Basic Income, Not Basic Jobs: Against Hijacking Utopia

Some Democrats angling for the 2020 presidential nomination have a big idea: a basic jobs guarantee, where the government promises a job to anybody who wants one. Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders are all said to be considering the plan.

I’ve pushed for a basic income guarantee before, and basic job guarantees sure sound similar. Some thinkers have even compared the two plans, pointing out various advantages of basic jobs: it feels “fairer” to make people work for their money, maybe there’s a psychological boost from being productive, you can use the labor to do useful projects. Simon Sarris has a long and excellent article on “why basic jobs might fare better than UBI [universal basic income]”, saying that:

UBI’s blanket-of-money approach optimizes for a certain kind of poverty, but it may create more in the long run. Basic Jobs introduce work and opportunity for communities, which may be a better welfare optimization strategy, and we could do it while keeping a targeted approach to aiding the poorest.

I am totally against this. Maybe basic jobs are better than nothing, but I have an absolute 100% revulsion at the idea of implementing basic jobs as an alternative to basic income. Before getting into the revulsion itself, I want to bring up some more practical objections:

1. Basic jobs don’t help the disabled

Only about 15% of the jobless are your traditional unemployed people looking for a new job. 60% are disabled. Disability has doubled over the past twenty years and continues to increase.

Experts disagree on how much of the rise in disability reflects deteriorating national health vs. people finding a way to opt out of an increasingly dysfunctional labor market, but everyone expects the the trend to continue. Any program aimed at the non-working poor which focuses on the traditionally unemployed but ignores the disabled is only dealing with the tip of the iceberg.

The current disability system has at least three major problems which I would expect basic income to solve.

First, the disability application process is a mess. Imagine the worst DMV appointment you’ve ever had to obtain the registration to a sketchy old car you got from a friend, then multiply it by a thousand – then imagine you have to do it all while being too disabled to work. Even clear-cut applications can take months to go through, inflicting an immense burden on people who don’t know where their money is coming from during that time. And people with harder-to-prove conditions like mental illness and chronic pain might require multiple appeals – dragging the process out for years – or never get it at all. The disabled people I have talked to generally hate everything about this.

Second, disability is becoming a catch-all for people who can’t find employment. This is a useful function that needs to be served. But right now, it involves unemployed people faking and exaggerating disability. This rewards liars and punishes the honest. If society labels the system “FOR DISABLED PEOPLE ONLY”, basic fairness – to the disabled, to taxpayers, and to honest workers who aren’t gaming the system – require them to gatekeep entry. Right now they spend lots of time and money on gatekeeping and still mostly fail. But any attempt to crack down would exacerbate the first problem, the one where real disabled people have to spend months or years in a Kafka novel before getting recognized.

Third, because of the first and second problems disabled people feel like they constantly have to prove themselves. Sometimes they’ll have good days – lots of conditions are relapsing-remitting – and they’ll want to go play in the park or something. Then they have to worry that some neighbor is going to think “well, that guy looks pretty healthy”, take a photo, and they’ll end up as one of those stories with headlines like SO-CALLED DISABLED PERSON CAUGHT PLAYING SPORTS IN PARK. Other times it’s a bureaucratic issue. I had a patient who, after a few years on disability, recovered enough that he thought he could work about ten hours a week. When he tried to make it happen, he learned he would lose his disability payments – apparently if you can work at all the government doesn’t believe you’re really disabled – and ten hours a week wasn’t enough to support himself. So he cancelled the new job and didn’t work at all.

As long as you have a system whose goal is to separate the “truly” disabled people from the fakers, you’re going to run into problems like these. But refuse to gatekeep, and you have an unjust system where anyone who wants to lie can get out of work while their more honest coworkers are left slaving away all day. Basic income cuts the Gordian knot by proposing that everyone is legally entitled to support, whether they’re disabled or not. Disabled people can get their money without gatekeeping, and there’s no reward for foul play.

Basic jobs abandons this solution and takes us right back to the current system. If you’re abled enough to perform a government job, you’ve got to do it. Who decides if you’re abled enough? The Kafkaesque gatekeepers. And so we get the same bureaucratic despair, the same attempts to cheat the system, and the same perverse incentives.

And the number of disability claims keeps rising. Remember, a lot of economists think that the flight away from work and toward disability comes from people voting with their feet against exactly the kind of low-paying unpleasant jobs that basic jobs advocates want to offer everybody. Expect them to vote against those too, with no clear solutions within the basic jobs paradigm.

2. Basic jobs don’t help caretakers

60% of the jobless are disabled. 15% are traditional unemployed people looking for a new job. And another 10% to 15% are people caring for their sick family members.

This is unavoidable and currently uncompensated. The AgingCare Caregiver forum says their “number one question” is whether people who need to take time off work to care for a sick or elderly parent can get money. The only answer they can provide is “if the person you’re caring for has money or insurance, maybe they can pay you”. If they don’t, you’re out of luck.

Right now our society just drops the ball on this problem. I don’t blame it; giving people money to care for family members would be prohibitively expensive. It would also require a gatekeeping bureaucracy that would put the disability gatekeeping bureaucracy to shame. Not only do they have to assess if someone’s really unable to subsist without care, they also have to decide who gets to take the option for which relatives. I have a second cousin some number of times removed who’s very disabled; can I quit my job and get paid a reasonable salary to take care of them? What if I tell you I’ve never met them or even talked to them on the phone, and just have my grandmother’s word for it that they exist and are sick? What exactly counts as caretaking? If I go visit my second cousin once a day for an hour to make sure he hasn’t gotten any sicker than usual, should the government pay me a full salary? What if actually doing that is 100% vital to my second cousin’s continued survival and I wouldn’t be able to do it consistently while holding down a job? You are never going to be able to make a bureaucracy that can address all these issues fairly.

Basic income cuts the knot again, giving everyone enough money that they can take care of sick or aging friends or relatives if they so choose. You don’t have to justify your choice to provide this level of care (but not that level) to the government. You can just do what needs to be done.

Basic jobs once again drops the ball on this problem. If your mother is dying, you can’t be there to help her, because the government is going to make you dig ditches and fill them in again all day to satisfy people’s worry that somebody somewhere might be getting money without doing enough make-work to “deserve” it.

3. Basic jobs don’t help parents

Everything above, except this time you’re a single parent (or a double parent whose spouse also works) and you want to take care of your child. If you could afford daycare, you probably wouldn’t be the sort of person who needs to apply for a guaranteed basic job. What do you do?

I know what the basic jobs people’s solution to this is going to be: free daycare for all! Okay. So in addition to proposing the most expensive government program ever invented, you want to supplement it by passing the second most expensive government program ever invented, at the same time? Good luck.

But even aside from this, I want us to step back and think about what we’re doing. I have met people – mostly mothers, but some fathers too – who are heartbroken at the thought of missing the best years of their children’s lives grinding away at a 9 to 5 job, stuck in traffic commuting to their job, or being too tired to spend time with them after they get home from their job. These people miss their kids’ first steps, outsource watching their first words to underpaid daycare employees, and have to choose between attending their kids’ school plays and putting food on the table.

And if we check the Treasury and decide that we, as a society, don’t have enough money to solve this problem – then whatever, we don’t have enough money to solve this problem.

But I worry we’re going to check and find we have more than enough money. But somebody is going to be so excited about making poor people do busy-work to justify their existence, that we’re going to insist on perpetuating the problem anyway. And if that forces us to pay for universal free daycare, we’re going to be spending extra money just to make sure we can perpetuate the problem as effectively as possible. We’re going to be saying “We could give basic income for $800 billion, or basic jobs plus universal daycare for $900 billion. And that extra $100 billion? That’s the money we spend to make sure you’re digging ditches and filling them in all day, instead of getting to be at home spending time with your kids.”

4. Jobs are actually a big cause of poverty

Poor people’s two largest expenses are housing and transportation.

