Why Do You Discriminate Against Boats?

For all of his adult life, Donald Trump has been telling people that he’s a brilliant businessman, a habit he continued, to great effect, on the campaign trail. So you’ll have to forgive Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull,who may have been laboring under a similar assumption when he got on the phone last January with the newly sworn-in president. One of the primary purposes of the call was to discuss a deal that had been struck by Barack Obama to take in 1,250 refugees who had been detained by Australia, which Turnbull was worried would not be honored in light of the travel ban Trump had ordered the day before. But as Turnbull quickly realized, as revealed Thursday by a leaked transcript of their conversation, Trump is completely incapable of grasping even basic facts about foreign policy—and is too ignorant to negotiate even the most basic deals. In fact, it seems highly possible Turnbull came away from the conversation not confident the president of the United States knows what Australia is.

The details of said deal were fairly straightforward: in order to deter human smuggling, as well as to prevent people from drowning at sea, Australia has a policy of not allowing refugees who arrive by boat to enter the country. That means you could be the second coming of Mother Teresa, Mr. Rogers, and Albert Einstein all rolled into one, but if you arrive by boat, you’re not coming into the country. Because Australia did not want to compromise this policy, when a significant number of refugees did arrive by boat, rather than deporting them, Turnbull’s government placed them in detention centers on the Pacific Islands of Nauru and Manus. Human-rights groups have condemned the conditions of these camps, the latter of which is set to close on October 31. Australia reached an agreement with the Obama administration for the U.S. to vet 1,250 of these refugees and then take as many of them as deemed acceptable to enter the country. If the U.S. decided none of them were safe, then it would be under no obligation to take any of them in. In exchange, Australia agreed to take in people the Obama administration wanted to get out of the United States. See? Simple. Really, it's not that difficult.

That is, unless you’re Donald Trump, president of the United States, who apparently can't follow a simple train of thought, based on the transcript of his mind-boggling conversation with Turnbull.

by Bess Levin, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Image: Nathan Edwards/Newspix/Getty Images

Rich SF Residents Get a Shock: Someone Bought Their Street

Thanks to a little-noticed auction sale, a South Bay couple are the proud owners of one of the most exclusive streets in San Francisco — and they’re looking for ways to make their purchase pay.

Tina Lam and Michael Cheng snatched up Presidio Terrace — the block-long, private oval street lined by 35 megamillion-dollar mansions — for $90,000 and change in a city-run auction stemming from an unpaid tax bill. They outlasted several other bidders.

Now they’re looking to cash in — maybe by charging the residents of those mansions to park on their own private street.

Those residents value their privacy — and their exclusivity. Past homeowners have included Sen. Dianne Feinstein and her financier husband, Richard Blum; House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi; and the late Mayor Joseph Alioto. A guard is stationed round the clock at the stone-gate entrance to the street to keep the curious away.

So imagine the residents’ surprise when San Jose residents Cheng and Lam wound up with the street, its sidewalks and every other bit of “common ground” in the private development that has been managed by the homeowners since at least 1905. That includes a string of well-coiffed garden islands, palm trees and other greenery that enhance the gated and guarded community at the end of Washington Street, just off Arguello Boulevard and down the hill from the Presidio.

“We just got lucky,”said Cheng, a real estate investor.

The homeowners, however, are crying foul and want the Board of Supervisors to negate the sale.

The couple’s purchase appears to be the culmination of a comedy of errors involving a $14-a-year property tax bill that the homeowners association failed to pay for three decades. It’s something that the owners of all 181 private streets in San Francisco are obliged to do.

In a letter to the city last month, Scott Emblidge, the attorney for the Presidio Homeowners Association, said the group had failed to pay up because its tax bill was being mailed to the Kearny Street address used by an accountant who hadn’t worked for the homeowners since the 1980s.

Two years ago, the city’s tax office put the property up for sale in an online auction, seeking to recover $994 in unpaid back taxes, penalties and interest. Cheng and Lam, trawling for real estate opportunities in the city, pounced on the offer — snatching up the parcel with a $90,100 bid, sight unseen.

Since the purchase in April 2015, the couple have been quietly sitting on the property, talking to a number of land-use attorneys to explore their options.

“We were looking to get title insurance so it could be marketable,” Cheng said.

He and his wife see plenty of financial opportunity — especially from the 120 parking spaces on the street that they now control.

“We could charge a reasonable rent on it,” Cheng said.

And if the Presidio Terrace residents aren’t interested in paying for parking privileges, perhaps some of their neighbors outside the gates — in a city where parking is at a premium — would be.

by Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross, SF Chronicle | Read more:
Image: Nicole Boliaux, The Chronicle
[ed. Sometimes you read a story that just makes your day.]

Rock On

On Stephen Stills and Tom Petty

Several years ago an academic colleague and I embarked on what we called a “Stills-off”: we would listen to our record collections and narrow the musician Stephen Stills’s oeuvre down to its top five songs. Then we’d see whose list was better. I assumed our choices would overlap, and that high among them would be “4 + 20,” whose piercing Appalachian melancholy seems to belong more to the ages than to the moody twenty-four-year-old who wrote it, as well as “Find the Cost of Freedom” with its sea shanty cry of grief and endurance. We would both surely include his Buffalo Springfield resistance anthem “For What It’s Worth,” with Stills’s calm, urgent baritone and rhythmic stops; originally released to protest a Los Angeles curfew—its composition probably began earlier when Stills was still nineteen—it has endured long past its original occasion. According to Tim Rice it is “one of the best songs ever written with just two chords.” (Rice is a lyricist: the song has more than two chords.)

