An irregular hodgepodge of links gathered together … Omnium Gatherum for January 10, 2021

Here’s a variety of notable things I’ve recently found that you may also be interested in checking out:

• Saturday night was apparently the best night to observe this, but … “How to see Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn in rare conjunction this weekend.”
• “Have Archaeologists Found History’s Deadliest Dance Floor? Archeologists working in Machaerus, in Israel, have allegedly discovered the site of Salome’s famous dance that cost John the Baptist his head.”
• Someone in Cornwall is really thirsty over Crowley clickbait! More about this: “Explorers film inside abandoned Cornwall home linked to ‘wickedest man in the world’ Aleister Crowley. The video shows demonic rituals found by urban explorers inside an abandoned ‘hideout'”
• Watch “Demons & Rockets at Devil’s Gate Dam!“—”What does Aleister Crowley, L. Ron Hubbard and Rocketeer, Jack Parsons all have in common? Devil’s Gate Dam! But, is it a really portal to hell? Devils Gate Dam is favorite place for hikers and joggers, but it holds a very dark past. From the connections between JPL founder, Jack Parsons The Sex-Crazed Father of Modern Rocketry and Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard to the abduction of children and the Ordo Templi Orientis, a religious secret society led by Aleister Crowley. The dark runs deep and it’s time once again, to separate fact from urban legend!”
• The Liberators: a Super Cats Science Fiction Story by T Thorn Coyle.
• “The Age of Fitness by Jürgen Martschukat review – why we are obsessed. Do we think of people who keep fit as more successful? The history and politics of an idea.” About The Age of Fitness: How the Body Came to Symbolize Success and Achievement [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Jürgen Martschukat, translated by Alex Skinner, due February, 2021—”In this new book, J rgen Martschukat traces the roots of our modern preoccupation with fitness back to the birth of modern societies in the eighteenth century, showing how the idea of fitness was interwoven with modernity’s emphasis on perpetual optimization and renewal. But it is only in the period since the 1970s, he argues, that the age of fitness truly emerged, as part and parcel of our contemporary neoliberal era. Neoliberalism enjoins individuals to work on themselves, to cultivate themselves in body and mind. Fitness becomes a guiding principle of social life, an era-defining network of discourses and practices that shape individuals’ actions and self-conceptions.”
• “Masters of Atlantis Is Essential Reading for the QAnon Age. Charles Portis’ book about a fictional cult has amassed a devoted following of its own, with Michael Cera, Bill Hader, and The Office creator Greg Daniels among its fans.”
  About The Masters of Atlantis [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Charles Portis—”Masters of Atlantis is a cock-eyed journey into an America of misfits and con-men, oddballs, and innocents by one of America’s most respected novelists.”

• “How wood shaped human history, from spears to boats to books.” About The Age of Wood: Our Most Useful Material and the Construction of Civilization [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Roland Ennos—”A groundbreaking examination of the role that wood and trees have played in our global ecosystem—including human evolution and the rise and fall of empires—in the bestselling tradition of Yuval Harari’s Sapiens and Mark Kurlansky’s Salt.”
• “Like a human thunderbolt: why Sylvia Plath’s art transcends her tragic story. Sylvia Plath’s extraordinary poetic gifts have been overshadowed by her death. A new biography sets that right.” About Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Heather Clark—”The highly anticipated new biography of Sylvia Plath that focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art.” “With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials–including unpublished letters and manuscripts; court, police, and psychiatric records; and new interviews–Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant daughter of Wellesley, Massachusetts who had poetic ambition from a very young age and was an accomplished, published writer of poems and stories even before she became a star English student at Smith College in the early 1950s.”
• Our Machiavellian Moment. Much maligned as a mere tactician of power, Machiavelli was in fact a philosopher of the people. His critique of oligarchic domination remains essential today.” About Machiavelli: The Art of Teaching the People What to Fear [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Patrick Boucheron, translated by Willard Wood—”In a series of poignant vignettes, a preeminent historian makes a compelling case for Machiavelli as an unjustly maligned figure with valuable political insights that resonate as strongly today as they did in his time.”
