Save Comcast!

Cable TV is a welcome addition in the homes of millions of Americans, and for more than 75 years, it's been a force for radical transformation of the opportunities available to creators, performers, and audiences alike.

But these may be the last days of the cable system.

Oh, not this cable system. This cable system is fine. But for anyone who wants to invent a new cable system, to ascend to the daring heights of cable providers, the way is being blocked. Having climbed from scrappy pirates to fleet-commanding admirals, the executives of the cable world want to pull up the ladder after themselves -- and they're being given a critical assist by the World Wide Web Consortium, which once stood for open standards, competition and innovation on the Web.

Imagine you wanted to start a business that intercepted the most expensive, high-production-value video content in the country and retransmitted it on your own wires, charging your customers for the privilege and not sending a dime back to the broadcasters or production studios.

Sounds like piracy?

It's the cable industry, at its inception in 1948. Back then, cable was called "Community Antenna TV," and it was pioneered by scrappy, daring entrepreneurs who erected titanic broadcast receiver antennas with the height to tune in distant TV signals that were too faint for their customers' set-top rabbit-ears. These companies ran physical cables from the antennas to their customers' homes, providing them with TV service -- for a fee.

The broadcasters squawked, called it piracy, but the cable operators stuck to their guns, and successfully lobbied Congress to set a compulsory licensing scheme that let them retransmit any signals they could tune, at a fixed fee, without having to negotiate with broadcasters.

Cable began as an industry founded on the principle that it was better to beg forgiveness than get permission -- especially permission from an incumbent broadcast industry that wanted no part of any new, "disruptive" business models that might upset its apple cart.

Today, Comcast is one of a handful of entertainment companies, incumbent browser vendors, and companies that make products that restrict your access to your own computer who've successfully co-opted the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the world's leading maker of standards for the open Web, into standardizing a system that will prevent anyone from ever doing to today's cable operators what they did to broadcasters a generation ago.

The W3C's Encrypted Media Extensions system is specifically designed to prevent anyone from making use of copyrighted works without permission, even if those uses are allowed by law. With EME, companies get to decide which software can access the videos they send out, and what features that software is allowed to have.

Normally, when a company tries to prevent something you want to do, something the law allows, then other companies -- like those cable pioneers -- step up to sell you what the competition refuses to offer.

But EME is designed to allow companies to invoke a notorious law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which contains a clause (section 1201) that lets companies sue the competition for breaking their locks, even if those locks were preventing us from doing something the law allowed. Once a technology is squeezed into the DMCA zone, companies get to write their own laws, imposing restrictions on our use of their products and services, and invoking the power of the courts to enforce them.

This problem goes beyond the USA. The US Trade Representative is patient zero in a global epidemic of these laws, enacted by other countries' governments as a condition of trading with the USA.

When the W3C announced that it was going to do this work, we asked them not to. We told them that standardizing a system designed to stop new, innovative companies was a betrayal of the trust that the Web's users put in them, the hard-won trust that treats the W3C as an honest broker of an open Web.

They turned us down.

We've put a new proposal to them as a compromise: enact a binding legal agreement between W3C members that requires them not to invoke the DMCA to shut down the competition. This isn't as good as not making EME in the first place, but it's in keeping with the W3C's existing policies: the W3C already makes its members promise not to use their patents to attack new technologies.

We understand why Comcast doesn't want new companies to give it the same treatment it gave to the old guard when it was getting started. We just don't understand why the W3C is willing to help it accomplish this dubious goal. A gathering of all the major players in the industry to agree on a course of conduct that locks out new competitors for no valid reason would be illegal, a form of anti-competitive collusion. The W3C's EME project doesn't just give moral support to the idea of designing computers to control their owners -- it gives cover to the companies who get to choose the winners and losers on the Web forever after.

The W3C once stood for the open Web. After decades of using its power to make companies agree to clear the barriers that prevented innovation, now they're helping them create those barriers. It's a shame.

It's shameful.

The W3C is supposed to stand for a Web where users control their own devices. They're supposed to listen to users, not just the companies that profit from them.

Please share this post. The W3C still has it in its power to make EME's architects sign a nonaggression pact that protects the browsers, projects and tools that don't yet exist, that don't have a seat at the table with the companies that are trying to prevent them from ever getting started. With enough public pressure, we can convince them to do the right thing.

by Cory Doctorow, EFF |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

How the Very Rich Use Art to Get Richer

“Whether we like it or not, art is used for tax avoidance and evasion,” said NYU economics professor Nouriel Roubini last year. “Plenty of people are using it for money laundering.”

It hardly comes as much of a surprise that amid the high-profile scandals and tales of political corruption in the Panama Papers, art is something of a constant: Mossack Fonseca was constantly helping to shuffle billions of dollars’ worth of art in and out of shell companies based in tax havens around the world.

ICIJ reporter Jake Bernstein has details on some of the more high-profile art-world scandals where Mossack Fonseca has been involved, although multi-million-dollar paintings turn up in other stories, too. Russian oligarch Dmitri Rybolovlev, for instance, incorporated a company called Xitrans Finance Ltd in the British Virgin Islands, to own paintings by Picasso, Modigliani, Van Gogh, Monet, Degas and Rothko. When he split from his wife Elena, he used Xitrans to move the art out of Switzerland – and, not coincidentally, out of the jurisdiction of the Swiss divorce courts.