But my colleague and I could not stay away from Stills’s rocking guitar solos—“Crossroads,” for instance, or “Ain’t It Always,” pieces that got Stills labeled “Guitar God” on YouTube. Then there is “The Love Gangster,” from his double album, Manassas, on which Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones plays bass. Wyman wanted at the time to leave the Stones and join Stills’s band; the instruments on Manassas are all in the hands of virtuosos. Stills has put out recordings in which, like Prince, he has played all the instruments and sung all the parts. (“Do for the Others,” a song from his first solo album, is aptly named.) But Manassas did not require that.

And so our lists began to burst at the seams and soon the Stills-off seemed an increasingly stupid exercise. Stills, now seventy-two, has often been named one of the top rock guitarists of all time and is the only musician to have recorded with both Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton on the same album—his first solo LP (1970). His work has sprung from every stripe of American music—blues, folk, rock, “songs with roots,” as he has put it; he was “Americana” and “singer-songwriter” before those terms were used. And although as a child he began as a drummer and tap dancer, the only percussion one is likely to hear from him now might be when he knocks rhythmically against an acoustic guitar. Once, on a 2006 tour that was being filmed, he tripped over some electrical cords and fell to the stage with a certain percussive flair. “We’ve got more lights than we’re used to,” he said. “We usually don’t care if they can see us because we’re old.”

A year after my misbegotten Stills-off I attended a sold-out concert in Nashville by the Long Players, a tribute band that performs one single album from start to finish at each of its concerts. This time they had chosen Déjà Vu (witty!), which is the first and best (and for a long while was the only) album by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. (Ampersand and no Oxford comma for Young: when he needs to get out of a band he flees quickly.) No sooner had the Long Players begun with Stills’s “Carry On” than the capacity crowd was standing—this cannot always be counted on with members of the AARP—and singing along at the top of their lungs. Jubilant, revelatory, the evening was more than a geezer-pleaser: it was baby boomer church, late-middle-aged ecstasy, a generation stating that it had not just yet entirely surrendered to the next. I started to suspect that no American demographic had so thoroughly memorized an album—not even one by the Beatles or Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell—as this generation of baby boomers had Déjà Vu.

by Lorrie Moore, NY Review of Books |  Read more: (Ain't It Always Stephen Stills)

***

In 1979, I was an undersized FM-generation high-school junior with a voice that wouldn’t change, a stressed single mom, and a bedroom in a rented gray two-family house in which I had to play my stereo low so I wouldn’t disturb all the people living close around me. And then my daily affront at this complete lack of agency found validation when some skinny blond dude calling his album “Damn the Torpedoes” uplifted my evenings with a simple phrase about being cut down to size on a regular basis: “Don’t do me like that.” He wasn’t celebrating humiliation—he understood the condition, which is, foremost, the inability to make the humiliation stop. There was nothing to do except to say to hell with annoying Mom and the neighbors and, in my alarmingly pitched treble that sounded like a radio veering between frequencies, to sing out that ambrosial phrase right along with Petty: “Don’t do me like that.”

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers have been filling the air with pop masterpieces for forty years now. Their hits have spent so much time in cars, in grocery aisles, in offices, and on beaches, and have such aural clarity that they are instantly individuating—you can be immersed in your own business, busy with tasks, and within three bright chords you are sure to recognize “American Girl” or “Runnin’ Down a Dream” or “I Won’t Back Down.” That kind of cultural endurance is sufficiently unusual that this summer, during what Petty has said is the band’s final big tour, I have found myself circling back and wondering what it is about Petty that’s kept him so much around. Certainly, Petty’s early embattled lyrical world view wouldn’t have promised such resilience; and the days and nights seemed to press hard on his gaunt, underfed pallor.

But protecting Petty against the inimical forces through the years have been his many admirable qualities: wry detachment, a bitter-green sense of humor, understated layers of musical ingenuity, and a completely original delivery. That voice! The incomparably distinct Petty vocal is thin, top-register, nasal, and yet cured in oak barrels. No white man in America works his septum through a vowel as distinctively as Petty, except maybe Jack Nicholson on a very good day. The voice is so seductive that it’s possible to listen to Petty describe the absolute mundane quotidian and feel completely ecstatic: “It was a beautiful day, the sun beat down, I had the radio on, I was drivin’.” Most advantageous of all, the voice communicates Petty’s great subject, which is strain.

As I grew older, Petty became for me a classic-rock fave; I was always glad when the songs appeared, but didn’t habitually seek them out. And that’s why it took me a long time to notice that, over the years, Petty’s alluring vocals, plugged into the beautiful, purring engine of his band, contrasted in their bright-sized vitality with what Petty was actually saying—which was pretty near the same thing that first brought me to him as a kid. Even twenty years into his career, on his 1994 solo hit “You Don’t Know How It Feels,” the message still seemed caught in that aggrieved adolescent moment. There were, in fact, so many songs of grievance, so many songs casting unhappily inward, so many songs expressing the perpetually injured and afflicted American male. That man’s wounds are inevitably some woman’s fault. She leads him on. She keeps him waiting. She wrecks him. He knows her heart’s beyond wicked, but he can’t kick it. Yes, there’s the occasional bluesman brag: “You got lucky, babe, when I found you.” But even then, it’s all about him—and that glint of grievance. He’s sticking around to take it because taking it is what he does.

