Monday, August 27, 2018
The Philanthropy Racket
As Anand Giridharadas argues in his indispensable new book, Winners Take All, “There is no denying that today’s elite may be among the more socially concerned elites in history. But it is also, by the cold logic of numbers, among the most predatory.”
As wages stagnate and decline, and income and housing supports are viciously winnowed away, a new brand of philanthropic do-goodism aims to transform social relief into entrepreneurial opportunity. In big-name corporate consultancies like McKinsey, at global meeting grounds like Davos, Aspen and Doha, within the warm self-admiring glow of the Clinton Global Initiatives (CGI), the very class profiting from global inequality convenes in search of ways to ameliorate its symptoms—profitably, of course, via a stable of “disruptive” market-driven interventions in healthcare, transportation, housing and other spheres that are sold to investors as ingenious ways of hacking society.
The perverse dogma behind such initiatives is the mantra “win-win”—the notion that social reform need never entail any cost to corporate bottom lines. As one of its chief theorists, former TechCrunch reporter Greg Ferenstein explains, if you assume the public sector is fundamentally at odds with the market:
Giridharadas supplies a lacerating critique of this quisling rationale by virtue of knowing it firsthand; he’s a former McKinsey consultant and Aspen Institute fellow who’s done the rounds of TED talks. His insider access allows him to tease out the intellectual and moral failures of our Optimist overlords in a devastating portrait of the “network and community” and “culture and state of mind” he calls “MarketWorld”:
Reporting from the last convocation of the CGI, Giridharadas quotes former President Bill Clinton’s valedictory address to this High Church of MarketWorld. “Good people, committed to creative cooperation, have almost unlimited positive impact to help people today and give our kids better tomorrows,” Clinton intoned. “This is all that does work in the modern world.” Giridharadas rightly dubs this latter claim “astonishing”—it’s redolent of Margaret Thatcher’s insistence that there was simply “no alternative” to untrammeled capitalist rule.
Giussani suggests that such Olympian narratives of elite reassurance serve to dismiss any critical perspective as backward and unenlightened: “Your problems don’t really matter compared to the past’s, and your problems are not really problems, because things are getting better.”
by Chris Lehmann, Jacobin | Read more:
Image: Jamie McCarthy/Getty
As wages stagnate and decline, and income and housing supports are viciously winnowed away, a new brand of philanthropic do-goodism aims to transform social relief into entrepreneurial opportunity. In big-name corporate consultancies like McKinsey, at global meeting grounds like Davos, Aspen and Doha, within the warm self-admiring glow of the Clinton Global Initiatives (CGI), the very class profiting from global inequality convenes in search of ways to ameliorate its symptoms—profitably, of course, via a stable of “disruptive” market-driven interventions in healthcare, transportation, housing and other spheres that are sold to investors as ingenious ways of hacking society.The perverse dogma behind such initiatives is the mantra “win-win”—the notion that social reform need never entail any cost to corporate bottom lines. As one of its chief theorists, former TechCrunch reporter Greg Ferenstein explains, if you assume the public sector is fundamentally at odds with the market:
You worry about disparities in wealth. You want labor unions to protect workers from corporations. You want a smaller government to get out of the way of business. If you don’t make that assumption, and you believe that every institution needs to do well, and they all work with each other, you don’t want unions or regulation or sovereignty or any of the other things that protect people from each other.He sums up this government-market synergy, daftly, as “Optimism.” After all, the neoliberal elite has found a remedy for the savage inequalities of the market—a suite of cosmetic social fixes that abide by market logic, such as micro-loans and school vouchers.
Giridharadas supplies a lacerating critique of this quisling rationale by virtue of knowing it firsthand; he’s a former McKinsey consultant and Aspen Institute fellow who’s done the rounds of TED talks. His insider access allows him to tease out the intellectual and moral failures of our Optimist overlords in a devastating portrait of the “network and community” and “culture and state of mind” he calls “MarketWorld”:
These elites believe and promote the idea that social change should be pursued principally through the free market and voluntary action, not public life and the law and the reform of the systems that people share in common; that it should be supervised by the winners of capitalism and their allies, and not be antagonistic to their needs; and that the biggest beneficiaries of the status quo should play a leading role in the status quo’s reform.As Giridharadas notes, defending MarketWorld requires no end of distortions and diminutions of social thought. The social psychologist Amy Cuddy, for instance, delivered one of the most successful TED talks in history by presenting feminist activism largely as a matter of adopting tweaks to personal comportment in the workplace, such as “power postures.” Such glosses on social conflict, Giridharadas writes, “have given rise to watered-down theories of change that are personal, individual, depoliticized, respectful of the status quo and the system, and not in the least bit disruptive.” Bruno Giussani, the TED official who hosted Cuddy’s talk, concedes as much, noting he’d even coined a term for the elite evasion of social conflict: “Pinkering,” after the Harvard linguist Steven Pinker’s argument that the arc of history is bending ineluctably toward world peace.
Reporting from the last convocation of the CGI, Giridharadas quotes former President Bill Clinton’s valedictory address to this High Church of MarketWorld. “Good people, committed to creative cooperation, have almost unlimited positive impact to help people today and give our kids better tomorrows,” Clinton intoned. “This is all that does work in the modern world.” Giridharadas rightly dubs this latter claim “astonishing”—it’s redolent of Margaret Thatcher’s insistence that there was simply “no alternative” to untrammeled capitalist rule.
Giussani suggests that such Olympian narratives of elite reassurance serve to dismiss any critical perspective as backward and unenlightened: “Your problems don’t really matter compared to the past’s, and your problems are not really problems, because things are getting better.”
by Chris Lehmann, Jacobin | Read more:
Image: Jamie McCarthy/Getty
[ed. Investment idea: Pitchforks. See also: Milken, Mnuchin Join Blankfein in the Hamptons to Fix World.]
Harley-Davidson Needs a New Generation of Riders
The first thing you should do when you meet a Harley-Davidson rider is check the back of his—or her, but let’s be honest, it’s probably his—jacket. The patches tell you who you’re dealing with. First, there’s the insignia. It might be a bald eagle atop the company’s logo to let everyone know this is a Harley guy—not a Honda guy, not a BMW guy, but a red-blooded, flag-waving American patriot. If this particular Harley guy belongs to one of 1,400 company-sponsored Harley Owners Group (H.O.G.) chapters around the world, the insignia will be coupled with a second patch that specifies which H.O.G. he belongs to: the Duluth H.O.G.s, the Waco H.O.G.s., or, today, the H.O.G.s of Long Island.
Sometimes there’s a third patch, for bikers who belong to an independent club—the Blue Knights are cops, the Hells Angels hate cops—but two-patch groups tend not to associate with them. “It’s a different mindset,” says Frank Pellegrino, who on weekdays is a vice president for a plastics outsourcing company and on weekends a Long Island H.O.G.
Pellegrino, who got his first Harley for his 65th birthday last year, is about to spend this cloudless summer Sunday exploring 100 miles along the back roads of New York and Connecticut with about 25 other Harley guys.
With him today are Joe, Marty, Dennis, Grover, Richie, Bob and his girlfriend, Dawn, and two Mikes, one with an American flag bandanna tied around his head. No one is younger than 45; many are well past 60. They’ve gathered behind a BP station at 8 a.m. in mid-July, sipping coffee and admiring one another’s bikes. At one point, Dennis talks politics with Joe and one of the Mikes.
“What’s the deal with all this fake news about a Europe plant?” Mike without a bandanna asks. “Harley was already going to build overseas, and now they’re just blaming it on the president.”
In June the European Union slapped what’s effectively a 31 percent retaliatory tariff on Harley in response to President Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs. To avoid them, Joe says, Harley will stop making the bikes it sells to Europe in the U.S. The company already has plants in Brazil and India and is in the process of opening one in Thailand.
“Oh, is that the case?” Mike asks. He swears he read something different on the internet.
“I see where they’re coming from,” Dennis says, crossing his arms over his We Stand For The Flag T-shirt. “How are they going to sell over there with millions in tariffs placed on them?”
“I still don’t like it,” Mike says. “Harley ought to be focused on us.”
Three weeks later, and about 1,000 miles away at its headquarters in Milwaukee, Harley-Davidson Inc. announced what executives called the most ambitious overhaul in its 115-year history with a plan that, for the first time in decades, wasn’t focused on riders like Frank or Dennis or the Mikes.
In the next few years, Harley will release more than a dozen motorcycles, many of them small, lightweight, even electric. The new Harleys are intended to reverse years of declining sales and appeal to a new rider: young, urban, and not necessarily American. Harley wants international riders to be half its business in the next 10 years. “We are turning a page in the history of the company,” says Matthew Levatich, chief executive officer. “We’re opening our arms to the next generation.”
The two-patch H.O.G. clubs and three-patch biker gangs that made the brand famous have saddled the company with an uninviting reputation that Harleys are only for older white men who roam the highways on rumbling, two-wheeled beasts. Young riders, women, people of color, or anyone who lives in a city and wants a motorcycle for commuting rather than joyrides—the bikers send the message that Harley isn’t for them.
And without new customers, the company can’t grow. Nor can it fully recover from the Great Recession. It’s shipping almost a third fewer motorcycles to its dealers than at its prerecession peak in 2006. After rebounding slightly, retail sales have steadily declined again since 2014, tumbling almost 14 percent in the U.S. The average Harley rider’s age has inched up to almost 50. “It’s not just the brand, but the people associated with the brand,” says Heather Malenshek, Harley’s vice president for global marketing. “We’ve made a tonal shift to think about ourselves as being more inclusive.”
Among motorcycle fans, Harley’s new image met with astonished enthusiasm. “We looked at pictures of the new bikes and were like, Harley did this? That’s pretty wild,” says Zack Courts, features editor of Motorcyclist magazine. Riders who generally preferred Honda or Yamaha said maybe they’d try a Harley. It should have been a marketing coup.
Then the president of the United States called on motorcyclists to boycott the company. (...)
Harley has been selling bikes overseas since 1912 and today has 800 international dealerships, more than in the U.S. Still, its image and reputation remain thoroughly American. Harley-Davidson motorcycles are one of those rare products, like Coca-Cola or Mickey Mouse, that have become shorthand for 20th century America. They show up in pictures of civil rights marches, as part of President John Kennedy’s Dallas motorcade, and at the Apollo 11 astronauts’ ticker-tape parade. The company supplied military motorcycles in both world wars. Marlon Brando, Elvis Presley, and the Terminator rode Harleys. Evel Knievel broke so many bones stunt-riding Harleys that for a while the company paid his medical bills.
“From a practical perspective, riding a Harley doesn’t make sense,” Courts says. “It’s heavy. It’s expensive. But when you talk to Harley people, they don’t talk about how the motorcycle performs. They talk about what it represents.” As Michael Abiles, a Harley owner from Brooklyn, says, “You don’t get a tattoo of Honda.”
Trump embraced the motorcycle’s mystique. Two weeks after taking office, he invited Harley executives to the White House and held them up as an example of American manufacturing at its finest. “In this administration, our allegiance will be to the American workers and to American businesses like Harley-Davidson,” he said in February 2017.
Trump embraced the motorcycle’s mystique. Two weeks after taking office, he invited Harley executives to the White House and held them up as an example of American manufacturing at its finest. “In this administration, our allegiance will be to the American workers and to American businesses like Harley-Davidson,” he said in February 2017.
It was a shrewd move on the president’s part. “Most of us are just right of Attila the Hun,” jokes Pellegrino, the Long Island H.O.G. Republicans have long courted the biker vote: Ronald Reagan visited a Harley factory, and John McCain attended the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in 2008. During the 2016 election, some of Trump’s most vocal supporters belonged to a 30,000-member group called Bikers for Trump. As the president said recently, “I guarantee you everybody that ever bought a Harley-Davidson voted for Trump.”
Maybe, but not that many people in the U.S. are buying Harleys—or any motorcycle. (This is a chicken-or-egg situation. Harley accounts for about half of U.S. motorcycle sales, so it’s hard to tell which one is dragging the other down.) In the U.S., motorcycles are generally used as leisure vehicles, costing from $5,000 to $45,000. Harleys average about $15,800. The baby boomers who want them already have them, and since the 2008 recession, that price is something younger people—especially millennials, who’re now in their early 30s and should be getting into the hobby—are unwilling to pay. According to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, the average millennial household owes almost $15,000 in student loans. Throw in a mortgage, children, and frozen purchasing power—it’s barely budged for 40 years in the U.S.—and what was once a middle-class luxury is out of reach. “For young adults, especially, we’re finding there’s a financial pressure that might not have been there in the past,” says Harley’s Malenshek.
Add that to the unappealing stereotype, and the problem becomes even more intractable. “That whole biker-with-his-T-shirt-sleeves-cut-off image has finally caught up with them,” says Randy McBee, author of the motorcycle history book Born to Be Wild. According to the Motorcycle Industry Council, only a quarter of all riders are age 25 to 40; just 14 percent are women. “I’m concerned about the core business, the hobby itself,” says Kevin Tynan, a Bloomberg Intelligence senior analyst. “I just don’t think young people are connecting with motorcycles the way previous generations did.”
While ridership has declined in the U.S., it’s growing in Europe and Asia. People in crowded Asian cities are turning to small, lightweight motorcycles for daily transportation. According to the Pew Research Center, 80 percent of households in Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam own a motorcycle or scooter. Europe is similarly promising. The number of motorcyclists there is larger than in the U.S. That’s good news for Harley, because Europeans use bikes to commute and for long-distance touring. Today, Europe accounts for 16 percent of the company’s business, and that number is growing. Last year, Harley’s sales in Europe rose 8 percent. (...)
The recession changed Harley’s perception of itself. Until then, it had never done much consumer research. “We’d mostly gone on gut feel. We thought we knew our existing customer base and what they wanted,” says Michelle Kumbier, Harley’s chief operating officer. She’s been with the company for almost 21 years and riding for more than a decade.
That gut feel led to some embarrassing oversights. In 2011, Harley’s top engineers and executives were at its test track in Arizona trying out new versions of its luxury touring bikes—ones designed for long-distance travel—when somebody remarked that couples rode 70 percent of touring motorcycles. When Levatich, who was COO at the time, heard that, he blanched. Neither he nor the engineers had considered the passenger, who is still generally a male rider’s wife or girlfriend. Kumbier was the only woman there. “She was the only one who’d ever been a passenger,” Levatich says. “We realized we were designing a product, but only listening to half the customer.”
Harley needed to do some emergency passenger-testing. The company is deeply proud of, and notoriously secretive about, its designs and technology. It won’t even let curators display old prototypes in the company museum. Harley wasn’t about to just show people its bikes—that would be ludicrous. Instead, it asked employees to try its motorcycles with a passenger. They returned with a lot of opinions: The armrest wasn’t right. The seat was too small to comfortably fit a rider and passenger, especially those made of “hardy Midwestern stock,” as Levatich says. A decorative bar around the saddlebags rubbed against the passenger’s leg. Later, Levatich’s wife, Brenda, attended the redesigned bikes’ unveiling. “When they announced the bar change, I get this jab in my ribs,” Levatich says. It was Brenda, who was thrilled they had redesigned it. “She’d never mentioned, ‘Hey, you need to fix this bar, it’s rubbing my leg all day long,’ ” he says. “We learned so much.”
