Opportunist to the Core

Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign has barely made its official start, and she’s continuing to show her unfitness for the job. Martin Luther King would be rolling in his grave if he were to learn that a former big city and then state prosecutor, with no known history of protesting but an anti-minorities rap sheet that includes criminalizing truancy, enthusiastically prosecuting drug-related activity, and pushed to keep nonviolent “second-strike” convicts in prison to assure California a continued supply of cheap labor, was misusing his name to try to burnish her sorry record.

If you missed them, these reviews of Harris’ record as a prosecutor should disabuse you of the notion that she’s a friend of the downtrodden:

Kamala Harris Was Not a ‘Progressive Prosecutor’ Lara Bazelon, New York Times 

A Problem for Kamala Harris: Can a Prosecutor Become President in the Age of Black Lives Matter? Intercept 

Reckoning With The Neoliberal Record Of Kamala Harris ShadowProof 

The Two Faces of Kamala Harris Jacobin

Readers may recall that last week, we addressed one Harris Big Lie about her record, that she was a big defender of abused homeowners by virtue of having gotten a less terrible deal than 48 other states in the 2012 National Mortgage Settlement, which we’ve regularly described as a “get out of liability almost free card” for the big mortgage servicers. Her lack of a commitment to homeowners, and her pliancy to big money interests, was confirmed by her failure to investigate One West Bank, ignoring a 2013 memo from attorneys in her office flagging the appearance of “widespread misconduct.” Her complacency was rewarded via One West’s former CEO, Steve Mnuchin, making Harris the recipient of his lone donation to a Democratic party Senate candidate.

Needless to say, if Harris had prosecuted Mnuchin, it’s hard to imagine he’d be Treasury Secretary now.

Harris’ book, The Truths We Hold, published earlier this month to help grease campaign skids, shows Harris applying lots of porcine maquillage to her record. It doesn’t work very well. As Teodrose Fikre writes in Black Agenda Report on one of the more measured reviews, by Hannah Giorgis in the Atlantic:

Kamala Harris’s memoir reads nothing like her actual record of locking up the poor and giving impunity to the rich… 

Checking off identity boxes and getting jiggy with it is not enough, we must demand more from politicians than soundbites and feigned indignation. Instead of addressing income inequalities and systematic imbalances that are the sources of most social ills, Harris tries to hide behind anecdotes and outlier stories in an attempt to minimize the disproportionate impact her decisions had on the poor and working class. After making a name for herself by aggressively locking up Californians and enhancing the inmate supply for the prison-industrial complex, she is now attempting an image makeover by using social justice and diversity hustles as launching pads…. 

Harris’s take every prisoner temperament was nowhere to be found when the time came for her to take on robber barons. She famously chose to look the other way when she had the chance to prosecute Steve Mnuchin and make an example of unscrupulous bankers. Her “progressive prosecution” reserved progress for the rich and doled out draconian measures for the poor and marginalized. It is worth repeating, Harris’s administration effectively argued for slave labor in order to enrich penal plantations. 

Kamala Harris is no activist, she is Hillary Clinton in a black face.This is precisely the reason why the corporate donor class are licking their chops and pushing Harris as a viable presidential candidate. She has proven her loyalty to Wall Street; when push comes to shove, CEOs know that they have an ally in Kamala. What Harris is banking on is an electorate that is so deranged by Trump’s puerility that we don’t inspect her positions and just accept her optics and rhetoric as a suitable alternative to the incumbent president. (...)

So Harris presents absolutely nothing in the way of policy stances. Apparently the reasons to want her as President is that she’s photogenic by the not-too-high standards of politics and she gets bonus points for not being a white man. (...)

It’s stating the obvious that Harris is yet another variant on the Obama formula: take an attractive, well-educated, mixed-race centrist and encourage the press and public to project that their “minority” background means that they’ll be staunch defenders of the downtrodden.

by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

[ed. Porcine maquillage! ha ha.. don't know much about her, but from what I've read she does remind me very much of Eric Holder, which is not good. See also: Kamala Harris presidential campaign attracts more donors in day one than Bernie Sanders’ first 24 hours in 2016 (The Independent) and Kamala Harris Assembles Campaign Staff Of Unpaid California Prison Laborers (The Onion). (If you've got the Onion on your case, you know you're pretty screwed).]

Renato Guttuso, Tre Operai e Una Prostituta, (1979)

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Francs and Beans

Russell Baker, Pulitzer-Winning Times Columnist and Humorist, Dies at 93 (NY Times)

As chance would have it, the very evening Craig Claiborne ate his historic $4,000 dinner for two with 31 dishes and nine wines in Paris, Lucullan repast for one was prepared and consumed in New York by this correspondent, no slouch himself when it comes to titillating the palate.

Mr. Claiborne won his meal in a television fund‐raising auction and had it professionally prepared. Mine was created from spur‐of‐the‐moment inspiration, necessitated when I discovered a note on the stove saying, “Am eating out with Dora and Imogene—make dinner for yourself.” It was from the person who regularly does the cooking at my house and, though disconcerted at first, I quickly rose to the challenge.

The meal opened with a 1975 Diet Pepsi served in a disposable bottle. Although its bouquet was negligible, its distinct metallic aftertaste evoked memories of tin cans one had licked experimentally in the first flush of childhood's curiosity.

