Saturday, September 20, 2014
What’s the Killer App for VR?
[ed. C'mon. Please. It's porn, just like it's always been since the dawn of the Internet.]
It’s a huge year for games, with tech giants dropping billions on Mojang, Twitch and Oculus VR.
But at Oculus Connect in Los Angeles, the company’s first developer conference, the consensus is that while virtual reality games will be fun, they probably won’t be the content that convinces average consumers to try VR. Instead, developers here say, the lure will be social and media experiences, and games will come later for most users.
The mainstream-crossover question is a salient one, as Oculus is expected today to lay out its roadmap for getting the Oculus Rift headset on consumers’ heads. As co-founder Palmer Luckey told conference attendees at a welcome reception, the company is counting on the developers in attendance to fill its app store.
“Without content, nobody would be interested in this whole virtual reality thing,” Luckey said.
Multiple developers at Oculus Connect pointed to the already-announced Samsung Gear VR, a mobile virtual reality headset developed with Oculus, as an indicator of the future.
“It’s the mobile experiences,” said Otherworld Interactive co-founder Robyn Gray. “You can download from the store, which you already do every day. It’s just like with mobile games, when people were like, ‘I’m not a gamer,’ and then you’re like, ‘Well what about Bejeweled? What about FarmVille?'”
Alchemy creative director Phil Harper agreed that mobile has already taught consumers how to spread a killer app around once it emerges.
“People already understand how to share an application,” he said. “Those moments where people gather around someone who has a Gear VR headset and someone says, ‘Look at this!’ It’s going to create those ‘you have to check this out’ moments, and the easier it is to get involved in those moments, the better.”
One of the most buzzed-about VR experiences at E3 this year was, in fact, not made for the most casual audience. It was a (I’m unanimously told) terrifying VR slice of the upcoming horror game Alien: Isolation, based on Ridley Scott’s classic 1979 film and developed by English studio The Creative Assembly; despite the hype around that experience, TCA programmer Sam Birley volunteered the first Oculus hit might be something completely different.
“I’m not really sure what the killer app is, yet,” Birley said. “I don’t think it necessarily has to be games. Social interaction is a massive draw to VR. Hypothetically, say they had some form of gaze tracking in the Rift. Being able to form eye contact in VR would be so powerful.”
It’s a huge year for games, with tech giants dropping billions on Mojang, Twitch and Oculus VR.
But at Oculus Connect in Los Angeles, the company’s first developer conference, the consensus is that while virtual reality games will be fun, they probably won’t be the content that convinces average consumers to try VR. Instead, developers here say, the lure will be social and media experiences, and games will come later for most users.
The mainstream-crossover question is a salient one, as Oculus is expected today to lay out its roadmap for getting the Oculus Rift headset on consumers’ heads. As co-founder Palmer Luckey told conference attendees at a welcome reception, the company is counting on the developers in attendance to fill its app store.“Without content, nobody would be interested in this whole virtual reality thing,” Luckey said.
Multiple developers at Oculus Connect pointed to the already-announced Samsung Gear VR, a mobile virtual reality headset developed with Oculus, as an indicator of the future.
“It’s the mobile experiences,” said Otherworld Interactive co-founder Robyn Gray. “You can download from the store, which you already do every day. It’s just like with mobile games, when people were like, ‘I’m not a gamer,’ and then you’re like, ‘Well what about Bejeweled? What about FarmVille?'”
Alchemy creative director Phil Harper agreed that mobile has already taught consumers how to spread a killer app around once it emerges.
“People already understand how to share an application,” he said. “Those moments where people gather around someone who has a Gear VR headset and someone says, ‘Look at this!’ It’s going to create those ‘you have to check this out’ moments, and the easier it is to get involved in those moments, the better.”
One of the most buzzed-about VR experiences at E3 this year was, in fact, not made for the most casual audience. It was a (I’m unanimously told) terrifying VR slice of the upcoming horror game Alien: Isolation, based on Ridley Scott’s classic 1979 film and developed by English studio The Creative Assembly; despite the hype around that experience, TCA programmer Sam Birley volunteered the first Oculus hit might be something completely different.
“I’m not really sure what the killer app is, yet,” Birley said. “I don’t think it necessarily has to be games. Social interaction is a massive draw to VR. Hypothetically, say they had some form of gaze tracking in the Rift. Being able to form eye contact in VR would be so powerful.”
by Eric Johnson, Recode | Read more:
Image: Shutterstock
Native Advertising is Here to Stay
[ed. See also: The invasion of corporate news]
“There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50 per cent more readers. You might think that the public would resent this trick, but there is no evidence to suggest that they do.”
That was David Ogilvy, the Mad Men-era advertising wizard, in Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1963.
When we look back on 2014 in the news business, we may think of it as the year that Ogilvy’s maxim went mainstream, accepted in the world’s top newsrooms.
In January, NYTimes.com ran its first piece of what’s come to be called native advertising. It had “The New York Times” blazed across the top of the page, and it had a lot of the visual DNA of a Times article — a headline about millennials in the workplace, about 700 words of copy, and even the honorific Mr. and Ms. of Times style.
But above that headline, in 12-point type, were the words “Paid for and posted by Dell.” The byline went to a freelance writer with a Dell logo next to her name; the typography looked different from what you’d see on a Gail Collins column. And at the bottom: “This page was produced by the Advertising Department of The New York Times in collaboration with Dell. The news and editorial staffs of The New York Times had no role in its preparation.” (...)
If you’re like many journalists, the last few paragraphs have made you feel a little unclean. The separation of editorial content and advertising was drilled into most of our heads at a young age — that first journalism school class, that first crusty night city editor. The credibility of the news, forever challenged, would seem to be deeply wounded if something that looks like an article is up for sale. (...)
Publishers also love native advertising because it plays to their strengths. Before the web, a newspaper could sell businesses on an amorphous idea of its “audience” and the idea that putting ads near stories would somehow, fuzzily, equal impact. And even today, most news organizations have only the broadest idea of what makes one online reader different from another.
But the kings of online advertising — Google, Facebook — are swimming in user data. Google knows what you’re searching for, what you’re emailing about, where you’re looking for directions — even what products you almost-but-not-quite bought online. Facebook knows who your friends are, where you went to school, whether you’re single, what brands you like. All that data means they can target ads at you far more effectively than a newspaper website that doesn’t know much more than the fact you’re interested in news about Kansas City. (...)
