Rock Riff Rip-Off

In a little-noticed moment during Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven plagiarism trial, a Guitar God inadvertently revealed that his industry’s most famous (and valuable) tunes were up for grabs. It was June 2016, on the third day of the proceedings in Los Angeles federal court, when Jimmy Page took the stand. He faced examination by attorney Francis Malofiy. At issue in the trial was whether Page had stolen the introduction of 1971’s Stairway from the obscure 1968 instrumental Taurus by the band Spirit.

To the frustration of Malofiy, the judge said it was irrelevant whether the songs’ album recordings sounded alike. What mattered was whether Page had lifted the Spirit song as it had been written on a single page of music submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office in 1967. The Taurus “deposit copy,” as it’s called, is a spare document handwritten by a record company scribe who listened to the record and then distilled it into only 124 notes of piano music. The reverse engineering was required to comply with U.S. law, which before 1978 allowed songs to be registered only via sheet music “deposited” in Washington. When a pianist performed the Taurus deposit copy for jurors earlier in the trial, it didn’t sound much like the Spirit record, let alone Stairway.

In a bind, Malofiy turned the issue on its head:

“I’d like to pull up Exhibit 2708, which is the Stairway to Heaven deposit copy,” he told the court. The sheet music appeared, projected on a screen between Page’s witness stand and the jury box. “Can you point to where on the deposit copy of Stairway to Heaven it indicates the solo?” Malofiy asked, referring to the electric guitar finale that’s considered one of Page’s crowning achievements.

“I’ll have to have a look,” Page said, then scanned the first bit. “Um, I think you need to scroll down one more.” The second folio came up on the screen. “Please scroll one more,” he said as more music appeared. “Please, one more,” he said again as the fourth and final bit came up. “OK. That’s it. I’ve read it.”

“You would agree that there’s no solo on the deposit copy … of Stairway to Heaven, which was deposited with the office?”

“Yeah, we—I agree with that. It’s not in there, no,” Page said.

Malofiy then pointed to the first measure. On the record, Stairway begins with a finger-picked introduction—one of the most recognizable musical passages of the past half-century, mimicked by millions of aspiring guitarists. That iconic intro, Malofiy said, “That’s not represented in the deposit copy?”

“No,” Page said. “You’re correct.”

Sitting in the courtroom that day, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Were some of the most famous passages in rock history really not protected by copyright? And did this also apply to any number of other songs whose deposit copies were certainly equally lacking? I felt as if someone had dropped $100 bills on the ground. Countless unregistered bits of song—guitar solos, bass lines, horn parts, background vocals—could be sitting out there exposed to unscrupulous financial exploitation. Ring tones, TV ads, film soundtracks—or even entire new songs—could be made and sold from these orphaned riffs. (...)

Led Zeppelin won at the 2016 trial, but the matter isn’t resolved, and the stakes seem to have actually grown. Malofiy appealed, and in September, a three-judge panel on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ordered a Stairway do-over trial for procedural reasons. At the heart of the judges’ decision was a potentially industry-changing declaration: For pre-1978 unpublished songs, the deposited sheet music “defines the scope of the copyright.”

That ruling set off second appeals by both sides. Led Zeppelin asked for the original verdict to be upheld. Malofiy asked the entire appeals court, and not only three judges, to decide on the narrow issue of deposit copies. In early June, the San Francisco appeals court voted to have a rare 11-judge panel rehear the case in September, suspending the earlier appeals decision. The only topic on which the court has asked the parties for briefs so far is the primacy of deposit copies. The litigation has broader implications, undergirding a high-profile New York case in which plaintiffs are demanding more than $100 million for the alleged theft of Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On for Ed Sheeran’s hit Thinking Out Loud .

The irony is there may be no winning outcome for Led Zeppelin. As Page’s testimony showed, the harder his lawyers push for strict readings of the copyright sheet music, the more they weaken the protection for Stairway. They’re going all-out, too. The legal team for the band and its publisher, Warner Music Group Corp., wrote in a December filing about “the primacy of deposited sheet music” as a bedrock of their industry and how “contracts are entered into in reliance on the certainty that a copyright protects the copyrighted work.”

by Vernon Silver, Bloomberg |  Read more:
Image: Library of Congress
[ed. Here's a side-by-side comparison of Taurus vs. Stairway (YouTube).]

The New Sex Drug Is Called Vyleesi

The New Sex Drug Is Called Vyleesi (The Cut)

The FDA just approved a new drug aimed at revving up women’s libidos and treating “low sexual drive.” Called Vyleesi, the drug calls for being injected, shortly before sex, into the abdomen or the thigh. In trials, 40 percent of women who tried Vyleesi experienced nausea. The chief medical officer for the company behind it, AMAG Pharmaceuticals, told the New York Times that they were “obviously thrilled about being able to bring another option to patients.”

Image: AMAG Pharmaceuticals
[ed. Insert joke here.]

Steely Dan

[ed. Reposts... sorry, I've been on a SD kick lately. I do miss smart music.]

Gene Tierney
via:

Chianti Classico, Beyond the Straw-Covered Bottle

Chianti Classico wines are better than they have ever been.

The best examples are remarkably distinctive, wonderfully satisfying and, in some ways, the essence of Italian red wines. Still many people seem unaware of what they are missing.

At a dinner party recently, I brought a few bottles of wine including one of my favorite Chianti Classicos, a 2016 from Monteraponi. When the bottle was poured, the other guests loved it, but seemed shocked at learning its identity.

“Chianti?” one said. “Really? I don’t think I’ve had Chianti since it used to come in those straw-covered bottles.”

Now, these people were not wine experts. But I had long convinced myself that differentiating today’s Chianti from those bottles of old was as unnecessary as reminding people that Chablis comes from Burgundy, not California.

