Sunday, January 5, 2020
The Unbearable Lightness of Being Russell Wilson
In a season filled with heart-pounding victories, Wilson had once again been his best when on the brink of defeat. His statistics in that Nov. 3 win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers: five touchdown passes, 378 yards, no interceptions and a cascade of elusive scrambles.
It was Seattle’s ninth game of the season, and his improvisation looked akin to watching Miles Davis in full flight while the opposing defense was playing basic keys. It was impossible not to wonder if this would be the season in which Wilson found the postseason redemption that has eluded him for five years.
It has been that long since Wilson threw the most infamous interception in Super Bowl history: a pass a yard from the goal line against the New England Patriots that denied the Seahawks a repeat as champions. “I am never going to let one play define my career, good or bad,” Wilson said in a recent interview with The New York Times, incanting the trademark mantra he has used since that throw. “I’m going to keep trusting the process, and continue to go for it.” (...)
As he prepares to lead his team in a wild-card playoff game Sunday in Philadelphia against the Eagles (9-7), how should Russell Wilson be regarded?
It seems fitting that he will chase the Super Bowl ghost with an injured team full of question marks. There are ways in which Wilson, in his eighth season in the N.F.L., is still a question mark, still an enigma to those outside his immediate sphere.
The Times followed Wilson and his team for the last nine weeks of the season and saw a riveting quarterback who had to be thrillingly perfect to win this season, and a preprogrammed, hard-to-fathom star who sometimes buckled when least expected.
Which Seahawks team will we see in the postseason? That depends on which Russell Wilson shows up. (...)
To fans in Seattle, Wilson sits firmly on the Mount Rushmore of sports icons. His No. 3 jersey is ubiquitous. His tendency to be friendly while also keeping the world at arm’s length fits in with a cultural vibe known locally as “Seattle nice.”
As stars such as Richard Sherman and Lynch left the team, and as Wilson spread his own narrative on social media, the city’s love affair with its favorite quarterback only intensified.
Social media is arguably the perfect platform for Wilson, allowing thin but glowing glimpses of his life through the mediating remove of technology. There he is, at the local children’s hospital on Facebook Live. On Instagram, getting his hair cornrowed, letting his goofball flag fly and cooing with his family for Christmas.
In April, after signing a record contract — $140 million for four years, with a $65 million signing bonus — he popped up on Twitter in the dead of night, barechested, cuddling next to his music superstar wife, Ciara.
“We got a deal, Seattle,” he said in a Barry White baritone far deeper than his usual voice, which some read as an assertion of his blackness.
“Russell understands how race works in America, that America sees what it wants to see in a black person, and him especially, being a black football player,” said Louis Moore, a professor at Grand Valley State in Michigan who focuses on race and sport, when asked about Wilson’s post. “The beauty of Russell Wilson is he is able to play with the stereotypes.”
However Wilson portrays himself, the online glimpses have given him a dash of personality that even longtime admirers find refreshing.
“It’s good for us to see he’s not some robot,” said a fan, Charlene Lewis, as she walked to Seattle’s downtown stadium.
by Kurt Streeter, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ezra Shaw/Getty Images
It was Seattle’s ninth game of the season, and his improvisation looked akin to watching Miles Davis in full flight while the opposing defense was playing basic keys. It was impossible not to wonder if this would be the season in which Wilson found the postseason redemption that has eluded him for five years.
It has been that long since Wilson threw the most infamous interception in Super Bowl history: a pass a yard from the goal line against the New England Patriots that denied the Seahawks a repeat as champions. “I am never going to let one play define my career, good or bad,” Wilson said in a recent interview with The New York Times, incanting the trademark mantra he has used since that throw. “I’m going to keep trusting the process, and continue to go for it.” (...)
As he prepares to lead his team in a wild-card playoff game Sunday in Philadelphia against the Eagles (9-7), how should Russell Wilson be regarded?It seems fitting that he will chase the Super Bowl ghost with an injured team full of question marks. There are ways in which Wilson, in his eighth season in the N.F.L., is still a question mark, still an enigma to those outside his immediate sphere.
The Times followed Wilson and his team for the last nine weeks of the season and saw a riveting quarterback who had to be thrillingly perfect to win this season, and a preprogrammed, hard-to-fathom star who sometimes buckled when least expected.
Which Seahawks team will we see in the postseason? That depends on which Russell Wilson shows up. (...)
To fans in Seattle, Wilson sits firmly on the Mount Rushmore of sports icons. His No. 3 jersey is ubiquitous. His tendency to be friendly while also keeping the world at arm’s length fits in with a cultural vibe known locally as “Seattle nice.”
As stars such as Richard Sherman and Lynch left the team, and as Wilson spread his own narrative on social media, the city’s love affair with its favorite quarterback only intensified.
Social media is arguably the perfect platform for Wilson, allowing thin but glowing glimpses of his life through the mediating remove of technology. There he is, at the local children’s hospital on Facebook Live. On Instagram, getting his hair cornrowed, letting his goofball flag fly and cooing with his family for Christmas.
In April, after signing a record contract — $140 million for four years, with a $65 million signing bonus — he popped up on Twitter in the dead of night, barechested, cuddling next to his music superstar wife, Ciara.
“We got a deal, Seattle,” he said in a Barry White baritone far deeper than his usual voice, which some read as an assertion of his blackness.
“Russell understands how race works in America, that America sees what it wants to see in a black person, and him especially, being a black football player,” said Louis Moore, a professor at Grand Valley State in Michigan who focuses on race and sport, when asked about Wilson’s post. “The beauty of Russell Wilson is he is able to play with the stereotypes.”
However Wilson portrays himself, the online glimpses have given him a dash of personality that even longtime admirers find refreshing.
“It’s good for us to see he’s not some robot,” said a fan, Charlene Lewis, as she walked to Seattle’s downtown stadium.
by Kurt Streeter, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ezra Shaw/Getty Images
Saturday, January 4, 2020
Shinkansen Train
The Shinkansen Bullet Train has a streamlined forefront and structural adaptations to significantly reduce noise resulting from aerodynamics in high-speed trains.
Key Differentiators
The more streamlined Shinkansen train not only travels more quietly, it now travels 10% faster and uses 15% less electricity.
Biomimicry Story
Eiji Nakatsu, an engineer with JR West and a birdwatcher, used his knowledge of the splashless water entry of kingfishers and silent flight of owls to decrease the sound generated by the trains. Kingfishers move quickly from air, a low-resistance (low drag) medium, to water, a high-resistance (high drag) medium. The kingfisher’s beak provides an almost ideal shape for such an impact. The beak is streamlined, steadily increasing in diameter from its tip to its head. This reduces the impact as the kingfisher essentially wedges its way into the water, allowing the water to flow past the beak rather than being pushed in front of it. Because the train faced the same challenge, moving from low drag open air to high drag air in the tunnel, Nakatsu designed the forefront of the Shinkansen train based on the beak of the kingfisher. Engineers were able to reduce the pantograph’s noise by adding structures to the main part of the pantograph to create many small vortices. This is similar to the way an owl’s primary feathers have serrations that create small vortices instead of one large one. Read more about the bioinspiration behind the Shinkansen Train in Zygote Quarterly:
by Japan Railways Group | Read more:
Key Differentiators
The more streamlined Shinkansen train not only travels more quietly, it now travels 10% faster and uses 15% less electricity.Biomimicry Story
Eiji Nakatsu, an engineer with JR West and a birdwatcher, used his knowledge of the splashless water entry of kingfishers and silent flight of owls to decrease the sound generated by the trains. Kingfishers move quickly from air, a low-resistance (low drag) medium, to water, a high-resistance (high drag) medium. The kingfisher’s beak provides an almost ideal shape for such an impact. The beak is streamlined, steadily increasing in diameter from its tip to its head. This reduces the impact as the kingfisher essentially wedges its way into the water, allowing the water to flow past the beak rather than being pushed in front of it. Because the train faced the same challenge, moving from low drag open air to high drag air in the tunnel, Nakatsu designed the forefront of the Shinkansen train based on the beak of the kingfisher. Engineers were able to reduce the pantograph’s noise by adding structures to the main part of the pantograph to create many small vortices. This is similar to the way an owl’s primary feathers have serrations that create small vortices instead of one large one. Read more about the bioinspiration behind the Shinkansen Train in Zygote Quarterly:
by Japan Railways Group | Read more:
Image: Sam Doshi
[ed. Interesting in itself, but click on the link for a super cool interactive presentation (Case Study Auspicious Forms).]
