Proposed New Weather Symbols

Tom Gauld
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In Praise of Selfish NFL Players

The idea that NFL players might put themselves before their team is a scary proposition for the league. Because if the players really start understanding their own value, they just might get what they’re actually worth.

The wide receiver Antonio Brown did. After months of friction with the Pittsburgh Steelers, where he was a key piece of the offense, and with the quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, Brown pushed his way out of the team. Last week, the Steelers dealt him to the Oakland Raiders.

For this, Brown has been categorized as selfish and petulant. “To be able to play with an all-time quarterback like he’s able to play with, I don’t think he understands how good he has it,” the respected veteran wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald said at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference earlier this month, before the trade materialized. “It can get tough out there.” The additional $30 million in guaranteed salary that Brown received from his new team has been cast as a reward for abandoning his old one. “Antonio Brown quit on his teammates & exhibited highly erratic behavior,” the NFL analyst Ross Tucker tweeted, “and as a result got a $20M raise with $30M guaranteed. Great lesson for all the kids out there.”

NFL players are expected to sacrifice everything—from their body to their mental health—for the game and for their team. Yet there are more and more signs that players are starting to understand their leverage. Their increased awareness might be born out of professional jealousy. Brown’s contract with the Steelers contained no guaranteed money over the next three seasons. NFL players look over at their NBA brethren and see that they have guaranteed contracts—and far more say-so with their team and in league matters.

There is also a wide salary disparity between the leagues. In 2019, the Detroit Lions quarterback Matt Stafford is slated to make $29.5 million, the highest salary in the NFL. But that’s not even Mike Conley money. Conley, the Memphis Grizzlies point guard, is making a little more than $30 million this season.

It’s noteworthy that a few weeks before his trade, Brown appeared on LeBron James’s HBO talk show, The Shop. The point of the The Shop is to create a keep-it-a-buck vibe; guests like Brown can have candid conversations with other black superstar athletes and entertainers who face similar problems. The most revealing conversation during Brown’s appearance on the show came when Brown, James, the rapper 2 Chainz, the actor Jamie Foxx, and the NBA’s Anthony Davis spoke candidly about realizing their own power.

“As the CEO of my own business, I got the power,” said Davis, who also is dealing with serious criticism after telling his team, the New Orleans Pelicans, in late January that he wished to be traded. “I’m doing what I want to do and not what somebody’s telling me to do,” Davis added.

Davis’s feeling of empowerment owes something to James, who—through the way he’s handled his own free agency, his production company, and other Hollywood ventures—has given this generation of superstar athletes a blueprint for controlling their own careers. NBA players like Davis and James, unlike Brown under his Steelers contract, have what many would call “screw you” money. (...)

Not every player can do what Brown did, because not every player has Brown’s record-breaking abilities. He’s the first player in NFL history to have six straight seasons with 100 receptions or more. His talent all but ensured that another team was going to want him, regardless of his issues in Pittsburgh.

“I was proud of him,” said the former NFL star wide receiver Terrell Owens, who had such a vicious contract battle with the Philadelphia Eagles that it resulted in Owens being suspended for multiple games before being ruled inactive for the rest of the 2005 season. “He used his productivity to create leverage.”

by Jemele Hill, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Charles LeClaire/USA Today Sports/Reuters

Microsoft, Facebook, Trust and Privacy

• There are strong parallels between organised abuse of Facebook and FB’s attempts to respond, in the last 24 months, and malware on Windows and Office and Microsoft’s attempts to respond, 20 years ago.

• Initial responses in both cases have taken two paths: tactical changes to development and API practices to try to make the existing model more secure, and attempts to scan for known bad actors and bad behavior (virus scanners then and human moderators now).

• Microsoft’s malware problem, however, this was not the long-term answer: instead the industry changed what security looked like by moving to SaaS and the cloud and then to fundamentally different operating system models (ChromeOS, iOS) that make the malware threat close to irrelevant. 

• Facebook’s pivot towards messaging and end-to-end encryption is (partly) an attempt to do the same: changing the model so that the threat is irrelevant. But where the move to SaaS and new operating systems happened largely without Microsoft, Facebook is trying to drive the change itself. 

________________________________

Way back in 1995, when they were just a hundred and fifty million PCs on Earth, somebody had a wonderful idea. Or, as the Grinch would say, a wonderful, terrible idea.

Microsoft had put a huge amount of effort into turning Office into an open development platform. All sorts of large and small businesses had created programs (called ‘macros’) that were embedded inside Office documents and allowed them to create wonderful automated workflows, and there was a big developer community around creating and extending this.

But the Grinch realized that there was an API for looking at your address book, an API for sending email and an API for making a macro run automatically when you opened a document. If you put these together in the right order, then you had a virus that would email itself to everybody you knew inside an innocuous-looking Word document, and as soon as they opened it it would spread to everyone they knew.

This was the ‘Concept’ virus, and it actually only infected about 35,000 computers. But four years later ‘Melissa’, doing much the same thing, really did go viral: at one point it even shut down parts of the Pentagon.

I've been reminded of this ancient history a lot in the last year or two as I’ve looked at news around abuse and hostile state activity on Facebook, YouTube and other social platforms, because much like the Microsoft macro viruses, the ‘bad actors’ on Facebook did things that were in the manual. They didn’t prise open a locked window at the back of the building - they knocked on the front door and walked in. They did things that you were supposed to be able to do, but combined them in an order and with malign intent that hadn’t really been anticipated.

It’s also interesting to compare the public discussion of Microsoft and of Facebook before these events. In the 1990s, Microsoft was the ‘evil empire’, and a lot of the narrative within tech focused on how it should be more open, make it easier for people to develop software that worked with the Office monopoly, and make it easier to move information in and out of its products. Microsoft was ‘evil’ if it did anything to make life harder for developers. Unfortunately, whatever you thought of this narrative, it pointed in the wrong direction when it came to this use case. Here, Microsoft was too open, not too closed.

Equally, in the last 10 years many people have argued that Facebook is too much of a ‘walled garden’ - that is is too hard to get your information out and too hard for researchers to pull information from across the platform. People have argued that Facebook was too restrictive on how third party developers could use the platform. And people have objected to Facebook's attempts to enforce the single real identities of accounts. As for Microsoft, there may well have been justice in all of these arguments, but also as for Microsoft, they pointed in the wrong direction when it came to this particular scenario. For the Internet Research Agency, it was too easy to develop for Facebook, too easy to get data out, and too easy to change your identity. The walled garden wasn’t walled enough.

The parallel continues when we think about how these companies and the industry around them tried to react to this abuse of their platforms:

• In 2002, Bill Gates wrote a company-wide memo entitled ‘Trustworthy Computing, which signaled a shift in how the company thought about the security of its products. Microsoft would try to think much more systematically about avoiding creating vulnerabilities and about how ‘bad actors’ might use the tools it chose to create, to try to reduce the number opportunities for abuse. 

• At the same time, there was a boom in security software (first from third parties and then from Microsoft as well) that tried to scan for known bad software, and scan the behavior of software already on the computer for things that might signal it’s a previously unknown bad actor.

Conceptually, this is almost exactly what Facebook has done: try to remove existing opportunities for abuse and avoid creating new ones, and scan for bad actors.

