How giving water to migrants became a religious freedom issue (Desert News)
Image: Charlie Riedel, Associated Press
Monday, June 17, 2019
Criminalizing Compassion
How giving water to migrants became a religious freedom issue (Desert News)
Hong Kong Protests
Hong Kong is not China yet, but that feared day is coming ever nearer (The Guardian)
Image: Carl Court/Getty Images via
[ed. See also: How many really marched in Hong Kong? And how should we best guess crowd size? (Columbia Journalism Review).]
Sunday, June 16, 2019
Bob Dylan
[ed. As seen in Martin Scorsese's Rolling Thunder Review on Netflix (see here and here). Concert footage starts around 1:29. See also: Bob Dylan and Guests (with Tom Petty).]
How to Get a Banksy Off the Wall
As the last sheet of protective plywood is pulled off the painting, a cheer goes up from the crowd. TV crews from all over Europe have come to capture the moment. We’re inside a former police station that is being transformed into Britain’s first museum of street art. And the first exhibit is the corner section of a breeze-block wall from a garage in the steel town of Port Talbot, south Wales.
Earlier in the morning, under pouring rain and surrounded by a small knot of dog walkers and locals, I watched as the Port Talbot Banksy was hoisted on to a flatbed truck by a giant crane, and transported under blue light escort the two miles from the Taibach area to the city centre, like the pasosfloats that carry religious sculptures through the streets of Spain during Holy Week.
The analogy is not entirely facetious. For the people of Port Talbot, the sudden appearance of Season’s Greetings on 18 December last year was nothing short of miraculous.
“We don’t get given much in Port Talbot, except one recession after another,” says Plaid Cymru councillor Nigel Thomas Hunt, a giant of a man wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with the Banksy image, which he sells in his nearby shop. “I can’t tell you the buzz there was in the town, the feeling of elation. It was like we had been given a gift.”Season’s Greetings – with its waif-like child gulping down ash – shone a spotlight on urban pollution. Located between the M4 corridor and the giant Tata steel works, Taibach lies in the most polluted part of the city. Gary Owen, who runs a community Facebook group, claims to have prompted Banksy to paint the mural by sending a message to his Instagram account about pollution.
“It’s an irony that the police have given an escort to a Banksy, which is a piece of illegal artwork, and that we are putting it into the old police station,” says John Brandler, a bow-tie-wearing gallerist from Essex, who bought the garage wall from local steelworker Ian Lewis.
Brandler, who owns several other paintings by Banksy, is on record as having paid a six-figure sum for Season’s Greetings. In February, in what some regard as a swipe at its removal, a second piece of graffiti appeared in Taibach. It depicted a Lego-like figure cutting out a section of wall decorated with an Emoji-like face, poking out a green tongue decorated with a dollar sign.
In the month after it appeared, the Banksy mural was visited by at least 2,000 people per day. Amid fears of vandalism Michael Sheen, a famous actor who grew up in Port Talbot, helped fund 24/7 security. This didn’t stop one visitor from attacking the plastic screen protecting it.
Debate surrounding the politics of street art can be intense. In Detroit in 2010, a Banksy showing a forlorn-looking African-American boy holding a paint pot and brush – next to the words: “I remember when this was all trees” – was cut off a cinder block wall with a masonry saw and an oxyacetelane torch. The local outcry was so great that the dealer who removed it had to hide the work.
When it became known that Ian Lewis planned to sell his Port Talbot Banksy, he was abused on social media. “There is a valid criticism that it should stay on the streets,” says Brandler, who was offered large sums to take the image elsewhere, but insisted it remained in Port Talbot. “But there is also an argument that it should be protected. We have found a compromise by bringing it into the town centre.”
In Italy, a technique called strappo is used to remove frescoes. This involves gluing layers of cheesecloth over the image, then peeling it off the wall, like sunburned skin. The corner of the garage featuring Season’s Greetings was simply sliced away. First, the floor was removed. Then the inside of the wall was covered in wire mesh and sprayed with resin, to prevent it from cracking. The wall, which weighed about 4.5 tonnes, was then encased in a steel and wood framework, which acted like a cradle when it was lifted. In the back of everyone’s minds was the fear that, like Girl With Balloon, auctioned at Sotheby’s last October, Season’s Greetings might self-destruct when removed.
by Simon Worrall, New Statesman | Read more:
Image: Banksy and Matt Cardy/Getty Images
I Don't Actually Have to Sell This War With Iran, Do I?
“Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday that intelligence reviewed by American officials showed that Iran was responsible for attacks earlier in the day on two tankers in the Gulf of Oman, a critical waterway for the transit of much of the world’s oil.” — New York Times, 6/13/19
Let me cut straight to the chase: I’m tired. You’re tired. The world is overwhelming. We all have stuff we’d rather be doing. There’s tons of brand new original content on Netflix, for God’s sake. Don’t make me actually have to sell this war with Iran.
What do you want me to say? You really want me to pay lip service to some flimsy justification? You’re gonna oppose the war on moral grounds anyway, so what does it matter? I shouldn’t still have to bother with the same old talking points about how they have nukes, or some ship or tanker got blown up, or that I suddenly care about the religious freedom of some brown people. I’ve been wanting this war with Iran for years and it’s time it gets going, so let’s cut to the chase and get it going.
Is it the fact that it’s an unauthorized “war” that’s causing you to bump? Do we really have to go through this old song and dance about how only Congress can declare war? I guess I could concede and call it a “conflict” with Iran, if that’s really what you want, but it’s frankly insulting you’re even making me do that. Let’s get real. The troops are already in Afghanistan. They’re practically in Iran already. I’m not waiting around for Mitch McConnell to finish appointing every right-wing maniac with a law degree to preside over a federal court. Daddy’s got weapons to sell and his summer home in Belize won’t pay for itself.
I get it. I had to lie about every other war since Vietnam. And some of them were good lies, that I honestly took pains to cover up. But I’m getting older and I simply don’t have the energy anymore. I’m practically falling asleep on these cable news shows where I have to talk about war with Iran. There’s only so many ways you can talk about the importance of “spreading democracy” before it starts to become so dull and you start wishing you were anywhere else. Well, not anywhere. Wouldn’t want to be in Iran. That’s a good way to get yourself killed.
Maybe I can make some sort of effort to sell this thing. Maybe I can trot out some steely-eyed psycho general or a self-appointed Iran “expert” to make this whole war more palatable. I suppose I can pay the guys at the Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal to write some pro-war with Iran op-eds. It shouldn’t be too hard — they just have to dig up their Iraq War pieces from 2002 and replace that “q” with an “n.” If all you need is some pseudo-intellectual drivel defending mass death, then great. That’s why those magazines exist. I’ll let those guys throw their backs out trying to climb up on a moral high horse. But I promise you, after a while, you won’t even notice we’re at war with Iran. Unless you’re the poor schmuck who has to actually fight the thing, this whole war can be pushed to the background of your mental landscape, like the last season of Game of Thrones and the children ICE keep in cages. I swear, a decade from now, you’ll see some footage of the war on Fox News in an airport and it won’t even register. You’ll be surprised how long it’s been around, like a browser tab you had open since 2010.
Let me cut straight to the chase: I’m tired. You’re tired. The world is overwhelming. We all have stuff we’d rather be doing. There’s tons of brand new original content on Netflix, for God’s sake. Don’t make me actually have to sell this war with Iran.
What do you want me to say? You really want me to pay lip service to some flimsy justification? You’re gonna oppose the war on moral grounds anyway, so what does it matter? I shouldn’t still have to bother with the same old talking points about how they have nukes, or some ship or tanker got blown up, or that I suddenly care about the religious freedom of some brown people. I’ve been wanting this war with Iran for years and it’s time it gets going, so let’s cut to the chase and get it going.Is it the fact that it’s an unauthorized “war” that’s causing you to bump? Do we really have to go through this old song and dance about how only Congress can declare war? I guess I could concede and call it a “conflict” with Iran, if that’s really what you want, but it’s frankly insulting you’re even making me do that. Let’s get real. The troops are already in Afghanistan. They’re practically in Iran already. I’m not waiting around for Mitch McConnell to finish appointing every right-wing maniac with a law degree to preside over a federal court. Daddy’s got weapons to sell and his summer home in Belize won’t pay for itself.
I get it. I had to lie about every other war since Vietnam. And some of them were good lies, that I honestly took pains to cover up. But I’m getting older and I simply don’t have the energy anymore. I’m practically falling asleep on these cable news shows where I have to talk about war with Iran. There’s only so many ways you can talk about the importance of “spreading democracy” before it starts to become so dull and you start wishing you were anywhere else. Well, not anywhere. Wouldn’t want to be in Iran. That’s a good way to get yourself killed.
