Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Coming for Your Hamburgers

Sebastian Gorka, late of the Trump Administration, stood before the annual gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference last week and made plain the inner frenzy of a party that must place its hopes for 2020 on a President who had just been described before a congressional committee as “a racist,” “a con man,” and “a cheat.” Hence the rhetorical smoke bombs. Wild-eyed Democrats are coming! Gorka declared, “They want to take your pickup truck! They want to rebuild your home! They want to take away your hamburgers! This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved!”

The Stalinist nightmare that Gorka had on his mind is the Green New Deal, a still rough proposal that calls on the U.S. government to come to the belated rescue of the planet with the same sense of urgency that it displayed in rescuing the economy during the Great Depression. To Gorka, such a proposal is a communist “watermelon”: “green on the outside, deep, deep red communist on the inside.”

The President, who dismisses climate change as “a Chinese hoax,” also waxed derisive at cpac. “New Green Deal or whatever they hell they call it . . . I encourage it,” he said caustically, in a sweaty, two-hour rant on Saturday. “I think it’s really something Democrats should promote. . . . No planes! No energy! When the wind stops blowing, that’s the end of your electric. ‘Darling, is the wind blowing today? I’d like to watch television, darling.’ ”

The focus of this fear campaign, the nexus of all danger, is a member of Congress who has been in office for two months: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, at twenty-nine, represents parts of the Bronx and Queens. With Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, she is a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal. Because she questions our habits of fossil-fuel consumption and industrial agriculture, her opponents reason, she can’t possibly be trying to head off global catastrophe. She just wants to steal your Chevy Colorado and your Big Mac.

“Apparently, I am a cow dictator,” Ocasio-Cortez told me. “What’s humorous to me is that we’re finally proposing a clear, ambitious, but necessary and grounded policy on the scale of the problem. And so it’s hard for the Republicans to refute the actual policy on its substance. They resort to mythologizing it on a ludicrous level. Ted Cruz says we want to ‘kill all the cows.’ How far have we slid in our discourse? But that’s what half our political representation is up to.” (...)

“It feels like an extra job,” she said of the attacks. “I’ve got a full-time job in Congress and then I moonlight as America’s greatest villain, or as the new hope. And it’s pretty tiring. I’m just a normal person. I knew that I was not going to be liked. I’m a Democrat. I’m a woman. I’m a young woman. A Latina. And I’m a liberal, a D.S.A. member,” she said, referring to the Democratic Socialists of America. “I believe health care is a right and people should be paid enough to live. Those are offensive values to them. But this ravenous hysteria—it’s really getting to a level that is kind of out of control. It’s dangerous and even scary. I have days when it seems some people want to stoke just enough of it to have just enough plausible deniability if something happens to me.”

The Trump family has attacked her from the start. Because she had the D.S.A.’s endorsement, last December, Donald Trump, Jr., posted a joke on Instagram about how in socialist countries people eat their dogs rather than walk them. (“It’s funny cuz it’s true!!!” he wrote.) Ocasio-Cortez’s office had no comment, but she did, tweeting, “Please, keep it coming Jr—it’s definitely a ‘very, very large brain’ idea to troll a member of a body that will have subpoena power in a month.”(...)

Ocasio-Cortez says that she has tried to keep her focus partly by avoiding watching Trump on television: “He relies and thrives on attention, and so the less attention he’s given, even if it’s just one set of eyeballs, the weaker he is.” She said that watching Trump in the House chamber at the State of the Union address made her feel “sick” and “underwhelmed.”

“He is such a small, mediocre person,” she told me. “I grew up with a real romanticism about America. I grew up in a first-generation household where your parents give up everything, and for me America was the greatest thing ever to exist. To be there on the floor of the House was beyond anything my parents would have ever dreamed of. But the person behind the podium was so unskilled. It was kind of sad.”

by David Remnick, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Mark Peterson/Redux
[ed. Stalin dreamt about... hamburgers? Wow. See also: Trump is not stable — and that should be a huge news story (Alternet)]

What Calamity Will Befall Us Next

Across the world, the reputation of elites and their institutions is in free fall. A flood of online information has given the public unprecedented access to elite individuals in politics, media, academia, science, business, and an array of other fields. Thanks to tools like social media, the activist public has greater proximity to its supposed mandarin class than ever before. What this newfound intimacy has revealed has not always been flattering. Many of those who had been held up as elites in their fields have, upon closer examination by the public, been revealed as mediocre, incompetent, buffoonish, and, in some cases, possibly unhinged. At the same time, the public, for all its passion, has also revealed itself to be vulnerable to conspiracy theories, disinformation, and outbreaks of hysteria.

In 2014, a former CIA media analyst named Martin Gurri published “The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.” Gurri had spent his career analyzing the global information environment and could see that something major was ahead. “The Revolt of the Public” predicted that the information revolution unleashed by the internet would end up destabilizing politics and institutions around the world, perhaps for decades to come. A flood of new online information — along with a series of failed wars and financial crises — would conspire to bleed the legitimacy of elite institutions and their representatives in the eyes of the public, likely beyond repair.

Events since the book was first released have made it appear prophetic. This past December, “The Revolt of the Public” was republished with a new chapter, reflecting on the election of Donald Trump in the United States and the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom.

Below is an interview with Gurri about the consequences of the information revolution on the relationship between elites and the public. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Can you tell us a little bit about your background in government and how it led you to write a book about the relationship between elite institutions and information?

I had probably the least glamorous job in the CIA: I was an analyst of global media. Early on, that was pretty straightforward work, as there was only a small volume of open information to analyze. Every country had their equivalent of the New York Times, a source which set the news agenda. If the president asked how his policies were playing in, say, France, all you needed to do was consult two newspapers for your answer. But around the turn of the millennium, the information environment suddenly went haywire. A tsunami of information arose, in volumes unprecedented in human experience. In the year 2001, the amount of information produced doubled that of all previous history. 2002 doubled 2001 — and this trend has continued ever since.