Guaranteed jobs have to be somewhere. Most of them will be in big cities, because that’s where everybody is. The ones in the country will be few and far between.

That means to get to your government-mandated job, you’ll either need to live in the big city or have a car. Living in the big city means tripling your monthly rent. Having a car means car payments, insurance payments, repair payments, gas payments, and incidentals.

When I first started working with poor patients, I was shocked how many of the problems in their lives were car-related. For well-off people like me, having a car is background noise; you buy or lease it for a reasonable price, then never worry about it again. Poor people can’t afford to buy and don’t always have good enough credit to lease. They tend to get older, sketchier cars that constantly break down. A constant complaint I heard: “My car broke, I can’t afford repairs, and I’m going to get fired if I can’t make it to my job”. Some of them can’t afford insurance and take their chances without it. Others have had various incidents with the police that cost them their license, but they can’t just not show up to work, so they drive anyway and hope they don’t get arrested.

Then there are the little things. Your work doesn’t have a break room, so you’ve got to eat out for lunch, and there goes a big part of your food budget. Your work demands a whole new set of business clothes, so there’s double your clothing budget. You can’t attend things during normal business hours, so you have to pay extra for out-of-hours services.

And then there’s all of the problems above. You can’t take care of your children anymore, so you’ve got to pay for daycare or a nanny or an Uber to take them to their grandparents’ house. You can’t take care of your sick parents anymore, so you’ve got to pay for a home health aide to come in and look after them. You get job-related strain or stress, and there’s the cost of a doctor’s appointment.

And then there are the fuzzier things. If you’ve just spent the entire day at work, and you’re really exhausted, and you never get any time to yourself, maybe you don’t have the energy left to drive to the cheaper supermarket on the other end of town. Maybe you don’t have the time to search for the absolute best deal on the new computer you’re getting. Maybe you don’t have the willpower to resist splurging and giving yourself one nice thing in your life of wage slavery. All of this sounds kind of shameful, but they’re all things that my patients have told me and things that I do myself sometimes despite my perfectly nice well-paying job.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. As Scott notes later in his post, Alaska has had a (very small) universal basic income for some time, which seems to have worked relatively well (the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend). Basic job advocates are undoubtedly thinking of something along the lines of the old WPA, which produced many fine projects and much needed infrastructure improvements, but not without some criticism. Maybe a solution would be some sort of hybrid? Basic incomes and basic jobs? I'm sure a lot of people would like to work for reasons not strictly related to income - a sense of self-worth and well-being, teamwork, pride, accomplishment? Or just to supplement a basic income. See also: We Work]

Colley Whisson, Main Street Dayboro
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All My Exes Live in Pixels

Tyler calls the folder on his laptop that contains nudes of his exes “Rogaine.” He changed it from “cocaine” after too many people asked him what he was keeping in there. Anwar called his “random stuff,” but he kept the nudes nested in the fourth of four untitled folders. That was before he deleted the folder sometime last year, when he got paranoid about potential hacking. Ryan’s old nudes are scattered throughout his email — you can find them by typing “.jpg” into the search bar — but he rarely looks at them, except when he’s newly single. Bill says he doesn’t know where his are, probably on camera memory cards and old hard drives. But now that I mention it, he’s gonna gather them into a single place.

Nudes from my exes are collected in a folder called “just drunk enough to send this.” I made it when I was studying abroad at a South African university with slow internet and a long-distance girlfriend. One day, she sent a video with the subject head “just drunk enough to send this.” I took my laptop to the library immediately and made small talk with a fellow American while the progress bar slowly filled up. The video featured my girlfriend wearing a tank top and camouflage booty shorts. “True Affection” by The Blow played in the background. The first line of that song is “I was out of your league,” which she almost definitely was. (I’ve only heard that song once in the years since she sent me the video. I would describe my reaction to it as Pavlovian.)

This was in 2010, just before the World Cup, and laptop cameras were still in the relative dark ages. Though the video was pixelated nearly beyond recognition, I watched it dozens of times before I got back to the United States. After that, because we lived in different cities and were off-and-on, the folder grew and grew. We broke up, finally, when I moved from Los Angeles to New York City and she didn’t. But there were other women that made their way into the folder. One girlfriend, a writer I dated for about six months, sent me a series of headless pictures of her lying on leopard-print bed sheets, boobs out, flipping me the bird. Another fling was fond of taking pictures in the bath, which put her face in high definition and gave the rest of her a kind of watery mystery.

And, though the specific practice is a modern phenomenon, we would be lying to ourselves if we said it wasn’t deeply rooted in history. Photographers like Albert Arthur Allen were producing boudoir photography as early as the 1920s, but nudes must have predated that. After all, the Tourist Multiple and the Simplex were consumer-focused cameras that debuted in 1913 and 1914, respectively. Another thing that debuted around that time was World War I. If you think that British, French and German women were sending their soldier husbands off to war empty-handed, then I have some beachfront property in Arizona to sell you.

Like all things invented in war, the practice has now moved to us soft-belly civilians. Basically as long as there’s been an ability to take photos, you can bet someone thought to train the camera on their own naked body. I don’t know whether people kept the photos around, but I’m sure if they did they did so in a pasteboard box, hidden at the back of some closet somewhere where nobody would look. You know, kind of like nesting it five deep in untitled folders.

Sending nudes is, whether we acknowledge it or not, an expression of trust. You trust that your significant other isn’t a fucking psychopath who’s going to use your belief in them against you, even if you have a terrible breakup. You trust your own feelings and desires and confidence in that moment. And if you’re feeling insecure about it, you can ask for a naked picture in return. (In my research for this article — combing through old emails — I found a lot of photos of my hard 20something dick poking out of jeans.)

I asked one of my exes what she thought of this whole thing—the fact that I still had her old nudes

“I don’t care,” she said. “The only thing I hate is when people message me like, the day of [having masturbated to them].”

Who does that? She listed three exes, though one had stopped when he got married. I hadn’t even known that was an option, to be frank. That seemed, and seems, several steps over the line. If you want to look, go right ahead, but there’s no need to let her know exactly how you’re using them.

There’s something comforting about looking at these nudes even now. It’s lower-impact than actually fucking, but still trips many of the same pleasure centers. I still want to see her naked, sure. But it’s also about being reminded of that time in my life, when romantic relationships were less encumbered by “real problems” and more defined by who lived on the same street, or had the best jokes about the uselessness of their major.

For a while, I thought I might be the only one with a nudes folder. It sat on my computer, visited mainly when I was hung over or the internet was out. That made me feel tremendously creepy, like I was somehow spying on content specifically produced for me. I realized only a few weeks ago just how commonplace it was. My current girlfriend left her phone on top of the car. As we drove onto the freeway, it slipped off and shattered on the pavement. She was upset, at least partially because she had lost all her old naked pictures of herself. Her estimate was that her ex had around 400 on his hard drive. So she Facebook messaged him and he sent them to her. And then she sent them to me.

It’s a strange experience, to see someone’s recycled nudes. I’m not naive enough to think that all naked pictures sent to me were taken with me as the intended recipient. I know for a fact that that’s not true. But to think that they had been produced for someone else, then repurposed for me, was enough to spin my head clean around. I told my girlfriend I thought she looked very pretty and then never looked at the pictures again. Why would I? I can’t be nostalgic for a past I never experienced. (...)

When you break up, in one instant, the feeling that you’ve had for someone is replaced by memories of that feeling, now qualified by their status as an ex. I remember, mainly, the fights, the upsets, the slow descent into mutual disillusionment. If we constantly remembered the good times, there would be no need to end the relationship. There would be no way to get over it. The human memory is a fallible and subjective thing for reasons of evolution.