Maybe I can make some sort of effort to sell this thing. Maybe I can trot out some steely-eyed psycho general or a self-appointed Iran “expert” to make this whole war more palatable. I suppose I can pay the guys at the Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal to write some pro-war with Iran op-eds. It shouldn’t be too hard — they just have to dig up their Iraq War pieces from 2002 and replace that “q” with an “n.” If all you need is some pseudo-intellectual drivel defending mass death, then great. That’s why those magazines exist. I’ll let those guys throw their backs out trying to climb up on a moral high horse. But I promise you, after a while, you won’t even notice we’re at war with Iran. Unless you’re the poor schmuck who has to actually fight the thing, this whole war can be pushed to the background of your mental landscape, like the last season of Game of Thrones and the children ICE keep in cages. I swear, a decade from now, you’ll see some footage of the war on Fox News in an airport and it won’t even register. You’ll be surprised how long it’s been around, like a browser tab you had open since 2010.
by Matthew Brian Cohen, McSweeny's | Read more:
Image: via
Tax Cut Windfall
Stephen Smith worked at an AT&T call center in Meriden, Connecticut, for over 20 years before the giant telecoms company announced it was closing the city’s three call centers in February 2019.
“At 46 years old, I’m looking for a new job,” Smith said. “They basically told us we either need to move south or lose our job. It was out of the blue. We had no idea.”
Smith and about 90 of his colleagues were offered severance packages or the option to relocate to Georgia or Tennessee. But for most workers who have spouses with their own careers, elderly parents nearby in need of care, or children still in school, relocating on a whim isn’t an option.
These sudden mass layoffs have become increasingly common for workers at AT&T and many other big firms. But it was not meant to be that way.
“At 46 years old, I’m looking for a new job,” Smith said. “They basically told us we either need to move south or lose our job. It was out of the blue. We had no idea.”
Smith and about 90 of his colleagues were offered severance packages or the option to relocate to Georgia or Tennessee. But for most workers who have spouses with their own careers, elderly parents nearby in need of care, or children still in school, relocating on a whim isn’t an option.These sudden mass layoffs have become increasingly common for workers at AT&T and many other big firms. But it was not meant to be that way.
AT&T’s CEO, Randall Stephenson, promised in November 2017 to invest $1bn in capital expenditure and create 7,000 new jobs at the company if Trump’s hugely controversial tax cut bill passed. Many opponents had slammed the cuts as a corporate giveaway that benefited the super-rich. But big firms lobbied for it, saying – as AT&T did – that it would fund job-creating expansions.
The bill was voted into law in December 2017, reducing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. AT&T’s benefit was a tax windfall of $21bn and an additional estimated $3bn annually. But instead of creating jobs and increasing investment into the company, AT&T has eliminated 23,328 jobs since the tax cut bill was passed, according to a recent report by the Communications Workers of America. The CWA also said AT&T reduced their capital investments by $1.4bn. (...)
AT&T is among several large corporations whose CEOs announced support of the Trump tax cut bill by claiming if the legislation passed, their companies would ensure workers reaped benefits from it. But a report published on 22 May by the Congressional Research Service, a non-partisan thinktank for members of Congress, found the tax cuts did not significantly affect the economy or boost wages, but benefited investors more than anyone else.
“The evidence continues to mount that the Trump-GOP tax cuts were a scam, a giant bait-and-switch that promised workers big pay raises, a lot more jobs and new investments, but they largely enriched CEOs and the already wealthy,” said Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness. (...)
General Motors’ CEO, Mary Barra, was one of Trump’s economic advisers on tax reform, and the company vocally supported working with the Trump administration on tax reform “that is beneficial to the US economy, beneficial to US manufacturing and creates jobs”.
In November 2018, GM announced it would cease operations at five plants in Michigan, Ohio, Maryland and Ontario, Canada, resulting in the loss of more than 14,000 jobs in those communities. As GM is closing plants, the company has spent $10bn since 2015 on stock buybacks, and made a net profit of over $8bn despite paying no federal taxes in 2018. GM reported a tax windfall of $157m in the first three months of 2018 due to the Trump tax cut. (...)
Wells Fargo, the fourth largest bank in the US by assets, tied a minimum wage increase of $15 an hour to the Trump tax cuts and pledged increased investments in workers. The company is estimated to save $3.7bn annually due to the Trump tax cut. The bank’s 2018 tax savings were 47 times more than the costs of its minimum wage increases. Rather than invest in its workforce, Wells Fargo bought back 350m shares in early 2018, worth about $22.6bn, increased CEO salary by 36%, and announced plans in September 2018 to eliminate at least 26,000 jobs in the US over the next three years as many of those positions are being sent overseas.
“Nobody here saw any of that benefit; if anything, quite the opposite. They changed our healthcare plans in 2019, so the costs for everyone went up, the costs for prescriptions went up,” said Mark Willie, a Wells Fargo office employee in Des Moines, Iowa.
The bill was voted into law in December 2017, reducing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. AT&T’s benefit was a tax windfall of $21bn and an additional estimated $3bn annually. But instead of creating jobs and increasing investment into the company, AT&T has eliminated 23,328 jobs since the tax cut bill was passed, according to a recent report by the Communications Workers of America. The CWA also said AT&T reduced their capital investments by $1.4bn. (...)
AT&T is among several large corporations whose CEOs announced support of the Trump tax cut bill by claiming if the legislation passed, their companies would ensure workers reaped benefits from it. But a report published on 22 May by the Congressional Research Service, a non-partisan thinktank for members of Congress, found the tax cuts did not significantly affect the economy or boost wages, but benefited investors more than anyone else.
“The evidence continues to mount that the Trump-GOP tax cuts were a scam, a giant bait-and-switch that promised workers big pay raises, a lot more jobs and new investments, but they largely enriched CEOs and the already wealthy,” said Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness. (...)
General Motors’ CEO, Mary Barra, was one of Trump’s economic advisers on tax reform, and the company vocally supported working with the Trump administration on tax reform “that is beneficial to the US economy, beneficial to US manufacturing and creates jobs”.
In November 2018, GM announced it would cease operations at five plants in Michigan, Ohio, Maryland and Ontario, Canada, resulting in the loss of more than 14,000 jobs in those communities. As GM is closing plants, the company has spent $10bn since 2015 on stock buybacks, and made a net profit of over $8bn despite paying no federal taxes in 2018. GM reported a tax windfall of $157m in the first three months of 2018 due to the Trump tax cut. (...)
Wells Fargo, the fourth largest bank in the US by assets, tied a minimum wage increase of $15 an hour to the Trump tax cuts and pledged increased investments in workers. The company is estimated to save $3.7bn annually due to the Trump tax cut. The bank’s 2018 tax savings were 47 times more than the costs of its minimum wage increases. Rather than invest in its workforce, Wells Fargo bought back 350m shares in early 2018, worth about $22.6bn, increased CEO salary by 36%, and announced plans in September 2018 to eliminate at least 26,000 jobs in the US over the next three years as many of those positions are being sent overseas.
“Nobody here saw any of that benefit; if anything, quite the opposite. They changed our healthcare plans in 2019, so the costs for everyone went up, the costs for prescriptions went up,” said Mark Willie, a Wells Fargo office employee in Des Moines, Iowa.
by Michael Sainato, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Lars Hagberg/AFP/Getty Images
Saturday, June 15, 2019
Dachshunds on Parade, 2019
[ed. Dachshunds on Parade Festival, 2019. Ellensburg, WA. More pictures after the jump (best viewed from a computer since not all are fully viewable on phones for some reason). Photos from 2015: here.]
Photos: markk
The New Sobriety
It seems not even sobriety will be saved from enjoying a made-for-Instagram moment, with new hashtaggable terms like “mindful drinking” and “sober curious.” No longer do you have to feel left out or uncool for being sober. You maybe don’t even have to completely stop drinking alcoholic beverages?
This is according to a new generation of kinda-sorta temporary temperance crusaders, whose attitudes toward the hooch is somewhere between Carrie Nation’s and Carrie Bradshaw’s. To them, sobriety is something less (and more) than a practice relevant only to clinically determined alcohol abusers. Now it can also just be something cool and healthful to try, like going vegan, or taking an Iyengar yoga class.
Anonymous? Hardly. No longer is the topic of sobriety confined to discreet meetings in church halls over Styrofoam cups of lukewarm Maxwell House. For these New Abstainers, sobriety is a thing to be, yes, toasted over $15 artisanal mocktails at alcohol-free nights at chic bars around the country, or at “sober-curious” yoga retreats, or early-morning dance parties for those with no need to sleep off the previous night’s bender.
Many will tell you they never had a drinking problem. They just had a problem with drinking.The simple act of waving off wine at a dinner party used to be interpreted as a tacit signal that you were in recovery, “on the wagon,” unless you were visibly pregnant or had known religious objections.
That was fine if you identified as an alcoholic. But what about people like Ruby Warrington, 43, a British style journalist in New York who spent her early career quaffing gratis cocktails at industry events, only to regret the groggy mornings, stumbles and embarrassing texts that have long been considered part of the bargain with so-called normal drinking?
After moving to New York in 2012, Ms. Warrington tried 12-step programs briefly but decided that “Ruby, alcoholic” was not the person she saw in the mirror. Three years ago she started Club Soda NYC, an event series for other “sober curious,” as she termed them: young professionals who were “kind-of-just-a-little-bit-addicted-to-booze.” (...)