• God at War: A Meditation on Religion and Warfare [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Mark Juergensmeyer—”God at War explores the dark attraction between religion and warfare. Virtually every religious tradition leaves behind it a bloody trail of stories, legends, and images of war, and most wars call upon the divine for blessings in battle. This book finds the connection between religion and warfare in the alternative realities created in the human imagination in response to crises both personal and social. Based on the author’s thirty years of field work interviewing activists involved in religious-related terrorist movements around the world, this book explains why desperate social conflict leads to images of war, and why invariably God is thought to be engaged in battle.”
• “A lost paradise of purity. Terror and transcendence in the late masterpieces of Schubert.”
• “The Lord of the Rings faithfully adapted Tolkien’s unrelenting belief in hope. In the early 20th century, the writer saw a lot of shit.”
• “Who Is René Girard? And Why Does Silicon Valley Care?”
• “Against Academic Book Reviews. The capsule format leads to painfully dull work. It’s time to try something new.”
• “Birds of a feather flock together, but patterns change with the mission. Autonomous robot swarms with interaction rules for different tasks might be possible.”
• “A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society? In 1995, a WIRED cofounder challenged a Luddite-loving doomsayer to a prescient wager on tech and civilization’s fate. Now their judge weighs in.”
• “Bad Astronomy | A solar flare in 774 AD changed Earth’s atmospheric chemistry.”
• “NASA suspects sunquakes are coming from deep beneath the sun’s surface. Shake, ripple and roll from below.”
• “Are primordial black holes really giant gravitinos?”
• From the X-Men dept: Rare quadruple-helix DNA found in living human cells with glowing probes
• From the Spidey Senses Tingling dept:”Birds Have a Mysterious ‘Quantum Sense’. For The First Time, Scientists Saw It in Action.” Also “Magnets dim natural glow of human cells, may shed light on how animals migrate. First direct observation of magnetic field affecting autofluorescence of flavins in living cells.”—”Researchers in Japan have made the first observations of biological magnetoreception – live, unaltered cells responding to a magnetic field in real time. This discovery is a crucial step in understanding how animals from birds to butterflies navigate using Earth’s magnetic field and addressing the question of whether weak electromagnetic fields in our environment might affect human health.”
• From the Lazarus Pit dept: “Scientists develop new gene therapy strategy to delay aging.”
• “Who needs a monolith when you’ve got a stone hammer? — This is how hominins adapted to a changing world 2 million years ago. Early hominins succeeded by being generalists with basic, versatile tools.” Also “Two-Million-Year-Old Stone Tools Found in East Africa – Archaeology Magazine.”
• “Another Thing a Triceratops Shares With an Elephant. It’s not just large size and something pointy near their faces.”
• “Study of 50,000 people finds brown fat may protect against numerous chronic diseases.”
• “Fermilab and partners achieve sustained, high-fidelity quantum teleportation.”—”A viable quantum internet — a network in which information stored in qubits is shared over long distances through entanglement — would transform the fields of data storage, precision sensing and computing, ushering in a new era of communication.” Also.
• “Catalyst transforms plastic waste to valuable ingredients at low temperature.”—”For the first time, researchers have used a novel catalyst process to recycle a type of plastic found in everything from grocery bags and food packaging to toys and electronics into liquid fuels and wax.”
• “There are an insane amount of cool space things happening in 2021. Yeah, we’re going to say it. We really think Webb is going to launch this year.” Also “Looking ahead at the year in space 2021.”
• “Synchronized violin players reveal uniqueness of human networks. It’s relevant to economics, epidemiology, traffic, and the spread of misinformation.”
• From the Propp’s Morphology dept: Study: Folklore structure reveals how conspiracy theories emerge, fall apart. Rumors swirling around 2016 Wikileaks dump was glue that held ‘Pizzagate’ together.”
• “Astronomers agree: Universe is nearly 14 billion years old.”
• From the Technomantic Sigils dept: “A better pen-and-ink system for drawing flexible circuits.”