Harley was supposed to be the master of touring bikes. If it could improve them that drastically, what else was it doing wrong? “We needed to talk to people in a more constructive way. In the past, we’d just go talk to customers at rallies,” Kumbier says. But those people already owned Harleys. If the company wanted new riders, it was going to have to court them, even if they didn’t like Harleys, or didn’t ride motorcycles at all.
by Claire Suddath, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Julian Berman
Sometimes there’s a third patch, for bikers who belong to an independent club—the Blue Knights are cops, the Hells Angels hate cops—but two-patch groups tend not to associate with them. “It’s a different mindset,” says Frank Pellegrino, who on weekdays is a vice president for a plastics outsourcing company and on weekends a Long Island H.O.G.
Pellegrino, who got his first Harley for his 65th birthday last year, is about to spend this cloudless summer Sunday exploring 100 miles along the back roads of New York and Connecticut with about 25 other Harley guys. With him today are Joe, Marty, Dennis, Grover, Richie, Bob and his girlfriend, Dawn, and two Mikes, one with an American flag bandanna tied around his head. No one is younger than 45; many are well past 60. They’ve gathered behind a BP station at 8 a.m. in mid-July, sipping coffee and admiring one another’s bikes. At one point, Dennis talks politics with Joe and one of the Mikes.
“What’s the deal with all this fake news about a Europe plant?” Mike without a bandanna asks. “Harley was already going to build overseas, and now they’re just blaming it on the president.”
In June the European Union slapped what’s effectively a 31 percent retaliatory tariff on Harley in response to President Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs. To avoid them, Joe says, Harley will stop making the bikes it sells to Europe in the U.S. The company already has plants in Brazil and India and is in the process of opening one in Thailand.
“Oh, is that the case?” Mike asks. He swears he read something different on the internet.
“I see where they’re coming from,” Dennis says, crossing his arms over his We Stand For The Flag T-shirt. “How are they going to sell over there with millions in tariffs placed on them?”
“I still don’t like it,” Mike says. “Harley ought to be focused on us.”
Three weeks later, and about 1,000 miles away at its headquarters in Milwaukee, Harley-Davidson Inc. announced what executives called the most ambitious overhaul in its 115-year history with a plan that, for the first time in decades, wasn’t focused on riders like Frank or Dennis or the Mikes.
In the next few years, Harley will release more than a dozen motorcycles, many of them small, lightweight, even electric. The new Harleys are intended to reverse years of declining sales and appeal to a new rider: young, urban, and not necessarily American. Harley wants international riders to be half its business in the next 10 years. “We are turning a page in the history of the company,” says Matthew Levatich, chief executive officer. “We’re opening our arms to the next generation.”
The two-patch H.O.G. clubs and three-patch biker gangs that made the brand famous have saddled the company with an uninviting reputation that Harleys are only for older white men who roam the highways on rumbling, two-wheeled beasts. Young riders, women, people of color, or anyone who lives in a city and wants a motorcycle for commuting rather than joyrides—the bikers send the message that Harley isn’t for them.
And without new customers, the company can’t grow. Nor can it fully recover from the Great Recession. It’s shipping almost a third fewer motorcycles to its dealers than at its prerecession peak in 2006. After rebounding slightly, retail sales have steadily declined again since 2014, tumbling almost 14 percent in the U.S. The average Harley rider’s age has inched up to almost 50. “It’s not just the brand, but the people associated with the brand,” says Heather Malenshek, Harley’s vice president for global marketing. “We’ve made a tonal shift to think about ourselves as being more inclusive.”
Among motorcycle fans, Harley’s new image met with astonished enthusiasm. “We looked at pictures of the new bikes and were like, Harley did this? That’s pretty wild,” says Zack Courts, features editor of Motorcyclist magazine. Riders who generally preferred Honda or Yamaha said maybe they’d try a Harley. It should have been a marketing coup.
Then the president of the United States called on motorcyclists to boycott the company. (...)
Harley has been selling bikes overseas since 1912 and today has 800 international dealerships, more than in the U.S. Still, its image and reputation remain thoroughly American. Harley-Davidson motorcycles are one of those rare products, like Coca-Cola or Mickey Mouse, that have become shorthand for 20th century America. They show up in pictures of civil rights marches, as part of President John Kennedy’s Dallas motorcade, and at the Apollo 11 astronauts’ ticker-tape parade. The company supplied military motorcycles in both world wars. Marlon Brando, Elvis Presley, and the Terminator rode Harleys. Evel Knievel broke so many bones stunt-riding Harleys that for a while the company paid his medical bills.
“From a practical perspective, riding a Harley doesn’t make sense,” Courts says. “It’s heavy. It’s expensive. But when you talk to Harley people, they don’t talk about how the motorcycle performs. They talk about what it represents.” As Michael Abiles, a Harley owner from Brooklyn, says, “You don’t get a tattoo of Honda.”
Trump embraced the motorcycle’s mystique. Two weeks after taking office, he invited Harley executives to the White House and held them up as an example of American manufacturing at its finest. “In this administration, our allegiance will be to the American workers and to American businesses like Harley-Davidson,” he said in February 2017.
Trump embraced the motorcycle’s mystique. Two weeks after taking office, he invited Harley executives to the White House and held them up as an example of American manufacturing at its finest. “In this administration, our allegiance will be to the American workers and to American businesses like Harley-Davidson,” he said in February 2017.
It was a shrewd move on the president’s part. “Most of us are just right of Attila the Hun,” jokes Pellegrino, the Long Island H.O.G. Republicans have long courted the biker vote: Ronald Reagan visited a Harley factory, and John McCain attended the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in 2008. During the 2016 election, some of Trump’s most vocal supporters belonged to a 30,000-member group called Bikers for Trump. As the president said recently, “I guarantee you everybody that ever bought a Harley-Davidson voted for Trump.”
Maybe, but not that many people in the U.S. are buying Harleys—or any motorcycle. (This is a chicken-or-egg situation. Harley accounts for about half of U.S. motorcycle sales, so it’s hard to tell which one is dragging the other down.) In the U.S., motorcycles are generally used as leisure vehicles, costing from $5,000 to $45,000. Harleys average about $15,800. The baby boomers who want them already have them, and since the 2008 recession, that price is something younger people—especially millennials, who’re now in their early 30s and should be getting into the hobby—are unwilling to pay. According to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, the average millennial household owes almost $15,000 in student loans. Throw in a mortgage, children, and frozen purchasing power—it’s barely budged for 40 years in the U.S.—and what was once a middle-class luxury is out of reach. “For young adults, especially, we’re finding there’s a financial pressure that might not have been there in the past,” says Harley’s Malenshek.
Add that to the unappealing stereotype, and the problem becomes even more intractable. “That whole biker-with-his-T-shirt-sleeves-cut-off image has finally caught up with them,” says Randy McBee, author of the motorcycle history book Born to Be Wild. According to the Motorcycle Industry Council, only a quarter of all riders are age 25 to 40; just 14 percent are women. “I’m concerned about the core business, the hobby itself,” says Kevin Tynan, a Bloomberg Intelligence senior analyst. “I just don’t think young people are connecting with motorcycles the way previous generations did.”
While ridership has declined in the U.S., it’s growing in Europe and Asia. People in crowded Asian cities are turning to small, lightweight motorcycles for daily transportation. According to the Pew Research Center, 80 percent of households in Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam own a motorcycle or scooter. Europe is similarly promising. The number of motorcyclists there is larger than in the U.S. That’s good news for Harley, because Europeans use bikes to commute and for long-distance touring. Today, Europe accounts for 16 percent of the company’s business, and that number is growing. Last year, Harley’s sales in Europe rose 8 percent. (...)
The recession changed Harley’s perception of itself. Until then, it had never done much consumer research. “We’d mostly gone on gut feel. We thought we knew our existing customer base and what they wanted,” says Michelle Kumbier, Harley’s chief operating officer. She’s been with the company for almost 21 years and riding for more than a decade.
That gut feel led to some embarrassing oversights. In 2011, Harley’s top engineers and executives were at its test track in Arizona trying out new versions of its luxury touring bikes—ones designed for long-distance travel—when somebody remarked that couples rode 70 percent of touring motorcycles. When Levatich, who was COO at the time, heard that, he blanched. Neither he nor the engineers had considered the passenger, who is still generally a male rider’s wife or girlfriend. Kumbier was the only woman there. “She was the only one who’d ever been a passenger,” Levatich says. “We realized we were designing a product, but only listening to half the customer.”
Harley needed to do some emergency passenger-testing. The company is deeply proud of, and notoriously secretive about, its designs and technology. It won’t even let curators display old prototypes in the company museum. Harley wasn’t about to just show people its bikes—that would be ludicrous. Instead, it asked employees to try its motorcycles with a passenger. They returned with a lot of opinions: The armrest wasn’t right. The seat was too small to comfortably fit a rider and passenger, especially those made of “hardy Midwestern stock,” as Levatich says. A decorative bar around the saddlebags rubbed against the passenger’s leg. Later, Levatich’s wife, Brenda, attended the redesigned bikes’ unveiling. “When they announced the bar change, I get this jab in my ribs,” Levatich says. It was Brenda, who was thrilled they had redesigned it. “She’d never mentioned, ‘Hey, you need to fix this bar, it’s rubbing my leg all day long,’ ” he says. “We learned so much.”
Harley was supposed to be the master of touring bikes. If it could improve them that drastically, what else was it doing wrong? “We needed to talk to people in a more constructive way. In the past, we’d just go talk to customers at rallies,” Kumbier says. But those people already owned Harleys. If the company wanted new riders, it was going to have to court them, even if they didn’t like Harleys, or didn’t ride motorcycles at all.
by Claire Suddath, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Julian Berman
Popularity of Texas BBQ Fuels Demand for Thousand-Gallon Smokers
Once a week, Sunny Moberg sets a cutting torch onto the surface of steel containers that once held one thousand gallons of flammable fuel. These propane tanks, delivered to Moberg’s shop in Dripping Springs by the trailer load, are all salvaged. Some were decommissioned decades ago. It seems counterintuitive to introduce fire to such a container, but Moberg is used to it. “I’ve been cutting into tanks for twenty years,” he tells me. I ask him whether he worries about an explosion from unreleased propane, a gas that’s heavier than air, sitting in the tanks after all these years. “I don’t want to say I get too comfortable,” Moberg says, adding, “I say a little prayer before cutting into each one.”
What was once considered trash is now in high demand. The popularity of smokers made from propane tanks has risen right along with the Texas-style barbecue boom across the state and the world. Instead of discussing smoker size by length, width, or cubic inches, it’s gallons that have become the most recognizable unit. One-thousand-gallon smokers are the big ones inside many restaurant smokehouses. They also come in five-hundred and 250-hundred-gallon sizes, but the latter are often cut in half to serve as fireboxes for the big boys. All of them are getting harder to find.
Moberg, who owns Moberg Smokers, says he used to find them for free, but salvage yards have gotten wise to the popularity of propane tanks. The 16-foot-long tubes, with half spheres on either end, have become the badge proving a new barbecue joint’s wood-cooking bonafides. Beauty shots of one-thousand-gallon smokers in barbecue joints all over the world—Moberg has smokers headed to Australia, New Zealand, and Canada currently—have become almost as popular as photos of the barbecue itself. Moberg is now paying anywhere from $300 to $1,200 for a one-thousand-gallon propane tank. He even jokes, “There may be a day where I’ll have to buy from the manufacturer,” but quickly adds that the older ones are prized because the walls of the tanks are thicker, making for more efficient smokers. They’re a finite commodity.
As the grandson of Albert C. “Smokey” Denmark, the founder of Smokey Denmark’s Smoked Meats Co., Moberg says, “I have smoking in my genes.” The first smoker he ever built was for himself, made from a water heater, and he describes it as “a horrible smoker.” He built another from a propane tank in 1992 after a customer brought it to him. It was an improvement, but he didn’t think much about making a career out of it then. Moberg’s welding skills were focused on building trailers. It took a Texas pitmaster to first make these smokers a real commercial venture.
In 2015, John Lewis Jr. was working as the pitmaster at la Barbecue in Austin, but was planning a new barbecue joint in Charleston, South Carolina. He needed some additional funding for what would become Lewis Barbecue in 2016. With the help of his father, John Lewis Sr., Austin Smoke Works was born in a welding shop. Their first customer was the mayor of Brownsville. Then Cattleack Barbecue in Dallas ordered one, and a few went to ZZQ in Richmond, Virginia. Each new order that came in was bittersweet for Lewis Jr. He had designed these smokers, and “I didn’t want anyone to get the design,” he says, noting that some details had been proprietary. Still, he needed the money. “I had to do it,” he says.
Those design details may seem trivial, but they can mean the difference between a consistent cooking temperature versus unforgiving hot and cold spots inside the smoker. This style of smoker isn’t mechanical. There are no blowers, fans, or automatic dampers. There’s no rotisserie. It’s just wood fire and fluid dynamics. Briskets sit idly within that 16-foot-long cooking chamber, and hopefully, a continuous ribbon of sweet smelling smoke wafts along their surface between the firebox and the exhaust stack at the other end. It requires draw, or a pressure difference that pulls heat and smoke from the firebox and slings it up the exhaust stack. Ideally, that moving air drops as little of its heat as possible from one end of the cooking chamber to the other. It’s the same concept as the old brick pits at joints like Kreuz and Smitty’s in Lockhart, just done with a new material on smokers that are a bit more portable.
Despite the overwhelming popularity of the one-thousand-gallon size, Lewis believes a five-hundred-gallon smoker size is naturally suited to the task of keeping an even airflow and temperature differential. “A lot of tricky things go into it to try and mimic what happens in a five-hundred-gallon pit into a thousand-gallon pit,” he says, but concedes, “If you’re going to make one fire, you might as well be cooking more things, right?” That’s why he uses a fleet of four one-thousand-gallon smokers from Austin Smoke Works in his Charleston pit room.
Lewis, who first cooked on a one-thousand-gallon smoker at Franklin Barbecue, said he studied that pressure imbalance to try and improve the draw when he built his first smoker. When he took over pit duties at la Barbecue in 2012, he wasn’t happy with the smoker he inherited. So, years before Austin Smoke Works was founded, he built his first pit using a propane tank as a replacement. “I fired it up for the first night” once the new smoker was competed, he says. Lewis continues the story with pride still in his voice: “I was sitting in a lawn chair about ten feet away for the firebox door, and had lit a fire in there. I sat down, opened a beer, and lit a cigarette. It started drawing my cigarette smoke, from ten feet away, into the firebox and through the smoker.” That’s when he knew his smoker design was a winner.