So native advertising — which is fundamentally about brands, both the news organization’s and the advertiser’s — is seen as a place where publishers can still have something to offer. For Dell, attaching its name and content to The New York Times is something that’s hard for a social network to match. For GE, sponsored content on sites like Quartz and The Economist attaches a vague innovation-friendly feeling to its brand. For the National Retail Federation, which has bought space for what sort of looks like an op-ed on Politico, native gives direct entrée to an audience of Hill staffers and political movers.
Why is it called “native” advertising anyway? It’s meant to embody the idea that, on any given environment, a piece of advertising will be more effective if it feels native to that platform. An ad on Twitter should look like a tweet. An ad on Facebook should look like a Facebook update. An ad on a Google search should look like a search result.
“There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50 per cent more readers. You might think that the public would resent this trick, but there is no evidence to suggest that they do.”
That was David Ogilvy, the Mad Men-era advertising wizard, in Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1963.When we look back on 2014 in the news business, we may think of it as the year that Ogilvy’s maxim went mainstream, accepted in the world’s top newsrooms.
In January, NYTimes.com ran its first piece of what’s come to be called native advertising. It had “The New York Times” blazed across the top of the page, and it had a lot of the visual DNA of a Times article — a headline about millennials in the workplace, about 700 words of copy, and even the honorific Mr. and Ms. of Times style.
But above that headline, in 12-point type, were the words “Paid for and posted by Dell.” The byline went to a freelance writer with a Dell logo next to her name; the typography looked different from what you’d see on a Gail Collins column. And at the bottom: “This page was produced by the Advertising Department of The New York Times in collaboration with Dell. The news and editorial staffs of The New York Times had no role in its preparation.” (...)
If you’re like many journalists, the last few paragraphs have made you feel a little unclean. The separation of editorial content and advertising was drilled into most of our heads at a young age — that first journalism school class, that first crusty night city editor. The credibility of the news, forever challenged, would seem to be deeply wounded if something that looks like an article is up for sale. (...)
Publishers also love native advertising because it plays to their strengths. Before the web, a newspaper could sell businesses on an amorphous idea of its “audience” and the idea that putting ads near stories would somehow, fuzzily, equal impact. And even today, most news organizations have only the broadest idea of what makes one online reader different from another.
But the kings of online advertising — Google, Facebook — are swimming in user data. Google knows what you’re searching for, what you’re emailing about, where you’re looking for directions — even what products you almost-but-not-quite bought online. Facebook knows who your friends are, where you went to school, whether you’re single, what brands you like. All that data means they can target ads at you far more effectively than a newspaper website that doesn’t know much more than the fact you’re interested in news about Kansas City. (...)
So native advertising — which is fundamentally about brands, both the news organization’s and the advertiser’s — is seen as a place where publishers can still have something to offer. For Dell, attaching its name and content to The New York Times is something that’s hard for a social network to match. For GE, sponsored content on sites like Quartz and The Economist attaches a vague innovation-friendly feeling to its brand. For the National Retail Federation, which has bought space for what sort of looks like an op-ed on Politico, native gives direct entrée to an audience of Hill staffers and political movers.
Why is it called “native” advertising anyway? It’s meant to embody the idea that, on any given environment, a piece of advertising will be more effective if it feels native to that platform. An ad on Twitter should look like a tweet. An ad on Facebook should look like a Facebook update. An ad on a Google search should look like a search result.
by Joshua Benton, NeimanLab | Read more:
Image: Ogilvy & Mather
Friday, September 19, 2014
Ink Sessions
I was a hooker — an art hooker — for most of my career,’ says Roxx, a tattooist in San Francisco. ‘I’d listen to what people wanted and I would do their things.’ When she suggested her own ideas, many declined — only to return later to confess their regret.
Today, no one tells Roxx what to do. Her clients come for a consultation in which she explores who they are and what they want their tattoo to say about them. They tell her where they want the piece and which of her other tattoos appeals to them. She takes notes and shoots photos. Unlike most tattooists, she uses no reference materials or stencils. ‘I just need to feel their energy and ask: “What would suit you? Do you want it to be warrior-like? Badass? Pretty and feminine?”’ A design takes shape, she draws it on freehand, and the work begins. ‘It’s nothing spiritual or philosophical,’ she says. When I ask her what she would create for me based on a half-hour of conversation, she exclaims: ‘I was just doing it!’ And her prescription is perfect, though I haven’t come for a tattoo.
We are in 2Spirit Tattoo, her shop on Pearl Street, where she has made her name as one of the most sophisticated and original tattooists in the world, working in a style — called ‘blackwork’ — that few women practice. Her studio is a sprawling open space with natural light, white walls, wood floors, brushed aluminium ceiling lamps, and black leather tattoo tables arranged at each of her four employees’ workstations. One wall near the glass-front entrance is covered in framed photos of her clients showing off their art: precise, geometric, all-black designs that follow the musculature of the body or fan out in lacy arcs between shoulder blades; boldly etched dharma wheels rolling across chests; honeycombed netting nicked from the Filipino Kalinga tradition and tailored like clothing on chests and arms; and in one photo, a simple trio of liquid lines pouring down a woman’s back and flowing around her waist.
Roxx’s workstation occupies a back corner of the shop that can be partitioned off with sliding doors. She sits on the edge of her chair, elbows on her knees, talking with increasing animation as the late morning coffee kicks in. Soothing electronica fills the space, softening the buzz of machines wielded by two artists, Michael Bennett and Matt Matik, who chat amiably with their prone clients. Two years ago when I interviewed her for my book Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo, Roxx called her shop ‘San Francisco hippie’, but that merely describes the comfort level; there is nothing hippie about the refined aesthetic of this studio, or her elegant tattoos.
Whether you follow tattooing or not, you’ve probably seen a spate of recent articles announcing that it’s no longer the exclusive province of bikers and gangbangers — though it long predates both groups, and never really belonged to either. It’s true, however, that in the new millennium tattooing has landed squarely in mainstream Western culture and burrowed deep into the middle class, where it’s flourishing. Since the 1970s, when the Japanese influence opened the way to all manner of innovation, the colours have become richer, the technique is stronger, the range of styles and subjects is broader, and more people are wearing better executed, more interesting tattoos. But one thing hasn’t changed: tattooing is still generally a matter of putting pictures on skin — something Roxx will have no part of.
