How Amazon Destroys the Intellectual Justifications for Capitalism

Amazon doesn’t fit comfortably within the free-market fable of how capitalism is supposed to operate. We are, in theory, supposed to get freedom, competition, the reward of innovation, the elimination of all-powerful centralized bureaucracy. But consider this recent Wall Street Journal report on how Amazon destroys its competitors. Essentially, because Amazon is gigantic and has vast sums of money at its disposal, it does not need to “innovate” the same way smaller companies do. It can simply lift the innovations of others, and because it can undercut their prices, it can put them out of business. The Journal cites a number of examples. Amazon “cloned a line of camera tripods that a small outside company sold on Amazon’s site,” copying the whole design and even having the components produced by the same manufacturer. Then Amazon kicked the original company off its marketplace so that it could no longer sell its tripods. Amazon did the same thing for “Allbirds Inc., the maker of popular shoes using natural and recycled materials,” with Amazon last year launching “a shoe called Galen that looks nearly identical to Allbirds’ bestseller—without the environmentally friendly materials and selling for less than half the price.”

So if you are an inventor, and you come up with some wonderful new widget, and Amazon is impressed by the number of widgets you sell, well, you can expect to see the Amazon Basic Widget popping up for half the price of yours soon. (And to find yourself banned from selling on Amazon.) The Journal reports that Amazon is even willing to take a loss in order to drive others out of business; when it decided to take on diaper manufacturer Quidsi, Amazon was at one point “losing $7 for every box of diapers” it sold. An internal email said that “we need to match pricing on these guys no matter what the cost.” Quidsi “unravel[ed]” and was forced to sell itself to Amazon.

Your first reaction might be to think “well, Amazon can’t just copy products, what about patents?” But Amazon is perfectly willing to break any law it can get away with breaking; even if a small manufacturer technically has a valid legal claim against Amazon, who wants to take on one of the most powerful legal teams in the world? In the Quidsi case, the Journal quotes a Quidsi board member’s flat statement that Amazon’s actions were illegal but that “we would be bankrupt” by the time they had concluded a legal fight with Amazon. (And of course, Amazon spends a fortune lobbying to change any laws that might place it at a disadvantage.)

Amazon’s marketplace has become so large that it is very difficult for manufacturers not to offer products through it. But when they do, they have to agree to Amazon’s terms, and Amazon’s control over who gets to sell on their platform means they can extract nearly any concessions they like, including getting access to the kinds of information that help them launch competitor products. So manufacturers are in a bind: they can’t not sell on Amazon, but if they sell on Amazon, Amazon will try to steal their ideas and destroy them. If Amazon is willing to take a $7 loss per sale, who on earth could compete?

I once wrote a short hypothetical called “The Infinitely Rich Man” that was designed to show how large amounts of concentrated wealth can come with almost limitless power to shape the economy according to your whims. If someone has near infinite riches, and decided they would like to destroy your life, there are nearly endless ways they could do it, because money is power. Amazon, which has this kind of nearly “endless” resources, could, if it wanted to, destroy pretty much anything you love. If they wanted to put your beloved corner coffeeshop out of business, they could do it. If they wanted to buy your whole neighborhood and flatten it, they could.

When a corporation becomes this powerful, all of the stories told about the “freedom” of the market begin to fall apart. This is because Amazon, as its unstoppable growth continues, is becoming more and more like the government in the scale of its power. Corporations are already like “private governments”—going to work is like entering a dictatorial microstate. Amazon’s control of the marketplace is as if a private company owned all of the roads, rails, and airports in the United States. Such a company would have almost endless power to make coercive demands on anyone wanting to engage in commerce. They would be a “dictatorship within a democracy.” 