Looking at old nudes is a little bit of a salve against that. The picture of my ex pulling down her bikini top to reveal her breasts reminds me of a day at the beach that was blessedly free of argument. The video of her sent during winter break from her childhood bedroom reminds me of the nights we spent trying to fuck quietly so her mother wouldn’t hear. They’re little postcards from a past, reminding you of what it’s like to be loved by someone who used to love you.

by Michael Hafford, MEL | Read more:

Image: uncredited

Elliott Erwitt
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via: Yamaha

As D.I.Y. Gene Editing Gains Popularity, ‘Someone Is Going to Get Hurt’

As a teenager, Keoni Gandall already was operating a cutting-edge research laboratory in his bedroom in Huntington Beach, Calif. While his friends were buying video games, he acquired more than a dozen pieces of equipment — a transilluminator, a centrifuge, two thermocyclers — in pursuit of a hobby that once was the province of white-coated Ph.D.’s in institutional labs.

“I just wanted to clone DNA using my automated lab robot and feasibly make full genomes at home,” he said.

Mr. Gandall was far from alone. In the past few years, so-called biohackers across the country have taken gene editing into their own hands. As the equipment becomes cheaper and the expertise in gene-editing techniques, mostly Crispr-Cas9, more widely shared, citizen-scientists are attempting to re-engineer DNA in surprising ways.

Until now, the work has amounted to little more than D.I.Y. misfires. A year ago, a biohacker famously injected himself at a conference with modified DNA that he hoped would make him more muscular. (It did not.)

Earlier this year, at Body Hacking Con in Austin, Tex., a biotech executive injected himself with what he hoped would be a herpes treatment. (Verdict: No.) His company already had live-streamed a man injecting himself with a home-brewed treatment for H.I.V. (His viral load increased.)

In a recent interview, Mr. Gandall, now 18 and a research fellow at Stanford, said he only wants to ensure open access to gene-editing technology, believing future biotech discoveries may come from the least expected minds.

But he is quick to acknowledge that the do-it-yourself genetics revolution one day may go catastrophically wrong.

“Even I would tell you, the level of DNA synthesis regulation, it simply isn’t good enough,” Mr. Gandall said. “These regulations aren’t going to work when everything is decentralized — when everybody has a DNA synthesizer on their smartphone.”

The most pressing worry is that someone somewhere will use the spreading technology to create a bioweapon.

Already a research team at the University of Alberta has recreated from scratch an extinct relative of smallpox, horsepox, by stitching together fragments of mail-order DNA in just six months for about $100,000 — without a glance from law enforcement officials.

The team purchased overlapping DNA fragments from a commercial company. Once the researchers glued the full genome together and introduced it into cells infected by another type of poxvirus, the cells began to produce infectious particles.

To some experts, the experiment nullified a decades-long debate over whether to destroy the world’s two remaining smallpox remnants — at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and at a research center in Russia — since it proved that scientists who want to experiment with the virus can now create it themselves.

The study’s publication in the journal PLOS One included an in-depth description of the methods used and — most alarming to Gregory D. Koblentz, the director of the biodefense graduate program at George Mason University — a series of new tips and tricks for bypassing roadblocks.

“Sure, we’ve known this could be possible,” Dr. Koblentz said. “We also knew North Korea could someday build a thermonuclear weapon, but we’re still horrified when they actually do it.”

Experts urged the journal to cancel publication of the article, one calling it “unwise, unjustified, and dangerous.” Even before publication, a report from a World Health Organization meeting noted that the endeavor “did not require exceptional biochemical knowledge or skills, significant funds or significant time.”

But the study’s lead researcher, David Evans, a virologist at the University of Alberta, said he had alerted several Canadian government authorities to his poxvirus venture, and none had raised an objection.

Many experts agree that it would be very difficult for amateur biologists of any stripe to design a killer virus on their own. But as more hackers trade computer code for the genetic kind, and as their skills become increasingly sophisticated, health security experts fear that the potential for abuse may be growing.

“To unleash something deadly, that could really happen any day now — today,” said Dr. George Church, a researcher at Harvard and a leading synthetic biologist. “The pragmatic people would just engineer drug-resistant anthrax or highly transmissible influenza. Some recipes are online.” (...)

A Biological Arms Race

If nefarious biohackers were to create a biological weapon from scratch — a killer that would bounce from host to host to host, capable of reaching millions of people, unrestrained by time or distance — they would probably begin with some online shopping.

A site called Science Exchange, for example, serves as a Craigslist for DNA, a commercial ecosystem connecting almost anyone with online access and a valid credit card to companies that sell cloned DNA fragments.

Mr. Gandall, the Stanford fellow, often buys such fragments — benign ones. But the workarounds for someone with ill intent, he said, might not be hard to figure out.

Biohackers will soon be able to forgo these companies altogether with an all-in-one desktop genome printer: a device much like an inkjet printer that employs the letters AGTC — genetic base pairs — instead of the color model CMYK.

A similar device already exists for institutional labs, called BioXp 3200, which sells for about $65,000. But at-home biohackers can start with DNA Playground from Amino Labs, an Easy Bake genetic oven that costs less than an iPad, or The Odin’s Crispr gene-editing kit for $159.

by Emily Baumgaertner, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ryan Christopher Jones for The New York Times

[ed. There must be some kind of law: If a technology exists, it'll be used (no matter what).]

The Coup Has Already Happened

A lot of people are waiting for something dramatic to happen, some line to be crossed, an epic event like the firing of special counsel Robert Mueller III that will allow them to say that now we have had a coup and now we are ready to do something about it.

We already had the coup.

It happened on November 8, 2016, when an unqualified candidate won a minority victory in a corrupted election thanks in part to foreign intervention. Any time is the right time to pour into the streets and demand that it all grinds to a halt and the country change direction. The evidence that the candidate and his goons were aided by and enthusiastically collaborating with a foreign power was pretty clear before that election, and at this point, they are so entangled there isn’t really a reason to regard the born-again alt-right Republican Party and the Putin Regime as separate entities.

Take the recent revelations about the president’s personal errand boy, Michael Cohen. He ran a shell company from which money was used to pay Stormy Daniels to remain silent in what was quite likely an illegal campaign contribution. Money came in, along with major corporations, from a Russian oligarch close to Putin, Viktor Vekselberg, or rather from a corporation called Columbus Nova, run by a cousin of his apparently appointed to mask Vekselberg’s own role. The New Yorker reports, “It is a company technically owned by others but which looks after money owned and controlled in large part—if not entirely—by Vekselberg and his family.” Or as Frank Rich put it at New York Magazine, it’s “an example of collusion so flagrant that it made Trump and Rudy Giuliani suddenly go mute: a Putin crony’s cash turns out to be an essential component of the racketeering scheme used to silence Stormy Daniels and thus clear Trump’s path to the White House in the final stretch of the 2016 election.”

The Washington Post reports that Columbus Nova “is listed as the organization behind a string of websites targeted toward white nationalists and other members of the alt-right.” That is, this Russian oligarch’s company was illegally attempting to influence the election, and they were giving money to the bagboy of the election’s winner. Pro Publica reports that another personal lawyer of the president’s, Marc Kasowitz, also worked on behalf of Columbus Nova. There are a thousand other details like that of financial dealings—real estate sales, investments, odd transfers of wealth, social connections, meetings—that tie the Trump mob to the Russian mob—because most of the oligarchs are, in that autocratic regime, in one way or another mobsters, because Putin himself runs that vast country as though he was a mob boss intent on exerting control through fear, and profit through extortion.

