Traveling Wilburys

[ed. Lyrics]

A New Day

[ed. And the walls came down.]

Surrounded by thousands of packages of marijuana, Seattle's top prosecutor sought some advice: Which one should he buy?

A new day, indeed.

Twenty months after voters legalized recreational cannabis for adults over 21, Washington state's first few licensed pot shops opened for business Tuesday, catering to hundreds of customers who lined up outside, thrilled to be part of the historic moment.

The pot being sold at four stores in Seattle, Bellingham, Prosser and Spokane was regulated, tested for impurities, heavily taxed and in short supply - such short supply that several other shops couldn't open because they had nothing to sell.

Pete Holmes, Seattle's elected city attorney and a main backer of the state's recreational marijuana law, said he wanted to be one of the first customers to demonstrate there are alternatives to the nation's failed drug war.

"This is a tectonic shift in public policy," he said. "You have to honor it. This is real. This is legal. This is a wonderful place to purchase marijuana where it's out of the shadows."

Dressed in a pinstripe suit, Holmes stood inside Seattle's first and, for now, only licensed pot shop, Cannabis City, south of downtown. The shop was sweltering. He fanned himself with a state-produced pamphlet titled "Marijuana Use in Washington State: An Adult Consumer's Guide."

Unsure what to buy, he asked the owner of the company that grew it, Nine Point Growth Industries of Bremerton, who recommended OG's Pearl. The strain tested at 21.5 percent THC, marijuana's main psychoactive compound.

The shop's 26-year-old twin salesmen, Andrew and Adam Powers, explained its benefits to Holmes: mainly, that the taste is not too "skunky" to turn off the occasional user.

Holmes noted it had been quite some time since he smoked pot. He paraphrased a line from the "South Park" cartoon series: "Remember, children, there's a time and place for everything. That place is college."

He spent $80 on 4 grams, including $20.57 in taxes.

Washington is the second state to allow marijuana sales without a doctor's note. Voters in Colorado also legalized pot in 2012, and sales began there Jan. 1.

Washington's Liquor Control Board began working right away to develop rules governing just about every aspect of the industry, from what fertilizers can be used to how extracts are produced.

But the board has been overwhelmed: Nearly 7,000 people applied to grow, process or sell pot, and those licenses are being reviewed glacially by the board's 18 investigators.

Fewer than 100 growers have been approved, and only about a dozen were ready to harvest in time for the market's launch. As for the stores, most first had to get lucky in state-run lotteries for 300-plus retail licenses being issued. Then they had to strike deals to buy product from the growers - in many cases at exorbitant prices.

by Gene Johnson, AP |  Read more:

Image: Swagger & Young

Investors Are Buying Troubled Golf Courses and Giving Them Makeovers

[ed. See also: Welcome to the Everything Boom, or Maybe the Everything Bubble.]

When the Gaillardia Golf and Country Club opened in 1998, it was to be the crown jewel of golf in Oklahoma City, complete with an 18-hole P.G.A. championship course and a 55,000-square-foot clubhouse of Norman-style architecture. The Gaylord family, best known as Oklahoma media moguls and owners of the Grand Ole Opry, sank a reported $59 million into the project.

Over the next 15 years, however, the course changed hands and fell into disrepair as a glut of new courses and declining demand punished the market. Finally, early this year, Gaillardia was sold to Concert Golf Partners, an investment firm based in Newport Beach, Calif., which assumed $7 million in loans and now owns the property free and clear.

“Between 1998 and 2005 there would have been a bidding war,” said Peter Nanula, the chairman of Concert Golf who previously ran Arnold Palmer Golf Management.

While golf is still anathema to many investment portfolios, investors who have the cash see the current market as an opportunity to scoop up distressed clubs and revamp their business models.

“It’s certainly a buyer’s market,” said Larry Hirsh, president of Golf Property Analysts. “There are a lot of distressed courses, financing is difficult and most buyers don’t have the ability to write a check.” (...)

Last September, the world’s largest owner and operator of private clubs, ClubCorp Holdings, went public at $14 a share. The Dallas-based company, which had been owned by the private equity firm KSL Capital Partners, has used the injection of capital to add to its portfolio of clubs and eventually pay off its high-yield debt. It now owns 109 golf and country clubs in 23 states and Mexico. Its shares climbed as high as $19.30 in May and closed at $18.63 on Thursday. (...)

Though the industry as a whole has been under a black cloud, not all clubs are losing money. The clubs that have held up best are those in densely populated areas with limited land on which to develop, Mr. Main noted. “You can have a club in Chicago doing better than one in Florida or Texas, even after you factor for the weather,” he said.

The worst off are those developed in the last 15 years as part of a residential community off the beaten path. “They’re relying solely on demand from that community,” Mr. Main added. Indeed, many of the new courses built during the housing boom were meant to be subsidized by home sales. When the bottom fell out of the housing market, developers had no way to pay for the expensive amenity. In many cases they defaulted on their loans, which are now getting scooped up by investors.

“Golf courses have high fixed costs,” Mr. Nanula said. “At a typical course, it’s at least $500,000 a year just to mow the grass.” Moreover, many clubs are mismanaged, he said. “The typical dynamic at a private club is that it’s not run with profit in mind but with the idea of making the place fabulous,” he said. As a result, he said, “we consistently see clubs that have no rhyme or reason on spending.”

