Judgment of Paris: The Tasting That Changed Wine Forever

In a Parisian hotel 45 years ago, some of France's biggest wine experts came together for a blind tasting.

The finest French wines were up against upstarts from California. At the time, this didn't even seem like a fair contest -- France made the world's best wines and Napa Valley was not yet on the map -- so the result was believed to be obvious.

Instead, the greatest underdog tale in wine history was about to unfold. Californian wines scored big with the judges and won in both the red and white categories, beating legendary chateaux and domaines from Bordeaux and Burgundy.

The only journalist in attendance, George M. Taber of Time magazine, later wrote in his article that "the unthinkable happened," and in an allusion to Greek mythology called the event "The Judgment of Paris," and thus it would forever be known.

"It was a complete game changer," says Mark Andrew, a wine expert and co-founder of wine magazine Noble Rot, "and it catapulted California wine to the top of the fine wine conversation." Wine had gotten its watershed moment.

The tasting was the brainchild of British wine merchant Steven Spurrier, who passed away in March 2021 aged 79. "He was a legend," says Andrew, who had known Spurrier for 15 years. "He was an open-minded guy who really knew wine, based on its quality and its intrinsic value rather than reputation."

In the early 1970s, Spurrier owned a wine shop in Paris and a wine school right next to it, called L'Academie du Vin. Both were aimed primarily at non-French speakers and were located on the Right Bank of the Seine river, where most of the foreign banks and firms were.

Spurrier liked to showcase wines from countries other than France in the shop and at the school -- an act of true rebellion in Paris -- and thought of a tasting as a way to promote his business.

Patricia Gastaud-Gallagher, an American associate of Spurrier, visited California wineries in 1975 and was impressed with the rising quality of their offerings. She suggested to look into such wines for the tasting and have it take place on the bicentennial of the 1776 American War of Independence. She also encouraged Spurrier to visit California himself, to pick a few worthy candidates.

And so, in early May 1976, Spurrier and his wife Bella took off for San Francisco for a wine tour. The tour was arranged by Napa resident and connoisseur Joanne DePuy, who showed the Spurriers around. "Steven wanted to go to the smaller, boutique wineries," she tells CNN. "He had a very good palate and he bought the wines he liked, at full price."

The tasting, now six months in the making, was scheduled for May 24, 1976 at the Intercontinental Hotel, not far from Spurrier's shop and school. The nine judges, all French, included Odette Khan, editor of a prestigious wine magazine, and Aubert de Villaine, the director of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, a Burgundy estate that makes some of the world's best, and most expensive, wines.

The fateful day

(...) Spurrier had no intention to cause a stir or to humiliate his French judges. He wanted little more than to create recognition for Californian wines and generate publicity for his school. But he did come up with a way of making things more interesting: he picked the four best white wines from Burgundy and the four best red Bordeaux blends from his cellar to go against the American wines, and covered up all the labels.

"It was only pretty much at the last minute that Steven decided to change the testing from an open one to a blind one. Blind tastings are common now, but at the time, it was a very innovative way to compare and contrast wines," says Andrew.

Among the French wines Spurrier picked were Batard-Montrachet, Chateau Mouton-Rothschild and Chateau Haut-Brion -- the elite of fine wine. The Californian offerings, 12 in total, included Ridge Vineyards, Freemark Abbey, Spring Mountain, Stag's Leap Wine Cellars and Chateau Montelena -- all of which were largely unknown in Europe.

The journalist George M. Taber was given a card with the names of the wines that were being served, so he knew exactly what the judges were tasting. He soon realized things were getting interesting when one of the judges tasted a white wine and proclaimed, "This is definitely California. It has no nose," when he was really tasting the Batard-Montrachet, a Burgundy Chardonnay that is often categorized as one of the world's best white wines.

The unthinkable was indeed happening.

When Spurrier tallied the scores, it turned out that California had dominated the white wine category, with a 1973 Chardonnay from Chateau Montelena as the winner, and three American wines in the top five. In the red category, a 1973 Cabernet Sauvignon from Stag's Leap Wine Cellars came out on top, narrowly edging out a 1970 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild from Bordeaux.

It was a David versus Goliath outcome, with wines that were much cheaper and younger unexpectedly getting rated higher. The Chateau Montelena retailed at the time for about $6.50 per bottle, a small fraction of the cost of its French rivals; Stag's Leap had been founded just six years earlier, in 1970, whereas winemaking at Chateau Mouton-Rothschild had been going on for three centuries. Both winners hailed from Napa Valley, which would go on to become one of the world's premier wine regions.

The French judges were far from impressed with the results. Odette Khan unsuccessfully demanded her scorecard back, according to Taber, so that the world wouldn't know how she scored the wines, while Aubert de Villaine later described the event as "a kick in the rear for French wine."

by Jacopo Prisco, CNN |  Read more:

Image: Bella Spurrier; WATFORD/Mirrorpix/Getty Images; Harold Dorwin/National Museum of American History/Smithsonian Institution Archives;
[ed. See also: Is Wine Fake? (Asterisk):]

What about the tasting notes — the part where experts say a wine tastes like aged orange peel or avocado or whatever?

There aren’t many studies that investigate this claim directly. But their claims make sense on a chemical level. Fermentation produces hundreds of different compounds, many are volatile (i.e., evaporate easily and can be smelled), and we naturally round chemicals off to other plants or foods that contain them.

When people say a wine has citrus notes, that might mean it has 9-carbon alcohols somewhere in its chemical soup. If they say chocolate, 5-carbon aldehydes; if mint, 5-carbon ketones.

(Do wines ever have 6-carbon carboxylic acids, or 10-carbon alkanes — i.e., goats, armpits or jet fuel? I am not a wine chemist and cannot answer this question. But one of the experts interviewed on Somm mentioned that a common tasting note is cat urine, but that in polite company you’re supposed to refer to it by the code phrase “blackcurrant bud.” Maybe one of those things wine experts say is code for “smells like a goat,” I don’t know.)

Hawaii Farmers Struggle As Worldwide Macadamia Market Goes Nuts

It’s a time-honored ritual for people traveling from Hawaii: a visit to the local grocery, ABC Store or Long’s Drugs to pick up boxes, bags and cans of macadamia nuts to deliver to friends and family as gifts – treats grown in the sun, soil and rain of Hawaii.

But now Hawaii’s most iconic macadamia nut brands are significantly scaling back their purchases of Hawaii-grown nuts. Instead, shipping records indicate, South Africa and Kenya have become big suppliers.

Hawaiian Host Group, which also owns the brand, earlier this year informed Big Island macadamia nut farmers that it was temporarily shutting down its Big Island processing facility in Keaau, “for at least a year or two,” due to costly problems involving a 50-year-old boiler that burns mac nut shells for fuel.

While Hawaiian Host has long imported nuts from elsewhere to supplement its Hawaiian nuts, this year’s harvest would be different: Hawaiian Host would cease buying from Big Island’s mac nut orchards for now, the company’s president and chief executive Ed Schultz wrote in a letter to growers.

“While we are exploring ways to potentially process some crop this year, the closure at Mauna Loa requires us to temporarily suspend receiving any macadamia nut harvest at our Napoopoo Husking Facility until further notice,” Schultz wrote. “Therefore, we understand that you will look for alternative places to sell your crop this year.”

In an email to Civil Beat, Schultz clarified that the company still will purchase about 4 million pounds of Hawaiian mac nuts for the harvest seasons from September 2022 through April 2023.

Still, the letter reverberated through an industry already reeling from high fuel and fertilizer costs, and other issues related to the Covid-19 pandemic. Now local growers are stepping up with a public education campaign urging people to buy locally grown mac nuts.

