Jimmy Lawlor
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DinoMike, The Great Godzilla off Kanagawa

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What’s Wrong With Electric Bicycles

A new electric bike — the Koben, from Karmic Bikes — promises to fix what ails the electric bicycle industry. We spoke to its designer to find out what those problems are, and how he thinks he’s solved them. (...)

Batteries You Can’t Replace Or Rebuild

The batteries in any electric vehicle (be it a Tesla Model S or a forklift) are composed of many individual cells, all clumped together to form a pack. Traditionally, if one of those cells fails, you have no option but to replace all of them. And, if new technology improves battery capacity, there’s no way an existing electric vehicle owner can take advantage of it without buying a whole new battery pack or a whole new vehicle. That’s bad.

“The big bugaboo with all these batteries is their packing,” starts Neal. Tesla is a great example. The cells inside the battery pack they sell, those only account for 40 percent of the price of the pack. It’s hard to get it waterproof, it’s hard to get it vibration proof and to do that in a package that doesn’t cost a million dollars.”

Electric vehicle batteries also need to be hugely crash proof, with strengths far, far greater than that required of gas tanks.

“You can’t replace the cells inside those packs,” continues Neal. “With our technology, you just pop off the cover and replace an individual cell. Those are a fraction of the price of an individual cell, so you’re able to replace them if they break and upgrade them as they improve. You can upgrade our batteries forever. You’re going to have a whole bunch of Teslas out there where you have to buy a whole ‘nother battery to replace or upgrade it.”

Motors That Wear Out

“Hub motor bikes are great for the first year; maybe two. They have a really limited lifespan. An electric motor is a bunch of little magnets that are glued on, with little wires connecting everything together. A motor in the wheel just gets beaten to death, it’s too brutal an environment.”

Locating a motor in a wheel hub subjects it to every last iota of movement and every shock the wheels encounter as they roll. Know how sitting in the middle of a plane is far less bumpy than sitting way forward, near the cockpit or way in the back, near the bathrooms? It’s the same thing on a bicycle, just hopefully with less poo-stench and many more impacts and vibrations.

by Wes Siler, Gizmodo |  Read more:

Image: Karmic Bikes 

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The Inherent Bullshit Of The Wellness Aesthetic

[ed. See also: The Bullshit Hypocricy of "All Natural" Foods]

Wellness is New Age for the Instagram era. Amethysts and incense have been replaced with kale and balayage; tie-dye and velvet with bamboo cotton and designer yoga pants. It’s the alternative lifestyle but with better design. It is a movement defined by its minimalist, feminine aesthetic – pastel homewares, bright vegetable smoothies, slim legs in clean, expensive exercise wear. It’s not really about health – health does not have to be beautiful, thin and tidy in designer crop tops, but wellness does. It’s an aesthetic of wealth, a sort of gentle, palatable capitalism. There’s a dizziness to its beauty: it is light, weightless, transcendent. It probably feels this way thanks to the restricted calories as much as the calm from appropriated Eastern meditation.

Aesthetically, conventional medicine does not “work”. Actual medical medicine doesn’t make the best Instagram subject. Medicine uses copious packaging and leaves unattractive bits of aluminium on your minimalist timber bedside table. It is made with chemicals that have long, indecipherable names with numbers that just don’t sound organic. Medicine is administered in cold, sterile environments, with walls painted in ugly sedated hues and smells like disinfectant.

At its simplest, wellness posits that natural is beautiful, and beautiful is good. A scroll through its dreamlike instascape teaches us that beauty is healthy. Look at this stunning quinoa beet salad, look at these berries, how can this not be better than a chemical cocktail in a capsule?

A movement that rejects science and embraces a value system based largely on aesthetics is bound to be engulfed by capitalism. I don’t know if Belle Gibson deliberately sought to financially exploit cancer sufferers or if it just happened, but it’s not surprising that it did. The Whole Pantry is a beautiful production – the book would have looked great on your blond Norwegian coffee table. It promises beauty and hope, simplicity and life. The answers are right here in the warmth of your home; just open the pantry.

The rejection of conventional medicine in favour of a vague, though stubborn, belief in the power of leafy greens demonstrates the same desperate logic as conspiracy theorists. Wellness advocates seek simple answers to problems that confound them, while the beautiful filters through which we view their beliefs give the movement respectability not afforded to UFO spotters or 911 truthers.