The emotions Petty describes are, of course, emotions most people experience, and to Petty’s credit, they aren’t what most people like to advertise about their inner lives. If for some the songs were awash in self-pity, many others heard the adversity in them and located something hopeful and persevering—they listened and thought, That’s me. (This was, perhaps, especially the case during breakups.) And Petty could also write excellent songs in a more romantic key, such as “Wildflowers.” Yet, in the end, so many of his memorable compositions work a path beginning with pain and leading to resentment. This is even true of “Here Comes My Girl,” in which a primary benefit of enduring love is that it enables a man feeling stuck and discouraged to “tell the whole wide world to shove it!” That thick and affirming carapace of injustice suggests that a man can subsist a long time on nothing more than his favorite grudge. As Petty writes of a man in “Rebels,” his characters are “a little rough around the edges, inside a little hollow.”

by Nicholas Dawidoff, New Yorker |  Read more: (The Proud Pain of Tom Petty)

Harold Harvey, Marazion Marsh
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The Average NFL Fan Will Watch 23.5 Hours Of Commercials This Season

The Average NFL Fan Will Watch 23.5 Hours Of Commercials This Season

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We're Screwed

These tiny screw cameras are about $20 on Amazon (or $15 on eBay), with versions that plug into CCTV systems, composite inputs, and USB ports. There's also the bare camera, minus the fake screwhead. [via OPSEC]

The Amazon listing includes a photo of it installed in a public toilet door.

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The Strangers Nextdoor

Gone, mostly, are the days of asking your neighbor to borrow a cup of sugar. When I was growing up, my mother viewed our neighbors with irritation — their principal crimes were overdoing their Christmas decorations, and on one occasion, drunk-driving through our fence. I can count on one hand the pleasant neighborly interactions I’ve had as an adult. Once, in my upscale urban neighborhood in Atlanta, my fiancé asked another neighbor for an egg — he eyed us with suspicion, as if blueberry muffins were a pretext for some sort of political scam or a multi-level marketing scheme. Now, irritation generally characterizes my relationship with my neighbors. Why would you wear heels when you have hardwood floors and a downstairs neighbor? Who still listens to the Barenaked Ladies, much less on repeat? But I also have intense curiosity, and in the absence of peeking through my neighbors’ windows as I walk by, which is hard to do in a high-rise, I have Nextdoor.

Nextdoor, for the sane and detached among you, is a social media platform that’s locality-driven, an alternative to meetings you actually have to show up for, neighborhood Facebook groups that might give away a little too much information about you, or listservs that clog your inbox. When you sign up, you give your address, which the company verifies by credit card billing address, phone billing address, or postcard. You have access only to your neighborhood and a few surrounding hoods. It’s a place to post about a lost dog or found kittens, advertise an estate sale, or ask for recommendations for a handyman from fellow residents.

My neighborhood’s Nextdoor includes a space for officials to communicate with residents, like the Atlanta Police Department and the Department of Watershed Management. The categories for posts from residents include classifieds, crime and safety, documents (almost never used), free items, general, lost and found, pet directory, recommendations, events calendar, real estate. More than 150,000 neighborhoods in the U.S., U.K., and Netherlands are on Nextdoor, according to Fortune. It was valued at about $1 billion in 2015.

“Community building” is usually more of a buzzword or phrase on social media, but in this case, it’s quite literal. The idea is that Nextdoor promotes community engagement with the people in your actual, geographic community, and that it would build social capital and better citizens. Instead, it’s been heavily criticized for contributing to fear, distrust, and racist behavior. There are also coyote sightings, warnings about the Starbucks Unicorn drink, and requests to borrow someone’s kombucha scoby.

The Crime category is where the ugliness of Nextdoor is most obvious. The coded language of “hip-hop types” and “thugs” (translation: black or brown), “suspicious” people and the homeless. In 2016, due largely to the efforts of advocacy groups in Oakland, California, the company changed how crimes and suspicious activity are reported in an attempt to crack down on racist language and incidents, forcing residents to describe a person’s clothing, for example, rather than just being able to say “a black man.”

It didn’t used to be like this, neighbors say; “this” being break-ins and rude language and panhandling and litter. Back in my day, we left our doors unlocked, they say. But they also say, be smart. See something, say something. You have second amendment rights. Take no chances.

“I wish we had a death penalty for stealing,” wrote my young, white, female neighbor. “Go to the range and hone in on your shooting ability and drop someone that shows total lack of regard for your personal property,” said a young white man, who explained that “castle doctrine” would protect you from prosecution if you killed someone for breaking your car windows. (No, it wouldn’t, commented a lawyer.)

My former neighbor Heather* exemplifies the worst of Nextdoor. She saw a Dodge Charger with tinted windows and rims parked on her street and posted several times over the course of a few days, with photos and video. “Suspicious Dodge Charger is here around again!!!” “I am getting angry because I don’t see a patrol neighbor drive around to check all of neighbors for their safety plus cop NEED to go his place to take him to jail for stalker often. (I gave him a tag number) there is nothing cop can do bc this suspicious didn’t break a law!”