In the works is a partnership between a local growers’ association and an international firm that tests chemical and molecular properties of things like food and textiles to determine their origin. In the meantime, last week the farmers took out half-page ads in Big Island newspapers calling on consumers to make sure the nuts they were buying were grown in Hawaii.

The ad from the Macadamia Growers of Hawaii didn’t single out Hawaiian Host or any other company, but instead implored readers to check product labels.

“The truth about products you buy,” the ad said, “isn’t hard to crack.”

After seed crops, such as genetically modified corn grown to produce seeds for farms elsewhere, mac nuts were Hawaii’s second most valuable crop in 2021, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Hawaii macadamia nut farmers produced 51 million pounds of nuts valued at $62.7 million from 17,000 acres, the USDA reported.

But this year looks bleak, said Brad Nelson, director of the Macadamia Growers of Hawaii, who is also president and chief executive of Hawaiian Macadamia Nut Orchards, a 5,000-acre operation that employs 180 workers on the Big Island.

“Millions of pounds of macadamia nuts are on the ground and won’t be harvested this year,” Nelson said in an interview.

If the situation continues, Nelson said, the Hawaiian macadamia nut industry could go the way of sugar cane and pineapple: once important crops that have largely disappeared from Hawaii’s economy.

“This is make or break, really,” he said.

Prices Drop Amidst Global Supply Glut

Complicating the situation further, Nelson said, is that Hawaiian Host and Mauna Loa are beloved brands that not only promote Hawaii as a macadamia nut region but also, in other years, buy a lot of Hawaii nuts. Nobody wants to see the brand damaged, Nelson said.

“Up until this year, I would say Mauna Loa would do everything they could to buy local macadamia nuts,” he said.

But that changed with the plant closing. Current farms face two problems now, Nelson said. First, he said, there simply is not enough processing capacity on the Big Island to make up for the lost facility. Second, Nelson said, even if a company like Island Harvest could quickly scale up, Island Harvest likely couldn’t find space on store shelves, which are dominated by Mauna Loa and Hawaiian Host products. 

by Stewart Yerton, Honolulu Civil Beat |  Read more:

Image: Stewart Yerton

[ed. Reminds me of the Kona Coffee branding debacle.]

Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Erupts

Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Erupts (Seattle Times)

Image: Mark Nowlin/Seattle Times

They May as Well Grow on Trees

On Aug. 18, 2053, Tyson Foods unveiled its much-anticipated product, Well Beef, at a benefit dinner in Lower Manhattan. Well Beef, a genetically engineered animal product derived from what the company is calling “Welfare-Enhanced Cows,” is the third GE food product that Tyson has released and comes just a year on the heels of Ecopig.

“It’s exceptional!” exclaimed Grant Willis, the company’s CEO, dabbing at his chin with a napkin. “We have finally achieved the Big Three. We have enjoyed phenomenal success with Pure Chicken and Ecopig, and now we are ushering in the era of Well Beef.” Willis gestured toward the room, where guests eddied about the tables surveying and sampling Tyson’s array of genetically engineered foods. The chefs had transformed the Well Beef into carpaccio woven into the shape of roses. Interspersed were silver trays of Ecopig sliders and Pure Chicken pâté nestled among garlands of fruit and salad greens.

As Pure Chicken celebrates half a decade of success this year, Well Beef is the first commercially available GE beef product that claims to be cruelty-free. “Genetic engineering for increased welfare” boasts a banner draped behind the podium. Light from the chandeliers shimmered across the marbled beef, giving the meat a dewy sheen. Lush bouquets of flowering sweet pea vines were placed throughout the rooms. “An homage to trait selection,” Herbert Muller, an attending geneticist from Tyson, tells me. “On this day, it is worth reflecting on humanity’s journey through the labyrinth of heredity.”

Unlike these pea vines, whose differences are largely cosmetic, what makes Well Beef distinct from traditional meat goes beyond appearances. By using CRISPR and other gene editing technology, companies like Tyson can make targeted modifications to the genome in order to delete or insert new genes. While those who selected favorable variants in the past were doing so in ways that were molecularly indiscriminate, today’s food engineers have gone from merely interpreting the gene to manipulating it. (...)

Tyson’s Pure Chicken was the first GE animal engineered not to perceive pain. Using CRISPR and other proprietary technologies, bioengineers were able to manipulate the chickens so they had brain function sufficient for maintaining growth but not for supporting mental states or psychological experiences. These chickens, which lacked beaks, eyes and feathers, also had ablations to their anterior cingulate that disrupted the affective dimensions of pain. Their secondary somatosensory cortex was left intact, rendering them able to eat and drink, and even to react instinctually to stimuli. But when exposed to adverse stimuli, rather than exhibiting nociceptive behavior, they remained serene. They resembled something between an animal and a fruit, an observation that is encapsulated by the product’s official slogan: “They may as well grow on trees.”

Although the product had its critics, its immediate commercial success left no doubt about the industry’s trajectory. Within months of its debut in 2048, Pure Chicken became the industry standard. Non-genetically engineered chicken simply could not compete with Pure Chicken for taste or efficiency. And whereas traditionally bred chickens are prone to pecking one another’s eyes out when too tightly confined, Pure Chickens are equanimous and placid. From temperament to taste, cruelty-free chicken outmatched non-GE poultry.

In the ebullience that followed the commercial success of Pure Chicken, companies like Tyson and Cal-Maine Foods turned their attention to bioengineering a larger array of more complex livestock animals. The methods that researchers used were similar, focusing on disrupting the neural pathways so that they could alleviate pain while not stunting growth. Three years ago, in the spring of 2050, a team of animal science researchers from California Polytechnic State University discovered that folic acid deficiency during embryogenesis could lead to a neural tube defect that disrupts pain signaling in the brain. They first implemented this strategy in pigs, which led to a spate of GE pork products, including Ecopig, before turning their attention to modifying cattle.

Well Beef is thus the tour de force of GE livestock. The welfare-enhanced cows from which Well Beef is manufactured are a genetic hybrid of Holstein and Angus cattle. Large and muscle-bound, their architectonic bodies ripple with prime cuts. The most pronounced distinction between these beef cows and their forebears is their heads, which develop with a concave brain but retain a partial skull, including the face.

According to Tyson, these cattle eat, grow, live and die without a vestige of pain. Even the most skeptical evaluators confirmed this appraisal. Upon visiting Tyson’s headquarters last month, Maxwell Harder, an investigator with the Factory Farming Awareness Coalition, marveled that he had “plausibly borne witness to the largest reduction of suffering ever undertaken.”

by Xander Balwit, Asterisk | Read more:
Image: Natalya Balnova

Xi Jinping: The Making of a Dictator

Xi Jinping: the Making of a Dictator (The Economist)
Images: During the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards beat, tortured and killed anyone they saw as an enemy. Many members of the party elite, including Xi Jinping’s father, were publicly denounced in the Cultural Revolution. Students relied on public notices to find out which leaders were no longer in favour. Like many educated youths, Xi was sent to the countryside in the 1960s. In 1985 Xi spent two weeks in America with a Chinese delegation. (uncredited)

He likes football, claims to swim 1,000 metres a day and is a fan of “Sleepless in Seattle”, “The Godfather” and “Saving Private Ryan”. These are among the short, carefully choreographed list of details we know about the world’s most powerful man. Beyond a veneer of openness – he carries his own umbrella, shuns suits for anoraks, pays for his own meal at a dumpling shop – he is an enigma. Leaders of the world’s most influential countries go on tv to debate their rivals and are interrogated in interviews about the minutiae of their policy statements; the comings and goings of their ministers are documented by a gleeful media. Yet even Xi’s speeches are often released only months or years after the event. His advisers are just as remote; sometimes we don’t even know their names.