As that tsunami of information swept over the world, we observed a great deal of social and political turbulence behind it. Angry voices were suddenly heard where before there was silence. At the time, it was an open question whether this was merely virtual anger or if it would have an impact on politics in the real world. When we pointed out the turbulence, and those voices mocking the status quo, we were asked: If the security forces come after them, what will they do — hit the police with their laptops?

The year 2011 proved to be the moment of phase change, when digital anger passed over into political action. That year saw the Arab insurgencies, but also the “indignados” movement in Spain, the “tent city” protests in Israel, and dozens of Occupy movements in the U.S. All these political insurgencies began online. The public we first glimpsed when I was with CIA has since toppled dictators, smashed political parties, and of course elected outlandish populists to high office.

It’s not just government either. An overabundance of information has been subversive of every modern institution, from the news media to the scientific establishment, to the university, and the corporation. All have come under siege and are bleeding authority and legitimacy. My concern, as I wrote the book, was that the public’s loathing of the established order was bound to implicate our democratic system itself.

How has the new information environment changed the relationship between elite institutions and the general public?

The institutions that sustain modern society were established in the industrial age. They are steep, top-down pyramids, with the industrial elites occupying the top of the pyramid, at a great distance from the public. Elites succeeded or failed in part by impressing the public with their expertise but mostly by impressing other elites. Today, due to the new information dispensation, these elites have been brought into close proximity to the public and are exposed to the public’s constant scrutiny. They are all too aware of the public’s anger, aware that they have lost control of the information sphere. The result has been a sort of elite panic and a bleeding away of their authority and legitimacy.

To function properly, industrial institutions, including government, need to have some proprietary control over the information in their own domains — the stories that get told about them. Once this control is lost, and a host of competing narratives about them arise, public trust inevitably starts to evaporate. This is what we see happening all around us. The effect has been a massive crisis of authority.

We have a picture of how this flood of new information has impacted elites, but how has it impacted the public?

Fifty years ago, society was organized according to the industrial model. People were passive recipients of information. It was a top-down system with limited choices or diversity. You could buy two or three different types of cars and get your information from two or three different television channels and newspapers. This system produced a relatively uniform “mass audience” that was suitable for the needs of industrial society.

What we have seen since is a complete breakdown of that system. The loss of control over information has resulted in the breakdown of the mass audience and many of the old ideologies. In its place has emerged a more ideologically diverse and fractious public. The public, which is not necessarily synonymous with “the people” or “the masses,” can come from any corner of the political environment today. It is not a fixed body of individuals and lacks an organization, leaders, shared programs, policies, or a coherent ideology. The public is characterized by negation: It is united in being ferociously against the established order.

What is the response of elites to their loss of trust and legitimacy?

The elite class can respond to their crisis of authority by heading in two opposite directions. And if I were to guess, I would say that they are now heading for the least productive option. They could identify the causes of the public’s anger and work to reconcile the public to the system. This would entail flattening the political pyramid and reducing as much as possible their distance from the public. Unfortunately, this is not happening.
“Elites currently seem to be more concerned with re-establishing their distance from the public than with reforming the system or restoring their own authority. They equate legitimacy with clinging to the top of the pyramid.”

Elites currently seem to be more concerned with re-establishing their distance from the public than with reforming the system or restoring their own authority. They equate legitimacy with clinging to the top of the pyramid. They find proximity to the public frightening and distasteful: No elite figure wants to come near the “deplorables.” They prefer to hide behind bodyguards and metal-detecting machines. Somewhat reluctantly, I have come to the conclusion that authority will not be restored to our democratic institutions until the current elite class — what I have called the “industrial elites” — is replaced. As I explain in the book, this can happen quite peacefully.

What I found interesting about your book is that in addition to criticizing the elite, you’re also quite skeptical of this newly vocal public.

When this new wave of information began to rise, I initially thought that I was on the side of the public. But on analyzing the statements and pronouncements of many of the new popular movements, I began to see that they had a distinctly nihilist streak. They were mired in negation towards the status quo, but rarely proposed clear alternatives to the order that they were bashing away at. The Arab Spring, as well as the Occupy movements and the Spanish “indignados,” among others in the West, were movements united on the basis of what they were against. They were far less clear about what they were in favor of or how they were going to build that future. The 2016 Brexit referendum and election of Donald Trump — both of which were based primarily on the angry repudiation of the status quo — provided further compelling evidence of this public sentiment.

Do you think that this was a reflection of naiveté on the part of the public?

My favorite philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset, talked about “mass man,” or modern man as being the end product of a long historical process. Previous generations struggled to put him in a place of relative affluence and education, with material comforts and freedoms that were achieved at tremendous cost and usually involved bloodshed at some point. Mass man doesn’t see it that way. He feels that all these material gifts are as natural as the air he breathes. The good things in life are taken for granted. Meanwhile, the smallest desire that goes unfulfilled is a source of outrage. Much of the public’s sentiment today — that impulse to negation — is driven by a failure to understand or remember history. Or if they do remember history, to see it purely as the mother of all injustices and a source of problems that must be now be abolished. If there is one thing I would ask people to do, it would be to study history. When you abolish history, you lose your memory and it’s like you’ve had a stroke. That condition can lead you to do crazy things.

by Murtaza Hussain, The Intercept | Read more:

Image: uncredited

Akiko Yano

Alejandra Caballero, Dinner
via:

Base Culture

Pain is weakness leaving the body. Most had internalized this boot camp mantra, and all had endured some form of arduous labor, torment, and sacrifice in the service. The marines I served with at the Palms hailed from a vast range of backgrounds, although few came from the upper reaches of society. In civilian life, many occupied lower rungs, and many found themselves in similarly oppressive situations on base (especially the women). But in relation to the area addicts and immigrants, we enjoyed our privilege and whatever semblance of narcissistic happiness or gratification it afforded. Often that enjoyment came at the expense of fellow marines and was frequently of a desperate, survivalist character, a kind of necessary Keynesian stimulus at the level of the individual. It was compulsive, cruel banter to keep the self-esteem sufficiently inflated, basically. But at least we weren’t torturing ourselves for a fix, like those tweaking and scrapping on the outskirts. The political economy of the Palms was treating us better than it was treating them.

