February 13, 2017

“Elon Musk’s concept of humanity excludes most living and breathing humans. In his September 2016 announcement, he declared that a fully self-sustaining civilisation on Mars would need around 1 million people. From Earth’s current population of 7.125 billion, the Musk Million would bring 0.014035087719298244 per cent of it to Mars.” Musk’s Mars shoot is less the humanity-saving mission he makes it out to be, more yet another rich white man’s colonialist fantasy, part of a long scientific tradition. Couldn’t the money be better spent? / Aeon

This news was largely caught up in the midst of the #DeleteUber protests (delete Uber, by the way), but Uber has graciously decided to allow cities and the public to view a tiny modicum of data about its trips, though nothing that’s particularly useful. / Wired

“It’s hard to establish rapport with a potential terror recruit when—as one former worker told the AP—translators repeatedly mix up the Arabic words for ‘salad’ and ‘authority.’” Word salad and worse plagues the Defense Department’s online counterterrorism propaganda efforts. / Associated Press

“Good trolls” are infiltrating pro-Trump and otherwise fascist groups on message boards you’ve never heard of to sow discord in the movement—a kind of moral COINTELPRO, if you will. / BuzzFeed

“I’m talking about really good male talent … and they just couldn’t get hard for VR.” Virtual reality porn is upon us, and yet the complexities that come with filming it (huge camera rigs, a need for seamless editing) mean that the men involved are reduced to just their members (and their stamina). / Vocativ

Hey, want to win every book that’s in the running for this year’s Rooster? / powells.com

Perhaps save this for tonight, if you struggle to sleep? / YouTube

More Nazis in the news, this time with tennis: During this weekend’s Fed Cup play in Hawaii, an old stanza of the German national anthem was sung—“Germany, Germany, above all, above all in the world”—that’s associated with the Third Reich, and just a little bit out of fashion. / Tennis.com, Wikipedia

“Writing a book about a career at Fox without mentioning its conservative agenda is like writing a book about a career at the Vatican without mentioning its Catholic agenda.” It would seem that Megyn Kelly’s new book is intellectually and historically dishonest, but you knew that already. / The Atlantic

A 2015 survey found that just 40 percent of pepole in Singapore had read a work of literature in the previous year. (In America, that number’s about 70 percent.) So a “National Reading Movement” has come up with a new idea: tiny books. / nationalreadingmovement.sg, The Washington Post

With everybody buying records these days, Bailey Brautigan at Forbes thought it’d be fun to break it down by state. / Forbes

Hanne Gaby Odiele, a top fashion model who’s a muse of Alexander Wang, has become the top advocate for being “intersex,”—“a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male.” / Instagram, isna.org

As the consensus around Trump’s raid in Yemen—his first military operation, one that killed 25 civilians (including nine children) and a Navy SEAL—seems to be that it was badly planned and ultimately botched (perhaps that’s what comes of late-night strategy sessions over dinner with Bannon and Miller), it now creates, as everything Trump has done so far, a negative ripple effect. / The New York Times, thebureauinvestigates.com

“It is impossible to distinguish bellicose rhetoric from real operational planning. A confrontation with Iran will probably not come soon; but in a year or two, when previous policies conceived under Obama have run their course, Trump may well feel that he has to show how much tougher and more effective he is than his predecessor.” Oh, good: Patrick Cockburn predicts President Trump’s war with Iran is not too far away. / The Independent

Trump’s main comments on the Iraq War since taking office have mostly been to bemoan the money wasted on it—which, fair—but also to complain that America never profited from Iraq’s oil, even though that would have broken the Geneva Conventions. / HuffPost, ThinkProgress

What will Trump will do in Afghanistan? He boasts that he wants to leave the country, but many of his military advisers likely want to maintain a US presence to help act as a bulwark against ISIS. / Harper’s

A new report from Human Rights Watch documents extensive use of chlorine gas and other chemical weapons on the part of the Assad regime, that were “integral” to its retaking of Aleppo. / YouTube

See also: An in-depth Atlanic Council report on the retaking of Aleppo that details, in part, the Assad regime’s Kafkaesque disinformation campaign. Page 59 of Breaking Aleppo: / publications.atlanticcouncil.org, documentcloud.org