Spring

Ray Morimura

Jerry Garcia, The Frets Interview, 1985

I spent the morning of Saturday, January 12, 1985, at a hotel in San Francisco, interviewing Yngwie Malmsteen, the extraordinary Swedish metal guitarist, for his first English-language cover story. As soon as that meeting was over, I switched cassettes in my tape recorder and headed over the Golden Gate Bridge to meet Grateful Dead spokesman Dennis McNally at a restaurant in San Rafael. Dennis led me to the home of a Grateful Dead supporter who, it turned out, was letting Jerry Garcia live in her basement. My mission: Interview Garcia for a cover story in Frets, a magazine devoted to acoustic music.

I’ve never been a Deadhead, but friends who are tell me that my meeting with Jerry took place during one of the lowest points of his life. Garcia, unwashed and disheveled, shuffled slowly into the living room, his black T-shirt sprinkled with white powder. His fingertips were blackened in a manner consistent with “chasing the dragon,” as smoking heroin was commonly referred to in the Bay Area. Ten minutes into our interview, Garcia nonchalantly chopped a large rock of cocaine into about twenty lines and consumed all of it during the next hour.

My pal Jon Sievert, who showed up midway through the interview to shoot photos, observes, “Jerry was probably at his absolute nadir at the time of the interview, as witnessed by his bust in Golden Gate Park six days later on January 18. In between the interview and the bust, the band and Mountain Girl staged an intervention, in which Jerry was told he had to choose between drugs and the band. In the few times I was around Garcia in a private setting, that was the only time I saw him openly snort coke. What I remember most, however, was how articulate he remained when talking about music. As you can tell by listening to the tapes, his enthusiasm never waned.”

I have to agree with Jon: Garcia was bright and articulate throughout the interview. In fact, he was fun to talk to. He laughed often and revealed far more about his creative process than most musicians could. Portions of our conversation were presented as the July ’85 Frets cover story, but the vast majority of this 10,000-word interview remained untranscribed until this blog. As he made his way across the living room and settled into a chair, Jerry smiled and began the conversation.

full article:

Pillow Fight

Harry Benson. Hotel George V, Paris, 1964.


The Beatles Pillow Fight: This was the night the Beatles found out that they made it to No. 1 in America and that they would be on the Ed Sullivan show. Harry had heard they had a pillow fight so when the other photographers left the room he suggested they have another one so he could capture it. John Lennon gave Harry a hard time, saying that was not a good idea and left the room. Two minutes later John came back swinging a pillow.

via:

5 Things You Never Knew Your Cell Phone Could Do

[ed. note.  A friend sent me this.  I don't use a cell phone and can't attest to the accuracy of these tips; still, they look like they might be pretty useful if they do work.  Easy to find out.] 

For all the folks with cell phones. (This should be printed and kept in your car, purse, and wallet. Good information to have with you.)  

There are a few things that can be done in times of grave emergencies.

Your mobile phone can actually be a life saver or an emergency tool for survival.

Check out the things that you can do with it:

FIRST (Emergency)
The Emergency Number worldwide for Mobile is 112. If you find yourself out of the coverage area of your mobile network and there is an Emergency, dial 112 and the mobile will search any existing network to establish the emergency number for you, and interestingly, this number 112 can be dialed even if the keypad is locked. Try it out.

SECOND (Locked keys in car)

Have you locked your keys in the car? Does your car have remote keyless entry? This may come in handy someday. Good reason to own a cell phone:

If you lock your keys In the car and the spare keys are at home, call someone at home on their cell phone from your cell phone. Hold your cell phone about a foot from your car door and have the person at your home press the unlock button, holding it near the mobile phone on their end. Your car will unlock. Saves someone from having to drive your keys to you. Distance is no object. You could be hundreds of miles away, and if you can reach someone who has the other 'remote' for your car, you can unlock the doors (or the trunk).

[ed. note. this is totally cool]

THIRD (Hidden battery power)
Imagine your cell battery is very low. To activate, press the keys *3370#. Your cell phone will restart with this reserve and the instrument will show a 50% increase in battery. This reserve will get charged when you charge your cell phone next time.

FOURTH (How to disable a stolen mobile phone)

To check your Mobile phone's serial number, key in the following Digits on your phone:

*#06#

A 15-digit code will appear on the screen. This number is unique to your handset. Write it down and keep it somewhere safe.