At its most extreme, wellness claims it can cure cancer. Cancer is often not curable – this is a terrible, upsetting fact. It is senseless how many people die from this disease. Conspiracy theorists crave order from chaos – they want a truth that makes more sense than life just being a random, unfair mess. It is much easier to believe that if you just eat all the right foods you can survive, rather than rolling the dice with a selection of invasive and painful treatments. An unwell person cannot be blamed for buying the answers sold by charlatans – it is in our nature to find hope wherever we can – but the people who espouse wellness cures are selling conspiracy theories that endanger lives.

The logic seems to go that the enactment of wellness, the practice of its minimalist and beautiful obsession with the “natural”, will yield what it promises. But what happens when it doesn’t work? What if eating well and meditating changes nothing?

by Jessica Alice, Junkee |  Read more:

Image: The Whole Pantry

photo: markk

The “Fight of the Century”: An Orgy of Wealth and Profit

On Saturday, Floyd “Money” Mayweather Jr. and Manny “Pacman” Pacquiao boxed for twelve rounds in the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. The bout had been billed as the “Fight of the Century.” At the end of the 36-minute fight, Mayweather defeated Pacquiao by unanimous decision by the three fight judges.

The fight was the subject of extravagant media hype. It was broadcast in the United States and many countries internationally by Pay-Per-View (PPV) television. Some poorer countries, such as the Philippines and Mexico, broadcast the bout without charge, subsidized by advertising revenue.

The figures involved in this one boxing match are mind-boggling.

The fight had a $300 million purse. Mayweather will make around $180 million while Pacquiao will pocket an estimated $120 million. But these figures pale before the total revenue that the fight generated.

The final figures have not yet been released, but the Wall Street Journalreported that Pay-Per-View industry executives have estimated there were three million paid viewers in the United States. HBO and Showtime charged viewers $99 to watch the fight in high definition and $89 for standard definition. Total PPV revenue in the United States is now estimated to be $300-$400 million.

But the money does not stop there. The fight brought in profits from ticket sales, hotel bookings, gambling, promotional merchandise and advertising. For the promoters and profiteers of the boxing and entertainment industries, the bout was a bonanza of over a billion dollars.

Ostentatious amounts of money oozed from every pore of the event. The shorts that Pacquiao wore in the ring displayed seven advertising logos that netted Pacquiao $2.5 million. A two-square-inch space on Pacquiao’s rear end cost Nike $416,000. Burger King paid $1 million to have their mascot walk in Mayweather’s entourage as he entered the arena, displacing the pop star Justin Bieber.

The bout was quite the fashionable to-do. Hedge fund managers and A-list actors and celebrities rubbed elbows as they posed for selfies. Many were there to be seen and not necessarily to watch the match. They spent a total of $80 million on the 16,000 tickets available for the event.

Ringside tickets sold for $250,000. About six rows back could cost anywhere from $85,000 to $100,000.

According to ABC News, the fight was “one of the most exclusive boxing events the destination has ever hosted. Only 500 tickets were offered to the public, and they sold in seconds.” To get your hands on a ticket you needed connections.

Celebrities of Hollywood and the music industry were there in droves. Music moguls Jay-Z and Beyoncé were in attendance as was billionaire heiress Paris Hilton, Robert de Niro and Michael Jordan, Clint Eastwood and Nicki Minaj, and real estate billionaire Donald Trump.

Long-time Democratic Party operative and charlatan purveyor of identity politics, Rev. Jesse Jackson, was seated in a section that averaged at least $10,000 per ticket. There were so many celebrities that many could not find space on the floor level and had to sit among the ordinary folks in the $4,000 nosebleed seats.

The multimillionaires and billionaires flew to Las Vegas in their private jets for the fight and turned McCarran International Airport into a parking lot. Pictures posted on Instragram and Twitter show the tarmac covered in hundreds of Gulf Streams and Cessnas and Lears, the exclusive air transit of the extremely wealthy. The tarmac was so crowded that McCarran had to temporarily close the terminal. Forty members of the National Guard were brought in to ensure that no one would disturb the arrival and departure of passengers for the fight.

