Did you know the CIA _____?

I remember learning about Frank Olson in a high school psychology class, in our unit on drugs. What I learned is that during the ’50s the CIA experimented with LSD in their offices until one of their own got so high he fell out a window, embarrassing the agency. Not yet having experimented with LSD myself, that sounded like a believable turn of events. I did not learn about Frank Olson’s son Eric, and his life-defining quest to discover the truth about his father’s death. I did not learn about what actually happened to Frank, which is the subject of the new Errol Morris Netflix series Wormwood. What I learned that day in high school was a CIA cover story.

Spoiler alert: Frank Olson did not fall out of a hotel window in New York City, at least not on accident. The CIA did drug him—along with some of his coworkers—on a company retreat, but the LSD element seems to have functioned mostly as a red herring, a way to admit something without admitting the truth. Frank did not die while on drugs; the week following the acid retreat, Olson informed a superior he planned to leave his job at Camp Detrick and enter a new line of work. Within days he was dead, murdered by the CIA.

Wormwood is a six-episode miniseries, and because Morris spends the first few wiggling out from behind various CIA lies, the viewer isn’t prepared to understand and contextualize what (upon reflection) obviously happened, even when we’re told more or less straight out. Olson was a microbiologist who worked in weapons systems. He was killed in November 1953, in the waning days of open hostilities on the Korean peninsula, almost two years after the North Koreans first accused the United States of engaging in biological warfare. For decades there were rumors and claims: meningitis, cholera, smallpox, plague, hemorrhagic fever. Some of them diseases that had never been previously encountered in the area. The United States denied everything. But the United States also denied killing Frank Olson.

The most affecting moment in Wormwood occurs not during any of the historical reenactments—Peter Sarsgaard’s performance as Frank is only a notch or two above the kind of thing you might see on the History Channel—but at the end, when journalist Seymour Hersh is explaining to Morris that he can’t say on the record exactly what he now knows to be true about the case without burning his high-level source, but he still wants to offer Eric some closure. “Eric knows the ending,” he says, “I think he’s right. He’s totally convinced he knows the ending, am I right? Is he ambivalent in any way?” “No,” Morris confirms. Hersh gives a small shrug, “It’s a terrible story.” In the slight movement of his shoulders he says it all: Yes, the CIA murdered Eric’s father, as he has spent his whole adult life trying to prove, as he has known all along.

The CIA manages to contain a highly contradictory set of meanings: In stock conspiracy theory, the agency is second only to aliens in terms of “who did it,” as well as the Occam’s Razor best suspect for any notable murder that occurred anywhere in the world during the second half of the 20th century. I don’t think Americans have trouble simultaneously believing that stories of the CIA assassinating people are mostly “crazy,” and that they absolutely happened. What emerges from the contradiction is naïveté coated in a candy shell of cynicism, in the form of a trivia game called “Did you know the CIA _____?” Did you know the CIA killed Mossadegh? Did you know they killed Lumumba? Did you know the CIA killed Marilyn Monroe and Salvador Allende? Did you know they made a fake porn movie with a Sukarno lookalike, and they had to take out Noriega because he still had his CIA paystubs in a box in his closet? There’s a whole variant just about Fidel Castro. Some of these stories are urban legends, most are fundamentally true, and yet as individual tidbits they lack a total context. If cold war is the name for the third world war that didn’t happen, what’s the name for what did?

In a recent segment, Fox News host Laura Ingraham invited former CIA director James Woolsey to talk about Russian intervention in the American election. After chatting about China and Russia’s comparative cyber capabilities, Ingraham goes off script: “Have we ever tried to meddle in other countries’ elections?” Woolsey answers quickly: “Oh, probably, but it was for the good of the system, in order to avoid communists taking over. For example, in Europe, in ’47, ’48,’49 . . . the Greeks and the Italians . . . we, the CIA . . . ” Ingraham cuts him off, “We don’t do that now though?” She is ready to deny it to herself and the audience, but here Woolsey makes a horrible, inane sound with his mouth. The closest analog I can think of is the sound you make when you’re playing with a toddler and you pretend to eat a piece of plastic watermelon, something like: “Myum myum myum myum.” He and Ingraham both burst into laughter. “Only for a very good cause. In the interests of democracy,” he chuckles. In the late ‘40s, rigged Greek elections triggered a civil war in which over 150,000 people died. It is worth noting that Woolsey is a lifelong Democrat, while Ingraham gave a Nazi salute from the podium at the 2016 Republican National Convention.

Why does Woolsey answer “Oh, probably,” when he knows, first- or second-hand, that the answer is yes, and follows up with particular examples? The non-denial hand-wave goes further than yes. It says: Come on, you know we’d do anything. And Ingraham, already submerged in that patriotic blend of knowing and declining to know, transitions smoothly from “We don’t do that now though?” to laughing out loud. The glare of the studio lights off her titanium-white teeth is bright enough to illuminate seventy years of world history.

For as long as the CIA has existed, the US government has used outlandish accusations against the agency as evidence that this country’s enemies are delusional liars. At the same time, the agency has undeniably engaged in activities that are indistinguishable from the wildest conspiracy theories. Did the CIA drop bubonic plague on North Korea? Of course not. But if we did, then of course we did. It’s a convenient jump: Between these two necessities is the range of behaviors for which people and institutions can be held responsible. It’s hard to pull off this act with a straight face, but as Woolsey demonstrates in the Fox News clip, there’s no law saying you can’t do it with a big grin. (...)

Unfortunately Morris and Wormwood are focused on ambiguity for ambiguity’s sake, when, by the end of the story, there’s very little of it left. Eric found the CIA assassination manual, which includes a description of the preferred method: knocking someone on the head and then throwing them out of a high window in a public place. He has narrowed down the reasonable explanations—at the relevant level of specificity—to one. Unlike in a normal true-crime series, however, there’s nothing to be done: As Eric explains, you can sue the government for killing someone on accident, but not for killing them on purpose. The end result of Wormwood is that the viewer’s answer to the son flips like an Ingraham switch, from “Of course the CIA didn’t murder your dad” to “Of course the CIA murdered your dad.” I hope for his sake that the latter is easier to bear.

***

Did you know the CIA killed Bob Marley?

A CIA agent named Bill Oxley confessed on his deathbed that he gave the singer a pair of Converse sneakers, one of which hid in the toe a wire tainted with cancer. When Marley put on the shoes, he pricked his toe and was infected with the disease that would lead to his death.

No, that’s wrong. There was no CIA agent named Bill Oxley, and the story of Bob Marley’s lethal shoe is somewhere between an urban legend and fake news.

But did you know the CIA almost killed Bob Marley?

In 1976, facing a potentially close election, Jamaican prime minister Michael Manley maneuvered to co-opt a public concert by Marley, turning an intentionally apolitical show into a government-sponsored rally. When Marley agreed to go through with the show anyway, many feared a reprisal from the opposition Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), whose candidate Edward Seaga was implicitly endorsed by the American government. All year accusations had been flying that the CIA was, in various ways, intentionally destabilizing Jamaica in order to get Seaga in power and move the island away from Cuba (politically) and, principally, ensure cheap American access to the island’s bauxite ore. Both the JLP and Manley’s PNP controlled groups of gunmen, but (much to America’s chagrin) the social democrat Manley controlled the security forces, remained popular with the people, and was in general a capable politician (as evidenced by the concert preparations).

On December 3, 1976—two days before the concert—Marley was wounded when three gunmen shot up his house. Witnesses to the destruction describe “immense” firepower, with four automatics firing round after round—one of the men using two at the same time. The confidential State Department wire from Kingston was sent four days later: “REGGAE STAR SHOT; MOTIVE PROBABLY POLITICAL.” There was only one reasonable political motive: destabilization, in the interest of Seaga (or, as Kingston graffiti had it, “CIAga.”) The concert was meant to bring Jamaicans together, but some forces wanted to rip them apart. Where did the assassins get their guns? The people of Jamaica knew: The CIA. (...)

The lack of a smoking gun for any particular accusation shouldn’t be a stumbling block. In the famous words of Donald Rumsfeld: “Simply because you do not have evidence that something exists does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn’t exist.” (Rumsfeld would know; he was serving his first tour as secretary of defense during the Jamaican destabilization campaign.) The CIA exists in part to taint evidence, especially of its own activity. Even participant testimony can be discredited, as the CIA has done repeatedly (and with success) whenever former employees have spoken out, including during the Jamaican campaign. After all, in isolation each individual claim sounds—is carefully designed to sound—crazy. The circumstantial evidence, however, is harder to dismiss. If I rest a steak on my kitchen counter, leave the room, and come back to no steak and my dog licking the tile floor, I don’t need to check my door for a bandit. The CIA’s propensity for replacing frustrating foreign leaders or arming right-wing paramilitaries—especially in the western hemisphere—is no more mysterious than the dog. Refusing to put two and two together is not a mark of sophistication or fair-mindedness.