Jeff Bezos’ vision for Amazon is megalomaniacal, and one company engineer has observed Bezos aspires to be the 21st century’s Alexander the Great. Bezos does not disguise the fact that there is no end to his ambition: he quite seriously wants to establish giant privatized space colonies, presumably under his sole control. We can see here how, if a single entity “wins the market,” eliminating all competition, the distinction between capitalism and dictatorship ceases to be very meaningful. A hierarchical organization exerts coercive control through its monopoly on necessary resources; the fact that it is “private” rather than “public” just means that it is free of any democratic accountability.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: Inside the Whale: An Interview with an Anonymous Amazonian (Logic).]

Seiichi Hayashi aka 林静 一 (Japanese, b. 1945, Manchuria, China) - Feeding the Cat
via:

Hobbies That Have Brought You Joy

Are there hobbies that don’t bring joy?   [ed. Apparently. One commenter mentioned slot machines and sudoku.]

In this sixth installment of end-of-2020 positive notes, let’s talk about hobbies that have helped us get through this crazy year. I started the following a bit before the pandemic, but it proved to be the perfect distraction (except for those beginning months of global postal confusion).

A little less than a year ago, I signed up for two postcard exchange Web sites: Postcrossing and Postcard United. “Exchange” is not entirely the right word for it since you are sending postcards to people different from the ones sending you postcards so it’s exchange in a global sense, but not concerning the specific items. (In reality, on occasion such an exchange does happen, but it’s rare.) You might think the model wouldn’t work. After all, there is no direct incentive to sending out something nice since the person you are sending to is not the one sending you a card. Do people put any care into sending thoughtful cards then given that there is no obvious incentive to doing so? It turns out many do. On the user profile, it’s possible to signal what is of interest and many of the cards I’ve received (over 200 at this point) have addressed my stated likes such as cards (and stamps!) of turtles and modern and/or local art. Similarly, I try my best to send something the person has requested and have amassed quite a postcard collection to assist me in this.

With all the distancing that 2020 has involved, it’s been genuinely lovely to connect with people from across the globe. There are a great number of participants in East Asia, I’ve sent numerous cards to and received many cards from China, as well as Malaysia and Indonesia. The hobby seems to be very big in Germany and Russia as well. Some of this is just a numbers game (countries with large populations), but it doesn’t seem to be entirely about that. Of course, the activity comes with its set of costs not least of which is the postage and so this will pose constraints on who can participate. There are accounts in places like Germany with more than 10,000 cards sent and received, in such instances we’re talking some major financial investment in the hobby. Not that many other hobbies don’t come with costs, but I do find that interesting.

The sites put limits on how many cards you can have traveling at any one time, which can be a bit frustrating if you’re ready to jump in full speed, but is also realistic from the site’s perspective to establish that a new member is serious and will continue sending out cards. This is why one would end up joining more than one site, by the way, that way you can have more cards traveling at the same time (and thus also be receiving more).

Through this hobby, I’ve learned some interesting tidbits about philately around the globe. I was not aware, for example, of so-called maxicards (examples here through an image search). These are special issue stamps with corresponding cards with the stamp on the front side of the matching postcard. They tend to look wonderful and I’ve enjoyed getting a few from various corners of the globe.

by Eszter Hargittai, Crooked Timber |  Read more:

Image: via

O-zōni

O-zōni (New Year's Soup)

Images: markk
[ed. New Year's morning, 2021. See also: Making mochi (YouTube).]

Adrian Tomine, New Yorker

via:

The Year in Quarantine Viewing

I’ve noted before that the past few years have often felt to me like that one postmodern theory course I took back in my undergrad days, where the professor explained how the spectacle of late-capitalist media has irrevocably divided us from our authentic experiences, turning us into passive viewers rather than active participants in our own lives. Even before the spring, reality under the Trump Administration had become so appallingly unbelievable—and, when not that, so amusingly surreal—that simply existing in it was like wandering through a waking dream in which nothing could be truly grasped, only observed. This sense was exacerbated by the pandemic: now that most of us were no longer leaving our homes, it was impossible to be anything other than a dazed spectator, and I recall those early days of quarantine viewing as feeling not quite real. Whether scripted or unscripted, whatever we watched converged to create a new genre: unreality TV.

