Sunday, March 10, 2019
Pentagon Spent $4.6 Million on Lobster Tail and Crab in One Month
The federal government spends a disproportionate amount of its budget for outside contractors in the final month of the fiscal year, as agencies rush to blow through cash before it's too late. Among the more noteworthy expenditures in 2018, according to the watchdog group Open the Books, was $4.6 million for lobster tail and crab.
Such use-it-or-lose-it spending stems from the fact that each federal agency is given a certain amount of money it can spend on outside contractors for the fiscal year. If the agency comes in under budget, Congress might decide to appropriate less money the following year.
Or as The Office's Oscar Martinez explains to Michael Scott in "The Surplus": "Your mommy and daddy give you $10 to open up a lemonade stand, so you go out and you buy cups and you buy lemons and you buy sugar. And now you find out that it only cost you $9, so you have an extra dollar," he explains. "So you can give that dollar back to mommy and daddy. But guess what: Next summer, and you ask them for money, they're going to give you $9 because that's what they think it cost to run the stand. So what you want to do is spend that dollar on something now, so that your parents think that it cost $10 to run the lemonade stand."
It works the same way at the federal level. Just replace that $10 with $544.1 billion—the amount federal agencies spent on contracts in the last fiscal year.
Of that $544.1 billion, almost $97 billion was spent in September 2018, the final month of the fiscal year, including $53.3 billion in the final seven days of the month. That's compared to $47 billion spent in the entire month of August. As the fiscal year came crashing to an end, bureaucrats apparently did their best to spend as much money as quickly as possible.
The Department of Defense led the pack, spending $61.2 billion in September. The Pentagon was followed not-so-closely by the Department of Health and Human Services ($5.7 billion), the Department of Veterans Affairs ($5.4 billion), and the Department of Homeland Security ($4.2 billion).
Federal agencies spent $402.2 million on food that month, with the Pentagon shelling out $2.3 million on crab and $2.3 million on lobster tail. Also, "agencies spent $2.1 million on games, toys, and wheeled goods," Open the Books notes, as well as "$412,008 on paint and artist's brushes." A whopping $490 million went to furniture, including a baffling $9,341 for a Wexford office chair. Agencies also spent $49,515 for skis and ski poles, $11,816 for a foosball table, and $258,901 on pianos.
by Joe Setyon, Reason | Read more:
Image: Olga Vasylieva/Dreamstime.com
[ed. See also: Peace Dividend vs Military Industrial Complex.]
Such use-it-or-lose-it spending stems from the fact that each federal agency is given a certain amount of money it can spend on outside contractors for the fiscal year. If the agency comes in under budget, Congress might decide to appropriate less money the following year.
Or as The Office's Oscar Martinez explains to Michael Scott in "The Surplus": "Your mommy and daddy give you $10 to open up a lemonade stand, so you go out and you buy cups and you buy lemons and you buy sugar. And now you find out that it only cost you $9, so you have an extra dollar," he explains. "So you can give that dollar back to mommy and daddy. But guess what: Next summer, and you ask them for money, they're going to give you $9 because that's what they think it cost to run the stand. So what you want to do is spend that dollar on something now, so that your parents think that it cost $10 to run the lemonade stand."It works the same way at the federal level. Just replace that $10 with $544.1 billion—the amount federal agencies spent on contracts in the last fiscal year.
Of that $544.1 billion, almost $97 billion was spent in September 2018, the final month of the fiscal year, including $53.3 billion in the final seven days of the month. That's compared to $47 billion spent in the entire month of August. As the fiscal year came crashing to an end, bureaucrats apparently did their best to spend as much money as quickly as possible.
The Department of Defense led the pack, spending $61.2 billion in September. The Pentagon was followed not-so-closely by the Department of Health and Human Services ($5.7 billion), the Department of Veterans Affairs ($5.4 billion), and the Department of Homeland Security ($4.2 billion).
Federal agencies spent $402.2 million on food that month, with the Pentagon shelling out $2.3 million on crab and $2.3 million on lobster tail. Also, "agencies spent $2.1 million on games, toys, and wheeled goods," Open the Books notes, as well as "$412,008 on paint and artist's brushes." A whopping $490 million went to furniture, including a baffling $9,341 for a Wexford office chair. Agencies also spent $49,515 for skis and ski poles, $11,816 for a foosball table, and $258,901 on pianos.
by Joe Setyon, Reason | Read more:
Image: Olga Vasylieva/Dreamstime.com
[ed. See also: Peace Dividend vs Military Industrial Complex.]
Saturday, March 9, 2019
Only One Roadblock on the Road to Reform: Mitch McConnell
With the conspicuous perversion of the political system on daily display, congressional Democrats are eager to brand themselves the party of reform. They took another step in this direction on Friday, when the House voted 234-to-193 — along straight party lines — to pass the For the People Act, a sweeping package of proposals aimed at rooting out political corruption and shoring up the integrity of the electoral system.
The bill is the Democrats’ chief policy priority and covers close to 700 pages. H.R. 1, as it is officially known, seeks, among other reforms, to strengthen ethics laws for lawmakers and lobbyists, increase voting access, improve voting security, tighten campaign finance laws and create an alternative campaign-finance system geared toward small donors.
To advance the bill, Democratic leaders had to work through more than 70 proposed amendments. Some were embraced, including several aimed at spotlighting questionable behavior in the Trump administration. One, for instance, bars federal money from being spent at businesses owned or controlled by the president or other top administration officials. Others were rejected, including a plan to lower the voting age to 16.
As a sign of Democrats’ commitment to a cause that helped power its takeover of the House, the bill’s passage was an important achievement. As a practical legislative matter, it’s a bit of a hollow victory. As fired up as Democrats are to shake up the system, Republicans are perhaps even more fired up to stop them.
The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has been openly hostile to the anticorruption package since its inception. This week he made clear that he would refuse even to bring it up for a vote.
Think of H.R. 1 as the Merrick Garland of reform legislation.
Mr. McConnell called the bill the “Democrat Politician Protection Act”(and a “turkey”) and predicted that lawmakers who back it will suffer come re-election time. As political logic, this is questionable. If the Republican leader really thought the package was a loser, he would absolutely bring it to the floor to force Democratic lawmakers to own it — which is, notably, the path he has pledged to pursue with the Green New Deal, which is supported by many Democrats. The Green New Deal, an assortment of ideas for fighting climate change and remaking the economy, is even more sprawling and amorphous than the For the People Act. Mr. McConnell is panting to have members vote on it.
Asked this week why the two measures were being handled so differently, the Republican leader didn’t bother making up excuses. He said simply, “Because I get to decide what we vote on.”
This grade-school taunt masks a deep current of fear and loathing. Loathing, because Mr. McConnell is a longtime enemy of campaign finance reform. Killing such efforts can seem like his singular legislative passion.
The fear is less targeted, but even more existential. Ever the shrewd political animal, Mr. McConnell is well aware that a majority of Americans favor overhauling a system they see as broken and unfair. In a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll from September, 77 percent of respondents said reducing corruption and the influence of special interests was either the most important or a very important issue facing the nation. Having his members blamed for derailing a major reform package could prove politically risky. Thus Mr. McConnell turns to his go-to move: stonewalling. (...)
H.R. 1 would put an end to at least some of the vile voter suppression practices that Republicans have embraced in recent years. Which goes to the heart of the party’s opposition.
Well before President Trump erupted on the scene, Republicans made the calculation that, with demographics trending against them, their best strategy was to make voting harder rather than easier, particularly for certain nonwhite segments of the electorate. Across the nation, they have pursued voter restriction tactics with vigor. Any effort to expand access to the ballot box sets off alarm bells within the party.
This leaves Republicans in the peculiar position of arguing that weeding out corruption, reducing the influence of special interests and protecting voting rights are inherently Democratic values.
The bill is the Democrats’ chief policy priority and covers close to 700 pages. H.R. 1, as it is officially known, seeks, among other reforms, to strengthen ethics laws for lawmakers and lobbyists, increase voting access, improve voting security, tighten campaign finance laws and create an alternative campaign-finance system geared toward small donors.
To advance the bill, Democratic leaders had to work through more than 70 proposed amendments. Some were embraced, including several aimed at spotlighting questionable behavior in the Trump administration. One, for instance, bars federal money from being spent at businesses owned or controlled by the president or other top administration officials. Others were rejected, including a plan to lower the voting age to 16.As a sign of Democrats’ commitment to a cause that helped power its takeover of the House, the bill’s passage was an important achievement. As a practical legislative matter, it’s a bit of a hollow victory. As fired up as Democrats are to shake up the system, Republicans are perhaps even more fired up to stop them.
The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has been openly hostile to the anticorruption package since its inception. This week he made clear that he would refuse even to bring it up for a vote.
Think of H.R. 1 as the Merrick Garland of reform legislation.
Mr. McConnell called the bill the “Democrat Politician Protection Act”(and a “turkey”) and predicted that lawmakers who back it will suffer come re-election time. As political logic, this is questionable. If the Republican leader really thought the package was a loser, he would absolutely bring it to the floor to force Democratic lawmakers to own it — which is, notably, the path he has pledged to pursue with the Green New Deal, which is supported by many Democrats. The Green New Deal, an assortment of ideas for fighting climate change and remaking the economy, is even more sprawling and amorphous than the For the People Act. Mr. McConnell is panting to have members vote on it.
Asked this week why the two measures were being handled so differently, the Republican leader didn’t bother making up excuses. He said simply, “Because I get to decide what we vote on.”
This grade-school taunt masks a deep current of fear and loathing. Loathing, because Mr. McConnell is a longtime enemy of campaign finance reform. Killing such efforts can seem like his singular legislative passion.
The fear is less targeted, but even more existential. Ever the shrewd political animal, Mr. McConnell is well aware that a majority of Americans favor overhauling a system they see as broken and unfair. In a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll from September, 77 percent of respondents said reducing corruption and the influence of special interests was either the most important or a very important issue facing the nation. Having his members blamed for derailing a major reform package could prove politically risky. Thus Mr. McConnell turns to his go-to move: stonewalling. (...)
H.R. 1 would put an end to at least some of the vile voter suppression practices that Republicans have embraced in recent years. Which goes to the heart of the party’s opposition.
Well before President Trump erupted on the scene, Republicans made the calculation that, with demographics trending against them, their best strategy was to make voting harder rather than easier, particularly for certain nonwhite segments of the electorate. Across the nation, they have pursued voter restriction tactics with vigor. Any effort to expand access to the ballot box sets off alarm bells within the party.
This leaves Republicans in the peculiar position of arguing that weeding out corruption, reducing the influence of special interests and protecting voting rights are inherently Democratic values.
by The Editorial Board, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Mark Pernice and Damon Winter/The New York Times
Don't Be Distracted
Israel and the deaths of Palestinian children
Over the past few weeks, there has been a furious political controversy over whether Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a Somali American Muslim, is anti-Semitic. Omar has been critical of the influence of pro-Israel lobbying on the U.S. government, and said members of Congress are expected to show “allegiance” and “pledge support” to Israel. In response, Omar has been accused of hating Jews. Bret Stephens has said Omar “knows exactly what she is doing” and is intentionally evoking stereotypes about Jewish conspiracies. Meghan McCain nearly came to tears on The View as she described Omar’s remarks as “very scary.” National Review’s Kevin Williamson said Democrats have a “major problem in the form of Jew-hating weirdos,” hauling out as his prime example Louis Farrakhan, a man whose entire significance in contemporary American politics is being denounced or being the subject of demands that others denounce him.
