Into Nothingness

Dusk, that most beautiful moment
With no pattern.
Millions of images appear and disappear.
Beloved people.
How unbearable to die in the sky.

Hours after writing these lines, the 24-year-old Tadao Hayashi fuelled a battered Mitsubishi A6M Zero and flew it towards an American aircraft carrier – and into nothingness. It was late July 1945. A few days later, the United States would drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A war sold to the Japanese public as a struggle for national survival would be over.

In contemporary Western memory, still stocked for the most part by wartime propaganda imagery of mad, rodent-like Japanese, those final weeks are a swirl of brainwashed fanaticism, reaching its apotheosis as hundreds of kamikaze planes slammed into the US ships closing in around Japan’s home islands. Three thousand raids and innumerable scouting missions were launched during the climax of the conflict, designed to show the US the terrible cost it would pay for an all-out invasion of Japan.

Yet the vast majority of planes never made it to their attack or reconnaissance targets; they were lost instead at sea. And war’s end failed to yield the apocalyptic romance for which Japan’s leaders so fervently hoped. By late 1944 and early ’45, the only ‘life or death struggle’ was the routine misery to which the empire itself had reduced its soldiers and civilians. Conscripts were trained and goaded to fire their rifles into their own heads, to gather around an activated grenade, to charge into Allied machine-gun fire. Civilians jumped off cliffs, as Saipan and later Okinawa were taken by the Allies. Citizens of great cities such as Tokyo and Osaka had their buildings torn town and turned into ammunition.

Nor do clichés of unthinking ultranationalism fit the experiences of many kamikaze pilots. For each one willing to crash-dive the bridge of a US ship mouthing militarist one-liners, others lived and died less gloriously: cursing their leaders, rioting in their barracks or forcing their planes into the sea. A few took their senninbari – thousand-stitch sashes, each stitch sewn by a different well-wisher – and burned them in disgust. At least one pilot turned back on his final flight and strafed his commanding officers. (...)

One of the most ambitious schemes for a Japanese philosophy – where nothing by that name had existed before – was emerging at Hayashi’s own institution in 1943, just when he was forcibly removed from it. The great project of Kitarō Nishida, a seasoned Zen practitioner and the founder of what became the ‘Kyoto School’ of philosophy at Kyoto Imperial University, was to do what many Zen Buddhists insisted was impossible: to describe the picture of reality revealed in meditation.

Nishida sought to reverse the key premise of Western philosophy, writing not about ‘being’ or ‘what is’, but instead about ‘nothingness’. His was not the relative nothingness of non-being – the world of the gone-away, the not-yet or the might-be. He meant absolute nothingness: an unfathomable ‘place’ or horizon upon which both being and non-being arise.

To help students make sense of this idea, Nishida liked to draw a cluster of small circles on the lecture-hall board. This is how people usually see the world, he would say: a collection of objects, and judgments about those objects. Take a simple sentence: ‘The flower is yellow.’ We tend to focus on the flower, reinforcing in the process the idea that objects are somehow primary. But what if we turn it around, focusing instead on the quality of yellowness? What if we say to ourselves ‘the flower is yellow’, and allow ourselves to become perceptually engrossed in that yellowness? Something interesting happens: our concern with the ‘is-ness’ of the flower, and also the is-ness of ourselves, begins to recede. By making ‘yellowness’ the subject of our investigation – trying to complete the sentence ‘Yellowness is…’ – we end up thinking not in terms of substance, but in terms of place. The question isn’t so much ‘What is yellowness?’ as ‘Where is yellowness?’ Against what broader backdrop does ‘yellowness’ emerge?

For Nishida, the answer was a special sort of consciousness: not first-person reflection, where consciousness is the possession of an individual, but rather a consciousness that possesses people. It becomes less true to say that ‘an individual has experiences’ than that ‘experience has individuals’.

But if consciousness is the horizon beyond ‘yellow’, what is the further horizon? Where is consciousness? Nishida drew a dotted, all-encompassing line on the board. This, he said, is ‘absolute nothingness’, producing and interpenetrating every other plane of reality. Absolute nothingness is God. And God is absolute nothingness. (...)

The trouble was, as an idea, it had other sorts of potential too. The war was dragging on. Japan’s chances of winning – or even achieving a respectable peace – were fading. There is a fine line between understanding an idea such as ‘absolute nothingness’ and deploying it as a rationalisation, and it appears that Nishida and his colleagues crossed it – and encouraged their readers to do so, too. A relatively abstract set of ideas were allowed to take on potent political form.

by Christopher Harding, Aeon |  Read more:

Image: uncredited photo by Rex Features

Supreme Court Urged to Overturn API Copyrights Decision

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a brief with the Supreme Court of the United States today, arguing on behalf of 77 computer scientists that the justices should review a disastrous appellate court decision finding that application programming interfaces (APIs) are copyrightable. That decision, handed down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in May, up-ended decades of settled legal precedent and industry practice.