If Mossack Fonseca’s main job was to keep assets and their ownership secret, then it was tailor-made for servicing the international art world, where dynastic fortunes can be made on the basis of nothing more than knowing who owns what.

Consider the man who sold Rybolovlev most of those paintings. Yves Bouvier is connected to five different Mossack Fonseca companies (Rybolovlev is comparatively modest, with a mere two), and would mark up the paintings he was selling by astonishing amounts. As Sam Knight has reported for The New Yorker, Bouvier started off by buying a Gauguin for $9.5 million and then selling it for $11.3 million, but soon got more ambitious. He bought a Picasso for $4.8 million and then flipped it to Rybolovlev for $34.4 million. He sold the oligarch a Klimt masterpiece for $183 million, including a $60 million profit for himself. There was also a Rothko that he bought for $80 million and sold for $189 million.

By those standards, the deal that caused the end of his relationship with Rybolovlev had a relatively low markup: Bouvier bought a Modigliani from Steve Cohen for $93.5 million, and then sold it to the Russian for $118 million. Add it all up, and Rybolovlev’s lawyers estimate that Bouvier overcharged his client by the hilariously specific, yet eye-poppingly enormous, sum of $1,049,465,009. Call it a nice round billion. (Rybolovlev declined the ICIJ’s request for a comment. A representative for Bouvier told ICIJ’s Bernstein that “his client used offshore companies for well-established legal purposes.” Mossack Fonseca has not yet commented on its involvement in art holdings, but has responded at length to the Panama Papers.)

Whether they were legal or not, those kind of markups could never be found in a transparent market. When everybody has the same information at the same time – in the stock market, for instance – dealers can get away with only the tiniest markups between where they’re buying and where they’re selling. In other areas where you’re selling unique and illiquid assets, like real estate, the markups are bigger, but still not enormous: The intermediary will normally end up collecting somewhere in the 2 to 3 percent range.

In the art world, by contrast, the most transparent companies of all – the auction houses – typically charge sellers about 12 percent, and buyers about 20 percent, for a total commission of more than 30 percent. And in private transactions, the slice taken by the middleman can be bigger still – even when prices get up into the $100 million range, as can be seen with the Bouvier-Rybolovlev transactions.

Such huge transaction costs are possible only because the art world runs on secrecy. There are some legitimate reasons for keeping things close to the chest – if you have a $100 million painting above your sofa, you might not want the whole world to know that fact. Still, on its face, it doesn’t make sense that so many of the world’s collectors keep the art they own a secret.

Knight reports that Bouvier specialized in “setting up offshore companies — Diva, Blancaflor, Eagle Overseas — to enable galleries to buy specific works and mask the identity of other investors in a transaction,” which is a great way to ensure that the buyers and sellers at the end of often long and complex chains are unaware of each others’ identities. The buyer doesn’t know how much the seller is receiving; the seller doesn’t know how much the buyer is paying, and neither one has any easy way of finding out. (Bouvier was finally rumbled only when Rybolovlev bumped into Cohen’s art advisor at a lunch in St. Barts and flat-out asked how much Cohen had sold his Modigliani for. Which is not the way the art world normally works.)

by Felix Salmon, Fusion |  Read more:

Image: Getty

Is Coachella Still Cool?

[ed. See also: From crop tops to Jimmy Choos: How Coachella became a fashion marketing hotbed]

It was the Coachella announcement that generated a million eye-rolls.

“Soar through the desert sky with UberCHOPPER this festival season,” trumpeted the Uber press release. “Reserve your UberCHOPPER powered by BLADE…in Los Angeles and Orange County, and we’ll get in touch to sort out all of your travel details. There’s no traffic 1,000 feet in the air – you and 5 friends will land in style.”

The price for these convenient helicopter rides? $4170.

With a six-person limit, that breaks down to $695 per person.

Attending the desert festival is already a pricey proposition, with general admission weekend passes starting at $375.

Add lodging, food and everything else required for the long weekend, and the price tag is considerable, to say the least.

Over the years, the Coachella music festival in Indio, California, has continually grown and evolved well beyond its humble beginnings back in 1999.

With each passing April, new amenities, upgrades, and peripheral activities have turned the annual event into something far beyond “just” a music festival.

While the festival itself thrives, so has the industry around it.

With a captive audience of hundreds of thousands of people squarely in the heart of the desirable demographic of 18-34 year olds, brands and sponsors ranging from Lacoste to McDonald’s flock to the desert to take advantage.

There are now enough parties, fashion shows, pop-up shops, industry events, and more surrounding Coachella that for some, the festival itself is an afterthought at best.

Instead of looking forward to seeing artists performing at Coachella, there are people who make the desert trek just for the scene it inspires. (...)

While the residual effects of Coachella’s exponential growth and expansion have made it (arguably, of course) America’s premier and most talked-about music festival, it also comes with a downside.

Between the helicopter shuttles, celebrity-packed VIP parties, branded fashion lines, and onslaught of industry initiatives, it’s been argued that the event itself has morphed into a music festival for the one-percent.

