Friday, March 22, 2019
Who Cares? Not Voters.
The Democrats’ Complexity Problem (NY Times)
Thursday, March 21, 2019
‘Us’ and Them
Why Jordan Peele Is the New Master of Suspense
The ending of Us is twisty, unsettling, and oddly shaped. I won’t spoil the surprise, though it demands that viewers retrace and reconsider the film’s narrative structure. Like any worthy brain-bender, it insists upon a rewatch. It’s an audacious choice with clear influences: a Twilight Zone conclusion—an Aha! followed instantly by a Wait, what?—mixed with the despairing and morbidly clever finish of an Alfred Hitchcock thriller. If Jordan Peele’s first film, Get Out, signaled the arrival of a singular new voice in genre-driven social satire, his new movie Us declares him something more straightforward: a master of suspense. He makes movies that feel modern, persistent, and wracked with unease—movies that are of a time, and that we will one day use to describe that time. Peele isn’t the first to claim this mantle. Hitchock was the originator, but Rod Serling, John Carpenter, Brian De Palma, Wes Craven, Guillermo del Toro, and M. Night Shyamalan have staked a claim to the title in the past. It’s a vital but burdensome role in the popular imagination. On the one hand, every new release is an event. On the other hand, every new release has to be an event.
Us is the most compelling and singular major studio release of the year so far—and it’s effective as both disquieting horror and subversive comedy. Whether it works as a grand statement about life in this country is more likely to stoke debate. One thing the film cannot do is offer the surprise of Get Out. When it was released in February 2017, Peele was known primarily as a sketch comedy writer and performer. The phenomenon of Get Out was utterly unpredictable—$255 million at the box office on a $5 million budget, to go with the instantaneous induction of several ideas into the pop cultural phrasebook: The Sunken Place. No, no, no, no, no, no. The spoon and the teacup. Rose, gimme those keys! It became idiomatic—a movie with a living history.
Us, however, is larded with expectations. You can feel it reckoning with the anxiety that’s built into following up a beloved debut. Peele’s intentionality feels both wider and more opaque. “It’s a bit more of a Rorschach than my last picture,” Peele told me last week after the film’s premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival. “It really is about looking within.” I love that Peele encourages viewers to seek out greater meaning in the movies he makes. He’s not a difficult artist or a mysterious Oz pulling levers behind a curtain. Like Hitchcock or Serling, he’s a showman. “I wanted to offer a fun starting point for racial conversation,” Peele told me about Get Out in 2017, “maybe some new touchstones in how we discuss race.” He’s Spielberg for the Reddit set—a populist with a twisted sense of humanity. (...)
For decades, Alfred Hitchcock was held in contempt by certain critics as a one-note trickster, more interested in the gimmickry of cinema—a fright peddler—than the epic, dramatic storytelling that was valorized in his time. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director five times, but never won, often losing to humanists like William Wyler. In the latter stages of his career, thanks to critical reevaluations in Europe and America, his ingenuity and influence came to the fore. He was worshipped and diminished at the same time. But eventually, seven of his films were added to the National Film Registry and four were named among the American Film Institute’s 100 best films of all time. Sight and Sound has named his Vertigo the greatest film ever made. He is now remembered as one of the three or four most important popular filmmakers of the 20th century.
Peele has grabbed hold of Hitchcock’s legacy by imitating some of his cleverest tactics. Both men are crowd-pleasing, coyly comic, and incisively strategic filmmakers working primarily in terror. Both are deeply self-conscious about style. Peele used the word “brand” when describing his work to me earlier this month. But that was unselfconscious. Like Hitchcock, Peele knows that marketing and message are synonyms.
“My creative drive automatically goes toward where I think the audience expectations are, and when I can pinpoint that, I can take them another way,” he says. “I can use that momentum against the audience.” (...)
Suspense is still the primary vehicle for his work, and it ought to be. His knack for tension is astonishing. Us drags you by the eye sockets, leaving you wondering where it’s all heading for two hours. Is this going to be peak Hitchcock or mid-period Shymalan?, I found myself thinking. And then Peele finally tells you what he means. He gives us the information we need. Perhaps too much.
by Sean Fennessey, The Ringer | Read more:
Image: AP Images/Ringer illustration
The ending of Us is twisty, unsettling, and oddly shaped. I won’t spoil the surprise, though it demands that viewers retrace and reconsider the film’s narrative structure. Like any worthy brain-bender, it insists upon a rewatch. It’s an audacious choice with clear influences: a Twilight Zone conclusion—an Aha! followed instantly by a Wait, what?—mixed with the despairing and morbidly clever finish of an Alfred Hitchcock thriller. If Jordan Peele’s first film, Get Out, signaled the arrival of a singular new voice in genre-driven social satire, his new movie Us declares him something more straightforward: a master of suspense. He makes movies that feel modern, persistent, and wracked with unease—movies that are of a time, and that we will one day use to describe that time. Peele isn’t the first to claim this mantle. Hitchock was the originator, but Rod Serling, John Carpenter, Brian De Palma, Wes Craven, Guillermo del Toro, and M. Night Shyamalan have staked a claim to the title in the past. It’s a vital but burdensome role in the popular imagination. On the one hand, every new release is an event. On the other hand, every new release has to be an event.
Us is the most compelling and singular major studio release of the year so far—and it’s effective as both disquieting horror and subversive comedy. Whether it works as a grand statement about life in this country is more likely to stoke debate. One thing the film cannot do is offer the surprise of Get Out. When it was released in February 2017, Peele was known primarily as a sketch comedy writer and performer. The phenomenon of Get Out was utterly unpredictable—$255 million at the box office on a $5 million budget, to go with the instantaneous induction of several ideas into the pop cultural phrasebook: The Sunken Place. No, no, no, no, no, no. The spoon and the teacup. Rose, gimme those keys! It became idiomatic—a movie with a living history.Us, however, is larded with expectations. You can feel it reckoning with the anxiety that’s built into following up a beloved debut. Peele’s intentionality feels both wider and more opaque. “It’s a bit more of a Rorschach than my last picture,” Peele told me last week after the film’s premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival. “It really is about looking within.” I love that Peele encourages viewers to seek out greater meaning in the movies he makes. He’s not a difficult artist or a mysterious Oz pulling levers behind a curtain. Like Hitchcock or Serling, he’s a showman. “I wanted to offer a fun starting point for racial conversation,” Peele told me about Get Out in 2017, “maybe some new touchstones in how we discuss race.” He’s Spielberg for the Reddit set—a populist with a twisted sense of humanity. (...)
For decades, Alfred Hitchcock was held in contempt by certain critics as a one-note trickster, more interested in the gimmickry of cinema—a fright peddler—than the epic, dramatic storytelling that was valorized in his time. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director five times, but never won, often losing to humanists like William Wyler. In the latter stages of his career, thanks to critical reevaluations in Europe and America, his ingenuity and influence came to the fore. He was worshipped and diminished at the same time. But eventually, seven of his films were added to the National Film Registry and four were named among the American Film Institute’s 100 best films of all time. Sight and Sound has named his Vertigo the greatest film ever made. He is now remembered as one of the three or four most important popular filmmakers of the 20th century.