In one widely viewed White House press briefing, in April, Trump outlined the government’s plan for battling the coronavirus. The usual props were there: the President wore a sombre navy suit and a striped blue-and-white tie; a small American flag was pinned to his lapel, and another, larger flag was positioned behind him. And yet, as I watched, I wondered if I was tripping. “I see disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute, and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning,” Trump said, suggesting, incredibly, that one treatment for the coronavirus might involve absorbing bleach. (Later, responding to the general alarm raised by his comment, Trump said that he was speaking “sarcastically.”) The outside world, with its people and relationships and rules, was now gone, and what was left was here before us, onscreen. What could we do with this sort of spectacle but sit back, openmouthed, and watch, frightened, but also mildly entertained?

Another kind of fever dream that many of us shared in the early days of quarantine was the Netflix docuseries “Tiger King,” which followed a group of vivid, unstable characters involved in the shadowy world of big-cat husbandry. At the heart of the seven-part series was a convoluted feud between Joe Exotic, a flamboyant, mullet-sporting Oklahoman zookeeper, and a goggle-eyed Florida animal rescuer named Carole Baskin. It débuted on March 20th, in tandem with the onset of the pandemic in America, and, within a month of its première, the program had been sampled by a whopping sixty-four million households worldwide. “Joe Exotic will go down as the man who singlehandedly helped us get through Covid-19,” one Twitter user opined at the time, and, indeed, not since the heyday of network television had I experienced such a collective viewing experience, a water-cooler conversation piece that, in the absence of an actual water cooler, circled around online memes, Instagram posts, and TikToks. “Tiger King,” at least momentarily, blocked the large-scale trauma we were all experiencing by distracting us with a smaller tale of American chaos, greed, and foolishness.

Like Trump’s press briefings, the series didn’t feel strictly real, nor was it scripted entertainment. If anything, it was suggestive of a new permeability between the world of documentary filmmaking and that of reality TV, also evident in other recent popular docuseries, such as “Cheer” and “The Vow.” As Kathryn VanArendonk wrote in a piece for Vulture, documentaries tend to first find their subjects and then seek out a narrative—shaping and prodding it only minimally—while reality television determines a narrative first and then populates it with eminently proddable, shapeable subjects. “Tiger King” ’s outlandish personalities, melodramatic plotlines, and surprise twists made the docuseries appear less Frederick Wiseman and more “Duck Dynasty” or “Intervention.” (...)

On the night of November 3rd, we sat down to watch what was arguably the greatest instance of reality TV this year—a gripping competition with unduly high stakes, and a rash, horribly behaved returning champion. Who would win America? The Presidential election lasted for several days, and with the results trickling in, ever so slowly, to our screens, as the very real labor of vote counting took place on the ground, it was an almost interminable viewing experience. We refreshed and scrolled and flipped through the channels endlessly, waiting to find out would happen next.

When the results did arrive, Trump’s refusal to accept his loss to Joe Biden was, as David Remnick noted, a continuation of the President’s familiar assault on truth, his stubborn upholding of what Kellyanne Conway had once dubbed “alternative facts.” In reality-TV terms, what Trump wanted was, essentially, to be granted a better edit, actual reality be damned. He was not just our reality-TV President; he was our alternate-reality-TV President. He was this show’s main star, its forever Survivor: How could he be eliminated now? As I watched this drama unfold in slow motion, I was reminded of an incident in July, in which Trump bragged to Fox News of his supposed facility in passing a mental acuity test, telling an interviewer that not only was he able to memorize the words “Person, woman, man, camera, TV,” but he could repeat them in order. These words were apropos. “Person, woman, man, camera, TV”: not just the building blocks of the Trump Administration but those of the reality medium as well.