The reaction to Omar is, as plenty have pointed out, absurd. The specific facts she alleges should be uncontroversial. Politicians of both parties do routinely pledge their heartfelt support for Israel. Here’s Nancy Pelosi: “I have said to people when they ask me, if this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain would be our commitment to our aid, I don’t even call it our aid, our cooperation with Israel. That’s fundamental to who we are.” And while I think Omar is wrong about the specific way that Israel’s influence in Washington works (it’s mostly ideological rather than financial), there is absolutely a fixed bipartisan consensus that support for Israel should be fundamental for Americans. The United States gives Israel billions of dollars in military aid each year, which the Congressional Research Service says “has helped transform Israel’s armed forces into one of the most technologically sophisticated militaries in the world.” U.S. military aid for Israel, it says, “has been designed to maintain Israel’s ‘qualitative military edge’ (QME) over neighboring militaries.” U.S. politicians routinely go to AIPAC and give slobbering speeches about how much they love Israel. Ilhan Omar’s words may have been chosen in a way that invited more controversy than needed, but the points she was making were quite true.
However: I am not really interested in litigating the controversy around Omar herself. In fact, I think the Left is somewhat falling into a trap here, because we are having the wrong discussion. I see many of my friends and colleagues getting into long arguments over whether it is or is not unfair to call Omar’s remarks anti-Semitic. It is important to fight back against smears, but I am worried that in doing so, we are not spending sufficient time discussing what I think is a far more important issue: the grotesque ongoing crime the state of Israel is committing against the Palestinian people. When we are having a fight about the meaning of anti-Semitism, or even having a meta-conversation about the influence of Israel rather than the actions of Israel, we are squandering time that could be spent discussing something far more important: Israel is murdering Palestinian children with impunity.
Last week, an independent commission of the UN Human Rights Council released a report on Israel’s 2018 conduct in Gaza. Last year, there were a number of protests by Gazans at the border. Israel responded to these protests by opening fire with live ammunition, killing 183 Palestinians. A further 6,000 were wounded with ammunition. (...)
The UN report provides far more disturbing details of Israel’s actions at the protests. Not only were thousands of Palestinians shot, but many of them were shot far from the border wall, and many of them weren’t even participating in the protest. Worse, those shot included children, disabled people, journalists, and paramedics. Journalists were even shot while wearing PRESS identification and paramedics were shot in uniform. And this wasn’t some “fog of war” situation: These people were shot by precision snipers. The UN report concludes that there is strong evidence Israel committed international crimes, by intentionally shooting children, disabled people, journalists, and medics.
Here are some of the individual accounts from the report. They are disturbing in the extreme:
Over the past few weeks, there has been a furious political controversy over whether Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a Somali American Muslim, is anti-Semitic. Omar has been critical of the influence of pro-Israel lobbying on the U.S. government, and said members of Congress are expected to show “allegiance” and “pledge support” to Israel. In response, Omar has been accused of hating Jews. Bret Stephens has said Omar “knows exactly what she is doing” and is intentionally evoking stereotypes about Jewish conspiracies. Meghan McCain nearly came to tears on The View as she described Omar’s remarks as “very scary.” National Review’s Kevin Williamson said Democrats have a “major problem in the form of Jew-hating weirdos,” hauling out as his prime example Louis Farrakhan, a man whose entire significance in contemporary American politics is being denounced or being the subject of demands that others denounce him.
The reaction to Omar is, as plenty have pointed out, absurd. The specific facts she alleges should be uncontroversial. Politicians of both parties do routinely pledge their heartfelt support for Israel. Here’s Nancy Pelosi: “I have said to people when they ask me, if this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain would be our commitment to our aid, I don’t even call it our aid, our cooperation with Israel. That’s fundamental to who we are.” And while I think Omar is wrong about the specific way that Israel’s influence in Washington works (it’s mostly ideological rather than financial), there is absolutely a fixed bipartisan consensus that support for Israel should be fundamental for Americans. The United States gives Israel billions of dollars in military aid each year, which the Congressional Research Service says “has helped transform Israel’s armed forces into one of the most technologically sophisticated militaries in the world.” U.S. military aid for Israel, it says, “has been designed to maintain Israel’s ‘qualitative military edge’ (QME) over neighboring militaries.” U.S. politicians routinely go to AIPAC and give slobbering speeches about how much they love Israel. Ilhan Omar’s words may have been chosen in a way that invited more controversy than needed, but the points she was making were quite true.
However: I am not really interested in litigating the controversy around Omar herself. In fact, I think the Left is somewhat falling into a trap here, because we are having the wrong discussion. I see many of my friends and colleagues getting into long arguments over whether it is or is not unfair to call Omar’s remarks anti-Semitic. It is important to fight back against smears, but I am worried that in doing so, we are not spending sufficient time discussing what I think is a far more important issue: the grotesque ongoing crime the state of Israel is committing against the Palestinian people. When we are having a fight about the meaning of anti-Semitism, or even having a meta-conversation about the influence of Israel rather than the actions of Israel, we are squandering time that could be spent discussing something far more important: Israel is murdering Palestinian children with impunity.Last week, an independent commission of the UN Human Rights Council released a report on Israel’s 2018 conduct in Gaza. Last year, there were a number of protests by Gazans at the border. Israel responded to these protests by opening fire with live ammunition, killing 183 Palestinians. A further 6,000 were wounded with ammunition. (...)
The UN report provides far more disturbing details of Israel’s actions at the protests. Not only were thousands of Palestinians shot, but many of them were shot far from the border wall, and many of them weren’t even participating in the protest. Worse, those shot included children, disabled people, journalists, and paramedics. Journalists were even shot while wearing PRESS identification and paramedics were shot in uniform. And this wasn’t some “fog of war” situation: These people were shot by precision snipers. The UN report concludes that there is strong evidence Israel committed international crimes, by intentionally shooting children, disabled people, journalists, and medics.
Here are some of the individual accounts from the report. They are disturbing in the extreme:
- Israeli forces shot a schoolboy in the face as he distributed sandwiches to demonstrators, 300 m from the separation fence. His hearing is now permanently impaired.
- Mohammad was a footballer. At approximately 9 a.m., Israeli forces shot him with a single bullet in both legs while he was walking alone approximately 150 m from the separation fence. His injuries ended his football career.
- Naji, a mechanic from the Bureij refugee camp, was killed with a shot to the abdomen by Israeli forces as he stood wrapped in a Palestinian flag, 300 m from the separation fence.
- Israeli forces shot Yousef, a student journalist, in the legs with two bullets in immediate succession. He was wearing a blue vest marked “Press” while photographing the demonstrations approximately 800 m from the separation fence. His right leg had to be amputated.
- Israeli forces shot Mohammad, a student athlete, in the back of his right leg as he gave onions to demonstrators to relieve tear-gas symptoms, approximately 300 m from the fence. His leg had to be amputated.
- Israeli forces killed Abed, from Beit Lahia, when they shot him in the back of the head as he ran, carrying a tyre, away from and about 400 m from the separation fence.
- Bader, from Jabaliya, was killed by Israeli forces when they shot him in the head as he stood smoking a cigarette 300 m from the separation fence.
- Israeli forces injured a schoolgirl with bullet fragmentation. As she lay on the ground, four men attempted to evacuate her. The forces shot three of them, killing Marwan Qudieh (45) from Khuzaa village and injuring a potato seller and another man in the legs. One of the rescuers had to have a leg amputated. (...)
- Israeli snipers shot and killed a double amputee in a wheelchair, and two men who walked with crutches:Fadi, from Khan Younis, had had both legs amputated following an Israeli airstrike in 2008. On 14 May, Israeli snipers shot him in the chest at the Abasan Al-Jadida protest site, where he was sitting in his wheelchair with two friends approximately 300 m from the separation fence. He died immediately. [Note that the reason Fadi was a double amputee in the first place was that Israel had bombed him.]
- Ahmad, from the Jabaliya refugee camp, walked with crutches, having been injured by Israeli forces during a demonstration in 2017. On 20 April, Israeli forces shot him in the back of the head as he sat on a hill approximately 150 m from the separation fence. He died that day.
- Mohammad, from the Jabaliya refugee camp, walked with crutches. On 26 October, Israeli forces killed him with a shot to the head, approximately 200 m from the separation fence.
On a single day, 60 demonstrators were shot and killed. Many survivors are now permanently disabled, and will live for decades in chronic pain and discomfort. A witness describes the scene:
What was notable was the amount of injured people. And the slow, methodical shooting. Every few minutes… you would hear a shot ring out and you would see someone fall. And then another shot and another person fell. It went on for hours… I saw a man who had been shot in the throat, I didn’t see it happen but I saw the immediate aftermath. He was covered in blood. I saw a man who had been shot in the head… There was a constant stream of bloody bodies being carried back towards the ambulances. It was surreal and endless. It became almost normal, it was happening so often. A shot, a person falling, people carrying the body away. The number of wounded was astonishing. I couldn’t say how many people I saw who were shot because it was so high. I have covered wars in Syria, Yemen, Libya. I have never seen anything like this. The slow methodical shooting. It was just shocking…
This is monstrous. Sickening. Thinking about what the Israeli government did should turn your stomach. This was not a “both sides” situation. Some demonstrators hurled stones, but these are unarmed people going up against one of the most powerful and sophisticated militaries in the world, with billions of dollars of U.S. weaponry. The demonstrators did not rain terror down upon Israel. They tried (and failed) to cross a border, and they were murdered in cold blood. Israel made it clear that they would tolerate no challenge to their authority: This was not about a perceived physical threat, it was about a threat to their legitimacy. Dissent could not be tolerated and had to be punished through the harshest possible means.
You may be wondering why Israel, The Middle East’s Only Democracy™, would do something like this. Aren’t they the good guys? In Bret Stephens’ article condemning Ilhan Omar, he says it’s “a shame” Omar doesn’t like Israel, because “Israel is the only country in its region that embraces the sorts of values the Democratic Party claims to champion.” (“When was the last time there was a gay-pride parade in Ramallah?” he asks.) Stephens does not mention the mass murder of dissidents, because it would make this argument seem somewhat ridiculous. It’s also hard for some to believe—Israel brags about how humane and restrained it is, why would they deliberately shoot disabled people? Here I think the answer is quite clear: Israel did not necessarily shoot disabled people and paramedics because they were disabled people and paramedics. Instead, snipers were given free rein to fire at will at the demonstrators, and because Israel has spent so long dehumanizing Palestinians and treating them as a terrifying threat to its security, the snipers simply found targets and took them out.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
What was notable was the amount of injured people. And the slow, methodical shooting. Every few minutes… you would hear a shot ring out and you would see someone fall. And then another shot and another person fell. It went on for hours… I saw a man who had been shot in the throat, I didn’t see it happen but I saw the immediate aftermath. He was covered in blood. I saw a man who had been shot in the head… There was a constant stream of bloody bodies being carried back towards the ambulances. It was surreal and endless. It became almost normal, it was happening so often. A shot, a person falling, people carrying the body away. The number of wounded was astonishing. I couldn’t say how many people I saw who were shot because it was so high. I have covered wars in Syria, Yemen, Libya. I have never seen anything like this. The slow methodical shooting. It was just shocking…
This is monstrous. Sickening. Thinking about what the Israeli government did should turn your stomach. This was not a “both sides” situation. Some demonstrators hurled stones, but these are unarmed people going up against one of the most powerful and sophisticated militaries in the world, with billions of dollars of U.S. weaponry. The demonstrators did not rain terror down upon Israel. They tried (and failed) to cross a border, and they were murdered in cold blood. Israel made it clear that they would tolerate no challenge to their authority: This was not about a perceived physical threat, it was about a threat to their legitimacy. Dissent could not be tolerated and had to be punished through the harshest possible means.
