Hundreds of Sea Lions to be Killed on Columbia River in Effort to Save Endangered Fish

Approval to kill up to 840 sea lions in a portion of the Columbia River and its tributaries over the next five years to boost the survival of salmon and steelhead at risk of extinction is expected from federal officials Friday.

The kill program has been in the works since Congress approved a change in the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 2018, allowing sea lions to be killed to reduce predation on salmon and other species.

The legislation for the first time allows the killing of Steller’s sea lions, in addition to California sea lions, and makes any of the marine mammals fair game within a nearly 200 mile stretch of the mainstem Columbia and its tributaries, between Bonneville and McNary dams. Previously, only California sea lions that had been determined to be problematic predators of salmon were allowed to be killed to benefit fish recovery.

The program is sure to be controversial; nearly 22,000 comments received during public review of the program were opposed and fewer than 200 were for it. But a task force in May overwhelmingly recommended approval of a kill program. Barry Thom, regional administrator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for the West Coast Region, is expected to approve an application to implement the program, which was submitted in June of last year from state and tribal fisheries managers.

Kill operations could begin at Bonneville Dam as soon as this fall.

Kessina Lee, regional director for Southwest Washington for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife is a member of the task force that voted yes. While work is ongoing to improve hatcheries, habitat, hydropower operations and reduce fishing impacts to benefit 13 runs of fish at risk of extinction in the Columbia and Snake Rivers, sea lions also are having an impact, she said.

In the highly altered Columbia and Snake, managers today find themselves killing protected marine mammals eating endangered salmon that in turn are crucial food for critically endangered southern resident killer whales.

“It is a wicked conservation problem,” Lee said.

by Lynda V. Mapes, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Don Ryan
[ed. No, it is a wicked dam problem.]

Neil Young

How Can Wall Street Be So Healthy When Main Street Isn’t?

The stock market is not the economy.

Rarely has that adage been as clear as it is now. An amazing, monthslong rally means the S&P 500 is roughly back to where it was before the coronavirus slammed the U.S, even though millions of workers are still getting unemployment benefits and businesses continue to shutter across the country.

The S&P 500, which is the benchmark index for stock funds at the heart of many 401(k) accounts, ended Wednesday at 3,380.35 after briefly topping its closing record of 3,386.15 set on Feb. 19. It’s erased nearly all of the 34% plunge from February into March in less time than it takes a baby to learn how to crawl.

The U.S. and global economies have shown some improvements since the spring, when business lockdowns were widespread, but they are nowhere close to fully healed. The number of virus cases continues to rise across much of the United States, and federal and local politicians for the most part lack a strategy to contain it. Many industries, such as airlines, hotels and dining, could take years to recover from the damage.

The Federal Reserve and the U.S. government get a lot of the credit for the rally after pouring trillions of dollars into the economy. Profits also remained incredibly resilient for the stock market’s most influential companies, such as Apple and Amazon. Rising hopes for a potential vaccine to halt the pandemic, meanwhile, have encouraged investors to look past the current dreary statistics.

Here’s a look at how Wall Street has flourished while Main Street struggles:

THE MARKET’S BIG GUNS

The corner bars, the family restaurants, the hair salons and other small businesses across the U.S. that are teetering or closing for good aren’t listed on the stock market. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and Google’s parent company are, and movements in their stocks alone are dictating the action in the S&P 500 more than ever before.

The pandemic has accelerated work-at-home and other trends that have boosted Big Tech, and their profits are piling up. The five big tech-oriented giants are now worth a combined $7.6 trillion, and by themselves account for more than 22% of the S&P 500′s total value.

Because stocks with the biggest market values carry the most weight in the S&P 500, the movements of Big Tech matter much more than what airlines, cruise-ship operators or other still-struggling companies are doing. American Airlines is down more than 50% for 2020 so far, but its much smaller market value means it doesn’t move the needle like Big Tech. It would take 280 American Airlines to have the heft of one Apple.

The stock market has seen some broadening out of gains recently, with stocks of smaller companies doing better. But Big Tech has done the heaviest lifting in the S&P 500′s rally.

HELP FROM WASHINGTON

A famous saying on Wall Street is: Don’t fight the Fed. The central bank is doing everything it can to support the economy, from cutting interest rates to nearly zero to the unprecedented promise to buy even riskier corporate debt. It’s all aimed at ensuring lending markets have enough cash to run smoothly and to prevent prices from going haywire. Economists say the moves have helped avoid a 2008-09 style meltdown of the financial system.

The Fed has signaled that it will keep its benchmark short-term interest rate at nearly zero through at least 2022, and low rates are often like steroids for stocks. With Treasurys and other bonds paying relatively little in interest, some investors are turning instead to stocks, gold and other investments, boosting their prices.

Congress also approved an unprecedented amount of aid for the economy. Some portions of that aid have already expired, and another economic relief package is tied up in partisan rancor on Capitol Hill. But many investors seem to expect Washington to eventually come to a compromise and throw another lifeline to the economy.

Meanwhile, the economy is recovering but at a much slower pace than its rapid collapse in the spring. After shrinking at an annual pace of 32.9% in the April-June quarter, economists forecast it will rebound at a 20% annual pace in the July-September period. The unemployment rate is 10.2% and is expected to remain in the high single-digits through at least the end of this year.

by Stan Choe, Alex Veiga and Christopher Rugaber, AP | Read more:
Image: Mark Lennihan/AP
[ed. See also: A Quick Guide To What Is Going On With The Economy (Current Affairs).]

How Live Music Is Coping, And What The Near Future Will Bring

Colin Pate was toiling away at his North Philadelphia recording studio in late June when he received an unbelievable text message: "Secret show at Johnny Brenda's tonight, 6:30."

Like so many places, the beloved Philly music venue has been shuttered since the Covid-19 pandemic first flared up in March. The 250-person venue, a staple of the local music scene that served as an early stage for Philly acts like Kurt Vile and The War on Drugs, used to host shows almost every night. While locals can still order take-out food and drinks from the bar, nobody expected a band to play there — or anywhere else for that matter — until sometime next year.

"At first, I thought it was a joke," says Pate, a local musician and recording engineer who has spent the pandemic bouncing between at-home isolation, recording solo in the studio and working at local bars to cover his rent. Like every other musician in town, Pate's hopes of playing any shows were dashed by the outbreak months earlier. By late June, the prospect of attending one seemed just as unlikely.

But this show was different. Rather than switch the upstairs stage lights back on, the venue's staff hauled a PA system onto the roof of the building. Pat Finnerty and the Full Band, an impromptu group of local musicians led by guitarist and singer Pat Finnerty, set up their gear, did a sound check, and proceeded to tear through covers of David Bowie, Marvin Gaye, Neil Young and, appropriately enough given the rooftop perch, The Beatles.

As music filled the streets below, so too did a gathering of mask-wearing locals, eager to experience their first concert in months. Some watched from apartment balconies. Others honked their car horns as they drove by. Most stood on the sidewalks and trolley platform below, maintaining a cautious, pandemic-friendly distance from one another.