Peele has grabbed hold of Hitchcock’s legacy by imitating some of his cleverest tactics. Both men are crowd-pleasing, coyly comic, and incisively strategic filmmakers working primarily in terror. Both are deeply self-conscious about style. Peele used the word “brand” when describing his work to me earlier this month. But that was unselfconscious. Like Hitchcock, Peele knows that marketing and message are synonyms.
“My creative drive automatically goes toward where I think the audience expectations are, and when I can pinpoint that, I can take them another way,” he says. “I can use that momentum against the audience.” (...)
Suspense is still the primary vehicle for his work, and it ought to be. His knack for tension is astonishing. Us drags you by the eye sockets, leaving you wondering where it’s all heading for two hours. Is this going to be peak Hitchcock or mid-period Shymalan?, I found myself thinking. And then Peele finally tells you what he means. He gives us the information we need. Perhaps too much.
by Sean Fennessey, The Ringer | Read more:
Image: AP Images/Ringer illustration
Big Name Lawsuit Could Upend Realtors and Their 6% Fee
A new class-action lawsuit takes aim at real estate agents and the tools they use to do business, and housing industry watchers say it could revolutionize the way Americans buy and sell the biggest asset they’ll ever own.
The suit was filed in Chicago on behalf of anyone who sold a home through one of 20 of the largest listing services in the country over the past five years. It charges that the mighty Washington-based lobby National Association of Realtors, as well as the four largest national real estate brokerages, and the Multiple Listing Services they use, have conspired to require anyone selling a home to pay the commission of the broker representing their buyer “at an inflated amount,” in violation of federal antitrust law.
Homeowners who are ready to sell their properties usually hire a real-estate agent to represent them by staging the home, photographing it, adding it to the MLS, marketing it, and showing it to prospective buyers. Sellers agree to pay that person a commission on the selling price of the home. That commission has traditionally been known as the “6%,” but it’s a little more complicated than that.
Sellers can really only negotiate with the agent they’ve hired, while agents representing buyers are generally assured of a standard 3% commission. That means that a seller’s agent who’s willing to negotiate, or one that works for a discount brokerage like Redfin will be paid less than a buyer’s agent.
Buyers can choose to be represented by an agent, or to go without one – but in any case, all commission money for both sides of the deal is always paid by the seller, thanks to a 1996 NAR rule known as the “Buyer Broker Commission Rule.”
In order to list a property on one of the many regional databases known as Multiple Listing Services, agents must abide by the Buyer Broker Rule. Listing on the MLS is essential for making a sale, and most MLSs are controlled by local NAR associations.
“The conspiracy has saddled home sellers with a cost that would be borne by the buyer in a competitive market,” the lawsuit says. “Moreover, because most buyer brokers will not show homes to their clients where the seller is offering a lower buyer broker commission, or will show homes with higher commission offers first, sellers are incentivized when making the required blanket, non-negotiable offer to procure the buyer brokers’ cooperation by offering a high commission.”
As MarketWatch has previously reported, many housing observers call Realtors a “cartel” for the way they purposely steer clients to transactions in which traditional ways of doing business are observed.
Rob Hahn is founder and managing partner of 7DS Associates, a real estate consultancy. In a blog posted shortly after the lawsuit was filed, Hahn called it a potential “nuclear bomb on the industry.” And in an interview with MarketWatch, he said that he’s taking it “very seriously.”
In large part, that’s because of the heft of the law firms behind the suit. Both Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, and Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro have a long history of prevailing over weighty entities like Volkswagen, for its emissions scandal, Apple, for its e-book collusion, and Exxon, after the Valdez spill.
In response to a request for comment, NAR said, “The complaint is baseless and contains an abundance of false claims. The U.S. Courts have routinely found that Multiple Listing Services are pro-competitive and benefit consumers by creating great efficiencies in the home-buying and selling process. NAR looks forward to obtaining a similar precedent regarding this filing.”
Still, as Hahn put it, past lawsuits have mostly been filed by what he calls “ambulance-chasers,” not the firms behind some of the biggest civil settlements in American history. (...)
Hahn thinks it’s ironic that an innovation that tried to protect buyers, by providing them with representation in a complex and deeply emotional transaction, has soured the market so badly. Many housing watchers have long argued that real estate services should be paid for a la carte, or in a sliding-scale fee structure, rather than a flat commission, whether that’s 6% or 1%. But, Hahn said, “there’s no chance whatsoever that the industry goes that way voluntarily.”
The suit was filed in Chicago on behalf of anyone who sold a home through one of 20 of the largest listing services in the country over the past five years. It charges that the mighty Washington-based lobby National Association of Realtors, as well as the four largest national real estate brokerages, and the Multiple Listing Services they use, have conspired to require anyone selling a home to pay the commission of the broker representing their buyer “at an inflated amount,” in violation of federal antitrust law.
Homeowners who are ready to sell their properties usually hire a real-estate agent to represent them by staging the home, photographing it, adding it to the MLS, marketing it, and showing it to prospective buyers. Sellers agree to pay that person a commission on the selling price of the home. That commission has traditionally been known as the “6%,” but it’s a little more complicated than that.Sellers can really only negotiate with the agent they’ve hired, while agents representing buyers are generally assured of a standard 3% commission. That means that a seller’s agent who’s willing to negotiate, or one that works for a discount brokerage like Redfin will be paid less than a buyer’s agent.
Buyers can choose to be represented by an agent, or to go without one – but in any case, all commission money for both sides of the deal is always paid by the seller, thanks to a 1996 NAR rule known as the “Buyer Broker Commission Rule.”
In order to list a property on one of the many regional databases known as Multiple Listing Services, agents must abide by the Buyer Broker Rule. Listing on the MLS is essential for making a sale, and most MLSs are controlled by local NAR associations.
“The conspiracy has saddled home sellers with a cost that would be borne by the buyer in a competitive market,” the lawsuit says. “Moreover, because most buyer brokers will not show homes to their clients where the seller is offering a lower buyer broker commission, or will show homes with higher commission offers first, sellers are incentivized when making the required blanket, non-negotiable offer to procure the buyer brokers’ cooperation by offering a high commission.”
As MarketWatch has previously reported, many housing observers call Realtors a “cartel” for the way they purposely steer clients to transactions in which traditional ways of doing business are observed.
Rob Hahn is founder and managing partner of 7DS Associates, a real estate consultancy. In a blog posted shortly after the lawsuit was filed, Hahn called it a potential “nuclear bomb on the industry.” And in an interview with MarketWatch, he said that he’s taking it “very seriously.”
In large part, that’s because of the heft of the law firms behind the suit. Both Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, and Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro have a long history of prevailing over weighty entities like Volkswagen, for its emissions scandal, Apple, for its e-book collusion, and Exxon, after the Valdez spill.