As such, investors focus primarily on buying private clubs — annual and monthly dues are “stickier” than daily fees on public courses — and turning around the operations.

While the right location and management is crucial, the golf clubs that are doing well have also evolved from being golf centric to family centric. “It’s now golf with a small ‘g’ instead of a capital ‘G,’ ” Mr. Affeldt said, explaining that ClubCorp is refreshing food and beverage operations, relaxing dress codes and adding water parks, tennis courts and fitness facilities. Case in point: His home club, Brookhaven Country Club in Dallas. “Kids are playing putt-putt golf and running around in their bare feet while grandmas do water aerobics,” he said. “It’s the epitome of a multiuse, multigenerational club.”

by Sarah Max, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Pacific Links International

Damon Albarn

Velvet Underground
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Quantum State May Be a Real Thing

[ed. I'm counting on Quantum State to win the Physics Bowl next year.]

At the very heart of quantum mechanics lies a monster waiting to consume unwary minds. This monster goes by the name The Nature of Reality™. The greatest of physicists have taken one look into its mouth, saw the size of its teeth, and were consumed. Niels Bohr denied the existence of the monster after he nonchalantly (and very quietly) exited the monster's lair muttering "shut up and calculate." Einstein caught a glimpse of the teeth and fainted. He was reportedly rescued by Erwin Schrödinger at great personal risk, but neither really recovered from their encounter with the beast.

The upshot is that we had a group of physicists and philosophers who didn't believe that quantum mechanics represents reality but that it was all we could see of some deeper, more fundamental theory. A subclass of these scientists believed that the randomness of quantum mechanics would eventually be explained by some non-random, deterministic property that we simply couldn't directly observe (otherwise known as a hidden variable). Another group ended up believing that quantum mechanics did represent reality, and that, yes, reality was non-local, and possibly not very real either.

To one extent or another, these two groups are still around and still generate a fair amount of heat when they are in proximity to each other. Over the years, you would have to say that the scales have been slowly tipping in favor of the latter group. Experiments and theory have largely eliminated hidden variables. Bohm's pilot wave, a type of hidden variable, has to be pretty extraordinary to be real.

This has left us with more refined arguments to settle. One of these is about whether the wave function represents reality or just an observer's view of reality.

Waiving a function

For example, say I shoot a single photon at a single atom, which may or may not absorb the photon. According to quantum mechanics, the atom enters a superposition state where it's both in its ground state and its excited state. We describe this superposition state with a wave function. One view of quantum mechanics states that the wave function really represents the atom. But an alternative interpretation is that the wave function represents what I, the observer, know about the atom—reality may be something else entirely.

The difference is subtle, but we only need to return to an atom and a photon to see it. Imagine that a photon can excite the atom into one of two possible states, but I only know about one of them. When I make my measurement, I can't ask "what state are you in?" I can only ask "are you in state two?"—that's the nature of quantum measurements. In my previous example, where I only have two possibilities, this doesn't matter. If it's not in the excited state, I know the atom is in the ground state.

But now I have three possibilities: the atom is in its ground state or in one of the two excited states—one of which i don't know about. In a measurement of my atom, I am still limited to a yes or no answer. There is no way for me to use that to distinguish between a superposition of two states and a superposition of three states. That's because the wave functions that represent these two possibilities overlap; they both include the chance of being in the ground state and state two.

In the original example, the wave function that I know is the same as the wave function of the atom: it represents reality. In the second example, the wave function is only my knowledge of the atom, not the atom itself. This difference can be resolved by making multiple measurements. I'd see that my measured probability distribution differs from that predicted by the wave function. That is, given enough measurements, the two wave functions are distinguishable.

In this case, figuring out what's going on is trivial. But the question applies to other, more complicated cases. Can these two perspectives on the wave function always be distinguished from each other, even when the wave functions involved generate the same probability distribution function? (...)

Now, a group of researchers has extended previous work to show that, yes, under a wide range of conditions, these two points of view do differ. They show that the wave function must in some sense represent the observed system rather than what the observer knows about the system. (...)

If you take the view that the wave function only produces a probability distribution and then take all the wave functions that produce the same probability distribution—in other words, the observer's possible choices of wave functions, based on his or her knowledge of the system—and try to reproduce measurement results, you'll fail. Consequently, there is a single wave function that must represent reality.

So which wave function represents reality? Many different wave functions could be right, because they produce the same probability distribution function, but we can't tell them apart. That's the consequence of this finding: one wave function represents reality, but our ability to tell which one is reduced.

by Chris Lee, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Consciousness On-Off Switch Discovered

One moment you're conscious, the next you're not. For the first time, researchers have switched off consciousness by electrically stimulating a single brain area.

Scientists have been probing individual regions of the brain for over a century, exploring their function by zapping them with electricity and temporarily putting them out of action. Despite this, they have never been able to turn off consciousness – until now.

Although only tested in one person, the discovery suggests that a single area – the claustrum – might be integral to combining disparate brain activity into a seamless package of thoughts, sensations and emotions. It takes us a step closer to answering a problem that has confounded scientists and philosophers for millennia – namely how our conscious awareness arises.