We have far more detail on his official backstory – the hardships he suffered when, along with millions of other urban Chinese, he spent years toiling in the countryside in a remote village in the 1960s. These fables tell us how Xi wants to be seen: a man who withstood great pain before rising to his rightful place in the highest office. Read more:

Medieval Autographs

Woman’s name and tiny sketches found in 1,300-year-old medieval text (The Guardian)

Image: Eadburg? The manuscript also contains tiny, rough drawings of figures – in one case, of a person with outstretched arms, reaching for another person who is holding up a hand to stop them.

[ed. Appears to be a woman's signature, so it can't be Bob. See also: It ain’t me babe: Bob Dylan apologises for using a machine to autograph ‘hand-signed’ books (Guardian).]

As Gen X and Boomers Age, Confronting Living Alone

Jay Miles has lived his 52 years without marriage or children, which has suited his creative ambitions as a videographer in Connecticut and, he said, his mix of “independence and stubbornness.” But he worries about who will take care of him as he gets older.

Donna Selman, a 55-year old college professor in Illinois, is mostly grateful to be single, she said, because her mother and aunts never had the financial and emotional autonomy that she enjoys.

Mary Felder, 65, raised her children, now grown, in her rowhouse in Philadelphia. Her home has plenty of space for one person, but upkeep is expensive on the century-old house.

Ms. Felder, Mr. Miles and Ms. Selman are members of one of the country’s fastest-growing demographic groups: people 50 and older who live alone.

In 1960, just 13 percent of American households had a single occupant. But that figure has risen steadily, and today it is approaching 30 percent. For households headed by someone 50 or older, that figure is 36 percent.

Nearly 26 million Americans 50 or older now live alone, up from 15 million in 2000. Older people have always been more likely than others to live by themselves, and now that age group — baby boomers and Gen Xers — makes up a bigger share of the population than at any time in the nation’s history. (...)

In interviews, many older adults said they feel positively about their lives.

But while many people in their 50s and 60s thrive living solo, research is unequivocal that people aging alone experience worse physical and mental health outcomes and shorter life spans.

And even with an active social and family life, people in this group are generally more lonely than those who live with others, according to Dr. Schafer’s research.

In many ways, the nation’s housing stock has grown out of sync with these shifting demographics. Many solo adults live in homes with at least three bedrooms, census data shows, but find that downsizing is not easy because of a shortage of smaller homes in their towns and neighborhoods.

Compounding the challenge of living solo, a growing share of older adults — about 1 in 6 Americans 55 and older — do not have children, raising questions about how elder care will be managed in the coming decades. (...)

With Space to Spare

Katy Mattingly, 52, an executive secretary, bought a house in Ypsilanti, Mich., three years ago. It is small but offers plenty of space, with three bedrooms.

The question for her, and many other single homeowners, is whether they can cash in when they get older.

Ms. Mattingly said she did not think she would ever be able to pay down the mortgage and build wealth.

“It’s implausible that I’ll ever be able to retire,” she said.

Living solo in homes with three or more bedrooms sounds like a luxury but, experts said, it is a trend driven less by personal choice than by the nation’s limited housing supply. Because of zoning and construction limitations in many cities and towns, there is a nationwide shortage of homes below 1,400 square feet, which has driven up the cost of the smaller units that do exist, according to research from Freddie Mac.

Forty years ago, units of less than 1,400 square feet made up about 40 percent of all new home construction; today, just 7 percent of new builds are smaller homes, despite the fact that the number of single-person households has surged.

This has made it more difficult for older Americans to downsize, as a large, aging house can often command less than what a single adult needs to establish a new, smaller home and pay for their living and health care expenses in retirement.

People in this group often face the reality that “it’s more expensive to get a smaller condo than the single family you’re selling — and that presumes the condo exists, which may not be the case,” said Jennifer Molinsky, director of the Housing an Aging Society Program at Harvard University.

And when they hold onto family-size houses well into retirement, there are fewer spacious homes placed on the market for young families, who in turn squeeze into smaller units or withstand long commutes in a search for affordable housing.

“Both ends of the age distribution are getting squeezed,” said Jenny Schuetz, an expert on housing and urban economics at the Brookings Institution.

by Dana Goldstein and Robert Gebeloff, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Sahar Coston-Hardy for The New York Times
[ed. Seems like pretty common knowledge. Btw...I don't know if readers are still hitting NYT (or other) paywalls, but if so try Quick Javascript Switcher.]

via:

The Illogic of Nuclear Escalation

This past summer, a bipartisan majority of Congress, with the blessing of President Biden, approved a massive military-spending bill that included $51 billion for nuclear weapons — nearly 20 percent more than allotted by the previous year’s budget, which itself broke previous records. Earlier in the spring, the Biden administration sent to congress a Nuclear Posture Review, committing to upgrade all three “legs” of the “strategic Triad” — including a new missile-launching submarine, a new bomber and a new land-based intercontinental ballistic missile — as well as a bevy of new bombs and warheads for these weapons to launch or drop. Since these weapons are still in development or the early phases of production, the costs are bound to grow; the price tag for the refurbished Triad alone is estimated at $2 trillion over the next 30 years.

The official rationale for this upgrade is that the existing subs, bombers and ICBMs are approaching obsolescence. Even if this claim were true (more about that later), it begs the question of whether the arsenal needs to be as large as it is. A serious assessment of the arsenal must begin by asking “How much is enough?” and, its corollary query, “Enough to do what?”

Yet in the debate over America’s nuclear stockpile, to the extent there is debate, these questions are going unasked. It is hard to have an informed public debate, as many of the issues are classified, esoteric or both. But even the debates in Congress and inside the executive branch tend to be shallow. Almost nobody is asking those basic questions. In fact, in the 60-plus years of the nuclear arms race, almost nobody ever has. (...)

1100 Declassified U.S. nuclear targets, 1956From the national Security Archives

President Dwight Eisenhower, a retired five-star Army general and WWII commander, was not at all bloodthirsty; once he understood the power of nuclear weapons, he feared and detested them. But he also believed, as did most officials and analysts, that if the U.S. and the USSR ever locked arms, even in a “small” war over a narrow strip of territory in Europe or Asia, it would soon escalate to nuclear exchanges. So the wise policy would be to deter the Soviets from attacking in the first place, and the best way to do that, he figured, was to warn them that we’d blow them to smithereens if they did. His secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, called the policy “massive retaliation,” and the Joint Chiefs of Staff — composed of the top U.S. military officers — translated it into a war plan that italicized massive.

Few realized at the time, or in the years since, just how massive it was. By 1960, the U.S. war plan called for launching the entire nuclear arsenal — at the time, 3,423 weapons, exploding with the blast power of 7,847 megatons — against 1,043 targets in the Soviet Union, its satellite countries in Eastern Europe and Communist China. This was not a plan to strike back if the Soviets launched a nuclear attack on the U.S.; it was a plan to strike first if the Soviets mounted a non-nuclear invasion against U.S. allies.

Some in Washington asked how many people such an attack would kill. The answer that came back from those who devised the war plan at Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha was 275 million. Such a figure had previously been inconceivable. No one could imagine a war aim that required killing so many civilians.

What’s striking is that, even so, no one among the few officials privy to this plan questioned its validity or how the numbers were calculated. They never asked whether such a massive arsenal, or such a cataclysmic attack, was necessary for national security.