The buzz has inspired many critics and disgruntled former fans to all ask the same question: Is Coachella still cool?

by Scott T. Sterling, Smashd |  Read more:

Image: CN Live

Experimenting With Nootropics

There are a few kinds of people that stumble into the nootropic community. I ended up there about five years ago because I like drugs and I wanted better ones. I’d been reading about weird drugs on the Internet since I was 15, back when we bought Salvia divinorum at the tacky head shop near the mall and fell down laughing and tried to get high on an amped-up kava kava homebrew.

I’ve generally experimented with nearly every upper and downer out there, across a pretty broad spectrum of legality. But what began as escapism when I was tethered to a Texan teenage wasteland later blossomed into something less bleak and more life-affirming, intellectual even. If perception is reality and we can actually retune the five senses—and do so safely and scientifically—well, that’s something indeed. And I’m not the only one who thinks so.

“I think nootropics appeal generally to folks with an armchair (or professional) interest in psychology, neurology, biology, and other facets of brain science, [who] feel comfortable occupying the role of both experimenter and subject,” an avid nootropics user with a degree in biochemistry tells me. “Nootropics may appeal greatly to those who have already rejected society’s blanket judgment that ‘drugs are bad.’”

Much like dive bars, virtual haunts all have their own cast of characters. On LongeCity, “the premier forum about extending the human lifespan”—and, more pertinently, extending human consciousness—one figure inspired a sort of messiah-like reverence: Isochroma. Isochroma had used the forums for years, often among the first to try newly synthesized drugs. He wrote with a mania that approached psychosis, but always coherently and with a strange, breathless elegance. He was a mega-doser—one of the brave few who’d take massive, unheard-of dosages of a substance to see what lay at its outer edges. Fascinated, I devoured his posts. That’s how I began to learn about nootropics.

In a handful of spartan, text-based Web forums like LongeCity, geeks with a wild streak convene with recovering addicts and mind-expanding, hippie types in pursuit of experiential knowledge—the kind mainstream science can’t or won’t provide. The result is a strange intellectual compound: virtual symposiums where bold souls ingest chemicals that science barely has a name for—and then they blog about it.

The class of drugs known as “nootropics” span a broad, heterogeneous swath of psychoactive substances. Many things that could be called nootropics are legal, often because the law either doesn’t know about it or just doesn’t know what to do with it yet. You can buy some nootropics, sometimes marketed as “smart drugs,” at Whole Foods next to the Vitamin D supplements. Others only pop up for sale online in limited quantities, straight from being synthesized and never before tested on humans.

“The biggest unknown factor remains long-term effects,” the psychonaut with the biochem background explains. “Where online forums and ‘amateur’ sources of information are light years ahead of official research and regulation for the vast majority of these substances, the recency of most of them makes long-term information simply unavailable anywhere.”

Naturally, here on the crowdsourced cutting edge of brain science, that’s part of the appeal. “Beyond the actual experimentation with nootropics, the research and investigation into some of the more esoteric corners of what we know (and don’t yet know) about how our brains work is a fascinating exercise unto itself.” (...)

Unlike many of Big Pharma’s greatest hits, some nootropics are heralded as “neuroprotective”—ideally capable of improving indices of cognitive function over time, not just in dangerous spurts. “I would recommend piracetam as a mental stimulant along with choline,” a user responds in the same thread. “Other safe stimulants are rhodiola rosea, st john’s wort and perhaps ginseng.” On this forum and many others, users look out for one another. Many threads emphasize the importance of diet and exercise. Some even dismiss caffeine as too dangerous, though green tea is generally well liked for its active ingredient, the amino acid L-theanine. Don’t want to drink tea? Buy 100 grams of bulk L-theanine powder on Amazon for $20.

The craziest part about all of this is that all of these faceless nootropics enthusiasts might be on to something. The most popular forums function like a fast-action thesis review: Users throw out potential chemical combos, known as “stacks,” and even hypothetical molecular compounds, often citing obscure but surprisingly solid scientific research. Then, it’s time for the peer review. It’s not uncommon for users to note their own backgrounds in biology, psychiatry, and other related fields, sprinkling their posts with complex molecular diagrams and neuroscience shorthand.

by Taylor Hatmaker, The Kernel |  Read more:

Image: Max Fleishman

20,000 Lesbians In the Desert

[ed. Congrats to Lydia Ko for winning the ANA Inspiration/Kraft-Nabisco/Dinah Shore tournament this year.]

Every year at the end of March, 20,000 lesbians from around the world fly into the Californian desert for five days of debauchery, and I’m one of them. It’s my second time at the Dinah, also known as the largest girl festival in the world. I’m staying at the Hilton in Palm Springs, which is hosting the famous Dinah pool parties, and the hotel feels like a homosexual harem.

It’s a surreal experience: for a few days the world is turned upside down, the minority is suddenly the majority. Everywhere you look, lesbians are smiling, drinking, dancing, kissing. There are a few men around – staff working the event and guys who have been dragged along by lesbian friends – but they are hard to spot. It’s basically entirely queer women in attendance.

The party is named after the Dinah Shore golf tournament, started in 1972 by the eponymous entertainer. Dinah Shore wasn’t a lesbian (she’d be doing somersaults in her grave if she knew what her moniker was attached to now), but golf seems to attract a lot of lesbians. A sapphic scene sprouted up around the golf tournament, and the Dinah was born. It’s now in its 26th year.