(It’s worth noting that these steps were precisely what people had previously insisted was evil - Microsoft deciding what code you can run on your own computer and what APIs developers can use, and Facebook deciding (people demanding that Facebook decide) who and what it distributes.)

However, while Microsoft’s approach was all about trying to make the existing model safe from abuse, over the last two decades the industry has moved to new models that make the kinds of abuse that targeted Microsoft increasingly irrelevant. The development environment moved from Win32 to the cloud, and the client moved from Windows (and occasionally Mac) to the web browser and then increasing to devices where the whole concept of viruses and malware is either impossible or orders of magnitude mode difficult, in the form of ChromeOS, iOS and to some extent also Android.

If there is no data stored on your computer then compromising the computer doesn’t get an attacker much. An application can’t steal your data if it’s sandboxed and can’t read other applications’ data. An application can’t run in the background and steal your passwords if applications can’t run in the background. And you can’t trick a user into installing a bad app if there are no apps. Of course, human ingenuity is infinite, and this change just led to the creation of new attack models, most obviously phishing, but either way, none of this had much to do with Microsoft. We ‘solved’ viruses by moving to new architectures that removed the mechanics that viruses need, and where Microsoft wasn’t present.

In other words, where Microsoft put better locks and a motion sensor on the windows, the world is moving to a model where the windows are 200 feet off the ground and don’t open.

So.

Last week Mark Zuckerberg wrote his version of Bill Gates’ ‘Trustworthy Computing’ memo - ‘A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking’. There are a lot of interesting things in this, but in the context of this discussion, two things matter:

by Benedict Evans |  Read more:

Living the (Affluent) Influencer Life

This Isn't The First College Scandal Lori Loughlin's Family Has Been Involved In (Refinery 29)

In August of 2018, Olivia Jade posted a video in which she answered fan questions. One question was about how she would balance her online career with her college aspirations. At the time of the video, Olivia Jade was about to move into a dorm at USC in Los Angeles.

“I don’t know how much of school I’m gonna attend, but I’m gonna go in and talk to my deans and everyone and hope that I can try and balance it all,” Olivia revealed in the YouTube video. "I do want the experience of like game days, partying. I don’t really care about school, as you guys all know.” (...)

Olivia Jade may not have been stoked to attend classes, but she did benefit from her student status. She posted sponsored content from Amazon Prime which focused on her freshman dorm room.

"Officially a college student! It’s been a few weeks since I moved into my dorm and I absolutely love it," Olivia Jade wrote on Instagram. "I got everything I needed from Amazon with @primestudent and had it all shipped to me in just two-days."

Image: via

[ed. Her 'brand' in tatters, parents facing criminal charges, and Wikipedia entries that'll detail the whole sordid story for the rest of their lives, this is quite a convergence of issues: social media, a dysfunctional educational system, celebrity, helicopter parenting, the 'influencer' economy, financial privilege, etc. I think the word is schadenfruede. See also: A for Effort (The Baffler).]

Miwa Yanagi
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Lô Borges

The Pentagon’s Bottomless Money Pit

Despite being the taxpayers’ greatest investment — more than $700 billion a year — the Department of Defense has remained an organizational black box throughout its history. It’s repelled generations of official inquiries, the latest being an audit three decades in the making, mainly by scrambling its accounting into such a mess that it may never be untangled.

Ahead of misappropriation, fraud, theft, overruns, contracting corruption and other abuses that are almost certainly still going on, the Pentagon’s first problem is its books. It’s the world’s largest producer of wrong numbers, an ingenious bureaucratic defense system that hides all the other rats’ nests underneath. Meet the Gordian knot of legend, brought to life in modern America.

At the tail end of last year, the Department of Defense finally completed an audit. At a cost of $400 million, some 1,200 auditors charged into the jungle of military finance, but returned in defeat. They were unable to pass the Pentagon or flunk it. They could only offer no opinion, explaining the military’s empire of hundreds of acronymic accounting silos was too illogical to penetrate.

The audit is the last piece in one of the great ass-covering projects ever undertaken, also known as the effort to give the United States government a clean bill of financial health. Twenty-nine years ago, in 1990, Congress ordered all government agencies to begin producing audited financial statements. Others complied. Defense refused from the jump.

It took a Herculean legislative effort lasting 20 years to move the Pentagon off its intransigent starting position. In 2011, it finally agreed to be ready by 2017, which turned into 2018, when the Department of Defense finally complied with part of the law ordering “timely performance reports.”

Last November 15th, when the whiffed audit was announced, Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan said it was nothing to worry about, because “we never expected to pass it.” Asked by a reporter why taxpayers should keep giving the Pentagon roughly $700 billion a year if it can’t even “get their house in order and count ships right or buildings right,” Shanahan quipped, “We count ships right.”

This was an inside joke. The joke was, the Pentagon isn’t so hot at counting buildings. Just a few years ago, in fact, it admitted to losing track of “478 structures,” in addition to 39 Black Hawk helicopters (whose fully loaded versions list for about $21 million a pop).

That didn’t mean 478 buildings disappeared. But they did vanish from the government’s ledgers at some point. The Pentagon bureaucracy is designed to spend money quickly and deploy troops and material to the field quickly, but it has no reliable method of recording transactions. It designs stealth drones and silent-running submarines, but still hasn’t progressed to bar codes when it comes to tracking inventory. Some of its accounting programs are using the ancient computing language COBOL, which was cutting-edge in 1959.

If and when the defense review is ever completed, we’re likely to find a pile of Enrons, with the military’s losses and liabilities hidden in Enron-like special-purpose vehicles, assets systematically overvalued, monies Congress approved for X feloniously diverted to Program Y, contractors paid twice, parts bought twice, repairs done unnecessarily and at great expense, and so on.

Enron at its core was an accounting maze that systematically hid losses and overstated gains in order to keep investor money flowing in. The Pentagon is an exponentially larger financial bureaucracy whose mark is the taxpayer. Of course, less overtly a criminal scheme, the military still churns out Enron-size losses regularly, and this is only possible because its accounting is a long-tolerated fraud.

We’ve seen glimpses already. The infamous F-35 Joint Strike fighter program is now projected to cost the taxpayers $1.5 trillion, roughly what we spent on the entire Iraq War. Overruns and fraud from that program alone are currently expected to cost taxpayers about 100 times what was spent on Obama’s much-ballyhooed Solyndra solar-energy deal.

Meanwhile, the Defense Department a few years ago found about $125 billion in administrative waste, a wart that by itself was just under twice the size of that $74 billion Enron bankruptcy. Inspectors found “at least” $6 billion to $8 billion in waste in the Iraq campaign, and said $15 billion of waste found in the Afghan theater was probably “only a portion” of the total lost.

Even the military’s top-line budget number is an Enron-esque accounting trick. Congress in 2011 passed the Budget Control Act, which caps the defense budget at roughly 54 percent of discretionary spending. Almost immediately, it began using so-called Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO), a giant second checking account that can be raised without limit.

Therefore, for this year, the Pentagon has secured $617 billion in “base” budget money, which puts it in technical compliance with the Budget Control law. But it also receives $69 billion in OCO money, sometimes described as “war funding,” a euphemistic term for an open slush fund. (Non-defense spending also exceeds caps, but typically for real emergencies like hurricane relief.) Add in the VA ($83 billion), Homeland Security ($46 billion), the National Nuclear Security Administration ($21.9 billion) and roughly $19 billion more in OCO funds for anti-ISIS operations that go to State and DHS, and the actual defense outlay is north of $855 billion, and that’s just what we know about (other programs, like the CIA’s drones, are part of the secret “black budget”).

