Americans Are "Fired Up" About First Commercially Available Flamethrowers

Facing possible ban, more Americans are buying new—and legal—$900 flamethrowers

And why would anyone need a handheld flamethrower, you ask? Here are some "ideas" from the Ion Productions' official XM42 website:

• start your bonfire from across the yard
• kill the weeds between your cracks in style
• clearing snow/ice
• controlled burns/ground-clearing of foliage/agricultural
• insect control

As Ion goes on to point out (correctly, we might add), there are "endless possibilities for entertainment and utility."

[ed. Is this a great country or what?]

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Romano Cagnoni, (Italian, 1935), British Museum, 1967
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Why. Didn't. I Sell.

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Sergio Cerchi
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As the Dow Jones Drops

Let’s review: First, various “emerging economy” exchanges lost value, then China, then Wall Street.

The actual economic contagion started with resource prices. That was driven by reduced demand, primarily from China. Oil prices (only one commodity), already under pressure from moderately increased supply (it was less than boosters make out), were crashed by Saudi Arabia’s decision to increase production rather than cutting it back. There’s plenty of speculation why, the practical result was to trash multiple exchange rates and economies and to encourage everyone to overproduce, breaking OPEC solidarity. I don’t think Saudi Arabia is going to win this bet, whether it was to crush specific countries (Russia, Iran) or to crush American high cost oil production.

During this period we had repeated currency devaluations in an attempt to increase the competitiveness of exports. These devaluations had marginal effect at best, didn’t work at least.

China’s growth had been slowing (thus the reduction in their demand for commodities), they encouraged a stock market bubble as consumers were proving reluctant to continue piling into real-estate. They printed vast amounts of money, at least twenty times as much as Europe, Japan, and the US combined, but exports were no longer leading growth. Regular Chinese and private firms have massive amounts of debt.

To put it simply, China had reached the point where export-led mercantilism was no longer working. They needed to shift to domestic consumer demand. They chose to try and inflate bubbles instead.

Virtually every country in the world was either rolling off a cliff, or struggling to keep their head above water. Most of the South of Europe had never really recovered (Ireland is a partial exception). Latin America was diving, Turkey’s real-estate driven, neo-liberal growth was stalling, India’s “miracle” was always more of a paper tiger than most made out, being concentrated to a minority even as the average number of calories consumed in the country dived.

But this started in China, which is important.

We are now in a situation analogous to the late 19th and early 20th century. America is the global hegemon (as Britain was then), and China is the world’s most important economy (America was then.) China is the global manufacturer. It buys the most resources, which is what most of the world sells, since most countries have given up manufacturing most goods for themselves. It prints the most money, dwarfing America and Europe. Its rich people are driving up real-estate prices all over the globe.

Yes, yes, by some measures the US economy is still “bigger,” but those measures are even more inflated than inflated and bogus Chinese ones. China is the key maker of goods. There are a few other countries that also make goods as the most important (not largest, most important) part of their economy. Everyone else is a commodity producer, a financier, or trying to sell intangibles (intellectual property, whether inventions or fiction or branding).

So what and how China does now matters most, economically. The contagion started in China, spread to emerging economies, money fled to the US and a few other safe havens, China’s economy continued to stall, its stock market fell despite radical attempts to keep it inflated, and that has now come home to New York.

Some are worried this is 1929, but in China. I have been stating for years that the big one would start in China. Whether this is it, we won’t know for a while (just as they did not know in 1929 that it was 1929).

Welcome to the new world. The US and Europe put a LOT of effort into moving as much industrial production as possible to China. China just promised that a very few people would get very rich doing it, and those people made sure it happened. (Look up the profit margins on iPhones.)

I will note that there are still bubbles. Real-estate bubbles (Canada, Britain, a few important US cities, Australia, etc.) and a vast amount of highly leveraged derivatives have been pumped back out since the 2008 crash, since no one actually bothered to regulate or forbid them. And banks and financial companies are now larger and fewer, making the economy and financial markets both more subject to contagion.

