Do We Really Need Daily Mail Delivery?

By now everyone is aware of the ongoing and increasing problems of the United States Postal Service.

There has been a longstanding interest by various members of Congress and business world to privatize the USPS - allegedly to modernize and improve its service, but in real life because the USPS is a monopoly with enormous profit potential.

“These changes are happening because there’s a White House agenda to privatize and sell off the public Postal Service,” said Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union. “But there’s too much approval for the organization right now. They want to separate the service from the people and then degrade it to the point where people aren’t going to like it anymore.”

This started back in the Bush administration:

"But the agency has been rapidly losing money since a 2006 law, passed with the support of the George W. Bush administration, required USPS to pre-fund employee retiree health benefits for 75 years in the future. That means the Postal Service must pay for the future health care of employees who have not even been born yet. The burden accounted for an estimated 80% to 90% of the agency’s losses before the pandemic."

Imagine any other business being told to pre-fund health benefits for the next 75 years.

Then this past year the prospect arose that disruption or slowing of the mail service might provide grounds for delegitimizing the results of mail-in ballots in the November election. Some post offices were physically removing mail-sorting machines. The justification (which may well be valid) was that the mix of mail has shifted massively away from letters to packages, and different machines are required for that purpose.

But for this post I'm going to set aside politics and just ask whether daily mail delivery is necessary in this modern era. What prompted me to do this was some interesting items I noticed in the philatelic news:

"News from vanishing postal services are familiar everywhere in these days... In Finland the Post has already dropped Tuesday, and is now planning a three-times per week delivery system. The iconic main Post office at the Helsinki city center was closed this summer, and there are not many post offices left in the city."

"Norway Post will provide every other day delivery of mail due to the decline in mail volume... Recipients will get their mail on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday one week, and Tuesday and Thursday the following week. Those who have a post office box will receive normal daily delivery each weekday... Packages will be delivered every day or every other day depending on where in Norway the household is... Newspapers will be delivered every other day, or daily if the addressee has a post office box."

Those reports were in the March 2020 issue of The Posthorn - Journal of Scandinavian Philately, a publication of the Scandinavian Collector's Club.

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[ed. I'm not sure what's going on with the Post Office. Some of it seems political, some of it economic (pre-funding health benefits for the next 75 years? Who else does that?)

Commerce and the World of Toys

No toy entertains my kids as much as the contents of our recycling bin. With the help of some tape, glue, string, and markers they can turn an assortment of containers and cardboard boxes into anything they can imagine. They have plenty of toys. But as many parents will tell you, most toys only hold their attention for so long before they wind up on the shelf, or in many cases smashed to pieces and scattered across the house for me to clean up or step on. Such is the contrived durability that manufacturers bake into their products in the hopes we will buy more of them.

This fascinates me. For all the wonders of industrial capitalist production it has a hard time competing with its own garbage when it comes to creating toys that hold kids’ attention. Of course the novelty of the objects that appear in our recycling bin every week give it an advantage over individual toys. Still, trash can stimulate creativity in ways that many toys simply don’t. Why can’t toy companies do a better job of engaging the imagination of children even with their massive marketing and manufacturing capabilities?

Well, because toy companies are in the business of selling toys, not the business of making them fun. Depending on your perspective this might sound either completely obvious, or far too cynical. I don’t wish to suggest the people working at these companies simply want to rob children and their parents of their money by selling them a bunch of toys that kids will forget about in a few days. But they do have to work within a capitalist system. If they can make a great toy that entertains kids for years they will, but only if it helps their bottom line. These people have jobs they want to hold onto and companies they want to keep out of the red. If a toy holds a child’s attention beyond a year, what will their parents have to buy at the holidays? The toy economy depends on the constant exhaustion of attention and pursuit of fresh toys.

This becomes very clear watching the Netflix documentary series The Toys That Made Us. Though many of the toy designers showcased in this series seem to have a genuine passion for their work, a lot of their decisions are economic ones that have to do with production costs and marketing, not stimulating creativity in children. For example, there is a team of Power Rangers because it let Bandai sell five action figures instead of just one. He-Man rode a strange oversized green tiger called Battle Cat because Mattel ran out of money for new tooling equipment to make vehicles, so they used the equipment from another toy line and just changed the color. Hasbro painted the G.I. Joe character Snake Eyes entirely black because eliminating the detail on one figure kept costs down. More broadly, the highly gendered nature of many modern toys comes not just from ingrained social norms, but from the way companies like to sell toys. They reason that by fragmenting the market into “girls toys” and “boys toys” they can make more sales than sticking with gender neutral toys. (...)

When I was a kid toys were… actually they were a lot like they are today. As much as the old man in me wants to launch into a nostalgic recollection of how much toys have changed since I was a kid, toys have changed surprisingly little since I grew up in the 80s. It’s not just that kids play with the same kinds of toys today as they did back then, action figures for instance. In many cases they play with toys that are almost identical to the ones me and my brothers played with as kids. Franchises like Transformers, Star Wars, and Power Rangers are not only still around and quite popular, their product lines have changed little in the past few decades. Just as we see the same movies endlessly rebooted, manufacturers like betting on toys that have sold well before. It feels stagnant to most of us, but it presents less of a risk than trying something new. This goes not just for action figures where I have different kinds of transforming robots marketed to different age groups, but for all the other toys that were new when I was a kid like laser tag and remote control cars.

That’s not to say a toy needs to be new to be good, fun, or imaginative. I still have a soft spot for Star Wars and though it gets repeated endlessly I find the Transformers design concept makes for engaging toys even if I wish they would stop making movies and TV shows. The robust simplicity of toy trucks means they are probably as engaging now as they were a century ago. Children have played with dolls for as long as our species has existed. Even our primate relatives play with objects in a way that resembles a child caring for a doll. A lot of the toys that occupy my kids the best are simple and time-tested. Play-Doh, art supplies, and puzzles pack a lot of bang for their buck if you want to keep your kids occupied. (...)

Due to the fact that adults, not children, actually buy the toys, manufacturers aim a lot of their marketing at grown-ups. This causes me a small amount of dread on the occasions where people buy my kids presents. The social pressure to purchase a present for a child can cause adults to buy a toy just for the sake of buying a toy. This often makes for bad gifts that kids don’t play with or break into a million pieces. The worst culprit is not birthday or holiday presents, but the favors, trinkets, and other little baubles handed out to kids on what seems like an increasing number of occasions. The little bits of plastic that barely qualify as toys don’t function to entertain kids, but for parents putting together goody bags to have something, anything, to give children attending a birthday party, or any number of functions. It seems like I can’t take my kids anywhere without somebody unloading this stuff on us. Like so many products of a capitalist system, these so-called toys bring to mind the excrement that the protagonist of Ursula LeGuin’s masterpiece The Dispossessed lamented, because they feel depressingly wasteful from start to finish. The kids usually forget about them after the car ride home. The people handing them out only do so because they feel obligated. I get a little sad having to send them off to the landfill when I find them broken in half behind the couch. And I doubt that anyone involved in their production or sale gets excited about them except to the degree which they let them pay their bills.