The Trump family aspires to mafia status, a thuggocracy, but they are manipulable and bumbling where Putin and company are disciplined and Machiavellian. They hire fools and egomaniacs and compromised figures—Scaramucci, Giuliani, Bannon, Flynn, Nunberg, the wifebeating Rob Porter—and then fire them, with a soap opera’s worth of drama; the competent ones quit, as have many lawyers hired to help Trump navigate his scandals. The Trumps don’t hide things well or keep their mouths shut or manage the plunder they grab successfully, and they keep committing crimes in public. Remember when Trump revealed highly classified data to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister when they visited him in the Oval Office, not long after he fired FBI director James Comey (but before he admitted it was to obstruct Comey’s investigation of his ties to Russia?). There’s a picture of that visit in which the Russians are laughing at him and he looks befuddled. Remember when Donald Jr. met with the Russian agent in Trump Tower in June of 2016 to get purloined data on Clinton and tried to cover it up by saying it was about adoptions? Remember when the Trump team was forced out of the Panama hotel that Trump still profited from, and how his lawyers appealed directly to the president of Panama? How he profits from that business and others despite the emoluments clause of the Constitution? Or the various lawsuits for violating that clause, including one pending from the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia? Or the women suing Trump for defamation? Perhaps not, as so many scandals have piled up on those ones.

From the aforementioned slush fund we just learned about, Cohen made a second payoff to a woman who had sex with and was supposedly impregnated by another wealthy Republican, though there’s suspicion that the $1.6 million payment wasn’t really on behalf of Elliott Broidy, but of Trump himself. Shutting up women is a big part of what these people do, though maybe the existence of those affairs shuts Trump up too. Jonathan Chait writes of last week’s Cohen revelations: “For all the speculation about the existence of the pee tape, the latest revelations prove what is tantamount to the same thing. Russia could leverage the president and his fixer—who, recall, hand-delivered a pro-Russian ‘peace plan’ with Ukraine to Trump’s national-security adviser in January 2017—by threatening to expose secrets they were desperate to keep hidden. Whether those secrets were limited to legally questionable payments, or included knowledge of sexual affairs, is a question of degree but not of kind.”

It’s understandable if you find connecting the dots hard when there are so many dots they blur into a blob. (...)

Right now, Devin Nunes is trying to drill a hole out of the Justice Department and push classified information through it, into the open. The Washington Post reported last week, “A subpoena that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) issued to the Justice Department last week made a broad request for all documents about an individual who people close to the matter say is a sensitive, longtime intelligence source for the CIA and FBI. The Justice Department has refused to provide the documents. Intelligence officials say the material could jeopardize the source.” There seems to be widespread expectation that Nunes is fully capable of setting someone up to be assassinated, since his clear agenda since Trump arrived has been to block, disrupt, discredit, or sabotage the investigation of ties between Russia and the president and his pack of thugs. It’s been more than a year since, in a midnight drama, Nunes rushed information to the White House that he got as a member of the House Intelligence Committee.

Sabotage of national institutions, laws, standards, and the greater good has been accepted as part of the new normal, which is staggeringly far from normal. An elected official is trying to prevent his country’s agencies and its citizens from finding out if and how the president and his goons are tangled up with a foreign regime and how that prevented us from having free and fair elections and may again. As fired FBI director Comey noted in his first briefing of the president, there is no concern with protecting the nation and its information systems. The president himself has done many extraordinary things to try to interfere with the investigation, and last year White House counsel Don McGahn reportedly only prevented him from firing Mueller by threatening to resign if he did. (...)

Some of the press is already on board, of course, though we are at a point where we should probably stop calling propaganda outlets news sources. The rightwing Daily Caller, a widely read online publication co-founded by Fox’s Tucker Carlson, has cut out the middle men and the apologists and gone straight to Oleg Deripaska, aka Putin’s favorite oligarch, the one who kept Paul Manafort on a short leash, letting him publish an editorial headlined “The Ever-Changing ‘Russia Narrative’ Is False Public Manipulation.” Traditionally you don’t let the accused party dictate the narrative, especially when the accused is suspected of being part of a foreign conspiracy to subvert the government of the United States. But it’s is no more unusual than Fox’s and the National Enquirer’s deep allegiance to Trump over truth. For Fox that means constantly running disinformation or just avoiding major news that casts the president in a negative light (and for Fox’s Sean Hannity, that means, according to a stunning new piece in New York magazine, a bedtime call with the president every night—“Generally, the feeling is that Sean is the leader of the outside kitchen cabinet,” says one source in the piece, which also reminds us Fox is almost Trump’s sole source of news). For the Enquirer, it means catch-and-kill payoffs to women who might damage his reputation (a catch-and-kill is when you pay for exclusive rights to a story and then don’t publish it).

The Enquirer performed a catch-and-kill operation to silence former playmate Karen McDougal, who had a relationship with Trump around the same time Daniels had her lone sexual encounter with him.

There are so many threads in this tangle involving women and how to shut them up. Deripaska—whose money apparently went to Cohen’s slush fund—took Sergei Prikhodko, Russia’s deputy prime minister, on an August 2016 cruise on his yacht with a very young paid female companion on board who goes by the name Nastya Rybka. Rybka shared a video she recorded of the two of them discussing the US election and says she has 16 hours more of recordings containing valuable information for the Mueller investigation. The Putin regime found the video—and an opposition candidate’s interpretation of it—so significant that the government attempted to shut down YouTube in Russia. Rybka is currently imprisoned in Thailand on prostitution charges. The New York Times reports that earlier this year she said, “If America gives me protection, I will tell everything I know. I am afraid to go back to Russia. Some strange things can happen.” The US seems disinclined to take her or take a look at her evidence.

More recently the National Enquirer ran a hit piece on Michael Cohen, which makes it seem possible that Cohen is going to rat on Trump and the forces lined up with Trump are going to try to discredit him. CNN reports that it “could be a strong sign President Donald Trump is upset with his personal lawyer and turning against the man,” as though it’s normal for the president to use the tabloids to discredit longtime allies. Acts that would have been shocking if committed by previous administrations are overshadowed and crowded by equally transgressive acts that pile up into something that would like us to forget that this is not normal. Even when Trump is gone, the corruption of a significant percent of the American population, those with whom we don’t merely disagree on principles and goals, but on reality itself, will be a lingering problem. They are weaponized minds, and their hate, as hate always is, is easily directed. The Republican Party itself now stands for little other than its own grasp on power, and for the domination of this country’s white male Christian-identified minority over the majority of us. (...)

The current situation of the United States is obscene, insane, and incredible. If someone had pitched it for a thriller novel or film a few years ago, they would’ve been laughed out of whatever office their proposal made it to because fiction ought to be plausible. It isn’t plausible that a solipsistic buffoon and his retinue of petty crooks made it to the White House, but they did and there they are, wreaking more havoc than anyone would have imagined possible, from environmental laws to Iran nuclear deals. It is not plausible that the party in control of the federal government is for the most part a kleptomaniac criminal syndicate.

by Rebecca Solnit, LitHub |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: Tillerson Says Lies Are a Threat to Democracy]

'Americans are Being Held Hostage and Terrorized by the Fringes’

Arthur Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute, the center-right Washington think tank that has, amid a decade of turmoil inside the Republican Party, remained a sober, respected voice on matters of policy—while gradually shedding its George W. Bush-era reputation as a leading voice for pugnacious, interventionist foreign policy.

Brooks, who is stepping down in June 2019 after 10 years at the helm of AEI, has consistently struck me as the smartest figure on the American right—someone not given to bouts of provocation or hyperbole, but rather someone who speaks with equal authority on macroeconomics and family budgeting, global starvation and American giving, corporate structure and worker behavior, cultural evolution and societal happiness.

Brooks also conjures comparisons to “The Most Interesting Man in the World,” the character in the Dos Equis beer commercials. He performed as a professional French hornist before entering the world of academia. He converted to Roman Catholicism when he was 16 after a quasi-supernatural experience at the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico. He met his future wife, who spoke no English, while touring in France—and immediately moved to Barcelona to learn Spanish and begin his courtship. He befriended the Dalai Lama during a trip to India some years ago, leading to repeated visits with one another and a joint New York Times op-ed.