Friday, January 3, 2020
Australia Is Committing Climate Suicide
Australia Is Committing Climate Suicide (NY Times)
Image: A man drags away plastic garbage bins from a property engulfed in flames in Lake Conjola in New South WalesMatthew Abbott for The New York Times
[ed. See also: This is not a Natural Disaster. It is Man Made (BNE).]
[ed. See also: This is not a Natural Disaster. It is Man Made (BNE).]
The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer
Having worked my way through almost all of Neal Stephenson’s novels, I’ve come to recognize a phenomenon I call The Stephenson Guarantee: You don’t know what any Stephenson book will be like before you crack it open, but you can be assured it won’t be like anything else. The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer is no exception. This isn’t my favorite Stephenson novel, but it certainly occupies an important place in his corpus. It’s also damned impressive for a near-future vision from 1995; although the advanced nanotech that drives the story is largely unrealized twenty years later, the book contains many other imaginative innovations that have since come to pass, either in part or full. And nanotech may be just around the corner, if technologists are to be believed.
It was a queer and exciting feeling to read The Diamond Age––a story about Nell, a young girl who accidentally comes to possess a nanotech book (The Primer) with the ability to sense its environment and incorporate the girl’s experiences into its instructive narratives––on a Kindle. My Kindle is certainly no Primer, but it’s also something more (and also less) than a paper book. Primer-like technologies are probably a couple decades or more away, so it seems plausible that future readers might look back on the quaint little Kindle and sigh: “It was clunky all right, but maybe we wouldn’t have got where we are without it.” Perhaps, I kept thinking as I prodded the touchscreen to turn pages and pull up definitions of unfamiliar words, perhaps we are on our way.
Trying to summarize the plot of The Diamond Age (or any Stephenson novel for that matter) is daunting, because the author generally eschews traditional narrative arcs, favoring instead a smorgasbord of oddly strung together concepts and moments of insight. This style, while contributing greatly to Stephenson’s mystique, is rarely rewarding in the way we expect. The relative dearth of traditional character development and clear resolutions of conflict, coupled with the deluge of tech-talk all Stephenson readers come to expect, can make The Diamond Age seem like a tough read. And it is. But it’s also worth the effort.
This book helped me realize something important about how I interpret Stephenson’s work, which is that his worlds almost always exceed his stories and characters. Stephenson designs linguistic webs that explore (and exploit) human nature, socio-cultural dynamics, geography, environmental and economic pressures, offbeat humor, historical trends, and sheer whimsy. The Diamond Age takes many forms: a fairy tale, a Dickensian rags-to-riches narrative, a treatise on the benefits and risks of nanotech, a crash course in Turing machines, an inquiry into the capabilities of the collective unconscious, a Confucian morality play, and a touching look at parent-child relationships. Although many of the characters in this book are interesting, fun, and even endearing, Stephenson’s runaway enthusiasm for ideas left little room for them to grow on me in the fashion I expect from “great” literature. But, of course, this is not “great” literature. It’s something else entirely.
It’s often difficult to locate unambiguous moral lessons in Stephenson novels, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t prod morality in a meaningful way. In The Diamond Age, Stephenson ruminates on the persistence of tribalism in human psychology and community. Beyond the predicament of living in a future world where nation-states have given way to “phyles” (self-chosen tribes), characters struggle with the timeless tension between the desire to do right by those closest to them (friends and family), and the desire to do what’s right for humanity in general. In a wonderful passage, the headmistress of a neo-Victorian prep school points out that even the best and brightest fail to dent the world if they ignore the collective efforts of fellow humans:
It was a queer and exciting feeling to read The Diamond Age––a story about Nell, a young girl who accidentally comes to possess a nanotech book (The Primer) with the ability to sense its environment and incorporate the girl’s experiences into its instructive narratives––on a Kindle. My Kindle is certainly no Primer, but it’s also something more (and also less) than a paper book. Primer-like technologies are probably a couple decades or more away, so it seems plausible that future readers might look back on the quaint little Kindle and sigh: “It was clunky all right, but maybe we wouldn’t have got where we are without it.” Perhaps, I kept thinking as I prodded the touchscreen to turn pages and pull up definitions of unfamiliar words, perhaps we are on our way.
Trying to summarize the plot of The Diamond Age (or any Stephenson novel for that matter) is daunting, because the author generally eschews traditional narrative arcs, favoring instead a smorgasbord of oddly strung together concepts and moments of insight. This style, while contributing greatly to Stephenson’s mystique, is rarely rewarding in the way we expect. The relative dearth of traditional character development and clear resolutions of conflict, coupled with the deluge of tech-talk all Stephenson readers come to expect, can make The Diamond Age seem like a tough read. And it is. But it’s also worth the effort.This book helped me realize something important about how I interpret Stephenson’s work, which is that his worlds almost always exceed his stories and characters. Stephenson designs linguistic webs that explore (and exploit) human nature, socio-cultural dynamics, geography, environmental and economic pressures, offbeat humor, historical trends, and sheer whimsy. The Diamond Age takes many forms: a fairy tale, a Dickensian rags-to-riches narrative, a treatise on the benefits and risks of nanotech, a crash course in Turing machines, an inquiry into the capabilities of the collective unconscious, a Confucian morality play, and a touching look at parent-child relationships. Although many of the characters in this book are interesting, fun, and even endearing, Stephenson’s runaway enthusiasm for ideas left little room for them to grow on me in the fashion I expect from “great” literature. But, of course, this is not “great” literature. It’s something else entirely.
It’s often difficult to locate unambiguous moral lessons in Stephenson novels, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t prod morality in a meaningful way. In The Diamond Age, Stephenson ruminates on the persistence of tribalism in human psychology and community. Beyond the predicament of living in a future world where nation-states have given way to “phyles” (self-chosen tribes), characters struggle with the timeless tension between the desire to do right by those closest to them (friends and family), and the desire to do what’s right for humanity in general. In a wonderful passage, the headmistress of a neo-Victorian prep school points out that even the best and brightest fail to dent the world if they ignore the collective efforts of fellow humans:
It’s a wonderful thing to be clever, and you should never think otherwise, and you should never stop being that way. But what you learn, as you get older, is that there are a few billion other people in the world all trying to be clever at the same time, and whatever you do with your life will certainly be lost––swallowed up in the ocean––unless you are doing it along with like-minded people who will remember your contributions and carry them forward. That is why the world is divided into tribes. (loc. 5325)In his or her own way, each character in The Diamond Age discovers that while individual concerns can sometimes mesh nicely with group priorities, such synchrony cannot be counted on. We must, therefore, make difficult choices, sometimes with consequences that we neither endorse nor fully understand. This is not a novel insight about the character of the moral universe, but simply a creative reminder of the ineluctable frustrations that complicate human conduct.
by Miles Raymer, Words & Dirt | Read more:
Image: Amazon
Thursday, January 2, 2020
Drone Strike Kills Top Iranian General in Baghdad
Iran Promises Retaliation After U.S. Kills General (NY Times)
Image: Iraq Security Media Cell, via Twitter
[ed. Without a doubt, the stupidist, most reckless thing Trump has ever done, and that's saying a lot. See also: Donald Trump’s assassination of Qassem Suleimani will come back to haunt him (The Guardian).]
Even though it is true that this killing amounts to an act of war, many regarded the severity of economic sanctions as an act of war too. So what is the point…to show the US as powerful even though it has yet to break Iran? To provoke Iran into doing something stupid?
It certainly did serve to poke a stick in the eye of Iraq, which was already gearing up to toss US troops out. The flagrant disregard for Iraq’s sovereignity is only going to accelerate that process as well as push a lot of fence-sitters in Iraq towards Iran. How smart was that?