You may be wondering why Israel, The Middle East’s Only Democracy™, would do something like this. Aren’t they the good guys? In Bret Stephens’ article condemning Ilhan Omar, he says it’s “a shame” Omar doesn’t like Israel, because “Israel is the only country in its region that embraces the sorts of values the Democratic Party claims to champion.” (“When was the last time there was a gay-pride parade in Ramallah?” he asks.) Stephens does not mention the mass murder of dissidents, because it would make this argument seem somewhat ridiculous. It’s also hard for some to believe—Israel brags about how humane and restrained it is, why would they deliberately shoot disabled people? Here I think the answer is quite clear: Israel did not necessarily shoot disabled people and paramedics because they were disabled people and paramedics. Instead, snipers were given free rein to fire at will at the demonstrators, and because Israel has spent so long dehumanizing Palestinians and treating them as a terrifying threat to its security, the snipers simply found targets and took them out.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: Getty
[ed. See also: Why Does Congress Care More About Jewish Feelings Than Palestinian Rights? (Forward)]
[ed. See also: Why Does Congress Care More About Jewish Feelings Than Palestinian Rights? (Forward)]
Is Japan Losing Its Umami?
Yasuo Yamamoto has a secret – or more precisely, 68 of them. On a recent morning on the Japanese island of Shodoshima, the fifth-generation soy sauce brewer slid open the door to his family’s wooden storehouse to reveal 68 massive cedar barrels caked in a fungus-filled crust. As he climbed up a creaky staircase into his dark, cobwebbed loft, every inch of the planked walkway, beams and ceiling was covered in centuries’ worth of black bacteria, causing the thick brown goo inside the barrels to bubble. The entire building was alive.
“This is what gives our soy sauce its unique taste,” Yamamoto said, pointing to a 150-year-old wooden barrel. “Today, less than 1% of soy sauce in Japan is still made this way.”
Until 70 years ago, all Japanese soy sauce was made this way, and it tasted completely different to what the world knows today. But despite a government ordinance to modernise production after World War Two, a few traditional brewers continue to make soy sauce the old-fashioned way, and Yamamoto is the most important of them all. Not only has he made it his mission to show the world how real soy sauce is supposed to taste, but he’s leading a nationwide effort to preserve the secret ingredient in a 750-year-old recipe before it disappears.
Different dimension
Soy sauce (shoyu) is arguably the single most important seasoning in Japan’s Unesco-inscribed Washoku cuisine. It’s found in every kitchen, used in nearly every meal and placed on every table in Japanese restaurants from Tokyo to Texas. More than just a flavour, its signature umami savouriness is an entirely different dimension of taste – so much so that umami was added as one of the five basic human tastes alongside sweet, sour, salty and bitter in 1908.
When it’s aged and fermented in a wooden barrel, soy sauce can be as sophisticated as a fine wine, but today, most of the world dips its sushi in the equivalent of a cheap cask rosé. That’s because in order to keep up with demand and increase production in the late 1940s, the Japanese government encouraged brewers to ditch the traditional wooden barrels used to ferment food, known as kioke, adapt stainless steel vats and cut the multi-year fermenting process to just three months.
According to Yamamoto, a kioke isn’t just a vessel, it’s the essential ingredient needed to make soy sauce, as the grain of the wood is home to millions of microbes that deepen and enrich the umami flavour. Because this bacteria can’t survive in steel tanks, many commercial companies pump their soy sauces full of additives. So unless you’ve visited an ancient craft brewer or artisanal store in Japan, you’ve likely only tasted a thin, salty imitation of a complex, nuanced brew.
More than soy
For the past 150 years, the Yamamotos and their millions of microbes have been making the family’s Yamaroku soy sauce by mixing soybeans with wheat, salt and water, and letting it ferment in a four-year process. But as more and more of Japan’s soy brewers have swapped their wooden barrels for steel tanks, a big problem has occurred: the country is running out of kioke, and almost no-one knows how to build them. In the last seven years, Yamamoto has set out to learn this ancient craft and teach it to others to try to ensure its survival.
What’s at stake is something much bigger than soy sauce. Until a century ago, Japan’s five main fermented seasonings (soy sauce, miso, vinegar, mirin and sake) were all made in kioke. Today, only 3,000 kioke are used in Japan to make soy sauce, and far fewer are used to ferment the country’s other seasoning staples. When these natural fermentation chambers are replaced with steel vats, you lose the authentic taste of traditional Japanese cuisine. And if they were to vanish completely, so would part of Japan’s cultural and culinary soul.
“Base seasoning is mostly mass produced. Hardly any real products left,” Yamamoto said. “When the ability to produce kioke barrels disappears … the main ingredients will also disappear. There is a need to preserve the real thing and pass it on to my children and grandchildren’s generations. That’s our mission.” (...)
Kioke custodian
Today, there are more than 1,400 soy sauce companies in Japan, and Yamaroku is one of the last to only use kioke. While this distinction has helped Yamamoto revive the family business in a more craft brew-friendly era, it also means that his family’s fragile ecosystem faces an uncertain future. Because kioke can only last about 150 years, Yamamoto’s ancestors never had to make them. Now, many of his barrels are on the brink of becoming unusable.
Before World War Two, hundreds of companies across Japan built kioke for shoyu, sake, mirin and other seasonings. Today, there’s only one: Fujii Seiokesho. When Yamamoto contacted them in 2009, he discovered that they hadn’t received an order for a new kioke in 70 years, and had spent the past seven decades repairing the ageing barrels still used around Japan. What’s more, he learned the youngest cooper at the three-person company was 68 years old, had no successors and was retiring in 2020. So, while Yamamoto could buy his barrel, soon no-one would be available to fix it.
Recognising that the future of his company and all authentically fermented Japanese foods depended on the continuation of this craft, Yamamoto and two carpenters travelled to Fujii Seiokesho’s workshop outside Osaka in 2012 to learn the ancient art for themselves. After three days of instruction and a year of practice, they made their first barrel in 2013.
Hidden treasure
Making these mammoth 4,000-litre barrels requires a team effort. More than 40 planks of 100-year-old Yoshino cedar are rounded and laid vertically to form a cylinder. To lock the planks into place, Fujii Seiokesho’s craftsmen told Yamamoto not to use glue, but bamboo. After talking to a neighbour, Yamamoto learned that his grandfather had planted a bamboo grove decades earlier for exactly that reason, knowing that someone in the family would one day need to build more barrels.
For each kioke, Yamamoto searches in the grove for just the right shoot, cuts it and shaves it down to make elastic strips that he slowly weaves into braided bamboo hoops. These cylindrical hoops are then hoisted atop the barrel and carefully hammered into place to prevent any liquid from seeping out.
Since 2013, Yamamoto and his colleagues have constructed 23 barrels, but he hasn’t kept most of them. As word of his quest to revive kioke craftsmanship spread, Yamamoto has started receiving orders from other fermented food producers across the country. “When these three people [at Fujii Seiokesho] retire, they won’t be making barrels anymore, which means I’ll be the only person left who can make them,” he said.
by Eliot Stein & Mari Shibata, BBC | Read more:
Image: uncredited
“This is what gives our soy sauce its unique taste,” Yamamoto said, pointing to a 150-year-old wooden barrel. “Today, less than 1% of soy sauce in Japan is still made this way.”
Until 70 years ago, all Japanese soy sauce was made this way, and it tasted completely different to what the world knows today. But despite a government ordinance to modernise production after World War Two, a few traditional brewers continue to make soy sauce the old-fashioned way, and Yamamoto is the most important of them all. Not only has he made it his mission to show the world how real soy sauce is supposed to taste, but he’s leading a nationwide effort to preserve the secret ingredient in a 750-year-old recipe before it disappears.
Different dimension
Soy sauce (shoyu) is arguably the single most important seasoning in Japan’s Unesco-inscribed Washoku cuisine. It’s found in every kitchen, used in nearly every meal and placed on every table in Japanese restaurants from Tokyo to Texas. More than just a flavour, its signature umami savouriness is an entirely different dimension of taste – so much so that umami was added as one of the five basic human tastes alongside sweet, sour, salty and bitter in 1908.
When it’s aged and fermented in a wooden barrel, soy sauce can be as sophisticated as a fine wine, but today, most of the world dips its sushi in the equivalent of a cheap cask rosé. That’s because in order to keep up with demand and increase production in the late 1940s, the Japanese government encouraged brewers to ditch the traditional wooden barrels used to ferment food, known as kioke, adapt stainless steel vats and cut the multi-year fermenting process to just three months.According to Yamamoto, a kioke isn’t just a vessel, it’s the essential ingredient needed to make soy sauce, as the grain of the wood is home to millions of microbes that deepen and enrich the umami flavour. Because this bacteria can’t survive in steel tanks, many commercial companies pump their soy sauces full of additives. So unless you’ve visited an ancient craft brewer or artisanal store in Japan, you’ve likely only tasted a thin, salty imitation of a complex, nuanced brew.
More than soy
For the past 150 years, the Yamamotos and their millions of microbes have been making the family’s Yamaroku soy sauce by mixing soybeans with wheat, salt and water, and letting it ferment in a four-year process. But as more and more of Japan’s soy brewers have swapped their wooden barrels for steel tanks, a big problem has occurred: the country is running out of kioke, and almost no-one knows how to build them. In the last seven years, Yamamoto has set out to learn this ancient craft and teach it to others to try to ensure its survival.
What’s at stake is something much bigger than soy sauce. Until a century ago, Japan’s five main fermented seasonings (soy sauce, miso, vinegar, mirin and sake) were all made in kioke. Today, only 3,000 kioke are used in Japan to make soy sauce, and far fewer are used to ferment the country’s other seasoning staples. When these natural fermentation chambers are replaced with steel vats, you lose the authentic taste of traditional Japanese cuisine. And if they were to vanish completely, so would part of Japan’s cultural and culinary soul.
“Base seasoning is mostly mass produced. Hardly any real products left,” Yamamoto said. “When the ability to produce kioke barrels disappears … the main ingredients will also disappear. There is a need to preserve the real thing and pass it on to my children and grandchildren’s generations. That’s our mission.” (...)
Kioke custodian
Today, there are more than 1,400 soy sauce companies in Japan, and Yamaroku is one of the last to only use kioke. While this distinction has helped Yamamoto revive the family business in a more craft brew-friendly era, it also means that his family’s fragile ecosystem faces an uncertain future. Because kioke can only last about 150 years, Yamamoto’s ancestors never had to make them. Now, many of his barrels are on the brink of becoming unusable.
