BTU

When it comes to safely transporting an infant or toddler in a car there are hundreds of elaborately designed car seats to choose from. But when it comes to safely getting a trio of newborn growler bottles home from a brewery, you're expected to just toss them in you trunk and hope for the best. Well thanks to the Growler On Board, that's no longer the case.

Also referred to as the Beer Transport Unit—or BTU for short—the koozie-like foam support holds up to three bottles in a vertical orientation so there's less risk of them bouncing around, colliding with each other, or spilling. And while the $30 BTU is just as effective when placed on the floor or in the trunk of your car, for maximum safety you can even buckle it into the front seat so there's absolutely no risk of anything happening to your bottles. After all, you'd never think of throwing your kids in the trunk, would you? So why would you put your even more fragile microbrews at risk?

by Andrew Liszewski, Gizmodo |  Read more:

Lan-Chiann Wu
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Neil Young Comes Clean

Young has routinely fled success, severed profitable musical partnerships, dumped finished records and withdrawn when it was precisely the moment to cash in. He is a person who will never leave well enough alone. “Sometimes a smooth process heralds the approach of atrophy or death,” he writes in “Waging Heavy Peace.”

Doing as he pleases has worked out pretty well for him. As a young musician torn between the crunch of the Rolling Stones and the lyricism of Bob Dylan, he avoided the fork altogether and forged his own path. Over the course of more than 40 records and hundreds of performances that date to the mid-’60s, he has backed Rick James, jammed with Willie Nelson, dressed up with Devo, rocked with Pearl Jam and traded licks with Dylan. Some of it has been terrible, much of it remarkable. He has made movies by himself and with Jim Jarmusch and Jonathan Demme. He called out Richard Nixon, praised Ronald Reagan and made fun of the second Bush. And he has little interest in how all of that was received. “I didn’t care and still don’t,” he said, then went on: “I experimented, I tried things, I learned things, I know more about all of that than I did before.”

His longtime manager and friend Elliot Roberts describes Young as “always willing to roll the dice and lose” and says: “He has no problem with failure as long as he is doing work he is happy with. Whether it ends up as a win or loss on a consumer level is not as much of an interest to him as one might think.” (...)

Two nights before, at the Outside Lands festival in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, Young headlined with Crazy Horse, their sixth performance this year after going the better part of a decade without playing together. Beck went on before them and covered “After the Gold Rush,” and Foo Fighters followed, with Dave Grohl mentioning that the sooner he got done, the sooner they’d all get to hear Young play. (He stood at the side of the stage afterward for Young’s entire set.)

The youthful festival crowd wore little more than tattoos on this damp summer night. Young and Crazy Horse took the stage looking like the Friday-night band at the local V.F.W.: big shirts, work boots and hair gone gray or just gone. Given the growing chill and a restless crowd, it would have made sense to begin with a song reminding the audience that a Big Deal Rock Star was at work.

Instead, the band kicked into “Love and Only Love,” a remarkable song from Young’s 1990 album with Crazy Horse, “Ragged Glory,” but hardly a singalong. It lasted 14 minutes, with Young shredding huge reams of noise and mixing it up with his fellow guitarist Frank (Poncho) Sampedro. Seeing them play was like watching an ancient steam shovel unfurl, claw the night air and dig in. “We thought it was important to introduce ourselves, to remind people what Crazy Horse is all about,” Sampedro said later.

Young, who has never been a graceful stage presence, lurched to the front. He is old — he began playing in this town more than 40 years ago — and bent over his guitar, but he is not old and bent. Young has never been physically whole, but that brokenness has annealed rather than slowed him. He is anything but a frail man when he has a guitar in his hand. (...)

The band’s music with Young is built around a long-running sibling argument between Young and Old Black, his painted-over Gibson Les Paul guitar. Young, born in 1945, is the older brother to Old Black, made in 1952. Through the years, Old Black has been souped up, tweaked and rebuilt, but it has never been replaced as his musical partner. When he plays it, he often looks and sounds furious. (In explaining the equanimity that characterizes his book, he writes: “Sometimes it’s better not to blow up at someone. I can save that anger and emotion for my guitar playing.”)