Of course the CIA shot Bob Marley. To assert that in that way is not to make a particular falsifiable claim about who delivered money to whom, who brought how many bullets where, who pulled which trigger, or who knew what when. It’s a broader claim about the circumstances under which it happened: a dense knot of information and interests and resources and bodies that was built that way on purpose, for that tangled quality, and to obtain a set of desired outcomes. The hegemonic “Grouping”—to put the State Department’s sarcastic term to honest work—ties the knot.

by Malcolm Harris, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The Imprint of a Mitsubishi kamikaze Zero along the side of H.M.S Sussex. 1945.

via:

Japanese college students during their relocation to a internment camp. Sacramento, California 1942
via:

Ira Carter
via:

In Which I Fix My Girlfriend's Grandparent's WiFi and am Hailed as a Conquering Hero

Lo, in the twilight days of the second year of the second decade of the third millennium did a great darkness descend over the wireless internet connectivity of the people of 276 Ferndale Street in the North-Central lands of Iowa. For many years, the gentlefolk of these lands basked in a wireless network overflowing with speed and ample internet, flowing like a river into their Compaq Presario. Many happy days did the people spend checking Hotmail and reading USAToday.com.

But then one gray morning did Internet Explorer 6 no longer load The Google. Refresh was clicked, again and again, but still did Internet Explorer 6 not load The Google. Perhaps The Google was broken, the people thought, but then The Yahoo too did not load. Nor did Hotmail. Nor USAToday.com. The land was thrown into panic. Internet Explorer 6 was minimized then maximized. The Compaq Presario was unplugged then plugged back in. The old mouse was brought out and plugged in beside the new mouse. Still, The Google did not load.

Some in the kingdom thought the cause of the darkness must be the Router. Little was known of the Router, legend told it had been installed behind the recliner long ago by a shadowy organization known as Comcast. Others in the kingdom believed it was brought by a distant cousin many feasts ago. Concluding the trouble must lie deep within the microchips, the people of 276 Ferndale Street did despair and resign themselves to defeat.

But with the dawn of the feast of Christmas did a beacon of hope manifest itself upon the inky horizon. Riding in upon a teal Ford Focus came a great warrior, a suitor of the gentlefolks’ granddaughter. Word had spread through the kingdom that this warrior worked with computers and perhaps even knew the true nature of the Router.

The people did beseech the warrior to aid them. They were a simple people, capable only of rewarding him with gratitude and a larger-than-normal serving of Jell-O salad. The warrior considered the possible battles before him. While others may have shirked the duties, forcing the good people of Ferndale Street to prostrate themselves before the tyrants of Comcast, Linksys, and Geek Squad, the warrior could not chill his heart to these depths. He accepted the quest and strode bravely across the beige shag carpet of the living room.

Deep, deep behind the recliner did the warrior crawl, over great mountains of National Geographic magazines and deep chasms of TV Guides. At last he reached a gnarled thicket of cords, a terrifying knot of gray and white and black and blue threatening to ensnare all who ventured further. The warrior charged ahead. Weaker men would have lost their minds in the madness: telephone cords plugged into Ethernet jacks, AC adapters plugged into phone jacks, a lone VGA cable wrapped in a firm knot around an Ethernet cord. But the warrior bested the thicket, ripping away the vestigial cords and swiftly untangling the deadly trap.

And at last the warrior arrived at the Router. It was a dusty black box with an array of shimmering green lights, blinking on and off, as if to taunt him to come any further. The warrior swiftly maneuvered to the rear of the router and verified what he had feared, what he had heard whispered in his ear from spirits beyond: all the cords were securely in place.

The warrior closed his eyes, summoning the power of his ancestors, long departed but watchful still. And then with the echoing beep of his digital watch, he moved with deadly speed, wrapping his battle-hardened hands around the power cord at the back of the Router.

Gripping it tightly, he pulled with all his force, dislodging the cord from the Router. The heavens roared. The earth wailed. The green lights turned off. Silently the warrior counted. One. Two. Three. And just as swiftly, the warrior plugged the cord back into the router. Great crashes of blood-red lightning boomed overhead. Murders of crows blackened the skies. The Power light came on solid green. The seas rolled. The WLAN light blinked on. The forests ignited. A dark fog rolled over the land and suddenly all was silent. The warrior stared at the Internet light, waiting, waiting. And then, as the world around him seemed all but dead, the Internet light began to blink.

by Mike Lacher, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: Piotr Adamowicz

via:

McCoy Tyner Trio

The Streaming Void

Has the era of the cult film come to an end?

The defining cult film of the twenty-first century is neither a mirror held up to nature or a hammer used to shape reality. The Room, released in 2003, is like a ninety-nine-minute episode of The Real World as performed by the inmates of the asylum of Charenton under the direction of no one. It is an incoherent broadside against evil women (or all women) and a backwards vindication of all-American male breadwinners who buy their girls roses and befriend at-risk teens. It’s a tragedy not just because it ends with a suicide, but also because sitting through it requires a robust Dionysian death drive. The Room is so bad that when you point out its idiocy, the idiocy of stating the obvious bounces back and sticks to you.

The plot is both simplistic and convoluted. The film’s writer, director, and producer, Tommy Wiseau, stars as Johnny, the only banker in America who’s also a stand-up guy. His fiancée, Lisa (Juliette Danielle), is a gold digger who spends idle days seducing Johnny’s best friend, Mark (Greg Sestero), and shopping with her manipulative mother (Carolyn Minnott). When Johnny learns about the affair, he kills himself. Fin. But first, Wiseau allows himself some inexplicable digressions. Johnny and his friends play football in tuxedos. Johnny and Mark save a teenage boy (Philip Haldiman) from a gun-wielding drug dealer (Dan Janjigian). The mom announces she has breast cancer. There are several endless, poorly blocked sex scenes. Some of this is funny; mostly, though, it’s boring.

It was Wiseau’s performance, mainly the dialogue studded with non sequiturs, that elevated The Room to its current “Citizen Kane of bad movies” status. In one famous scene, Johnny storms onto his building’s roof deck, ranting about a rumor Lisa’s spreading that he hit her, then greets his buddy with a casual, “Oh, hi, Mark.” It didn’t help that Wiseau was a creepy-looking dude in his late forties who styled himself like a romance-novel cover model and cast actors in their twenties as his peers. His accent, which is never explained in the movie, brings to mind a generic “foreigner” in an old sitcom.

Before you protest that I’m picking on a defenseless oddball, you should know how The Room got made and how it became a cult sensation. Wiseau was a wealthy man living under an assumed name, with residences in San Francisco and Los Angeles. An enthusiastic American patriot, he was cagey about his country of origin and claimed, flimsily, to have made his money flipping real estate. Sestero—Wiseau’s friend, collaborator, sometime roommate, and the co-author of The Disaster Artist, a memoir about The Room—once found a driver’s license in his friend’s name listing a date of birth thirteen years later than Wiseau was actually born.

Wiseau spent $6 million on the project—which used few locations and no complicated special effects—because its star wasted hours stumbling over simple lines and its director made dozens of expensive, absurd decisions. The Room was shot simultaneously on 35 mm film and digital video, for no good reason. Instead of filming an exterior scene in an alley outside the studio, Wiseau made his art director build an identical indoor alley set. It’s not that everyone just sat back and let a rich fool wreck himself—Wiseau ignored his crew’s advice, bullied actresses about their appearances, threw tantrums, and lied constantly. Minott once fainted because Wiseau refused to buy an air conditioner for the set.

When the movie was finally finished, Wiseau paid for two weeks of L.A.-area screenings in order to submit it for Oscar consideration. During that run, The Room earned only $1,800 but caught the attention of film students Michael Rousselet and Scott Gairdner, who Sestero claims were drawn in by a review blurb outside the theater that read, “Watching this film is like getting stabbed in the head.” They spread the gospel of Tommy Wiseau to its rightful audience of bad-movie connoisseurs, who’ve been throwing spoons (in tribute to the living-room set’s inscrutable spoon art) at the screen during sold-out midnight showings ever since. In September 2017, The Hollywood Reporter quoted an expert who estimated The Room was earning up to $25,000 a month. This must have helped Wiseau recoup the $300,000 he spent on the strange billboard advertising the film that hung in Hollywood for five years.

The Disaster Artist has been fictionalized as a well-received buddy comedy that yielded a best actor Golden Globe for its own director and star, James Franco. As midnight screenings of The Room grew ever more popular, the new publicity secured it one day of wide theatrical release, on January 10. (The next evening, the L.A. Times published five women’s allegations of sexual misconduct against Franco, which helps to explain both his apparent amusement at Wiseau’s creepy misogyny and why he didn’t get any Oscar nominations.) But the awards-bait Tommy Wiseau is a lighter character than the mean, narcissistic borderline stalker Sestero describes, and the movie’s tale of a weirdo’s unlikely triumph rings hollow when you consider that people with $6 million of disposable income can do pretty much whatever they want. (Although we now know Wiseau is sixty-two and hails from Poland, the source of his fortune—described in Sestero’s book as a “bottomless pit”—remains a mystery.)

It makes an unfortunate sort of sense, when you consider our current political reality, that we’ve spent so much time and money celebrating the stupid, misogynistic vanity project of a self-described real estate tycoon with piles of possibly ill-gotten cash. Cult movies used to be scruffy, desperately original, and intermittently brilliant works of transgressive art that left audiences energized, and sometimes radicalized. The Room—which is bad art, but art nonetheless—does the opposite. The mirror it holds up is the underside of a dirty metal spoon; the reflection you see in it is blurry but genuine. So what’s sadder: that it set the prototype for the twenty-first-century American cult film or that it might wind up being our last enduring cult hit?