Today, nobody is here for the golf. No one is here for the DJs, comedians or YouTube stars performing either. They’re here for the girls. Butch, femme, old, young, gold stars, bi, black, white, hardcore, normcore – the Dinah attracts a diverse group. There’s a sense of liberation and a tacit understanding that what happens in Dinah stays in Dinah (unless it ends up on Facebook).

“Flashing is normal,” Charlotte, 24, told me. “I get flashed at a lot.” Random girls pulling you into their hotel rooms are also pretty standard. One year, there was a minor earthquake in Palm Springs. Debbie, a Dinah veteran who has attended every event since 1991, recalls that half the water splashed out of the pool. Most of the girls were too drunk to realize or care.

The feeling of permissiveness is compounded by the desert scenery: it looks like there has been some sort of gaypocalypse, and all the straight men and women have died out.

I can’t lie, it’s nice being in a predominantly female space for a few days. There’s a feeling of comfortable camaraderie; a sense of suddenly being a first-class citizen. But I feel like that comes more from the queerness rather than the femaleness. No one at the Dinah wishes a plague on all men. Despite the stereotype of the man-hating dyke, most lesbians really like men (we need them around to ensure we don’t get too distracted). The Dinah isn’t about separatism; it’s about celebration.

by Arwa Mahdawi, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Steven T Photography

The 1% Hide Their Money Offshore – Then Use It To Corrupt Our Democracy

[ed. Of course everyone knows this, the question is what can/will be done to fix it when the 1 percent control everything.]

Over the past 72 hours, you have seen our political establishment operating at a level of panic rarely equalled in postwar history. Britain’s prime minister has had yanked out of him some of his most intimate financial details. Complete strangers now know much he’s inherited so far from his mum and dad, and the offshore investments from which he’s profited. Yesterday he even took the unprecedented step of revealing the taxes he’d paid over the past six years. Leaders of other parties have responded by summarily publishing their own HMRC returns. In contemporary Britain, where one’s extramarital affairs are more readily discussed in public than one’s tax affairs, this is jaw-dropping stuff.

And it will not stop here. Whatever the lazy shorthand being used by some commentators, David Cameron has not released his tax returns, but merely a summary certified by an accountants’ firm. That halfway house will hardly be enough. If Jeremy Corbyn, other senior politicians and the press keep up this level of attack, then within days more details of the prime minister’s finances will emerge. Nor will the flacks of Downing Street be able to maintain their lockdown on disclosing how many cabinet members have offshore interests: the ministers themselves will break ranks. Indeed, a few are already beginning to do so.

But the risk is that all this will descend into a morass of semi-titillating detail: a string of revelations about who gave what to whom, and whether he or she then declared it to the Revenue. The story will become about “handling” and “narrative” and individual culpability. That will be entertaining for those who like to point fingers, perplexing for those too busy to engage in the detail – and miss the wider truth revealed by the leak which forced all this into public discussion.

Because at root, the Panama Papers are not about tax. They’re not even about money. What the Panama Papers really depict is the corruption of our democracy.

Following on from LuxLeaks, the Panama Papers confirm that the super-rich have effectively exited the economic system the rest of us have to live in. Thirty years of runaway incomes for those at the top, and the full armoury of expensive financial sophistication, mean they no longer play by the same rules the rest of us have to follow. Tax havens are simply one reflection of that reality. Discussion of offshore centres can get bogged down in technicalities, but the best definition I’ve found comes from expert Nicholas Shaxson who sums them up as: “You take your money elsewhere, to another country, in order to escape the rules and laws of the society in which you operate.” In so doing, you rob your own society of cash for hospitals, schools, roads…

by Aditya Chakrabortty, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Paramount Pictures

The Masters 2016

[ed. What a disappointing Masters. It seemed no one brought their A-game this year (except Danny Willett, at least for one round). Kudos to Danny, but it was Jordan's tournament to lose, and he did - spectacularly. It's a cruel game sometimes (or all the time if you play like me.]

Willett Wins the Masters After Shocking Spieth Collapse

Chris Dunn
via:

David Horton
via:

via:

Robert Crumb Hates You

With this generation of overfed, spoiled-brat writers, every long, arduous journey into uncharted territories is called a Heart of Darkness—GPS and lack of war notwithstanding. The man that I’m looking for in the bowels of France is thankfully deprived of any irony. Robert Crumb has been living in a godforsaken medieval village, where cars are banned and spotty Wi-Fi has only been recently discovered. This true American has been locked up in self-exile—in an unlocked house—for the last 20 years.

There’s a direct line of salt-of-the-earth, irony-free, all-American icons, passing from the painters Thomas Hart Benton and Reginald Marsh, the musicians Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, all the way to Crumb. America, for them, wasn’t its flag, but its dirt. They eluded political and religious affiliations and labels: Guthrie liked the K.K.K. in his youth and Dylan became an evangelical Christian, for instance, yet they all fought against the oppressive American conformist machine. The Kennedys slept with Marilyn Monroe; Crumb did Janis Joplin’s friend Pattycakes.

“Can I smoke?” I asked Robert Crumb, sure that he would say no in his studio, where we spoke off and on for more than three days.

“Yes, I don’t care,” he said.