Young can plink out a song on a piano, and play harmonica when it serves, but he has an intimate, if savage, relationship with his guitars. “If you wanna write a song, ask a guitar,” he said to Patti Smith onstage at a book convention earlier this year to promote “Waging Heavy Peace.”

He played that night as if he were mad at Old Black, even if he smiled into the squall. The crowd remained enthralled as he tortured a single note with the whammy bar, although this kind of indulgence has worn out some of his other playing partners. “We’ve played that note, can we move on, Neil?” Stephen Stills says with a laugh over the phone as he recalls playing with Young.

The guitar owned the night, but the secret to Young’s durability is his voice, a nasal-inflected borderline whine that was never a luxurious instrument, but remains intact. He sounded as he always did, yelling the chorus to “Powderfinger” or plaintively singing “The Needle and the Damage Done.” (...)

Tonight, he was feeling playful, telling the crowd, “I wrote this one this morning,” before starting into “Cinnamon Girl,” one of a trilogy of songs, which also includes “Cowgirl in the Sand” and “Down by the River,” that he wrote in a single-day fever back in 1968. Later, he stepped to the mike and introduced a new song by saying: “We can’t help ourselves, we’re trained like chimps. They trained us to write songs, and we don’t know how to stop.”

by David Carr, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Rolling Stone

Romance, the Quirky Souvenir

This summer, during a conference in Berlin, a fellow attendee told me about the kind of summer love that arises in his profession.

He was a military officer who had been posted in Europe, and not infrequently a soldier would come back from a furlough in Croatia confessing he had fallen in love with a stripper. Not in lust, in love, the soldier would insist, and he wanted to marry her.

A fellow officer had developed a question to test the depth of a young man’s passion, though the officers still rolled their eyes at the idea that enduring love could be born in a pole-dancing joint in Dubrovnik.

“Do you know her parents’ names?” he would ask his love-struck charge. “If not, you can’t marry her.”

I laughed. Not because the soldier’s feelings were ridiculous, but because they were so recognizable.

I’ve always fallen in love on vacation. Who hasn’t? There’s a distinctive intensity to vacation romances. The object of our affection rises from the crowd like fireworks, simultaneously illuminating the unfamiliar landscape of our travels and obliterating its interest.

Why do we fall so hard on vacation? I have my theories.

The first is that the vacation, as a setting, imbues a crush with a heightened sense of meaning. Although conventional wisdom says we have flings on vacation because they won’t have to mean anything, this couldn’t be more wrong. We have flings on vacation because they seem to mean everything.

You know the feeling, when away, that the new and magical environment you are in is trying to send you a message about how to live? A week in Paris reiterates the power of great food; a month in Joshua Tree National Park admonishes you to wedge time out of your work flow for the contemplative and the holy.

We’re primed, on vacation, to recognize such messages in what we see, hear and eat, and in the people we meet. These strangers often seem to carry important information about what is valuable in life, and this makes them incredibly alluring.

by Eve Fairbanks, NY Times |  Read more:

Illustration: Brian Rea 

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The Honor System

On or about March 15 of this year, Teller — the smaller, quieter half of the magicians Penn & Teller — says he received an e-mail from a friend in New York. In that e-mail, the friend included a link to a video on YouTube called the Rose & Her Shadow. Teller, sitting at his computer in his Las Vegas home, within eyeshot of a large black escape cross once owned by Houdini, clicked on the link. The video lasted one minute and fifty-one seconds. "I had what I can only describe as a visceral reaction to it," Teller says today.

The video was posted by a magician who works under the stage name Gerard Bakardy; his real name is apparently Gerard Dogge. (Bakardy, a fifty-five-year-old Dutch national born in Belgium, is more than a magician; he prefers the title entertainer, because he's a musician, too. Along with his blond partner, Nadia, he was, until recently, part of a lounge act called Los Dos de Amberes, the Two from Antwerp, booked mostly in the resort of Fuerteventura on the Canary Islands off Spain. "A lovely way to spend an evening," they said in online advertisements that have since disappeared.) Leaning into his computer screen, Teller watched Bakardy perform some kind of trick.