Some late arrivals jetted in for the fight from the Kentucky Derby horse race. The Derby ran at 6:26 pm Eastern time. According to the Washington Post, they raced in police-escorted limousines from Millionaire’s Row at Churchill Downs where they had just watched a horse named American Pharaoh win at the races, to the airport. From there they boarded private jets, which flew them to Las Vegas to round out the day with the Pacquiao-Mayweather fight.

Less prominently featured in the press, but very much in attendance, were the billionaire managers of the world’s leading hedge funds. The Pacquiao-Mayweather bout had been scheduled to take place the day before the opening of the annual SkyBridge Alternatives (SALT) convention in Las Vegas.

The SALT convention is an annual gathering of around 2,000 executives from the world’s largest hedge fund companies that collectively control the majority of the planet’s wealth. This year’s convention has a speakers list that includes former head of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke, former head of the NSA Keith Alexander, former US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, former director of the CIA David Petraeus, and former secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. The former prime ministers of Australia and Greece, Julia Gillard and George Papandreou, were among dozens of other world leaders and CEOs.

What better way was there to kick off a convention of the financial aristocracy and its war criminals than watching a high-ticket gladiator bout?

by Joseph Santolan , WSWS | Read more:
Image: Daily Mail

It’s Complicated

Once upon a time there lived a King, Laius of Thebes, who supported a woman’s Right to Choose after a pediatrician predicted that his son would drive him to an early grave. But Laius’s pregnant wife, Jocasta, a Right-to-Lifer, already had the nursery set up and a cute name picked out: Oedipus. So, after she bore the boy, her husband spirited Oed from the delivery room and strung him up on a mountainside. Soon the stork arrived in the form of a local shepherd who delivered the colicky kid to the childless king of Corinth.

Later, Oed, a teen now, was hitchhiking on Delphi Road when a motorist—with an uncanny resemblance to his old man, Laius—gave him the brush, the boy lost his head, and popped him. Then he continued on for Thebes, home of the fearful Sphinx.

Part lion, part bird, with a woman’s face and breasts: The Sphinx ate anybody who couldn’t figure out her riddles. Everybody. The mayor, Creon, was offering to any man who solved the monster’s riddle not only the crown, but his recently widowed sister, Jocasta.

Oedipus solved the riddle, took the throne, and tied the knot with Jo. The young man had always preferred older, more mature women. Ingenues had never interested him. Oed’s bride bore him two strong sons, Polynices and Eteocles, and two beautiful daughters, Antigone and Ismene. Each was the image of both parents, had exactly 10 fingers apiece, Oed and Jo were delighted, praised the gods, and sacrificed profusely.

Then one morning locusts descended on Thebes, and an oracle informed Oed that they’d leave as soon as the murderer of Laius, the former king, was apprehended.

By nightfall, his senior seer, a blind transsexual by the name of Tiresias, hurried onto the royal portico with a local shepherd. The conversation began in whispers at the monarch’s ear but soon rose to baying, beating of breasts, and gnashing of teeth. Meanwhile, the queen swooned and was carried to the powder room.

After dismissing his seer, Oedipus sat down at his desk stocked with vellum, the royal seal, and golden quills. He composed more than a few letters that evening, tearing up each only after a few words. This is the last surviving draft…

by David Comfort, TMN |  Read more:

Image: Oedipus explains the riddle of the Sphinx, byJean Auguste Dominique Ingres, c. 1805

'Deflategate": The Final Report

Tom Brady: Unbelievable.

The 243-report on "Deflategate" came out Wednesday and stopped barely short of calling the Patriots star quarterback a cheater. It did, however, call some of his claims "implausible" and left little doubt that he had a role in having footballs deflated before New England's AFC title game against Indianapolis in January and probably in previous games.

In his report, attorney Ted Wells said the quarterback "was at least generally aware" of all the plans to prepare the balls to his liking, below the league-mandated minimum of 12.5 pounds per square inch. Wells said it was "more probable than not" that two Patriots employees - officials' locker room attendant Jim McNally and equipment assistant John Jastremski - executed the plan.

For his trouble, McNally asked for expensive shoes and signed footballs, jerseys and cash. He brokered the deals over a series of salty text messages with Jastremski that portray Brady as a hard-to-please taskmaster. "F--- Tom," one read.

For the biggest home game of the season, McNally came through, taking the footballs from the officials' locker room into a bathroom before delivering them to the field, the report said.

The footballs - measured by officials at halftime- somehow lost pressure between being tested by the referee and the break.