In response to a request for comment, NAR said, “The complaint is baseless and contains an abundance of false claims. The U.S. Courts have routinely found that Multiple Listing Services are pro-competitive and benefit consumers by creating great efficiencies in the home-buying and selling process. NAR looks forward to obtaining a similar precedent regarding this filing.”
Still, as Hahn put it, past lawsuits have mostly been filed by what he calls “ambulance-chasers,” not the firms behind some of the biggest civil settlements in American history. (...)
Hahn thinks it’s ironic that an innovation that tried to protect buyers, by providing them with representation in a complex and deeply emotional transaction, has soured the market so badly. Many housing watchers have long argued that real estate services should be paid for a la carte, or in a sliding-scale fee structure, rather than a flat commission, whether that’s 6% or 1%. But, Hahn said, “there’s no chance whatsoever that the industry goes that way voluntarily.”
by Andrea Riquier, Marketwatch | Read more:
Image: Bloomberg News/Landov
Rick Steves Wants to Set You Free
Rick Steves can tell you how to avoid having your pocket picked on the subway in Istanbul. He can tell you where to buy cookies from cloistered Spanish nuns on a hilltop in Andalusia. He can tell you approximately what percentage of Russia’s gross domestic product comes from bribery. He can teach you the magic idiom that unlocks perfectly complementary gelato flavors in Florence (“What marries well?”).
But Rick Steves does not know his way around New York City.
“In the Western Hemisphere,” Steves told me one afternoon last March, “I am a terrible traveler.”
We were, at that moment, very much inside the Western Hemisphere, 4,000 miles west of Rome, inching through Manhattan in a hired black car. Steves was in the middle of a grueling speaking tour of the United States: 21 cities in 34 days. New York was stop No.17. He had just flown in from Pittsburgh, where he had spent less than 24 hours, and he would soon be off to Los Angeles, Denver and Dallas. In his brief windows of down time, Steves did not go out searching for quaint restaurants or architectural treasures. He sat alone in his hotel rooms, clacking away on his laptop, working on new projects. His whole world, for the time being, had been reduced to a concrete blur of airports, hotels, lecture halls and media appearances.
In this town car, however, rolling through Midtown, Steves was brimming with delight. He was between a TV interview at the New York Stock Exchange and a podcast at CBS, and he seemed as enchanted by all the big-city bustle as the most wide-eyed tourist.
“Look at all the buildings!” he exclaimed. “There’s so much energy! Man, oh, man!”
A woman crossed the street pushing two Yorkies in a stroller.
“How cute!” Steves shouted.
The town car crawled toward a shabby metal hulk spanning the East River.
“Wow!” Steves said. “Is that the Brooklyn Bridge?”
It was almost the opposite of the Brooklyn Bridge. The Brooklyn Bridge is one of the most recognizable structures in the world: a stretched stone cathedral. This was its unloved upriver cousin, a tangle of discolored metal, vibrating with cars, perpetually under construction. The driver told Steves that it was the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge — or, as most New Yorkers still thought of it, the 59th Street Bridge.
This revelation only increased Steves’s wonder.
“The 59th Street Bridge!” he said. “That’s one of my favorite songs!”
With buoyant enthusiasm, Steves started to sing Simon and Garfunkel’s classic 1966 tune “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy).”
“Slow down, you move too fast,” he sang. “You got to make the mornin’ last — just — kickin’ down the cobblestones. ... ”
The car hit traffic and lurched to a stop. Steves paused to scan the street outside. “Where are the cobblestones?” he asked. Then he refocused. He finished the song with a flourish: “Lookin’ for fun and feelin’ — GROOOVYYYYYY!”
There was a silence in the car.
“Can you imagine those two guys walking around right here?” Steves said. “Just feeling groovy? Gosh, that’s cool.”
Steves pulled out his phone and, for his online fans, recorded a video of himself singing “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy).”
“It’s fun to be in New York City,” he signed off. “Happy travels!”
There was another silence in the car, this one longer.
“You know,” the driver said finally, “you’re not very different than you are on your show.”
This was correct. The driver was referring to Steves’s long-running, widely syndicated, family-friendly public-television travel series, “Rick Steves’ Europe,” on which Steves is a joyful and jaunty host, all eager-beaver smiles and expressive head tilts. With a backpack over one shoulder and a hand tucked into his pocket, Steves gushes poetically about England’s Lake District (“a lush land steeped in a rich brew of history, culture and nature”) and Erfurt, Germany (“this half-timbered medieval town with a shallow river gurgling through its center”) and Istanbul (“this sprawling metropolis on the Bosporus”) and Lisbon (“like San Francisco, but older and grittier and less expensive”). He reclines jauntily atop the cliffs of Dover and is vigorously scrubbed in a Turkish bath. The show has aired now for nearly 20 years, and in that time, among travelers, Steves has established himself as one of the legendary PBS superdorks — right there in the pantheon with Mr. Rogers, Bob Ross and Big Bird. Like them, Steves is a gentle soul who wants to help you feel at home in the world. Like them, he seems miraculously untouched by the need to look cool, which of course makes him sneakily cool. To the aspiring traveler, Steves is as inspirational as Julia Child once was to the aspiring home chef. (...)
Rick Steves is absolutely American. He wears jeans every single day. He drinks frozen orange juice from a can. He likes his hash browns burned, his coffee extra hot. He dislikes most fancy restaurants; when he’s on the road, he prefers to buy a foot-long Subway sandwich and split it between lunch and dinner. He has a great spontaneous honk of a laugh — it bursts out of him, when he is truly delighted, with the sharpness of a firecracker on the Fourth of July. Steves is so completely American that when you stop to really look at his name, you realize it’s just the name Rick followed by the plural of Steve — that he is a one-man crowd of absolutely regular everyday American guys: one Rick, many Steves. Although Steves spends nearly half his life traveling, he insists, passionately, that he would never live anywhere but the United States — and you know when he says it that this is absolutely true. In fact, Steves still lives in the small Seattle suburb where he grew up, and every morning he walks to work on the same block, downtown, where his parents owned a piano store 50 years ago. On Sundays, Steves wears his jeans to church, where he plays the congas, with great arm-pumping spirit, in the inspirational soft-rock band that serenades the congregation before the service starts, and then he sits down and sings classic Lutheran hymns without even needing to refer to the hymnal. Although Steves has published many foreign-language phrase books, the only language he speaks fluently is English. He built his business in America, raised his kids in America and gives frequent loving paeans to the glories of American life.