She is against using the body — a 3D form, a sculptural form — as if it were paper or canvas. The reason: horses. Roxx (née Roxanne) has loved horses since she was a child growing up in England who dreamed of becoming an equine veterinarian. ‘My Granny taught me to draw them when I was two,’ she says, and she has been riding for nearly as long. ‘I spent most of my childhood with horses — grooming them, touching them, running my hands down their legs and feeling their anatomy, and that’s how I learnt to draw them,’ she explains. ‘That’s all I drew as a kid, and all I cared to draw.’
Her sketches led to her interest in tattooing, first in London as a teen and a punk in the 1980s, then in Edinburgh and Amsterdam. Early on, when she tried to get a formal apprenticeship in London, she says: ‘People looked at me like I had horns growing out of my head — because I was a woman.’ (She is also a mixed-race lesbian of Persian, Dutch and German descent, which surely didn’t help in what was then a hetero-centric, white-dominated tattoo culture.) She went to Amsterdam because the tattoo consciousness was more evolved there. ‘The people in Amsterdam were educated about tattoos as an art form rather than some old historical, nasty, dirty trade,’ she says. She initially worked in a street shop doing flash designs — stock images pulled from a sheet — for people who lined up 100 deep every morning, pumped to get inked.
‘That was like tattoo university,’ she says. The non-stop work honed her technique and boosted her confidence. But the trite imagery nearly drove her to quit tattooing for good. ‘I worked for three years doing dolphins and rainbows and fuckin’ lions’ heads day in and day out, and I was like: “This isn’t being an artist; this is bollocks”.’ (...)
Anatomy is one reason she insists on choosing designs for her clients. It’s not that Roxx doesn’t respect their wishes (‘I’m a people-pleaser’), it’s just that she knows better. ‘A lot of these people, even if they’re 2D artists, they have no idea how things work when it comes to the 3D form. We know what works on the body and what doesn’t. I think it’s changing now where people trust the artist to do their piece and they don’t want to get in the way of the artist’s process. It’s a really privileged, nice position to be in, but I’ve worked really hard to get there.’ And, she says: ‘I don’t want to spend any more of my life doing art that makes my soul disappear.’
Blackwork tattoo, as defined by Marisa Kakoulas in Black Tattoo Art 2 (2013), which features Roxx’s art, emerged in the late 1960s and became fashionable in the ’90s. ‘It is a contemporary tattooist’s interpretation of an art largely derived from Polynesian, Maori and Southeast Asian cultures — often blending together signature styles from different traditions,’ Kakoulas explains. In the 1980s, the iconic artist Leo Zulueta popularised blackwork by combining it with Old School imagery — hearts, flames, and skulls. He was the first to build his style on a bedrock of tribal elements.
‘The black graphic look has introduced an important option to modern tattooing,’ wrote the artist Ed Hardy in Art From the Heart (1991), ‘that of clarity, visibility, and an appreciation of abstract form for its own sake.’
Throughout most of the 20th century, Western tattooing was a closed system wedded to a static roster of folk forms that included anchors, hearts, pin-ups, skulls, devils, snakes, panthers, tigers, swallows, eagles, mermaids, Christs, crucifixes, ships, tombstones, horseshoes, and nautical stars. A wave of Japanese and Polynesian influences enriched it both formally and technically from the 1970s to the ’90s, and by the turn of the millennium a recombinant postmodernism had scrambled the lexicon, allowing for everything from Day of the Dead pin-ups to solid black Banksy reproductions. This is the era in which Roxx came of age as a tattooist. But it was the blackwork that grabbed her: its abstract motifs promised timeless designs, and its graphic simplicity allowed for customising it on the body.
‘I’ve never done anything authentic from another culture,’ says Roxx. ‘I went through years of tattooing Polynesian — Tahitian, Samoan — the Samoan pe’a [traditional tattoo] has influenced my entire career, [but] I warped it.’ Once she was fluent in these styles, she built and distilled her own image library informed by them. ‘It’s all down to lines and forms and curves now, and the simplicity of how you put them together. It’s back to graphic design.’ And it’s all stored in her head.
‘She’s like a conceptual artist,’ says Cats, her newest hire and mentee, a young British artist with a graduate degree in fine arts who has joined our conversation. ‘The process is entirely theoretical until it’s on the person’s body.’
by Margot Mifflin, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Roxx
The Last Ride
There is no honor in worshiping a monolith, not really, and so consequently there’s no recompense or sympathy when it is toppled. That is life for those that care about the Dallas Cowboys. To do this is to take a long position on the NFL’s answer to Bear Stearns; it is to run cheering in the wake of a diamond-encrusted boulder that has just rumbled through some humble village. It is football exceptionalism at its highest peak and, now, its lowest valley.
The epistemology behind this particular fealty varies. Sometimes it’s a birthright, or something other than high-volume idolatry; more often, it’s the front-running jewelry store caper one comes to associate with the ritziest franchises. But it all leads to a similarly tacky endgame, the same broken-down luxury liner sputtering into port. Every professional franchise conducts business, of course, but only one has stamped the entire country onto its crest, only one is commanded by an owner who so manages his multi-billion-dollar enterprise like his family’s personal backwater canteen. There is no quiet failure here: America’s Team burns loudly. It is, unmistakably, burning.
Truthfully, even writing all that above seems a touch grandiose; there is no need to aggrandize stupidity, especially on such a lavish scale. This is a bad football franchise and does the things bad franchises do. It doesn’t simply leave positions unaddressed; it willfully and ritualistically ignores them, slapping papier-mache over various craters because to do more would be to admit the need to do more. Instead, they make do, or mostly don’t, with thrift-store safeties and bargain-basement interior linemen.
The Cowboys cannot bear to merely blow mid-round draft picks, either; they waste scores of them, unearthing just two starters after the third round in their last eight drafts. Smart teams require one premium pick at most to fix a roster need; Dallas fumbles through fistfuls, only to see more problems crop up once the first one finally resolves itself; it’s a hopelessly idiotic game of Whac-A-Mole that requires feeding hundred dollar bills, one after another, into a slot built for quarters. Good organizations have roster depth; Dallas employs the likes of Jeff Heath, Nick Hayden and David Arkin, all of whom sound and mostly play like TV actors.
It is, unsurprisingly, very difficult to win this way, which is the exactly the sort of concern that owner-general manager-huckster savant Jerry Jones should bother with and yet somehow cannot be bothered by. Those are concerns for other, lesser teams, the small fry with some sort of fowl or jungle cat on their helmets instead of a bright, gleaming star, the one that was for so long the league’s foremost guiding light.