Signatories to the brief include five Turing Award winners, four National Medal of Technology winners, and numerous fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The list also includes designers of computer systems and programming languages such as AppleScript, AWK, C++, Haskell, IBM S/360, Java, JavaScript, Lotus 1-2-3, MS-DOS, Python, Scala, SmallTalk, TCP/IP, Unix, and Wiki.

"The Federal Circuit's decision was wrong and dangerous for technological innovation," EFF Intellectual Property Director Corynne McSherry said. "Excluding APIs from copyright protection has been essential to the development of modern computers and the Internet. The ruling is bad law, and bad policy."

Generally speaking, APIs are specifications that allow programs to communicate with each other. So when you type a letter in a word processor, and hit the print command, you are using an API that lets the word processor talk to the printer driver, even though they were written by different people.

The brief explains that the freedom to re-implement and extend existing APIs has been the key to competition and progress in both hardware and software development. It made possible the emergence and success of many robust industries we now take for granted—for example, mainframes, PCs, and workstations/servers—by ensuring that competitors could challenge established players and advance the state of the art.

The litigation began several years ago when Oracle sued Google over its use of Java APIs in the Android OS. Google wrote its own implementation of the Java APIs, but, in order to allow developers to write their own programs for Android, Google's implementation used the same names, organization, and functionality as the Java APIs.

In May 2012, Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California ruled that the Java APIs are not subject to copyright. The court understood that ruling otherwise would have allowed Oracle to tie up "a utilitarian and functional set of symbols" that provides the basis for so much of the innovation and collaboration we all rely on today. The Federal Circuit disagreed, holding that Java's API packages were copyrightable, although it sent the case back to the trial court to determine whether Google's copying was nonetheless a lawful fair use.

by Electronic Frontier Foundation |  Read more:

Image: astanush

Eduardo Urculo Fernandez
via:

The Van Gogh Mystery

A lone figure tramps toward a field of golden wheat. He carries a canvas, an easel, a bag of paints, and a pained grimace. He sets up his kit and begins to paint furiously, rushing to capture the scene of the swirling wheat as a storm approaches. Murderous crows attack him. He flails them away. As the wind whips the wheat into a frenzy, he races to add the ominous clouds to his canvas. Then the threatening crows. When he looks up, his eyes bug out with madness. He goes to a tree and scribbles a note: “I am desperate. I see no way out.” Gritting his teeth in torment, he reaches into his pocket. Cut to a long shot of the wheat field churning in the storm. The sudden report of a gun startles a passing cart driver. The music swells. “The End” appears against a mosaic of famous paintings and a climactic crash of cymbals.

It’s a great scene, the stuff of legend: the death of the world’s most beloved artist, the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh. Lust for Life was conceived in 1934 by the popular pseudo-biographer Irving Stone and captured on film in 1956 by the Oscar-winning director Vincente Minnelli, with the charismatic Kirk Douglas in the principal role.

There’s only one problem. It’s all bunk. Though eagerly embraced by a public in love with a handful of memorable images and spellbound by the thought of an artist who would cut off his own ear, Stone’s suicide yarn was based on bad history, bad psychology, and, as a definitive new expert analysis makes clear, bad forensics. (...)

Van Gogh himself wrote not a word about his final days. The film got it wrong: he left no suicide note—odd for a man who churned out letters so profligately. A piece of writing allegedly found in his clothes after he died turned out to be an early draft of his final letter to his brother Theo, which he posted the day of the shooting, July 27, 1890. That letter was upbeat—even ebullient—about the future. He had placed a large order for more paints only a few days before a bullet put a hole in his abdomen. Because the missile missed his vital organs, it took 29 agonizing hours to kill him.

None of the earliest accounts of the shooting—those written in the days immediately after the event—mentioned suicide. They said only that Van Gogh had “wounded himself.” Strangely, the townspeople of Auvers, the picturesque community near Paris where he stayed in the last months of his life, maintained a studied silence about the incident. At first, no one admitted having seen Van Gogh on his last, fateful outing, despite the summer crowding in the streets. No one knew where he would have gotten a gun; no one admitted to finding the gun afterward, or any of the other items he had taken with him (canvas, easel, paints, etc.). His deathbed doctors, an obstetrician and a homeopathist, could make no sense of his wounds.

And, anyway, what kind of a person, no matter how unbalanced, tries to kill himself with a shot to the midsection? And then, rather than finish himself off with a second shot, staggers a mile back to his room in agonizing pain from a bullet in his belly?