Hammer Time

Cult films once resembled Brechtian hammers more often than Shakespearean mirrors. The history of the form is as disjointed as the shaggiest entries in its filmography, but it’s possible to splice together a rough chronology. Although the phrase “cult film” wasn’t common until the seventies, the idea that movies and their stars could have cultish appeal dates back to the silent era. In the essay “Film Cults,” from 1932, the critic Harry Alan Potamkin traces the phenomenon to French Charlie Chaplin fans in the 1910s. He figures the United States had cultists of its own by 1917, when “American boys of delight,” by which he means populist critics, “began to write with seriousness, if not with critical insight, about the rudimentary film.” Potamkin cites the Marx Brothers, Mickey Mouse, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as early objects of cinephilic obsession.

Over the next few decades, cults formed around stars whose personalities eclipsed their versatility as actors, from Humphrey Bogart to Judy Garland. B movies thrived at fifties drive-ins, spawning genre-loyal cults of western, sci-fi, and horror fans. Exploitation cinema—skeletally plotted collages of sex, drugs, and violence created to “exploit” captive audiences of various demographics—took off in the sixties, especially after the Production Code collapsed in 1968. Then the Hollywood wing of the youth counterculture started to make psychedelic films like Easy Rider and Head. Arthouses showed such sexually explicit, politically radical European movies as I Am Curious (Yellow) alongside the work of Fellini and Godard. Low-budget auteurs, most notably John Waters, combined all of those influences to make self-aware trash with subversive overtones.

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s mystical “acid western” El Topo wasn’t the first movie to screen at midnight, but its six-month run at New York’s Elgin Theater in 1970 and 1971 set the template for “midnight movies” as a cult ritual. About five years later, The Rocky Horror Picture Show opened a mile away at the Waverly. Interactive midnight screenings in cities around the country followed, and they’re still filling theaters after four decades.

That half a century of cult films preceded any attempt to define the category helps to explain why determining what even makes a “cult film” is so difficult. Cultists’ holiest text, Danny Peary’s Cult Movies (1981), does a solid job enumerating their most common attributes: “atypical heroes and heroines; offbeat dialogue; surprising plot resolutions; highly original storylines; brave themes, often of a sexual or political nature; ‘definitive’ performances by stars who have cult status; the novel handling of popular but stale genres.” Rocky Horror, a retro sci-fi musical that chronicles a prudish young couple’s corruption at the hands of a genderqueer alien/mad scientist who is ultimately vanquished by his own servants, meets all of these criteria.

Still, “cult classic” is an infinitely elastic term that crosses the boundaries of budget, genre, style, language, and intended audience.

by Judy Berman, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Najeebah Al-Ghadban

[ed. I just finished reading The Disaster Artist and have absolutely zero interest in ever watching it on film, or The Room either (although one of my favorite movies of all time is Ed Wood. Go figure).]

Thoughts on the Trump-Kim Summit

I wanted to briefly comment and share some perspective on yesterday’s announcement of a Kim-Trump summit this spring. I’m going to format them as a series of propositions or individual items rather than a structured argument.

1. Despite all the bad things about President Trump’s management of U.S. foreign policy, there’s almost nothing that could be worse or more perilous than the progression of events of the last six to eight months on the Korean peninsula. There’s likely no more dangerous tension point in the world for the United States than the Korean peninsula. This is better than the alternative.

2. It is critical to understand that it is very, very hard to imagine that North Korea at any time in the foreseeable future will give up its nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons delivery capacity. President Trump does not seem to realize that. Why should they? One thing that is clear in the post-Cold War world is that states with nuclear weapons do not get attacked or overthrown by force of arms by the U.S. or anyone else. Nuclear states are the “made men” of the 21st-century global order. The North Korean state leadership may be paranoid. But they do have enemies. Critically, they are the only communist state based on a Cold War-era national division which has survived the fall of the Soviet Union. And power vis a vis the outside world is a centerpiece of the Kim family’s legitimacy within North Korea. (People I listen to who really know these issues often remind me that the Kim family’s calculus is driven not by calculations about the U.S. or South Korea but with the internal logic of regime stability.)

It is equally important to understand that North Korea probably mainly already has what it wants, a robust nuclear deterrent. They have demonstrated an ability to detonate multiple nuclear warheads and they have demonstrated the ability to launch ICBMs which can likely reach the continental United States. It’s unclear to me (and I suspect unclear to the U.S.) whether North Korea can combine those two technologies to deliver a nuclear warhead to the United States. But I don’t think we can discount that possibility. That very real possibility creates a massive deterrent already. This is important because it means that North Korea has some freedom to suspend its nuclear and missile testing for a short time or perhaps even indefinitely. Because they already have what they want. On the deterrence front, the status quo may work for them.

What Kim has done is agree to suspend testing (something he likely feels he can do from some position of strength) and meet with the U.S. as equals with no preconditions. This is a resounding confirmation of Kim’s premise and internal argument for legitimacy and power that building a nuclear arsenal will bring North Korea respect, power, and international legitimacy. Remember a key point. The Kims have been pushing for a summit with a U.S. president for 25 years. They have wanted this forever. Did President Trump know this? Or did he think it was a confirmation of his policy and genius? I strongly suspect it’s the latter.

What all of this means is that North Korea mainly has what it wants or rather what it feels it truly needs and can bargain from a position of strength to get what it wants: end of sanctions, normalization, aid, etc. It is highly unrealistic to imagine that North Korea will ever agree to denuclearize.

3. Generally speaking, you agree to a summit like this once there’s an agreement more or less in place worked out by subordinates. The meeting is what brings it all together. Trump appears inclined to approach this like a business negotiation that he’s going to knock out of the park even though he doesn’t have much understanding of what’s being discussed. He shows every sign of getting played and we’re likely to see a lengthy process of aides trying to make the best of the fait accompli he’s created.

US commentators often say that the U.S. shouldn’t hold summits like this because it confers “legitimacy” on a bad acting state. This always sounds a bit self-flattering to me. It is probably more accurate to say that it confers status and power to treat with the global great power as an equal. That is a thing of value, certainly to North Korea. They’ve wanted it for decades.

President Trump has already stated publicly that this is a negotiation, a meeting to achieve denuclearization. No one from North Korea has said that. Trump has said that. It is highly unlikely that North Korea will ever agree to that. That sets up high odds of embarrassment and disappointment. Given that President has shown very little inclination to be briefed or take advice, the odds are even greater. So will Trump agree to things he shouldn’t? Will he feel humiliated and react belligerently? It’s a highly unpredictable encounter with an inexperienced and petulant President who will reject almost all counsel. It sounds like North Korea has gotten a really big thing in exchange for very little and has no real incentive to do more than meet, bask, say generic things and not agree to anything. Trump looks like he’s getting played big time. I suspect we will learn that he didn’t consult with any advisors before agreeing to meet.

What does this all mean? As Churchill said, jaw, jaw, jaw is better than war, war, war. We have been on an extremely dangerous trajectory. There are no good solutions. There are probably no realistic paths to North Korea ceasing to be a nuclear power. But you could perhaps find agreements to limit the scope and reach of the nuclear and missile programs in place (perhaps even scale it back) with some mix of normalization and aid. But we start with an opening gambit in which Trump seems to be stumbling into something of a trap and being guided by his self-importance and vanity rather than any realistic appraisal of the situation.

Despite it being better than the alternative it’s starting in the worst way.

by Josh Marshall, TPM |  Read more:

[ed. See also: White House Now Trying To Moonwalk Back Trump’s Summit Goof]

$1 Fentanyl Test Strip

No drug has fueled the current spike in overdose deaths more than fentanyl. The synthetic opioid claimed two thirds of the record 64,000 such fatalities in the U.S. in 2016.

Up to 100 times more potent than morphine, this compound has played a significant role in reducing Americans’ life expectancy for the second straight year. In three states—Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Massachusetts—the drug was found responsible for at least 70 percent of opioid-related deaths, in what drug-harm reduction specialists have described as “slow-motion slaughter.”

Jess Tilley, a harm-reduction veteran in Northampton, Mass., deploys several outreach teams to rural areas. They pass out clean syringes and the overdose-reversal drug naloxone—and refer people to detox programs. But Tilley’s most in-demand item is a $1 testing strip that accurately detects the presence of fentanyl, which dealers sometimes add to boost the strength of illicit drugs.

In 2016, when the overdose rate in western Massachusetts doubled in a year, Tilley bought a thousand fentanyl testing strips—a low-tech device that resembles a pregnancy test—from a Canadian company, and began distributing them to drug users. She says the response was immediate. As demand skyrocketed, she also began asking low-level drug dealers to test their supplies for fentanyl. Tilley says they began regularly pulling tainted supplies from the market. “When people get a tangible result, it changes behavior,” says Tilley, executive director of the nonprofit New England User's Union. “I’ve been able to track behavior trends. People say when they get results [from the strips], they’re cutting back half of what they’re doing, or they’re making sure they have someone with them when they get high.”