In the new era of unreality TV, however, we might no longer have a need for reality television itself, which is perhaps why this was also the year in which it was announced that the E! network’s “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” would be coming to an end after twenty seasons and fourteen years. The series, which has sparked several spinoffs, multiple smartphone games, a robust array of products, and even more gossip scandals, has molded the family at its center into a kind of monolith of the reality-TV world, an always-ready-for-a-closeup hydra that stands shoulder to shoulder perhaps only with the President in creating the texture of life around us. In recent seasons, the show itself has seemed almost beside the point, its characters existing independently of its contrived story lines, surfing the ever-roiling waters of Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and the Daily Mail, like iPhone-scrolling Venuses on half shells.

Without the “KUWTK” anchor, the family will finally emerge free, now able to compete with its peers in the expanded reality world, a sort of “Garden of Earthly Delights” that the Kardashians’ early innovations in obsessive self-documentation gave birth to: 2020 protagonists like Chris Cuomo and Carole Baskin, or Hilaria Baldwin, the wife of Alec—whose response on Instagram to suggestions that she had a disingenuous Spanish accent slipped in just under the wire in December—or the surprise TikTok star Nathan Apodaca. In late September, Apodaca, a warehouse worker from Idaho, filmed himself skateboarding while swigging from a jug of Ocean Spray cranberry juice, as Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” lilted in the background. The video went viral, reaching twenty-seven million views by October 4th. The song, meanwhile, which last charted in 1977, reëntered the Billboard Top Ten a week later. When asked about the popularity of the video, Apodaca said, “There’s just too much chaos now. Everybody just needed something to relax to and vibe out with.”

by Naomi Fry, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Dan Ender, Queens Gambit

JC Götting, Sundays are the worst

via:

Top 25 News Photos of 2020 (The Atlantic)

LNU Lightning Complex fires burn in Napa County, California, on August 18, 2020
Image: Noah Berger/AP

The Plague Year

The mistakes and the struggles behind America’s coronavirus tragedy.  [ed. Must read.]

A vaccine trains the immune system to recognize a virus in order to counter it. Using imaging technology, structural biologists can intuit the contours of a virus and its proteins, then reproduce those structures to make more effective vaccines. McLellan said of his field, “From the structure, we can determine function—it’s similar to how seeing a car, with four wheels and doors, implies something about its function to transport people.”

The surface of an RSV particle features a protein, designated F. On the top of the protein, a spot called an epitope serves as a landing pad for antibodies, allowing the virus to be neutralized. But something extraordinary happens when the virus invades a cell. The F protein swells like an erection, burying the epitope and effectively hiding it from antibodies. Somehow, McLellan had to keep the F protein from getting an erection.

Until recently, one of the main imaging tools used by vaccinologists, the cryogenic electron microscope, wasn’t powerful enough to visualize viral proteins, which are incredibly tiny. “The whole field was referred to as blobology,” McLellan said. As a work-around, he developed expertise in X-ray crystallography. With this method, a virus, or even just a protein on a virus, is crystallized, then hit with an X-ray beam that creates a scatter pattern, like a shotgun blast; the structure of the crystallized object can be determined from the distribution of electrons. McLellan showed me an “atomistic interpretation” of the F protein on the RSV virus—the visualization looked like a pile of Cheetos. It required a leap of imagination, but inside that murky world Graham and McLellan and their team manipulated the F protein, essentially by cloning it and inserting mutations that kept it strapped down. McLellan said, “There’s a lot of art to it.”

In 2013, Graham and McLellan published “Structure-Based Design of a Fusion Glycoprotein Vaccine for Respiratory Syncytial Virus,” in Science, demonstrating how they had stabilized the F protein in order to use it as an antigen—the part of a vaccine that sparks an immune response. Antibodies could now attack the F protein, vanquishing the virus. Graham and McLellan calculated that their vaccine could be given to a pregnant woman and provide enough antibodies to her baby to last for its first six months—the critical period. The paper opened a new front in the war against infectious disease. In a subsequent paper in Science, the team declared that it had established “clinical proof of concept for structure-based vaccine design,” portending “an era of precision vaccinology.” The RSV vaccine is now in Phase III human trials.