Less flashy but equally fascinating—at least in the annals of Washington— Brooks enhanced AEI’s reputation as an engine of introspection and debate, even as anti-intellectualism and lowest-common-denominator conservatism became the currency of the modern GOP. Brooks employs scholars from across the ideological spectrum, including Never-Trumpers, and unlike the rival Heritage Foundation, AEI has kept its distance from the administration.

In March, Brooks announced his impending retirement. We sat down recently to discuss the polarization of the electorate, the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, and the reason he remains optimistic about America’s future. Excerpts of that conversation follow, edited for length and clarity.

***

POLITICO Magazine: For conservatism, for Republicanism, for the institutions of government and for the country as a whole, from your perch over the past 10 years, what went wrong?

Arthur Brooks: For me, unity is a really big deal. By that I don’t mean agreement. The founding model in this place was super old school—a competition of ideas is fundamental to a free society, which was so subversive in the ’30s and ’40s because there was no competition of ideas. Disagreement is the essence of how we can unify as a people. We have a moral consensus about pushing opportunity out to people who need it most. Then we actually have to become a constellation of disagreement around that so that we can find the best way to do it. In the same way that you need a competition within the economy so that you can serve consumers best. Competition is hugely important in all areas. It’s a moral good. When you basically see a culture that's not trying to win competition vigorously and civilly and respectfully, but rather trying to shut down competition by any means necessary, that’s like an economy that's going from free enterprise to mercantilism. That’s basically what’s happened. We’ve gone from free enterprise of ideas to mercantilism of ideas. That’s what’s happening on both right and left today. That’s really disappointing.

Now, I’m sanguine still. Why? Because that happens periodically and competition also always wins out. There are basically two kinds of people in life: people who want to win competition and people who want to shut it down. People who don’t understand competition actually are the ones who want to shut it down because they don’t understand that competition requires rules. It requires moral precepts. Pepsi doesn’t want to go blow up the Coca-Cola bottling factory. It wants to take their customers fair and square for the better product and better pricing. The same thing should be true in American politics and policy.

PM: So you see intellectual sabotage?

Brooks: Yeah, and it’s not just unfair, it’s stupid because it leads to mediocrity. It leads to a flaccid set of political parties and not very creative ideas. When you’re shutting down the competition like this you don’t solve problems. You perpetuate problems, and you simply build up power structures. So all politics becomes a rent-seeking mechanism: my tribe, your tribe. I’m going to get power, I’m going to deny you power as opposed to colluding within the kind of the noble cause of solving ideas by competing at the head. What’s always disappointing to me is when we’re moving in the wrong direction and right now we’re moving in the wrong direction on that by moving to intellectual mercantilism. I want to move to intellectual free enterprise. That’s what I want.

PM: And the folks who want to suppress competition of ideas now have tools at their disposal the likes of which they’ve never had before, to do just that.

Brooks: I have a book coming out next year called The Culture of Contempt. We’ve created a culture of not anger, not disagreement, it’s contempt. And we need to strike back. We’re the majority. We don’t want this. Americans are being held hostage and terrorized by the fringes. That’s what’s going on here. It’s not like 50 percent of Americans thinks one thing and 50 percent thinks another thing. No, 15 percent on each side are effectively controlling the conversation and 70 percent of us don’t hate each other. I can ask any audience, “How many of you love somebody with whom you disagree politically?” Every hand goes up. And yet, you’re willing to have somebody, some fringe person on your side of the debate, say that your brother-in-law or your mother or your aunt is evil and stupid.

PM: But isn’t the problem more that the fringe used to be called “the fringe” for a reason—and today the fringe represents a broader chunk of both politicians and voters?

Brooks: They always do in this cycle. It’s always the case that when you get into a time of really big political polarization, that people are manipulated by people who are at the fringe. It’s only in retrospect that people go, “Whoa, man, I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that we were putting up with that.” We need a kind of an ethical populism. What basically happened is that political establishment was a little bit too reticent. It was not paying attention, and the result was that the fringe picked up the football and ran off with it. But there’s going to be a backlash. If I have anything to say about it, there’s going to be a backlash of people who say that your radical, hateful views, and I’m no liberal, but I don’t hate liberals. I refuse to hate liberals. Refuse. I think there’s a lot of Americans that want to join me in that.

PM: How do you think we got to this point?

Brooks: The two things to read are Reinhart and Rogoff’s book, This Time Is Different. It came out in 2010—the single best book ever on financial cycles and financial crisis. The second is an article that was written in the European Economic Review in early 2017 by three German economists that looks at the knock-on political effect of financial crises—not a regular recession, but a big overhang of assets that becomes a bubble and then pops, which typically happens a couple times a century. So it’s silver and the railroads in 1894 and 1896, or it’s the stock market in 1929, or it's the real estate market in ’08. The most interesting thing for me is that in the decade after a financial crisis, the knock-on effect over 10 years is not low growth, it’s uneven growth. The big thing that happens for 10 years is that you have asymmetric economic growth where 80 percent of the income distribution gets none of the rewards of the growth after the recession. Of course you get populism after that. It’s natural. It’s just the way it works.

PM: But populism is not inherently a bad thing.

Brooks: Bernie Sanders is a populist. Bernie Sanders’ populism is all about scapegoating. It’s rich people, it’s bankers, it’s Republicans—it’s all these people who got your stuff. That’s the kind of populism that we frequently see as opposed to a kind of ethical populism, which basically says we have good values, let’s go share. Let’s make sure that our values are ascendant to save our country. Right? Wouldn't that be great? But it turns out it’s easier in the political process when people are suffering a lot to say somebody came and got your stuff. Whether it’s immigrants or whether it’s trading partners or whether it’s bankers or whatever.

PM: What about conservatism? In your nine years at AEI, what’s been the single most important, most fundamental change you have seen in conservatism itself?

Brooks: Well for sure it’s the rise to Trump.

by Tim Alberta, Politico |  Read more:

Image: Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
[ed. Great interview, although my perspective on the question of 'how we got here' wouldn't be limited to just the Great Recession. There's also: a dishonest and ill-conceived war with Iraq (and everything that followed - legitimizing torture; a new Homeland Security bureaucracy and rise of the surveillance state; the demise of habeas corpus and the normalization of indefinite political imprisonment; neoliberalism in general (including the demise of Glass-Steagall) and the focus on maximizing short-term corporate shareholder profit as a national economic policy, etc.); plus, John McCain's decision to cast Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008. It's just been a cascading series of moral and ethical failures since 9/11 - but beginning with the Reagan administration.]

tantaku, My Workspace
via:

Cosmic Crisp: Washington’s New Apple Could Be a Game-Changer

Bruce Barritt, Ph.D., is running around the apple orchard with his camera snapping pictures. He resembles a kind of horticultural Pete Carroll, coach of the Seattle Seahawks. He’s energetic, articulate and has a bounce for a guy in his 70s.

It is spring planting season and what’s taking place here in the hills east of Wenatchee is the elaborate choreography of putting in a new orchard. Multiple tractors are going back and forth opening rows of soil while workers drop small, twig-like trees into the furrows. Other workers follow behind covering the rootstock and trimming each tree as it’s planted. Hundreds of trees are planted in minutes. Watering systems and trellises follow.

It’s not uncommon to have a camera when an important birth is taking place, and make no mistake, this planting season is part of an elaborate gestation of a new apple variety that is designed to change the industry and consumer tastes. Barritt, emeritus professor of apple breeding at Washington State University, is the proud papa.

He has been working on this new apple for more than 20 years — since the mid-1990s — and now his dream is literally coming to fruition. “My kids don’t like me to say this but these are like my kids,” he says gesturing at the trees.

The patented name of the new apple is WA 38, but you will know it as the Cosmic Crisp. It is part of a huge bet the Washington apple industry is making to create a new variety that will supplant many of the old familiars, like the iconic Red Delicious. The Northwest, led by Washington, provides about two-thirds of America’s fresh apples and also nearly 75 percent of all U.S. apples, including those used for juice. The state’s apples also sell around the world. With funding from state growers and led by Barritt, WSU researchers have invented a new variety that, they believe, will change the face of the industry and win enthusiasm among the public with a combination of taste, texture and usability.