If your phone is stolen, you can phone your service provider and give them this code. They will then be able to block your handset so even if the thief changes the SIM card, your phone will be totally useless. You probably won't get your phone back, but at least you know that whoever stole it can't use/sell it either. If everybody does this, there would be no point in people stealing mobile phones.

and finally:

FIFTH (Free directory service for cells)
Cell phone companies are charging us $1.00 to $1.75 or more for 411 information calls when they don't have to. Most of us do not carry a telephone directory in our vehicle, which makes this situation even more of a problem. When you need to use the 411 information option, simply dial:

(800) FREE411 or (800) 373-3411

without incurring any charge at all. Program this into your cell phone now.

This is sponsored by McDonalds.

Schemes of My Father

Like most California dreamers, my East Coast dad tried to relocate—and reinvent—himself in the land of red-hot cars and eternal suntans. Too bad we all got burned.

 

I was 12 the first time I visited California, which as far as I was concerned was twelve years too late. I could barely sit still during the plane ride, thinking of all the girls I was going to have sex with once I became a Californian, the coolness that would drip from my every freckled pore. My father had recently moved to L.A. for the job of his dreams, and now my mom and I were flying out to visit him before returning to Baltimore to pack up the house and bid farewell to our lame eastern selves. I knew from my dad's tickled voice on the phone that something marvelous had happened to him and that it had to do with the money he was making or perhaps the warm ocean breeze ruffling his hair in the pictures he'd sent.

When he picked us up at the airport, I barely recognized him. He was wearing prescription sunglasses, some snazzy titanium numbers that said CARRERA on one lens, and his normally pink face was tanned from all the tennis he'd been playing. He had his shirt undone to the third button. Even his hair looked different: lighter and rakishly askew. He'd always been irresistible to me, but now I found him outright glamorous.

He drove us to the house he'd rented in Rolling Hills, a tony gated community perched above the cliffs of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. It was a beautiful summer day, and you could smell the salt air from the Pacific coming through the window. There was none of that Maryland mugginess that made you drip downstairs in the middle of the night and stick your head in the freezer. My siblings were all older than I was, getting ready to return to their boring eastern colleges, and I felt badly for them that they wouldn't be living out here with me in the land of endless summer.

I don't think I realized how rich we'd become until the moment we pulled up to the entrance of Rolling Hills and the man in the little guardhouse actually tipped his cap. The gate lifted, ushering us into someone's vision of paradise. By "someone's" I guess I mean my father's. There were horse trails and faux hacienda signs and old wagon wheels sitting in people's yards in islands of unmown grass, like the Hollywood back lot for some Waspy New England burg. And yet it was Californian through and through, the ranch-style homes as flat and gargantuan as UFOs. We slowed down to pass a group of horseback riders in skintight pants, and even the manure plopping from their horses seemed expensive to me, better smelling than the dogshit smearing our sidewalk in Baltimore.

Eventually we pulled into the driveway of our house. I got out of the car and was greeted by an enormous bird with a sapphire neck and a tail as long as a surfboard. It peered at me nonchalantly for a minute and then dragged itself into the bushes.

"Was that a peacock?" I asked.

"A wild one," my father said. "They're everywhere around here."

There was pride in his face, a touch of giddiness. He grinned, and I don't remember having seen my father look so happy before. My mom and I couldn't help grinning back. It was like he'd cooked this all up especially for us—the peacocks, the ocean breeze, the rolling-in-it hills. We were Californians now, a part of his dream.

full article:

Haupia

We trip over haupia so easily in Hawaii, it's easy to forget what a distinctive dessert it is.

Technically, haupia is coconut pudding, but it has the firmness and slice-ability of gelatin. This, plus its cool, clean taste, makes it a natural palate-cleanser after a heavy Hawaiian meal.

Two recipes follow.  The first is the usual approach to haupia, using coconut milk and cornstarch. The second is billed as an "easy haupia," using gelatin to firm up the milk.

Both cook up light, sweet and refreshing, but with different textures. The first is creamy and would make a nice filling for a cream puff; the second is more like Jell-O and would work cubed and served with fruit like a Chinese almond float.