• “Stretching diamond for next-generation microelectronics.”—”Diamond is the hardest material in nature. But out of many expectations, it also has great potential as an excellent electronic material. A joint research team led by City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has demonstrated for the first time the large, uniform tensile elastic straining of microfabricated diamond arrays through the nanomechanical approach. Their findings have shown the potential of strained diamonds as prime candidates for advanced functional devices in microelectronics, photonics, and quantum information technologies.”
• “Chandra observations reveal extraordinary magnetar.”
• “Stunning footage reveals how much the moon ‘wobbles’ in the night sky during each 27-day orbit.”
• “Mars is wobbling, and scientists have questions.”
• “Platypus complete genome mapped by scientists.”
• Astronomers still stewing after 70 years over clouds above Milky Way
• “The mystery at heart of Milky Way: Astronomers are still arguing after 70 years over mushroom clouds at centre of galaxy… so were they caused by exploding stars or a black hole swallowing a gas cloud?”
• “Meteorites From the Beginning of the Solar System May Have Carried Water Quite Recently.”
• “What Would Earth Look Like to Alien Astronomers? A new paper asks which exoplanets could find Earth. Such worlds could be targets for SETI searches.”
• “The Milky Way Gets a New Origin Story. Over the past two years, astronomers have rewritten the history of our galaxy.”
• “Is This Baboon Skull a Clue to Egypt’s Lost Kingdom of Punt. New evidence based on a mummified baboon skull may help unlock the secrets of a lost civilization.”
• “How the ‘Western mind’ was shaped by the Medieval Church. Most research on human psychology focuses on Western societies, but the way people in the West think can be traced to changes in family structures in the Middle Ages.”
• “Scientists create ON-OFF switches to control CAR T cell activity.”—”Scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Mass General Cancer Center have created molecular ON-OFF switches to regulate the activity of CAR T cells, a potent form of cell-based immunotherapy that has had dramatic success in treating some advanced cancers, but which pose a significant risk of toxic side effects.”
• “Mount Sinai Researchers Identify and Characterize Three Molecular Subtypes of Alzheimer’s Disease. Critical Step Toward Developing Precision Medicine Treatments.”
• “Cancer cells hibernate like bears to evade harsh chemotherapy.”—” Tapping into an ancient evolutionary survival mechanism, cancer cells enter into a sluggish, slow-dividing state to survive the harsh environment created by chemotherapy or other targeted agents.”
• “Why the American Brand of Anti-Science Is So Unique. The U.S. isn’t alone in harboring anti-vaxxers and flat-earthers. But two specific things about America set us apart from the rest — and make our distinct hatred of science stand out.”
• “Cory Doctorow: Neofeudalism and the Digital Manor.”—”Here in the 21st century, we are beset by all manner of digital bandits, from identity thieves, to stalkers, to corporate and government spies, to harassers… To be safe, then, you have to ally yourself with a warlord. Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and a few others have built massive fortresses bristling with defenses, whose parapets are stalked by the most ferocious cybermercenaries money can buy, and they will defend you from every attacker — except for their employers. If the warlord turns on you, you’re defenseless.”
• “Hamas May Be Threat to 8chan, QAnon Online.”
• “Autopsies Reveal The Terrible Damage COVID-19 Can Inflict on The Human Brain.”
• “The immune system and COVID: It’s still confusing. Antibodies may help, inflammation may hurt, but immunosuppressants are irrelevant?”
• “At risk of extinction, black-footed ferrets get vaccinated for COVID-19. Ferrets, minks, and other Mustelinae species are susceptible to COVID-19.”
• “QAnon Takes the Capitol: Culmination or Beginning? Timothy Denevi Reports from the Streets of DC.”
• From the OpSec dept: “Insurrectionists’ social media presence gives feds an easy way to ID them. You don’t need fancy technology to identify folks who livestream their crimes.” Also “Senator’s Tweet Revealed Where Lawmakers Were Hiding From Trump Rioters. Sen. Jeff Merkley’s tweets also showed where the electoral college ballots were relocated to.”
• Watch “EDITED Storming of The US Capitol In Washington DC (Viewer Discretion Advised).”