Against a crimson curtain, Bakardy had erected an easel with what looked like a large pad of white paper on it. Perhaps six feet in front of the easel sat a small wood table bearing a glass Coke bottle filled with water. That bottle also contained a single rose. A spotlight, outside of the camera's view, cast the rose's shadow on the paper on the easel. Dressed in a dark suit, Bakardy appeared in the frame carrying a large knife in his right hand. He sliced it deep into the rose's shadow. And when he cut into its shadow, something impossible happened: The corresponding part of the rose fell off the stem and onto the table. Petal by petal, Bakardy cut at the rose's shadow until that Coke bottle somehow held only a decapitated stem, which he removed as though to demonstrate the absence of wires. He then lifted up the bottle itself — still no strings attached — and poured out the water. Ta-da.

The video ended with Bakardy's e-mail address and an offer to sell the props necessary for the Rose & Her Shadow for what turned out to be 2,450 euros, or about $3,050 at the time. In bold white type across the bottom of the screen, Bakardy left a final message for his fellow magicians, including a dumbstruck Teller: EASY TO PERFORM.

On or about March 22 of this year, Teller called Gerard Bakardy. They would talk many times on the phone, Teller says, and they would also exchange e-mails. Teller told Bakardy that the Rose & Her Shadow looked a little too much like a trick of his own called Shadows that he conceived when he was a teenager and has performed at nearly every one of his shows since 1975. If you saw Bakardy's version and only it, you would think that it was very good. To paraphrase Penn, it would be like hearing the Byrds play "Mr. Tambourine Man." Watching Teller performing Shadows is like hearing Dylan. (...)

Shadows is the most elusive sort of trick, beautiful and mystifying. It's also particularly ripe for theft, because it's small and self-contained. Penn's solo tricks might involve nail guns or fire eating, and together, Penn & Teller shoot pistols and risk asphyxiating each other inside giant bags of helium. But in Teller's solo tricks, in his silent, lonely tricks, the only props might be a red ball or a single rose in a vase and a knife. When Teller is just Teller — he has legally dropped his given name, Raymond, as needless clutter — his tricks are stripped down to their glowing white cores. (...)

Until Bakardy came along, Teller had never needed his copyright filings to stake a claim. "It's not like good manners and generosity are inappropriate ways to behave in the world," he says. When he has contacted light-fingered magicians in the past, they have always apologized and stopped performing the trick. For instance, he does a trick in which he spills handfuls of coins into a tank filled with water, and they somehow turn into living, breathing goldfish. It's a throat-catching effect, and a magician in Sweden, who had seen Teller performing the trick on TV, studied the tape and finally lifted it. After Teller called him, the magician said sorry, boxed up his props in a crate, minus the fish, and shipped them to Las Vegas.

This time around, Teller offered to pay Gerard Bakardy several thousand dollars for the time he spent working on the Rose & Her Shadow. He had to promise only that he would stop performing and selling the trick. Bakardy, after asking whether Teller might help him bring Los Dos de Amberes to America, countered with a higher price. No one will confirm exactly what that amount was, but it was allegedly more than $100,000. "It really wasn't possible for me to come to any terms," Teller says. "It ended up having certain elements that reminded me of a kidnapping."

Teller, who had already persuaded YouTube to take down the offending video, asked Bakardy whether his demands were firm. Bakardy said they were.

Teller had a decision to make.

by Chris Jones, Esquire | Read more:

Photo: Peter Yang

Storied TV: Cable Is the New Novel

In 1973, Tom Wolfe, nattily dressed ringleader-theoretician of the New Journalism, declared that his uppity oeuvre had bumped off "the novel as the number one literary genre, starting the first new direction in American literature in half a century." Licking his chops over the carcass, he explained that the no-longer-Great American Novel had croaked as a result of complications from congenital self-absorption and straying from the healthy engagement with manners and morals that had been the novel's lifeblood since its birth in the 18th century. "The top rung is up for grabs," he gloated. "The Huns have arrived."

As usual, Wolfe was a little hyperbolic, but he had a point. Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1966), Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), and his own The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)—not to mention any issue of Rolling Stone or Esquire—contained more razor-edged prose and narrative propulsion than the dreary cascade of academic-minded fiction dripping from writers' workshops, where the target readership was mainly other writers.