Younger consumers nowadays may have no idea that 40 years ago Americans often referred generically to California white wine as “Chablis.” Nor are they likely to know that college students in the 1970s bought Chianti not for the wine but to use the empty fiasco, as the straw-covered bottle is called in Italian, as a candleholder.

The last time I thought about Chianti in fiaschi was a few years ago when Monte Bernardi, a very good producer, began selling Chianti in the straw-covered bottles as a sort of playful retro statement.

As good as Chianti Classico is these days, it rarely seems to be an object of anybody’s desire. With the exception of some excellent Italian restaurants, few wine lists put it in the spotlight. It seldom features on any sommelier’s Instagram feed.

Yet a good Chianti Classico is one of the most soulful wines I know. The best have a pure, deep red-cherry flavor, sometimes deliciously tart or bittersweet, along with pronounced floral aromas and flavors, and an earthy minerality. The acidity is fresh and lively; tannins should be discernible, though not overly chewy — often with what I think of as a dusty quality, focusing the wine and readying the mouth for another sip.

I love Chianti with cooked tomato sauces and pizza. It is also a natural partner with sausages, all sorts of beef dishes and stews. And if you wonder why I’m thinking about a red wine as summer is about to envelop us with heat, I wonder if you ever plan to eat burgers or steaks off the grill. If so, you might consider a Chianti Classico.

How is it that Chianti Classico is generally well known and so often ignored? There are several reasons beyond its checkered-tablecloth past.

First, Chianti is an expression of the sangiovese grape, and sangiovese is very much undervalued, except in the case of Chianti’s Tuscan sibling, Brunello di Montalcino.

Chianti is the historic name of the hilly Tuscan wine region between Florence and Siena. As Chianti became well known in the early 20th century, Italian wine authorities took advantage of its fame by expanding the zone in which wine could legally be called Chianti. Not surprisingly, one result of this expansion was to dilute the quality of the wine.

It wasn’t until the 1980s and ’90s that the greater Chianti region was officially divided into a series of subzones, of which Chianti Classico represents the historic heartland.

Geography was only one issue. While what constituted Chianti centuries ago is difficult to reconstruct as few records exist, most authorities date modern Chianti back to 1872, when Baron Bettino Ricasoli, a leading Tuscan statesman and agricultural expert, set out what came to be considered the formula for Chianti.

by Eric Asimov, NY Times | Read more:
Image: DEA / G.COZZI/ Getty Images

Slouching Toward War

President Trump has been all over the place on Iran, which is what happens when you take a serious subject, treat it with farcical superficiality, believe braggadocio will sway a proud and ancient civilization, approach foreign policy like a real estate deal, defer to advisers with Iran Derangement Syndrome, refuse to read any briefing papers and confuse the American national interest with the Saudi or Israeli.

This American slouching toward another Middle East war has been a disgrace, shot through with the twisting of truth or outright lies. Now Trump has approved, only to reverse, a retaliatory strike for the Iranian downing of an American drone, an aptly chaotic culmination to the drift the president has allowed.

The 11th-hour calling-off of military action was the one wise decision Trump has taken on Iran since he took office. Dazzled by Saudi blandishments, Israeli veneration, the opportunity to trash Barack Obama’s diplomacy and the lure of evangelicals’ votes, Trump determined from Day 1 that the Islamic Republic was the enemy from Central Casting. His view was unburdened by any serious assessment of how to balance toughness and engagement in the long-traumatized American-Iranian relationship.

The United States does not need the war with Iran that John Bolton, the national security adviser, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo seem determined to deliver. It would be a war of choice, illusion and irresponsibility. It would place Americans at risk across the Middle East, with no benefit to the United States or its allies.

The Trump administration has been lucky. Now, in a real crisis, and one of the administration’s own making, the cavalier ineptitude and absence of anything resembling process is on full public view. Threats and bombast get you just so far. Iran has called Trump’s bluff.

Just over a year ago, when Trump tore up the nuclear deal that the United States, France, Britain, Germany, Russia and China had hammered out over years of diplomacy to keep Iran from a bomb, I wrote:

“President Trump is withdrawing the United States from an Iran nuclear deal that has worked, in the name of unrelated demands that are unworkable, at very high cost to America’s alliances and the value of its word, with no viable alternative policy in place and at the risk of igniting the Middle East.”

Here we are, on the brink of ignition. Over the past year, Bolton has threatened military action multiple times, telling Iran there will be “hell to pay,” ratcheting up tensions wherever possible and extending potential pretexts for war.

Pompeo has been a willing dance partner in this exercise. He has declared a determination to drive Iran’s oil exports to “zero” and energetically pursued the grotesque objective of conflating Iran, a Shia nation, with Al Qaeda, an expression of murderous Wahhabi Sunni extremism. In fact, as former Secretary of State John Kerry told me, “Iran has helped in the war against the ISIS,” another Sunni terrorist group.

The aim of the Bolton-Pompeo Iran-equals-Al-Qaeda maneuver has been obvious: to bring a war with Iran within the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force that was passed by Congress in response to Sept. 11, whose perpetrators were overwhelmingly Saudi. (...)

“The Trump administration policy has been unnecessary, counter-strategic and dangerous,” Kerry told me. “It has completely upended the legitimacy of approaching certain issues — Yemen, Hezbollah, missile technology — while having the nuclear issue in a box in the most accountable, transparent nuclear deal on the planet.

“All they have done is given life to the deeply held Iranian belief that you cannot trust or negotiate with the United States, while trying to squeeze Iran into economic oblivion in pursuit of regime change that would only hand power to the hard-line Republican Guards, not some democrat.”

by Roger Cohen, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: US bases around Iran via

‘Most of Government Is Unconstitutional’

On Thursday, the conservative wing of the Supreme Court called into question the whole project of modern American governance.