"We weren't sure what to expect, but we really pulled it off," says Marley McNamara, a talent buyer at Johnny Brenda's who helped organize the show. "I was happy with the way people were all masked up and being respectful of those around them. It even sounded good, which I was surprised about."

For residents of the city's Fishtown neighborhood, the surprise performance seemed to offer a much-needed distraction after months of social isolation, followed by citywide protests and racial tension that had boiled over in front of the police precinct down the street from Johnny Brenda's just a few weeks earlier. The vibe on the street was decidedly less intense as Finnerty and his friends closed out with the "Ghostbusters" theme song against a multi-colored sunset.

Shows like this are a rare, if imperfect, bright spot for the independent live music industry, which currently sits, like so many, on the brink of catastrophe. Since March, thousands of independent venues across the U.S. have remained closed in response to the coronavirus outbreak. As the pandemic drags on, it has created an existential crisis for these venues and the critical role they play in music scenes and communities across the U.S. The Barracuda in Austin, The Satellite in Los Angeles and Portland's Port City Music Hall are just a few of the venues that have closed for good in recent weeks, with many more at risk of going under.

"It's a really surreal and scary time for everyone, but especially for the music industry," says McNamara. "We can't lose places like Johnny Brenda's."

Without federal intervention, as many as 90% of indie music venues could disappear, according to the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA). To that end, the newly formed advocacy organization is lobbying hard for legislation like the Restart Act or Save Our Stages Act, which would provide large-scale financial assistance to these endangered institutions. (...)

The impact of such a collapse could be culturally devastating. Unlike restaurants or shops, a small or medium-sized music venue is more than just a business serving its customers. They are living, breathing mini-institutions in their own right, each one with its own unique capacity to incubate local bands and artists, host touring ones, and connect them all to the communities of like-minded show attendees that these spaces attract.

For artists, who tend to make the bulk of their income performing live, this could jeopardize their ability to plan successful tours once the pandemic is over. "You can't get on a bus and play at a boarded-up building," Schaefer points out.

As the live music industry awaits an economic lifeline and an eventual vaccine, some are using the standstill to creatively rethink the functionality and economics of live music. While nobody expects new formats like socially distanced, limited capacity shows to address the industry's bigger, more systemic threat, the experimentation may yield clues as to how to safely experience live shows before a full reopening is possible. Crucially, it's also a chance to build more future-proof models for live entertainment.

by John Paul Titlow, NPR |  Read more:

Image: via
[ed. See also: Can Neil Young Block Trump From Using His Songs? It’s Complicated (NYT).]

Super Cub
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How Personal Victimhood Will Doom The Left

Reaction to the innuendo against Alex Morse perfectly demonstrates how some progressives and all liberals have come to put feelings, symbols and personal self-actualization over any project of real political change.

[ed. I don't know anything about Alex Morse but it's nice to hear someone distill the whole cancel culture bullshit down to its basic essence, especially in politics.]

The Scramble to Pluck 24 Billion Cherries in Eight Weeks

Consider the cherry. Consider this cherry, actually, this one here, hanging off the tree at the very end of a long, deep green row. Look at how its red and gold skin shines in the bright sun. It’s a famous hybrid variety, a Rainier, which means it has sweet yellow flesh and that you’ll have to pay a premium price to eat it. If you do, it will be delicious, the very taste of summer. But first it will have to get to you.

So far, this cherry has been mostly lucky. No disease has come for its tree, though there’s a bad one, little-cherry disease, stalking nearby orchards. No frost kept its springtime blossoms from giving way to fruit. No excessive rain has fallen in the short time since it ripened.

That could have been a disaster, because water likes to pool in the little divot by the stem. There it seeps into the flesh, making the cherry swell. Too much, and the cherry will burst through its own skin, causing splits; whole harvests can be lost this way. So dangerous is poorly timed water that cherry growers rely on fans, wind machines and even low-flying helicopters to dry ripe fruit before it is lost. Yet wind presents its own peril: It can knock cherries against one another or into branches, bruising them so that they’re rejected on the packing line, where fruit is sorted for size and quality with high-tech optical scanners. Rainiers, because of their color, are particularly prone to showing their past with telltale “wind marks,” tiny incursions of brownness on that golden skin. This cherry has just a few.

But it’s not to market yet. The window in which a sweet cherry can be picked for sale is excruciatingly narrow. Cherries don’t continue to ripen once they’re off the tree, the way a peach does, and once picked they don’t store for very long, even when refrigerated. If they’re too ripe, they won’t make it to the packing house, the truck or the airplane, the grocery-store display, your summery dessert. The sugar content must be Goldilocksian — neither too high nor too low. Wait even a couple of days too many, and it may be too late.

Paige Hake, the second generation of her family to farm this orchard, considered the cherry. Then she considered its neighbors, with their own wind marks, in the lambent heat of a June afternoon. She looked down the long green row of trees, lined with its strip of white plastic fabric, meant to reflect sunlight onto the undersides of the cherries, helping them color evenly. She consulted with her father, Orlin Knutson, who has been growing fruit on this stretch of dry sagebrush steppe near Mattawa, Wash., for 41 years, the last 31 of them organically. There was a refrigerated truck waiting by the gate, with a growing stack of full bins next to it. There was rain in the forecast, as well as more heat, and sugar levels in the cherries were rising as they spoke. They wanted to get these cherries harvested today; they were far enough along that it was probably now or never, a whole year of investment and work leading to this one afternoon. But it was getting late, and there were a lot of other cherries that needed to be picked, and today the crew of people available to pick them was smaller than they would have liked. She turned to me and pointed to the wind-marked cherry, still unsure whether it would be worth the cost of trying to get it to market. “Would you buy that at Whole Foods?” she asked.

The yellow cherry was one of a great many across the orchards of Washington State that were just beginning to ripen. Karen Lewis, who works with growers as a tree-fruit specialist for the agricultural extension service of Washington State University, has tried to calculate exactly how many individual cherries need to be picked during a whirlwind season that Jon DeVaney, the president of the Washington State Tree Fruit Association, calls “eight weeks of craziness.” Multiplying all the millions of boxes by the number of cherries they can hold, Lewis determined that as many as 24 billion individual cherries must be plucked, separately, from their trees and placed carefully into bags and buckets and bins, each and every one of them by human hands.

Lewis thinks that people who aren’t used to thinking much about the source of their food, or who assume that the food system is as mechanized and smoothly calibrated as a factory, spitting out produce like so many sticks of gum, ought to spend some time contemplating that figure and what it means. “I’m here to tell you that people do not think we harvest everything by hand,” she says. But hands, belonging to highly skilled workers, are needed for every last cherry. During the harvest, many thousands of people are out picking by dawn, nearly every day, their fingers flying as they watch out for rattlesnakes under dark trees. (Compounding the labor crunch, this is also the time when workers in the region must hand-thin more than 100 million apple trees, so that the remaining fruit can grow larger.) Later in the season, many of the same hands will pick and place each peach and plum and apricot, every single apple — five and a half billion pounds, just of apples, just in Washington, just last year. “I think those numbers are staggering,” Lewis said.