[ed. note. Can also be used to make macadamia/haupia torts and chocolate/haupia pie]

Traditional

3 cups coconut milk
1/2 cup sugar
Dash salt
1/2 cup cornstarch

Combine coconut milk with sugar and salt over medium heat in a saucepan. Slowly add cornstarch while stirring. Continue to cook and stir until thickened, making sure to scrape the bottom of the pan to prevent burning. Pour into an ungreased 9-inch square pan. Cool slightly, then refrigerate until chilled and firm, about 1 hour.


Easy Haupia

1 13.5-ounce can coconut milk
3/4 cup sugar
3 envelopes unflavored gelatin
1/2 cup water
1 cup milk

Combine coconut milk and sugar in a pan and stir over low heat until sugar dissolves.

Sprinkle gelatin over water and let stand 1 minute.

Add gelatin mixture and milk to the coconut milk. Cook, stirring, until gelatin dissolves. Pour into an ungreased 8-inch square pan. Refrigerate until firm, about 2 hours.

via:

I Fought the Sea Killer

Mort Kunstler:  I Fought the Sea Killer, Adventure Magazine, 1956.

Late for the Sky

Late for the Sky

All the words had all been spoken,
Somehow the feeling still wasn't right
And still we continued on through the night.
Tracing our steps from the beginning,
Until they vanished into the air
Trying to understand how our lives had led us there.
Looking hard into your eyes
There was nobody I'd ever known
Such an empty suprise
To feel so alone.

Now, for me, some words come easy
But I know that they don't mean that much
Compared with the things that are said when lovers touch.
You never knew what I loved in you
I don't know what you loved in me.
Maybe the picture of somebody you were hoping I might be.

Awake again, I can't pretend
That I know I'm alone,
And close to the end
Of the feeling we've known.
How long have I been sleeping?
How long have I been drifting along through the night?
How long have I been dreaming I could make it right,
If I closed my eyes and tried with all my might,
To be the one you need?

Awake again, I can't pretend
That I know I'm alone,
And close to the end
Of the feeling we've known.
How long have I been sleeping?
How long have I been drifting along through the night?
How long have I been running for that morning flight
Through the whispered promises, and the changing light
Of the bed where we both lie,
Late for the sky.

One of the great albums of 2010:

Nobu and Charlie

photo: markk

Patricia Barber - Winter

Secret Fears of the Super-Rich

[ed. note. Yang to the previous post's Yin.  I'm pretty sure I'd still take rich and melancholy over struggling and desperate]

Does great wealth bring fulfillment? An ambitious study by Boston College suggests not. For the first time, researchers prompted the very rich—people with fortunes in excess of $25 million—to speak candidly about their lives. The result is a suprising litany of anxieties: their sense of isolation, their worries about work and love, and most of all, their fears for their children.

By Graeme Wood

The October 2008 issue of SuperYacht World confirmed it: money cannot buy happiness. Page 38 of “the international magazine for superyachts of distinction”—if you have to ask what it takes for a yacht to qualify as “super,” you can’t afford to be in the showroom—presented the Martha Ann, a 230-foot, $125 million boat boasting a crew of 20, a master bedroom the size of my house, and an interior gaudy enough to make Saddam Hussein blush. The feature story on the Martha Ann was published just as the S&P 500 suffered its worst week since 1933, shedding $1.4 trillion over the course of the week, or about 2,240 Martha Anns every day. Still, one of the captions accompanying the lavish photos betrayed the status anxiety that afflicts even the highest echelons of wealth. “From these LOFTY HEIGHTS,” the caption promised, “guests will be able to look down on virtually any other yacht.” Virtually any other yacht! One imagines the prospective owner wincing at this disclaimer, pained by the knowledge that the world would still contain superyachts more super than his own, that at least one gazillionaire in Saint-Tropez harbor would likely be able to peer over his gunwales and down at the Martha Ann.

The lesson that Mammon is a false or inadequate god goes back a long way, and a glossy spread in SuperYacht World is just one place to relearn it. Another is Boston College’s Center on Wealth and Philanthropy, which since 1970 has minted a diverse array of studies of the wealthy. For four years, the Gates Foundation has supported an effort by the center to determine exactly how the American wealthy think and live—and in particular how, when, and to what degree they make the shift from accumulating fortunes to giving them away philanthropically. (The John Templeton Foundation, which is concerned with spiritual matters, kicked in additional funding to study correlations between wealth, philanthropy, and religion.) The project has produced one of the most remarkable documents in the center’s history: a survey that invited the very rich to write freely about how prosperity has shaped their lives and those of their children. From the anonymity of their home computers, the respondents wrote anything from a few words to a few pages, volunteering not only their net worth and sources of wealth but also their innermost hopes, fears, and anxieties. 