A study released in February reinforces Tilley’s anecdotal accounts. Conducted by Johns Hopkins and Brown universities, the study examined three technologies for testing fentanyl in street drug supplies, and looked at how such testing influenced fentanyl use behavior. The strips (based on an immunoassay, which uses the bonding of an antibody with an antigen to detect the presence of fentanyl) proved most reliable according to the study, detecting fentanyl with 100 percent accuracy in drug samples from Baltimore and 96 percent accuracy in those from Rhode Island. (...)

“It’s an important study, and it shows that the fentanyl test can be really used as a point-of-care test within harm-reduction programs,” says Jon Zibbell, a public health scientist at nonprofit research organization RTI International. “The one limitation of the test strips is that they are not quantitative—they don't tell you how much product is there.”

Zibbell, a former health scientist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who was not involved in the new study, says he is working on his own fentanyl-testing research. He believes the logical next step for opioid-deluged communities would be to set up local facilities where users can have their drugs subjected to a more quantitative and qualitative analysis. “If we really want to deal with the myriad of drugs that are in these products,” he says, “we need to have labs where people can drop their stuff off and have a result in real time. That would increase knowledge, increase safety and, at the end of the day, reduce overdose fatalities.”

by Alfonso Serrano, Scientific American | Read more:
Image: wonderferret Flickr

Kimiyo Mishima, Fragment II, 1964
via:

When Winter Never Ends

DAY 1: FEB. 4, 2018

"There is timing in the whole life of the warrior, in his thriving and declining, in his harmony and discord."
--Musashi Miyamoto (circa 1584-1645), samurai and artist

Ichiro Suzuki steps out of the cold into the small restaurant that serves him dinner most nights. It's winter in Kobe, Japan, where he once played professional baseball and where he comes during the offseason to train. His wife, Yumiko, is back home in Seattle. He is here alone, free from the untidy bits of domestic life that might break his focus. Every day, he works out in a professional stadium he rents, and then he usually comes to this restaurant, which feels like a country inn transported to the city. It's tucked away on the fifth floor of a downtown building and accessible by a tiny elevator. Someone on the staff meets Ichiro at the back door so he can slip in unseen. Someone else rushes to take his coat, and Ichiro sits at a small bar with his back to the rest of the diners. Two friends join him. Inside the warm and glowing room, the chef slips on his traditional coat as he greets Ichiro in mock surprise.

"Thanks for coming again," says the chef, wearing Miami Marlins shorts.

"You guys made me wait outside," Ichiro jokes.

Ichiro is a meticulous man, held in orbit by patterns and attention to detail. This place specializes in beef tongue, slicing it thin by hand and serving it raw alongside hot cast-iron skillets. They do one thing perfectly, which appeals to Ichiro. Tonight he's got dark jeans rolled up to the calf, each leg even, and a gray T-shirt under a white button-down with a skinny tie. His hair looks darker than in some recent photos, maybe the lighting, maybe a dye job. Either way, not even a 44-year-old future Hall of Famer is immune from the insecurities and diminishments that come with time. This winter is the most insecure and diminished he's been.

He doesn't have a professional baseball contract in America or Japan. His agent, John Boggs, has called, texted and emailed teams so often that one MLB general manager now calls Boggs "the elephant hunter," because he's stalking his prey. Boggs recently sent an email to all 30 teams. Only one wrote back to decline. Ichiro hasn't spoken to Boggs once this offseason, locked in on what he and his aging body can control.

The restaurant fills up. Customers take off their shoes. At every table, signs warn that no pictures can be taken. Ichiro waves at an older couple. A producer type brings two young women over to meet him, and Ichiro makes small talk before they bow and recede. He makes some jokes about aging and turns a wine bottle in his hand to read the label. The waiters, wearing sandals and blue bandannas, sling plates of raw tongue and mugs of cold beer with ice flecks in them. The chef installs a fresh gas can and sets down a cast-iron grill in front of Ichiro.

"This is really delicious," Ichiro says.

He and his companions discuss the future, debating philosophies of business, a new world opening up. Later they turn nostalgic and talk about the past. He started training every day in the third grade and has never stopped. Once during his career he took a vacation, a trip to Milan that he hated. This past October, Marlins infielder Dee Gordon came to get something at the clubhouse after the season. He heard the crack of a bat in the cages and found Ichiro there, getting in his daily swings. "I really just hope he keeps playing," Gordon says with a chuckle, "because I don't want him to die. I believe he might die if he doesn't keep playing. What is Ichiro gonna do if he doesn't play baseball?"

Former teammates all have favorite Ichiro stories, about how he carries his bats in a custom humidor case to keep out moisture, how in the minors he'd swing the bat for 10 minutes every night before going to sleep, or wake up some mornings to swing alone in the dark from 1 to 4 a.m. All the stories make the same point: He has methodically stripped away everything from his life except baseball. Former first baseman Mike Sweeney, who got close to Ichiro in Seattle, tells one about getting a call from an old teammate who'd had an off-day in New York. You're not gonna believe this, the guy began. He'd brought along his wife and they walked through Central Park, thrilled to be together in such a serene place. Far off in the distance, at a sandlot field with an old backstop that looked leftover from the 1940s, they saw a guy playing long toss. The big leaguer did the quick math and figured the distant stranger was throwing 300 feet on the fly. Curious, he walked closer. The guy hit balls into the backstop, the powerful shotgun blast of real contact familiar to any serious player. He became impressed, so he got even closer, close enough to see.

The man working out alone in Central Park was Ichiro.

His agent and those close to him think he'll sign with a Japanese team if no offer comes from the major leagues. Television crews floated around the Ginza district in Tokyo the night before asking people what they think about Ichiro's future. Ichiro, as usual, is saying nothing. He's a cipher, keeping himself hidden, yet his yearning has never been more visible. His old team, the Orix Buffaloes, wants him back desperately -- but Japanese spring training started three days ago and Ichiro remains in Kobe. For a private man, these three days speak loudly about his need for another season in America. Over the years, he's talked about playing until he's 50 but also of his desire to "vanish" once his career ends. Those two desires exist in opposition, and if America never calls, he holds the power to make either of them real. He can sign with Orix, or he can fade away. The choice is his.

These are the things working in his life at dinner, a cold Sunday night between the Rokko mountains and Osaka Bay. Ichiro finally stands to leave. Two customers step into the aisle and bow, not the perfunctory half-bow of business associates and hotel bellmen, but a full to-the-waist bow of deep respect. Is this what the end of a great career looks like up close? Ichiro hates not playing baseball, but he might hate playing poorly even more. When he's slumping, his wife has said, she will wake up and find him crying in his sleep. The first time he went on the disabled list as a major leaguer was because of a bleeding stomach ulcer. That year, he'd led Japan to a victory in the 2009 World Baseball Classic, winning the final game with a base hit in extra innings. The stress ate a hole in his stomach. Weeks later, a Mariners team doctor told him he couldn't play on Opening Day. Ichiro refused to listen, his teammate Sweeney says. Before the team ultimately forced him to sit, the doctor tried to explain that a bleeding ulcer was a serious condition that could actually kill him.

Ichiro listened, unmoved.

"I'll take my chances," he said.

DAY 2: FEB. 5, 2018

The next morning at 11:46, Ichiro moves quickly through the Hotel Okura lobby. A hood covers his head. This 35-story waterfront tower is where he always stays, an understated gold and black lacquer palace that looks designed by the prop department from "You Only Live Twice." His green Mercedes G-Class SUV is parked directly in front of the hotel and he climbs inside. The ballpark he rents, literally an entire stadium, is over the mountains, and he takes a right onto Highway 2, then an exit onto Fusehatake. He uses his blinker to change lanes.

The temperature is 38 degrees and falling.

A waterfall in front of the hotel is frozen mid-cascade.

On the drive toward the stadium, it begins to flurry.

At the field, he changes into shorts and steps out onto the field. A hard wind blows. Passing clouds drop the mercury even more. Ichiro isn't here in spite of the brutal cold but because of it. Japanese culture in general -- and Ichiro in particular -- remains influenced by remnants of bushido, the code of honor and ethics governing the samurai warrior class. Suffering reveals the way to greatness. When the nation opened up to the Western world in 1868, the language didn't even have a word to call games played for fun. Baseball got filtered through the prism of martial arts, and it remains a crucible rather than an escape. Japanese home run king Sadaharu Oh wrote in his memoir: "Baseball in America is a game that is born in spring and dies in autumn. In Japan it is bound to winter as the heart is to the body." (...)

DAY 3: FEB. 6, 2018

Ichiro walks through the hotel lobby at exactly the same time as the day before, 11:46 a.m., repeating his routine to the minute. He's a funny self-deprecating guy who often makes light of his own compulsive behaviors, which extend far beyond his baseball-related rituals. He said in a Japanese interview that he once listened to the same song for a month or more. There's enlightenment in obsession, he says, because focus opens perception to many things. It boils life down.

"I'm not normal," he admitted.