What was once considered trash is now in high demand. The popularity of smokers made from propane tanks has risen right along with the Texas-style barbecue boom across the state and the world. Instead of discussing smoker size by length, width, or cubic inches, it’s gallons that have become the most recognizable unit. One-thousand-gallon smokers are the big ones inside many restaurant smokehouses. They also come in five-hundred and 250-hundred-gallon sizes, but the latter are often cut in half to serve as fireboxes for the big boys. All of them are getting harder to find.Moberg, who owns Moberg Smokers, says he used to find them for free, but salvage yards have gotten wise to the popularity of propane tanks. The 16-foot-long tubes, with half spheres on either end, have become the badge proving a new barbecue joint’s wood-cooking bonafides. Beauty shots of one-thousand-gallon smokers in barbecue joints all over the world—Moberg has smokers headed to Australia, New Zealand, and Canada currently—have become almost as popular as photos of the barbecue itself. Moberg is now paying anywhere from $300 to $1,200 for a one-thousand-gallon propane tank. He even jokes, “There may be a day where I’ll have to buy from the manufacturer,” but quickly adds that the older ones are prized because the walls of the tanks are thicker, making for more efficient smokers. They’re a finite commodity.
As the grandson of Albert C. “Smokey” Denmark, the founder of Smokey Denmark’s Smoked Meats Co., Moberg says, “I have smoking in my genes.” The first smoker he ever built was for himself, made from a water heater, and he describes it as “a horrible smoker.” He built another from a propane tank in 1992 after a customer brought it to him. It was an improvement, but he didn’t think much about making a career out of it then. Moberg’s welding skills were focused on building trailers. It took a Texas pitmaster to first make these smokers a real commercial venture.
In 2015, John Lewis Jr. was working as the pitmaster at la Barbecue in Austin, but was planning a new barbecue joint in Charleston, South Carolina. He needed some additional funding for what would become Lewis Barbecue in 2016. With the help of his father, John Lewis Sr., Austin Smoke Works was born in a welding shop. Their first customer was the mayor of Brownsville. Then Cattleack Barbecue in Dallas ordered one, and a few went to ZZQ in Richmond, Virginia. Each new order that came in was bittersweet for Lewis Jr. He had designed these smokers, and “I didn’t want anyone to get the design,” he says, noting that some details had been proprietary. Still, he needed the money. “I had to do it,” he says.
Those design details may seem trivial, but they can mean the difference between a consistent cooking temperature versus unforgiving hot and cold spots inside the smoker. This style of smoker isn’t mechanical. There are no blowers, fans, or automatic dampers. There’s no rotisserie. It’s just wood fire and fluid dynamics. Briskets sit idly within that 16-foot-long cooking chamber, and hopefully, a continuous ribbon of sweet smelling smoke wafts along their surface between the firebox and the exhaust stack at the other end. It requires draw, or a pressure difference that pulls heat and smoke from the firebox and slings it up the exhaust stack. Ideally, that moving air drops as little of its heat as possible from one end of the cooking chamber to the other. It’s the same concept as the old brick pits at joints like Kreuz and Smitty’s in Lockhart, just done with a new material on smokers that are a bit more portable.
Despite the overwhelming popularity of the one-thousand-gallon size, Lewis believes a five-hundred-gallon smoker size is naturally suited to the task of keeping an even airflow and temperature differential. “A lot of tricky things go into it to try and mimic what happens in a five-hundred-gallon pit into a thousand-gallon pit,” he says, but concedes, “If you’re going to make one fire, you might as well be cooking more things, right?” That’s why he uses a fleet of four one-thousand-gallon smokers from Austin Smoke Works in his Charleston pit room.
Lewis, who first cooked on a one-thousand-gallon smoker at Franklin Barbecue, said he studied that pressure imbalance to try and improve the draw when he built his first smoker. When he took over pit duties at la Barbecue in 2012, he wasn’t happy with the smoker he inherited. So, years before Austin Smoke Works was founded, he built his first pit using a propane tank as a replacement. “I fired it up for the first night” once the new smoker was competed, he says. Lewis continues the story with pride still in his voice: “I was sitting in a lawn chair about ten feet away for the firebox door, and had lit a fire in there. I sat down, opened a beer, and lit a cigarette. It started drawing my cigarette smoke, from ten feet away, into the firebox and through the smoker.” That’s when he knew his smoker design was a winner.
by Daniel Vaughn, Texas Monthly | Read more:
Image: Daniel Vaughn
Sunday, August 26, 2018
NFL’s Ridiculous Helmet Rule is a Bad Joke
The NFL has a curious and extremely annoying way of addressing safety issues . When it comes to bottom-line revenue, these people shove aside players’ health like stale garbage. When there’s no cost involved, such as the rule book, they’re full of ridiculous ideas that threaten the game’s integrity.
If the league really had concern about players enjoying their retirement years without dementia, it would wipe out Thursday night football. This is a joke, completely unfair from a competitive standpoint and a serious threat to players who need ample recovery time from a game. Instead, the league greedily accepted $3.3 billion in a new, five-year television deal with Fox and made sure the matchups look a bit more attractive.
Exhibition games routinely send key players to the hospital, sidelined for weeks or the rest of the season before it even begins. Perhaps the spectacle would be worthwhile if it remotely approached the real thing; instead, it’s a half-baked, unwatchable product designed mostly to sort out a team’s reserve units. Nothing to see here except, uh-oh, the star running back just got carted off to knee surgery.
(Which doesn’t include the Rams’ Todd Gurley, last year’s Offensive Player of the Year, by the way. Granted his wish to not risk injury, Gurley told reporters on Thursday, “That is everyone’s dream, to not play in the preseason.”)
Most coaches wouldn’t mind if the entire exhibition schedule was wiped out. They envy the collegiate game, where fans get their first, thrilling look at a team when it races out of the tunnel for the season opener. But the NFL doesn’t give a damn if players get hurt for no plausible reason; preseason games mean more money for a bunch of billionaire owners, so the discussion stops cold.
As if to mask this laughably transparent facade, the NFL gets all concussion-obsessed, turns to the rule book and decides for the coming season that “it is a foul if a player lowers his head to initiate and make contact with his helmet against an opponent.” The reaction among defensive players throughout the league: Are you kidding?
Without question, the NFL took some necessary initial steps in this regard, penalizing blatantly intentional helmet-to-helmet hits in the open field. Nobody needs to see that horrifying (and just plain stupid) brand of tackling, and it’s rare to witness it these days. But the league’s new rules mess with the art of tackling, and that’s going way too far.
The NFL seems to think the game is played in a sort of slow motion, each moment ripe for after-the-fact analysis. It’s more like the Indy 500, all about blinding speed and instantaneous reactions. Do what you can to bring that man down, or you might find yourself on the bench. “There is no ‘make an adjustment’ to the way you tackle,” 49ers cornerback Richard Sherman said. “Even in a perfect form tackle, the body is led by the head. The rule is idiotic and should be dismissed immediately.”
What this rule tells players is to be very careful about the high tackle. Ducking down — aiming for the knees — has long been dismissed as a cheap-shot tactic. So what are they supposed to do? It’s not that coaches teach players to lead with the crown of the helmet, but “these guys are dealing with world-class athletes who are moving targets,” Eagles defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz told reporters. “A little bit easier said than done.”
Worst of all, a lot of apparently textbook tackles — absolutely normal stuff for anyone who has followed the game for decades — have been flagged in the preseason.
The NFL has to realize that football-loving fans enjoy the violence; they’ll recoil in disgust if they see defenders hesitating, suddenly unsure of their technique, and look like wimps. Stash that mentality inside any NFL player’s head, and he may as well retire.
Some believe this new rule is essentially a scare tactic and won’t be as strictly enforced once the regular season starts. Already, an adjustment has been made, stating that “inadvertent or incidental contact with the helmet and/or face mask is not a foul.” Let’s hope the backtrack continues. The NFL will have no excuse for a game lost, or a playoff spot vanquished, over an episode of authentic football.
If the league really had concern about players enjoying their retirement years without dementia, it would wipe out Thursday night football. This is a joke, completely unfair from a competitive standpoint and a serious threat to players who need ample recovery time from a game. Instead, the league greedily accepted $3.3 billion in a new, five-year television deal with Fox and made sure the matchups look a bit more attractive.
Exhibition games routinely send key players to the hospital, sidelined for weeks or the rest of the season before it even begins. Perhaps the spectacle would be worthwhile if it remotely approached the real thing; instead, it’s a half-baked, unwatchable product designed mostly to sort out a team’s reserve units. Nothing to see here except, uh-oh, the star running back just got carted off to knee surgery.(Which doesn’t include the Rams’ Todd Gurley, last year’s Offensive Player of the Year, by the way. Granted his wish to not risk injury, Gurley told reporters on Thursday, “That is everyone’s dream, to not play in the preseason.”)
Most coaches wouldn’t mind if the entire exhibition schedule was wiped out. They envy the collegiate game, where fans get their first, thrilling look at a team when it races out of the tunnel for the season opener. But the NFL doesn’t give a damn if players get hurt for no plausible reason; preseason games mean more money for a bunch of billionaire owners, so the discussion stops cold.
As if to mask this laughably transparent facade, the NFL gets all concussion-obsessed, turns to the rule book and decides for the coming season that “it is a foul if a player lowers his head to initiate and make contact with his helmet against an opponent.” The reaction among defensive players throughout the league: Are you kidding?
Without question, the NFL took some necessary initial steps in this regard, penalizing blatantly intentional helmet-to-helmet hits in the open field. Nobody needs to see that horrifying (and just plain stupid) brand of tackling, and it’s rare to witness it these days. But the league’s new rules mess with the art of tackling, and that’s going way too far.
The NFL seems to think the game is played in a sort of slow motion, each moment ripe for after-the-fact analysis. It’s more like the Indy 500, all about blinding speed and instantaneous reactions. Do what you can to bring that man down, or you might find yourself on the bench. “There is no ‘make an adjustment’ to the way you tackle,” 49ers cornerback Richard Sherman said. “Even in a perfect form tackle, the body is led by the head. The rule is idiotic and should be dismissed immediately.”
What this rule tells players is to be very careful about the high tackle. Ducking down — aiming for the knees — has long been dismissed as a cheap-shot tactic. So what are they supposed to do? It’s not that coaches teach players to lead with the crown of the helmet, but “these guys are dealing with world-class athletes who are moving targets,” Eagles defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz told reporters. “A little bit easier said than done.”
Worst of all, a lot of apparently textbook tackles — absolutely normal stuff for anyone who has followed the game for decades — have been flagged in the preseason.
The NFL has to realize that football-loving fans enjoy the violence; they’ll recoil in disgust if they see defenders hesitating, suddenly unsure of their technique, and look like wimps. Stash that mentality inside any NFL player’s head, and he may as well retire.
Some believe this new rule is essentially a scare tactic and won’t be as strictly enforced once the regular season starts. Already, an adjustment has been made, stating that “inadvertent or incidental contact with the helmet and/or face mask is not a foul.” Let’s hope the backtrack continues. The NFL will have no excuse for a game lost, or a playoff spot vanquished, over an episode of authentic football.
by Bruce Jenkins, SF Chronicle | Read more:
Image: Kelvin Kuo / Associated Press
The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys and the Shrub
Prologue: Who Cares?
Since you’re reading Rolling Stone, the chances are you’re an American between say 18 and 35, which demographically makes you a Young Voter. And no generation of Young Voters has ever cared less about politics and politicians than yours. There’s hard demographic and voter-pattern data backing this up … assuming you give a shit about data. In fact, even if you’re reading other stuff in RS, it’s doubtful you’re going to read much of this article – such is the enormous shuddering yawn that the Political Process evokes in us now, in this post-Watergate-post-Iran’Contra’ post’Whitewater ‘post’ Lewinsky era, an era when politicians’ statements of principle or vision are understood as self-serving ad copy and judged not for their sincerity or ability to inspire but for their tactical shrewdness, their marketability. And no generation has been marketed and Spun and pitched to as ingeniously and relentlessly as today’s demographic Young. So when Senator John McCain says, in Michigan or South Carolina (which is where Rolling Stone sent the least professional pencil it could find to spend the standard media Week on the Bus with a candidate who’d never ride higher than he is right now), when McCain says “I run for president not to Be Somebody, but to Do Something,” it’s hard to hear it as anything more than a marketing angle, especially when he says it as he’s going around surrounded by cameras and reporters and cheering crowds … in other words, Being Somebody.
And when Senator John McCain also says – constantly, thumping it at the start and end of every speech and THM – that his goal as president will be “to inspire young Americans to devote them- selves to causes greater than their own self-interest,” it’s hard not to hear it as just one more piece of the carefully scripted bullshit that presidential candidates hand us as they go about the self-interested business of trying to become the most powerful, important and talked-about human being on earth, which is of course their real “cause,” to which they appear to be so deeply devoted that they can swallow and spew whole mountains of noble – sounding bullshit and convince even themselves that they mean it. Cynical as that may sound, polls show it’s how most of us feel. And it’s beyond not believing the bullshit; mostly we don’t even hear it, dismiss it at the same deep level where we also block out billboards and Muzak.
But there’s something underneath politics in the way you have to hear McCain, something riveting and unSpinnable and true. It has to do with McCain’s military background and Vietnam combat and the five-plus years he spent in a North Vietnamese prison, mostly in solitary, in a box, getting tortured and starved. And the unbelievable honor and balls he showed there. It’s very easy to gloss over the POW thing, partly because we’ve all heard so much about it and partly because it’s so off-the – charts dramatic, like something in a movie instead of a man’s life. But it’s worth considering for a minute, because it’s what makes McCain’s “causes greater than self-interest” line easier to hear.