• Watch “Republicans suddenly distance themselves from Trump’s false election claims.”—”Republicans who had echoed President Trump’s false election claims suddenly distanced themselves after a pro-Trump mob breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.”
• Tweet—”And you thought “Taking A Knee” was too much!?!” Also tweet—”it was only a matter of time before the coup coup clock struck 13.” Also tweet—”Can’t believe the creators of the monster have lost control of the monster, is there any precedent for this in books or film.” Also tweet—”the folks who stormed the capitol yesterday are the Coup Cucks Clan.” Also tweet—”Who would have thought in all those years of hearings the GOP was studying how to do a Benghazi on the US Capitol”
• “King Arthur’s Camelot Castle Is Now Ground Zero for Brit QAnon. The English West Country has long been home to ancient legends and New Age mysticism. Now, it harbors a darker, dangerous set of beliefs.”
• From 2019: “Hysteria High: How Demons Destroyed a Florida School. A true story of witchcraft, possession, and murder.”
• “Risking the loss of an enlightened America.”—”How will this disturbing trend play out after the Trumpocalypse we witnessed on TV? Do we still believe in the self-evident truths articulated in 1776 and in the words of the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights: ‘All human beings are … endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood?’ Is America still guided by the Enlightenment or is its thin filament failing? Is the light flickering, threatening to go dark? Dim bulbs cannot sustain a democracy.”
• “A Nation Shocked at the Near Loss of a Democracy that was Always Part Illusory.”—”Many of us are rejoicing that Trump’s attempted coup didn’t work. And we are rightly outraged at those who stormed the Capitol. Yet the upsurge of feeling about protecting democracy is a good time to suggest that we seek fundamental changes in our system to make it a real democracy that could work for everyone.”
• “How Trump Rallies Foretold the Capitol Attack. Those following the president’s events around the country for the past four years were not surprised by the mob violence that unfolded in Washington.”
• “How Trump’s GOP Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Rioting. Today’s right-wing activist is citing instances of bad behavior on the left to justify not only replicating that behavior but dramatically escalating it.” Also “Why the ‘Blue Lives Matter’ Thugs Were So Quick to Kill a Cop. MAGA going ACAB is where the supporters of police violence were always headed: a declaration about who, not what behavior, deserves impunity and who deserves the baton.”
• “Let’s Make 2021 The Year Of Social Justice. This new year may be one of greater justice and better social conditions, but only if people fight for them.”
• “The US economy lost 140,000 jobs in December. All of them were held by women.”
• “Rosca de Reyes de Baby Yoda Arrives Just in Time for Día de Los Reyes Magos.” Also “‘Baby Yoda’ appearing in Rosca de Reyes.” Also tweet—”There’s a dish called ‘Rosca de Reyes,’ it’s a cake with slices of fruit. Inside of it, they place a small baby figure that represents baby Jesus. This year, in Mexico, people were selling the cake with figures of Baby Yoda instead of the baby Jesus. So, conservative groups are extremely upset about it, and are calling it a direct attack to family values and religion. So now, Baby Yoda is considered a LGBT icon for making furious those conservative, homophobic people.”
• “Inside the U.S. Army’s Warehouse Full of Nazi Art.”—”Much of it is virulent; most of it is never seen by the public.” “The works at Fort Belvoir are so vacant of nuance and irony that they can approach kitsch.”
• “Benedict’s House. Monastic life takes many forms, but life according to the Rule of St Benedict is the oldest of those that have survived to the present day in the western church. Benedict’s House seeks the remarkable beauty of the Benedictine monastery. The houses of God, and those devoted to a spiritual service.”
• “Inside Randonautica, the App Leading Zoomers to Discover Rainbows, Dead Bodies, and Hidden Treasures. All I found was a barbecue grill.”
• “Reply Guys, Sliding into the DMs, and the Intensification of Parasocial Relationships.”
• “One Good Thing: Midnight Cafeteria feeds Taipei’s stray cats.”—”You can just be one person doing something a little bit at a time, a little bit, and taken all together, you can achieve a lot.”

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