As for Brady's claims that he didn't know of efforts to deflate game balls and didn't know anything about what McNally did: "We found these claims not plausible and contradicted by other evidence," Wells wrote.

by Eddie Pells, AP |  Read more:

Image: Elise Amendola

Clay Bennett, Kings and Pawns
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Bryce Johnson
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Toxically Pure

Shortly before the first election of the second President Bush, Joe Bageant convinced his third wife that they should move from Oregon to Virginia. At the time, Barbara was a bored Merrill Lynch middle manager, while Joe, a self-taught intellectual with stifled literary aspirations, was editing an agribusiness newsletter. They had money and lived well, but when Military History magazine offered him a job in Virginia, Joe saw it as an opportunity to return to his hometown of Winchester. He hadn’t been back in decades, and like many displaced Southern men on the far side of middle age, he felt the pull of home. The people were real there, he told his wife. They took care of each other. Without spending too much, Joe and Barbara could buy a colonial with a porch, right downtown, and say hello to a dozen friends every time they walked to the store.

So they moved. Bought the colonial, downtown as promised, and settled into the nominal capital of the Shenandoah Valley, a 250-year-old, tradition-bound town that had given George Washington his first political victory and Patsy Cline her first stable home. Before long, Joe shook off the cultivated air he’d acquired in his west-coast days. He started dressing in cheap work clothes and guzzling beer alongside the rednecks he’d grown up with. At karaoke nights and in the 7-Eleven parking lot, he listened to his people rail about their menial jobs, their healthcare debt, and their proud anti-liberalism.

Joe was familiar with the shitkicker ethos, but he was unprepared for the tone of panic and resentment that charged his old friends’ conversations. Increasingly despondent, he vented his frustrations in writing, first in chatrooms, and then in the galloping voice that he’d honed as a Hunter S. Thompson–obsessed newspaper columnist in his earlier life. “Something new and . . . ominous is afoot down here,” he wrote in 2004, in the first essay to appear on his website, joebageant.com:

Our girthsome, ill-educated polity hoots, cheers and guffaws at a Fox network made-for-the masses political movie called America, the Baddest Dog on the Block, as the power elite pick every pocket in the audience through regressive taxes, stopping only to loot the local treasury on their way out the back door to that money-insulated estate they bought for a song.

That essay, “Howling in the Belly of the Confederacy,” invoked a hellscape of blue-collar anger. Before long, similar tracts—about guns, real estate, alcohol, Pentecostalism, and other aspects of the Scots-Irish Southern trailer lifestyle—started appearing more frequently than most people exercise, and by the time Bush left the White House, Joe Bageant had detailed Winchester’s spiritual and economic devolution in dozens of elite-indicting online tirades, a book of which, Deer Hunting with Jesus, brought him a six-figure advance from Random House and blurbs from Studs Terkel and Howard Zinn.

His return home, as described in that book, had convinced Joe that American culture “is based on two things: television and petroleum.” We live “in an age of corporate dominion just as we once lived in an age of domination by royal families, kings, and warlords.” He reserved his greatest ferocity for the liberals who let it all happen, with their thick-headed denial of what is obvious to nearly every thinking white person: A class conflict is being played out between the Scots-Irish culture and what James Webb rightly called America’s “paternalistic Ivy League-centered, media-connected, politically correct power centers.” Whether educated liberals believe this or not, it is true. Tens of millions of Scots Irish and thousands of Scots Irish–influenced communities believe it is true and vote as if it is true, and that makes it true.

Joe’s book prompted speaking invitations in England, Italy, and Australia. His ideas were quoted approvingly by the New York Times, NPR, and the BBC, particularly as the 2008 presidential election neared. His rage became his brand, a fishing vest and beer gut his uniform, and before Barack Obama began campaigning for a second term, Joe Bageant was dead, at age sixty-four. It was cancer, not suicide, but by the end he’d grown so angry about the root cruelty and unfairness of American-style capitalism that the only solace he allowed himself in his columns was a firm belief in the oncoming collapse. “It is seeing everything in material terms, just like our avaricious capitalist overlords, that holds us back,” he wrote just months before learning of the tumor that had clenched around his intestines like a fist. “We are in the sixth great species die-off here.”