A similar status upheaval may be happening in the realm of screen entertainment. Long top dog in the media hierarchy, the Hollywood feature film—the star-studded best in show that garnered the respectful monographs, the critical cachet, and a secure place on the university curriculum—is being challenged by the lure of long-form, episodic television. Let's call the breed Arc TV, a moniker that underscores the dramatic curvature of the finely crafted, adult-minded serials built around arcs of interconnected action unfolding over the life span of the series. Shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Downton Abbey, Homeland, Dexter, Boardwalk Empire, and Game of Thrones—the highest-profile entrees in a gourmet menu of premium programming—are where the talent, the prestige, and the cultural buzz now swirl. Fess up: Are you more jazzed about the release of the new Abraham Lincoln biopic by Steven Spielberg or the season premiere of Homeland (September 30, 10 p.m., on Showtime)? The lineup hasn't quite yet dethroned the theatrical feature film as the preferred canvas for moving-image artistry, but Hollywood moviemakers are watching their backs. (...)

Traditionally, even late into the age of cable, television thrived on two durable genres, the weekly 30-minute sitcom and the hourlong drama. Play the theme song, rack up the signature montage, and a virgin viewer has no trouble following along. Each episode was discrete and self-contained, wrapped up on schedule, with no overarching Ur-plot, designed to be digested full at one sitting, and meant to spiral autonomously ever after in syndication: Gilligan stranded forever on his island, Columbo freeze-framed in his trench coat.

The dramatis personae existed in a realm that was picaresque, a pre-novel mode in which a one-dimensional protagonist is hit by one damn thing after another. A viewer could spend years, maybe decades, with the likes of Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke or Steve McGarrett on Hawaii Five-Oand not know a whit about the hero's psychic interior or personal history. Many of the surviving remnants of network television follow that time-worn template. The repetition compulsion of Homer Simpson—always the same, never learning from experience—is an ironic homage to the picaresque legacy: "D'oh! D'oh! D'oh!"

By contrast, Arc TV is all about back story and evolution. Again like the novel, the aesthetic payoff comes from prolonged, deep involvement in the fictional universe and, like a serious play or film, the stagecraft demands close attention. For the show to cast its magic, the viewer must leap full body into the video slipstream. Watch, hour by hour, the slow-burn descent into the home-cooked hell of the high-school-chemistry-teacher-turned-meth-kingpin Walter White in Breaking Bad, or the unraveling by degrees of the bipolar CIA agent Carrie Mathison, falling off her meds and cracking to pieces in Homeland.

At its best, the world of Arc TV is as exquisitely calibrated as the social matrix of a Henry James novel, where small gestures and table manners reveal the content of a character molded by convention, class, and culture. In an emblematic moment in Mad Men, Don Draper cues up his turntable to the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows," gives the trippy dissonance a fair hearing, and walks away unmoved: He will live and die a Sinatra man. For the viewer who tunes in late, the strands of the intricate plot lines may seem too tangled ever to unthread, but the insular complexities are how the shows pack their punch. One of the nice things about Mad Men is that there is no top-of-the-episode recap for come-latelies: If you can't take the heat, get out of the gestalt.

The Era of the Arc would have been impossible without two blessings of the post-network age: the decline of censorship and the revolutions in television technology. Freed from the corset of the Television Code, the video successor to Hollywood's restrictive Production Code, even basic cable may venture into topics, language, and imagery unthinkable during the zenith of three-network hegemony. The way Game of Thrones flaunts full frontal nudity or The Walking Dead wallows in forensic gross-out are the most naked manifestations of the new license, but the more provocative defiance is in the breaking of generic conventions embedded in the DNA of the medium since the days of kinescope. (...)