The responses, which run to 500 pages and fill three plastic binders on the fifth floor of Boston College’s McGuinn Hall, constitute what the center’s director, the sociologist Paul G. Schervish, calls “an extraordinary sample of confession, memoir, and apologia” from the super-rich. (The researchers admit that this sample is not representative, being inevitably skewed toward those wealthy people who are willing to offer their confessions to a computer screen.) Roughly 165 households responded, 120 of which have at least $25 million in assets. The respondents’ average net worth is $78 million, and two report being billionaires. The goal, say the survey’s architects, was to weed out all but those at or approaching complete financial security. Most of the survey’s respondents are wealthy enough to ensure that in any catastrophe short of Armageddon, they will still be dining on Chateaubriand while the rest of us are spit-roasting rats over trash-can fires.

The results of the study are not yet public, but The Atlantic was granted access to portions of the research, provided the anonymity of the subjects was strictly maintained. The center expects to present the full conclusions gradually at upcoming conferences and to publish them over the next several months. The study is titled “The Joys and Dilemmas of Wealth,” but given that the joys tend to be self-evident, it focuses primarily on the dilemmas. The respondents turn out to be a generally dissatisfied lot, whose money has contributed to deep anxieties involving love, work, and family. Indeed, they are frequently dissatisfied even with their sizable fortunes. Most of them still do not consider themselves financially secure; for that, they say, they would require on average one-quarter more wealth than they currently possess. (Remember: this is a population with assets in the tens of millions of dollars and above.) One respondent, the heir to an enormous fortune, says that what matters most to him is his Christianity, and that his greatest aspiration is “to love the Lord, my family, and my friends.” He also reports that he wouldn’t feel financially secure until he had $1 billion in the bank.

Such complaints sound, on their face, preposterous. But just as the human body didn’t evolve to deal well with today’s easy access to abundant fat and sugars, and will crave an extra cheeseburger when it shouldn’t, the human mind, apparently, didn’t evolve to deal with excess money, and will desire more long after wealth has become a burden rather than a comfort. A vast body of psychological evidence shows that the pleasures of consumption wear off through time and depend heavily on one’s frame of reference. Most of us, for instance, occasionally spoil ourselves with outbursts of deliberate and perhaps excessive consumption: a fancy spa treatment, dinner at an expensive restaurant, a shopping spree. In the case of the very wealthy, such forms of consumption can become so commonplace as to lose all psychological benefit: constant luxury is, in a sense, no luxury at all.

Taken together, the survey responses make a compelling case that being fantastically wealthy—especially when the wealth is inherited rather than earned—is not a great deal more fulfilling than being merely prosperous. Among other woes, the survey respondents report feeling that they have lost the right to complain about anything, for fear of sounding—or being—ungrateful. Those with children worry that their children will become trust-fund brats if their inheritances are too large—or will be forever resentful if those inheritances (or parts of them) are instead bequeathed to charity. The respondents also confide that they feel their outside relationships have been altered by, and have in some cases become contingent on, their wealth. “Very few people know the level of my wealth, and if they did, in most cases I believe it would change our relationship,” writes one respondent. Another notes, “I start to wonder how many people we know would cut us off if they didn’t think they could get something from us.” Robert A. Kenny, who has trained as a psychologist and is one of the survey’s architects, says that extreme wealth can take away some of the basic joys of living—for instance, that some wealthy people don’t look forward to the holidays, “because they were always expected to give really good presents.” When you’re a millionaire, Kenny says, expensive gifts merely meet expectations. That was a pretty good present, the recipients might respond. But last year, you gave me a car.

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Older Union Member's Fears

Workers face broad assaults

He is worried, he says, about a lot: the future of the bankrupt supermarket chain he works for, the midcareer colleagues who feel trapped and hopeless, and anyone, really, who strives for a middle-class life anymore.

He's been stocking shelves and moving groceries through the checkout line for the same Philadelphia-area chain since the Vietnam War. It's how he put a child through college, bought a $28,000 rowhouse, and pays for the occasional movie when he and his wife go out for a treat.