***
The Cowboys never won quite like anyone else, and they cannot and will not lose as other teams do. It must be bigger and louder and wholly unmerciful, less defeat than overdue penance for past sins. Among bloated American sports franchises, only the Yankees and Lakers can claim this sort of organizational overstatement. But while the former ages into decrepitude and the latter has rotted from the inside out, neither has sunk into an abyss this deep, not yet.
There is no corollary for a team so outsized and significant both in its sport’s history and broader identity winning just one playoff game over 18 seasons, let alone in a league defined by (among other things) its parity. This is made odder still by this fan base’s defiant—in general, and in defiance of nearly two decades of factual failure—insistence on puffing their chests and denying a very palpable descent.
It’s a bad look. Not every Cowboys fan is that way, of course, but enough are, and are so brazenly and grandiosely that way, that it’s pro forma to assume that all involved deserve this particular bit of ironic retribution. If you’re the Cowboys fan, you’re the asshole.
That, I should mention, is me. This is the team I grew up caring about. This is the team that has more recently earned me a bit of well-meaning condescension from a good friend, who happens to be a Browns fan. We have argued idly about which team is more depressing—more buffoonish or idiotically mismanaged or multiply and deservingly doomed. We both know that he will win this argument, if that’s the word. It’s not much of a contest, really; Jones’ autocratic imbecility is no match for the endless carousel of buffoons that comprise Cleveland’s brain trust, and not even the most beaten-down Cowboy supporter can grasp a championship drought that’s eligible for Social Security. Still, he understands the situation.
“The worst part about your liking the Cowboys,” he tells me, “is that you don’t get to enjoy the Cowboys.”The epistemology behind this particular fealty varies. Sometimes it’s a birthright, or something other than high-volume idolatry; more often, it’s the front-running jewelry store caper one comes to associate with the ritziest franchises. But it all leads to a similarly tacky endgame, the same broken-down luxury liner sputtering into port. Every professional franchise conducts business, of course, but only one has stamped the entire country onto its crest, only one is commanded by an owner who so manages his multi-billion-dollar enterprise like his family’s personal backwater canteen. There is no quiet failure here: America’s Team burns loudly. It is, unmistakably, burning.Truthfully, even writing all that above seems a touch grandiose; there is no need to aggrandize stupidity, especially on such a lavish scale. This is a bad football franchise and does the things bad franchises do. It doesn’t simply leave positions unaddressed; it willfully and ritualistically ignores them, slapping papier-mache over various craters because to do more would be to admit the need to do more. Instead, they make do, or mostly don’t, with thrift-store safeties and bargain-basement interior linemen.
The Cowboys cannot bear to merely blow mid-round draft picks, either; they waste scores of them, unearthing just two starters after the third round in their last eight drafts. Smart teams require one premium pick at most to fix a roster need; Dallas fumbles through fistfuls, only to see more problems crop up once the first one finally resolves itself; it’s a hopelessly idiotic game of Whac-A-Mole that requires feeding hundred dollar bills, one after another, into a slot built for quarters. Good organizations have roster depth; Dallas employs the likes of Jeff Heath, Nick Hayden and David Arkin, all of whom sound and mostly play like TV actors.
It is, unsurprisingly, very difficult to win this way, which is the exactly the sort of concern that owner-general manager-huckster savant Jerry Jones should bother with and yet somehow cannot be bothered by. Those are concerns for other, lesser teams, the small fry with some sort of fowl or jungle cat on their helmets instead of a bright, gleaming star, the one that was for so long the league’s foremost guiding light.
***
The Cowboys never won quite like anyone else, and they cannot and will not lose as other teams do. It must be bigger and louder and wholly unmerciful, less defeat than overdue penance for past sins. Among bloated American sports franchises, only the Yankees and Lakers can claim this sort of organizational overstatement. But while the former ages into decrepitude and the latter has rotted from the inside out, neither has sunk into an abyss this deep, not yet.
There is no corollary for a team so outsized and significant both in its sport’s history and broader identity winning just one playoff game over 18 seasons, let alone in a league defined by (among other things) its parity. This is made odder still by this fan base’s defiant—in general, and in defiance of nearly two decades of factual failure—insistence on puffing their chests and denying a very palpable descent.
It’s a bad look. Not every Cowboys fan is that way, of course, but enough are, and are so brazenly and grandiosely that way, that it’s pro forma to assume that all involved deserve this particular bit of ironic retribution. If you’re the Cowboys fan, you’re the asshole.
That, I should mention, is me. This is the team I grew up caring about. This is the team that has more recently earned me a bit of well-meaning condescension from a good friend, who happens to be a Browns fan. We have argued idly about which team is more depressing—more buffoonish or idiotically mismanaged or multiply and deservingly doomed. We both know that he will win this argument, if that’s the word. It’s not much of a contest, really; Jones’ autocratic imbecility is no match for the endless carousel of buffoons that comprise Cleveland’s brain trust, and not even the most beaten-down Cowboy supporter can grasp a championship drought that’s eligible for Social Security. Still, he understands the situation.
by Mike Piellucci, The Classical | Read more:
Image: Dmitry Samarov.
Panel Urges Overhauling Health Care at End of Life
[ed. See also: When Medicine is Futile]
The 21-member nonpartisan committee, appointed by the Institute of Medicine, the independent research arm of the National Academy of Sciences, called for sweeping change.“The bottom line is the health care system is poorly designed to meet the needs of patients near the end of life,” said David M. Walker, a Republican and a former United States comptroller general, who was a chairman of the panel. “The current system is geared towards doing more, more, more, and that system by definition is not necessarily consistent with what patients want, and is also more costly.”
Many of the report’s recommendations could be accomplished without legislation. For example, the panel urged insurers to reimburse health care providers for conversations with patients on advance care planning. Medicare, which covers 50 million Americans and whose members account for about 80 percent of deaths each year, is considering doing just that, prompted by a recent request from the American Medical Association. Some private insurers are already covering such conversations, and many more would if Medicare did.
But some recommendations — like changing the reimbursement structure so that Medicare would pay for home health services instead of emphasizing hospital care, and so that Medicaid would provide better coverage of long-term care for the frail elderly — would require congressional action.