In Gundy v. United States, which concerned the constitutionality of a law requiring the registration of sex offenders, four of the more conservative justices endorsed a controversial legal theory according to which Congress lacks the power to delegate broad powers to agencies like the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Heath and Human Services.

For now, the four more-liberal justices have brushed back the challenge, ruling 5 to 3, with Justice Samuel Alito, that Congress can give to the executive branch the authority to implement that specific law. But a close reading of the decisions in the case — and the fact that Justice Brett Kavanaugh was recused — suggests that the liberals may not have the votes to turn back the conservative assault on Congress’s powers.

Federal agencies have been vested with expansive authority since the dawn of the republic, but the administrative state as we know it really took off in the 20th century. The rise of agencies like the Office of Price Administration, the Social Security Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency was essential to the prosecution of two world wars, the creation of the post-New Deal welfare state and the regulation of novel risks such as industrial pollution.

But powerful agencies have long generated anxiety among conservatives. The Constitution, they note, assigns to Congress “all legislative powers herein granted.” Very broad delegations of power from Congress to administrative agencies, conservatives argue, amount to an unconstitutional dereliction of Congress’s responsibilities.

Back in 1935, the Supreme Court signaled that it was open to this argument. In two cases, the court struck down New Deal laws for vesting too much authority with too little guidance. According to the court, Congress had to offer some “intelligible principle” about how agencies were to exercise the power they were given.

It turned out, however, that the intelligible principle could be pretty minimal. Since 1935, the Supreme Court has approved laws telling agencies to regulate “in the public interest” and to set pollution standards “requisite to protect the public health.” Not once in the 84 years since has the Supreme Court invalidated a law because it offends the so-called nondelegation doctrine.

And for good reason. To run a functional, modern government, Congress has no choice but to delegate authority and discretion to federal agencies. Doing so allows Congress to make use of agencies’ resources and scientific expertise, to enable a nimble response to emerging problems and to insulate technocratic decisions from raw politics.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the Supreme Court’s post-1935 consensus — that Congress gets to decide how much power to delegate to an agency, not the courts — serves as the foundation of the American state. That’s what makes Thursday’s decision so troubling.

by Nicholas Bagley, NY Times | Read more:
Image: J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
[ed. It's like the Twilight Zone.]

The Problem With HR

In the old days, there was personnel: payroll, hiring, and—should things go terribly awry—pink slips. It was an office where the clatter of a typewriter signaled that volumes of paperwork were being shifted from inbox to outbox, and where employees could be just as bloodlessly reshuffled from “in” to “out.” It was women’s work, and in the popular imagination it was the terrain of the spinster: humorless, a stickler.

Human resources performs all of these old functions, along with a host of new ones. Employees often imagine that the “resources” on offer are the benefits that flow to them from that department, but in the term’s 19th-century origins, it is the workers themselves who are the resources, one more asset—along with equipment, factories, and capital—at the company’s disposal. Most HR reps today would never dream of speaking about employees as a type of commodity (at least not to their face), although it can be hard to understand what, exactly, these reps are talking about, because the field is rich with jargon: onboarding, balanced scorecards, cultural integration, the 80/20 rule.

On The Office, Michael Scott once said of Toby, the Dunder Mifflin HR rep: “If I had a gun with two bullets, and I was in a room with Hitler, bin Laden, and Toby, I would shoot Toby twice.” Over the past year, every time a friend asked what I was working on and I mentioned the letters HR, there was a remarkably consistent response: a quiet groan and a brief, skyward look—not a two-bullet look, but not a one-bullet look, either.

Fairly or not, HR is seen as the division of the company that slows things down, generates endless memos, meddles in employees’ personal business, holds compulsory “trainings,” and ruins any fun and spirit-lifting thing employees come up with. A notorious Fast Company cover story, published in 2005, is called “Why We Hate HR.” Its author, Keith H. Hammonds, laid out a string of damning questions that have resonated with businesspeople ever since:

Why are annual performance appraisals so time-consuming—and so routinely useless? Why is HR so often a henchman for the chief financial officer, finding ever-more ingenious ways to cut benefits and hack at payroll? Why do its communications—when we can understand them at all—so often flout reality? Why are so many people processes duplicative and wasteful, creating a forest of paperwork for every minor transaction? And why does HR insist on sameness as a proxy for equity?

But the real reason many workers don’t love human resources is that while the department often presents itself as functioning like a union—the open door for worker complaints, the updates on valuable new benefits—it is not a union. In a strong job market, HR is the soul of generosity, making employees feel valued and significant. But should the economy change, or should management decide to go in another direction, HR can just as quickly become assassin as friend. The last face you’ll see is Jane’s—your pal from HR, who hands out the discounted tickets to Knott’s Berry Farm and sends the blast emails about Chipotle Friday—and she’ll be dry-eyed while collecting your employee badge and invoking the executioner’s code: COBRA.

Jane’s not a bad person—she’s just carrying out orders from far up the ladder. And when it comes to sexual harassment, women understand that Jane reports to upper management, not some neutral body that stands in allegiance with right moral action. If employers judged HR departments by their ability to prevent sexual harassment, most would have gotten a failing grade long ago. What HR is actually responsible for—one of the central ways the department “adds value” to a company—is serving as the first line of defense against a sexual-harassment lawsuit. These two goals are clearly aligned, but if the past year has taught us anything, it’s that you can achieve the latter without doing much of anything at all about the former.

In october 2014, Ellen DeGeneres did something on her talk show that we can hardly imagine in today’s environment: She made an extended joke about sexual harassment. “Last week we had our mandatory sexual-harassment training seminar,” she told the audience. “We have it every year for all of the employees, and it combines frank discussions about the workplace behavior and … mind-numbing boredom.” The people in the audience laughed appreciatively—they knew exactly what she meant. Then she introduced a game: “Sexual-Harassment Training or Late-Night Movie?” And, with the eager participation of the audience, she read lines of dialogue and asked the crowd to guess their source.