In a supreme irony, the auditors’ search for boondoggles has itself become a boondoggle. In the early Nineties and 2000s, the Defense Department spent billions hiring private firms in preparation for last year. In many cases, those new outside accountants simply repeated recommendations that had already been raised and ignored by past government auditors like the Defense inspector general.

After last year’s debacle, the services are now spending even more on outside advice to prepare for the next expected flop. The Air Force alone just awarded Deloitte up to $800 million to help the service with future “audit preparation.” The Navy countered with a $980 million audit-readiness contract spread across four companies (Deloitte, Booz Allen Hamilton, Accenture and KPMG).

Taxpayers, in other words, are paying gargantuan sums to private accounting firms to write reports about how previous recommendations were ignored. (...)

For instance, part of what inspired original investigations into defense finances were infamous stories in the 1980s and early Nineties about the military charging $640 for toilet seats, $436 for hammers, etc. A chief crusader was a young Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, who was so determined to hear such tales from famed military whistle-blower Franklin C. “Chuck” Spinney — one of the first military analysts to go public with accusations of waste and procurement fraud — that early in 1983 Grassley drove to the Pentagon in an orange Chevette to see him.

The DoD refused to let Grassley see Spinney. Grassley got him to testify on the Hill six weeks later.

“The following Monday, his photo was on the cover of Time magazine,” Grassley recalls. The March 1983 cover asked, are billions being wasted?

It seemed like a breakthrough. Spinney’s tales of waste became symbols that aroused the imagination of both the left and the right, who each saw in them their own vision of government run amok.

But 35 years later, Chuck Grassley, now 85, is still sending letters to the Pentagon about overpriced parts, only this time with more zeros added. The Iowan last year asked why we were spending more than $10,000 apiece for 3D printed airborne toilet-seat covers, or $56,000 on 25 reheatable drinking cups at a brisk $1,280 each (apparently an upgrade to earlier iterations of $693 coffee cups, whose handles broke too easily). The DoD has since claimed to have fixed these problems.

Asked if he was frustrated that it’s the same stories decades later, Grassley says, “Absolutely.” He pauses. “And a long time after I leave the Senate, it’ll likely still be the same problem.”

Three decades into the effort to pry open the Pentagon’s books, it’s not clear if we’ve been going somewhere, or we’ve just been spending billions to get nowhere, in one of the most expensive jokes any nation has played on itself. “When everything’s always a mystery,” says Grassley, “nothing ever has to be solved.”

by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Victor Juhasz
[ed. This is how Rome died (History.com). See also: Pentagon tells Congress of projects that could be hit to pay for wall (Reuters). Laugh. Or cry.]

7ft 6in Tacko Fall Has Scorched College Basketball

You could be forgiven for thinking this year’s NCAA Tournament, the culmination of the college basketball season, is all about Zion Williamson and his Duke teammates. Williamson is the most gifted player to step on a collegiate court in years – the sure-fire No1 overall pick in the upcoming NBA Draft – but he may not be the most effective player in college basketball.

That would be Tacko Fall, a 7ft 6in center from the University of Central Florida. And, yes, you read his height correctly. Fall’s size and skills have scrambled basketball: he’s in the midst of the most efficient career for any player on record – and he’s only been playing the sport for seven years.

The 23-year-old moved to the US from Senegal a little over seven years ago. Fall was already huge when he left Senegal and he learned how to craft his own shoes and clothes to make life easier. His mother, who along with his father is tall but not extraordinarily so, did not see her son play basketball competitively until his final home game of this season.

A mini-documentary shot while Fall was still in high school has garnered over 2.4m views. Yet he was viewed more as a curiosity than a basketball prospect. “I definitely don’t just want to be seen as an attraction. I’m a man of faith. I’m a pretty smart guy,” Fall, who is studying computer science, told Bleacher Report this month. There’s more to me than just my height. I’m a human being just like you.”

And he is a dominant basketball player, too. Fall is on pace to shatter the NCAA’s record for field-goal percentage, breaking Steve Johnson’s all-time mark of 67.8% set in the 1980s. If Fall’s rate holds during the tournament he will break the record by six percentage points.

Fall is officially the tallest basketball player in college, and taller than anyone in the NBA (and some at UCF claim he has grown by an inch this year). He can put the ball in the hoop without jumping: he just reaches up on his toes, like he’s putting something on the highest shelf, and lets the ball slide out of his hand for the simplest of two points.

Games begin to looks like an overly enthusiastic gym teacher has joined in a pickup game against seventh graders. It just doesn’t seem fair: Fall is too big, too tall, too skillful. Just watch the clip above: in a little under three minutes, you’re treated to the full Fall experience. He drives and he dunks. He posts up and boxes out. He blocks shots and defends everyone from the point guard to center. You almost see the will drain from his opponents. Why even bother trying to contest his shot or jump for that rebound?

by Oliver Connolly, The Guardian | Read more:

Image: YouTube

Your Guide to the Cool New Airport Terminal

Ace Frehley’s Loud ’n’ Food ROCKstaurant

If you’re looking to exhaustedly chew a veggie omelette while Loverboy’s “Turn Me Loose” blares at 4:50 a.m., this is the retro fifties-and-eighties-themed diner for you! The spirit of rock lives on near gate D57 (and the surrounding fifteen gates, which can all hear Billy Squier’s “The Stroke” blasting), in the only dining establishment that abides by Ace Frehley’s trademark lawyer’s heavy-metal principles: sex, drugs, and a bewildering number of menu sections.

Bill O’Reilly’s Killinbooks

Need a beach book? Help yourself to the latest from Bill O’Reilly’s “Killing” series, including “Killing Reagan,” “Killing Van Buren,” “Killing the Smoot-Hawley Tariff,” “Killing Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne,” and J. K. Rowling’s “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them—Just Kidding, the ‘K’ in J. K. Stands for ‘Killing.’ ” There’s also a small selection of Staff Non-Killing Picks, featuring the vaguest mainstream books of the month, like Howard Schultz’s “Imagining Dreams: An American Journey of Reimaginement” and Deepak Chopra’s “Mindful Soul: The Quantum Wellness of Brain Good.”

Paddy MciPad’s Olde Irish Pub

Top of the morning to you! This traditional-style Irish pub has a selection of more than four kinds of whiskey, which you can order by touching the bar itself—it’s one giant iPad that endlessly cycles between a slow-motion video of a margarita being poured and ads for the United Exxon Yum! Brands Chromium-Élite Fees Club™ credit card. Kick back and enjoy our thirty-five flat-screens, all tuned to either a muted episode of ESPN’s “First Take” or closed-captioned disaster updates on CNN.

Wolfgang Puck’s Handcrafted Whatever-Was-Here Brasserie

This definitely isn’t just the old convenience store rebranded with Google images of Wolfgang Puck and doubled prices. Yes, some of the photos are still watermarked, and, yes, two of them are of Michael Symon, for some reason. But we assure you that Chef Puck hand-selected every boxed turkey wrap, lukewarm salad, bag of trail mix, Snickers bar, Maxim magazine, and pair of Beats headphones for sale at this classic bistro/brasserie/gastropub.

