Finally, Something Isn’t the Matter With Kansas

The most momentous political news of the past week? For my money, it wasn’t James Comey’s Senate testimony, riveting as it was. It was the Kansas Legislature’s decision to defy the governor and raise income taxes — a move that could well be the first step in a transformation of American politics much more far-reaching than anything that could come from Russiagate.

Hear me out. Kansas, under Gov. Sam Brownback, has come as close as we’ve ever gotten in the United States to conducting a perfect experiment in supply-side economics. The conservative governor, working with a conservative State Legislature, in the home state of the conservative Koch brothers, took office in 2011 vowing sharp cuts in taxes and state spending, except for education — and promising that those policies would unleash boundless growth.

The taxes were cut, and by a lot. The cumulative cut was forecast to be $3.9 billion by 2019. A fellow at a right-leaning Missouri think tank said in 2015 that Mr. Brownback’s cuts were “the biggest tax cut of any state, relative to the size of its economy, in recent history.”

The cuts came. But the growth never did. As the rest of the country was growing at rates of just above 2 percent, Kansas grew at considerably slower rates, finally hitting just 0.2 percent in 2016. Revenues crashed. Spending was slashed, even on education: In March, the State Supreme Court ruled that state-level school spending was unconstitutionally low. The court is ideologically mixed, but its ruling was unanimous.

The experiment has been a disaster. Mr. Brownback is widely disliked. If he has anything to be grateful for, it’s the existence of Gov. Chris Christie, Republican of New Jersey, who recently swiped from him the title of the nation’s most unpopular governor, which Mr. Brownback had held for the better part of three years.

Finally, even the Republican Kansas Legislature faced reality. Earlier this year it passed tax increases, which the governor vetoed. Last Tuesday, the legislators overrode the veto.

Not only is it a tax increase — it’s even a progressive tax increase! A married couple filing jointly and earning $30,000 will pay an additional $120, which is 0.4 percent of total income, while the same couple earning $100,000 will fork over $755, or 0.755 percent. More than half of the Republicans in both houses voted for the increases.

There’s the background. Now, why is this a big deal?

Because Republicans are not supposed to raise taxes, ever. In Washington or in the states. This goes back to President George H. W. Bush’s agreeing to a bipartisan tax increase in 1990 after famously saying in his 1988 campaign, “Read my lips: no new taxes.” Afterward, the conservative group Americans for Tax Reform, led by Grover Norquist, started making Republican candidates for Congress and state houses sign a no-tax pledge.

Ever since, with scattered exceptions, no Republican member of the House or Senate has voted for a tax increase. For 27 years. If you wonder why problems arise and Congress never does anything about them, the tax pledge is usually the answer, or at least an answer.

by Michael Tomasky, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Andrew DeGraff

Kamran Bigdely, Tardigrade (Water Bear)
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No is Not Enough

The fact that Naomi Klein predicted the forces that explain the rise to power of Donald Trump gives her no pleasure at all. It is 17 years since Klein, then aged 30, published her first book, No Logo – a seductive rage against the branding of public life by globalising corporations – and made herself, in the words of the New Yorker, “the most visible and influential figure on the American left” almost overnight. She ended the book with what sounded then like “this crazy idea that you could become your own personal global brand”.

Speaking about that idea now, she can only laugh at her former innocence. No Logo was written before social media made personal branding second nature. Trump, she suggests in her new book, No Is Not Enough, exploited that phenomenon to become the first incarnation of president as a brand, doing to the US nation and to the planet what he had first practised on his big gold towers: plastering his name and everything it stands for all over them.

Klein has also charted the other force at work behind the victory of the 45th president. Her 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine, argued that neoliberal capitalism, the ideological love affair with free markets espoused by disciples of the late economist Milton Friedman, was so destructive of social bonds, and so beneficial to the 1% at the expense of the 99%, that a population would only countenance it when in a state of shock, following a crisis – a natural disaster, a terrorist attack, a war.

Klein developed this theory first in 2004 when reporting from Baghdad and watching a brutally deregulated market state being imagined by agents of the Bush administration in the rubble of war and the fall of Saddam Hussein. She documented it too in the aftermath of the Boxing Day tsunami in Sri Lanka, when the inundated coastline of former fishing villages was parcelled up and sold off to global hotel chains in the name of regeneration. And she saw it most of all in the fallout of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, when, she argued, disaster was first ignored and exacerbated by government and then exploited for the gain of consultants and developers.

Friedmanites understood that in extreme circumstances bewildered populations longed above all for a sense of control. They would willingly grant exceptional powers to anyone who promised certainty. They understood too that the combination of social media and 24-hour cable news allowed them to manufacture such scenarios almost at will. The libertarian right of the Republican party, in Klein’s words, became “a movement that prays for crisis the way drought-struck farmers pray for rain”.

In 2008, the year after The Shock Doctrine was published, Klein believed that the financial crash would prove a reckoning for this cynical philosophy. That the ways in which the Wall Street elite had enriched itself through manipulation and deregulation would finally be exposed in plain sight. In retrospect, it seems, the monumental frailties of the system, its patent vulnerability, allied with concerns over terrorism and a global refugee crisis, only made populations more desperate and fearful. They appeared to crave anyone who could suggest simple solutions to apparently intractable problems. Anyone who said that they could turn back the clock to “make America great again” and who had the branded cap to prove it.

For those of us who can’t help looking at those events without turning lines from WB Yeats’s The Second Coming over in our heads (“what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”), Klein’s new book – which examines in detail both the phenomenon of Trump and how liberal and progressive forces might counter his reality – is a brilliant articulation of restless anxiety.

Speaking at her home in Toronto last week, Klein suggested to me that Trump’s novelty was to take the shock doctrine and make it a personal superpower. “He keeps everyone all the time in a reactive state,” she said. “It is not like he is taking advantage of an external shock, he is the shock. And every 10 minutes he creates a new one. It is like he has these lasers coming out of his belt.”

She wrote the book very fast, much faster than is her usual habit, because she feared that the further into a Trump administration America travels, the less scope there might be for resistance, for building an alternative. In this she believes that there are important precedents for people to understand.

She points hopefully to the example of Spain in 2004, when after the Madrid train bombings the prime minister, José Maria Aznar, announced that a state of emergency and special state powers were necessary. The people, remembering Franco, took to the streets to reject that analysis and kicked the government out, voting in a party that would pull Spanish troops out of Iraq. She is fully aware, too, of the alternative in Turkish president Recip Tayyip Erdoğan’s successful plea for dictatorial powers following the chaos of the failed coup in 2016. Klein’s book sets out those examples in advance of any comparable shock in America, and makes the case for collective resistance in the event of crisis. “I hope none of it happens [in the States] and none of it is useful,” she says, “but just in case, I wanted to have it out there as soon as possible.”