Someone’s brother ran the plates. Other neighbors posted surveillance photos. Then, Daniel*, another neighbor, chimed in about “this suspicious.” Daniel, whose nanny has never been late, not once in 2 years. In fact, she arrives early every day, so she parks around the corner from the house before her shift.

She didn’t pull into the driveway to get away from you, she pulled into the driveway to bring our kids home. She drives by your house frequently, well, because you are my neighbor. If you want to know, she has a clean driving and criminal record, and the respect of a lot people in our neighborhood. I trust her with the safety of my family and we love her like a member of our family. It breaks my heart to see her arrive in tears, which was the case this morning. I understand why you might approach someone outside your house if you do not recognize the car. Three separate people approached her this morning, each interaction was a bit different, but thematically there was clear message sent “that she didn’t belong”. How can I say that you might ask? Well, one person told her explicitly that she need to go even after she tried to explain who she is, and another approach her with a gun holstered on his hip. You can’t tell me, that as a woman sitting in a car alone you wouldn’t find that scary. Hell, I know I would be scared in that situation.

Not that there isn’t crime, though — there are carjackings, the burglaries, the stolen tires and cold cases. Police departments post about criminals they’ve caught. Neighbors warn each other about rashes of car break-ins.

But it’s the cases of paranoia that are the most fascinating. There’s the mother who saw a car slow down and decided it must be a child sex trafficker out to get her toddler (and the neighbors who backed her up, as a mother’s instinct is never, ever wrong, even when it is). There’s the woman whose neighbor smokes weed, and the commenter who informed her that they probably run a “drug lab.” The man who asked how we should prepare to combat the “Ferguson effect,” or the supposed phenomenon that police officers are now afraid to use force because of the riots over Michael Brown’s death.

by Katie Lambert, The Awl | Read more:
Image: uncredited

[ed. I'm generally a community-minded person and tried Nextdoor thinking it might be something useful (in the last town I lived in). It only took one pass through the site before I decided to unsubscribe (for reasons noted above).]   

Jim Plunkett's Painful Journey: 'My Life Sucks'

He rises from a chair next to his Heisman Trophy in a room stuffed with dozens of silver and gold keepsakes that recognize a remarkable sports legacy. At 6-foot-3, Jim Plunkett still commands a room.

But underneath the tanned exterior anxiety grows over an uncertain future.

“My life sucks,” said Plunkett, 69. “It’s no fun being in this body right now. Everything hurts.”

The years of daily pain pulsating from the neck, back, knees, shoulders, hips and head have taken a toll on a quarterback who played 15 NFL seasons and led the Raiders to two Super Bowl victories.

His body is a patchwork of medical magic: Artificial knees, an artificial shoulder and a surgically repaired back. After 18 operations, Plunkett’s activities have been reduced to golf and light workouts at home on a Crosstrainer.

A quiet figure during his quarterbacking days, Plunkett represents a generation of men who played football with a taste for violence while locking their emotions in safety deposit boxes. For decades, Sunday’s heroes have suffered in silence from degenerative brain disease, depression, opioid addiction, Parkinson’s and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

The price for playing football has come due.

“Think of getting in 50 car wrecks a week for 20 straight weeks a year,” said Hank Bauer, a former San Diego Chargers running back known for his reckless play on special teams. “Everybody hurts at our age. We just hurt more.”

Latest health problems

A year ago, Plunkett contracted Bell’s Palsy, a temporary facial paralysis that causes one side of the face to droop. No sooner had the disorder disappeared than the throbbing headaches began. The head pain has been diagnosed as a neurological disorder that his physician thinks is connected to Bell’s Palsy.

These are the latest in a series of health problems that began four years after Plunkett left the NFL in 1986. He takes six pills in the morning, seven at night for his heart, blood pressure and other problems. Plunkett usually takes an opioid to play a round of golf, but otherwise stays away from the addictive painkillers. In early summer, he even tried hemp oil for a month but stopped when he didn’t see any results.

“There are a couple other drugs I take — I can’t know them all,” he said. “I’ve got to take them every day to quote-unquote survive.”

Plunkett’s football career began in the 1960s at James Lick High School in East San Jose. Then he played four years at Stanford, appearing in 32 games. After winning the Heisman Trophy in 1970 — he remains the only Heisman recipient in Stanford history — Plunkett was the No. 1 pick in the NFL draft by the New England Patriots.

He weathered 380 sacks in a pro career from 1971-86, and that doesn’t begin to account for all the times he was hit after throwing.

A year after Plunkett retired, NFL officials began addressing ways to protect their most valuable asset as quarterbacks were getting injured at an alarming rate. They prohibited pass rushers from taking two steps before smashing into a signal caller after the ball had been thrown. Such tactics were legal in Plunkett’s era. So was slamming quarterbacks to the ground. 

by Elliot Almond, Mercury News |  Read more:

Image: Matt Slocum

[ed. How sad. I remember standing next to Jim when he came to practice at my high school football field before the 1971 Hula Bowl game. I was in awe - a Heisman trophy winner, throwing zingers right next to me! He was big, humble, an easy-going guy, signing autographs and joking around with everyone. Highly respected by all.]