Many theories abound but most agree that consciousness has to involve the integration of activity from several brain networks, allowing us to perceive our surroundings as one single unifying experience rather than isolated sensory perceptions.

One proponent of this idea was Francis Crick, a pioneering neuroscientist who earlier in his career had identified the structure of DNA. Just days before he died in July 2004, Crick was working on a paper that suggested our consciousness needs something akin to an orchestra conductor to bind all of our different external and internal perceptions together.

With his colleague Christof Koch, at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, he hypothesised that this conductor would need to rapidly integrate information across distinct regions of the brain and bind together information arriving at different times. For example, information about the smell and colour of a rose, its name, and a memory of its relevance, can be bound into one conscious experience of being handed a rose on Valentine's day.

The pair suggested that the claustrum – a thin, sheet-like structure that lies hidden deep inside the brain – is perfectly suited to this job (Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B, doi.org/djjw5m).

It now looks as if Crick and Koch were on to something. In a study published last week, Mohamad Koubeissi at the George Washington University in Washington DC and his colleagues describe how they managed to switch a woman's consciousness off and on by stimulating her claustrum. The woman has epilepsy so the team were using deep brain electrodes to record signals from different brain regions to work out where her seizures originate. One electrode was positioned next to the claustrum, an area that had never been stimulated before.

When the team zapped the area with high frequency electrical impulses, the woman lost consciousness. She stopped reading and stared blankly into space, she didn't respond to auditory or visual commands and her breathing slowed. As soon as the stimulation stopped, she immediately regained consciousness with no memory of the event. The same thing happened every time the area was stimulated during two days of experiments (Epilepsy and Behavior, doi.org/tgn).

by Helen Thomson, New Scientist |  Read more:

Image: Kirk Weddle/Getty Images

Franco Matticchio (b. 1957, Varese, Italy) - Sparadrap, 2013
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Sean Landers
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Andrew Archer
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Nature's Dying Migrant Worker

In a cool January day in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, Steve Ellis culled his sick bees. The only sounds were their steady buzz and the chuffing of the smoker he used to keep them calm as he opened the hives, one by one, to see how many had survived. The painful chore has become an annual ritual for Ellis, and, hardened now like a medic on the front lines, he crowned another box with a big rock to mark it.

“This one is G.A.D.,” he said. “Good as dead.”

Ellis, of Barrett, Minn., is one of some 1,300 commercial beekeepers from across the United States who migrate to California each year, along with nearly 2 million hives, for the single largest pollination event in the world. Below him in the sprawling valley, nearly 1,400 square miles of almond trees — three-fourths of the global supply — were ready to burst out into a frothy sea of pink and white. To grow into a nut, every single blossom would need at least one American honeybee.

Ever since the ominous phrase “colony collapse disorder” first surfaced in 2006, scientists have struggled to explain the mysterious mass die-offs of honeybees. But here in America’s food basket the escalating stakes are laid out as clearly as the almond trees that march in perfect rows up to the horizon.

Modern farm economics have created an enormously productive system of genetically engineered, chemically dependent agriculture. But it relies on just one domesticated insect to deliver a third of the food on our plate.

And that insect is dying, a victim of the very food system that has come to depend on it.

A rush of recent research points to a complex triangle of causes: pervasive pesticides, a flowerless rural landscape dominated by cash crops, and the spread of parasites and diseases. Together they inflict enormous damage on the honeybees that crisscross the country each spring and summer, like migrant laborers, to pollinate everything from almonds in California to apples in Maine.

In the past several decades, the number of crops that depend on bees for pollination has quadrupled, even as the number of hives available to pollinate them has dropped by half. Every winter, beekeepers on average continue to lose a fourth to a third of their hives, raising fears that the gradual decline of these remarkably resilient insects will soon limit the production of foods that Americans now take for granted. (...)

When he looks out over the edge of the old gravel pit near Elbow Lake where he keeps his hives, Ellis sees what he calls a vast agricultural desert of corn and soybeans — two plants that don’t need bees for fertilization. Synthetic fertilizers have replaced the natural ones, farming has become increasingly specialized and now about a third of Minnesota’s land — and much of the Midwest — is covered with just those two crops.

Almost all Midwestern crops are now genetically engineered to withstand the herbicide Roundup, so farmers can kill weeds efficiently without harming their yields — a major advance in productivity that has revolutionized agriculture. But the widespread use of herbicides has virtually wiped out the milkweed, clover and wildflowers from Minnesota’s vast farming regions. That doesn’t include the millions of acres devoted to grass in urban areas, another form of chemically intensive monoculture.

For bees — which need 150 million flowers to make enough honey for one hive to survive the winter — there isn’t much left to eat.

“This is supposed to be the land of milk and honey,” Ellis said.

What flowers remain are increasingly exposed to a new family of insecticides that, along with corn and soybeans, have exploded across the Midwest and the world: neonicotinoids. They come coated on virtually every seed planted in every major crop across the country — sunflowers, canola, cotton, soybeans and corn. Each spring when farmers take to the fields, some unknown quantity of the chemical escapes into the environment, especially in corn country.

