A single group of hackers appears responsible for supply chain hacks of CCleaner, Asus, and more, planting backdoors on millions of machines.
Category: Flotsam-and-Jetsam
Cancel Culture Comes for Counterculture Comics
Today it’s creators, not cops, who want to banish R. Crumb, onetime king of the comics underground.
Robert Crumb is the undisputed godfather of alternative comics. His work has appeared in museums across the world, from the Venice Biennale to New York’s Museum of Modern Art; he was the subject of Terry Zwigoff’s acclaimed documentary Crumb(Gene Siskel’s favorite film of 1994); his drawings are so coveted by collectors that a sale of some sketchbooks in the early 1990s bought him a centuries-old chateau in southeast France. The legendary art critic Robert Hughes has favorably compared his portrayals of the human grotesque to Pieter Bruegel and William Hogarth, declaring Crumb “the one and only genius the 1960s underground produced in visual art, either in America or Europe.”
LINK: https://reason.com/2019/04/29/cancel-culture-comes-for-count/
A Killer Asteroid Is Coming — We Don’t Know When
People are too complacent about the asteroid threat for Bill Nye’s liking.
The former TV “Science Guy,” who currently serves as CEO of the nonprofit Planetary Society, warned that catastrophic impacts like the one that offed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago are not confined to the past.
“The Earth is going to get hit with another [big] asteroid,” Nye said yesterday (May 2) at the International Academy of Astronautics’2019 Planetary Defense Conference in College Park, Maryland.
LINK: https://www.space.com/killer-asteroids-warning-bill-nye.html
Tons of ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ Fans Think Thanos Might Be Right
Part of what makes Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War so scary is that his “evil” plan makes a certain amount of rational sense: The greatest enemy of the Marvel Cinematic Universe isn’t Thanos; it’s overpopulation that will eventually lead to famine and ruin. By writing his own narrative, Thanos becomes the hero if he succeeds in wiping out half of the universe’s population from existence. Thanos isn’t a generic villain like Ultron or Steppenwolf who simply wants to destroy everything. He’s much more calculated, even logical in his approach, and more than 20,000 people in the real world agree with him enough to subscribe to a subreddit called /r/thanosdidnothingwrong. Even in moral philosophy, they’re probably not alone.
LINK: https://www.inverse.com/article/44383-avengers-infinity-war-thanos-ethics-philosophy
David Lynch Presents the History of Surrealist Film (1987)
What living director has drawn the descriptor “surreal” more often than David Lynch? If you’ve seen, or rather experienced, a few of his films — particularly Eraserhead, Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., or Inland Empire, or even the first half of his television series Twin Peaks — you know he’s earned it. Like any surrealist worth his salt, Lynch creates his own version of reality, with its own set of often unfathomable and inexplicably but emotionally and psychologically resonant qualities. In 1987, the year after his breakthrough Blue Velvet opened in theaters, the BBC apparently thought him enough of an authority on the matter of cinematic surrealism to enlist him to present an episode of Arena on the subject.
LINK: http://www.openculture.com/2013/10/david-lynch-presents-the-history-of-surrealist-film-1987.html
China cracks down on funeral strippers
China officials have launched its latest crackdown on funeral strippers. Yes, funeral strippers.
The country’s Ministry of Culture announced late last month that it will be targeting a slew of rural provinces “for their obscene and vulgar performances at weddings, funerals and temple fairs,” China’s state-run Global Times newspaper reported.
LINK: https://nypost.com/2018/02/21/china-cracks-down-on-funeral-strippers/
Man plotted terror attacks in L.A. County to cause ‘mass casualties,’ authorities say
A Reseda man planned to detonate improvised explosive devices at several Southern California locations to cause “mass casualties” in a terror plot thwarted by law enforcement officials, authorities said Monday.
Former Manson follower says despite murders, she still loves him: ‘I don’t think you fall out of love’
It’s been nearly 50 years since notorious cult leader Charles Manson and some of his devout followers shocked the world with a series of brutal murders, including that of “Valley of the Dolls” actress Sharon Tate, who was more than eight months pregnant at the time.
And yet, despite knowing what he’d done, one of his followers, Lynette Fromme, said she’s still in love with Manson.
“I don’t think you fall out of love,” she told ABC News. “I feel very honored to have met him, and I know how that sounds to people who think he’s the epitome of evil.”
Fromme and Dianne Lake, two members who lived with the so-called “Manson Family” for years, spoke to ABC News about how they came to know Charles Manson and how the group’s 1969 murders shaped their lives and impacted American culture.
Watch the full story of “Manson Girls” tonight, April 30 at 10 p.m. ET on ABC.
How Iowa Flattened Literature
With CIA help, writers were enlisted to battle both Communism and eggheaded abstraction. The damage to writing lingers.
LINK: https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Iowa-Flattened-Literature/144531
