Monday, March 18, 2024

Where Honour and Ridiculousness Collide

Received wisdom holds that haughty music critics, grinding our axes on fans’ beloved pop stars, are nothing more than failed musicians. This has always struck me as slander – not of critics, who certainly can be bitter and mean, but of supposedly failed musicians. How, after all, does one fail at music? To suggest success rides on certain technicalities, like talent or a career, gravely underestimates music’s draw, and nowhere is the lie more spectacularly exposed than in karaoke.

Here is an arena of musical greatness in which incompetence is the house style. Delusions of grandeur, haywire pitch, weird stage presence? Join the party. On that valorising little stage, “failed musician” becomes the most entertaining role in the business.

We take this noble pursuit for granted, so it was alarming to learn last week that the inventor of the karaoke machine had died at the age of 100 – having walked, sashayed and warbled among us till the end. Who would bear witness to a world without karaoke machines and know just what was missing? The visionary in question was Shigeichi Negishi, a Japanese consumer-electronics whiz who invented the Sparko Box machine in 1967, apparently to get one over on a colleague who had mocked his singing around the factory. Quibbles surround the origin story – Daisuke Inoue independently invented his own karaoke box in 1971, and the bar-karaoke tradition predates both – but Negishi, who won the race to make a commercially available machine, tends to get the credit.

And, occasionally, the blame. Negishi’s invention has attracted a chorus of naysayers, starting with the live musicians who saw the Sparko Box as the latest robot hustling to snap up their jobs. In the decades since, non-believers have denounced the endeavour on aesthetic grounds, deeming it tedious, silly and kitsch. I understand this bad opinion, because until last year I shared it. Karaoke bars – clandestine lairs seemingly populated by the unembarrassable – are custom-made to intimidate the uninitiated. (...)

Last year, some friends and I succumbed to the tractor beam of a karaoke bar in a crowded east London basement, with a vigilant no-drinks-on-stage policy and catty drag queen hosts to enforce it. Private booths have their loyalists, but in that murkily fabulous venue, witnessing dreams manifest or be brutally dashed, I was forever sold on the magic of the public act. More than a nostalgic ritual, karaoke at its best is a high-stakes spectacle where honour and ridiculousness collide.

One recent evening, I stepped up for the sacred duty of performing Björk’s It’s Oh So Quiet. The drag queen, clocking my heterosexual overshirt, sourly regaled us with the cautionary tale of a man who had attempted the song a week before, exuding insufficient charisma. This was clearly a warning shot, and it gets to the heart of the matter. Karaoke tests not only our steel but also our deep-seated sense of propriety. You have to be willing to be ludicrous – to cast off humility and etiquette and basically look like a bit of a freak – to get a shot at transcendence.

In a room filled with potential hecklers, the threat, or certainty, of a stranger’s judgment adds to the faux-gravitas. The music starts. Tension ripples through the room. You find your pose and cast about for the opening note, discovering that breath control is not a technical skill but a mysterious elite art form. Maybe in the chorus, needing a distraction, you drop to your knees, palms imploring the sky. By then, at least in the mind’s eye, your adoring audience is heartily screaming along. At the end your friends enshrine the performance with whoops and hollers, like loving parents sticking your naff crayon drawing on the fridge.

Karaoke’s conjuring of phantom star power occupies a unique space in music fandom, nothing like the communion of a concert singalong. To get on stage and hyperventilate through Olivia Rodrigo’s Vampire – fumbling the bridge, perhaps, but doing so with all your heart – may be an act of love, but it could never be mistaken for one of respect. Whether you go in for a bit of fun or a Stars in Their Eyes throwdown, the role you inhabit is fundamentally one of mischief: kill your idols, amuse your friends and banish all hope of sparking romance in the immediate vicinity.

by Jazz Monroe, The Guardian |  Read more:
Image: Jill Giardino/Getty Images/Tetra images RF

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Our Real National Security Budget

$2 Trillion, Here We Come.

The Biden Administration has just published its proposed budget, generating copious commentary, much of it displaying a commensurate degree of misunderstanding, especially regarding our gargantuan national security spending. To get at the truth of the matter, I consulted my friend Winslow Wheeler, who has been observing the insalubrious intricacies of the budget process over the past fifty years as a senior aide to Senators from both parties as well as a senior analyst for the General Accounting Office and directing the Center for Defense Information.

The defense budget has just been posted by the administration is being described as approaching a trillion dollars. Is that accurate? :

No. It's actually a lot more than that. In fact it's beginning to inch up on $2 trillion.

How so?

The problem is that when most people look at the defense budget, they don't count everything that we spend even for the Pentagon. But in addition to that, there are hundreds of billions of dollars outside of the Pentagon's budget that we spend for national security. Things like the nuclear weapons activities in the Department of Energy; that’s $37 billion; $26 billion for retired military pensions and healthcare and $12 billion for the Selective Service, the National Defense Stockpile, and a strange and suspicious looking category for the international activities of the FBI in something called “Defense Related Activities.”

Do we have any idea what that last one is for?

It has always been classified. In the 50 years I've been watching the defense budget, it's never been explained other than some occasional hints. One year they admitted to a lot of money being spent by the FBI in, wait for it, Taiwan, and so it's very unclear exactly what this is, but it's always counted as part of so-called defense related activities.

The expenses that I have just been describing come to $970 billion, but that leaves out a lot.. Add in about $800 billion for the Department of Veterans Affairs, the State Department and its associated agencies, the Department of Homeland Security. And we know now from our Republican friends that border protection is a dire national security issue. Add all that together. Then you can calculate the share for the interest on the debt that we pay each year. All those activities I've just described come to 21% of all federal spending. Calculating in that percentage as a the amount it contributes to the debt burden gives you $254 billion.. And so you add all of that up together and you get $1.767 trillion. (...)

Since the budget was published, there's been some wailing and lamentation that because of irksome spending restraints, this budget actually represents a cut or at least restraint on defense spending. What's your view on that?

Well, last year the budget deal that then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy negotiated with the Democrats for the Pentagon allowed only a 1% increase in defense spending. But because of the screwy way that we actually calculate things, if you put together everything we spent just for the Pentagon without all those other items I mentioned, last year, it looks like we will have spent $968 billion, while for 2025, Biden's requesting $921 billion. So yes, that's a cut. But that doesn't include the supplementals that Biden will request later this year for the Pentagon, for Ukraine, Israel, God knows what, that will get us back into competition with 2024. The reason why 2024 is higher than the Biden request is because it had 60 billion worth of emergency supplementals that Congress is about to approve and that money is counted in my total. But because of the broken accounting rules that we use for the budget, that money's not counted when you calculate the deal that McCarthy made with the Democrats, and that's emergency money that doesn't count on budget cap.

For years we had the Overseas Contingency Operations defense spending, the so called war budget, which was the extra money the military got for actually fighting wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Are we getting back to that?

Yes. The politically-derived budget caps don’t apply to that money. And it’s a lot more than just for the wars; lots of billions for goodies for everybody added each year there. It's all part of the hocus pocus ways that Congress allows itself to appropriate money so it can pretend that it's using restraint, but actually is exploiting all kinds of loopholes to increase whatever cap or restraint they pretend that they've added to the defense budget.

What's the next budgetary legislative stage that we're going to endure?

We haven't finished with 2024 yet, because Congress has gotten into this habit of never passing budgets on time. And it also helps the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of the Senate discipline members so they don't get out of the line on things. We do these things called continuing resolutions that keep the money flowing but only at the level approved in the previous year. And we're in that situation for the Defense Department for 2024. Next week or the week after, they're going to resolve that and pick a final total for 2024, which will include most, but probably not all of the emergency supplemental that Biden requested for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and defense industrial base spending. So that number will become final in two or three weeks. We have barely begun on the 2025 consideration in Congress that will take the next three, four months and we'll have another continuing resolution because they won't pass things in time for the beginning of the fiscal year on October 1st, and we'll go through this charade once again. And because this is an election year, it'll be all that more sloppy, painful, and unappealing to observe.

Then when they do it, Chuck Schumer and whoever is the Speaker of the House will pat themselves on the back and say, ‘well, we've done a great job. Who says we can't do anything. We just got the budget finally passed.’ But that will be months late yet again.

Are there items tacked onto the defense bills that have nothing to do with defense?