And yet: Rick Steves desperately wants you to leave America. The tiniest exposure to the outside world, he believes, will change your entire life. Travel, Steves likes to say, “wallops your ethnocentricity” and “carbonates your experience” and “rearranges your cultural furniture.” Like sealed windows on a hot day, a nation’s borders can be stultifying. Steves wants to crack them open, to let humanity’s breezes circulate. The more rootedly American you are, the more Rick Steves wants this for you. If you have never had a passport, if you are afraid of the world, if your family would prefer to vacation exclusively at Walt Disney World, if you worry that foreigners are rude and predatory and prone to violence or at least that their food will give you diarrhea, then Steves wants you — especially you — to go to Europe. Then he wants you to go beyond. (For a majority of his audience, Steves says, “Europe is the wading pool for world exploration.”) Perhaps, like him, you will need large headphones and half a tab of Ambien to properly relax on the flight, but Steves wants you to know that it will be worth it. He wants you to stand and make little moaning sounds on a cobblestone street the first time you taste authentic Italian gelato — flavors so pure they seem like the primordial essence of peach or melon or pistachio or rice distilled into molecules and stirred directly into your own molecules. He wants you to hike on a dirt path along a cliff over the almost-too-blue Mediterranean, with villages and vineyards spilling down the rugged mountains above you. He wants you to arrive at the Parthenon at dusk, just before it closes, when all the tour groups are loading back onto their cruise ships, so that you have the whole place to yourself and can stand there feeling like a private witness to the birth, and then the ruination, of Western civilization.
[ed. See also: There Is No Reason to Cross the U.S. by Train. But I Did It Anyway. (NY Times).]
But Rick Steves does not know his way around New York City.
“In the Western Hemisphere,” Steves told me one afternoon last March, “I am a terrible traveler.”
We were, at that moment, very much inside the Western Hemisphere, 4,000 miles west of Rome, inching through Manhattan in a hired black car. Steves was in the middle of a grueling speaking tour of the United States: 21 cities in 34 days. New York was stop No.17. He had just flown in from Pittsburgh, where he had spent less than 24 hours, and he would soon be off to Los Angeles, Denver and Dallas. In his brief windows of down time, Steves did not go out searching for quaint restaurants or architectural treasures. He sat alone in his hotel rooms, clacking away on his laptop, working on new projects. His whole world, for the time being, had been reduced to a concrete blur of airports, hotels, lecture halls and media appearances.
In this town car, however, rolling through Midtown, Steves was brimming with delight. He was between a TV interview at the New York Stock Exchange and a podcast at CBS, and he seemed as enchanted by all the big-city bustle as the most wide-eyed tourist.“Look at all the buildings!” he exclaimed. “There’s so much energy! Man, oh, man!”
A woman crossed the street pushing two Yorkies in a stroller.
“How cute!” Steves shouted.
The town car crawled toward a shabby metal hulk spanning the East River.
“Wow!” Steves said. “Is that the Brooklyn Bridge?”
It was almost the opposite of the Brooklyn Bridge. The Brooklyn Bridge is one of the most recognizable structures in the world: a stretched stone cathedral. This was its unloved upriver cousin, a tangle of discolored metal, vibrating with cars, perpetually under construction. The driver told Steves that it was the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge — or, as most New Yorkers still thought of it, the 59th Street Bridge.
This revelation only increased Steves’s wonder.
“The 59th Street Bridge!” he said. “That’s one of my favorite songs!”
With buoyant enthusiasm, Steves started to sing Simon and Garfunkel’s classic 1966 tune “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy).”
“Slow down, you move too fast,” he sang. “You got to make the mornin’ last — just — kickin’ down the cobblestones. ... ”
The car hit traffic and lurched to a stop. Steves paused to scan the street outside. “Where are the cobblestones?” he asked. Then he refocused. He finished the song with a flourish: “Lookin’ for fun and feelin’ — GROOOVYYYYYY!”
There was a silence in the car.
“Can you imagine those two guys walking around right here?” Steves said. “Just feeling groovy? Gosh, that’s cool.”
Steves pulled out his phone and, for his online fans, recorded a video of himself singing “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy).”
“It’s fun to be in New York City,” he signed off. “Happy travels!”
There was another silence in the car, this one longer.
“You know,” the driver said finally, “you’re not very different than you are on your show.”
This was correct. The driver was referring to Steves’s long-running, widely syndicated, family-friendly public-television travel series, “Rick Steves’ Europe,” on which Steves is a joyful and jaunty host, all eager-beaver smiles and expressive head tilts. With a backpack over one shoulder and a hand tucked into his pocket, Steves gushes poetically about England’s Lake District (“a lush land steeped in a rich brew of history, culture and nature”) and Erfurt, Germany (“this half-timbered medieval town with a shallow river gurgling through its center”) and Istanbul (“this sprawling metropolis on the Bosporus”) and Lisbon (“like San Francisco, but older and grittier and less expensive”). He reclines jauntily atop the cliffs of Dover and is vigorously scrubbed in a Turkish bath. The show has aired now for nearly 20 years, and in that time, among travelers, Steves has established himself as one of the legendary PBS superdorks — right there in the pantheon with Mr. Rogers, Bob Ross and Big Bird. Like them, Steves is a gentle soul who wants to help you feel at home in the world. Like them, he seems miraculously untouched by the need to look cool, which of course makes him sneakily cool. To the aspiring traveler, Steves is as inspirational as Julia Child once was to the aspiring home chef. (...)
Rick Steves is absolutely American. He wears jeans every single day. He drinks frozen orange juice from a can. He likes his hash browns burned, his coffee extra hot. He dislikes most fancy restaurants; when he’s on the road, he prefers to buy a foot-long Subway sandwich and split it between lunch and dinner. He has a great spontaneous honk of a laugh — it bursts out of him, when he is truly delighted, with the sharpness of a firecracker on the Fourth of July. Steves is so completely American that when you stop to really look at his name, you realize it’s just the name Rick followed by the plural of Steve — that he is a one-man crowd of absolutely regular everyday American guys: one Rick, many Steves. Although Steves spends nearly half his life traveling, he insists, passionately, that he would never live anywhere but the United States — and you know when he says it that this is absolutely true. In fact, Steves still lives in the small Seattle suburb where he grew up, and every morning he walks to work on the same block, downtown, where his parents owned a piano store 50 years ago. On Sundays, Steves wears his jeans to church, where he plays the congas, with great arm-pumping spirit, in the inspirational soft-rock band that serenades the congregation before the service starts, and then he sits down and sings classic Lutheran hymns without even needing to refer to the hymnal. Although Steves has published many foreign-language phrase books, the only language he speaks fluently is English. He built his business in America, raised his kids in America and gives frequent loving paeans to the glories of American life.
And yet: Rick Steves desperately wants you to leave America. The tiniest exposure to the outside world, he believes, will change your entire life. Travel, Steves likes to say, “wallops your ethnocentricity” and “carbonates your experience” and “rearranges your cultural furniture.” Like sealed windows on a hot day, a nation’s borders can be stultifying. Steves wants to crack them open, to let humanity’s breezes circulate. The more rootedly American you are, the more Rick Steves wants this for you. If you have never had a passport, if you are afraid of the world, if your family would prefer to vacation exclusively at Walt Disney World, if you worry that foreigners are rude and predatory and prone to violence or at least that their food will give you diarrhea, then Steves wants you — especially you — to go to Europe. Then he wants you to go beyond. (For a majority of his audience, Steves says, “Europe is the wading pool for world exploration.”) Perhaps, like him, you will need large headphones and half a tab of Ambien to properly relax on the flight, but Steves wants you to know that it will be worth it. He wants you to stand and make little moaning sounds on a cobblestone street the first time you taste authentic Italian gelato — flavors so pure they seem like the primordial essence of peach or melon or pistachio or rice distilled into molecules and stirred directly into your own molecules. He wants you to hike on a dirt path along a cliff over the almost-too-blue Mediterranean, with villages and vineyards spilling down the rugged mountains above you. He wants you to arrive at the Parthenon at dusk, just before it closes, when all the tour groups are loading back onto their cruise ships, so that you have the whole place to yourself and can stand there feeling like a private witness to the birth, and then the ruination, of Western civilization.
by Sam Anderson, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Zachary Scott[ed. See also: There Is No Reason to Cross the U.S. by Train. But I Did It Anyway. (NY Times).]