The elites learned from 2008 that the important thing to do in a financial crisis is to just print enough money and relax enough accounting rules–extend and pretend. That will be the play again this time if this contagion turns truly serious. I would guess that it will work, sort of: More zombies will be created, they will need higher profits, the real economy will be even more stagnant.

by Ian Welsh |  Read more:

Image: gavatron

Whales Found Dead In ‘Mortality Event’ In Alaska

Image: Dr. Bree Witteveen/Alaska Sea Grant Marine Advisory Program

Duke Kahanamoku

Google gives Duke Kahanamoku, ‘father of modern surfing,’ a swell of popularity

Why Salad Is So Overrated

As the world population grows, we have a pressing need to eat better and farm better, and those of us trying to figure out how to do those things have pointed at lots of different foods as problematic. Almonds, for their water use. Corn, for the monoculture. Beef, for its greenhouse gases. In each of those cases, there’s some truth in the finger-pointing, but none of them is a clear-cut villain.

There’s one food, though, that has almost nothing going for it. It occupies precious crop acreage, requires fossil fuels to be shipped, refrigerated, around the world, and adds nothing but crunch to the plate.

It’s salad, and here are three main reasons why we need to rethink it.

Salad vegetables are pitifully low in nutrition. The biggest thing wrong with salads is lettuce, and the biggest thing wrong with lettuce is that it’s a leafy-green waste of resources.

In July, when I wrote a piece defending corn on the calories-per-acre metric, a number of people wrote to tell me I was ignoring nutrition. Which I was. Not because nutrition isn’t important, but because we get all the nutrition we need in a fraction of our recommended daily calories, and filling in the rest of the day’s food is a job for crops like corn. But if you think nutrition is the most important metric, don’t direct your ire at corn. Turn instead to lettuce.

One of the people I heard from about nutrition is organic consultant Charles Benbrook. He and colleague Donald Davis developed a nutrient quality index — a way to rate foods based on how much of 27 nutrients they contain per 100 calories. Four of the five lowest-ranking foods (by serving size) are salad ingredients: cucumbers, radishes, lettuce and celery. (The fifth is eggplant.)

Those foods’ nutritional profile can be partly explained by one simple fact: They’re almost all water. Although water figures prominently in just about every vegetable (the sweet potato, one of the least watery, is 77 percent), those four salad vegetables top the list at 95 to 97 percent water. A head of iceberg lettuce has the same water content as a bottle of Evian (1-liter size: 96 percent water, 4 percent bottle) and is only marginally more nutritious.

Take collard greens. They are 90 percent water, which still sounds like a lot. But it means that, compared with lettuce, every pound of collard greens contains about twice as much stuff that isn’t water, which, of course, is where the nutrition lives. But you’re also likely to eat much more of them, because you cook them. A large serving of lettuce feels like a bona fide vegetable, but when you saute it (not that I’m recommending that), you’ll see that two cups of romaine cooks down to a bite or two.

The corollary to the nutrition problem is the expense problem. The makings of a green salad — say, a head of lettuce, a cucumber and a bunch of radishes — cost about $3 at my supermarket. For that, I could buy more than two pounds of broccoli, sweet potatoes or just about any frozen vegetable going, any of which would make for a much more nutritious side dish to my roast chicken.

Lettuce is a vehicle to transport refrigerated water from farm to table. When we switch to vegetables that are twice as nutritious — like those collards or tomatoes or green beans — not only do we free up half the acres now growing lettuce, we cut back on the fossil fuels and other resources needed for transport and storage.

by Tamar Haspel, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: T.J. Kirkpatrick

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Dead Flies Art
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In Praise of Missing Out: On the Paradoxical Value of Our Unlived Lives

“Our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live. But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are.”

“In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation,” Alain de Botton wrote in his meditation on Nietzsche and why a fulfilling life requires difficulty. “We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not,” Joan Didion wrote in contemplating the value of keeping a notebook. But we are just as well advised, it turns out, to keep on nodding terms with the people we could’ve been, the people we never were, the people who perished in the abyss between our ideal selves and our real selves. So argues psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (public library) — a fascinating read, acutely relevant to our culture so plagued by the fear of missing out that we’ve shorthanded it to “FOMO.”