Yes. There's two bills. One is the National Defense Authorization Act, which is the bill that goes to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. That's a policy bill. It doesn't make money actually available to be spent, but it pretends it does. It has lots of numbers in it; it’s a tar baby for all kinds of crazy stuff or politically driven stuff because the legislative process is so broken. Members don't have an opportunity to do stuff on the floor of the House and Senate and especially in the Senate because the Majority Leader exploits the rules to make amendments impossible. The National Defense Authorization Act is one of those bills where they actually get a chance to do amendments and they do all kinds of crazy stuff, lots of stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with national defense. Last year they had 600 amendments for that bill.

Whew.

But they don’t really get debated. This is yet another way that the Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer, controls things. If you’re a Senator, you have to supplicate Schumer to get him to accept your amendment. That will then will get into a package that he's blessed and it'll be adopted wholesale by the Senate with perfunctory debate and members giving staff-written speeches about ‘this is a wonderful bill. It includes my important amendment to increase ice block cutting in Minnesota’ and all kinds of other crazy stuff. Every one of these will have been approved by Schumer or his agents as politically acceptable. If you are a dissenter and have a problem with how things are done in the Pentagon or anywhere else, you will not get Schumer's blessing and your amendment will not be added to his package to be dumped into the National Defense Authorization Act, and you'll be out in the cold. We go through essentially the same process with the appropriations bill, which is the one that actually makes the money available to all these agencies. Yet again, Schumer controls the process where if he likes the smell of your amendments and it's okay with the prevailing political dogma that week or that month or for the last decade, it'll get included. And if you have something that that Chuck Schumer doesn't like, your amendment will be out in the cold.

Was it always like this?

When the Senate described itself as the world's greatest deliberative body back in the 1970s and eighties, it would have a process where a bill would come up on the floor in the Senate, and the Senate took great pride in the fact that it had unlimited amendments, and you could offer an amendment on anything you wanted to all of these bills, whether it's the National Defense Authorization Act or the FAA Authorization Act, and there would be a proper debate, and then the Senate would vote and the majority of those senators present in voting would prevail.

Today it's a fundamentally broken process because of the automatic filibuster, which allows the party leaders to totally control things. Unless a Senator can somehow put together sixty votes to override a filibuster, Schumer and McConnell can simply prevent your amendment from even coming to the floor, let alone get debated. It’s also a corrupt process because if you legislate in ways that Chuck Schumer, or whoever is the leader, doesn't like or your idea is a pain in the ass for the Democratic, or Republican, caucus, you will be on the outs. Furthermore, Schumer, and McConnell control a large portion of the money that you need for your reelection campaign. And if you don't behave yourself, you'll be on the outs, not just on getting your amendment adopted, but you'll be on the outs so far as getting any of his money is concerned. And for the money that he doesn't directly control, he'll be sending the message to the big political donors, ‘don't give anything to Senator So and So. He's not one of us; he’s not a good boy.’ That's the way we do business these days. 

by Andrew Cockburn, Spoils of War |  Read more:
Image: Wikipedia
[ed. For everyone wondering how "their tax dollars" are spent.]

Aerial Relocation Service

Some of our best friends play golf.

Seriously. But we’re not that into it. It’s not just all the pesticides, fertilizers, water consumption, obstructed flood plains and fish migrations. It’s also the whiff of patriarchal privilege and work-masquerading-as-leisure that hangs about it.

So when Early Majority member Krzysztof Wroński shared his work with us, we loved it. As trees are threatened by changing climate and increasingly inhospitable conditions at Southern latitudes, Krzysztof is exploring playful approaches to their assisted migration, moving seeds to new locations within a particular species' historical range.


Using a commercial drone, a remotely operable basket, and a series of biodegradable parachutes made of kraft paper and straw, Krzysztof takes acorns dropped from oak trees near the urban and built environment and relocates them to locations where they have a greater chance to thrive in the long-term. The tools and practice can also be used to make a political statement, for example, by dropping acorns onto a golf course to challenge the practice of managing landscapes in highly humanistic and structured ways.

by Krzysztof Wroński, Early Majority | Read more:
Video: Who knows.
[ed. Must be some kind of dumb art project. If this person (and his enablers) had spent 30 seconds researching golf course recycling and management practices (and privileges) in the last few decades maybe they'd be a little more circumspect about making sweeping statements about maintenance and access these days. Guaranteed these little acorn droplets (litter) were swept up early the next day, probably before the first tee time.]

Not Your Gramp's Old Toupee

While losing a battle with genes and nature atop his scalp, Long Islander Rene Galarza came across the Instagram account of a barber offering very realistic hair pieces. To find such a service closer to home, he did some googling and found Dina Kales, who owns the N.Y.C. business Top Shoppe. She told him producing the same results he’d seen on social media wouldn’t be easy or cheap. But after his first appointment, Galarza said he fell in love with the way he looked.

“It was like, ‘Oh my god, I cannot believe this,’” the 43-year-old told Robb Report. “I’m able to style my hair, like, naturally. You just get a different level of confidence about yourself.”

Galarza is one of a growing number of men of his age—and considerably younger—having toupees installed, thanks to next-gen versions that are slimmer, easier to wear, and way more realistic than anything your grandfather might have considered. They even have a new street name. Gen-Z guys (and their willing barbers) call them hair systems or hair additions. And they look very, very good. 

“Back in the day, you’d hear the word toupee and it was a no-no,” says celebrity stylist Mark Bustos, who’s cut the hair of stylish, famous men including Jeff Gordon and Philip Lim. “The stigma is not as strong anymore, fortunately. Men are starting to take a lot more care of themselves.”

Given that about 80 percent of men experience some form of hair loss—and that market analysts value the U.S. hair transplant industry at around $6 billion—it’s no surprise that hair systems are booming. Their progression has only been hastened by the deluge of happy hair system recipients that have started to flood our social media feeds.

Barber Geraldo Quinones, who goes by “Q,” operates the Royal Crown Hair Club in Harlem and says the demand for hair systems has jumped 500 percent over the last two years. (It doesn’t hurt that he documents the process for his 21,000 Instagram followers.) The Las Vegas-based barber Samara Elizabeth, a.k.a. @Hairartbysam, a.k.a. Toupee Barbie, once installed a system for the video version of the podcast The Yard, which, naturally, has nearly 500,000 views on YouTube. And then there’s Em Cheney, known online as the Toupee Queen, who has generated 36 million views on TikTok through viral videos of guys who enter her shop balding and leave looking decades younger.

Kales, Galarza’s hairy godmother, says social media isn’t the only reason the systems have gotten so popular. There’s also something far more ancient, and Freudian, at play: No young person wants to look like their dad. “Somewhere in the early 1990s, shaving your head became a hairstyle,” she says. The generation entering its 20s now had fathers who often dealt with hair loss by simply shaving their scalps. In one sense, you can consider the shift to hair pieces as Gen Z’s move away from Gen X.

While guys in the ‘50s and ‘60s would measure their heads for a full-coverage, helmet-style wig, today’s toupee wearers are much more precise. Instead of covering up one’s entire head with a rug, barbers now aim to meld a hairpiece with the strands that remain, providing a more natural and seamless appearance. In that way, modern hair systems do more with less: Pieces are -sized to a subject’s balding area, adhered with a special glue, and then styled with the existing hair. “We can now customize the hair system to where they’re really, really thin,” says Quinones. The potential for a perfect pate, and all that comes with it, is only as limited as a stylist’s skill set.

Part of what makes the new versions work is that they’re disposable. “You’re basically wearing a hair system for anywhere between four weeks to six months and then throwing it out and putting on a new one,” Kales says.

Pricing varies wildly depending on where you live, how skilled your barber is, and what your needs include. Kales charges $875 for a Top Shoppe hair system (this includes fitting, “installation,” a haircut, and styling. Maintenance appointments, which you can schedule as often as you’d get a normal haircut, run $195.) Quinones charges around $500 for the piece and $200 to install it.

At the higher end is N.Y.C.-based Terri Green, who mostly works with actors and rock stars to create hair additions that look so real a high-definition camera operator couldn’t tell the difference. She employs a team of five wigmakers who make each piece with untreated human hair, because Green doesn’t trust factory-made options. (“It doesn’t matter what the hair quality they start with in a factory; as soon as they dip it in that acid treatment, it looks like doll hair,” she says. “I’ve tried many, many factories. None of them will work with raw hair.”) Then she applies the systems with clips and micro beading—the same technique used to install hair extensions—and applies her five decades of styling experience in shaping a look. The costs of such perfection start at $6,000 and can reach upward of $15,000.