He gets stuck in patterns. In the minors, sometimes his 10-minute bedtime swinging ritual stretched to two hours or more. His mind wouldn't let him stop. For years, he only ate his wife's curry before games, day after day. According to a Japanese reporter who's covered him for years, Ichiro now eats udon noodles or toasted bread. He likes the first slice toasted for 2 minutes, 30 seconds, and the second slice toasted for 1 minute, 30 seconds. (He calculates the leftover heat in the toaster.) For a while on the road he ate only cheese pizzas from California Pizza Kitchen. He prefers Jojoen barbecue sauce for his beef. Once Yumiko ran out and mixed the remaining amount with Sankoen brand sauce -- which is basically identical -- and Ichiro immediately noticed. These stories are endless and extend far beyond food. This past September, a Japanese newspaper described how he still organizes his life in five-minute blocks. Deviations can untether him. Retirement remains the biggest deviation of all. Last year, a Miami newspaperman asked what he planned on doing after baseball.

"I think I'll just die," Ichiro said.

Today Ichiro walks onto the field in Kobe, right on time, and everyone is waiting. It's uncanny. They bow when he reaches the dugout. It's a Tuesday, even colder than the day before, but the routine doesn't change: the four jogging laps across the outfield, the baserunning, the 50 soft-toss pitches, exactly 50. Except for the cold these aren't hard workouts, more like a ritualized ceremony among friends. He could choose the best players in Japan to help him but he doesn't. He doesn't need to get better at swinging a bat. What he needs, and what he seems to find in this rented stadium, is the comfort of the familiar, a place where he knows who he is supposed to be.

He is equally precise during the season, to the amusement of teammates. Dee Gordon says Ichiro even lint-rolls the floor of his locker. He cleans and polishes his glove and keeps wipes in the dugout to give his shoes a once-over before taking the field. The Yankees clubhouse manager tells a story about Ichiro's arrival to the team in 2012. Ichiro came to him with a serious matter to discuss: Someone had been in his locker. The clubhouse guy was worried something had gone missing, like jewelry or a watch, and he rushed to check.

Ichiro pointed at his bat.

Then he pointed at a spot maybe 8 inches away.

His bat had moved.

The clubhouse manager sighed in relief and told Ichiro that he'd accidentally bumped the bat while putting a clean uniform or spikes or something back into Ichiro's locker, which is one of the main roles of clubhouse attendants.

"That can't happen," Ichiro said, smiling but serious.

From that day forward, the Yankees staff didn't replace anything in his locker like they did for every other player on the team. They waited until he arrived and handed him whatever he needed for the day.

These stories are funny individually, but they feel different when taken as a whole. Like nearly all obsessive people, Ichiro finds some sort of safety in his patterns. He goes up to the plate with a goal in mind, and if he accomplishes that goal, then he is at peace for a few innings. Since his minor league days in Japan, he has devised an achievable, specific goal every day, to get a boost of validation upon completion. That's probably why he hates vacations. In the most public of occupations, he is clearly engaged in a private act of self-preservation. He's winnowed his life to only the cocoon baseball provides. His days allow for little beyond his routine, like leaving his hotel room at 11:45, or walking through the lobby a minute later, or going to the stadium day after day in the offseason -- perhaps his final offseason. Here in the freezing cold, with a 27-degree wind chill, the hooks ping off the flagpoles. The bat in his hand is 33.46 inches long. He steps into the cage and sees 78 pitches. He swings 75 times.

Up close, he looks a lot like a prisoner.

by Wright Thompson, ESPN | Read more:
Image: Kevork Djansezian/Getty

Małgorzata Sajur, Mirror mirror
via:

The Arithmetic of Risk

A month ago, I noted that prevailing valuation extremes implied negative total returns for the S&P 500 on 10-12 year horizon, and losses on the order of two-thirds of the market’s value over the completion of the current market cycle. With our measures of market internals constructive, on balance, we had maintained a rather neutral near-term outlook for months, despite the most extreme “overvalued, overbought, overbullish” syndromes in U.S. history. Still, I noted, “I believe that it’s essential to carry a significant safety net at present, and I’m also partial to tail-risk hedges that kick-in automatically as the market declines, rather than requiring the execution of sell orders. My impression is that the first leg down will be extremely steep, and that a subsequent bounce will encourage investors to believe the worst is over.”

On February 2nd, our measures of market internals clearly deteriorated, shifting market conditions to a combination of extreme valuations and unfavorable market internals, coming off of the most extremely overextended conditions we’ve ever observed in the historical data. At present, I view the market as a “broken parabola” – much the same as we observed for the Nikkei in 1990, the Nasdaq in 2000, or for those wishing a more recent example, Bitcoin since January.

Two features of the initial break from speculative bubbles are worth noting. First, the collapse of major bubbles is often preceded by the collapse of smaller bubbles representing “fringe” speculations. Those early wipeouts are canaries in the coalmine. For example, in July 2000, the Wall Street Journal ran an article titled (in the print version) “What were we THINKING?” – reflecting on the “arrogance, greed, and optimism” that had already been followed by the collapse of dot-com stocks. My favorite line: “Now we know better. Why didn’t they see it coming?” Unfortunately, that article was published at a point where the Nasdaq still had an 80% loss (not a typo) ahead of it.

Similarly, in July 2007, two Bear Stearns hedge funds heavily invested in sub-prime loans suddenly became nearly worthless. Yet that was nearly three months before the S&P 500 peaked in October, followed by a collapse that would take it down by more than 55%. (...)

As I’ve emphasized in prior market comments, valuations are the primary driver of investment returns over a 10-12 year horizon, and of prospective losses over the completion of any market cycle, but they are rather useless indications of near-term returns. What drives near-term outcomes is the psychological inclination of investors toward speculation or risk-aversion. We infer that preference from the uniformity or divergence of market internals across a broad range of securities, sectors, industries, and security-types, because when investors are inclined to speculate, they tend to be indiscriminate about it. This has been true even in the advancing half-cycle since 2009.

The only difference in recent years was that, unlike other cycles where extreme “overvalued, overbought, overbullish” features of market action reliably warned that speculation had gone too far, these syndromes proved useless in the face of zero interest rates. Evidently, once interest rates hit zero, so did the collective IQ of Wall Street. We adapted incrementally, by placing priority on the condition of market internals, over and above those overextended syndromes. Ultimately, we allowed no exceptions.

The proper valuation of long-term discounted cash flows requires the understanding that if interest rates are low because growth rates are also low, no valuation premium is “justified” by the low interest rates at all. It requires consideration of how the structural drivers of GDP growth (labor force growth and productivity) have changed over time.

Careful, value-conscious, historically-informed analysis can serve investors well over the complete market cycle, but that analysis must also include investor psychology (which we infer from market internals). In a speculative market, it’s not the understanding of valuation, or economics, or a century of market cycles that gets you into trouble. It’s the assumption that anyone cares.

The important point is this: Extreme valuations are born not of careful calculation, thoughtful estimation of long-term discounted cash flows, or evidence-based reasoning. They are born of investor psychology, self-reinforcing speculation, and verbal arguments that need not, and often do not, hold up under the weight of historical data. Once investor preferences shift from speculation toward risk-aversion, extreme valuations should not be ignored, and can suddenly matter to their full extent. It appears that the financial markets may have reached that point.

A second feature of the initial break from a speculative bubble, which I observed last month, is that the first leg down tends to be extremely steep, and a subsequent bounce encourages investors to believe that the worst is over. That feature is clearly evident when we examine prior financial bubbles across history. Dr. Jean-Paul Rodrigue describes an idealized bubble as a series of phases, including that sort of recovery from the initial break, which he describes as a “bull trap.”

I continue to expect the S&P 500 to lose about two-thirds of its value over the completion of the current market cycle. With market internals now unfavorable, following the most offensive “overvalued, overbought, overbullish” combination of market conditions on record, our market outlook has shifted to hard-negative. Rather than forecasting how long present conditions may persist, I believe it’s enough to align ourselves with prevailing market conditions, and shift our outlook as those conditions shift. That leaves us open to the possibility that market action will again recruit the kind of uniformity that would signal that investors have adopted a fresh willingness to speculate. We’ll respond to those changes as they arrive (ideally following a material retreat in valuations). For now, buckle up.

by John P. Hussman, Ph.D. Hussman Funds |  Read more:

Image: Dr. Jean-Paul Rodrigue

Ralph Goings, Still Life With Spoons
via:

Socialism as a Set of Principles

Nearly half of millennials describe themselves as sympathetic to “socialism” and not terribly fond of “capitalism.” Yet if you asked each of them to explain the mechanics of how a socialist economy would function, I doubt many would have especially detailed answers. Jacobin magazine’s ABCs of Socialism consists of answers to skeptical questions about socialism (e.g. “Don’t the rich deserve their money?” “Is socialism pacifist?” “Will socialism be boring?”) but notably “How will socialism actually work?” is not among them. With twelve million Democratic primary voters having cast ballots for a self-described “socialist,” isn’t it concerning that nobody has explained in detail how socialism will “work”? Embracing a new economic system without having a blueprint seems like it could only ever lead to something like Venezuela’s collapse.