To create the balance of tastes so cherished by the epicurean palate, I followed with a paté de fruites de nuts of Georgia, prepared according to my own recipe. A half‐inch layer of creamy‐style peanut butter is troweled onto a graham cracker, then half a banana is crudely diced and pressed firmly into the peanut butter and cemented in place as it were by a second graham cracker.

The accompanying drink was cold milk served in a wide‐brimmed jelly glass. This is essential to proper consumption of the pate, since the entire confection must be dipped into the milk to soften it for eating. In making the presentation to the mouth, one must beware lest the milk‐soaked portion of the sandwich fall onto the necktie. Thus, seasoned gourmandisers follow the old maxim of the Breton chefs and “bring the mouth to the jelly glass.”

At this point in the meal, the stomach was ready for serious eating, and I prepared beans with bacon grease, a dish I perfected in 1937 while developing my cuisine du dépression.

The dish is started by placing a pan over a very high flame until it becomes dangerously hot. A can of Heinz's pork and beans is then emptied into the pan and allowed to char until it reaches the consistency of hardening concrete. Three strips of bacon are fried to crisps, and when the beans have formed huge dense clots firmly welded to the pan, the bacon grease is poured in and stirred vigorously with a large screw driver.

This not only adds flavor but also loosens some of the beans from the side of the pan. Leaving the flame high, I stirred in a three‐day‐old spaghetti sauce found in the refrigerator, added a sprinkle of chili powder, a large dollop of Major Grey's chutney and a tablespoon of bicarbonate of soda to make the whole dish rise.

Beans with bacon grease is always eaten from the pan with a tablespoon while standing over the kitchen sink. The pan must be thrown away immediately. The correct drink with this dish is a straight shot of room‐temperature gin. I had a Gilbey's, 1975, which was superb.

For the meat course, I had fried bologna à la Nutley, Nouveau Jersey. Six slices of A&P bologna were placed in an ungreased frying pan over maximum heat and held down by a long fork until the entire house filled with smoke. The bologna was turned, fried the same length of time on the other side, then served on air‐filled white bread with thick lashings of mayonnaise.

The correct drink for fried bologna à la Nutley, Nouveau Jersey is a 1927 Nehi Cola, but since my cellar., ??, had none, I had to make do with a second shot of Gilbey's 1975.

The cheese course was deliciously simple‐‐a single slice of Kraft's individually wrapped yellow sandwich cheese, which was flavored by vigorous rubbing over the bottom of the frying pan to soak up the rich bologna juices. Wine being absolutely de rigueur with cheese, I chose a 1974 Muscatel, flavored with a maraschino cherry, and afterwards cleared my palate with three pickled martini onions.

It was time for the fruit. I chose Del Monte tinned pear, which, regrettably, slipped from the spoon and fell on the floor, necessitating its being blotted with a paper towel to remove cat hairs. To compensate for the resulting loss of pear syrup, dipped it lightly in hot‐dog relish which created a unique flavor.

With the pear I drank two shots of Gilbey's 1975 and one shot of Wolfschmidt vodka (non‐vintage), the Gilbey's having been exhausted.

by Russell Baker, NY Times |  Read more:
Image: Israel Shenker

[ed. Gave my mom Growing Up  when it came out and it was one of her all time favorite books. See also: Russell Baker: ‘When Writing Is Fun, It’s Not Very Good’]

Watching Brexit Fall Apart

If French voters, unsettled by the revolt of the Yellow Vests, are tempted to use referendums to enhance the democratic process, they should look at the sad spectacle across the Channel: the British people trying to pick up the shards of their future after their House of Commons rejected the Brexit deal that Prime Minister Theresa May had spent 18 months negotiating with the European Union — on the basis of a referendum.

It is hard to think of a more powerful deterrent. For three years, Continental Europe has watched with bewilderment, despair and exasperation as the world’s oldest democracy embarked on a path that no country has tried before: leaving the European Union.

We watched a young, ambitious British prime minister, David Cameron, gamble that the June 23, 2016, referendum would strengthen Britain’s position within the union because the vote would be to remain. We watched him fail, resign and disappear. After a referendum campaign marred by fake news, lies, false promises and attacks against immigrants, we watched Westminster’s lively political culture plunge into chaos.

We watched a former empire, winner of two world wars, aspire to become Singapore upon Thames. We watched Brexit ministers under Mrs. May, confused by incoherent policies and a nightmarish negotiation, throw in one towel after another. And we are now observing, dumbfounded, the growing possibility of a second referendum, promoted by smart but desperate people, convinced that it will undo the first one, which approved Brexit by 51.9 percent.

From the Continent rises a clamor of “Oh, no, not another one!”

Ironically, the Brexit referendum was won on the promise to “take back control.” Sometimes we wondered whether the British had lost not only control but also their minds. We came to dread conversations with our dearest friends from England, now so obsessed with Brexit that they would forget to mention the weather. As journalists, we felt sympathy for heartbroken British diplomats putting a brave face on a decision that they had to carry out, when deep down they knew they were heading to disaster.

But most of all, this process has taught us about the strength of the European Union in a way that we never suspected.

There was Mrs. May’s surrealistic, elegant love letter to the union, “our closest friend,” to ask for divorce, on March 28, 2017. You don’t so easily put an end to 44 years of shared life. Activating Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty to start the process of separation, the prime minister insisted that Europe should “remain strong and prosperous, capable of projecting its values, leading in the world.”