Ellen’s joke depended on our common understanding that in the decades since Anita Hill’s testimony, HR has created a huge body of instructional films, computer training modules, seminar scripts, and written policies on sexual harassment. That a subject as urgent and—in its own, lurid way—bound with eros, fear, and guilt created an oeuvre known primarily for its stupefying dullness should have been a clue that the serious issue of harassment was being funneled through a bureaucracy whose aim was not (at least not purely) protecting women workers.

Hill’s testimony riveted the nation. It occurred years before the forensically prurient Starr Report became part of breakfast-table discourse; before hard-core pornography became a subject of open conversation; before sex workers were interviewed, respectfully, on staid national news programs. It was unprecedented: a dignified and extremely well-educated woman testifying before a group of male senators about pubic hair on a Coke can, all while the camera whirred before her and the entire country looked on. It was, in other words, exactly the kind of sui generis event that should not have resonated on a deeply personal level with any woman, save perhaps some of Clarence Thomas’s law clerks. Yet it did resonate with women—millions of them. Their response was nonpartisan, unifying, nationwide, and—for many men—eye-opening. The concept, if not the linguistic formation, of “Me too” was born almost overnight. Hill’s composure in the face of withering and often humiliating male commentary (including, let us not forget, that of Joe Biden) was stirring. “I am not given to fantasy,” she said simply. “This is not something I would have come forward with if I were not absolutely sure.”

Hill’s testimony gave American women a way of understanding something that the Supreme Court had decided four and a half years earlier, in the famous Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson case, which established that sexual harassment is a form of discrimination as defined by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. A potent combination of factors was born: Women could sue for sexual harassment, and their employer could be on the line for big damages. That last fact caught the attention of American employers and is the true father of the system that Ellen and so many other Americans have mocked.

At solving the problem, HR is not great. At creating protocols of “compliance” to defend a company against lawsuits? By that criterion, it has been a smashing success. How do we know? Partly because employers are so devoted to it; the first thing many an executive will do when a company is under scrutiny for sexual harassment is heap praise on its crackerjack HR team, and describe the accused men as outliers.

Pam Teren, an employment lawyer in Los Angeles, graduated from law school and began working at a firm in 1990. “I thought I’d probably never have a sexual-harassment case,” she told me. The next year, Anita Hill testified, and these cases poured in. She told herself, “This is a five-year window. Because how simple is this? Don’t grab women. Don’t stare at their chests.” We both laughed—it really was pretty obvious. She figured that men would catch on quickly and the window would close. But she was wrong. Like thousands of lawyers across the country, she has been taking sexual-harassment cases ever since. Her entire career has been devoted to this work.

by Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: New Studio

via:

If Kim Jong-Un Opened a KFC, Would You Eat There?

Philip Morris is pivoting to smoke-free cigarettes, because “society expects us to act responsibly, and we are doing just that by designing a smoke-free future”. Also, KFC “promises not to let vegans down” with their new meatless chicken-like nuggets. They’ll have to compete with factory-farming mega-conglomerate Tyson Foods, who are coming out with their own vegetarian chicken option.

Clearly this is progress. Tobacco-free cigarettes have helped a lot of people quit smoking; meat substitutes have helped a lot of people (recently sort of including me) become vegetarian. I want a smoke-free meatless future. But does it become a mockery when the same companies that provided the smoky meaty past are selling it to us? If they make a fortune being evil, resist change, and lose, should they get to make a second fortune being good? If Hitler, when the war turned against him, quit the Nazism industry and opened a matzah bakery, would you buy his matzah?

I think the answer is supposed to be yes. I’ve heard many smart people argue that we should offer evil dictators a comfortable and lavish retirement, free from any threat of justice. After all, if they take the offer, they’ll go off and enjoy their retirement instead of continuing to dictate. But if they expect to be put on trial for war crimes the second they relinquish power, they’ll hold on to power forever. If Hitler had been willing to give up and open a bakery when he lost Stalingrad in 1943, think how many lives would have been saved by letting him. And if Kim Jong-Un wants to give up and move to Tahiti, of course you say yes.

In the same way, if evil companies want to go good, you should let them. If they have a line of retreat, they won’t fight so hard against change. If Tyson Foods wants to use its lobbyists to support meat substitutes instead of sabotaging them, that’s good for everybody. If they want to use their research budget to push plant-based meats forward, so much the better.

The counterargument is that punishment is the only tool we have to make bad actors do good things. If dictators fear punishment, maybe they won’t dictate to begin with. If companies know that moral progress will eventually leave the immoral companies bankrupt, maybe they’ll try being moral before it’s immediately profitable.

We’re in a weird situation where before anything happens, we might want to precommit to “punish companies who do evil, no matter what”. After companies have started doing evil, we might want to break our previous precommitment and switch to “let evil companies avoid punishment if they stop doing evil”. And after companies have stopped doing evil, we might want (if only for the sake of our own sense of justice) to break both of our previous precommitments and go with “punish them after all”.

What is the right action?

I’m not sure, but I lean toward “buy the meatless chicken from KFC”, for a few reasons.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

Image: via

Georges Rouault, Paysage avec barque
via:

Back to the Future

Former Vice President Joe Biden told affluent donors Tuesday that he wanted their support and -- perhaps unlike some other Democratic presidential candidates -- wouldn’t be making them political targets because of their wealth.

“Remember, I got in trouble with some of the people on my team, on the Democratic side, because I said, you know, what I’ve found is rich people are just as patriotic as poor people. Not a joke. I mean, we may not want to demonize anybody who’s made money,” Biden told about 100 well-dressed donors at the Carlyle Hotel on New York’s Upper East Side, where the hors d’oeuvres included lobster, chicken satay and crudites.

“Truth of the matter is, you all know, you all know in your gut what has to be done,” Biden said. “We can disagree in the margins. But the truth of the matter is, it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living would change. Nothing would fundamentally change,” he said. (...)