Before World War Two, hundreds of companies across Japan built kioke for shoyu, sake, mirin and other seasonings. Today, there’s only one: Fujii Seiokesho. When Yamamoto contacted them in 2009, he discovered that they hadn’t received an order for a new kioke in 70 years, and had spent the past seven decades repairing the ageing barrels still used around Japan. What’s more, he learned the youngest cooper at the three-person company was 68 years old, had no successors and was retiring in 2020. So, while Yamamoto could buy his barrel, soon no-one would be available to fix it.
Recognising that the future of his company and all authentically fermented Japanese foods depended on the continuation of this craft, Yamamoto and two carpenters travelled to Fujii Seiokesho’s workshop outside Osaka in 2012 to learn the ancient art for themselves. After three days of instruction and a year of practice, they made their first barrel in 2013.
Hidden treasure
Making these mammoth 4,000-litre barrels requires a team effort. More than 40 planks of 100-year-old Yoshino cedar are rounded and laid vertically to form a cylinder. To lock the planks into place, Fujii Seiokesho’s craftsmen told Yamamoto not to use glue, but bamboo. After talking to a neighbour, Yamamoto learned that his grandfather had planted a bamboo grove decades earlier for exactly that reason, knowing that someone in the family would one day need to build more barrels.
For each kioke, Yamamoto searches in the grove for just the right shoot, cuts it and shaves it down to make elastic strips that he slowly weaves into braided bamboo hoops. These cylindrical hoops are then hoisted atop the barrel and carefully hammered into place to prevent any liquid from seeping out.
Since 2013, Yamamoto and his colleagues have constructed 23 barrels, but he hasn’t kept most of them. As word of his quest to revive kioke craftsmanship spread, Yamamoto has started receiving orders from other fermented food producers across the country. “When these three people [at Fujii Seiokesho] retire, they won’t be making barrels anymore, which means I’ll be the only person left who can make them,” he said.
by Eliot Stein & Mari Shibata, BBC | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Friday, March 8, 2019
Fleabag Returns
If you are a Fleabag devotee, you could only find yourself whispering in reverential awe as the opening episode seated our antihero at a family dinner next to … a Catholic priest. “Oh,” I found myself murmuring and, as Fleabag looked meaningfully to camera, I mentally bowed the knee. “Of course.”
As soon as the emotionally pulverising end of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s first series about the super-combustible eponymous thirtysomething was revealed, fans wondered how there could be a second run. Where could she go from there?
Desecration makes perfect sense. Defilement and corruption of the divine. We should, we see as she watches him drink and light up a fag, have known.
The priest, played by Andrew Scott with his customary acuity and lightness of touch, is at the dinner table because time has moved on by just over a year and he is to marry the newly engaged couple; Fleabag’s useless father (Bill Paterson) and malignant godmother (the Oscar-winning-since-last-time Olivia Colman). Across from her sit brittle, unforgiving sister Claire and brother-in-law, Martin, whom we last saw trying to kiss Fleabag then persuading Claire it had been the other way round. The air is thick with bitterness, rancour and betrayal even before anyone speaks.
But oh, when they speak …
It is, in short, an immaculately scripted (by Waller-Bridge) and performed (by everyone) half-hour – certainly up there with the best of the first series, and probably up with the best of TV comedy-drama entire. Waller-Bridge’s dialogue is whetted to such a fine edge that you hardly notice when it strikes – you’re too busy laughing at the joke, the audacity – until the blood starts to well up in the wound a second later. Someone remarks that Claire looks happy, and she says she has worked hard at it. “It’s not just about eating and drinking well either,” she says, looking daggers at Fleabag who has tried purging her sins via a health kick since we last saw her. “Putting pine nuts on your salad doesn’t make you a grownup.” “Fucking does,” mutters Fleabag, whose natural state is mutiny. Claire returns to the point when it turns out that their father has not given Fleabag the expected cheque for her birthday, but a voucher for counselling. “I don’t believe you can pay your problems away,” says Claire. “You have to face who you are and suffer the consequences. It’s the only road to happiness.” “Maybe happiness isn’t about what you believe but who you believe,” snaps back Fleabag, flaying skin with every word.
Only in Fleabag’s world does the revelation that the priest doesn’t have any contact with his family because his brother is a paedophile come as light relief. “I am aware,” he says helpfully, “of the irony of that.”
After the flaying, Claire runs to the loo. Fleabag follows. “You’ve been ages. Are you pissed off or are you doing a poo?” In fact, she’s having a miscarriage and her refusal to tell anyone or go to hospital plays out, unbelievably and yet perfectly credibly, as farce. Fleabag claims it is she who has miscarried and Claire insists with heartbreaking fury that “it’s gone, it’s gone” and there’s no need for a doctor. Dinner ends with a literal family fight that sees at least three people going home with bloodied noses.
Everything is here in this densely packed 30-minute nugget. Laughs that come from the deepest part of you, where your better judgment flails and fails. Waller-Bridge’s fleetness as she pivots to camera and back, capturing her tiny moment each time, so we see her in the round and cannot help but follow her wherever in her awfulness she leads. The vivid portraits of human frailty, weakness and – in Martin’s case – near-evil (his toxicity here was so potent it was almost visible; if the priest had performed an exorcism instead of ordered pudding it would not have gone amiss) drawn with just a handful of lines each from an unflinching, excoriating, lethally funny writer whose performers knock every one out of the park.
[ed. Big Fleabag fan. See also: 'It's a WOW from me' – fans review the return of Fleabag (The Guardian).]
As soon as the emotionally pulverising end of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s first series about the super-combustible eponymous thirtysomething was revealed, fans wondered how there could be a second run. Where could she go from there?
Desecration makes perfect sense. Defilement and corruption of the divine. We should, we see as she watches him drink and light up a fag, have known.The priest, played by Andrew Scott with his customary acuity and lightness of touch, is at the dinner table because time has moved on by just over a year and he is to marry the newly engaged couple; Fleabag’s useless father (Bill Paterson) and malignant godmother (the Oscar-winning-since-last-time Olivia Colman). Across from her sit brittle, unforgiving sister Claire and brother-in-law, Martin, whom we last saw trying to kiss Fleabag then persuading Claire it had been the other way round. The air is thick with bitterness, rancour and betrayal even before anyone speaks.
But oh, when they speak …
It is, in short, an immaculately scripted (by Waller-Bridge) and performed (by everyone) half-hour – certainly up there with the best of the first series, and probably up with the best of TV comedy-drama entire. Waller-Bridge’s dialogue is whetted to such a fine edge that you hardly notice when it strikes – you’re too busy laughing at the joke, the audacity – until the blood starts to well up in the wound a second later. Someone remarks that Claire looks happy, and she says she has worked hard at it. “It’s not just about eating and drinking well either,” she says, looking daggers at Fleabag who has tried purging her sins via a health kick since we last saw her. “Putting pine nuts on your salad doesn’t make you a grownup.” “Fucking does,” mutters Fleabag, whose natural state is mutiny. Claire returns to the point when it turns out that their father has not given Fleabag the expected cheque for her birthday, but a voucher for counselling. “I don’t believe you can pay your problems away,” says Claire. “You have to face who you are and suffer the consequences. It’s the only road to happiness.” “Maybe happiness isn’t about what you believe but who you believe,” snaps back Fleabag, flaying skin with every word.
Only in Fleabag’s world does the revelation that the priest doesn’t have any contact with his family because his brother is a paedophile come as light relief. “I am aware,” he says helpfully, “of the irony of that.”
After the flaying, Claire runs to the loo. Fleabag follows. “You’ve been ages. Are you pissed off or are you doing a poo?” In fact, she’s having a miscarriage and her refusal to tell anyone or go to hospital plays out, unbelievably and yet perfectly credibly, as farce. Fleabag claims it is she who has miscarried and Claire insists with heartbreaking fury that “it’s gone, it’s gone” and there’s no need for a doctor. Dinner ends with a literal family fight that sees at least three people going home with bloodied noses.
Everything is here in this densely packed 30-minute nugget. Laughs that come from the deepest part of you, where your better judgment flails and fails. Waller-Bridge’s fleetness as she pivots to camera and back, capturing her tiny moment each time, so we see her in the round and cannot help but follow her wherever in her awfulness she leads. The vivid portraits of human frailty, weakness and – in Martin’s case – near-evil (his toxicity here was so potent it was almost visible; if the priest had performed an exorcism instead of ordered pudding it would not have gone amiss) drawn with just a handful of lines each from an unflinching, excoriating, lethally funny writer whose performers knock every one out of the park.
by Lucy Mangan, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: BBC/Two Brothers/Luke Varley[ed. Big Fleabag fan. See also: 'It's a WOW from me' – fans review the return of Fleabag (The Guardian).]
The Case Against Octopus Farming
A couple years ago, Inky, an octopus at a New Zealand aquarium, made headlines with a daring escape — he busted out of his enclosure, travelled eight feet across the floor, and wriggled into a tiny drain pipe that emptied directly into the ocean. This didn’t surprise many octopus enthusiasts. Octopuses are highly intelligent animals; they use tools, feel pain, make plans, and communicate with one another to coordinate hunting.
If some people have their way, they’ll soon be confined in underwater factory farms for human consumption.
Such a development would be terrible for octopuses. Octopuses are solitary, carnivorous animals badly suited to captivity. Confined in tiny cages, they suffer and die; confined together, they kill each other.
But this hasn’t stopped the push to factory farm them. Teams from Spain to China to Chile are testing new methods of intensive octopus farming.
A new study argues that the nascent factory farming of octopuses is a bad idea — a moral and ecological disaster waiting to happen. But there are no octopus factory farms yet — which means that, for once, we could stop a mistake before we make it instead of spending decades recovering from it afterward.
Why octopus factory farms are a bad idea
Octopuses are not a part of a regular diet anywhere in the world, but they’re a delicacy in many countries. Some 350,000 metric tons of octopus are caught annually, and the real numbers may be higher, as fishing is often underreported.
To some, this looks like a business opportunity; octopus could be sold more widely and become a bigger part of the food supply. Researchers are working to figure out how to keep octopuses alive in tiny, featureless cages for long enough to harvest them for food. But “there’s almost zero chance that this represents acceptable welfare to any standard,” Jennifer Jacquet, one of the co-authors of the report, told me.
Factory farming octopus is terrible for the environment, too: “On land, we farm herbivores. In the ocean, we tend to farm animals that are carnivorous, and we have to put more pressure on the oceans,” to catch all of the animals we need to feed to the animals we’re raising for food. “We think that aquaculture will alleviate pressure on wild ecosystems, but it actually exacerbates that pressure,” Jacquet said.
Nonetheless, the group’s report, published in the winter 2019 edition of Issues of Science and Technology, finds that efforts to industrially farm octopus are plunging ahead.
First, there’s a lot of research pointing us to the conclusion that octopuses are conscious, capable, and really, really smart. “Once octopuses have solved a novel problem,” the paper notes, “they retain long-term memory of the solution. One study found that octopuses retained knowledge of how to open a screw-top jar for at least five months. They are also capable of mastering complex aquascapes, conducting extensive foraging trips, and using visual landmarks to navigate.”