Ellis sees it every year in May, when his neighbors crisscross their fields with massive planters that inject the pesticide-coated seeds into the earth. They have to use a talc to keep the seeds from sticking together, and as the air pressure in the machines forces the seeds into the ground, the contaminated powder escapes and drifts over the land.

But May is also the month when his bees work the blooming willow trees, shrubs and other flowers around the gravel pit, collecting pollen and nectar as they play their part in the seasonal reproduction of plants. And when wind blows the fine powders from corn seeds over the blooming plants around his yard, many of the bees that return to the hive come back and die.

The sight of thousands of bees twitching and convulsing in front of their boxes has become a near-annual event for Ellis and other beekeepers in the same predicament.

Farmers don’t have much choice in this transaction; 90 percent of the seed corn available to them comes precoated with neonicotinoids. It’s just one of the many chemical and genetic advances that have helped farmers double their production from 80 or 100 bushels per acre to up to 200 today, said Leon Johnson, who farms near Ellis in Barrett.

“It’s hard to argue with success,” he said, even though he recognizes that there is a downside to that abundance.

“Most farmers are smart enough to know you can’t kill all the bees going forward,” he said. “But we haven’t been asked.” (...)

Since their introduction in the mid-1990s, neonicotinoids have sparked a quiet revolution in agriculture. Because they are considered far safer than their predecessors, they won fast-track approval by the EPA and are now the most widely used insecticides in the world. Made from a synthetic nicotine, they are a neurotoxin to insects — but not for people, their livestock and their pets.

But it’s their delivery system that makes neonicotinoids truly novel.

As the chemical-coated seed germinates and matures, the insecticide moves into the circulatory system and grows with the plant. As a result, today all major crops — and even many of the geraniums and petunias at retail garden centers — are poisonous to insects, regardless of whether they need to be protected. It’s a built-in insurance policy.

“Making plants themselves toxic is a whole different thing than killing bugs with a toxin,” Ellis said. “It’s a game-changer.”

by Josephine Marcotty, Star Tribune |  Read more:

Image: Renée Jones Schneider

h/t Scott P.

Deco Japan

[ed. Saw this show yesterday and it is indeed a knockout. The accompanying book is here.]

I am passionate on a cellular level for the Chrysler Building in New York; I love you, I cannot resist you. Art deco is as alluring as a dapper villain. Deco has no enemies, no politics, no ethics, no manifestos, not even a united school of makers, all of which is why art history has never taken it seriously, and all of which makes it fascinating. Its streamlined, diamantine appearance is adaptable by all comers: rapacious capitalists, jazz players, proto-feminists. It gleams, glows, and glimmers. And now that examples of that naked, forceful exuberance created in Japan in the years leading up to war are paying their first visit to the victorious enemy country 70 years later, it's a major, marvelous, vaguely uneasy event. You will love it; you will not be able to resist it.

War is the backdrop, but Deco Japan: Shaping Art and Culture, 1920–1945 is summering in leafy, bucolic Volunteer Park, where Seattle Asian Art Museum physically nestles Japanese deco in a sisterly embrace. SAAM's 1933 building is a deco gem, designed to provide pleasure in every respect, from the ornate aluminum grills on the doors to the air ducts and light fixtures outside the bathrooms, all veiny marble and shiny gilt in between. It is an American couple named Robert and Mary who brought together Deco Japan, which represents most of their collection of around two hundred paintings, sculptures, woodblock prints, home furnishings, graphic designs, and pieces of clothing. Robert Levenson is an anesthesiologist; anesthesia knocks you out while you're still breathing, too.

When Levenson began collecting this stuff, nobody wanted it. Levenson was told it didn't exist, but he persisted because he'd glimpsed catalogs from a 1930s exhibition at the Toledo Museum of Art, of all places. With no clearinghouses to turn to, Levenson scouted out and went through four dozen dealers. Asking for interwar material once, he was actually chased out of a Kyoto antique shop. There is no pride in the militarism of a lost war, and anyway, of far greater value in Japan than deco are objects rooted to the heritage developed during Japan's 200 years of self-enforced seclusion, which gives Japan its ongoing distinctiveness. By comparison, deco is alien-smeared and brief. Even the director of the first venue where Deco Japan appeared, New York's Japan Society in 2012, said that until Deco Japan, he'd assumed Japanese art had basically gone dark between 1910 and the anime pop of the 1990s.

by Jen Graves, The Stranger |  Read more:
Image: Seattle Asian Art Museum

How Should We Think About the Caliphate?

In its recent propaganda video, Clanging of the Swords: Part 4, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis) presented a tightly edited series of grotesque executions. Thirty-eight people were filmed being killed: one man was shot as he ran through the desert trying to escape gunmen in a 4x4; another was trapped in his car; one was at home when Isis broke in and beheaded him in his bedroom. It’s hard to believe that what you’re watching really happened until the relentless inhumanity is interrupted by an occasional human moment. At one point a gunman walks down a row of kneeling young men with their hands tied behind them. He aims a pistol at the back of each man’s head, fires, watches the body slump forward in a pool of blood, moves on to the next in line and repeats the exercise. Then, one of his victims has the idea of trying to save himself by anticipating the shot and, a split second too early, falls forward, pretending to be dead. Needless to say, the ruse doesn’t work. There is also footage of Isis gunmen driving through a town when, for no apparent reason, they stick their Kalashnikovs out of the car windows and fire at two men walking along the pavement. One is hit and collapses. The car moves forward, and the Isis fighters keep firing as their victim lies motionless on the ground. Presumably they want to make sure he’s dead. As they drive away the second pedestrian – amazingly still unharmed – runs for his life in the other direction.