The new technologies of reception and delivery may have been even more pivotal than the loosening of censorship in nurturing the growth of the genre. Viewing and reviewing shows on mobile devices, iPads, and computer screens, or via DVR and box sets, not only helps aficionados connect dots and track motifs across a season but encourages artists to more carefully embroider the details of their product. Often consumed in marathon sessions of obsessive binge viewing, the television box set, a season's worth of episodes sans commercials, often with commentary tracks and behind-the-scenes extras, assumes that no less than the big screen, the small screen is worth a second and third look.

by Thomas Doherty, The Chronicle Review  |  Read more

Photo: AMC

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The Best Night $500,000 Can Buy

When you see the entrance to Marquee at 11 P.M. on a Saturday, you know why the promoters call this process "bringing the shitshow." Massing out front were, by my estimation, at least 2,000 people. Packs of Asian bachelorettes sucking on cock-and-balls lollipops. Pods of probably either Libyan or Italian princes of the overclass in blazers and exposed solar plexuses and calfskin loafers and Adrian Grenier knit caps. Teams of 29-year-old white men in untucked dress shirts and heavy cuff links who stood stunned mute by the endless throng of women wearing almost identical vagina-length dresses that perpetually seemed on the verge of revealing at least, at least, a butt cheek—though by some invisible force above the hemline never, never ever did. It wasn't just for show, either, this massing of people. Las Vegas isn't New York, where part of the social psychology is the difficulty of entrance. "We don't do a door-hold just for the sake of doing a door-hold, so we can look busy," one of the owners had told me. Inside, they were already at capacity.

A series of velvet ropes tranched the guests into classes—extreme VIPs, semi-VIP hot ladies, unrich ladyless dudes who probably wouldn't get in before 2 A.M. I guesstimate the general-admission line was a quarter mile long, stretching past the Cosmopolitan hotel's curated "shopping experience" and into a recessed hallway of Pentagonian proportions.

This was maybe the sixth or seventh night I'd been to Marquee. On other nights I would show up before the club opened, so I could observe the hidden machinery and ascertain how the people who run the place go about manufacturing the communal fun-gasm that made Marquee the highest-grossing nightclub in Las Vegas and very likely the universe. But tonight I was with a bachelor party, and in honor of the occasion we'd decided to avail ourselves of a table reservation. A table reservation requires guests to spend between $1,000 and $10,000, depending on the night, and among its perks is access to a special line. The table line is the line you're supposed to see from other lines and think: Why am I not in that line? Or: Why didn't my boyfriend get me into that line?

A trim woman wearing smart business attire and a clear Secret Service earpiece greeted me as if she had been waiting all night to see me. She had a tiny envelope with my name on it, and into this tiny envelope she deposited my driver's license and credit card. She then passed the envelope to a man in a dark suit, a VIP host, who shook my hand with similar warmth. All the suited functionaries at Marquee that night treated me as if I were an important business partner in a business where important business partners may or may not be bought prostitutes.

An elevator car with glass walls, lit like a lounge, was waiting. The desperate sounds of human beings begging doormen and imploring homeys to hurry up because I'm waiting for you at the entrance, son,were silenced by the shush of the closing doors. A woman in a white short-sleeve shirt, whom you might call an elevator host, pressed a button on the control panel and then began a speech prepared to last precisely the duration of one elevator ride to the fourth floor.

Hello, gentlemen, she said. My name is Laura. When you step out of the elevators, you will find our Boom Box bar, down the stairs. Upstairs is the Library, our exclusive lounge. And just outside, you'll find our main level. There is a bar straight ahead, and to our right the dance floor, where your table is. Benny Benassi will be DJ'ing tonight. We have 60,000 square feet of nightclub. Our outdoor space is open. Roam the club. Find some ladies. Bring them back to your table. The elevator jostled us gently as it stopped. Welcome to Marquee, gentlemen. Your party starts...now.

by Devin Friedman, GQ | Read more:
Photo: Lauren Gtreenfield

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In Plain View

How child molesters get away with it.

In a 2001 book, “Identifying Child Molesters,” the psychologist Carla van Dam tells the story of a young Canadian elementary-school teacher she calls Jeffrey Clay. Clay taught physical education. He was well liked by his students, and often he asked boys in his class to stay after school, to do homework and help him with chores. One day, just before winter break, three of the boys made a confession to their parents. Mr. Clay had touched them under their pants.

The parents went to the principal. He confronted Clay, who denied everything. The principal knew Clay and was convinced by him. In his mind, what it boiled down to, van Dam writes, “is some wild imaginations and the three boys being really close.”