You probably already know what happened. In October of ’67 McCain was himself still a Young Voter and flying his 23rd Vietnam combat mission and his A-4 Skyhawk plane got shot down over Hanoi and he had to eject, which basically means setting off an explosive charge that blows your seat out of the plane, which ejection broke both McCain’s arms and one leg and gave him a concussion and he started falling out of the skies right over Hanoi. Try to imagine for a second how much this would hurt and how scared you’d be, three limbs broken and falling toward the enemy capital you just tried to bomb. His chute opened late and he landed hard in a little lake in a park right in the middle of downtown Hanoi, Imagine treading water with broken arms and trying to pull the life vest’s toggle with your teeth as a crowd of Vietnamese men swim out toward you (there’s film of this, somebody had a home – movie camera, and the N.V. government released it, though it’s grainy and McCain’s face is hard to see). The crowd pulled him out and then just about killed him. U.S. bomber pilots were especially hated, for obvious reasons. McCain got bayoneted in the groin; a soldier broke his shoulder apart with a rifle butt. Plus by this time his right knee was bent 90-degrees to the side with the bone sticking out. Try to imagine this. He finally got tossed on a jeep and taken five blocks to the infamous Hoa Lo prison – a.k.a. the “Hanoi Hilton,” of much movie fame – where they made him beg a week for a doctor and finally set a couple of the fractures without anesthetic and let two other fractures and the groin wound (imagine: groin wound) stay like they were. Then they threw him in a cell. Try for a moment to feel this. All the media profiles talk about how McCain still can’t lift his arms over his head to comb his hair, which is true. But try to imagine it at the time, yourself in his place, because it’s important. Think about how diametrically opposed to your own self-interest getting knifed in the balls and having fractures set without painkiller would be, and then about getting thrown in a cell to just lie there and hurt, which is what happened. He was delirious with pain for weeks, and his weight dropped to 100 pounds, and the other POWs were sure he would die; and then after a few months like that after his bones mostly knitted and he could sort of stand up they brought him in to the prison commandant’s office and offered to let him go. This is true. They said he could just leave. They had found out that McCain’s father was one of the top-ranking naval officers in the U.S. Armed Forces (which is true – both his father and grandfather were admirals), and the North Vietnamese wanted the PR coup of mercifully releasing his son, the baby-killer. McCain, 100 pounds and barely able to stand, refused, The U.S. military’s Code of Conduct for Prisoners of War apparently said that POWs had to be released in the order they were captured, and there were others who’d been in Hoa Lo a long time, and McCain refused to violate the Code. The commandant, not pleased, right there in the office had guards break his ribs, rebreak his arm, knock his teeth out. McCain still refused to leave without the other POWs. And so then he spent four more years in Hoa Lo like this, much of the time in solitary, in the dark, in a closet-sized box called a “punishment cell.” Maybe you’ve heard all this before; it’s been in umpteen different media profiles of McCain. But try to imagine that moment between getting offered early release and turning it down. Try to imagine it was you. Imagine how loudly your most basic, primal self-interest would have cried out to you in that moment, and all the ways you could rationalize accepting the offer. Can you hear it? If so, would you have refused to go? You simply can’t know for sure. None of us can. It’s hard even to imagine the pain and fear in that moment, much less know how you’d react.
But, see, we do know how this man reacted. That he chose to spend four more years there, in a dark box, alone, tapping code on the walls to the others, rather than violate a Code. Maybe he was nuts. But the point is that with McCain it feels like we know, for a proven fact, that he’s capable of devotion to something other, more, than his own self-interest. So that when he says the line in speeches in early February you can feel like maybe it isn’t just more candidate bullshit, that with this guy it’s maybe the truth. Or maybe both the truth and bullshit: the guy does – did – want your vote, after all.
But that moment in the Hoa Lo office in ’68 – right before he refused, with all his basic normal human self-interest howling at him – that moment is hard to blow off. All week, all through MI and SC and all the tedium and cynicism and paradox of the campaign, that moment seems to underlie McCain’s “greater than self-interest” line, moor it, give it a weird sort of reverb that’s hard to ignore. The fact is that john McCain is a genuine hero of the only kind Vietnam now has to offer, a hero not because of what he did but because of what he suffered – voluntarily, for a Code. This gives him the moral authority both to utter lines about causes beyond self-interest and to expect us, even in this age of Spin and lawyerly cunning, to believe he means them. Literally: “moral authority,” that old cliche, much like so many other cliche’s – “service,” “honor,” “duty,” “patriotism” – that have become just mostly words now, slogans invoked by men in nice suits who want something from us. The John McCain we’ve seen, though – arguing for his doomed campaign-finance bill on the Senate floor in ’98, calling his colleagues crooks to their faces on C-SPAN, talking openly about a bought-and-paid-for government on Charlie Rose in July ’99, unpretentious and bright as hell in the Iowa debates and New Hampshire Town Hall Meetings – something about him made a lot of us feel the guy wanted something different from us, something more than votes or money, something old and maybe corny but with a weird achy pull to it like a whiff of a childhood smell or a name on the tip of your tongue, something that would make us think about what terms like “service” and “sacrifice” and “honor” might really refer to, like whether they actually stood for something, maybe. About whether anything past well-Spun self-interest might be real, was ever real, and if so then what happened? These, for the most part, are not lines of thinking that the culture we’ve grown up in has encouraged Young Voters to pursue. Why do you suppose that is? (...)
Who Even Cares Who Cares
It’s hard to get good answers to why Young Voters are so uninterested in politics. This is probably because it’s next to impossible to get someone to think hard about why he’s not interested in something. The boredom itself preempts inquiry; the fact of the feeling’s enough. Surely one reason, though, is that politics is not cool. Or say rather that cool, interesting, alive people do not seem to be the ones who are drawn to the political process. Think back to the sort of kids in high school who were into running for student office: dweeby, overgroomed, obsequious to authority, ambitious in a sad way. Eager to play the Game. The kind of kids other kids would want to beat up if it didn’t seem so pointless and dull. And now consider some of 2000’s adult versions of these very same kids: Al Gore, best described by CNN sound tech Mark A. as “amazingly lifelike”; Steve Forbes, with his wet forehead and loony giggle; G. W. Bush’s patrician smirk and mangled cant; even Clinton himself, with his big red fake-friendly face and “I feel your pain.” Men who aren’t enough like human beings even to hate—what one feels when they loom into view is just an overwhelming lack of interest, the sort of deep disengagement that is often a defense against pain. Against sadness. In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians make us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about. It’s way easier to roll your eyes and not give a shit. You probably don’t want to hear about all this, even.
One reason a lot of the media on the Trail like John McCain is simply that he’s a cool guy. Nondweeby. In school, Clinton was in student government and band, whereas McCain was a varsity jock and a hell-raiser whose talents for partying and getting laid are still spoken of with awe by former classmates, a guy who graduated near the bottom of his class at Annapolis and got in trouble for flying jets too low and cutting power lines and crashing all the time and generally being cool. At 63, he’s witty, and smart, and he’ll make fun of himself and his wife and staff and other pols and the Trail, and he’ll tease the press and give them shit in a way they don’t ever mind because it’s the sort of shit that makes you feel that here’s this very cool, important guy who’s noticing you and liking you enough to give you shit. Sometimes he’ll wink at you for no reason. If all that doesn’t sound like a big deal, you have to remember that these pro reporters have to spend a lot of time around politicians, and most politicians are painful to be around. As one national pencil told Rolling Stone and another nonpro, “If you saw more of how the other candidates conduct themselves, you’d be way more impressed with [McCain]. It’s that he acts somewhat in the ballpark of the way a real human being would act.” And the grateful press on the Trail transmit – maybe even exaggerate – McCain’s humanity to their huge audience, the electorate, which electorate in turn seems so paroxysmically thankful for a presidential candidate somewhat in the ballpark of a real human being that it has to make you stop and think about how starved voters are for just some minimal level of genuineness in the men who want to “lead” and “inspire” them.
Since you’re reading Rolling Stone, the chances are you’re an American between say 18 and 35, which demographically makes you a Young Voter. And no generation of Young Voters has ever cared less about politics and politicians than yours. There’s hard demographic and voter-pattern data backing this up … assuming you give a shit about data. In fact, even if you’re reading other stuff in RS, it’s doubtful you’re going to read much of this article – such is the enormous shuddering yawn that the Political Process evokes in us now, in this post-Watergate-post-Iran’Contra’ post’Whitewater ‘post’ Lewinsky era, an era when politicians’ statements of principle or vision are understood as self-serving ad copy and judged not for their sincerity or ability to inspire but for their tactical shrewdness, their marketability. And no generation has been marketed and Spun and pitched to as ingeniously and relentlessly as today’s demographic Young. So when Senator John McCain says, in Michigan or South Carolina (which is where Rolling Stone sent the least professional pencil it could find to spend the standard media Week on the Bus with a candidate who’d never ride higher than he is right now), when McCain says “I run for president not to Be Somebody, but to Do Something,” it’s hard to hear it as anything more than a marketing angle, especially when he says it as he’s going around surrounded by cameras and reporters and cheering crowds … in other words, Being Somebody.
And when Senator John McCain also says – constantly, thumping it at the start and end of every speech and THM – that his goal as president will be “to inspire young Americans to devote them- selves to causes greater than their own self-interest,” it’s hard not to hear it as just one more piece of the carefully scripted bullshit that presidential candidates hand us as they go about the self-interested business of trying to become the most powerful, important and talked-about human being on earth, which is of course their real “cause,” to which they appear to be so deeply devoted that they can swallow and spew whole mountains of noble – sounding bullshit and convince even themselves that they mean it. Cynical as that may sound, polls show it’s how most of us feel. And it’s beyond not believing the bullshit; mostly we don’t even hear it, dismiss it at the same deep level where we also block out billboards and Muzak.But there’s something underneath politics in the way you have to hear McCain, something riveting and unSpinnable and true. It has to do with McCain’s military background and Vietnam combat and the five-plus years he spent in a North Vietnamese prison, mostly in solitary, in a box, getting tortured and starved. And the unbelievable honor and balls he showed there. It’s very easy to gloss over the POW thing, partly because we’ve all heard so much about it and partly because it’s so off-the – charts dramatic, like something in a movie instead of a man’s life. But it’s worth considering for a minute, because it’s what makes McCain’s “causes greater than self-interest” line easier to hear.
You probably already know what happened. In October of ’67 McCain was himself still a Young Voter and flying his 23rd Vietnam combat mission and his A-4 Skyhawk plane got shot down over Hanoi and he had to eject, which basically means setting off an explosive charge that blows your seat out of the plane, which ejection broke both McCain’s arms and one leg and gave him a concussion and he started falling out of the skies right over Hanoi. Try to imagine for a second how much this would hurt and how scared you’d be, three limbs broken and falling toward the enemy capital you just tried to bomb. His chute opened late and he landed hard in a little lake in a park right in the middle of downtown Hanoi, Imagine treading water with broken arms and trying to pull the life vest’s toggle with your teeth as a crowd of Vietnamese men swim out toward you (there’s film of this, somebody had a home – movie camera, and the N.V. government released it, though it’s grainy and McCain’s face is hard to see). The crowd pulled him out and then just about killed him. U.S. bomber pilots were especially hated, for obvious reasons. McCain got bayoneted in the groin; a soldier broke his shoulder apart with a rifle butt. Plus by this time his right knee was bent 90-degrees to the side with the bone sticking out. Try to imagine this. He finally got tossed on a jeep and taken five blocks to the infamous Hoa Lo prison – a.k.a. the “Hanoi Hilton,” of much movie fame – where they made him beg a week for a doctor and finally set a couple of the fractures without anesthetic and let two other fractures and the groin wound (imagine: groin wound) stay like they were. Then they threw him in a cell. Try for a moment to feel this. All the media profiles talk about how McCain still can’t lift his arms over his head to comb his hair, which is true. But try to imagine it at the time, yourself in his place, because it’s important. Think about how diametrically opposed to your own self-interest getting knifed in the balls and having fractures set without painkiller would be, and then about getting thrown in a cell to just lie there and hurt, which is what happened. He was delirious with pain for weeks, and his weight dropped to 100 pounds, and the other POWs were sure he would die; and then after a few months like that after his bones mostly knitted and he could sort of stand up they brought him in to the prison commandant’s office and offered to let him go. This is true. They said he could just leave. They had found out that McCain’s father was one of the top-ranking naval officers in the U.S. Armed Forces (which is true – both his father and grandfather were admirals), and the North Vietnamese wanted the PR coup of mercifully releasing his son, the baby-killer. McCain, 100 pounds and barely able to stand, refused, The U.S. military’s Code of Conduct for Prisoners of War apparently said that POWs had to be released in the order they were captured, and there were others who’d been in Hoa Lo a long time, and McCain refused to violate the Code. The commandant, not pleased, right there in the office had guards break his ribs, rebreak his arm, knock his teeth out. McCain still refused to leave without the other POWs. And so then he spent four more years in Hoa Lo like this, much of the time in solitary, in the dark, in a closet-sized box called a “punishment cell.” Maybe you’ve heard all this before; it’s been in umpteen different media profiles of McCain. But try to imagine that moment between getting offered early release and turning it down. Try to imagine it was you. Imagine how loudly your most basic, primal self-interest would have cried out to you in that moment, and all the ways you could rationalize accepting the offer. Can you hear it? If so, would you have refused to go? You simply can’t know for sure. None of us can. It’s hard even to imagine the pain and fear in that moment, much less know how you’d react.
But, see, we do know how this man reacted. That he chose to spend four more years there, in a dark box, alone, tapping code on the walls to the others, rather than violate a Code. Maybe he was nuts. But the point is that with McCain it feels like we know, for a proven fact, that he’s capable of devotion to something other, more, than his own self-interest. So that when he says the line in speeches in early February you can feel like maybe it isn’t just more candidate bullshit, that with this guy it’s maybe the truth. Or maybe both the truth and bullshit: the guy does – did – want your vote, after all.
But that moment in the Hoa Lo office in ’68 – right before he refused, with all his basic normal human self-interest howling at him – that moment is hard to blow off. All week, all through MI and SC and all the tedium and cynicism and paradox of the campaign, that moment seems to underlie McCain’s “greater than self-interest” line, moor it, give it a weird sort of reverb that’s hard to ignore. The fact is that john McCain is a genuine hero of the only kind Vietnam now has to offer, a hero not because of what he did but because of what he suffered – voluntarily, for a Code. This gives him the moral authority both to utter lines about causes beyond self-interest and to expect us, even in this age of Spin and lawyerly cunning, to believe he means them. Literally: “moral authority,” that old cliche, much like so many other cliche’s – “service,” “honor,” “duty,” “patriotism” – that have become just mostly words now, slogans invoked by men in nice suits who want something from us. The John McCain we’ve seen, though – arguing for his doomed campaign-finance bill on the Senate floor in ’98, calling his colleagues crooks to their faces on C-SPAN, talking openly about a bought-and-paid-for government on Charlie Rose in July ’99, unpretentious and bright as hell in the Iowa debates and New Hampshire Town Hall Meetings – something about him made a lot of us feel the guy wanted something different from us, something more than votes or money, something old and maybe corny but with a weird achy pull to it like a whiff of a childhood smell or a name on the tip of your tongue, something that would make us think about what terms like “service” and “sacrifice” and “honor” might really refer to, like whether they actually stood for something, maybe. About whether anything past well-Spun self-interest might be real, was ever real, and if so then what happened? These, for the most part, are not lines of thinking that the culture we’ve grown up in has encouraged Young Voters to pursue. Why do you suppose that is? (...)
Who Even Cares Who Cares
It’s hard to get good answers to why Young Voters are so uninterested in politics. This is probably because it’s next to impossible to get someone to think hard about why he’s not interested in something. The boredom itself preempts inquiry; the fact of the feeling’s enough. Surely one reason, though, is that politics is not cool. Or say rather that cool, interesting, alive people do not seem to be the ones who are drawn to the political process. Think back to the sort of kids in high school who were into running for student office: dweeby, overgroomed, obsequious to authority, ambitious in a sad way. Eager to play the Game. The kind of kids other kids would want to beat up if it didn’t seem so pointless and dull. And now consider some of 2000’s adult versions of these very same kids: Al Gore, best described by CNN sound tech Mark A. as “amazingly lifelike”; Steve Forbes, with his wet forehead and loony giggle; G. W. Bush’s patrician smirk and mangled cant; even Clinton himself, with his big red fake-friendly face and “I feel your pain.” Men who aren’t enough like human beings even to hate—what one feels when they loom into view is just an overwhelming lack of interest, the sort of deep disengagement that is often a defense against pain. Against sadness. In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians make us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about. It’s way easier to roll your eyes and not give a shit. You probably don’t want to hear about all this, even.