You might think that a film showing your organisation randomly murdering people would not attract new recruits. But Isis’s various communications have achieved two objectives. First, they have terrified the Iraqi army, sapping the soldiers’ will to defend the Iraqi state. Threatening text messages sent direct to their mobile phones reinforce the point. Second, Isis has quickly carved out a global presence. A few weeks ago it seemed that only policy wonks had heard of it. It didn’t even have a settled acronym: some called it Isis, others Isil (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant – the Arabic supports either). The distinction hardly matters now as the organisation has renamed itself the Islamic State, with its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as its caliph. Whatever it’s called, its pitch relies on glamour shots of earnest young men with dishevelled, flowing hair living in rural settings unsullied by the paraphernalia of modern life – except for the assault rifles and ammunition strapped to their chests. The talk is all about duty, sacrifice and martyrdom.

But in many respects Isis is a very modern organisation. The brochure detailing its 2012-13 activities is like a state of the art corporate report. The most striking page, with slick graphic design, has 15 silhouetted icons – time bombs, handcuffs, a car, a man running – with each representing a field of activity: roadside bombs, prisoner escapes, car bombs and the clearance of apostates’ homes. Next to a picture of a pistol is the word ‘assassinations’ and the number 1083: the number of targeted killings Isis claims to have pulled off in the year under review. That sits alongside 4465 roadside bombs, 160 suicide attacks and more than one hundred repentances by apostates. And these impressive statistics relate to the period before the greatest jihadi achievement since 9/11, Isis’s conquest of Iraq’s second city, Mosul. Isis is also the first jihadi group to occupy contiguous land in two countries. You could argue that al-Qaida did that in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border areas but it could only survive by remaining in the shadows. Isis, by contrast, has been able to move through north-east Syria and large parts of northern Iraq with almost complete freedom. There has always been a strand of Islam with global aspirations rising above national frontiers: the Islamic State now aims to put those ideas into practice. One of the caliph’s first acts was to send bulldozers to destroy the frontier posts between Iraq and Syria. (...)

... Every time a jihadi movement has won power it has lost popularity by failing to give the people what they want: peace, security and jobs. In Afghanistan, for instance, the Taliban had considerable public support when it came to power in 1996 after years of civil war: many Afghans were glad of the stability the Taliban offered. But Mullah Omar’s administration was so violent and so little concerned about worldly matters that by 2001 most were pleased to see him go. Other jihadi administrations have faced similar problems. In 2009 the current leader of the Taliban in Pakistan, Mullah Fazlullah, won control of the Swat Valley, just a few hours’ drive from Islamabad. His practice of murdering opponents and leaving their bodies to rot in the main square of the valley’s biggest town, Mingora, so disgusted the local people that they supported an army offensive against the militants. Similar things have happened in North Africa, where no jihadi movement has been able to hold on to power.

The lesson would seem to be that left to their own devices, jihadi administrations fail. There are signs, however, that Baghdadi or at least some of his commanders has begun to appreciate the importance of this issue. In some Syrian towns Isis has managed to restore a degree of normality not just by guaranteeing security through a system of rough justice but also by introducing price controls on basic commodities and even carrying out civic tasks such as issuing car number plates. Free fuel and food – all with Isis branding – are often distributed to the needy. For the moment these attempts to win over local populations are outweighed not only by Baghdadi’s violent methods but also by his insistence on unpopular, religiously inspired rules to do with alcohol, smoking, dress codes and music. But should the Islamic State learn to govern as well as it fights, its support would be greatly enhanced.

by Owen Bennett-Johnson, LRB |  Read more:

Image: The Guardian

Greg Klassen, Elm River Console Table
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How To Price a Forest, and Other Economics Problems

[ed. I'm glad to see this discussion. In my career, which included conservation policy, planning, litigation, and permitting, I and other collegues frequently wrestled with essentially the same problem: how do you attach a dollar value to healthy fish and populations, natural forests, clean water, functional wetlands, pristine beaches (or the loss thereof) when there are no suitable economic models to factor in all the various benefits that those resources provide (ie., something other than simple market metrics based on the economic value of activities like logging, mining, fishing or other commercial activities). Not to mention the cost of restoring those resources should they be lost. For example, what value should we place on a killer whale that's neither consumed nor used in any commercial context (other than whale watching)? Contingent valuation is one way, but it's still a rather broad and imprecise science, prone to high levels of subjectivity. What's needed is a methodology that adequately prices all service benefits, both directly and indirectly, not only to humans but the rest of the natural environment as a whole. The flip-side of this is, of course, that not all of the world is known, or knowable... which is why scientists still have a job. But, to the extent that some of those complexities can be identified and integrated, they should be.]