Wednesday, March 20, 2019
I’m Worried I’ll Never Get Around to Using All These Good Band Names
There comes a time in every man’s life when he has to face up to the fact that he’ll never achieve all his dreams. I’ve made my peace with the knowledge that I will probably never win an Oscar, date a supermodel, or own a dune buggy. But there’s one dream I can’t let go, and I know if I don’t make it happen I’ll regret it to the end of my days. What if I never create a musical group using these hilarious potential band names I’ve catalogued in my notebook over the years? What if I die tomorrow and I never appeared on stage sporting a bass drum with the name Cephalopod Anxiety or Tainted Meat Panic on it?
Like most young men, my dream of starting a band with a striking word combination I’d come across in a newspaper or book began when I read Dave Barry’s column. I’ll never forget those Saturday mornings on the couch, reading Barry’s latest with my dad, and laughing at the hilarious phrases he’d say would make good band names. I knew then and there that my destiny was to lead a series of bands with names like Hypogonad, Suburban Inferno, and Exploded Whale Carcass.
My dream came so close to fruition my senior year in college, when my roommate Jim and I started a “pop-thresh garage-inflected post-grunge” band. Naturally, I wanted to call the band Charismatic Megafauna, but Jim said that was “too whimsical” and he booked gigs under the name Midwaste instead. As you might imagine, Midwaste didn’t last long, and neither did our friendship.
After college, I was too busy with grad school and then my career to catalogue good band names, let alone start one and book gigs as Rectal Abrasions or Highway Jellyfish Disaster. One morning I woke up after a particularly grueling day at the office and found a new entry in my trusty notebook of band names. I must have written it in a fit of inspiration in the middle of the night. But instead of a flash of brilliance, I’d jotted down: “Band Names? Desk Metal. The Spreadsheets. Stale Bagel.” Clearly, my creativity was gone. I sank into an unmitigated funk, one so bad I didn’t even realize Unmitigated Funk is a great band name.
I quit my stifling office job after that, but by then I’d married and had a kid, which gave me ample material for band names (Diaper Cake, Cradle Cap, Newborn Jaundice), but no time to actually put a band together. I haven’t even touched my guitar since my son was born.
Now I’m staring down forty, and while I have a notebook full of names like Forty Rabid Squirrels, Caution Crow, Weird Uncle, Hobo Pie Revival, and Fugu Toxin Nightmares, I can’t claim to have performed a single gig. The last time I was even on a stage was that night in ‘04 when Midwaste took home 18th place at the Naperville, IL Battle of the Bands.
by Austin Gilkeson, Points in Case | Read more:
Image: via
Like most young men, my dream of starting a band with a striking word combination I’d come across in a newspaper or book began when I read Dave Barry’s column. I’ll never forget those Saturday mornings on the couch, reading Barry’s latest with my dad, and laughing at the hilarious phrases he’d say would make good band names. I knew then and there that my destiny was to lead a series of bands with names like Hypogonad, Suburban Inferno, and Exploded Whale Carcass.
My dream came so close to fruition my senior year in college, when my roommate Jim and I started a “pop-thresh garage-inflected post-grunge” band. Naturally, I wanted to call the band Charismatic Megafauna, but Jim said that was “too whimsical” and he booked gigs under the name Midwaste instead. As you might imagine, Midwaste didn’t last long, and neither did our friendship.After college, I was too busy with grad school and then my career to catalogue good band names, let alone start one and book gigs as Rectal Abrasions or Highway Jellyfish Disaster. One morning I woke up after a particularly grueling day at the office and found a new entry in my trusty notebook of band names. I must have written it in a fit of inspiration in the middle of the night. But instead of a flash of brilliance, I’d jotted down: “Band Names? Desk Metal. The Spreadsheets. Stale Bagel.” Clearly, my creativity was gone. I sank into an unmitigated funk, one so bad I didn’t even realize Unmitigated Funk is a great band name.
I quit my stifling office job after that, but by then I’d married and had a kid, which gave me ample material for band names (Diaper Cake, Cradle Cap, Newborn Jaundice), but no time to actually put a band together. I haven’t even touched my guitar since my son was born.
Now I’m staring down forty, and while I have a notebook full of names like Forty Rabid Squirrels, Caution Crow, Weird Uncle, Hobo Pie Revival, and Fugu Toxin Nightmares, I can’t claim to have performed a single gig. The last time I was even on a stage was that night in ‘04 when Midwaste took home 18th place at the Naperville, IL Battle of the Bands.
by Austin Gilkeson, Points in Case | Read more:
Image: via
The Obama Boys
If you want to understand why leftists look back on the Obama years with such a sense of frustration and disappointment, all you need to do is pick up one of the White House memoirs written by members of Obama’s staff. I’ve now poked through three of them, David Litt’s Thanks Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years, Dan Pfeiffer’s Yes We (Still) Can, and Ben Rhodes’ The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House, plus a collection of first-person testimonies called Obama: An Oral History.* But the genre is expansive, and also includes Pat Cunnane’s West Winging It (with a front cover almost indistinguishable from Litt’s book), Alyssa Mastromonaco’s Who Thought This Was A Good Idea? (which at least asks the right question), and a second oral history volume called West Wingers: Stories from the Dream Chasers, Change Makers, and Hope Creators Inside the Obama White House.
I can’t say that once you have read one of these books, you have read them all. But if you read Litt, Pfeiffer, and Rhodes, you may get a sense that you have met the same man three times. Not only does each tell the same story, but they share common habits of mind, common interpretations of the same events, that reveal a lot about what “Obamaism” as a political mindset is. They have their differences: Litt’s book is breezy and jokey, Pfeiffer is obsessively focused on “fake news,” and Rhodes is slightly more cerebral and worldly (he was a foreign policy guy, after all). But each of them looks at politics through roughly the same lens, and reading their accounts can help to show why the left dislikes this kind of politics.