He is reluctant to have his name published in The Inquirer, even though he belongs to a union. Partly, it seems, because he belongs to a union. And partly because it feels like a scary time to be a worker in this country at all - union or not.

"I'm afraid I'd be retaliated against," he says, in a tone so evenhanded, so unassuming, that during the first, the second, and even the third time we talked, it was hard to resist wanting to hear more from him.

When reader and reporter finally met after two years of occasional phone chats, the blogosphere, and the so-called cable-news pundits were bloviating about assaults by Republican governors against public-sector unions in Wisconsin, New Jersey, and elsewhere. (Time will tell whether this remains an exclusively Republican pursuit.)

Against all the raucous blah-blah-blahs, his middle-of-the-road wisdom was humbling.

His thoughts are like the unvarnished dispatches of a soldier on the front lines of a lost war. Some people might find his plain-and-simpleness jarring as it portrays an American dream gone off the rails.

Decide for yourselves.

"The anxiety is tremendous," he says. Fellow employees of the bankrupt A&P chain are worried they'll be out of a job soon and unable to find decent-paying new ones, given that many supermarkets now hire mostly part-timers at wages too low to support a household. Full-time positions at his company are going unfilled, as part-timers come in.

"I don't want to come across as a griper. I have a good life," he says. Paid about $19 an hour and in line for a modest pension if he retires in the next few years, he counts himself among the luckier people in the retail sector, which accounted for more than one in 10 U.S. jobs in February.

And yet, he says of his pension, "we would still starve on that." He is putting off retirement because health benefits for him and his wife will cost $10,000 a year - more than a third of the $27,000 in Social Security and pension payments he expects. "I got a gas bill for $240, you've got the phone, you've got the Internet, you've got Comcast, you've got real estate taxes: $2,400." The math is troubling.

"If I can get you to pay me more by contract, that's capitalism. It works," he says of the basic concept of collective bargaining, the foundation of labor unions. But curiously, the tenet is under siege in states being governed by some newly elected Republicans.

"I think the governor just whooped them bad today," he says of Ohio, where GOP lawmakers last week backed a bill to ban strikes and curb bargaining by unionized state workers. This followed street protests in Wisconsin, where that state's Republican governor launched a similar assault weeks earlier, and came as strife continued between New Jersey's Gov. Christie and teachers.

"I don't make enough money to buy my house today," he says. Even his union wage falls short in the current economy. Homes in his neighborhood sell for about $180,000 - too high even for the $19-an-hour full-time rate he's worked up to through the decades.

"The younger ones, I'm saying, 'Go back to school and learn something.' . . . The people that are caught in their late 30s and early 40s, they feel really trapped," he says. "They just can't make that leap." He feels for midcareer workers who have 15 or 20 years with the company and feel too invested to leave. With young kids at home, they fear starting somewhere else at lower wages.

"We're not martyrs. We chose to do this," he says. Here, he insists on playing the devil's advocate with his own thoughts. "I wanna smack myself in the head." Why? He dropped out of college and never went back. "I could have gone back to school a million times and gotten a degree." He tells today's young workers to go to college - for their own good.

It's interesting, he says, how some people think nothing of beating up on unions: "How one group of workers is always annoyed at how somebody else got a raise - instead of aspiring to do the same." But up close, he says, they all have something in common, and it's the one thing he believes is truly threatened by the changing U.S. economy and the harsh winds of political opportunism:

"There's a million of us, and unfortunately, we're the core of this whole country. When you attack the middle class, which is what I think is happening," he says, it's attacking "what this country is all about."

via:

Four Boys

photo: markk

Mind vs. Machine

In the race to build computers that can think like humans, the proving ground is the Turing Test—an annual battle between the world’s most advanced artificial-intelligence programs and ordinary people. The objective? To find out whether a computer can act “more human” than a person. In his own quest to beat the machines, the author discovers that the march of technology isn’t just changing how we live, it’s raising new questions about what it means to be human.

Brighton, England, September 2009. I wake up in a hotel room 5,000 miles from my home in Seattle. After breakfast, I step out into the salty air and walk the coastline of the country that invented my language, though I find I can’t understand a good portion of the signs I pass on my way—LET AGREED, one says, prominently, in large print, and it means nothing to me.