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Lexington Lab Band

[ed. Best Cover Band Ever (BCBE). See also: New Kid in Town, Voodoo Child, Josie, Driven to Tears, Crazy on You (and more). Have a nice weekend.]

An Honest Business News Update

NEW YORK – The S&P 500 closed at a new high on Wednesday in what analysts hailed as the accumulated result of several hundred million people waking up every morning hoping to solve problems and improve their lives.

The index finished up 4 points. Goldman Sachs strategist Bill Blake said the move was the result of unidentified marginal buyers being a little bit more motivated than unidentified marginal sellers. “We’ve now had 241 years of people in daily competitive pursuits to do things a little better, and those benefits add up over time. Mix that with some good luck and where we happen to be in the business cycle, and here we are,” he said. “My job is to sound smart, but you can explain this stuff to a five year old,” he laughed.

Corporations earned $5.89 billion in after-tax profits. Financial advisors and middlemen took in $710 million in fees. The difference, Blake said, would accrue to investors over time.

Analysts warned of several metric tons of dopamine and cortisol careening through the global economy, which they said created a near certainty of poor financial decisions. At some point, Blake said, these bad decisions create social proof and feed on each other, leading to recessions. “When is the next recession?” he asked. “I don’t know. Whenever the second mortgage you took out to buy a boat to appease your insecurity convinces your brother in-law to do the same, and his boat gives the boat salesman enough misguided confidence to become a day trader, and then all three of you crack under a collective bout of geopolitical bad luck or something. But we’ll move on.”

About 9,000 new businesses formed on Wednesday. Another 8,200 dissolved. Analysts expect the trend to continue, calling it an “unmistakable example of basic capitalism.”

Fifty-five million American children went to school Wednesday morning, leveraging the compounded knowledge of all previous generations. Analysts expect this to lead to a new generation of doctors, engineers, and problem solvers more advanced than any other in history. “This just keeps happening over and over again,” one analyst said. “Progress for one group becomes a new baseline for the next, and it grows from there.”

Three dozen political pundits yelled at each other on TV in front of an audience of 75 million. Meanwhile, a couple hundred million people were reasonable and productive in front of an audience of zero. (...)

* Nothing, and yet everything, about this post is accurate.

by Morgan Housel, Collaborative Fund | Read more:
Image: Camila Demasio

Adolf Dietrich, Still Life with Vegetables, Mice and Rabbits, 1928
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The Ethics of Adjusting Your Assets to Qualify for Medicaid

At any given moment, there is a large group of citizens who want nothing more than to make absolutely certain that they are impoverished enough to qualify for Medicaid sooner rather than later. Someday, you might be one of them.

Welcome to the (perfectly legal) world of Medicaid planning, the plain-vanilla term for the mini-industry of lawyers and others who help people arrange their financial lives so they don’t spend every last dime on a nursing home. Once properly impoverished under the law, then Medicaid, which gets funding both from your state and the federal government, picks up the tab.

Whatever twists and turns the health insurance debates in Washington take, Medicaid will be at the center, and the program will probably affect you and your family more than you know. After all, if you run out of money in retirement, it is Medicaid that pays for most of your nursing home or home-based care.

The bill that contains the caps that Republican senators have proposed, which would remake Medicaid, seems for now to have a low chance of passing. But even if no bill survives, politicians on both sides of the aisle fear what demographics will do to the program’s costs. Most Americans haven’t saved enough to pay for decades of post-retirement living expenses and years of expensive end-of-life care, so it stands to reason that Medicaid will come under increasing strain.

In my first Medicaid column on June 30, I asked for your questions about the program, aging and long-term care, and you sent me more notes about the ethics of Medicaid planning than on nearly any other topic. About half of you were outraged by the ethical implications, and the rest wanted to know where you could sign up for it.

The debate is not new, though it happens to be the rare topic on which the editorial boards of The New York Times (“Pretending to Be Poor”) and The Wall Street Journal (“Medicaid for Millionaires”) have agreed over the decades.

What are we talking about when we talk about Medicaid planning? First, you have to qualify. So let’s begin by putting a fat “generally” in front of every statement below, along with a warning that you should not try this at home alone. A lawyer experienced in the field is a necessity.

Medicaid eligibility for long-term care can differ by state and also by marital status. Generally, you can’t have income higher than $2,205 per month per person, including Social Security. Asset restrictions of just a few thousand dollars also apply, unless you’re a spouse who is not receiving care, in which case you can have up to $120,900 while your husband or wife qualifies for Medicaid. Homes don’t count in the asset calculation, though there is a cap on home equity if you’re single that is either $560,000 or up to $840,000, depending on the state. The Medicaid officials in your state can also tap your estate for repayment under certain circumstances.

To get within those limits, lawyers may encourage gifts to family members (though if they are within five years of a Medicaid application, there can be penalties), annuity purchases, trusts of various sorts and a certain type of long-term care insurance that can shield some assets from the Medicaid calculation once you’ve made a claim.

There are dozens of other nuances, maybe hundreds. Did I mention the need for a qualified lawyer? If you want to do some homework first, the book “How to Protect Your Family’s Assets From Devastating Nursing Home Costs” will give you a sense of what questions you need to ask.