The daughter of American parents, Klein lives in Toronto with dual citizenship. When she thought about putting her book together, her original plan was for an anthology of articles threaded together with interviews, but once she started analysing the presidency she kept writing in a kind of frenzy. One of the benefits of having a deadline and an all-consuming project was that it meant she was forced to use the blocking app Freedom to protect her from the distraction of the internet. “I think if I hadn’t written this book I just would have stared at Twitter like many others for months on end, watching it unfold, and writing snippy things at people.”

That tendency among Trump’s critics, she says, is a symptom of his banal influence. She devotes one section of her book to the notion that through Twitter Trump is making the political sphere in his own image and that “we all have to kill our inner Trump”. Among other things, she says, the president “is the embodiment of our splintered attention spans”. One essential ingredient of resistance, she suggests, is to retain a belief in telling and understanding complex stories, keeping faith with narrative.

One of the questions that Klein’s book does not reach a conclusion about is how conscious Trump is of his shock doctrine tactics. Is he a demagogue in the scheming manner of Putin and Erdoğan, or just a useful idiot for the forces around him?

“I think he is a showman and that he is aware of the way that shows can distract people,” she says. “That is the story of his business. He has always understood that he could distract his investors and bankers, his tenants, his clients from the underlying unsoundness of his business, just by putting on the Trump show. That is the core of Trump. He is undoubtedly an idiot, but do not underestimate how good he is at that.”

by Tim Adams, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Koroush Keshiri

Andrew Archer, Edo Ball: Illustrations Based on Japanese Mythology and Culture
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[ed. See also: The Cavaliers Won Game 4 With a Performance for the Ages]

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What No One Ever Tells You About Tiny Homes

My husband and I share a 492-square-foot apartment in Cambridge, Mass. We inhabit a “micro apartment,” or what is sometimes called a tiny house. This label is usually proudly applied to dwellings under 500 square feet, according to Wikipedia. We are unwittingly on a very small bandwagon, part of a growing international movement.

But deep inside the expensive custom closets and under the New Age Murphy beds, the pro-petite propaganda has hidden some unseemly truths about how the other half lives. No one writes about the little white lies that help sell this new, very small American dream.

Here, on the inside, we have found small not so beautiful after all. Like the silent majority of other middling or poor urban dwellers in expensive cities, we are residents of tiny homes not by design, but because it is all our money can rent.

Tiny houses are booming. The movement, whose origins fans often link in spirit all the way to Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond, became increasingly popular after the 2008 housing crash. Living small has come to signal environmental mindfulness and restrained consumerism.

A tiny home is a state of mind, if not a religion. It is in vogue, and it is in Dwell. The tiny house pairs well with other contemporary cultural currents. It is cut from the same cloth as the Marie Kondo craze of 2014, and suits this year’s hygge, too. (The recently imported cult of hygge-ness — or coziness, from Denmark — often entails the burning of candles, wearing of chunky sweaters and a pursuit of togetherness facilitated by small spaces.) Micro living plugs into the age of Apple minimalism, too. In real estate listings, “cozy” is no longer an unconvincing euphemism, but a coveted catchphrase.

Our apartment in Cambridge was built in 1961, part of an earlier wave of utopian interest in tiny affordable housing. Our space occupies most of the lower third of a two-unit, three-story building. There is a contiguous row of nine such pairings — pint-size below, family-size above — on our street. The original developer’s vision was that income from renting the lower units could help cover the mortgage for the owners’ homes above.

The most striking feature of our small lives is the unavoidable, domineering presence of the plastic laundry hamper originally bought from Target in 2007. Embarrassing, ordinary objects like the hamper are empowered in small spaces; they become tyrants. In a larger home, this perfectly functional item might recede quietly into a closet or laundry room.

Our unattractive $10 centerpiece occupies approximately 0.4 percent of our home’s surface area, but visually, it seems much larger. In an otherwise horizontal bedroom landscape (a queen-size mattress on the floor), the hamper looms high and white above the rest of the room. It often reminds me of the Capitol in Lincoln, Neb. — a piece of monumental architecture designed to dominate the prairie, to force man’s will over nature. (...)

Life in our tiny home is characterized above all by shabbiness. Like the apartment’s pervasive, undomesticateable dust bunnies, the threadbare feeling grows and grows simply because it already exists.

No one warns you that everything is more concentrated in a tiny house, that the natural life cycle of objects accelerates.

Our things are aging faster than they did in their previous homes. We sit on our lone couch more hours a day than in any previous dwelling. The cushions are fading, the springs sagging, the corners fraying. Our rug is balding along our daily paths, starkly revealing repetitive routines: back and forth to the coffee machine, to the couch, to the sink, to the couch. The denudations look like cow paths cut through sage brush — invasive affronts on the landscape. Everything in our tiny house is worked over more, used harder.

Here, even smells take up space. We once made a meal that called for caramelizing three pounds of onions. For hours the onions melted in their pan. Technically they were taking up less and less space, but somehow they intruded more. In a tiny house, the smell of slowly sweated onions is an inescapable, cloyingly rich aroma; a scent to drive men — and women — mad.

The eau de onion spread to everything. It clung especially to the moist bathroom towels, and to the laundry drying in the bedroom. We were never clean again. Fresh from the shower, we immediately smelled of onions — of tiny house. For weeks, smelling like old onions became one of our micro lives’ certainties. The scent’s preferred repository, I eventually learned, was my New Age, polyester sports bra.

“It smells like onion,” my husband had certified weeks later. “That doesn’t seem like a good thing to wear.” I said, “I can’t not wear it.” And that was true. I did wear it, but the bra’s coolly advertised moisture-wicking technology seemed designed to activate the old onions. I carried the smell with me deep into the city. You can never really leave a tiny house; it goes with you everywhere.

For generations, writers have warned about romanticizing the lives of the poor. Beware the nostalgie de la boue. Small can be a bad fit.

So we daydream big. Dreams of unfashionable, politically incorrect, old American aspirations that our generation isn’t supposed to believe in anymore. Dreams of design features so vast that they sound like foreign countries. I dream of kitchen islands. I dream outside this box.

by Gene Tempest, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Bee Murphy

The Difference Between Liberalism and Leftism

It is reasonable to wonder whether the divide between liberalism and leftism actually matters very much. Why does there actually need to be so much animosity between the Clinton and Sanders factions of the Democratic Party? (Or the Blair and Corbyn factions in the UK’s Labour Party.) Why on earth did the race for DNC chair between Keith Ellison and Tom Perez grow so vicious, given their substantially similar progressive credentials? With Donald Trump poised to ravage the planet, either through boiling it slowly over time or blowing it up instantaneously with his vast nuclear arsenal, it would seem time for liberals and leftists to emphasize their similarities rather than their differences. Squabbling over minutiae is a fine way to ensure political irrelevance, and if everyone agrees that right-wing policies are poisonous and immoral, then surely the differences among progressive and leftish people can be worked out later.