Then we went to Afghanistan. On that front, I would prefer not to have to say anything at all. The commodification of America’s wars tends to know no bounds. It also happens to be unavoidable for those of us who have taken part in them. I can’t really speak about my past or my politics without risking the encouragement and benefits of America’s cheap yet profitable obsession with war, an obsession that predates the now ancient-seeming date of my war’s putative beginning, September 11, 2001. If the war involved any dignity, it is not deserving of an American audience that will make instantaneous patriotic sap from it. (...)

During my most frank interludes in Afghanistan, I’d refer to the grotesque mess as the amusement park ride. There was little amusement for the inhabitants of the villages we were leveling or the tenders of the opium fields we were burning. There wasn’t much amusement for the marines being hit the hardest either, although they had a tendency to surprise when it came to their capacity to be amused. But for so many, myself included, the point, or one point anyway, was to be amused. This should come off as trite. Marines would be the first to concede it. So would the reporters, novelists, and filmmakers who narrate their exploits. But the observation must be closed off from the ethical debate in which it is embedded. The culture has deemed it kosher to note that marines have fun lighting shit on fire, blowing shit up, and dodging death. But when you, and especially as a current or former member of the armed services, move from this basic empirical observation to the question of whether the larger enterprise is just and necessary, you violate a taboo. That day we were shot at but ended up all right, we were amused. That day, months later, when a replacement for one of my marines stepped off on the same patrol, landed on an IED, and died, he was dead. Whether anyone was amused immediately before or after that death is a question we don’t ask.

The list of questions never asked bends toward the infinite: What were the mercenaries I kept meeting truly there for? The ones who couldn’t help letting me know how much they were making for a six-month stint? The ones who kept on bragging about raking in six figures, and how those numbers always paled in comparison to what their bosses were making back in Maryland or Virginia? What about those contractors, specifically in the intel world, who foisted a never-ending line of gadgetries on my men to be field-tested and then shipped off to the global marketplace? Why did the gear never work? Why was it so unwieldy? Why did it slow down ops, and why did no one seem to care that it usually had to be escorted by those with the appropriate clearance, which meant putting my guys at risk from point A to point B and back again? Why so much acceptance in the face of ambitious captains who wanted to be majors, ambitious majors who wanted to be lieutenant colonels, ambitious lieutenant colonels who wanted to be full birds, ambitious full birds who wanted to be generals, and ambitious generals who wanted an extra star, all putting other lives on the line to make it happen?

Then one time I watched a group of marines obliterate the corner of a remote hamlet with the totality of their arsenal, from the M4 carbine to the M249 light machine gun to the M240 machine gun to the Mk 19 grenade launcher to the AT4 recoilless smoothbore weapon to the FGM-148 Javelin missile to the BGM-71 TOW missile. They’d lost friends, they were bitter, and they had come to see their surroundings not only as hostile, as was already the case back in Twentynine Palms, but as damnable. They were heading home soon and had some underutilized weapon systems to play with. I took pictures along with everyone else. I told myself there was something I didn’t know that justified the carnage I was consuming.

by Lyle Jeremy Rubin, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: Bill Jenkins, Pass, 2012. Photo by Cathy Carver

Troll Patrol: The Life of a Comment Moderator

For six years, from 2012 to 2018, my job was to read and delete the most inappropriate comments on a conservative news site. Not all the inappropriate comments. Just the most inappropriate comments. Hundreds of comments an hour. Thousands of comments a day. Tens of thousands of comments a week. More than a million comments a year.

I started my day at 8 a.m., and by then it was already bedlam. My first task was to go over the flagged comments, and ones from problem users, that had been held throughout the night. I have only anecdotal evidence to base this on, but anti-Semites and spambots, speaking generally, tend to be night owls. It’s a weird way to start the day: Good morning! “Jews control the banks, and you should try this amazing new weight loss shake!”

Some of the choices people make on the internet, and in life in general, remain baffling to me. Not just in their intolerance, but also in their sheer stupidity. I would tell a user that he was banned, and instead of choosing a unique user name to throw us, he would immediately sign back up with a nearly identical name. Just an extra “L” to SickOfItAlll. Some people are really loyal to the name they use to be racist on a website.

It was an odd turn of events for me to be working there at all. The site (which I'm not allowed to publicly name) is one that I knew some friends and family read, but it wasn’t for me. I’ve always been a pretty liberal guy. A friend got a job there, though, so I applied too. Liberal or not, the rent needed to be paid. After doing the job for a while, I wasn’t liberal anymore. I certainly wasn’t conservative. I just resented everyone with opinions and an internet connection.

Before working as a moderator, I never would have known how many comments on a story about Africanized bees it would take before they started taking a racist turn. Now, having done the job, I know that that’s a trick question, because the answer is: immediately. It will happen on the first comment and keep on going until the last one.

If you’ve ever spent any time reading comments on a website, you’re no doubt surprised to find out that anybody had deleted anything. The internet often seems like a lawless wasteland. But there was a law. And it was me.

by Adam Sokol, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Angus Greig

Robert Alan Clayton, Brush CO
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Free Money: The Surprising Effects of a Basic Income Supplied by Government

Scooter McCoy was 20 years old when his wife, Michelle, gave birth to their first child, a son named Spencer. It was 1996, and McCoy was living in the tiny town of Cherokee, North Carolina, attending Western Carolina University on a football scholarship. He was the first member of his family to go to college.