Phillips — whom I’ve long considered the Carl Jung of our time, and who has written beautifully about such transfixing psychosocial complexities as how kindness became our forbidden pleasure, balance and the requisite excesses of life, and the necessity of boredom — examines the paradoxical relationship between frustration and satisfaction, exploring how our unlived lives illuminate the priorities, values, and desires undergirding the lives we do live.

In a sentiment that calls to mind Parker Palmer’s magnificent commencement address on the wholehearted life — “If the unexamined life is not worth living,” he counseled graduates, “it’s equally true that the unlived life is not worth examining.”— Phillips writes:

The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unlived life worth examining? It seems a strange question until one realizes how much of our so-called mental life is about the lives we are not living, the lives we are missing out on, the lives we could be leading but for some reason are not. What we fantasize about, what we long for, are the experiences, the things and the people that are absent. It is the absence of what we need that makes us think, that makes us cross and sad. We have to be aware of what is missing in our lives — even if this often obscures both what we already have and what is actually available — because we can survive only if our appetites more or less work for us. Indeed, we have to survive our appetites by making people cooperate with our wanting. We pressurize the world to be there for our benefit. And yet we quickly notice as children — it is, perhaps, the first thing we do notice — that our needs, like our wishes, are always potentially unmet. Because we are always shadowed by the possibility of not getting what we want, we learn, at best, to ironize our wishes — that is, to call our wants wishes: a wish is only a wish until, as we say, it comes true — and, at worst, to hate our needs. But we also learn to live somewhere between the lives we have and the lives we would like.

[…]

We refer to them as our unlived lives because somewhere we believe that they were open to us; but for some reason — and we might spend a great deal of our lived lives trying to find and give the reason — they were not possible. And what was not possible all too easily becomes the story of our lives. Indeed, our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live. But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are.

Nowhere is this paradox more evident than in how we think of loves that never were — “the one that got away” implies that the getting away was merely a product of probability and had the odds turned out differently, the person who “got away” would have been The One. But Phillips argues this is a larger problem that affects how we think about every aspect of our lives, perhaps most palpably when we peer back on the road not taken from the fixed vantage point of our present destination:

We are always haunted by the myth of our potential, of what we might have it in ourselves to be or do… We share our lives with the people we have failed to be. 

[…] 

Our lives become an elegy to needs unmet and desires sacrificed, to possibilities refused, to roads not taken. The myth of our potential can make of our lives a perpetual falling-short, a continual and continuing loss, a sustained and sometimes sustaining rage.

Phillips argues that these unlived lives reveal themselves most obviously in our envy of others, the psychology of which Kierkegaard keenly observed a century and a half earlier, and in the demands we place on our children — an idea that furthers the parallel between Phillips with Jung, for it was the great Swiss psychiatrist who famously asserted that what most shapes children’s developing psychological reality are “the unlived lives of the parents.” But where Jung believed that “the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being,” Phillips suggests that it’s equally important to kindle a light in the darkness of non-being, of never-having-been.

by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Dinner and Deception

It's 4:25 p.m. I make my way through the kitchen, past the prep cooks, up to the locker room on the second floor. Getting dressed takes 10 minutes. That leaves 20 to get “family meal” before the porters break everything down. At 4:55, I’m ready. Lineup is in five minutes — “live at five.” I double-check my uniform, an expensive-looking suit issued by the restaurant, before I join the rest of the wait staff downstairs.

Lineup is our final meeting before service. The managers report on menu changes and our ranking on the world’s top restaurants list. Sometimes they test us. “Where did Chef get his first Michelin star?” “What kind of stone is the floor made of?” But tonight we just taste the new wine. A classic Burgundy: red fruit, rose petal, underripe cherry; med-high acid, soft tannins. It’ll pair well with the pork.

The dining room has four “stations,” each with six or seven tables overseen by a four-person service team — captain, sommelier, server and assistant server. As a captain, I’m in charge of my team. It took me eight months to get promoted to this job; some captains waited for years.