The cherry industry has done everything it can to squeeze every possible bit of extra time into the season. Growers plant at a range of different elevations: Every 100 feet above sea level, one orchard manager says, buys you an extra day until maturity. And they choose different varietals that ripen at slightly different speeds — most red cherries are marketed to the public simply as “dark sweets” but are actually a genetically distinct array, whose different sizes and tastes and unique horticultural personalities are intimately known by growers and pickers. If everything bloomed and matured all at once, Lewis said, there’s no way there would be enough bees, enough trucks, enough bins, to make the scale of the current cherry harvest possible. Most of all, there wouldn’t be enough people. There already aren’t.

For years, the tree-fruit industry in Washington — like the salad industry in California, the blueberry industry in New Jersey, the tomato industry in Florida and countless other sources of the things that we eat — has been struggling to find the workers it needs to keep producing food. Across the country, the number of farmworkers is dwindling. Current workers, who are often immigrants without legal permission to work in the industries that are reliant on them, are getting older; those who are able to are leaving an industry that’s poorly paid and physically damaging and often exploitative; and crackdowns at the border mean that there are fewer new arrivals to take their place. To cope, some growers have turned to a ballooning visa-based “guest worker” program, which comes with its own significant problems, while many others have simply buckled under debt and rising costs, going under or selling their orchards to ever-bigger companies. “Everyone’s squeezed pretty much to the limit,” Knutson said, surveying the dark leaves, the shining fruit, the clear blue sky. “It’s kind of an ugly time.”

Such was the state of things before the coronavirus pandemic arrived, bringing with it a host of new troubles. When I called Lewis early in this year’s cherry harvest, she had just sent out a newsletter that, along with the latest updates on cherry disease and apple varieties, included information on suicide prevention. Piled on top of everything else, she said, “this is enough to take people to their knees.”

In March, when the United States began to lock down to slow the spread of the new virus, some workers noticed a change in how the government talked about them. As leaders planned for closures, it became clear that many of the lowest-paid and least-respected jobs in America were, in fact, the most important: the ones that could not be paused or interrupted or bypassed if society was to keep functioning. You could not, as Knutson put it, simply close the door to a farm for a month and then reopen it. People who had regularly been called illegal suddenly found themselves rebranded as essential.

Harvest seasons were underway or rapidly approaching across the country; without enough workers, the nation’s food would not be produced. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced that it would “temporarily adjust its enforcement posture,” narrowing its focus to people involved in criminal activity rather than arresting anyone who was undocumented. In California, where labor-intensive fruit-and-vegetable crops account for about 85 percent of the state’s crop sales, farmers handed out letters that workers who feared attracting the attention of law enforcement by going to work during lockdowns could carry with them: not papers by the usual definition, but a paper to show that they were, informally, and just for now, legitimate by virtue of being indispensable.

by Brooke Jarvis, NY Times Magazine| Read more:
Image:Jovelle Tamayo for The New York Times

Japan's Unknown Indigenous Cuisine

On a crisp autumn morning in Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, Sachiko Hoshizawa was meticulously setting out bowls and plates. Immaculately styled in a cheery yellow apron, she ensured that the long tables in front of her had the right selection of crockery, chopsticks and mixing bowls. She then turned to prepare the ingredients, carefully placing pieces of salmon, kelp, potato, carrots and spring onions on the counter of the small kitchen. Finally, she surveyed the scene and stood back behind the counter, perfectly poised with a TV-ready smile on her face, ready for the eager queue of people to swarm into the room.

Hoshizawa – a hugely popular TV cooking show host in Japan – was preparing for a highly anticipated cooking class and I was there to participate. While Japanese cuisine offers a wealth of gastronomic delights, with an endless variety of regional dishes, today she was cooking Ainu cuisine, the food of the indigenous people of Japan. That’s because, long before Japanese food became so emblematic, with sushi and shabu shabu, ramen and yakitori prized the world over, there was another cuisine here that has almost been forgotten.

Most of the world will not have heard of Japan’s indigenous people, let alone their food. The Ainu are the original inhabitants of Hokkaido, who have called this island and parts of the surrounding region their home for many thousands of years, living on and with the land. Unlike the Japanese, who practiced rice farming, the Ainu traditionally hunted, foraged and fished. Their food culture was rich and vibrant – and had a distinct and lasting impact on Japanese cuisine.

“Without Japan’s indigenous people, you wouldn’t have that Japanese taste that’s so famous,” said Remi Ie, Director of Japan at Slow Food International. “They created and fostered the food culture of Japan.”

She’s referring to umami, the savoury “fifth taste” that is often associated with Japanese dishes. It’s found in soy, miso and other fermented foods that give the cuisine its unique flavour. But Japan’s umami in fact has its roots in Ainu culture, in the kombu (a type of edible kelp) that grows in lush underwater forests around Hokkaido’s coastlines and has always been used in traditional Ainu cuisine. (...)

Kombu is a main ingredient in dashi (stock), a simple broth that forms one of the culinary cornerstones of Japanese cooking. It’s also used in a slew of other Japanese dishes, from kombu tsukudani (kombu simmered in soy sauce and mirin) to kombu kamaboko (kombu-wrapped fish cakes). Its umami flavour comes from an abundance of amino acids such as glutamic and aspartic acid, and its taste is almost synonymous with Japanese cuisine.

“Hokkaido kelp has very much influenced Japanese cuisine,” agrees food historian Takashi Morieda. “It [used to be] prohibited to kill animals more than 1,000 years ago [in Japan] due to the influence of Buddhism. That meant we didn’t have fat and oil, so we needed something else to make vegetables delicious. That’s why we use dashi; it brings the umami flavour.”

The Ainu did have fat and oil from the animals they hunted, but also used kombu as a savoury seasoning. They would harvest and dry the kombu, deep fry it and grind it into a powder to be sprinkled on deer meat; or mix the powder with water to form a paste or sauce. And by the 14th Century, they were trading kombu and other goods with the Japanese, thus introducing this umami flavour into Japanese food. Today more than 95% of Japan’s kombu comes from Hokkaido.

“This trade shaped the food culture of Japan. Kelp is the umami we all talk about in the world as the food of Japan,” said Ie.

Hoshizawa agrees, telling me: “We think kombu is the secret of long life. I eat it every day.” (...)