But if you’re going to spend the money, why wouldn’t you just get hair plugs? The surgical alternative can cost tens of thousands of dollars in this country, though there is a bustling plug tourism industry in Turkey, where the government typically subsidizes the operation to the tune of a few thousand.

“So few people are good candidates for transplants,” says Cheney, the aforementioned Toupee Queen, who operates a hair systems business from Salt Lake City and Newport Beach. There are other drawbacks: you need a strong donor area; your hair will still look very thin on top until it’s grown back to full strength; and it’s surgery. Cheney followed her mother into the business, who began doing hair systems because so many of her clients came to her unhappy with their transplant results.

by John Ortved, Robb Report |  Read more:
Image: Wirestock
[ed. Check out the accompanying videos and pictures.]

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Judge Shopping Restricted

For more than a decade, conservative plaintiffs have been gaming the judiciary by filing lawsuits before a hard-right judge who’s guaranteed to rule in their favor. Worse, a handful of Republican-appointed judges have made a habit of issuing sweeping decisions that apply nationwide—hobbling the federal government, short-circuiting the democratic process, and transferring inconceivable amounts of power into the hands of a few unelected jurists. The Judicial Conference of the United States, which makes policy for the federal courts, finally struck a blow against this cynical gamesmanship on Tuesday, announcing a new rule to restore the random assignment of cases and close the loophole that lets plaintiffs hand-pick their judges.

On the Slate Plus bonus segment of Saturday’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discuss the new policy and its furious reception among the fringe-right faction of the judiciary. Below is a preview of their conversation, which has been condensed and edited for clarity. (...)

Dahlia Lithwick: It’s always hard for me to think that anything the Judicial Conference does is a big piece of news, but they did announce a new policy that sets out to curb judge-shopping. It’s the Conference trying to say: “Hey, you can’t just go to the casino that is Amarillo, Texas, and get Matthew Kacsmaryk every time you file a case.” This certainly doesn’t make a difference going backward, but can you tell us about the new policy and whether it will in fact curb litigants shopping for a judge who’s certain to hand them a nationwide injunction?

Mark Joseph Stern: So we don’t actually have the text of the rule yet. We have a press release from the Judicial Conference announcing the policy and its broad strokes. [Update, 5:10 p.m.: The text has been released.] We can glean that under this rule, when somebody files a lawsuit in federal district court that challenges some kind of federal policy—specifically, if it seeks a nationwide injunction or other sweeping relief—it must be randomly assigned to any judge in that district. The lawsuit cannot simply be glued onto the one judge who happens to sit in the division of the district where the plaintiffs strategically filed to prevail in their case.

As you suggested, this is the Matthew Kacsmaryk fix. Kacsmaryk is the guy who sits in a one-judge division in Amarillo, Texas, who will do whatever anti-LGBTQ, anti-abortion, anti-immigrant plaintiffs ask him to do. The state of Texas goes back into his courthouse over and over again to get sweeping injunctions. The same thing happens with a handful of other Trump-appointed judges in Texas and Louisiana. But judge-shopping is also a problem in patent litigation: Patent trolls spent years going to the same judge in Texas because they knew they’d get a favorable ear. That obviously can’t be right.

Chief Justice John Roberts brought up this problem in one of his annual reports, and now he has dropped the hammer. He’s the head of the Judicial Conference, and one of the other most prominent members is Jeffrey Sutton of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Sutton is a very Roberts-ian figure who has complained bitterly, and I think correctly, about the scourge of nationwide injunctions. And now they’ve sort of shivved this entire scheme. Their message to these out-of-control district judges seems to be: “It’s over. You can’t keep the grift up. We’re patching this workaround.”

Judge Sutton, talking about this new rule, said: “I actually think the story is about national injunctions. That’s been a new development, really in the last 10 years and maybe the last two or three administrations, where that has become a thing.” I always love when a judge runs out of words and just says “a thing.” But I think it’s important to understand that this policy doesn’t actually stop a single-judge division from issuing a nationwide injunction. It just makes it harder. It sends cases through the spinner to avoid a case going directly to someone like Kacsmaryk. But cases will still end up being randomly assigned to Kacsmaryk.

Yes. It’s alarming that if a case is randomly assigned to Kacsmaryk, he can still work his mischief. He clearly has no hesitation to do whatever his client-plaintiffs want him to do in their ongoing collusion. So the ultimate solution has to be an end to this trend of single judges purporting to seize control of the law and make it whatever they want because they got 51 votes in the Senate and they have a God complex and they’ve decided that they’re the King of America.

But nationwide injunctions will remain until either Congress or the Supreme Court steps in to stop it. And I think the three liberal justices are clearly holding off on dropping the hammer here. They might see some value in nationwide injunctions under Republican presidents and Republican policies. But I have become convinced that this stuff has no basis at all in the law or the Constitution.

Look at Kacsmaryk’s decision purporting to remove medication abortion from the shelves of every pharmacy and doctor’s office in all 50 states. That is just king-level arrogance. It is monarchic. It is czarist. It is transferring so much power away from Congress, from the executive, from the people, into the hands of this one guy in Amarillo.

Just stop and consider, Mark, that we have federal judges making Fox News sound bites complaining about this policy. Because that is perfectly normal now.

All the worst people are throwing total hissy fits about this. Especially from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which reviews and upholds a lot of injunctions from Kacsmaryk and his disgraceful ilk. (...) All they can do is whine and gripe about the Judicial Conference allegedly overstepping its bounds and making policy.

But Congress created the Judicial Conference to make policy for the courts! It is doing what it’s supposed to do. This is, like, the bare minimum that it could have done to put a dent in this completely outrageous and lawless system of judge-shopping.

Even Republican politicians are getting in on the bashing of the poor Judicial Conference.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell himself, from the floor of the Senate, delivered a screed against this policy, calling it an “unforced error” and also encouraging district courts to defy the Judicial Conference’s authority and ignore the new policy. McConnell actually sent a letter to the chief judge of every district court in the country, co-signed by GOP Sens. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, encouraging them to disregard the policy, basically saying it’s illegal. So we’re seeing Republicans telling courts to defy the chief justice of the United States and his ultimate authority as head of the entire Article III judiciary. We might see an intra-war branch within Article III between judges who accept the policy and judges who don’t.

by Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, Yahoo News |  Read more:
Image: John Roberts, uncredited

Nashville Sessions

[ed. The mechanics of a Nashville recording session (with Tom Bukovac). The singer, Cecilia Castleman has such a beautiful voice.]

Friday, March 15, 2024

Reputational Turbulence

You know a company is in deep trouble when comedians and stock analysts take similar jabs.

With almost every day bringing more negative headlines about the quality and airworthiness of its products, Boeing is both a punchline and a cautionary tale. In response, the company has made a series of moves to reassure nervous airline customers, investors and the flying public. Much of it has been deemed too little, too late.

Something bigger is in order — something to restore faith that the company is serious about reversing its slide, will restore the priority of safety over stock price, and treat its workers and partners well.

The opportunity for change is at hand.

As of March 7, Boeing opened contract talks with its largest labor union. The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers District 751 represents more than 32,000 Boeing workers in Washington.

For Boeing, there is more at stake than what it pays for in salaries and benefits. It is no exaggeration to say the future of the 107-year-old manufacturer hangs in the balance.

Boeing must do right by its workforce. It must reinforce its commitment to the women and men who work in its local factories by making the unprecedented declaration that its next plane will be made in Washington. It must move its corporate headquarters from Virginia back to Seattle — a symbolic but meaningful return to the community that once made aerospace history, in a good way.

So far, Boeing’s attempts to manage the reputational turbulence after a piece of fuselage blew off an Alaska Airlines flight in January has not met the moment.

Last month, Boeing announced a management shake-up, including the creation of a new position of senior vice president for quality.

On a Feb. 25 podcast, aviation expert Richard Aboulafia was unimpressed. “I think there must be maybe 1% of the customer and investor community that thinks something has changed,” he said. “You’ve got to reverse decades of damage both to how they treat their workforce and their supply chain and their supply chain’s workforce. … So the idea that this couple of superficial changes means anything is just completely bizarre.”