There’s an extraordinary Crumb comic, 1988’s Memories Are Made of This, that made a lasting impression on anyone who read it. He takes a long bus ride under the rain to go to this attractive woman’s house. She is his type: stocky with big, fat calves. She doesn’t really seem interested at first, but she gets drunk and he ends up having destroying sex with her from behind. He then looks at us and tells us that from now on, no woman will want him because he copped to this story. The drawing is precise, sharp, simple, straight to the point—until it reaches the sex part, and all hell breaks loose. The eyes are popping, the tongues are erupting and the orgasm transforms the woman into a Cubist bull.

“That story is an extremely unromantic view of love and sex,” Mr. Crumb said. “Any normal, intelligent, college-type woman would find this story disgusting, would say look at how he’s portraying this woman. She gets drunk and then puts out, this guy is a creep, that’s just hateful to women. It’s very unromantic; they want romance. Some writers have a talent for seducing women through their work, you read their stuff and you know they are seducing women. It’s an art. Some men know how to talk to women and I just don’t have that.”

“Writers like Martin Amis or Christopher Hitchens are like that, you can tell that their writing is meant to bed women. They used to hit on everything that moves,” I told him.

“My publisher told me that women don’t buy my stuff,” Mr. Crumb said. “When I do book signings and I spot an attractive woman on the line I know she’s gonna ask me to sign the book for her husband or boyfriend, who is a big fan of my work. I tell you, it’s almost 100 percent predictable!”

“I know many women who like your work. Some women don’t care about romance; they know that the guy who gives them flowers, carries their shit and holds doors will end up cheating on them.”

“Yes, in private those are the guys who say the worst things about women,” Mr. Crumb said.

“I was in a restaurant with this very attractive woman once and I could tell I was losing her,” I said. “I was so intimidated, insecure and meek. I was broke but invited her to Nobu, just that in itself was ridiculous. I decided to flip the script and go for broke. I was getting weaker by the moment, she was sensing my weakness and probably saw me as this almost effeminate guy.”

“Yes, you were castrating yourself,” Mr. Crumb said.

“Exactly. I knew she would never see me again anyway, so when she came back from the bathroom I told her: you have the most beautiful ass, I would love to eat it—and it worked. In one of your comics, you say that women will always go for the most obnoxious guy.”

“They will protest and say, ‘I hate that kind of offensive, arrogant male,’ ” Mr. Crumb said. “Many women will tell you that what they really like in a man is a sense of humor. The two funniest men I know with the best sense of humor are these bitter, self-deprecating Jewish guys, with a very negative, ironic sense of humor. They are total losers with women. Women see the self-deprecating part—you point out a weakness about yourself; they might laugh, but they perceive the weakness. Even if it’s hard to generalize, if you make a joke about yourself that you are awkward or a failure, that’s what sticks in their mind.”

I responded, “I once asked a gorgeous guy if he had ever been rejected, and he told me, ‘All my life.’ He said what women don’t realize is that by the time we find one who says yes, we bring to her the 50 nos we got before, with all the angst, bitterness that comes with it, the prior rejections that destroyed our self esteem.”

“I have tried to talk to women about that very issue of male domination, power and feminism many times before to no avail. They don’t wanna hear about it. One rejection and that’s it for me. That just kills me,” said Mr. Crumb. “I couldn’t take all those nos so I don’t do anything. I’m just paralyzed. Women expect men to take the initiative, to be forceful, assertive; they expect to be courted and seduced. In spite of feminism, women still want to be the object of attraction, and the male’s confidence in courting her is a test that he must pass in order to win her.”

“So, before you became famous, how did you get laid?”

“I didn’t.”

by Jacques Hyzagi, Observer | Read more:
Image:Brill Ullstein/ Getty Images

The Remains of the Day

"I was very consciously trying to write for an international audience,"Kazuo Ishiguro says of The Remains of the Day in his Paris Review interview ("The Art of Fiction," No. 196). "One of the ways I thought I could do this was to take a myth of England that was known internationally – in this case, the English butler."  (...)

The surface of The Remains of the Day is almost perfectly still. Stevens, a butler well past his prime, is on a week's motoring holiday in the West Country. He tootles around, taking in the sights and encountering a series of green-and-pleasant country folk who seem to have escaped from one of those English films of the 1950s in which the lower orders doff their caps and behave with respect towards a gent with properly creased trousers and flattened vowels. (...)

Nothing much happens. The high point of Mr Stevens's little outing is his visit to Miss Kenton, the former housekeeper at Darlington Hall, the great house to which Stevens is still attached as "part of the package", even though ownership has passed from Lord Darlington to a jovial American named Farraday who has a disconcerting tendency to banter. Stevens hopes to persuade Miss Kenton to return to the hall. His hopes come to nothing. He makes his way home. Tiny events; but why, then, is the ageing manservant to be found, near the end of his holiday, weeping before a complete stranger on the pier at Weymouth? Why, when the stranger tells him that he ought to put his feet up and enjoy the evening of his life, is it so hard for Stevens to accept such sensible, if banal, advice? What has blighted the remains of his day?