With much of their culture eradicated after the Japanese government formally colonised Hokkaido in the late 1800s and banned their traditional hunting and fishing, there is now a movement to showcase Ainu cuisine and culture to outsiders, as well as a resurgence of interest in their traditions and ingredients. Our cooking class group eagerly followed Hoshizawa’s precise instructions to make salmon ohau (soup) and inakibi (millet) dumplings, boiling the salmon pieces, rolling the starchy dumplings in ground walnuts and stirring a kelp sauce. It was a fascinating insight into a little-known culinary culture, but beyond these dishes, there is a wealth of other ingredients and techniques that make up Ainu cuisine.

by Ellie Cobb, BBC |  Read more:
Image: MJ Photography/Alamy

Please Throw Away Your Onions

In these divisive times, there are always onions. You cannot go wrong with onions. Onions are a staple of cuisines across the world. Are you making German potato salad? You will need onions. Mangú? Also onions. Curries, tacos, or Bolognese? Onions, onions, and onions. We are all cooking at home now. We are churning through so many onions.

Or we were. Now, we cannot even have those. A salmonella outbreak linked to red onions, first reported at the tail end of July, has expanded to 43 states and Canada, the New York Times reports. As of Sunday, nearly 900 people had fallen ill. There have been no deaths.

According to the FDA, the likely source of the outbreak is red onions from California produce supplier Thomson International, but because of the risk of contamination, the company has recalled red, yellow, white, and sweet onions shipped since May 1. The questionable onions, Thompson said, were distributed to “wholesalers, restaurants, and retail stores,” and were distributed under many names: TII Premium, El Competitor, Hartley, Onions 52, Imperial Fresh, Utah Onions, Food Lion, Thomson Premium, TLC Thomson International, Tender Loving Care, Majestic and Kroger [ed. Fred Meyer]. Grocery stores, too, are recalling the onions, as well as any store products made with them. (...)

If you know you have Thomson International onions, the CDC advises that you toss them. If you’re not sure where your onions are from, the agency recommends you get rid of those, too. And Cornell food safety professor Martin Wiedmann told the Times that the onions should be abandoned even if they’re cooked, because of the possibility of cross-contamination. “It’s better to be safe than sorry,” he told the paper. “Just don’t use them.”

by Rachel Sugar, NY Mag/Grub Street | Read more:
Image: MirageC/Getty Images
[ed. The cashier at Fred Meyer (Kroger) mentioned this to me yesterday.]

Two Fish
via: (lost)

Banksy
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[ed. November, 2020]

Odd Virus News

Wearing a neck gaiter may be worse than no mask at all, researchers find (with rebuttal here); and

Forty percent of people with coronavirus infections have no symptoms. Might they be the key to ending the pandemic? (Washington Post)

The Good (But Not Great) News About T-Cells and Herd Immunity (NY Mag/Intelligencer)

Image: Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty Images

Is This The Future of Acoustic Guitar? Yamaha LS-TA

Playing an unplugged acoustic guitar is one of life’s greatest simple, uncomplicated joys. But sometimes a guitarist wants just a little more than the raw, naked sound of the acoustic strings resonating in the guitar’s body, such as some reverb or chorus to add depth and dimension to the overall sound. One could always plug into an acoustic guitar amp or use an app and some headphones, but the extra equipment and cables tend to distract from that freewheeling feeling of just picking up a guitar and playing.

Yamaha’s new TransAcoustic technology allows acoustic guitar players to enjoy effects-processed sounds directly from the guitar’s sound chamber without any external boxes, devices or equipment and without changing the overall aesthetics of an acoustic-electric guitar. The effects even work when the guitar is plugged into an amp or mixing board, providing even greater convenience for performing players. Yamaha offers four TransAcoustic models with the technology built into their already popular and acclaimed L and FG series designs, so anyone interested in this technology can rest assured that the guitar itself meets high quality standards. We took a look at the LS-TA model.

First and foremost, the LS-TA is a fine-crafted concert-size flattop steel-string acoustic comparable to the Yamaha LS16 ARE with a solid Engelmann spruce top, solid rosewood back and sides, five-piece mahogany and rosewood neck and ebony fingerboard and bridge. The gold-plated Yamaha die-cast tuners, shell dot neck inlays and rosette ring, clear teardrop-shape pickguard and maple binding with multiply black and white purfling surrounding the top combine to give the guitar a deluxe touch of class. Neck features include a 25 9/16-inch scale, 1 ¾-inch nut width, 15 ¾-inch radius, 20 medium frets and a comfortable, shallow C-shape profile. The top has received Yamaha’s proprietary A.R.E. (Acoustic Resonance Enhancement) treatment that gives new wood the characteristics of aged, vintage wood.

On its own, the guitar is impressive, but the built-in TransAcoustic technology offers an even more compelling reason to check it out. Located on the upper bass bout are three control knobs that turn the TransAcoustic feature on or off, adjust the level of a room or hall reverb effect, adjust the level of a chorus effect, and adjust the level of the line output when the guitar is plugged into an external amplification system. Note, however, that no external amplification is needed to hear the reverb and chorus effects, which instead are amplified internally by the guitar’s natural resonance chamber.

The TransAcoustic technology achieves this via an actuator mounted inside the resonance chamber on the guitar’s back that senses string vibrations, amplifies and processes them, and transfers the processed sound via the guitar’s natural vibrations. It’s sort of like a transducer in reverse—instead of picking up vibrations from the guitar’s body the actuator transfers vibrations to the body. The reverb and chorus effects are also amplified through the guitar’s piezo saddle pickup when the guitar is plugged into an external amp.

by Chris Gill, Guitar World |  Read more:
[ed. Pretty awesome (I think) and around $1,100 new. See also: Yamaha LS-TA (TransAcoustic) with Sunburst Finish (Review - Guitar World).]

Bill Gates on Covid: Most US Tests Are ‘Completely Garbage’

For 20 years, Bill Gates has been easing out of the roles that made him rich and famous—CEO, chief software architect, and chair of Microsoft—and devoting his brainpower and passion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, abandoning earnings calls and antitrust hearings for the metrics of disease eradication and carbon reduction. This year, after he left the Microsoft board, one would have thought he would have relished shedding the spotlight directed at the four CEOs of big tech companies called before Congress.

But as with many of us, 2020 had different plans for Gates. An early Cassandra who warned of our lack of preparedness for a global pandemic, he became one of the most credible figures as his foundation made huge investments in vaccines, treatments, and testing. He also became a target of the plague of misinformation afoot in the land, as logorrheic critics accused him of planning to inject microchips in vaccine recipients. (Fact check: false. In case you were wondering.)

My first interview with Gates was in 1983, and I’ve long lost count of how many times I’ve spoken to him since. He’s yelled at me (more in the earlier years) and made me laugh (more in the latter years). But I’ve never looked forward to speaking to him more than in our year of Covid. We connected on Wednesday, remotely of course. In discussing our country’s failed responses, his issues with his friend Mark Zuckerberg’s social networks, and the innovations that might help us out of this mess, Gates did not disappoint. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

WIRED: You have been warning us about a global pandemic for years. Now that it has happened just as you predicted, are you disappointed with the performance of the United States?