I pause, and stare dumbly at the sea for a moment, parsing and reparsing the sign. Normally these kinds of linguistic curiosities and cultural gaps intrigue me; today, though, they are mostly a cause for concern. In two hours, I will sit down at a computer and have a series of five-minute instant-message chats with several strangers. At the other end of these chats will be a psychologist, a linguist, a computer scientist, and the host of a popular British technology show. Together they form a judging panel, evaluating my ability to do one of the strangest things I’ve ever been asked to do.

I must convince them that I’m human.

Fortunately, I am human; unfortunately, it’s not clear how much that will help. 

The Turing Test

Each year for the past two decades, the artificial-intelligence community has convened for the field’s most anticipated and controversial event—a meeting to confer the Loebner Prize on the winner of a competition called the Turing Test. The test is named for the British mathematician Alan Turing, one of the founders of computer science, who in 1950 attempted to answer one of the field’s earliest questions: can machines think? That is, would it ever be possible to construct a computer so sophisticated that it could actually be said to be thinking, to be intelligent, to have a mind? And if indeed there were, someday, such a machine: how would we know?

Instead of debating this question on purely theoretical grounds, Turing proposed an experiment. Several judges each pose questions, via computer terminal, to several pairs of unseen correspondents, one a human “confederate,” the other a computer program, and attempt to discern which is which. The dialogue can range from small talk to trivia questions, from celebrity gossip to heavy-duty philosophy—the whole gamut of human conversation. Turing predicted that by the year 2000, computers would be able to fool 30 percent of human judges after five minutes of conversation, and that as a result, one would “be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.”

Turing’s prediction has not come to pass; however, at the 2008 contest, the top-scoring computer program missed that mark by just a single vote. When I read the news, I realized instantly that the 2009 test in Brighton could be the decisive one. I’d never attended the event, but I felt I had to go—and not just as a spectator, but as part of the human defense. A steely voice had risen up inside me, seemingly out of nowhere: Not on my watch. I determined to become a confederate.

The thought of going head-to-head (head-to-motherboard?) against some of the world’s top AI programs filled me with a romantic notion that, as a confederate, I would be defending the human race, à la Garry Kasparov’s chess match against Deep Blue.

During the competition, each of four judges will type a conversation with one of us for five minutes, then the other, and then will have 10 minutes to reflect and decide which one is the human. Judges will also rank all the contestants—this is used in part as a tiebreaking measure. The computer program receiving the most votes and highest ranking from the judges (regardless of whether it passes the Turing Test by fooling 30 percent of them) is awarded the title of the Most Human Computer. It is this title that the research teams are all gunning for, the one with the cash prize (usually $3,000), the one with which most everyone involved in the contest is principally concerned. But there is also, intriguingly, another title, one given to the confederate who is most convincing: the Most Human Human award.

full article:

Huxley vs. Orwell

VS.

Illustrative Guide inspired by a chapter from Neil Postman's classic: Amusing Ourselves to Death, Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.

Revolt of the Elites

Has any concept more completely defined and disfigured public life over the last generation than so-called elitism? Ever since Richard Nixon’s speechwriters pitted a silent majority (later sometimes “the real America”) against the nattering nabobs of negativism (later “tenured radicals,” the “cultural elite,” and so on), American political, aesthetic, and intellectual experience can only be glimpsed through a thickening fog of culture war. And the fog, very often, has swirled around a single disreputable term.

The first thing to note is the migration of the word elite and its cognates away from politics proper and into culture. Today “the cultural elite” is almost a redundancy — the culture part is implied — while nobody talks anymore about what C. Wright Mills in 1956 called “the power elite.” Mills glanced at journalists and academics, but the main elements of the elite, in his sense, were not chatterers and scribblers but (as George W. Bush might have put it) deciders: generals, national politicians, corporate boards. “Insofar as national events are decided,” Mills wrote, “the power elite are those who decide them.” The pejorative connotations of “elite” have remained fairly stable across the decades. The word suggests a group of important individuals who have come by their roles through social position as much as merit; who place their own self-maintenance as an elite and the interests of the social class they represent above the interests and judgments of the population at large; and who look down on ordinary people as inferiors. Today, though, it’s the bearers of culture rather than the wielders of power who are taxed with elitism. If the term is applied to powerful people, this is strictly for cultural reasons, as the different reputations of the identically powerful Obama and Bush attest. No one would think to call a foul-mouthed four-star general an elitist, even though he commands an army, any more than the term would cover a private equity titan who hires Rod Stewart to serenade his 60th birthday party. Culture, not power, determines who attracts the epithet.