“Perhaps now more than ever,” she wrote, “the world needs the liberal, democratic values of Europe.” So, one wondered, why on earth leave it? Indeed, Mrs. May herself was initially a “Remainer” but would end up exhausting her meager political capital fighting to deliver the opposite: Such was her fate, and such was the absurdity of Brexit.

by Sylvie Kauffmann, NY Times |  Read more:
Image: Thomas Paterson

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Time to Break the Silence on Palestine

On April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stepped up to the lectern at the Riverside Church in Manhattan. The United States had been in active combat in Vietnam for two years and tens of thousands of people had been killed, including some 10,000 American troops. The political establishment — from left to right — backed the war, and more than 400,000 American service members were in Vietnam, their lives on the line.

Many of King’s strongest allies urged him to remain silent about the war or at least to soft-pedal any criticism. They knew that if he told the whole truth about the unjust and disastrous war he would be falsely labeled a Communist, suffer retaliation and severe backlash, alienate supporters and threaten the fragile progress of the civil rights movement.

King rejected all the well-meaning advice and said, “I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice.” Quoting a statement by the Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, he said, “A time comes when silence is betrayal” and added, “that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.”

It was a lonely, moral stance. And it cost him. But it set an example of what is required of us if we are to honor our deepest values in times of crisis, even when silence would better serve our personal interests or the communities and causes we hold most dear. It’s what I think about when I go over the excuses and rationalizations that have kept me largely silent on one of the great moral challenges of our time: the crisis in Israel-Palestine.

I have not been alone. Until very recently, the entire Congress has remained mostly silent on the human rights nightmare that has unfolded in the occupied territories. Our elected representatives, who operate in a political environment where Israel's political lobby holds well-documented power, have consistently minimized and deflected criticism of the State of Israel, even as it has grown more emboldened in its occupation of Palestinian territory and adopted some practices reminiscent of apartheid in South Africa and Jim Crow segregation in the United States.

Many civil rights activists and organizations have remained silent as well, not because they lack concern or sympathy for the Palestinian people, but because they fear loss of funding from foundations, and false charges of anti-Semitism. They worry, as I once did, that their important social justice work will be compromised or discredited by smear campaigns.

Similarly, many students are fearful of expressing support for Palestinian rights because of the McCarthyite tactics of secret organizations like Canary Mission, which blacklists those who publicly dare to support boycotts against Israel, jeopardizing their employment prospects and future careers.

Reading King’s speech at Riverside more than 50 years later, I am left with little doubt that his teachings and message require us to speak out passionately against the human rights crisis in Israel-Palestine, despite the risks and despite the complexity of the issues. King argued, when speaking of Vietnam, that even “when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict,” we must not be mesmerized by uncertainty. “We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.”

And so, if we are to honor King’s message and not merely the man, we must condemn Israel’s actions: unrelenting violations of international law, continued occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, home demolitions and land confiscations. We must cry out at the treatment of Palestinians at checkpoints, the routine searches of their homes and restrictions on their movements, and the severely limited access to decent housing, schools, food, hospitals and water that many of them face.

We must not tolerate Israel’s refusal even to discuss the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, as prescribed by United Nations resolutions, and we ought to question the U.S. government funds that have supported multiple hostilities and thousands of civilian casualties in Gaza, as well as the $38 billion the U.S. government has pledged in military support to Israel.

And finally, we must, with as much courage and conviction as we can muster, speak out against the system of legal discrimination that exists inside Israel, a system complete with, according to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, more than 50 laws that discriminate against Palestinians — such as the new nation-state law that says explicitly that only Jewish Israelis have the right of self-determination in Israel, ignoring the rights of the Arab minority that makes up 21 percent of the population.

by Michelle Alexander, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Hosam Salem

Worst Job In Showbiz

The loss of the Oscars’ latest host is, on the one hand, just another mishap to add to the list. From 2016’s #OscarsSoWhite to 2017’s wrong delivery of the best picture award, the ceremony now seems like a particularly slow bloopers reel. Yet the loss of Kevin Hart – who quit after old homophobic tweets resurfaced – is also a sign of something else. The fact that no one has replaced him, and that it’s difficult to think of many people who could, or would, reveals a much deeper malaise: a scary loss of nerve across showbiz’s top-tier events.

Within weeks, the Super Bowl half-time show will air. In the past, the American football final has been an epic showcase for the likes of Madonna, Prince and Beyoncé, a 20-minute, legacy-defining megamix. This year, though, with Rihanna and Cardi B having turned it down in solidarity with the activist NFL player Colin Kaepernick, we will be left with the hardly epochal sounds of Maroon 5.

A certain blandness seems to threaten all proceedings. Earlier this month the Golden Globes made do with the anodyne pairing of Andy Samberg and Sandra Oh as hosts, while the White House correspondents’ dinner – historically a raucous roast for America’s political class – has now asked a historian to host April’s televised event after the comedian Michelle Wolf was deemed to have taken last year’s proceedings too far. (...)

“It feels like a failure, and an ominous sign of our inability to sustain any kind of shared stage,” says Spencer Kornhaber, a pop culture journalist for the Atlantic. “No one is able to step up to the plate and just tell some jokes and get out of the way.”