One reason a lot of the media on the Trail like John McCain is simply that he’s a cool guy. Nondweeby. In school, Clinton was in student government and band, whereas McCain was a varsity jock and a hell-raiser whose talents for partying and getting laid are still spoken of with awe by former classmates, a guy who graduated near the bottom of his class at Annapolis and got in trouble for flying jets too low and cutting power lines and crashing all the time and generally being cool. At 63, he’s witty, and smart, and he’ll make fun of himself and his wife and staff and other pols and the Trail, and he’ll tease the press and give them shit in a way they don’t ever mind because it’s the sort of shit that makes you feel that here’s this very cool, important guy who’s noticing you and liking you enough to give you shit. Sometimes he’ll wink at you for no reason. If all that doesn’t sound like a big deal, you have to remember that these pro reporters have to spend a lot of time around politicians, and most politicians are painful to be around. As one national pencil told Rolling Stone and another nonpro, “If you saw more of how the other candidates conduct themselves, you’d be way more impressed with [McCain]. It’s that he acts somewhat in the ballpark of the way a real human being would act.” And the grateful press on the Trail transmit – maybe even exaggerate – McCain’s humanity to their huge audience, the electorate, which electorate in turn seems so paroxysmically thankful for a presidential candidate somewhat in the ballpark of a real human being that it has to make you stop and think about how starved voters are for just some minimal level of genuineness in the men who want to “lead” and “inspire” them.
by David Foster Wallace, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Image: Christopher Morris/VII/Redux
[ed. John McCain: a conflicted legacy: John McCain, Legendary Republican Senator, Dead at 81]
The Booming Business of Fraud
Why They Think They Can Get Away With It
Oh, the audacity of dopes. The crimes of Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen are notable not just for how blatant they were but also for their lack of sophistication. The two men did little to hide their lying to banks and the Internal Revenue Service. One can almost sympathize with them: If it wasn’t for their decision to attach themselves to the most unlikely president in modern history, there’s every reason to think they might be still working their frauds today.
But how anomalous are Mssrs. Manafort and Cohen? Are there legions of K Street big shots working for foreign despots and parking their riches in Cypriot bank accounts to avoid the IRS? Are many political campaigns walking felonies waiting to be exposed? What about the world of luxury residential building in which Cohen plied his trade with the Trump Organization?
The answer is more disturbing than the questions: We don’t know. We don’t know because the cops aren’t on the beat. Resources have been stripped from white-collar enforcement. The FBI shifted agents to work on international terror in the wake of 9/11. White-collar cases made up about one-tenth of the Justice Department’s cases in recent years, compared with one-fifth in the early 1990s. The IRS’ criminal enforcement capabilities have been decimated by years of budget cuts and attrition. The Federal Election Commission is a toothless organization that is widely flouted.
No wonder Cohen and Manafort were so brazen. They must have felt they had impunity.
How could they not? Any person in any bar in America can tell you who was held accountable for the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, which peaked 10 years ago next month: No one. No top officer from any major bank went to prison.
But the problem goes beyond big banks. The Department of Justice — in both Democratic and Republican administrations — has lost the will and ability to prosecute top executives across corporate America, at large industrial firms, tech giants, retailers, drug makers and so on. Instead the Department of Justice reaches settlements with corporations, which pay in dollars instead of the liberty of their top officers and directors.
Beginning with a charge to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election, special counsel Robert Mueller has fallen upon a rash of other crimes. In doing so, he has exposed how widespread and serious our white-collar fraud problem really is, and how lax enforcement has been for years.
At least he is also showing a way out of the problem. He and his team are demonstrating that the proper attention, resources, technique and experience can go a long way to rectify the white-collar prosecution crisis.
What’s Mueller’s secret? For one thing, he has a focus. He and his team have sufficient resources to go after a discrete set of investigations. In the early 2000s, the Justice Department had similar success setting up the Enron Task Force, a special SWAT team of government lawyers that prosecuted top executives of the failed Texas energy trader. That contrasts with the financial crisis, when the Justice Department never created a similar task force. No single department official was responsible for the prosecutions of bankers after the global meltdown.
The investigation’s techniques are also instructive. The Southern District of New York, which was referred the Cohen case by Mueller, raided President Trump’s former attorney’s offices and fought for access to the materials, even as Cohen asserted attorney-client privilege. When federal prosecutors investigate large companies, out of custom and deference they rarely use such aggressive tactics. They place few wiretaps, conduct almost no undercover operations and do almost no raids. Instead government attorneys reach carefully negotiated agreements about which documents they can review, the product of many hours of discussion with high-powered law firms on behalf of their clients. All the battles over privileged materials happen behind closed doors and without the benefit of a disinterested special master, as the Cohen case had.
Indeed it’s worse than that. The government has essentially privatized corporate law enforcement. The government effectively outsources the investigations to the companies themselves. The companies, typically trying to appear cooperative or to forestall government action, hire law firms to do internal investigations. Imagine if Mueller relied on Trump to investigate whether he colluded with the Russians or violated any other laws, and Trump hired Rudy Giuliani’s firm to do the probe.
The aggressive Mueller techniques have yielded the most crucial element for white-collar cases: flippers; i.e., wrongdoers who agree to testify against their co-conspirators. Rick Gates, the Manafort protégé, helped tighten his mentor’s noose. We are going to see in the next few months how many people flip and what they will say. No wonder President Trump mused that flipping “almost ought to be illegal.”
Mueller’s experience has given him the courage to take cases to trial, where juries are mercurial and the federal bench has turned hostile. Mueller’s prosecutors tried a “thin case” against Manafort, as the expression goes, boiling their evidence down to a few elements that the jury could absorb easily. They even managed to overcome the open hostility of U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis. Good prosecutors are used to that in white-collar cases. Judges and justices have not looked favorably upon white-collar prosecutions for more than a decade now, overturning verdicts and narrowing statutes. But with well-marshaled evidence and clear presentation, prosecutors can surmount the difficulties.
Moreover, Mueller isn’t looking to go soft in order to preserve his professional viability. I’m assuming that at age 74, he’s not going to go through the revolving door after this. That hasn’t been true for most top Justice Department officials in recent years. Many of them come from the defense bar and when they leave government they go back to defending large corporations. The same goes with the younger prosecutors who negotiate those corporate settlements. Almost all go on to become corporate defense attorneys. In those negotiations, they are auditioning for their next jobs, wanting to display their dazzling smarts but also eventually needing to appear like reasonable people and avoid being depicted by the white-collar bar as cowboys unworthy of a prestigious partnership.
Of course, we don’t know whether Mueller can go all the way to the top. The big issue in white-collar crime is whether the Justice Department can prosecute CEOs. Sure, it occasionally brings charges against lower-level executives of major corporations, but hasn’t held the chief of a Fortune 500 company accountable in more than a decade. While most observers believe Mueller will adhere to policy and not indict the president, will his report to Congress implicate the chief executive of the United States, if the evidence warrants it?
One man cannot fix the large problem on his own, however. “For these individual episodic financial crimes, the government can muster the capacity and courage to investigate and prosecute,” says Paul Pelletier, a former federal prosecutor who recently ran for Congress in a Democratic primary. “The real question is whether, in the context of a national economic crisis, the Department of Justice has sufficient experience, resources and leadership to effectively tackle it. I’d argue that it’s pretty obvious it does not.”
Oh, the audacity of dopes. The crimes of Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen are notable not just for how blatant they were but also for their lack of sophistication. The two men did little to hide their lying to banks and the Internal Revenue Service. One can almost sympathize with them: If it wasn’t for their decision to attach themselves to the most unlikely president in modern history, there’s every reason to think they might be still working their frauds today.
But how anomalous are Mssrs. Manafort and Cohen? Are there legions of K Street big shots working for foreign despots and parking their riches in Cypriot bank accounts to avoid the IRS? Are many political campaigns walking felonies waiting to be exposed? What about the world of luxury residential building in which Cohen plied his trade with the Trump Organization?The answer is more disturbing than the questions: We don’t know. We don’t know because the cops aren’t on the beat. Resources have been stripped from white-collar enforcement. The FBI shifted agents to work on international terror in the wake of 9/11. White-collar cases made up about one-tenth of the Justice Department’s cases in recent years, compared with one-fifth in the early 1990s. The IRS’ criminal enforcement capabilities have been decimated by years of budget cuts and attrition. The Federal Election Commission is a toothless organization that is widely flouted.
No wonder Cohen and Manafort were so brazen. They must have felt they had impunity.
How could they not? Any person in any bar in America can tell you who was held accountable for the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, which peaked 10 years ago next month: No one. No top officer from any major bank went to prison.
But the problem goes beyond big banks. The Department of Justice — in both Democratic and Republican administrations — has lost the will and ability to prosecute top executives across corporate America, at large industrial firms, tech giants, retailers, drug makers and so on. Instead the Department of Justice reaches settlements with corporations, which pay in dollars instead of the liberty of their top officers and directors.
Beginning with a charge to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election, special counsel Robert Mueller has fallen upon a rash of other crimes. In doing so, he has exposed how widespread and serious our white-collar fraud problem really is, and how lax enforcement has been for years.
At least he is also showing a way out of the problem. He and his team are demonstrating that the proper attention, resources, technique and experience can go a long way to rectify the white-collar prosecution crisis.
What’s Mueller’s secret? For one thing, he has a focus. He and his team have sufficient resources to go after a discrete set of investigations. In the early 2000s, the Justice Department had similar success setting up the Enron Task Force, a special SWAT team of government lawyers that prosecuted top executives of the failed Texas energy trader. That contrasts with the financial crisis, when the Justice Department never created a similar task force. No single department official was responsible for the prosecutions of bankers after the global meltdown.
The investigation’s techniques are also instructive. The Southern District of New York, which was referred the Cohen case by Mueller, raided President Trump’s former attorney’s offices and fought for access to the materials, even as Cohen asserted attorney-client privilege. When federal prosecutors investigate large companies, out of custom and deference they rarely use such aggressive tactics. They place few wiretaps, conduct almost no undercover operations and do almost no raids. Instead government attorneys reach carefully negotiated agreements about which documents they can review, the product of many hours of discussion with high-powered law firms on behalf of their clients. All the battles over privileged materials happen behind closed doors and without the benefit of a disinterested special master, as the Cohen case had.
Indeed it’s worse than that. The government has essentially privatized corporate law enforcement. The government effectively outsources the investigations to the companies themselves. The companies, typically trying to appear cooperative or to forestall government action, hire law firms to do internal investigations. Imagine if Mueller relied on Trump to investigate whether he colluded with the Russians or violated any other laws, and Trump hired Rudy Giuliani’s firm to do the probe.
The aggressive Mueller techniques have yielded the most crucial element for white-collar cases: flippers; i.e., wrongdoers who agree to testify against their co-conspirators. Rick Gates, the Manafort protégé, helped tighten his mentor’s noose. We are going to see in the next few months how many people flip and what they will say. No wonder President Trump mused that flipping “almost ought to be illegal.”
Mueller’s experience has given him the courage to take cases to trial, where juries are mercurial and the federal bench has turned hostile. Mueller’s prosecutors tried a “thin case” against Manafort, as the expression goes, boiling their evidence down to a few elements that the jury could absorb easily. They even managed to overcome the open hostility of U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis. Good prosecutors are used to that in white-collar cases. Judges and justices have not looked favorably upon white-collar prosecutions for more than a decade now, overturning verdicts and narrowing statutes. But with well-marshaled evidence and clear presentation, prosecutors can surmount the difficulties.
Moreover, Mueller isn’t looking to go soft in order to preserve his professional viability. I’m assuming that at age 74, he’s not going to go through the revolving door after this. That hasn’t been true for most top Justice Department officials in recent years. Many of them come from the defense bar and when they leave government they go back to defending large corporations. The same goes with the younger prosecutors who negotiate those corporate settlements. Almost all go on to become corporate defense attorneys. In those negotiations, they are auditioning for their next jobs, wanting to display their dazzling smarts but also eventually needing to appear like reasonable people and avoid being depicted by the white-collar bar as cowboys unworthy of a prestigious partnership.
Of course, we don’t know whether Mueller can go all the way to the top. The big issue in white-collar crime is whether the Justice Department can prosecute CEOs. Sure, it occasionally brings charges against lower-level executives of major corporations, but hasn’t held the chief of a Fortune 500 company accountable in more than a decade. While most observers believe Mueller will adhere to policy and not indict the president, will his report to Congress implicate the chief executive of the United States, if the evidence warrants it?
One man cannot fix the large problem on his own, however. “For these individual episodic financial crimes, the government can muster the capacity and courage to investigate and prosecute,” says Paul Pelletier, a former federal prosecutor who recently ran for Congress in a Democratic primary. “The real question is whether, in the context of a national economic crisis, the Department of Justice has sufficient experience, resources and leadership to effectively tackle it. I’d argue that it’s pretty obvious it does not.”
by Jesse Eisinger, ProPublica | Read more:
Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
California Lawmakers Steal Hawaii’s ‘Official’ Sport, Snub State’s Own
The California poppy, the quail, the coastal redwood — when it comes to selecting official icons, this state has made lots of wise choices.
But Sacramento politicians made a big mistake this week. By designating surfing as the state’s official sport, they tried to steal the creation of another state. They also overlooked the real official sport of California.
Surfing is a spectacular sport, don’t get me wrong. It’s been popular on the California coast for decades, and as an experience, it offers everything you could possibly want: athleticism, grace, visual beauty and the poetic kind of lifestyle that includes a beach.
These are the reasons why people want to be surfers. These are the reasons why the global surfing industry generates billions of dollars every year.
But surfing belongs to Hawaii. For centuries, native Hawaiians practiced and perfected the art of riding waves. The Hawaiian coast, with its warm water and constant waves, remains the sport’s spiritual and social home.
Trying to pretend otherwise is just a bad look for California. For crying out loud, the U.S. overthrew Hawaii’s government and snatched the island for itself. Now some state politicians want to snatch away one of the greatest gifts Hawaii offered to the world?
Meanwhile, California’s actual state sport has never been more exciting.
Look around, and you’ll see it everywhere — children bombing hills in San Francisco, kids massing under freeway overpasses in Fresno, adults successfully lobbying politicians to build the sport’s infrastructure in San Diego. It debuts as an Olympic sport in Tokyo’s 2020 program. Like surfing, it also generates billions of dollars every year.
Unlike surfing, this is a sport that Californians can claim with absolute honesty. Its origins are in the streets, the curbs and the abandoned pools of Southern California.
I’m speaking of skateboarding.
By overlooking the sport, Sacramento didn’t just insult the skateboarding community, it missed an important opportunity to honor the California spirit in front of the entire world.