Just over 600,000 Cosmic Crips trees were in the ground in 2017, with some 7 million more being planted this year in 2018, and another 6 million next — a pace faster than expected. The new apple will be available to consumers in the fall of 2019 — it takes about two years for a new tree to bear fruit.

Barritt says growers will invest some $500 million planting the Cosmic Crisp over the next few years. Kathryn Grandy, director of marketing and operations for Proprietary Variety Management (PVM), a Yakima company tasked with introducing the apple to consumers, tells me it’s “the largest launch of a produce item” ever in the U.S.

According to PVM, Cosmic Crisp will begin to replace Galas, Fujis, Cameos, Braeburns and other varieties, including the Red and Golden Delicious.

Casey Corr, who just retired as managing editor of the industry publication Good Fruit Grower, says the apple has to be an instant success when it hits the supermarket. “It’s gotta be like the new iPhone,” Corr says.

The Cosmic Crisp is big, mostly red and very juicy. Barritt says from the beginning the breeding program was designed with the consumer in mind. The apple market has changed over the years. Once staple varieties like Red and Golden Delicious were problematic — short shelve lives, bland flavors — and they’ve lost some popularity (sales peaked in 1994). Those varieties still sell and in some overseas markets like Japan, where tastes run to the familiar, the Red Delicious still is regarded as the ideal of what an apple should be, mostly due to its iconic shape and deep red color. Personally, though, I have never liked it. Other varieties have more flavor, better texture and are easier to grow. For those reasons some believe the Delicious is “obsolete.” (...)

The Cosmic Crisp has a number of advantages. It is slow to turn brown when cut. I had half of one in the car for six hours and it hadn’t even started to turn brown when I got it home. It keeps longer after harvest. Picked in September, the Cosmic Crisp in cold storage can last a year, extending its lifespan and reducing waste. It’s a 365-day-a-year apple designed to thrive in Eastern Washington’s apple friendly soils and climate, unlike varieties brought from overseas or the East Coast.

Barritt says that while benefits for growers are important, it’s taste that will make or break the variety. To that end, I visited WSU’s Tree Fruit Research and Extension Center in Wenatchee where I had a chance to discuss the Cosmic Crisp with Barritt and his successor overseeing research, Kate Evans, Ph.D.

We went down into a basement lab where vials filled with fluid from various Cosmic Crisps was being tested for acidity, which “provides the character of the apple,” says Barritt. It plays a key role in how any apple tastes, and learning to get the proper balance under differing growing conditions is important. Evans continues to conduct research on test trees in order to compile a grower’s manual for how to produce the optimum Cosmic Crisps.

The researchers take a batch of Cosmic Crisp apples out of the box. Barritt and Evans give some instruction on how to taste an apple. “Taste,” it turns out, is not just on the tongue. How does an apple sound when you bite into it? Does it crunch? Does the bite snap off in your mouth? What’s the texture like — smooth or mealy? Is the skin too thick? Is it juicy or dry? Taste involves all the sense before you even get to sweet or sour, the blend of flavors that make up an apple.

The WA 38 designation means it was the WSU team’s 38th attempt to get a new variety. Coming up with the perfect apple takes time. I was fully prepared to be disappointed — the industry hype and catering to mass tastes made me a little suspicious. While it’s not a GMO apple like the Arctic, you’re still talking about something created by scientists and commercial growers who are planting cloned trees.

But the Cosmic Crisp ticked every box: good looking, with a nice crunch and powerful snap, a beautiful sweet-tart balance, tons of juice trickling down the chin. I wasn’t overwhelmed by, say, hints of blueberry or a floral nose — the kinds of complexities wine tasters go on about. But it was one of the best apples I’ve ever eaten. In fact, my sample was the essence of apple.

by Knute Berger & Eric Keto, Crosscut | Read more:
Image: Karen Ducey

via:

Has Wine Gone Bad?

Once you know what to look for, natural wines are easy to spot: they tend to be smellier, cloudier, juicier, more acidic and generally truer to the actual taste of grape than traditional wines. In a way, they represent a return to the core elements that made human beings fall in love with wine when we first began making it, around 6,000 years ago. Advocates of natural wine believe that nearly everything about the £130bn modern wine industry – from the way it is made, to the way critics police what counts as good or bad – is ethically, ecologically and aesthetically wrong. Their ambition is to strip away the artificial trappings that have developed in tandem with the industry’s decades-long economic boom, and let wine be wine.

But among wine critics, there is a deep suspicion that the natural wine movement is intent on tearing down the norms and hierarchies that they have dedicated their lives to upholding. The haziness of what actually counts as natural wine is particularly maddening to such traditionalists. “There is no legal definition of natural wine,” Michel Bettane, one of France’s most influential wine critics, told me. “It exists because it proclaims itself so. It is a fantasy of marginal producers.” Robert Parker, perhaps the world’s most powerful wine critic, has called natural wine an “undefined scam”.

For natural wine enthusiasts, though, the lack of strict rules is part of its appeal. At a recent natural wine fair in London, I encountered winemakers who farmed by the phases of the moon and didn’t own computers; one man foraged his grapes from wild vines in the mountains of Georgia; there was a couple who were reviving an old Spanish technique of placing the wine in great clear glass demijohns outside to capture sunlight; others were ageing their wines in handmade clay pots, buried underground to keep them cool as their predecessors did in the days of ancient Rome. (...)

At first glance, the idea that wine should be more natural seems absurd. Wine’s own iconography, right down to the labels, suggests a placid world of rolling green hills, village harvests and vintners shuffling down to the cellar to check in on the mysterious process of fermentation. The grapes arrive in your glass transformed, but relatively unmolested.

Yet, as natural wine advocates point out, the way most wine is produced today looks nothing like this picture-postcard vision. Vineyards are soaked with pesticide and fertiliser to protect the grapes, which are a notoriously fragile crop. In 2000, a French government report noted that vineyards used 3% of all agricultural land, but 20% of the total pesticides. In 2013, a study found traces of pesticides in 90% of wines available at French supermarkets.

In response to this, a small but growing number of vineyards have introduced organic farming. But what happens once the grapes have been harvested is less scrutinised, and, to natural wine enthusiasts, scarcely less horrifying. The modern winemaker has access to a vast armamentarium of interventions, from supercharged lab-grown yeast, to antimicrobials, antioxidants, acidity regulators and filtering gelatins, all the way up to industrial machines. Wine is regularly passed through electrical fields to prevent calcium and potassium crystals from forming, injected with various gases to aerate or protect it, or split into its constituent liquids by reverse osmosis and reconstituted with a more pleasing alcohol to juice ratio.

Natural winemakers believe that none of this is necessary. The basics of winemaking are, in fact, almost stupefyingly simple: all it involves is crushing together some ripe grapes. When the yeasts that live on the skin of the grape come into contact with the sweet juice inside, they begin gorging themselves on the sugars, releasing bubbles of carbon dioxide into the air and secreting alcohol into the mixture. This continues either until there is no more sugar, or the yeasts make the surrounding environment so alcoholic that even they cannot live in it. At this point, strictly speaking, you have wine. In the millennia since humans first undertook this process, winemaking has become a highly technical art, but the fundamental alchemy is unchanged. Fermentation is the indivisible step. Whatever precedes it is grape juice, and whatever follows it is wine.

“The yeasts are the key between the vines and the people,” Pacalet told me, in a reverent tone. “You use the living system to express the information in the soil. If you use industrial techniques, even if it’s a small operation, you’re making an industrial product.” Viewed in this quasi-spiritual way, the winemaker’s job is to grow healthy grapes, tend to the fermentation, and intervene as little as possible.