However, as Jacquet pointed out to me, it’s not the research literature on octopus intelligence or on consciousness in animals that’s convincing to the general public — it’s the abundant videos available online of octopuses using tools, stealing crabs, camouflaging themselves, and solving problems in their environment. People can recognize an intelligent animal when they see it, whether they’ve read the research on octopus intelligence or not.
Second, the paper points out, “octopus farming has the same environmental consequences as other types of carnivorous aquaculture. And, like other carnivorous aquaculture, octopus farming would increase, not alleviate, pressure on wild aquatic animals.”
Global fisheries are already being depleted by overfishing. Aquaculture, sometimes sold as a solution, often makes this worse by dramatically increasing the demand for fish products. “The over-fishing of the oceans to get food for farmed fish is already a big problem, and this would be made worse if octopus farming became common,” Peter Godfrey-Smith, co-author of the paper, told me in an email. I asked Jacquet whether it’d at least be good for wild octopus if more octopuses for human consumption came from farms. It likely wouldn’t, she said. As long as it’s cost-effective to catch octopus in the wild, we’ll keep doing it — and aquaculture might actually increase demand, by making octopus cuisine more mainstream.
Third, the usual justifications for intensive animal farming don’t hold up in this case. “The case in favor of octopus farming is weak,” the paper points out. “The main markets for farmed octopus — upscale outlets in Japan, South Korea, northern Mediterranean countries, the United States, China, and Australia — are largely food secure” — meaning that the populations in those countries have affordable, consistent access to food that meets both their needs and their preferences. Industrial farming of animals is hard to tackle because many food-insecure populations rely on meat. No one is relying on octopus. It’s a bad idea to change that.
If some people have their way, they’ll soon be confined in underwater factory farms for human consumption.
Such a development would be terrible for octopuses. Octopuses are solitary, carnivorous animals badly suited to captivity. Confined in tiny cages, they suffer and die; confined together, they kill each other.But this hasn’t stopped the push to factory farm them. Teams from Spain to China to Chile are testing new methods of intensive octopus farming.
A new study argues that the nascent factory farming of octopuses is a bad idea — a moral and ecological disaster waiting to happen. But there are no octopus factory farms yet — which means that, for once, we could stop a mistake before we make it instead of spending decades recovering from it afterward.
Why octopus factory farms are a bad idea
Octopuses are not a part of a regular diet anywhere in the world, but they’re a delicacy in many countries. Some 350,000 metric tons of octopus are caught annually, and the real numbers may be higher, as fishing is often underreported.
To some, this looks like a business opportunity; octopus could be sold more widely and become a bigger part of the food supply. Researchers are working to figure out how to keep octopuses alive in tiny, featureless cages for long enough to harvest them for food. But “there’s almost zero chance that this represents acceptable welfare to any standard,” Jennifer Jacquet, one of the co-authors of the report, told me.
Factory farming octopus is terrible for the environment, too: “On land, we farm herbivores. In the ocean, we tend to farm animals that are carnivorous, and we have to put more pressure on the oceans,” to catch all of the animals we need to feed to the animals we’re raising for food. “We think that aquaculture will alleviate pressure on wild ecosystems, but it actually exacerbates that pressure,” Jacquet said.
Nonetheless, the group’s report, published in the winter 2019 edition of Issues of Science and Technology, finds that efforts to industrially farm octopus are plunging ahead.
In China, up to eight different species of octopus are now being experimentally farmed. In Japan, the seafood company Nissui reported hatching octopus eggs in captivity in 2017 and is predicting a fully farmed market-ready octopus by 2020. Many scientists are contributing to the tools and technology to make genetic modifications that may accelerate industrial aquaculture of octopus and other types of cephalopods.Spain, Portugal, Greece, Mexico, and Chile have active octopus farming efforts underway as well. The researchers urge their colleagues working on inventing techniques for industrial farming of octopus to reconsider. There are three key reasons why.
First, there’s a lot of research pointing us to the conclusion that octopuses are conscious, capable, and really, really smart. “Once octopuses have solved a novel problem,” the paper notes, “they retain long-term memory of the solution. One study found that octopuses retained knowledge of how to open a screw-top jar for at least five months. They are also capable of mastering complex aquascapes, conducting extensive foraging trips, and using visual landmarks to navigate.”
However, as Jacquet pointed out to me, it’s not the research literature on octopus intelligence or on consciousness in animals that’s convincing to the general public — it’s the abundant videos available online of octopuses using tools, stealing crabs, camouflaging themselves, and solving problems in their environment. People can recognize an intelligent animal when they see it, whether they’ve read the research on octopus intelligence or not.
Second, the paper points out, “octopus farming has the same environmental consequences as other types of carnivorous aquaculture. And, like other carnivorous aquaculture, octopus farming would increase, not alleviate, pressure on wild aquatic animals.”
Global fisheries are already being depleted by overfishing. Aquaculture, sometimes sold as a solution, often makes this worse by dramatically increasing the demand for fish products. “The over-fishing of the oceans to get food for farmed fish is already a big problem, and this would be made worse if octopus farming became common,” Peter Godfrey-Smith, co-author of the paper, told me in an email. I asked Jacquet whether it’d at least be good for wild octopus if more octopuses for human consumption came from farms. It likely wouldn’t, she said. As long as it’s cost-effective to catch octopus in the wild, we’ll keep doing it — and aquaculture might actually increase demand, by making octopus cuisine more mainstream.
Third, the usual justifications for intensive animal farming don’t hold up in this case. “The case in favor of octopus farming is weak,” the paper points out. “The main markets for farmed octopus — upscale outlets in Japan, South Korea, northern Mediterranean countries, the United States, China, and Australia — are largely food secure” — meaning that the populations in those countries have affordable, consistent access to food that meets both their needs and their preferences. Industrial farming of animals is hard to tackle because many food-insecure populations rely on meat. No one is relying on octopus. It’s a bad idea to change that.
by Kelsey Piper, Vox | Read more:
Image: Wikimedia Commons
[ed. Original article: Issues in Science and Technology by Jacquet et al. here.]
Thursday, March 7, 2019
In Bad Taste
It’s Tuesday, loyalty card double-stamp night at my neighborhood sushi place in Oakland. It’s the kind of spot where the sweaty owner in a headband and his kid assistant slur “irasshaimase!”—welcome!—in tandem when you push open the chime-tinkling door, no matter how harried they look. It’s a place that gives customers what they want: inside-out dragon rolls, seven-dollar glasses of Chardonnay poured nearly to the rim, the NBA on a TV cantilevered high in the corner, and pale, shaggy-battered shrimp tempura as meaty as a kitten’s flexed hind legs.
At the next table, beneath a Mondrian wall grid of squares and rectangles filled with primary colors (cool in the ’90s, washed out now), two women are most of the way through a dinner that has sprawled across several plates. One is talking about her daughter’s skeevy boyfriend. She clutches her phone, which is scrolled to an Instagram pic that busts him with another woman, I guess, and turns it to show her companion, who makes an O-mouth gesture of shock.
Her friend has the last piece of salmon nigiri clenched between slivery, pale wood chopsticks and is dangling it above a sauce dish, which, though shallow, shows a hefty volume of soy sauce cloudy with wasabi. I watch as the friend, focused on dispensing sympathetic outrage, lowers the rice end of her nigiri into the slurry, swabs the dish with it, rotates her wrist so the salmon tile faces down (its free ends, the parts ungripped by chopsticks, flop lazily sauceward), and gives it even more swipes through the soy mixture. The thing she raises to her mouth appears soaked, like a shore bird after an oil spill. She chews and goes right on talking, looking unaware that she has just done something heinous, violating the integrity of a small, rectangular piece of orange-pink flesh striped with dental-tape strands of connective tissue. The former food critic in me winces. This is a crime against taste.
Crimes against taste aren’t prosecutable, of course, but they are clear offenses. By drowning a nice, fresh hunk of raw salmon in soy-wasabi slurry, my table neighbor was guilty of a kind of murder. She’d killed whatever subtlety was in that fish (the faint tang of raw flesh and the mineral richness of fat). Did she even know what she obliterated in that toxic wash of salt and heat? (And for sure, in a modest sushi place like this, there wasn’t a speck of wasabi rhizome in her pea-green paste—only tinted mustard-seed powder. It’s cheaper than real wasabi, hotter, and, for the thing being dipped, an even deadlier poison for ruining flavor.)
But who can say what’s “better”? Do crimes against food need to be policed? Who plays cop? And should anyone, even a professional restaurant critic, dictate the terms of another’s pleasure? Yelp and Instagram have remade food into a realm of boundless relativism, where extracting a thread of universal, objective truth about what’s delicious and what’s gross can be as hard as piercing an algorithm’s code—unless “universal” and “objective” are themselves the problem.
At the next table, beneath a Mondrian wall grid of squares and rectangles filled with primary colors (cool in the ’90s, washed out now), two women are most of the way through a dinner that has sprawled across several plates. One is talking about her daughter’s skeevy boyfriend. She clutches her phone, which is scrolled to an Instagram pic that busts him with another woman, I guess, and turns it to show her companion, who makes an O-mouth gesture of shock.
Her friend has the last piece of salmon nigiri clenched between slivery, pale wood chopsticks and is dangling it above a sauce dish, which, though shallow, shows a hefty volume of soy sauce cloudy with wasabi. I watch as the friend, focused on dispensing sympathetic outrage, lowers the rice end of her nigiri into the slurry, swabs the dish with it, rotates her wrist so the salmon tile faces down (its free ends, the parts ungripped by chopsticks, flop lazily sauceward), and gives it even more swipes through the soy mixture. The thing she raises to her mouth appears soaked, like a shore bird after an oil spill. She chews and goes right on talking, looking unaware that she has just done something heinous, violating the integrity of a small, rectangular piece of orange-pink flesh striped with dental-tape strands of connective tissue. The former food critic in me winces. This is a crime against taste.Crimes against taste aren’t prosecutable, of course, but they are clear offenses. By drowning a nice, fresh hunk of raw salmon in soy-wasabi slurry, my table neighbor was guilty of a kind of murder. She’d killed whatever subtlety was in that fish (the faint tang of raw flesh and the mineral richness of fat). Did she even know what she obliterated in that toxic wash of salt and heat? (And for sure, in a modest sushi place like this, there wasn’t a speck of wasabi rhizome in her pea-green paste—only tinted mustard-seed powder. It’s cheaper than real wasabi, hotter, and, for the thing being dipped, an even deadlier poison for ruining flavor.)
But who can say what’s “better”? Do crimes against food need to be policed? Who plays cop? And should anyone, even a professional restaurant critic, dictate the terms of another’s pleasure? Yelp and Instagram have remade food into a realm of boundless relativism, where extracting a thread of universal, objective truth about what’s delicious and what’s gross can be as hard as piercing an algorithm’s code—unless “universal” and “objective” are themselves the problem.
by John Birdsall, Topic | Read more:
Image: Adrian Samson
Opioid Prescribing Fell. Pain Patients Suffer.
Three years ago this month, as alarms about the over-prescription of opioid painkillers were sounding across the country, the federal government issued course-correcting guidelines for primary care doctors. Prescriptions have fallen notably since then, and the Trump administration is pushing for them to drop by another third by 2021.