Six food runners also roam the floor, along with three managers. Two expediters — the “expos” — stay in the kitchen to decide when food leaves and where it goes. At most other three-Michelin-star restaurants in New York City, the system is much the same.

Doors open at 5:30. Tonight, the book says 152 covers. About 120 used to be normal, but the owners are opening a new place next month and need cash. So tonight it’s 152. The service director calls this an “opportunity for more guests to experience the restaurant.” But this is spin, and everyone knows it. Thirty-two more covers means we need to turn eight more tables, two more in my section, which means I’ll be taking a cab home at 3 a.m., not 2.

My team is good. Not perfect, good. The sommelier knows his wine, but on busy nights gets buried fast. I can rely on my server. My assistant server is great. Every captain knows that an assistant server can make or break you. “Crumb, clear, water” — that’s all an assistant server technically does, but a good one keeps things moving in your section.

First table gets seated at 5:31. I print and scan the chit, a digital dossier we keep on every guest, new or old. Who are these people? V.I.P.? (“Soigné” is the preferred term.) It’s the first seating, so I know they’re not, but I check anyway. Have they been here before? Do they have a water preference? Food allergies? Likes? Dislikes? Spend big on wine?

I announce my presence on the greet: a flourish, a hand gesture, a pressing of the palms, anything to signal that everyone at the table needs to pay attention, that I’ll be dictating the pace of the experience tonight, not the other way around. “Good evening.” Big smile. “Do you still prefer sparkling water? Or would you like something else this time?” The assistant server stands by the credenza next to the Champagne bucket, waiting. A slight wiggle of my fingers behind my back means bubbles; a slashing motion, still; a twist of the fist, ice water. Like magic, he appears with the correct selection. “May I take a moment to explain the menu?”

Captains compete for the briefest menu spiel possible. The key is to eliminate unnecessary choices; most people just want to be told what to do. At 5:35 I’m back at the table for the order. I memorize every guest’s selection; writing things down would suggest a “transactional” relationship, something I want to avoid. Each guest should feel special. A minute later I dictate the orders to the server, who transcribes and then places them while I stay on the floor.

In an ideal service, the captain never leaves the floor. After that, it’s all about table maintenance until I drop the check with some complimentary cognac in three or five hours, depending on whether they go four-course or tasting. I’ll do this 13 more times tonight.

by Edward Frame, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Owen Freeman

[ed. What?]
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A Simple Fusion Reactor That Could Be Running in 10 years

Scientists at Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT) in the US have designed a 6.6-metre-wide fusion reactor that they say could provide electricity to around 100,000 people. Even better, it could be up and running within 10 years, according to their calculations.

For decades, scientists have been trying to find a way to harness nuclear fusion - the reaction that powers stars - because of its ability to produce almost-unlimited energy supplies using little more than seawater, and without emitting greenhouse gasses. But despite many promising designs, finding a way to contain and commercialise the reaction on Earth has proven far more challenging than imagined. In fact it's a long-running joke among scientists that practical nuclear fusion power plants are just 30 years away - and always will be.

But not only does the new MIT design promise to be cheaper and smaller than current reactors, it also provides hope that commercial nuclear fusion reactors could become a reality in our lifetime, with the team explaining that similar devices in size and complexity have taken just five years to build.

"Fusion energy is certain to be the most important source of electricity on Earth in the 22nd century, but we need it much sooner than that to avoid catastrophic global warming," David Kingham, a UK-based nuclear fusion expert who wasn't involved in the research, told David L. Chandler from the MIT news office. "This paper shows a good way to make quicker progress."

To explain it very simply, nuclear fusion relies on fusing hydrogen atoms together at super-high temperatures to release enormous amounts of energy. This is different to the nuclear fission used in nuclear power plants, which is where scientists split atoms to generate electricity - a process that's less stable and also produces large amounts of nuclear waste.

So why aren't we already using nuclear fusion to generate ridiculous amounts of clean energy? Well, that's because the reaction requires heating hydrogen atoms to hundreds of millions of degrees Celsius. And keeping that super-hot plasma together in one place for long enough for the atoms to fuse is a lot harder than it sounds.

by Fiona McDonald, Science Alert |  Read more:

Image: MIT

Are Lawyers Getting Dumber?