It’s also true that, according to one view, the differences between liberals and leftists are not even differences of substance, but differences of political strategy. The claim of people like Clinton and Blair is that, while they share the core progressive principles of compassion and equality, they are simply more hard-nosed and pragmatic. They are more cynical about the limits of political possibility, and believe that change happens slowly. From this perspective, the core difference between Clinton and Sanders is not their ultimate end goals (they both want a world of progressive values), but how to get there.

If that’s the case, and the core of the divide is over “compromise” versus “purity,” or “a view that major progress happens slowly” versus “a demand that it happens immediately,” then the disagreements here should be friendly ones. Unity should be pretty easy, because we’re literally trying to help one another pursue the same objective. I want the same things you do, but I simply think that I have a more effective way of getting them.

But while this is often the kind of language with which moderate liberals distinguish themselves from more “radical” progressive factions, I don’t actually think it does accurately describe the nature of the liberal/left divide. And while conservatives would lump all these varying political tendencies together as a generic political tendency called “the left,” there are some internal conflicts that are both fundamental and irresolvable. It is not simply a disagreement over tactics among people who share ideals. The two sets of ideals are different, and come from two entirely different worldviews.

The core divergence in these worldviews is in their beliefs about the nature of contemporary political and economic institutions. The difference here is not “how quickly these institutions should change,” but whether changes to them should be fundamental structural changes or not. The leftist sees capitalism as a horror, and believes that so long as money and profit rule the earth, human beings will be made miserable and will destroy themselves. The liberal does not actually believe this. Rather, the liberal believes that while there are problems with capitalism, it can be salvaged if given a few tweaks here and there. As Nancy Pelosi said of the present Democratic party: “We’re capitalist.” When Bernie Sanders is asked if he is a capitalist, he answers flatly: “No.” Sanders is a socialist, and socialism is not capitalism, and there is no possibility of healing the ideological rift between the two. Liberals believe that the economic and political system is a machine that has broken down and needs fixing. Leftists believe that the machine is not “broken.” Rather, it is working perfectly well; the problem is that it is a death machine designed to chew up human lives. You don’t fix the death machine, you smash it to bits.

I was recently reminded of the nature of the difference while glancing through Timothy Snyder’s (very) short book On Tyranny. Snyder is a historian of fascism, who believes that the rise of Donald Trump has parallels with 20th century authoritarian movements, and he offers twenty “lessons” for how ordinary people should act under tyrannical regimes. (Trump actually goes undiscussed in the book, but it is quite clear throughout what Snyder is referring to when he talks about contemporary tyranny.) Some of Snyder’s lessons reminded me strongly of why, despite our mutual antipathy for Trump, there is such a serious contrast between his beliefs (as a liberal) and my own (as a leftist).

One Snyder lesson was particularly striking: Number 19—Be a Patriot. Snyder’s exhortation to patriotism runs as follows:

What is patriotism? Let us begin with what patriotism is not. It is not patriotic to dodge the draft and to mock war heroes and their families… It is not patriotic to compare one’s search for sexual partners in New York with the military service in Vietnam that one has dodged. [Snyder’s use of this oddly specific act is a good representation of just how clear it is that the book is about Trump despite treating the president as a Voldemort-esque unmentionable.] It is not patriotic to avoid paying taxes…. It is not patriotic to admire foreign dictators… It is not patriotic to cite Russian propaganda at rallies. It is not patriotic to share an adviser with Russian oligarchs. It is not patriotic to solicit foreign policy advice from someone who owns shares in a Russian energy company… [Snyder’s list of things that are not patriotic goes on further.] [P]atriotism involves serving your own country. [A patriot] wants the nation to live up to its ideals…A patriot has universal values.

Snyder’s patriotism passage stuck out to me, because I realized I totally rejected a core part of his message: the idea that “patriotism” is a good thing to begin with. Patriotism has always seemed to me to be a profoundly irrational notion; I believe one should love and serve humanity, not one’s particular arbitrary geopolitical segment of humanity. Snyder’s problem with Trump is that Trump is not enough of a patriot. But I see all rhetoric of patriotism as profoundly conservative and antithetical to everything I believe. In fact, I find Snyder’s whole case to be based on deeply conservative principles. Rhetoric against “draft dodgers”? The idea that one shouldn’t listen to the advice of someone with shares in a foreign company? What the hell kind of liberalism is this?

But that’s why I say the divide has something to do with one’s view of political and economic institutions as either fundamentally good or not. The liberal sees the conservative patriot wearing a flag pin and says: “A flag pin isn’t what makes you a patriot.” The leftist says: “Patriotism is an incoherent and chauvinistic notion.” The liberal says, “We’re the real ones who love America,” while the leftist says, “What is America?” or “I don’t see what it would mean to love or hate a meaningless conceptual entity.” The liberal says, “I’m standing up for what the Founding Fathers actually believed” while the leftist says, “The Founding Fathers endorsed the ownership of human beings. Some owned human beings themselves, and beat or raped these human beings. I will not measure the worth of something by what the Founding Fathers thought about it.” Certainly, the word “liberal” is an unfortunately overbroad and imprecise term, but it’s fair to say that some strains of liberalism actually have more values in common with conservatism than with leftism, in that they affirm key conservative premises that leftists abhor. (e.g. all that “America is the greatest country in the history of the world” poppycock.)

I don’t think this difference is merely rhetorical. Sometimes it is; the ACLU often sees as politically and legally advantageous to frame everything it does as a defense of the great and noble values embedded in the Constitution, instead of pointing out that many of the Constitution’s values are not particularly great or noble. But there is also a strong sense in which the liberal affirms the nation’s core ideological underpinnings, while the leftist rejects them. (Some other divides: the liberal view of the Vietnam War is that it was well-intentioned but doomed and badly handled. The leftist view is that it was evil in both intention and execution. Likewise with Iraq: was George W. Bush a well-meaning bungler or a predatory war criminal?)

Snyder’s suggestions for resisting tyranny are in conflict with leftism in other ways. Most of them are individualistic: they focus on people as isolated units. Thus they include:

• Believe in truth.
• Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.
• Contribute to good causes.
• Listen for dangerous words.
• Practice “corporeal” politics. [Sarcastic quotation marks my own.]
• Make eye contact and small talk.
• Establish a private life.

Amusingly, most of these seem like woefully ineffective weapons against fascism. At best they are useless (“Make small talk”??). At worst, like prescriptions for “revolutionary self care” (e.g. learning to play an instrument as revolutionary act), they provide convenient rationalizations for people’s inaction, allowing them to feel as if they are being politically active by doing the same thing they were probably going to do anyway. Read the news! Hug your friends! The idea that these things constitute meaningful resistance to Trump could be held only by somebody who wasn’t actually thinking about what serious political change looks like.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: What’s the Cost of Keeping Corrupt Pharma-Stooge Senators Like Patty Murray in Office?]