“We know that there may be a need for new legislation to be introduced to accomplish that, and we recognize that that’s harder to accomplish in a politically charged environment,” said Dr. Philip A. Pizzo, a former dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine and the committee’s other chairman. (...)
It called for a “major reorientation and restructuring of Medicare, Medicaid and other health care delivery programs” and the elimination of “perverse financial incentives” that encourage expensive hospital procedures when growing numbers of very sick and very old patients want low-tech services like home health care and pain management.
And it said that medical schools and groups that accredit and regulate health providers should greatly increase training in palliative care and set standards so that more clinicians know how to compassionately and effectively treat patients who want to be made comfortable but avoid extensive medical procedures.
The 507-page report, “Dying in America,” said its recommendations would improve the quality of care and better satisfy more patients and families. It also said the changes would produce significant savings that would help make health care more affordable.
“If you meet their needs, treat their pain, treat their depression, get them some help in the house, your costs plummet,” said Dr. Diane E. Meier, a committee member and the director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care. Fewer patients would end up in emergency rooms getting expensive care they do not want, she said, adding, “It’s a rare example in health policy of doing well by doing good.”
by Pam Belluck, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Heather Ainsworth
Thursday, September 18, 2014
The Solution to ISIS Is the First Amendment
As the elite panic about ISIS — the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant — continues apace, it’s worth looking at how violations of the First Amendment have allowed this group to flourish, and just generally screw up US policy-making. The gist of the problem is that Americans have been lied to for years about our foreign policy, and these lies have now created binding policy constraints on our leaders which make it impossible to eliminate groups like ISIS.
Let’s start by understanding what ISIS actually is. First, ISIS is a brutal fascistic movement of radical Sunni militants, well-armed and well-trained, and bent on the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate throughout the Middle East. Second, it may also be and almost certainly was an arm of a wealthy Gulf state allied with the United States. This contradiction probably doesn’t surprise you, but if it does, that’s only because it cuts against a standard narrative of good guys and bad guys peddled by various foreign policy interests. The reality is that ally and enemy in post-colonial lands is often a meaningless term —it’s better to describe interests. A good if overly romanticized Hollywood illustration of this dynamic is the movie Charlie Wilson’s War, about the secret collaboration between Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan Israel and the CIA to undermine the Soviets in Afghanistan. This foreign policy apparatus is usually hidden in plain sight, known to most financial, political, military, and corporate elites but not told to the American public.
ISIS, like Al Qaeda, is an armed and trained military group. Guns and training cost money, and this money came from somewhere. There are two Gulf states that finance Sunni militants — Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Both states use financial power derived from oil to build armed terrorist groups which then accomplish aims that their states cannot pursue openly. This occasionally slips out into the open. German Development Minister Gerd Mueller recently blamed Qatar, for instance, for financing ISIS. Qatar itself swiftly denied the charges and claimed it only funds Jabhat al-Nusra. Al-Nusra is the other radical Al Qaeda offshoot militant group fighting in Syria.In other words, Qatar denied funding ISIS by saying it funds Al-Qaeda. It’s a sort of ‘we fund the bad guys who want to kill Americans but not the really bad guys who behead them on social media,’ a non-denial denial by geopolitical psychopaths. (...)
This is what happened after 9/11, a lack of an informed debate due to propaganda, media control, and a special kind of censorship. Our policy on ISIS is the price for such ignorance. Polling shows Americans want something done on ISIS, but they have no confidence that what is being done will work. This is a remarkably astute way to see the situation, because foreign policy since 9/11 has been a series of geopolitical duct tape and costly disasters. Despite the layers of gauze and grime pulled over our foreign policy viewfinder, the public itself is aware that whatever we’re doing ain’t working.
Until that happens, Americans will not be willing to pay any price for a foreign policy, and rightfully so. Fool me once, shame on you. And so forth.
Unwinding the classified state, and beginning the adult conversation put off for seventy years about the nature of American power, is the predicate for building a global order that can drain the swampy brutal corners of the world that allow groups like ISIS to grow and thrive. To make that unwinding happen, we need to start demanding the truth, not what ‘national security’ tells us we need to know. The Constitution does not mention the words ‘national security’, it says ‘common defense.’ And that means that Americans should be getting accurate information about what exactly we are defending.
Let’s start by understanding what ISIS actually is. First, ISIS is a brutal fascistic movement of radical Sunni militants, well-armed and well-trained, and bent on the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate throughout the Middle East. Second, it may also be and almost certainly was an arm of a wealthy Gulf state allied with the United States. This contradiction probably doesn’t surprise you, but if it does, that’s only because it cuts against a standard narrative of good guys and bad guys peddled by various foreign policy interests. The reality is that ally and enemy in post-colonial lands is often a meaningless term —it’s better to describe interests. A good if overly romanticized Hollywood illustration of this dynamic is the movie Charlie Wilson’s War, about the secret collaboration between Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan Israel and the CIA to undermine the Soviets in Afghanistan. This foreign policy apparatus is usually hidden in plain sight, known to most financial, political, military, and corporate elites but not told to the American public.ISIS, like Al Qaeda, is an armed and trained military group. Guns and training cost money, and this money came from somewhere. There are two Gulf states that finance Sunni militants — Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Both states use financial power derived from oil to build armed terrorist groups which then accomplish aims that their states cannot pursue openly. This occasionally slips out into the open. German Development Minister Gerd Mueller recently blamed Qatar, for instance, for financing ISIS. Qatar itself swiftly denied the charges and claimed it only funds Jabhat al-Nusra. Al-Nusra is the other radical Al Qaeda offshoot militant group fighting in Syria.In other words, Qatar denied funding ISIS by saying it funds Al-Qaeda. It’s a sort of ‘we fund the bad guys who want to kill Americans but not the really bad guys who behead them on social media,’ a non-denial denial by geopolitical psychopaths. (...)
This is what happened after 9/11, a lack of an informed debate due to propaganda, media control, and a special kind of censorship. Our policy on ISIS is the price for such ignorance. Polling shows Americans want something done on ISIS, but they have no confidence that what is being done will work. This is a remarkably astute way to see the situation, because foreign policy since 9/11 has been a series of geopolitical duct tape and costly disasters. Despite the layers of gauze and grime pulled over our foreign policy viewfinder, the public itself is aware that whatever we’re doing ain’t working.
Until that happens, Americans will not be willing to pay any price for a foreign policy, and rightfully so. Fool me once, shame on you. And so forth.