Much of the understandable jitteriness results from the idea that Iran will strike back and precipitate a hot war. Iran has managed to survive by being among other things exceptionally disciplined and strategic. It’s unlikely to do anything without sounding out Russia and China, who are likely to be similarly measured and not show their hands. (via:)
Things We Hope Will Die in 2020
The Wing: A women-only coworking space branded as a feminist wonderland, The Wing calls itself “a diverse community open to all.” How inclusive! Memberships start at $185 per month. —Abigail Weinberg
Malcolm Gladwell’s career: Let’s thinslice: Malcolm Gladwell needs to stop writing. Gladwell’s theories are wrong (stop and frisk) or obvious (1,000 10,000 hours) or dumb (talking to strangers is the problem with everything). He made his bones at a time when glib, crypto-conservative contrarianism was the reigning media ethos. Today, the shtick has been worn so smooth as to be transparent. Flip through his latest book and you’ll find an easy-pass treatment of the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State and a determinedly apolitical reading of the death of Sandra Bland—two cases of institutional pathologies that Gladwell turns into parables about a quirk in human nature. Powerful people thus get excused for their mistakes, under the guise of Gladwell’s interrogating some orthodoxy or another. You don’t need to be a bestselling author of pop-science airport books to come up with a word for this stuff: bullshit. —Jacob Rosenberg
The careers of all business pop-psychology writers, while we’re at it
Podcasts
Complaining about “cancel culture”
Cars
Saturday Night Live political sketches
The “Overton window”
Caring about the Conways
Daylight savings time
“Neoliberal”
Slack: Hating on Slack isn’t an original idea, but let me add my name to the chorus of voices asking office decision-makers everywhere (including where I work) to spare us and get rid of it once and for all. If your office doesn’t use Slack, consider yourself lucky. It’s as if the annoying co-worker who never shuts up suddenly had a direct portal into your computer and you can’t turn it off. Suddenly you’re part of dozens of separate conversations, some of which you need to see, but most of which you don’t. You can try to leave but you’ll inevitably be added back in against your will, and there’s always at least one colleague who abuses the dreaded “@here” to summon everybody at once. It can be performative in the worst ways, including being used by managers to dress down subordinates in front of large groups of coworkers—see, for instance, the Away scandal—and serves as an involuntary venue for mediocre takes and tweet workshopping. It’s an information security nightmare, full of loose conversation and casual shit-talking that would be awkward (at best) when reviewed in a deposition or in some hacker’s Pastebin dump, and you have to trust your workplace admins to not look through it (the name is an acronym for Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge, after all). Let’s go back to email. —AJ Vicens
Fad diets
Newsletters
Craft cocktails
The CIA’s Instagram account
The New England Patriots (...)
30-under-30 lists: This might have something to do with my recently turning 30, but I can tell you from experience: 30 is no different from 29 or 31. Why do we treat youth as its own virtue? I wish I could unlearn the word “Wunderkind.” —Rebecca Leber
Ratios
“I have a daughter, so I…”: Perhaps the best thing to happen over the past decade was the #MeToo movement, but of course, as with any step forward, there came bad allies and clout chasers. After the first wave of women who stood up and said, “Me, too,” there came a tide of men who said, “I have a daughter, so I… .” Fellas, maybe try thinking of women as whole human beings on their own merit, rather than in relation to yourselves. Your mothers and daughters and nieces and coworkers deserve more, dammit. —Becca Andrews
The idea of a monolithic “left”
“Adulting”: This is a word that never needed to be a word. Grow up already and just handle your shit. —Becca Andrews
Gender reveals
Gratuitous semiannual “I love women” threads in which men praise women in media: Chris Cillizza once unhelpfully tweeted “Women > Men. Everyone knows this.” Most men are only slightly more subtle, tweeting performative threads of women they admire on occasion, only to ignore the same women’s work and gravitate toward elevating and praising men’s work the rest of the year. —Rebecca Leber
Lists
Rankings
“Doggos”
“Puppers”
Hero worship of billionaires
Brands on Twitter
The “absolutely no one: / me:” meme
Creepy attacks on Greta Thunberg
Respect
Saying “regardless of your politics”
Devil’s advocacy
Zoom
Brexit
Uber/Lyft: They’re clogging streets, polluting, and killing public transit by offering unsustainably low investor-subsidized prices while mistreating drivers just long enough to replace them with robots. —Aaron Wiener
Goop and other pseudo-wellness bullshit: Stop saying juice cleanses and a $50 rose quartz face roller will make me feel better. —Laura Thompson
Detox elixirs
BS CBD promo
Fake butts
Image: Mother Jones/Getty
[ed. Something that should live (but sadly lacking these days): barbed and subversive satire.]
A Theory or Two of These Grim Times
Maybe it’s a function of who I follow on Twitter, but I didn’t see much in the way of “ring in the new year” chipperness. Seeing Australia go up in flames might have something to do with that, but even those who seemed awfully domestically focused also seemed subdued. I also noticed comparatively few “Year in review” or “Best of 2019/the past ten years” but that could just as well be due to the gutting of news rooms. Nevertheless, I thought I might be so bold as to offer a theory.
It’s not hard to see plenty of reasons why all save a select few (which includes the deluded and End of Days fans) have reason to be downbeat. Climate change. Mass species dieoff. Poisoning of the planet, particularly with plastics (that overlaps with dieoff but also creates day to day health and diet worries). Student debt. Short job tenures combined with mainly McJobs on offer. Often unaffordable and crapified health care. Having kids who ought to be able to go to college but need to be talked out of it since the debt load would be punitive. Fear over one’s likely inability to retire with the real risk of not being able to work. And that’s before getting to personal tragedies, like suffering a foreclosure or bankruptcy, or death, disability or drug addiction in the family. Shocks like that are even harder to take when so many things seem precarious.
To add to that long list, there’s more anxiety. Bizarrely fearful parenting even though the overwhelming majority of kids are safer than their free-range parents were at a similar age….and the riskiest thing kids do today on a regular basis is ride in a car. Anger and frustration over seemingly more and more Kafka-eque bureaucracies wreaking havoc. Surprisingly widespread diet fesithism. Anger about Trump. I’m sure readers could add to these lists.
None of these are news, but what seems to deepen the general gloom is a lack of confidence that anything will get better, a sense both of sorely limited personal power and lack of trust in those nominally in charge to do the right thing. And that is made more intense by concerns about pending collapse. When the very richest people in the world are acting like preppers, there’s reason to be worried.
I am personally upset at being part of the problem. I now live in a freestanding house, which means energy inefficient. I use a car to get about. Public transportation here is pretty much non-existent, and please don’t advise walking or biking. Both are physically impossible.
I also despair at my inability to do anything other than take pathetically trivial steps to reduce how much plastic I wind up using. Even with being a Yankee and using things until they are about to or do fall apart, I do wind up buying some things. Even socks are in plastic! And forget about buying food in the US. Eggs? Yogurt? Berries? You’d be surprised at how few egg vendors use cardboard cartons. It’s even gotten hard to to buy loose lettuce down here (although oddly loose kale is a different story). Admittedly not everything is this way….but way too much is.
So why are we so stuck on a bad trajectory? Simple explanations are always simplistic, but I hazard is that humans have seldom been good at working out how to manage competing levels of responsibility, and the tensions and contradictions get greater as societies become more complex. Let me turn the mike over to that great philosopher, Jamie Lannister:
Traditionally, religion as well as settled systems of obligation (like feudalism) provided something of a framework for working to serve broader social/community interests as well as personal/family ones.
Neoliberalism has weakened community ties while religion has come to play a much less powerful role in organizing society than it once did. Western society, even down to marketing, fosters individualism, yet individuals have little power. And people who are struggling to survive or substantially occupied with earning an income and doing their best with their spouse and kids in a society that keeps them leisure and even sleep deprived barely have the slack to think about the looming problems bearing down on all of us, let alone do much about them.
It’s not hard to see plenty of reasons why all save a select few (which includes the deluded and End of Days fans) have reason to be downbeat. Climate change. Mass species dieoff. Poisoning of the planet, particularly with plastics (that overlaps with dieoff but also creates day to day health and diet worries). Student debt. Short job tenures combined with mainly McJobs on offer. Often unaffordable and crapified health care. Having kids who ought to be able to go to college but need to be talked out of it since the debt load would be punitive. Fear over one’s likely inability to retire with the real risk of not being able to work. And that’s before getting to personal tragedies, like suffering a foreclosure or bankruptcy, or death, disability or drug addiction in the family. Shocks like that are even harder to take when so many things seem precarious.
To add to that long list, there’s more anxiety. Bizarrely fearful parenting even though the overwhelming majority of kids are safer than their free-range parents were at a similar age….and the riskiest thing kids do today on a regular basis is ride in a car. Anger and frustration over seemingly more and more Kafka-eque bureaucracies wreaking havoc. Surprisingly widespread diet fesithism. Anger about Trump. I’m sure readers could add to these lists.
None of these are news, but what seems to deepen the general gloom is a lack of confidence that anything will get better, a sense both of sorely limited personal power and lack of trust in those nominally in charge to do the right thing. And that is made more intense by concerns about pending collapse. When the very richest people in the world are acting like preppers, there’s reason to be worried.