But in a letter to be sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday, more than 300 medical experts, including three former White House drug czars, contend that the guidelines are harming one group of vulnerable patients: those with severe chronic pain, who may have been taking high doses of opioids for years without becoming addicted. They say the guidelines are being used as cover by insurers to deny reimbursement and by doctors to turn patients away. As a result, they say, patients who could benefit from the medications are being thrown into withdrawal and suffering renewed pain and a diminished quality of life, even to the point of suicide. (...)
The guidelines are nonbinding, but many of them have become enshrined in state regulations. Therefore, said Dr. Stefan G. Kertesz, an author of the letter who teaches addiction medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, “it’s normal to say from the top: ‘This needs a clarification because we don’t want people hurt.’”
Others say the problem lies not with the guidelines, which urge non-opioid therapies as the first-line treatment for chronic pain, but with their misapplication.
“What the guidelines are being blamed for versus what they actually recommend are two different things,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, who ran the C.D.C. when the guidelines were developed. (...)
The letter to the C.D.C. echoes a November resolution by the American Medical Association, which protested the “misapplication” of the guidelines “by pharmacists, health insurers, pharmacy benefit managers, legislatures, and governmental and private regulatory bodies in ways that prevent or limit access to opioid analgesia.” (...)
Accompanying the experts’ letter are testimonials by hundreds of pain patients detailing struggles in the wake of the guidelines.
The opioid prescribing rate has been falling since 2012, but the amount prescribed per person is still about three times higher than it was in 1999, at the beginning of the addiction crisis, according to the C.D.C. While overdose deaths because of prescription opioids have begun leveling off, deaths from illicit fentanyl and its analogues increased by more than 45 percent in 2017 alone, a phenomenon that the letter writers attribute in part to the crackdown on pain pill prescriptions. (...)
That the guidelines have had widespread impact is not in question. While a handful of hospital systems and states had adopted opioid prescription limits before 2016, the number of institutions have since shot up.
In its annual survey of hospital-based pharmacies last year, the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists asked about opioid monitoring for the first time. In preliminary results, 41 percent said they had done so and some cited the C.D.C. guidelines.
By the end of 2016, seven states had passed legislation limiting opioid prescriptions; by October 2018, 33 states had enacted laws with some type of limit, guidance or requirement related to opioids, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
by Jan Hoffman and Abby Goodnough, NY Times | Read more:
But in a letter to be sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday, more than 300 medical experts, including three former White House drug czars, contend that the guidelines are harming one group of vulnerable patients: those with severe chronic pain, who may have been taking high doses of opioids for years without becoming addicted. They say the guidelines are being used as cover by insurers to deny reimbursement and by doctors to turn patients away. As a result, they say, patients who could benefit from the medications are being thrown into withdrawal and suffering renewed pain and a diminished quality of life, even to the point of suicide. (...)
The guidelines are nonbinding, but many of them have become enshrined in state regulations. Therefore, said Dr. Stefan G. Kertesz, an author of the letter who teaches addiction medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, “it’s normal to say from the top: ‘This needs a clarification because we don’t want people hurt.’”Others say the problem lies not with the guidelines, which urge non-opioid therapies as the first-line treatment for chronic pain, but with their misapplication.
“What the guidelines are being blamed for versus what they actually recommend are two different things,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, who ran the C.D.C. when the guidelines were developed. (...)
The letter to the C.D.C. echoes a November resolution by the American Medical Association, which protested the “misapplication” of the guidelines “by pharmacists, health insurers, pharmacy benefit managers, legislatures, and governmental and private regulatory bodies in ways that prevent or limit access to opioid analgesia.” (...)
Accompanying the experts’ letter are testimonials by hundreds of pain patients detailing struggles in the wake of the guidelines.
The opioid prescribing rate has been falling since 2012, but the amount prescribed per person is still about three times higher than it was in 1999, at the beginning of the addiction crisis, according to the C.D.C. While overdose deaths because of prescription opioids have begun leveling off, deaths from illicit fentanyl and its analogues increased by more than 45 percent in 2017 alone, a phenomenon that the letter writers attribute in part to the crackdown on pain pill prescriptions. (...)
That the guidelines have had widespread impact is not in question. While a handful of hospital systems and states had adopted opioid prescription limits before 2016, the number of institutions have since shot up.
In its annual survey of hospital-based pharmacies last year, the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists asked about opioid monitoring for the first time. In preliminary results, 41 percent said they had done so and some cited the C.D.C. guidelines.
By the end of 2016, seven states had passed legislation limiting opioid prescriptions; by October 2018, 33 states had enacted laws with some type of limit, guidance or requirement related to opioids, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
by Jan Hoffman and Abby Goodnough, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Michael Kirby Smith
[ed. Read the comments. Please, less political pandering and knee-jerk regulatory hysteria. It's only making the problem worse.]
[ed. Read the comments. Please, less political pandering and knee-jerk regulatory hysteria. It's only making the problem worse.]
When Bitcoin Miners Take Over Your Town
EAST WENATCHEE, Washington—Hands on the wheel, eyes squinting against the winter sun, Lauren Miehe eases his Land Rover down the main drag and tells me how he used to spot promising sites to build a bitcoin mine, back in 2013, when he was a freshly arrived techie from Seattle and had just discovered this sleepy rural community.
The attraction then, as now, was the Columbia River, which we can glimpse a few blocks to our left. Bitcoin mining—the complex process in which computers solve a complicated math puzzle to win a stack of virtual currency—uses an inordinate amount of electricity, and thanks to five hydroelectric dams that straddle this stretch of the river, about three hours east of Seattle, miners could buy that power more cheaply here than anywhere else in the nation. Long before locals had even heard the words “cryptocurrency” or “blockchain,” Miehe and his peers realized that this semi-arid agricultural region known as the Mid-Columbia Basin was the best place to mine bitcoin in America—and maybe the world.
The trick, though, was finding a location where you could put all that cheap power to work. You needed an existing building, because in those days, when bitcoin was trading for just a few dollars, no one could afford to build something new. You needed space for a few hundred high-speed computer servers, and also for the heavy-duty cooling system to keep them from melting down as they churned out the trillions of calculations necessary to mine bitcoin. Above all, you needed a location that could handle a lot of electricity—a quarter of a megawatt, maybe, or even a half a megawatt, enough to light up a couple hundred homes.
The best mining sites were the old fruit warehouses—the basin is as famous for its apples as for its megawatts—but those got snapped up early. So Miehe, a tall, gregarious 38-year-old who would go on to set up a string of mines here, learned to look for less obvious solutions. He would roam the side streets and back roads, scanning for defunct businesses that might have once used a lot of power. An old machine shop, say. A closed-down convenience store. Or this: Miehe slows the Land Rover and points to a shuttered carwash sitting forlornly next to a Taco Bell. It has the space, he says. And with the water pumps and heaters, “there’s probably a ton of power distributed not very far from here,” Miehe tells me. “That could be a bitcoin mine.”
These days, Miehe says, a serious miner wouldn’t even look at a site like that. As bitcoin’s soaring price has drawn in thousands of new players worldwide, the strange math at the heart of this cryptocurrency has grown steadily more complicated. Generating a single bitcoin takes a lot more servers than it used to—and a lot more power. Today, a half-megawatt mine, Miehe says, “is nothing.” The commercial miners now pouring into the valley are building sites with tens of thousands of servers and electrical loads of as much as 30 megawatts, or enough to power a neighborhood of 13,000 homes. And in the arms race that cryptocurrency mining has become, even these operations will soon be considered small-scale. Miehe knows of substantially larger mining projects in the basin backed by out-of-state investors from Wall Street, Europe and Asia whose prospecting strategy, as he puts it, amounts to “running around with a checkbook just trying to get in there and establish scale.”
For years, few residents really grasped how appealing their region was to miners, who mainly did their esoteric calculations quietly tucked away in warehouses and basements. But those days are gone. Over the past two years, and especially during 2017, when the price of a single bitcoin jumped from $1,000 to more than $19,000, the region has taken on the vibe of a boomtown. Across the three rural counties of the Mid-Columbia Basin—Chelan, Douglas and Grant—orchards and farm fields now share the rolling landscape with mines of every size, from industrial-scale facilities to repurposed warehouses to cargo containers and even backyard sheds. Outsiders are so eager to turn the basin’s power into cryptocurrency that this winter, several would-be miners from Asia flew their private jet into the local airport, took a rental car to one of the local dams, and, according to a utility official, politely informed staff at the dam visitors center, “We want to see the dam master because we want to buy some electricity.”
The Mid-Columbia Basin isn’t the only location where the virtual realm of cryptocurrency is colliding with the real world of megawatts and real estate. In places like China, Venezuela and Iceland, cheap land and even cheaper electricity have resulted in bustling mining hubs. But the basin, by dint of its early start, has emerged as one of the biggest boomtowns. By the end of 2018, according to some estimates, miners here could account for anywhere from 15 to 30 percent of all bitcoin mining in the world, and impressive shares of other cryptocurrencies, such as Ethereum and Litecoin. And as with any boomtown, that success has created tensions. There have been disputes between miners and locals, bankruptcies and bribery attempts, lawsuits, even a kind of intensifying guerrilla warfare between local utility crews and a shadowy army of bootleg miners who set up their servers in basements and garages and max out the local electrical grids. (...)
For local cryptocurrency enthusiasts, these slings and arrows are all very much worth enduring. They believe not only that cryptocurrency will make them personally very wealthy, but also that this formerly out-of-the-way region has a real shot at becoming a center—and maybe the center—of a coming technology revolution, with the well-paid jobs and tech-fueled prosperity that usually flow only to gilded “knowledge” hubs like Seattle and San Francisco. Malachi Salcido, a Wenatchee building contractor who jumped into bitcoin in 2014 and is now one of the basin’s biggest players, puts it in sweeping terms. The basin, he tells me, is “building a platform that the entire world is going to use.”
And squarely between these two competing narratives are the communities of the Mid-Columbia Basin, which find themselves anxiously trying to answer a question that for most of the rest of us is merely an amusing abstraction: Is bitcoin for real?
by Paul Roberts, Politico | Read more:
Image: Patrick Cavan
The attraction then, as now, was the Columbia River, which we can glimpse a few blocks to our left. Bitcoin mining—the complex process in which computers solve a complicated math puzzle to win a stack of virtual currency—uses an inordinate amount of electricity, and thanks to five hydroelectric dams that straddle this stretch of the river, about three hours east of Seattle, miners could buy that power more cheaply here than anywhere else in the nation. Long before locals had even heard the words “cryptocurrency” or “blockchain,” Miehe and his peers realized that this semi-arid agricultural region known as the Mid-Columbia Basin was the best place to mine bitcoin in America—and maybe the world.
The trick, though, was finding a location where you could put all that cheap power to work. You needed an existing building, because in those days, when bitcoin was trading for just a few dollars, no one could afford to build something new. You needed space for a few hundred high-speed computer servers, and also for the heavy-duty cooling system to keep them from melting down as they churned out the trillions of calculations necessary to mine bitcoin. Above all, you needed a location that could handle a lot of electricity—a quarter of a megawatt, maybe, or even a half a megawatt, enough to light up a couple hundred homes.