A Literal Bugatti Dealership

This appears to be a room full of actual Bugattis. Are they for sale? How did they get here? Who is buying them? Is this an attempt to raise brand awareness, or could the entire business model be geared toward one Qatari financier randomly deciding to impress his entourage some afternoon? It’s best not to ask questions; just move on.

$4.90 Waters Xpress

Sorry you had to throw out your water! Help yourself to our vast selection of Smartwater, Fiji water, Dasani water—you name it, they’re all here, and they’re all $4.90. What are you going to do about it? You want the water or not? Yeah, that’s what we thought: $4.90.

The Self-Conscious-Lotus Spa

Stiff from travelling? Take a moment to relax with a nice neck massage or a pedicure at the Self-Conscious-Lotus Spa, situated in the dead center of the security line. Feel the stress melt away as a woman rubs your shoulders in front of ten thousand frustrated, gawking strangers.

by Dan Hopper, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Luci Gutiérrez

Steely Dan

[ed. Greatly underappreciated album. Two Against Nature. See also: here, here and here.]

“Robotic” Pill Sails Through Human Safety Study

An average person with type 1 diabetes and no insulin pump sticks a needle into their abdomen between 700 and 1,000 times per year. A person with the hormone disorder acromegaly travels to a doctor’s office to receive a painful injection into the muscles of the butt once a month. Someone with multiple sclerosis may inject the disease-slowing interferon beta drug three times per week, varying the injection site among the arms, legs and back.

Medical inventor Mir Imran, holder of more than 400 patents, spent the last seven years working on an alternate way to deliver large drug molecules like these, and his solution—an unusual “robotic” pill—was recently tested in humans.

The RaniPill capsule works like a miniature Rube Goldberg device: Once swallowed, the capsule travels to the intestines where the shell dissolves to mix two chemicals to inflate a balloon to push out a needle to pierce the intestinal wall to deliver a drug into the bloodstream.

Simple, right?

It may not be simple, but so far, it’s working: Imran’s company, San Jose-based Rani Therapeutics, just announced the successful completion of the first human study of the pill—a 20-person trial that showed a drug-free version of the capsule (roughly the size of a fish oil pill) was well-tolerated, easy-to-swallow, and passed safely through the stomach and intestines.

“There were no issues in swallowing the capsule, in passing it out, and, most importantly, no sensation when the balloon inflated and deflated,” says Imran, Rani’s chairman and CEO. (...)

Working from the outside in, the RaniPill consists of a special coating that protects the pill from the stomach’s acidic juices. Then, as the pill is pushed into the intestines and pH levels rise to about 6.5, the coating dissolves to reveal a deflated biocompatible polymer balloon.

Upon exposure to the intestinal environment, a tiny pinch point made of sugar inside the balloon dissolves, causing two chemicals trapped on either side of the pinch point to mix and produce carbon dioxide. That gas inflates the balloon, and the pressure of the inflating balloon pushes a dissolvable microneedle filled with a drug of choice into the wall of the intestines. Human intestines lack sharp pain receptors, so the micro-shot is painless.

The intestinal wall does, however, have lots and lots of blood vessels, so the drug is quickly taken up into the bloodstream, according to the company’s animal studies. The needle itself dissolves. (...)

Imran calls the device a robot though it has no electrical parts and no metal. “Even though it has no brains and no electronics, it [works through] an interplay between material science and the chemistry of the body,” says Imran. “It performs a single mechanical function autonomously.”

by Megan Scudellari, IEEE Spectrum | Read more:
Image: Rani Therapeutics

Jeremy Corbyn, 1970s Revanchist, Is Suddenly the Face of the New New Left

The politics of Britain and the U.S. can have a strange, synchronized rhythm to them. Margaret Thatcher was a harbinger of Ronald Reagan as both countries veered suddenly rightward in the 1980s. Prime Minister John Major emerged as Thatcher’s moderate successor as George H.W. Bush became Reagan’s, cementing the conservative trans-Atlantic shift. The “New Democrats” and the Clintons were then mirrored by “New Labour” and the Blairs, adapting the policies of the center-left to the emerging consensus of market capitalism. Even Barack Obama and David Cameron were not too dissimilar — social liberals, unflappable pragmatists — until the legacies of both were swept aside by right-populist revolts. The sudden summer squall of Brexit in 2016 and the triumph of Trump a few months later revealed how similarly the Tories and the Republicans had drifted into nationalist, isolationist fantasies.

But what of the parallels on the left? What’s generating activist energy and intellectual ferment in both countries is an increasingly disinhibited and ambitious socialism. Bernie Sanders’s strength in the Democratic Party primaries two years ago was a prelude to a new wave of candidates who’ve struck unabashedly left-populist notes this year, calling for “Medicare for all” and the end of ICE, alongside a more social-justice-oriented cultural message. Some, like the charismatic Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have achieved national visibility as an uncomplicated socialism has found more converts, especially among the young. Moderate Democrats have not disappeared, but they are on the defensive. A fight really is brewing for the soul of the Democrats.

And so it seems worth trying to understand what has happened in the Labour Party in Britain in the past few years. In 2015, in a flash, Labour became the most radical, left-wing, populist force in modern British political history. Its message was and is a return to socialism, a political philosophy not taken seriously there since the 1970s, combined with a truly revolutionary anti-imperialist and anti-interventionist foreign policy. This lurch to the extremes soon became the butt of jokes, an easy target for the right-wing tabloid press, and was deemed by almost every pundit as certain to lead the party into a distant wilderness of eccentric irrelevance.

Except it didn’t. Today, Labour shows no sign of collapse and is nudging ahead of the Tories in the polls. In the British general election last year, it achieved the biggest gain in the popular vote of any opposition party in modern British history. From the general election of 2015 to the general election of 2017, Labour went from 30 percent of the vote to 40 percent. It garnered 3.6 million more votes as a radical socialist party than it had as a center-left party. Hobbled only by a deepening row over anti-Semitism in its ranks, Labour will be the clear favorite to form the next government if the brittle Tory government of Theresa May falls as a result of its internal divisions over Brexit.

This success — as shocking for the Labour Establishment as for the Tories — has, for the moment at least, realigned British politics. It has caused Tony Blair, the most successful Labour prime minister in history, to exclaim: “I’m not sure I fully understand politics right now.” It comes a decade after the 2008 crash, after ten years of relentless austerity for most and unimaginable wealth for a few, and after market capitalism’s continued failure to meaningfully raise the living standards of most ordinary people. When the bubble burst ten years ago, it seemed as if Brits were prepared to endure an economic hit, to sacrifice and make the most of a slow recovery, but when growth returned as unequally distributed as ever, something snapped. The hearing the hard left has gotten is yet more evidence that revolutions are born not in the nadir of economic collapse but rather when expectations of recovery are dashed.

Revolution is not that much of an exaggeration. In the wake of capitalism’s crisis, the right has reverted to reactionism — a nationalist, tribal, isolationist pulling up of the drawbridge in retreat from global modernity. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before the left reacted in turn by embracing its own vision of an egalitarian future unimpeded by compromise or caveat. This is the socialist dream being revived across the Atlantic, and not on the fringes but at the heart of one of the two great parties of government.

Democrats should pay attention. Labour’s path is the one they narrowly avoided in 2016 but are warming to this fall and in 2020. It’s an English reboot of Clinton-Sanders, with Sanders winning, on a far more radical platform. And, politically, it might just work.