She wrote a book called “Sober Curious” that was published in 2018, started a podcast and has staged subsequent Sober Curious events for what she calls the “Soho House crowd” at places like the Kripalu wellness retreat in Massachusetts, where participants also engage in heart-baring, 12-step-style testimonials.
Their fellow travelers band together at early-morning sober Daybreaker raves, held in 25 cities around the country.
Then there are the more than 18,000 Facebook followers of a nonprofit called Sober Movement, which promotes sobriety “as a lifestyle,” who post smiling pictures of themselves cartwheeling in the surf, or rocking ripped, beer-binge-free abs, appended with hashtags like #soberissexy, #partysober and #endthestigma.
Online, sobriety has become “the new black,” asserts a recovery site called, yes, Hip Sobriety.
The old idea that going dry is pretty dry would mean little to the 39,000 Instagram followers who feast on golden-hour beach shots from adventure travel retreats for sober or sober-curious “big life enthusiast” women in, say, Baja organized by The Sober Glow, a sobriety site run by Mia Mancuso, an accountability coach for women who consider themselves “gray area drinkers.”
“Once I removed the option of drinking, a whole new world opened up to me,” said Ms. Mancuso, 42. “I now live a life full of integrity, confidence and grace, which ironically was what I was hoping to find in all those pretty little cocktails.”
Some not willing to eschew liquor completely are trying what Rosamund Dean, Ms. Warrington’s compatriot, called “Mindful Drinking” in a 2017 book: a half-measure approach to sobriety where you drink less, perhaps think about it more.
“People invest so much of their identity in their lifestyle choices, and it’s the same with drinking,” Ms. Dean wrote in an email. “Everyone is either a wine-guzzling party animal or a clean-living health freak. Personally, I believe the middle ground is the healthiest place to be.‘Rules, No!’
This is according to a new generation of kinda-sorta temporary temperance crusaders, whose attitudes toward the hooch is somewhere between Carrie Nation’s and Carrie Bradshaw’s. To them, sobriety is something less (and more) than a practice relevant only to clinically determined alcohol abusers. Now it can also just be something cool and healthful to try, like going vegan, or taking an Iyengar yoga class.
Anonymous? Hardly. No longer is the topic of sobriety confined to discreet meetings in church halls over Styrofoam cups of lukewarm Maxwell House. For these New Abstainers, sobriety is a thing to be, yes, toasted over $15 artisanal mocktails at alcohol-free nights at chic bars around the country, or at “sober-curious” yoga retreats, or early-morning dance parties for those with no need to sleep off the previous night’s bender.Many will tell you they never had a drinking problem. They just had a problem with drinking.The simple act of waving off wine at a dinner party used to be interpreted as a tacit signal that you were in recovery, “on the wagon,” unless you were visibly pregnant or had known religious objections.
That was fine if you identified as an alcoholic. But what about people like Ruby Warrington, 43, a British style journalist in New York who spent her early career quaffing gratis cocktails at industry events, only to regret the groggy mornings, stumbles and embarrassing texts that have long been considered part of the bargain with so-called normal drinking?
After moving to New York in 2012, Ms. Warrington tried 12-step programs briefly but decided that “Ruby, alcoholic” was not the person she saw in the mirror. Three years ago she started Club Soda NYC, an event series for other “sober curious,” as she termed them: young professionals who were “kind-of-just-a-little-bit-addicted-to-booze.” (...)
She wrote a book called “Sober Curious” that was published in 2018, started a podcast and has staged subsequent Sober Curious events for what she calls the “Soho House crowd” at places like the Kripalu wellness retreat in Massachusetts, where participants also engage in heart-baring, 12-step-style testimonials.
Their fellow travelers band together at early-morning sober Daybreaker raves, held in 25 cities around the country.
Then there are the more than 18,000 Facebook followers of a nonprofit called Sober Movement, which promotes sobriety “as a lifestyle,” who post smiling pictures of themselves cartwheeling in the surf, or rocking ripped, beer-binge-free abs, appended with hashtags like #soberissexy, #partysober and #endthestigma.
Online, sobriety has become “the new black,” asserts a recovery site called, yes, Hip Sobriety.
The old idea that going dry is pretty dry would mean little to the 39,000 Instagram followers who feast on golden-hour beach shots from adventure travel retreats for sober or sober-curious “big life enthusiast” women in, say, Baja organized by The Sober Glow, a sobriety site run by Mia Mancuso, an accountability coach for women who consider themselves “gray area drinkers.”
“Once I removed the option of drinking, a whole new world opened up to me,” said Ms. Mancuso, 42. “I now live a life full of integrity, confidence and grace, which ironically was what I was hoping to find in all those pretty little cocktails.”
Some not willing to eschew liquor completely are trying what Rosamund Dean, Ms. Warrington’s compatriot, called “Mindful Drinking” in a 2017 book: a half-measure approach to sobriety where you drink less, perhaps think about it more.
“People invest so much of their identity in their lifestyle choices, and it’s the same with drinking,” Ms. Dean wrote in an email. “Everyone is either a wine-guzzling party animal or a clean-living health freak. Personally, I believe the middle ground is the healthiest place to be.‘Rules, No!’
by Alex Williams, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Tracy Ma/The New York Times; Shutterstock
Friday, June 14, 2019
Drug to Replace Chemotherapy May Reshape Cancer Care
A class of drugs is emerging that can attack cancer cells in the body without damaging surrounding healthy ones. They have the potential to replace chemotherapy and its disruptive side effects, reshaping the future of cancer care.
The complex biological medicines, called antibody drug conjugates (ADCs), have been in development for decades, and are now generating renewed excitement because of the success of one ADC in late-stage testing, a breast cancer treatment called DS-8201.
The fervor over ADCs is such that AstraZeneca Plc in March agreed to pay as much as $6.9 billion to jointly develop DS-8201 with Japan’s Daiichi Sankyo Co., the British drugmaker’s biggest deal in more than a decade. The investment was widely seen to be a validation of DS-8201’s potential -- and the ADC class of drugs as a whole -- as an alternative for chemotherapy, the most widely used treatment, for some types of cancer.
DS-8201, which will be filed for U.S. approval by the end of September, is so well-regarded that some analysts already predict it will surpass the $7 billion in annual sales for Roche Holding AG’s breast cancer drug Herceptin, which it aims to replace.
“DS-8201 may become one of the largest cancer biologic drugs,’’ said Caroline Stewart, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, who estimates sales of the drug to eventually approach $12 billion globally -- that’s a level attained by only a handful of biologics, which are drugs based on a living organism. “While the field has advanced and there are several companies focusing on ADCs, Daiichi in particular seems to have developed a unique expertise.”
Analysts say DS-8201 could triple the number of patients who get powerful targeted treatment for breast cancer, the most common tumor in women that kills more than half a million annually. As importantly, its ability to target cancer cells without affecting normal cells is a key advantage over the take-no-prisoners approach of chemotherapy.
Daiichi’s treatment has been seen to double survival time for advanced breast cancer patients to 20 months from 10, former UBS Securities Japan Co. analyst Atsushi Seki said in March. In trials, patients using DS-8201 experienced less nausea and hair loss compared with chemotherapy. (...)
Another Level
Daiichi Sankyo’s drug takes ADCs to another level. Its advantage is that it carries eight payloads stably to cancer cells, double the number of the industry standard, said Toshinori Agatsuma, head of oncology research at Daiichi Sankyo who led a team that discovered the therapy.
“Currently available ADCs are far from being perfect technically because the payload linked to antibodies aren’t properly delivered to cancer cells,’’ said Agatsuma. “We wanted to challenge and improve that. We were a latecomer in biotech, but I knew it was an area where we could catch up, compete and win.’’
About 2.1 million women are diagnosed with breast cancer each year, according to the World Health Organization. Some 18% of cases are driven by a protein called HER2, and their first treatment is chemotherapy alongside Roche’s Herceptin and Perjeta, a related drug. While DS-8201 is currently in testing for later-stage cancer, the plan is to go up against the first-line treatment in the next two years.
“It would be transformative” if the drug were to become the sole first-line treatment, said David Fredrickson, president of AstraZeneca’s oncology business. “If we can eliminate the side effects associated with chemotherapy, that would be a tremendous benefit for women.”
Drugs like Herceptin only target high levels of HER2, and women with lower levels must rely on hormone therapy or chemotherapy. That’s where DS-8201 has the potential to serve far more patients, treating those with both higher and lower levels of HER2.
by Kanoko Matsuyama, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Science Photo Library
The complex biological medicines, called antibody drug conjugates (ADCs), have been in development for decades, and are now generating renewed excitement because of the success of one ADC in late-stage testing, a breast cancer treatment called DS-8201.
The fervor over ADCs is such that AstraZeneca Plc in March agreed to pay as much as $6.9 billion to jointly develop DS-8201 with Japan’s Daiichi Sankyo Co., the British drugmaker’s biggest deal in more than a decade. The investment was widely seen to be a validation of DS-8201’s potential -- and the ADC class of drugs as a whole -- as an alternative for chemotherapy, the most widely used treatment, for some types of cancer.DS-8201, which will be filed for U.S. approval by the end of September, is so well-regarded that some analysts already predict it will surpass the $7 billion in annual sales for Roche Holding AG’s breast cancer drug Herceptin, which it aims to replace.