I am personally upset at being part of the problem. I now live in a freestanding house, which means energy inefficient. I use a car to get about. Public transportation here is pretty much non-existent, and please don’t advise walking or biking. Both are physically impossible.
I also despair at my inability to do anything other than take pathetically trivial steps to reduce how much plastic I wind up using. Even with being a Yankee and using things until they are about to or do fall apart, I do wind up buying some things. Even socks are in plastic! And forget about buying food in the US. Eggs? Yogurt? Berries? You’d be surprised at how few egg vendors use cardboard cartons. It’s even gotten hard to to buy loose lettuce down here (although oddly loose kale is a different story). Admittedly not everything is this way….but way too much is.
So why are we so stuck on a bad trajectory? Simple explanations are always simplistic, but I hazard is that humans have seldom been good at working out how to manage competing levels of responsibility, and the tensions and contradictions get greater as societies become more complex. Let me turn the mike over to that great philosopher, Jamie Lannister:
So many vows…they make you swear and swear. Defend the king. Obey the king. Keep his secrets. Do his bidding. Your life for his. But obey your father. Love your sister. Protect the innocent. Defend the weak. Respect the gods. Obey the laws. It’s too much. No matter what you do, you’re forsaking one vow or the other.More specifically, one’s most pressing duties are to immediate family. Neoliberalism has somewhat weakened that; even Japan now sees young people regularly neglecting their parents, something that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. But people. But in many societies, those ties are extremely strong, to the degree that some countries are run on a tribal/clientelist basis.
Traditionally, religion as well as settled systems of obligation (like feudalism) provided something of a framework for working to serve broader social/community interests as well as personal/family ones.
Neoliberalism has weakened community ties while religion has come to play a much less powerful role in organizing society than it once did. Western society, even down to marketing, fosters individualism, yet individuals have little power. And people who are struggling to survive or substantially occupied with earning an income and doing their best with their spouse and kids in a society that keeps them leisure and even sleep deprived barely have the slack to think about the looming problems bearing down on all of us, let alone do much about them.
by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism | Read more:
Wednesday, January 1, 2020
A Restaurant With No Leftovers
A recent report from ReFED, a nonprofit organization focused on food waste reduction, found that restaurants in the United States generate about 11.4 million tons of food waste annually, or $25.1 billion in costs. The Environmental Protection Agency has reported that food waste and packaging account for nearly 45 percent of the materials sent to landfills in the United States.
The reason zero-waste “is not a mainstream concept, that you don’t see it in gastronomy or hospitality in mainstream ways, is because we’re just waking up to it,” said the chef Douglas McMaster, who runs the waste-free London restaurant Silo and advised the owners of Rhodora. “We’re just seeing the reality of wasting as much as we do.”
by Matthew Sedacca, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Winnie Au
[ed. Sorry, zero points for 'wokeness' at this point. Go away.]
Farmers Got Billions From Taxpayers In 2019, And Hardly Anyone Objected
In 2019, the federal government delivered an extraordinary financial aid package to America's farmers. Farm subsidies jumped to their highest level in fourteen years, most of them paid out without any action by Congress.
The money flowed to farms like Robert Henry's. When I visited in early July, many of his fields near New Madrid, Mo., had been flooded for months, preventing him from working in them. The soybeans that he did manage to grow had fallen in value; China wasn't buying them, in retaliation for the Trump administration's tariffs.
That's when the government stepped in. Some of the aid came from long-familiar programs. Government-subsidized crop insurance covered some of the losses from flooding. Other payments were unprecedented. The U.S. Department of Agriculture simply sent him a check to compensate him for the low prices resulting from the trade war.
"'Trump money' is what we call it," Henry said. "It helped a lot. And it's my understanding, they're going to do it again."
Indeed, a few weeks later, the USDA announced another $16 billion in trade-related aid to farmers. It came on top of the previous year's $12 billion package, for a grand total of $28 billion in two years. About $19 billion of that money had been paid out by the end of 2019, and the rest will be paid in 2020. (...)
The announcement aroused little controversy. "I was surprised that it didn't attract more attention," says Joe Glauber, the USDA's former chief economist, who's now a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute.
Glauber says it deserves more attention, for a whole collection of reasons.
For one thing, it's an enormous amount of money, more than the final cost of bailing out the auto industry during the financial crisis of 2008. The auto industry bailout was fiercely debated in Congress. Yet the USDA created this new program out of thin air; it decided that an old law authorizing a USDA program called the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) already gave it the authority to spend this money.
"What's unique about this is, [it] didn't go through Congress," Glauber says. Some people have raised questions about whether using the CCC for this new purpose is legal.
Glauber sees a risk of "moral hazard" — a situation in which someone is shielded from the consequences of poor decisions. The decision to start the trade war was costly, he says, and the Trump Administration, by tapping the federal treasury, is avoiding the political fallout from that decision. "The sector that is hurt the most, and which would normally complain, all of a sudden it's assuaged by these payments. To me, that's a problem," he says.
Also, the payments are quite generous. According to studies by several independent economists, the USDA is paying farmers roughly twice as much as the actual harm that they suffered from the trade war. And the payments are based on production; the bigger the farm, the bigger the payments. Thousands of farmers got more than $100,000 each. According to an NPR analysis of USDA records of payments made through July 2019, 100,000 individuals collected just over 70 percent of the money.
[ed. Bribery masquerading as socialism masquerading as capitalism. See also: Trump's tariffs are backfiring on the U.S., Fed finds (Yahoo News); and Trump, Granting Lobbyist Demands, Quietly Handed Billions More in Tax Breaks to Huge Corporations (Common Dreams); and finally, Will Small Farmers’ Beef With Trump Sway the 2020 Election? (Mother Jones)]
The money flowed to farms like Robert Henry's. When I visited in early July, many of his fields near New Madrid, Mo., had been flooded for months, preventing him from working in them. The soybeans that he did manage to grow had fallen in value; China wasn't buying them, in retaliation for the Trump administration's tariffs.
That's when the government stepped in. Some of the aid came from long-familiar programs. Government-subsidized crop insurance covered some of the losses from flooding. Other payments were unprecedented. The U.S. Department of Agriculture simply sent him a check to compensate him for the low prices resulting from the trade war."'Trump money' is what we call it," Henry said. "It helped a lot. And it's my understanding, they're going to do it again."
Indeed, a few weeks later, the USDA announced another $16 billion in trade-related aid to farmers. It came on top of the previous year's $12 billion package, for a grand total of $28 billion in two years. About $19 billion of that money had been paid out by the end of 2019, and the rest will be paid in 2020. (...)
The announcement aroused little controversy. "I was surprised that it didn't attract more attention," says Joe Glauber, the USDA's former chief economist, who's now a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute.
Glauber says it deserves more attention, for a whole collection of reasons.
For one thing, it's an enormous amount of money, more than the final cost of bailing out the auto industry during the financial crisis of 2008. The auto industry bailout was fiercely debated in Congress. Yet the USDA created this new program out of thin air; it decided that an old law authorizing a USDA program called the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) already gave it the authority to spend this money.
"What's unique about this is, [it] didn't go through Congress," Glauber says. Some people have raised questions about whether using the CCC for this new purpose is legal.
Glauber sees a risk of "moral hazard" — a situation in which someone is shielded from the consequences of poor decisions. The decision to start the trade war was costly, he says, and the Trump Administration, by tapping the federal treasury, is avoiding the political fallout from that decision. "The sector that is hurt the most, and which would normally complain, all of a sudden it's assuaged by these payments. To me, that's a problem," he says.