In practice, this means going without the methods that have given modern winemakers so much control over their product. Even more radically, it means jettisoning the expectations of mainstream wine culture, which dictates that wine from a certain place should always taste a certain way, and that a winemaker works like a conductor, intervening to turn up or tamp down the various elements of the wine until it plays the tune the audience expects. “It is important a sancerre tastes like a sancerre, then we can start to determine levels of quality,” says Ronan Sayburn, the head of wine at the private wine club and bar 67 Pall Mall.

In France, which remains the cultural and commercial centre of the wine world, the acceptable styles of winemaking aren’t just a matter of history and convention; they are codified into law. For a wine to be labelled as from a particular region, it must adhere to strict guidelines about which grapes and production techniques can be used, and how the resulting wine should taste. This system of certification – the appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC), or “protected designation of origin” – is enforced by inspectors and blind-tasting panels. Wines that fail to conform to these standards are labelled “vin de France”, a generic designation that suggests low quality and makes them less attractive to buyers.

Some natural winemakers have rebelled against this legislation, which they believe only reinforces the dominant styles and methods that are ruining wine altogether. In 2003, the natural winemaker Olivier Cousin opted out of his local AOC, complaining in a letter that meeting their standards meant that “one must beat the grapes with machines, add sulphites, enzymes and yeast, sterilise and filter”. When he refused to stop describing his wine as being from Anjou, he was actually prosecuted for labelling violations. In response, Cousin put on a good show, riding his draft horse up to the courtroom steps and bringing a barrel of his offending wine to share with passers-by. But he ended up changing the labels.

“The AOC are liars,” Olivier’s son Baptiste, who has taken over several of his father’s vineyards, told me. “The local designations were created to protect small producers, but now they just enforce poor quality.”

The expectations of how a wine from a certain region should taste go back hundreds of years, but the global industry that has been built atop them is largely a product of the past century. If natural wine is a backlash against anything, it is the idea that it is possible to square traditional methods of winemaking with the scale and demands of that market. There is a sense that alongside economic success, globalisation has slowly forced the wine world toward a dull, crowd-pleasing conformity.

France has long been the centre of the wine world, but until the mid-20th century most vineyards were small and worked mainly by hand. In the eyes of natural winemakers, the rot began in the decades after the second world war, as French vineyards modernised and the industry grew into a global economic behemoth. To these disillusioned observers, what seems like a story of technical and economic triumph is really the tragic tale of how wine lost its way.

by Stephen Buranyi, The Guardian | Read more:

Image: uncredited

Ogata Kenzan 尾形乾山 (1663 – 1743). Tea bowl with pines” ca. 1700
via:

Shipwreck Beach (Kaiolohia)
photo: Bert T.

North Korean Tunnels

North Korea has long depended on tunnel technology. Tunnels hide some of the country’s biggest secrets. Between 1974 and 1990, four tunnels were discovered running from the North under the D.M.Z. deep into South Korea. There may be dozens more still undetected, South Korean officials told me. Pyongyang dug the tunnels through bedrock and later equipped them with lights and ventilation, to infiltrate troops into the South in the event of war. I visited the so-called Third Tunnel of Aggression earlier this month. It came within thirty miles of Seoul. It was large enough for thirty thousand troops to pass through in an hour. It was detected, on a tip from a North Korean defector, in 1978.

Visitors can now tour the tunnel after clearing a South Korean military checkpoint into the D.M.Z. You put on a hard hat and take a little tram down a steep slope, two hundred and forty feet into the earth. A list of instructions advises, in English and Korean, “Do not enter the tunnel drunk” and “People with respiratory and heart problems should not participate in this tour.” Claustrophobia, too. Access to the tunnel ends at a concrete slab installed by the South to demarcate the border. (...)

The challenge will be what North Korea actually surrenders. Kim will have to confess the location and details of hundreds, maybe even thousands, of tunnels on the other side of the D.M.Z. which hide his military treasures. “Some think North Korea has built ten thousand underground facilities since the nineteen-sixties,” the retired lieutenant-general In-Bum Chun, a former director of operational planning for the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff, told me. The facilities reportedly include troop bunkers along the D.M.Z.; facilities for up to five thousand metric tons of chemical weapons, one of the world’s largest stockpiles; underground hangars; and three underground runways to allow tunnel takeoffs by military aircraft.

by Robin Wright, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Olivier Mirguet / Agence VU/ Redux
[ed. Underground runways! See also: North Korea expands threat to cancel Trump-Kim summit, saying it won’t be pushed to abandon its nukes. They hate Bolton (for good reason).]

Outrageous Medical Bills? Get Them Itemized First

If you happened to be listening to NPR this morning, you might have heard this story on outrageous medical bills sandwiched between reports of the new U.S. embassy in Israel and dozens of dead Palestinians (welcome to Infrastructure Week!). For months, NPR has been working with Kaiser Health News to collect stories of medical bills gone wrong, and today, they brought us the tale of Sherry Young, a retired librarian who underwent two relatively minor surgeries in one day, one for a shoulder injury and one for a bone spur in her foot. In total, she was in the hospital for three days.

Her bill? Over $115,000.

Young had insurance, but because her hospital stay wasn't pre-approved, Young was on the hook for the whole thing, which was more than her home was worth and over five times her annual income. Young did the smart thing: She asked for an itemized bill, and what she found was shocking. According to the bill, Young was being charged $15,076 for four tiny screws made by a company called Arthrex that were placed in her foot.

"Unless the metal [was] mined on an asteroid, I do not know why it should cost that amount," Young told NPR. She tried to get to the bottom of it herself, but the University of Oklahoma, where she'd had her surgery, refused to tell her how much the screws and other things had cost the hospital, so Young did another smart thing: She got in touch with NPR, and NPR was able to get more answers than the patient herself.

John Schmieding, senior vice president and general counsel for Arthrex, declined to tell reporters exactly how much his company charges hospitals for those screws, but he did say that screws generally range from $300 per screw to $1,000 per screw, which means the hospital marked them up anywhere from 275 to 1,150 percent. Those screws, according to an expert NPR interviewed, likely cost around $30 to manufacture.

And that was just the beginning of it. Young was also charged $4,265 for a drill bit, $5,047 for a tool that removes and cauterizes tissue, and $619 for a saw blade. And those tools are (or at least should be) reusable.

Young got lucky. When reporters started looking into her story, BlueCross BlueShield of Oklahoma said the whole thing was a mistake. But if she hadn't been insured—and if she hadn't contacted the media—she would have been responsible for those $115,000 in hospital fees, the sort of money that that makes people go broke. And she's hardly alone: There are endless accounts of outrageous hospital fees: from $3000 for a 15-minute consult and no treatment to $1,420 for two hours of babysitting to $441 for one liter of salt water. In general, insurance companies negotiate with hospitals over prices and patients don't ever see the true costs of their care. But of course, without insurance, and having no negotiating power with hospitals, the uninsured are often times out of luck. Those $15,000 screws are coming out of your pocket.

NPR and Kaiser are going to continue to report on these issues, so, if you have an outrageous medical bill, upload it here.

by Katie Herzog, The Stranger |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. Stories like this are so common these days it's easy to get desensitized (except for the people experiencing them!). Do note the link at the end of this article: (Share Your Medical Bill With Us). Sometimes public shaming is the only effective method for dealing with the hospital/insurance industrial complex.

'Tax Amazon': Seattle Passes Plan for Corporate Wealth Tax to Fund Housing

A parade of hardhat union workers and threats from hometown-behemoth Amazon did not stop Seattle leaders from passing on Monday a “head tax” meant to fund housing projects and homeless services.

A watered-down version of the tax, which will charge the city’s largest employees $275 per worker annually, is now expected to be enacted by Seattle’s mayor, Jenny Durkan. The tax is projected to generate about $48m a year to address a housing crisis spurred on by Amazon’s rapid growth.

A broader tax proposal prompted the tech company to halt construction on one Seattle office tower and put off a lease of another tower. Union construction workers marched on city call to protest the tax, which also drew opposition from business interests.