I think this criticism seems very powerful, and comes from an understandable instinct. But it has a mistaken view of what socialism actually means to the people who use the label. In the 21st century, for many of its adherents socialism is not describing a particular set of economic rules and government policies, some clearly-defined “system” that must be implemented according to a plan. Instead, it describes a set of principles that we want the economic and political system to conform to. Bringing the world into harmony with these principles will require experimentation, but that lack of rigidity is an asset. Because 20th century “socialist” states attempted vast social engineering projects, there is a tendency to think of “a socialist economy” in engineering terms. Capitalism is an engine, with its parts all working together to produce an effect. Socialists come along and say that the engine should be designed entirely differently, with a totally different set of rules in order to produce better effects. If this is what we’re talking about when we’re talking about “capitalism versus socialism,” then it’s completely right to ask for an explanation of how the proposed alternative works. We’d be very suspicious of someone who said they had reinvented the combustion engine but refused to tell us how the alternative would work and insisted that before trying it we destroy all of our combustion engines.

But this is a poor way of thinking about what is being advocated by socialists. Books are a better analogy. We have, in our hands, a badly-written manuscript and are trying to edit it into a well-written manuscript. But there’s no blueprint for the well-written manuscript. We create it through a process. Delete a passage here, insert one there, move this around, move that around. And in doing this, we follow a set of principles: we want it to flow well, we want the reader not to get confused, we want all our sentences to be forceful and precise. Those principles aren’t handed down from on high, and there are lots of different ways we could write the book that would produce something satisfactory. But asking at the beginning of the process “Well, what will the finished product look like?” makes no sense. If we could present a blueprint for the finished book, we wouldn’t need a blueprint because we would already have finished the book.

Socialism can be conceived of similarly: socialists are trying to make society better, so that its operations meet a particular set of ideal criteria. Here, I want to quote Leszek Kołakowski, the Polish scholar of Marxism, who was a vicious opponent of communist governments but drew an important distinction between socialism as a system and an ideal:

[It would be] a pity if the collapse of communist socialism resulted in the demise of the socialist tradition as a whole and the triumph of Social Darwinism as the dominant ideology….Fraternity under compulsion is the most malignant idea devised in modern times… This is no reason, however, to scrap the idea of human fraternity. If it is not something that can be effectively achieved by means of social engineering, it is useful as a statement of goals. The socialist idea is dead as a project for an ‘alternative society.’ But as a statement of solidarity with the underdog and the oppressed, as a motivation to oppose Social Darwinism, as a light that keeps before our eyes something higher than competition and greed—for all these reasons, socialism—the ideal, not the system—still has its uses.

By his last years, Kołakowski was bitterly disenchanted by the left to an extreme I find off-putting. But even he offered high praise for the great socialists of early 20th century Europe, and the ideals they embodied. They “wanted not only equal, universal and obligatory education, a social health service, progressive taxation and religious tolerance, but also secular education, the abolition of national and racial discrimination, the equality of women, freedom of the press and of assembly, the legal regulation of labour conditions, and a social security system. They fought against militarism and chauvinism [and] embodied what was best in European political life.”

Here we begin to see what socialist principles actually involve. How can they best be summarized? Kołakowski suggests it’s “fraternity,” but that seems too limited and too squishy. It does start there, though: with a feeling of connectedness and compassion for other human beings. “We are here to help each other through this thing, whatever it is,” as Kurt Vonnegut said. Many socialists begin with that feeling of “solidarity” with people whose lives are needlessly hard and painful, and a sense that we are all in this together. (...)

This is what leads socialists toward the idea about “collective ownership of the means of production,” which is often cited as the core tenet of socialism. The reason socialists talk about “ownership” so much is that “ownership” refers to decision-making power. If I own a book, it means I am the one who gets to decide what happens to it. I can write in it, sell it, or throw it away. The instinct that “people should be able to shape their own destinies” leads socialists to endorse what I think is the core meaning of “democracy,” namely the idea that people should have decision-making power over those things that affect them. If we think people’s choices should be valued, then they should be included in decision-making that affects them. (...)

There are plenty of different ideas for how to make the world more democratic, to ensure that people’s lives aren’t being controlled by mysterious private or state forces that they have no control over. Socialists have a variety of proposals for economic democracy, such as the Universal Basic Income, worker cooperatives, and mandating profit-sharing. But the democratic principle isn’t just about economics. It’s also what turns socialists into feminists and anti-racists. Sexism and racism are outside forces that are acting on people against their will, making their lives more difficult on account of demographic characteristics that they cannot choose. The principle “everyone should have the most fulfilling possible life” means that women shouldn’t be harassed at work, transgender teens shouldn’t be bullied, and people of color shouldn’t face unique structural disadvantages.

One may think that by identifying ideas like “giving everyone a maximally fulfilling life” as core principles, I am draining socialism of meaning. After all, who doesn’t want people to have fulfilling lives? If socialism just means “things should be good,” everyone is a socialist. But that’s part of the point: socialism tries to apply values that are essentially universal. What differentiates the socialist and the non-socialist is the “apply” part. Everyone talks about democracy and freedom and fulfillment, but socialists are concerned to figure out what those things would really entail, and ensure that they are meaningful components of everybody’s lives, rather than only existing for some. The United States is “democratic,” and people are “free.” But when the public’s views don’t affect the government’s policies, and when people can’t get vacation time to go and take advantage of their freedom, these concepts are not being fully realized. (...)

The millennial embrace of socialism, then, does not mean that millennials are trying to implement some complicated new economic system that they do not understand. It means that they measure any economic system by the degree to which it is humane and democratic, and they are angered by the degree to which our current one fails people. It means that they reject selfishness and believe in solidarity. And it means that they are determined to help each other build something better, whatever that may be.

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

Image: uncredited

Busting the Myth of ‘Welfare Makes People Lazy’

“Welfare makes people lazy.” The notion is buried so deep within mainstream political thought that it can often be stated without evidence. It was explicit during the Great Depression, when Franklin D. Roosevelt’s WPA (Works Progress Administration) was nicknamed “We Piddle Around” by his detractors. It was implicit in Bill Clinton’s pledge to “end welfare as we know it.” Even today, it is an intellectual pillar of conservative economic theory, which recommends slashing programs like Medicaid and cash assistance, partly out of a fear that self-reliance atrophies in the face of government assistance.

Many economists have for decades argued that this orthodoxy is simply wrong—that wisely designed anti-poverty programs, like the Earned Income Tax Credit, actually increase labor participation. And now, across the world, a fleet of studies are converging on the consensus that even radical welfare programs—including basic-income programs and what are called conditional cash transfers—don’t make people any less productive.

Most notably, a 2015 meta-study of cash programs in poor countries found “no systematic evidence that cash transfer programs discourage work” in seven different countries: Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras, the Philippines, Indonesia, or Morocco. Other studies of cash-grant experiments in Uganda and Nigeria have found that such programs can increase working hours and earnings, particularly when the beneficiaries are required to attend classes that teach specific trades or general business skills.

Welfare isn’t just a moral imperative to raise the living standards of the poor. It’s also a critical investment in the health and future careers of low-income kids.

Take, for example, the striking finding from a new paper from researchers at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago. They analyzed a Mexican program called Prospera, the world’s first conditional cash-transfer system, which provides money to poor families on the condition that they send their children to school and stay up to date on vaccinations and doctors’ visits. In 2016, Prospera offered cash assistance to nearly 7 million Mexican households.

In the paper, researchers matched up data from Prospera with data about households’ incomes to analyze for the first time the program’s effect on children several decades after they started receiving benefits. The researchers found that the typical young person exposed to the program for seven years ultimately completed three more years of education and was 37 percent more likely to be employed. That’s not all: Young Prospera beneficiaries grew up to become adults who worked, on average, nine more hours each week than similarly poor children who weren’t enrolled in the program. They also earned higher hourly wages.

This finding has direct implications for the United States, where a core mission of the Republican Party is to reduce government aid to the poor, on the assumption that it makes them lazy. This attitude is supported by many conservative economists, who argue that government benefits implicitly reward poverty and thus encourage families to remain poor—the idea being that some adults might reject certain jobs or longer work hours because doing so would eliminate their eligibility for programs like Medicaid.

But this concern has little basis in reality. One of the latest studies on the subjectfound that Medicaid has “little if any” impact on employment or work hours. In research based in Canada and the U.S., the economist Ioana Marinescu at the University of Pennsylvania has found that even when basic-income programs do reduce working hours, adults don’t typically stay home to, say, play video games; instead, they often use the extra cash to go back to school or hold out for a more desirable job.

But the standard conservative critique of Medicaid and other welfare programs is wrong on another plane entirely. It fails to account for the conclusion of the Prospera research: Anti-poverty programs can work wonders for their youngest beneficiaries. It’s true north of the border, as well. American adults whose families had access to prenatal coverage under Medicaid have lower rates of obesity, higher rates of high-school graduation, and higher incomes as adults than those from similar households in states without Medicaid, according to a 2015 paper from the economists Sarah Miller and Laura R. Wherry. Another paper found that children covered by Medicaid expansions went on to earn higher wages and require less welfare assistance as adults.