At the center of this story is a 69-year-old socialist eccentric, Jeremy Corbyn, who never in his life thought he would lead any political party, let alone be credibly tipped to be the next British prime minister. The parallels with Sanders are striking: Both are untouched by the mainstream politics of the past 30 years, both haven’t changed their minds on anything in that time, both are characterologically incapable of following party discipline, both have a political home (Vermont; Islington in London) that is often lampooned as a parody of leftism, and both are political lifers well past retirement age who suddenly became cult figures for voters under 30. (...)

Born into an upper-middle-class family, Corbyn was a classic “red diaper” baby. His parents were socialists, and Yew Tree Manor, the 17th-century house in rural Shropshire he grew up in (which his parents renamed Yew Tree House), was a bohemian, left-leaning, capacious, book-filled salon. As Rosa Prince’s biography Comrade Corbyn details, he rebelled at his high school, joined the Young Socialists at the age of 16, and has told a journalist that his main interests as a teen were “peace issues. Vietnam. Environmental issues.” He graduated with such terrible grades that college was not an option, so he joined Britain’s equivalent of the Peace Corps and decamped to Jamaica for two years, then traveled all over Latin America. Appalled by the rank inequality he saw around him, he radicalized still further, and when he came back to Britain, he moved to multiracial North London, with a heavy immigrant population (today, less than half of those living in his district identify as “white British”). It was as close to the developing world as Britain got. And he felt at home.

Even then, he was an outlier on the left. Sympathetic to the goals of the Irish Republican Army, hostile to the monarchy, supportive of Third World revolutionary movements, campaigning for unilateral nuclear disarmament, the young Corbyn was also opposed to Britain’s membership in NATO and what was to become the European Union, because he despised the American alliance and the EU’s capitalist ambitions. He was ascetic: averse to drink and drugs, a vegetarian, interested in hardly anything but attending meetings, and meetings, and meetings. His first wife left him in part because he was never home, always building the movement; his second because he refused to agree to send their son to a selective high school, rather than to a local one open to all abilities. He was the perpetual organizer, the kind who made sure everyone had a cup of tea before a meeting and for whom no fringe activist group was too small to tend to. Decades later, Corbyn has barely shifted on any of these beliefs — and has only recently agreed to sing the national anthem (he long refused to because it invokes the queen). As Labour leader, though, Corbyn has compromised some: The party’s official position in the Brexit referendum was for remaining, and the party manifesto in 2017 supported NATO. He first became a member of Parliament for Islington North in 1983, at the height of Thatcherism, and has held his seat ever since, his majority increasing in all but two of his seven campaigns. (In 2017, he won with a crushing 73 percent of the vote.) His fierce local support tells you something else about Corbyn. Despite his extreme views, he is, by all accounts, a model in attending to the concerns of his local voters and has made remarkably few political enemies of a personal nature. He’s soft-spoken, sweet, invariably cordial, and even his foes concede his deep personal integrity. When I was in London recently, I spoke with people across the political spectrum, from Blairites to Tories to Corbynistas, and I couldn’t find anyone who disliked him personally. Politically, sure — with venom. But as a human being? No. That’s rare for someone who’s been in Parliament for 35 years. (...)

When I visited Britain this past spring, I was struck by how deep and bitter the divide within Labour remains. “Yeah, it was real intense. Yeah, really intense, really intense. You know, we all lost friendships,” one Corbynista told me of the leadership campaigns and their aftermath. This was Sanders-versus-Clinton-level animosity, but in a smaller, more concentrated pool. I listened to one Labour moderate after another denounce Corbyn’s politics as “sinister” and “incompetent,” even evil. And I heard Corbyn supporters’ faces grow red and their lips curl whenever I mentioned the dissenters. Each of them insisted I tell no one I’d interviewed them. If Labour’s divisions these past few years are any guide, the Democrats’ internal fight could get brutal by 2020.

The central question, of course, is one Corbyn’s opponents have had a hard time answering. Why was the far left able, in its darkest hour, to take over the Labour Party and then come remarkably close in the general election? Some still argue that it’s a fluke. What won Corbyn the leadership was simply his authenticity, they say, compared with the packaged pols who ran against him. And what gave him his general-election surge, they explain, was one of the worst Tory campaigns in memory, a stiff and incompetent performance by the prime minister, Theresa May, who refused even to debate Corbyn one-on-one. Others claim that Corbyn did well precisely because no one thought he could win and so it was a consequence-free vote. Many pro-EU Tory voters may also have used the occasion to vent against their party leadership and vote Labour as a protest. And perhaps all of these factors played a part.

But what’s also unmissable is how deep a chord Corbyn struck. Like Trump, he was a murder weapon against the elite. More specifically, he was the vessel through which the losers of the neoliberal post-Thatcher consensus expressed their long-suppressed rage. And the anger is not hard to understand. There’s no question that, since Thatcher, Britain has regained its economic edge. Its economy for quite a while outperformed those of its European partners, unemployment was relatively low, and London transformed from a dreary city into a global capital. But at the same time, most public- and private-sector wages were stagnating badly and economic inequality soared. From 2010 onward, public spending was slashed under a rigorous austerity program. Hikes in college tuition forced a new generation into deeper debt as interest rates on student loans rose to 6 percent and higher. The new jobs that were created were increasingly low-paid and precarious. Imagine the U.S. economy of the past two decades but with serious cuts to entitlements and public spending instead of the 2009 Recovery Act and tax relief.

by Andrew Sullivan, New York Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Rick Findler/PA Images via Getty Images
[ed. Fascinating (to me anyway... not knowing much about British politics).]

Pink Restaurants Used to Be Edgy

Now They’re (Mostly) Derivative Instabait.

Restaurant design trends come and go: Dark walls, bare bricks, and Edison bulbs give way to white-washed spaces accented with natural wood and succulents. The latest restaurant-interior fad, however, is not a checklist of design hallmarks, but a single color: pink.

Pink is everywhere in dining today: On restaurant walls (see June’s All Day in Austin, Gabrielle in Charleston, Cha Cha Matcha in New York City), in logos and branding (Momofuku Milk Bar’s neon-inspired logo, Tartine Manufactory’s espresso bean bags), and even in the food and drinks themselves (hello, radicchio del Veneto and hibiscus-spiked cocktails). You’ll find pink to-go bags at the fast-casual chain Dig Inn, pink kitchen cabinet doors for your Ikea kitchen from Los Angeles-based Semihandmade, and pink tableware from trendy direct-to-consumer brand Year & Day. The color now seems to be visual shorthand for healthy-leaning, fashion-forward dining destinations.

The pink restaurant trend is, of course, a subtrend of the overall rise of pink — and yes, by “pink” I mean “millennial pink,” but what I prefer to think of as the “new” pink. The new pink spans a broad spectrum, from a dusty, grayish blush to salmon, often with a bit of dirtiness to its tone; while its hue varies, it is universal in what it is not: bubblegum pink, hot pink, fuchsia. The new pink has taken over fashion, packaging design, and residential and commercial interiors. It’s a rare tsunami of a single color dominating across categories. Leatrice Eiseman, a color consultant and executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, attributes this cross-category color trending to our increasingly connected digital age. “In the 20th century, it took seven years for a color to migrate from fashion into the home,” says Eiseman. “Today it’s almost instantaneous.”