Let’s remember what the left critique of Obama’s administration is. Leftists argue, roughly, that while Obama came in with lofty promises of “hope” and “change,” the change was largely symbolic rather than substantive, and he failed to stand up for progressive values or fight for serious shifts in U.S. policy. He deported staggering numbers of immigrants, let Wall Street criminals off the hook, failed to take on (and now proudly boasts of his support for) the fossil fuel industry, sold over $100 billion in arms to the brutal Saudi government, killed American citizens with drones (and then made sickening jokes about it), killed lots more non-American citizens with drones (including Yemenis going to a wedding) and then misled the public about it, promised “the most transparent administration ever” and then was “worse than Nixon” in his paranoia about leakers, pushed a market-friendly healthcare plan based on conservative premises instead of aiming for single-payer, and showered Israel with both public support and military aid even as it systematically violated the human rights of Palestinians (Here, for example, is Haaretz: “Unlike [George W.] Bush, who gave Israel’s Iron Dome system a frosty response, Obama has led the way in funding and supporting the research, development and production of the Iron Dome”). Obama’s defenders responded to every single criticism by insisting that Obama had his hands tied by a Republican congress, but many of the things Obama did were freely chosen. In education policy, he hired charterization advocate Arne Duncan and pushed a horrible “dog-eat-dog” funding system called “Race To The Top.” Nobody forced him to hire Friedmanite economists like Larry Summers, or actual Republicans like Robert Gates, or to select middle-of-the-road judicial appointees like Elena Kagan and Merrick Garland. Who on Earth picks Rahm Emanuel, out of every person in the world, to be their chief of staff?
Centrism and compromise were central to Obama’s personal philosophy from the start. The speech that put him on the map in 2004 was famous for its declaration that there was no such thing as “blue” and “red” America, just the United States of America. A 2007 New Yorker profile said that “in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative.” Obama spoke of being “postpartisan,” praised Ronald Reagan, gave culturally conservative lectures about how Black people supposedly needed to stop wearing gold chains and feeding their children fried chicken for breakfast. From his first days in office, there simply didn’t seem to be much of a “fighting” spirit in Obama. Whenever he said something daring and controversial (and correct), he would fail to stand by it. For example, when he publicly noted that the Cambridge police force acted “stupidly” in arresting Henry Louis Gates Jr. for trying to break into his own home, he followed up by inviting the police officer and Gates to sit down and talk things out over a beer. A disgusted Van Jones has characterized this as the “low point” of the Obama presidency, but the desire to be “all things to all people” had always been central to the Obama image. Matt Taibbi described him during his first campaign as:
…an ingeniously crafted human cipher… a sort of ideological Universalist… who spends a great deal of rhetorical energy showing that he recognizes the validity of all points of view, and conversely emphasizes that when he does take hard positions on issues, he often does so reluctantly… You can’t run against him on issues because you can’t even find him on the ideological spectrum. (...)
Obama supporters think all of this is deeply cynical and unfair. But those who want to argue that Obama was the proponent of a genuinely transformational progressive politics, his ambitions tragically stifled by the ideological hostility of reactionaries, have to contend with a few damning pieces of evidence: the books of Pfeiffer, Rhodes, and Litt.
Granted, these men are all devoted admirers of Obama who set out to defend his legacy. But in telling stories intended to make Obama and his staff look good, they end up affirming that the left’s cynicism was fully warranted. Litt, for instance, seems to have been a man with almost no actual political beliefs. Recently graduated from Yale when he joined the campaign, he was never much of an “activist.” Litt was drawn to Obama not because he felt that Obama would actually bring particular changes that he wanted to see happen, but because he developed an emotional obsession with Barack Obama as an individual person. Pfeiffer feels similarly—he fell in “platonic political love.” Litt’s book begins:
On January 3, 2008, I pledged my heart and soul to Barack Obama… My transformation was immediate and all-consuming. One moment I was a typical college senior, barely interested in politics. The next moment I would have done anything, literally anything, for a freshman senator from Illinois.
He describes the beginning of his brainless infatuation: “[Obama] spoke like presidents in movies. He looked younger than my dad. I didn’t have time for a second thought, or even a first one. I simply believed.”
Paul Krugman’s 2008 warning that “the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality,” and Reed’s idea that Obama supporters radiated “faddish, utterly uninformed exuberance,” is confirmed by Litt’s account of his own political awakening. Throughout the book, Litt is humorously self-effacing, so it can be difficult to tell just how serious he is in his “kidding but not really” observations. But when he describes the religious fervor with which he unthinkingly embraced Obama’s candidacy, he seems to be at least partly serious:
We had no doubt that everyone would soon see the light… Our critics would later mock the depths of our devotion. Obamabots, they’d call us. And really, weren’t they right? Becoming obsessed with Barack Obama wasn’t a choice I made… My switch had been flipped… Obama wasn’t just fighting for change. He was change. He was the messenger and message all at once. It’s one thing to follow a prophet who speaks glowingly of a promised land. It’s another thing entirely to join him once he parts the sea… Given the circumstances, it seemed selfish not to spread the good news. Overnight, my friends found themselves living with an evangelist. (...)
My colleague Luke Savage has analyzed how pernicious the influence of The West Wing was on a generation of young Democratic politicos, and sure enough Litt says that “like nearly every Democrat under the age of thirty-five, I was raised, in part, by Aaron Sorkin.” (More accurately, of course, is “nearly every wealthy white male Democrat who worked in Washington.” The near total absence of women and people of color in top positions on The West Wing may give more viewing pleasure to a certain audience demographic over others.) Litt says in college he “watched West Wing DVDs on an endless loop,” and Pfeiffer too describes “watching The West Wing on a loop.”
Luke describes the kind of mentality this leads to: a belief that “doing politics” means that smart, virtuous people in charge make good decisions for the people, who themselves are rarely seen. Social movements don’t exist, even voters don’t exist. Instead, the political ideal is a PhD economist president (Jed Bartlet) consulting with a crack team of Ivy League underlings and challenging the ill-informed (but well-intended) Republicans with superior logic and wit. During the West Wing’s seven seasons, the Bartlet administration has very few substantive political accomplishments, though as Luke points out it “warmly embraces the military-industrial complex, cuts Social Security, and puts a hard-right justice on the Supreme Court in the interests of bipartisan ‘balance.’” It has always struck me as funny that Sorkin’s signature West Wing shot is the “walk and talk,” in which characters strut down hallways having intense conversations but do not actually appear to be going anywhere. What better metaphor could there be for a politics that consists of looking knowledgeable and committed without any sense of what you’re aiming at or how to get there? Litt says of Obama that “he spoke like presidents in movies.” Surely we can all see the problem here: Presidents in movies do not pass and implement single-payer healthcare. (They mostly bomb nameless Middle Eastern countries.)
Their West Wing-ism meant that the Obama staffers completely lacked an understanding of how political interests operate, and were blindsided when it turned out Republicans wanted to destroy them rather than collaborate to enact Reasonable Bipartisan Compromises. Jim Messina, Obama’s deputy chief of staff and reelection campaign manager, spoke to a key Republican staffer after the 2008 election and was shocked when she told him: “We’re not going to compromise with you on anything. We’re going to fight Obama on everything.” Messina replied “That’s not what we did for Bush.” Said the Republican: “We don’t care.” Rhodes and Pfeiffer, in particular, are shocked and appalled when Republicans turn out to be more interested in their own political standing than advancing the objective well-being of the country.