“Welfare helps people work” may sound like a strange and counterintuitive claim to some. But it is perfectly obvious when the word people in that sentence refers to low-income children in poor households. Poverty and lack of access to health care is a physical, psychological, and vocational burden for children. Poverty is a slow-motion trauma, and impoverished children are more likely than their middle-class peers to suffer from chronic physiological stress and exhibit antisocial behavior. It’s axiomatic that relieving children of an ambient trauma improves their lives and, indeed, relieved of these burdens, children from poorer households are more likely to follow the path from high-school graduation to college and then full-time employment.

by Derek Thompson, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Kai Pfaffenbach / Reuters

Giving Up the Ghost

When it comes to quitting smoking, you’re on your own

I had expected an austere, sanatorium-like atmosphere, with staff in crisp lab coats, the walls plastered with rules and bumper sticker–type slogans: Rehab is for quitters, maybe. Instead, the place skews toward homey, or at least as homey as a medical facility can be, with nary a motivational poster to be seen. My room features a Murphy bed, a small desk, a wall-mounted TV, and an inoffensive print; brown and beige are the dominant colours. The space is reminiscent of an upscale dorm or a highway motel, except for the syringe disposal receptacle in the bathroom.

But matters of decor are not top of mind on this Friday in January, as I stand outside the entrance of the building. Instead, I’m focused on cigarettes—or, more precisely, smoking as many of them as possible in the time left before 4:30 p.m., when nine other people and I will hand over our packs and lighters, and put our faith in the Mayo Clinic’s Nicotine Dependence Center.

A half-century ago, I lit up for the first time. It was 1964, the same year that United States surgeon general Luther Terry released a depth-charge report unequivocally drawing a direct link between cigarettes and lung cancer, chronic bronchitis, emphysema, and coronary heart disease. Or, as the New York Times headline succinctly put it, “Cigarettes Peril Health.” Being fourteen at the time, I didn’t read the Times, but the news filtered into my hometown of Guelph, Ontario—the site of an Imperial Tobacco factory, where, it was said, workers got free cartons. My friends and I mordantly joked that every cigarette we smoked would shorten our lives by ten minutes. Because we were immortal, this didn’t seem like a big deal.

At school, I belonged to the science club and entered fairs with projects like “The Miracle of Rayon.” I was an A student in home economics; my pocket money came from babysitting. In short, I was something of a nerd, and desperately wished for an edgier image, which I believed smoking bestowed.

At the time, nearly half of Canadian adults were smokers, and in that Mad Men era you could light up just about anywhere—planes, banks, movie theatres, even doctors’ offices and hospital rooms. To object to someone smoking was rather like being the cranky neighbour yelling at kids for playing hockey in the street. These days, though, the 16 percent of us who still smoke daily are the ones beyond the pale—which is to say a car’s length or two from building entrances, if we’re obeying the omnipresent signs.

I could claim that an extremely belated road-to-Damascus experience led me to rehab, but the fact is, for years now, you have had to be either terminally dense or a Big Tobacco executive (not mutually exclusive categories) to deny the health risks. It wasn’t even the pariah status, the death-ray glares of disapproval that lighting up automatically incurs. True, that contempt—and its flip side, a self-image hovering below zero—was one of the reasons I’d quit numerous times over the past five decades. I had stopped for as little as a week and as long as seven years, the latter an interregnum that went up in flames during an evening that featured a lot of fun and too much wine; suddenly, cadging a cig seemed like a good idea. Within a week, I was back to a pack and a half a day.

This time, there were two things that influenced me to kick the habit. One was my kid, twenty-three years old and a smoker since he was fifteen. I know he’s not immortal, even if he doesn’t, and my guilt about being a noxious role model is intense. The second, at the risk of seeming to have skewed priorities, was the money. I was smoking two large packs a day—fifty cigarettes, about thirty more than what’s currently defined as heavy smoking—which translated to a ludicrous $8,750 a year. On the cusp of retirement, with its decreased income, I realized I couldn’t afford to keep smoking if I still wanted to live indoors. (...)

The truth is that we don’t fund cigarette rehab because we don’t consider smoking a true addiction. Today, people are said to be hooked on everything from Facebook to Oreos, but being an Internet fanatic or cookie monster is not the same as experiencing the panicky tightening in the gut, the I’d-do-anything-for-a-hit feeling, that strikes when you’re running short of fill-in-the-blank—smack, booze, Oxys, cocaine, cigs. Unlike those other substances, though, cigarettes are both legal and, when used as intended, apt to kill their consumers. It’s impossible to contemplate these dissonant facts without engaging in some conspiracy theorizing. Might there be a connection between cigarettes’ still-lawful status, despite their indisputably lethal nature, and the $7.3 billion in tobacco-related tax revenue the federal and provincial governments reaped last year? After all, if everyone actually quit, that’s a lot of dough forgone.

Behind these counterintuitive policies is the big lie that smoking is merely a bad habit. As the industry’s disingenuous slogan of the 1980s and 1990s had it, “My pleasure, my choice.” But it’s not just Big Tobacco that advances this perspective. Last February, Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente articulated a common outlook: “If addiction is a disease, it’s a peculiar one.” Her point was that, unlike those with so-called real diseases, addicts get themselves into trouble and can jolly well get themselves out. “The disease model of addiction implies that the victim is helpless,” she wrote. “It denies the role of personal agency, which is probably the most important force of all when facing down your demons.”

This is reminiscent of how wartime post-traumatic stress disorder was once chalked up to lmf—lack of moral fibre. It’s the attitude of those who unhelpfully recount how they just got up one day and pitched their cigs, the implication being that you could do the same if you weren’t such a gormless loser. And it’s a point of view that even permeates anti-tobacco campaigns, which over the decades have morphed from concern for the addict—“Smoking kills”—to stigma-driven shock and shame. Think of that American Cancer Society poster featuring the ravaged older woman, puffing away, with the slogan, “Smoking is very glamorous.” Cruise the Internet a bit, and you’ll find images that are even more jolting. One substitutes a cigarette filter for a woman’s nipple (i.e., smoking is bad for breastfeeding babies); another, aimed at teenagers, equates smoking with being forced to perform oral sex. In these ads, there is no acknowledgement of cigarettes’ extraordinary addictive power. We don’t expect drug users to just kick the habit, but that idea permeates cigarette discourse. The message is as clear as a No Smoking sign: when it comes to quitting, you’re on your own.

In the minutes before Friday’s 4:30 p.m. relinquishing of our cigs and lighters, everyone chain-smokes furiously outside the Colonial Building. We aren’t acquainted yet, but there’s lots of nervous banter as we mainline our nicotine, huddled in twos and threes. Do any of us really believe the butts we’ve just ground out will be our last? Still, once inside, we all participate in the disposal ritual—everything’s tossed into an ordinary plastic bag, which doesn’t strike me as sufficiently ceremonious—and then we have our initial group therapy session. Besides me, there are six men and three women, two of whom are also Canadian.

A decade ago, I realized I was drinking too much—more than a bottle of wine a night—and tottered off to Alcoholics Anonymous. There, we called them drunkalogs—tales of humiliating things done while under the influence of booze. At the exotic end of the spectrum were exploits like attempting to steal a plane or losing a rental car; more common were heartbreaking accounts of domestic upheaval, workplace flame-outs, sordid affairs. In smokers’ rehab, our versions are more quotidian. Illicit puffs in airport washrooms figure prominently, with a couple of the guys trading stories about their favourite spots at Chicago O’Hare. An entertainment entrepreneur spins a hilarious story about smoking up a hotel room and simply leaving the several-hundred-dollar fine in cash when he checked out. The parents of younger children describe John le Carré–level diversionary tactics to prevent their kids from learning their secret. I recount having missed a plane in Dublin a few years ago because I was indulging my addiction rather than lining up for the security check, a dumb-ass move that cost me $500 in rebooking fees; it’s too painful to confess to the group that I missed the moment of my mother’s death because I’d nipped out for a hit. None of these anecdotes addresses the matter of compromised health, but they don’t really have to, since one of us, a fellow in his late fifties, has barely finished chemo for lung cancer.

The absence of the titillating or outlandish in our stories perhaps explains the dearth of motivational books or movies for the would-be non-smoker. Prior to my trip to the Mayo, a diligent search for butting-out memoirs, something along the lines of Mary Karr’s Lit, or Augusten Burroughs’s Dry, turned up just one. Lighting Up features an overexcited subtitle—How I Stopped Smoking, Drinking, and Everything Else I Loved in Life Except Sex—that fails to suggest the mix of chaos and catharsis that makes a good taking-the-cure account. On the flick front, finding nothing about tobacco at all, I thought I’d screen some of the booze-and-drugs rehab movies I’d watched when I decided to quit drinking—28 Days; Clean and Sober; My Name Is Bill W. What I hadn’t noticed ten years ago was that everyone in these movies smokes all the time. In fact, being a nicotine fiend is kind of a thing among reformed drinkers. Bill Wilson of AA fame apparently smoked like a chimney. Caroline Knapp, the author of the acclaimed memoir Drinking: A Love Story, died of lung cancer at forty-two. As Burroughs observed, “Everybody in recovery smokes.” You can see the problem. Popular culture basically doesn’t acknowledge smoking as a dangerous addiction, nor does it lend it the patina of romantic dissolution that might garner users more sympathy—or better treatment options.