Although I have heaped a lot of criticism on capitalism for producing such lame toys I have to admit that it also produces some really excellent toys. I absolutely love LEGO and magnetic tiles. My kids like them too. When done right I find building toys amongst some of my favorite, not only because they entertain my kids, but because they do encourage them to create. Depending on the day, LEGO occupy them as much as their recycling bin projects.

But here I will go into old man mode and say that when I was a boy LEGO was different. You had fewer special pieces and no branded sets or movie tie-ins. (The special pieces are oddly-shaped bricks that fit very specifically into a particular place.) While a young Greg would have loved a Star Wars X-Wing LEGO set, I’m glad I only had the old space sets. This forced me to create my own star fighters which came entirely out of my head. The shift towards branded sets and the specialized pieces push kids into making the model as it exists on the box. The boxes of the old sets often showed several projects you could make with them. This let you know the pieces held more potential than what the manufacturers laid out in the single set of instructions provided. Corporate tie-ins won’t stop kids from smashing their creations to bits and building something original, and there is a broader range of LEGO available today than ever before, but it’s a clear example of purely marketing-based design choices.

Despite the continued success of the cartoon marketing model, it has an expiration date built into it. As my generation cuts the cord and moves from live tv to streaming services children don’t see advertisements for toys along with their cartoons. We don’t have cable in my home, so my kids almost never see commercials. On the occasions when we travel somewhere that has only live TV they get quite indignant that they have to sit through so many commercials. Some of their favorite Netflix shows have toys, but they only know this because Santa or some other adult came through with them. I don’t doubt that marketers have already considered this issue, but I don’t know if their new approaches can make up for the fact that the old model can’t penetrate through streaming services that don’t have ads.

In fact, the way that toys get sold has changed significantly. Since Toys R Us filed for bankruptcy we no longer have a nationwide toy store chain—thank you, private equity firms—and very few smaller independent shops. Because of hyper-capitalism run amok we now live in a world without toy stores. Places like Target have a few toy aisles, but it’s not the same. Like so much of our world today the way kids interact with toys has lost an important in-person quality. People buy toys online or grab them in a cramped aisle in a big box store that has lots of other things for sale.

The stagnation in the toy market might have something to do with the fact that much of the innovation that once went into physical toys has now gone into video games. With the power to create and interact in such detailed worlds that video games provide, small plastic figurines seem rather boring and limited. I must admit that although I grew up with video games I feel rather resistant to letting my kids play them and plan on holding this off as long as I can. I have enough trouble pulling myself away from screens and I blame this partially on spending so much time playing video games. I would like to see toys that engage kids in the physical world at least for the time being.

To that end I stopped playing video games about a decade ago. When I want to play around with electronics I make electronic music. I find this a more creative outlet that still lets me get my fix of pressing buttons and manipulating electric devices. I don’t even need to look at a screen to do it. A modest synthesizer setup will cost as much as a gaming console and a handful of games. A number of small independent companies have even seen the potential for parents sharing a passion for synthesizers with children and produced products that straddle the line between toy and instrument. Kids love to turn knobs and press buttons at least as much as adults. These synths are fun toys on their own, but also connect with more adult gear so that parents and kids can jam together. Given the independent nature of these companies some of the kid synthesizers on offer are a bit expensive. I would like to see more large manufacturers step in and make some at a lower price. Though arguably some already make synths that kids can play.

I bring this up not just because it gives an alternative to video games that I include my kids in. The world of electronic music also gives a lesson on interoperability that toy companies could learn a great deal from. The story of MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) really shows how cooperation can expand horizons and spur innovations. In the early 80s there was no standard way to synchronize electronic instruments or for them to transmit information between them. Some manufacturers had their own proprietary standards for communicating between their own synths and drum machines, but these could not be used by other manufacturers. Then engineers from different companies came together and created MIDI as a way for electronic instruments to communicate things like notes and clock data (tempo). This worked so well that the MIDI language went almost 30 years without getting an update. I can’t think of another piece of software that has gone that long without a tweak. Because of the implementation of MIDI I can own a drum machine from one manufacturer, a synth from another, a sequencer (a device that plays patterns) from a third, and they can all synchronize together. I could not do this if Roland and other companies each created their own proprietary way for instruments to communicate the way Apple and Microsoft created their own operating systems and software. Along with the increased popularity of modular synthesizers that let musicians combine different aspects of sound synthesis to create their own unique instrument, standards like MIDI and CV (control voltage) have helped expand the possibilities of what you can do with electronic instruments.

Imagine for a moment if we did something similar with building toys. Imagine if all, or at least most of them, worked together. LEGO has arguably created the best building system, so it should probably form the core of this new paradigm. But like any system it has its limits. If instead of competing with other building toys LEGO encouraged cooperation this would expand the possibilities of what you can create with LEGO. Imagine building something with LEGO, magnetic tiles, and your favorite lesser known building system. You could leverage the strengths of each and make some truly amazing things. Maybe one system lets you build bigger structures, another works better for building moving things, and a third lets you create things with more detail.

by Greg Belvedere, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited

 

Chris Ware, Last Days
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How to Know When You Can Trust a Covid-19 Vaccine

How To Know When You Can Trust A COVID-19 Vaccine (FiveThirtyEight).

Image: Colleen Tighe

Marvelous Belief

In the 1960s, the world of comic books was dominated by two companies. The first was DC, home of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and Flash. The second was Marvel, home of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, and X-Men. DC heroes were square-jawed, staid, and tended to be dull. “This looks like a job for Superman,” Superman proclaimed. He also liked to announce, “Up, up, and away” (right before he started to fly). By contrast, Marvel heroes were irreverent, witty, insecure, and playful. Spider-Man called himself, “Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.” His nickname was “Spidey.” Ben Grimm, also known as The Thing, liked to announce, “It’s clobberin’ time!” (right before he started to clobber).

DC was Dwight Eisenhower; Marvel was John F. Kennedy. DC was Bing Crosby; Marvel was the Rolling Stones. DC was Apollo; Marvel was Dionysus.

Marvel’s guiding spirit, and its most important writer, was Stan Lee, who died in 2018 at the age of 95. Lee helped create many of the company’s iconic figures — not only Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, and the X-Men, but also the Black Panther, the Avengers, Thor, Daredevil (Daredevil!), Doctor Strange, the Silver Surfer, and Ant-Man. There were many others. Lee defined the Marvel brand. He gave readers a sense that they were in the cool kids’ club — knowing, winking, rebellious, with their own private language: “Face Forward!” “Excelsior!” “’Nuff said!”

Aside from their superpowers, Lee’s characters were vulnerable. One of them was blind; another was confined to a wheelchair. By creating superheroes who faced real-world problems (romantic and otherwise), Lee channeled the insecurities of his young readers. As he put it: “The idea I had, the underlying theme, was that just because somebody is different doesn’t make them better.” He gave that theme a political twist: “That seems to be the worst thing in human nature: We tend to dislike people who are different than we are.” DC felt like the past, and Marvel felt like the future, above all because of Marvel’s exuberance, sense of fun, and subversive energy. (...)