Gross Domestic Product is the market value of all goods and services produced within a country in a year. It is, today, the standard snapshot of a country’s economy. But does it deserve this position? After all, it focuses on economic activity while ignoring many of the consequences of that activity, economic or otherwise.

Cambridge economist Sir Partha Dasgupta has long argued for a broader measure of a country’s wealth, and has worked on some of the most difficult challenges involved: How do you assign a dollar value to a forest? To human capital? How do humans understand long-term planning, and the effects of their actions on fellow citizens?

What should economists be most concerned with measuring?

Ultimately we social scientists should be concerned with human wellbeing, the quality of lives people lead. That sounds very metaphysical or perhaps repugnant to the hard-nosed social scientist, a policy maker. But at the end of the day that’s what it’s all about, otherwise we should just call it a halt, call our enterprise a halt. The question is not how to measure human wellbeing, because that’s an impossible thing, but whether you can find some metric which more or less approximately corresponds to it. So two things can move in the same way, even though they are not the same thing. The metric which best, and it can be proved to be so, mimics movements of human wellbeing, no matter how you define human wellbeing, is the measure of wealth. Wealth was originally a word used to define wellbeing, but that’s not how I want to use it. The result I’m quoting, the metric that you were asking for, is a value of all the assets an economy has inherited from the past. And the assets include not just buildings, machinery, roads, and equipment, the stuff that we typically think of as being capital goods, but also our health and education, which now economists all agree consist of asset, which we call the human capital. But a third category, and that’s the one we are discussing here at the Pontifical Academy, is natural capital, nature, which comes in abundance and in various forms and sizes.

Let me give you an example of why wealth, which is the value of these assets, could be going down even when GDP goes up. Imagine now, just to take a simple example, suppose you convert a huge swathe of wetlands and construct shopping malls, just as an illustration. Now, in national accounting, from which you can estimate GDP, the shopping mall will be an investment; the amount that you’ve spent will be counted as investment. But the fact that you have lost the wetlands, the republic property out there, will not be costed, it will not be seen as a depreciation of your assets, because the wetland is lost and the wetland was supplying lots and lots of services, birds and bees, and water. There’s a huge amount of services that a wetland does and I needn’t innumerate that here. But that loss will not be counted against the project.

How can economics calculate the value of nature itself?

What are the sounding blocks? The mineral subsoil resources, they are not too bad, that can be done and that has been done. We have very few estimates of stocks of fisheries, for example, so never mind valuation, governments don’t even estimate what’s out there in terms of stocks. So it’s crazy. It’s like a household. Somebody comes and says what do you own? And they won’t know whether they have pots and pans in their kitchen, they won’t know how many beds they have, they won’t know if they own the house, or perhaps have forgotten a cottage.

So national accounts are disgraceful because national governments aren’t encouraged to actually have a, if you like, an inventory of what people have at their disposal, one person or the other. Fisheries, for example—for most countries you will not be able to get estimates of the stocks of fisheries, inland fisheries or coastal fisheries. Then there is all this factory out there, forests, wetlands, mangroves, they are churning out stuff, churning out services which you’re using either in extractive form or just using as invisible inputs into production. Do we have an inventory of that? Very little. But it’s not impossible these days, because you have satellite imaging. But remember, look at the number, you have forest covering acreage or hectares or millions of hectares, but it’s not going to give you very much about the composition of forest. You might say it’s deciduous or tropical, but what’s in there, the species in there which is churning out all that stuff, most of it is not in the national accounts, not even in the most crude approximate form. So we have been able to use the timber value of forest in constructing wealth measuring using market prices, but we have not been able to devise methods to estimate the services forest provide in, say, preventing floods, all the other services that we know nature offers. So they’re all missing. So it’s very, very early days now and I don’t apologize for that. If I have to apologize, I should apologize on behalf of my profession for not having done this 30 years ago or 40 years ago, but we haven’t and we’ve started. I like to think 20, 30 years from now we’ll be in a much better position to talk about the wealth of nations.

Let me give you a simple example. It’s not a complete answer to the problem, but suppose the forest recedes from the village center because there’s over-extraction. Then to heat your home, to cook food, you have to walk a longer distance to collect firewood. Now you could as a first cut estimate the time cost, energy cost of walking, say two kilometers, three kilometers to pull back a few kilograms of firewood. So you could try and start valuing things that way.

Is the free market to blame for not assigning value to the environment? (...)

