Powderhorn

The new US political party that Elon Musk has boasted about bankrolling could initially focus on a handful of attainable House and Senate seats while striving to be the decisive vote on major issues amid the thin margins in Congress.

Tesla and SpaceX’s multibillionaire CEO mused about that approach on Friday in a post on X, the social media platform he owns, as he continued feuding with Donald Trump over the spending bill that the president has signed into law. On Saturday, without immediately elaborating, the former Trump adviser announced on X that he had created the so-called America party.

“One way to execute on this would be to laser-focus on just 2 or 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts,” wrote Musk, who is the world’s richest person and oversaw brutal cuts to the federal government after Trump’s second presidency began in January. “Given the razor-thin legislative margins, that would be enough to serve as the deciding vote on contentious laws, ensuring they serve the true will of the people.”

Ross Perot already tried this gambit. Billions of dollars can't buy a political party starting from scratch. Musk has always been more successful as an investor who turns around and claims to be the founder.

Not to mention, Fox News will no doubt find any snippet they can to tear him down after being the golden boy for a while.

I point this out because I think he can only pull from non-MAGA conservatives, and I've no idea what his approval rating is amongst them. The rest of us know he's a drug-addled Nazi.

A phased start makes logical sense instead of trying to build out a 50-state network Day 1. But I see no way to critical mass, even at the congressional district level, for a win as opposed to being a spoiler.

A nationwide US network of dozens of far-right, men-only fraternal clubs has what members describe as “literally hundreds” of participants who include past and currently serving military personnel, lawyers, civil servants, and prominent antisemitic influencers, a Guardian investigation can reveal.

The Old Glory Club (OGC) – which has at least 26 chapters in 20 US states and until now has drawn little attention – exemplifies the alarming rise of organized racist political groups in the past few years but especially during the rise of Donald Trump and his return to the White House.

The OGC network has held conferences, meetups and other events. Key members like podcaster Pete Quinones use their platforms to push far-right ideas about Jewish people and immigrants. Other members have used their platforms to respond to political events, and to advocate measures including “cancellation insurance” for members whose extreme political views might impede their professional lives.

Do people from different cultures and environments see the world differently? Two recent studies have different takes on this decades-long controversy. The answer might be more complicated, and more interesting, than either study suggests.

One study, led by Ivan Kroupin at the London School of Economics, asked how people from different cultures perceived a visual illusion known as the Coffer illusion. They discovered that people in the UK and US saw it mainly in one way, as comprising rectangles – while people from rural communities in Namibia typically saw it another way: as containing circles.

To explain these differences, Kroupin and colleagues appeal to a hypothesis raised more than 60 years ago and argued about ever since. The idea is that people in western industrialised countries (these days known by the acronym “weird” – for western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic – a summary that is increasingly questionable) see things in a specific way because they are generally exposed to highly “carpentered” environments, with lots of straight lines, right angles – visual features common in western architecture. By contrast, people from non-“weird” societies – like those in rural Namibia – inhabit environments with fewer sharp lines and angular geometric forms, so their visual abilities will be tuned differently.

To address the elephant in the room, this full series is on YouTube, but blocked in the U.S. (I'm sure it's available elsewhere, but I'm poor). Switching my VPN to Switzerland did the trick, though I realize that's not an option for everyone.

I ran into a suggestion to watch this in a comment on a Reddit thread about Star Trek-adjacent series, given that Gene Roddenberry gave both William Shatner and Patrick Stewart the full set of 10 books (the TV series only covers the first three) and told them to use Hornblower as a template for how they'd play captains.

This was one of those rare series where the writing is sharp, the mysteries compelling, the production values outstanding and the acting superb.

Each "episode" is two-hours long (sounds like movie-length to me), so it's not just something to throw on in the background, because everything ties together both within each story and as a whole, and there are a couple of cliffhangers in the back half that kept me up way too late because I couldn't go to bed without seeing how things got resolved.

Anyway, strongly recommended.

Maybe you spell it "barbecue" or barbeque or BBQ.

And maybe you prefer a nice charred burger to a smoky steak and a sweet sauce over one that has more of a vinegar tang to it.

Regardless of how you take it, or spell it, barbecue as we know it has the same origins — stretching back to before Europeans set foot in the U.S.

Now technically, the method of cooking outside on an open flame has likely been around since man discovered fire. Yet, it's an early encounter between Spanish conquerors and Indigenous Caribbeans that brought us the actual word "barbecue."

Before you get ready to scrape off the grill for this July Fourth, learn more about the history of this quintessential American tradition.