In terms of cultural impact, was Lee the most important writer of the last 60 years? You could make the argument. His characters have given rise to countless movies, television shows, and novels. As Liel Leibovitz puts it in his sharp and engaging new book, “Lee’s creations redefined America’s sense of itself.” Countless children, and not a few adults, have identified with Bruce Banner, alter ego of the Hulk, who warned: “Mr. McGee, don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.” And whatever our role in life, many of us have never forgotten Lee’s line from the first Spider-Man story: “With great power there must also come — great responsibility!” If, as Shelley said, “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” then Lee, the poet, was responsible for more than a few laws. (...)

In that respect, Lee had something in common with George Lucas, architect of the Star Wars story, who was also able to offer variations on universals. Lucas was self-conscious about his use of often-used tropes. He was greatly influenced by Joseph Campbell and his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which argued that many heroes, in many myths and religions, followed a similar arc (“the monomyth”). The arc had many ingredients, but as Campbell summarized it:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

As far as I am aware, there is no evidence that Lee read Campbell, but the lives of many of Marvel’s superheroes included important features of the monomyth, offering them enduring and cross-cultural appeal, and evidently tapping into something in the human spirit. It helped, of course, that Lee was also a terrific, inventive storyteller, with a pathbreaking insistence on seeing vulnerability, neediness, and sweetness in superheroes (Spider-Man was just a teenager who felt shy and awkward around girls).

But that wasn’t Lee’s secret sauce. It was his exuberance — contagious, joyful, defiant, and impossible to resist. When Peter Parker first meets the gorgeous Mary Jane Watson, the love of his life, her first words to him are these: “Face it, tiger … You just hit the jackpot!” For decades, one of Lee’s favorite words was “Excelsior!” In 2010, he offered a definition (on Twitter no less): “Upward and onward to greater glory!”

by Cass R. Sunstein, LARB |  Read more:

Image: via:

History Will Judge the Complicit

Why have Republican leaders abandoned their principles in support of an immoral and dangerous president?"

... Until March 1949, Leonhard’s and Wolf’s biographies were strikingly similar. Both grew up inside the Soviet system. Both were educated in Communist ideology, and both had the same values. Both knew that the party was undermining those values. Both knew that the system, allegedly built to promote equality, was deeply unequal, profoundly unfair, and very cruel. Like their counterparts in so many other times and places, both men could plainly see the gap between propaganda and reality. Yet one remained an enthusiastic collaborator, while the other could not bear the betrayal of his ideals. Why?

In english, the word collaborator has a double meaning. A colleague can be described as a collaborator in a neutral or positive sense. But the other definition of collaborator, relevant here, is different: someone who works with the enemy, with the occupying power, with the dictatorial regime. In this negative sense, collaborator is closely related to another set of words: collusion, complicity, connivance. This negative meaning gained currency during the Second World War, when it was widely used to describe Europeans who cooperated with Nazi occupiers. At base, the ugly meaning of collaborator carries an implication of treason: betrayal of one’s nation, of one’s ideology, of one’s morality, of one’s values.

Since the Second World War, historians and political scientists have tried to explain why some people in extreme circumstances become collaborators and others do not. The late Harvard scholar Stanley Hoffmann had firsthand knowledge of the subject—as a child, he and his mother hid from the Nazis in Lamalou-les-Bains, a village in the south of France. But he was modest about his own conclusions, noting that “a careful historian would have—almost—to write a huge series of case histories; for there seem to have been almost as many collaborationisms as there were proponents or practitioners of collaboration.” Still, Hoffmann made a stab at classification, beginning with a division of collaborators into “voluntary” and “involuntary.” Many people in the latter group had no choice. Forced into a “reluctant recognition of necessity,” they could not avoid dealing with the Nazi occupiers who were running their country.

Hoffmann further sorted the more enthusiastic “voluntary” collaborators into two additional categories. In the first were those who worked with the enemy in the name of “national interest,” rationalizing collaboration as something necessary for the preservation of the French economy, or French culture—though of course many people who made these arguments had other professional or economic motives, too. In the second were the truly active ideological collaborators: people who believed that prewar republican France had been weak or corrupt and hoped that the Nazis would strengthen it, people who admired fascism, and people who admired Hitler.

Hoffmann observed that many of those who became ideological collaborators were landowners and aristocrats, “the cream of the top of the civil service, of the armed forces, of the business community,” people who perceived themselves as part of a natural ruling class that had been unfairly deprived of power under the left-wing governments of France in the 1930s. Equally motivated to collaborate were their polar opposites, the “social misfits and political deviants” who would, in the normal course of events, never have made successful careers of any kind. What brought these groups together was a common conclusion that, whatever they had thought about Germany before June 1940, their political and personal futures would now be improved by aligning themselves with the occupiers.

Like Hoffmann, Czesław Miłosz, a Nobel Prize–winning Polish poet, wrote about collaboration from personal experience. An active member of the anti-Nazi resistance during the war, he nevertheless wound up after the war as a cultural attaché at the Polish embassy in Washington, serving his country’s Communist government. Only in 1951 did he defect, denounce the regime, and dissect his experience. In a famous essay, The Captive Mind, he sketched several lightly disguised portraits of real people, all writers and intellectuals, each of whom had come up with different ways of justifying collaboration with the party. Many were careerists, but Miłosz understood that careerism could not provide a complete explanation. To be part of a mass movement was for many a chance to end their alienation, to feel close to the “masses,” to be united in a single community with workers and shopkeepers. For tormented intellectuals, collaboration also offered a kind of relief, almost a sense of peace: It meant that they were no longer constantly at war with the state, no longer in turmoil. Once the intellectual has accepted that there is no other way, Miłosz wrote, “he eats with relish, his movements take on vigor, his color returns. He sits down and writes a ‘positive’ article, marveling at the ease with which he writes it.” Miłosz is one of the few writers to acknowledge the pleasure of conformity, the lightness of heart that it grants, the way that it solves so many personal and professional dilemmas.

We all feel the urge to conform; it is the most normal of human desires. I was reminded of this recently when I visited Marianne Birthler in her light-filled apartment in Berlin. During the 1980s, Birthler was one of a very small number of active dissidents in East Germany; later, in reunified Germany, she spent more than a decade running the Stasi archive, the collection of former East German secret-police files. I asked her whether she could identify among her cohort a set of circumstances that had inclined some people to collaborate with the Stasi.

She was put off by the question. Collaboration wasn’t interesting, Birthler told me. Almost everyone was a collaborator; 99 percent of East Germans collaborated. If they weren’t working with the Stasi, then they were working with the party, or with the system more generally. Much more interesting—and far harder to explain—was the genuinely mysterious question of “why people went against the regime.” The puzzle is not why Markus Wolf remained in East Germany, in other words, but why Wolfgang Leonhard did not.

by Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Borja Alegre

[ed. History will not be kind. The only consolation being these people will forever have to live with themselves (and their grandchildren can read about them years from now). A good read.]

