South Korea in which criminals demanded payments not to falsely accuse businesses of being sources of new coronavirus infections (!!).

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/06/more-scary-than-coronavirus-south-koreas-health-alerts-expose-private-lives

Private Kit allows for user location-history sharing directly with health authorities, without requiring third-party (carrier, app maker) intervention, aggregation or other high-risk activities.

This is an excellent example of the principle that "privacy" isn't the same as "secrecy." Privacy isn't "Nobody knows your business but you." It's "You decide who gets to know your business."

http://privatekit.mit.edu/

Italy's mayors berate quarantine-breaking citizens (permalink)

Our household can't stop marveling at this highlight reel of Italian mayors berating their stubborn residents for denying the quarantine orders. It's magnificent.

https://twitter.com/GiuliaRozzi/status/1241859350060093442

"We will send the police over. With flamethrowers."

"I can't formally ban you from leaving your house, Fine. I will ban you from setting foot on public land."

"Where the fuck are you all GOING? You and your dogs!* They must have inflamed prostates!"

"You can't play ping-pong. Go home. Play videogames."

"How can I spell it out? You can't stay in the streets. We need their girlfriends here. With clubs."

"Getting in your mobile hairdressers?! What the fuck is that for? Don't you understand that the casket will be CLOSED?"

"I saw a fellow citizen jog up and down the street, accompanied by a dog* who was visibly worn out. I told him, 'Look, this isn't a movie. You are not Will Smith in 'I am Legend.' You have to go home."

*Dog walking is a popular pretense for breaking quarantine.

This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago Reflex: brilliant, page-turning sequel to Jumper https://boingboing.net/2005/03/23/reflex-brilliant-pag.html

#10yrsago: Secret ACTA fights over iPod border-searches http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/03/acta-de-minimus-proposals/

#10yrsago: Demonstration against Digital Economy Bill tomorrow at Parliament, London <a href="https://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/disconnection/>https://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/disconnection/

#5yrsago: Backchannel: computers can talk to each other with heat https://www.wired.com/2015/03/stealing-data-computers-using-heat/

#1yrago DCCC introduces No-More-AOCs rule https://theintercept.com/2019/03/22/house-democratic-leadership-warns-it-will-cut-off-any-firms-who-challenge-incumbents/

#1yrago British schoolchildren receive chemical burns from "toxic ash" on Ash Wednesday https://metro.co.uk/2019/03/08/children-end-hospital-burns-heads-toxic-ash-wednesday-ash-8868433/

#1yrago Procedurally generated infinite CVS receipt https://codepen.io/garrettbear/pen/JzMmqg

#1yrago Video from the Radicalized launch with Julia Angwin at The Strand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbdgdH8ksaM&feature=youtu.be

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/), Naked Capitalism (https://nakedcapitalism.com/), Alice Taylor (https://twitter.com/wonderlandblog/), Four Short Links (https://www.oreilly.com/feed/four-short-links).

Currently writing: I've just finished rewrites on a short story, "The Canadian Miracle," for MIT Tech Review. It's a story set in the world of my next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation. I've also just completed "Baby Twitter," a piece of design fiction also set in The Lost Cause's prehistory, for a British think-tank. I'm getting geared up to start work on the novel next.

Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland: it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs. Last month, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs"; it's a magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: The Masque of the Red Death and Punch Brothers Punch https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/16/the-masque-of-the-red-death-and-punch-brothers-punch/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583

[jpf-sydney]

Rice, noodle, fish

Book review:

The author and his new spouse reflect after a meal, both of them eyes glazed with that same new Japan sheen, "there will forever be a line in our lives: Before Japan, After Japan.“

Rice, Noodle, Fish takes readers on a food sojourn through Japan unlike any other. The eating crawl visits street vendors, food courts (some that take up entire buildings), ramen stands, bars and drinking holes. This is a travel journal, not a restaurant and menu guide. It's entirely about conveying the eating experience, the food culture and some of the diverse personalities encountered along the way. Early in the book is a visit to the tiny restaurant operated by a shokunin; one of Japan's virtuoso chefs who have specialised in a given cuisine to the point of perfection. There is a meeting with the renowned, ramen-obsessed authority, Kamimura Toshiyuki. Partway through, there is a particularly magnificent photo of a grinning, bald-headed stall owner standing over his grill brandishing a mini flamethrower in one hand and giving a thumbs up with the other.

It's no small demonstration of ability to write, not a column or even an article but an entire book centred on eating food but without becoming repetitive. The author, Matt Gouding, displays all the nous of a seasoned travel writer yet simultaneously pens with the smitten gusto of a first time Japan visitor. Language is casually colloquial, occasionally with some smack. The energy and persuasiveness could easily be imagined serving as the voice over narration to a travel documentary. Goulding, and this book, hail from the online publication, Roads & Kingdoms, which specialises in food, politics, travel and culture. The senior R&K stable includes Anthony Bourdain of Parts Unknown and Kitchen Confidential fame.

If anything, one of the annoyances of this book is the lack of an index. Maybe such a time honoured feature is passé and the hip non-fiction books leave them out now. Yes, ebooks can be searched but it still would have been kind to include an index for those bereft of ctrl+f. Admittedly however, it is the very writing in its rapid, palpable glory that compels one to keep reading to the detriment of pausing long enough to take notes in the first place.

Shelf: 383.81 GOU Rice, noodle, fish : deep travels through Japan's food culture. by Matt Goulding ; edited by Nathan Thornburgh. Richmond, Victoria : Hardie Grant Books, 2016. xv, 327 pages : illustrations, portraits ; 21 cm. First published by Harper Wave an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Text in English. ISBN: 978-1-74379130-1