Also, the payments are quite generous. According to studies by several independent economists, the USDA is paying farmers roughly twice as much as the actual harm that they suffered from the trade war. And the payments are based on production; the bigger the farm, the bigger the payments. Thousands of farmers got more than $100,000 each. According to an NPR analysis of USDA records of payments made through July 2019, 100,000 individuals collected just over 70 percent of the money.
by Dan Charles, NPR | Read more:
Image: Bloomberg via Getty Images[ed. Bribery masquerading as socialism masquerading as capitalism. See also: Trump's tariffs are backfiring on the U.S., Fed finds (Yahoo News); and Trump, Granting Lobbyist Demands, Quietly Handed Billions More in Tax Breaks to Huge Corporations (Common Dreams); and finally, Will Small Farmers’ Beef With Trump Sway the 2020 Election? (Mother Jones)]
Tuesday, December 31, 2019
Get in Losers, We’re Doing Socialism
If I were to tell you “a great deal of American television is dedicated to portraying the glories of capitalism and tearing down anything that looks like an alternative system” you would probably say “thank you, that’s the most obvious thing I’ve ever heard.” All the same, the third season of Netflix’s Stranger Things merits special mention, since it takes the love of all things corporate to a supersized extreme. Product placement crawls across the screen, more frightening and insidious than this season’s body-snatching monsters. A legion of “Evil Russians” (they are literally referred to as “Evil Russians”) builds a gigantic evil laboratory under a good, law-abiding, honest American mall. A 10-year-old Black girl gives the following unlikely speech: “Know what I love most about this country? Capitalism. Do you know what capitalism is?…It means this is a free market system. Which means people get paid for their services depending on how valuable their contributions are.” Stranger Things has always been a Reagan-era nostalgia-fest, but generally through its popcorn-movie source material rather than as a hammy reimagining of the time period itself. There’s no hint whatsoever of acid irony or critique: Watching the third season of Stranger Things is the equivalent of bathing in the undesired sugariness of New Coke.
So you may be surprised to learn that the very same Netflix that brought us The Plucky Mallrats vs. the Red Menace has also created a show called The Society, in which a group of stranded teenagers—with hope, fear, clumsy wonder, and a lot of mistakes—explicitly, directly, textually, try to do socialism. I mean it: They actually say the word “socialism” and it’s presented as something quite positive.
How can these two shows exist on the same streaming service? I suppose The Society is simply being paid for the value of its contributions to art. That being said, The Society is only a good show, not a great one; for starters, the title is too vague, and guaranteed to get buried in Netflix’s black-box algorithmic rankings, even though Get In Losers, We’re Doing Socialism was a perfectly available choice.
So how do the teens come to embrace socialism? It’s not, alas, through a student revolution planned in the cafeteria, but through a series of mysterious occurrences. First, a weird smell pervades a small upscale Connecticut town. Then the local teens are all bussed away for an overnight school trip. The trip is suddenly canceled; the teens are turned back and dropped off in the town square, only to find that everyone else is gone. No parents, no teachers, no younger siblings, no grandparents. The town is deserted except for the teens. All roads and train tracks heading out of town now end in a massive, eerie wood crawling with snakes. There’s still electricity and water—for now—and cell service, but the characters can only reach each other, not the internet or the outside world. Where are they? Is it a parallel universe? Why is all this happening? Who has done this to them? These questions are not fully answered in the first season, and they’re ultimately unimportant. In the tradition of what’s commonly called “soft” science fiction, The Society is a thought experiment about power, gender, and civilization, with the mysterious premise serving mostly as a backdrop and a framing device.
Here’s our thought experiment: What would happen if a bunch of mostly affluent Connecticut teenagers were suddenly forced to form their own society? On the opening night in their strange new town, the teens—not yet realizing that everyone else is gone forever—throw a dance party in the empty church. But once the full reality of their situation sinks in, there’s lots of moping about and missing their parents. As boring as this is, it’s appropriately realistic. These aren’t just any kids, but the children of the upper middle class in a New York City commuter town (as one character says: “everyone’s parents are lawyers. It’s like a zoning requirement or something.”) With a few exceptions, these high schoolers are bound for Ivy League universities and private liberal arts colleges. They don’t really know how to let loose and have real fun, because they haven’t been raised to have a good time. They’ve been bred as room-meat for the professional-managerial class order, which has suddenly vanished along with their parents.
The sudden lack of social expectations throws them completely off-balance.
Cassandra, the student body president, initially attempts to instill a sense of social responsibility and communal effort. “There’s no civilization here, not until we start one,” she says. “So what are we going to do? First, I think we have no choice but to share. Share food. Share resources.” She’s joined in this effort by the only working-class character, the biracial orphan Will; and virulently opposed by the rich kids, led by the outrageously wealthy Harry and Cassandra’s own sociopathic cousin Campbell. Harry and Campbell’s position boils down to “keep what’s ours”—that is, hold on to their private property (even in the absence of their parents or any other governing authority) at all costs. Harry, in an effort to impress his estranged girlfriend Kelly and convince her of the rightness of his ideology, shows her a stack of gold bars that his father put in a safe “in case things go to shit…You can’t trust anybody. All you can do is have an advantage, and this is mine.” Kelly, skeptically eyeing a gold bar, replies, “It’s just a chunk of metal, Harry. I don’t think that’s gonna matter now.”
At first, most of the teens follow Harry and Campbell’s example, and anarcho-capitalism reigns supreme, with everyone just hoarding and hiding while the trash accumulates behind their houses. But 10 days of chaos culminate in a violent, drunken riot, with smashed windows and burned-out cars. Almost all the perpetrators are boys. The next day, Cassandra gathers the girls and organizes them into a socialist feminist liberation front. “Right now it’s just pillage, but how long until someone’s raped walking home one night and no one gives a shit because that’s just how it is?” Cassandra argues. “Women aren’t safe in a world that’s run by brute force and stupidity. If we want peace, we need order. And to get order, we need to exert our power.” From this moment follows a delightful series of scenes, cutting from conversation to conversation across town, in which different groups of girls organize, recognizing their power (“We’re like, half the town. Women. More than half, I think. I mean, if we all just said ‘stuff needs to change’, would they be able to say no?”) and discussing how to convince their boyfriends.
Interestingly, however, these grassroots feminist organizers are not the first characters on the show to directly say the forbidden word “socialism”: that comes out of the innocent mouths of the jocks.
The jocks are easily the funniest characters in the show: I’ve transcribed their conversation in full, because it’s great.
JASON:
I’ve been thinking. What if we like, didn’t… take stuff? Like food or whatever? Wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, right? Sharing? It could be like… socialism. There’s no “I” in team, right?
CLARK:
Erika give you that talk?
JASON:
CLARK:
LUKE:
Well, it’s not like it worked in China. Socialism…
JASON:
It kind of worked. Everything’s made in China.
GRIZZ (THE SMART ONE):
China’s a poor example. The party took complete priority over the workers. In reality, we’ve never seen a true socialist state.
CLARK:
Maybe all the Chinese women said they wouldn’t put out unless the men got on board.
JASON (WITH HORROR):
Gwen said that TOO?
(Jason, Clark, and Luke all take a moment to realize they are being Lysistrated).
LUKE (AFTER A PAUSE):
Well, socialism it is.
Letting the silly jocks introduce socialism by name, and agree to it reluctantly in exchange for sex—rather than having the earnest, organized girls declare themselves openly and seriously in favor of socialism—feels like a deliberate narrative choice, and if it is, it’s a clever one. Introducing socialism in an offhanded, funny way makes the concept more palatable to an audience that’s been wired by decades of propaganda to see socialism as inherently dangerous and doomed. The script even brings up the classic “what about China/Venezuela/the Soviet Union” canard, but then allows it to be shot down by the well-read Grizz. This is simply not done on mainstream American television, or at least quite rarely. (...)
Time and again, the teens are portrayed as kids who are just trying to do what’s right, despite the evils they’ve inherited, and the general lack of creative solutions available to them from the old world. A review in Variety insists that “despite—or maybe thanks to—their best efforts, [the teens’] attempts to make a revolutionary new order end up looking an awful lot like the more rigid, heteronormative one in which they all grew up.” This is of course, exactly the point—it is very difficult for the teens to shed the awful attitudes they’ve been raised with. Grizz, who finally comes out as gay, says to Sam, his semi-closeted sort-of boyfriend, “We might be in a new fucking universe and we also might starve in here. How do you want to live, Sam?” He’s referring to their sexuality, but also of course to the entire situation; the teens have arrived in a new world, and they can make choices. Those choices are constrained by the history of the old world they brought with them, but at the same time, they can still choose how they want to live.
The repeat misunderstandings of the show’s depth by its critics are not surprising: Its political orientation is atypical, plus its admitted aesthetic flaws (too many characters, frequently portentous dialogue, a slow second half) obscure a lot of its real thoughtfulness and originality. What The Society is trying to do is fundamentally hard. It’s asking a question many people are asking themselves right now in a time of frightening upheaval: How do we want to live? And it’s asking it in the context of emergency. The teens have arrived in a strange, unknowable world that could hurt them suddenly and inexplicably. In the longer term, their resources are also running out. The feeling of living in a familiar place suddenly turned dangerous and mysterious is a clear echo of climate change anxiety; by the end of the season, the teens have realized they will probably have to transform from comfortable house-dwelling suburbanites into grubby farmers. Their lives are going to be difficult, physically taxing, and utterly different from the ones their parents led. Judging by the current dire climate predictions and the difficulty of halting global capitalism’s runaway carbon emissions, this is probably going to be the case for our real-world teens also.