However, you may want nothing to do with this. It would not surprise K. Gabriel Heiser, the lawyer who wrote the book. He’s heard from colleagues over the years who wanted no part of this work. This confused him, he said in an interview this week, given that many of them handled estate planning for wealthier clients. There, they helped people avoid paying millions to the government, whereas Mr. Heiser’s work merely helps clients get the government to pay a few hundred thousand for care on their behalf.

That bit of relativism, however, does not erase a basic fact: Anyone who engages in legal Medicaid planning is attempting to qualify for a government program for the indigent when they do have at least some assets that could pay for their care.

by Ron Lieber, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Robert Neubecker

There Is Someone In There

Academic study of dolphin intelligence got off to a rickety start that cost it about a decade. In some sense it has never recovered from its first publicly noted researcher, who cloaked dolphins with a mystical allure they’ve never quite shaken. On the other hand, dolphins have earned a bit of mystique.

In the late 1950s and ’60s, neurophysiologist and brain researcher John C. Lilly presented us with creatures whose gigantic brains made them our superiors. It was an improvement on the idea that whales felt nothing but an inexplicable urge to swallow humans. But Lilly, too, was wrong. John Lilly pronounced that an animal with a brain the size of a sperm whale’s must have a “truly godlike” mind. We’ll leave aside the question of what a “godlike” mind would be and what a whale would do with one. Lilly mistakenly assumed that brain size translated directly to thinking ability. (...)

Scientists rightly scorned John Lilly. His insistence that we could crack dolphin communication — by teaching them English — proved wrong. But his image of dolphins as superior to humans grabbed the imagination of the public, which remains captivated, waiting for a sign that they’re on a higher plane. Perhaps we hope that somehow, someday, someone better will deliver us from our own evils. (...)

Like human babies, infant dolphins babble sequences of whistles that become more organized as they grow. At anywhere between one month and two years, bottlenose, Atlantic spotted, and other dolphins develop their own distinctive individual “signature whistles.” Signature whistles are a name they create for themselves. The sound is distinctive, and the dolphin doesn’t change it, ever. They use it to announce themselves.

Dolphins who hear their own signature whistled by another dolphin call back. They don’t respond to a dolphin who whistles a third dolphin’s signature call. In other words, they call each other by name, and they answer when they hear their own name called. Dolphins call their close friends’ names when they are separated. No other mammal seems to do that (that we know of). Dolphins more than ten miles away can hear each other if water conditions are right. Atlantic spotted dolphins seemingly use names to call together several individuals. When groups meet at sea, they exchange names (but not, so far as is known, phone numbers).

Dolphins remember and recognize one another’s signature whistles for their whole lives. In the experiment that showed this, captive bottlenose dolphins heard recorded signature whistles of dolphins with whom they’d been housed as long as twenty years earlier. They remembered and responded even if they’d known each other only a short while before being separated. The experimenter, Jason Bruck, concluded, “Dolphins have the potential for lifelong memory for each other.” That was the first formal study showing social memory lasting twenty years in a nonhuman.

Dolphins at the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies, in Mississippi, were trained to help keep their pools clean by trading litter for fish. A dolphin named Kelly realized that she got the same size fish for bringing a big sheet of paper as for a small piece. So, under a weight at the bottom of the pool, she hid any paper that blew in. When a trainer passed, she tore off a piece of paper to trade for a fish. Then she tore off another piece, got another fish. Into the economy of litter, she’d rigged a kind of trash inflation rate that kept the food coming. Similarly, in California, a dolphin named Spock got busted for tearing pieces off a paper bag he’d stuffed behind one of the pool’s underwater pipes, using each shred to buy another fish.

One day, a gull flew into Kelly’s pool, and she grabbed it and waited for the trainers. The humans seemed to really like birds; they traded her several fish for it. This gave Kelly a new insight, and a plan: During her next meal she took the last fish and hid it. When the humans left, she brought the fish up and baited more gulls, to get even more fish. After all, why wait to scrounge an occasional piece of accidental paper when you could become a wealthy commercial bird-fishing dolphin? She taught this to her youngster, who taught other youngsters, and so the dolphins there become professional gull baiters. (...)

Insight, innovation, planning, culture.

In 1979 Diana Reiss started working with a captive bottlenose dolphin named Circe. When Circe did the behavior that Reiss was looking for, Circe got verbal praise and some fish. When she didn’t, she got a “time-out,” in which Reiss stepped back or turned away to indicate that Circe had not performed “correctly.” (Time-outs are now considered outdated; they can frustrate intelligent creatures.) Circe didn’t like tail fins left on her mackerel, and by spitting out the pieces with tails, she essentially trained Reiss to cut them off. One day a few weeks into training, Reiss absentmindedly gave Circe an untrimmed tail section. Circe waved her head from side to side the way we might indicate “No,” spat out the fish, swam to the other side of the pool, positioned herself upright, and just looked at Reiss for a short time. Then she came back. Circe the dolphin had given Reiss the human a time-out.