Invoking Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’s goal of political “revolution,” Biden suggested that he would be the antidote by making marginal changes that would improve the lives of working and middle class Americans without slapping onerous taxes on the rich.

“When you have income inequality as large as we have in the United States today, it brews and ferments political discord and basic revolution,” he said. Also perhaps hinting at President Donald Trump he continued: “It allows demagogues to step in” and blame what’s wrong in voters’ lives on “the other.”

“You’re not the other,” Biden told the assembled group, most of whom were wearing suits. “I need you very badly.”

by Jennifer Epstein, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg

Gustaf Munch-Petersen
via:

If Donald Trump Is the Symptom...

Then what's is the disease?

Don’t try to deny it! The political temperature of this country is rising fast. Call it Trump change or Trump warming, if you want, but grasp one thing: increasingly, you’re in a different land and, whatever happens to Donald Trump, the results down the line are likely to be ever less pretty. Trump change isn't just an American phenomenon, it's distinctly global. After all, from Australia to India, the Philippines to Hungary, Donald Trumps and their supporters keep getting elected or reelected and, according to a recent CNN poll, a majority of Americans think Trump himself will win again in 2020 (though, at the moment, battleground-state polls look grim for him).

Still, whether or not he gets a second term in the White House, he only seems like the problem, partially because no president, no politician, no one in history has ever gotten such 24/7 media coverage of every twitch, tweet, bizarre statement, falsehood, or fantasy he expresses (or even the clothes he wears). Think of it this way: we’re in a moment in which the only thing the media can’t imagine saying about Donald Trump is: “You’re fired!” And believe me, that’s just one sign of a media -- and a country -- with a temperature that’s anything but 98.6.

Since you-know-who is always there, always being discussed, always @(un)realdonaldtrump, it’s easy enough to imagine that everything that’s going wrong -- or, if you happen to be part of his famed base, right (even if that right isn’t so damned hot for you) -- is due to him. When we’re gripped by such thinking and the temperature’s rising, it hardly matters that just about everything he’s “done” actually preceded him. That includes favoring the 1%, deporting record numbers of illegal immigrants, and making war (unsuccessfully) or threatening to do so across significant parts of the planet.

Here, then, is the question of the day, the sort you’d ask about any patient with a rising temperature: If Donald Trump is only the symptom, what’s the disease?

Blowback Central

Let me say that the late Chalmers Johnson would have understood President Trump perfectly. The Donald clearly arrived on the scene as blowback -- the CIA term of tradecraft Johnson first put into our everyday vocabulary -- from at least two things: an American imperium gone wrong with its never-ending wars, ever-rising military budgets, and ever-expanding national security state, and a new “gilded age” in which three men (Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett) have more wealth than the bottom half of society and the .01% have one of their own, a billionaire, in the Oval Office. (If you want to add a third blowback factor, try a media turned upside down by new ways of communicating and increasingly desperate to glue eyes to screens as ad revenues, budgets, and staffs shrank and the talking heads of cable news multiplied.)

Now, I don’t mean to sell Donald Trump short in any way. Give that former reality TV star credit. Unlike either Hillary Clinton or any of his Republican opponents in the 2016 election campaign, he sensed that there were voters in profusion in the American heartland who felt that things were not going well and were eager for a candidate just like the one he was ready to become. (There were, of course, other natural audiences for a disruptive, self-promoting billionaire as well, including various millionaires and billionaires ready to support him, the Russians, the Saudis... well, you know the list). His skill, however, never lay in what he could actually do (mainly, in these years, cut taxes for the wealthy, impose tariffs, and tweet his head off). It lay in his ability to catch the blowback mood of that moment in a single slogan -- Make America Great Again, or MAGA -- that he trademarked in November 2012, only days after Mitt Romney lost his bid for the presidency to Barack Obama.

Yes, four years later in the 2016 election, others began to notice the impact of that slogan. You couldn’t miss the multiplying MAGA hats, after all. Hillary Clinton’s advisers even briefly came up with the lamest response imaginable to it: Make America Whole Again, or MAWA. But what few at the time really noted was the crucial word in that phrase: “again.” Politically speaking, that single blowback word might then have been the most daring in the English language. In 2016, Donald Trump functionally said what no other candidate or politician of any significance in America dared to say: that the United States was no longer the greatest, most indispensable, most exceptionable nation or superpower or hyper-power ever to exist on Planet Earth.

That represented a groundbreaking recognition of reality. At the time, it didn’t matter whether you were Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or Marco Rubio, you had to acknowledge some version of that formula of exceptionalism. Trump didn’t and, believe me, that rang a bell in the American heartland, where lots of people had felt, however indirectly, the blowback from all those years of taxpayer-funded fruitless war, while not benefiting from infrastructure building or much of anything else. They experienced blowback from a country in which new billionaires were constantly being created, while the financial distance between CEO salaries and those of workers grew exponentially vaster by the year, and the financing of the political system became a 1% affair.

With that slogan, The Donald caught the spirit of a moment in which both imperial and economic decline, however unacknowledged by the Washington political elite, had indeed begun. In the process, as I wrote at that time, he crossed a psychologically taboo line and became America’s first declinist candidate for president. MAGA captured a feeling already at large that tomorrow would be worse than today, which was already worse than yesterday. As it turned out, it mattered not at all that the billionaire conman spouting that trademarked phrase had long been part of the problem, not the solution.