So you may be surprised to learn that the very same Netflix that brought us The Plucky Mallrats vs. the Red Menace has also created a show called The Society, in which a group of stranded teenagers—with hope, fear, clumsy wonder, and a lot of mistakes—explicitly, directly, textually, try to do socialism. I mean it: They actually say the word “socialism” and it’s presented as something quite positive.
How can these two shows exist on the same streaming service? I suppose The Society is simply being paid for the value of its contributions to art. That being said, The Society is only a good show, not a great one; for starters, the title is too vague, and guaranteed to get buried in Netflix’s black-box algorithmic rankings, even though Get In Losers, We’re Doing Socialism was a perfectly available choice.So how do the teens come to embrace socialism? It’s not, alas, through a student revolution planned in the cafeteria, but through a series of mysterious occurrences. First, a weird smell pervades a small upscale Connecticut town. Then the local teens are all bussed away for an overnight school trip. The trip is suddenly canceled; the teens are turned back and dropped off in the town square, only to find that everyone else is gone. No parents, no teachers, no younger siblings, no grandparents. The town is deserted except for the teens. All roads and train tracks heading out of town now end in a massive, eerie wood crawling with snakes. There’s still electricity and water—for now—and cell service, but the characters can only reach each other, not the internet or the outside world. Where are they? Is it a parallel universe? Why is all this happening? Who has done this to them? These questions are not fully answered in the first season, and they’re ultimately unimportant. In the tradition of what’s commonly called “soft” science fiction, The Society is a thought experiment about power, gender, and civilization, with the mysterious premise serving mostly as a backdrop and a framing device.
Here’s our thought experiment: What would happen if a bunch of mostly affluent Connecticut teenagers were suddenly forced to form their own society? On the opening night in their strange new town, the teens—not yet realizing that everyone else is gone forever—throw a dance party in the empty church. But once the full reality of their situation sinks in, there’s lots of moping about and missing their parents. As boring as this is, it’s appropriately realistic. These aren’t just any kids, but the children of the upper middle class in a New York City commuter town (as one character says: “everyone’s parents are lawyers. It’s like a zoning requirement or something.”) With a few exceptions, these high schoolers are bound for Ivy League universities and private liberal arts colleges. They don’t really know how to let loose and have real fun, because they haven’t been raised to have a good time. They’ve been bred as room-meat for the professional-managerial class order, which has suddenly vanished along with their parents.
The sudden lack of social expectations throws them completely off-balance.
Cassandra, the student body president, initially attempts to instill a sense of social responsibility and communal effort. “There’s no civilization here, not until we start one,” she says. “So what are we going to do? First, I think we have no choice but to share. Share food. Share resources.” She’s joined in this effort by the only working-class character, the biracial orphan Will; and virulently opposed by the rich kids, led by the outrageously wealthy Harry and Cassandra’s own sociopathic cousin Campbell. Harry and Campbell’s position boils down to “keep what’s ours”—that is, hold on to their private property (even in the absence of their parents or any other governing authority) at all costs. Harry, in an effort to impress his estranged girlfriend Kelly and convince her of the rightness of his ideology, shows her a stack of gold bars that his father put in a safe “in case things go to shit…You can’t trust anybody. All you can do is have an advantage, and this is mine.” Kelly, skeptically eyeing a gold bar, replies, “It’s just a chunk of metal, Harry. I don’t think that’s gonna matter now.”
At first, most of the teens follow Harry and Campbell’s example, and anarcho-capitalism reigns supreme, with everyone just hoarding and hiding while the trash accumulates behind their houses. But 10 days of chaos culminate in a violent, drunken riot, with smashed windows and burned-out cars. Almost all the perpetrators are boys. The next day, Cassandra gathers the girls and organizes them into a socialist feminist liberation front. “Right now it’s just pillage, but how long until someone’s raped walking home one night and no one gives a shit because that’s just how it is?” Cassandra argues. “Women aren’t safe in a world that’s run by brute force and stupidity. If we want peace, we need order. And to get order, we need to exert our power.” From this moment follows a delightful series of scenes, cutting from conversation to conversation across town, in which different groups of girls organize, recognizing their power (“We’re like, half the town. Women. More than half, I think. I mean, if we all just said ‘stuff needs to change’, would they be able to say no?”) and discussing how to convince their boyfriends.
Interestingly, however, these grassroots feminist organizers are not the first characters on the show to directly say the forbidden word “socialism”: that comes out of the innocent mouths of the jocks.
The jocks are easily the funniest characters in the show: I’ve transcribed their conversation in full, because it’s great.
JASON:
I’ve been thinking. What if we like, didn’t… take stuff? Like food or whatever? Wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, right? Sharing? It could be like… socialism. There’s no “I” in team, right?
CLARK:
Erika give you that talk?
JASON:
… no.
CLARK:
Oh really? ’Cause Gwen said that exact shit to me last night. Lukey?
LUKE:
Well, it’s not like it worked in China. Socialism…
JASON:
It kind of worked. Everything’s made in China.
GRIZZ (THE SMART ONE):
China’s a poor example. The party took complete priority over the workers. In reality, we’ve never seen a true socialist state.
CLARK:
Maybe all the Chinese women said they wouldn’t put out unless the men got on board.
JASON (WITH HORROR):
Gwen said that TOO?
(Jason, Clark, and Luke all take a moment to realize they are being Lysistrated).
LUKE (AFTER A PAUSE):
Well, socialism it is.
Letting the silly jocks introduce socialism by name, and agree to it reluctantly in exchange for sex—rather than having the earnest, organized girls declare themselves openly and seriously in favor of socialism—feels like a deliberate narrative choice, and if it is, it’s a clever one. Introducing socialism in an offhanded, funny way makes the concept more palatable to an audience that’s been wired by decades of propaganda to see socialism as inherently dangerous and doomed. The script even brings up the classic “what about China/Venezuela/the Soviet Union” canard, but then allows it to be shot down by the well-read Grizz. This is simply not done on mainstream American television, or at least quite rarely. (...)
Time and again, the teens are portrayed as kids who are just trying to do what’s right, despite the evils they’ve inherited, and the general lack of creative solutions available to them from the old world. A review in Variety insists that “despite—or maybe thanks to—their best efforts, [the teens’] attempts to make a revolutionary new order end up looking an awful lot like the more rigid, heteronormative one in which they all grew up.” This is of course, exactly the point—it is very difficult for the teens to shed the awful attitudes they’ve been raised with. Grizz, who finally comes out as gay, says to Sam, his semi-closeted sort-of boyfriend, “We might be in a new fucking universe and we also might starve in here. How do you want to live, Sam?” He’s referring to their sexuality, but also of course to the entire situation; the teens have arrived in a new world, and they can make choices. Those choices are constrained by the history of the old world they brought with them, but at the same time, they can still choose how they want to live.
The repeat misunderstandings of the show’s depth by its critics are not surprising: Its political orientation is atypical, plus its admitted aesthetic flaws (too many characters, frequently portentous dialogue, a slow second half) obscure a lot of its real thoughtfulness and originality. What The Society is trying to do is fundamentally hard. It’s asking a question many people are asking themselves right now in a time of frightening upheaval: How do we want to live? And it’s asking it in the context of emergency. The teens have arrived in a strange, unknowable world that could hurt them suddenly and inexplicably. In the longer term, their resources are also running out. The feeling of living in a familiar place suddenly turned dangerous and mysterious is a clear echo of climate change anxiety; by the end of the season, the teens have realized they will probably have to transform from comfortable house-dwelling suburbanites into grubby farmers. Their lives are going to be difficult, physically taxing, and utterly different from the ones their parents led. Judging by the current dire climate predictions and the difficulty of halting global capitalism’s runaway carbon emissions, this is probably going to be the case for our real-world teens also.
by Lyta Gold, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: John Biggs
Republican Women Are in Crisis
The 2010s were a transformative decade for women in politics. But the biggest trend has been obscured by 2018’s female-led Democratic wave in Congress: G.O.P. women, at both the national and state levels, are on the brink of extinction.