2014 was a breakout year for the new pink. Disrupter beauty brand Glossier launched with its signature pink packaging. Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel opened in theaters with vivid doses of pink throughout the film, including the namesake hotel’s exterior and the perfectly pink boxes that fill Mendl’s bakery. It was also the year that architect and designer India Mahdavi and artist David Shrigley opened their redesign of the Gallery at Sketch in London.

The Gallery at Sketch is the restaurant that spawned dozens of rosy imitators. Speaking about the design to Lauren Collins in the the New Yorker last year, Mahdavi said, “Today we’re subjected to spending a lot of time dealing with these cold digital interfaces. I think we’re seeking visual comfort.” In an email, Mahdavi further explained this idea of pink as visual comfort: “It reminds me of my childhood growing up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the mid-’60s — from strawberry milkshake to the color of the typical objects of that period.” Perhaps the Gallery at Sketch’s instantaneous popularity was due not only to its cinematic look, but in part to that feeling of comfort it offered.

Following pink’s breakout year, it was a slow and steady rise until our current moment of peak pink. Throughout the 2010s, rosé (and its 2016 Instagram-darling cousin frosé) has also experienced increasing popularity, with seemingly no end in sight: 2017 saw sales up 53 percent in the U.S., according to Nielsen. As rosé gained more and more cultural brain space, so did pink. In 2016, the Pantone Institute named Rose Quartz 13-520 one of two colors of the year (perhaps not coincidentally, Rose Quartz 13-520 is the same Pantone color Mahdavi referenced for Sketch).

Later that same year, writer Veronique Hyland is credited with coining the term “millennial pink” in a piece for the Cut. In Hyland’s 2016 story, she wrote: “But ask yourself: Do I like this because I like this or because I’m buying back my own re-packaged childhood in the form of blush-toned lip gloss and stickers?” If the trend had gone away, I would have been inclined to answer that it was the latter, but the new pink remains popular, suggesting its pull runs deeper than marketers’ influence or personal nostalgia.

In the era of Trump and #MeToo, the new pink’s appeal may also lie in what it is not: the bright, garish pink of Barbie and Victoria’s Secret that the modern feminist has spent her life eschewing. “Today’s pinks are not connected with cutesy baby-doll concepts,” says Eiseman. “There is a bit of power in it.”

By email, Mahdavi echoed this idea of power in her design for the Gallery at Sketch, writing: “Pink is treated in a very radical and masculine way.” That strength and the surprise of pink’s power is what appeals to brands that aim to market their feminist credentials, like the all-women’s co-working space the Wing, which decked out its flagship location in pastel pink and has used the shade in every subsequent location, or menstrual panty company Thinx, which chose a muted pink for its launch advertisements.

Restaurant interiors overall have taken a turn to softer, lighter colors and playful design elements, perhaps as a reaction to the dark, heavy, almost industrial designs that had been the norm. (Just take a look at Eater’s picks for the most beautiful restaurants to open last year: You’ll see botanical-patterned wallpaper, pastel upholstery, and whimsical color galore.) At the beginning of the 21st century, design-forward restaurants were predominantly “masculine” and moody, furnished with reclaimed lumber, featuring exposed brick, and lit by bare bulbs. Will Cooper, chief creative officer at ASH NYC, says his team notices this contrast every time the firm’s recently opened Candy Bar, a pastel-pink jewel box of a bar at the Siren Hotel in Detroit, appears in roundups of the best bars. “We’re always the pastel pink outlier,” he laughs, noting that his team settled on pink after imagining the glamorous people who might have visited the hotel at its opening in 1926, looking to Los Angeles’s Perino’s, an old Hollywood hot spot, for inspiration.

This visual transformation reflects a transformation of the way we eat today: trendy restaurants have moved away from the bacon-fueled richness that characterized early-aughts dining, opting instead for breezier, vegetable-centric fare that can comprise an all-day menu. Plus, the pink decor trend has roots in this new wellness-adjacent way of eating. Dimes, the influential hipster-health-food restaurant on New York’s Lower East Side, opened in 2014 with one pink-topped table that became so desirable as an Instagram backdrop that the restaurant had to do away with the table altogether. Bread & Circus in Sydney, Australia, opened in 2011, is one of the progenitors of the all-day-cafe concept. Outfitted with pink tile, cabinets, and dishes (the same ones you’ll find at its sister restaurant, the all-pink Carthage Must Be Destroyed in Bushwick, Brooklyn), it may also be the first to pair pink decor and healthy cuisine. In turn, decorating your restaurant in rosy hues may create a health halo for your brand.

The famous table at Dimes might be the biggest clue to why so many designers have been, ahem, “inspired” by Mahdavi’s design: Pink gets an awful lot of likes (according to the New Yorker profile of Mahdavi, Sketch is reportedly the most Instagrammed restaurant in London). Perhaps restaurateurs see diners flocking to restaurants like Sketch and think pink will lure in customers. Some are unsubtle in their Instagram baiting, such as Pietro, a very pink Italian restaurant that opened in Manhattan in 2016 that has emblazoned its motto, “Pink as fuck,” on menus, takeaway cups, and T-shirts you can buy as souvenirs. (Pietro’s designer, Jeanette Dalrot, told the New York Times that the Memphis Group, another decor trend du jour, was her inspiration for Pietro). In going long on pink, restaurateurs are also appealing to Instagram’s core demographic: 68 percent of the platform’s users are women.

by Laura Fenton, Eater |  Read more:

Image: Ed Reeve courtesy of India Mahdavi

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In the Kingdom of Mitch

What comes after McConnellism?

The worst political leaders have a way of unifying their opposition. George W. Bush, with utter lack of self-awareness, campaigned on the delusion he could be “a uniter, not a divider.” By the end of his presidency, the nation was united in the judgment that his two terms had been a divisive and bloody mess of war and financial calamity. When Trump’s corruption and incompetence eventually drag the economy down, he’ll face the same reckoning.

But there’s another leader who has great unifying potential. At times he seems capable of the impossible: bringing America’s centrists, liberals, and leftists into a sincere if tenuous alliance. Yes, we stand together in our mutual contempt for the loathsome, unctuous, chinless invertebrate known as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. We despised him when he made it the defining cause of his career to fend off any kind of campaign finance reform and to protect the power of the wealthy to buy whatever politicians and policies they saw fit. We despised him when he made up a new rule that prevented a twice-elected president from choosing a Supreme Court justice in his final year. We despised him as recently as last week, when he stated that a package of anti-corruption and election-reform legislation that passed the House will not get a hearing in the Senate “because I get to decide what we vote on.”

The cynicism that oozes from McConnell was never more apparent than in the early weeks of this year when, after repeatedly warning Trump against declaring a national emergency to fund a border wall, he then announced he would support the rogue president’s craven power grab. The emergency declaration, he said, “is the predictable and understandable consequence of Democrats’ decision to put partisan obstruction ahead of national interest.” That’s a sentence-wide glimpse into what makes McConnell so detestable. When called to defend his views in public, he reveals himself not as the stately Bluegrass compromiser found in his own imagination, but as the unscrupulous lackey of a brazen and unstable president.