Culture change is more than a new poster in the break room. It’s about changing the structure of the company and what it values above all else.

Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that Boeing was modifying its bonus pay, making safety and quality metrics a top priority. In the past, hitting financial targets earned the most rewards. (...)

Which brings us to the upcoming full contract negotiations, the first in 16 years.

Where once Boeing could take the entire state hostage and demand tax concessions and worker givebacks, the tide has turned.

Politically, one wonders: Who are Boeing’s allies? President Joe Biden has made his long support of big labor a centerpiece of his reelection campaign. Given his predilection for harboring grudges, former President Donald Trump is not likely to forget that onetime rival Nikki Haley once served on Boeing’s board of directors.

When he was running for president in 2019, Gov. Jay Inslee reflected on the $8.7 billion in tax breaks the state awarded to Boeing six years before. “If you’ve ever been mugged, you understand what it feels like,” he told “The Daily Show” host Trevor Noah.

The goodwill is gone.

In a recent interview, Jon Holden, president of IAM, told the Times’ Dominic Gates that the union “must stand up and save this company from itself.” (...)

For decades, Boeing fought its unions, outsourcing work across the globe and opening a new factory in labor-unfriendly South Carolina. The results can fill business textbooks of what not to do.

Boeing’s top leadership is a rogue’s gallery of mistakes and malfeasance. Phil Condit left in 2003 during a Pentagon procurement scandal; Harry Stonecipher was forced to resign over an affair; James McNerney launched the 787 Dreamliner, which suffered from massive cost overruns associated with outsourcing production; Dennis Muilenburg drew condemnation for his handling of two 737 MAX crashes.

That leaves current CEO Dave Calhoun with a lot of responsibility and not much public confidence.

Since January, Boeing stock has tanked, losing about $45 billion of market value so far this year.

“Boeing needs a top-to-bottom change of culture, and it can start by rebuilding its relationship with its touch-labor union,” wrote Leeham News and Analysis, which follows aerospace.

It took a long time for Boeing to tumble to its reputational and financial depth. It will take a long time to return to respect and admiration, let alone assurance that the plane you’re about to board has been put through the most rigorous safety assessment and maintenance.

Boeing cannot do so with a cadre of bean-counters and Wall Street suck-ups leading the charge. It is the people who design and manufacture these technological marvels who ought to be valued above all others.

by Seattle Times Editorial Board |  Read more:
Image: Elizabeth Le via AP

The Cult of the Costco Surfboard

Earlier this summer, on a beach in Santa Cruz, the big-wave surfer Shawn Dollar took a swig from a magnum bottle of champagne and hoisted a trophy in the sun. Dollar has a couple of Guinness World Records to his name, which he got by paddling into monstrous waves over fifty-five feet tall, rides he pulled off on an ultra-stiff, hand-shaped, gun-style surfboard. But on this day in early July he was celebrating his victory in the Wavestorm World Championship, a contest he won in two-foot surf atop the Wavestorm Classic Longboard, a soft surfboard that sells for a hundred bucks at Costco.

Dollar founded the soft-top-surfboard-only contest with a couple of other surfers in 2015, as kind of a gag. Despite its name, the championship is not affiliated with AGIT Global, the company that manufactures Wavestorm boards, or with Costco. (It was formerly called the Kirkland Classic World Championships, in a kind of mocking honor to Kirkland Signature, the Costco house brand that labels everything from vitamins to bacon to gasoline.)

There are no rules at the Wavestorm World Championship, which is part demolition derby, part beach party. (Dollar said that most of the hundred or so surfers were pretty buzzed.) It’s also a sendup of the surfers who tend to ride on Wavestorm boards—“kooks,” or surf newbies, who don’t necessarily know or follow the sport’s tacit codes. Really, though, the event gives experienced surfers an excuse to have a blast breaking those codes themselves. To win, Dollar said, he did everything you’re not supposed to do in a surf contest: steal waves, make contact with other surfers, and “create a general mess in the water.” In one heat, he pushed a surfer wearing angel wings into the whitewash. “No matter who you are, when you ride a Wavestorm, you’re a kook,” Dollar told me. “I don’t know, I kind of like being a kook.”

Though it has been nipped, tucked, and stiffened over the years, the Wavestorm eight-footer has existed in roughly the same form since 2006. That’s when Matt Zilinskas, a former manager of the Boogie Board brand, and the Taiwanese businessman John Yeh, of AGIT Global—Boogie Board’s manufacturer—tweaked AGIT’s sandwich of expanded polystyrene foam and plastic to create a board for a surfer’s “first standup experience.” The Wavestorm, a high-volume, low-profit-margin play, was priced at a third of what most starter surfboards cost. By 2015, Bloomberg Businessweek reported that over half a million Wavestorms had been sold, and Costco was on pace to sell a hundred thousand that year alone. (Zilinskas calls those numbers “outrageous” but declined to provide more accurate figures.) In peak summer, they can be bought at nearly two hundred coastal Costco locations.

Though pro surfers like Jamie O’Brien have taken Wavestorms on some of the world’s most dangerous breaks—such as Oahu’s Pipeline—as a kind of humblebrag, the board is not perfect. Surfers note that it soaks up seawater with time. At high speed, its plastic fins chatter. Its leash is tangle-prone. Compared to the carbon-fibre-wrapped shortboards currently championed by surf shops and ridden in high-level competitions—boards that slash up and down a wave’s face, building speed like a Scuderia Ferrari—the Wavestorm moves more like a school bus. But it is very good at catching waves. Maybe too good. “It’s possible to get greedy on one,” Gary Linden, a surf shaper and co-founder of the Big Wave World Tour, a triannual contest held in thirty-foot-plus waves, told me. He cites the board’s float, its paddling ease, and its drive through the water.

Surfers call the Wavestorm a Costco Cadillac, a sofa, or a bath toy. “If I’m in really good waves and someone paddles out on one, it means they most likely don’t know what they’re doing,” Dollar said. Such riders may endanger others by not knowing where to paddle out; they might ignore a break’s pecking order, “dropping in” on a wave where another surfer has priority. Matt Warshaw, the author of “The Encyclopedia of Surfing,” called the antagonism toward Wavestormers “just the latest misguided frustration for surfers, who are always pissed off,” and said that it resembled the scorn that surfers had in the eighties for bodyboarding, then experiencing a boom. “You saw prime breaks like Off the Wall, on the North Shore, become nearly overtaken by bodyboarders,” he said. “It was like the killer bees were coming. You’d think there was going to be a civil war.” A commenter on Surfer magazine’s Web site, meanwhile, recently promoted stoic forbearance. “The Wavestorm phenomenon will pass,” he wrote. “We lived through ‘Gidget.’ We’ll live through this.”

by Jesse Will, New Yorker |  Read more:
Image: Peter King
[ed. Fast forward a few years to the effects of democratization in both surfing and online discourse: Arguing Ourselves to Death:]

About ten miles south of San Francisco, there’s a public beach called Linda Mar. As far as Northern California beaches go, Lindy isn’t particularly pleasant or pretty; the sand is gross, the water’s cold and slate gray on account of the persistent fog that hangs around the area. The spot is best known for an oceanfront Taco Bell, which is great in theory, but in practice is plagued by a perpetual sogginess and the hundreds of surfers who clog its parking lot every weekend.

I’ve been surfing at Linda Mar on and off for about fifteen years now. At first, it was because I was a beginner, and Lindy is one of the few places you can surf within a short drive of San Francisco without being sucked out to sea. Now I go because I am older and the waves at the better beaches are sometimes too big and scary. (I won’t name the other spots here; perhaps the most illuminating thing I can say about Lindy is that I can break surfer taboo and publish its name because it’s already the most packed spot in the area.)

Linda Mar was always crowded, but it’s become much worse recently, thanks to three separate innovations. The first is the wide-scale production of cheap soft-top surfboards, which are floaty enough to catch pretty much every mushy wave that rolls through. The second is the ubiquity of surf-camera Web sites that live-stream the waves and provide constantly updating, color-coded reports on the conditions. The third is the popularity of short-form surf content on social media, which, like so much of what you find on the Internet, highlights little fights or asks stupid rhetorical questions aimed at inciting as much conflict as possible.