Paying a Price for 8 Days of Flying in America

On the sixth day of my weeklong odyssey across America by air, I found myself wedged into a middle seat in the far reaches of a flight from Des Moines to Phoenix, wearing the sweatpants I had slept in. Angry at the in-flight movie system and feeling hungry, I turned to my carry-on lunch: a container of yogurt.

The yogurt had spent the flight in the seat pocket, building up internal pressure. As I removed the top, it exploded, spraying blobs onto me, the seat, the floor and a nearby man whose mood was not enhanced by the arrival of a wet vanilla-flavored substance in his hair. I never did have lunch that day.

As flights go, it was not a personal success. But anyone who travels knows that wretchedness on a plane is only a matter of degree and never confined to a single passenger. The unfriendliness of the skies seems to grow only more baroquely awful with each new incident immortalized on a cellphone. (...)

To understand the forces defining air travel in America today, I spent eight days crisscrossing the country in economy class. Four airlines. Twelve flights (half of them delayed). Twelve cities. Twelve cups of tomato juice. Three trips through whole-body scanners. One alarming use of the words “groin area.” Eight testy conversations with authority figures. One lost bag. Two broken entertainment systems. And a reporter who went a week without washing her hair.

The trip had its share of surreal moments — interrogated by a security agent at one point, I forgot what city I was flying to — and I felt increasingly removed from myself, dehumanized and disaffected. Through a grim twist of fate, every flight seemed to leave from a gate in a distant corner of the terminal. Sitting again and again at the back of the plane, I wondered, am I getting enough oxygen?

But the week also showed people at their mordant best: helping each other wedge luggage into overhead spaces, trading information about delays and exhibiting a bracing what-fresh-hell-is-this solidarity, at least when they were not squabbling over spots in the boarding line. I began to get a sense of the perverse forces that drive airlines, airports and security personnel to pursue seemingly customer-hostile policies in the name of profits and safety.

As bad as flying can be, more people are doing it. Some 24,000 commercial flights take off and land in the United States every day, most at or close to capacity. Last year, a record 719 million people flew on domestic flights, as compared with 696 million the year before.

To help their profits, airlines fit more passengers into smaller spaces, charge more for once-basic services like legroom, inveigle customers into joining frequent-flier programs, and lavish ever more perks on higher-revenue passengers at the front of the plane.

The result is a widening caste system that can turn an airplane into a microcosm of “The Hunger Games.” The elite bask in an airborne version of Panem, enjoying over-the-top frivolities distant from the tedium of normal life, while the masses scrap over scant resources, dreaming of revolution. (...)

DAY 1: THE CASTE SYSTEM

• American Airlines Flight 85, New York to San Francisco, 7:55 p.m.

I can’t sleep on crowded late-night planes, so I pick a flight that leaves at a reasonable hour and duly present myself at Kennedy International Airport at 6 p.m. Right away, the passengers are funneled into two groups, one that will have a good experience and one that will not.

To the left is the regular check-in area, a scrum of anxiety where the regular travelers jostle and fret into ragged lines staffed by overburdened agents.

To the right is the priority area, a calm oasis of privilege where smaller numbers of high-status travelers are promptly ushered to check-in desks by smiling airline employees eager to help.

This pattern will continue throughout the trip, and it all makes perfect economic sense. Airlines make far more money from premium-class passengers than from economy passengers, and their focus is on making these customers as happy as possible.

At the gate, the flight is delayed for more than two hours, for whimsical reasons known only to the airline. Just under 80 percent of flights in the United States landed on time last year, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, an independent agency that is part of the Transportation Department. In the last decade, the on-time rate has been as low as 70.91 percent and as high as 82.11 percent.

The mood changes as you go further along in a plane. It’s like starting at a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and traversing the city until you reach your own house, a tent shared by 20 people on the banks of the Gowanus Canal. I have a middle seat, which will prove to be a recurring theme.

A thin curtain separates us from first class, but it feels impenetrable. A passenger attempts to use the first-class bathrooms but is ordered to the back of the plane. As the flight attendants dole out our sole free snack on this flight of six and a half hours — a lone Lotus Biscoff (“Europe’s Favorite Cookie With Coffee”) — the aroma of something delicious that may or may not be lasagna wafts in from the front. (...)

DAY 2: BOARDING NIGHTMARE

• Delta Flight 1106, San Francisco to Salt Lake City, 10:34 a.m.

• Delta Flight 2926, Salt Lake City to Denver, 3:20 p.m.

Half of America is furious at the other half, unable to agree on even previously uncontroversial topics like the weather. But if there’s one subject that unites the country, it is a loathing of what the airlines euphemistically call the boarding process.

I’m already grumpy because of fatigue and the fact that this flight, too, is unaccountably late. Besides, I fail to discard my water bottle at security, a rookie mistake that results in a walk of shame to the garbage bin reserved for people who do not understand what “no beverages” means.

At the gate, the mood is restive. The plane has not arrived.

A group of passengers — these people are known derisively as “gate lice” to frequent fliers — is surging toward the door anyway, jockeying for position in imaginary lines. This makes the others nervous, so they head over there, too.

“It gives me a sense of comfort to stand near the gate,” says Kristin Olson, who has left the lounge to stake out a prime position at the boarding area. “It can be chaotic and uncertain. I’m like, any time it’s set to board, I want to be here.”

Airlines have experimented with everything, including back-to-front boarding, window-seats-before-aisle-seats boarding, and what some people call “chaos boarding,” where passengers basically rush the gate en masse. Reasonable people can disagree on which is most efficient, but one thing seems clear: The current system — organized according to elaborate status-based hierarchies — is a highly irritating way to board a plane.

“On some flights, you have so many elite travelers that by the time they all board, there’s no one left,” Seth Kaplan, managing partner of the online publication Airline Weekly, said in an interview.

Each airline has its own way of calculating status, calibrating down to the most picayune distinction, just the way English people will tell you in all seriousness that they grew up upper lower-middle class, say, or lower upper-middle class.

It’s always startling to see how starkly this little slice of class warfare plays out. After boarding passengers who need extra help, Delta divides the remaining people into five “boarding zones” comprising 24 separate categories. If that seems like a lot, it is. The zones are cunningly arranged so that Zone 1 is actually the third group to board.

Zone 3 is for passengers with the cheapest tickets. They are forbidden to get on the plane until everyone else — the Sky Team Elite Plus members, the Priority Boarding Trip Extra customers, and so on — has already boarded.

There’s something soul-destroying about actively caring whether you’ve achieved, say, Crossover Rewards SPG Platinum status. On the other hand, it’s uniquely dispiriting to be a member of Zone 3.