McCoy’s father had ruined his body as a miner, digging tunnels underneath lakes and riverbeds, and his son had developed a faith that college would lead him in a better direction. So McCoy was determined to stay in school when Spencer came along. Between fatherhood, football practice, and classes, though, he couldn’t squeeze in much part-time work. Michelle had taken an entry-level job as a teacher’s aide at a local childcare center right out of high school, but her salary wasn’t enough to support the three of them.

Then the casino money came.

Just months before Spencer was born, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians opened a casino near McCoy’s home, and promised every one of its roughly 15,000 tribal members—among them Skooter and Michelle—an equal cut of the profits. The first payouts came to $595 each—a nice little bonus, McCoy says, just for being. “That was the first time we ever took a vacation,” McCoy remembers. “We went to Myrtle Beach.”

Once Spencer arrived, the checks covered the family’s car payments and other bills. “It was huge,” McCoy says. He graduated college and went on to coach football at the local high school for 11 years. Two decades later, McCoy still sets aside some of the money the tribe gives out twice a year to take his children—three of them, now—on vacation. (He and Michelle are separated.) And as the casino revenue has grown, so have the checks. In 2016, every tribal member received roughly $12,000. McCoy’s kids, and all children in the community, have been accruing payments since the day they were born. The tribe sets the money aside and invests it, so the children cash out a substantial nest egg when they’re 18. When Spencer’s 18th birthday came three years ago, his so-called “minor’s fund” amounted to $105,000 after taxes. His 12-year-old sister is projected to receive roughly twice that. (...)

The casino money made it possible for him to support his young family, but the money his children will receive is potentially life-altering on a different scale. “If you’ve lived in a small rural community and never saw anybody leave, never saw anyone with a white-collar job or leading any organization, you always kind of keep your mindset right here,” he says, forming a little circle with his hands in front of his face. “Our kids today? The kids at the high school?” He throws his arms out wide. “They believe the sky’s the limit. It’s really changed the entire mindset of the community these past 20 years.”

These biannual, unconditional cash disbursements go by different names among the members of the tribe. Officially, they’re called “per capita payments.” McCoy’s kids call it their “big money.” But a certain kind of Silicon Valley idealist might call it something else: a universal basic income. (...)

The Eastern Band of Cherokee isn’t the only group whose members get unconditional cash: The Alaska Permanent Fund has been giving $1,000 to $2,000 a year to its citizens for decades, and other Native American tribes have also divided up casino revenues. But the Cherokee example is among the most researched. Back in the 1990s, scholars at Duke were studying the mental health of Cherokee children in the region; then the casino was built, creating the conditions for a natural experiment. Three decades of longitudinal research backs up McCoy’s anecdotal evidence that the money has had profound positive effects.

As the richest people in America fixate on how to give money to the poorest, the Cherokee program is a case study of whether a basic income is in fact a practical proposal for alleviating economic inequality or just another oversimplified, undercooked Silicon Valley fix to one of the most intractable problems our society faces. Or maybe it’s both.

by Issie Lapowski, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Yael Malka

Tedeschi Trucks Band

[ed. Kofi Burbridge on organ (September 22, 1961 – February 15, 2019) with little brother Oteil on bass.] 

Buddy Bating

Why Straight Men Are Joining Masturbation Clubs

When Brandon* was in his early 20s and studying abroad, he went on a trip to Israel with his friends to hike in the Judean caves. At a certain point, they reached a part of the cave that was pitch-black. “It didn't take long for someone to suggest we all jerk off in the darkness,” Brandon, now 35, says. “And so we did.” After they finished, they zipped themselves up and proceeded to continue meandering through the caves, as if nothing happened. They never spoke of it again.

Brandon self-identifies as straight. He had never masturbated in front of another man, let alone a group of other men, before in his life. Yet he says in retrospect, the weirdest thing about the incident was how not-weird it seemed at the time. “It was tame, fratty, kind of lame,” he said.

In truth, Brandon is absolutely right: his experience masturbating in front of other men is far from a singular one. Though there isn’t much data attesting to its exact prevalence, it’s far from uncommon for straight men to have had communal masturbatory experiences during adolescence, whether it’s beneath the alpaca blankets in their parents’ basement or behind the bleachers after gym class or in the bunks at sleepaway camp (or at John Lennon’s house). There’s even a term for it on Tumblr: “buddy bating.”

“We know it’s common for teenage boys to masturbate together or to instruct one another in how to do it,” says Dr. Jane Ward, author of the 2015 Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men, which coined the viral term “bro jobs” to describe straight men having sex with each other. Ward cites a 1981 report on male sexuality by sexologist Shere Hite, which suggested that nearly 20 percent of men had engaged in group masturbation during adolescence.

Most men who are willing to speak openly about experiences like this will do so with a certain measure of fondness, even nostalgia. “It's a rite of passage and an essential part of the teenage male bonding ritual,” says Sean*, 31, who used to buddy bate with his friends when he was in his early teens. Sean came of age in the early aughts during the pre-Pornhub, post-Limewire era, when online porn was far less accessible than it is now, so he viewed communal masturbation more as a matter of convenience and less as a display of budding masculinity. But regardless of the impetus behind buddy bating, for some men, the urge to whip it out in front of your bros extends beyond adolescence, even though there are fewer options for them to dabble in that interest in adulthood.

In Seattle, for instance, there’s the Rain City Jacks, a jackoff club for men who wish to, per the website, “jack off openly and safely in a uniquely sex-positive, non-discriminating and mutually respectful community.” (They also have Mardi Gras-themed events, if you’re into that.) Every Sunday and Tuesday, the Rain City Jacks meet at an erotic art gallery in Seattle. The furniture is covered in canvas, and volunteers hand out small plastic cups of lube to guests. (“We try to be environmentally responsible, but people want their own clean lube,” Rain City Jacks founder and organizer Paul Rosenberg told me.) The lights are dimmed slightly and soft music plays while the men gather, either alone or in small clusters, and proceed to jerk off, all the while keeping conversation to a minimum to ensure everyone stays in the moment.