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Albert Camus’s The Plague

Usually a question like this is theoretical: What would it be like to find your town, your state, your country, shut off from the rest of the world, its citizens confined to their homes, as a contagion spreads, infecting thousands, and subjecting thousands more to quarantine? How would you cope if an epidemic disrupted daily life, closing schools, packing hospitals, and putting social gatherings, sporting events and concerts, conferences, festivals and travel plans on indefinite hold?

In 1947, when he was 34, Albert Camus, the Algerian-born French writer (he would win the Nobel Prize for Literature ten years later, and die in a car crash three years after that) provided an astonishingly detailed and penetrating answer to these questions in his novel The Plague. The book chronicles the abrupt arrival and slow departure of a fictional outbreak of bubonic plague to the Algerian coastal town of Oran in the month of April, sometime in the 1940s. Once it has settled in, the epidemic lingers, roiling the lives and minds of the town’s inhabitants until the following February, when it leaves as quickly and unaccountably as it came, “slinking back to the obscure lair from which it had stealthily emerged.”
Camus shows how easy it is to mistake an epidemic for an annoyance.

Whether or not you’ve read The Plague, the book demands reading, or rereading, at this tense national and international moment, as a new disease, COVID-19, caused by a novel form of coronavirus, sweeps the globe. Since the novel coronavirus emerged late last year in the Chinese city of Wuhan (the city has been in lockdown since January), it has has gone on the march, invading more than a hundred countries, panicking populations and financial markets and putting cities, regions, and one entire country, Italy, under quarantine. This week, workplaces, schools and colleges have closed or gone online in many American towns; events have been canceled; and non-essential travel has been prohibited. The epidemic has been upgraded to pandemic. You may find yourself with more time to read than usual. Camus’s novel has fresh relevance and urgency—and lessons to give. (...)

As the story begins, rats are lurching out of Oran’s shadows, first one-by-one, then in “batches,” grotesquely expiring on landings or in the street. The first to encounter this phenomenon is a local doctor named Rieux, who summons his concierge, Michel, to deal with the nuisance, and is startled when Michel is “outraged,” rather than disgusted. Michel is convinced that young “scallywags” must have planted the vermin in his hallway as a prank. Like Michel, most of Oran’s citizens misinterpret the early “bewildering portents,” missing their broader significance. For a time, the only action they take is denouncing the local sanitation department and complaining about the authorities. “In this respect our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves,” the narrator reflects. “They were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences.” Camus shows how easy it is to mistake an epidemic for an annoyance.

But then Michel falls sick and dies. As Rieux treats him, he recognizes the telltale signs of plague, but at first persuades himself that, “The public mustn’t be alarmed, that wouldn’t do at all.” Oran’s bureaucrats agree. The Prefect (like a mayor or governor, in colonial Algeria) “personally is convinced that it’s a false alarm.” A low-level bureaucrat, Richard, insists the disease must not be identified officially as plague, but should be referred to merely as “a special type of fever.” But as the pace and number of deaths increases, Rieux rejects the euphemism, and the town’s leaders are forced to take action.

Authorities are liable to minimize the threat of an epidemic, Camus suggests, until the evidence becomes undeniable that underreaction is more dangerous than overreaction. Most people share that tendency, he writes, it’s a universal human frailty: “Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.”

Soon the city gates are closed and quarantines are imposed, cutting off the inhabitants of Oran from each other and from the outside world. “The first thing that plague brought to our town was exile,” the narrator notes. A journalist named Rambert, stuck in Oran after the gates close, begs Rieux for a certificate of health so he can get back to his wife in Paris, but Rieux cannot help him. “There are thousands of people placed as you are in this town,” he says. Like Rambert, the citizens soon sense the pointlessness of dwelling on their personal plights, because the plague erases the “uniqueness of each man’s life” even as it heightens each person’s awareness of his vulnerability and powerlessness to plan for the future.

This catastrophe is collective: “a feeling normally as individual as the ache of separation from those one loves suddenly became a feeling in which all shared alike,” Camus writes. This ache, along with fear, becomes “the greatest affliction of the long period of exile that lay ahead.” Anyone who lately has had to cancel a business trip, a class, a party, a dinner, a vacation, or a reunion with a loved one, can feel the justice of Camus’s emphasis on the emotional fallout of a time of plague: feelings of isolation, fear, and loss of agency. It is this, “the history of what the normal historian passes over,” that his novel records, and which the novel coronavirus is now inscribing on current civic life.“A feeling normally as individual as the ache of separation from those one loves suddenly became a feeling in which all shared alike,” Camus writes.

If you read The Plague long ago, perhaps for a college class, you likely were struck most by the physical torments that Camus’s narrator dispassionately but viscerally describes. Perhaps you paid more attention to the buboes and the lime pits than to the narrator’s depiction of the “hectic exaltation” of the ordinary people trapped in the epidemic’s bubble, who fought their sense of isolation by dressing up, strolling aimlessly along Oran’s boulevards; and splashing out at restaurants, poised to flee should a fellow diner fall ill, caught up in “the frantic desire for life that thrives in the heart of every great calamity”: the comfort of community. The townspeople of Oran did not have the recourse that today’s global citizens have, in whatever town: to seek community in virtual reality. As the present pandemic settles in and lingers in this digital age, it applies a vivid new filter to Camus’s acute vision of the emotional backdrop of contagion.

Today, the exile and isolation of Plague 2.0 are acquiring their own shadings, their own characteristics, recoloring Camus’s portrait. As we walk along our streets, go to the grocery, we reflexively adopt the precautionary habits social media recommends: washing our hands; substituting rueful, grinning shrugs for handshakes; and practicing “social distancing.” We can do our work remotely to avoid infecting others or being infected; we can shun parties, concerts and restaurants, and order in from Seamless. But for how long? Camus knew the answer: we can’t know.

by Liesl Schillinger, LitHub |  Read more:
Image: The dance of death: the careless and the careful. T. Rowlandson, 1816.

[ed. I read The Stranger in college but never got around to The Plague. It's amazing how closely it predicted the social, medical, and psychological issues of our present pandemic. Well worth a read.]

The Social Dilemma

That social media can be addictive and creepy isn’t a revelation to anyone who uses Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like. But in Jeff Orlowski’s documentary “The Social Dilemma,” conscientious defectors from these companies explain that the perniciousness of social networking platforms is a feature, not a bug.

They claim that the manipulation of human behavior for profit is coded into these companies with Machiavellian precision: Infinite scrolling and push notifications keep users constantly engaged; personalized recommendations use data not just to predict but also to influence our actions, turning users into easy prey for advertisers and propagandists.