Our boarding passes might as well say “Loser” on them.

by Sarah Lyall, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Sarah Lyall

The Making of Erin Hills

In June, Erin Hills, the mammoth rumpled blanket of a golf course in tiny Erin, Wis., will host the first of what will be many U.S. Opens. I say that with confidence, because it's the right course in the right place at the right time.

Erin Hills is a privately owned public golf course, befitting the USGA's populist desire to grow the game, in an untapped market. The course sits on 652 acres, an expanse unprecedented in championship golf. There's enough room to accommodate every money-making skybox, hospitality palace and merchandise tent imaginable. There's room for 100,000 spectators, if the USGA wanted that many. It doesn't. Ticket sales were capped at 35,000, evidently to avoid traffic snarls.

The course will be a genuine test. Yes, it's ridiculously long from its back tees at 8,348 yards, but it isn't intended to ever be played at that length. For the Open, it'll officially measure 7,693 yards but will be shorter on any given day because each hole has enormous flexibility. It's a par 72, first for a U.S. Open since Pebble Beach in 1992, and at least a couple of par 5s could force even big hitters to use a fairway wood to reach those greens in two.

Agreed, it's not a genuine links where one can bounce every shot into every target. There are some elevated fairways and elevated greens, and that's by design. The wind blows a considerable amount of the time at Erin Hills, and one of its tests is handling aerial shots in the wind. Fairways pitch and heave, dip and tumble, with few level lies anywhere. Its bunkers are real hazards where recovery is often secondary to escape. The greens are pure bentgrass, the first time in a U.S. Open in forever, slick and smooth surfaces on which there will be plenty of birdie putts made.

Yes, I'm an unabashed cheerleader for Erin Hills. I have a right to be, for I was involved in its creation. Or rather, its excavation. Erin Hills existed within the glacial folds of Wisconsin's kettle-moraine topography for eons. We just had to unearth it. (...)

When Mike and I first saw the land, in June 2000 (Dana made his first visit in the fall of 2001), it was an overgrown, rolling pasture with several sections covered in dense trees. Yet we could see, even then, its glorious natural contours. This was our opportunity to emulate Sand Hills Golf Club, the brilliant minimalist layout by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw in central Nebraska, easily the most natural course in America. We wanted to move as little earth as possible, make it memorable, walkable, with holes no one had ever seen or played before. (Some would say we went overboard in that last regard.)

We were also determined to build it efficiently and inexpensively, and we did. Erin Hills was built for less than $3 million, about a third of that devoted to irrigation. A ton of money was subsequently spent on other aspects of Erin Hills, but the course itself was two point nine eight.

Once we finally settled on our routing—18 holes plus a bonus, a par-3 Bye hole—Mike suggested minimally invasive construction. We mowed down existing grasses, sprayed the stubble with herbicide, slit in irrigation and seeded right into the mat of dead vegetation, preserving nearly every ridge, wrinkle, hump and hollow. We cored out areas for greens, which were constructed of pure sand, and hauled the soil off for use elsewhere, mostly in creating landforms for tees. We used a bulldozer sparingly, mainly to carve away small portions of four holes. (...)

There was also our general manager-to-be, who looked like every mousy accountant ever portrayed in the movies. He had quit his job as a software programmer to pursue a dream of running a golf course. He'd located the land and talked a businessman into buying it, lobbied to have Doak design it, and when we got the job, became our champion. He shepherded every regulatory permit to a successful conclusion, participated in most discussions about design and made sure everyone got paychecks on time. He was eager to run the club once it opened, until, on the cusp of completion, he went home one night and, for reasons unknown, killed his wife. He subsequently pleaded no contest to a charge of reckless homicide and is now serving a lengthy term in a Wisconsin prison. I mention him here because he was essential in the creation of Erin Hills, but decline to state his name out of respect for his children, who are now adults.

Finally, and most important, there was the guy who hired us, Bob Lang, who had created a small business empire producing greeting cards, calendars and gift-shop collectibles. His Lang Companies was based in Delafield, 20 miles south of Erin. Bob had rebuilt its downtown into a charming 19th-century retreat, a Wisconsin version of Colonial Williamsburg. The day we first met, he proudly pointed out specific building details, such as hand-planed floor planks secured by square nails. His office contained valuable Civil War relics, an incredible collection of Abe Lincoln portraits and the framed autographs of the first 12 presidents of the United States.

Bob was a less-than-avid golfer whose vision for the project was the lush, green, tree-lined Brown Deer Golf Course in Milwaukee. Though there's nothing wrong with Brown Deer, it was not what our site was offering. Mike and Dana left it to me to educate Bob, so I took him to Prairie Dunes in Kansas, then sent him on to Sand Hills. Bob didn't like what he saw. Sand Hills had no trees, and both courses were more brown than green. "I want Ireland," he said, "I want emerald green."

"Ireland is 40 shades of green," I told him. It took a while, but it eventually sank in. Bob would later launch an Erin Hills media campaign that boasted Forty Shades of Green.

Bob knew just enough golf to be dangerous. He wanted a par-73 course, with six par 5s. We explained to him that par would end up being whatever the land allowed us to build, but six 5s were at least two too many, unless he wanted six-hour rounds. His solution was 15-minute tee times. We explained it would be hard to make money with only four foursomes per hour.

He also wanted to own the longest golf course in the world and wasn't happy when I told him that was an indication of phallic envy. We informally lasered the course from stake to stake and found it to be 7,911 yards from the proposed championship "black tee" markers. Bob wanted more. He wanted a set of "back black" tees to reach his goal of 8,800 yards. We finally caved, found him some locations and ran irrigation to them, but explained they were for use 30 years or more down the road. We made him pledge to us that he wouldn't put markers on them or list them on the scorecard.

The first thing he did after the course opened was to hold a highly publicized Back Black Challenge, involving local pros and amateurs. The course measured over 8,300 yards, par 75 (including the Bye hole), and the winning score was 81. I told him that was the worst sort of PR he could give to a new public golf course. But he persisted. He was soon selling hats in the clubhouse with the inscription Erin Hills ... Not for the Faint of Heart.

by Ron Whitten, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: Dom Furore

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Priorities

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[ed. While everyone was watching James Comey's testimony in Congress, Republicans had other important business to take care of: Bill to Erase Some Dodd-Frank Banking Rules Passes in House. How about a little Ry Cooder to celebrate?]

Cancer Drug Proves to Be Effective Against Multiple Tumors

The 86 cancer patients were a disparate group, with tumors of the pancreas, prostate, uterus or bone. One woman had a cancer so rare there were no tested treatments. She was told to get her affairs in order.

Still, these patients had a few things in common. All had advanced disease that had resisted every standard treatment.

All carried genetic mutations that disrupted the ability of cells to fix damaged DNA. And all were enrolled in a trial of a drug that helps the immune system attack tumors.