When I moved to Texas a decade ago, I was very quickly taught that "barbecue" is not a synonym for "grill."

In a memo to employees earlier this week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared a vision for a near-future in which "personal [AI] superintelligence for everyone" forms "the beginning of a new era for humanity." The newly formed Meta Superintelligence Labs—freshly staffed with multiple high-level acquisitions from OpenAI and other AI companies—will spearhead the development of "our next generation of models to get to the frontier in the next year or so," Zuckerberg wrote.

Reading that memo, I couldn't help but think of another "vision for the future" Zuckerberg shared not that long ago. At his 2021 Facebook Connect keynote, Zuckerberg laid out his plan for the metaverse, a virtual place where “you're gonna be able to do almost anything you can imagine" and which would form the basis of "the next version of the Internet."

Zuckerberg believed in that vision so much at the time that he abandoned the well-known Facebook corporate brand in favor of the new name "Meta." "I'm going to keep pushing and giving everything I've got to make this happen now," Zuckerberg said at the time. Less than four years later, Zuckerberg seems to now be “giving everything [he's] got" for a vision of AI “superintelligence," reportedly offering pay packages of up to $300 million over four years to attract top talent from other AI companies (Meta has since denied those reports, saying, “The size and structure of these compensation packages have been misrepresented all over the place").

Once again, Zuckerberg is promising that this new technology will revolutionize our lives and replace the ways we currently socialize and work on the Internet. But the utter failure (so far) of those over-the-top promises for the metaverse has us more than a little skeptical of how impactful Zuckerberg’s vision of “personal superintelligence for everyone" will truly be.

Looks like Zuck is angling for the golden shoehorn award (a real thing at one of the papers I worked for). It would be nice if all these failures actually put a dent in Meta's income, but who's really going to notice tens of billions being lost when you essentially own a money-printing scheme?

The traffic receded as Chicago withdrew into the distance behind me on Interstate 90. Barns and trees dotted the horizon. The speakers in my rental car, playing Spotify from my smartphone, put out the opening riff of a laid-back psychedelic-rock song. When the lyrics came, delivered in a folksy vibrato, they matched my mood: “Smoke in the sky / No peace found,” the band’s vocalist sang.

Except perhaps he didn’t really sing, because he doesn’t exist. By all appearances, neither does the band, called the Velvet Sundown. Its music, lyrics, and album art may be AI inventions. Same goes for the photos of the band. Social-media accounts associated with the band have been coy on the subject: “They said we’re not real. Maybe you aren’t either,” one Velvet Sundown post declares. (That account did not respond to a request for comment via direct message.) Whatever its provenance, the Velvet Sundown seems to be successful: It released two albums last month alone, with a third on its way. And with more than 850,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, its reach exceeds that of the late-’80s MTV staple Martika or the hard-bop jazz saxophonist Cannonball Adderley. As for the music: You know, it’s not bad.

It’s not good either. It’s more like nothing—not good or bad, aesthetically or morally. Having listened to both of the Velvet Sundown’s albums as I drove from Chicago to Madison, Wisconsin, earlier this week, I discovered that what may now be the most successful AI group on Spotify is merely, profoundly, and disturbingly innocuous. In that sense, it signifies the fate of music that is streamed online and then imbibed while one drives, cooks, cleans, works, exercises, or does any other prosaic act. Long before generative AI began its takeover of the internet, streaming music had turned anodyne—a vehicle for vibes, not for active listening. A single road trip with the Velvet Sundown was enough to prove this point: A major subset of the music that we listen to today might as well have been made by a machine.

I don't understand streaming music as a concept. My collection of individual tracks stands at about 1,700 (clocking in at 190 hours -- that is 22 hours more than a week), and there are several full albums atop that.

In my 40s, new music discovery has been a low priority, but if I'm really in the mood, I'll find a weekly radio mix from known quality DJs and hop over to Beatport if something moves me.

The use case for streaming is ... you don't want to choose what you listen to, pay monthly for stuff you'll never own and pay for a higher data plan? That sounds like radio with really expensive extra steps (I ceased listening to the radio after being thrust into the rave scene in the late '90s, and through interactions with others came to the conclusion that I was missing out on nothing.).

I'm sure "AI" can produce perfectly milquetoast music, but are you ever going to want to listen again? I have tracks I've listened to hundreds of times because they mean something to me emotionally (and often have a temporal element wherein I remember where I was living and what I was doing the first time I heard it) -- and most of my tracks do not have lyrics.