“DS-8201 may become one of the largest cancer biologic drugs,’’ said Caroline Stewart, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, who estimates sales of the drug to eventually approach $12 billion globally -- that’s a level attained by only a handful of biologics, which are drugs based on a living organism. “While the field has advanced and there are several companies focusing on ADCs, Daiichi in particular seems to have developed a unique expertise.”
Analysts say DS-8201 could triple the number of patients who get powerful targeted treatment for breast cancer, the most common tumor in women that kills more than half a million annually. As importantly, its ability to target cancer cells without affecting normal cells is a key advantage over the take-no-prisoners approach of chemotherapy.
Daiichi’s treatment has been seen to double survival time for advanced breast cancer patients to 20 months from 10, former UBS Securities Japan Co. analyst Atsushi Seki said in March. In trials, patients using DS-8201 experienced less nausea and hair loss compared with chemotherapy. (...)
Another Level
Daiichi Sankyo’s drug takes ADCs to another level. Its advantage is that it carries eight payloads stably to cancer cells, double the number of the industry standard, said Toshinori Agatsuma, head of oncology research at Daiichi Sankyo who led a team that discovered the therapy.
“Currently available ADCs are far from being perfect technically because the payload linked to antibodies aren’t properly delivered to cancer cells,’’ said Agatsuma. “We wanted to challenge and improve that. We were a latecomer in biotech, but I knew it was an area where we could catch up, compete and win.’’
About 2.1 million women are diagnosed with breast cancer each year, according to the World Health Organization. Some 18% of cases are driven by a protein called HER2, and their first treatment is chemotherapy alongside Roche’s Herceptin and Perjeta, a related drug. While DS-8201 is currently in testing for later-stage cancer, the plan is to go up against the first-line treatment in the next two years.
“It would be transformative” if the drug were to become the sole first-line treatment, said David Fredrickson, president of AstraZeneca’s oncology business. “If we can eliminate the side effects associated with chemotherapy, that would be a tremendous benefit for women.”
Drugs like Herceptin only target high levels of HER2, and women with lower levels must rely on hormone therapy or chemotherapy. That’s where DS-8201 has the potential to serve far more patients, treating those with both higher and lower levels of HER2.
by Kanoko Matsuyama, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Science Photo Library
Inside the Cultish Dreamworld of Augusta National
Beneath Augusta National, the world’s most exclusive golf club and most venerated domain of cultivated grass, there is a vast network of pipes and mechanical blowers, which help drain and ventilate the putting greens. The SubAir System was developed in the nineteen-nineties, by the aptly named course superintendent Marsh Benson, in an effort to mitigate the effects of nature on this precious facsimile of it. When the system’s fans blow one way, they provide air to the densely seeded bent grass of the putting surface. This promotes growth. When the fans are reversed, they create a suction effect, and leach water from the greens. This promotes firmness. The professionals who arrive at Augusta every April to compete in the Masters Tournament, the event for which the club is known, expect to be tested by greens that are hard and fast. Amid all the other immodesties and peculiarities of Augusta, the greens, ultimately, are the thing. Herbert Warren Wind, who for decades covered the sport at this magazine and at Sports Illustrated, once asked a colleague, on arriving in Augusta, “Are they firm?” The antecedent was understood. In 1994, Gary McCord, a golf commentator for CBS, the network that has televised the tournament for sixty-three years, said on the air, “They don’t cut the greens here at Augusta, they use bikini wax.” He was banned from the broadcast.
It is by now hardly scandalous to note that Augusta National—called the National by its members and devotees, and Augusta by everyone else—is an environment of extreme artifice, an elaborate television soundstage, a fantasia of the fifties, a Disneyclub in the Georgia pines. Some of the components of the illusion are a matter of speculation, as the club is notoriously stingy with information about itself. It has been accepted as fact that recalcitrant patches of grass are painted green and that the ponds used to be dyed blue. Because the azaleas seem always to bloom right on time, skeptics have propagated the myth that the club’s horticulturists freeze the blossoms, in advance of the tournament, or swap out early bloomers for more coöperative specimens. Pine straw is imported. Pinecones are deported. There is a curious absence of fauna. One hardly ever sees a squirrel or a bird. I’d been told that birdsong—a lot of it, at any rate—is piped in through speakers hidden in the greenery. (In 2000, CBS got caught doing some overdubbing of its own, after a birder noticed that the trills and chirps on a golf broadcast belonged to non-indigenous species.)
You hear about this kind of stuff, before your first visit, just as you get the more commonplace spiel that everything is perfect, that the course is even more majestic in real life than it is on TV, and that, in spite of all the walking, you’ll put on five pounds. Pimento-cheese sandwiches, egg-salad sandwiches, peach-ice-cream sandwiches, MoonPies, underpriced beer. You are urged to adopt the terminology favored by the tournament hosts and embraced by CBS. Spectators are “patrons.” The rough—longer grass that lines the fairways—is the “second cut.” (And it is controversial, because its abundance contravenes the wishes of the patriarchs, who designed the course to have a dearth of rough. Gary McCord may have been onto something.) The traps are bunkers, and what appears to patrons and television viewers to be the whitest sand in golf is technically not sand but waste from feldspar mines in North Carolina.
Augusta National is sometimes likened to Oz. For one thing, it’s a Technicolor fantasyland embedded in an otherwise ordinary tract of American sprawl. Washington Road, the main approach to the club, is a forlorn strip of Waffle Houses, pool-supply stores, and cheap-except-during-the-Masters hotels. In the Hooters parking lot during tournament week, fans line up for selfies with John Daly, the dissolute pro and avatar of mid-round cigarettes and booze. But step through the club’s metal detectors and badge scanners, and you enter a lush, high-rent realm, where you are not allowed to run, talk loudly, or cheer a player’s mistakes. Order is maintained by security guards, who for decades were provided by the Pinkerton detective agency. (Though Pinkerton was acquired by a Swedish company called Securitas, in 1999, many patrons still refer to the guards as Pinkertons.) In 2012, a fan who stole onto a fairway to take a cup of bunker sand was thrown in jail.
I showed up on a Monday afternoon before the tournament, just as a series of storms swept in, and as the spectators, there to witness the first rounds of practice, were being herded off the grounds. Owing to the threat of lightning, play was suspended for the day and the club was closed to visitors. The throngs poured out of the gates into the real world, just as I was leaving it. I took refuge in what the club calls the press building, a recently constructed Taj Mahal of media mollycoddling. This columned, ersatz-antebellum megamansion, in operation just ten days a year, has got to be the fanciest media center in sports. It has state-of-the-art working quarters, radio and television studios, locker rooms, a gratis restaurant with made-to-order omelettes for breakfast and a bountiful hot lunch, as well as a grab-and-go counter with craft beers, artisanal cheeses and jerkies, and a full array of Augusta’s famous sandwiches, each wrapped in green paper.
Such generosity and care, for the journalists, reflects the role that so many of them have played in burnishing the mythology of the Masters; it also suggests an effort to keep them away from the course and the clubhouse. The press is provided with every disincentive to venture out. The gang’s all there. Even the bathrooms are capacious, and staffed with attendants. Each member of the media has a work station with a brass nameplate, a leather swivel chair, a pair of computer monitors, and a surfeit of real-time tournament footage and information—far more data than one would be able to gather out on the golf course, especially because, outside the press building, reporters are not allowed to carry cell phones. (The phone ban, strictly enforced and punishable by immediate removal from the grounds, applies to patrons and members, too. One morning during the tournament this year, a story went around that the club had done a spot inspection of staff headquarters and found that an employee had hidden a cell phone between two slices of bread.) The golfers and the tournament officials appear dutifully for press conferences; why bother heading out to the clubhouse to hound them for quotes? No phones are allowed at the press conferences, either. The club wants control over sounds and pictures—the content. The club can tell who’s who, and who’s where, by rfid chips affixed to each press badge.
The working area faced the practice range, which the players had abandoned, once the rain began hammering down. As dusk approached, the rain briefly let up, and a battalion of men in baggy white coveralls—the official caddie costume at Augusta—fanned out across the range, to retrieve the hundreds of balls that the players had struck there earlier in the day. In the gloaming, these white jumpsuits, moving irregularly amid the deep green of the manicured grounds, brought to mind an avant-garde film about a lunatic asylum: the inmates, in their hospital gowns, out for a constitutional.
The course was still closed the next morning. I caught a ride to the clubhouse on a golf cart with a member, a so-called green jacket, named John Carr, an oil magnate from Ireland, who told me that he was on the media committee.
The members in attendance during the tournament (and at dinner, whenever they visit) are required to wear their green blazers. The club’s founders decreed, in the earliest years of the tournament, that any members present had to make themselves available to patrons who might be in need of assistance. The jackets tell you who the members are. It is an oddity of the place that its members insist on secrecy—there are some three hundred, but there is no public list, and omertà is strictly enforced—and yet here, at the biggest golf tournament of the year, they parade about in uniform, wearing name tags: Roger Goodell, Sam Nunn, Rex Tillerson.