I can’t say that once you have read one of these books, you have read them all. But if you read Litt, Pfeiffer, and Rhodes, you may get a sense that you have met the same man three times. Not only does each tell the same story, but they share common habits of mind, common interpretations of the same events, that reveal a lot about what “Obamaism” as a political mindset is. They have their differences: Litt’s book is breezy and jokey, Pfeiffer is obsessively focused on “fake news,” and Rhodes is slightly more cerebral and worldly (he was a foreign policy guy, after all). But each of them looks at politics through roughly the same lens, and reading their accounts can help to show why the left dislikes this kind of politics.Let’s remember what the left critique of Obama’s administration is. Leftists argue, roughly, that while Obama came in with lofty promises of “hope” and “change,” the change was largely symbolic rather than substantive, and he failed to stand up for progressive values or fight for serious shifts in U.S. policy. He deported staggering numbers of immigrants, let Wall Street criminals off the hook, failed to take on (and now proudly boasts of his support for) the fossil fuel industry, sold over $100 billion in arms to the brutal Saudi government, killed American citizens with drones (and then made sickening jokes about it), killed lots more non-American citizens with drones (including Yemenis going to a wedding) and then misled the public about it, promised “the most transparent administration ever” and then was “worse than Nixon” in his paranoia about leakers, pushed a market-friendly healthcare plan based on conservative premises instead of aiming for single-payer, and showered Israel with both public support and military aid even as it systematically violated the human rights of Palestinians (Here, for example, is Haaretz: “Unlike [George W.] Bush, who gave Israel’s Iron Dome system a frosty response, Obama has led the way in funding and supporting the research, development and production of the Iron Dome”). Obama’s defenders responded to every single criticism by insisting that Obama had his hands tied by a Republican congress, but many of the things Obama did were freely chosen. In education policy, he hired charterization advocate Arne Duncan and pushed a horrible “dog-eat-dog” funding system called “Race To The Top.” Nobody forced him to hire Friedmanite economists like Larry Summers, or actual Republicans like Robert Gates, or to select middle-of-the-road judicial appointees like Elena Kagan and Merrick Garland. Who on Earth picks Rahm Emanuel, out of every person in the world, to be their chief of staff?
Centrism and compromise were central to Obama’s personal philosophy from the start. The speech that put him on the map in 2004 was famous for its declaration that there was no such thing as “blue” and “red” America, just the United States of America. A 2007 New Yorker profile said that “in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative.” Obama spoke of being “postpartisan,” praised Ronald Reagan, gave culturally conservative lectures about how Black people supposedly needed to stop wearing gold chains and feeding their children fried chicken for breakfast. From his first days in office, there simply didn’t seem to be much of a “fighting” spirit in Obama. Whenever he said something daring and controversial (and correct), he would fail to stand by it. For example, when he publicly noted that the Cambridge police force acted “stupidly” in arresting Henry Louis Gates Jr. for trying to break into his own home, he followed up by inviting the police officer and Gates to sit down and talk things out over a beer. A disgusted Van Jones has characterized this as the “low point” of the Obama presidency, but the desire to be “all things to all people” had always been central to the Obama image. Matt Taibbi described him during his first campaign as:
…an ingeniously crafted human cipher… a sort of ideological Universalist… who spends a great deal of rhetorical energy showing that he recognizes the validity of all points of view, and conversely emphasizes that when he does take hard positions on issues, he often does so reluctantly… You can’t run against him on issues because you can’t even find him on the ideological spectrum. (...)
Obama supporters think all of this is deeply cynical and unfair. But those who want to argue that Obama was the proponent of a genuinely transformational progressive politics, his ambitions tragically stifled by the ideological hostility of reactionaries, have to contend with a few damning pieces of evidence: the books of Pfeiffer, Rhodes, and Litt.
Granted, these men are all devoted admirers of Obama who set out to defend his legacy. But in telling stories intended to make Obama and his staff look good, they end up affirming that the left’s cynicism was fully warranted. Litt, for instance, seems to have been a man with almost no actual political beliefs. Recently graduated from Yale when he joined the campaign, he was never much of an “activist.” Litt was drawn to Obama not because he felt that Obama would actually bring particular changes that he wanted to see happen, but because he developed an emotional obsession with Barack Obama as an individual person. Pfeiffer feels similarly—he fell in “platonic political love.” Litt’s book begins:
On January 3, 2008, I pledged my heart and soul to Barack Obama… My transformation was immediate and all-consuming. One moment I was a typical college senior, barely interested in politics. The next moment I would have done anything, literally anything, for a freshman senator from Illinois.
He describes the beginning of his brainless infatuation: “[Obama] spoke like presidents in movies. He looked younger than my dad. I didn’t have time for a second thought, or even a first one. I simply believed.”
Paul Krugman’s 2008 warning that “the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality,” and Reed’s idea that Obama supporters radiated “faddish, utterly uninformed exuberance,” is confirmed by Litt’s account of his own political awakening. Throughout the book, Litt is humorously self-effacing, so it can be difficult to tell just how serious he is in his “kidding but not really” observations. But when he describes the religious fervor with which he unthinkingly embraced Obama’s candidacy, he seems to be at least partly serious:
We had no doubt that everyone would soon see the light… Our critics would later mock the depths of our devotion. Obamabots, they’d call us. And really, weren’t they right? Becoming obsessed with Barack Obama wasn’t a choice I made… My switch had been flipped… Obama wasn’t just fighting for change. He was change. He was the messenger and message all at once. It’s one thing to follow a prophet who speaks glowingly of a promised land. It’s another thing entirely to join him once he parts the sea… Given the circumstances, it seemed selfish not to spread the good news. Overnight, my friends found themselves living with an evangelist. (...)
My colleague Luke Savage has analyzed how pernicious the influence of The West Wing was on a generation of young Democratic politicos, and sure enough Litt says that “like nearly every Democrat under the age of thirty-five, I was raised, in part, by Aaron Sorkin.” (More accurately, of course, is “nearly every wealthy white male Democrat who worked in Washington.” The near total absence of women and people of color in top positions on The West Wing may give more viewing pleasure to a certain audience demographic over others.) Litt says in college he “watched West Wing DVDs on an endless loop,” and Pfeiffer too describes “watching The West Wing on a loop.”
Luke describes the kind of mentality this leads to: a belief that “doing politics” means that smart, virtuous people in charge make good decisions for the people, who themselves are rarely seen. Social movements don’t exist, even voters don’t exist. Instead, the political ideal is a PhD economist president (Jed Bartlet) consulting with a crack team of Ivy League underlings and challenging the ill-informed (but well-intended) Republicans with superior logic and wit. During the West Wing’s seven seasons, the Bartlet administration has very few substantive political accomplishments, though as Luke points out it “warmly embraces the military-industrial complex, cuts Social Security, and puts a hard-right justice on the Supreme Court in the interests of bipartisan ‘balance.’” It has always struck me as funny that Sorkin’s signature West Wing shot is the “walk and talk,” in which characters strut down hallways having intense conversations but do not actually appear to be going anywhere. What better metaphor could there be for a politics that consists of looking knowledgeable and committed without any sense of what you’re aiming at or how to get there? Litt says of Obama that “he spoke like presidents in movies.” Surely we can all see the problem here: Presidents in movies do not pass and implement single-payer healthcare. (They mostly bomb nameless Middle Eastern countries.)