Just below the understatement of the novel's surface is a turbulence as immense as it is slow; for The Remains of the Day is in fact a brilliant subversion of the fictional modes from which it seems at first to descend. Death, change, pain and evil invade the innocent Wodehouse-world. (In Wodehouse, even the Oswald Mosley-like Roderick Spode of the Black Shorts movement, as close to an evil character as that author ever created, is rendered comically pathetic by "swanking about," as Bertie says, "in footer bags.") The time-hallowed bonds between master and servant, and the codes by which both live, are no longer dependable absolutes but rather sources of ruinous self-deceptions; even the happy yokels Stevens meets on his travels turn out to stand for the post-war values of democracy and individual and collective rights which have turned Stevens and his kind into tragicomic anachronisms. "You can't have dignity if you're a slave," the butler is informed in a Devon cottage, but for Stevens, dignity has always meant the subjugation of the self to the job, and of his destiny to his master's. What then is our true relationship to power? Are we its servants or its possessors? It is the rare achievement of Ishiguro's novel to pose big questions – what is Englishness? What is greatness? What is dignity? – with a delicacy and humour that do not obscure the tough-mindedness beneath.

The real story here is that of a man destroyed by the ideas upon which he has built his life. Stevens is much preoccupied by "greatness", which, for him, means something very like restraint. The greatness of the British landscape lies, he believes, in its lack of the "unseemly demonstrativeness" of African and American scenery. It was his father, also a butler, who epitomised this idea of greatness; yet it was just this notion which stood between father and son, breeding deep resentments and an inarticulacy of the emotions that destroyed their love.

In Stevens's view, greatness in a butler "has to do crucially with the butler's ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits". This is linked to Englishness. Continentals and Celts do not make good butlers because of their tendency to "run about screaming" at the slightest provocation. Yet it is Stevens's longing for this kind of "greatness" that has wrecked his one chance of finding romantic love. Hiding within his rôle, he long ago drove Miss Kenton away into the arms of another man. "Why, why, why do you always have to pretend?" she asks him in despair, revealing his greatness to be a mask, a cowardice, a lie.

Stevens's greatest defeat is the consequence of his most profound conviction - that his master is working for the good of humanity, and that his own glory lies in serving him. But Lord Darlington is, and is finally disgraced as, a Nazi collaborator and dupe. Stevens, a cut-price St Peter, denies him at least twice, but feels forever tainted by his master's fall. Darlington, like Stevens, is destroyed by a personal code of ethics. His disapproval of the ungentlemanly harshness towards the Germans of the Treaty of Versailles is what propels him towards his collaborationist doom. Ideals, Ishiguro shows us, can corrupt as thoroughly as cynicism.

by Salman Rushdie, The Guardian |  Read more:
Image: Remains of the Day
[ed. Repost.  See also: Never Let Me Go.]

Morphine

Kamisaka Sekka, Sparrow beside Bamboo in Snow
via:

The Yips

[ed. Here's Ernie Els experiencing the yips yesterday on the first hole of the first round of the Masters. Yips and shanks will drive you insane.]

Six or seven years ago, I played a round of golf in a foursome that included Hank Haney, who at the time was Tiger Woods’s coach. Haney’s golf swing was exceedingly strange. On the first tee, after he lined up his shot, he drew his driver back high in the air while turning to look at the clubhead, took a baseball-like practice swing well above the ball—then, immediately, took the club all the way back again and swung. The last part looked pretty normal, but if I hadn’t known who Haney was I wouldn’t have guessed that his occupation was teaching golf.

Haney is tall and trim. He was an all-conference player at the University of Tulsa, in the mid-nineteen-seventies, but a few years after graduation he began having serious difficulty controlling his tee shots, which travelled unpredictable distances and were sometimes more than a hundred yards off-line. The problem became so severe, he told me, that between 1985 and 2002 he played fewer than ten rounds, even as he was building a national reputation as an instructor. “One morning, I went out alone with a carry bag and one of those eighteen-packs of cheap balls,” he wrote later. “I lost every one of them by the time I made the turn.” He studied videotapes of his swing, frame by frame, in the hope of discovering some fundamental flaw, and when no one was watching he hit hundreds of range balls, trying to straighten himself out. But the harder he worked the worse his problem became.

Haney was suffering from a much dreaded golf malady, which consists of an involuntary disruptive movement of the hands, wrists, or forearms. In the great majority of cases, it affects putting or chipping, both of which involve relatively small, relatively slow strokes, but, as in Haney’s case, it can infect full swings, too. Versions of it have been known over the years by many names, among them “freezing,” “the waggles,” “the staggers,” “the jerks,” “whiskey fingers,” and “the yips.” That last term is the one that’s used almost universally today. It was coined around the middle of the last century by the Scottish golfer Tommy Armour, a sufferer, who defined it as “a brain spasm that impairs the short game.” Bill Mehlhorn—a contemporary of Armour’s and a leading tour player in the nineteen-twenties—once had a short putt in a tournament in Florida, but he jabbed the ball so far past the hole that a competitor standing in the fringe on the far side of the green had to jump out of the way. Harry Vardon, Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, and Tom Watson all developed the yips late in their careers. Johnny Miller, who was a tour superstar in the mid-nineteen-seventies and early eighties, developed such severe yips that watching him play was painful; a rebroadcast of a 1997 match between him and Jack Nicklaus included relatively few of his (many) putts, presumably because the producers had mercifully edited them out.