A while ago, when I confessed my splenetic feelings about McConnell to a friend who is a veteran Washington journalist, he reacted with a verbal shrug: “He’s just a pure partisan.” Or is he something worse? After McConnell caved to Trump on the national emergency, former Democratic speechwriter Michael A. Cohen assailed the Senate leader as a “Republican nihilist” in the New York Review of Books. “He is a remorselessly political creature, devoid of principle, who, more than any figure in modern political history has damaged the fabric of American democracy,” Cohen wrote. “That will be his epitaph.”

Cohen cited a previous NYRB consideration, by historian Christopher R. Browning, that likened McConnell to Paul von Hindenburg, the German president who aided Hitler’s rise to power. “If the U.S. has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell,” Browning wrote. “He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could.”

Centrists such as Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute have seen McConnell as a key figure in accommodating the extremism of the Republican Party and of its destruction of long-prevailing rules and norms. For his obstructionist role in the Obama era, Ornstein wrote last year, McConnell “will go down in history as a villain.” More pointedly, perhaps, writers on the left have also indicted McConnell. Our own Baffler contributor Maximillian Alvarez wrote in this space almost two years ago of his “unhealthy obsession” with McConnell’s odiousness. “Everyone knows McConnell is a slimy hypocrite,” Alvarez wrote. “He is the soulless corpse that’s left when every fantasy about how politics is supposed to be is stripped away.”

Everyone also knows that eventually his time will pass (the man turned 77 last month) and so we speculate about what his lasting legacy will be. Political scientist David Faris, in last year’s It’s Time to Fight Dirty, called McConnell “Kentucky’s dollar-store Machiavelli” and speculated that “future historians . . . will almost certainly write about Mitch McConnell the way today’s scholars write about Joseph McCarthy or Andrew Johnson—as dangerous scoundrels whose machinations imperiled both the American democratic experiment as well as vital civil rights for millions of people.”

by Dave Densison, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Yup. Worst of the worst. Trump is the symptom, McConnell is the disease.]

The Best of a Bad Situation

This is what extinction feels like from the inside.

In our age of Republican minority despotism, attempts to grapple with anthropogenic climate destruction have been warped to encourage several varieties of despair, rendered acute by the ticking-time-bomb nature of the problem. The losses suffered by Earth and its populations — plant and animal — are neither reversible nor remediable. There is no future filled with reparations. There is no long moral arc. Ten or fifteen years ago it was possible to think of the polar bear and the white rhinoceros as martyrs, dying off to shame us into better harmony with the natural world. Not ruined archaic torsos but videos of extinct creatures would say, “You must change your life.” The same hope held with respect to coral reefs, forests, and certain small Pacific Islands. A dark glimmer of progressive thinking (the “bargaining phase,” as it were) was discernible in the Kyoto Protocol and at the Paris conference, where the prime minister of Tuvalu’s call to impose a strict not-to-be-exceeded target of a 1.5-degree-Celsius rise in global temperature — the minimum required to save his people from a homeless future in a world hostile to refugees and immigrants — was dismissed in favor of pragmatic mitigating maneuvers intended to induce the cooperation of holdout nations such as the United States, Russia, and Saudi Arabia.

At least now we can see things clearly — if only we could focus on the problem. Whatever they may say or tweet, the Trump Administration is not in denial about climate change. In fact, it has the perverse distinction of being the first US administration to address it head-on. In 2000, we had a presidential candidate who understood the perils facing us, even if he underplayed them to try to get elected. (By a margin of one United States Supreme Court justice, he was not elected.) Instead, the Bush Administration pretended climate change did not exist, though back then it was called global warming; “climate change” was a Bush/Rove term of obfuscation that eventually carried the day, even among scientists. President Obama spoke softly about the seriousness of human-driven climate change in public while his administration chipped away at automobile emissions and provided token green-energy incentives. These may have been the correct policies for a major, developed nation . . . in the early 1990s. But like much else after the financial crisis in 2008, the opportunity for a visionary shift in national focus — one that would have required investment at least equal to that being poured into the unwinnable war on terror — was bartered away to chase after an illusory political consensus with the terminally uncompromising opposition.

By contrast, from its first days the Trump presidency brought a series of cabinet appointments and executive orders clustered around the single purpose of hastening ecological collapse: Bring back coal! Shackle and corrupt the EPA! Remove climate change information from government websites! Withdraw from the Paris Agreement! A candidate whose platform called for pushing carbon dioxide levels past the frontier of scientists’ most dire predictions could not have expressed that desire more swiftly or succinctly. It was almost as if that were the whole point. As indeed it was.

There are two clearheaded ways to deal with what’s happening to the Earth. One is to Manhattan-Project the implementation of clean energy sources and immediately stop burning fossil fuels. We also need to ditch the patriarchal models of wealth and status reproduction that have been constitutive of nearly all expansionist, war-making, and resource-depleting societies of the past ten thousand years. While we do that, we can try to ameliorate the many catastrophes that have already been set in motion.

The other way, the path we’re on currently, is to concede that billions of people will see their economic and cultural lives ruined before dying off at a scale to make the casualties of World War II appear insignificant — and “gameplan” not to be among them. That’s what “winning” in the climate-changed future amounts to, and that’s the world the Republican Party has committed itself — and the rest of us — to endure: a social-Darwinist survival of the “fittest,” “wealthiest,” or most prepared, at least in the sense of stockpiling the most guns and canned food. It’s been painfully apparent since the term ecological refugee was popularized by a UN report in the mid-1980s that unthinkable numbers of people would be forced into migration in coming decades by climate change. Immigration, national borders, and food, water, and energy distribution will be the central issues facing all governments. From there it’s a short step, if it’s even a step at all, to a vehement resurgence of open racism and bigotry among those with the good fortune to inhabit the least immediately vulnerable areas, be they the highlands of Burma, the fertile Pannonian plain of Hungary, or the plunder-enriched sprawl of the United States.

The looming prospect of a panoply of belligerent, Blut und Boden regimes has always been one of the scariest potential political outcomes of widespread ecological collapse. Through a series of accidents and “influences,” we got our version early in the United States. We can and should get rid of it, but the paranoid energies that enabled its triumph are durable and already have pervaded much of the world. Trumpism is our first national response to climate change, and it’s a brutal, fearful, vengeful, and gloating response — one that predicts and invites warfare on a global scale. For all the terrible statistical projections, alarming models, and buried reports, what’s most immediately terrifying to the human imagination about climate change is the revelation of how large numbers of our species behave under conditions of perceived threat, scarcity, and danger. (...)

Truly, we have fucked it up in so many ways! Yet while climate change increasingly feels like an inescapable doom upon humanity, our only means of recourse remains political. Even under the heavy weather of present and near-future conditions, there’s an imperative to imagine that we aren’t facing the death of everyone, or the end of existence. No matter what the worst-case models using the most advanced forecasting of feedback loops may predict, we have to act as if we can assume some degree of human continuity. What happens in the next decades is instead, as the climate reporter Kate Aronoff has said, about who gets to live in the 21st century. And the question of who gets to live, and how, has always been the realm of politics.

The most radical and hopeful response to climate change shouldn’t be, What do we give up? It should remain the same one that plenty of ordinary and limited humans ask themselves each day: How do we collectively improve our overall quality of life? It is a welfare question, one that has less to do with consumer choices — like changing light bulbs — than with the spending of trillions and trillions of still-available dollars on decoupling economic growth and wealth from carbon-based fuels and carbon-intensive products, including plastics.