The problem as I see it is that in no society that I can think of is there an absence—and in most societies there is an awful lot of it—of unaccounted for consequences for others of the actions that we each take. When we do some damage to nature and we’re not charged for it, that’s an unaccounted consequence for others, future generations and so forth. So we have a collective action problem, that’s what it really amounts to, and that collection active problem will not disappear anytime soon; it will never disappear. And the origins of market fundamentalism, if you want an intellectual basis for it, was that there will not be any unaccounted for consequences because everything will be priced, so you’ll pay for every consequence of your action. But, of course, market fundamentalists don’t remember that theorem, so they apply it to a world in which all hell breaks loose in terms of what we call externalities, and we still say, well, the market still works. So we have a serious problem of understanding the conceptual basis for a social philosophy.

by John Steele, Nautilus |  Read more:
Image: Nautilus

Volunteer Park Conservatory, 2014
photo: markk

Liberian Civil War
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"Do The Right Thing" at Twenty-Five

Last weekend was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the release of Spike Lee’s 1989 Brooklyn masterpiece, “Do the Right Thing.” The movie was celebrated all over the country: in Los Angeles, with a screening at LACMA and a panel moderated by John Singleton; in the White House, where Barack and Michelle Obama recorded a video greeting to Lee, in praise of the movie they’d seen on their first date (” ‘Do the Right Thing’ still holds up a mirror to our society, and it makes us laugh and think, and challenges all of us to see ourselves in one another,” Obama said); with a party in Bed-Stuy, on the block where the film was shot, recently renamed Do the Right Thing Way, featuring Lee, Dave Chappelle, Chuck D, and thousands of fans; and at BAM, which concluded BAMcinemaFest with a sold-out screening and a panel of cast and crew members. An all-ages Brooklyn crowd showed up to the Harvey Theatre on Sunday, wearing sundresses and suits and caps and red BOYCOTT SAL’S T-shirts.

“Do the Right Thing,” about a day in the life of a Bed-Stuy neighborhood on the hottest day of the year, starts with its heroes waking up and ends the next morning, after a night that includes a fight, police brutality that ends in murder, and a riot. The movie was controversial when it came out—some publicly speculated that it would ignite violence—but, as in the character Radio Raheem’s monologue about his LOVE-HATE set of brass knuckles, love won. “Do the Right Thing” reignited interest in Malcolm X and encouraged a broader cultural reappraisal of his ideas; it inspired independent filmmakers; it made a zillion teen-agers into Public Enemy fans. But it didn’t get much love from the Academy. Though Lee was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and Danny Aiello was nominated for Best Actor, the film wasn’t nominated for Best Picture—and, in a detail that Lee found especially painful, that honor went to “Driving Miss Daisy.” (Public Enemy razzed “Daisy” in its song “Burn Hollywood Burn,” with Big Daddy Kane concluding, “So let’s make our own movies like Spike Lee.”)

That was then. In 2014, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences co-presented theBAM and LACMA celebrations of “Do the Right Thing.” At BAM, Patrick Harrison, the Academy’s director of New York programs, told the crowd about his experience of seeing the film when it came out. “I saw it in Los Angeles, and I remember how it felt watching it,” Harrison said. “I thought, Who is this guy? Who is this director? And who is that hot chick dancing in the credits? Spike Lee has a vision and a voice. And he is absolutely not ashamed or afraid to tell you what it is. Mr. Spike Lee!”

Spike Lee came to the lectern. He wore a vaguely nautical outfit, looking like a ship’s commander: white pants, navy blazer, white shirt, white cap. His hair is graying. His facial expression hovered between above-the-fray and mildly suspicious. There was a slight commotion at stage right, and he turned toward it. “Rosie, grab a seat!” he said. Rosie Perez poked her head out of the darkness and waved. The crowd laughed. She took a seat in the front row, far off to one side. “That’s where you’re going to sit?” Lee said. “I want to thank the Academy and BAM for this screening tonight, and also for the retrospective,” he said.

Then, on a screen the size of the whole stage: Perez, in a short, tight red dress, in front of a brownstone stoop, dancing to “Fight the Power,” by Public Enemy. The room erupted in cheers, applause, joyous yelling. This also happened a few years ago at another screening of the movie at BAM, on a hot summer day, without cast and crew there—Brooklyn loves to watch Rosie Perez dance. It’s a knockout sequence: brutal, expressive, vital, the colors hot, then cool, sounds and visuals making fighting and beauty harmonize. Perez is shown dancing at night, in a blue bodysuit and a leather jacket, the sound of a police helicopter overhead; in a boxer’s gloves and a sports bra, shorts, and boxing gloves, in front of a wall of graffiti.

Got to give us what we want
Got to give us what we need
Our freedom of speech is freedom or death
We’ve got to fight the powers that be

Perez pops her chest in and out, arms raised in fists. She looks like she’s working toward something. She purses her lips and looks angry, sensual, exhausted, unwilling to quit. She dances to the whole song, for nearly four minutes. “Do the Right Thing” is the perfect delivery system for “Fight the Power,” perhaps the most danceable protest song ever. Throughout the film, it keeps reasserting itself, coming from the giant boom box of Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), a tall, broad-shouldered guy with a flattop, a focussed, serious expression, and a BED-STUY DO OR DIE T-shirt. “Fight the Power” sounds energized, aggressive, and now. (Even now.)