The parents were at a loss. Mr. Clay was beloved. He had started a popular gym club at the school. He was married and was a role model to the boys. He would come to their after-school games. Could he really have abused them? Perhaps he was just overly physical in the way that young men often are. He had a habit, for example, of grabbing boys in the hallway and pulling them toward him, placing his arms over their shoulders and chest. At the gym club, he would pick boys up and turn them upside down, holding them by the legs. Lots of people—especially gym teachers—like to engage in a little horseplay with young boys. It wasn’t until the allegations about Clay emerged that it occurred to anyone to wonder whether he might have been trying to look down the boys’ shorts.

“We weren’t really prepared to call the police and make it into a police investigation,” one of the mothers told van Dam. “It was an indiscretion, as far as we were concerned at this point. It was all vague: ‘Well, he put his hands down there.’ And, ‘Well, it was inside the pants, but fingers went to here.’ We were all still trying to protect Mr. Clay’s reputation, and the possibility this was all blown up out of proportion and there was a mistake.”

The families then learned that there had been a previous complaint by a child against Clay, and they took their case to the school superintendent. He, too, advised caution. “If allegations do not clearly indicate sexual abuse, a gray area exists,” he wrote to them. “The very act of overt investigation carries with it a charge, a conviction, and a sentence, a situation which is repugnant to fair-minded people.” He was responsible not just to the children but also to the professional integrity of his teachers. What did they have? Just the story of three young boys, and young boys do, after all, have wild imaginations.

Clay was kept on. Two months later, after prodding from a couple of social workers, the parents asked the police to investigate. One of the mothers recalls an officer interviewing her son: “He was gentle, but to the point, and he wanted to be shown exactly where Mr. Clay had touched him.” The three boys named other boys who they said had been subjected to Mr. Clay’s advances. Those boys, however, denied everything. A new, more specific allegation against Clay surfaced. He resigned, and went to see a therapist. But still the prosecutor’s office didn’t feel that it had enough evidence to press charges. And within the school there were teachers who felt that Clay was innocent. “I was running into my colleagues who were saying, ‘Did you know that some rotten parents trumped up these charges against this poor man?’ ” one teacher told van Dam. The teacher added, “Not just one person. Many teachers said this.” A psychologist working at the school thought that the community was in the grip of hysteria. The allegations against Clay, he thought, were simply the result of the fact that he was “young and energetic.” Clay threatened to sue. The parents dropped their case.

Clay was a man repeatedly accused of putting his hands down the pants of young boys. Parents complained. Superiors investigated. And what happened? The school psychologist called him a victim of hysteria.

When monsters roam free, we assume that people in positions of authority ought to be able to catch them if only they did their jobs. But that might be wishful thinking. A pedophile, van Dam’s story of Mr. Clay reminds us, is someone adept not just at preying on children but at confusing, deceiving, and charming the adults responsible for those children—which is something to keep in mind in the case of the scandal at Penn State and the conviction, earlier this year, of the former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky on child-molestation charges.

by Malcolm Gladwell, New Yorker | Read more:
Illustration: A. J. Frackattack; Photo: Gene J. Puskar/AP

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by HORITOSHI-I scan from Takagi Akimitsu’s Japanese tattooed ladies vol.1

Takagi Akimitsu was a book publisher that worked with Horiyoshi II to create keibunsha, an organisation devoted to preserving and encouraging the traditional Japanese art of hand-tattooing know as tebori.

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Too Big to Fail and Too Risky to Exist

In 1989, the CEOs of our seven largest banks earned an average of $2.6 million. In 2007, the average CEO income had risen to $26 million. The ordinary citizen might believe that this is grotesque overcompensation, but the financial sector found the pay perfectly reasonable. A year later, this sort of thinking led us to the brink of complete financial collapse. The financial crisis of 2008 now looks more and more like a defining moment, a crisis of capitalism. Globally, it has produced, in addition to a crippling recession, an unending debt crisis. Our own escalating, unpayable debt makes the future of U.S. power increasingly uncertain. Government borrowing and spending policies have failed to stimulate growth in the economy.