This confusion is one place where the Oscars can claim a type of relevance, although not the type it wants. As its TV audience has dwindled, the Academy has tried to shake things up by hiring a variety of “edgy” hosts. Jon Stewart, Chris Rock, Seth Macfarlane, the bizarre pairing of James Franco and Anne Hathaway: you can’t say they haven’t tried. But the reception has been lukewarm. (...)

The loose expectation of an awards host is to act as a court jester among showbusiness royalty, poking fun at their foibles. The problem is that these events thrive on a sense of their own prestige, so it doesn’t do to jest too much. And this is the age of “wokeness”, where people – particularly that crucial younger audience – are more conscious of gags revolving around gender, sexuality and race.

“I think it’s a generational thing,” says Abramovitch, who is 46. “With my generation, it was still OK to poke some things, and the millennial generation are a lot more sensitive. It’s hard for them to understand context or satire.” Not that he thinks it is all political correctness gone mad. “This reckoning that’s happening, it’s all good.”

When causing offence is almost inevitable, it takes a strong stomach to want to give it a go. I spoke, on condition of anonymity, to an events organiser who helps put together an important awards ceremony in London. “I’ve found it trickier to find a host this year,” they said. “You want a big name – but they don’t need to do it.” The reasons for hosting an event have changed, the organiser suggests: comedians have other platforms to showcase their talents. Often they don’t need the money. And yes, there is the danger of saying the wrong thing. “You have to be so careful, don’t you? Because the backlash can be extreme.”

by Louis Wise, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image:Lucas Jackson/Reuters

Tons of Golf Balls Polluting the Ocean

A teen scientist helped me discover tons of golf balls polluting the ocean (Phys.org)

Images: Alex Weber

While My Guitar Gently Smirks

I love guitars, and I’ve had a few sitting in my office for years, but it took hip surgery for me to begin playing one of them.

Actually, one of them wasn’t a real guitar, but a wall clock in the shape of one, with an illustration of Elvis, in ’68-comeback black leather, on the body. Another was a junior guitar that I got on eBay, certified to be the one used by the actor playing a ten-year old Elvis in a TV movie about him.

The only playable one was a shiny black Epiphone—an Elvis model. You’re getting the picture: I fell in love with the guitar around the time I—and millions of other kids in the 1950s— became a Presley fanatic.

As a music journalist, at Rolling Stone and elsewhere, I interviewed Jerry Garcia, George Harrison, Bonnie Raitt, B.B. King, Carlos Santana, Jorma Kaukonen, Robert Cray, Stephen Stills, James Taylor, Ann Wilson, John Cipollina, Robby Krieger, Tom Petty, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, and Elvis’ first guy, Scotty Moore. And his second guy, James Burton.

I never met them, but I remember watching the Monterey Pop film and marveling at Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendrix; the windmill and the fire. I also dug Garcia, Kaukonen, and Michael Bloomfield. And I knew that I’d never learn to play guitar myself. As a kid in the ’50s and ’60s, I was trapped in my parents’ Chinese restaurants, juggling chores and homework, from grade school into college. “Do you play music?” someone would ask. “Yeah, I can play the radio.”

In recent decades, I thought about taking lessons, but never did. Visiting musician friends would pick up the Epiphone, get it in tune, and play it. Nice guitar, they’d say. Other than that, nothing, except one time when a couple of friends had a jam session at my house. One brought his guitar, another lugged in a portable keyboard; I would sing. But, wanting to do more, I fetched my guitar and sat in, trying to strum as lightly as I could, knowing that whatever sounds I made would be wrong ones. I was the not-so-great pretender.

And there was the time I appeared on a syndicated TV show called Your Big Break, featuring amateur singers impersonating music stars. After a tryout at a local club, I was called in to do . . . Bob Dylan. They assigned me “Like a Rolling Stone” and, on the set, gave me an electric guitar. This time, making sounds would be no problem; they’d be drowned out by the backing track and the noise of the rabid studio audience. My concern was the fingering of chords. I had no idea, so my fingers moved randomly up and down the frets, except when I had to concentrate to recall lyrics. Then they just stopped. Neither Dylan nor I won.

Flash forward to a few years ago, and to my hip surgery. I decided that, while recovering, I wouldn’t just watch TV and read, but would finally do something with that Epiphone. I told my plan to Todd Swenson, lead guitarist with a jam band I sing with, Los Train Wreck. Swenson teaches guitar when he’s not playing with the Train Wreck, the Soul Delights, or his own band, This Side Up. He’s taught students of all ages for 30 years. Any time, he said.

As it turned out, my recovery took far less time than expected, and I’d barely dug out my VHS tapes of guitar lessons when I was up and hobbling. But that shiny Epiphone seemed to look at me now and again, from its perch in the corner, saying, in an Elvis snarl, “You had your chance, man.”

I thought back to a saying I’d heard from Bob Neuwirth: If you don’t take a chance, you ain’t got a chance.

So I picked up the Elvis. Actually, the Epiphone felt too big, so I got a parlor guitar. Unwilling to spend a lot on what might well be a folly, I chose a Gretsch Jim Dandy and, in case I ever graduated from acoustic to amplified, an Accent, both purchased from Amazon, the first name in musical instrument stores.

by Ben Fong-Torres, Acoustic Guitar |  Read more:

Image: KAT

Queen & David Bowie

This Is Why Ghosting Hurts So Much

The opposite of love isn’t hate; it is indifference. Ghosting, for those of you who haven’t yet experienced it, is having someone that you believe cares about you, whether it be a friend or someone you are dating, disappear from contact without any explanation at all. No phone call or email, not even a text. Ghosting isn’t new—people have long done disappearing acts—but years ago this kind of behavior was considered limited to a certain type of scoundrel. In today’s dating culture being ghosted is a phenomenon that approximately 50 percent of men and women have experienced—and an almost equal number have done the ghosting. Despite ghosting's commonality, the emotional effects can be devastating, and particularly damaging to those who already have fragile self-esteem.