Most of the attendees at Rain City Jacks are gay men. But Rosenberg says it is not uncommon to see curious straight men at the club’s events. He conducts annual surveys of the group, and he says that while the majority of members are gay, about 10 percent of the Seattle Jacks’ 300 or so members self-identify as heterosexual, with 25 percent identifying as bisexual.

“You can sometimes tell a guy is straight because he’s not interested in kissing another guy,” says Rosenberg. “It’s easy for him to focus on the penis, but not to be physically affectionate.” Nonetheless, he says, they all get something out of it. “The straight men I’ve played with at my club want to evangelize it to other straight guys, because they enjoy it so much and they don’t feel threatened by it,” Rosenberg said. “They may feel no romantic attraction to other men, but we’ve given them a green light to experiment: to touch another man’s penis, to share pleasure with each other. One of the terms I hear a lot is that this is the ultimate form of male bonding.”

by E.J. Dickson, GQ |  Read more:

Image: Simon Abranowicz

Tom Petty

Woke

In the late ’90s and early aughts, the word woke was a life vest. My parents and the other black people I grew up with used it to stay afloat in a Wisconsin town whose university once feigned diversity by photoshopping a black man onto the cover of an admissions brochure. We ended our talks about redlining, racial profiling, Abner Louima, and Amadou Diallo with a reminder to stay woke. The word was a command to keep ourselves informed about anti-blackness, and to fight it. It acknowledged that being black meant navigating the gaps between the accepted narrative of normality in America and our own lives. Even the sound of the word woke kept me on my toes. When I heard it, I felt a pinprick. A probing finger in my side.

The Oxford English Dictionary credits William Melvin Kelley with the first printed, political use of woke, in a 1962 New York Times article titled “If You’re Woke You Dig It,” about white cooption of black language. But twenty years earlier, in a 1942 edition of Negro Digest, J. Saunders Redding used the term in an article about labor unions. A black, unionized mine worker told him: “Waking up is a damn sight harder than going to sleep, but we’ll stay woke up longer.” Barry Beckham’s 1972 play Garvey Lives! is often cited as another early example of the word’s political meaning. A character exclaims, in reference to Marcus Garvey, “I been sleeping all my life. And now that Mr. Garvey done woke me up, I’m gon stay woke. And I’m gon help him wake up other black folk.” This is the version of woke that I grew up with: a call to study and act against anti-black oppression.

In 2008, mass audiences discovered the phrase “I stay woke” in the popular Erykah Badu song “Master Teacher.” Six years later, after the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, “Stay woke” became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement. But with its mass adoption, the word’s black activist history has faded, and its urgency has dulled. Now it functions merely as a nod to the speaker’s mainstream lefty positions, a smug confirmation that the speaker holds the expected progressive beliefs. What’s been left out is any reference to the structural and political systems that caused black leftists to adopt progressivism—or any understanding that maintaining woke views requires continuous work.

by Kashana Cauley, The Believer | Read more:
Image: Kristen Radtke

Catechism of the Waters

Perched in a triangle between river, ocean, and forest, Astoria is the oldest permanent American settlement west of the Rockies. The great Columbia, which begins in Canada, takes in water from seven states, and forms most of the border between Oregon and Washington, exhales here, fanning out with majestic slowness in an estuary almost four miles wide. Cargo ships dot its blue expanse. People have been sustained along this river for more than 11,000 years. It was commonly said of the fish in the Columbia that one could walk across the river on their backs: sturgeon, lamprey, shad, eulachon (a kind of smelt, called ooligan by the tribes), and salmon, perhaps 15 million or more. The salmon ran 13,000 miles of the Columbia River and its countless tributaries, from early spring until late in the fall: Chinook, steelhead, sockeye, pink, coho, and chum. The tribes of the Columbia Plateau traded and intermarried, sharing customs, religious beliefs, and language, through the common wealth of salmon. (...)

Astoria was founded just six years after Lewis and Clark traveled much of the lower river to the ocean, in 1805, and the long history of tribal prosperity quickly ended. In 1855, the tribes signed draconian treaties with the United States government, ceding millions of acres of ancestral land. In exchange, they were allowed to continue certain traditions, and most particularly to continue fishing on their ancient grounds. The Nez Perce treaty states,

The exclusive right of taking fish in all the streams where running through or bordering said reservation is further secured to said Indians: as also the right of taking fish at all usual and accustomed places in common with citizens of the territory, and of erecting temporary buildings for curing.

But the first cannery on the river opened in 1866, and many more followed, fed by diabolical fish wheels that scooped millions of pounds of fish a year from the water. The Army Corps of Engineers arrived in the 1860s, too, to dredge a shipping channel and build canals, jetties, and dams.

Today there are eighteen hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River and its main tributary, the Snake River. The most notorious was built near Celilo Falls, once the largest waterfall by volume in North America. Celilo, about 190 miles from the Pacific Ocean, formed a series of long, low plateaus at different heights across a narrow section of the Columbia: wide, ceaseless cascades of hard water that naturally gathered the fish in great pools. Fishing sites at Celilo were passed down for generations, and even after the treaties forced the tribes onto distant reservations, they came to fish here. But when the Dalles Dam just downriver was finished, in 1957, Celilo Falls was drowned. It simply ceased to be. (Several Native fishing villages along the banks were inundated; the government promised to rebuild, but so far has done very little.)