The plan was founded, in large part, on the basis of self-interest. SAC — the branch of the now-independent U.S. Air Force that controlled nuclear plans and operations — had set up a unit called the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff (JSTPS). Its job was to find every plausible target inside the Soviet empire, then assign U.S. nuclear weapons to destroy each one. As JSTPS found more targets, SAC had a rationale to request more weapons. As the Soviets matched the U.S. arms buildup, they created more targets — thus driving the rationale for still more U.S. bombs and warheads. (...)

In 1989, soon after George H.W. Bush was sworn in as president, his secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, was briefed on the latest version of the nuclear war plan. Cheney asked his assistant on strategic issues, a civilian analyst named Franklin Miller, to sit in. Miller had perused the array of classified documents reciting the rationales for limited nuclear options. Yet, he noticed, the briefing said nothing about such options.

Cheney and Miller were also struck by one detail in the war plan: It called for hitting the Soviet transportation network with 725 nuclear weapons. Cheney asked the briefer, a SAC general, why. The general shrugged and said he’d get back to him on that. (He never did.) After the meeting, Cheney told Miller to go out to Strategic Air Command’s headquarters, in Omaha, and conduct a thorough review of the war plan; he alerted the officers at SAC that Miller should have full authority to look at everything.

What Miller discovered made the term “overkill” seem a gross understatement. For example, just outside Moscow, the Soviets had an ancient anti-ballistic missile system holding 68 interceptors. After the Cold War, U.S. inspectors discovered that the system was completely useless. But the war plan specified that the site had to be destroyed with near-total certainty. SAC intelligence estimated (incorrectly) that each of the Soviet interceptors had a high probability of shooting down an incoming American warhead. So, JSTPS — Omaha’s nuclear targeting agency — assigned 69 warheads to hit the site, to make absolutely certain that at least one of the warheads got through.

Another jaw-dropping example: One part of the nuclear war plan called for destroying the Soviet tank army. As a result, JSTPS aimed a lot of weapons at not only the tanks themselves, but also the factory that produced the tanks, the steel mill that supplied the factory, the ore-processing facility that supplied the steel mill, and the mine that furnished the ore. Miller and his staff learned that some SAC analysts had already pointed out the excesses. A branch of math called nodal analysis suggested that, as long as the central links of a supply system were destroyed, there was no need to destroy every single piece; in many cases, just a few warheads, aimed at the right targets, would cripple the system. Gradually, Miller realized that the entire war plan was like this — a senseless aggregate of compartmentalized calculations.

Then came the key revelation. At this point the Bush administration was negotiating the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Soviets. During one of his trips, one of Miller’s assistants asked a JSTPS officer whether the treaty’s prospective cuts would affect SAC’s ability to fulfill its mission — whether the U.S. could continue to deter nuclear war and limit damage if deterrence failed. The officer replied that he didn’t do that sort of analysis. JSTPS, he went on, was prohibited from setting requirements or analyzing whether a certain kind of attack, with a certain number of weapons, would be militarily effective. When asked what the JSTPS actually did, the officer explained that they take all the weapons that are assigned to SAC and aim them at all the targets on the list.

The code was unlocked. It turned out that the war plan was based on supply, not demand — on how many weapons SAC happened to have, not on how many were needed.

by Fred Kaplan, Asterisk Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Future of Life Institute

It’s Public Land. But the Public Can’t Reach It.

The first time I showed the app to someone who had never used it, I had to gently extract my phone from the person’s hand. This happened the second time, too, and was followed by an email requesting the name of “that mapping program.”

The app is called OnX. Its basic functionality is simple: OnX shows you where you are in real time, using a blue dot exactly the same as the one on Google Maps. The difference is that OnX is designed to show where you are in a forest, on a mountain or in a canyon. It has been around since 2009 and is popular with hunters and outdoor enthusiasts.

It is also at the root of a potentially far-reaching case in federal court in which a Wyoming landowner accuses four hunters of trespassing — and causing millions of dollars in damage — even though they never stepped foot on his land.

OnX was born when Eric Siegfried, a mechanical engineer and part-time hunting guide in Montana, decided to make a Google Maps for the wilderness. He had solid navigation skills, he said, but was sick of getting lost.

To address the problem, he filled up a workspace in his wife’s scrapbooking room in Missoula with U.S. government maps, which he then loaded onto a microchip. OnX’s layers of data would eventually include everything from wind patterns to fire histories. The most important data by far, however, showed property lines. (...)

Property data is often inaccurate and outdated, and early in the development of OnX Mr. Siegfried found himself asking, “Why is there no nationwide picture of land ownership, of public and private property boundaries, of who owns what?”

This was the “game changer,” he has said. By collating state and county data and putting it on a microchip, Mr. Siegfried turned the project in the scrapbooking room into a company that just received more than $87 million from investors and that understands the American landscape arguably better than the government does.

It turned OnX almost overnight into a popular tool for the nation’s 15 million hunters.

In answering the question of who owns what, OnX helped bring to light how much public land — often highly coveted — is not reachable by the public. That’s because private landowners control access.

Across America, 15 million acres of state and federal land lies surrounded by private land, with no legal entry by road or trail. Most can be found scattered across the West, moated by ranches and corporate holdings. Such “landlocked land,” if it were one contiguous piece, would form the largest national park in the country, an area nearly the size of Vermont, New Hampshire and Connecticut. (...)

Throughout the West, hand-held technology has added a volatile ingredient to an already simmering conflict between landowners and outdoor recreationists. In small town after small town, the increased visibility of property lines on devices has coincided with a generational shift in land ownership, as wealthy out-of-state buyers have scooped up vast portions of countryside.

Many of the new owners, after buying old ranches where hunting access was generally permissive, have converted them into tightly controlled private hunting experiences charging upward of ten thousand dollars for a single elk. (...)

Using OnX’s 3-D view, hunters can zoom in on the mountain’s rugged, varied terrain, which provides abundant refuge for pronghorn antelope, black bear and mule deer. They might even pinpoint the ledge where they intend to perch on Opening Day, waiting for one of the mountain’s 2,000-pound bull elk to pass by.

More important than its game-friendly topography, however, what Elk Mountain offers is landlocked land — and a legal loophole of sorts, offering access for a hunter willing to take risks.

Most of the nearby area is owned by Fred Eshelman, a drug company founder from North Carolina. In 2005, Mr. Eshelman bought a 50-square-mile ranch encompassing much of the mountain and multiple trout-filled lakes. His large home is visible for miles. And as he settled in, he aggressively moved to ward off hunters. (Not because he opposes hunting. Mr. Eshelman is a mountain lion hunter.)

However, he couldn’t keep the public out, for interspersed within his property lay 27 parcels — 11,000 acres in total, an area the size of several airports — owned by the federal Bureau of Land Management and the State of Wyoming.

Hunters tend to steer clear. “If you cross, they call the sheriff,” reported one poster on Hunt Talk, a message board. Wyoming has multiple laws against trespassing. And “if you were looking for a red-as-red county where people are pro property rights,” said Sabrina King, a lobbyist for the Wyoming chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, Carbon County, home of Elk Mountain, “would be it.”

Some hunters have long believed, however, that the publicly owned parcels on Elk Mountain can be legally reached using a practice called corner-crossing.

Corner-crossing can be visualized in terms of a checkerboard. Ever since the Westward Expansion, much of the Western United States has been divided into alternating squares of public and private land. Corner-crossers, like checker pieces, literally step from one public square to another in diagonal fashion, avoiding trespassing charges. The practice is neither legal nor illegal. Most states discourage it, but none ban it.

by Ben Ryder Howe, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Elk Mtn. Wyoming/ James Stukenberg for The New York Times

Semaglutidonomics

Semaglutide started off as a diabetes medication. Pharma company Novo Nordisk developed it in the early 2010s, and the FDA approved it under the brand names Ozempic® (for the injectable) and Rybelsus® (for the pill).