Bill Gates: Yeah. There’s three time periods, all of which have disappointments. There is 2015 until this particular pandemic hit. If we had built up the diagnostic, therapeutic, and vaccine platforms, and if we’d done the simulations to understand what the key steps were, we’d be dramatically better off. Then there’s the time period of the first few months of the pandemic, when the US actually made it harder for the commercial testing companies to get their tests approved, the CDC had this very low volume test that didn’t work at first, and they weren’t letting people test. The travel ban came too late, and it was too narrow to do anything. Then, after the first few months, eventually we figured out about masks, and that leadership is important.

So you’re disappointed, but are you surprised?

I’m surprised at the US situation because the smartest people on epidemiology in the world, by a lot, are at the CDC. I would have expected them to do better. You would expect the CDC to be the most visible, not the White House or even Anthony Fauci. But they haven’t been the face of the epidemic. They are trained to communicate and not try to panic people but get people to take things seriously. They have basically been muzzled since the beginning. We called the CDC, but they told us we had to talk to the White House a bunch of times. Now they say, “Look, we’re doing a great job on testing, we don’t want to talk to you.” Even the simplest things, which would greatly improve this system, they feel would be admitting there is some imperfection and so they are not interested.

Do you think it’s the agencies that fell down or just the leadership at the top, the White House?

We can do the postmortem at some point. We still have a pandemic going on, and we should focus on that. The White House didn’t allow the CDC to do its job after March. There was a window where they were engaged, but then the White House didn’t let them do that. So the variance between the US and other countries isn’t that first period, it’s the subsequent period where the messages—the opening up, the leadership on masks, those things—are not the CDC’s fault. They said not to open back up; they said that leadership has to be a model of face mask usage. I think they have done a good job since April, but we haven’t had the benefit of it.

At this point, are you optimistic?

Yes. You have to admit there’s been trillions of dollars of economic damage done and a lot of debts, but the innovation pipeline on scaling up diagnostics, on new therapeutics, on vaccines is actually quite impressive. And that makes me feel like, for the rich world, we should largely be able to end this thing by the end of 2021, and for the world at large by the end of 2022. That is only because of the scale of the innovation that’s taking place. Now whenever we get this done, we will have lost many years in malaria and polio and HIV and the indebtedness of countries of all sizes and instability. It’ll take you years beyond that before you’d even get back to where you were at the start of 2020. It’s not World War I or World War II, but it is in that order of magnitude as a negative shock to the system.

In March it was unimaginable that you’d be giving us that timeline and saying it’s great.

Well it’s because of innovation that you don’t have to contemplate an even sadder statement, which is this thing will be raging for five years until natural immunity is our only hope.

Let’s talk vaccines, which your foundation is investing in. Is there anything that’s shaping up relatively quickly that could be safe and effective?

Before the epidemic came, we saw huge potential in the RNA vaccines—Moderna, Pfizer/BioNTech, and CureVac. Right now, because of the way you manufacture them, and the difficulty of scaling up, they are more likely—if they are helpful—to help in the rich countries. They won’t be the low-cost, scalable solution for the world at large. There you’d look more at AstraZeneca or Johnson & Johnson. This disease, from both the animal data and the phase 1 data, seems to be very vaccine preventable. There are questions still. It will take us awhile to figure out the duration [of protection], and the efficacy in elderly, although we think that’s going to be quite good. Are there any side effects, which you really have to get out in those large phase 3 groups and even after that through lots of monitoring to see if there are any autoimmune diseases or conditions that the vaccine could interact with in a deleterious fashion.

Are you concerned that in our rush to get a vaccine we are going to approve something that isn’t safe and effective?

Yeah. In China and Russia they are moving full speed ahead. I bet there’ll be some vaccines that will get out to lots of patients without the full regulatory review somewhere in the world. We probably need three or four months, no matter what, of phase 3 data, just to look for side effects. The FDA, to their credit, at least so far, is sticking to requiring proof of efficacy. So far they have behaved very professionally despite the political pressure. There may be pressure, but people are saying no, make sure that that’s not allowed. The irony is that this is a president who is a vaccine skeptic. Every meeting I have with him he is like, “Hey, I don’t know about vaccines, and you have to meet with this guy Robert Kennedy Jr. who hates vaccines and spreads crazy stuff about them.” (...)

What goes through your head when you’re in a meeting hearing misinformation, and the President of the United States wants you to keep your mouth shut?

That was a bit strange. I haven’t met directly with the president since March of 2018. I made it clear I’m glad to talk to him about the epidemic anytime. And I have talked to Debbie Birx, I’ve talked to Pence, I’ve talked to Mnuchin, Pompeo, particularly on the issue of, Is the US showing up in terms of providing money to procure the vaccine for the developing countries? There have been lots of meetings, but we haven’t been able to get the US to show up. It’s very important to be able to tell the vaccine companies to build extra factories for the billions of doses, that there is procurement money to buy those for the marginal cost. So in this supplemental bill, I’m calling everyone I can to get 4 billion through GAVI for vaccines and 4 billion through a global fund for therapeutics. That’s less than 1 percent to the bill, but in terms of saving lives and getting us back to normal, that under 1 percent is by far the most important thing if we can get it in there.

Speaking of therapeutics, if you were in the hospital and you have the disease and you’re looking over the doctor’s shoulder, what treatment are you going to ask for?

Remdesivir. Sadly the trials in the US have been so chaotic that the actual proven effect is kind of small. Potentially the effect is much larger than that. It’s insane how confused the trials here in the US have been. The supply of that is going up in the US; it will be quite available for the next few months. Also dexamethasone—it’s actually a fairly cheap drug—that’s for late-stage disease.

I’m assuming you’re not going to have trouble paying for it, Bill, so you could ask for anything.

Well, I don’t want special treatment, so that’s a tricky thing. Other antivirals are two to three months away. Antibodies are two to three months away. We’ve had about a factor-of-two improvement in hospital outcomes already, and that’s with just remdesivir and dexamethasone. These other things will be additive to that.

You helped fund a Covid diagnostic testing program in Seattle that got quicker results, and it wasn’t so intrusive. The FDA put it on pause. What happened?

There’s this thing where the health worker jams the deep turbinate, in the back of your nose, which actually hurts and makes you sneeze on the healthy worker. We showed that the quality of the results can be equivalent if you just put a self-test in the tip of your nose with a cotton swab. The FDA made us jump through some hoops to prove that you didn’t need to refrigerate the result, that it could go back in a dry plastic bag, and so on. So the delay there was just normal double checking, maybe overly careful but not based on some political angle. Because of what we have done at FDA, you can buy these cheaper swabs that are available by the billions. So anybody who’s using the deep turbinate now is just out of date. It’s a mistake, because it slows things down.

But people aren’t getting their tests back quickly enough.

Well, that’s just stupidity. The majority of all US tests are completely garbage, wasted. If you don’t care how late the date is and you reimburse at the same level, of course they’re going to take every customer. Because they are making ridiculous money, and it’s mostly rich people that are getting access to that. You have to have the reimbursement system pay a little bit extra for 24 hours, pay the normal fee for 48 hours, and pay nothing [if it isn’t done by then]. And they will fix it overnight.