The chief purveyor of the suicide narrative was Van Gogh’s fellow artist Émile Bernard, who wrote the earliest version of artistic self-martyrdom in a letter to a critic whose favor he was currying. Two years earlier, he had tried the same trick when Van Gogh cut off part of his ear. Bernard spun a completely invented account of the event that thrust himself into the sensational tale. “My best friend, my dear Vincent, is mad,” he gushed to the same critic. “Since I have found out, I am almost mad myself.” Bernard was not present at the time of Vincent’s fatal shooting, but he did attend the funeral.

If later accounts are to be believed—and they often are not—the police briefly investigated the shooting. (No records survive.) The local gendarme who interviewed Vincent on his deathbed had to prompt him with the open question “Did you intend to commit suicide?” To which he answered (again, according to later accounts) with a puzzled equivocation: “I think so.”

That account, like almost all the other “early accounts” of Van Gogh’s botched suicide, rested mainly on the testimony of one person: Adeline Ravoux, the daughter of the owner of the Ravoux Inn, where Van Gogh was staying in Auvers, and where he died. Adeline was 13 at the time. She did not speak for the record until 1953. When she did, she mostly channeled the stories her father, Gustave, had told her half a century earlier. Her story changed constantly, developing dramatic shape, and even dialogue, with each telling.

Around the same time, another witness stepped forward. He was the son of Paul Gachet, the homeopathic doctor who had sat for a famous portrait by Van Gogh. Paul junior was 17 at the time of the shooting. He spent most of the rest of his life inflating his own and his father’s importance to the artist—and, not incidentally, the value of the paintings father and son had stripped from Vincent’s studio in the days after his death. It was Paul junior who introduced the idea that the shooting had taken place in the wheat fields outside Auvers. Even Theo’s son, Vincent (the painter’s namesake and godson), who founded the museum, dismissed Gachet Jr. as “highly unreliable.”

by Steven Neifeh, Vanity Fair |  Read more:
Image: Van Gogh

[ed. Deep thoughts.]
via:

Emily Shur
via:

Kasokudo Bonsai Planter by Adrian Magu
via:

Why You Should Not Have Broken Up With Me, According to Various Critical Theories

Deconstruction

Ferdinand de Saussure famously said, “In language there are only differences.” What he meant by this was that words have no meaning except insofar as they contrast with other words. Thus my failure to hold down a job for more than a month cannot implicitly carry the meaning of “failure” ascribed to it by you, Tandy. A word such as “unemployed” carries a semantic value only in terms of its partner word “employed,” just as “flat broke” defines itself relatively to “financially independent” and “manic-depressive” to “emotionally stable.” The noble goal of deconstruction is to overturn these simplistic oppositions and, in Derrida’s words, reject a “hierarchizing teleology” of language. In short, the deconstructionists certainly would not approve of my being compared to our more “successful” friends, such as Steven, who grew up in a wealthy household and whose job at the New Yorker is a clear-cut case of nepotism.

Marxism

Marx believed that the arc of history bends inevitably towards a more equitable distribution of the means of production, but that the battle for socialism would be a long one. I’m confident he would agree that my current financial straits are an inevitable result of the current socioeconomic moment, rather than “a permanent shitstorm born out of sheer laziness,” as you described it in your letter. In spite of your attending that Occupy rally last year, which I missed because I was hung over from drinking too much at your work party (you’re welcome for supporting you, BTW), you seem to have forgotten the socialist credo: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” If you were ever incapable of making rent on your own, I certainly would have been willing to get a job in order to help out. But you always insisted on focusing on the negative; you had no trouble criticizing me when I couldn’t pay for dinner, but you never thanked me for going to the trouble of ordering it in the first place.

Structuralism

Structuralist readings of texts tend to collapse differences, seeing the underlying patterns and paradigms and ignoring surface variations. Viewed this way, our relationship is really no different from that of Romeo and Juliet. True, we did not overcome decades of internecine violence and the harsh judgments of our families in order to be together, but all of your friends did originally tell you not to date me, because of my criminal record and facial tattoos. To focus on the things that make us different from other couples—my request that you not look me in the eyes during meals or sex, the fact that I’ve yet to introduce you to my parents even though I still live with them, my insistence that you give up your cat for adoption because of my childhood attraction to Catwoman—is a failure of intellectual rigor on your part. Our relationship is all relationships, and don’t all relationships involve some amount of compromise and/or abandonment of one’s more physically attractive cats?