Last August, the tens of thousands of answer sheets from the bar exam started to stream into the National Conference of Bar Examiners. The initial results were so glaringly bad that staffers raced to tell their boss, Erica Moeser. In most states, the exam spans two days: The first is devoted to six hours of writing, and the second day brings six hours of multiple-choice questions. The NCBE, a nonprofit in Madison, Wis., creates and scores the multiple-choice part of the test, administered in every state but Louisiana. Those two days of bubble-filling and essay-scribbling are extremely stressful. For people who just spent three years studying the intricacies of the law, with the expectation that their $120,000 in tuition would translate into a bright white-collar future, failure can wreak emotional carnage. It can cost more than $800 to take the exam, and bombing the first time can mean losing a law firm job.

When he saw the abysmal returns, Mark Albanese, director of testing and research at the NCBE, scrambled to check his staff’s work. Once he and Moeser were confident the test had been fairly scored, they began reporting the numbers to state officials, who released their results to the public over the course of several weeks.

In Idaho, bar pass rates dropped 15 percentage points, from 80 percent to 65 percent. In Delaware, Iowa, Minnesota, Oregon, Tennessee, and Texas, scores dropped 9 percentage points or more. By the time all the states published their numbers, it was clear that the July exam had been a disaster everywhere. Scores on the multiple-choice part of the test registered their largest single-year drop in the four-decade history of the test.

“It was tremendously embarrassing,” says Matt Aksamit, a graduate of Creighton University School of Law, who failed Nebraska’s July bar exam last year. “I think a lot of people can relate to what it’s like to work hard for something and fall short of what you want.” (Aksamit took it again in February and passed.)

Panic swept the bottom half of American law schools, all of which are ranked partly on the basis of their ability to get their graduates into the profession. Moeser sent a letter to law school deans. She outlined future changes to the exam and how to prepare for them. Then she made a hard turn to the July exam. “The group that sat in July 2014 was less able than the group that sat in July 2013,” she wrote. It’s not us, Moeser was essentially saying. It’s you.

by Natalie Kitroeff, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Meredith Jenks

David Hockney, A Bigger Splash 1969
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Laulau
[ed. Happiness comes in various forms.]
photo: markk

[ed. I'll be taking a short break. Enjoy the archives.]

Tsuneo Sanda (1986)
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Love in the Age of Big Data

Once upon a time, in the Pony Expresso cafe in Seattle, a man and a woman began to experience the long-mysterious but increasingly scientifically investigated thing we call love. The first stage is called "limerence." This is the spine-tingling, heart-twisting, can't-stop-staring feeling, when it seems as though the world stops whirling and time itself bows down and pauses before the force of your longing. The man, a then-44-year-old University of Washington research psychologist named John Gottman, was drawn to the woman's wild mane of black curly hair and her creativity: She was an amateur musician and painter as well as a psychologist like himself. The woman, a then-35-year-old named Julie Schwartz, who'd placed a personal ad in the Seattle Weekly that John had answered, was turned on by John's humble little car—voted the ugliest vehicle in the University of Washington faculty parking lot—and his expansive curiosity. He read physics and math and history and kept a little spiral-bound notebook in his pocket that he used to jot down things his companions said that captivated him.

They talked avidly; it felt as if they'd known each other forever. Over the following months they drew closer and closer, proceeding through subsequent stages of building a fulfilling love relationship. John learned about the unhappy home life growing up in Michigan that had driven Julie to spend so much time in the forest by herself, and Julie learned about John's desire to understand deeply earth's biggest mysteries, like the nature of time. Although they were afraid—they'd both been divorced before—they confided their admiration for each other, John's for the courage Julie showed in her therapy practice by helping the “sickest of the sickest,” schizophrenics and Vietnam veterans on Skid Row, and Julie's for John's absurdist sense of humor. They kayaked together. They joined a synagogue. They married and had a daughter, fulfilling one of John's longtime dreams, and bought a house on a forested island three hours north of Seattle, fulfilling a dream of Julie's. They fought. They attended couples therapy. Through their conflict they came to love each other more.