Why do people ghost?

People who ghost are primarily focused on avoiding their own emotional discomfort and they aren’t thinking about how it makes the other person feel. The lack of social connections to people who are met online also means there are less social consequences to dropping out of someone’s life. The more it happens, either to themselves or their friends, the more people become desensitized to it and the more likely they are to do it to someone else.

“I didn't understand exactly how I actually felt at the time, so instead of trying to talk it out, I ghosted.”  

“I used to disappear when it was all I thought it was [a fling], or I got scared of finding what I wanted…Or some kind of fear factor from a past relationship kicks in.”  

“Looking through the lens of a coward, passive withdrawal from dating seems like the easiest and nicest route…until it’s done to you.”  

“I kind of think that it's part of what makes the online dating scene so appealing. Since you don't have friends in common or weren't introduced through some other channel, it's not the end of the world if you just drop off the face of the earth.”  

“I, for one, consider myself to be an honest and straightforward person. And yet I’ve ghosted...And I’ve told myself, time and time again, that it’s all the fault of the toxic dating culture we’ve created. And at the end of the day, I think that’s what we’re all telling ourselves.” 

How does it feel to be ghosted?

For many people ghosting can result in feelings of being disrespected, used and disposable. If you have known the person beyond more than a few dates then it can be even more traumatic. When someone we love and trust disengages from us it feels like a very deep betrayal.

“I felt like an idiot. Like I had been played a fool. And more so I felt disrespected. Take the romantics away, to have a great connection with a new friend and then all of a sudden never hear from them again? That’s painful and really disappointing. No one deserves to be blown off.”  

“It still felt a bit like someone had punched me in the gut when it happened. The disregard is insulting. The lack of closure is maddening. You move on, but not before your self-esteem takes a hit. The only thing worse than being broken up with is realizing that someone didn’t even consider you worth breaking up with.”  

“Going from texting every day and seeing each other a couple times a week to nothing without the slightest hint of why was a kick in the gut.”  

“Ghosting is one of the cruelest forms of torture dating can serve up.” 

Why does it feel so bad?

Social rejection activates the same pain pathways in the brain as physical pain. In fact, you can reduce the emotional pain of rejection with a pain medication like Tylenol. But in addition to this biological link between rejection and pain, there are some specific factors about ghosting that contribute to the psychological distress.

Ghosting gives you no cue for how to react. It creates the ultimate scenario of ambiguity. Should you be worried? What if they are hurt and lying in a hospital bed somewhere? Should you be upset? Maybe they are just a little busy and will be calling you at any moment. You don’t know how to react because you don’t really know what has happened. Staying connected to others is so important to our survival that our brain has evolved to have a social monitoring system (SMS) that monitors the environment for cues so that we know how to respond in social situations. Social cues allow us to regulate our own behavior accordingly, but ghosting deprives you of these usual cues and can create a sense of emotional dysregulation where you feel out of control.

One of the most insidious aspects of ghosting is that it doesn’t just cause you to question the validity of the relationship you had, it causes you to question yourself. Why didn’t I see this coming? How could I have been such a poor judge of character? What did I do to cause this? How do I protect myself from this ever happening again? (...)

Ghosting is the ultimate use of the silent treatment, a tactic that has often been viewed by mental health professionals as a form of emotional cruelty. It essentially renders you powerless and leaves you with no opportunity to ask questions or be provided with information that would help you emotionally process the experience. It silences you and prevents you from expressing your emotions and being heard, which is important for maintaining your self-esteem.

Regardless of the ghoster’s intent, ghosting is a passive-aggressive interpersonal tactic that can leave psychological bruises and scars.

by Jennice Vilhauer Ph.D., Psychology Today |  Read more:

Image: Antonio Guillem/Shutterstock
[ed. Lasting scars.]

Why High-Fidelity Streaming Is The Audio Revolution Your Ears Have Been Waiting For

Digital audio enthusiasts, myself included, have been watching the fall and rise of sound quality closely over the last few years. Mass-market digital audio has been with us since the launch of storage media like the CD, but our migration towards files stored on portable devices or streamed from the cloud has been a rollercoaster in terms of quality.

The most significant developments have usually been at the behest of the largest tech companies, rather than record companies. Apple famously took the MP3 revolution mainstream with the birth of the iTunes Music Store in 2003, before launching a series of portable devices: the iPod, iPad, and the epoch-defining iPhone. But the MP3 revolution came at a cost, namely a degradation in audio quality compared to CDs.

A gradual clawback of audio quality mirrored the increase in data storage, and the iTunes Music Store doubled their default encoding rate in 2009. Similarly, streaming quality has increased in parallel with internet bandwidth. Once the digital audio genie was out of the internet bottle, factors as baroque as mobile bandwidth, on-device RAM, all-you-can-eat mobile data plans, and triple-play cable packages have arguably been as influential to the fortunes of the modern music business as the invention of the CD.