Existentialism

Life is meaningless, and any attempt to find connection through human relationship is doomed to failure. In other words, your insistence that I support you and validate your existence was misguided from the start. Also, your stubborn belief that it was “wrong” of me to send those late-night texts to your best friend, Sarah, posits a dualistic notion of good/bad that is belied by human experience. There is no such thing as morality, only authenticity (i.e. acting in accordance with one’s freedom). And there was nothing inauthentic in the way that I asked Sarah if she was “down to clown around on the town, Leroy Brown” (though her refusal on the grounds that she was your best friend reeked of bourgeois conformism).

by Tommy Wallach, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: via:

Hip Hops
via:

Bering Strait Theory Comes Crashing Down

For most of the 20th century, new discoveries of American Indian origins that cast doubt on the Bering Strait Theory were either dismissed or ignored. But as the technology of science marched on, the cracks grew deeper and deeper.

An unintended consequence of the atmospheric testing of atomic weapons during the Cold War was that by the 1960s it had doubled the amount of radioactive carbon 14 in the environment, and this “bomb pulse” was showing up on the instruments that were used for radiocarbon dating. This led scientists to suspect that the amount of carbon 14 that is found in the environment might not have always been constant, possibly leading to wrong dates.

By the mid-1980s, dendrochronologists, those that study and date tree-rings, had manage to piece together–by matching the tree-rings of long-living species such as the bristlecone pine with those of ancient trees–an unbroken string of tree-rings over 7,000 years old. Since dendochronology can give extremely accurate dates, often to the year, matching the two dating systems found exactly that, that the amount of C14 fluctuated and that many radiocarbon dates had to be adjusted.

For Clovis First advocates, this presented a real problem, for the new calibrated radiocarbon dates pushed back the Clovis culture almost 2,000 years. It meant that the oldest reliably dated Clovis site, in Aubrey, Texas, which was radiocarbon dated at 11,590 years ago, was now approximately 13,490 years old. The Paleoindians would have had to race through the Ice-free Corridor to get to Texas in time.

But the new radiocarbon dates would give even more bad news. Geologists, also recalibrating their radiocarbon data, began to refine their estimates for when the massive ice sheets began to melt, and found them adjusting their dates between 500 and 2,000 years earlier. The Ice-free Corridor was now certainly impassable 13,000 years ago and possibly as late as 12,000 years ago. This meant that there was no way the Paleoindians could have walked over from Asia–or if they had, they would have had to done so 20,000 years earlier, a non-starter for the theory’s advocates. A central thesis of the Bering Strait Theory was now toppled, for if the Clovis culture was indeed the first peoples in the Americas, they had to have come by boat.

The use of boats had always been rejected by the Bering Strait advocates, because it opened up other possible routes of migration, such as Europe or Polynesia. Thus they had dismissed any contacts between Polynesians and American Indians (and many continue to dismiss evidence of prehistoric contacts), because it would undercut the contention that “primitive people” could not cross the oceans, and that walking across the Bering Strait was the only possible way that Paleoindians could have come to the Americas.

But the presumption that primitive people cannot sail the ocean is a belief born out of the social evolutionary theories of Herbert Spencer and Lewis Henry Morgan–that societies inexorably evolve to greater complexity and skill. Since the Europeans were unable to cross the oceans until the 16th-century, no one else should have been able to do so earlier. (...)

Many of Lang’s ideas were fanciful, but no more so than any one else’s at the time. He believed the Polynesians landed near Copiapo in Chile in some distant past and from there colonized the Americas. The historian George Bancroft (whose dubious accomplishments include instigating the Mexican War as acting Secretary of War under President James Polk), wrote about Lang’s theory in 1841 in his influential book, History of the Colonization of the United States,“It would not be safe to reject the possibility of an early communication between South America and the Polynesia world.” The distinguished French naturalist Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages also considered American voyages likely in his 1866 work, The Polynesians and Their Migrations.

There was little doubt in those days that the Polynesians could have made a trans-Pacific voyage. The early settlement of Hawaii, more than 2,500 miles from the northernmost islands of French Polynesia and over 3,000 miles from Tahiti, required a tremendous feat of sailing and navigation. European explorers often recorded meeting Polynesian sailors in the open ocean, including an encounter in 1615 by the Dutch navigator, Willem Cornelisz Schouten, who came across a party of Polynesians in a double-hulled ship more than 3,000 miles from their home in the Marianas.

Lang noted physical and cultural similarities between the two peoples, many of which today would be seen as the result of simple prejudice, but others, such as similar types of fishhooks, canoes, and harpoons used by Indians in California, Chile, and among the Polynesians, were not to be dismissed lightly.