Returning as he did to Winchester right as Bush took office, Joe Bageant stepped into a writer’s dream—a perfect confluence of subject, setting, and personal knowledge—and he responded with fury, writing essay after raging essay, a dazzling output that collectively foresaw the housing crisis and recession, Obamacare, and “the 1 percent” as a rhetorical tool. Yet four years after his death, he’s remembered for one book and a corresponding moment of semi-fame as “America’s Most Literate Redneck,” if he’s remembered at all.

From the outside, Joe Bageant’s career and image seemed to materialize spontaneously, but for all his bubba bona fides, Joe’s outlook was equally the product of LSD, Buddhism, American Indian activists, Timothy Leary, and the back-to-the-land movement. In fact, the twenty-first century’s foremost chronicler of red-state dispossession was more than just a literate redneck—he was an avenging angel of the forgotten rural hippie movement. If his work—particularly his vivid second book, Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir, which remains without a U.S. publisher—were more deeply and widely read and his life more fully understood, Joe’s most radical propositions might seem worth considering: he insisted that tree-huggers are the natural allies of trailer trash, and that the political disasters of the last few decades are a result of the mainstream left’s disavowal of them both.

by John Lingan, Baffler | Read more:
Image: Stephen Kroninger
[ed. Howling in the Belly of the Confederacy]

The Met Gala

America’s Economy is a Nightmare of Our Own Making

For the past quarter-century I’ve offered in articles, books, and lectures an explanation for why average working people in advanced nations like the United States have failed to gain ground and are under increasing economic stress: Put simply, globalization and technological change have made most of us less competitive. The tasks we used to do can now be done more cheaply by lower-paid workers abroad or by computer-driven machines.

My solution—and I’m hardly alone in suggesting this—has been an activist government that raises taxes on the wealthy, invests the proceeds in excellent schools and other means people need to become more productive, and redistributes to the needy. These recommendations have been vigorously opposed by those who believe the economy will function better for everyone if government is smaller and if taxes and redistributions are curtailed.

While the explanation I offered a quarter-century ago for what has happened is still relevant—indeed, it has become the standard, widely accepted explanation—I’ve come to believe it overlooks a critically important phenomenon: the increasing concentration of political power in a corporate and financial elite that has been able to influence the rules by which the economy runs. And the governmental solutions I have propounded, while I believe them still useful, are in some ways beside the point because they take insufficient account of the government’s more basic role in setting the rules of the economic game.

Worse yet, the ensuing debate over the merits of the “free market” versus an activist government has diverted attention from how the market has come to be organized differently from the way it was a half-century ago, why its current organization is failing to deliver the widely shared prosperity it delivered then, and what the basic rules of the market should be. It has allowed America to cling to the meritocratic tautology that individuals are paid what they’re “worth” in the market, without examining the legal and political institutions that define the market. The tautology is easily confused for a moral claim that people deserve what they are paid. Yet this claim has meaning only if the legal and political institutions defining the market are morally justifiable.

Most fundamentally, the standard explanation for what has happened ignores power. As such, it lures the unsuspecting into thinking nothing can or should be done to alter what people are paid because the market has decreed it.

The standard explanation has allowed some to argue, for example, that the median wage of the bottom 90 percent—which for the first 30 years after World War II rose in tandem with productivity—has stagnated for the last 30 years, even as productivity has continued to rise, because middle-income workers are worth less than they were before new software technologies and globalization made many of their old jobs redundant. They therefore have to settle for lower wages and less security. If they want better jobs, they need more education and better skills. So hath the market decreed.

Yet this market view cannot be the whole story because it fails to account for much of what we have experienced. For one thing, it doesn’t clarify why the transformation occurred so suddenly. The divergence between productivity gains and the median wage began in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and then took off. Yet globalization and technological change did not suddenly arrive at America’s doorstep in those years. What else began happening then?

Nor can the standard explanation account for why other advanced economies facing similar forces of globalization and technological change did not succumb to them as readily as the United States. By 2011, the median income in Germany, for example, was rising faster than it was in the United States, and Germany’s richest 1 percent took home about 11 percent of total income, before taxes, while America’s richest 1 percent took home more than 17 percent. Why have globalization and technological change widened inequality in the United States to a much greater degree?

Nor can the standard explanation account for why the compensation packages of the top executives of big companies soared from an average of 20 times that of the typical worker 40 years ago to almost 300 times. Or why the denizens of Wall Street, who in the 1950s and 1960s earned comparatively modest sums, are now paid tens or hundreds of millions annually. Are they really “worth” that much more now than they were worth then?