However, a recent technical development has triggered an entirely new wave of streaming digital audio quality. Bang & Olufsen’s most senior Tonmeister (sound engineer) Geoff Martin outlines what’s happened, and how. “For a time, streaming services, in general, made quality worse. But that time has passed. And that's because the way that streaming services work has changed. Initially, they were sending out low bitrate MP3 in the same way that Internet radio works these days. But what's happening now with services like TIDAL, Deezer HiFi and Qobuz is that they are pushing a FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) file out to the player.”

A codec (coder-decoder) is the mechanism by which the original master quality audio is encoded into a more portable format, and subsequently decoded for playback. While the "lossy" MP3 codec loses information which is deemed to be of less importance to the listener, FLAC files are lossless, so can deliver full CD quality audio. Geoff explains that this new development stretches the definition of streaming itself. “It looks like streaming, but it's not. It's a download for a one-time play; we can dance around the words if you want.”

While our ears may be attuned to lossy compressed audio in most everyday scenarios, the experience of rediscovering high-fidelity lossless digital audio can be nothing short of a revelation. Fine details reappear, performers have more space, sounds have more definition, audio feels warmer, sounds clearer, and is noticeably more pleasurable to listen to. The higher you go with audio file resolution, the better it gets.

Thanks to the new range of streaming apps delivering CD-quality or higher, our beloved “universal jukebox” is undergoing a significant upgrade. Consumer demand for high-resolution audio has been growing steadily, for example users of Deezer HiFi have increased by 71% in the past 12 months alone, and the product is now available in 180 countries and works with a wide range of FLAC streaming compatible devices.

by Oisin Lunny, Forbes | Read more:
Image: Bang & Olufsen

Max Ernst, Scallops flower
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The Legend of Sasquatch Won’t Die. Unless One Dies.

Like everyone else upright and breathing, I have heard all the (mostly fake) tales, seen all the (fake) footprint castings, viewed the (fake) videos, heard recent (real) podcasts, even perused the (fake) “field guides.” I’ve also read large numbers of Sasquatch sightings, and believe that many reporters probably thought they saw something.

It just wasn’t an elusive long-lost subhuman, ape or shape-shifting alien species. Of this I am dead-dog nearly certain.

Can I prove this? Of course not. That’s not my job. But I am happy to be the guy who publicly looks into the glassy eyes of the professional true believers — especially those profiting from the mossy-roofed cottage industry feeding off this remarkably resilient fantasy — and issues a long-overdue ultimatum:

Show me a dead one, and we’ll talk.

SERIOUSLY, FOLKS. This overripe argument about the hairy ape-beast out back has long ago passed its best-by date. And if that question is seen as a put-up-or-shut-up demand, well, it is.

The imaginary Squatch was cute for a while, and any legend that spawns generations of coloring books, postcards, plush stuffed animals and fantastically bad late-night cable TV is harmless in my book — to a point.

In the present era of post-truth, what once qualified as playful mythology increasingly feels like overlooked symptoms of early onset societal nutjobbery, which at some critical-mass level becomes a dangerous thing. So please forgive me for attempting here to point at least one little LED headlamp beam of reason upon the logic-suffocating rot behind the Bigfoot industrial complex.

(He pauses to clear throat and pen the requisite qualifiers.)

An underlying premise here is that trying to prove a negative is sheer folly. No one can scientifically prove, for example, that a giraffe has never risen from the depths of Lake Union, marched down Westlake and taken a big dump atop the grassy knoll at Gas Works Park. But a reasonable person can apply her/his own probability mathematics to the question.

Accordingly: It’s impossible to prove that forested areas of the Northwest are not home to stealthy, apelike creatures standing 8 feet tall; weighing up to 800 pounds; constantly emitting putrid, gaseous odors; and prone to issuing earsplitting, guttural, train-whistle screams — yet managing at all times to conceal themselves more effectively than a thimble-sized hummingbird.

It is equally impossible to prove that the Mariners won’t win the 2019 World Series.

Some things, the sane people just know to be true.

As mentioned, the burden of proof here is not on me, or anyone else who finds better things to do than stumble around in the dark in the soggy hills of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest wearing night-vision goggles and carrying an AR-15.

All that’s on Team Squatch. And to that organization, I reissue the plea:

Please, oh please, just show me a dead one.

by Ron Judd, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Maybe he just moved somewhere else?]

Grab and Go: How Sticky Gloves Have Changed Football

One of the most infamous dropped passes in football history clanged off Dallas Cowboys tight end Jackie Smith as he lay in the end zone during Super Bowl XIII.

Poor Smith. Forty years ago, he had only his bare hands to try to pull in Roger Staubach’s low pass. Had he played in a more recent edition of the N.F.L. playoffs, he almost certainly would have been wearing a pair of the sticky, silicone gloves that have transformed receivers’ mitts into virtual Spider-Man hands.

The technological advances on the skin of those gloves have been so profound that they now enable receivers to snare passes their forebears never dreamed of catching, and in making the seemingly impossible possible, they may be changing the way football is played.

The grippy polymer used on the new generation of gloves, said to be developed first by a Canadian wide receiver and a chemist in a Pakistan laboratory in 1999, is about 20 percent stickier than a human hand — according to a recent study by the M.I.T. Sports Lab performed at the request of The New York Times.

The technology has made life easier for receivers at all levels, of course, and now it is rare for any player in search of a better grip — pass catchers, but also quarterbacks, running backs and tight ends — not to make them part of his standard equipment. Even defenders have taken to wearing them.