Patients reported significant weight loss as a side effect. Semaglutide was a GLP-1 agonist, a type of drug that has good theoretical reasons to affect weight, so Novo Nordisk studied this and found that yes, it definitely caused people to lose a lot of weight. More weight than any safe drug had ever caused people to lose before. In 2021, the FDA approved semaglutide for weight loss under the brand name Wegovy®.

Weight loss pills have a bad reputation. But Wegovy is a big step up. It doesn’t work for everybody. But it works for 66-84% of people, depending on your threshold.

(Source)

Of six major weight loss drugs, only two - Wegovy and Qsymia - have a better than 50-50 chance of helping you lose 10% of your weight. Qsymia works partly by making food taste terrible; it can also cause cognitive issues. Wegovy feels more natural; patients just feel full and satisfied after they’ve eaten a healthy amount of food. You can read the gushing anecdotes here (plus some extra anecdotes in the comments). Wegovy patients also lose more weight on average than Qsymia patients - 15% compared to 10%. It’s just a really impressive drug.

Until now, doctors didn’t really use medication to treat obesity; the drugs either didn’t work or had too many side effects. They recommended either diet and exercise (for easier cases) or bariatric surgery (for harder ones). Semaglutide marks the start of a new generation of weight loss drugs that are more clearly worthwhile.

Modeling Semaglutide Accessibility

40% of Americans are obese - that’s 140 million people. Most of them would prefer to be less obese. Suppose that a quarter of them want semaglutide. That’s 35 million prescriptions. Semaglutide costs about $15,000 per year, multiply it out, that’s about $500 billion.

Americans currently spend $300 billion per year total on prescription drugs. So if a quarter of the obese population got semaglutide, that would cost almost twice as much as all other drug spending combined. It would probably bankrupt half the health care industry.

So . . . most people who want semaglutide won’t get it? Unclear. America’s current policy for controlling medical costs is to buy random things at random prices, then send all the bills to an illiterate reindeer-herder named Yagmuk, who burns them for warmth. Anything could happen!

Right now, only about 50,000 Americans take semaglutide for obesity. I’m basing this off this report claiming “20,000 weekly US prescriptions” of Wegovy; since it’s taken once per week, maybe this means there are 20,000 users? Or maybe each prescription contains enough Wegovy to last a month and there are 80,000 users? I’m not sure, but it’s somewhere in the mid five digits, which I’m rounding to 50,000.

That’s only 0.1% of the potential 35 million. The next few sections of this post are about why so few people are on semaglutide, and whether we should expect that to change. I’ll start by going over my model of what determines semaglutide use, then look at a Morgan Stanley projection of what will happen over the next decade.

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: Silverman et.; Jastreboff. et al.; wegovy.com; IQVIA; Morgan Stanley Research

[ed. Pharmaceutical economics.]

Moët Hails New ‘Roaring 20s'

The company behind Moët & Chandon, Veuve Clicquot, Krug and Dom Pérignon has said it is “running out of stock on our best champagnes” as the wealthy spend big on luxury goods in a new “roaring 20s” age of decadence.

Working Britons may have suffered the biggest slump in living standards since records began in the 1950s, but according to the head of LVMH’s wines and spirits division, “pent-up demand” following the easing of coronavirus restrictions has prompted a run on the finest fizz.

The chief executive of Moët Hennessy, Philippe Schaus, said 2022 would be “a fabulous year” for its champagne – which starts at about £40 a bottle and can runs into the thousands – as evidenced by stocks running low in the company’s network of cellars that stretch for 17 miles under the town of Epernay in France’s Champagne region.

“We are running out of stock on our best champagnes. As people are coming out of Covid there’s been pent up demand for luxury, enjoyment and travelling,” Schaus told Bloomberg in an interview at New Economy Forum in Singapore on Tuesday.

He said the leap in demand had been so big that, internally, the company was referring to the current boom as “the roaring 20s”, a reference to the economic prosperity of a century ago.

Schaus – whose wines and spirits division includes Glenmorangie single malt whiskies, Belvedere vodka and New Zealand’s Cloudy Bay wine – did not state which champagnes were running low, or how low stocks had fallen.

In its latest financial results, LVMH said its “Champagne Maisons” had “enjoyed excellent momentum, which increased pressure on supplies”. The company, which is part-owned and run by France’s richest person, Bernard Arnault, said growth was particularly strong in Europe, the United States and Japan and had been “led by tourism recovery”. Overall, champagne and wine sales were up 32% in the first nine months of 2022 compared with 2021.(...)

It’s not just champagne that’s flying off shelves. Luxury goods companies across the world have recently reported booming sales in everything from designer label clothing and handbags to expensive watches and supercars as the ranks of the ultra wealthy hit record highs.

There are now record 218,200 people classed as ultra-high net worth (UHNW), with assets of more than $50m (£43.7m), according to research by the investment bank Credit Suisse. It said there had been “almost an explosion of wealth” during the recovery from the pandemic.

by Rupert Neate, The Guardian | Read more:

Image: François Nascimbeni/AFP/Getty
[ed. Yay.]

An Alaskan Town Is Losing Ground—and a Way of Life

For years, Kivalina has been cited—like the Maldives, in the Indian Ocean, or the island nation of Tuvalu, in the Pacific—as an example of the existential threat posed to low-lying islands by climate change. In the past two decades, stormwaters have overtopped Kivalina at least once, threatening lives and infrastructure. In 2003, the Government Accountability Office reviewed nine Alaskan villages and identified Kivalina as one of four in “imminent danger.” (Of those four, only one, Newtok, a Yupik village near the Bering Sea, has been able to move some of its residents.) A more recent report designated Kivalina as one of seventy-three Alaska Native villages threatened with destruction because of erosion, flooding, and permafrost degradation. On a visit to the state in 2015, President Barack Obama flew over Kivalina and posted a photograph of the island on social media from the air. “There aren’t many other places in America that have to deal with questions of relocation right now,” Obama wrote, “but there will be.” He described what was happening in the village as “America’s wake-up call.”

Seven years later, Kivalina’s move is still mostly in the future, even though the island continues to lose ground. Building housing is an expensive and laborious process in the remote Arctic, and no single federal agency is responsible for relocating communities facing environmental threats. After more than a decade of navigating government bureaucracies, tribal members successfully lobbied for the construction of a bridge from Kivalina to the mainland. Its completion, in 2021, created a vital evacuation route where once the only possibility of escape was by water or air. The bridge is part of an eight-mile road that zigzags across the tundra, which is covered in snow in winter and prone to flooding in spring and fall. It ends at the foot of a large hill, where a newly constructed school forms the heart of the future village. More years are likely to pass before homes are built there, even as engineers predicted, in 2013, that Kivalina will be fully under water by 2025. The new site is a desolate and rocky place, but, at an elevation of a hundred and twenty-five feet, it is a safe distance from Kivalina’s receding beach and eroding riverbanks. Until the community can move inland, residents live with the worry that the right storm at the right moment could wipe out everything. (...)