The jackets themselves never leave the grounds; they hang in the members’ lockers. Each winner of the Masters gets a green jacket, too, which is presented immediately after the victory by the club’s chairman and the previous year’s winner, in an awkward ceremony staged for television in the basement of a house called the Butler Cabin, near the eighteenth hole. The solemnity surrounding this perennial observance suggests the initiation ritual of a really square fraternity. Jim Nantz, the longtime host of the CBS broadcast and of the Butler Cabin sacrament, has perfected an air of unctuous self-satisfaction that signals even to the casual viewer that there is something batty about the whole enterprise. The way that Nantz repeats the tag line—“A tradition unlike any other”—assumes a sinister, cultish edge. Everyone associated with the club seems to take all this very seriously. On the official Masters podcast, the host, Marty Smith, said to the celebrity chef David Chang, as though reciting a prayer, “The respect for the grounds and the reverence for the event permeate us as human beings and we thereby disseminate that same respect to our peers.”
“It’s a beautiful thing,” Chang replied. “It almost restores my faith in humanity.” As one long-standing media-badge holder told me, after he’d spent ten minutes singing the club’s praises on the record, “These guys are out of their fucking minds. They think it’s supernatural.”
[ed. See also: If Brooks Koepka Is the Future of Golf, What Does That Future Look Like? (The Ringer).]
It is by now hardly scandalous to note that Augusta National—called the National by its members and devotees, and Augusta by everyone else—is an environment of extreme artifice, an elaborate television soundstage, a fantasia of the fifties, a Disneyclub in the Georgia pines. Some of the components of the illusion are a matter of speculation, as the club is notoriously stingy with information about itself. It has been accepted as fact that recalcitrant patches of grass are painted green and that the ponds used to be dyed blue. Because the azaleas seem always to bloom right on time, skeptics have propagated the myth that the club’s horticulturists freeze the blossoms, in advance of the tournament, or swap out early bloomers for more coöperative specimens. Pine straw is imported. Pinecones are deported. There is a curious absence of fauna. One hardly ever sees a squirrel or a bird. I’d been told that birdsong—a lot of it, at any rate—is piped in through speakers hidden in the greenery. (In 2000, CBS got caught doing some overdubbing of its own, after a birder noticed that the trills and chirps on a golf broadcast belonged to non-indigenous species.)You hear about this kind of stuff, before your first visit, just as you get the more commonplace spiel that everything is perfect, that the course is even more majestic in real life than it is on TV, and that, in spite of all the walking, you’ll put on five pounds. Pimento-cheese sandwiches, egg-salad sandwiches, peach-ice-cream sandwiches, MoonPies, underpriced beer. You are urged to adopt the terminology favored by the tournament hosts and embraced by CBS. Spectators are “patrons.” The rough—longer grass that lines the fairways—is the “second cut.” (And it is controversial, because its abundance contravenes the wishes of the patriarchs, who designed the course to have a dearth of rough. Gary McCord may have been onto something.) The traps are bunkers, and what appears to patrons and television viewers to be the whitest sand in golf is technically not sand but waste from feldspar mines in North Carolina.
Augusta National is sometimes likened to Oz. For one thing, it’s a Technicolor fantasyland embedded in an otherwise ordinary tract of American sprawl. Washington Road, the main approach to the club, is a forlorn strip of Waffle Houses, pool-supply stores, and cheap-except-during-the-Masters hotels. In the Hooters parking lot during tournament week, fans line up for selfies with John Daly, the dissolute pro and avatar of mid-round cigarettes and booze. But step through the club’s metal detectors and badge scanners, and you enter a lush, high-rent realm, where you are not allowed to run, talk loudly, or cheer a player’s mistakes. Order is maintained by security guards, who for decades were provided by the Pinkerton detective agency. (Though Pinkerton was acquired by a Swedish company called Securitas, in 1999, many patrons still refer to the guards as Pinkertons.) In 2012, a fan who stole onto a fairway to take a cup of bunker sand was thrown in jail.
I showed up on a Monday afternoon before the tournament, just as a series of storms swept in, and as the spectators, there to witness the first rounds of practice, were being herded off the grounds. Owing to the threat of lightning, play was suspended for the day and the club was closed to visitors. The throngs poured out of the gates into the real world, just as I was leaving it. I took refuge in what the club calls the press building, a recently constructed Taj Mahal of media mollycoddling. This columned, ersatz-antebellum megamansion, in operation just ten days a year, has got to be the fanciest media center in sports. It has state-of-the-art working quarters, radio and television studios, locker rooms, a gratis restaurant with made-to-order omelettes for breakfast and a bountiful hot lunch, as well as a grab-and-go counter with craft beers, artisanal cheeses and jerkies, and a full array of Augusta’s famous sandwiches, each wrapped in green paper.
Such generosity and care, for the journalists, reflects the role that so many of them have played in burnishing the mythology of the Masters; it also suggests an effort to keep them away from the course and the clubhouse. The press is provided with every disincentive to venture out. The gang’s all there. Even the bathrooms are capacious, and staffed with attendants. Each member of the media has a work station with a brass nameplate, a leather swivel chair, a pair of computer monitors, and a surfeit of real-time tournament footage and information—far more data than one would be able to gather out on the golf course, especially because, outside the press building, reporters are not allowed to carry cell phones. (The phone ban, strictly enforced and punishable by immediate removal from the grounds, applies to patrons and members, too. One morning during the tournament this year, a story went around that the club had done a spot inspection of staff headquarters and found that an employee had hidden a cell phone between two slices of bread.) The golfers and the tournament officials appear dutifully for press conferences; why bother heading out to the clubhouse to hound them for quotes? No phones are allowed at the press conferences, either. The club wants control over sounds and pictures—the content. The club can tell who’s who, and who’s where, by rfid chips affixed to each press badge.
The working area faced the practice range, which the players had abandoned, once the rain began hammering down. As dusk approached, the rain briefly let up, and a battalion of men in baggy white coveralls—the official caddie costume at Augusta—fanned out across the range, to retrieve the hundreds of balls that the players had struck there earlier in the day. In the gloaming, these white jumpsuits, moving irregularly amid the deep green of the manicured grounds, brought to mind an avant-garde film about a lunatic asylum: the inmates, in their hospital gowns, out for a constitutional.
The course was still closed the next morning. I caught a ride to the clubhouse on a golf cart with a member, a so-called green jacket, named John Carr, an oil magnate from Ireland, who told me that he was on the media committee.
The members in attendance during the tournament (and at dinner, whenever they visit) are required to wear their green blazers. The club’s founders decreed, in the earliest years of the tournament, that any members present had to make themselves available to patrons who might be in need of assistance. The jackets tell you who the members are. It is an oddity of the place that its members insist on secrecy—there are some three hundred, but there is no public list, and omertà is strictly enforced—and yet here, at the biggest golf tournament of the year, they parade about in uniform, wearing name tags: Roger Goodell, Sam Nunn, Rex Tillerson.
The jackets themselves never leave the grounds; they hang in the members’ lockers. Each winner of the Masters gets a green jacket, too, which is presented immediately after the victory by the club’s chairman and the previous year’s winner, in an awkward ceremony staged for television in the basement of a house called the Butler Cabin, near the eighteenth hole. The solemnity surrounding this perennial observance suggests the initiation ritual of a really square fraternity. Jim Nantz, the longtime host of the CBS broadcast and of the Butler Cabin sacrament, has perfected an air of unctuous self-satisfaction that signals even to the casual viewer that there is something batty about the whole enterprise. The way that Nantz repeats the tag line—“A tradition unlike any other”—assumes a sinister, cultish edge. Everyone associated with the club seems to take all this very seriously. On the official Masters podcast, the host, Marty Smith, said to the celebrity chef David Chang, as though reciting a prayer, “The respect for the grounds and the reverence for the event permeate us as human beings and we thereby disseminate that same respect to our peers.”
“It’s a beautiful thing,” Chang replied. “It almost restores my faith in humanity.” As one long-standing media-badge holder told me, after he’d spent ten minutes singing the club’s praises on the record, “These guys are out of their fucking minds. They think it’s supernatural.”
by Nick Paumgarten, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Leo Espinosa[ed. See also: If Brooks Koepka Is the Future of Golf, What Does That Future Look Like? (The Ringer).]
Thursday, June 13, 2019
The Propaganda Multiplier
It is one of the most important aspects of our media system, and yet hardly known to the public: most of the international news coverage in Western media is provided by only three global news agencies based in New York, London and Paris.
The key role played by these agencies means Western media often report on the same topics, even using the same wording. In addition, governments, military and intelligence services use these global news agencies as multipliers to spread their messages around the world.
A study of the Syria war coverage by nine leading European newspapers clearly illustrates these issues: 78% of all articles were based in whole or in part on agency reports, yet 0% on investigative research. Moreover, 82% of all opinion pieces and interviews were in favor of the US and NATO intervention, while propaganda was attributed exclusively to the opposite side.