Twenty-nine years after that first date, John Gottman and Julie Schwartz Gottman stood on a black stage in a ballroom of the Seattle Sheraton in front of about 250 other couples, young and old, straight and gay. The intense intimacy of their relationship was on full display: They finished each other's sentences, bantered with each other and talked candidly about how their struggles had made them stronger. Julie wept. John held Julie, caressing her hair. The rest of us, seated in chairs that had been hooked together in sets of twos, watched them with yearning.

We'd come to see the Gottmans because the pair has spent the last 20 years refining a science-based method to build a beautiful love partnership yourself. They reveal it over a two-day, $750-per-pair workshop called "The Art and Science of Love." “It turns out Tolstoy was wrong," John told the crowd in an opening lecture. "All happy relationships are similar and all unhappy relationships are also similar. … Is there a secret? It turns out, empirically, yes, there is a secret."

by Eve Fairbanks, Huffington Post |  Read more:

Image: Jun Cen

Plain White T-Shirts, Ranked

In case you momentarily forgot which website you were reading, let me say right here up at the top that I am not a textile expert. I’m actually not even particularly fashionable. To me, obsessing about fashion is silly. There are better things to obsess about, such as the optimal marinade for skirt steak. The fact that I’m not qualified to opine about fashion, however, makes me absolutely well qualified to opine on something that symbolizes its opposite: the white T-shirt.

The white T-shirt is my kind of garment. It is utilitarian by design. Extensive research has taught me that its origin dates back to the Spanish-American War, when the Navy issued them as part of the standard uniform. “The word T-shirt became part of American English by the 1920s,” says a website I read. This makes it even better: Not only is the white T the garment of choice for those of us who despise having to choose garments, but it’s also quintessentially American.

In Amazon, there are 2.6 million results that come up when you search “Men’s White T-Shirt,” and while those get pretty interesting pretty fast (“Konflic NWT Men’s Giant Cross Graphic Designer MMA Muscle T-shirt”), reviewing all of them would take more time and effort than anyone has. Here, along with my research assistant (pictured at left), I’ve done my best to compile a range of recognizable brands at various price points, with some curveballs thrown in as well, because if you’re going to write about white T-shirts, you need to buy at least one of the outlandishly expensive ones, just to see how the other half lives. And actually, since that particular shirt is far and away the worst garment of the 14 brands I tried, we might as well just start there. Here is the definitive ranking of white T-shirts, from worst to best, with at-press-time prices from Amazon, plus a few from the brands’ sites themselves.

14. Hanro of Switzerland’s Cotton Superior

Price: $70 for a single damn shirt

These guys have one of those websites where everything is in black and white and the sexless models stare back at you like failed AI experiments (which actually sums up the Swiss in general, I’ve found). The shirt itself is made from a blend of cotton and “elastane” (aka spandex) and stretches like a pair of pantyhose. You’re not supposed to put it in the dryer. Now, I believe that if a T-shirt makes you feel like $70 worth of awesome when you wear it, then go right ahead and spend that money (you overpaid social-media marketing whiz, you). This shirt, however, makes me feel like a robot’s penis sheathed in a polymer condom. Knowing that there are people are out there actually wearing this somehow makes me feel both superior and inferior at the same time.

13. Levi’s 200 Series Cotton V-Neck

Price: $29.50 for a two-pack

I had high hopes for Levi’s. I have at least two pairs of their 511 jeans in heavy rotation at all times, and a lot of their flannels and jackets are the male equivalent of yoga pants, in that they’re basically designed like pajamas you can wear outside. But this “reengineered” V-neck blows. It’s not soft, it rides up in the armpits, and there’s an obnoxious square of red stitching sewn into the lower-right flank. White T-shirts should be white, period—no branding, no subtle flourish that whispers, “Dude, check it out, I’m wearing Levi’s.” Even the Swiss Robot Condom people know better.

by Garrett Kamps, Adequate Man |  Read more:

Image: Jim Cooke