The results, published on Thursday in the journal Science, are so striking that the Food and Drug Administration already has approved the drug, pembrolizumab, brand name Keytruda, for patients whose cancers arise from the same genetic abnormality.

It is the first time a drug has been approved for use against tumors that share a certain genetic profile, whatever their location in the body. Tens of thousands of cancer patients each year could benefit.

“This is absolutely brilliant,” said Dr. José Baselga, physician in chief at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, which has just hired the study’s lead investigator, Dr. Luis A. Diaz Jr.

After taking pembrolizumab, 66 patients had their tumors shrink substantially and stabilize, instead of continuing to grow. Among them were 18 patients whose tumors vanished and have not returned.

There was no control group, which meant the results had to be absolutely compelling to be convincing. The study started in 2013 and is funded by philanthropies; the drugmaker’s only role was to supply the drug. The study is continuing.

The drug, made by Merck, is already on the market for select patients with a few types of advanced lung, melanoma and bladder tumors. It is expensive, costing $156,000 a year.

A test for the mutations targeted by the drug is already available, too, for $300 to $600.

Just 4 percent of cancer patients have the type of genetic aberration susceptible to pembrolizumab. But that adds up to a lot of patients: as many as 60,000 each year in the United States alone, the study’s investigators estimated.

Clinicians have long been accustomed to classifying cancers by their location in the body — patients are diagnosed with lung cancer, for example, or brain cancer.

Yet researchers have been saying for years that what matters was the genetic mutation causing the tumors. At first, they were certain they would be able to cure cancers with drugs that zeroed in on the mutations, wherever the tumors were lodged.

But cancers were more complicated than that, said Dr. Drew M. Pardoll, director of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute and an author of the new paper.

A mutation that appeared in half of all melanomas, for example, turned out to be rare in other cancers. And even when scientists pinpointed that mutation in 10 percent of colon cancers, the drug that worked for melanoma patients did not work for other cancer patients.

“It was a great dream,” Dr. Pardoll sighed.

The new study was based on a different idea. The immune system can recognize cancer cells as foreign and destroy them. But tumors deflect the attack by shielding proteins on their surface, making them invisible to the immune system.

Pembroluzimab is a new type of immunotherapy drug known as a PD-1 blocker, which unmasks the cancer cells so that the immune system can find and destroy them.

The drug is the happy result of a failed trial. A nearly identical drug, nivolumab, was given to 33 colon cancer patients, and just one showed any response — but his cancer vanished altogether.

What was special about that one patient? Dr. Diaz, a geneticist at Johns Hopkins until now, and lead author of the new study, found the answer: a genetic mutation that prevented the tumor from repairing DNA damage.

As a result, the man’s cancer cells contained a plethora of mutated genes, which produced thousands of strange-looking proteins on the surfaces of the cells. Once the tumor’s cloaking mechanism was short-circuited by the drug, the man’s immune system had no trouble targeting the foreign proteins on the cancer cells.

That led to the idea for the Dr. Diaz’s new study. He and his colleagues sought patients whose tumors had the same genetic defect, which can arise in any of four genes in a pathway that repairs damaged DNA. They gave these patients a PD-1 blocker and were surprised by the results.

The drug’s effects have been so durable that the investigators do not know how long the results should be expected to persist or how long these patients might expect to survive. That kind of result, Dr. Baselga said, “is insane.”

by Gina Kolata, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Medscape

via: here and here

Henri-Cartier Bresson. Vitaliano Bassetti, Italy 1954
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Slow Crash

Two years before the 2008 Wall Street crash that toppled the global economy into deep recession, Harper’s Magazine published a dark prophecy of what was to come. In “The New Road to Serfdom,” economist Michael Hudson laid out how millions of Americans had taken on huge debts to buy houses on the presumption that they could later sell them at a profit. “Most everyone involved in the real estate bubble so far has made at least a few dollars,” he wrote. “But that is about to change. The bubble will burst, and when it does the people who thought they would be living the easy life of a landlord will soon find out that what they really signed up for is the hard servitude of debt serfdom.” As the twenty million people who lost their homes discovered, Hudson got it entirely right.

Today, unemployment is at record lows, and the stock market is at record highs. Allegedly, we have recovered from the disaster. I talked to Hudson, Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the author, most recently, of J is For Junk Economics, A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception, about his pre-crash prediction, and what he now sees in our future. (...)

So are we heading for another explosion comparable to 2008?

I’m not sure it’ll be an explosion. It’s more like a slow crash. It’s more like people are getting desperate. They’re having to live off their credit cards, not to buy luxuries but just simply to break even. They’re falling further and further behind, and as they fall behind the interest rate rises, the penalties rise, so people are getting more and more squeezed.

That’s why where I live in New York City, on all the big shopping streets there are more and more storefronts for rent. The stores are going out of business, especially the stores that are either mom and pops, or small well-known stores like art supply stores that have been there for a generation. Only the big chains are surviving, and even the chains are closing down, Sears and others. Entire shopping malls are going into default.

But we keep being told that this is because people are shifting to online shopping. Is that not the case?

Certainly many people are shopping online, but that’s not the real cause. The real cause is that overall retail sales are going down, because the average wage earner is only able to spend between a quarter and a third of their income on goods and services, after what’s left over from housing and taxes. The Federal Housing Authority now guarantees government mortgages up to 42 percent of your income. In New York City it’s normal to pay 40 percent of your income for rent.

Assume that 40 percent of your income goes for housing. Maybe 15 percent of your income is taken right off the paycheck by the FICA [Federal Insurance Contributions Act] for Social Security and essentially pre-saving for Social Security medical care (which provides the government with enough money to cut taxes on the higher brackets.) There’s another 10 percent to 15 percent in income taxes, local income taxes, and sales taxes. In addition to paying the mortgage debt, people have to pay bank debt, auto debt, and credit card debt. That’s about 10 percent. When you add all of these up, there’s only about maybe 30 percent of the income that they can spend on goods and services.

Economic textbooks talk about a circular flow, where the workers will get paid wages and they buy what they produce. That’s why Henry Ford paid his workers $5.00 a day, so that they could afford to buy cars. Now they only have a little bit to buy what they produce, and the rest of their money goes to the banks and to the government to give tax cuts for the top 10 percent. You’re having a slow squeeze on the middle class and the working class in this country, and it’s stifling the domestic market.

How do you explain what are billed as record low unemployment figures?

People are desperate to go to work. But if you look at where the jobs are, these are minimum wage jobs. Most of the jobs are in retail, trade, or in other low-paying jobs. Yes, employment is going up, but at very low wages that don’t enable families to save. You can see this particularly every two years when the Federal Reserve publishes a survey of consumer finances. You can see for instance that blacks and Hispanics have almost no savings at all, and 50 percent of the American population as a whole doesn’t have any savings because if you’re earning a low salary, then almost all of what you do earn has to go to pay for rent and for bank credit and for taxes.