Golfers aren’t the only yippers. Cricket bowlers suffer a similar disability, which they also call the yips. In darts, the problem is “dartitis”; in snooker, “cueitis”; in archery, “target panic”; in gun shooting, “flinching”; in baseball pitching, “the creature,” “the monster,” and “Steve Blass disease” (after the Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher, who, in 1973, developed what turned out to be a career-ending inability to find the strike zone). In 1999, Chuck Knoblauch, the Yankees’ second baseman, began flubbing routine plays to first base, and in one game threw a ball so far off target that it hit the mother of the ESPN sportscaster Keith Olbermann, in the stands. Knoblauch finished his career in left field, and what until that time had usually been called Steve Sax syndrome—after the Dodgers’ second baseman, who had the same problem for several years in the nineteen-eighties—became widely known as Knoblauch disease.

Even bad cases of the yips don’t always end sports careers—at least, not immediately. Miller won the 1976 British Open, at Royal Birkdale, even though he was afraid that, if he looked at his ball or at the head of his putter while making a stroke, he wouldn’t be able to putt at all, and so he placed a dab of red fingernail polish on the grip, below the position of his right thumb, and looked at that instead. Later, he sometimes putted with his eyes closed, or while looking at the hole instead of the ball. The German tour pro Bernhard Langer was able to control his yips by using his right hand to brace the shaft of his putter against his left forearm—and, when the problem returned, by switching to putters with longer shafts and anchoring them against his chest.

Hank Haney arrived at the peculiar swing I saw after deciding he needed to develop a technique that, while it might not be mechanically optimal, made him physically less able to hit the ball in the wrong direction. To reduce the mobility of his hands and wrists, he adopted an unconventional grip, holding the club mostly in his palms, rather than in his fingers. He had noticed that, on the few occasions when he couldn’t avoid demonstrating a shot with his driver, he was able to do so successfully if he looked at his audience, not the ball, while he swung—a feat that impressed his students but for him was an act of desperation. “That was something I discovered by trial and error,” he told me. “Focussing my eyes and my attention on something different—anything to not anticipate the hit, anything to not anticipate the moment of contact with the ball.” In his new swing, he glanced at the ball only briefly, at the very beginning of his routine; during the actual swing, he kept his eyes on the brim of his cap.

Athletes and sports fans have generally assumed that yipping and its variants are forms of performance anxiety, or choking. It’s true that nervous athletes often play poorly, and that yipping is most evident when the stakes are high, and that even serious sufferers are sometimes able to perform in practice or while playing alone. Yet many yippers are veterans of competition at the highest levels, who never showed a tendency to buckle under stress; many others are casual players who have trouble even when the pressure is low. Yipping also is usually extremely task-specific. Haney never stopped being a good putter. Knoblauch didn’t have a problem throwing from the outfield. Archers who can no longer hit a bull’s-eye often have no trouble shooting at bare bales of straw. If the yips and other sports-related movement problems are solely a matter of anxiety, why do they affect only certain motions? And how can a change of target, technique, or equipment sometimes make them go away?

by David Owen, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Leo Espinosa

via:

Dox Populi: A Few Missing Links

What if they held a mammoth document leak and nobody came? That seems, with a slight allowance for hyperbole, the impact of the release of 2.6 terabytes of data from the inner sanctums of Mossack Fonseca, the high-rolling Panamanian law firm. Mossack Fonseca—which is, appropriately enough, the joint brainchild of a scion of an émigré Nazi family and a Panamanian lawyer-novelist—is maniacally dedicated to the instant incorporation of obliging shell companies for an elite clientele seeking to shelter their fortunes from revenue collectors in their economic homeland. More than 100 newsgathering outfits across the globe collaborated, under the aegis of the nonprofit International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, to roll out the lead disclosures arising from the leak—a project that is still ongoing. But American news operations largely consigned these lurid revelations of how diligently the international political and economic power elite conceal their pelf from prying auditors to their back pages.

Indeed, the redoubtable hot-take maestros at Vox media leapt fearlessly into the fray to declare that, you know, when you really think about it, offshore tax shelters can be kind of cool—like when, for instance, wealthy dissidents in authoritarian countries use them to shield their fortunes from grasping strongmen! Of course, this enormously charitable view of things suffers a good deal from the actual material leaked about Mossack Fonseca’s enormous client base, which leans heavily toward authoritarian strongmen and their enablers, from Vladimir Putin to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to Bashar al-Assad’s enterprising cousin-cum-financial fixer, Rami Makhlouf. It also didn’t help the slapdash case that Vox quisling—er, excuse me, “reporter”—Zack Beauchamp was hoping to make that he staked it largely on an interview with Yale political science professor Margaret Peters, who went out of her way to praise the transparent business climate of the authoritarian regime in Singapore, without bothering to disclose that Yale is partnering with the National University of Singapore in a glorified tax shelter of its own. (Indeed, Yale, like many an elite institution of higher learning, is a centuries-old master of tax dodging.) But hey, as Beauchamp cheerily assures us, “the relations between individuals, states, and offshore accounts isn’t as straightforward as we might think.”

The unexamined presumption in such recursive and rudderless counter-taking is that Beauchamp and his colleagues, or anyone else notionally tasked with reporting on the inner workings of wealth accumulation in our new millennial gilded age, thinks at all about offshore capital shelters. Far from being an exotic plaything of thuggish world leaders like Putin, or merely corrupt ones like Iceland’s ex-Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson (who laid the groundwork for his parliamentary exit on Tuesday in the wake of the news that he’d used Mossack Fonseca shell firms to conceal banking assets at the height of the global financial crisis), the phony incorporation trick is at the heart of America’s own decrepit, financialized, and top-heavy economic order.