Republicans will ring in the new year with only 13 women in the House of Representatives, the lowest number since 1993, and eight women in the Senate. (There are, for comparison, 88 Democratic women in the House and 17 Democratic women in the Senate.)
The prospects for Republican women looked quite different at the decade’s start. Pundits heralded 2010 as the Year of the Republican Woman. In a speech that spring, Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee, touted her endorsements for the election of “common-sense conservative women.”
“Look out, Washington, because there’s a whole stampede of pink elephants crossing the line,” she said.
For a moment, it seemed that Ms. Palin and her pack of “Mama Grizzlies” would become the prime beneficiaries of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. Yet as 2020 begins, Republicans have Ms. Palin and her brand of right-wing populism — revived and carried on by Donald Trump — to thank for the endangered state of the Republican woman. (...)
In 2012, female voters, outraged over G.O.P. attacks on Planned Parenthood and access to birth control, powered President Barack Obama to re-election and denied Republicans two winnable Senate seats. Republican women’s representation in Congress decreased by 21 percent, while Democratic women increased theirs by 26 percent
Acknowledging the party’s mistakes with female voters, the G.O.P. fielded female candidates in the 2014 midterms who could appeal more broadly. These candidates downplayed their social conservatism and leaned in to their biographies as glass-breaking female leaders. In 2014, Martha McSally, the nation’s first female fighter pilot to serve in combat, won the Republican primary in a swing district in Arizona. Elise Stefanik, then the youngest congresswoman ever elected, was chosen to be co-chairwoman of the party’s moderate caucus.
With the exception of her endorsement of Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, Ms. Palin played a minor role in the 2014 midterm victories. Her days as queen-maker seemed over. Most signs suggested that Republican pragmatism would prevail going forward.
The rise of Donald Trump eliminated any chance of that. The signs of women’s disillusionment with the party were immediate. One day after President Trump’s inauguration, an estimated four million people, mostly women, participated in hundreds of women’s marches throughout the United States. In the months that followed, women mobilized to defeat Republicans at the federal, state and local levels.
In the 2018 midterms, every Republican congresswoman from the 2014 class except for Ms. Stefanik lost. Martha McSally was defeated, though she was appointed by Arizona’s Republican governor to fill John McCain’s Senate seat after Mr. McCain died. She faces a tough election battle in 2020.
Despite winning three governors’ races and one open Senate seat in 2018, Republican women will end the decade with their governors and senators outnumbered two to one by their Democratic counterparts. Three of the four current female Republican senators running in 2020 face highly competitive elections in 2020. There are more than six times as many Democratic women as Republican women in the House.
Granted, Republicans — both men and women — have suffered dramatic losses in elections at national, state and local levels since 2016; they have lost control of the House, eight governorships and nine state legislative chambers since Mr. Trump’s election. But female Republican candidates and officeholders face an existential threat.
Mr. Trump’s misogyny and the party’s far-right stance on issues such as abortion and L.G.B.T.Q. rights, guns and immigration have driven away many female voters. Women favor the Democratic Party over the Republican Party by a 19-point margin, according to the Pew Research Center. Seventy-three percent of women under the age of 30 disapprove of the president’s performance, according to the Harvard Institute of Politics Youth Poll.
Suburban and college-educated white women, once reliable Republican voters, have fled the party in droves since Mr. Trump’s election. According to the Brookings Institution, white college educated women increased their vote for Democrats by 13 points between 2016 and 2018. Among women, only white evangelicals remain firmly committed to the G.O.P. and Mr. Trump.
The alienation of female voters from the Republican Party is compounded by the indifference, at best, of Republican men to female candidates.
by Nancy L. Cohen, NY Times | Read more:
Image:Erin Schaff/The New York Times
Republicans will ring in the new year with only 13 women in the House of Representatives, the lowest number since 1993, and eight women in the Senate. (There are, for comparison, 88 Democratic women in the House and 17 Democratic women in the Senate.)
The prospects for Republican women looked quite different at the decade’s start. Pundits heralded 2010 as the Year of the Republican Woman. In a speech that spring, Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee, touted her endorsements for the election of “common-sense conservative women.”
“Look out, Washington, because there’s a whole stampede of pink elephants crossing the line,” she said.For a moment, it seemed that Ms. Palin and her pack of “Mama Grizzlies” would become the prime beneficiaries of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. Yet as 2020 begins, Republicans have Ms. Palin and her brand of right-wing populism — revived and carried on by Donald Trump — to thank for the endangered state of the Republican woman. (...)
In 2012, female voters, outraged over G.O.P. attacks on Planned Parenthood and access to birth control, powered President Barack Obama to re-election and denied Republicans two winnable Senate seats. Republican women’s representation in Congress decreased by 21 percent, while Democratic women increased theirs by 26 percent
Acknowledging the party’s mistakes with female voters, the G.O.P. fielded female candidates in the 2014 midterms who could appeal more broadly. These candidates downplayed their social conservatism and leaned in to their biographies as glass-breaking female leaders. In 2014, Martha McSally, the nation’s first female fighter pilot to serve in combat, won the Republican primary in a swing district in Arizona. Elise Stefanik, then the youngest congresswoman ever elected, was chosen to be co-chairwoman of the party’s moderate caucus.
With the exception of her endorsement of Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, Ms. Palin played a minor role in the 2014 midterm victories. Her days as queen-maker seemed over. Most signs suggested that Republican pragmatism would prevail going forward.
The rise of Donald Trump eliminated any chance of that. The signs of women’s disillusionment with the party were immediate. One day after President Trump’s inauguration, an estimated four million people, mostly women, participated in hundreds of women’s marches throughout the United States. In the months that followed, women mobilized to defeat Republicans at the federal, state and local levels.
In the 2018 midterms, every Republican congresswoman from the 2014 class except for Ms. Stefanik lost. Martha McSally was defeated, though she was appointed by Arizona’s Republican governor to fill John McCain’s Senate seat after Mr. McCain died. She faces a tough election battle in 2020.
Despite winning three governors’ races and one open Senate seat in 2018, Republican women will end the decade with their governors and senators outnumbered two to one by their Democratic counterparts. Three of the four current female Republican senators running in 2020 face highly competitive elections in 2020. There are more than six times as many Democratic women as Republican women in the House.
Granted, Republicans — both men and women — have suffered dramatic losses in elections at national, state and local levels since 2016; they have lost control of the House, eight governorships and nine state legislative chambers since Mr. Trump’s election. But female Republican candidates and officeholders face an existential threat.
Mr. Trump’s misogyny and the party’s far-right stance on issues such as abortion and L.G.B.T.Q. rights, guns and immigration have driven away many female voters. Women favor the Democratic Party over the Republican Party by a 19-point margin, according to the Pew Research Center. Seventy-three percent of women under the age of 30 disapprove of the president’s performance, according to the Harvard Institute of Politics Youth Poll.
Suburban and college-educated white women, once reliable Republican voters, have fled the party in droves since Mr. Trump’s election. According to the Brookings Institution, white college educated women increased their vote for Democrats by 13 points between 2016 and 2018. Among women, only white evangelicals remain firmly committed to the G.O.P. and Mr. Trump.
The alienation of female voters from the Republican Party is compounded by the indifference, at best, of Republican men to female candidates.
by Nancy L. Cohen, NY Times | Read more:
Image:Erin Schaff/The New York Times
Monday, December 30, 2019
Say Goodbye to Banking as We Know It
So is China readying its own Bitcoin? Banish the thought.
It’s far bigger than that. Yes, just like any other cryptocurrency — or for that matter, cigarettes in prisoners-of-war camps — the upcoming digital yuan will be “tokenized” money. But the similarity ends there. The crypto yuan, which may be on offer as soon as 2020, will be fully backed by the central bank of the world’s second-largest economy, drawing its value from the Chinese state’s ability to impose taxes in perpetuity. Other national authorities are bound to embrace this powerful idea.
Little is known about the digital yuan except that it’s been in the works for five years and Beijing is nearly ready to roll. The consensus is that the token will be a private blockchain, a peer-to-peer network for sharing information and validating transactions, with the People’s Bank of China in control of who gets to participate. To begin with, the currency will be supplied via the banking system and replace some part of physical cash. That won’t be hard, given the ubiquitous presence of Chinese QR code-based digital wallets such as Alipay and WeChat Pay.