In 1974, after protracted legal efforts and sometimes violent protests, a US district court in Washington State upheld the treaties of the Columbia Plateau tribes. Known as the Boldt Decision, the ruling upended the fishing industry and still angers non-Indian fishermen. It gave tribal members the right to half of the river’s harvestable fish, and it was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1979. (The number considered harvestable varies. Fishery managers meet throughout the year to set limits that will allow weak populations to rebound and tributary stocks to spawn, but the shares are always kept equal between treaty and non-treaty fishers.) The tribes also have access to thirty-one fishing sites closed to others. A long stretch of the lower river is now divided into six fishing zones. The first five zones are in the 145 miles between the mouth of the Columbia and Bonneville Dam. Zone 6 runs above Bonneville for another 147 miles, and commercial fishing can only be done by the tribes there. The Boldt Decision affirmed the right to fish—but it didn’t bring back the fish. It did nothing to mitigate the desperate losses caused by dams, development, and overfishing. By 1995, there were about 750,000 salmon left in the entire Columbia River.

This kind of devastation is hard to comprehend. How could such infinite bounty come to an end? Numbers continued to fall, despite serious restoration work that began decades ago. In 2008, the Columbia Basin Fish Accords secured $900 million toward repairing habitat. More and better fish ladders, detours that allow fish to pass safely through the dams in ascending pools, were built. A few dams have been removed on tributaries, and efforts to breach more dams continue. The Nez Perce and Yakama tribes have created novel fish hatcheries that mimic natural conditions of camouflage and river flow, to improve smolt survival. Fish runs once extirpated have been restored. But no one is comfortable. Today the river holds about 1.5 million salmon. Barely a fourth are of wild origin, and thirty-two separate stocks are listed as threatened or endangered. Climate change has already caused significant reductions in prey species such as sardines and anchovies, early steps in the collapse of an ecosystem. In September, commercial fisheries for salmon and sardines throughout the West Coast states were granted disaster relief. But over the past ten years, much of the damage has been done by sea lions. (...)

This past spring, ninety-eight California sea lions and at least sixty-six Steller sea lions were seen at Bonneville Dam. Often, they were all foraging at once. The sea lions do not always swallow the fish whole; they shake and tear at them, and fishers haul in catch that is torn or injured. Many of the Stellers are staying almost year-round. Individual sea lions trapped at the dam and released on the coast hundreds of miles away have returned in fewer than two days. One sea lion trapped at Ballard Locks in Seattle and driven to San Diego swam back before the truck reached home. Only one in every thirty male sea lions has the chance to breed in the rookeries, and the sea lions that stay near the dam have no chance.

When they first arrived, the Stellers ate large sturgeon—fish that may be eight or ten feet long—but then they started on the salmon and steelhead. The Corps has observed around a hundred sea lions in the tailrace eating more than 2,000 salmon in a single season—another estimate puts the number closer to 13,000. Everyone involved remembers specifics, such as the California sea lion known as C697. He was observed at the pool below the dam for 275 consecutive days. Another California sea lion, C265, was trapped in March 2007, when he weighed 560 pounds. By May, after months of foraging at the dam, he weighed more than 1,000 pounds. ­FiveCrows says, “By the end, he looked like a giant tick.”

None of this sea lion behavior is exactly natural—that is, sea lions didn’t used to behave this way on the Columbia. They didn’t even come upriver, and there is no historical use of the animal by upper river tribes. (There are remains in coastal middens, where they were likely an occasional food source.) Before they discovered the dams, sea lions would chase spring Chinook into the estuary, then swim up the coast to Puget Sound, and come back to the mouth of the Columbia for fall fish. They worked hard for every pound. As ocean-prey stocks decline and shift with climate change and human pressure, the sea lions have even more motivation to find easier food sources. At Bonneville, Tidwell says, “They’ve found an evolutionary win,” because they get plenty of calories for much less work. Research has found that the behavior of swimming up the river to lodge near the tailrace is passed from animal to animal in the same way a microorganism might pass through a population. Once a lion finds the dam, says Tidwell, “he’s infected with ‘Bonneville.’”

by Sallie Tisdale, Harper's |  Read more:

Image: Samuel James for Harper’s Magazine
[ed. Deplete salmon. Kill sea lions. Wipe out sardines, herring, and other forage fish. Leave dams. Good strategy.]

Why Drugs That Work In Mice Don't Work In Humans

LRI conducts experiments on animals; currently, in particular, mice. We believe that this is worthwhile -- that is, we believe that whether a drug makes mice live longer tells us something meaningful about whether it will make people live longer.

But is that a valid assumption? We know, after all, that most drugs that “work” in mouse experiments don’t go on to succeed in human clinical trials. Only 14% of drugs that are tested on humans succeed in demonstrating effectiveness[1], and all of these are drugs that have been found efficacious in animals, so successful animal studies are very far from a guarantee by themselves. Why do we trust them at all?

First of all, it should be noted that the overall clinical trial success rate is brought down by cancer drugs, which have only an 8% success rate in clinical trials. The success rate for trials of all non-oncology drugs is 20%.

Curing cancer in a laboratory mouse is very different from curing it in a person. In particular, these aren’t animals that got old and developed tumors spontaneously; they’re mice that have been made to get cancer, either by breeding a cancer-prone strain of mice, or by exposing the mice to a carcinogen, or by grafting a tumor into the mouse directly. None of these processes works exactly the same as developing spontaneous tumors, and in particular they may be easier to reverse than spontaneous tumors. Part of what makes humans get cancer is that, with age, we lose the ability to fight cancer off, through weakened immune systems and other dysfunctions; we’d expect it to be easier to eradicate tumors implanted in a young, healthy mouse than the ones acquired by an old, unhealthy one. Similarly, mutant tumor-prone mice may have genetically simpler forms of cancer than mice who develop cancer in old age, and their genetic defects may thus be easier to counteract with drugs. This means that the animal experiments are “playing on easy mode”, and many drugs that pass them would not pass the “hard mode” of a human study.

The same argument goes for many other so-called “animal models” of disease. We induce Parkinson’s-like symptoms in animals with a poison called MPTP -- but this produces only a narrowly targeted form of brain damage, while real Parkinson’s disease, naturally acquired in elderly humans, includes more types of damage to more areas of the brain. It is easier to reverse MPTP symptoms than Parkinson’s disease. Animal models of age-related disease generally do not wait for the diseases to be naturally acquired, but induce them artificially in young animals, which we’d expect to be overall more resilient than the elderly humans who normally get these diseases.