He caught the essence of the moment, in other words, but certainly didn’t faintly cause it in the years when he financed Trump Tower, watched his five Atlantic City casinos go bankrupt, and hosted The Apprentice. In that election campaign, he captured a previously forbidden reality of the twenty-first century. For example, I was already writing this in June 2016, five months before he was elected president:

“In its halcyon days, Washington could overthrow governments, install Shahs or other rulers, do more or less what it wanted across significant parts of the globe and reap rewards, while (as in the case of Iran) not paying any price, blowback-style, for decades, if at all. That was imperial power in the blaze of the noonday sun. These days, in case you hadn’t noticed, blowback for our imperial actions seems to arrive as if by high-speed rail (of which by the way, the greatest power on the planet has yet to build a single mile, if you want a quick measure of decline).

“Despite having a more massive, technologically advanced, and better funded military than any other power or even group of powers on the planet, in the last decade and a half of constant war across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa, the U.S. has won nothing, nada, zilch. Its unending wars have, in fact, led nowhere in a world growing more chaotic by the second.”

Mind you, three years later the United States remains a staggeringly powerful imperial force, with hundreds of military bases still scattered across the globe, while its economic clout -- its corporations control about half the planet's wealth -- similarly remains beyond compare. Yet, even in 2016, it shouldn’t have been hard to see that the American Century was indeed ending well before its 100 years were up. It shouldn’t have been hard to grasp, as Donald Trump intuitively did, that this country, however powerful, was already both a declining empire -- thank you, George W. Bush for invading Iraq! Mission Accomplished! -- and a declining economic system (both of which still looked great indeed, if you happened to be profiting from them). That intuition and that slogan gave Trump his moment in... well, dare I call it “the afternoon sun”? They made him president.

MTPGA

In a sense, all of this should have been expectable enough. Despite the oddity of Donald Trump himself, there was little new in it, even for the imperial power that its enthusiasts once thought stood at “the end of history.” You don’t need to look far, after all, for evidence of the decline of empires. You don’t even have to think back to the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, almost three decades ago in what now seems like the Stone Age. (Admittedly, Russian President Vladimir Putin, a brilliant imagineer, has brought back a facsimile of the old Soviet Union, even if, in reality, Russia is now a rickety, fraying petro-state.)

Just take a glance across the Atlantic at Great Britain at this moment. And imagine that three-quarters of a century ago, that modest-sized island nation still controlled all of India, colonies across the planet, and an impressive military and colonial service. Go back even further and you'll find yourself in a time when it was the true superpower of planet Earth. What a force it was -- industrially, militarily, colonially -- until, of course, it wasn’t.

If you happen to be looking for imperial lessons, you could perhaps say that some empires end not with a bang but with a Brexit. Despite all the pomp and circumstance (tweeting and insults) during the visit of the Trump royal family (Donald, Melania, Ivanka, Jared, Donald Jr., Eric, and Tiffany) to the British royals, led by a queen who, at 93, can remember better days, here’s something hard to deny: with Brexit (no matter how it turns out), the Earth’s former superpower has landed in the sub-basement of history. Great Britain? Obviously that adjective has to change.

In the meantime, across the planet, China, another once great imperial power, perhaps the greatest in the long history of this planet, is clearly on the rise again from another kind of sub-basement. That, in turn, is deeply worrying the leadership, civilian and military, of the planet’s “lone superpower.” Its president, in response, is wielding his weapon of choice -- tariffs -- while the U.S. military prepares for an almost unimaginable future war with that upstart nation, possibly starting in the South China Sea.

Meanwhile, the still-dominant power on the planet is, however incrementally, heading down. It’s nowhere near that sub-basement, of course -- anything but. It’s still a rich, immensely powerful land. Its unsuccessful wars, however, go on without surcease, the political temperature rises, and democratic institutions continue to fray -- all of which began well before Donald Trump entered the Oval Office and, in fact, helped ensure that he would make it there in the first place.

And yet none of this, not even imperial decline itself, quite captures the “disease” of which The Donald is now such an obvious symptom. After all, while the rise and fall of imperial powers has been an essential part of history, the planetary context for that process is now changing in an unprecedented way. And that’s not just because, since the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, growing numbers of countries have come to possess the power to take the planet down in a cataclysm of fire and ice (as in nuclear winter). It’s also because history, as we’ve known it, including the rise and fall of empires, is now, in a sense, melting away.

by Tom Englehart, Tom Dispatch | Read more:

[ed. See also: America’s Suicide Epidemic (Tom Dispatch).]

Donald Fagen

I Want a Friend

Maybe it was only the mood I was in that night—bitter, biting, yet full of loose energy—that led me back to the queer bar, a place I’d sworn I’d never go again. By then I had no grand hopes left for love, but was propelled instead by quite another purpose: I wanted a friend. Not just any friend. I wanted thefriend, the friend who is the stuff of movies and books and love songs—the friend who sees, the friend who gets, the friend to whom you have to explain nothing and who is yours until the end of time.

All afternoon and into the gloaming, I’d been sitting in the dark, watching my screen and polishing off a bottle of screw-top rosé, precisely the kind of blissful combination my other self disapproves of. What was the deal with Tony Soprano, finally and after all? So beautiful, so angry.

Then it was time to go. On the metro, two girls sat side by side in matching floral dresses and cursed each other over tiny hands made of butterfly wings. The exit tunnel and escalator smelled like important documents burning, which is the best description of Paris as a whole that I am capable of offering.

My potential new friend was a woman I’d met on Twitter when she’d liked a picture of my cat. Cute cat, she’d commented. What’s his name?

I told her his name—yes, like the angel—and she launched into a monologue about the Holy Trinity, which is my actual favorite subject to debate. Three into one, one into three. It makes no sense, yet it makes sense. I agree, utterly and totally, this woman said. In her little photo, she wore a droopy yellow bow in her hair. Here, I remember thinking, was a person who did not play by the world’s rules.

As usual, the filmmaker and her girlfriend stood in the street outside the bar smoking the cheapest possible kind of cigarettes. They greeted me with kisses in a tired kind of way, turning their faces to mine so that only the corners of our chins touched. Once upon a time, I had caused a lot of trouble here, both emotional and physical, so I understood their loyalty.