That would be why, for example, Apple—which has surpassed merely industrial-age corporations like General Motors and Exxon as the most heavily capitalized company in the world—has routed sales through Ireland (while concertedly soaking its labor force in China). After depositing more than $200 billion in overseas accounts, the computer giant actually borrowed $17 billion in 2013 to finance a massive stock buyback to artificially spike its share prices—and thereby reap hundreds of millions for its lead shareholders to store in their tax-avoidant nest eggs. As finance scams go, the Apple ownership structure admittedly lacks the screwball ribaldry of Ukrainian President Poroshenko busily at work with Mossack Fonseca, worried about his private assets and providing a current utility billto document his home address, on the very day Russia was (again) invading Ukraine. But, structurally speaking, there’s no bright line to distinguish Tim Cook’s Cupertino tax dodges from the more downmarket variety east of the Black Sea.

Indeed, the reason that more American financiers and political figures aren’t named in the Panama Papers is that most of the elaborate ruses of Mossack Fonseca are perfectly legal within American borders, and indeed, the standard m.o., for the American financial sector. Nest-feathering American investors “mostly don’t go to Panama,” says Ken Silverstein, who published a major Mossack Fonseca expose for Vice in 2014. “Hey, Goldman Sachs has private banking systems all over the world.”

America has conspicuously refrained from adopting automated data-sharing protocols promulgated by the OECD to crack down on offshore tax havens—for the simple reason that more robust enforcement of global tax laws would impair the bottom line of the U.S. financial sector.

by Chris Lehman, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: David McLimans

Boz Scaggs

A Corporate Tax Dodge Gets Harder

[ed. See also: Pfizer Faces Limited Options After Its Dead Deal With Allergan]

Pfizer never tried to hide the fact that its proposed $152 billion merger with Allergan, based in Ireland, would cut its tax bill in the United States. But even as it rushed to complete the biggest tax-avoidance deal in the history of corporate America, it continued to promote the strategic and economic benefits of the merger.

Any pretense to a motivation other than dodging taxes has now been wiped away. On Wednesday, just two days after the Obama administration introduced new rules to narrow the loopholes that the drug companies were exploiting, Pfizer announced that the deal with Allergan was off.

The new Treasury Department rules take aim at “inversions,” in which an American company merges with a foreign company in a low-tax nation to pass itself off as foreign and in that way cut its American taxes. Inverted companies are often described as having “moved abroad” or “renounced their citizenship.” But the only tie that an inverted company really cuts with the United States is the one that binds it to the Internal Revenue Service.

Such companies almost invariably keep their headquarters, officers and much of their business in the United States. Some 40 American companies have become inverted over the past five years, while tax laws have failed to keep pace with tax-avoidance strategies made possible by a complex mix of corporate offshore accounts and global capital flows.

The Treasury had to act to stop inversions because Congress, still in the grip of an anti-tax Republican majority, won’t. One of the new rules effectively denies tax benefits in new mergers that involve companies that have recently inverted. That scotches the Pfizer and Allergan deal because Allergan, when it was still known as Actavis, an American company, inverted to Ireland in 2013.

The new rules will also clamp down on a practice known as earnings stripping, in which a multinational reduces its American tax bill by having its American subsidiary borrow money from a foreign parent company and then deduct the interest on that loan against its earnings, which cuts its tax bill.

Worse, cash can also be lent to a foreign parent from American profits stashed abroad that are supposed to be taxed when they are repatriated to the United States. Such loans essentially allow foreign-held profits to be used tax-free. American companies could avoid tax on as much as $1 trillion in foreign-held profits by this strategy.

by Editorial Board, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: The Heads of State

A Programming Language For Living Cells

MIT biological engineers have created a programming language that allows them to rapidly design complex, DNA-encoded circuits that give new functions to living cells.

Using this language, anyone can write a program for the function they want, such as detecting and responding to certain environmental conditions. They can then generate a DNA sequence that will achieve it.

"It is literally a programming language for bacteria," says Christopher Voigt, an MIT professor of biological engineering. "You use a text-based language, just like you're programming a computer. Then you take that text and you compile it and it turns it into a DNA sequence that you put into the cell, and the circuit runs inside the cell."

Voigt and colleagues at Boston University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology have used this language, which they describe in the April 1 issue of Science, to build circuits that can detect up to three inputs and respond in different ways. Future applications for this kind of programming include designing bacterial cells that can produce a cancer drug when they detect a tumor, or creating yeast cells that can halt their own fermentation process if too many toxic byproducts build up.

The researchers plan to make the user design interface available on the Web.

No experience needed

Over the past 15 years, biologists and engineers have designed many genetic parts, such as sensors, memory switches, and biological clocks, that can be combined to modify existing cell functions and add new ones.

However, designing each circuit is a laborious process that requires great expertise and often a lot of trial and error. "You have to have this really intimate knowledge of how those pieces are going to work and how they're going to come together," Voigt says.

Users of the new programming language, however, need no special knowledge of genetic engineering.

"You could be completely naive as to how any of it works. That's what's really different about this," Voigt says. "You could be a student in high school and go onto the Web-based server and type out the program you want, and it spits back the DNA sequence."

by Anne Trafton, Phys.org | Read more:
Image: Janet Iwasa