“The Invisible Nerve Center of the Media System”
So what are the names of these agencies that are “always at the source of the story”? There are now only three global news agencies left:
Wolfgang Vyslozil, former managing director of the Austrian APA, described the key role of news agencies with these words: “News agencies are rarely in the public eye. Yet they are one of the most influential and at the same time one of the least known media types. They are key institutions of substantial importance to any media system. They are the invisible nerve center that connects all parts of this system.” (Segbers 2007, p.10)
Small abbreviation, great effect
However, there is a simple reason why the global agencies, despite their importance, are virtually unknown to the general public. To quote a Swiss media professor: “Radio and television usually do not name their sources, and only specialists can decipher references in magazines.” (Blum 1995, P. 9)
The motive for this discretion, however, should be clear: news outlets are not particularly keen to let readers know that they haven’t researched most of their contributions themselves.
The key role played by these agencies means Western media often report on the same topics, even using the same wording. In addition, governments, military and intelligence services use these global news agencies as multipliers to spread their messages around the world.
A study of the Syria war coverage by nine leading European newspapers clearly illustrates these issues: 78% of all articles were based in whole or in part on agency reports, yet 0% on investigative research. Moreover, 82% of all opinion pieces and interviews were in favor of the US and NATO intervention, while propaganda was attributed exclusively to the opposite side.
Introduction: “Something strange”
“How does the newspaper know what it knows?” The answer to this question is likely to surprise some newspaper readers: “The main source of information is stories from news agencies. The almost anonymously operating news agencies are in a way the key to world events. So what are the names of these agencies, how do they work and who finances them? To judge how well one is informed about events in East and West, one should know the answers to these questions.” (Höhne 1977, p. 11)
A Swiss media researcher points out: “The news agencies are the most important suppliers of material to mass media. No daily media outlet can manage without them. So the news agencies influence our image of the world; above all, we get to know what they have selected.” (Blum 1995, p. 9)
In view of their essential importance, it is all the more astonishing that these agencies are hardly known to the public: “A large part of society is unaware that news agencies exist at all … In fact, they play an enormously important role in the media market. But despite this great importance, little attention has been paid to them in the past.” (Schulten-Jaspers 2013, p. 13)
Even the head of a news agency noted: “There is something strange about news agencies. They are little known to the public. Unlike a newspaper, their activity is not so much in the spotlight, yet they can always be found at the source of the story.” (Segbers 2007, p. 9)
“How does the newspaper know what it knows?” The answer to this question is likely to surprise some newspaper readers: “The main source of information is stories from news agencies. The almost anonymously operating news agencies are in a way the key to world events. So what are the names of these agencies, how do they work and who finances them? To judge how well one is informed about events in East and West, one should know the answers to these questions.” (Höhne 1977, p. 11)A Swiss media researcher points out: “The news agencies are the most important suppliers of material to mass media. No daily media outlet can manage without them. So the news agencies influence our image of the world; above all, we get to know what they have selected.” (Blum 1995, p. 9)
In view of their essential importance, it is all the more astonishing that these agencies are hardly known to the public: “A large part of society is unaware that news agencies exist at all … In fact, they play an enormously important role in the media market. But despite this great importance, little attention has been paid to them in the past.” (Schulten-Jaspers 2013, p. 13)
Even the head of a news agency noted: “There is something strange about news agencies. They are little known to the public. Unlike a newspaper, their activity is not so much in the spotlight, yet they can always be found at the source of the story.” (Segbers 2007, p. 9)
“The Invisible Nerve Center of the Media System”
So what are the names of these agencies that are “always at the source of the story”? There are now only three global news agencies left:
- The American Associated Press (AP) with over 4000 employees worldwide. The AP belongs to US media companies and has its main editorial office in New York. AP news is used by around 12,000 international media outlets, reaching more than half of the world’s population every day.
- The quasi-governmental French Agence France-Presse (AFP) based in Paris and with around 4000 employees. The AFP sends over 3000 stories and photos every day to media all over the world.
- The British agency Reuters in London, which is privately owned and employs just over 3000 people. Reuters was acquired in 2008 by Canadian media entrepreneur Thomson – one of the 25 richest people in the world – and merged into Thomson Reuters, headquartered in New York.
Wolfgang Vyslozil, former managing director of the Austrian APA, described the key role of news agencies with these words: “News agencies are rarely in the public eye. Yet they are one of the most influential and at the same time one of the least known media types. They are key institutions of substantial importance to any media system. They are the invisible nerve center that connects all parts of this system.” (Segbers 2007, p.10)
Small abbreviation, great effect
However, there is a simple reason why the global agencies, despite their importance, are virtually unknown to the general public. To quote a Swiss media professor: “Radio and television usually do not name their sources, and only specialists can decipher references in magazines.” (Blum 1995, P. 9)
The motive for this discretion, however, should be clear: news outlets are not particularly keen to let readers know that they haven’t researched most of their contributions themselves.
by Swiss Propaganda Research | Read more:
Image: SPR
[ed. Thirty-Two Tips For Navigating A Society That Is Full Of Propaganda And Manipulation and Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix (Caitlin Johnstone).]
[ed. Thirty-Two Tips For Navigating A Society That Is Full Of Propaganda And Manipulation and Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix (Caitlin Johnstone).]
Wednesday, June 12, 2019
I Want to Live in Elizabeth Warren’s America
It’s early, but this much is true: Elizabeth Warren is running the most impressive presidential campaign in ages, certainly the most impressive campaign within my lifetime.
I don’t mean that the Massachusetts senator is a better speaker than anyone who has ever run, nor a more strident revolutionary, nor as charismatic a shaper of her public image. It’s not even that she has better ideas than her opponents, though on a range of issues she certainly does.
I’m impressed instead by something more simple and elemental: Warren actually has ideas. She has grand, detailed and daring ideas, and through these ideas she is single-handedly elevating the already endless slog of the 2020 presidential campaign into something weightier and more interesting than what it might otherwise have been: a frivolous contest about who hates Donald Trump most.
Warren’s approach is ambitious and unconventional. She is betting on depth in a shallow, tweet-driven world. By offering so much honest detail so early, she risks turning off key constituencies, alienating donors and muddying the gauzy visionary branding that is the fuel for so much early horse-race coverage. It’s worth noting that it took Warren months of campaigning and reams of policy proposals to earn her a spot on the cover of Time Magazine. Meanwhile, because they match the culture’s Aaron Sorkinian picture of what a smart progressive looks like, Beto and Buttigieg— whose policy depth can be measured in tossed-off paragraphs — are awarded fawning coverage just for showing up male.
Yet, deliciously, Warren’s substantive approach is yielding results. Her plans are so voluminous that they’ve become their own meme. She’s been rising like a rocket in the polls, and is finally earning the kind of media coverage that was initially bestowed on many less-deserving men in the race. Warren’s policy ideas are now even beginning to create their own political weather. Following her early, bold call to break up big technology companies, the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission are dividing up responsibilities on policing tech giants, and lawmakers in the House are planning a sweeping inquiry into tech dominance. Warren’s Democratic opponents are now rushing to respond with their own deep policy ideas; Joe Biden’s staff seems to be pulling all-nighters, cutting and pasting from whatever looks good, to match Warren’s policy shop.
You might think I’m getting too giddy here. You might argue that policy ideas, especially at this stage of the game, don’t really matter — either because the public doesn’t care about substance, or because it’s unlikely that any president can get what she wants through a partisan, rigid Congress, so all these plans are a mere academic exercise. Or you may simply not like what you’ve heard of Warren’s ideas.
Still, do me a favor. Whatever your politics, pull out your phone, pour yourself a cup of tea, and set aside an hour to at least read Warren’s plans. You’ll see that on just about every grave threat facing Americans today, she offers a plausible theory of the problem and a creative and comprehensive vision for how to address it.
This week, she unveiled a $2 trillion plan that combines industrial policy, foreign policy and federal procurement to tackle the existential threat of climate change. She also has a plan for housing affordability, for child care affordability, and for student debt and the crushing costs of college. She knows what she wants to do to stem opioid deaths and to address maternal mortality. She has an entire wing of policy devoted to corporate malfeasance — she wants to jail lawbreaking executives, to undo the corporate influence that shapes military procurement, and to end the scandal of highly profitable corporations paying no federal taxes. And she has a plan to pay for much on this list, which might otherwise seem like a grab-bag of expensive lefty dreams: She’ll tax ultra-millionaires and billionaires — the wealthiest 75,000 American households — yielding $2.75 trillion over 10 years, enough to finance a wholesale reformation of the American dream.
There’s a good chance you’ll disagree with some or all of these ideas. Three months ago, when Warren outlined her plan for cleaving the economic dominance of large technology companies, I spent a few days quizzing her staff on what I considered to be flaws in her approach. I planned to write about them, but I was beaten by a wave of other tech pundits with similar reservations.