The signs asking for donations to fund the bar’s legal fees had come down, and I wondered what this meant. The bar had opened in a disreputable neighborhood that over time had become reputable, triggering a campaign from its new neighbors to close it down for reasons of sound and sexuality. But this argument does not play out the same way in France as it would in America, I have learned, for though the French surely have their own confusions of object and symbol, they are generally unimpressed by binary thinking. It’s an immunity I am still trying to acquire.

Over my large plastic cup of good beer, I watched the butch-femme couples kiss each other with their tender fish mouths and surveyed the gaggles of androgynes in vests made from various shades of denim who occupied the couches in the graffiti-soaked back room. I had the feeling again then, the only feeling that makes my other self shut up and listen.

Once, as a teenager in Virginia, after feeling the feeling for a whole year, I drove to a shooting range/gun store and looked at the big sign. GUNS, it said, ALL SHAPES AND SIZES. My friend’s older brother worked inside, and I knew I could be successful if I wanted to be. Success, in this context, would be a lovely rectangular gun, very small and possibly silver, held to the right side of my head and fired. Did I want to? My other self was silent as I sat in the car and silent when I pulled the car back onto the two-lane, back onto I-95 and through all the miles home. The decision was mine.

According to the clock above the bathroom with pictures of cats for numbers, my potential new friend was late. I saw one girl I thought was cute, in a black denim button-up onesie—little tits, no bra—which was just the kind of garment I would like to wear but never would. By the time you got the pants on and fastened in just the right way, you’d have no energy left for the top.

Here is the thing: I had a friend once, for three years. One day it was all, Let’s write our names on a cheap gold lock and lock it to this bridge. It was I who went to the hardware store and bought the lock, but she who wrote the initials in Sharpie and plopped the little key into the water. To be fair, the lock was so cheap that the U of it kept coming out altogether, so I helped my friend jam it back in once it was around the thin iron trestle. We also wrote vows, promising to bring more joy into each other’s lives rather than less and to remind each other that we are both special and talented and destined for great things. This is a kind of marriage, I said, and it means we are together now, until the end of time. Okay, she said.

by Emma Copley Eisenberg, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: Franz Lang

The Evangelical, the ‘Pool Boy,’ the Comedian and Michael Cohen

Senator Ted Cruz was running neck and neck with Donald J. Trump in Iowa just before the caucuses in 2016, but his campaign was expecting a last-minute boost from a powerful endorser, Jerry Falwell Jr.

Mr. Falwell was chancellor of one of the nation’s largest Christian colleges, Liberty University, and a son of the Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., the televangelist and co-founder of the modern religious right.

Months earlier, Mr. Falwell had provided Liberty’s basketball arena for Mr. Cruz’s formal presidential announcement and required that the student body attend, giving the Texas Republican a guaranteed audience of thousands of cheering young religious conservatives.

With the caucuses now fast approaching, the senator’s father, Rafael Cruz, an evangelical pastor who had taken the lead in wooing Mr. Falwell, alerted the campaign that Mr. Falwell had pledged to endorse his son.

But when the time came for an announcement, Mr. Falwell rocked the Cruz campaign and grabbed the attention of the entire political world. He endorsed Mr. Trump instead, becoming one of the first major evangelical leaders to get behind the thrice-married, insult-hurling real estate mogul’s long-odds presidential bid.

Mr. Falwell — who is not a minister and spent years as a lawyer and real estate developer — said his endorsement was based on Mr. Trump’s business experience and leadership qualities. A person close to Mr. Falwell said he made his decision after “consultation with other individuals whose opinions he respects.” But a far more complicated narrative is emerging about the behind-the-scenes maneuvering in the months before that important endorsement.

That backstory, in true Trump-tabloid fashion, features the friendship between Mr. Falwell, his wife and a former pool attendant at the Fontainebleau hotel in Miami Beach; the family’s investment in a gay-friendly youth hostel; purported sexually revealing photographs involving the Falwells; and an attempted hush-money arrangement engineered by the president’s former fixer, Michael Cohen.

by Frances Robles and Jim Rutenberg, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Angel Valentin/NY Times

The Explorer

My birthday is tomorrow. I’m turning sixty-one, the Year of the Nap. A couple of gift cards for coffee and clothes, tip the pizza man, and that will be that.

Not that I’m ungrateful. I live in a big house in Kansas City, Missouri, with two teenagers and my ex-wife. Yes, you read that right. We’ve been divorced a dozen years — five more than we were married — and we know now what we didn’t know then: that family is what matters, that love is relative, that life is full of unexpected turns.

My ex and my kids are all I have, if I ignore my younger brother — which I can’t, because he’s outside tooting his car horn and blaring what sounds like a Robert Johnson blues song.

He told me he was going to buy a camper van, and here it is, a rusty tan Explorer, but the E and the X have fallen off the logo, leaving just “PLORER.” He says the roof leaks, which explains why it smells like a wet ashtray inside. My brother wears his usual getup: XXXL tie-dye T-shirt, King Biscuit Blues Festival ball cap, saggy stonewashed jeans. October in Missouri is not cold enough for his favorite full-length leather duster.

He’s only just arrived, and my head is already pounding.

My brother lives in the California desert but summers in a trailer in Tennessee, which is like swapping hell for the equator. He’s currently on the last leg of a circuitous cross-country run. Picture Dante’s Virgil visiting all nine circles of the Inferno in a camper van. At the end he’ll be back in the desert again, where the sidewalk doubles as a frying pan, but for now he’s here to help celebrate my birthday.

“Not bad, huh?” he asks, unlocking the van’s side doors.

He’s wanted a camper van ever since our dad died three years ago. Dad left us both some dough, and my brother didn’t waste any time spending his. He bought a modest house with an elaborate surveillance system (it may or may not have once been a meth lab) and now this van, which he got from an old hippie couple for five grand. He put another nine hundred dollars into the engine but ignored the mechanic’s advice about the transmission.