“The great irony of this is that there’s no other sport that represents the spirit of California as well as this one,” Stacy Peralta told me. “If you think about the California ethos — going it alone, making it happen yourself — that’s what skateboarding is all about.”
There are few people on the planet who understand the importance of surfing and skateboarding to California’s identity better than Peralta. As he was a teenage surfer in Venice (Los Angeles County), in the early 1970s, he joined the Zephyr team, also known as the Z-Boys.
The Z-Boys were volatile, aggressive young men who are widely acknowledged for inventing what we now call contemporary skateboarding— the speed, the aerials and the tricks. The Z-Boys are legends in the skateboarding community, but their inspiration was all from surfing.
Peralta, now 60, was one of the first professional skateboarders and one of the first to launch a skate gear company.
“It is indigenous to California,” Peralta said. “It could not have been invented and developed anywhere but here.”
With some exceptions, coastal access in California is a luxury of the affluent. So many kids don’t have access to surfing — but it’s pretty easy to get ahold of a skateboard and a sidewalk. (...)
Skateboarding tends to attract children who need an escape from rigid hierarchies and adult expectations. It’s most appealing to youth who need to try something for themselves. Many adults find this attitude to be threatening in young people. That’s a big part of the reason why skateboarding, for all of its popularity, has never been able to rid itself of a slight stigma.
“It’s subversive, it’s noisy, and it’ll always be partially illegal because skateboarders ride in places where they’re not invited,” Peralta said. “But so many people don’t understand that young people need something that allows them to be civilly disobedient without hurting others. And skateboarding provides them with that.”
What’s interesting is that California prides itself on these kinds of values. The Golden State, originally the land of going your own way to find gold, is more recently the land of personal enrichment via “disruptive” innovation.
by Caille Millner, SF Chronicle | Read more:
Image:Spud Hilton / The Chronicle
But Sacramento politicians made a big mistake this week. By designating surfing as the state’s official sport, they tried to steal the creation of another state. They also overlooked the real official sport of California.
Surfing is a spectacular sport, don’t get me wrong. It’s been popular on the California coast for decades, and as an experience, it offers everything you could possibly want: athleticism, grace, visual beauty and the poetic kind of lifestyle that includes a beach.These are the reasons why people want to be surfers. These are the reasons why the global surfing industry generates billions of dollars every year.
But surfing belongs to Hawaii. For centuries, native Hawaiians practiced and perfected the art of riding waves. The Hawaiian coast, with its warm water and constant waves, remains the sport’s spiritual and social home.
Trying to pretend otherwise is just a bad look for California. For crying out loud, the U.S. overthrew Hawaii’s government and snatched the island for itself. Now some state politicians want to snatch away one of the greatest gifts Hawaii offered to the world?
Meanwhile, California’s actual state sport has never been more exciting.
Look around, and you’ll see it everywhere — children bombing hills in San Francisco, kids massing under freeway overpasses in Fresno, adults successfully lobbying politicians to build the sport’s infrastructure in San Diego. It debuts as an Olympic sport in Tokyo’s 2020 program. Like surfing, it also generates billions of dollars every year.
Unlike surfing, this is a sport that Californians can claim with absolute honesty. Its origins are in the streets, the curbs and the abandoned pools of Southern California.
I’m speaking of skateboarding.
By overlooking the sport, Sacramento didn’t just insult the skateboarding community, it missed an important opportunity to honor the California spirit in front of the entire world.
“The great irony of this is that there’s no other sport that represents the spirit of California as well as this one,” Stacy Peralta told me. “If you think about the California ethos — going it alone, making it happen yourself — that’s what skateboarding is all about.”
There are few people on the planet who understand the importance of surfing and skateboarding to California’s identity better than Peralta. As he was a teenage surfer in Venice (Los Angeles County), in the early 1970s, he joined the Zephyr team, also known as the Z-Boys.
The Z-Boys were volatile, aggressive young men who are widely acknowledged for inventing what we now call contemporary skateboarding— the speed, the aerials and the tricks. The Z-Boys are legends in the skateboarding community, but their inspiration was all from surfing.
Peralta, now 60, was one of the first professional skateboarders and one of the first to launch a skate gear company.
“It is indigenous to California,” Peralta said. “It could not have been invented and developed anywhere but here.”
With some exceptions, coastal access in California is a luxury of the affluent. So many kids don’t have access to surfing — but it’s pretty easy to get ahold of a skateboard and a sidewalk. (...)
Skateboarding tends to attract children who need an escape from rigid hierarchies and adult expectations. It’s most appealing to youth who need to try something for themselves. Many adults find this attitude to be threatening in young people. That’s a big part of the reason why skateboarding, for all of its popularity, has never been able to rid itself of a slight stigma.
“It’s subversive, it’s noisy, and it’ll always be partially illegal because skateboarders ride in places where they’re not invited,” Peralta said. “But so many people don’t understand that young people need something that allows them to be civilly disobedient without hurting others. And skateboarding provides them with that.”
What’s interesting is that California prides itself on these kinds of values. The Golden State, originally the land of going your own way to find gold, is more recently the land of personal enrichment via “disruptive” innovation.
by Caille Millner, SF Chronicle | Read more:
Image:Spud Hilton / The Chronicle
Saturday, August 25, 2018
I Worked With Richard Russell at Horizon Air, and I Understand Why He Did What He Did
I was surprised to wake up last Saturday morning to the headlines. Not completely shocked, but surprised nonetheless. I was a ground service agent at Horizon Air for the better part of 2016, and I worked alongside Richard "Beebo" Russell [ed. who stole and crashed a Horizon Q400 turboprop]. As ground service agents, we handled luggage, walked through planes for final inspection, and pushed them out onto the taxiway.
We weren’t close, barely acquaintances, which seems odd considering the tight quarters and the foxhole mentality that is required to work in these particular roles. But with the high turnover (if you follow Horizon Air jobs, you will know they are always hiring that position for SeaTac), it’s not that hard to imagine.
Day-to-day survival on The Ramp (the area between the terminal and the taxiway, where passengers are loaded and unloaded, baggage is handled, planes fueled, etc.) requires a lot of sacrifice to keep the planes moving. It would be difficult enough if the inadequate break room didn’t always resemble a crowded, sweatbox college party—but without any drugs or alcohol, and nobody having fun. Brought your lunch to save spending $10 buying a meal in the terminal? Sure hope it’s still in the fridge when you get your lunch break. Nasty emails directed to anonymous lunch bandits were a common occurrence. There was a locker room, but not enough lockers for everyone. Think about how many layers are required to work in the weather in Seattle, and then think about where you might put your jacket, gloves, etc., when you don’t need them without them getting stolen, if you don’t have a locker. These things aren’t luxuries; they are a basic part of work life.
Going into the job, I knew that there was a sharp disconnect between the shiny happy side of the terminal, and the grit on the ground. What I didn’t realize was how much like a military base it was run. Which makes sense, historically, and which is why Horizon and other airlines recruit heavily from military bases. I went through initial training with a guy who had just spent 10 years in the army.
"How was that?" I asked him.
"Well, I didn’t blow my brains out," was his reply.
So I supposed working at Horizon was an upgrade for him. When a lot of your supervisory staff and co-workers are ex-military you begin to realize what being expendable is. I believe Beebo was acutely aware of that—because we all were. It's the kind of dehumanizing situation that could lead to what happened on August 10.
If the environment itself isn’t enough to persuade you that you are nothing more than a cog to the upper management/shareholders, there are plenty of other, even more exasperating reminders. You are making around $3 less per hour than anybody else at SeaTac (including other airline employees, restaurant employees, car rental employees, bus drivers, etc.), although there are benefits! Health insurance and stock options might be nice, but they don’t pay the rent. However, a vast majority of the ground service agents are men under age 30, so insurance and stock options mean nothing to them. They become empty gestures from a management who knows you’ll never use them, and thus cost the company little.
But that's only one part of the picture. To be clear, the people I worked with were dedicated, hard working, safety-conscious, attempting to be loyal—all of the things that are supposed to get you ahead in America. But the workers on the ground and our immediate supervisors could barely keep our heads above water. As a subsidiary of Alaska Air Group, Horizon Air is the proverbial red-headed stepchild. It is glaringly clear to everyone who works there that cost-cutting by the executive team(s) in order to keep the shareholders happy is the main goal, and Horizon is the first stop on the belt-tightening train.
We the lowest level employees knew that when the record quarterly earnings report came out there wasn’t going to be any trickle down. When I worked for Horizon, we were cursing our low-wage fate in the break room, while Alaska was spending $2.5 billion acquiring Virgin America (gotta keep up with Delta), and then investing another $2.5 billion upgrading their turboprop airplane fleet to jets. Acquisitions and sexy new jets play well at the stockholder meeting; increased labor costs do not.
The first thing I thought when I heard the news about a plane being stolen by a Horizon employee was, "Ah yes, the end of summer. Of course." Summer is nearly constantly as busy as the holiday season.
My summer of 2016 kicked off with a new schedule (we bid on shifts every 3-4 months), which as it turns out was literally generated by a computer program. X number of flights, X number of employees, some advanced mathematics, and poof! Perfection. Except the schedule that summer was so out of touch with what was going on on the ground that a handful of veteran employees went to management and successfully lobbied for a "do-over," because the schedule as presented was unrealistic, and featured far too many new employees at a given time compared to experienced ones.
An important perk are monthly bonuses, which can range from $50-200 a month depending on whether "target numbers" are hit. About halfway through my summer tenure at Horizon Air, we were informed that the bonus structure was being revamped. It now included delays caused by weather and Air Traffic Control, circumstances completely out of our control. This was described as "more realistic to the situation on the ground." It was more like a morale murderer.
This is all to say that I can understand what could drive a normal person to do what Richard Russell did: He saw his chance for relevance—to be simply acknowledged as an individual human being—and grabbed it. I don’t condone it, and wish it would have turned out with a spectacular landing that he could've walked away from as a folk hero to some (myself included). I'll leave the question of exactly how he did it to the investigators.
Richard's situation was not unusual for what has morphed into a wage-slave economy. The fact that he had access to a plane makes it sensational. There are plenty of people out there making not-enough money, and they keep plugging along, not stealing multi-million dollar aircraft and crashing them.
We weren’t close, barely acquaintances, which seems odd considering the tight quarters and the foxhole mentality that is required to work in these particular roles. But with the high turnover (if you follow Horizon Air jobs, you will know they are always hiring that position for SeaTac), it’s not that hard to imagine.
Day-to-day survival on The Ramp (the area between the terminal and the taxiway, where passengers are loaded and unloaded, baggage is handled, planes fueled, etc.) requires a lot of sacrifice to keep the planes moving. It would be difficult enough if the inadequate break room didn’t always resemble a crowded, sweatbox college party—but without any drugs or alcohol, and nobody having fun. Brought your lunch to save spending $10 buying a meal in the terminal? Sure hope it’s still in the fridge when you get your lunch break. Nasty emails directed to anonymous lunch bandits were a common occurrence. There was a locker room, but not enough lockers for everyone. Think about how many layers are required to work in the weather in Seattle, and then think about where you might put your jacket, gloves, etc., when you don’t need them without them getting stolen, if you don’t have a locker. These things aren’t luxuries; they are a basic part of work life.Going into the job, I knew that there was a sharp disconnect between the shiny happy side of the terminal, and the grit on the ground. What I didn’t realize was how much like a military base it was run. Which makes sense, historically, and which is why Horizon and other airlines recruit heavily from military bases. I went through initial training with a guy who had just spent 10 years in the army.
"How was that?" I asked him.
"Well, I didn’t blow my brains out," was his reply.
So I supposed working at Horizon was an upgrade for him. When a lot of your supervisory staff and co-workers are ex-military you begin to realize what being expendable is. I believe Beebo was acutely aware of that—because we all were. It's the kind of dehumanizing situation that could lead to what happened on August 10.
If the environment itself isn’t enough to persuade you that you are nothing more than a cog to the upper management/shareholders, there are plenty of other, even more exasperating reminders. You are making around $3 less per hour than anybody else at SeaTac (including other airline employees, restaurant employees, car rental employees, bus drivers, etc.), although there are benefits! Health insurance and stock options might be nice, but they don’t pay the rent. However, a vast majority of the ground service agents are men under age 30, so insurance and stock options mean nothing to them. They become empty gestures from a management who knows you’ll never use them, and thus cost the company little.
But that's only one part of the picture. To be clear, the people I worked with were dedicated, hard working, safety-conscious, attempting to be loyal—all of the things that are supposed to get you ahead in America. But the workers on the ground and our immediate supervisors could barely keep our heads above water. As a subsidiary of Alaska Air Group, Horizon Air is the proverbial red-headed stepchild. It is glaringly clear to everyone who works there that cost-cutting by the executive team(s) in order to keep the shareholders happy is the main goal, and Horizon is the first stop on the belt-tightening train.
We the lowest level employees knew that when the record quarterly earnings report came out there wasn’t going to be any trickle down. When I worked for Horizon, we were cursing our low-wage fate in the break room, while Alaska was spending $2.5 billion acquiring Virgin America (gotta keep up with Delta), and then investing another $2.5 billion upgrading their turboprop airplane fleet to jets. Acquisitions and sexy new jets play well at the stockholder meeting; increased labor costs do not.
The first thing I thought when I heard the news about a plane being stolen by a Horizon employee was, "Ah yes, the end of summer. Of course." Summer is nearly constantly as busy as the holiday season.
My summer of 2016 kicked off with a new schedule (we bid on shifts every 3-4 months), which as it turns out was literally generated by a computer program. X number of flights, X number of employees, some advanced mathematics, and poof! Perfection. Except the schedule that summer was so out of touch with what was going on on the ground that a handful of veteran employees went to management and successfully lobbied for a "do-over," because the schedule as presented was unrealistic, and featured far too many new employees at a given time compared to experienced ones.
An important perk are monthly bonuses, which can range from $50-200 a month depending on whether "target numbers" are hit. About halfway through my summer tenure at Horizon Air, we were informed that the bonus structure was being revamped. It now included delays caused by weather and Air Traffic Control, circumstances completely out of our control. This was described as "more realistic to the situation on the ground." It was more like a morale murderer.
This is all to say that I can understand what could drive a normal person to do what Richard Russell did: He saw his chance for relevance—to be simply acknowledged as an individual human being—and grabbed it. I don’t condone it, and wish it would have turned out with a spectacular landing that he could've walked away from as a folk hero to some (myself included). I'll leave the question of exactly how he did it to the investigators.
Richard's situation was not unusual for what has morphed into a wage-slave economy. The fact that he had access to a plane makes it sensational. There are plenty of people out there making not-enough money, and they keep plugging along, not stealing multi-million dollar aircraft and crashing them.
by Todd Bunker, The Stranger | Read more:
Image: Dave Allen/Getty
Pain Town
Agent-based modelling offers opportunities to explore the complex social interactions at the heart of the addiction crisis.
With the tip of her syringe, Brandi pokes at a grey lump of heroin in a spoon. It’s a new variety of the drug that has shown up on the market in the past few days, and Brandi likes it. “I feel this more, I feel more of the pain resistance,” she says.
Once it has dissolved into a liquid, she injects it into her arm, then uses a fresh needle to inject the skinny arm of another woman. “She does it better than the hospital,” the woman comments.
“I’ll help anybody who needs it,” Brandi explains to public-health researcher Daniel Ciccarone of the University of California, San Francisco, who has been filming the entire process.
Ciccarone’s team has embedded with Brandi — whose name has been changed for this story — in Charleston, West Virginia, documenting her interactions without judgement or interference. Later, the group will analyse this video, in addition to half a dozen other videos of drug users from across the city, logging details big and small. Brandi does not heat the solution on the spoon, for instance, and that may increase the likelihood of spreading viruses such as HIV. And tests reveal that what she’s taking has been laced with fentanyl, a synthetic drug up to 50 times more powerful than heroin.
The researchers will plug these data into powerful computer simulations of Charleston, populated by thousands of virtual Brandis — heroin users and dealers going about their daily routines. They will watch these digital agents buy more heroin as their tolerance increases, form networks with sellers and users and, in some cases, accidentally overdose.
Ciccarone’s is one of several groups using agent-based models to understand what is driving the US opioid epidemic — the dramatic rise over the past two decades in the use of opioids, including prescription pain medications and illegal drugs such as heroin. By studying the motivations and practices of real drug dealers and users, the researchers hope to build agents whose behaviour in the virtual world mimics that in real life.
Agent-based models promise to provide a more granular view of the opioid crisis than standard modelling, which is based on average populations, and to capture some of the complexity of the driving forces. This could prove important for demonstrating the effects of opening or closing methadone clinics or needle exchanges. The models allow scientists to compare interventions at almost no cost and could help policymakers to decide how to proceed in the real world. “It’s a very classic and useful way to try and see where is the best place to deploy an intervention to have the biggest effect,” says John Brooks, a medical adviser for the division of HIV/AIDS prevention at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia.
Although such simulations have long been used to model disease outbreaks and have, in some instances, guided public policy, their track record with more complex social behaviour such as drug use is limited, largely owing to sparse data and the breadth of parameters to consider. (...)
To create an agent-based model, researchers first ‘build’ a virtual town or region, sometimes based on a real place, including buildings such as schools and food shops. They then populate it with agents, using census data to give each one its own characteristics, such as age, race and income, and to distribute the agents throughout the virtual town.
The agents are autonomous but operate within pre-programmed routines — going to work five times a week, for instance. Some behaviours may be more random, such as a 5% chance per day of skipping work, or a 50% chance of meeting a certain person in the agent’s network. Once the system is as realistic as possible, the researchers introduce a variable such as a flu virus, with a rate and pattern of spread based on its real-life characteristics. They then run the simulation to test how the agents’ behaviour shifts when a school is closed or a vaccination campaign is started, repeating it thousands of times to determine the likelihood of different outcomes. (...)
In response to the opioid epidemic, Bobashev’s group has constructed Pain Town — a generic city complete with 10,000 people suffering from chronic pain, 70 drug dealers, 30 doctors, 10 emergency rooms and 10 pharmacies. The researchers run the model over five simulated years, recording how the situation changes each virtual day.
During this time, the patients’ drug tolerance increases, leading them to find different ways of acquiring drugs. Their behaviour is driven by variables such as the chance that a doctor will increase their prescription, or the likelihood that a dealer will have enough heroin. At a certain threshold, patients become addicted or more likely to overdose. Bobashev’s early data suggest, for example, that requiring doctors to track patients’ medication history can be effective over the long term, but not immediately.
The model contains many assumptions and simplifications, Bobashev says. For example, it doesn’t capture the fact that the rate at which people develop tolerance and addiction can depend on factors such as genetics, and that whether a person switches from prescription drugs to heroin can depend on the relative availability of the two drugs.
But researchers can adjust models such as Pain Town to test various interventions, such as increasing access to emergency rooms, arresting a dealer or equipping police with naloxone (a drug that reverses opioid overdoses), to see how the system reacts and whether it affects the number of deaths over time. And as models become more sophisticated, the researchers may be able to incorporate more factors, such as people who are not taking pain medications but are susceptible to trying opioids for the first time. (...)
Data drought
The models face numerous challenges before they will be ready for widespread adoption, primarily data gaps. Marshall says that researchers struggle to get access to data on opioid prescriptions that are held by manufacturers, pharmacies and law-enforcement agencies. It is also difficult to obtain government information on drug cartels and the type and rate of drugs flowing into the country. Other data simply do not exist in usable form: agencies may record deaths due to drug overdose, for instance, but fail to specify which drug was responsible.
Observing drug users such as Brandi can provide certain types of information more quickly and accurately. “Drug users know their chemicals intimately,” Ciccarone says.
Lee Hoffer is a cultural anthropologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, who studies heroin markets and collaborates with Bobashev. He says the ethnographic data that his group and others are collecting could help to fill some of the information gaps: “We’re trying to enter their world as interlopers to see how they see their life.” After an initial awkward period, he says, drug users tend to become more honest with the researchers, telling them crucial information such as how they form networks with dealers and the cost of drugs.
Understanding the psychology of drug users is also crucial, says Epstein. Most decision-making models assume rational behaviours. In reality, emotions, misinformation and irrational calculations play a major part. “When you put them together you get collections of dynamics that are very dysfunctional.”
by Sara Reardon, Nature | Read more:
Image: Jerome Sessini/Magnum
With the tip of her syringe, Brandi pokes at a grey lump of heroin in a spoon. It’s a new variety of the drug that has shown up on the market in the past few days, and Brandi likes it. “I feel this more, I feel more of the pain resistance,” she says.
Once it has dissolved into a liquid, she injects it into her arm, then uses a fresh needle to inject the skinny arm of another woman. “She does it better than the hospital,” the woman comments.
“I’ll help anybody who needs it,” Brandi explains to public-health researcher Daniel Ciccarone of the University of California, San Francisco, who has been filming the entire process.Ciccarone’s team has embedded with Brandi — whose name has been changed for this story — in Charleston, West Virginia, documenting her interactions without judgement or interference. Later, the group will analyse this video, in addition to half a dozen other videos of drug users from across the city, logging details big and small. Brandi does not heat the solution on the spoon, for instance, and that may increase the likelihood of spreading viruses such as HIV. And tests reveal that what she’s taking has been laced with fentanyl, a synthetic drug up to 50 times more powerful than heroin.
The researchers will plug these data into powerful computer simulations of Charleston, populated by thousands of virtual Brandis — heroin users and dealers going about their daily routines. They will watch these digital agents buy more heroin as their tolerance increases, form networks with sellers and users and, in some cases, accidentally overdose.
Ciccarone’s is one of several groups using agent-based models to understand what is driving the US opioid epidemic — the dramatic rise over the past two decades in the use of opioids, including prescription pain medications and illegal drugs such as heroin. By studying the motivations and practices of real drug dealers and users, the researchers hope to build agents whose behaviour in the virtual world mimics that in real life.
Agent-based models promise to provide a more granular view of the opioid crisis than standard modelling, which is based on average populations, and to capture some of the complexity of the driving forces. This could prove important for demonstrating the effects of opening or closing methadone clinics or needle exchanges. The models allow scientists to compare interventions at almost no cost and could help policymakers to decide how to proceed in the real world. “It’s a very classic and useful way to try and see where is the best place to deploy an intervention to have the biggest effect,” says John Brooks, a medical adviser for the division of HIV/AIDS prevention at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia.
Although such simulations have long been used to model disease outbreaks and have, in some instances, guided public policy, their track record with more complex social behaviour such as drug use is limited, largely owing to sparse data and the breadth of parameters to consider. (...)
To create an agent-based model, researchers first ‘build’ a virtual town or region, sometimes based on a real place, including buildings such as schools and food shops. They then populate it with agents, using census data to give each one its own characteristics, such as age, race and income, and to distribute the agents throughout the virtual town.
The agents are autonomous but operate within pre-programmed routines — going to work five times a week, for instance. Some behaviours may be more random, such as a 5% chance per day of skipping work, or a 50% chance of meeting a certain person in the agent’s network. Once the system is as realistic as possible, the researchers introduce a variable such as a flu virus, with a rate and pattern of spread based on its real-life characteristics. They then run the simulation to test how the agents’ behaviour shifts when a school is closed or a vaccination campaign is started, repeating it thousands of times to determine the likelihood of different outcomes. (...)
In response to the opioid epidemic, Bobashev’s group has constructed Pain Town — a generic city complete with 10,000 people suffering from chronic pain, 70 drug dealers, 30 doctors, 10 emergency rooms and 10 pharmacies. The researchers run the model over five simulated years, recording how the situation changes each virtual day.
During this time, the patients’ drug tolerance increases, leading them to find different ways of acquiring drugs. Their behaviour is driven by variables such as the chance that a doctor will increase their prescription, or the likelihood that a dealer will have enough heroin. At a certain threshold, patients become addicted or more likely to overdose. Bobashev’s early data suggest, for example, that requiring doctors to track patients’ medication history can be effective over the long term, but not immediately.
The model contains many assumptions and simplifications, Bobashev says. For example, it doesn’t capture the fact that the rate at which people develop tolerance and addiction can depend on factors such as genetics, and that whether a person switches from prescription drugs to heroin can depend on the relative availability of the two drugs.
But researchers can adjust models such as Pain Town to test various interventions, such as increasing access to emergency rooms, arresting a dealer or equipping police with naloxone (a drug that reverses opioid overdoses), to see how the system reacts and whether it affects the number of deaths over time. And as models become more sophisticated, the researchers may be able to incorporate more factors, such as people who are not taking pain medications but are susceptible to trying opioids for the first time. (...)
Data drought
The models face numerous challenges before they will be ready for widespread adoption, primarily data gaps. Marshall says that researchers struggle to get access to data on opioid prescriptions that are held by manufacturers, pharmacies and law-enforcement agencies. It is also difficult to obtain government information on drug cartels and the type and rate of drugs flowing into the country. Other data simply do not exist in usable form: agencies may record deaths due to drug overdose, for instance, but fail to specify which drug was responsible.
Observing drug users such as Brandi can provide certain types of information more quickly and accurately. “Drug users know their chemicals intimately,” Ciccarone says.
Lee Hoffer is a cultural anthropologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, who studies heroin markets and collaborates with Bobashev. He says the ethnographic data that his group and others are collecting could help to fill some of the information gaps: “We’re trying to enter their world as interlopers to see how they see their life.” After an initial awkward period, he says, drug users tend to become more honest with the researchers, telling them crucial information such as how they form networks with dealers and the cost of drugs.
Understanding the psychology of drug users is also crucial, says Epstein. Most decision-making models assume rational behaviours. In reality, emotions, misinformation and irrational calculations play a major part. “When you put them together you get collections of dynamics that are very dysfunctional.”
by Sara Reardon, Nature | Read more:
Image: Jerome Sessini/Magnum
Friday, August 24, 2018
Thursday, August 23, 2018
The Other Side of “Broken Windows”
In the nineteenth century, British researchers began studying the variation in crime rates between and within cities. Some of these studies offered relatively simple accounts of the variance, in which concentrated poverty led to higher crime. Others went further, asking what explained the disparities in crime rates among poor neighborhoods. Most of this work “offered theories,” the University of Pennsylvania criminologist John MacDonald wrote in a recent paper, “but did not attempt to provide guidance on how to curb crime.” He compared this tradition, unfavorably, with the work of British health scholars, most notably John Snow, whose research on cholera “noted the importance of the spatial environment,” and who “suggested the separation of sewers and drinking water wells to prevent water-borne diseases.”
Of course, social scientists have long influenced crime policies. Consider the “broken windows” theory, which the Harvard political scientist James Q. Wilson and the Rutgers criminologist George Kelling introduced, in a piece in the Atlantic, in 1982. According to Wilson and Kelling, criminals perceive broken windows and other forms of disorder as signs of weak social control; in turn, they assume that crimes committed there are unlikely to be checked. “Though it is not inevitable,” Wilson and Kelling argue, “it is more likely that here, rather than in places where people are confident they can regulate public behavior by informal controls, drugs will change hands, prostitutes will solicit, and cars will be stripped.”
“Broken Windows” is one of the most cited articles in the history of criminology; it’s sometimes called the Bible of policing. Since the nineteen-eighties, cities throughout the world have used Wilson and Kelling’s ideas as motivation for “zero tolerance” policing, wherein officers monitor petty crimes, such as graffiti, loitering, public intoxication, and even panhandling, and courts severely punish those convicted of committing them. “If you take care of the little things, then you can prevent a lot of the big things,” the former Los Angeles and New York City police chief William J. Bratton has said. (Bratton has also applied the theory in overseas consulting work.) In practice, this meant stopping, frisking, and arresting more people, particularly those who live in high-crime areas. It also meant a spike in reports that police were unfairly targeting minorities, particularly black men.
Broken-windows theory always worked better as an idea than as a description of the real world. The problems with the theory, which include the fact that perceptions of disorder generally have more to do with the racial composition of a neighborhood than with the number of broken windows or amount of graffiti in the area, are numerous and well documented. But more interesting than the theory’s flaws is the way that it was framed and interpreted. Consider the authors’ famous evocation of how disorder begins:
But what if the authors—and the policymakers who heeded them—had taken another tack? What if vacant property had received the attention that, for thirty years, was instead showered on petty criminals?
A few years ago, John MacDonald, the Penn criminologist, and Charles Branas, the chair of epidemiology at Columbia University, began one of the most exciting research experiments in social science. Branas is a leading scholar of gun violence, having become interested in the subject while working as a paramedic. He met MacDonald in the aughts, when they were both working at the University of Pennsylvania, in a seminar on gun violence at the medical school’s trauma center. Both were frustrated by the science that linked crime to neighborhood disorder. “A lot of it, from ‘broken windows’ on, was just descriptive,” Branas told me. “You didn’t know exactly what counted as disorder. And it wasn’t actionable. Outside of policing, which was obviously complicated, there wasn’t much you could do about it.”
The two began meeting on campus. While they were brainstorming, Branas was invited to discuss his research at a conference in Philadelphia. During his presentation, he briefly mentioned his interest in running an experiment on the physical factors related to gun violence. “When I finished, someone from the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society approached me,” Branas recalled. That person was convinced that vacant properties—Philadelphia had tens of thousands of empty lots—were driving up violent crime in poor neighborhoods. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, or P.H.S., had incredible data, and offered to help.
Branas and MacDonald were excited about the idea. There was, after all, an established literature on the relationship between abandoned properties and crime. In 1993, the criminologist William Spelman published a paper showing that, in Austin, “crime rates on blocks with open abandoned buildings were twice as high as rates on matched blocks without open buildings.” In 2005, the sociologist Lance Hannon showed that, in New York City’s high-poverty areas, the number of abandoned houses in a given census tract correlated with homicide levels. But Branas and MacDonald wanted to draw from an even deeper study, which required collecting an enormous amount of data and designing an experiment. They invited more scientists to join them: a health economist, a professor from Penn’s Department of Emergency Medicine, and a medical anthropologist.
On a warm and windy day in September, I visited Philadelphia to observe the sites that P.H.S. had remediated. Keith Green, a P.H.S. employee with a salt-and-pepper beard, picked me up in his blue Ford pickup truck, and told me that we’d begin by driving to West Philadelphia, where P.H.S. maintains 2.3 million square feet of vacant land. Green, who grew up in a part of Philadelphia that’s so gray it’s known as “the concrete city,” started working at P.H.S. twenty-one years ago, first as an intern and then on community-garden projects. “I never thought I’d be doing this for so long,” he told me. “But I found my niche when we started fixing up abandoned property.”
As we drove, Green told me about one of his first jobs. “The city asked us to clean up a two-block area in North Philadelphia where there was a flea infestation. We got there, and it was like the entire area had turned into a jungle. Weeds, tall grass, messed-up trees. People were using it as a dumping ground.” The team ended up treating a hundred and twenty-five empty lots. “It was a horrible job, but when we finished you could tell that the neighborhood was going to be different,” he said. “And people were so happy. I’d have kids running up to my truck, yelling, ‘Mr. Keith! Mr. Keith! Can you come back tomorrow?’ They treated me like I was Mister Softee.”
Green drove slowly up Fortieth Street, on the west side of the city. “You’re gonna want to keep your eyes open,” he said. The area looked a lot like Englewood and North Lawndale, neighborhoods I’d studied in Chicago, where row houses and apartment buildings, some empty, some well-kept, sat adjacent to large, open lots that were thick with weeds, debris, and six-foot-high grass. “See that?” He pulled over at a corner lot with a low-lying wooden fence, two benches, trimmed trees, and a neatly cut lawn. “That’s one of our treated sites. You can tell because it’s so well maintained.”
We got out and walked through the pocket park to a vacant house and large lot a few steps away. There, the grass had grown both high and wide, so that it came through the sidewalk and out to the curb. “Now this—this is a disaster,” Green said. “It’s probably got an owner who wouldn’t let us work here, or someone we couldn’t track down. If you live here, you’ve got to deal with all the problems this attracts into the neighborhood: pests, insects, garbage, crime. And you know it’s gonna make it hard for new development to work here. People see that and they want to run.”(...)
Green and his colleagues at P.H.S. suspected that fixing up the empty lots and buildings was improving Philadelphia’s poor neighborhoods, but they weren’t certain. Branas and MacDonald had a more specific hypothesis: that remediation would reduce violent crime nearby. “It’s not simply that they are signs of disorder,” Branas told me. “It’s that the places themselves create opportunities for gun violence; they take what might just be a poor neighborhood and make it poor and dangerous.”
The reasons are straightforward. Abandoned houses are good places for people involved in crime to hide when on the run. They’re also good places to store firearms. Untended lots are notoriously useful for drug dealing—in part because most law-abiding residents avoid them, and in part because dealers can hide their products in the weeds and tall grass if the police drive by. For communities, and for the police, they are hard places to monitor and control.
Green and his colleagues at P.H.S. suspected that fixing up the empty lots and buildings was improving Philadelphia’s poor neighborhoods, but they weren’t certain. Branas and MacDonald had a more specific hypothesis: that remediation would reduce violent crime nearby. “It’s not simply that they are signs of disorder,” Branas told me. “It’s that the places themselves create opportunities for gun violence; they take what might just be a poor neighborhood and make it poor and dangerous.”
The reasons are straightforward. Abandoned houses are good places for people involved in crime to hide when on the run. They’re also good places to store firearms. Untended lots are notoriously useful for drug dealing—in part because most law-abiding residents avoid them, and in part because dealers can hide their products in the weeds and tall grass if the police drive by. For communities, and for the police, they are hard places to monitor and control.
Compelling theories, as critics of broken-windows policing know all too well, are often betrayed by evidence. That’s why Branas was so surprised by the findings from their first study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, which showed a thirty-nine-per-cent reduction in gun violence in and around remediated abandoned buildings and a smaller—but still meaningful—five-per-cent reduction in gun violence in and around remediated lots. These are extraordinary numbers, at a level of impact one rarely sees in a social-science experiment.
Equally powerful, Branas said, was that there was no evidence that the violence had simply shifted to nearby places. The declines were real. And they lasted from one to nearly four years, making the benefit far more sustainable than those of other crime-reduction programs. “Honestly, it was a bigger effect than we’d expected to find,” he said.
For Branas, the results pointed toward a new approach to crime prevention. Early in his career, he worked on what, in hindsight, he views as a failed experiment—conventional anti-violence research that focussed on the people most likely to commit crimes. “When I started at Penn, we had been working hard to reduce gun crime in Philadelphia. We had the interpreters, the social workers, the community leaders,” he said. “Some of them were amazing, and we had some successes. But they were always short-lived. . . . In the end, it wound up helping only, I don’t know, about fifty kids, just the ones who were there at the time.”
To this day, most policies that aim to reduce crime focus on punishing people rather than improving places. The President has called for a national “stop and frisk” police program; the Attorney General wants more severe sentencing; advocates of “law and order” are resurgent. We invest little in housing and neighborhood amenities like libraries, senior centers, and community gardens, which draw people into the public realm and put more eyes on the street. And we spend even less to address criminal “hot spots”—the empty lots and abandoned buildings that, according to Branas’s team, account for fifteen per cent of city space in America.
by Eric Klinenberg, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Mark Makela
Of course, social scientists have long influenced crime policies. Consider the “broken windows” theory, which the Harvard political scientist James Q. Wilson and the Rutgers criminologist George Kelling introduced, in a piece in the Atlantic, in 1982. According to Wilson and Kelling, criminals perceive broken windows and other forms of disorder as signs of weak social control; in turn, they assume that crimes committed there are unlikely to be checked. “Though it is not inevitable,” Wilson and Kelling argue, “it is more likely that here, rather than in places where people are confident they can regulate public behavior by informal controls, drugs will change hands, prostitutes will solicit, and cars will be stripped.”
“Broken Windows” is one of the most cited articles in the history of criminology; it’s sometimes called the Bible of policing. Since the nineteen-eighties, cities throughout the world have used Wilson and Kelling’s ideas as motivation for “zero tolerance” policing, wherein officers monitor petty crimes, such as graffiti, loitering, public intoxication, and even panhandling, and courts severely punish those convicted of committing them. “If you take care of the little things, then you can prevent a lot of the big things,” the former Los Angeles and New York City police chief William J. Bratton has said. (Bratton has also applied the theory in overseas consulting work.) In practice, this meant stopping, frisking, and arresting more people, particularly those who live in high-crime areas. It also meant a spike in reports that police were unfairly targeting minorities, particularly black men.Broken-windows theory always worked better as an idea than as a description of the real world. The problems with the theory, which include the fact that perceptions of disorder generally have more to do with the racial composition of a neighborhood than with the number of broken windows or amount of graffiti in the area, are numerous and well documented. But more interesting than the theory’s flaws is the way that it was framed and interpreted. Consider the authors’ famous evocation of how disorder begins:
A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up, a window is smashed. Adults stop scolding rowdy children; the children, emboldened, become more rowdy. Families move out, unattached adults move in. Teenagers gather in front of the corner store. The merchant asks them to move; they refuse. Fights occur. Litter accumulates. People start drinking in front of the grocery; in time, an inebriate slumps to the sidewalk and is allowed to sleep it off. Pedestrians are approached by panhandlers.Things get worse from there. But what’s curious is how the first two steps of this cycle—“A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up”—have disappeared in the public imagination. The third step—“a window is smashed”—inspired the article’s catchy title and took center stage. Debates about the theory ignored the two problems at the root of its story, jumping straight to the criminal behavior. We got “broken windows,” not “abandoned property,” and a very different policy response ensued.
But what if the authors—and the policymakers who heeded them—had taken another tack? What if vacant property had received the attention that, for thirty years, was instead showered on petty criminals?
A few years ago, John MacDonald, the Penn criminologist, and Charles Branas, the chair of epidemiology at Columbia University, began one of the most exciting research experiments in social science. Branas is a leading scholar of gun violence, having become interested in the subject while working as a paramedic. He met MacDonald in the aughts, when they were both working at the University of Pennsylvania, in a seminar on gun violence at the medical school’s trauma center. Both were frustrated by the science that linked crime to neighborhood disorder. “A lot of it, from ‘broken windows’ on, was just descriptive,” Branas told me. “You didn’t know exactly what counted as disorder. And it wasn’t actionable. Outside of policing, which was obviously complicated, there wasn’t much you could do about it.”
The two began meeting on campus. While they were brainstorming, Branas was invited to discuss his research at a conference in Philadelphia. During his presentation, he briefly mentioned his interest in running an experiment on the physical factors related to gun violence. “When I finished, someone from the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society approached me,” Branas recalled. That person was convinced that vacant properties—Philadelphia had tens of thousands of empty lots—were driving up violent crime in poor neighborhoods. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, or P.H.S., had incredible data, and offered to help.
Branas and MacDonald were excited about the idea. There was, after all, an established literature on the relationship between abandoned properties and crime. In 1993, the criminologist William Spelman published a paper showing that, in Austin, “crime rates on blocks with open abandoned buildings were twice as high as rates on matched blocks without open buildings.” In 2005, the sociologist Lance Hannon showed that, in New York City’s high-poverty areas, the number of abandoned houses in a given census tract correlated with homicide levels. But Branas and MacDonald wanted to draw from an even deeper study, which required collecting an enormous amount of data and designing an experiment. They invited more scientists to join them: a health economist, a professor from Penn’s Department of Emergency Medicine, and a medical anthropologist.
On a warm and windy day in September, I visited Philadelphia to observe the sites that P.H.S. had remediated. Keith Green, a P.H.S. employee with a salt-and-pepper beard, picked me up in his blue Ford pickup truck, and told me that we’d begin by driving to West Philadelphia, where P.H.S. maintains 2.3 million square feet of vacant land. Green, who grew up in a part of Philadelphia that’s so gray it’s known as “the concrete city,” started working at P.H.S. twenty-one years ago, first as an intern and then on community-garden projects. “I never thought I’d be doing this for so long,” he told me. “But I found my niche when we started fixing up abandoned property.”
As we drove, Green told me about one of his first jobs. “The city asked us to clean up a two-block area in North Philadelphia where there was a flea infestation. We got there, and it was like the entire area had turned into a jungle. Weeds, tall grass, messed-up trees. People were using it as a dumping ground.” The team ended up treating a hundred and twenty-five empty lots. “It was a horrible job, but when we finished you could tell that the neighborhood was going to be different,” he said. “And people were so happy. I’d have kids running up to my truck, yelling, ‘Mr. Keith! Mr. Keith! Can you come back tomorrow?’ They treated me like I was Mister Softee.”
Green drove slowly up Fortieth Street, on the west side of the city. “You’re gonna want to keep your eyes open,” he said. The area looked a lot like Englewood and North Lawndale, neighborhoods I’d studied in Chicago, where row houses and apartment buildings, some empty, some well-kept, sat adjacent to large, open lots that were thick with weeds, debris, and six-foot-high grass. “See that?” He pulled over at a corner lot with a low-lying wooden fence, two benches, trimmed trees, and a neatly cut lawn. “That’s one of our treated sites. You can tell because it’s so well maintained.”
We got out and walked through the pocket park to a vacant house and large lot a few steps away. There, the grass had grown both high and wide, so that it came through the sidewalk and out to the curb. “Now this—this is a disaster,” Green said. “It’s probably got an owner who wouldn’t let us work here, or someone we couldn’t track down. If you live here, you’ve got to deal with all the problems this attracts into the neighborhood: pests, insects, garbage, crime. And you know it’s gonna make it hard for new development to work here. People see that and they want to run.”(...)
Green and his colleagues at P.H.S. suspected that fixing up the empty lots and buildings was improving Philadelphia’s poor neighborhoods, but they weren’t certain. Branas and MacDonald had a more specific hypothesis: that remediation would reduce violent crime nearby. “It’s not simply that they are signs of disorder,” Branas told me. “It’s that the places themselves create opportunities for gun violence; they take what might just be a poor neighborhood and make it poor and dangerous.”
The reasons are straightforward. Abandoned houses are good places for people involved in crime to hide when on the run. They’re also good places to store firearms. Untended lots are notoriously useful for drug dealing—in part because most law-abiding residents avoid them, and in part because dealers can hide their products in the weeds and tall grass if the police drive by. For communities, and for the police, they are hard places to monitor and control.
Green and his colleagues at P.H.S. suspected that fixing up the empty lots and buildings was improving Philadelphia’s poor neighborhoods, but they weren’t certain. Branas and MacDonald had a more specific hypothesis: that remediation would reduce violent crime nearby. “It’s not simply that they are signs of disorder,” Branas told me. “It’s that the places themselves create opportunities for gun violence; they take what might just be a poor neighborhood and make it poor and dangerous.”
The reasons are straightforward. Abandoned houses are good places for people involved in crime to hide when on the run. They’re also good places to store firearms. Untended lots are notoriously useful for drug dealing—in part because most law-abiding residents avoid them, and in part because dealers can hide their products in the weeds and tall grass if the police drive by. For communities, and for the police, they are hard places to monitor and control.
Compelling theories, as critics of broken-windows policing know all too well, are often betrayed by evidence. That’s why Branas was so surprised by the findings from their first study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, which showed a thirty-nine-per-cent reduction in gun violence in and around remediated abandoned buildings and a smaller—but still meaningful—five-per-cent reduction in gun violence in and around remediated lots. These are extraordinary numbers, at a level of impact one rarely sees in a social-science experiment.
Equally powerful, Branas said, was that there was no evidence that the violence had simply shifted to nearby places. The declines were real. And they lasted from one to nearly four years, making the benefit far more sustainable than those of other crime-reduction programs. “Honestly, it was a bigger effect than we’d expected to find,” he said.
For Branas, the results pointed toward a new approach to crime prevention. Early in his career, he worked on what, in hindsight, he views as a failed experiment—conventional anti-violence research that focussed on the people most likely to commit crimes. “When I started at Penn, we had been working hard to reduce gun crime in Philadelphia. We had the interpreters, the social workers, the community leaders,” he said. “Some of them were amazing, and we had some successes. But they were always short-lived. . . . In the end, it wound up helping only, I don’t know, about fifty kids, just the ones who were there at the time.”
To this day, most policies that aim to reduce crime focus on punishing people rather than improving places. The President has called for a national “stop and frisk” police program; the Attorney General wants more severe sentencing; advocates of “law and order” are resurgent. We invest little in housing and neighborhood amenities like libraries, senior centers, and community gardens, which draw people into the public realm and put more eyes on the street. And we spend even less to address criminal “hot spots”—the empty lots and abandoned buildings that, according to Branas’s team, account for fifteen per cent of city space in America.
by Eric Klinenberg, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Mark Makela
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