As in his documentaries about climate change, “Chasing Ice” and “Chasing Coral,” Orlowski takes a reality that can seem too colossal and abstract for a layperson to grasp, let alone care about, and scales it down to a human level. In “The Social Dilemma,” he recasts one of the oldest tropes of the horror genre — Dr. Frankenstein, the scientist who went too far — for the digital age.

In briskly edited interviews, Orlowski speaks with men and (a few) women who helped build social media and now fear the effects of their creations on users’ mental health and the foundations of democracy. They deliver their cautionary testimonies with the force of a start-up pitch, employing crisp aphorisms and pithy analogies.

“Never before in history have 50 designers made decisions that would have an impact on two billion people,” says Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google. Anna Lembke, an addiction expert at Stanford University, explains that these companies exploit the brain’s evolutionary need for interpersonal connection. And Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook, delivers a chilling allegation: Russia didn’t hack Facebook; it simply used the platform. (...)

Despite their vehement criticisms, the interviewees in “The Social Dilemma” are not all doomsayers; many suggest that with the right changes, we can salvage the good of social media without the bad. But the grab bag of personal and political solutions they present in the film confuses two distinct targets of critique: the technology that causes destructive behaviors and the culture of unchecked capitalism that produces it.

Nevertheless, “The Social Dilemma” is remarkably effective in sounding the alarm about the incursion of data mining and manipulative technology into our social lives and beyond. Orlowski’s film is itself not spared by the phenomenon it scrutinizes. The movie is streaming on Netflix, where it’ll become another node in the service’s data-based algorithm.

by Devika Girish, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Netflix

America’s Plastic Hour Is Upon Us

There are in history what you could call ‘plastic hours,’” the philosopher Gershom Scholem once said. “Namely, crucial moments when it is possible to act. If you move then, something happens.” In such moments, an ossified social order suddenly turns pliable, prolonged stasis gives way to motion, and people dare to hope. Plastic hours are rare. They require the right alignment of public opinion, political power, and events—usually a crisis. They depend on social mobilization and leadership. They can come and go unnoticed or wasted. Nothing happens unless you move.

Are we living in a plastic hour? It feels that way.

Beneath the dreary furor of the partisan wars, most Americans agree on fundamental issues facing the country. Large majorities say that government should ensure some form of universal health care, that it should do more to mitigate global warming, that the rich should pay higher taxes, that racial inequality is a significant problem, that workers should have the right to join unions, that immigrants are a good thing for American life, that the federal government is plagued by corruption. These majorities have remained strong for years. The readiness, the demand for action, is new.

What explains it? Nearly four years of a corrupt, bigoted, and inept president who betrayed his promise to champion ordinary Americans. The arrival of an influential new generation, the Millennials, who grew up with failed wars, weakened institutions, and blighted economic prospects, making them both more cynical and more utopian than their parents. Collective ills that go untreated year after year, so bone-deep and chronic that we assume they’re permanent—from income inequality, feckless government, and police abuse to a shredded social fabric and a poisonous public discourse that verges on national cognitive decline. Then, this year, a series of crises that seemed to come out of nowhere, like a flurry of sucker punches, but that arose straight from those ills and exposed the failures of American society to the world.

The year 2020 began with an impeachment trial that led to acquittal despite the president’s obvious guilt. Then came the pandemic, chaotic hospital wards, ghost cities, lies and conspiracy theories from the White House, mass death, mass unemployment, police killings, nationwide protests, more sickness, more death, more economic despair, the disruption of normal life without end. Still ahead lies an election on whose outcome everything depends.

The year 1968—with which, for concentrated drama, 2020 is sometimes compared—marked the end of an era of reform and the start of a conservative reaction that resonated for decades. In 1968 the core phenomenon was the collapse of order. In 2020 it is the absence of solidarity. Even with majorities agreeing on central issues, there’s little sense of being in this together. The United States is world-famously individualistic, and the past half century has seen the expansion of freedom in every direction—personal, social, financial, technological. But the pandemic demonstrates, almost scientifically, the limits of individualism. Everyone is vulnerable. Everyone’s health depends on the health of others. No one is safe unless everyone takes responsibility for the welfare of others. No person, community, or state can withstand the plague without a competent and active national government.

The story of the coronavirus in this country is a sequence of moments when this lesson broke down—when politicians spurned experts, governors reopened their states too soon, crowds liberated themselves in rallies and bars. The graph that shows the course of new infections in the United States—gradually falling in late spring, then rising sharply in summer—is an illustration of both ineffectual leadership and a failed ideology. Shame is not an emotion that Americans readily indulge, but the spectacle of the national coronavirus case rate surging ahead of India’s and Brazil’s while it declined in most rich countries has produced a wave of self-disgust here, and pity and contempt abroad.

“We’re at this moment where, because of COVID‑19, it is there for anybody who has eyes to see that the systems we are committed to are inadequate or have collapsed,” Maurice Mitchell, the director of the left-wing Working Families Party, told me. “So now almost all 300-plus million of us are in this moment of despair, asking ourselves questions that are usually the province of the academy, philosophical questions: Who am I in relation to my society? What is the role of government? What does an economy do? ”

by George Packer, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Hudson Christie

‘This is the Worst Thing Ever’

Fans, business owners bemoan a Seahawks home game without its usual atmosphere

Eighteen minutes before the Seahawks host the New England Patriots at CenturyLink Field on Sunday, a man in a blue Shaquill Griffin jersey walks along Occidental Avenue on the west side of the stadium.

“I’ve got two tickets for sale!” he shouts, at no one in particular.

Then, with his flowing brown hair flapping in the breeze, he lets out a booming laugh.

Inside Gantry Public House across the street, Farshid Varamini gets the joke.

But he might not find it funny.

After all, Varamini opened Gantry Public House in late February — just weeks before COVID-19 unsuspectingly squashed the Mariners’ and Sounders’ seasons and sapped his revenue stream. He also operates several “The People’s Burger” food trucks and two Pioneer Grill hot dog carts outside the stadium, and says that business is down 80-85% year-over-year.

Still, he perseveres — even during a home opener without fans at CenturyLink Field. On Sunday night, Gantry Public House, The People’s Burger and Pioneer Grill were all open for business.

But it’s not business as usual.

“It’s very different,” Varamini says, sitting at a table in his modestly filled restaurant at 3:58 p.m. ahead of a scheduled 5:20 p.m. Seahawks kickoff. “This will be year 23 that I’m down here, and we’ve done every Mariner game, every football game. I’ve never been closed. So to see this … usually I would get down here at 4 in the morning. Today I was able to sleep in and get here around 9.”

Varamini was born in Iran and came to Seattle when he was 7. He operated his first Pioneer Grill hot dog cart when he was 18. When he says he built this place, he means it; besides the plumbing and electrical, Varamini constructed much of the interior of Gantry Public House himself.

Which is all to say, this Seahawks home opener should have been a celebration — a culmination of two-plus decades of diligent work. It should have been a boon to his brand-new business.

Instead, it’s anything but.