One afternoon, I set off to visit Janet Mitchell at her house, a wooden building in the center of the village. It was a brilliantly sunny day, with clear skies and temperatures in the mid-forties. The equinox had just passed; the snow that blankets the island for most of the year had not started falling, but the change of seasons was in the air. I walked past houses with snowmobiles parked haphazardly outside, and dogs chained to fenceposts. A family were putting away a harpoon, used to hunt beluga in the summer, and readying their boat for seining, the net fishing that happens in the fall. Another family rolled past on A.T.V.s. They were bundled up in parkas, with rifles strapped to their backs, heading inland to look for moose and caribou. (Before the bridge was built, people had to travel upriver by boat to hunt in the interior.)

The caribou, part of the Western Arctic herd, were late showing up this year, a much discussed subject in the village. The seining had also been delayed. In Kivalina, fish are traditionally left to age on the riverbanks for at least several days before being eaten or stored in freezers. (“The Western people call them stinky fish,” a villager explained to me, “but here we call them ambrosia.”) If the fish are caught too early in the season, before the frost, they spoil. The fall had been warm, and the thin layer of ice known in Inupiat as qinu, which used to begin forming over the lagoon in late August, had not yet appeared by the last week of September. The puddles in the road which froze overnight would melt by midmorning.

Mitchell, who has gray hair and a friendly demeanor, welcomed me into her living room. Dressed in a black T-shirt and sweats, she was seated on a couch beneath a large photograph of her grandfather Clinton Swan, a whaling captain, a member of the tribal council, and a minister in the Episcopal Church, from whom she had inherited the house. In the picture, the elderly Swan looks dapper in a red lumberjack shirt, suspenders, and nineteen-fifties-style glasses with black-topped rims; in his left hand, he holds a small whale’s tail carved out of walrus ivory. The Swans are one of several families who are active in village politics. (Captains of whaling crews, which are typically organized by family, are also integral to the community, even though a bowhead whale has not been caught in Kivalina in more than two decades.) Above the photograph, wolf and wolverine furs were draped over a clothesline—they belonged to Mitchell’s mother, who died in 2019. A computer and headphones lay on a coffee table, and on a shelf was a large pile of hard drives, evidence of Mitchell’s years of digital documentation, which include audio recordings with older relatives and video footage of major storms.

Mitchell grew up in a sod house on the site of the house she now lives in, part of a multigenerational compound presided over by her great-grandmother Regina, who was born in 1870. In the summer, the family would move into tents on the beach, where it was much cooler. It is common in Inupiat families for grandparents to adopt a grandchild to help them around the house as they age. When Mitchell was eight or nine, her grandmother chose her to come live with her and her husband, just as today Mitchell’s grandson Aaron lives with Mitchell. Her youth was one of physical labor—chopping wood, lugging ice, and hanging the slabs of ugruk, or bearded seal, that her grandmother butchered. Mitchell’s family followed the subsistence food-gathering patterns of the seasons, and in the spring she would sometimes join her father’s whaling crew at their encampment on the ice, to hunt bowhead whales. Mitchell reminisced about the years when the arrival of qinu marked the time to dig whale out of underground caches, “the permafrost freezers, if you will,” she said. “That’s when they would pull out the maktak and distribute it to the whole village. They always waited for qinu.”

According to oral histories recorded in the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies, the region that Kivalina occupies today was known in the nineteenth century as Kivalliñiq, and the people who inhabited the area, the Kivalliñigmiut, were considered their own nation. Until the mid-nineteenth century, they had only minimal contact with Westerners. Then American whalers came to the region, decimating the bowhead and walrus populations and contributing to the spread of deadly epidemics. The Kivalliñigmiut nation was scattered by famine in the early eighteen-eighties, but for Mitchell’s great-grandmother’s generation the barrier island of Kivalina remained a summer base from which to hunt marine mammals: ugruk, walrus, and beluga whales. In late summer and fall, when the caribou arrived and fish migrated upriver, families would travel inland, setting up camp with winter supplies of meat and oil.

According to oral histories recorded in the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies, the region that Kivalina occupies today was known in the nineteenth century as Kivalliñiq, and the people who inhabited the area, the Kivalliñigmiut, were considered their own nation. Until the mid-nineteenth century, they had only minimal contact with Westerners. Then American whalers came to the region, decimating the bowhead and walrus populations and contributing to the spread of deadly epidemics. The Kivalliñigmiut nation was scattered by famine in the early eighteen-eighties, but for Mitchell’s great-grandmother’s generation the barrier island of Kivalina remained a summer base from which to hunt marine mammals: ugruk, walrus, and beluga whales. In late summer and fall, when the caribou arrived and fish migrated upriver, families would travel inland, setting up camp with winter supplies of meat and oil.

Kivalina remained a sparsely populated seasonal hunting ground until 1905, when the federal government constructed a school there. Like many Alaska Native villages situated on shorelines and riverbanks around the state, Kivalina was presumably chosen because of its accessibility by water. The government, in mandating the attendance of the region’s children, began a project of forced settlement in a place that was seen as precarious from the outset. Mitchell maintains a history of Kivalina on a Web site, which references the oldest known written request for relocation. A teacher named Clinton S. Replogle wrote an official report in 1911: Kivalina “is very beautifully situated when the weather is nice and calm, but when the wind blows from the south it raises the water in the ocean until it sometimes almost comes over the banks. . . . We believe that to move would be the wiser if not the safer plan.”

The subject of relocation was raised again many times during the next century. In 1963, the tribe voted on the issue, and a split vote resulted in the community’s staying on the island. It was in the nineteen-seventies that the village’s wooden houses replaced the sod ones. There were other changes, too. Snow machines (as snowmobiles are known in Alaska) replaced dogsled teams. Outboard motorboats and Hondas (regional shorthand for the four-wheel A.T.V.s that everyone in Kivalina uses to get around) replaced skin boats. Stove oil replaced driftwood for heat. An airstrip, completed in 1960, connected Kivalina by air to the rest of Alaska and beyond. Electrification arrived in 1971.

Today, Mitchell works as the shareholder-relations coördinator in Kivalina for the nana Regional Corporation, which is owned by Inupiat shareholders who live or have roots in Northwest Alaska. The corporation was formed after the passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, in 1971, which ceded some forty million acres of land in Alaska to Native-owned corporations (in exchange for their relinquishing claims over the rest) and offered Native Alaskans a stake in the sale of oil and mineral leases on their land. The act gave Native Alaskans greater self-determination, but it also linked their economic w ell-being to the commercial exploitation of their lands.

by Emily Witt, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Ash Adams for The New Yorker
[ed. I usually skip over disaster travelogues (as I imagine them) but Ms. Witt is an excellent writer and captures well the lives and lifestyles of many people in Alaska's remote villages - the conflicts between traditional cultures, history, modernization, and powerless frustration. See also: Climate change from A to Z - the stories we tell ourselves about the future (New Yorker).]

Apocalypse Nowish

The sense of an ending 

I first read the Book of Revelation in a green pocket-size King James New Testament published by the motel missionaries Gideons International. I was in seventh grade. I remember reading the tiny Bible in the hallway outside my chemistry classroom, in which lurked a boy I loathed named Glenn, who would make fun of my Journey T-shirts. It would be years before I really got into Iron Maiden, but at my friend Jonathan’s house I’d heard Barry Clayton’s creepy recitation of Revelation 13:18 on the title track of The Number of the Beast: “Let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the beast: for it is a human number; its number is six hundred and sixty-six.”

I wanted to know what that was all about. My father was so dismissive of any form of religious thought that I was in second grade before I realized that some people believed in the devil, whom I had drawn for an art project. My teacher wouldn’t post my drawing on the wall with the others, on the grounds that it might offend Christian sensibilities, though it was a standard cartoonish red devil with horns, pitchfork, and pointy tail. I was nonplussed: surely Satan was a fictional character, like Santa Claus or Batman. (Of course he is, my dad explained that night, but not everyone realizes this.) (...)