Why don’t we just do that?

Because the federal government sets that reimbursement system. When we tell them to change it they say, “As far as we can tell, we’re just doing a great job, it’s amazing!” Here we are, this is August. We are the only country in the world where we waste the most money on tests. Fix the reimbursement. Set up the CDC website. But I have been on that kick, and people are tired of listening to me.

by Steven Levy, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Jeff Pachoud/Getty

Reading the First Drafts of Anna Karenina

We know that Tolstoy’s reading of a collection of Alexander Pushkin’s fiction on March 18, 1873, brought on an urge to write; sometime later that day, his right hand picked up his pen and, instead of trying again to inspire himself about the court of Peter the Great in 1700, he began describing a modern high-society party where a floozy of a wife was carrying on an affair under the nose of her good, honest husband. The thought of that cuckolded husband mocked by a depraved society evoked more pity and alarm in Tolstoy than the thought that that same wife would kill herself. Her husband, who had been humiliated while she lived and cheated, would soldier on. Or would he kill himself too? Tolstoy wondered. How her suicide would happen, Tolstoy didn’t know or care. The poor husband!

Sofia wrote, in her “Various Notes for Future Reference”:

Last night L. suddenly said to me: “I have written a page and a half, and it seems good.” I assumed this was yet another attempt to write about the Peter the Great period, and didn’t pay much attention.

She must have heard something like this often enough from her husband that his vague mention of that night’s accomplishment did not impress her:

But then I realized that he had in fact embarked on a novel about the private lives of present-day people.

How exactly did she realize that? Had Tolstoy stood up and walked over to her and shyly handed over the page and a half? Did she start to read it and become confused? But, Levochka, what does this have to do with Peter’s time? That’s not true of Peter’s time!

She only remarked in the notes to herself: “So strange, the way he just pitched straight into it.”

. . . this evening he read various other excerpts from the [Pushkin] book, and under Pushkin’s influence he sat down to write. He went on with his writing today, and said he was well pleased with it.

In the next four years of working on Anna Karenina, Tolstoy would communicate having had one, maybe two more experiences of being “well pleased” with what he had written that given day. Some of the pleasure of these first two days of work may have had to do with his relief of escaping the complications of the Peter project.

Sofia added a detail concerning the second day of his work that helps dissolve the image we might conjure up of artists as relentless slaves to their work. Tolstoy was not working all day; sometimes he was out playing: “At the moment he is out looking at the fox with his two sons, their tutor Fyodor Fyodorovich and Uncle Kostya. This fox runs past the bridge near our house every day.”

That fox might be seen running through Tolstoy’s procrastinating mind for the next several years; mostly in periods of feeling unable to write, he would, grumbling about his frustration, get up from his desk and go hunting.

Sofia was now excited for him, for them, and on March 19 wrote her sister Tatyana: “Last night Levochka suddenly unexpectedly began writing a novel of contemporary life. The subject of the novel—an unfaithful wife and all the drama proceeding from this.” After Tolstoy had been working happily on Anna Karenina for a week, he wrote to Strakhov. After commiserating with his friend’s health problems, he shyly opened up: “Now I’ll tell you about myself, but please, keep it a great secret, because nothing may come of what I have to say.”(...)

The resolution of his doubts had to be about quitting the Peter project. The light from Pushkin’s brilliance exposed Tolstoy’s efforts’ seeming lifelessness.

It’s as if Tolstoy woke up in Pushkin-world and put on his own seven-league boots and started striding over the heads of all the other writers:

Not only Pushkin, but nothing else at all, it seemed, had ever aroused my admiration so much before. The Shot, Egyptian Nights, The Captain’s Daughter!!! And then there is the fragment The guests were arriving at the country house. Involuntarily, unwittingly, not knowing why and what would come of it, I thought up characters and events, began to go on with it, then of course changed it, and suddenly all the threads became so well and truly tied up that the result was a novel which I finished in draft form today, a very lively, impassioned and well-finished novel which I’m very pleased with and which will be ready in two weeks’ time if God gives me strength, and which has nothing in common with all that I’ve been wrestling with for a whole year.

Let’s consider this prediction of Anna Karenina being “ready in two weeks’ time” as one of the biggest miscalculations in literary history. And what could Tolstoy have meant by “a novel which I finished in draft form”? Some of us think of drafts as compositions that run all the way from the beginning to end. All the material is on the page; it just needs to be rewritten, reordered, revised. But Tolstoy didn’t mean that. His “draft” of the novel consisted of a few scenes and a list of notes.

His first plan, a story in four parts plus an epilogue, looks like this:

Prologue. She leaves her husband under happy “auspices.” She goes <to meet> to console the bride and meets Gagin [the name of the future Vronsky].

Part 1.

Chapter 1. The guests gathered at the end of winter, and were awaiting the Karenins and talking about them. She arrived and conducted herself indecently with Gagin. 

Chapter 2. She has it out with her husband. She reproaches him for previous indifference. “It’s too late.” 

Chapter 3. <In the artels> Gagin from the riding-ring gathers himself to go to the meeting. His mother and brother advise him to go to her. <Party at her place. The husband.> 

4th Chapter. Dinner at the Karenins’ with Gagin. The husband, conversation with the brother. St[epan] Ark[ad’ich] calms things down on the account of the German party and on account of his wife. 

5th Chapter. The races—he falls. 

Chapter 6. She runs to him, reveals her pregnancy, revelation to her husband.

The basic story had come to him in a few scenes. He would not hereafter be inventing all the plot points. Those of us who have read the novel can recognize these notes’ connections to it. But Tolstoy has not created the Anna we know yet. The most cinematic pre-cinema scene in literature, the horserace, is in place—with the consequent fall. Tolstoy never imagined Vronsky winning that race. No matter what, Vronsky will fall off his horse, and his fall will precipitate Anna’s announcement of her pregnancy to her husband.

by Bob Blaisdell, LitHub | Read more:

Image: Anna Karenina, uncredited
[ed. If you haven't read this masterpiece yet, what are you waiting for!]

On the 75th Anniversaries of the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

U.S. leaders knew we didn’t have to drop atomic bombs on Japan to win the war. We did it anyway.

At a time when Americans are reassessing so many painful aspects of our nation’s past, it is an opportune moment to have an honest national conversation about our use of nuclear weapons on Japanese cities in August 1945. The fateful decision to inaugurate the nuclear age fundamentally changed the course of modern history, and it continues to threaten our survival. As the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock warns us, the world is now closer to nuclear annihilation than at any time since 1947.

The accepted wisdom in the United States for the last 75 years has been that dropping the bombs on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and on Nagasaki three days later was the only way to end the World War II without an invasion that would have cost hundreds of thousands of American and perhaps millions of Japanese lives. Not only did the bombs end the war, the logic goes, they did so in the most humane way possible.