All this has undeniably changed Linda Mar. Some shifts are obvious. When the color-coded report is green, for example, the crowds arrive. When it’s yellow, you might find fewer than twenty people in the water, even if the actual waves are no different from supposedly green conditions. Other changes are more subjective and harder to parse. Since the widespread distribution of WorldStarHipHop-style surf videos—which show surfers screaming at one another over snaked rides and tussling on the beach—I have noticed a discomforting edge in the water. Before, a typical kook at Linda Mar would cut you off, fall, and apologize while laughing at himself. Most of the time, he wouldn’t even know the surf etiquette he had violated, and, if you explained it to him, he’d listen.

Today, it’s as though the kooks are replaying, in their heads, the hundreds of social-media videos they’ve watched. They have a vague but often errant understanding of surf ethics, and it rarely translates into politeness. If they feel like you cut them off or snaked their wave, they will transform, however fleetingly and unconvincingly, into the saltiest local they’ve seen on Instagram. (...)

If online content is reshaping the world of surfing—sending people to the same beaches while also making them belligerent and misinformed—who or what is to blame, and what can we do about it? Is it the responsibility of the people who run popular Instagram accounts to share more stoke and less disharmony? Should Surfline, the surf-camera and forecasting site, change the way it reports conditions, to more evenly distribute crowds? Do high-information surfers need to flag misinformation about who has priority on a wave?

Similar questions, of course, have been asked again and again, for the past decade or so, about American political life. Most Americans believe that we are in deeply polarized times; sixty-five per cent of respondents to a Pew survey last year said that they were “exhausted” when thinking about politics. Those of us who have appointed ourselves stewards of discourse have spent a great deal of energy trying to build some consensus, however imaginary and manufactured, but we are losing. Journalists have published fact-checks of politicians, government officials have created short-lived boards to combat disinformation, school systems have adopted media-literacy curricula to teach children how to take in what’s good and reject what’s bad. These efforts are largely driven by the hope that if we can control the inputs of the information ecosystem, and pump in a lot of truth and democracy, we might be able to save the country from irrevocable internal conflict. But what if the inputs don’t actually matter? What if it’s the technology itself?

Forty years ago, the late Neil Postman delivered a keynote address at the Frankfurt Book Fair, which, that year, had taken George Orwell and his works as its special topic, with particular reference to “1984.” The book’s dark prophecy of a world controlled by the censorious hand of Big Brother hadn’t come to pass, at least in a literal sense, but there were still many questions—as there are today—about where we might see Big Brother’s shadow. Postman, an education scholar at New York University, insisted that if we wanted to understand how the masses would be controlled, we shouldn’t look to Orwell but rather to his contemporary Aldous Huxley. Postman’s talk became a book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” In the foreword, he lays out the distinction between the two authors’ visions of the future: “Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.” (...)

Postman, an acolyte of the influential Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, argued that if McLuhan’s most famous postulation was correct—that the medium is the message—then television was a uniquely destructive and obscurantist force that had already ruined American discourse. Politics had become a show dictated by ratings and the aesthetics of mass media; politicians were now judged by how they looked and performed on television. Under the totalitarian paradigm of television, Postman suggested, words and their associations no longer really mattered. He wrote:
What is happening in America is not the design of an articulated ideology. No Mein Kampf or Communist Manifesto announced its coming. It comes as the unintended consequence of a dramatic change in our modes of public conversation. But it is an ideology nonetheless, for it imposes a way of life, a set of relations among people and ideas, about which there has been no consensus, no discussion and no opposition. Only compliance. Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is ideology.
So what is the ideology of the Internet? An optimist might invoke the idea of democratization, pointing to the medium’s ability to amplify otherwise silent voices, in ways both good and bad. But the Internet is not so much a forum as a language unto itself, one with its own history, predilections, and prejudices.

by Jay Caspian Kang, New Yorker |  Read more:

Paul McCartney: The Songwriting Process

Martin Scorsese

[ed. This is how you make a good commercial.]

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

The New Media Goliaths

One of the more remarkable artifacts of late-stage social media is the indelible presence of a particular character: the persecution profiteer. They are nearly unavoidable on Twitter: massive accounts with hundreds of thousands to millions of followers, beloved by the recommendation engine and often heavily monetized across multiple platforms, where they rail against the corporate media, Big Tech and elites. Sometimes, the elites have supposedly silenced them; sometimes, they’ve supposedly oppressed you — perhaps both. But either way, manipulation is supposedly everywhere, and they are supposedly getting to the bottom of it.

Many of these polemicists rely on a thinly veiled subtext: They are scrappy truth-tellers, citizen-journalist Davids, exposing the propaganda machine of the Goliaths. That subtext may have been true in last century’s media landscape, when independent media fought for audience scraps left by hardy media behemoths with unassailable gatekeeping power. But that all changed with the collapse of mass media’s revenue model and the rise of a new elite: the media-of-one.

The transition was enabled by tech but realized by entrepreneurs. Platforms like Substack, Patreon and OnlyFans offered infrastructure and monetization services to a galaxy of independent creators — writers, podcasters and artists — while taking a cut of their revenue. Many of these creators adopted the mantle of media through self-declaration and branding, redefining the term and the industry. Many were very talented. More importantly, however, they understood that creating content for a niche — connecting with a very specific online audience segment — offered a path to attention, revenue and clout. In the context of political content in particular, the media-of-one creators offered their readers an editorial page, staffed with one voice and absent the rest of the newspaper.

The rise of a profitable niche media ecosystem with a reach commensurate with mass media has been a boon for creators and consumers alike. YouTube, Instagram and TikTok have enabled sponsorships and ad-revenue sharing for quite some time — spawning a generation of influencers — but patronage opened additional paths to success. A tech blogger can start a podcast about Web3 with no infrastructural outlay, reaching their audience in a new medium. A Substack newsletter devoted to political history can amass thousands of subscribers, charge $5 a month, and deliver a salary up to seven figures for its author. Pop culture pundits can earn a living producing content on Patreon, and web-cam adult performers can do the same on OnlyFans. Even Twitter has launched subscriptions.

Whatever the kink — from nudes to recipes to conspiracy theories — consumers can find their niche, sponsor it and share its output. This ecosystem has given rise to people with millions of followers, who shape the culture and determine what the public talks about each day.

Well, their public, anyway.
 
The Rise Of Niche Propaganda

Like the media, the public has increasingly fragmented. The internet enabled the flourishing of a plethora of online subcultures and communities: an archipelago of bespoke and targetable realities. Some of the most visible are defined by their declining trust in mass media and institutions. Recognizing the opportunity, a proliferation of media-of-one outlets have spun up to serve them.

In fact, the intersection of a burgeoning niche media ecosystem and a factionalized public has transformed precisely the type of content that so concerns the persecution profiteers: propaganda. Propaganda is information with an agenda, delivered to susceptible audiences to serve the objectives of the creator. Anyone so inclined can set up an account and target an audience, producing spin to fit a preferred ideological agenda. Those who achieve a degree of success are often increasingly cozy with politicians and billionaire elites who hold the levers of power and help advance shared agendas. In fact, the niche propagandists increasingly have an advantage over the Goliaths they rail against. They innately understand the modern communication ecosystem on which narratives travel and know how to leverage highly participatory, activist social media fandoms to distribute their messages; institutions and legacy media typically do not.

Although the mechanics of who can spread propaganda, and how, has shifted significantly over the last two decades, public perception of the phenomenon has not. People discussing concerns about propaganda on social media frequently reference the idea of a powerful cabal composed of government, media and institutional authorities, manipulating the public into acquiescing to an elite-driven agenda. This misperception comes in large part from popular understanding of a theory presented by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their 1988 book, “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.”

“Manufacturing Consent” proposed a rather insidious process by which even a free press, such as that of the United States, filters the information that reaches the public by way of self-censorship and selective framing. Even without the overt state control of media present in authoritarian regimes, Chomsky and Herman argued, American media elites are influenced by access, power and money as they decide what is newsworthy — and thus, determine what reaches the public. Chomsky and Herman identified five factors, “five filters” — ownership, advertising, sourcing, catching flak, and fear — that comprised a system of incentives that shaped media output.

by Renee Diresta, Noema |  Read more:
Image: Hvass & Hannibal/FORESIGHT

via:

Monday, March 11, 2024

Gary Larson
via:

Rolling Stones

How Do You Define Who’s an Alaskan?