“The first couple weeks (after COVID-19 hit) were eerie — coming down here and not seeing anything,” he says. “It’s gotten a little more normal. I’m still coming to work. We still need to make sure machines are running and things like that. Normally you couldn’t even see the sidewalk or the roads out here, because there’s so many people, not to mention all the noise.

“I’m not going to try to get used to it, is what I’m trying to say.”

Further down the block, Hector Ramos says the same. He’s standing alone in the parking lot he owns on Occidental Avenue, wearing a blue Bobby Wagner jersey and a matching Seahawks mask. It’s 4:08 p.m., barely an hour before kickoff, and the parking lot is empty.

Ramos doesn’t mince his words.

“This is the worst thing ever,” he says. “I’ve been doing this for so many years. I came today to see what was going on, whether the police would come and try to close the streets, or to watch for people or anything. I found out there’s no business. There isn’t anything.”

There is only Ramos, standing in a parking lot made abruptly obsolete. He says, in a normal season, the 20-some spots would always sell out — fetching between $50 and $100 each, depending on the size of the spot or how long they plan to stay. He actually calls his customers “friends,” because so many have reserved the same spots for countless Seahawks Sundays. They tailgate together and talk to each other; some never enter the stadium and watch from here instead.

“I don’t need to even announce it anymore,” says Ramos, who moved to the United States from Mexico City 22 years ago and has owned the parking lot for 20. “My customers are regular customers. I’m here every year and I have customers who have been coming here for 10 years. So I don’t have to advertise my business. They just come. They just come, every year.”

Every year but one.

by Mike Vorel, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Dean Rutz / The Seattle Times

[ed. See also: Unlikely savior: L.J. Collier stops Cam Newton short of goal line for wild Seahawks win vs. Patriots; and Despite all the fun storylines, the Seahawks’ win starts and stops with another incredible Russell Wilson performance (Seattle Times).]

The New Blogger Sucks

 

[ed. You know how whenever somebody says they're going to make something "better" and whatever it is has been working perfectly fine up to that point? You're probably going to get screwed. That's Blogger, the platform running this website (by Google). I expect to write more about how awful this new version is, but for the short term expect to see fewer posts until I can figure out how to work around the incomprehensible changes they've made (or I can migrate to another platform like WordPress). For background, see also: here, here, here, here, here and here. In the mean time, take this as an opportunity go back and visit some previous posts from the archive. There's some great stuff there.]

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Dies at 87 (NY Times)

Image: Doug Mills/The New York Times

[ed. A giant in our time. See also: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Champion Of Gender Equality, Dies At 87 (NPR); and A 5-Decade-Long Friendship That Began With A Phone Call (NPR).]

Telemedicine Tales

A few months back, I described my Luddite biases about telemedicine. On the one hand, the idea of allowing established patients to consult with an MD outside an office visit is a big plus. Even before getting to Covid-19 concerns, it saves patient time and hopefully allows patients whose work or family demands makes it hard to free up time during normal office hours to get treated. On the other, the US being the world capital of rentierism, it isn’t hard to anticipate that telemedicine will often provide lower service levels with no corresponding price reductions.

Below, we feature a post by a clinician who confirms our concerns. He had advocated telemedicine in the pre-Covid era. He warns that telemedicine is creating cookie-cutter by design “doc in a box” practices, for instance restricting participating MDs in the tests they can run.

It had not occurred to me that the telemedicine services provided to MDs would be anything more than established MDs consulting with patients by phone, as they routinely did in Australia in the early 2000s, and/or getting a secure videoconference line. Earlier this year, in Alabama, my mother’s crusty MD reluctantly did her annual exam by phone. But my regular doctor in New York insisted on video (I needed an office visit for her to consider giving me a new scrip), claiming it was necessary to be “HIPPA compliant.” That made me wonder if she thought she was required to retain a recording. I didn’t find that acceptable (I also generally hate videoconferencing with the passion of a thousand suns) and flew to New York instead (yes, I am insanely protective of my medical privacy).1 This discussion of the tech of telemedicine makes me think I am less nuts than I did before.

This post doesn’t acknowledge another pet peeve: in Australia, telemedicine in the form of phone consults for established patients was well established. It was also understood to be a supplement to office visits, not a substitute for them, and priced accordingly.

Due to Covid-19, CMS mandated payment parity for telemedicine visits. This is unfortunate since for some, perhaps arguably many types of concerns, a telemedicine session simply cannot allow for as much diagnosis as a live visit. The doctor cannot listen to your lungs and heart, stick a light in your ear, see your skin color accurately, poke your belly if it needs poking, or examine body parts that are not behaving normally. And if the doctor provides a treatment, it would seem probable that at least for some patients, the placebo effect would be reduced.

In other words, a practice that ought to be a boon looks set to become a vehicle for crapification. And the US medical system is pretty crappy to begin with.

By Cetona. Originally published at Health Care Renewal

1. Introduction. This post might just as easily be entitled “tales from the crypt,” so far down the netherworld chute have American public health and medical workers been plunged. Nowadays whenever I speak to fellow physicians and tell them I’ve moved on from my own front line patient care, we exchange these utterances: they say “congratulations, I’m envious” and I say “my condolences.” But the topic for today is more focal: telemedicine in the Age of Coronavirus.

Telemedicine, or “telemed,” doesn’t quite fit neatly into my ongoing series on why my dander’s up. So for now let’s set it aside and come back another time. It turns out that telemed—remote diagnosis and treatment using telecoms—is, like so many other innovations in health care, a two-edged sword. Let’s look at it and see if we can come up with provisional answers to what, exactly, it means, beyond fear of face-to-face, to see its use soaring these days.

I’ve observed telemedicine now in a number of settings—lots of testimonials from colleagues, family, friends, and in just one instance myself as patient. Most of this is quite recent, for reasons we’ll get to. I’ve never practiced it, never had time on my schedule to Zoom into some patient’s bedroom. That’s just an artifact of the timing. But I used to teach about it. And now it’s arrived like gangbusters after languishing for decades in the ever-hopeful hearts of long standing organizations (here, here) devoted in part or in full to digital medicine.

The “why” for this onrush of telemedicine exposure is an easy one. In the Before Times, we had reimbursement problems that impeded it. All the other barriers, by, say 2010, were secondary. All our clocks now have a thick black line between BC and AD. Before Coronavirus versus After Donald.

Back in the BC, we can’t get it paid for. Now, in the almost-AD: HHS rushes out new emergency regs, enabling telemed. With the pandemic, the new regs arrived just when providers, deprived of adequate PPE and in some cases a big chunk of salary, really needed the option. Whether they actually approved of it or not, different story. Necessity is the mother. All the rest is dross.

The above remarks set the stage. We just need to remind ourselves in passing: there’s just not much scientific evidence for this technology’s safety or efficacy. Rather, like so much else in digital medicine, telemed is probably here to stay because of one or another regulatory or epidemiologic crisis. Contrariwise, it’s not an evidence-based imperative, at least not with respect to clinical results. For providers, of course, it may well mean survival, a different story.