“Screw that dude,” says my brother, who’s no more of a mechanic than I am.

Our father, a Baptist preacher, didn’t raise us to have a lot of common sense. After our mother left him, his congregation asked him to step down, and he was just a man with two sons, no wife, and no church. My brother and I became his cult of two, watching sitcom after sitcom while he tried to figure out what to do.

My brother starts toweling off a pair of iguanas with a dirty rag. “This one’s Gilligan, and this one’s Mary Ann,” he says, letting the lizards cling to his belly as he lights his second Camel in five minutes. “And this,” he says, draping a seven-foot ball python around his neck, “is Lilly.”

He refers to them as his “family,” not unlike how Charles Manson did his followers.

While my brother leans into the van to grab a plastic bag of pet supplies — two heads of lettuce and a box of dead mice — I pick up his dirty terrarium to bring inside.

Our father disciplined us harshly as kids. He told us it hurt him more than it hurt us, but I don’t think anyone believed that. We all just passed the pain down: father beats older son, older son beats younger brother, younger brother brutalizes family dog, brutalized dog disappears.

Dad screamed at us for that, too.

My brother’s all about peace and reptiles these days. He delicately wraps tiny harnesses around his iguanas’ legs so they won’t escape.

I escaped home after graduation, got a job, and never looked back. My brother was too traumatized to get away, and our father took advantage of that, supporting (or enabling) him into his early thirties so that he, our dad, wouldn’t be alone.

Having suffered the self-inflicted wound of my divorce, I can sympathize with my father’s loneliness. And I apologized long ago to my brother for treating him the way I did: beating and belittling him and condescending to him. But dang if I don’t still feel bad every time I see him.

He carries a cane now. That’s new. Its handle is a silver skull in a top hat, like some souvenir from the Church of Satan gift shop. “I just use it for stairs,” my brother says, grunting up the six steps to my front door. Carrying three hundred pounds on arthritic knees and a bad back, he’s fifty-eight going on ninety. In fact, our elderly dad was in better shape, until his prostate gave out.

My precociously geriatric brother coughs, lights another cigarette, and takes a break on a porch chair, resting the devil’s walking stick beside him.

“Got a good deal on a dozen cartons of Camels,” he says, breathing hard, “but I’m almost out of meds.” (...)

Even as a grown man, my brother struggled under our father’s disapproval. Meanwhile Dad bragged to his friends about my career as a television-news reporter. He had no clue I was also a drug addict and a drunk.

I confessed all this a dozen years ago — not to my father and brother but to Jesus. The Gospel seed my father planted in us as children had finally sprouted. Since then, I’ve slowly, tenuously reconstructed my life and family and moved on from my past. But now, with our father three years in the ground and my brother sitting in front of me, low on meds and holding Satan’s scepter of the damned, the past is not so past. My brother pours Dr Pepper from a two-liter bottle into a thirty-ounce plastic Subway cup he never goes anywhere without, like a fast-food-sponsored athlete in training for a diabetes competition. He sips, stubs out his smoke, and pulls out his marijuana pipe, the stem of which is a Confederate flag, as if he bought it in a Klan head shop. Twice he has called me after getting arrested for pot: “Dude,” he said each time, “you’re not going to believe what happened.”

He was right. I couldn’t believe he’d made the front page of the local Tennessee paper for irrigating two acres of marijuana that weren’t his. And I couldn’t believe he’d thought his California-issued medicinal-marijuana card would keep him from getting busted for possession in Texas. (For something that’s supposed to relieve his anxiety, weed sure seems to be the cause of a lot of it.)

In my brother’s mind it wasn’t his fault he’d let some dude borrow his hose to water a pot crop, any more than it was his fault he looked like a central-casting drug dealer: long ponytail, purple-lensed granny glasses, Fu Manchu mustache. It was the cops’ fault. The crooked, profiling cops.

But he’s not getting caught on this trip, he says. He’s packing his stash wrapped in tinfoil, sprayed with deer urine, and taped to the inside of his engine, as per a YouTube tutorial.

“Good luck sniffing that out,” he says, tapping the pipe’s bowl on the heel of his Teva sandal.

I don’t ask where he got the deer urine from.

by Corvin Thomas, The Sun |  Read more:

Image: Brody Scotland

Intense Garlic Hack Has Captivated the Internet

Peeling garlic is one of those cooking chores that chefs tolerate, painstakingly peeling off the paper-thin covering while dreaming up new ways to get the job done. While some chefs are content to smashing cloves with a knife and peel individual cloves, others opt for the shaking method or invest in a garlic press that doesn’t require peeling. Now, there’s a new addition to the garlic-peeling bag of tricks, one that some home cooks were not yet privy to.

On Sunday, Twitter user Twitter user @VPestilenZ posted their own rapid-fire method for peeling cloves off from a head of garlic. “As someone who makes a lot of Korean food, this is the best method for getting garlic peeled!” the person who posted the video wrote. In the video posted online someone held a head of garlic in one hand and a knife in the other. Using the pointed blade, they would stab an individual clove and pull, peeling the clove while freeing it from the head. It was easy, painless, and fast.

The internet was instantly smitten with the new—or at least previously unknown— garlic-peeling technique. Cookbook author and model Chrissy Teigen shared the tweet, commenting, “WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT” which mirrored many of the other comments online. Reactions varied from stunned amazement to something verging on anger that they never heard about this technique before. The technique has since gone viral so we shouldn’t be surprised if cooks experiment with it at home the next time they are cooking roast chicken, japchae, pesto, garlic fried rice, Lebanese toum, or any recipe that requires a lot of garlic.

by Melissa Locker, Time |  Read more:

Image: via
[ed. Pretty amazing if it works.]

via: