Wall Street's Corruption Runs Deeper Than You Can Fathom

Of the myriad policy decisions that have brought us to our current precipice, from the signing of the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to the invasion of Iraq and the gerrymandering of House districts across the country, few have proven as consequential as the demise of Glass-Steagall. Signed into law as the U.S.A. Banking Act of 1933, the legislation had been crucial to safeguarding the financial industry in the wake of the Great Depression. But with its repeal in 1999, the barriers separating commercial and investment banking collapsed, creating the preconditions for an economic crisis from whose shadow we have yet to emerge.

Carmen Segarra might have predicted as much. As an employee at the Federal Reserve in 2011, three years after the dissolution of Lehman Brothers, she witnessed the results of this deregulation firsthand. In her new book, “Noncompliant: A Lone Whistleblower Exposes the Giants of Wall Street,” she chronicles the recklessness of institutions like Goldman Sachs and the stunning lengths the United States government went to to accommodate them, even as they authored one of the worst crashes in our nation’s history.

“They didn’t want to hear what I had to say,” she tells Robert Scheer in the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence.” “And so I think what we have in terms of this story is really not just a failure of the banks and the regulators, but also a failure of our prosecutors. I mean, a lot of the statutes that could be used—criminal statutes, even, that could be used to hold these executives accountable are not being used, and they have not expired; we could have prosecutors holding these people accountable.”

Segarra also explains why she decided to blow the whistle on the Fed, and what she ultimately hopes to accomplish by telling her story. “I don’t like to let the bad guys win,” she says. “I’d rather go down swinging. So for me, I saw it as an opportunity to do my civic duty and rebuild my life. … I was very lucky to be blessed by so many people who I shared the story to, especially lawyers who were so concerned about what I was reporting, who thought that the Federal Reserve was above this, who thought that the government would not fail us after the financial crisis, and who were livid.”

“Noncompliant” explores one of the darkest chapters in modern American history, but with a crook and unabashed narcissist occupying the Oval Office, its lessons are proving remarkably timely. “We live in a culture where we reward bad behavior, we worship bad behavior, and it’s something that needs to stop,” she cautions. “Changing the regulatory culture on [a] U.S. governmental level is something that’s going to take a decade, maybe two. And we need to start now, before things get worse.”

Listen to Segarra’s interview with Scheer or read a transcript of their conversation below:

Robert Scheer: Hi, I’m Robert Scheer, and this is another edition of “Scheer Intelligence,” where the intelligence comes from my guests. Today, Carmen Segarra. She’s written a book, just came out, called “Noncompliant: A Lone Whistleblower Exposes the Giants of Wall Street.” And boy, did she ever. Perhaps you remember this case; it was in 2011, two, three years into the Great Recession. There was a lot of pressure from Congress that these banks be regulated in a more serious way. As a result, Carmen Segarra, someone of considerable education, was brought in. And she was assigned to do a survey of Goldman Sachs, to go over to Goldman Sachs. And I just want to preface this, people have to understand that not only is the Federal Reserve an incredibly—the most important economic institution in the United States, but the New York Federal Reserve plays a special role being in New York. And they are basically entrusted with regulating the banks, and they are the institution that most definitely failed in that task, and helped bring about the Great Recession. Would you agree with that assessment?

Carmen Segarra: Yes, I would agree with that assessment. When I joined the Federal Reserve, as you pointed out, I was hired from outside the regulatory world, but within the legal and compliance banking world, to help fix its problems. And I was well aware of the problems that existed. And scoping the problems itself was relatively easy; I mean, within days of arriving, I had participated in meetings where you had Goldman Sachs executives, you know, lying, doublespeaking, and misrepresenting to regulatory agencies without fear of repercussions. And where I saw Federal Reserve regulators actively working to suppress and expunge from the record evidence of wrongdoing that could be used by regulatory agencies, prosecutors, and even the Federal Reserve itself to hold Goldman Sachs accountable. The question was, when I arrived, you know, are these problems fixable? And, spoiler alert: I don’t think so. (...)

RS: Well, before you get to the whistleblowing stage, I think you’re being too kind to what I personally think are people who should be considered as, or at least charged and examined often with what is criminal behavior. Because ignorance is really not a good defense; when they were called before congressional committees, these knowledgeable people admitted they really didn’t understand collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps. And for people who are not that familiar, you mentioned Glass-Steagall. And what Glass-Steagall was, was one of the, really maybe the most important response of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s democratic administration to the Great Depression. And how did this terrible depression happen, how were the banks so irresponsible. And they decided the key thing was to separate investment banks from commercial bank; investment banks could be high-rollers, private money, you know what you’re doing, you have knowledge; and commercial banks where you’re basically protecting the assets of ordinary people, they’re not knowledgeable, they’re trusting your expertise. And eliminating Glass-Steagall eliminated this wall between the two kinds of banking. And the company that you went to observe, Goldman Sachs, was an investment bank. And by the working of that law, they should have been allowed to go belly-up when it turned out they had a lot of these dubious credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations. To people who don’t know, a credit default swap was a phony insurance policy pretending to cover these things, but really there’s nothing backing it up. And somehow, in order to save them, they were allowed to announce they could do commercial banking. One could argue, in some ways, the barrier was lifted to help–Citigroup was of course the other one–Citibank. And these are two banks that the government stepped in to help and create this monster. Is it not the case?

CS: Yeah, that’s absolutely the case. But there’s a couple of things that we need to keep in mind. I mean, I think that we’re all sort of educated enough to know that, you know, where there’s a will, there’s a way. And so if a system can be corrupted, people that are allowed to grab hold of power will corrupt it–insofar and only for so long as we allow those people to have the ability and the power to corrupt it. So ultimately, talking about more or less rules, or different rules, is productive only to a point. Because ultimately what we’re talking about here is the haphazard, slap on the wrist, failure to truly enforce the rules and regulations equitably across the system. And that creates the imbalances that you see, for example, in Goldman Sachs, and that you see in the system in general. One of the things that happened as a result of Glass-Steagall coming down was that a lot of the investment bankers were allowed to take over the commercial banks. And those investment bankers knew nothing about banking, and Goldman is a great example of that. I mean, when I arrived three years in after the financial crisis, what was one of the things that was very shocking to me was going into meeting after meeting with Goldman senior management and hearing them lie, doublespeak, and most shockingly of all, insist that they didn’t have to comply with the law. And that is a problem. Because a bank that doesn’t believe, or management at a bank that doesn’t believe they have to comply with the law–you bet they are not supervising their employees correctly, and they’re not incentivizing employees correctly in terms of how to do their job. So their behavior is injecting enormous risk into the system.

RS: Why should they think they should comply with the law when they got the law written and they could get it rewritten? I mean, after all, the treasury secretary, who pushed in the Clinton administration, right, to get rid of this restraint of Glass-Steagall and allow companies like Goldman Sachs to cross that line, was Robert Rubin. And he had been a top executive at Goldman Sachs. In fact, people used to refer to it as Government Sachs, that they had people all over the government, and it was a revolving door. And I want to point out that what you did, which was really unique–you had the guts to record these conversations. When you finally got to have your say before Congress, you could be backed up because you had the record. And tell us about that record. The conversations you recorded are absolutely chilling in describing an atmosphere of cynicism; you know, corruption; contempt, actually, for the political process and for restraint and regulation.

CS: Yeah. And I would sort of add that part of what the book sort of points out is that I didn’t really get my say. I mean, Congress did hold a hearing, but they did not invite me to testify. They didn’t want to hear what I had to say. And so I think what we have in terms of this story is really not just a failure of the banks and the regulators, but also a failure of our prosecutors. I mean, a lot of the statutes that could be used–criminal statutes, even, that could be used to hold these executives accountable are not being used, and they have not expired; we could have prosecutors holding these people accountable. We could have trial lawyers filing cases and holding these people accountable. Yet we can’t count on them to do it; we can’t count on the judiciary to do anything about it. I mean, when you read about what happened in my case in the book, it’s tragic, you know? It’s unbelievable. (...)

RS: Well, we’ll see change. It might not be good change. I mean, you have Donald Trump–and I want to put some oomph behind this, that it’s bipartisan. Because one of the–you know, everybody, a lot of people I know are very upset about Donald Trump. He’s speaking to what Hillary Clinton calls the “deplorables”; but there’s a lot of people hurting out there. And if you read a study done by the Federal Reserve of St. Louis about the consequence of this economic meltdown that was engineered from places like Goldman Sachs, the human cost was incredible. I mean, people lost everything. They weren’t bailed out. There was no mortgage relief. They were not helped. The banks were bailed out. And yet no one has been held accountable, and the politicians, democrats and republicans, who supported it, have gotten off scot-free.

CS: ... This is not a democratic problem, this is not a republican problem. This is an American problem with worldwide impact. The U.S. dollar is a reserve currency. The world depends in large part on the American banking system to work. And for it to work, there are these rules, and these rules are there to create trust in the system and to create smooth processes in the system, so that money can be moved and the economy can continue to grow. If the world can no longer trust the American banking system because Americans cannot be trusted to regulate it, they are going to move away from the American banking system. They are going to move away from the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency. And then we are going to find ourselves in the situation that a lot of countries that are not governed by reserve currencies find themselves occasionally, from time to time, whenever they have a crisis. You know, we’re talking about countries in Latin America; we’re talking about countries in Africa; we’re talking about countries in Asia. I hope the book will inspire people to really take a look around and realize, you know, the American consumer, the American worker, is incredibly powerful. You know, these banks cannot survive without our money. We don’t have to wait for the government to keep failing us; we don’t have to wait for the judiciary to keep failing us; we don’t have to wait for lawyers to keep failing us. We choose who we work for. We choose where we keep our money. We can choose to protest. We can choose to call our pension funds and tell them, I want you to stop doing business with Goldman Sachs. It’s what we do on a daily basis. When we stand up and we say, I am not going to be banking with these people–they will listen. It’s like, they control all of these other checks and balances that were put in place in terms of the government to stop them. So now it’s up to us as a people to actually do something about this.

by Robert Sheer, Truthdig |  Read more:
[ed. See also: “US Regulators Have Essentially Become Do-Nothing Institutions”.]

Flight of the Conchords
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Millennials Killed Canned Tuna!

What millennial panic stories — like “killing” canned tuna — tell us about Boomer guilt.

Have you heard? Millennials have killed the canned tuna industry. Why? Because apparently we don't own can-openers.

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that canned tuna consumption is way down, it's declined by 42 percent in three decades and has dropped four percent just in the last five years. And tuna companies, particularly the big three — StarKist Co., Bumble Bee Foods LLC and Chicken of the Sea International — are not happy.

While the companies spoke about rebranding efforts, such as trying out new flavored tuna packs and innovative packaging to appeal to a younger consumer base, their more realized strategy is one we've seen over and over in recent years: cluelessly scapegoating millennials for the sake of one's shrinking business.

"In a country focused on convenience, canned tuna isn’t cutting it with consumers," WSJ reported. "Many can’t be bothered to open and drain the cans, or fetch utensils and dishes to eat the tuna. 'A lot of millennials don’t even own can openers,' said Andy Mecs, vice president of marketing and innovation for Pittsburgh-based StarKist, a subsidiary of South Korea’s Dongwon Group." (...)

As many people suggested on Twitter, there are myriad reasons to not eat canned tuna and none of them include millennials not owning can openers. Many people simply think it's disgusting, and also there was a whole movement of concern over dolphins being killed as a byproduct of being captured in the nets of tuna fishers, plus concern over its mercury levels.

As Business Insider reported, the smell of canned tuna makes eating it for lunch during the workday a cardinal sin in today's common open office settings where lunch hours away from one's desk are considered almost a luxury. And let's not forget that two of tuna's biggest brands, StarKist and Bumble Bee, were central to a price-fixing scandal that resulted in guilty pleas from the companies and from three executives.

But alas, it can be hard to keep track of all the things that the millennial generation has taken down. There's cereal, mayonnaise, napkins, golf, department stores, savings accounts, home ownership, diamonds, even sex. But the messaging is oddly similar across all of these stories — the shaming of young adults for failing to function in the world exactly as older generations did. Millennials' innovation to survive in the face of massive debt, the instability of the gig economy and lackluster career prospects, is seen in moral terms as a failure to prioritize and is often cast as entitlement. (...)

Sweeping, monolithic representations of a generation are rarely as insightful as they purport to be, but perhaps yelling at millennials for not eating enough cheap tuna while complaining that they consume too much avocado toast to ever be able to buy homes is easier than reckoning with the alarm of surging economic inequality, the stronghold of student debt, and a failure to pass universal health care. These shaming trend stories seem to cater primarily to Baby Boomers who still believe they simply worked harder and prioritized their spending better than their millennial offspring have, and so were able to afford houses, cars, and diamond engagement rings earlier in life.

Is the collective schadenfreude induced by millennial panic stories a coping mechanism for generational guilt over leaving a worse-off economy and world for us to inherit? If so, please stop; we've got enough anxiety as is.

by Rachel Leah, Salon | Read more:
Image: Tim Boyle/Getty

They're So Dumb They Might Just Get Away With It

Recent revelations from special counsel Robert Mueller have been more intriguing than enlightening (at least so far) but they do indicate that there's a whole lot of investigating going on. The Michael Cohen plea and sentencing memorandum, as well as the heavily redacted filing on Michael Flynn's sentence, were full of tantalizing hints about various possible crimes in multiple jurisdictions. Perhaps the most interesting tidbits in those documents are those that indicate both Cohen and Flynn spent a massive number of hours being interviewed. As CNN's Ron Brownstein said, "You can imagine meeting 19 times if someone was resisting you and not providing information. But if someone is cooperating, it doesn’t take 19 meetings for them to explain nothing unusual happened.” It's clear that Cohen and Flynn have stories to tell. We only know pieces of what they are.

I can't help but wonder whether Donald Trump and his family will be able to get away with whatever it is they're suspected of simply because people will believe that they are just too dumb to have known better. I'm aware that's not a legal excuse, but the future of all this is political as much as it is legal. And the great paradox of the Trump phenomenon is that while his followers believe he is a genius of epic proportions, everyone else can see that he's monumentally stupid.

That could add up to a reluctant acceptance that Trump can't be held responsible for any of the things he's suspected of doing. His voters will say that he was actually being "smart" (as he famously claimed was the reason he didn't pay taxes), further degrading whatever standards we had for honesty and intelligence in public life. Everyone else will be stuck trying to refute the defense that he was an "outsider businessman" who didn't know that his actions were unethical or illegal. Sure, we can all scream that that doesn't or shouldn't matter and that he must be held accountable regardless. But we'll also probably have to acknowledge on some level that he was too simpleminded to understand the ramifications of his actions. He probably was.

Trump's breathtaking arrogance in these matters might just allow him to barrel through. Take, for instance, his insistence that he has not obstructed justice but is simply "fighting back." Surely criminals all think that they are just fighting back when they try to cover up their crimes, threaten witnesses or offer bribes. In their minds it's self-defense. But Trump doesn't know that he sounds like a criminal when he makes this excuse, therefore making himself look even guiltier. He thinks it's a smart defense. Most of his followers take his word at face value and see him as heroically fighting the "deep state" on their behalf. The ones who know better see him as clever for twisting reality to frustrate his opponents, who become exasperated by his obtuse inability to understand reality.

Even Ivanka Trump, who everyone seemed to think was the smart one in the family, recently proved that she's a chip off the old block too. When it was reported that Ivanka used a private email account for government business, the excuse was that she didn't realize it wasn't OK to do that. People assumed she was lying because no sentient being could have missed the scandal surrounding Hillary Clinton's use of a private email for government business, least of all someone in Donald Trump's family. But it's really not unreasonable to believe that she didn't think it would be a problem for her. After all, she and the family were meeting with various foreign businessmen and political leaders on behalf of the Trump Organization and the president-elect during the transition and saw nothing wrong with talking business during those meetings. I don't think it occurred to them that there might be something unethical in doing that because they simply don't understand what ethics are.

by Heather Digby Parton, Hullabaloo |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. Sad but true. It may finally come down to 'intent' vs. simple cluelessness and greed. Of course, the coverup is usually worse.]

Jackson Pollock, Untitled (Green Silver) 1946
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Erik Satie

The XFL is a Nightmare and It's Coming to Seattle

The XFL, an alternative version of football, was born in 2001. It also died in 2001.

America wasn’t ready for “extreme” football. The pre-season XFL advertising blimp that deflated and crashed in Oakland, CA was some on-the-nose foreshadowing. After its single season, the XFL quietly faded from memory, but its founder, Vince McMahon, of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) acclaim, was lying in wait.

Now, a short 17 years later, America is getting exactly what we never asked for, and maybe exactly what we deserve: the Second Coming of the XFL.

McMahon announced today that he and Andrew Luck’s (you know, that guy from football) dad, Oliver Luck, will be rebooting the league. There will be eight teams: Dallas, Los Angeles, Tampa Bay, Houston, New York, St. Louis, Washington D.C., and Seattle.

So, just what are we in for? When I first heard about the XFL, I assumed it was some cool, modern revamping of football like what Twenty20 did for cricket. Nope.

Bob Costas, an NBC sportscaster, described the XFL as a combination of “mediocre high school football and a tawdry strip club.”

The XFL was co-sponsored by NBC and the WWF (the precursor to the WWE). NBC was all bitter that they lost NFL broadcasting rights to CBS. So, naturally, they teamed up with the wrestling world to bring a new, spicier football to American television sets. Wrestling and football? What could go wrong?

The game, played by mostly amateur players (aside from this one guy), was designed to be faster and more violent.

For instance, there wasn’t a coin toss. There was, instead, an “opening scramble.” Players would race toward the middle and fight to get to a football first. Whoever got it would get to choose who had possession first. One guy ripped up his shoulder so badly in his first game during the scramble that he was out for the whole season.

The cheerleaders wore scantily clad and sexually suggestive outfits. The XFL filmed inside looks into the cheerleaders’ locker room. Players were encouraged to date them, according to the Wall Street Journal. There were hot tubs in the end zones filled with actual strippers.

by Nathalie Graham, The Stranger | Read more:
Image: Fatcamera/Getty

Lunch With M.

One afternoon last month, a woman in her early thirties, with shoulder-length blond hair and large brown eyes, arrived at Jean Georges, on the ground floor of the Trump International Hotel, in midtown Manhattan. The restaurant, which is owned by the chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and is one of the highest rated in the world, has an understated décor, with bare white walls and floor-to-ceiling windows. The woman took a seat at one of the tables in the center of the room. She wore a light-blue dress with a high neckline, little makeup, and no jewelry. There was nothing remarkable about her appearance, and her demeanor was quiet and unassuming, as if designed to deflect attention—a trait indispensable for her profession as an inspector for the Michelin hotel-and-restaurant guide. (...)

Michelin has gone to extraordinary lengths to maintain the anonymity of its inspectors. Many of the company’s top executives have never met an inspector; inspectors themselves are advised not to disclose their line of work, even to their parents (who might be tempted to boast about it); and, in all the years that it has been putting out the guide, Michelin has refused to allow its inspectors to speak to journalists. The inspectors write reports that are distilled, in annual “stars meetings” at the guide’s various national offices, into the ranking of three stars, two stars, or one star—or no stars. (Establishments that Michelin deems unworthy of a visit are not included in the guide.) A three-star Michelin ranking—like that enjoyed by Jean Georges—is exceedingly rare. Only twenty-six three-star restaurants exist in France, and only eighty-one in the world. (...)

Maxime is a New Yorker. She said that speaking to me about her work felt “surreal.” “We spend all our time not letting people know who we are,” she said, but admitted that she had told her husband what she does for a living. “He’s an attorney; he knows all about confidentiality.” For most others, she keeps her occupation vague. “We try not to lie,” she said. “You say you’re ‘in publishing,’ something like that.”

The waiter, a young man in a dark suit, handed us menus. I asked Maxime how she chooses what to order.

“You’re looking for something that really tests a number of quality ingredients and then something that’s a little complex, because you want to see what the kitchen can do,” she said. “We would never order something like a salad. We rarely order soup.” She decided to try the foie-gras brûlée, “although I usually avoid it, because of the calories.”

Maxime eats out more than two hundred days of the year, lunch and dinner. She eats the maximum number of courses offered—at Jean Georges, we were having three courses, plus dessert; that way, she said, “you really get to see the most food”—and she is required to eat everything on her plate. It is a regimen that calls to mind the force-feeding of the ducks that supply Vongerichten with his velvety foie gras, but Maxime, blessed with a quick metabolism, had managed to avoid obesity, an occupational hazard.

She was tending toward the Arctic char for her main course but couldn’t decide about her second course. The waiter reappeared and asked if he could answer any questions.

“Can you tell me about the crab toast?” she asked.

“It’s Peekytoe crab, a chiffonade of tarragon as well as chives topped with white sesame seeds, toasted in the oven, finished with a miso mustard, and a pear salad on the side,” he said.

“It’s new?” she said.

“About a week on the menu.”

She asked the waiter to give her a minute and then leaned in to me. Inspectors love it when they ask a question and can tell that a waiter has made up an answer, she explained, adding, “That never happens here.”

The original Guide Michelin was developed by André Michelin, an engineer, and his younger brother, Édouard. Born into a wealthy manufacturing family in Clermont-Ferrand, the brothers, in 1895, presented a new design for a pneumatic tire for cars. Automobiles were still a rarity on roads in France. The brothers had the idea that a guidebook to hotels in the French countryside would encourage people to climb into a car (equipped with Michelin tires) and hit the open road. The first edition, published in 1900, was a five-hundred-and-seventy-five-page alphabetical listing of towns throughout France and the distances between them, with recommendations for hotels and places to refuel, and instructions on how to change a flat. In a preface to the first edition, André wrote, “This work comes out with the century; it will last as long.” In 1933, the Michelin brothers introduced the first countrywide restaurant listings and unveiled the star system for ranking food, with one star denoting “a very good restaurant in its class”; two stars “excellent cooking, worth a detour”; and three stars “exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey.”

Over the years, other publications attempted to challenge Michelin but without success. To offset the expense of sending inspectors to restaurants across the country, rival guides were obliged to accept free meals, or to offer favors, like free advertising in the guides’ pages. Michelin’s inspectors faced no such quid pro quo. A century after André and Édouard created their first tire patent, Michelin has grown into one of the most successful multinational corporations in the world, a company more than three times the size of Goodyear. Michelin’s profits help to defray the costs of food inspectors’ salaries, travel budgets, and restaurant bills (which can run into real money at the upper end of the gastronomic scale: six years ago, at Bernard Loiseau’s La Côte d’Or, a three-star restaurant in Burgundy, the chicken stuffed with carrots, leeks, and truffles was two hundred and sixty-seven dollars). This independence, coupled with the jealously guarded anonymity of its inspectors, is what gives Michelin its aura of incorruptibility. The French chef Paul Bocuse, who helped create nouvelle cuisine in the nineteen-sixties, and whose restaurant near Lyons has held a three-star Michelin ranking for a record forty-five years, has said, “Michelin is the only guide that counts.” Indeed, in France publication of the guide each year sparks the kind of media excitement attendant on the Academy Awards. The days and weeks leading up to publication day are given over to endless debate, speculation, and rumor on TV and in newspapers over who might lose, and who might gain, a star. The results, revealed in early March, provide either a very public triumph or a very public humiliation for the chefs concerned, and a corresponding rise or drop in revenues for their restaurants.

Not everyone, however, is convinced that anonymous experts with bottomless expense accounts are the key to a dependable restaurant guide. “We’re coming at it from a completely different perspective,” says Nina Zagat, who dreamed up the idea of a customer-driven food survey with her husband, Tim, in their Upper West Side apartment thirty-one years ago. Today, Zagat covers more than ninety cities worldwide, is available as an iPhone app, and remains the top-selling restaurant guide in New York. “We’ve never believed that there were experts that should tell you what to do.”

“I’d love to know what their training is,” Tim Zagat added, speaking about Michelin’s inspectors. “Usually, the experts—for example, the major critics for the major papers—you know what their background is. But this business of making a virtue out of not knowing? I question it. How are you supposed to judge their expertise if you don’t have any idea who they are?”

by John Colapinto, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Floc’h

Jules Pascin, Siesta
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[ed. Fell it, section it, load it, haul it, cut it into plugs, split it, stack it, burn it. It'll warm you more than twice.]

Migrating From Tumblr to Wordpress

Okay, folks. So. Tumblr’s jumped the shark in a big way, and I’m not even just talking about indiscriminately blocking all “adult” content on a platform that IS, in fact, primarily 18+. (...)

I know lots of people are talking about migrating, but none of us are sure to where yet. Pillowfort seems to be an option, some people are talking about Twitter. But for now, it’s a mess, and even if we knew where we were going, it’s often a huge process, and a lot of us have stuff on tumblr that ONLY exists there.

One possible quick solution to save your blogs, both NSFW and personal, is to import it to WordPress. I found this solution through from frantic googling on how to save an entire blog, text posts an all. There are several apps for downloading all the pictures from a tumblr, (Plently for Windows, but only a few paid ones for mac, of which Tumbelog Picture Downloader is working for me so far) but this is the only solution I’ve seen so far that allows you to save EVERYTHING. I downloaded my NSFW blog in like 10 min. My regular blog, which is significantly larger, is in the process of importing, but I don’t anticipate any problems. I will, of course, update you if I have any.

This tutorial I found worked really easily. http://quickguide (.) tumblr (.) com/post/39780378703/backing-up-your-tumblr-blog-to-wordpress

I put parenthesis around the .’s like we’re back in FF-Hell, just in case tumblr’s new thing about outgoing links kicks in. You know what to do.

To break it down, just in case:

Sign up for a WordPress.com account at wordpress (.) com/start

You’ll have to create an account, with your email, a username, and a password. They should send you a confirmation email immediately, check it, activate it, and you’re good to go.

On the site, it will ask you for a site name. That page asks you a bunch of other information too, but you only have to fill out the site name.

Then you have to give your site a URL. If you’re lucky, your tumblr URL is still available, if not you’ll have to come up with another one, sorry.

It will tell you if that option is still available for free.

Then it will ask you to pick a plan. Free is really good enough, I swear.

Now you’re set up! You can import your tumblr!

The only differences from the linked tutorial are that the Import button is now on the first level menu, not in tools.

Hit Import, then you have to follow the link for “other importers” at the bottom, to find the option for Tumblr.

Then you’ll have to sign in with tumblr, using your normal tumblr credentials. You’ll be redirected there automatically.

You’ll have to allow Wordpress permissions on your blog.

Then your blogs, including all your sideblogs, will show up in wordpress.

Hit import, wait a WHILE depending on the size of your blog, and you’re done!

ALSO!!

I made my NSFW blog private for now, since I don’t know WP’s policy on NSFW.

This means that to access it, someone has to have an account and request access. But hey, part of our problem on this hellsite has been people going places they aren’t wanted, so I don’t personally see this as a bad thing. They can send a request from the landing site on your blog, you get an email, click a link in the email, and PRESTO, they have access.

To make it private, go to Settings > Reading > Site Visibility. Go back and check, it took me changing the setting twice for it to actually stick.

tl;dr, you can import your entire blog to wordpress in just a few steps. 

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[ed. Interesting to see a corporation destroys a cultural touchstone in realtime. I feel so bad for people (hundreds of thousands, millions?) who've invested years in creating and maintaining blogs on Tumblr who will now see all their work vanish on December 17 just because they've posted an occasional nude, or art work containing nudity (or god forbid, female nipples). That's why I'm so reticent about embracing cloud storage and having all your eggs in one basket (like Picasa). It's a good wake up call. I'll have to start exploring Wordpress too (as an alternative to Google's Blogger). We'll see how it goes.]

What Has Everyone Got Against Dave Matthews?

When the sun sets on the Columbia River, behind the boxy stage of the Gorge Amphitheatre, the scene’s as placid and vivid as a nineteenth century landscape painting. This is nature as those Romantic artists would’ve rendered it, brutal, sublime. The rock cliffs are lined like a layer cake in browns and tans, topped with the Central Washington sky in a watercolorist’s pink and blue. But now that the August sky has almost fully turned dark, the star of the show finally strolls mid-stage before 20,000 people fanned like congregants and goes directly into the first song.

The first sound the band makes is…a hiccup.

And nearly all 20,000 break into woos and screams of appreciation, because that “Hhuunc!” from lead singer Dave Matthews is the first lyric of “Pig,” an old standby from the 28-year-old band. It gets a lot more intelligible after the first nonsense noises; a jam about enjoying the here and now. A plea to “don’t burn the day away” in case “a great wave should wash us all away.” You know, carpe diem and all that.

The audience has interpreted that edict as an embrace of all things comfortable, clad in plaid flannels or hoodies or plaid flannels layered over hoodies. One trio wears matching lime-green shirts printed with the Tommy Boy callout “Holy Schnikes!” and nonmatching baggy cargo shorts. Some raise $25 big plastic goblets of strawberry frosé. The air smells like weed. Of course it smells like weed.

Of the thousands here, about half have stepped out of RVs and those big square tents you buy at Target parked on thousands of campsites spread on the festival grounds that fan out from the amphitheater.

Here, 150 miles east of Seattle, a 51-year-old man rocking the ultimate dad bod holds court, as he’s done for decades on summer stints that have become like annual tent revivals. What most of the crowd doesn’t consider is how deep Dave Matthews’s local ties run—that he lives in Seattle, enrolls his kids in Seattle schools. That Dave Matthews is Seattle’s biggest rock star.

No, really. It just depends a little on how you define “biggest.” And “rock,” and “star.” And, now that you mention it, “Seattle’s.”

Though the band formed in a Virginia college town back in 1991, Dave Matthews has been a Seattle resident since Bush II’s first term. His eponymous band has sold more than 33 million records, right behind Bob Dylan and Queen on lists of the best-selling recording artists of all time.

In 2014, Billboard marked them the seventh most successful touring band since 1990, noting their then-$777 million gross haul—it’s probably around a billion by now—outpaced Paul McCartney and Metallica. The Recording Industry Association of America ranks the Dave Matthews Band in their top 50, with gold and platinum stats similar to U2’s.

The only Seattle band—and we’ll get to DMB’s Emerald City bona fides in a second—that comes close to that longevity or success is one that formed a year earlier than Matthews’s crew: Pearl Jam. And while no one’s going to deny that Eddie Vedder and Co. are a quintessential Seattle outfit, before this year’s Home Shows at Safeco Field they hadn’t played the city in five years.

Both are wildly successful music acts, the top 1 percent of 1 percent of dudes who sing songs for a living. But if you believe the stats on the internet—big grain of salt here—Eddie Vedder has a net worth of $100 million, but Dave Matthews is sitting on three times that.

For two decades Matthews has parked his jam band circus at the Gorge and he’s funded progressive causes. His photos hang next to platinum records from Death Cab for Cutie, Sir Mix-a-Lot, and Nirvana at Robert Lang Studio in Shoreline—the Northwest’s most hallowed recording spot.

When KEXP fundraised for their new Seattle Center studio in the mid 2010s, three big bands showed up with cash: “Macklemore and Ryan Lewis came through, Pearl Jam came through,” says longtime DJ and program director John Richards. “And Dave Matthews.” This in spite of the fact that while KEXP’s airwaves might blast “Thrift Shop” or “Jeremy,” the station doesn’t even play DMB.

There’s a Dave Matthews shaped hole in the public idea of the Seattle sound, and neither Matthews nor the Emerald City seems interested in changing that. Why do two wildly successful entities—a music man and a music city—have so little to do with each other?

When I tell Seattle music critic Charles R. Cross that I’m writing about the Dave Matthews Band, he immediately quips, “Why? Did you lose a bet with your editor?”

Sometime in the past two decades, the group’s ubiquity seeped into the national consciousness so thoroughly that the band and the man melded into one familiar entity, “Dave.” And to most, “Dave” became unbearably irritating.

The punchlines were mockery wrapped up in derision of cargo shorts and ultimate Frisbee. Basic, before “basic” was an insult. For a whole generation of late-stage Gen Xers, the DMB posters that papered their dorm rooms have become as embarrassing as that ’90s men’s haircut with floppy side bangs. Try it. Mention Dave Matthews Band anywhere in Seattle and look for the knowing cringe.

DMB made it so easy. There was the Day Dave Matthews Band Pooped on Chicago: On August 8, 2004, one of the band’s busses—that Dave wasn’t on at the time—emptied its sewage tank through the grated roadway of the Windy City’s Kinzie Street Bridge. Right on an open-air boat of sightseers on an architecture tour. The bus driver was hit with fines, but the metaphor of Poopgate was, well, easy pickings. (...)

He married and moved to Seattle where his wife studied holistic medicine, buying a house on an unremarkable block of Wallingford in 2001. Today the tiny blue Craftsman, even with its finished basement and artfully overgrown front garden, would barely qualify as a Seattle starter home. Dave still owns the property, valued at less than a million dollars in a city where that barely buys a dog house. Seattleites do double takes when Dave pops up at QFC or an Eastlake punk show, but he seems to crave the anonymity he found here. He declined to be interviewed for this story, but in 2012 he told critic Gene Stout, “For the most part, I feel comfortably middle class in Seattle.”

by Alison Williams, Seattle Met |  Read more:

Image: Taylor Hill/Getty via Longreads

Scientists Develop 10-Minute Universal Cancer Test

Scientists have developed a universal cancer test that can detect traces of the disease in a patient’s bloodstream.

The cheap and simple test uses a colour-changing fluid to reveal the presence of malignant cells anywhere in the body and provides results in less than 10 minutes.

While the test is still in development, it draws on a radical new approach to cancer detection that could make routine screening for the disease a simple procedure for doctors.

“A major advantage of this technique is that it is very cheap and extremely simple to do, so it could be adopted in the clinic quite easily,” said Laura Carrascosa, a researcher at the University of Queensland.

The test has a sensitivity of about 90%, meaning it would detect about 90 in 100 cases of cancer. It would serve as an initial check for cancer, with doctors following up positive results with more focused investigations.

“Our technique could be a screening tool to inform clinicians that a patient may have a cancer, but they would require subsequent tests with other techniques to identify the cancer type and stage,” Carrascosa said.

The test was made possible by the Queensland team’s discovery that cancer DNA and normal DNA stick to metal surfaces in markedly different ways. This allowed them to develop a test that distinguishes between healthy cells and cancerous ones, even from the tiny traces of DNA that find their way into the bloodstream.

Healthy cells ensure they function properly by patterning their DNA with molecules called methyl groups. These work like volume controls, silencing genes that are not needed and turning up others that are. In cancer cells, this patterning is hijacked so that only genes that help the cancer grow are switched on. While the DNA inside normal cells has methyl groups dotted all over it, the DNA inside cancer cells is largely bare, with methyl groups found only in small clusters at specific locations.

Writing in the journal Nature Communications, the Queensland team described a series of tests that confirmed the telltale pattern of methyl groups in breast, prostate and colorectal cancer as well as lymphoma. They then showed that the patterns had a dramatic impact on the DNA’s chemistry, making normal and cancer DNA behave very differently in water. “This is a huge discovery that no one has grasped before,” said Carrascosa.

After a series of experiments, the scientists hit on the new test for cancer. The suspect DNA is added to water containing tiny gold nanoparticles. Though made of gold, the particles turn the water pink. If DNA from cancer cells is then added, it sticks to the nanoparticles in such a way that the water retains its original colour. But if DNA from healthy cells is added, the DNA binds to the particles differently, and turns the water blue. “The test is sensitive enough to detect very low levels of cancer DNA in the sample,” Carrascosa said.

by Ian Sample, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Steve Gschmeissner/Getty/Science Photo Library RM

Under China's New Rules, U.S. Recycling Suffers

Under China's New Rules, U.S. Recycling Suffers

Image: Shutterstock

Tumblr Tumbles

Since its founding in 2007, Tumblr has always been a place for wide open, creative self-expression at the heart of community and culture. To borrow from our founder David Karp, we’re proud to have inspired a generation of artists, writers, creators, curators, and crusaders to redefine our culture and to help empower individuality.

Over the past several months, and inspired by our storied past, we’ve given serious thought to who we want to be to our community moving forward and have been hard at work laying the foundation for a better Tumblr. We’ve realized that in order to continue to fulfill our promise and place in culture, especially as it evolves, we must change. Some of that change began with fostering more constructive dialogue among our community members. Today, we’re taking another step by no longer allowing adult content, including explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions).

Let’s first be unequivocal about something that should not be confused with today’s policy change: posting anything that is harmful to minors, including child pornography, is abhorrent and has no place in our community. We’ve always had and always will have a zero tolerance policy for this type of content. To this end, we continuously invest in the enforcement of this policy, including industry-standard machine monitoring, a growing team of human moderators, and user tools that make it easy to report abuse. We also closely partner with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation, two invaluable organizations at the forefront of protecting our children from abuse, and through these partnerships we report violations of this policy to law enforcement authorities. We can never prevent all bad actors from attempting to abuse our platform, but we make it our highest priority to keep the community as safe as possible.

So what is changing?

Posts that contain adult content will no longer be allowed on Tumblr, and we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect this policy change. We recognize Tumblr is also a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your personal journey. We want to make sure that we continue to foster this type of diversity of expression in the community, so our new policy strives to strike a balance.

Why are we doing this?

It is our continued, humble aspiration that Tumblr be a safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community. As Tumblr continues to grow and evolve, and our understanding of our impact on our world becomes clearer, we have a responsibility to consider that impact across different age groups, demographics, cultures, and mindsets. We spent considerable time weighing the pros and cons of expression in the community that includes adult content. In doing so, it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.

Bottom line: There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content. We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.

So what’s next?

Starting December 17, 2018, we will begin enforcing this new policy. Community members with content that is no longer permitted on Tumblr will get a heads up from us in advance and steps they can take to appeal or preserve their content outside the community if they so choose. All changes won’t happen overnight as something of this complexity takes time.

Another thing, filtering this type of content versus say, a political protest with nudity or the statue of David, is not simple at scale. We’re relying on automated tools to identify adult content and humans to help train and keep our systems in check. We know there will be mistakes, but we’ve done our best to create and enforce a policy that acknowledges the breadth of expression we see in the community.

Most importantly, we’re going to be as transparent as possible with you about the decisions we’re making and resources available to you, including more detailed information, product enhancements, and more content moderators to interface directly with the community and content.

Like you, we love Tumblr and what it’s come to mean for millions of people around the world. Our actions are out of love and hope for our community. We won’t always get this right, especially in the beginning, but we are determined to make your experience a positive one.

Jeff D’Onofrio
CEO

[ed. Tumblr is/was one of the best sites on the Internet for blogging and self-expression (including sexual expression) - the closest thing to "the old Internet" that we now/used to have. But you could see the writing on the wall when Yahoo and then Verizon acquired it. See also: The Death of Tumblr and Why Tumblr’s adult content ban is about so much more than porn. Expect to see a lot more commentary in the next few days.]

Sake vs. Mirin

Japanese Pantry Essentials: Sake vs. Mirin

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All night noodles in Sendai
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Tesla, Software and Disruption

“We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in.” - Ed Colligan, CEO of Palm, 2006, on rumours of an Apple phone

“They laughed at Columbus and they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” - Carl Sagan

When Nokia people looked at the first iPhone, they saw a not-great phone with some cool features that they were going to build too, being produced at a small fraction of the volumes they were selling. They shrugged. “No 3G, and just look at the camera!”

When many car company people look at a Tesla, they see a not-great car with some cool features that they’re going to build too, being produced at a small fraction of the volumes they’re selling. “Look at the fit and finish, and the panel gaps, and the tent!”

The Nokia people were terribly, terribly wrong. Are the car people wrong? We hear that a Tesla is ‘the new iPhone’ - what would that mean?

This is partly a question about Tesla, but it’s more interesting as a way to think about what happens when ‘software eats the world’ in general, and when tech moves into new industries. How do we think about whether something is disruptive? If it is, who exactly gets disrupted? And does that disruption mean that one company wins in the new world? Which one?

The idea of ‘disruption’ is that a new concept changes the basis of competition in an industry. At the beginning, either the new thing itself or the companies bringing it (or both) tend to be bad at the things the incumbents value, and get laughed at, but they learn those things. Conversely, the incumbents either dismiss the new thing as pointless or presume they’ll easily be able to add it (or both), but they’re wrong. Apple brought software and learnt phones, whereas Nokia had great phones but could not learn software.

However, not every new technology or idea is disruptive. Some things do not change the basis of competition enough, and for some things the incumbents are able to learn and absorb the new concept instead (these are not quite the same thing). Clay Christensen calls this ‘sustaining innovation’ as opposed to ‘disruptive’ innovation.