The most important evidence was biological. As early as 1770, Spanish explorers wrote that maize, manioc, and white potatoes, all indigenous to the Americas, had been grown on Easter Island. Similar varieties of coconuts, bottle gourd (calabash), bananas, and chickens, were all seen as evidence of voyages back and forth. Most significantly, the sweet potato, clearly indigenous to the Americas, was found across Polynesia, including Hawaii and New Zealand. In 1866, in the journalBotany, the German botanist Berthold Carl Seemann wrote that the Polynesian name for sweet potato, “Kumara or umara, of the South-Sea Islanders, is identical with cumar, the Quichua name for sweet potato in the highlands of Ecuador.”

by Alex Ewan, Indian Country Today |  Read more:

Image: world-mysteries.com

Oysters on Halfshell - Carlos Lopez
via:

A Country Disappeared

[ed. The casual horror described here reminds me of Roberto Bolano's novel 2666. See also: Crisis in Mexico.]

A few months ago, 22 people were allegedly executed by Mexican soldiers in Tlatlaya, a small community southwest of Mexico City. They were told to kneel facing the wall, and then a bullet was sent through each of their skulls.

The news and shock came a few months later, when the Associated Press published an interview with a witness. There were women and children among those who had died.

Before that, the official explanation prevailed: a skirmish between the Army and criminals, in which a few soldiers were injured while the “bad guys” got what they deserved. Sometimes it feels that the only time Mexicans react anymore is when the day-to-day atrocities that go on in our country make it to the news elsewhere around the world. If someone outside Mexico hadn’t noticed, perhaps we wouldn’t be angry. Perhaps just wary.

A couple of weeks after the news about Tlatlaya came out, something unusual, even by our current standards, occurred. Around 50 students at a Teacher’s College in Guerrero, one of Mexico’s poorest states, were traveling by bus overnight through the city of Iguala. The account is muddled at best: They were leaving the city to take part in a protest for the remembrance of a student massacre that took place in 1968, but they were also collecting funds for their studies. Some vehicles were abandoned in front of their buses, essentially creating a barricade. Gunfire ensued. Six people died. Witnesses—and now, the federal investigation into the shooting—say it was the police that opened fire. The officers then escorted the students out of the buses, but instead of handing them over to the local state’s attorney office—supposing there was something to charge them with in the first place—they were handed over to other people. A local cartel, according to media reports. Days after, four mass graves were found near the city. It seemed as though the bodies of the 43–yes, 43–kidnapped students were there.

When the graves were found, the governor of the state–who would step down weeks after–, in a bizarrely joyous tone, declared that some of the bodies–tortured, then charred–did not belong to the students. Who were they then? It didn’t matter. Not right now. If there was time in the future, maybe then he’d try to figure it out.

The story first broke out in El País, a daily from Spain. We had to learn about what went on in our country, again, from the outside press.

In order to understand how 43 people could disappear in one single swoop, it’s necessary to tell the tale of the town of Iguala, and how, in essence, it could be any other town in Mexico.

José Luis Abarca was elected as mayor of Iguala in 2012. He ran under a leftist coalition of parties, even though he hadn’t formally registered in one until a month before the campaign started. He was known as a local businessman; he owned the city’s main mall and 18 buildings in the area. His wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda, had a lonstanding relationship to the Mexican criminal underworld. Two of her brothers had died in 2009 and were part of Mexico’s most-wanted criminal list at the time. Her father was arrested that same year and her other brother was also thought to be part of the business: the Attorney General’s office suspected (and later confirmed) that were part of the local cartel called Guerreros Unidos (“United Warriors”).

How this went unnoticed, or at least ignored during Abarca’s and Pineda’s affiliation to the party, during the campaign, and most importantly, during his tenure as mayor, is egregious at best. Once elected, the government was essentially handed over to the cartel. They also ran the police, and most importantly, the federal budget assigned to the county (around 18 million USD per year).

During Abarca’s first year in office, his main rival for the party candidacy the year before, Justino Carvajal, was gunned down outside his mother’s house. As of today, there’s no motive and no suspects.

Four protestors who called the mayor out in public at a town hall meeting, accusing him of taking money from the budget, disappeared a couple of days afterward. A witness emerged later on, and he stated that the mayor himself had shot one of them in the face and killed him. He also said that he saw at least seven other people bound and gagged, kneeled before open graves, when this happened. The message was clear: If you complained, you died.

A party leader then claimed to have brought the information to federal officials, only to be ignored. The testimony that blamed Abarca for the killings sat in a dusty file in the local State Attorney’s office. It was as if everybody knew but no one wanted to do anything about it except let it lie.

In short, there was information that he was involved with the cartels, that he was giving them public money, that he was killing people who opposed him, and nothing happened. Until he crossed a threshold that previously had seemed hypothetical: he went too far when he ordered the police to kidnap and hand the students over to the cartel.

by Esteban Illades, TNI |  Read more:

Image: uncredited 

via:

Inside MotoGP: How ASIMO's Tech Makes for Faster Motorcycles

MotoGP is the world's premier class of motorcycle racing. GP stands for Grand Prix, or "grand prize," which more or less says it all. On any given Sunday, the guy standing on the top of the MotoGP podium is the best sportbike rider in the world.