The best mining sites were the old fruit warehouses—the basin is as famous for its apples as for its megawatts—but those got snapped up early. So Miehe, a tall, gregarious 38-year-old who would go on to set up a string of mines here, learned to look for less obvious solutions. He would roam the side streets and back roads, scanning for defunct businesses that might have once used a lot of power. An old machine shop, say. A closed-down convenience store. Or this: Miehe slows the Land Rover and points to a shuttered carwash sitting forlornly next to a Taco Bell. It has the space, he says. And with the water pumps and heaters, “there’s probably a ton of power distributed not very far from here,” Miehe tells me. “That could be a bitcoin mine.”These days, Miehe says, a serious miner wouldn’t even look at a site like that. As bitcoin’s soaring price has drawn in thousands of new players worldwide, the strange math at the heart of this cryptocurrency has grown steadily more complicated. Generating a single bitcoin takes a lot more servers than it used to—and a lot more power. Today, a half-megawatt mine, Miehe says, “is nothing.” The commercial miners now pouring into the valley are building sites with tens of thousands of servers and electrical loads of as much as 30 megawatts, or enough to power a neighborhood of 13,000 homes. And in the arms race that cryptocurrency mining has become, even these operations will soon be considered small-scale. Miehe knows of substantially larger mining projects in the basin backed by out-of-state investors from Wall Street, Europe and Asia whose prospecting strategy, as he puts it, amounts to “running around with a checkbook just trying to get in there and establish scale.”
For years, few residents really grasped how appealing their region was to miners, who mainly did their esoteric calculations quietly tucked away in warehouses and basements. But those days are gone. Over the past two years, and especially during 2017, when the price of a single bitcoin jumped from $1,000 to more than $19,000, the region has taken on the vibe of a boomtown. Across the three rural counties of the Mid-Columbia Basin—Chelan, Douglas and Grant—orchards and farm fields now share the rolling landscape with mines of every size, from industrial-scale facilities to repurposed warehouses to cargo containers and even backyard sheds. Outsiders are so eager to turn the basin’s power into cryptocurrency that this winter, several would-be miners from Asia flew their private jet into the local airport, took a rental car to one of the local dams, and, according to a utility official, politely informed staff at the dam visitors center, “We want to see the dam master because we want to buy some electricity.”
The Mid-Columbia Basin isn’t the only location where the virtual realm of cryptocurrency is colliding with the real world of megawatts and real estate. In places like China, Venezuela and Iceland, cheap land and even cheaper electricity have resulted in bustling mining hubs. But the basin, by dint of its early start, has emerged as one of the biggest boomtowns. By the end of 2018, according to some estimates, miners here could account for anywhere from 15 to 30 percent of all bitcoin mining in the world, and impressive shares of other cryptocurrencies, such as Ethereum and Litecoin. And as with any boomtown, that success has created tensions. There have been disputes between miners and locals, bankruptcies and bribery attempts, lawsuits, even a kind of intensifying guerrilla warfare between local utility crews and a shadowy army of bootleg miners who set up their servers in basements and garages and max out the local electrical grids. (...)
For local cryptocurrency enthusiasts, these slings and arrows are all very much worth enduring. They believe not only that cryptocurrency will make them personally very wealthy, but also that this formerly out-of-the-way region has a real shot at becoming a center—and maybe the center—of a coming technology revolution, with the well-paid jobs and tech-fueled prosperity that usually flow only to gilded “knowledge” hubs like Seattle and San Francisco. Malachi Salcido, a Wenatchee building contractor who jumped into bitcoin in 2014 and is now one of the basin’s biggest players, puts it in sweeping terms. The basin, he tells me, is “building a platform that the entire world is going to use.”
And squarely between these two competing narratives are the communities of the Mid-Columbia Basin, which find themselves anxiously trying to answer a question that for most of the rest of us is merely an amusing abstraction: Is bitcoin for real?
by Paul Roberts, Politico | Read more:
Wednesday, March 6, 2019
The Greeter
They call me the Greeter. I sell shoes at the Boca Raton Town Center mall — bedazzled stilettos and platforms, neon-strapped pumps saved for special occasions. I stand by the entrance of the store, heels dug into the carpet, tummy tucked in, and I greet people. Hi, how are you, sunshine? Have you seen our shoes today? I wear sparkling eye shadow for the job. Smooth down the shine of my hair with coconut-scented spray. I bend at just the right angle as I crawl on the floor, my legs spread like a dumb secretary in the movies, the perfect C-curve of my waist. I pull the shoes out of their boxes, the tissue paper out of the shoes. I slip them on one foot, then the other, and secure them just right.
That’s a perfect fit, I say, propped up on my knees. Take a walk in them.
No heel grips necessary, no insoles, no pads. I know how to fit a shoe.
You’re adorable, the customers will say. How old are you?
Sixteen, I say.
The customers hand over their credit cards, and I make my dimples show. Would you like to wear them out? You can’t return them if you do, but I’m sure you won’t want that!
I clean up the wads of tissue paper, use a metal wand to lift and store the boxes back in their proper places in the stockroom; I bang the boxes until the wall of cardboard looks smooth.
I move to the front of the store again after each sale. Suck in until my ribs show, try to catch the gaze of anyone walking by, Hello there. Have you seen these shoes? On my break, I spend all thirty minutes smoking cigarettes in the mall alleyway, next to the dumpster. I close my eyes and lean against the wall, blowing smoke into the wet heat. When I finish, I chew out the final Parliament with my heel, clean the heel with a tissue, squirt antibacterial gel on my hands, neck, and face, rub cucumber-melon lotion on these places, smooth my hair again with coconut oil, and smack on a piece of gum. I am the Greeter. The Greeter must smell good. The Greeter must smile.
I count down the hours until my boss, Eliza, will drive me home in her black Pontiac, where we’ll chain-smoke, talk shit about our rudest customers. I’ll do my purification process all over again before walking through the front door of my home.
Nothing smells good at home. It’s been two years since my uncle got locked up in northern Florida and my father moved to New York to help take care of his business. Two years since he kissed my mother at the airport — It’s only temporary — with a small black suitcase in his hand.
Lately my mother has begun writing pages and pages of words by candlelight. The title reads, “Story of My Life,” but the words are all illegible. They slant off the loose-leaf pages and continue onto the dining-room table.
At home, my mother tries to cook food, but she forgets what she’s cooking in the middle of it. I find SpaghettiOs mashed up with scrambled eggs, coffee grounds on top. I find crumbling sheets of seaweed inside our containers of mint-chocolate-chip ice cream.
Want dinner? she’ll always offer, spooning out the mixture she made.
No thanks.
This is not a problem for me, because when I do eat, it’s a cold-cut slice of turkey that I roll up with a single slice of provolone cheese. I give myself up to fifteen minutes after eating the roll before excusing myself to the stock-room or school bathroom, where I jam three fingers at my tonsils until it gives. Sometimes I eat a handful of hard-boiled eggs. I hate them so much that the gagging turns on without effort, and I’ll take anything that comes this easily.
The Senior said he would give me a lift whenever I needed, so long as I let him move two fingers, sometimes three, up between my legs before my shift. I let him do this in the mall parking garage, bored, lifting up my school-uniform skirt, staring out the car window. Sometimes he jerks off in the driver’s seat with his other hand. He cleans up with a Papa John’s napkin.
Tonight, my mother calls me on the store line, when business is slow.
Hey, Greeter! says Eliza. It’s your ma!
What’s up? I whisper into the phone. I cup my hand around my mouth. What’s wrong?
Can I pick you up tonight? Need to talk to you about something.
Eliza’s taking me home, I say. Eliza always takes me home.
I’ll be OK driving, I promise, she says.
I can tell from her voice that she is, indeed, OK. It’s my mother on the other end. My mother, who gave me language; who grew up in a house of Chinese and Hawaiian and pidgin but still found her own vocabulary, her own exquisite handwriting; who used to spell words like Hello and You Are Mine in frosting on my breakfast Toaster Strudels until I learned how to read.
Sure, Mom, I say.
At 9:30 PM, my mother is waiting outside the back exit of the mall. She’s punctual, and I am impressed by this. As I walk over to the car, I pull a fistful of my hair beneath my nose to make sure it doesn’t smell like tobacco.
Hi, MomMom, I say, as I climb into her car. I snap the seat belt.
Hi, baby, she says, really looking at me, rubbing my knee. How was work?
Slow, I say. Didn’t hit our numbers.
I hate the idea of you and Eliza walking to her car this late at night, she says. It gets so dark here. Is there even any security?
This is the Boca Raton mall, I say. Safest place in the world. What’ll they do, hold us up with Botox needles?
Ten minutes into our drive, at a red light, my mother opens the car door and pukes on the street. We’re on Glades Road, and the headlights behind us are a blinding spotlight on her face, on the stream of yellow liquid spilling from her throat. When the light ticks Go, cars begin to honk. I rub my mother’s back. You OK?
I’m fine, she says. Something I ate.
My mother pulls over and pukes four more times before she asks me to drive.
Do you need to go to the hospital? I ask.
She’s all shakes, her lips greening. Her teeth clatter so loud I can hear them. Something I ate, she says.
What’d you want to talk to me about? I ask her. Why’d you pick me up?
I just wanted to see you, she says. That’s all. Just wanted to see my baby girl. She squeezes my hand.
My mother will later tell me that this was the day she made a decision — this was the morning she flushed the bottles of pills down the toilet in a colorful clicking stream, changed her bedsheets, got dressed, sprayed perfume. She wanted to pick me up from work and tell me about it — this new life that would unfold for us, this new chapter, how sorry she was for losing herself again, how she was done this time, she really was.
She’ll tell me she wanted to make me proud. She wanted to live. Instead, she’s sick all week. She kicks the new sheets off her bed. She sweats, sleeps, gags herself with the corner of her pillow when she can’t stop crying. She mumbles words to herself — sentences I can’t make out. She stares at the ceiling with eyes like seeds. Something I ate, she says over and over again, as I press cold washcloths to her forehead.
On the seventh day, after returning from a long afternoon drive, she is not sick anymore, but she is also no longer my mother.
by T Kira Madden, The Sun | Read more:
That’s a perfect fit, I say, propped up on my knees. Take a walk in them.
No heel grips necessary, no insoles, no pads. I know how to fit a shoe.
You’re adorable, the customers will say. How old are you?
Sixteen, I say.
The customers hand over their credit cards, and I make my dimples show. Would you like to wear them out? You can’t return them if you do, but I’m sure you won’t want that!
I clean up the wads of tissue paper, use a metal wand to lift and store the boxes back in their proper places in the stockroom; I bang the boxes until the wall of cardboard looks smooth.
I move to the front of the store again after each sale. Suck in until my ribs show, try to catch the gaze of anyone walking by, Hello there. Have you seen these shoes? On my break, I spend all thirty minutes smoking cigarettes in the mall alleyway, next to the dumpster. I close my eyes and lean against the wall, blowing smoke into the wet heat. When I finish, I chew out the final Parliament with my heel, clean the heel with a tissue, squirt antibacterial gel on my hands, neck, and face, rub cucumber-melon lotion on these places, smooth my hair again with coconut oil, and smack on a piece of gum. I am the Greeter. The Greeter must smell good. The Greeter must smile.I count down the hours until my boss, Eliza, will drive me home in her black Pontiac, where we’ll chain-smoke, talk shit about our rudest customers. I’ll do my purification process all over again before walking through the front door of my home.