The crisis is, at its heart, a cultural failure combined with a political collapse. Behavior by bank executives that once was discouraged by a lifted eyebrow created complex structures abetted by an aggressive reading of the statutes—anything not explicitly prohibited was considered permissible. As Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, put it, “There was a cultural tendency to be always on one side and always to be pushing the limits.” The crisis almost immediately destroyed the rule of law. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson told The Washington Post in November 2008: “Even if you don’t have the authorities—and frankly I didn’t have the authorities for anything—if you take charge, people will follow. Someone has to pull it all together.” In 2011, Phil Angelides, chairman of the U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, summarized the problem: “These banks are too big to fail. They’re too big to manage. They’re too big to regulate. They’re too complex to understand and they’re too risky to exist. And the bottom line is they offer very little benefit.”

Four years after the crisis began, another election is upon us. What have we learned? Where are we now? What are the prospects for meaningful reform of the financial system? Will our debt crush us? Should we let it? Is it legitimate? What comes next? An open discussion of these questions needs to take place now. The health of the financial system, and of our republic, depends on it.

Yet for the bankers, it is still business as usual. In his book, Bailout, Neil Barofsky, the former special inspector general in charge of oversight of TARP (the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program), writes that a major cost of the bailout is the perpetuation of the existing financial system: Paulson and his successor, Timothy Geithner,“hadn’t just saved the banks, they’d also preserved a status quo that was dangerously broken, and in so doing they might have actually increased the danger lurking in our financial architecture.”

Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, says that when Jay Gatsby tells him their luncheon companion, Meyer Wolfsheim, fixed the World Series in 1919, “the idea staggered me.” Nick says he knew that the Series had been fixed, but he had thought of it as a thing that just happened, the end of some inevitable chain of events. “It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people—with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.”

Like Wolfsheim, the big banks have since 2005 fixed a benchmark thought by millions to be beyond manipulation or reproach—the London interbank offered rate. The LIBOR is an average reported by 16 big banks of what they estimate it would cost them to borrow from another bank. It is used to set rates on mortgages, credit cards, and many other personal and commercial loans. The amount of money affected by the rate, at any given time, is estimated at $800 trillion. The British bank Barclays routinely altered its submitted rates to push the LIBOR high or low to benefit bets it had made on interest rate derivatives. That is, it was fixing the result of its outstanding bets. One Barclays executive was recorded as saying, “We’re clean but we’re dirty-clean, rather than clean-clean.” Barclays derivatives traders made at least 257 requests to the bank’s London rate submitters over a four-year period. The emails between Barclays New York derivatives traders and its London rate submitters are stark: “For Monday we are very long $3 m cash here in NY and would like the setting to be set as low as possible … thanks”; “Always happy to help, leave it to me, Sir”; “Done for you big boy”; and “Dude. I owe you big time! … I’m opening a bottle of Bollinger.” Lord Turner, chair of the British regulator, the Financial Services Authority, expressed disbelief at the blatant behavior on the New York and London trading floors: “One of the shocking things about this,” he said, “is that on some occasions, the derivatives trader is not asking the submitter to change his submission on the basis of a hidden phone call or a note that he believes is hidden, but by shouting it across the trading floor.”

A single bank could not have that much effect on a 16-bank average, and sure enough, the scandal has spread. British regulators found that Barclays colluded with other big banks, among them JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, and HSBC. The banks seem to have a huge potential liability to those on the losing side of the fixed bets and to those who paid too much interest when the LIBOR was fixed too high. According to the July 7 Economist, “This could well be global finance’s ‘tobacco moment.’ ” Even now, the problems may persist. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told the Senate on July 17 that he “lack[s] full confidence in the rate-setting procedure.” Moreover, “it’s clear beyond these disclosures that the LIBOR structure is structurally flawed.” Andrew Tyrie, chair of the British parliamentary committee investigating the LIBOR, asked Paul Tucker, the deputy governor of the Bank of England, whether he was confident that it was now working normally. Tucker replied, “We can’t be confident of anything after learning of this cesspit.” Lord Turner added, “We would be fooling ourselves” to assume that trading manipulation was limited to trades. “There is a degree of cynicism and greed which is really quite shocking … and that does suggest that there are some very wide cultural issues that need to be strongly addressed.” In June, Barclays agreed to pay $450 million to British and American regulators, and arrests in connection with the LIBOR are thought to be imminent.

by William J. Quirk, American Scholar |  Read more:

Photo by Josh Hallett

Detail of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”
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To Build or Not to Build a Road

Every summer, my husband and I roll back the canvas roof of our small Cit­roen 2CV and head out to explore small towns, farming communities, forests, and parkland along beautiful, picturesque rural roads that are untraveled by most Ontarians. Leaving highways behind, we meander through landscapes that open up unique visual and ol­factory experiences that enrich our days and be­come a staple in our store of happiest memories together.