Anyway, I thought Revelation was deranged, and I loved it. “And I heard a voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of a great thunder: and I heard the voice of harpers harping with their harps.” Its closing lines struck me then and still strike me as immeasurably moving: “He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”

In the decades following Jesus’ death, the apocalypse was believed to be so imminent that Paul felt he had to hurry, complaining that barely had he begun to spread the gospel in one place when another beckoned to him. In the first few centuries of the Christian era, the world was “a dark house full of war,” as Anthony the Great wrote from the desert, and heavy shit was being revealed to prophets all over the place. Some of it has been passed down in text, such as the Secret Book of John, to whom “a figure with several forms within the light” appeared to tell of “what is, what was, and what is to come, that you may understand what is invisible and what is visible; and to teach you about the unshakable race of perfect humankind.” (...)

I’ve been thinking about all this lately for obvious reasons. We live in a dark house full of war. Not that I anticipate the Christian eschaton—who needs divine revelation when you can google “more plastic than fish by 2050”? Nor have I been “black-pilled.” I didn’t ask to get “Eve of Destruction” stuck in my head. I desperately want us to get our shit together. We could build a free society that doesn’t view the planet as a profit engine. I just really doubt that we will. Climate disaster, economic collapse, war, resurgent fascism and nationalism, assaults on basic political freedoms, mass violence: all these mutually reinforcing in a sinister feedback loop, the structural stresses of capital’s death throes accelerating ecological catastrophe and exacerbating reactionary forces, which in turn further stress the structure. The collapse won’t be a single event, but a slide into what the world-systems analyst Giovanni Arrighi calls “systemic chaos.” Late-capitalist society is a coyote suspended above an abyss, believing he still stands on solid ground. We are in the interval before he notices he’s supported by thin air and plummets to the canyon floor. (...)

Today’s apocalyptic structure of feeling differs from its predecessors in that it is totally pessimistic. “Remain calm,” communist theorist Bifo Berardi advises readers. “Don’t be attached to life, and most of all: don’t have hope, that addictive poisonous weed.” Nuclear warheads may or may not fall from the skies. Ditto Jesus. But the planet will get hotter. Even in the most realistically optimistic scenario, coral reefs face complete die-off, sea levels rise, and entire species and ecosystems vanish. Extreme weather—storms, wildfires, floods, droughts—will become ever more commonplace. And of course it is the less optimistic scenarios that are more likely to come to pass. (...)

As a synecdoche for the tragedy of our historical moment, consider a news item about the murder of nineteen schoolchildren in Uvalde, Texas. One victim, ten-year-old Maite Rodriguez, was identifiable only by the green Converse sneakers she wore. She had drawn a heart on her right shoe. After the actor Matthew McConaughey, for some reason delivering a press briefing at the White House, made this detail known to the public, the shoes sold out as appalled consumers ordered them online.

It is impossible to understand a society whose response to the slaughter of children is to purchase green Converse sneakers as anything other than psychotic. It is impossible, I believe, to wish for such a society to continue—a society that is also bent on murdering as many other forms of life as possible, driving entire species extinct, rendering the planet uninhabitable. To say nothing of the millions of incarcerated souls, the hundreds of millions living in slums while the superrich eat like emperors on private jets. And on and on. No, “I always wanted this world ended,” as the communist Franco Fortini said.

Within the limits of history, there is no solution, whether we look to climate accords or philanthropic billionaires. Liberals stroll the fairylands of blue waves and Green New Deals or cling to the hope that science will save us, through geoengineering or nuclear power, carbon capture or magic beans. I think of Los, in Blake’s Jerusalem, “Striving with Systems to deliver Individuals from those Systems.” The crisis cannot be resolved from within the institutions that gave rise to the crisis.

by y Michael Robbins, Harper's | Read more:
Image: Kiss the Son (detail, center panel of triptych), by Nicora Gangi © The artist

The Many Complex Layers of the Monument to Crazy Horse

Of all the striking monuments you might encounter while driving an overstuffed minivan west across the United States, few leave quite as intense and complex an impression as the Crazy Horse Memorial — the vast unfinished carving of the Oglala Lakota warrior, whose face emerges as an 87-foot-high profile from the side of Thunderhead Mountain in the Black Hills, about 17 miles from Mount Rushmore.

Rushmore is complex in its own way, of course: a gleaming monument to the heroes of the American Republic, sunwashed by day and lit up in the twilight, that doubles as a darker monument to the Republic’s sins, set amid land held sacred by its native inhabitants that was promised to them by treaty and conquered unjustly soon thereafter.

But Rushmore’s duality still feels simpler than the layers of significance and controversy around the monument to Crazy Horse. The unfinishedness alone makes the project fascinating: At present it’s mostly just the face, an immense profile looming above a terraced-looking rock formation that’s supposed to become a charging horse. Depending on your perspective it can seem like a monument to persistent American ambition (in its final form it will be one of the largest statues in the world) or a symbol of our national sclerosis (since Rushmore was completed in about a decade-and-a-half and the Crazy Horse Memorial began in 1948 and has no clear completion date).

Then there is the question of what the statue actually memorializes. Is it an answer to the white presidential faces just a short (if winding) drive away, a symbol of Native American resilience and power? That’s how it was envisioned by the Lakota elder who originally commissioned it, and the complex of tourist enticements around the mountain is presented as a shrine to Native culture and tradition.

But the monument also feels, at certain moments, more like a shrine to its presiding genius, the Polish-American sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski — a figure of undoubted brilliance and a certain megalomania who died in 1982 and was buried in the tomb he built for himself at the base of the mountain. This left the (privately funded) project in the hands of a foundation steeped in Ziolkowski family influence — which means that when you pay your entrance fee, it’s the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation that gets the revenue, and when you drop some money on Native American jewelry in the gift shop, you’re funding a for-profit entity called Korczak’s Heritage, Inc.

Which in turn is just a layer atop the more fundamental question of whether this way of celebrating Indigenous heroism actually does appropriate honor to Crazy Horse or the Lakota way of life. In a rich 2019 New Yorker article on the memorial and its critics, Brooke Jarvis quotes Indigenous voices on both sides. On the one hand, people who love the monument’s scale and brazen counterpoint to Rushmore, the claim it makes on American history. On the other, people who consider it sacrilege to carve up sacred geography to honor a warrior who in his own life declined to be photographed and who asked to be buried in an unmarked grave.

You could distill this controversy to a still-simpler question: For its 21st-century future, what kind of power does Indigenous America want? Is it power within America as we have known it — the power to keep Crazy Horse (and Sitting Bull and Red Cloud and Chief Joseph and Sacagawea …) on the same list of American heroes as the Rushmore presidents, the power to draw crowds that rival any other great American tourist attraction, the power to interweave the Native story with stories of colonists and immigrants, the way this week’s vision of the crowded Pilgrim table tries to do?

Or is it fundamentally a different kind of power, a power against America as we have known it — a power of resistance rather than competition or integration, Indigenous Peoples’ Day against Columbus and all the other European discoverers, sustainability against industrial capitalism and its discontents? Is the Indigenous answer to Mount Rushmore a statue of Crazy Horse emerging at a gallop from a mountain, or just the mountains themselves, sacred and untouched? 

by Ross Douthat, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Simon Peter Groebner, via ZUMA Press

Successful Tool-Lending Libraries Force Us to Rethink What the Public Is Willing to Share

As the old saying goes, there’s a right tool for every job—but what happens when a sizable tree branch falls in someone’s driveway after a big storm and the person neither owns a chainsaw nor has the extra cash to rush off to purchase a new one? Or perhaps a student with a tiny apartment doesn’t have storage space for tools, and suddenly needs a drill to fix the sagging cabinet door in the kitchen but has never used one and doesn’t know how to.