It's just as prestigious for those who make the machines they ride. Manufacturers spend millions creating custom, prototype motorcycles that bear little resemblance to what you see on the street. For years, it was a matter of best engine, best chassis and best suspension. Now, there's another, equally important factor at play: electronics.

A modern MotoGP bike is riddled with technology, and for the 2014 season, Honda has absolutely dominated the class. But it's taken a herculean effort, pulling in engineering resources from all corners of its corporate empire to create a two-wheeled rocket, launching rider Marc Marquez to victory again and again. Even ASIMO, the little white robot who is hardly known for his speed, would lend some support.

Earlier this year, I visited the factory Repsol Honda MotoGP team at Indianapolis, the most historic race track in the world, to get a better look at how it all comes together.

The technology

MotoGP machines are two-wheeled miracles, hand-crafted of exotic materials. Carbon-fiber bodywork and chassis, magnesium wheels and high-strung 1,000cc engines delivering upwards of 240 horsepower. Bikes must weigh just 350 pounds to pass inspection, giving them an outrageous power-to-weight ratio. The 0-to-60 sprint would happen in somewhere around two seconds, and the bikes pull eagerly past 215 mph.

To put that in perspective, consider the Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat. That car puts out a ridiculous 707 horsepower from its supercharged Hemi V-8 and weighs just under 4,500 pounds. Given that mass, to match the acceleration of a MotoGP bike the Challenger would need roughly 3,100 horsepower. And much bigger tires.

With that kind of power, the car would be a heck of a lot of fun, but almost completely undrivable. But then, for most mere mortals, MotoGP bikes are all but unridable. That's by design -- at least in part. These bikes are augmented with an extensive electronics package that help to tame them, filling in any gaps in human ability.

by Tim Stevens, CNET |  Read more:

Image: HRC

Supreme Court to Hear New Case Challenging Affordable Care Act

[ed. How nice. Three days after the election. You'd think they could have waited at least a week. More here.]

The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear a new challenge to the Affordable Care Act, potentially imperiling President Obama’s signature legislative achievement two years after it survived a different Supreme Court challenge by a single vote.

The case concerns tax subsidies that currently help millions of people afford health insurance under the law. According to the challengers, those subsidies are being provided unlawfully in three dozen states that have decided not to run the marketplaces, known as exchanges, for insurance coverage.

If the challengers are right, people receiving subsidies in those states would become ineligible for them, destabilizing and perhaps dooming the law.

The Obama administration said it would mount a vigorous defense in the Supreme Court.

“This lawsuit reflects just another partisan attempt to undermine the Affordable Care Act and to strip millions of American families of tax credits that Congress intended for them to have,” said Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary. “We are confident that the financial help afforded millions of Americans was the intent of the law and it is working as Congress designed.”

Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma’s attorney general, said he welcomed the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case. The administration, he said, “cannot ignore the plain language in a statute and rewrite laws with which they disagree.” He added, “This Supreme Court review will provide Oklahoma and the 35 other states that did not establish state-based exchanges with immediate and conclusive clarity as to their rights and obligations under the A.C.A. so that the states may make appropriate health care policy decisions.”

The case is likely to be argued in February or March, and a decision will probably arrive in June, three years after the court ruled that Congress had acted constitutionally in enacting the law.

In a supporting brief urging the court to hear the case, several Republican lawmakers said the law as currently enforced would result in “tens of billions of dollars of unlawful spending in the next year, and hundreds of billions over the next decade.”

Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, said the court’s move was a surprise. “It’s troubling that they would even consider this,” she said. “The language is very clear. The intent of Congress is very clear.”

by Adam Liptak, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Jabin Botsford/The New York Times

Thirst Trap

California is home to the Folsom Street Fair and the majority of the American porn industry, but our biggest fetish is for direct democracy. Unlike most states, we routinely decide matters of governance by putting them on the ballot and letting every citizen directly vote on them. It’s how we recalled Governor Gray Davis in favor of Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2003, it’s how we banned same-sex marriage in 2008, and it’s how, in December 2013, venture capitalist Timothy Draper almost got us all to weigh in on whether we’d like to carve the state into six pieces.