Unwinding the classified state, and beginning the adult conversation put off for seventy years about the nature of American power, is the predicate for building a global order that can drain the swampy brutal corners of the world that allow groups like ISIS to grow and thrive. To make that unwinding happen, we need to start demanding the truth, not what ‘national security’ tells us we need to know. The Constitution does not mention the words ‘national security’, it says ‘common defense.’ And that means that Americans should be getting accurate information about what exactly we are defending.
by Matt Stoller, Medium | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Honolulu Is Building America's First Fully Driverless Transit System
Perfect weather and sandy beaches might spring to mind when a mainlander thinks of Honolulu. But this metro area of nearly 1 million people is far from paradise for those who get stuck in its notorious traffic, which competes with Los Angeles for the title of worst in the United States.
"Anybody who flies into Honolulu and drives into town—heading to Waikiki, for example—you are immediately struck by the H-1 freeway, seven lanes of traffic going in the same direction," says Dan Grabauskas, executive director and CEO of the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART). "And if you land at rush hour, it's a standstill. It surprises people when they come here, to see how much congestion we face."
HART is working on an alternative to that miserable commute: a 20-mile elevated rail line—a first for the islands—that will whisk passengers between downtown and outlying communities in a fraction of the time it currently takes to crawl through rush hour traffic. With the first trips planned for 2017, the $5.2 billion Honolulu Rail Transit Project is expected to reduce congestion by 18 percent, taking as many as 40,000 automobiles off the road and replacing them with a fleet of four-car trains that can accommodate up to 800 riders, with racks for both bicycles and surfboards.
But surfboard storage will not be the project's only unique feature; this will also be the first fully automated wide-scale urban transit system in the United States. Instead of human drivers, a centrally-located computer system will control stops, departures, and speed, and even open and close doors. Operation will be cheaper than for manually-driven rail, says Grabauskas, and he also expects it to be safer. "There are transit systems where driver error has caused collisions or other incidents," he says. "The driverless operation we have is going to be very safe." (...)
In Honolulu, which is starting from scratch, automation was perhaps the easiest thing about making the system a reality. The rail line was "decades in the making," says Jennifer Sabas, former chief of staff to Hawaii's Sen. Daniel Inouye, who secured $1.5 billion in federal funding for the rail line before his death in 2012. Sabas now serves as executive director of Move Oahu Forward, a business- and labor-backed non-profit organized to support the line in the face of opposition from residents and politicians who argued that the elevated tracks and stations would loom over the landscape, and that the system, which will be funded by a half-cent surcharge on the state's general excise tax in addition to the federal contribution, simply cost too much. "Since there was such an issue over whether to even build a train, the driverless aspect hasn't gotten much attention," says Sabas.
"Anybody who flies into Honolulu and drives into town—heading to Waikiki, for example—you are immediately struck by the H-1 freeway, seven lanes of traffic going in the same direction," says Dan Grabauskas, executive director and CEO of the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART). "And if you land at rush hour, it's a standstill. It surprises people when they come here, to see how much congestion we face."HART is working on an alternative to that miserable commute: a 20-mile elevated rail line—a first for the islands—that will whisk passengers between downtown and outlying communities in a fraction of the time it currently takes to crawl through rush hour traffic. With the first trips planned for 2017, the $5.2 billion Honolulu Rail Transit Project is expected to reduce congestion by 18 percent, taking as many as 40,000 automobiles off the road and replacing them with a fleet of four-car trains that can accommodate up to 800 riders, with racks for both bicycles and surfboards.
But surfboard storage will not be the project's only unique feature; this will also be the first fully automated wide-scale urban transit system in the United States. Instead of human drivers, a centrally-located computer system will control stops, departures, and speed, and even open and close doors. Operation will be cheaper than for manually-driven rail, says Grabauskas, and he also expects it to be safer. "There are transit systems where driver error has caused collisions or other incidents," he says. "The driverless operation we have is going to be very safe." (...)
In Honolulu, which is starting from scratch, automation was perhaps the easiest thing about making the system a reality. The rail line was "decades in the making," says Jennifer Sabas, former chief of staff to Hawaii's Sen. Daniel Inouye, who secured $1.5 billion in federal funding for the rail line before his death in 2012. Sabas now serves as executive director of Move Oahu Forward, a business- and labor-backed non-profit organized to support the line in the face of opposition from residents and politicians who argued that the elevated tracks and stations would loom over the landscape, and that the system, which will be funded by a half-cent surcharge on the state's general excise tax in addition to the federal contribution, simply cost too much. "Since there was such an issue over whether to even build a train, the driverless aspect hasn't gotten much attention," says Sabas.
by Amy Crawford, CityLab | Read more:
Image: HART
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
A 'Heapin' of Alaska Hospitality
[ed. See also: More details emerge in fight that witnesses say involved Palin family.]
Sing along, boys and girls, to the tune of the "Beverly Hillbillies" theme song:
Or at least an upper middle-class Anchorage suburb pre-Palin punchout. Who knows now. Property-value valuing homeowners on Harbor Circle may have joined the likes of American liberals hoping they never see Alaska's favorite reality TV clan again.
Sing along, boys and girls, to the tune of the "Beverly Hillbillies" theme song:
Come and listen to a story
'bout a woman named Palin.
At private-sector jobs
she was always a-failin',
Then one day
she got into the politics game,
And up through the web
came a bubblin' fame.
Celebrity that is, money for nothin', Tea Party!
Well, the first thing you knowYes, for those of you who were out hunting and missed it, the 49th state's favorite, half-term, ex-governor and her clan are home for a spell and back at it again. This time it's a made-for-the-internet brawl in Oceanview, an upper middle-class Anchorage neighborhood.
ol' Palin's a millionaire,
Alaska voters said, "Palin move away from there,"
Said, "The screen's where you oughtta be."
So they gassed up the snowmachine and moved onto TV.
Reality that is: Bristol's Bayou, pay-per-view, cage match ...
Or at least an upper middle-class Anchorage suburb pre-Palin punchout. Who knows now. Property-value valuing homeowners on Harbor Circle may have joined the likes of American liberals hoping they never see Alaska's favorite reality TV clan again.
by Craig Medred, Alaska Dispatch | Read more:
Image:CBS
Bertha: Stuck in the Mud
What do you do if you're operating the world'sbiggest tunneling machine and something goes wrong? You're digging along, everything fine, the machine's five-story maw about to chew beneath the skyscrapers of one of the great American cities. Then suddenly one day things are not so fine. Bertha—that's her name, in honor of Seattle's first woman mayor, Bertha Knight Landes—hits something. A few days later her temperature starts rising. Not good. Then her cutting head stops spinning.