So until we get more convincing science, here, for this blog’s intrepid readers, are some narrative bits and bites to chew on: telemedicine, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

by Yves Smith, Cetona, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

[ed. This tracks with my experience these days, not just with telemedicine, but with hospitals in general (and doc-in-a-box staff that appear to want as little interaction with patients as possible). I get the sense that I'm just a billable code, their main priority being moving patients through the system).]

Winged Foot Golf Course Flyover

[ed. The US Open starts today. Expect the usual carnage.]

via:

via: lost

In America’s Blood

Twenty years ago​,​ the National Rifle Association didn’t know what to do after a mass shooting. But it now has the protocol down: it’s had, after all, plenty of practice. First: keep quiet. Cancel events and interviews, stop updating Twitter and Facebook. If cornered, say: ‘This is a time to mourn, not to play politics.’ Or: ‘The anti-gun zealots are exploiting a tragedy to advance their anti-freedom agenda.’ Meanwhile, NRA fundraisers will be trying to reach all their five million members to let them know that this time it’s serious, the liberals are coming for their guns, and they need to dig deep and donate whatever can be spared to ‘freedom’s safest place’, the NRA. On their own, the members will have already started calling politicians to demand that they not back down on gun freedom: 60 per cent of Americans, when surveyed, are in favour of stricter gun control laws, but you wouldn’t know it from a congressman’s call log. On its website, the NRA advises members not to threaten the politicians they telephone, and to be careful about identifying themselves as members of the NRA, since ‘unfortunately, many anti-gun politicians are under the misguided impression that NRA members only say what NRA tells them to say.’

What the NRA no longer does after a mass shooting is grovel before Congress, as its flustered head did after Columbine in 1999, when – was that shame? – he testified that anyone who buys a gun should have to pass a background check (he took that back a few years later), and agreed that guns shouldn’t be allowed in schools (he took that back too). With reporters, silence and deflection tend to work well enough, but if a particular mass shooting seems to be getting more attention than usual, or if even Republican allies start suggesting that maybe they’re not completely unsympathetic to ‘some common-sense gun laws’, then the NRA takes to the airwaves, ideally with an attractive young mother as its spokeswoman. She’ll say: gun control doesn’t work, it just keeps law-abiding folks from protecting their children, since criminals will always find a way to get guns. In Chicago they have some of the strictest gun laws in the nation, and how’s that working out for them? More than one hundred Americans are killed every day by cars – will you outlaw cars too? Will you force women to defend themselves against murderers and rapists with knives? And she’ll quote Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s leader, who likes to say that ‘the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.’ In 2012, after 26 people (twenty of them six and seven-year-olds) were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School, he suggested that every school in America should have ‘an extraordinary corps’ of armed citizens patrolling the halls. After all, Obama’s daughters were protected with guns: ‘Are the president’s kids more important than yours?’ an NRA ad asked. In 2018, after 17 people were killed at a high school in Parkland, Florida, LaPierre said the solution was to arm teachers. News stations followed by holding debates on whether teachers should pack heat, with federal funds allocated to shooting lessons. Never mind gun control. The next month, the NRA broke a 15-year fundraising record.

LaPierre likes to say that shooting is in America’s blood: it’s what Americans have always done, with the right to own guns ‘granted by God to all Americans as our American birthright’. But as Frank Smyth points out in his new history of the NRA, the organisation was actually founded because a group of Union Army veterans were dismayed by how few Americans actually knew how to shoot, particularly compared with Europeans. According to one of its founders, George Wingate of the New York National Guard, ‘the Civil War had demonstrated with bloody clarity that soldiers who could not shoot straight were of little value. This situation, and the general ignorance concerning marksmanship which I found among our soldiers during the Civil War, appalled me.’ He assumed that Americans would eventually be drawn into a European war in which they would be outmatched, particularly against the Prussians with their superior rear-loading rifles. (...)

John F. Kennedy’s assassination was harder for the NRA to explain away: the president’s motorcade was hardly lacking in good guys with guns, and Lee Harvey Oswald had ordered his cheap Carcano infantry rifle, surplus from the Italian military, from the back pages of the NRA’s monthly magazine, American Rifleman. In response, the NRA’s then head, Franklin Orth, came out in favour of limiting mail-order gun purchases and did little to prevent the Gun Control Act of 1968, which ‘banned the interstate retail sale of guns, prohibited all sales to juveniles, convicted felons and individuals adjudicated as being mentally unsound’. It was far more anaemic than the bill that Lyndon Johnson had hoped to pass, but it enraged a faction of NRA hardliners, who would succeed in overturning the law prohibiting interstate sales. One board member, Neal Knox, argued that Kennedy’s assassination might have been the work of gun control activists trying to bring about disarmament – a commie plot to make Americans easier to subdue. The NRA split between members who bought their guns for hunting and target practice – and who wanted to move the organisation’s headquarters to Colorado Springs, where they would concentrate on gun safety and environmental awareness – and those who bought their guns for self-defence, and had no interest in ever leaving Washington. You know who won. (...)

There​ are probably 400 million ‘civilian owned’ firearms in the US, and (although there is of course no registry) 43 per cent of Americans report that they live in a home with a gun, even if they don’t own one themselves. Those numbers are going up. Anxiety about the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests have done more for gun sales than the 9/11 attacks, and even more than the election of Barack Obama and the Sandy Hook shootings, when Americans thought that guns were about to become illegal and that they needed to stock up. Not all states require that all gun purchasers undergo background checks – loopholes abound – but whenever a person does buy a gun from a licensed dealer, the FBI dutifully performs one. The checks usually take a few minutes and are hardly intrusive, but at least they can be counted. Last year, they performed 28.4 million checks; by the end of August this year, they were already at 25.9 million. (Just wait until Christmas sales are taken into account.) In January and February, according to a Brookings study, Americans were buying between 80,000 and 100,000 guns a day. In March, after Trump declared a state of emergency, it went up to 176,000 a day. When George Floyd was killed at the end of May, sales went up again. Smith & Wesson had its best quarter of all time; gun store owners say they’re having trouble keeping ammunition in stock. The NRA isn’t wrong to take some of the credit: they successfully lobbied governors – and, when lobbying failed, filed lawsuits – to have gun shops classified as ‘essential businesses’, to stop them having to close during lockdowns. What could be more ‘essential’, the NRA argued, than the ability to defend your life? Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, pushed back, and eventually prevailed in the courts; other Democratic governors caved in. The Republicans had needed little persuading in the first place. (...)