Finally and perhaps most significantly, the market explanation cannot account for the decline in wages of recent college graduates. If the market explanation were accurate, college graduates would command higher wages in line with their greater productivity. After all, a college education was supposed to boost personal incomes and maintain American prosperity.

To be sure, young people with college degrees have continued to do better than people without them. In 2013, Americans with four-year college degrees earned 98 percent more per hour on average than people without a college degree. That was a bigger advantage than the 89 percent premium that college graduates earned relative to non-graduates five years before, and the 64 percent advantage they held in the early 1980s.

But since 2000, the real average hourly wages of young college graduates have dropped. The entry-level wages of female college graduates have dropped by more than 8 percent, and male graduates by more than 6.5 percent. To state it another way, while a college education has become a prerequisite for joining the middle class, it is no longer a sure means for gaining ground once admitted to it. That’s largely because the middle class’s share of the total economic pie continues to shrink, while the share going to the top continues to grow.

A deeper understanding of what has happened to American incomes over the last 25 years requires an examination of changes in the organization of the market. These changes stem from a dramatic increase in the political power of large corporations and Wall Street to change the rules of the market in ways that have enhanced their profitability, while reducing the share of economic gains going to the majority of Americans.

This transformation has amounted to a redistribution upward, but not as “redistribution” is normally defined. The government did not tax the middle class and poor and transfer a portion of their incomes to the rich. The government undertook the upward redistribution by altering the rules of the game.

by Robert Reich, Salon |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Deco Japan

K. Kotani, Songbook for "The Modern Song" (Modan Bushi), 1930
From: Deco Japan: Shaping Art and Culture, 1920-1945

[ed. See also: Ten Qualifications for Being a Moga (Modern Girl)]

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Rodrigo y Gabriela

The End of California?

In a normal year, no one in California looks twice at a neighbor’s lawn, that mane of bluegrass thriving in a sun-blasted desert. Or casts a scornful gaze at a fresh-planted almond grove, saplings that now stand accused of future water crimes. Or wonders why your car is conspicuously clean, or whether a fish deserves to live when a cherry tree will die.

Of course, there is nothing normal about the fourth year of the great drought: According to climate scientists, it may be the worst arid spell in 1,200 years. For all the fields that will go fallow, all the forests that will catch fire, all the wells that will come up dry, the lasting impact of this drought for the ages will be remembered, in the most exported term of California start-ups, as a disrupter.

“We are embarked upon an experiment that no one has ever tried,” said Gov. Jerry Brown in early April, in ordering the first mandatory statewide water rationing for cities.

Surprising, perhaps even disappointing to those with schadenfreude for the nearly 39 million people living in year-round sunshine, California will survive. It’s not going to blow away. The economy, now on a robust rebound, is not going to collapse. There won’t be a Tom Joad load of S.U.V.s headed north. Rains, and snow to the high Sierra, will eventually return.

But California, from this drought onward, will be a state transformed. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s was human-caused, after the grasslands of the Great Plains were ripped up, and the land thrown to the wind. It never fully recovered. The California drought of today is mostly nature’s hand, diminishing an Eden created by man. The Golden State may recover, but it won’t be the same place.

Looking to the future, there is also the grim prospect that this dry spell is only the start of a “megadrought,” made worse by climate change. California has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs. What if the endless days without rain become endless years?

In the cities of a changed California, brown is the new green. A residential lawn anywhere south of, say, Sacramento, is already considered an indulgence. “If the only person walking on your lawn is the person mowing it,” said Felicia Marcus, chairwoman of the State Water Resources Control Board, then maybe it should be taken out. The state wants people to convert lawns to drought-tolerant landscaping, or fake grass.

Artificial lakes filled with Sierra snowmelt will become baked-mud valleys, surrounded by ugly bathtub rings. Some rivers will dry completely — at least until a normal rain year. A few days ago, there was a bare trickle from the Napa, near the town of St. Helena, flowing through some of the most valuable vineyards on the planet. The state’s massive plumbing system, one of the biggest in the world, needs adequate snow in order to serve farmers in the Central Valley and techies in Silicon Valley. This year, California set a record low Sierra snowpack in April — 5 percent of normal — following the driest winter since records have been kept.