It may start small, but the digital yuan can disrupt both traditional banking and the post-Bretton Woods system of floating exchange rates that the world has lived with since 1973. No wonder that for China, “blockchain and the yuan digital currency are a national strategic priority — almost at the level of the internet,” says Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. fintech analyst Gautam Chhugani.
Ever since the advent of the 17th-century goldsmith-banker in London, the most crucial thing in banking has been the ledger, a repository of irrefutable records to establish trust in situations where it doesn’t exist. When Peter in Vancouver agrees to send money to Paul in Singapore, they’re forced to use a chain of interlinked intermediaries because there’s no ledger in the world with both of them on it. Blockchain’s distributed ledgers make trust irrelevant. Paul devises a secret code, and shares its encrypted version with Peter, who uses it to create a digital contract to pay Paul. A cumbersome and expensive network of correspondent banks becomes redundant, especially when it comes to the $124 trillion businesses move across borders annually. Imagine the productivity boost; picture the threat to lenders.
China isn’t the only one experimenting. Fast, cheap cross-border payment settlement is one application of JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Quorum, an Ethereum-based platform on which the Monetary Authority of Singapore is running Project Ubin, an exploration into central bank digital money. These are early days, but if blockchain technology shows promise in handling a large number of transactions simultaneously, then digital currencies could become substitutes not just for physical cash but also for bank reserves.
That’s when the game changes. Reserves at a central bank are maintained by deposit-taking lenders. A digital yuan — or Singapore dollar or Indian rupee — could bypass this system and allow any holder of the currency to have a deposit at the central bank, potentially making the state the monopoly supplier of money to retail customers. As Agustin Carstens, the general manager at the Bank for International Settlement, noted recently, “If the central bank becomes everybody’s deposit-taker, it may find itself becoming everybody’s lender too.”
by Andy Mukherjee, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Michael Nicholson/Corbis/Getty
It’s far bigger than that. Yes, just like any other cryptocurrency — or for that matter, cigarettes in prisoners-of-war camps — the upcoming digital yuan will be “tokenized” money. But the similarity ends there. The crypto yuan, which may be on offer as soon as 2020, will be fully backed by the central bank of the world’s second-largest economy, drawing its value from the Chinese state’s ability to impose taxes in perpetuity. Other national authorities are bound to embrace this powerful idea.
Little is known about the digital yuan except that it’s been in the works for five years and Beijing is nearly ready to roll. The consensus is that the token will be a private blockchain, a peer-to-peer network for sharing information and validating transactions, with the People’s Bank of China in control of who gets to participate. To begin with, the currency will be supplied via the banking system and replace some part of physical cash. That won’t be hard, given the ubiquitous presence of Chinese QR code-based digital wallets such as Alipay and WeChat Pay.It may start small, but the digital yuan can disrupt both traditional banking and the post-Bretton Woods system of floating exchange rates that the world has lived with since 1973. No wonder that for China, “blockchain and the yuan digital currency are a national strategic priority — almost at the level of the internet,” says Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. fintech analyst Gautam Chhugani.
Ever since the advent of the 17th-century goldsmith-banker in London, the most crucial thing in banking has been the ledger, a repository of irrefutable records to establish trust in situations where it doesn’t exist. When Peter in Vancouver agrees to send money to Paul in Singapore, they’re forced to use a chain of interlinked intermediaries because there’s no ledger in the world with both of them on it. Blockchain’s distributed ledgers make trust irrelevant. Paul devises a secret code, and shares its encrypted version with Peter, who uses it to create a digital contract to pay Paul. A cumbersome and expensive network of correspondent banks becomes redundant, especially when it comes to the $124 trillion businesses move across borders annually. Imagine the productivity boost; picture the threat to lenders.
China isn’t the only one experimenting. Fast, cheap cross-border payment settlement is one application of JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Quorum, an Ethereum-based platform on which the Monetary Authority of Singapore is running Project Ubin, an exploration into central bank digital money. These are early days, but if blockchain technology shows promise in handling a large number of transactions simultaneously, then digital currencies could become substitutes not just for physical cash but also for bank reserves.
That’s when the game changes. Reserves at a central bank are maintained by deposit-taking lenders. A digital yuan — or Singapore dollar or Indian rupee — could bypass this system and allow any holder of the currency to have a deposit at the central bank, potentially making the state the monopoly supplier of money to retail customers. As Agustin Carstens, the general manager at the Bank for International Settlement, noted recently, “If the central bank becomes everybody’s deposit-taker, it may find itself becoming everybody’s lender too.”
by Andy Mukherjee, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Michael Nicholson/Corbis/Getty
Sunday, December 29, 2019
George Rodrigue, The Blue Dog, 1991
“People who have seen a Blue Dog painting always remember it. They are really about life, about mankind searching for answers. The dog never changes position. He just stares at you. And you’re looking at him, looking for some answers, ‘Why are we here?,’ and he’s just looking back at you, wondering the same. The dog doesn’t know. You can see this longing in his eyes, this longing for love, answers.” - George Rodrigue
via:
[ed. Hmm, ok... See also: Trash Talk: On Translating Garbage (Paris Review)]
Saturday, December 28, 2019
Russia Deploys First Hypersonic Missiles
Russia has deployed its first hypersonic nuclear-capable missiles, with Vladimir Putin boasting that it puts his country in a class of its own.
The president described the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, which can fly at 27 times the speed of sound, as a technological breakthrough comparable to the 1957 Soviet launch of the first satellite.
Putin has said Russia’s new generation of nuclear weapons can hit almost any point in the world and evade a US-built missile shield, though some western experts have questioned how advanced some of the weapons programmes are.
The Avangard is launched on top of an intercontinental ballistic missile, but, unlike a regular missile warhead, which follows a predictable path after separation, it can make sharp manoeuvres en route to its target, making it harder to intercept.
The defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, told Putin the first missile unit equipped with the Avangard had entered combat duty.
“I congratulate you on this landmark event for the military and the entire nation,” Shoigu said later during a conference call with top military leaders. (...)
The Russian leader said the Avangard had been designed using new composite materials to withstand temperatures of up to 2,000C (3,632F) which can be reached while travelling at hypersonic speeds. The missile can carry a nuclear weapon of up to 2 megatons.
Putin has said Russia had to develop the Avangard and other weapons systems because of US efforts to develop a missile defence system that he claimed could erode Russia’s nuclear deterrent. Moscow has scoffed at US claims that its missile shield isn’t intended to counter Russia’s missile arsenals.
This week, Putin noted that for the first time Russia was leading the world in developing a new class of weapons, unlike in the past when it was catching up with the US.
by Staff, The Guardian | Read more:
The president described the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, which can fly at 27 times the speed of sound, as a technological breakthrough comparable to the 1957 Soviet launch of the first satellite.
Putin has said Russia’s new generation of nuclear weapons can hit almost any point in the world and evade a US-built missile shield, though some western experts have questioned how advanced some of the weapons programmes are.The Avangard is launched on top of an intercontinental ballistic missile, but, unlike a regular missile warhead, which follows a predictable path after separation, it can make sharp manoeuvres en route to its target, making it harder to intercept.
The defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, told Putin the first missile unit equipped with the Avangard had entered combat duty.
“I congratulate you on this landmark event for the military and the entire nation,” Shoigu said later during a conference call with top military leaders. (...)
The Russian leader said the Avangard had been designed using new composite materials to withstand temperatures of up to 2,000C (3,632F) which can be reached while travelling at hypersonic speeds. The missile can carry a nuclear weapon of up to 2 megatons.
Putin has said Russia had to develop the Avangard and other weapons systems because of US efforts to develop a missile defence system that he claimed could erode Russia’s nuclear deterrent. Moscow has scoffed at US claims that its missile shield isn’t intended to counter Russia’s missile arsenals.
This week, Putin noted that for the first time Russia was leading the world in developing a new class of weapons, unlike in the past when it was catching up with the US.
by Staff, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Mikhail Klimentyev/AP
[ed. Our new best friends.]
College Football Playoff Offers Its Strongest Semifinals Yet
College Football Playoff Offers Its Strongest Semifinals Yet (NY Times)
[ed. Holy mackerel. It's not even halftime and: LSU 49, Oklahoma 14 (and Oklahoma is not playing that bad - except for pass defense, obviously. Burrow is dropping bombs everywhere - 495 yds total offense in the first half!). One for the ages. Tune in if you can.]
Friday, December 27, 2019
2019
Weekly Editorial Roundtable: Best of 2019 Edition (Current Affairs)
[ed. Not your normal New Year's roundup.]
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