But then, in the discussion that followed, I realized what a service Warren had done, even if I disagreed with her precise approach. For months, commentators had been debating the generalities of policing tech. Now a politician had put forward a detailed plan for how to do so, sparking an intense policy discussion that was breaking new analytical ground. For a moment, it almost felt like I was living in a country where adults discuss important issues seriously. Wouldn’t that be a nice country to live in?
by Farhad Manjoo, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Mason Trinca for The New York Times
I don’t mean that the Massachusetts senator is a better speaker than anyone who has ever run, nor a more strident revolutionary, nor as charismatic a shaper of her public image. It’s not even that she has better ideas than her opponents, though on a range of issues she certainly does.
I’m impressed instead by something more simple and elemental: Warren actually has ideas. She has grand, detailed and daring ideas, and through these ideas she is single-handedly elevating the already endless slog of the 2020 presidential campaign into something weightier and more interesting than what it might otherwise have been: a frivolous contest about who hates Donald Trump most.
Warren’s approach is ambitious and unconventional. She is betting on depth in a shallow, tweet-driven world. By offering so much honest detail so early, she risks turning off key constituencies, alienating donors and muddying the gauzy visionary branding that is the fuel for so much early horse-race coverage. It’s worth noting that it took Warren months of campaigning and reams of policy proposals to earn her a spot on the cover of Time Magazine. Meanwhile, because they match the culture’s Aaron Sorkinian picture of what a smart progressive looks like, Beto and Buttigieg— whose policy depth can be measured in tossed-off paragraphs — are awarded fawning coverage just for showing up male.Yet, deliciously, Warren’s substantive approach is yielding results. Her plans are so voluminous that they’ve become their own meme. She’s been rising like a rocket in the polls, and is finally earning the kind of media coverage that was initially bestowed on many less-deserving men in the race. Warren’s policy ideas are now even beginning to create their own political weather. Following her early, bold call to break up big technology companies, the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission are dividing up responsibilities on policing tech giants, and lawmakers in the House are planning a sweeping inquiry into tech dominance. Warren’s Democratic opponents are now rushing to respond with their own deep policy ideas; Joe Biden’s staff seems to be pulling all-nighters, cutting and pasting from whatever looks good, to match Warren’s policy shop.
You might think I’m getting too giddy here. You might argue that policy ideas, especially at this stage of the game, don’t really matter — either because the public doesn’t care about substance, or because it’s unlikely that any president can get what she wants through a partisan, rigid Congress, so all these plans are a mere academic exercise. Or you may simply not like what you’ve heard of Warren’s ideas.
Still, do me a favor. Whatever your politics, pull out your phone, pour yourself a cup of tea, and set aside an hour to at least read Warren’s plans. You’ll see that on just about every grave threat facing Americans today, she offers a plausible theory of the problem and a creative and comprehensive vision for how to address it.
This week, she unveiled a $2 trillion plan that combines industrial policy, foreign policy and federal procurement to tackle the existential threat of climate change. She also has a plan for housing affordability, for child care affordability, and for student debt and the crushing costs of college. She knows what she wants to do to stem opioid deaths and to address maternal mortality. She has an entire wing of policy devoted to corporate malfeasance — she wants to jail lawbreaking executives, to undo the corporate influence that shapes military procurement, and to end the scandal of highly profitable corporations paying no federal taxes. And she has a plan to pay for much on this list, which might otherwise seem like a grab-bag of expensive lefty dreams: She’ll tax ultra-millionaires and billionaires — the wealthiest 75,000 American households — yielding $2.75 trillion over 10 years, enough to finance a wholesale reformation of the American dream.
There’s a good chance you’ll disagree with some or all of these ideas. Three months ago, when Warren outlined her plan for cleaving the economic dominance of large technology companies, I spent a few days quizzing her staff on what I considered to be flaws in her approach. I planned to write about them, but I was beaten by a wave of other tech pundits with similar reservations.
But then, in the discussion that followed, I realized what a service Warren had done, even if I disagreed with her precise approach. For months, commentators had been debating the generalities of policing tech. Now a politician had put forward a detailed plan for how to do so, sparking an intense policy discussion that was breaking new analytical ground. For a moment, it almost felt like I was living in a country where adults discuss important issues seriously. Wouldn’t that be a nice country to live in?
by Farhad Manjoo, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Mason Trinca for The New York Times
[ed. I'm a supporter.]
Tuesday, June 11, 2019
Recession Or Not, There Will Be Pain
Coping with corporate bonds.
With memories of 2008-2009 still fresh, some observers have focused on corporate debt as the likely culprit. It’s true that corporate debt has risen rapidly during the expansion, both in absolute terms and in relation to corporate profits. But low interest rates mean that debt service—interest payments on this debt relative to after-tax profit—is about 25 percent, where it usually is during periods of expansion and not a cause for worry. Bank regulators are concerned about the rapid growth of leveraged loans and weaker lender protections. But they appear to be correct in their assessment that leveraged lending, despite a 20 percent growth since last year to almost $1.2 trillion, “isn’t a current threat to the financial system.”
Still, recession or no recession, there will be pain.
A large and growing share of corporate debt is “speculative debt”—either leveraged loans used to acquire target companies and burden them with high debt levels or high risk junk bonds. Many companies with high levels of speculative debt on their books were acquired by private equity in a leveraged buyout, meaning the PE firm used high amounts of debt to buy them. This is debt the target companies, not their private equity owners, are obligated to repay.
Often, these PE-owned companies are required to issue junk bonds and further increase their indebtedness in order to pay dividends to their owners. A 100-day plan imposed on company managers at the time of the buyout lays out the steps that the company will need to take to service this mountain of debt. Reducing labor costs is a big part of these plans, whether by closing less profitable stores and establishments, laying off workers at those it continues to operate, or cutting pay and benefits. After it takes these steps to manage its debt, the company is on a knife-edge.
If all the assumptions made by the private equity firm when it persuaded creditors to lend it boatloads of money hold up, the company will avoid defaulting on its loans and going bankrupt. But if these assumptions are upended—say, by a slowdown in the economy, defaults and bankruptcies will spike. Creditors who have loaned billions of dollars to finance private equity-sponsored leverage buyouts will experience losses. Establishments will be shuttered, some companies will be liquidated, workers will lose their jobs, and communities will lose businesses that have played a key role in the local economy.
In 2013, concerned that loading a company with debt greater than 6 times earnings increased the likelihood of default or bankruptcy, bank regulators—the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Federal Reserve (Fed) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)—updated lending guidance. Banks were advised to avoid making loans that saddled a company with debt greater than 6 times earnings unless they could show that the company would be able to pay back the loan.
Initially, this put a crimp in private equity’s ability to load up companies with excessive amounts of debt. But private equity firms soon found a way around this limitation. They set up their own lending operations and extended loans to other firms in the industry. Trump administration regulators have chosen to relax enforcement of the guidelines. The result? In the first quarter of 2019, six years after the updated guidance was issued, leverage used in buyouts has risen to an average of 6.96 times earnings, up from 5.80 times in the first quarter or 2013.
We don’t need to look far to understand how this will affect the viability of businesses and the outcome for workers. Bankruptcies of department stores and specialty shop chains are so widespread, they have been dubbed a “retail apocalypse.” Retail is a business that has always faced disruptors—consumer tastes can be fickle, innovations like fast fashion challenge traditional marketing, recessions lead customers to postpone purchases, e-commerce puts pressure on brick and mortar stores. Traditionally, retailers have prepared for this by keeping debt levels low and owning their own real estate—holding costs down so they can weather tough times and make the necessary adaptations in how they do business.
Private equity owners turn this formula for success on its head. The low debt levels of retailers are an invitation to load up the stores they acquired with high amounts of debt. Selling off some of the stores’ real estate in sale-lease back agreements enriches the PE owners who pocket the proceeds of the sale, but leaves the stores to pay rent on facilities they used to own. Stores are stripped of resources they need to modernize and keep up with the competition by owners that put their hands in the till to pay themselves generous dividends. Often the owners collect fees from these companies, even when company profits spiral downward. These measures guarantee that the PE firm will make its bundle. While private equity owners prefer a profitable resale of their companies, that’s really the second bite of the apple. Exiting investments via bankruptcy is increasingly common.
Private equity firms own only a fraction of U.S. retail chains, but they are behind a disproportionate share—financial news service Debtwire calculates 40 percent—of retail bankruptcies: Toys ‘R Us, Payless Shoes, Gymboree, Claire’s Stores, PetSmart, Radio Shack, Staples, Sports Authority, Shopko, The Limited Charlotte Russe, Rue 21, Nine West, Aeropostale. The list goes on.
by Eileen Appelbaum, Economic Policy Institute | Read more:
The Queen of Eating Shellfish Online
Most of us can probably agree that eating food is more enjoyable than watching someone else eat food. For one, it’s a basic human need. It also tastes good a lot of the time. Not to mention, people can be pretty gross when they eat, especially when they do so in over-the-top, finger-licking fashion.
Still, hundreds of thousands of people tune in each week to watch Bethany Gaskin binge-eat shellfish on YouTube.
Mrs. Gaskin, 44, has capitalized on the popularity of a food-video genre known as mukbang, which involves scarfing down, on camera, more grub than should rightly be consumed in a single sitting.