There are two opposed explanations for this situation. One would be that access to political, economic, and military power is today more meritocratic and open than access to filmmaking, humanistic academia, freelance writing, wine criticism, and so on. Do people no longer complain about the power elite because those with power are no longer elitist? Culture, in that case, would constitute a last vestige of unearned prestige in an otherwise democratically constituted society. The other explanation would be that it simply goes without saying these days that the materially consequential areas of life are lorded over by self-recruiting elites. You wouldn’t speak of a business elite, a governing elite, or a firepower elite because, now, that would be redundant. Complaints about cultural elitism would then be merely a sign that in the world of culture (unlike that of power) there is still an ongoing contest between elitism and equality that in all other realms has already been decided. By the deciders.

read more:

America's First National Aquaculture Policy Is Born

 

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has proposed the nation's first aquaculture policy, which it says it did in response to consumer demand for local, safe, sustainably produced seafood (FoodNavigator.com has a good summary).

Ah yes. Seafood. The wild west of the food industry. Safe and sustainable sounds good, but the statistics are not reassuring.

As NOAA explains, U.S. aquaculture - meaning farmed - currently only accounts for about 5% of our seafood. Get this: an astonishing 84% of U.S. seafood is imported. Of this, half is farmed.

Worldwide, farmed seafood exceeded catches of wild seafood for the first time in 2009.

NOAA guesses that with wild fish stocks depleting rapidly, we will see plenty more fish and shellfish farming.

NOAA quotes the depressing Food and Agriculture Organization report on world fisheries and aquaculture. This says that worldwide per capita fish availability is about 17 kg per year, and supplies more than 3 billion people with at least 15% of their average animal protein intake. No wild fish stock can keep up with that kind of demand.

NOAA's yawn-inducing recommendations (edited):

• Enable sustainable aquaculture...in harmony with healthy, productive, and resilient marine ecosystems

• Ensure agency decisions to protect wild species and coastal and ocean ecosystems

• Advance scientific knowledge concerning sustainable aquaculture Make timely and unbiased aquaculture management decisions

• Support aquaculture innovation and investments that benefit the nation's coastal ecosystems, communities, seafood consumers, industry, and economy.

• Advance public understanding of sustainable aquaculture practices

• Work with our federal partners to provide resources and expertise needed to address aquaculture challenges

• Work internationally to learn from aquaculture practices around the world

It's going to take a lot more than that to fix the fish situation.

Article: 

[ed. note:  the NOAA document (.pdf) is worth reading just to marvel at its mind-numbing blandness on an issue of immediate economic and environmental importance. Some good contextural information is still provided.]

Politics 101

Algorithm Revolution

Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software

[ed note.  I've long suspected that professions relying on specialized expertise to sell a product or service will become mostly obsolete when technology or the internet advances far enough.  Think doctors, lawyers, accountants, insurance agents, financial advisors, realtors and other professions that require a detailed knowledge of information now residing in large, distributed databases.  When was the last time you used a travel agent?  Or a librarian?  The most lucrative careers in the future may well be those that focus on specialized manual skills: plumbers, electricians, carpenters and mechanics, for which there is no substitute for human involvement].

When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of “discovery” — providing documents relevant to a lawsuit — the studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million, much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates.

But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.

Some programs go beyond just finding documents with relevant terms at computer speeds. They can extract relevant concepts — like documents relevant to social protest in the Middle East — even in the absence of specific terms, and deduce patterns of behavior that would have eluded lawyers examining millions of documents.

“From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,” said Bill Herr, who as a lawyer at a major chemical company used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. “People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t.”

Computers are getting better at mimicking human reasoning — as viewers of “Jeopardy!” found out when they saw Watson beat its human opponents — and they are claiming work once done by people in high-paying professions. The number of computer chip designers, for example, has largely stagnated because powerful software programs replace the work once done by legions of logic designers and draftsmen.
Software is also making its way into tasks that were the exclusive province of human decision makers, like loan and mortgage officers and tax accountants.

These new forms of automation have renewed the debate over the economic consequences of technological progress.

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