“The gloves definitely help with the one-handed catches,” said Rasul Douglas, a cornerback for the Philadelphia Eagles who wears a Nike version. “You rarely see guys making one-handed catches without gloves on.”

For those who have not played any football in the last 15 years, just touch a pair at a sporting goods store. It will be obvious why the gloves, now manufactured by several companies, are probably the most significant performance-related football equipment innovation since the advent of the cleat.

by David Waldstein, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Brad Penner/Associated Press; Bob Levey/Getty Images; Joe Sargent/Getty Images; Tommy Gilligan/USA Today Sports, via Reuters

Billionaires vs. LA Schools

Unlike many labor actions, the Los Angeles teachers’ strike is not really about wages or benefits. At its core, this is a struggle to defend public schools against the privatizing drive of a small-but-powerful group of billionaires.

The plan of these business leaders is simple: break-up the school district into thirty-two competing “portfolio” networks, in order to replace public schools with privately run charters. As firm believers in the dogmas of market fundamentalism, these influential downsizers truly believe that it’s possible to improve education by running it like a private business. Not coincidentally, privatization would also open up huge avenues for profit-making — and deal a potentially fatal blow to one of the most well-organized and militant unions in the country, the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA). As union leader Arlene Inouye explains, “This is a struggle to save public education; the existence of public education in our city is on the line.”

It’s always important to “know thy enemy.” But this is especially true for the educators’ movement in Los Angeles, which is directly challenging an unholy alliance of the some of richest individuals in the United States. Here’s a short primer on the corporate “who’s who” aiming to destroy public schools in LA — and across the nation.

The Walton Family (Walmart)

Doris Fischer

Reed Hastings

Eli Broad:
As with almost everybody else on this billionaires list, LA’s Eli Broad has no professional experience in education. Yet this hasn’t stopped him from using his immense personal fortune to foist his vision upon the city’s schools. With a net worth of over $7.4 billion, Broad is the fourth richest individual in the United States. In 2017, he gave nearly $2 million dollars to elect a pro-charter majority to the school board. This was just the latest manifestation of Broad’s longstanding drive to dismantle public education in Los Angeles and nationwide.

After striking it big in the home building and insurance industries, he founded the Broad Academy in 2002 to train a new generation of privatizing school leaders. By 2012, the center was boasting that it had “filled more superintendent positions than any other national training program” and that “Broad graduates are in the number one or number two seats in the three largest districts in the country (New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago).”

Like Hastings, Broad is a liberal — and major funder of the Democratic Party establishment, including leading lights such as Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, and Chuck Schumer. “The unions no longer control the education agenda of the Democratic Party,” Hastings bragged to the Wall Street Journal.

Broad stepped up his hometown privatizing efforts in 2015 by producing a plan to ensure that charters would capture at least 50 percent of the so-called “market share” of LA schools. The proposal was explicit about the national stakes of the campaign: “Los Angeles is uniquely positioned to create the largest, highest-performing charter sector in the nation. Such an exemplar would serve as a model for all large cities to follow.”

A major public scandal erupted after the forty-four-page plan was leaked to the press — then-school board president Steve Zimmer denounced it as “an outline for a hostile takeover.” The specific initiative was scrapped, but only temporarily. Within two years, Broad had begun a renewed push for a “hostile takeover.” This time it took the form of helping buy the 2017 school board elections — and subsequently imposing one of his close friends as new district superintendent: Austin Beutner.

Austin Beutner
For LA’s teachers, students, and parents, Austin Beutner is currently enemy number one. Beutner is not only the handpicked representative of the democracy-subverting billionaires discussed above — he’s one of these billionaires himself.

Beutner has zero credentials to lead the second-largest school district in the country. He began his career as a downsizing investment banker in the early 1990s. The Clinton administration chose him to head their project of helping privatize state enterprises in Russia and, as the New York Times reported, “teaching the American way of doing business.”

Beutner soon after co-founded the investment firm Evercore Partners together with other Clinton confidants. Today, Evercore is the second-largest such firm in the world, behind only Goldman Sachs.

Like Hastings and Broad, Beutner is a major funder of the Democratic Party. Beutner’s considerable financial contributions to the Democrats helped convince Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to appoint him as first deputy mayor in 2010. (Last week, Beutner returned the favor by tapping Villaraigosa to be his PR man against LA teachers.) As the Wall Street Journal explained, Deputy Mayor Beutner was “charged with making Los Angeles more business friendly.”

In 2013, Beutner joined with with Eli Broad in an attempt to buy the Los Angeles Times. Though the bid was ultimately unsuccessful, their partnership bore fruit in early 2018 when the new school board chose Beutner as superintendent. Upon taking office, he immediately used Broad funding to hire a cadre of downsizers led by two consulting firms, Ernst & Young and Kitamba; the latter company has already played a central role in privatizing schools in Newark and Washington D.C. If they get their way, Los Angeles will become the model for privatization efforts across the United States.

by Eric Blanc, Jacobin |  Read more:

Image: Barbara Davidson / Getty Images

[ed. See also: What LA Teachers Have Already Won]

After Dark

In 1924 a young man named Gyula Halász left Brasov, Transylvania—his Hungarian hometown, annexed by Romania in the aftermath of World War I—and moved to Paris. There he began to call himself Brassaï and discovered his vocation as a photographer working in black and white and almost entirely at night.