“Alaska calls to those who crave solitude and adventure, and have a deep respect for nature’s power.” — John McPhee, “Coming into the Country”

In deciding a court case about a Legislature seat, the Alaska Supreme Court waded into one of the most contentious debates in our state: How do you define “Alaskan” — and how long does it take to qualify?

In the lawsuit, the court ruled that Rep. Jennie Armstrong qualified as an Alaska resident for the purposes of her candidacy for the Legislature in 2022, if only barely. Alaska law states that candidates must have been residents of Alaska for three years and must have lived in the district they seek to represent for a year prior to filing. Armstrong met that bar by a matter of days, having come to visit in 2019 and making plans to return permanently after traveling Outside to move her belongings.

The squishiness of the residency requirement points to the difficulty of defining intent — and nods to deeper, potentially insoluble questions: What makes a person an Alaskan? Is it a matter of time spent here? Is it a state of mind? Is there a physical or psychological entrance exam, so to speak?

Even when looking only at the state’s legal residency definitions that most of us agree are woefully insufficient in defining whether a person is an Alaskan, there’s a surprising amount of variability. The requirement of three years in Alaska to run for the Legislature is on the long end, even if (as the state Supreme Court found) it permits for trips Outside to tie up the loose ends of the incorrect lives that prospective Alaskans formerly maintained. When it comes to that other famous marker of Alaskan-ness, the Permanent Fund dividend, the residency requirement is a calendar year in the state before filing your first application; woe betide those who arrive here on Jan. 2.

Other residency definitions get progressively looser. The Department of Fish and Game requires Alaskans to have lived here for 12 consecutive months — a year, though not necessarily a calendar one — before they can purchase a resident hunting, fishing and/or trapping license. When it comes to resident tuition at the University of Alaska, a year in the state will qualify you — but there are a number of shortcuts allowed too, such as being an active military member, spouse or dependent. And the bar for getting an Alaska driver’s license is perhaps the lowest of any of the government residency markers — an Alaska mailing address, as established by paperwork such as a utility bill.

In defining what makes a person an Alaskan, however, the conversation often steers away from some precise duration of residency and toward a host of subjective and sometimes intangible metrics. Some people say you have to live here for a winter (or 10 of them) before you’re an Alaskan, so that you prove you can stick it out. Some people say you have to live outside Anchorage, or Fairbanks, or even off the road system altogether. Some people say you have to see 20 below, or 40 below (the days of colder standards are fleeting, though they do still come around occasionally).

And there’s something more, too. Most of us know people who have been in Alaska for a long time — in some cases, their whole lives — and never do anything particularly Alaskan. On the flip side, there are people who are Alaskans in their temperament, interests and sense of place from the day they arrive. It’s worth betting that there are Alaskans out there who never actually make it here — theirs is the saddest lot, never knowing that their place in the world exists and they just haven’t found it yet.

Even though what makes a person a “real Alaskan” isn’t strongly correlated with the duration of their habitation, Alaskans have a decided tendency to “pull rank” by introducing their opinions with a preamble: “I’ve been here for 35 years,” “I came up before the pipeline,” “I’m a fourth-generation Alaskan,” and so forth. We would probably all be wise to stay humble when it comes to that kind of imagined credibility, given that Alaska’s Native people have all of us new arrivals beat by hundreds — even thousands — of generations. When you consider that some of the state’s people have been here since prehistoric times, the braggadocio over having once stood in front of a bank sign at 40 below seems pretty silly. Who among us could credibly claim to be able to make our way without electricity, imported food or even forged-metal hand tools?

So when it comes to what constitutes a real Alaskan, perhaps a better set of criteria is needed: Does a person respect the land and all we get from it? Do they work to keep this a place where their children and grandchildren can grow up and experience the same ineffable wonder as those who came before them? Will they stop to help a neighbor in distress when it’s cold out?

by The Editors, Anchorage Daily News |  Read more:
Image: Bill Roth/ADN
[ed. I was a biologist with the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game for 30 years - probably the most Alaskan of all Alaskan institutions (existing before statehood). My son was raised in a log home, heated by 6-7 cords of wood a winter. I had a pilot's license and a couple of planes. We snowshoed, hiked, skied, fished, camped, and did all the Alaskan things Alaskans do. I wouldn't have traded it for any other life. But, as this article suggests, being an Alaskan isn't necessarily about the years you reside in the state but about your commitment to the Alaskan ethic (also mentioned in this article). Which is: help your neighbors, appreciate and experience this beautiful country to the best of your abilities, and however you experience it, keep its wild essence alive for future generations.] 

Just Win, Baby

The transactional politics that destroyed a country and its legal system. [ed.]

The convergence on 28 February of Mitch McConnell’s retirement announcement as the Republican Senate leader with the supreme court’s order to accept Donald Trump’s appeal to consider his immunity from prosecution was a bitter irony for McConnell and triumph for Trump. It is a telltale subplot in Trump’s theater of humiliation in which the supreme court is playing a starring role as his best supporting actor. (...)

McConnell, the partisan architect of the partisan supreme court majority, could, if he wished to boast, rightly claim credit for those justices staging the timely rescue of his nemesis. Putting in place justice after justice, breaking precedent after precedent, he is the father of this court’s majority. He considers it his greatest accomplishment.

McConnell’s cold arrangement with Trump was strictly business: McConnell protected Trump in exchange for Trump packing the court. While few truly deeply loathe Trump more than McConnell, nobody has been a more consequential enabler or fatally miscalculated the spread of his stain. But their unholy alliance cannot be mistaken for a Faustian bargain; neither was selling his soul.

McConnell made plain the purely transactional basis of the relationship when he endorsed Trump after Super Tuesday, citing how “we worked together to accomplish great things for the American people … a generational change of our federal judiciary – most importantly, the supreme court”. (...)

McConnell had many reasons for declaring he has reached the twilight of his career, even though the Republicans may gain control of the Senate after the election and he would be leader again. His health, after all, is fragile. He froze speechless twice in press conferences. He has suffered a terrible personal tragedy, the accidental drowning of his wife’s sister. But approaching the promised land once more, which might be his culmination, he restrained himself from entering. He announced he would relinquish the enormous power he has accumulated over a lifetime because he could see it ebbing away to his worst enemy. That very worst enemy is not Joe Biden, who he likes and would destroy out of cold partisanship, but Trump, who he hates with a white-hot passion, but whom he has safeguarded and would help become “dictator for a day”.

“Believe me, I know the politics within my party at this particular time,” said McConnell in his Senate speech announcing his retirement. “I have many faults. Misunderstanding politics is not one of them.” Believe him, he can count. (...)

McConnell’s enforcement of the party line made him appear like Senate leaders before him. His acolytes praise him as an “institutionalist”. He basks in presenting himself as a “constitutionalist”. But to build his power McConnell has subverted constitutional norms and standards, corroded and corrupted checks and balances, and drastically weakened the Senate through his explosive abuse of filibusters to transfer power to the federal courts, which he stuffed with Federalist Society cadres. He has been more than a great anti-institutionalist; he has been an anti-constitutionalist.

McConnell’s great crusade was to tear down the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (the so-called McCain-Feingold bill) and open the sluice gates for dark money. The year after its passage he filed his opposition in a case that made its way to the supreme court, McConnell v Federal Election Commission, which he lost in a 5-4 ruling upholding the bill. Still, he persisted.

In 2006, far-right Samuel Alito was nominated to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the court. She was a moderate Republican of the old school, who upheld abortion rights and campaign finance reform. When 25 Democrats attempted a symbolic filibuster against Alito, McConnell took the floor to denounce the effort as unconstitutional: “Mr President, we stand today on the brink of a new and reckless effort by a few to deny the rights of many to exercise our constitutional duty to advise and consent, to give this man the simple up or down vote he deserves. The Senate should repudiate this tactic.”

In 2010, with Alito on the court, it ruled 5-4 in Citizens United v FEC that restrictions on independent campaign funds – dark money – were violated free speech. “So, all Citizens United did was to level the playing field for corporate speech,” said McConnell. It was his emancipation proclamation; he freed the dark money.

In 2014, McConnell filed an amicus brief in McCutcheon, et al v FEC, a case he inspired that was backed by the Republican National Committee, challenging aggregate limits on campaign contributions as “a severe infringement on the rights of speech.” The supreme court ruled for McCutcheon in a 5-4 decision.