You say the most likely prospect for the future is a “slow crash” but when your Road to Serfdom piece ran in Harper’s, the Case-Schiller national home price index stood at 184.38. As of February this year it stood at 185.56. Why shouldn’t there be a similar blow-up?

Nowadays nearly all residential mortgages are guaranteed by the government’s Federal Housing Agency (and have been since 2008), so banks are not threatened. The government is on the hook to guarantee American mortgage loans as well as student loans.

A large portion of the millions of homes that were foreclosed have been bought by hedge funds, often for all cash – because they can make more money renting them out than they can make in the financial markets. So this real estate is not debt leveraged.

Wall Street’s investment banks and bondholders were rescued, not the economy. The debts were left in place, and continue to grow not only by compound interest but by arrears and penalties compounding. The proportion of national income paid as interest, insurance fees and economic rent is rising faster than the economy is growing.

Banks lend mainly to other financial institutions. They don’t lend to factories that are creating jobs. They don’t lend out for goods and services. They lend to other financial institutions. The whole economy has turned into trying to make money on speculation and arbitrage, not on producing goods and services, not on hiring people to actually do work. The economy therefore is very fragile.

The whole economy at the end of the road is going to look like Greece or Spain or Portugal or Italy. All of these economies are shrinking by what’s called debt deflation. In other words, people have to pay either so much debt or they have to have forced saving, like pension fund saving, that the economy is shrunk for financial reasons, for putting more and more of its money out of the real economy of goods and services into the financial sector.

Is that your prediction for our future here in the United States? Greece?

Yes, a slow crash as more and more money is drained from the economy to pay the FIRE sector—finance, insurance, and real estate—not the goods and service producing sector.

by Andrew Cockburn, Harper's | Read more:

Packing and Cracking

Gerrymandering has a long and unpopular history in the United States. It is the main reason that the country ranked 55th of 158 nations — last among Western democracies — in a 2017 index of voting fairness run by the Electoral Integrity Project, an academic collaboration between the University of Sydney, Australia, and Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Although gerrymandering played no part in the tumultuous 2016 presidential election, it seems to have influenced who won seats in the US House of Representatives that year.

“Even if gerrymandering affected just 5 seats out of 435, that’s often enough to sway crucial votes,” Mattingly says.

The courts intervene when gerrymandering is driven by race. Last month, for example, the Supreme Court upheld a verdict that two North Carolina districts were drawn with racial composition in mind (see ‘Battleground state’). But the courts have been much less keen to weigh in on partisan gerrymandering — when one political party is favoured over another. One reason is that there has never been a clear and reliable metric to determine when this type of gerrymandering crosses the line from acceptable politicking to a violation of the US Constitution.

[ed. See:  The Mathematicians Who Want to Save Democracy]

Are the Warriors' Brogrammer Army the Most Hated Fans in Sports?

It was hard to find anyone who begrudged Cleveland fans their championship 12 months ago. The fanbase had suffered through decades of losing and crushing defeats; there had been tears and screams and, yes, even flames. The collective futility of the Cavaliers, Indians and Browns had endured year-round, one failed season rolling into the next. And all the sports misery occurred at a time when the city and the entire region of northeast Ohio was struggling just to survive. So only the cruelest of souls were upset by the sight of a million people in the streets of Cleveland celebrating the city’s good fortune.

Good luck finding a person alive who feels the same way about Warriors fans. Golden State are two wins away from winning their second NBA title in three years and entering the conversation about the greatest basketball teams of all time. They’re also two wins away from making Warriors fans perhaps the most despised in all of American sports.

All due respect to the widely loathed supporters of the Patriots, Yankees, Cowboys and Lakers, but the Warriors are building a fanbase that could dwarf them all for unlikability. Golden State fans’ negatives are on a hockey stick growth curve as Oracle Arena increasingly fills with – apologies for the poor attempt at using Silicon Valley lingo – brogrammers who truly believe they offer a value add to the organization. (And for the sake of clarity, it is this new breed of fan that attracts ire, rather than the Warriors supporters who pulled for the team even during the bad old days.)

Part of the problem is simple demographics. Bandwagon jumpers are considered to be the lowest form of fan – even below drunk, belligerent and face-painted – whereas the diehard, thick and thin, fan-since-birth group is the most respected. Because of the massive influx of people into northern California with the tech boom, many of those filling the choice seats at Oracle Arena have ties to the region that are tenuous even compared to those of Kevin Durant. Yet they’re cheering their hearts out for their beloved Warriors every night, while across the street the last place A’s – with the second-worst attendance in all of baseball and portions of the upper deck covered in tarp – don’t seem to have captured the imagination of Silicon Valley big wigs. The new Warriors fan has not suffered anything near the sports heartache of a Cleveland lifer. Their toughest season to endure was one in which the Warriors won an NBA-record 73 games. Sad!

The biggest example of the new strain of Golden State fan is none other than Joe Lacob himself, the team owner. Born in Massachusetts, he grew up a Celtics fan before his family relocated when he was a teenager to Los Angeles ... upon which he became a Lakers fan. Who knew that kind of swap in loyalty was even legal? But avoiding charges, Lacob started a venture capital firm in the late 80s, became part owner of the Celtics in 2006 (another flip!) and then majority owner of the Warriors after the 2010 season. Like the worst Silicon Valley stereotype, he credits tech culture for his team’s success, telling the New York Times Magazine last spring: “We’ve crushed them on the basketball court, and we’re going to for years because of the way we’ve built this team. We’re light years ahead of probably every other team in structure, in planning, in how we’re going to go about things. We’re going to be a handful for the rest of the NBA to deal with for a long time.”

Lacob is undoubtedly correct that his team is positioned to win for a long time, but that has more to do with hitting on Stephen Curry in the 2009 draft – a selection that came before Lacob arrived – and the ensuing benefits Curry’s abilities have afforded (on an under-market contract, mind) than it does with any sort of ingenious tech management style we in the small-brained community can’t comprehend. The Portland Trail Blazers and Sacramento Kings also have owners with tech backgrounds, don’t they? But their tech culture hasn’t created much success without the likes of Curry and Durant (who is deeply involved in Silicon Valley himself) on the rosters. Having an owner that irks is a near-necessity for despised teams, however – see Jerry Jones and Robert Kraft – and Lacob goes the extra mile there with his comments on how he and his fiancee had sex alongside the Larry O’Brien Trophy following Golden State’s 2015 title win. Thinking of that is like Uber but for vomiting.

by DJ Gallo, The Guardian | Read more:

Image:Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

Carriage of Musical Instruments

SUMMARY: The Department of Transportation is issuing a final rule to implement section 403 of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 regarding the carriage of musical instruments as carry-on baggage or checked baggage on commercial passenger flights operated by air carriers. This rule responds to difficulties musicians have encountered when transporting their instruments during air travel.