In an overcoat specially designed with pockets large enough to hold twenty-four glass negatives, and with cigarettes that he used to time the long exposures—“a Gauloise for a certain light, a Boyard if it was darker”—he walked the streets of Paris, its neighborhoods and suburbs, sometimes with his friend Henry Miller but mostly by himself. He knocked on strangers’ doors and asked to take pictures from their windows; he was arrested three times. He returned to his apartment only once the sun rose or when his supply of glass plates ran out.

If, as Diane Arbus said, “a photograph is a secret about a secret,” Brassaï soon discovered which secrets he wanted to tell—confidences revealed (and withheld) about the after-hours lives of raffish Parisians who frequented the low-life cafés, the high-end brothels and cross-dressers’ clubs; about the workers who repaired and maintained the systems that enabled the city to function; about the way that the light from a street lamp illuminated a long deserted staircase descending a hill in Montmartre.

In his introduction to his photography collection The Secret Paris of the ’30s, Brassaï wrote,

Just as night birds and nocturnal animals bring a forest to life when its daytime fauna fall silent and go to ground, so night in a large city brings out of its den an entire population that lives its life completely under cover of darkness…I wanted to know what went on inside, behind the walls, behind the facades, in the wings: bars, dives, nightclubs, one-night hotels, bordellos, opium dens. I was eager to penetrate this other world, this fringe world, the secret, sinister world of mobsters, outcasts, toughs, pimps, whores, addicts, inverts. Rightly or wrongly, I felt at the time that this underground world represented Paris at its least cosmopolitan, at its most alive, its most authentic, that in these colorful faces of its underworld there had been preserved from age to age, almost without alteration, the folklore of its most remote past.

Perhaps this is why so many of my favorite paintings and photographs are night scenes. Brassaï’s photographs. The nocturnes of James McNeill Whistler and Albert Pinkham Ryder. The dark, dramatically lit landscapes of Jean-François Millet and Albert Bierstadt, especially Millet’s painting of men hunting birds by the light of torches throwing off volleys of sparks. The dreamscapes of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, populated as they are by the nightmarish phantasms that live only in darkness. The greatest Caravaggios reimagine Christianity’s most theatrical moments as night scenes—the flagellation of Christ, the conversion of Saint Paul, the martyrdom of Saint Peter, the burial of Saint Lucy—perhaps because the painter was himself nocturnal. His circle included criminals and the neighborhood prostitutes he employed as his models; he belonged to a street gang whose nighttime misadventures culminated in the murder that would compel Caravaggio to spend the last years of his brief life on the run. “I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day,” Vincent van Gogh once wrote to his sister Willemien. “I definitely want to paint a starry sky now.” (...)

In the hours between midnight and dawn, Paris seemed to Brassaï not only another city but a different world—a “fringe world” with its own climate, its own natural laws, its own geography, denizens, and species.

by Francine Prose, Lapham's Quarterly | Read more:
Image: Giovanni di Paolo, 1457. Wikimedia Commons

Mary Fedden, Lilies at Moonlight, 1996
via:

Top Dinner Suggestions According to a Three-Year-Old's Eating Habits

A French baguette, but only the inside — NO CRUST

Seven slices of American cheese

A frozen waffle, cooked

A frozen waffle, raw

The ricotta layer of an entire lasagna

Half a stick of butter

Four very specific Oreos

Pizza, just the cheese

Applesauce through a straw

Macaroni and cheese, the “real” kind that cooks in a plastic cup in the microwave

A $4.99 half-pint of organic blueberries

Pizza, just the sauce

Around the edges of a cheeseburger without ever actually biting into the meat

A Swiss Miss hot cocoa packet

One bite each of three apples

by Kristen Mulrooney, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Australia Bakes

It was 48.9C last Tuesday in Port Augusta, South Australia, an old harbour city that now harvests solar power. Michelle Coles, the owner of the local cinema, took off her shoes at night to test the concrete before letting the dogs out. “People tend to stay at home,” she said. “They don’t walk around when it’s like this.”

It’s easy to see why: in the middle of the day it takes seconds to blister a dog’s paw or child’s foot. In Mildura, in northern Victoria, last week gardeners burned their hands when they picked up their tools, which had been left in the sun at 46C. Fish were dying in the rivers.

Almost every day last week a new heat record was broken in Australia. They spread out, unrelenting, across the country, with records broken for all kinds of reasons – as if the statistics were finding an infinite series of ways to say that it was hot. (...)

In Mildura, Tolga Ozkuzucu, owner of Top Notch Gardens, had the misfortune to be working outdoors.

“It’s been like hell,” he said. “You have to try to leave your tools in the shade. If you don’t, it burns your fingers. There’s not much you can do.

“I try to start as early as I can. I’m not going to risk my body and health. People here are very understanding of that because they know how hot it is … nobody wants to be outside when it’s 46C.”

In South Australia, they declared a “code red” across Adelaide, the state capital. Homelessness services were working overtime and the Red Cross started calling round a list of 750 people who were deemed especially vulnerable.

by Naaman Zhou, The Guardian | Read more:
Image:Torsten Blackwood/AFP/Getty Images
[ed.  48.9C = 120F. Wow .. need some koalafications to endure that. See also: The equivalent of one atomic bomb per second: How fast the oceans are warming.]