Their West Wing-ism meant that the Obama staffers completely lacked an understanding of how political interests operate, and were blindsided when it turned out Republicans wanted to destroy them rather than collaborate to enact Reasonable Bipartisan Compromises. Jim Messina, Obama’s deputy chief of staff and reelection campaign manager, spoke to a key Republican staffer after the 2008 election and was shocked when she told him: “We’re not going to compromise with you on anything. We’re going to fight Obama on everything.” Messina replied “That’s not what we did for Bush.” Said the Republican: “We don’t care.” Rhodes and Pfeiffer, in particular, are shocked and appalled when Republicans turn out to be more interested in their own political standing than advancing the objective well-being of the country.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: Mark Wilson/Getty via
[ed. So far, the only candidate I see talking about specifics (which get little to no attention from the media) is Elizabeth Warren. Bernie has the vision but seems too vague on the details. The rest? See also: Beto O'Rourke Is the Candidate For Vapid Morons (Paste). And: Unlikely Journeys (The Baffler).]
It's Scary How Much Personal Data People Leave on Used Laptops and Phones
In a dusty plastic bin under my bed lies at least four laptops, six cellphones, and a half-dozen hard drives. I have no idea what’s on any of them. Most of these devices predate the cloud-storage era, and so likely contain solitary copies of photos, texts, and emails, among other confidential files (porn?) that I’d probably be horrified to learn had fallen into the hands of strangers.
In retrospect, I should’ve taken a sledgehammer to my pile of electronic garbage long ago, or maybe tossed it into a burn barrel before soaking the charred remains in a bath of hydrochloric acid. Overkill? Maybe not.
A recent experiment by Josh Frantz, a senior security consultant at Rapid7, suggests that users are taking few if any steps to protect their private information before releasing their used devices back out into the wild. For around six months, he collected used desktop, hard disks, cellphones and more from pawn shops near his home in Wisconsin. It turned out they contain a wealth of private data belonging to their former owners, including a ton of personally identifiable information (PII)—the bread and butter of identity theft.
Frantz amassed a respectable stockpile of refurbished, donated, and used hardware: 41 desktops and laptops, 27 pieces of removable media (memory cards and flash drives), 11 hard disks, and six cellphones. The total cost of the experiment was a lot less than you’d imagine. “I visited a total of 31 businesses and bought whatever I could get my hands on for a grand total of around $600,” he said.
Frantz used a Python-based optical character recognition (OCR) tool to scan for Social Security numbers, dates of birth, credit card information, and other sensitive data. And the result was, as you might expect, not good.
The pile of junk turned out to contain 41 Social Security numbers, 50 dates of birth, 611 email accounts, 19 credit card numbers, two passport numbers, and six driver’s license numbers. Additionally, more than 200,000 images were contained on the devices and over 3,400 documents. He also extracted nearly 150,000 emails. (...)
A similar study at the University of Hertfordshire recent found that more than two-thirds of used USB drives sold in the U.S. and U.K. still contained the data of their previous owners. Out of 100 drives purchased in the U.S., 64 had data that was deleted deleted, but could easily be recovered.
The important thing to remember is that when a file appears to be deleted, it may not be. On a desktop or laptop computer, when a user deletes a file, the operating system mere flags the space that the data occupies as available to be overwritten. Without this, the workflow would get bogged down, as data erasure is actually more time consuming than you might think. Fifty gigabytes of space, for instance, could take up to an hour or more to properly wipe. Unless the space is overwritten, deleted files can be easily recovered.
There are a lot of tools available to help users properly sanitize a hard disk, such as BitRaser and BitBleach. Used properly, these will generally overwrite data thoroughly enough that most commercial forensic data-recovery tools will be fairly useless. (More authoritative methodologies can be read here.) Frantz recommends using DBAN, also known as Darik’s Boot and Nuke.
by Dell Cameron, Gizmodo | Read more:
In retrospect, I should’ve taken a sledgehammer to my pile of electronic garbage long ago, or maybe tossed it into a burn barrel before soaking the charred remains in a bath of hydrochloric acid. Overkill? Maybe not.
A recent experiment by Josh Frantz, a senior security consultant at Rapid7, suggests that users are taking few if any steps to protect their private information before releasing their used devices back out into the wild. For around six months, he collected used desktop, hard disks, cellphones and more from pawn shops near his home in Wisconsin. It turned out they contain a wealth of private data belonging to their former owners, including a ton of personally identifiable information (PII)—the bread and butter of identity theft.Frantz amassed a respectable stockpile of refurbished, donated, and used hardware: 41 desktops and laptops, 27 pieces of removable media (memory cards and flash drives), 11 hard disks, and six cellphones. The total cost of the experiment was a lot less than you’d imagine. “I visited a total of 31 businesses and bought whatever I could get my hands on for a grand total of around $600,” he said.
Frantz used a Python-based optical character recognition (OCR) tool to scan for Social Security numbers, dates of birth, credit card information, and other sensitive data. And the result was, as you might expect, not good.
The pile of junk turned out to contain 41 Social Security numbers, 50 dates of birth, 611 email accounts, 19 credit card numbers, two passport numbers, and six driver’s license numbers. Additionally, more than 200,000 images were contained on the devices and over 3,400 documents. He also extracted nearly 150,000 emails. (...)
A similar study at the University of Hertfordshire recent found that more than two-thirds of used USB drives sold in the U.S. and U.K. still contained the data of their previous owners. Out of 100 drives purchased in the U.S., 64 had data that was deleted deleted, but could easily be recovered.
The important thing to remember is that when a file appears to be deleted, it may not be. On a desktop or laptop computer, when a user deletes a file, the operating system mere flags the space that the data occupies as available to be overwritten. Without this, the workflow would get bogged down, as data erasure is actually more time consuming than you might think. Fifty gigabytes of space, for instance, could take up to an hour or more to properly wipe. Unless the space is overwritten, deleted files can be easily recovered.
There are a lot of tools available to help users properly sanitize a hard disk, such as BitRaser and BitBleach. Used properly, these will generally overwrite data thoroughly enough that most commercial forensic data-recovery tools will be fairly useless. (More authoritative methodologies can be read here.) Frantz recommends using DBAN, also known as Darik’s Boot and Nuke.
by Dell Cameron, Gizmodo | Read more:
Image: Jason Rollette (YouTube)
[ed. And thumb drives and memory cards. See also: Please, for the Love of God, Make Sure You Delete Things Properly (Gizmodo).]
Tuesday, March 19, 2019
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.”
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.
________________________________
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.
(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).]
Monday, March 18, 2019
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.”
[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.]
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.”
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
Sunday, March 17, 2019
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.
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
Saturday, March 16, 2019
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)