DATES: Effective Date: This rule is effective March 6, 2015.  (...)

Background

On February 14, 2012, the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 (the Act) was signed into law. Section 403 of the Act requires U.S. air carriers to accept musical instruments on their passenger flights either as carry-on baggage or checked baggage, provided that certain conditions are met. The passage of Section 403 is Congress’ response to difficulties musicians have encountered when transporting their instruments during air travel. The statute directs the Department of Transportation (Department or DOT) to issue a final rule to implement the requirements set forth in section 403.

During the past year, the Department has been engaged in dialogue with musicians as well as representatives of airlines and industry associations to address the difficulties musicians face when traveling by air with musical instruments. In July 2014, DOT Secretary Anthony Foxx hosted a ‘‘Flying with Musical Instruments’’ meeting to provide airline representatives, musicians, and government officials an opportunity to exchange ideas on ways to prevent or resolve difficulties encountered by musicians when flying with their instruments while still ensuring the safety of passengers and crew. At the meeting, several members of various musician organizations described problems that musicians encounter when traveling by air with their musical instruments, particularly when bringing instruments as carry-on baggage. Airline representatives in attendance described their policies for transport of musical instruments as carry-on or checked baggage. Many airlines have already adopted policies concerning the air transportation of musical instruments that mirror the requirements in Section 403 of the Act. The stakeholders recognized that, while most airlines’ current policies regarding musical instruments are consistent with the statute, frontline customer service agents and flight crew may not always be well-versed in those policies and may not communicate those policies accurately and effectively to musicians. By the same token, the meeting attendees also agreed that many musicians were not very well informed about airline policies regarding transporting musical instruments or about the measures they can take to better prepare themselves to ensure that the transport goes smoothly.

Since then, the stakeholders have voluntarily taken certain steps to better understand the extent of the problem and prevent or minimize confusion over musical instruments as carry-on baggage. (...)

Section 403 of the Act and this final rule provide that carriers are required to allow passengers to stow their musical instruments in an approved stowage area in the cabin only if at the time the passenger boards the aircraft such stowage space is available. With the exception of certain disability assistance devices, overhead bins or under seat stowage space is available to all passengers and crew members for their carry-on baggage on a ‘‘first come, first served’’ basis. Accordingly, carriers are not required to remove other passengers’ or crew members’ carry-on baggage that is already stowed in order to make space for a musical instrument. However, this also means carriers are not allowed to require a passenger to remove his or her musical instrument that is already safely stowed (e.g., in the overhead bin) to make room for carry-on baggage of other passengers who boarded the aircraft later than the passenger with the musical instrument. This is true even if the space taken by the musical instrument could accommodate one or more other carry-on items. Because the rule does not require that musical instruments be given priority over other carry-on baggage, we encourage passengers traveling with musical instruments to take steps to board before as many other passengers as possible to ensure that space will be available for them to safely stow their instruments in the cabin. This includes utilizing preboarding opportunities that some carriers offer (usually for a fee). This rule also states that carriers are prohibited from charging passengers with a musical instrument as carry-on baggage an additional fee other than any standard fee carriers impose for carry-on baggage. By including such a requirement in the statute, Congress clearly meant to require carriers to treat musical instruments in the cabin as no different from other carry-on baggage. For example, many carriers’ FAA approved carry-on baggage programs permit one piece of carry-on baggage plus one personal item such as a purse or a briefcase. If the passenger with the musical instrument already has these two standard items and the musical instrument is the third carry-on item, that carrier may not permit the passenger to board the aircraft with a third carry-on item. (...)

§ 251.3 Small musical instruments as carry-on baggage. Each covered carrier shall permit a passenger to carry a violin, guitar, or other small musical instrument in the aircraft cabin, without charging the passenger a fee in addition to any standard fee that carrier may require for comparable carry-on baggage, if: (a) The instrument can be stowed safely in a suitable baggage compartment in the aircraft cabin or under a passenger seat, in accordance with the requirements for carriage of carry-on baggage or cargo established by the FAA; and (b) There is space for such stowage at the time the passenger boards the aircraft. § 251.4 Large musical instruments as carry-on baggage. Each covered carrier shall permit a passenger to carry a musical instrument that is too large to meet the requirements of § 251.3 in the aircraft cabin, without charging the passenger a fee in addition to the cost of an additional ticket described in paragraph (e) of this section, if: (a) The instrument is contained in a case or covered so as to avoid injury to other passengers; (b) The weight of the instrument, including the case or covering, does not exceed 165 pounds or the applicable weight restrictions for the aircraft; (c) The instrument can be stowed in accordance with the requirements for carriage of carry-on baggage or cargo established by the FAA; (d) Neither the instrument nor the case contains any object not otherwise permitted to be carried in an aircraft cabin because of a law or regulation of the United States; and (e) The passenger wishing to carry the instrument in the aircraft cabin has purchased an additional seat to accommodate the instrument.

by Federal Register, Vol. 80, No. 2 / Monday, January 5, 2015 / Rules and Regulations | Read more (pdf):

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Real vs. Fake: The Eames Lounge

I know this post is kind of a departure from my regular programming ’round these parts, but what can I say? It’s Monday, it’s almost the end of March, it’s snowing, possibly this is the rapture, my apartment building has no heat, and I woke up feeling like it was high time to nerd out over chairs.

So. Remember how I used to have a fake Eames lounge chair? Back when my living room looked like this:

Yeah. Well. When we received the very special things from my grandparents’ house, there was a brief hot second when I had two Eames lounge chairs—the real deal, straight out of Zeeland, Michigan circa 1972, and the fakey guy who I think was manufactured by Plycraft, probably a few years later.

“Reproductions” and “replicas” and “inspired-by” designs have been around for forever, but it seems like only in more recent years have these unauthorized replicas inched closer and closer to looking like the real thing. Now. There is a whooooollllleeee long debate to be had about “real” vs. “fake” and the legal standing of intellectual property surrounding furniture designs and who is getting ripped off and how and what this means for society and design and quality and whether the sky is blue. Frankly, I’d rather not get into that because everybody has their own opinions and I find that type of squabbling annoying. Personally, I can’t picture myself buying a newly-produced knock-off piece of furniture for a number of reasons, but I think the rules change a little when you’re talking vintage and secondhand. Nobody’s getting hurt, it isn’t perpetuating the lousy knock-off furniture industry—it’s just good clean old-fashioned thrifty fun times. I support that.

Point is, people often wonder what the differences are between authentic and knock-off furniture—Eames lounge chairs, specifically—and it’s hard to find a good guide explaining it. So being in the unique position of owning both concurrently, I thought it would be a good time to put together a little show and tell.

by Daniel Kanter, Manhattan Nest |  Read more:

Images: Daniel Kanter

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