The economist Robert Pollin makes a convincing case that only massive investment in and commitment to alternative energy sources stands any chance of lowering emissions to acceptable levels. All other solutions, from “degrowth” to population control, will fall well short of intended targets while causing greater societal pain and instability. To achieve a fairly modest 40 percent reduction in carbon emissions within twenty years, Pollin suggests in a recent New Left Review essay, we would have to invest, per year, “1–1.5 per cent of global GDP — about $1 trillion at the current global GDP of $80 trillion,” and continually increase that investment, “rising in step with global growth thereafter.” Whether we call this a Manhattan Project for renewable, sustainable energy or a Green New Deal, as Pollin and politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have named it, the point is to change the political discourse around climate change from either mindless futurism of the kind that proposes large scale “geoengineering” projects or fruitless cap-and-trade negotiations at the mercy of obstructionists. Only a great potlatch of what we have can save us from a bonfire of the vanities on a planetary scale.

In the short term, a true Green New Deal would need to be more like a Green Shock Doctrine. As hurricanes, fires, and floods pile up, each one would provide the occasion to unhook more people from the fossil-fuel grid. At the scale Pollin envisions, it would be naive to assume that a switch from fossils to renewables could happen smoothly. There would be disruptions to almost every aspect of economic life, including food supplies, the power grid (even the internet!), and daily work rhythms and commutes. There would be black markets in banned fuels, and even some forms of violence, like the current populist French riots against Macron’s gasoline taxes. If even such small measures aimed at reducing carbon consumption result in such aggressive pushback, there is no reason to be moderate. Compared with what awaits us if we continue as we are, such shocks are as a rainstorm to a hurricane, or the 1977 blackout of New York City to the bombing of Dresden.

The economic costs of climate change can already be measured by toting up the losses incurred during every single hurricane, wildfire, drought, and war of the past ten years or longer. Because these costs have not yet been borne by any of the major stakeholders in the US or — really — the global economy, they are written off as the price of doing business. No sane group of investors or empowered body of citizens, however, would make these trade-offs to ensure a few more years of short-term profits when measured against the prospects of what would be the last and most profound crash in the history of capitalism.

by The Editors, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: Amanda Means, Light Bulb 00BY1. 2007

Los Lobos

Gentrification Is a Feature, Not a Bug

Of Capitalist Urban Planning

Capitalism and state planning have a complicated relationship. Capitalist ideology insists that markets are the best mechanism for economic, social, and environmental decision-making, and that consumer choice is the fairest and most efficient arbiter of public will. Deregulation has been the byword of the business class for decades, and diminished government has been the goal of conservative politicians at all levels.

Grover Norquist of the right-wing Americans for Tax Reform famously claimed he wanted to shrink government “to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

That’s what capitalists say; it’s not really what they do. Capitalists and political conservatives are quick to call for an expansion of the state when it comes to its carceral capacities or its military might, and those expressions of state power have been ballooning budgets at the local, state, and federal levels. Big businesses love the kinds of complex regulations that keep smaller firms from competing with them; they can hire armies of lawyers to whack through the weeds, while their competitors get mired in the muck. They herald expansions of state power that increase inequalities and suppress insurgencies as government doing its job.

On the level of city planning and land use policy, the rhetoric and the reality are similarly mismatched. Capitalists have serious and specific demands of the state, without which they are unlikely to function in the long term, or even on a day-to-day basis. They want the state to make big, fixed-capital investments in infrastructures that enable their own profit-making. They also want government to ensure some degree of support for people’s social reproduction, in order to assure they have a living, breathing workforce to exploit in the first place. Without these investments — planned, paid for and coordinated by the state — they have little basis on which to operate.

The Contradictions of Capitalist Planning

Look a little closer, however, and some important cracks arise. In his classic 1986 book Planning the Capitalist City, Richard Foglesong analyzes the relationship between capitalism and city planning as it evolved in the United States from the colonial period through the 1920s. He frames the book around two primary contradictions: one he calls “the property contradiction,” and the other “the capitalist-democracy contradiction.”

The property contradiction arises because capitalists demand certain planning interventions from the state to enable their mode of accumulation, but then deny the utility of planning as some sort of socialist sickness. Crucially, beyond certain fundamentals, urban capitalists do not want the same things from city planners. Their demands crudely break down along industry lines. Manufacturing capitalists might bristle at environmental regulations that curb their abilities to exploit land, water, and air without legal consequences. They could, however, be broadly supportive of planning interventions meant to cool rising land and housing prices, as they view land as a cost factor of production and housing prices as a cause around which their workers could rally and demand higher wages.

Real estate capitalists, on the other hand, might welcome environmental regulations that limit pollution if they see smog and grime as factors that might bring down the value of their buildings. They would not, however, cheer the state for imposing rent controls or building high-quality public housing, as those measures might threaten their very business model. Planners, then, must manage a double bind: meeting the competing demands of various types of capitalists, without doing so much planning that the capitalists freak out.

In trying to thread that needle, urban planners face the capitalist-democracy contradiction. Actual capitalists — those who own the means of production, not just those who think like them — are always the numerical minority. In a republican government and a capitalist economy, planners must incorporate the working class into their process or risk a legitimacy crisis. At the same time, however, they are entrusted to appease the capitalists for whom the system is designed to work. To navigate this dilemma, cities have devised elaborate land use review systems (in which public comment is encouraged but non-binding) and public city planning commissions (which are generally staffed by real estate experts and business elites).

According to this model, urban planners’ main job is to contain these two contradictions; neither can be resolved, but both can be managed. It’s a complicated bind. They are supposed to make certain land use interventions, but are prevented from making more sweeping changes. Their process must be open to the public, while simultaneously guaranteeing that ultimate power resides in the hands of propertied elites. It can be a pretty shitty job. (...)

With real estate concentrating and manufacturing dispersing, the relationship between urban capital and urban planning has shifted in important ways. If manufacturers no longer make up a powerful capitalist constituency for lower central city land and housing costs, planners managing “the property contradiction” are really only hearing from real estate capitalists and those aligned with their growth agenda, who are calling for policies that push land and property values ever-upward. Even when attempting to solve urban quandaries that have little do with real estate directly — education, transportation, parks, etc. — real estate capital demands planning interventions that enhance speculation. (...)

Whatever problems planners attack, the solutions they propose are likely to include luxury development as a key component — even when that problem is a lack of affordable housing. Planners in the real estate state are tasked with stoking property values: either because they are low and investors want them higher, or because they are already high and if their deflation could bring down an entire budgetary house of cards. Working to curb speculation and develop public and decommodified housing seem like absurd propositions to a planning regime whose first assumption is that future public gains come first through real estate growth.

In this system, gentrification is a feature not a bug. It is surely an economic and social force, but it is also the product of the state — a planned process of channeled reinvestment and targeted displacement. Urban planners, however, are not just corporate tools or government stooges. For the most part they join the profession to have a positive impact on cities. Many come from radical backgrounds and see planning as a means to impose control on capital’s chaos. But under the strictures of the real estate state, producing space for purposes other than profit is an enormous challenge.

by Samuel Stein, Jacobin |  Read more:
Image: A view of the Hudson Yards development zone. Stephanie Keith/Getty

[ed. See also: New York's Hudson Yards is an ultra-capitalist Forbidden City (The Guardian).]