I used to wonder why I am the only member of my family with addiction issues. Then I realized a strong vein of clinical depression runs through our history, and addiction is often a co-occurring condition. My father struggled through many dark days; one of my sisters committed suicide; my cousins knock back antidepressants, and so do I. I saw my first psychiatrist at eighteen, when even taking a shower began to seem too hard. I can’t recall when my drinking shifted from recreational to alcoholic, but it spiked during a period of high drama: My kid (step-grandson, actually)—who, tragically, has fetal alcohol syndrome—was a rebel without a cause by the time he was thirteen. My husband had his own alcohol issues. There was also my then-undiagnosed bipolar disorder, which co-occurs with alcoholism up to 50 percent of the time. At the Mayo, we don’t spend a lot of time comparing our psychological profiles, but I quickly realize that I’m not alone. Three of the others are addicts-turned-teetotallers; another takes a pharmacopoeia of medications that rivals my own.

Scientists trying to understand people like us have found that the brain of the zebrafish, a freshwater member of the minnow family, is a good substitute for the human organ when it comes to studying addiction. The Center for Tobacco-Free Living, a public-information space at the Mayo, features a big tank labelled Zebrafish, in recognition of their key role in research. But the tank’s occupants are imposters—the real zebrafish were so small they kept getting sucked into the filter. It’s not hard to see a metaphor here, with the doomed creatures representing smokers trapped and enslaved by Big Tobacco. This interpretation, embraced by the Mayo program, is comforting: it’s not my fault.

Still, I have to acknowledge that being a cigarette addict isn’t all tubercular coughing and grimy ashtrays. Smoking doesn’t come with the perils associated with other types of dependence—jail time, homelessness, personal chaos. Plus, there’s that first-puff-of-the-morning kapow, the immediate rush of nicotine to the brain, a high that doesn’t fade no matter how long you’ve smoked—no chasing the dragon, trying to recapture the sensation of your initial hit. It makes for great anecdotes, like the time I realized the only other occupant of a New York theatre’s gritty little smoking area (except for a bodyguard) was Pierre Trudeau, then on his second stint as prime minister. And then there’s the camaraderie of smokers at events, puffing away alfresco and joking that we are the most interesting people there. (...)

But these golden moments account for just a fraction of the half-million-odd cigarettes I’ve consumed in my life. According to Dr. Richard Hurt, the founder of the Mayo program, I’ve mostly lit up because the numerous nicotine receptors in my brain have been calling out for another hit. Why some people can smoke and not get hooked is what those zebrafish are helping to illuminate. Clearly, I’m not addiction-proof, and neither are the members of my Mayo posse.

by Lynn Cunningham, The Walrus |  Read more:

Image: Alena Skarina

Off the Green and into the Blue

Alex Weber takes a deep breath through her snorkel and dives to the bottom of Carmel Bay, a calm coastal cove several kilometers south of Monterey, California. Just meters away, atop the small cliffs that drop into the waves, golfers tread on the emerald greens of Pebble Beach Golf Links. It’s early December—the sky’s blue, the weather T-shirt warm. The golfers swing their way from hole to hole on the famed golf course. Unfortunately, their aim is rarely perfect.

Weber surfaces 45 seconds later and drops nearly a dozen golf balls into a yellow mesh bag held open by her father, Mike, who is also in a wetsuit and snorkeling gear. The pair have been in the water for several hours and have collected more than 1,500 golf balls—the fallout of a sport that has unseen, and probably significant, consequences for the ocean.

About 1.2 billion golf balls are manufactured every year, according to a 2017 report in Chemical & Engineering News, and more than half may be lost in the environment. A New York Times story in 2010 reported that an estimated 300 million disappear each year in the United States alone. With many of the planet’s approximately 32,000 golf courses located beside the ocean, countless golf balls find their way into the water, where they sink and accumulate more rapidly than anyone is cleaning them up.

Weber, a grade 12 student, is doing her best, but is barely putting a dent in the collection of drowned balls. Just two weeks earlier, Weber and her father spent several hours snorkeling in the same cove and cleared the seafloor of about 2,000 balls.

Now, the ocean bottom is again awash with golf balls.

“Big waves come through and uncover them,” says Weber, who started collecting golf balls here in 2016. “It can sometimes make what we’re doing feel futile.”

Her effort began as a simple volunteer cleanup job but has morphed into a novel research project in which the golf balls are data and Weber is a groundbreaking scientist. To date, she and her helpers have collected more than 20,000 golf balls. Weber keeps the stash at home in buckets and barrels, where the balls are sorted by collection site and graded by level of wear. Number ones, she explains, appear new, still shiny and covered with dimples. Fours are as smooth as ping-pong balls, their outer layers of plastic polished away. The fives are so old their shells have worn away entirely, allowing spaghetti-like rubber to erupt out the sides.

To better understand the problem, Weber is collaborating with ecologist Matthew Savoca, a California Sea Grant State Fellow who earned his PhD studying the effects of plastic and marine debris on the ocean. Together, they are writing a paper they hope to have published before the end of the year. Their research, Weber says, is intended to set a baseline understanding of the problem while exploring why the balls gather in certain areas, how long it takes for them to break down, and what it all means for marine life—all topics that nobody else, it seems, has closely explored. Some of this subject matter may be explored in more depth in subsequent studies, Weber says.

“But in this first paper,” she explains, “we’re basically just saying there are golf balls in the ocean.”

According to a former golf pro at Pebble Beach, that course alone hosts about 62,000 rounds of golf per year, and Weber says caddies working the course have told her that three or four balls are lost per round. Even a conservative estimate would suggest that tens—and perhaps hundreds—of thousands of them reach the ocean.

In his 2012 book Sandy Parr at the 19th Hole, author Mohamed Noorani reported that one billion golf balls—almost 46 million kilograms, much of it plastic—disappear every year. Some of this material is recovered. A cottage industry, in fact, is based upon collecting and selling lost golf balls. Todd Baker, an Indiana golfer who manufactures wooden Eco Golf Balls that float in water and biodegrade, says entrepreneurial collectors retrieve millions of golf balls from ponds, lakes, and rivers each year and sell them to vendors.

“But golf balls that go into the ocean are pretty much goners,” he says.

They don’t just sit inertly on the seafloor, either. As Weber has documented, they corrode. A standard golf ball weighs about 46 grams, but those she has recovered have lost as much as a third of their mass. That means for every 1,000 submerged golf balls, several kilograms of microplastic are shed into the ocean. Such debris may enter the food chain through creatures such as copepods and anchovies. Plastic tends to attach to a variety of contaminants that may be present in the water, including PCBs, and research has shown these particles can bioaccumulate in aquatic organisms, disrupting behavior and cellular functions.

University of Toronto scientist Chelsea Rochman studies microplastics, one of the planet’s most concerning but least understood forms of pollution. “It’s ubiquitous now,” she says. “We find microplastic virtually everywhere we sample. It affects wildlife, and it’s in our seafood.”

Although a leader in her research field, Rochman has not studied golf ball toxicity, nor has she ever found a golf ball in a trawl-net trash survey—probably, she guesses, because she has not surveyed areas near golf courses.

Rochman notes that much microplastic is so degraded that it cannot be traced back to its source. “So it’s really important that people are focusing on the bigger material, because that can influence policy change,” she explains.

There’s no question how the golf balls landed in Carmel Bay. “They’re different from other types of plastic pollution in that way—you’ve got a very clear point source,” Savoca says.

Still, prompting policy changes takes time and effort. When Richard Steiner, a retired professor of marine conservation at the University of Alaska, demanded in 2016 that authorities investigate a resort in Fairbanks, Alaska, that challenges its guests to hit golf balls across the Chena River, the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation took little meaningful action. Steiner said the practice, promoted by Pike’s Waterfront Lodge for many years, has created a stream of golf balls flowing downriver to the Bering Sea, creating a potential threat to marine life. While there was a temporary shutdown of the driving range in 2016, in a September 2017 letter to Steiner, the Department of Environmental Conservation’s water division director Michelle Hale said the “limited environmental risks posed by golf balls” that enter waterways merited no enforcement action. Steiner also made the US Environmental Protection Agency aware of the matter, but the agency has said it is not pursuing an investigation. The resort’s owner, Jay Ramras, did not respond to requests for an interview.

Even if golf balls entering the Chena River never reach the ocean, those used in the Bering Sea Ice Classic Golf Tournament, an annual event held in western Alaska, almost certainly do. Participants play on the frozen surface of the sea, and an online bulletin promoting the event says golf balls used in the competition “have a tendency to roll into cracks in the ice or get lost in snow drifts.”

This marine region, Steiner points out, is a summer feeding zone for gray whales. “They scoop up their food from the seafloor,” he says.

In fact, golf balls have been found in the stomachs of at least two gray whales found dead in Washington State—one in 2010, the other in 2012—though the balls were not identified as the cause of either death. Golf balls also appear in bird stomachs on occasion—something Steiner says he has seen scores of times while inspecting decayed albatross carcasses in the northwestern Hawai‘ian Islands. Golf balls may even find their way into birds’ reproductive tracts—in one documented case, a golf ball encased in shell was laid by a Canada goose.

by Alastair Bland , Hakai Magazine | Read more:
Image:Silver Parrot Studio/Getty