Trump admits that he’s been bought – ‘a lot of the people who put me where I am are strong supporters of the Second Amendment’ – and says that the best way to prevent gun violence is to build mental institutions (since ‘mental illness and hatred pull the trigger, not the gun’). But financially, Trump’s victory was a disaster for the NRA: members became complacent with an ally in the White House, and dues dropped by $35 million. (‘We have an unusual business model,’ one board member told the New York Times. ‘The more successful we are, the less money we make.’) In the midterm elections, for the first time, the NRA was outspent by gun control advocacy groups, and they’ve had layoffs. All this has made them increasingly dependent on large donations from gun manufacturers, sometimes estimated to be at least 60 per cent of their income. It’s not just American money: a quarter of the guns in the US were made in Europe, and Austrians (Glock), Germans (SIG Sauer) and Italians (Beretta) have donated millions of dollars to the NRA in order to protect their biggest market. The interests of gun sellers and gun buyers often overlap, but not always. I used to wonder why the NRA seemed to value the right to carry a concealed gun over an openly carried one, until it was pointed out to me (in Tom Diaz’s excellent book The Last Gun: How Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans and What It Will Take to Stop It) that gun manufacturers often make more money from accessories – waistband holsters, ankle holsters, jackets with special pockets, vegan leather handbags with gun compartments – than from the guns themselves.

But above all, the NRA protects its own interests. Smyth’s book only touches on the Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), which established for the first time that Americans have a right under the Second Amendment to keep guns for self-defence in their homes. Smyth mentions that the majority opinion partly relied on the work of a legal academic who’d been on the payroll of the NRA – a canny investment. But Adam Winkler’s more comprehensive (also more engaging) book, Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America (2011), offers a persuasive account of the NRA’s efforts to prevent libertarian gun rights activists from pursuing Heller all the way to the Supreme Court – not because the NRA thought they’d lose, or that another case would be stronger, but because they feared that a stunning legal victory would depress membership dues. As a former NRA lobbyist told Winkler, ‘nothing keeps the fundraising machine whirring more effectively than convincing the faithful that they’re a pro-gun David facing an invincible anti-gun Goliath.’ And the NRA needed the money – not only for its voter registration drives. The New York attorney general, Letitia James, alleges that NRA executives, principally LaPierre, have been diverting ‘charitable assets for their own benefit and interests’. The lawsuit she filed in August is a 168-page chronicle of lives well lived: private jets, yachts, safaris; $12,332.75 of NRA money for LaPierre’s niece to spend eight nights at a Four Seasons resort; $16,359 for hair and make-up artists for LaPierre’s wife. A senior assistant put her son’s wedding on expenses.

by Deborah Friedell, LRB |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

Why Everything Is Sold Out

All summer, I tried to buy things, and mostly I failed. I signed up for two separate wait lists for out-of-stock black spandex bike shorts, which I needed for the Peloton I had bought, itself back-ordered for two months. I also added my email address to a wait list for curtain rods, remembering how the shifting fall sun broils the kitchen table that’s now my office. When word from Bed Bath & Beyond came weeks later to let me know they were back on sale, I was too slow on the draw—they sold out about as swiftly as hand sanitizer did in March. Over the weekend, I believed I had acquired replacements for my worn-out bed linens, but my email receipt contained a confession: The sheets would arrive, at best, around Halloween.

When I asked Steve Rowen, a managing partner at the retail-analytics firm Retail Systems Research, if these inventory problems were as widespread as my personal frustrations suggested, he had to stifle a laugh before answering me: “Absolutely.” Similar problems currently dog all kinds of retailers, and they have for months. At the beginning of the pandemic, when most people assumed that things would be back to normal in weeks or months, retailers and manufacturers “weren’t really in a hurry to shift gears and make a lot of expensive decisions,” Rowen said. “I don’t think anyone really had any indication as to how long this pandemic and its effects were going to be felt.” (...)

Since millions of Americans started spending a lot more time at home, many of them have been making very similar decisions about how to do so comfortably. According to Rowen, that has helped create supply issues in all sorts of categories: food, cleaning products, medication, exercise equipment, outdoor gear, furniture and home decor, renovation supplies, home electronics, office supplies, loungewear, and beyond. At the start of the year, no one could know that standing desks and kiddie pools would become hot commodities. But this far into the pandemic, shortages aren’t persisting only because of what’s suddenly trendy.

To understand why you still can’t find your preferred migraine medication or your usual brand of dog food, you have to start with where those products begin: manufacturing. Long before most Americans had a hint of the disaster to come, the inventory of many products began to thin behind the scenes. The United States imported more than half a trillion dollars’ worth of products from China in 2018, about 20 percent of the country’s total annual imports. When China went into lockdown in late January to stanch the spread of the coronavirus, the country’s enormous manufacturing sector screeched to a halt. That paralyzed the flow of all kinds of things into the United States—strollers, gym clothes, Nintendo Switch consoles, and crucial components for products assembled in other countries, such as textiles for clothing and parts for cellphones and computers. When those components disappeared, some assembly lines in countries such as Vietnam and South Korea went idle, compounding the crisis in the U.S.

Brands and retailers that relied on imports from China or elsewhere in Asia began considering suppliers in Latin America, Europe, or the U.S. to pick up the slack. But as those searches got under way, the coronavirus spread to more countries, shutting down many manufacturing facilities around the world, at least temporarily.

Then, having controlled the coronavirus, Chinese manufacturing rebounded. “As soon as China was up and running, and the United States’ manufacturing facilities weren’t, we started importing more goods from China than ever before,” Rowen said. But an elevated reliance on things produced half a world away comes with some risks. Goods make their way from Asia to the U.S. on massive cargo ships, and the shipping industry is barrelling toward a labor crisis: Hundreds of thousands of workers are currently stranded at sea because their home countries’ pandemic travel restrictions prevent them from coming ashore. Abandoning them on ships threatens to collapse global shipping by exhausting and abusing workers currently at sea while driving those waiting for work to other industries. Meanwhile, the rest of the world—which supplies the remaining 80 percent of imported goods sold in the U.S.—has yet to return to full manufacturing capacity.

No matter where a product is made, it has to be packaged before it can be shipped or stocked on a shelf, creating yet another obstacle. Plastic bottles and pouches, cardboard boxes, and aluminum cans all have to be manufactured too, and often with expensive machinery that can make only a very specific type of bag or bottle. It doesn’t matter how much hand sanitizer you make if you don’t have the right thing to put it in. The consumer supply of flour is still recovering, in part because mills spent months fighting over a finite supply of the small paper sacks it’s packaged in. There was always plenty of flour, but someone baking sourdough for the first time doesn’t want one of the giant bags that typically get sent to restaurants.

Once products are manufactured, packaged, and imported, they still have to be distributed to warehouses and stores, which has become its own bottleneck. The pandemic has made long-haul trucking more dangerous and difficult—in the spring, truckers lacked protective gear and sanitizing equipment, and many of the places where they’d normally get a night’s rest or a hot meal had closed due to lockdowns. Since then, demand for truckers’ services has surged along with demand for certain types of products, and some trucking companies have capitalized on it by switching on short notice to routes that pay better, adding even more chaos to the scramble to get sought-after products onto shelves. Even when items make it onto a truck, more slowdowns await: More trucks are arriving than warehouses and stores usually deal with, and they have only so many loading docks and so many hours in a day.

by Amanda Mull, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Getty/The Atlantic

Australian Football League: What Is It?

[ed. My buddy was telling me about this and it sounded crazy. It is.]