This flaw doesn’t apply to lifespan studies of mice -- we’re not simulating aging, we’re observing natural aging, and how drugs modify it.

by Sarah Constantin, LRI |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Borsalino

Borsalino (NY Times)
via:

via:
[ed. Reminds me of my grandson.]

Ōhno Bakufu 大野麦風 (1888–1976)
via:

UC Terminates Subscriptions With World’s Largest Scientific Publisher

As a leader in the global movement toward open access to publicly funded research, the University of California is taking a firm stand by deciding not to renew its subscriptions with Elsevier. Despite months of contract negotiations, Elsevier was unwilling to meet UC’s key goal: securing universal open access to UC research while containing the rapidly escalating costs associated with for-profit journals.

In negotiating with Elsevier, UC aimed to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery by ensuring that research produced by UC’s 10 campuses — which accounts for nearly 10 percent of all U.S. publishing output — would be immediately available to the world, without cost to the reader. Under Elsevier’s proposed terms, the publisher would have charged UC authors large publishing fees on top of the university’s multi-million dollar subscription, resulting in much greater cost to the university and much higher profits for Elsevier.

“Knowledge should not be accessible only to those who can pay,” said Robert May, chair of UC’s faculty Academic Senate. “The quest for full open access is essential if we are to truly uphold the mission of this university.” The Academic Senate issued a statement today endorsing UC’s position.

Open access publishing, which makes research freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world, fulfills UC’s mission by transmitting knowledge more broadly and facilitating new discoveries that build on the university’s research and scholarly work. This follows UC’s faculty-driven principles on scholarly communication.

“I fully support our faculty, staff and students in breaking down paywalls that hinder the sharing of groundbreaking research,” said UC President Janet Napolitano. “This issue does not just impact UC, but also countless scholars, researchers and scientists across the globe — and we stand with them in their push for full, unfettered access.”

Elsevier is the largest scholarly publisher in the world, disseminating about 18 percent of journal articles produced by UC faculty. The transformative model that UC faculty and libraries are championing would make it easier and more affordable for UC authors to publish in an open access environment.

“Make no mistake: The prices of scientific journals now are so high that not a single university in the U.S. — not the University of California, not Harvard, no institution — can afford to subscribe to them all,” said Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, university librarian and economics professor at UC Berkeley, and co-chair of UC’s negotiation team. “Publishing our scholarship behind a paywall deprives people of the access to and benefits of publicly funded research. That is terrible for society.”

by UC Office of the President, Univ. of California |  Read more:
[ed. Elsevier = parasite.]

An Interview With Bob Costas

What do you think baseball needs to do for the next generation?

The most important thing is pace of play, and what’s best according to the analytics and the modern way of looking at the game, what’s best to give you a chance to win, is not what is best for the product. Baseball’s supposed to have a pleasing, leisurely pace. It’s not supposed to have a lethargic pace, and that’s what Manfred and company and the Players Association, if they’re enlightened about it, have to grapple with.

Here’s the kind of thing that just irks me, and it shows you football’s sway over everything. Baseball’s agreement with Fox allows league-championship games to be on Fox Sports 1. So Game Seven [of the Nation League championship] between the Brewers and the Dodgers is on FS1, which a lot of people can’t get or don’t know where to find. Game Seven.

But during the World Series, after Game Two, at Fenway Park, Joe Buck, by contract, has to go [announce] some dog-ass Thursday night [football] game, and then go to Dodger Stadium to do Game Three [of the World Series], which turns out to be an eighteen-inning classic. Game Three of the World Series. Now what does that say? That some soon-to-be-forgotten, regular-season football game in October should actually be important enough to divert the voice of the World Series from Boston to Houston before he goes to Los Angeles for Game Three. Now, I don’t care how many chartered planes are involved. I don’t care how capable Joe Buck is, and he’s very capable, and it’s amazing that he was able to do an excellent job on both and still be fresh in the eighteenth inning of a marathon game. What does this say? Subliminally—

It’s not even subliminal—

Forget about subliminally. What does it say about the power of the N.F.L. that its relatively meaningless Thursday-night game in October should get in the way of the World Series? That’s an affront to anyone’s intelligence.

Is football at a place now where its power to demand this stuff is unparalleled in the history of modern sports?

Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. They’re unaccountable. They get their way on everything. They’re a sports juggernaut, an entertainment juggernaut, and, in some sense, a cultural juggernaut. (...)

The N.B.A. right now is in an interesting place. The ratings are obviously nowhere near football, but, generally, they’ve been really good. The impact in popular culture and the brands of these athletes seem to be through the roof. The sport has not had the scandals that football has had, and, politically, it’s got a lot of stars who seem to be outspoken without a ton of controversy, the way you see in the N.F.L. I don’t know how you feel about basketball as a sport now, but it just seems like the type of thing you’re interested in doing, which involves talking about sports but also bringing in cultural and political things sometimes. Would you fit well in the N.B.A. of 2019?

Eventually, sooner rather than later, I’ll go back to doing something that’s a hybrid of what I used to do on HBO and what I did on “Later.” And there’s always been an intersection of sports and society, sports and issues beyond the playing field. People who say otherwise are abjectly ignorant of history, going all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt and football, to Jack Johnson and the Great White Hope, to Jackie Robinson, Billie Jean King, [Tommie] Smith and [John] Carlos. You know the list. And so the idea that sports and politics do not intersect is insane. (...)

What did you think of Colin Kaepernick’s settling his lawsuit against the N.F.L.?