With the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, McConnell laid down the Republican line. “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” he ordered. His tactic was the filibuster that he had decried. During the Obama presidency, McConnell held up 517 Senate debates through filibusters. The Senate Republicans successfully filibustered 79 Obama federal judicial nominees during his first five years, compared to 68 in entire previous history. After the Republicans gained control of the Senate in 2015, they blocked 50 of 70 nominations to federal judgeships.

Through dark money and filibusters, servicing corporate interests, McConnell built a new political machine at the expense of paralyzing and diminishing the Senate. He capped his obstructions after the death of conservative justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016. If Obama were to succeed in seating his appointment on the supreme court the majority would tilt 5-4 against the conservatives.

McConnell refused to allow even a single committee hearing for Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, a highly regarded judge of the most moderate temperament on the DC district court. McConnell asserted a novel doctrine that a nomination to the supreme court could not be considered in a president’s last year and that the vacancy must be filled by the next president. He dubbed his gambit “a constitutional right”. “One of my proudest moments,” he said after killing the Garland nomination, “was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr President, you will not fill the supreme court vacancy.’” When Sean Hannity later asked McConnell wondered why Obama left so many vacancies on the federal courts, McConnell replied: “I’ll tell you why. I was in charge of what we did the last two years of the Obama administration.”

In the 2016 campaign, McConnell backed Senator Marco Rubio, of Florida, an acolyte, in the primaries. After Trump bulldozed his way to the nomination, McConnell expected him to be a dead weight on Republican Senate candidates. He suggested that they could separate themselves by running negatives ads against him. “We’ll drop him like a hot rock,” he said.

McConnell remained complacent that he was the enduring Republican standard and Trump the blip. “My view is that Trump will not change the Republican party,” he said. “If he brings in new followers, that’s great, and well worth the effort, but he will not change the Republican party … I think he’d be fine.” He added as an additional note of reassurance that the constitution “constrains all of us, members of Congress and the president as well”.

Watching Trump’s win on election night, McConnell said: “The first thing that came to my mind was the supreme court.” He was soon in touch with Leonard Leo, chairman of the Federalist Society, who described McConnell as his “vigilant and irrepressible” partner in gaining control of the federal courts. Leo was an octopus of dark money operations, his tentacles reaching far and wide. After Citizens United, he sat atop hundreds of millions and then billions of dollars to promote his causes and McConnell’s candidates.

A week after the election, Leo carried a list of court nominees into a meeting with Trump at Trump Tower. Trump’s first supreme court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, was on the list. His second and third nominees, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, were on Leo’s next list. Leo sent more lists to the White House, rubber-stamped by White House counsel Don McGahn, a Federalist Society stalwart, and McConnell would process them through the Senate. Eighty-five per cent of Trump’s court appointees were Federalist Society members. He was entrenching conservative power in the courts for a generation to come. Trump remarked privately, “Mitch McConnell. Judges. Judges. Judges. The only thing he wants is judges.” McConnell told Trump: “Mr President, when are you going to thank me for that?”

Six weeks before election day, on 18 September 2020, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. As soon as McConnell heard the news he called Trump: “First, I’m going to put out a statement that says we’re going to fill the vacancy. Second, you’ve got to nominate Amy Coney Barrett.” McConnell’s doctrine that a president could not fill a supreme court vacancy in an election year suddenly evaporated. “President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.” Barrett was sworn in on 26 October. McConnell’s relationship with Trump got him what he wanted. The conservative majority on the court was now seven to three. (...)

McConnell has a decades-long history in the Senate from intern to dinosaur, from minion to overlord, but his overweening pride in his shrewdness, his inner hackery, has prevented him from learning any larger lessons of history that explain his fall. He cannot dispense with his ingrained belief that he remains the true Republican and that there is an invisible Republican party that belongs to him, not Trump.

by Sidney Blumenthal, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Mariam Zuhaib/AP
[ed. Nice thumbnail sketch of Mitch's greatest hits. A real statesman of the lowest order.]

North Sentinel Island: Stay Away

North Sentinel Island is one of the Andaman Islands, an Indian archipelago in the Bay of Bengal which also includes South Sentinel Island. It is home to the Sentinelese, an indigenous tribe in voluntary isolation who have defended, often by force, their protected isolation from the outside world. The island is about 8 kilometres (5.0 mi) long and 7 kilometres (4.3 mi) wide, and its area is approximately 60 square kilometres (23 sq mi).

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands Protection of Aboriginal Tribes Regulation 1956 prohibits travel to the island, and any approach closer than 5 nautical miles (9.3 km), in order to protect the remaining tribal community from "mainland" infectious diseases against which they likely have no acquired immunity. The area is patrolled by the Indian Navy.

Nominally, the island belongs to the South Andaman administrative district, part of the Indian union territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. In practice, Indian authorities recognise the islanders' desire to be left alone, restricting outsiders to remote monitoring (by boat and sometimes air) from a reasonably safe distance; the Indian government will not prosecute the Sentinelese for killing people in the event that an outsider ventures ashore. The island is a protected area of India. In 2018, the Government of India excluded 29 islands – including North Sentinel – from the Restricted Area Permit (RAP) regime, in a major effort to boost tourism. In November 2018, the government's home ministry stated that the relaxation of the prohibition on visitations was intended to allow researchers and anthropologists (with pre-approved clearance) to finally visit the Sentinel islands.

The Sentinelese have repeatedly attacked approaching vessels, whether the boats were intentionally visiting the island or simply ran aground on the surrounding coral reef. The islanders have been observed shooting arrows at boats, as well as at low-flying helicopters. Such attacks have resulted in injury and death. In 2006, islanders killed two fishermen whose boat had drifted ashore, and in 2018 an American Christian missionary, 26-year-old John Chau, was killed after he illegally attempted to make contact with the islanders three separate times and paid local fishermen to transport him to the island. (...)

First peaceful contact

The first peaceful contact with the Sentinelese was made by Triloknath Pandit, a director of the Anthropological Survey of India, and his colleagues on 4 January 1991. Although Pandit and his colleagues were able to make repeated friendly contact, dropping coconuts and other gifts to the Sentinelese, no progress was made in understanding the Sentinelese language, and the Sentinelese repeatedly warned them off if they stayed too long. Indian visits to the island ceased in 1997.

Indian Ocean earthquake and later hostile contact

The Sentinelese survived the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and its after-effects, including the tsunami and the uplifting of the island. Three days after the earthquake, an Indian government helicopter observed several islanders, who shot arrows and threw spears and stones at the helicopter. Although the tsunami disturbed the tribal fishing grounds, the Sentinelese appear to have adapted.

In January 2006, two Indian fishermen, Sunder Raj and Pandit Tiwari, were fishing illegally in prohibited waters and were killed by the Sentinelese when their boat drifted too close to the island. There were no prosecutions.

In November 2018, a 26-year old American missionary named John Allen Chau, who was trained and sent by Missouri-based All Nations, was killed during an illegal trip to the restricted island where he planned to preach Christianity to the Sentinelese. The 2023 documentary film The Mission discusses the incident. Seven individuals were taken into custody by Indian police on suspicion of abetting Chau's illegal access to the island. Entering a radius of 5 nautical miles (9.3 km) around the island is illegal under Indian law. The fishermen who illegally ferried Chau to North Sentinel said they saw tribesmen drag his body along a beach and bury it. Despite efforts by Indian authorities, which involved a tense encounter with the tribe, Chau's body was not recovered. Indian officials made several attempts to recover the body but eventually abandoned those efforts. An anthropologist involved in the case told The Guardian that the risk of a dangerous clash between investigators and the islanders was too great to justify any further attempts.

by Wikipedia |  Read more:
Image: NASA
[ed. No tourist problems here. See also: Escape From Simulation Island (3QD).]

2024 Academy Award Music Performances

Some excellent performances at the 2024 Academy Awards ceremony:


Ryan Gosling's "I'm Just Ken"


Clearly a tribute to Marilyn Monroe's "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend"

Sunday, March 10, 2024

André 3000

Here’s how a photoshoot with a global celebrity typically goes. The star, aka “the talent,” arrives accompanied by a team — basically a military assault unit of publicist, manager, personal assistant or two, personal stylist or two (plus their assistants), and then various hangers-on who each carry two iPhones for no good reason. The unit is carried to the shoot’s location in black SUVs driven by men with earpieces. The group proceeds to an air-conditioned motorhome hired for the occasion, and it’s here that the talent spends their time between photographs looking at their phone(s) while the rest of the team finds reasons to complain about something on-set not being quite right. A friend of mine directs Super Bowl commercials; he told me the best “talent” he ever worked with was Lil Wayne — extremely professional, extremely punctual, where the only complication was a request for a small skate park to be constructed next to his trailer.