Layering nonsensical lyrics atop forgettable melodies sounds more like torture than a service providing any value.

Barack Obama, the former US president, sounded the alarm about Joe Biden’s ailing re-election bid almost a year before polling day, warning his former vice-president’s staff “your campaign is a mess”, a new book reveals.

The intervention came amid tensions between the Obama and Biden camps as they braced for a tough fight against Donald Trump. In the end, the ageing Biden withdrew from the race in favor of his vice-president, Kamala Harris, who was defeated by Trump.

Obama’s prescient anxiety is captured in the upcoming book 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America by journalists Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf, a copy of which was obtained by the Guardian.

The authors describe how Biden, trailing in opinion polls, kept hearing complaints from congressional Democrats that his campaign lacked a presence in their district. His staff in Wilmington, Delaware, were “despondent” and the president confided in one aide: “I have a leadership problem on the campaign.”

The actor Lea Thompson has had a distinguished screen career but hesitated to share it with her daughters when they were growing up. “I did not show them most of my stuff because I end up kissing people all the time and it was traumatic to my children,” she recalls. “Even when they were little the headline was, ‘Mom is kissing someone that’s not Dad and it’s making me cry!’”

Thompson’s most celebrated role would be especially hard to explain. As Lorraine Baines in Back to the Future, she falls in lust with her own son, Marty McFly, a teenage time traveller from 1985 who plunges into 1955 at the wheel of a DeLorean car.

Back to the Future, released 40 years ago on Thursday, is both entirely of its time and entirely timeless. It was a box office summer smash, set a benchmark for time travel movies and was quoted by everyone from President Ronald Reagan to Avengers: Endgame. It is arguably a perfect film, without a duff note or a scene out of place, a fantastic parable as endlessly watchable as It’s a Wonderful Life or Groundhog Day.

It's sort of surreal that movies from my childhood have become classics.

Reporting Highlights

Winning Record: In the Texas Capitol, where the vast majority of bills fail to pass, all but three of Elon Musk’s public priorities became law this legislative session.

Company Gains: Musk’s wins include laws that will benefit companies like SpaceX and Tesla.

Playing the Long Game: Musk has steadily invested his personal and professional capital in Texas over more than a decade. Most of his businesses are now headquartered here.

In an era when a cold beer and a hot dog define the quintessential baseball experience, it’s hard to imagine a time when the former could cause an all-out riot. But the annals of baseball history are not only filled with double plays and home runs; they also record moments when the game spiraled out of control. One such incident, the infamous “Ten Cent Beer Night,” is a tale of caution recounted with both horror and fascination by the channel Weird History, and detailed by Grace Johnson and Samuel Trunley in an article for the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.

The promotion by the Cleveland Indians (now Guardians) was deceptively simple: entice fans to a baseball game by offering Stroh’s beer cans for just 10 cents, significantly below the standard price of 65 cents. On June 4, 1974, this ploy worked a little too well. The Indians were in a slump, and a Tuesday night game would usually draw a crowd of 12,000 to 13,000 fans. That night, the lure of cheap beer attracted over 25,000 spectators, who consumed an estimated 60,000 cups of beer.

The stage was set for chaos even before the first pitch. Earlier that season, the Indians and the Texas Rangers had been involved in a heated brawl, leaving tensions high. Add to that the social conditions in Cleveland—economic downturn, factory closures, environmental crises—and you had the perfect storm for trouble.

UW college roommate just sent this my way after we were talking about nickel beer night a mile or two from the ASU campus.

In a welcome sign that sky-high egg prices are coming home to roost, Waffle House is dropping its 50 cent per egg surcharge.

Government price-checkers monitor prices around the country every month to compile the government's cost-of-living index. Staffing shortages have recently forced the Labor Department to scale back that data gathering.

"Egg-cellent news," the chain announced Tuesday in a social media post. "The egg surcharge is officially off the menu. Thanks for understanding."

Waffle House had added the surcharge in February as an outbreak of avian flu forced the culling of tens of millions of egg-laying chickens, sending prices to record highs. Since then, both wholesale and retail prices have begun to normalize, although retail egg prices in May were still up more than 40% from a year ago.

I can't say that lede actually makes sense. "Coming home to roost" does not idiomatically mean what is clearly intended here. Were this a story about Waffle House going out of business because of the egg surcharge, then, by all means, go with that.

It isn't, so ...

A local diner chain had the same surcharge for a while and dropped it last month. I'm just glad they didn't print new menus and make it permanent in either case.