Now what? What do you do when the world's largest tunneling machine is, essentially, stuck in the mud? Bertha is 60 feet under the earth, and you're on the surface watching a squirmy public swap rumors of cost and delay on the $1.35 billion tunnel component of an even larger transportation project, and the naysayers are howling: Just you watch, Bertha will be abandoned like an overheated mole, boondoggle to end all boondoggles. Because, don't forget, when you're boring the world's largest tunnel, everything is bigger—not just the machine and the hole and the outsize hopes but the worries too. The cynicism.
What do you do?
Here's what you do: You try to tune out the media. You shrug off the peanut gallery's spitballs. You put off the finger-pointing and the lawsuits for now; that's what the lawyers are paid for afterward. You do the only thing you can do. You put your head down and you think big, one more time. You figure out how to reach Bertha and get her moving again.
This is a rescue story.
Ask a Seattleite why he likes it here and he'll invoke the things we Seattleites always say: good fish. Better coffee. White sails on the blue water of Puget Sound. Never high on anybody's list is the Alaskan Way Viaduct. For 61 years the elevated double-decker freeway that slices along the waterfront has been the city's grim, gray mule, carrying roughly one-third of Seattle's north–south traffic while effectively divorcing the city from its waterfront, as so many other highways have done around the nation—from New York City's FDR Drive to Boston's Interstate 93 before the Big Dig buried it.
In 2001 a magnitude 6.8 earthquake rattled Seattle, cracking the aging viaduct. As years passed and the road deteriorated, the city argued about what to do. Finally, in 2009 local and state leaders decided: the viaduct would fall. In its place a waterfront renaissance would bloom as 26 blocks along Elliott Bay rejoined the city. James Corner Field Operations, visionary of the acclaimed High Line project in Manhattan, was hired to imagine a string of walkways, parks, public piers, bike paths, beaches—even a swimming pool on a barge—that would knit the city's core and its shoreline together and transform the place into an urban waterfront to rival those of Sydney, Copenhagen, Vancouver.
The costliest and most complicated puzzle piece—the one that would make all of this possible—would also be one of the least visible. A 2-mile tunnel would replace the hulking viaduct. The tunnel would whisk traffic underground from the Seattle Seahawks' stadium, just south of downtown's high-rises, north to the Space Needle and South Lake Union.
Seattle's tunnel wouldn't be very long—just 1.7 miles of it bored through the earth—but it couldn't be just any tunnel. It needed to be big enough to hold four lanes of traffic across two decks, with cars traveling at highway speeds. It would have to dive deep, more than 200 feet below downtown's heart, to avoid disturbing the city's skyscrapers and old buildings. The machine would have to be wily enough to dig through Seattle's funky soils, everything from glacial till to pudding, the latter a legacy of early city fathers, who flattened the lumpy pioneer town into the salt marshes to create the modern city by the sound.
The requirements emerged: Bertha's cutterhead—her face—would be 57½ feet across, as tall as the viaduct she was replacing. She would have hundreds of teeth to chew with. She'd digest the muck she chewed and then build the tunnel behind her as she worked, so she would be 326 feet long, as long as a home run over the right-field fence at nearby Safeco Field. She would weigh as much as the Eiffel Tower and would use enough power to light a town of 30,000 people. She'd be able to generate so much thrust—44,000 tons—she could send 13 space shuttles into orbit. And, of course, she'd be burly, because by the time she burrowed through the subterranean darkness and emerged on the other side she would have shed 9 tons of solid steel.
Bertha would be all of these things. She would be the biggest tunnel-boring machine ever built.
by Christopher Solomon, Popular Mechanics | Read more:
Image: WSDOT
Now what? What do you do when the world's largest tunneling machine is, essentially, stuck in the mud? Bertha is 60 feet under the earth, and you're on the surface watching a squirmy public swap rumors of cost and delay on the $1.35 billion tunnel component of an even larger transportation project, and the naysayers are howling: Just you watch, Bertha will be abandoned like an overheated mole, boondoggle to end all boondoggles. Because, don't forget, when you're boring the world's largest tunnel, everything is bigger—not just the machine and the hole and the outsize hopes but the worries too. The cynicism.
What do you do? Here's what you do: You try to tune out the media. You shrug off the peanut gallery's spitballs. You put off the finger-pointing and the lawsuits for now; that's what the lawyers are paid for afterward. You do the only thing you can do. You put your head down and you think big, one more time. You figure out how to reach Bertha and get her moving again.
This is a rescue story.
Ask a Seattleite why he likes it here and he'll invoke the things we Seattleites always say: good fish. Better coffee. White sails on the blue water of Puget Sound. Never high on anybody's list is the Alaskan Way Viaduct. For 61 years the elevated double-decker freeway that slices along the waterfront has been the city's grim, gray mule, carrying roughly one-third of Seattle's north–south traffic while effectively divorcing the city from its waterfront, as so many other highways have done around the nation—from New York City's FDR Drive to Boston's Interstate 93 before the Big Dig buried it.
In 2001 a magnitude 6.8 earthquake rattled Seattle, cracking the aging viaduct. As years passed and the road deteriorated, the city argued about what to do. Finally, in 2009 local and state leaders decided: the viaduct would fall. In its place a waterfront renaissance would bloom as 26 blocks along Elliott Bay rejoined the city. James Corner Field Operations, visionary of the acclaimed High Line project in Manhattan, was hired to imagine a string of walkways, parks, public piers, bike paths, beaches—even a swimming pool on a barge—that would knit the city's core and its shoreline together and transform the place into an urban waterfront to rival those of Sydney, Copenhagen, Vancouver.
The costliest and most complicated puzzle piece—the one that would make all of this possible—would also be one of the least visible. A 2-mile tunnel would replace the hulking viaduct. The tunnel would whisk traffic underground from the Seattle Seahawks' stadium, just south of downtown's high-rises, north to the Space Needle and South Lake Union.
Seattle's tunnel wouldn't be very long—just 1.7 miles of it bored through the earth—but it couldn't be just any tunnel. It needed to be big enough to hold four lanes of traffic across two decks, with cars traveling at highway speeds. It would have to dive deep, more than 200 feet below downtown's heart, to avoid disturbing the city's skyscrapers and old buildings. The machine would have to be wily enough to dig through Seattle's funky soils, everything from glacial till to pudding, the latter a legacy of early city fathers, who flattened the lumpy pioneer town into the salt marshes to create the modern city by the sound.