Nothing smells good at home. It’s been two years since my uncle got locked up in northern Florida and my father moved to New York to help take care of his business. Two years since he kissed my mother at the airport — It’s only temporary — with a small black suitcase in his hand.
Lately my mother has begun writing pages and pages of words by candlelight. The title reads, “Story of My Life,” but the words are all illegible. They slant off the loose-leaf pages and continue onto the dining-room table.
At home, my mother tries to cook food, but she forgets what she’s cooking in the middle of it. I find SpaghettiOs mashed up with scrambled eggs, coffee grounds on top. I find crumbling sheets of seaweed inside our containers of mint-chocolate-chip ice cream.
Want dinner? she’ll always offer, spooning out the mixture she made.
No thanks.
This is not a problem for me, because when I do eat, it’s a cold-cut slice of turkey that I roll up with a single slice of provolone cheese. I give myself up to fifteen minutes after eating the roll before excusing myself to the stock-room or school bathroom, where I jam three fingers at my tonsils until it gives. Sometimes I eat a handful of hard-boiled eggs. I hate them so much that the gagging turns on without effort, and I’ll take anything that comes this easily.
The Senior said he would give me a lift whenever I needed, so long as I let him move two fingers, sometimes three, up between my legs before my shift. I let him do this in the mall parking garage, bored, lifting up my school-uniform skirt, staring out the car window. Sometimes he jerks off in the driver’s seat with his other hand. He cleans up with a Papa John’s napkin.
Tonight, my mother calls me on the store line, when business is slow.
Hey, Greeter! says Eliza. It’s your ma!
What’s up? I whisper into the phone. I cup my hand around my mouth. What’s wrong?
Can I pick you up tonight? Need to talk to you about something.
Eliza’s taking me home, I say. Eliza always takes me home.
I’ll be OK driving, I promise, she says.
I can tell from her voice that she is, indeed, OK. It’s my mother on the other end. My mother, who gave me language; who grew up in a house of Chinese and Hawaiian and pidgin but still found her own vocabulary, her own exquisite handwriting; who used to spell words like Hello and You Are Mine in frosting on my breakfast Toaster Strudels until I learned how to read.
Sure, Mom, I say.
At 9:30 PM, my mother is waiting outside the back exit of the mall. She’s punctual, and I am impressed by this. As I walk over to the car, I pull a fistful of my hair beneath my nose to make sure it doesn’t smell like tobacco.
Hi, MomMom, I say, as I climb into her car. I snap the seat belt.
Hi, baby, she says, really looking at me, rubbing my knee. How was work?
Slow, I say. Didn’t hit our numbers.
I hate the idea of you and Eliza walking to her car this late at night, she says. It gets so dark here. Is there even any security?
This is the Boca Raton mall, I say. Safest place in the world. What’ll they do, hold us up with Botox needles?
Ten minutes into our drive, at a red light, my mother opens the car door and pukes on the street. We’re on Glades Road, and the headlights behind us are a blinding spotlight on her face, on the stream of yellow liquid spilling from her throat. When the light ticks Go, cars begin to honk. I rub my mother’s back. You OK?
I’m fine, she says. Something I ate.
My mother pulls over and pukes four more times before she asks me to drive.
Do you need to go to the hospital? I ask.
She’s all shakes, her lips greening. Her teeth clatter so loud I can hear them. Something I ate, she says.
What’d you want to talk to me about? I ask her. Why’d you pick me up?
I just wanted to see you, she says. That’s all. Just wanted to see my baby girl. She squeezes my hand.
My mother will later tell me that this was the day she made a decision — this was the morning she flushed the bottles of pills down the toilet in a colorful clicking stream, changed her bedsheets, got dressed, sprayed perfume. She wanted to pick me up from work and tell me about it — this new life that would unfold for us, this new chapter, how sorry she was for losing herself again, how she was done this time, she really was.
She’ll tell me she wanted to make me proud. She wanted to live. Instead, she’s sick all week. She kicks the new sheets off her bed. She sweats, sleeps, gags herself with the corner of her pillow when she can’t stop crying. She mumbles words to herself — sentences I can’t make out. She stares at the ceiling with eyes like seeds. Something I ate, she says over and over again, as I press cold washcloths to her forehead.
On the seventh day, after returning from a long afternoon drive, she is not sick anymore, but she is also no longer my mother.
by T Kira Madden, The Sun | Read more:
Image: Ann Hubard
Tuesday, March 5, 2019
One Breath Around The World
[ed. Not sure about the barefoot stuff (especially under ice). I like the whales at 8:15]
On Dreyer's English
As this review goes to press, Benjamin Dreyer’s Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, sits at #1 on Amazon’s Best Sellers list (Words, Language, & Grammar Reference). Shortly after the book’s release, he tweeted its march up the overall sales ranks, as it broke the top hundred, the top ten, and made it all the way to number two. Already in its fourth pressing, it is also currently at number two on this week’s New York Times Best Sellers list (Advice, How-to, and Miscellaneous). Think about that: a book by a copyeditor about the niceties of style elbowing up to the table with the likes of Marie Kondo and Michelle Obama. As Dreyer himself said in another endearingly flabbergasted tweet, “It’s a freakin’ style guide, for Pete’s sake.”
In one sense, I share his amazement. It would be difficult to think of a current subject that feels, superficially, less likely to top a list of best sellers (or best-sellers or bestsellers—Dreyer devotes an interesting page to the accelerated life-cycle and evolution of open, hyphenate, and closed words). We live, after all, in a paradoxically hyper-literate yet hyper-illiterate age—never before in human history have more people written more, and never before has less care gone into the production of this writing. We are inundated with emojis, unpunctuated tweets, garbled emails, and dashed-off chyrons rife with errata, not to mention the self-publishing phenomenon: hundreds of books going up on Amazon daily, thousands of Tumblr and WordPress sites, all the bloggy flotsam of the Internet’s wild reaches. The writerly ethos of the age would seem to echo Blaise Pascal’s famous apology: “I only made this letter longer because I had not the leisure to make it shorter.” (...)
Throughout the proceedings, Dreyer is simultaneously meticulous and unfussy, a winning combination and surely a byproduct of dealing with authorial egos for the better part of his adult life. As the tongue-in-cheek subtitle implies, a good copyeditor has to both believe in their absolute correctness, while allowing for the mutability of language, authorial eccentricities, and the fact that most rules can and should be broken if they’re broken in the service of clarity. Dreyer’s tone is authoritative, yet relaxed and playful, with the presence of teacher that you do not fear, but do fear disappointing.
He is not a grammarian, and certainly not a so-called “Guardian of Grammar,” as a recent Times profile had it. Chapter Six is titled “A Little Grammar Is a Dangerous Thing,” and the first line is, “I’m going to let you in on a little secret: I hate grammar.” Grammar is, he explains, important—a firm grasp of the basic rules allows a writer to convey thought clearly; grammar jargon, on the other hand—and the oft-attendant starchiness about it—is not. Lynne Truss is a grammarian, and popular on that basis with people who see dashed-off text messages as the sign of a culture in shambles. Dreyer is not fighting this sort of proxy culture war; he simply wants people to write well.
But beyond the pleasure of Dreyer’s prose and authorial tone, I think there is something else at play with the popularity of his book. To put it as simply as possible, the man cares, and we need people who care right now. Dreyer’s English is, beyond a freakin’ style guide, the document of a serious person’s working life. At sixty, Dreyer is at the top of his game and profession, an honorable profession he has worked diligently at for more than three decades. To write a book is to care deeply and in a sustained way about something; to copyedit a book is to care deeply and in a sustained way about someone else’s deep and sustained caring. And to have copyedited books for one’s adult life is to have spent one’s adult life caring about other people’s words and the English language. As he writes in the introduction:
by Adam O’Fallon Price, The Millions | Read more:
Image: Amazon
In one sense, I share his amazement. It would be difficult to think of a current subject that feels, superficially, less likely to top a list of best sellers (or best-sellers or bestsellers—Dreyer devotes an interesting page to the accelerated life-cycle and evolution of open, hyphenate, and closed words). We live, after all, in a paradoxically hyper-literate yet hyper-illiterate age—never before in human history have more people written more, and never before has less care gone into the production of this writing. We are inundated with emojis, unpunctuated tweets, garbled emails, and dashed-off chyrons rife with errata, not to mention the self-publishing phenomenon: hundreds of books going up on Amazon daily, thousands of Tumblr and WordPress sites, all the bloggy flotsam of the Internet’s wild reaches. The writerly ethos of the age would seem to echo Blaise Pascal’s famous apology: “I only made this letter longer because I had not the leisure to make it shorter.” (...)Throughout the proceedings, Dreyer is simultaneously meticulous and unfussy, a winning combination and surely a byproduct of dealing with authorial egos for the better part of his adult life. As the tongue-in-cheek subtitle implies, a good copyeditor has to both believe in their absolute correctness, while allowing for the mutability of language, authorial eccentricities, and the fact that most rules can and should be broken if they’re broken in the service of clarity. Dreyer’s tone is authoritative, yet relaxed and playful, with the presence of teacher that you do not fear, but do fear disappointing.
He is not a grammarian, and certainly not a so-called “Guardian of Grammar,” as a recent Times profile had it. Chapter Six is titled “A Little Grammar Is a Dangerous Thing,” and the first line is, “I’m going to let you in on a little secret: I hate grammar.” Grammar is, he explains, important—a firm grasp of the basic rules allows a writer to convey thought clearly; grammar jargon, on the other hand—and the oft-attendant starchiness about it—is not. Lynne Truss is a grammarian, and popular on that basis with people who see dashed-off text messages as the sign of a culture in shambles. Dreyer is not fighting this sort of proxy culture war; he simply wants people to write well.
But beyond the pleasure of Dreyer’s prose and authorial tone, I think there is something else at play with the popularity of his book. To put it as simply as possible, the man cares, and we need people who care right now. Dreyer’s English is, beyond a freakin’ style guide, the document of a serious person’s working life. At sixty, Dreyer is at the top of his game and profession, an honorable profession he has worked diligently at for more than three decades. To write a book is to care deeply and in a sustained way about something; to copyedit a book is to care deeply and in a sustained way about someone else’s deep and sustained caring. And to have copyedited books for one’s adult life is to have spent one’s adult life caring about other people’s words and the English language. As he writes in the introduction:
I am a copyeditor… my job is to lay my hands on [a] piece of writing and make it… better. Not rewrite it, not to bully and flatten it into some notion of Correct Prose, whatever that might be, but to burnish and polish it and make it the best possible version of itself that it can be—to make it read even more like itself than it did when I got to work on it. That is, if I’ve done my job correctly. (...)Mr. Dreyer was kind enough to respond via email to a few questions that came to mind as I read his book.
by Adam O’Fallon Price, The Millions | Read more:
Image: Amazon
Monday, March 4, 2019
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.”
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)]
[ed. Stalin dreamt about... hamburgers? Wow. See also: Trump is not stable — and that should be a huge news story (Alternet)]
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