For all of these moments when the right tool for the job is out of reach, there are lending libraries that have been springing up around the country, which supply more than just books.

According to a 2021 study by an alumna from San José State University (SJSU), tool libraries were first documented in the United States in the 1940s. These unique institutions lend devices such as power and hand tools, yard and garden implements, and even kitchen utensils to those in need of the right tool, but without the means to own or store them.

According to the San José State University study, more than 50 tool libraries were operating in the United States until May 2021. There was a boom in the number of tool lending libraries in the late 1970s with the establishment of these libraries in places such as Berkeley, California, which opened in 1979 with one staff member in a portable trailer, according to the study. After more than 40 years of evolution, the Berkeley Public Library’s (BPL) current tool lending library can now be accessed through BPL’s website.

The study, which compiled “news clippings, refereed articles, blog posts, and websites,” according to the author, pointed out that scholars of the subject traditionally thought that tool lending libraries sprang up in the late 1970s. However, earlier examples date further back to the 1940s when the public library in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, opened the first tool lending library. (...)

Today, the Grosse Pointe Public Library’s collection of tools includes more than 150 implements and devices ranging from bolt cutters to bird-watching binoculars, and even includes yard games such as bocce ball and croquet sets. All games, devices, and implements borrowed from the institution come with a how-to information pamphlet.

The local Rotary Club adopted the responsibility of maintaining and repairing a varied catalog of items, and still does so today. The study’s author stated that the survival and growth of the Grosse Pointe Public Library’s tool collection might not have been possible without the involvement of the Rotary Club, and that it was the only tool library in the country until the mid-1970s. (...)

The greatest increase in tool lending libraries in the United States came around 2008 during the Great Recession, according to the study, with institutions like the Sacramento Library of Things in California and the Chicago Tool Library in Illinois opening as part of this “tool-lending movement.” Another organization that provides tools to charitable groups instead of individuals, called ToolBank USA, was also established at that time in 2008. The study’s author credits advances in technology like cloud-based software to the continued boom in tool lending libraries across the United States. 

by Aric Sleeper, Naked Capitalism/Local Peace Economy | Read more:
Image: via

[ed. No way! What about those poor corporations that make these tools in the first place? Oh, that's right... they have other options (like making it impossible to repair your tools without paying more fees).]

John Mayer & Keith Urban

[ed. Guitar lesson here.]

The Pentagon Fails Its Fifth Audit in a Row

If the Defense Department can’t get its books straight, how can it be trusted with a budget of more than $800 billion per year?

---

Last week, the Department of Defense revealed that it had failed its fifth consecutive audit.

“I would not say that we flunked,” said DoD Comptroller Mike McCord, although his office did note that the Pentagon only managed to account for 39 percent of its $3.5 trillion in assets. “The process is important for us to do, and it is making us get better. It is not making us get better as fast as we want.”

The news came as no surprise to Pentagon watchers. After all, the U.S. military has the distinction of being the only U.S. government agency to have never passed a comprehensive audit. (...)

The Pentagon’s most famous recent boondoggle is the F-35 program, which has gone over its original budget by $165 billion to date. But examples of overruns abound: As Sens. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Jack Reed (D-RI) wrote in 2020, the lead vessel for every one of the Navy’s last eight combatant ships came in at least 10 percent over budget, leading to more than $8 billion in additional costs. (...)

Despite the long odds, a bipartisan group of lawmakers led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) proposed a bill last year that could help make that happen. The legislation would cut one percent off the top of the budget of any part of the Pentagon that fails an audit. That means that, if the proposal had already passed, 20 of the agency’s 27 auditing units would face a budget cut this year.

Unfortunately, momentum around that bill appears to have fizzled out, leaving the Pentagon’s accountants as the last line of defense. (...) That may coincide with another historical moment, according to Andrew Lautz of the National Taxpayers Union.

“[W]e could reach a $1 trillion defense budget five years sooner [than the CBO estimates], in 2027,” Lautz wrote.

by Connor Echols, Responsible Statecraft |  Read more:

Image: gualtiero boffi/shutterstock

[ed. One percent. Ouch! That's gonna hurt. Whenever someone starts complaining about tax and spend blah, blah, blah for unnecessary things like healthcare, social programs, infrastructure, or anything else that "we can't afford", this is what comes to mind.]

World Cup 2022: Capitalism Can’t Kill Football — Try As It Might

A week or so before the kickoff of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, I was walking in the coastal city of Zihuatanejo in Mexico’s southern Guerrero state when I passed a group of children playing football with a plastic Coca-Cola bottle. They were as gleefully animated as any group of children playing football anywhere, while the Coke bottle was, I thought, regrettably appropriate in a world governed by corporate toxicity.

It was particularly appropriate, perhaps, given that Coca-Cola and football go way back. The company, which has been an official World Cup sponsor since 1978, entered into a formal association with FIFA in 1974 – although its logo has saturated World Cup events since 1950. The partnership was initially ostensibly meant to promote youth development programmes, since there is clearly nothing better for youth development than ingesting sticky brown liquid that is bad for human health.

Of course, that alliance is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of global capitalism’s efforts to suck the soul out of football and eradicate any remnants of primordial joy by monetising and commodifying everything on and off the field. Given the deluge of corporate propaganda that we call “sponsorship”, the uninitiated football spectator would be forgiven for thinking Adidas was a football team – or that matches are waged between Emirates and Etihad airlines.

And there’s nothing like sponsoring football’s biggest competition to improve one’s international branding. Chinese firms have also caught on – they’re leading in spending for the Qatar World Cup.

In his book, El Fútbol a sol y sombra (Football in sun and shadow), first published in 1995, the renowned Uruguayan writer and die-hard football fan Eduardo Galeano remarked how every footballer had become an “advertisement in motion”- though not everyone was happy with that arrangement. In the mid-1950s, he recalled, when the prominent Montevideo club Peñarol had endeavoured to impose company advertising on its shirts, 10 members of the team had obediently taken to the field with the updated jerseys while Black player Obdulio Varela had declined: “They used to drag us Blacks around with rings in our noses. Those days are gone.”

To be sure, it’s never just fun and games when obscene quantities of money are involved. Take the case of Horst Dassler – the son of Adidas founder Adi Dassler, himself charmingly a former member of the Nazi Party – who in 1982 started a company called International Sports and Leisure, which promptly acquired exclusive marketing and TV rights to FIFA operations, including the World Cup. This was done by paying bribes to then-FIFA President João Havelange – the same Havelange who had graciously appeared alongside Argentine dictator Jorge Videla during the 1978 World Cup in Buenos Aires. (...)

But as the US well knows, corrupt self-enrichment and corporate impunity are business as usual in capitalism – which has also produced a “gentrification” of the sport itself, as researchers have shown. A study published by the Royal Society in December 2021 found that the “excessive monetisation of football” had led to increasing inequality between teams in major European leagues and a growing predictability of match outcomes. Even as those responsible for the sport’s governance claim to be globalising football, in reality, the process replicates the inequality endemic to corporate globalisation.

by Belén Fernández, Al Jazeera | Read more:
Image: Sorin Furcoi/Al Jazeera

[ed. Seen a NASCAR/Formula 1 race recently? See also: The eerily quiet $200 billion World Cup stadiums marooned in the Qatar desert (Daily Mail).]