The music perfectly reflects the film’s power: Public Enemy young, smart, confrontational; Bill Lee’s orchestral score classic, beautiful, narrative, Hollywood. Lee is a master at revealing all the little interactions in a New York neighborhood: among three guys shooting the shit all day long (“If this heat wave continues, it’s going to melt the polar ice caps and the whole wide world,” one says), between the pizzeria owner, Sal (Aiello), and Da Mayor (Ossie Davis), who sweeps his sidewalk when Sal’s angry, racist son (John Turturro) doesn’t want to do it; between teens messing around with a fire hydrant and a tough guy who hollers at them not to douse his convertible as he drives by; between Clifton (John Savage), a white brownstoner in a Larry Bird jersey, and Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito), whose Jordans he scuffs. The movie is a touch poetic, heightened by the hilarity of the script and the beauty of the cinematography, by Ernest Dickerson, the colorful production design, by Wynn Thomas, and the eye-popping costume design, by Ruth E. Carter. You might cry when Perez dances, and you might cry toward the end, when Sal and Radio Raheem tumble onto the sidewalk, hands at each other’s throats. When I saw it as a teen-ager in 1989, in a theatre in Hartford, I was shattered at the end, seeing the image of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., come onscreen, and reading their quotations about violence and nonviolence. Now, at BAM, I was most struck by the humanness of the story: the way we assert and defend ourselves, the way we see people and don’t, the way we respect people and don’t; the way we do things we regret when we’re angry or fed up or even too hot. I’d love to know what Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson said to each other when the lights came on in the theatre in Chicago.

by Sarah Larson, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Do The Right Thing

Exploring Lanai, Hawaii, Rough Roads to Resorts

The first clue that Lanai is not just another Hawaiian island comes as your two-propeller plane banks off the Pacific Ocean, crossing stark cliffs rising out of the churning blue water before lowering over fields rustling with scrappy brown shrub, dry and flat in all directions, and onto the single runway at Lanai Airport. There is barely a swaying palm tree, beach umbrella, sparkling pool, or splash of tropical color in sight.

The aridness of Lanai, in dry contrast to the lushness of Kauai or Maui, may be stark and startling, but it suggests the peculiar history and charms of this small island west of Maui. These were once fields of pineapples, and this was known as Pineapple Island; the Dole Company owned 98 percent of Lanai for nearly 100 years before moving its plantations to less expensive shores. David Murdock, a billionaire entrepreneur, took it over in 1985 and moved to put it on the luxury tourism map, building two high-end resorts, one by Manele Bay and another 10 miles away, overlooking the only town, Lanai City. It was a tough sell. When Larry Ellison, a founder of Oracle, bought Lanai from a discouraged Mr. Murdock in 2012, he was bursting with ideas about how to make this island finally work — starting with multimillion-dollar renovations at the resorts, but including the notion of transforming Lanai into an international model of an environmentally sustainable community.

Long before Mr. Ellison came on the scene, a devoted sort of traveler has been drawn to Lanai, in search of a rough and rural Hawaii that once was — before the walls of beach resorts, condominiums, high-end restaurants and beaches crawling with swimmers, surfers and snorkelers. After coming to Lanai over the last three years, I, too, embraced its wind-swept barrenness and isolation, the harsh challenges in traveling deeply rutted and dusty roads to find its beaches, trails and ruins, even the relative lack of things to do after sundown. Still, a return trip in June made clear that things are changing. Mr. Ellison’s presence can be felt almost everywhere: the construction at the resorts; the spiffing-up of Lanai City, the onetime plantation town; the talk of long-term plans for desalination plants; agriculture; middle-class housing; and even a college campus and a film festival. Everyone is watching as the billionaire visionary seeks to change Lanai to his liking while, presumably, remaining faithful to the idea of it as the place to find Hawaii as it once was.

From the outset, I should stress that the way Hawaii once was is not for everyone. There are more restaurants, bars, hotels and places to surf, swim and snorkel in Maui and the Big Island. (Those islands are also easier on your knees, tires and wallet.) As high-end as the two Four Seasons resorts on Lanai aspire to be — and these days, Mr. Ellison’s crews are bang-bang-banging away, racing to transform them into the kind of destination that people will think nothing of spending $650 a night to enjoy — the St. Regis Princeville Resort in Kauai, to name one of many impressive options spread across the islands, matches it in setting and grandeur without quite the forced isolation.

Being a tourist on Lanai can be as exhausting as it is exhilarating. There is just one gas station on all of Lanai’s 141 square miles, and not a single traffic light. The population is just over 3,000, most clustered in the plantation homes that make up Lanai City. Three roads are paved; the island is crisscrossed with a largely unmapped network of red-dirt roads — impossibly rutted and rough, throwing up clouds of dust that provide a thick coat over wheels, fenders, clothes and shoes.

Still with me? Good.

There are two ways to experience Lanai, and visitors who come here can initially be divided into two groups: Those who rent jeeps, and those who don’t. It is entirely possible to fly in, or jump on the 45-minute intoxicatingly beautiful ferry trip from Maui, to the waiting luxury Mercedes-Benz minibuses to the Four Seasons Hotel at Manele Bay or the Lodge at Koele and disappear into these islands-within-an-island. An adventure would consist of braving a trip from one Four Seasons Resort to the other Four Seasons resort.

Alternately, you can get a room at the charming Hotel Lanai, snag a Jeep, throw some towels, sturdy shoes and walking sticks into the back seat and set out to explore one of the last truly undeveloped Hawaiian islands.

It’s actually not a choice. Do both.

by Adam Nagourney, NY Times |  Read more:

Images: Kahekili's Leap and Club Lanai, markk

Brenda Cablayan, Queen St. Corridor
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