On her two YouTube channels, Bloveslife and BlovesASMR Eating Her Way, Mrs. Gaskin chats up her audience while eating king crab legs, mussels, lobster tails, hard-boiled eggs and roasted red potatoes. The videos, produced in her Cincinnati home, have made her a millionaire, she said. But getting into the business wasn’t about money; mukbang was more of a calling than a vocation.“I think of mukbanging as a ministry,” Mrs. Gaskin said. “I didn’t consult with my husband before I quit my job. I knew this was it, and I quit by faith.”
The Spread of Binge Culture
Mukbang seems to have begun as an internet trend more than a decade ago in South Korea. The name is a mash-up of the Korean words for let’s eat (“muk-ja”) and broadcasting (“bang-song”). Korean live-streamers often schedule their mukbang videos to align with dinnertime hours, so their viewers eating alone at home feel like they’re sharing a meal with a friend.
Viewers cite other benefits too. Watching the videos can serve as an appetite-curbing exercise. And for a certain subset, the sounds of a person eating foster an autonomous sensory meridian response, or A.S.M.R.; viewers derive pleasure from the sounds created by extra-loud crunching, slurping and lip smacking. (...)
Gross Profits
Perhaps the noisy and bad-mannered eating is off-putting for most, but the genre has a lot of devotees, if Mrs. Gaskin’s success is any indication. Her primary YouTube channel, Bloveslife, has 1.8million subscribers, and on Instagram she has a following of nearly 900,000, one of whom is Cardi B.
Through advertising on her videos, Mrs. Gaskin said she has made more than $1 million, providing screenshots of a report from YouTube.
Before becoming a YouTube sensation, Mrs. Gaskin, who has an associate’s degree in early childhood development, owned a day care facility. After five years, she sold the business and used the money to pay off loans and leases. She then got a job making circuit boards for the military for a year.
In 2017, she started making Food Network-style cooking videos in her home kitchen and posting them on YouTube. “I’m a foodie,” Mrs. Gaskin said. “I’ve always liked to cook.”
“Then I did a mukbang, and people just went crazy,” she said. “I was like, ‘People want to see me eat, this is weird,’ and since they were easier to record, I just started doing mukbangs and all of a sudden, it just took off from there.”
by Jasmin Barmore, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times
[ed. What a world.]
The U.S. Health Care System is Full of Monopolies
The U.S. health care system is full of monopolies (Axios)
Image: Open Markets Institute; Chart Axios Visuals
Monday, June 10, 2019
Fashions Fade, But Fleabag Is Forever
This is a love story. A dangerously elegant woman (noble stock) in lips the color of a dying rose (not a lipstick, but a blend of oils, waxes, and pigments based on MAC’s Dare You), hair a roaring bob, a cigarette perched on her Erté fingers, stands pensively against a brick wall (real?), the burnished light (not real?) casting the kind of shadow that fills in the blanks — and the cleavage. This is Fleabag (of the Amazon series of the same name, written by and starring Phoebe Waller-Bridge), taking a breather behind a restaurant during a fraught family dinner, a fourth-wall-demolishing millennial café owner who could pass for a femme fatale in a film noir. A big part of that latter fantasy is the navy blue jumpsuit she’s wearing (Love, $50), or, more accurately, embodying. The keyhole at the front is more like a door ajar, two strips of material like curtains begging to be parted while threatening to close. Her shoulders jut out, her back is exposed — this is as naked as chic is allowed to be. It is a sleeveless, backless, armless, chestless (well, sort of) number that requires legs for days. To wear it the way Fleabag does, you basically need to be Fleabag, which means you basically need to be Waller-Bridge, whose androgyny (she dressed as a boy when she was a kid), sexiness (she dressed what we think of as the opposite of a boy when she discovered them), and sylphlike stature are as impossible to mimic as the rest of her.
When everyone ran out to buy that jumpsuit last week, that is what they wanted: everything it entailed, from the lights illuminating the scene right down to the It Girl inside it. In her ode to the jumpsuit, The Cut’s Kathryn VanArendonk — who bought two sizes just to be sure — wrote not so much about how it looked as what it meant: “It’s revealing in a way that feels like a choice rather than a plea.” A British fan then polled Twitter: “Will buying the Fleabag jumpsuit solve my emotional problems AS WELL as making me look bomb?” The only answers she provided were “Yes” and “Absolutely.”
“I think people don’t always view contemporary costuming as hard, and it’s really hard,” says Emma Fraser, creator of the TV Ate My Wardrobe blog. “It’s not just about throwing together an outfit,” she explains, it’s using clothes as “an extension of who that character is.” The last time a television star’s style migrated en masse into off-screen culture may have been The Rachel in the ’90s: the shaggy hairdon’t of the Friends’ everywoman played by Jennifer Aniston, whose face was normal enough that every woman thought a mere haircut could be a conduit for a New York City life that didn’t suck. Fleabag gives us an updated version of that same generational aspiration — the bold red lip, the navy jumpsuit, the “achievable” look and life. Describing the character’s allure, Fraser inadvertently defines the millennial: “Everything can be a mess, but you can still kind of be put together.” Watching television can be like window-shopping, shallow characters being little more than clothes horses for pricey brands, so seeing a layered antiheroine whose affordable accoutrements are inseparable from who she is feels revolutionary. And who, these days, doesn’t want to be part of a revolution? As Waller-Bridge herself texted Fleabag costume designer, Ray Holman, (referencing Twitter): “The jumpsuit is a movement.” (...)
As much as the first season of Fleabag is about loss, the second is about love. And isn’t it like that messy bitch to fall for the one guy she can’t have sex with. When we first meet the priest (aka “the hot priest,” played by Sherlock’s Andrew Scott), it’s not clear he is one. He’s unknown to Fleabag, just a random sweary guy at the table of her family dinner. He’s not wearing the dog collar (the audience shouldn’t have any preconceived notions, says Holman). Instead, he is rumpled, in a lavender linen shirt designed by Oliver Spencer, master of the relaxed Brit look (as if that isn’t an oxymoron). Father looks good, but not too good. “He’s quite poor,” the costume designer explains. “He’s not a rich Catholic priest so he doesn’t have many clothes and the clothes he has, they’re old.” He’s not the point anyway. This episode belongs to Fleabag. Fleabag and her jumpsuit (and, okay, her priest boner).
by Soraya Roberts, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Steve Schofield, Amazon / Illustration by Homestead
[ed. Here it is: Fleabag: Season 2 (YouTube). See also: The Case for Boring Office Clothes (The Atlantic).]
When everyone ran out to buy that jumpsuit last week, that is what they wanted: everything it entailed, from the lights illuminating the scene right down to the It Girl inside it. In her ode to the jumpsuit, The Cut’s Kathryn VanArendonk — who bought two sizes just to be sure — wrote not so much about how it looked as what it meant: “It’s revealing in a way that feels like a choice rather than a plea.” A British fan then polled Twitter: “Will buying the Fleabag jumpsuit solve my emotional problems AS WELL as making me look bomb?” The only answers she provided were “Yes” and “Absolutely.” “I think people don’t always view contemporary costuming as hard, and it’s really hard,” says Emma Fraser, creator of the TV Ate My Wardrobe blog. “It’s not just about throwing together an outfit,” she explains, it’s using clothes as “an extension of who that character is.” The last time a television star’s style migrated en masse into off-screen culture may have been The Rachel in the ’90s: the shaggy hairdon’t of the Friends’ everywoman played by Jennifer Aniston, whose face was normal enough that every woman thought a mere haircut could be a conduit for a New York City life that didn’t suck. Fleabag gives us an updated version of that same generational aspiration — the bold red lip, the navy jumpsuit, the “achievable” look and life. Describing the character’s allure, Fraser inadvertently defines the millennial: “Everything can be a mess, but you can still kind of be put together.” Watching television can be like window-shopping, shallow characters being little more than clothes horses for pricey brands, so seeing a layered antiheroine whose affordable accoutrements are inseparable from who she is feels revolutionary. And who, these days, doesn’t want to be part of a revolution? As Waller-Bridge herself texted Fleabag costume designer, Ray Holman, (referencing Twitter): “The jumpsuit is a movement.” (...)
As much as the first season of Fleabag is about loss, the second is about love. And isn’t it like that messy bitch to fall for the one guy she can’t have sex with. When we first meet the priest (aka “the hot priest,” played by Sherlock’s Andrew Scott), it’s not clear he is one. He’s unknown to Fleabag, just a random sweary guy at the table of her family dinner. He’s not wearing the dog collar (the audience shouldn’t have any preconceived notions, says Holman). Instead, he is rumpled, in a lavender linen shirt designed by Oliver Spencer, master of the relaxed Brit look (as if that isn’t an oxymoron). Father looks good, but not too good. “He’s quite poor,” the costume designer explains. “He’s not a rich Catholic priest so he doesn’t have many clothes and the clothes he has, they’re old.” He’s not the point anyway. This episode belongs to Fleabag. Fleabag and her jumpsuit (and, okay, her priest boner).
by Soraya Roberts, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Steve Schofield, Amazon / Illustration by Homestead
[ed. Here it is: Fleabag: Season 2 (YouTube). See also: The Case for Boring Office Clothes (The Atlantic).]
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