Astonished but skeptical, Reiss planned an experiment. Six times over several weeks, Reiss purposely fed Circe a tail section with the fin on. Circe gave Reiss four more time-outs. Those were the only times Circe behaved that way. Circe had not only learned “reward” and “no reward; time-out” for her own behavior; she had conceptualized the time-out as a way of communicating the idea “That’s not what I’ve asked for” and used it to correct her human friend.

by Carl Safina, The Sun |  Read more:

Image: via:

Nancy Depew, Sweet Talk
via:

Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916).
via:

Here’s How to Survive a Possible North Korea Nuclear Strike in Hawai‘i

Hawai‘i residents are used to scrambling to the grocery store to stock up on bottled water and disaster supplies in preparation for a hurricane. Now the Hawai‘i State Department of Defense recommends stocking up on a 14-day emergency food supply to prepare for a possible missile attack from North Korea.

“Everyone can prepare for this type of hazard the same way they would prepare for another natural disaster,” says Lt. Col. Charles Anthony, Hawai‘i state Department of Defense spokesman. “Their emergency preparedness kit should be virtually identical.”

And, since hurricane season runs June through November, most people are already prepared. North Korea threatening to nuke Honolulu, where the U.S. Pacific Command is based, is nothing new. However, the recent news of North Korea firing a new ballistic missile into the Sea of Japan is cause for concern since North Korea’s state-run media previously identified Hawai‘i and Alaska as possible targets.

To alert folks to the different threat, the state’s Emergency Management Agency announced it will begin each month testing using an “attack-warning” wailing siren that hasn’t been used since the Cold War ended in the 1980s.

Hawai‘i is more likely to be struck by a Category 4 hurricane than get hit by a nuke, but the possibility is still out there. “We need to make sure we prepare the public for that threat,” Anthony says. [ed. What!?]

Translation: Don’t panic or write it off. So, what is the best way to prepare for a ballistic missile strike?

Here’s a hint: If you hear the sirens, duck and take cover. There are no designated fallout shelters in Honolulu, so go inside a nearby building and stay there. If you’re at home, then stay home, Anthony says. Just avoid windows and, whatever you do, the department warns, “DO NOT look at the flash of light.” Following the detonation, the department recommends remaining in the shelter until “you are told it is safe to leave or two weeks (14 days) have passed, whichever comes first.”

by Dianne Lee, Honolulu Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Stefan Krasowski, Flicrkr via cc by 2.0

[ed. I feel like crying.]

Cogito Zero Sum

What do we really mean when we say we’re “entitled to our opinions”? So many questions have been asked over the past year with the hope that the answers to them may help us better understand how our dangerously absurd political moment came to be. But this question is way more revealing than most.

I’ve been fortunate enough to design and teach my own college courses exploring, from literary, historical, and philosophical angles, the many complex processes that led to a Donald Trump presidency. But, as a teacher of argumentative writing, I’ve also been given a window through which to observe some of those processes in action, to see how their effects manifest in the peculiar ways people—namely, my students—think and act. In classes where argumentation is the center of gravity for everything else we do, my students and I begin every term by discussing whether or not, in our classroom and in the world at large, we are, in fact, entitled to our opinions.

On a purely literal level, the first implication of this common refrain is that, no matter how out of wack your opinion may be, you’re entitled to have it—no one can physically stop you. Sure. That’s reasonable, if kind of banal. (You can physically punish or silence people who have certain opinions, but can you actually stop them from having the opinions in the first place?) But, as it’s generally understood, the second implication of the phrase is more troublesome.

As Patrick Stokes, Senior Lecturer at Deakin University, explains it, the phrase suggests that you’re “entitled to have your views treated as serious candidates for the truth.” As if there’s a social law that says all opinions are equal and all deserve, by right, to be treated equally. This is where lines start to blur—when opinions themselves are seemingly given their own protective rights—and the common refrain that people are “entitled to their opinions” absorbs into itself the pseudo-noble cliché that we must always “respect other people’s opinions.” For Stokes, the obvious problem is that this kind of customary treatment devalues the ways that opinions are supposed to earn serious consideration through logical argumentation, persuasion, rigorous research, and expertise. When these are thrown out the window, people start to expect that their views deserve to not only be taken seriously, but to also be protected from serious challenges, because, well, it’s their opinion.

As Stokes argues, this shared belief that every opinion has an equal claim to being right or true leads to the twisted state of things we have today where, say, anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories or climate change denialism are given plenty of media time and mainstream consideration even when it can be shown that some of their claims are verifiably wrong and have serious negative consequences. Stokes, in other words, is on to something here, but the problem goes much deeper. This prevailing situation hinges less on differing opinions that claim, by their own merits, to be “serious candidates for the truth” and more on the ways that opinions have been given cultural and political protection in the “free market of ideas.” Opinions have been subsumed under the various and more totalizing categories of identity, which are understood to be “off limits.”

Looking back on this tumultuous election year, it seems clear that our political culture is marked, at the micro level, by the fusion of a given person’s opinion and what they perceive to be their singular, permanent, and authentic self. (I know that sounds like highfalutin, farty, pseudo-philosophical B.S., but just bear with me for a minute.) Like race, wingspan, or nationality, a person’s political opinions are now treated as if they are hardwired into their being—they are part of one’s fundamental, seemingly unchanging essence. When I talk with many Trump supporters, for example, or staunch Democrats, they share a striking tendency to describe themselves as individuals who are anything but malleable. They seem to deny that their journey to becoming who they are today might have involved being convinced and even reshaped by the things they’ve chosen to politically affiliate with. Instead, theirs is a story of homecoming. In response to the question, “Why do you support X?” I’ve heard countless personal parables from people who, like every children’s-book character ever, detail how they discovered a place where people like them belonged. (...)