However, the overwhelming historical evidence from American and Japanese archives indicates that Japan would have surrendered that August, even if atomic bombs had not been used — and documents prove that President Truman and his closest advisors knew it.

The allied demand for unconditional surrender led the Japanese to fear that the emperor, who many considered a deity, would be tried as a war criminal and executed. A study by Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Command compared the emperor’s execution to “the crucifixion of Christ to us.”

“Unconditional Surrender is the only obstacle to peace,” Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo wired Ambassador Naotake Sato, who was in Moscow on July 12, 1945, trying to enlist the Soviet Union to mediate acceptable surrender terms on Japan’s behalf.

But the Soviet Union’s entry into the war on Aug. 8 changed everything for Japan’s leaders, who privately acknowledged the need to surrender promptly.

Allied intelligence had been reporting for months that Soviet entry would force the Japanese to capitulate. As early as April 11, 1945, the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Joint Intelligence Staff had predicted: “If at any time the USSR should enter the war, all Japanese will realize that absolute defeat is inevitable.”

Truman knew that the Japanese were searching for a way to end the war; he had referred to Togo’s intercepted July 12 cable as the “telegram from the Jap emperor asking for peace.”

Truman also knew that the Soviet invasion would knock Japan out of the war. At the summit in Potsdam, Germany, on July 17, following Stalin’s assurance that the Soviets were coming in on schedule, Truman wrote in his diary, “He’ll be in the Jap War on August 15. Fini Japs when that comes about.” The next day, he assured his wife, “We’ll end the war a year sooner now, and think of the kids who won’t be killed!”

The Soviets invaded Japanese-held Manchuria at midnight on Aug. 8 and quickly destroyed the vaunted Kwantung Army. As predicted, the attack traumatized Japan’s leaders. They could not fight a two-front war, and the threat of a communist takeover of Japanese territory was their worst nightmare.

Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki explained on Aug. 13 that Japan had to surrender quickly because “the Soviet Union will take not only Manchuria, Korea, Karafuto, but also Hokkaido. This would destroy the foundation of Japan. We must end the war when we can deal with the United States.”

While a majority of Americans may not be familiar with this history, the National Museum of the U.S. Navy in Washington, D.C., states unambiguously on a plaque with its atomic bomb exhibit: “The vast destruction wreaked by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the loss of 135,000 people made little impact on the Japanese military. However, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria … changed their minds.” But online the wording has been modified to put the atomic bombings in a more positive light — once again showing how myths can overwhelm historical evidence. (...)

MacArthur thought the use of atomic bombs was inexcusable. He later wrote to former President Hoover that if Truman had followed Hoover’s “wise and statesmanlike” advice to modify its surrender terms and tell the Japanese they could keep their emperor, “the Japanese would have accepted it and gladly I have no doubt.”

by Gar Alperovitz and Martin J Sherwin, LA Times |  Read more:

Image:Toru Yamanaka / AFP/Getty Images
[ed. See also: Reparation for the Frightful Wounds Inflicted on the Whole Human Family (National Catholic Register).]

Links

As the curve flattened, misconceptions took hold. Perhaps the biggest was that social distancing was a policy that would need to be enacted only once, for a brief period, after which the virus would be defeated and life would return to normal. With this fantasy in mind, politicians began to argue that the time had come to reopen. A number of factors—mounting economic distress, inevitable claustrophobia and fatigue, the President’s deranged tweets about “liberating” certain states, an explosion of justified protest against police brutality and racial injustice—combined to weaken the consensus around social distancing. Across the country, and despite a lack of testing-based data about how widely the virus had spread, bans on gatherings were lifted. We were tired of being shut in and shut down; we wanted to go back to the world we’d left behind in March. We told ourselves, erroneously, that our social-distancing efforts had defeated the virus.

The reality, of course, is that social distancing cannot cure or defeat covid-19. It only allows us to hide from the virus while scientists do their work. The overwhelming majority of Americans—perhaps as many as three hundred million people—are still susceptible to infection. As they venture back into a reopened world in which the virus is still circulating, they are at risk. In the past few weeks, this simple reality has asserted itself. In states as varied as Texas, Arizona, Florida, and California, we have seen a steepening of the curve. Since June 15th, case counts in the United States have exploded from roughly twenty thousand new cases a day to more than sixty thousand. The U.S. now leads the world in the production of new coronavirus cases. The sheer number of new cases and deaths is staggering. Since May 28th, when the hundred-thousandth American died of covid-19, sixty thousand more have been killed by the virus. The C.D.C. is now projecting that we will reach somewhere between a hundred and sixty-eight and a hundred and eighty-two thousand deaths by August 22nd. The harsh truth about our situation is clear: it isn’t over. (...)

In retrospect, one of the biggest weaknesses in our pandemic planning was that many infectious-disease experts, including me, focussed on the threat posed by a novel strain of influenza. We feared a repeat of 1918—and yet, because we now have the technology to create and mass-produce a new flu vaccine in only a few months’ time, a flu pandemic isn’t necessarily the worst-case scenario. As we are currently discovering, designing and testing an entirely new vaccine against a never-before-seen infectious disease is a far more uncertain and daunting task. The fact that the novel coronavirus is RNA-based, like H.I.V., intensifies the difficulty. It’s possible that a vaccine will arrive this year—but many experts think that it could be two years or even longer before a safe and effective shot has been developed, tested, manufactured, and made widely available.

The challenge, therefore, isn’t just flattening the curve but keeping it flat—holding the line not for months but for years. In a study published in Science in April, researchers at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health estimated that, in the absence of a vaccine for the coronavirus, periods of social distancing would be necessary into the year 2022. (Their analysis was, in its own way, optimistic: it incorporated the possibilities of new treatments for covid-19, increases in I.C.U. capacity, and the spread of durable immunity over time.) The researchers noted that, even after social distancing lets up, governments will need to continue tracking the virus and addressing occasional outbreaks. In that sense, there’s a good chance that the pandemic may not be over until 2024.

America’s Coronavirus Endurance Test (New Yorker)

___

June 2021. The world has been in pandemic mode for a year and a half. The virus continues to spread at a slow burn; intermittent lockdowns are the new normal. An approved vaccine offers six months of protection, but international deal-making has slowed its distribution. An estimated 250 million people have been infected worldwide, and 1.75 million are dead.

Scenarios such as this one imagine how the COVID-19 pandemic might play out1. Around the world, epidemiologists are constructing short- and long-term projections as a way to prepare for, and potentially mitigate, the spread and impact of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Although their forecasts and timelines vary, modellers agree on two things: COVID-19 is here to stay, and the future depends on a lot of unknowns, including whether people develop lasting immunity to the virus, whether seasonality affects its spread, and — perhaps most importantly — the choices made by governments and individuals. “A lot of places are unlocking, and a lot of places aren’t. We don’t really yet know what’s going to happen,” says Rosalind Eggo, an infectious-disease modeller at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).