Some people may have misread what the settlement or the nondisclosure clause means. It does not mean that Kaepernick can’t speak out on social issues. It doesn’t mean that he can’t, if he should return to the field, take a knee if he feels like taking a knee. Unless there’s some secret clause that we as yet don’t know of, my read of it is that it’s a standard nondisclosure as to the terms of the settlement, but it certainly isn’t a gag order going forward.

Do you think it’s important that he keeps speaking out?

I think he should do whatever he feels comfortable doing, but I don’t think the following is a contradiction: you can recognize that he was interested in shining a light on an important issue, but many of his other proclamations made him a less than perfect messenger. Maybe that’s why it’s better that he’s essentially gone radio-silent, and there are images of him, and a notion of him that’s out there, that elevates him to hero status in some quarters.

But, when you look a little deeper, it doesn’t hold up as well when he says, I don’t vote, because the oppressor will never allow you to vote your way out of your oppression. So I guess it doesn’t matter to him that, when he first took a knee, Barack Obama was President, and now Donald Trump is President. If you praise Fidel Castro without reservation, or without nuance, if you wear socks that depict cops as pigs, I think you undermine your own credibility with reasonable people who are sympathetic to the issue that first brought you to public prominence. (...)

Do these things that you just brought up make you think that he should not be grouped with a number of other athletes throughout history whom you would probably think of as heroic political spokespeople?

Yeah. I was asked that when he first knelt. And I was asked about it by Michael Smerconish, going on two years ago.

Oh, God, I’m asking the same questions as Michael Smerconish.

No, it was just that one question. He asked me whether Kaepernick has gained that status, and it was in the same interview in which I said flatly it was clear that he was being blackballed. But, no, I would not put him with Muhammad Ali. I would not put him with Curt Flood. I wouldn’t put him with Arthur Ashe. I wouldn’t put him with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Did I say Billie Jean King?

No.

Yeah, I just think that, in the case of Ali or even Smith and Carlos, their impact was more profound, and I think if you talk about Ashe or Kareem or others, that they had a more sophisticated grasp of issues. And, in the case of Ali, he put so much more on the line.

Well, there’s no Vietnam War going on.

I think what Kaepernick did had a noble intent, and he deserves credit for that. I would just hesitate to elevate him into that pantheon. We have to see how this plays out, and we have to see whether he can articulate something that is more nuanced and more convincing than his original statement. If his original statement of kneeling and starting this movement is all he wants to do, then mission accomplished, and I applaud him for it. But that doesn’t mean that his every utterance is worthy of immediate agreement or everybody falling in line.

On the other hand, if any team over the last two years had signed Colin Kaepernick, although many of us would have supported that, there would have been huge outcries: “I’m burning my season tickets in front of the stadium. I’ll never go to another game. This is it. I can’t stand this. Screw him.” Yet, when domestic abusers or people with long rap sheets bounce from one team to another, there aren’t picket lines, by and large, outside the stadium. People are evidently more comfortable with literal criminals than they are with someone who protests peacefully and in a dignified way.

by Isaac Chotiner, New Yorker | Read more:
Image:Rich Schultz/Getty

Tidying Up is Not Joyful

Inspired by an episode of Tidying Up with Marie Kondo on Netflix, I cleaned my dresser drawers this weekend. It was a generally satisfying way to shirk work duties (the reason I watched Netflix in the first place). Yet, despite my neater bureau, I find the popularity of Kondo’s ‘tidying’ unbearable. We are awash in stuff, and apparently so joyless that the promise of joy through house-cleaning appeals to us. The cultural fascination sparked by Kondo strikes me as deeply disordered.

As a scholar of East Asian philosophies, one pattern in the Kondo mania is all too familiar: the susceptibility of Americans to plain good sense if it can but be infused with a quasi-mystical ‘oriental’ aura. Kondo is, in several ways, a Mr Miyagi for the anxious, late-capitalist, consumerist age. Unlike the Karate Kid, we are bedevilled by our own belongings rather than by bullies – but just as Mr Miyagi could make waxing cars a way to find one’s strength and mettle, so too Marie Kondo can magically render folding T-shirts into a path toward personal contentment or even joy. The process by which mundane activities transmute into improved wellbeing is mysterious, but the mystery is much of the allure, part of what makes pedestrian wisdom palatable. Folding clothes as an organisational strategy is boring. But folding clothes as a mystically infused plan of life is alluring. It’s not about the clothes. It’s about everything, all at once.

Popular uses of East Asian philosophies often tend this way: toward making the circumscribed expansive, toward making small wisdoms carry water for all the wisdom. This is how the ancient military theorist Sun Tzu might end up guiding your retirement savings, coaching your kid’s football team, improving your marriage, or even raising your kids. Sun Tzu’s Art of War has been leveraged into self-help advice on all of these subjects and more. Superficially, and also for trained scholars of early Chinese military history, it might seem that Sun Tzu is in fact only really interested in managing violent conflict well. But at a deeper level – which is to say, at the level of what might be marketed to gullible Western consumers – he is actually addressing all of life’s mysteries. What reads like straightforward instruction on wartime espionage might yet have something to teach us about our children. To access this deeper meaning, we need to assume that ‘oriental’ wisdom is never about this or that, but always about everything. And importantly, at root, it is reassuring.

Worse than the bizarre uses of Sun Tzu are the seemingly endless heartwarming and encouraging things that Confucius is claimed to have said. Blandly inspirational Confucius memes are now so numerous and so detached from reality that they have spawned a meta-meme, one that reads: ‘Confucius: I never said all that shit.’ Most of the memes detailing what Confucius ‘said’ say little that is compelling or even mildly interesting. But that is exactly why it’s so important to append ‘Confucius said’ to them. Without this addendum, bracing us to receive a bit of ‘Eastern wisdom’, we might believe them to be yet more dull mini-homilies. Which, to be clear, they are. Poor old Confucius features in these memes as a mystical oriental kitten, telling us all to hang in there!

by Sally Davies, Aeon |  Read more:

Image: Netflix