What the global celebrity never does is arrive alone with a dozen instruments and spend the day wandering the shoot location playing flute.
***
On this afternoon, André 3000, one of the most singular and best-dressed musicians of all time, is only days away from releasing New Blue Sun, a solo album of flute music — flutes being so much his thing at the moment, he’s brought one to Gjelina, one of Venice’s more hyped restaurants, where we are having lunch. It is carved from dark wood, the length of his arm, ancient-looking. Only a couple minutes later, he starts playing a string of soft notes, in the manner of a breathy bird. Soon, diners’ heads are swiveling to locate the sound, maybe to see if Pan, the Greek god of shepherds, has joined us for upscale pizza. This is probably obvious, but no one else in the restaurant is playing flute over their upscale pizza.

André has on what he describes as his daily uniform: vintage overalls, a beanie, and clean Nikes. His sunglasses are brown, lightly tinted. Under his overalls, he wears a long-sleeved camouflage shirt. “I have 40 of these shirts. I wake up in the morning and put the same thing on.” The look is duck hunter meets farmhand meets sneakerhead. Have you ever met someone and wanted to buy their look in entirety and throw it on right there? I ask if such a thing were possible. He explains he’s just gotten back from Amsterdam where he was developing a new brand of his own, of similar workwear, coming soon. (André had a line in the late aughts called Benjamin Bixby, with clothes that recalled early Ivy League prep.) “Whenever I’m on the street, at least for a month, whenever I see someone with overalls on, they’re going to get a free pair,” André says. “Because I know they’re overall lovers. It takes a certain person to wear overalls. They’re like grown-people baby clothes. They feel very comfortable — that’s why I love them.”

If anybody was comfortable in their own skin, it’s André 3000. Over the years, just going by style alone, André has dressed like a Gatsby dandy, a Scottish lord, and a streetwear prince. Recently he had been on the street a lot, playing the flute while wandering the globe — so much that a meme grew around it, like Bill Murray being spotted at frat parties, where somebody would take a picture of André playing flute in a coffee shop or in an airport security line. “I was in Philadelphia,” he says, “and someone came up to me. He was like, ‘You know, it’s a game now.’” A game asking not only where in the world was André 3000 these days, à la Where’s Waldo, but what the hell was this famous rapper doing walking around with a flute?

An hour earlier, driving to lunch and listening to an advance copy of New Blue Sun in my car, I’d been wondering the same thing. I hadn’t known what to expect; I didn’t have any context. (“No context?” André says, when I confess as much, and starts laughing. “No context? Wow.”) If anything, I expected a rap album because that’s what André 3000 was known for: being half of OutKast, the Atlanta duo, the legendary hip-hop group. I mean, I wondered if I’d been sent the wrong record. Just a few minutes into it, all shimmering cymbals and keyboard tones, then a warbling, digital flute, my mind was floundering, stretching hard for comparisons. Was this jazz or New Age? Was it what shamans played during ayahuasca ceremonies or what they piped into massage chambers at the Maui Four Seasons?

Were these songs or something else?

“I don’t even call them songs,” André says, smiling at my confusion. “They’re almost like formations, like you’re hearing something as it’s happening. It’s a living, breathing, sound exploration.”


He stares at me intently across the table, and I remember the first track’s title: “I swear, I Really Wanted To Make A ‘Rap’ Album But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me This Time.” The sub-text suggests: Put aside your preconceived notions and listen closely, I’ll tell you exactly where I’m at.

So, I start to listen.

In 2003, André 3000 had the world at his feet. He and his OutKast partner, Big Boi, born Antwan André Patton, had produced four albums that defined a style — precise lyricism meets updated funk meets Afrofuturism meets avant-soul — and basically launched Southern hip-hop at a time when any rap that wasn’t from New York or Los Angeles was dismissed. And then, with their fifth album, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, they created a global juggernaut: the best-selling rap album in history, a record that went 13 times platinum and won three Grammys in 2004 (Album of the Year, Best Rap Album, and Best Urban/Alternative Performance) on the back of two number-one singles, “Hey Ya!” and “The Way You Move,” which have been played at half the world’s weddings ever since.

At that Grammy Awards ceremony, André performed onstage in fluorescent green (buckskin leggings?), but he could’ve worn anything. He could’ve done anything.

What he did was basically disappear from the public eye, except for occasional moments when people posted snapshots of him on social media.

And now, 20 years later, he is back — with a woodwind album.

André 3000 doesn’t read music, he doesn’t know keys, he doesn’t know chords — but he knows what he’s doing. He was born André Lauren Benjamin in 1975, in Atlanta, Georgia. As a kid, he thought he’d become a visual artist. “And then I discovered rap videos.” He met Big Boi in high school. OutKast’s debut album, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, came out in 1994 and went on to establish Atlanta as a viable alternative to the East Coast/West Coast rivalry — based partly on André’s extremely studied, meticulously composed verses. “I’m not a freestyle rapper, right?” he says. “I architecturally made those verses bar by bar.” (...)

André, over time, has resisted such calcification. After OutKast, he helped to produce and voice Class of 3000, an animated show for Cartoon Network. He’s acted in dozens of films and TV episodes, including the starring role in 2013’s Jimi Hendrix biopic Jimi: All Is by My Side; a scene-stealing turn in French auteur Claire Denis’ 2018 sci-fi High Life; and a critically lauded part, alongside Michelle Williams, in 2022’s Showing Up. Still, there’s also been rapping: appearing on remixes, covering Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black” with Beyoncé, and doing a guest verse for Drake. The point is, the longer we speak, it seems as though André’s part in OutKast is a figment of a former life.

His present life, at least until recently, hadn’t necessarily been easy. In 2019, André appeared on the podcast Broken Record with super-producer Rick Rubin and talked about being diagnosed as an adult with anxiety and hypersensitivity. “Any little thing I put out, it’s instantly attacked, not in a good or bad way. People nitpick it with a fine-tooth comb. ‘Oh, he said that word!’ And that’s not a great place to create from and it makes you draw back. Maybe I don’t have the confidence that I want, or the space to experiment like I used to.” But that was four years ago. And clearly, releasing his first solo album — no bars, all flute — hints that his confidence has been re-discovered. I suggest to André the new album points toward a new direction, particularly since it isn’t — different from his rap work — carefully planned or composed. “Freedom is happening,” he says. “We listened to each other. Sometimes the melodies you’re hearing, I was making them up on the spot or I was responding on the spot. That’s the value of this album, that it’s fully alive. It wasn’t planned.” If anything, he worried how the spontaneity would be received by listeners. “I’m scared. I don’t want to troll people. New André 3000 album coming out! And you play it — like, man, what the fuck? On the packaging, there’s a graphic that says ‘Warning: no bars.’ So it completely lets you know what you’re getting into before you get into it. I don’t want people to feel like I’m playing with them. That could ruin the whole thing.”

A moment later, he says, “It’s very intimate. With rap, with an OutKast song, people know the beat, and I can hide behind the beat. With this, you can’t hide behind anything.” (...)

So, where is André 3000 now, literally at this present moment? I mean, other song titles on the album suggest what he’s been up to during his time away from rap — “That Night In Hawaii When I Turned Into A Panther And Started Making These Low Register Purring Tones That I Couldn’t Control … Sh¥t Was Wild,” or “The Slang Word P(*)ssy Rolls Off The Tongue With Far Better Ease Than The Proper Word Vagina . Do You Agree?” Maybe the more interesting question is what is André now? He’s a meme, he’s a man, he’s a musician. He’s a rapper, he’s a flautist, he’s a style star. I put it to him: Does he miss rapping? “I do,” he says. “I would love to make a rap album. I just think it’d be an awesome challenge to do a fire-ass album at 48 years old. That’s probably one of the hardest things to do! I would love to do that.” Maybe that’s what’s coming next, I offer. “Possibly! That’s the cool thing about my whole ride. It really is a ride.”

by Rosecrans Baldwin, Highsnobiety |  Read more:
Image: Djeneba Aduayom
[ed. New Blue Sun album in full here.]