To Californians stunned by their bare mountains, there was no more absurd moment in public life recently than when James Inhofe, the Republican senator from Oklahoma who is chairman of the environment and public works committee, held up a snowball in February as evidence of America’s hydraulic bounty in the age of climate change.

You can see the result of endless weeks of cloudless skies in New Melones Lake, here in Calaveras County in the foothills east of the Central Valley, where Mark Twain made a legend of a jumping frog. The state’s fourth largest reservoir, holding water for farmers, and for fish downstream, is barely 20 percent full. It could be completely drained by summer’s end.

It’s a sad sight — a warming puddle, where the Stanislaus River once ran through it. At full capacity, with normal rainfall, New Melones should have enough water for nearly two million households for a year.

Even worse is the Lake McClure reservoir, impounding the spectral remains of the Merced River as it flows out of Yosemite National Park. It’s at 10 percent of capacity. In a normal spring, the reservoir holds more than 600,000 acre-feet of water. As April came to a close, it was at 104,000 acre-feet — with almost no snowmelt on the way. (The measurement is one acre filled to a depth of a foot, or 325,851 gallons.) That’s the surface disruption in a state that may soon be unrecognizable in places.

The morality tale behind California’s verdant prosperity will most certainly change. In the old narrative, the evil city took water from powerless farmers. Swimming pools in greater Los Angeles were filled with liquid that could have kept orchards alive in the Owens Valley, to the north.

It was hubris, born in the words of the city’s chief water engineer, William Mulholland, when he opened the gates of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913 with an immortal proclamation: “There it is. Take it.”

by Timothy Egan, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Ken Light/Contact Press Images

Borb

Borb, story of a severely alcoholic homeless man

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Obsessed with Parkour

On the Thursday morning I arrive in London, my phone pings with a message from a teenage mother and school dropout named Shirley Darlington: "Kilburn tube station, 7pm."

I get there 10 minutes early, but about 20 women are already warming up, including the British movie actress Christina Chong and her sister Lizzi, a professional dancer.

Every Thursday, Shirley emails the 100 or so members of her all-female Parkour crew, revealing the secret location for that night's challenge. She keeps the venue a surprise so her crew never knows what to expect, and she keeps guys away because the biggest threat to Parkour - as even Parkour's all-male founders would agree - is testosterone.

"Young guys turn up, and lots of times all they want is the flash and not the fundamentals," says Dan Edwardes, the master instructor who gave Shirley her start. "They want to backflip off a wall and leap around on rooftops. With a group of lads, you'll get the show-off, the questioner, the giddy one. But in a women's group, there's none of that. It's very quiet. They get to it."

What I was after was even more fundamental than the fundamentals. I'd only come to Parkour by accident while chasing the secrets of the most remarkable athletes of our time - World War Two resistance fighters.

I'd become fascinated with the underground when I realised it wasn't made up of hardened soldiers. Often, they were civilians hiding behind enemy lines who had to live off the land while attacking Hitler's forces in gruelling hit-and-run operations.

Take Crete - on that small Greek island, farmers and shopkeepers were joined by British academics and poets who'd essentially been recruited just because they knew Ancient Greek. For the next four years, these misfits routinely covered ultra-marathon distances over mountain peaks and pulled off feats of strength and endurance that would stagger an Olympic athlete. I wanted to learn - what was their secret? And could I master it too?

One clue came from Samuel Gridley Howe, an American medic who joined the Greek Revolution in the early 1800s. Howe was amazed by the way Greek fighters seemed to bounce along the landscape, using so little effort that they barely needed food or rest. "A Greek soldier," Howe commented, "will march, or rather skip, all day among the rocks, expecting no other food than a biscuit and a few olives, or a raw onion, and at night, lies down content upon the ground with a flat rock for a pillow." (...)

To me, this sounded remarkably similar to what I knew of Parkour, the French street art of using the body's natural elastic recoil to leap and flow across the urban outback.

I wondered if Parkour's pioneers, seven French street kids who called themselves the "Yamakasi", and learned their basic moves from a survivor of colonial jungle fights in French-occupied Asia - might have rediscovered the same ancient athletic principle which allowed the Cretans to cover fantastic distances with remarkably little effort.

by Christopher McDougall, BBC | Read more:
Image: Ben Curwen