By extension, any new technology is probably disruptive to someone, at some part of the value chain. The iPhone disrupted the handset business, but has not disrupted the cellular network operators at all, though many people were convinced that it would. For all that’s changed, the same companies still have the same business model and the same customers that they did in 2006. Online flight booking doesn’t disrupt airlines much, but it was hugely disruptive to travel agents. Online booking (for the sake of argument) was sustaining innovation for airlines and disruptive innovation for travel agents.

Meanwhile, the people who are first to bring the disruption to market may not be the people who end up benefiting from it, and indeed the people who win from the disruption may actually be doing something different - they may be in a different part of the value chain. Apple pioneered PCs but lost the PC market, and the big winners were not even other PC companies. Rather, most of the profits went to Microsoft and Intel, which both operated at different layers of the stack. PCs themselves became a low-margin commodity with fierce competition, but PC CPUs and operating systems (and productivity software) turned out to have very strong winner-takes-all effects. Being first is not the same as having a sustainable competitive advantage, no matter how disruptive you are, and the advantage might be somewhere else.

This gives us four things to think about when looking at Tesla: 

• First, it does have to learn the ‘old’ things - it has to learn how to make cars at scale with the efficiency and quality that the existing car industry takes for granted, preferably not in a tent, and preferably without running out of cash on the way. But, solving ‘production hell’ is just a condition of entry - it’s not victory. If it can only do this, it’s just another car company, and that’s not what has anyone excited. It’s what the cars are that matters. 
• Second, Tesla also has to be doing things that the incumbent car OEMs will struggle to learn. This is not quite the same as doing things that the OEMs’ suppliers will struggle to learn. 
• Third, those disruptive things need to be fundamentally important - they need to be enough to change the basis of competition, and to change what it is to be a car and a car company, so that it matters if they can’t be copied.
• Fourth, in addition to all of these there needs to be some fundamental competitive advance, not just over the existing car industry but also over other new entrants. Apple did things Nokia could not do, but it also does things that Google cannot do. 

Now, let’s talk about what’s happening in cars. 

by Benedict Evans |  Read more:

Even When I Lie

So what does that make you? Good guys? Don’t kid yourselves. You’re no better’n me. You just know how to hide…and how to lie. Me? I don’t have that problem. I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.

Tony Montana’s speech to restaurant patrons from Scarface (1983)

Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (1951)

Justice and honesty will be the first topics of our speech, especially as we are asking for alliance; because we know that there can never be any solid friendship between individuals, or union between communities that is worth the name, unless the parties be persuaded of each other’s honesty.

History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 3, by Thucydides

When I was young, a Sunday School teacher presented our class with a hypothetical.

Imagine for a moment, he said, that a criminal came into the church today and seized your parents. He took them up to the front of the church and pointed a gun at both of their heads. Unless you denied your faith, he would kill them both. What should you do?

A heavy question for a 12-year old, it always disturbed me. ‘Always’, I say, because it was asked of me more than once. It came up shockingly often, although I suspect given differing sensibilities that you might consider once shocking enough. Perhaps it was the favorite brainteaser of a teacher bored of 30 years of giving the same pictorial lessons of Zacchaeus climbing the tree. I think it was a reflection of some evangelical churches’ occasionally morbid obsession with the end times described in Revelations. There was a time when ‘What will you do when you are persecuted for your faith’ occupied much of my mind. ‘What if Jesus returns before a girl ever kisses you?’ occupied most of the rest. There was really no doubt in any of our minds that it was going to happen during our lifetimes. Probably much sooner.

The intended moral of the story was that there is no valid justification for sin. To lie by denying Christ was the greatest of these sins. You will be disappointed to learn that the typical lesson does not discuss the two last people who were asked if they knew Him; the one who lied became Pope, and the one who told the truth hanged himself and, if Luke’s vivid account is to be believed, exploded. Instead, the usual lesson proceeds from Job to a reading from the Sermon on the Mount. You know this sermon, even if you don’t know that you know it. Blessed are the meek, etc. You may not know that this is where it ends up:

If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell.

Matthew 5:30

More heavy stuff. In a spectacle to be repeated in a thousand thousand Dodge Caravans and Chevy Suburbans on the way to Old Country Buffet after church, the children turn their Sunday School lesson around on their parents. What would you do, mom and dad, if I were brought to the front of the church? I bet that if you could look in on those parents in those minivans, you’d see just about all of them look their children straight in the eyes and tell them the same thing: I would lie a million times before I let someone hurt you.

For the most part, our moral systems end up with a similar basic set of rules. Don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t cheat, don’t lie. The problems arise in weighing conflicts between rules within our value system, or between multiple value systems. Common sense allows us to easily resolve some of these conflicts. Don’t lie, but if the alternative would result in the murder of your children, lie until your lips turn numb. More often, the units we must weigh are irreducible and incompatible. How many lies offset an act of generosity? The answers to these questions are non-falsifiable, even if various ethical systems purport to have adopted more objective means to answer them. That means that we will disagree. It also means that, as much as we might like to say ‘the ends don’t justify the means’, we are often left with no choice but to judge the rightness of actions by calculating their expected consequences, and by weighing unweighable goods and bads.

This ground was well-trod among ethicists hundreds of years ago. You need a 4,000-word, dime store survey version of it from me today like you need a hole in the head. But if we would be students of the widening gyre of politics and the black hole of financial markets, there is one ethical topic we must grapple with directly and urgently. It is the thing which Thucydides considered a prerequisite for union within a community. It is what Hannah Arendt considered the first casualty of a state veering toward totalitarianism.

Honesty.

Like any other ethical idea, honesty may inevitably come into conflict with other principles. It is these conflicts and how they are resolved or justified, whether rightly or wrongly, that empower the widening gyre. In simpler terms: our differing reasons for becoming liars are what are causing us to fall apart. Understanding those reasons will play a large role in how we chart a path back to sanity. The way I see it, there are three reasons a person becomes a liar: he believes that he must, he believes that he may, or he believes it serves a Greater Truth.

by Rusty Guinn, Epsilon Theory |  Read more:

Image: Scarface 

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[ed. See also: Ice fishing.]