The “Six Californias” initiative declared California in its current iteration “ungovernable,” and proposed to divide it into six smaller states: Jefferson (near the Oregon border), North California (including Sacramento), Silicon Valley (including San Francisco and Oakland), Central California (most of the middle of the state up to the Nevada border), West California (including Los Angeles), and South California (including San Diego). The putative idea behind the initiative was that smaller, more localized governments would be better able to serve citizens. In reality, it was mostly a publicity stunt. Though it generated plenty of headlines and Twitter jokes, the initiative didn’t get enough valid signatures to make it to the ballot, and the six mini-Californias died before they were born.

When I first read about Six Californias, my second thought was, This is what I’ve been trying to explain to people! My first thought was, This would never work, because some of those substates wouldn’t have any water.

As it turns out, those are actually sort of the same thought. Water—who accesses it, how, and for what ­reason—has played a fundamental role in the creation of the areas roughly mapped out by the Six Californias initiative and the conflicts between them. It is fitting that a venture capitalist drew these hydrologically untenable lines on the map. After all, corporate interests and a few ­super-wealthy individuals are the ones who stand to gain the most from California’s tangled water politics. (...)

Longstanding regional water conflicts like the one between L.A. and Owens Valley have intensified in the past few years as California has sunk deeper into a devastating combination of heat and drought—the worst on record since record-keeping began in 1895, according to the National Weather Service. Conditions are so severe that quakes are rumbling and mountains are literally moving as our rapid consumption of groundwater from aquifers warps the earth’s crust.

As our agricultural backbone, the Central Valley (which is technically two valleys that together dominate the middle of the state) has been particularly hard-hit. It is largely in the Central Valley that California produces about half of the country’s fruits, vegetables, and nuts; one-fifth of its dairy; and, of course, most of its wine. But hydrating all those cows and growing all those crops requires water—an immense amount of water, 80 percent of what California uses.

Usually, Central Valley farmers get around 5 million acre-feet of water from the federally run Central Valley Project, but in 2014, they received none of their contracted water supply. Zero. Instead, the limited water went to other regions. More densely populated residential counties in the Bay Area got 50 percent of their promised supply, for example. The Klamath River, which runs through the far north of California and into Oregon, got extra water to keep endangered salmon alive. The Central Valley got none.

Farmers, forced to rely more heavily on the already overtaxed supply of groundwater or water shipped in from elsewhere at great expense—more on this later—are understandably unhappy about the scenario. If you drive from one end of the state to the other on I-5, you see signs bristling along the roadside. They say things like food grows where water flows and no water = no jobs. Farmers blame the coastal regions, with their politicians and environmentalists who think “fish are more important than our farms.” The signs say congress created dust bowl, not dismantle capitalism.

And “big-city liberals”, anxious too about access to water, respond in kind. When journalist Alan Heathcock, who’d been reporting in the Central Valley, posted pictures of drought-stricken fallow farmland to Facebook, his friends left comments about how “these must be really shitty farmers” and “this is what happens when you ‘overfarm’ land.” A move by Senator Dianne Feinstein to divert water to the Central Valley met resistance from a congressman from Draper’s “Jefferson,” who protested that the Senator was “trying to spin this as a job saver, but that ignores the jobs up north that depend on water.” Another from the Bay Area said, “Best I can see, she’s making a decision that jobs in the Bay Area and Northern California and the Peninsula south of San Francisco aren’t as important as jobs in the Central Valley.”

When the problem appears as so many trade-offs, it’s impossible to say which people in which area of the state have more legitimate claims to dwindling water supplies. The farmers in the Central Valley need water, and so do the suburbanites, the fishers, and the environment. The people of the Owens Valley need water, and so do the people of Los Angeles. The social and microeconomic diversity of the state makes our water problem appear ever more morally complex, when the basic pathology is in fact pretty simple.

Who does the water system benefit the most? What powers comprise the San Fernando land syndicates of the present-day Central Valley? Though the bramble of California water politics is impenetrable in places, a few entities stand out as disproportionate beneficiaries of today’s system.

by Lauren O'Neal, TNI |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

via:

And Away We Go...

[ed. I think this little guy has brought his act to the neighborhood.]
via:

Hawaii High School Confidential: Where All Politics Is Truly Local

Is there any way to escape high school in Hawaii politics?

Take Mufi Hannemann. The former mayor of Honolulu and candidate for governor studied at Harvard University before serving as special assistant in the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Punahou alum Sen. Brian Schatz, razzing a politician from a rival high school, recently said that Hannemann has an “impressive resume, but a lot of people will say, ‘You know, that guy went Iolani.’”

A bit more seriously, Schatz noted that, in Hawaii, “where you went to high school is almost a defining characteristic.”

There is little doubt that Hannemann, 60, carries traces of Iolani in the minds of some voters. Similarly, Schatz is a U.S. senator but for many people, he’s a product of Punahou. U.S. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa is, of course, a “Waianae girl.” And so on.

The question is why?