Moreover, it makes sense that the endgame of this process isn’t to justify the righteousness of an argumentative position but to assert that position’s right to exist in the social museum of tolerance. For instance, most of my new students understand that a basic requirement of argumentative papers is to include something called a “counterargument.” So many of them simply take this to mean that they must acknowledge that other viewpoints on the matter at hand exist. At the beginning, students can rarely conceptualize how such counterarguments may derive from conflicts with the logic or evidence bolstering their own arguments; instead, nine times out of ten, they can only imagine these counterarguments coming from assumed interlocutors who quite simply think differently than they do.

In their assigned classwork, students are pushed to express what is otherwise a general condition for social actors today, who daily demonstrate the leap from I-think-therefore-I-am to I-am-therefore-what-I-think. It is really no wonder that, from classrooms to social media pages to newsrooms, strong challenges to individuals’ argumentative positions feel more like personal, existential attacks than anything else. Even if others are responding to your viewpoint with researched facts and deductive reasoning, the idea that they are arguing against your viewpoint in the first place means that they are challenging the very tissue of who you are.

by Maximillian Alvarez, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Rene Descartes, Wikimedia Commons

The English Beat

Dream Daddy

A month ago, if most people had tried to predict what kind of videogame would become the game of the summer, very few of them would have guessed "queer dating simulator." Yet, Dream Daddy did just that, with a pair of stunning usurpals: Not only did it replace beloved first-person shooter Overwatch as the most-discussed videogame on Tumblr for the first time in more than nine months, but it shot to the top of Steam's global sales chart, unseating battle-royal phenomenon PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. Not bad for a tiny game, created by two people, that upends so many notions about what works in a game—and about gamers themselves.

You don't just date dads in Dream Daddy, though; you are one. The game casts you in the role of a single father who has just moved to a new town with his teenage daughter. Although the two of you have been on your own for a while, the death of your spouse—you can specify if they were male or female—clearly still weighs on your mind. You meet six other dads who just happen to live in the same suburban cul-de-sac, and with a little help from a Facebook analogue called Dadbook, the dating begins.

The result is something as sincere and funny as it is heart-rending, a self-aware, deeply humanistic game whose witty script makes even the most groan-worthy dad puns seem to sparkle. It’s a subversion of dating sims that is not just the best dating sim I’ve ever played but also one of the best games of the year.

At first glance, the game's romantic roster looks like a who’s who of sexy stereotypes: the bad boy, the jock, the sensitive artist, the clean-cut hunk. Spend a little more time with them, however, and these facades dissolve, revealing complicated men whose passions, secrets and struggles cannot be neatly contained in cookie-cutter character types. Yes, the Goth Dad enjoys cloaks and long walks in graveyards, and the Jock Dad loves getting in his reps at the gym—but they both struggle to cope with rebellious children, shattered marriages, and the parts of their lives that they are ashamed to share with the world.

Leighton Gray, a 19-year-old student at the Savannah College of Art and Design who created, cowrote, and art-directed Dream Daddy, is queer herself; when she and cowriter Vernon Shaw sat down to develop the game, she says, defying stereotypes was at the forefront of their minds: “We wanted to set up expectations and knock them down.”

A Romance Game Actually About Romance

Those complex characterizations not only make the story far more interesting, they render obsolete the usual rules of dating sims. For all of the genre's seeming emphasis on romance, dating sims often contain a reductively transactional notion of love and sex, relying on a mechanic that independent game developer Arden once described as “kindness coins”: Put enough compliments or gifts into the object of your affection and receive sex in return. “A lot of times with dating sims it’s a matter of getting a read on the character’s personality and telling them exactly what they want to hear,” Gray says. “That's a really frustrating way to play a game.”

Dream Daddy, though, encourages players not to think about romance as a game at all. You can try to impress the music nerd or the academic with knowledge you don't have, but chances are your fakery will fall flat. You might think that the best way to win points with a standoffish dad is through sarcasm; once you learn his backstory, however, you find that what he really wants is kindness. The heartaches and emotional wounds of the men you pursue are not obstacles to be overcome en route to sex, but rather fragments of real humanity that make them even more lovable—and often force you to reexamine your own intentions.

During the resolution of one storyline, you're given an option when comforting one of the dads in a moment of personal crisis: You can tell him what he wants to hear or tell him what he needs to hear. If you prioritize your desire to “win” sex over the well-being of your vulnerable friend—to treat him like a game rather than a person—the result is guilt-inducing, even a little tragic.

Dream Daddy is an unabashedly queer game, but not performatively so; it's far more interested in being than announcing. Some of the dads have had relationships with women before, some with men, but there's no agonizing about their sexual orientation and no more mention of it than there would be in a traditionally heterosexual romance. They simply follow their hearts, and any obstacles they face are a result of emotional and personal complications, not struggles with their identities. “We were determined to not make any of the dads' individual paths about their sexuality or have their sexuality be their defining trait," Gray says. "We can have narratives that are about queer people that are not necessarily about being queer. It’s about these relationships.”

by Laura Hudson, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Game Grumps