Socialists and self-styled members of the “Seattle silent majority” squared off prior to Monday’s vote. Neither side supported the compromise, and most speakers blamed city leaders for an escalating homelessness crisis that has seen city sidewalks, parks and roadsides packed with tents and shacks.

About 60% of the tax revenue will go to new housing projects for low and middle-income Seattle residents. The remainder would go to homeless services, including shelter beds, camps and overnight parking.

On Friday, city council members approved a proposal to charge the large employers in the city $500-per-employee. Following a veto threat from Durkan, the council decreased the total charge and included a five-year sunset provision over objections of supporters of the original legislation.

“Do not capitulate to [Amazon CEO Jeff] Bezos’ bullying,” Emily McArthur, an organizer with Socialist Alternative, demanded of the council. “Tax Amazon. Be leaders.”

Amazon has driven Seattle’s economy in recent years, drawing thousands of well-paid workers to the region. The “Bezos Boom” has proved a mixed blessing, though, as middle-income residents have been priced out of Seattle. The city council president, Bruce Harrell, spoke to a growing “fear of what this city is becoming”.

The move by Amazon to create HQ2 – a second headquarters elsewhere – has stoked fears that Seattle’s liberal politics will turn off the company. Threats from Amazon that it will halt growth in Seattle in favor of other offices lend credence to those concerns.

In a statement issued Monday, Vice President Drew Herdener said the company would resume construction on the downtown tower but was considering whether Seattle is the place for it to grow.

“We remain very apprehensive about the future created by the council’s hostile approach and rhetoric toward larger businesses, which forces us to question our growth here,” Herdener said.

by Levi Pulkkinen, The Guardian | Read more:

Image: Elaine Thompson/AP
[ed. Too Big to Tax? Apparently not, and that's a good thing (although the current Seattle City Council does seem a little nuts in other ways). See also: Amazon threatens to move jobs out of Seattle over new tax and Seattle returns to Wells Fargo because no other bank wants city’s business]

The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

Introduction:

I don't mean for this to sound like "I had a vision" or anything, but there was a specific starting point for practically all of these stories. I wrote them in a fifteen-month period, and the whole thing started with the afternoon I went to a Hot Rod & Custom Car show at the Coliseum in New York. Strange afternoon! I was sent up there to cover the Hot Rod & Custom Car show by the New York Herald Tribune, and I brought back exactly the kind of story and of the somnambulistic totem newspapers in America would have come up with. A totem newspaper is the kind people don't really buy to read but just to have, physically, because they know it supports their own outlook on life. They're just like the buffalo tongues the Omaha Indians used to carry around or the dog ears the Mahili clan carried around in Bengal. There are two kinds to totem newspapers in the country. One is the symbol of the frightened chair-arm-doilie Vicks Vapo-Rub Weltanschauung that lies there in the solar plexus of all good gray burghers. All those nice stories on the first page of the second section about eighty-seven-year-old ladies on Gramercy Park who have one-hundred-and-two-year-old turtles or about the colorful street vendors of Havana. Mommy! This fellow Castor is in there, and revolutions may come and go, but the picturesque poor will endure, padding around in the streets selling their chestnuts and salt pretzels the world over, even in Havana, Cuba, assuring a paradise, after all, full of respect and obeisance, for all us Vicks Vapo-Rub chair-arm-doilie burghers. After all. Or another totem group buys the kind of paper they can put under their arms and have the totem for the touch-but-wholesome outlook, the Mom's Pie view of life. Everybody can go off to the bar and drink a few "brews" and retail some cynical remarks about Zora Folley and how the fight game is these days and round it off, though, with how George Chuvalo has "a lot of heart," which he got, one understands, by eating mom's pie. Anyway, I went to the Hot Rod & Custom Car show and wrote a story that would have suited any of the totem newspapers. All the totem newspapers would regard one of these shows as a sideshow, a panopticon, for creeps and kooks; not even wealthy, eccentric creeps and kooks, which would be all right, but lower class creeps and nutballs with dermatitic skin and ratty hair. The totem story usually makes what is known as "gentle fun" of this, which is a way of saying, don't worry, these people are nothing.

So I wrote a story about a kid who had built a golden motorcycle, which he called "The Golden Alligator." The seat was made of some kind of gold-painted leather that kept going back, on and on, as long as an alligator's tail, and had scales embossed on it, like an alligator's. The kid had made a whole golden suit for himself, like a space suit, that also looked as if it were covered with scales and he would lie down on his stomach on this long seat, stretched out full length, so that he appeared to be made into the motorcycle or something, and roar around Greenwich Village on Saturday nights, down Macdougal Street, down there in Nut Heaven, looking like a golden alligator on wheels. Nutty! He seemed like a Gentle Nut when I got through. It was a shame I wrote that sort of story, the usual totem story, because I was working for the Herald Tribune, and the Herald Tribune was the only experimental paper in town, breaking out of the totem formula. The thing was, I knew I had another story all the time, a bona fide story, the real story of the Hot Rod & Custom Car show, but I didn't know what to do with it. It was outside the system of ideas I was used to working with, even though I had been through the whole Ph.D. route at Yale, in American Studies and everything.

Here were all these . . . weird . . . nutty-looking, crazy baroque custom cars, sitting in little nests of pink angora angel's hair for the purpose of "glamorous" display—but then I got to talking to one of the men who make them, a fellow named Dale Alexander. He was a very serious and soft-spoken man, about thirty, completely serious about the whole thing, in fact, and pretty soon it became clear, as I talked to this man for a while, that he had been living like the complete artist for years. He had starved, suffered—the whole thing—so he could sit inside a garage and create these cars which more than 99 per cent of the American people would consider ridiculous, vulgar and lower-class-awful beyond comment almost. He had started off with a garage that fixed banged-up cars and everything, to pay the rent, but gradually he couldn't stand it any more. Creativity—his own custom car art—became an obsession with him. So he became the complete custom car artist. And he said he wasn't the only one. All the great custom car designers had gone through it. It was the only way. Holy beasts! Starving artists! Inspiration! Only instead of garrets, they had these garages.

So I went over to Esquire magazine after a while and talked to them about this phenomenon, and they sent me out to California to take a look at the custom car world. Dale Alexander was from Detroit or some place, but the real center of the thing was in California, around Los Angeles. I started talking to a lot of these people, like George Barris and Ed Roth, and seeing what they were doing, and—well, eventually it became the story from which the title of this book was taken, "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby." But at first I couldn't even write the story. I came back to New York and just sat around worrying over the thing. I had a lot of trouble analyzing exactly what I had on my hands. By this time Esquire practically had a gun at my head because they had a two-page-wide color picture for the story locked into the printing presses and no story. Finally, I told Byron Dobell, the managing editor at Esquire, that I couldn't pull the thing together. O.K., he tells me, just type out my notes and send them over and he will get somebody else to write it. So about 8 o'clock that night I started typing the notes out in the form of a memorandum that began, "Dear Byron." I started typing away, starting right with the first time I saw any custom cars in California. I just started recording it all, and inside of a couple of hours, typing along like a madman, I could tell that something was beginning to happen. By midnight this memorandum to Byron was twenty pages long and I was still typing like a maniac. About 2 A.M. or something like that I turned on WABC, a radio station that plays rock and roll music all night long, and got a little more manic. I wrapped up the memorandum about 6:15 A.M., and by this time it was 49 pages long. I took it over to Esquire as soon as they opened up, about 9:30 A.M. About 4 P.M. I got a call from Byron Dobell. He told me they were striking out the "Dear Byron" at the top of the memorandum and running the rest of it in the magazine. That was the story, "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby."

by Tom Wolfe, TomWolfe.com |  Read more:

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[ed. See also: Tom Wolfe, Pyrotechnic ‘New Journalist’ and Novelist, Dies at 88]

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