“The future will very much depend on how much social mixing resumes, and what kind of prevention we do,” says Joseph Wu, a disease modeller at the University of Hong Kong. Recent models and evidence from successful lockdowns suggest that behavioural changes can reduce the spread of COVID-19 if most, but not necessarily all, people comply.

Last week, the number of confirmed COVID-19 infections passed 15 million globally, with around 650,000 deaths. Lockdowns are easing in many countries, leading some people to assume that the pandemic is ending, says Yonatan Grad, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. “But that’s not the case. We’re in for a long haul.”

If immunity to the virus lasts less than a year, for example, similar to other human coronaviruses in circulation, there could be annual surges in COVID-19 infections through to 2025 and beyond.

How the Pandemic Might Play Out In 2021 and Beyond (Nature)

___

America’s about to make a double digit percentage of its population homeless. Something like 20 to 30%, or more of American small businesses have or will shut down by the end of the pandemic. The jobs won’t all come back and those that do will pay worse and feature worse treatment than the ones before (which were mostly not well paid and featured routine meanness.)

We’re talking about 30 million to 60 million homeless.

These are staggering numbers.

The United States will feel third world. Oh, parts already did, when I landed in Miami airport the first time I immediately thought “third world”. Relatively prosperous third world, but third world.

Those places will be worse ((and Florida, as I predicted near the beginning of the crisis) has handled the pandemic noticeably badly.)

Of course, for many, little will change. They’ll keep their jobs, they’ll be fine. I recently witnessed a discussion of infosec jobs, talking about how for a person with a degree and a couple certification $120,000 was a lowball. There will still be good jobs, and you’ll still be able to lose everything in a few months if you become seriously ill.

But when those people who are hanging on go out in the streets, they’ll see, even more than now, the fate that awaits them if they slip.

So much of American meanness, and the culture is mean in the details of its daily life, comes from this fear. Because it is so easy to slip into the underclass, even if one “does everything right”, Americans are scared, even terrified, all the time. They suppress it with massive amounts of drugs (most of them legal), and most deny it, but the fear drives the cruelty.

America Is About To Feel Like A 3rd World Nation; and American Social Collapse Is Far Closer than Most Will Admit (Ian Welsh)

Image: Ana Kova
[ed. Doomscrolling (so you don't have to). See also: Here’s How to Crush the Virus Until Vaccines Arrive (NYT)]

NRA In Disarray

Hours after the National Rifle Association was hit by a lawsuit from New York’s attorney general on Thursday seeking to have the gun lobby dissolved over allegations that millions of dollars were diverted to pay for the lavish lifestyles of its leaders, the NRA’s CEO, Wayne LaPierre, hit back.

In typically pugnacious fashion, LaPierre issued his own counter-suit against the attorney general, Letitia James. In a rallying cry to NRA members, he accused her of “weaponizing” her regulatory powers and “politicizing” her office in an “affront to democracy and freedom”.

If LaPierre, 70, was hoping to spark a new culture war between the hyper-conservative group he runs and one of New York’s top Democrats, it is not clear the strategy will work this time. For almost 30 years LaPierre has used the same aggressive tactic to build up the NRA into the world’s largest and most feared gun advocacy group, with 5 million members, steering it in an ever more partisan direction that has culminated with its enthusiastic support for Donald Trump.

But misgivings about the inner workings of the NRA are not confined to prosecutors in the progressive outpost of New York. Inside the organization itself, there is a groundswell of discontent relating to the alleged misuse of millions of dollars from the association and its charitable arm, the NRA Foundation.

Speaking to the Guardian from Nashville, Tennessee, one of the NRA’s top donors was unrestrained in his criticism of LaPierre and the 76 members of the NRA’s board who he accused of collectively turning a blind eye to alleged financial impropriety.

“It makes me feel sad and depressed,” Dave Dell’Aquila said shortly after the New York lawsuit had been lodged. “And angry. Extremely angry. I’m angry that a 152-year-old historic institution has been taken down under Wayne LaPierre and his management team, while the board of directors let this happen.”

Were LaPierre tempted to try to squeeze Dell’Aquila into the same gun-hating, freedom-loathing pigeonhole in which he crams Letitia James, he would have a tough job. It’s not just that the former tech company boss is a lifetime member of the NRA and has given more than $100,000 to forward its core mission. (...)

Equally, the class-action lawsuit Dell’Aquila initiated in a federal court in Tennessee in August 2019 carries the weight of an insider.

The suit, brought against LaPierre personally as well as the NRA and its foundation, is strikingly similar to New York’s action. It recalls how Dell’Aquila donated $100,000 to the organization thinking it would go towards promoting shooting and hunting, gun safety, wildlife conservation and the right to gun ownership in the US.

It then recounts how he discovered that far from going towards these core objectives, his money was allegedly contributing towards the luxury habits of LaPierre and other top NRA executives. Through the 2018 investigation conducted by the NRA’s then president, Oliver North of Irangate fame, Dell’Aquila learned of allegations that over several years “LaPierre had received hundreds of thousands of dollars in clothing, private jet travel and other benefits”.

In particular, Dell’Aquila’s suit alleges, some $243,644 was spent on “luxury travel for LaPierre to the Bahamas; Palm Beach; Los Angeles; Reno, Nevada; Budapest, Hungary; and Italy”. The court document further cites spending of $274,695 at a Beverly Hills clothing store on suits for LaPierre – none of which was declared under IRS tax filings.

A similar theme is taken up by the New York suit. It accuses LaPierre and three members of his top team of creating a “culture of self-dealing, mismanagement and negligent oversight at the NRA that was illegal, oppressive and fraudulent”.

Such financial impropriety contributed to total losses to the NRA of an astonishing $64m, the prosecutors allege. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of charitable money went on private jet trips for LaPierre and his family, at least eight trips to the Bahamas over three years costing more than $500,000, and use of a 107ft yacht owned by an NRA vendor.

The CEO also allegedly went on an African safari, all expenses paid, and spent almost $4m on luxury limousines in the past two years alone. The suit says he negotiated without board approval a post-employment contract in which the NRA would pay him $1m a year for the rest of his life after he retires or steps down – a package worth $17m.

In its counter-suit, the NRA claims that the New York attorney general was trying “to silence the NRA’s advocacy and neutralize it as an opposing political force”. In his letter to NRA members following release of the legal action, LaPierre said: “The NRA is well governed, financially solvent, and committed to good governance.”

Responding to Dell’Aquila’s lawsuit, the NRA has argued that as a member of the group he has no standing to sue and has asked a federal judge to dismiss the case. A ruling on the motion could come any day.

But for now there’s no stopping Dell’Aquila. He is apoplectic above all about the post-employment contract, contrasting its largesse to the meagre incomes of many of the NRA’s members.

“I mean, how does Wayne have a $17m contract after he leaves the NRA? On top of the close to $2m he earns a year with stock and everything like that? Two million dollars to run a non-profit? You gotta be kidding me.”

by Ed Pilkington, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images

[ed. See also: The National Rifle Association faces its worst nightmare: accountability (USA Today via Yahoo News).]