Another Punahou graduate Charles Djou, the Republican candidate for the 1st Congressional District, said that high school in this state “is the one thing that can easily and immediately identify individuals geographically, socioeconomically (and) demographically.” It can, he said, provide a sort of “instant connection.”

‘Where You Wen Grad?’

When people ask — sometimes in pidgin — where a local went to school, the question can tap into something deep, especially on the campaign trail. In some ways, Hawaii politics can feel like the continuation of high school by other means.

That is why Civil Beat asked the candidates for governor, Congress or the U.S. Senate to analyze the importance of high school in electoral politics in Hawaii and what sort of kid they were back in the day. (Lightly edited audio recordings of each candidate’s responses can be heard by clicking the “play” button beneath their portrait photos in this article.)

Several of the candidates we spoke to got their first taste of electoral politics running for student government.

But why on earth do they, decades later, still harvest their high school’s identities with such persistence on the campaign trail?

For a local candidate, Hannemann explained, “It is a matter of being able to identify where you are from. And, most importantly, that you’ll never forget your roots.”

by Eric Pape, Honolulu Civil Beat |  Read more:

Image: via:

A Birth Story

[ed. For Anna.]

It was Monday, June 2nd, and I was wide awake at 6 a.m. Maybe to some of you this hour doesn’t sound remarkable, but for me it was. It was the first day in a lifetime of six in the mornings, and I made the three-hour leap all in one go.

By this point, it was 10 days past my due date, and I had a very specific and recurring fantasy of being moved around town in a hammock flown by a helicopter. I wanted to be airlifted between boroughs.

When I told my fiancé, Dustin, this wish, he was quiet for a second. He had learned to reply to me with caution, but I imagine in this case he just couldn’t help himself.

“Like a whale?” he asked.

I laughed, standing on the curb somewhere. Actually yes, come to think of it: Like a whale.

On the morning of June 2nd I had been waking up “still pregnant” for quite some time—41 weeks and two days to be exact; 289 days. My mom was in town already, at an Airbnb rental a block away. Dustin was done with work. I was chugging raspberry red leaf tea, bouncing on a purple exercise ball whenever I could, shoving evening primrose oil pills up my vagina, paying $40 a pop at community acupuncture sessions I didn’t believe in, and doing something called “The Labor Dance.” The Dance (preferred shorthand) involves rubbing your belly in a clockwise direction—vigorously—and then getting as close to twerking as one can at 41 weeks pregnant.

I never did get far enough into adulthood where I was waking up at 6 a.m. for self-betterment, which is one among many things I thought I would master before having children. Add to that: novel writing, working out, makeup, clothing, getting up early. As I got closer and closer to childbirth I still held out hope for a few of them. I went to Sephora; I opened Google Docs; downloaded the Couch to 5k app for the tenth time; waddled around the track at my local park, my baby bump a-bouncing. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.

Anyway, it was 6 a.m. and I was wide awake and staring at the wall. Then ow. It was like the crest of a wave of a period cramp; the worst moment, if you have forgotten to take Tylenol and then are cursing yourself that you forgot to take Tylenol. I lay there with my mind racing for awhile, then got up and ate Frosted Mini Wheats the way I had done for much of my pregnancy. Dustin was sleeping. I had another one. Another “thing.” Ow. I was kind of smiling at them at this point. Whoa, no way. Could it be? I got in the shower, jittery with this new development. Ow-ow-ow. I grabbed the towel rack and wondered how many more showers I’d take that day. In all of my natural childbirth classes everyone was raving about the magic of hot showers. I suspected, or feared, that their analgesic powers were not as good as advertised. Ow.

I got back into bed and lay there naked and huge, staring at Dustin sleeping, waiting for him to wake up. I didn’t want to look at the time, but I looked at the time and theows were 15 minutes or so apart. Ow, ow, ow I whispered into my arm. I grimaced; I cringed. So far the pain was about as bad as a stubbed toe. It was a “Damn!” pain, but it was still amusing. I was kind of proud of it, too, of my body. It had finally kicked itself into gear.

I was also a little excited because I didn’t feel like working that day, or going to another one of my doctor’s appointments at the hospital, a 40-minute commute away. The appointments are for overdue women. You sit in a room full of hospital-style armchairs (comfy but upholstered in cornflower blue, and with the kind of material you could wipe down with a washcloth) and you pull up your shirt to reveal your belly, while the nurse lubes you up and straps monitors to you and you sit with the other women whose bodies have not kicked into gear, and a chorus of fetal heart tones sing out in the room like horses galloping. The first time I sat there I cried with some kind of joy at this.

Today though, I was done with all of it.

by Meaghan O’Connell, Longreads | Read more:
Image: Kjell Reigstad