The requirements emerged: Bertha's cutterhead—her face—would be 57½ feet across, as tall as the viaduct she was replacing. She would have hundreds of teeth to chew with. She'd digest the muck she chewed and then build the tunnel behind her as she worked, so she would be 326 feet long, as long as a home run over the right-field fence at nearby Safeco Field. She would weigh as much as the Eiffel Tower and would use enough power to light a town of 30,000 people. She'd be able to generate so much thrust—44,000 tons—she could send 13 space shuttles into orbit. And, of course, she'd be burly, because by the time she burrowed through the subterranean darkness and emerged on the other side she would have shed 9 tons of solid steel.
Bertha would be all of these things. She would be the biggest tunnel-boring machine ever built.
by Christopher Solomon, Popular Mechanics | Read more:
Image: WSDOT
How Gangs Took Over Prisons
On a clear morning this past February, the inmates in the B Yard of Pelican Bay State Prison filed out of their cellblock a few at a time and let a cool, salty breeze blow across their bodies. Their home, the California prison system’s permanent address for its most hardened gangsters, is in Crescent City, on the edge of a redwood forest—about four miles from the Pacific Ocean in one direction and 20 miles from the Oregon border in the other. This is their yard time.
Most of the inmates belong to one of California’s six main prison gangs: Nuestra Familia, the Mexican Mafia, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Black Guerrilla Family, the Northern Structure, or the Nazi Lowriders (the last two are offshoots of Nuestra Familia and the Aryan Brotherhood, respectively). The inmates interact like volatile chemicals: if you open their cells in such a way as to put, say, a lone member of Nuestra Familia in a crowd of Mexican Mafia, the mix can explode violently. So the guards release them in a careful order.
“Now watch what they do,” says Christopher Acosta, a corrections officer with a shaved head who worked for 15 years as a front-line prison guard and now runs public relations for Pelican Bay. We are standing with our backs to a fence and can see everything. (...)
Understanding how prison gangs work is difficult: they conceal their activities and kill defectors who reveal their practices. This past summer, however, a 32-year-old academic named David Skarbek published The Social Order of the Underworld, his first book, which is the best attempt in a long while to explain the intricate organizational systems that make the gangs so formidable. His focus is the California prison system, which houses the second-largest inmate population in the country—about 135,600 people, slightly more than the population of Bellevue, Washington, split into facilities of a few thousand inmates apiece. With the possible exception of North Korea, the United States has a higher incarceration rate than any other nation, at one in 108 adults. (The national rate rose for 30 years before peaking, in 2008, at one in 99. Less crime and softer punishment for nonviolent crimes have caused the rate to decline since then.)
Skarbek’s primary claim is that the underlying order in California prisons comes from precisely what most of us would assume is the source of disorder: the major gangs, which are responsible for the vast majority of the trade in drugs and other contraband, including cellphones, behind bars. “Prison gangs end up providing governance in a brutal but effective way,” he says. “They impose responsibility on everyone, and in some ways the prisons run more smoothly because of them.” The gangs have business out on the streets, too, but their principal activity and authority resides in prisons, where other gangs are the main powers keeping them in check. (...)
Another common misconception about prison gangs is that they are simply street gangs that have been locked up. The story of their origins, however, is closer to the opposite: the Mexican Mafia, for example, was born at Deuel Vocational Institution, in Tracy, California, in 1956, and only later did that group, and others, become a presence on the streets. Today, the relation of the street to the cellblock is symbiotic. “The young guys on the street look to the gang members inside as role models,” says Charles Dangerfield, a former prison guard who now heads California’s Gang Task Force, in Sacramento. “Getting sentenced to prison is like being called up to the majors.”
by Graeme Wood, Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Brian L. Frank
Most of the inmates belong to one of California’s six main prison gangs: Nuestra Familia, the Mexican Mafia, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Black Guerrilla Family, the Northern Structure, or the Nazi Lowriders (the last two are offshoots of Nuestra Familia and the Aryan Brotherhood, respectively). The inmates interact like volatile chemicals: if you open their cells in such a way as to put, say, a lone member of Nuestra Familia in a crowd of Mexican Mafia, the mix can explode violently. So the guards release them in a careful order.“Now watch what they do,” says Christopher Acosta, a corrections officer with a shaved head who worked for 15 years as a front-line prison guard and now runs public relations for Pelican Bay. We are standing with our backs to a fence and can see everything. (...)
Understanding how prison gangs work is difficult: they conceal their activities and kill defectors who reveal their practices. This past summer, however, a 32-year-old academic named David Skarbek published The Social Order of the Underworld, his first book, which is the best attempt in a long while to explain the intricate organizational systems that make the gangs so formidable. His focus is the California prison system, which houses the second-largest inmate population in the country—about 135,600 people, slightly more than the population of Bellevue, Washington, split into facilities of a few thousand inmates apiece. With the possible exception of North Korea, the United States has a higher incarceration rate than any other nation, at one in 108 adults. (The national rate rose for 30 years before peaking, in 2008, at one in 99. Less crime and softer punishment for nonviolent crimes have caused the rate to decline since then.)
Skarbek’s primary claim is that the underlying order in California prisons comes from precisely what most of us would assume is the source of disorder: the major gangs, which are responsible for the vast majority of the trade in drugs and other contraband, including cellphones, behind bars. “Prison gangs end up providing governance in a brutal but effective way,” he says. “They impose responsibility on everyone, and in some ways the prisons run more smoothly because of them.” The gangs have business out on the streets, too, but their principal activity and authority resides in prisons, where other gangs are the main powers keeping them in check. (...)
Another common misconception about prison gangs is that they are simply street gangs that have been locked up. The story of their origins, however, is closer to the opposite: the Mexican Mafia, for example, was born at Deuel Vocational Institution, in Tracy, California, in 1956, and only later did that group, and others, become a presence on the streets. Today, the relation of the street to the cellblock is symbiotic. “The young guys on the street look to the gang members inside as role models,” says Charles Dangerfield, a former prison guard who now heads California’s Gang Task Force, in Sacramento. “Getting sentenced to prison is like being called up to the majors.”
by Graeme Wood, Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Brian L. Frank
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