Roads open up inimitable vistas and opportunities but, of course, they also have their costs, particularly when they take the form of large-scale highways that often infringe upon agricultural and wildlife commu­nities or exacerbate urban stress

What constitutes a good road? And how do we decide when it is appropriate to build a new road? As urbanist Jane Jacobs puts it, “how to accommodate transportation without destroying the related intricate and concentrated land use?—this is the question.”

Presumably, decision making in such a case ought to be driven by more than mere sentimentality. In the words of the National Research Council, “practical decision making begins by identifying the elements of a responsible and competent decision-making pro­cess.”

At the same time, it is important to recognize that complex environmental decisions—from how to tackle global climate change to planning megalopolitan set­tlements—often must be made in the face of scientific uncertainty. In such cases, judgment calls are made, and, therefore, we need to better understand both the nature and the significance of taken-for-granted val­ues, attitudes, and perceptions.

I begin this paper by identifying some essential el­ements of what might typically be described as a “ra­tional” process of decision making. I then proceed to describe how such a rational environmental decision procedure must reflect not only narrowly logical rea­soning processes but also essential elements of moral virtue, wisdom, and, ultimately, a respect for sense of place.

FROM IDENTIFYING OBJECTIVES TO VIABLE ALTERNATIVES: THE PLACE OF VALUES

From engineering consulting firms to governmen­tal environmental impact assessments, technical mod­els are utilized to ensure that complex problems are addressed in a comprehensive manner. Decision trees, cost-benefit analyses, and decision-making matrices that employ sensitivity analysis or analyze expected monetary value are examples of such tools.

While each model incorporates distinct strategies, it is feasible to draw from these examples six major ge­neric steps that are typically reflected in such models, despite their variations. These include:

• Identify the project objectives, problem, and opportunities.
• Identify constraints that possible solutions must respect.
• Identify viable alternative solutions.
• Select evaluation criteria of alternatives.
• Evaluate alternatives and select the preferred option.
• Monitor and adjust the strategy, as necessary, documenting lessons learned. 

Like the technical models listed above as well as other similar decision-making procedures, this six-step decision-making process aspires to be rational, logical, and, thereby, comprehensive. Yet I would contend that genuine thoughtfulness is not necessar­ily achieved simply by virtue of such sequential logic.

Embedded in such apparently “objective” models are personal biases, value judgments, hidden para­digms, and different worldviews. Genuinely rational choices—those that aim for wisdom over mere techni­cal efficiency—are made only if these taken-for-grant­ed values and assumptions are explicitly addressed. The fact is that “value choices are often hidden in the simplifying assumptions of analytic techniques, and the assumed values may not be universally shared.”

It is important to recognize that values and as­sumptions impact every phase of decision making, no matter how logical, linear, and “objective” that process appears. For instance, value judgments very much shape the first step in the decision-making process, where project objectives, problems, and opportunities are identified and bounded. The fact is, as energy sci­entist Amory Lovins points out, that “the answers you get depend on the questions you ask.”

So, despite the title of this paper, it is important to note that the problem to be addressed here may not be properly scoped in the form of the engineering ques­tion whether to build a road. Rather, the problem may actually be that travel times are currently too long; or perhaps, as in the case of some First Nations com­munities in Northern Canada, there may be a lack of easy access. Maybe the issue may be as broadly scoped as to ask the question about how to build a healthier, more sustainable community overall. The opportuni­ties identified may certainly include the construction of a road, but, alternatively, a preferred option may consist of improvements to public transport or rail systems instead. After all, in the words of Jane Jacobs, “The more space that is provided for cars in cities, the greater becomes the need for use of cars”—which, in an era of global climate change, is hardly a wise course of action. Unless one scopes the problem sufficiently broadly, productive alternatives may simply be missed.

by Ingrid Leman Stefanovic, Center for Humans and Nature |  Read more:

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