In 2012, the MERS coronavirus emerged in Saudi Arabia. It was extremely dangerous to work with: a third of infected people died. Ominously, it was the second novel coronavirus in ten years. Coronaviruses have been infecting humans for as long as eight centuries, but before SARS and MERS they caused only the common cold. It’s possible that, in the distant past, cold viruses were as deadly as covid, and that humans developed resistance over time.

Like RSV, coronaviruses have a protein that elongates when invading a cell. “It looks like a spike, so we just call it Spike,” Graham said. Spike was large, flexible, and encased in sugars, which made it difficult to crystallize, so X-ray crystallography wasn’t an option. Fortunately, around 2013, what McLellan calls a “resolution revolution” in cryogenic electron microscopy allowed scientists to visualize microbes down to one ten-billionth of a metre. Finally, vaccinologists could truly see what they were doing.

Using these high-powered lenses, Graham and McLellan modified the MERS spike protein, creating a vaccine. It worked well in mice. They were on the way to making a version for humans, but, after MERS had killed hundreds of people, it petered out as an immediate threat to humans—and the research funding petered out, too. Graham was dismayed, realizing that such a reaction was shortsighted, but he knew that his energies hadn’t been wasted. About two dozen virus families are known to infect humans, and the weapon that Graham’s lab had developed to conquer RSV and MERS might be transferrable to many of them.

What was the best way to deliver a modified protein? Graham knew that Moderna, a biotech startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had encoded a modified protein on strips of genetic material known as messenger RNA. The company had never brought a vaccine to market, concentrating instead on providing treatments for rare disorders that aren’t profitable enough to interest Big Pharma. But Moderna’s messenger-RNA platform was potent.

In mice, Graham had proved the effectiveness of a structure-based vaccine for MERS and also for Nipah, a particularly fatal virus. In 2017, Graham arranged a demonstration project for pandemic preparedness, with mers and Nipah serving as prototypes for a human vaccine using Moderna’s messenger-RNA platform. Almost three years later, as he was preparing to begin human trials for the Nipah vaccine, he heard the news from Wuhan.

Graham called McLellan, who happened to be in Park City, Utah, getting snowboard boots heat-molded to his feet. McLellan had become a star in structural biology, and was recruited to the University of Texas at Austin, where he had access to cryogenic electron microscopes. It took someone who knew Graham well to detect the urgency in his voice. He suspected that China’s cases of atypical pneumonia were caused by a new coronavirus, and he was trying to obtain the genomic sequence. It was a chance to test their concept in a real-world situation. Would McLellan and his team like to get “back in the saddle” and help him create a vaccine?

“Of course,” McLellan said.

“We got the sequences Friday night, the tenth of January,” Graham told me. They had been posted online by the Chinese. “We woke up on the eleventh and started designing proteins.”

Nine days later, the coronavirus officially arrived in America.

Within a day after Graham and McLellan downloaded the sequence for sars-CoV-2, they had designed the modified proteins. The key accelerating factor was that they already knew how to alter the spike proteins of other coronaviruses. On January 13th, they turned their scheme over to Moderna, for manufacturing. Six weeks later, Moderna began shipping vials of vaccine for clinical trials. The development process was “an all-time record,” Graham told me. Typically, it takes years, if not decades, to go from formulating a vaccine to making a product ready to be tested: the process privileges safety and cost over speed.

Graham had to make several crucial decisions while designing the vaccine, including where to start encoding the spike-protein sequence on the messenger RNA. Making bad choices could render the vaccine less effective—or worthless. He solicited advice from colleagues. Everyone said that the final decisions were up to him—nobody had more experience in designing vaccines. He made his choices. Then, after Moderna had already begun the manufacturing process, the company sent back some preliminary data that made him fear he’d botched the job.

Graham panicked. Given his usual composure, Cynthia, his wife, was alarmed. “It was a crisis of confidence that I just never see in him,” she said. So much depended on the prompt development of a safe and effective vaccine. Graham’s lab was off to a fast start. If his vaccine worked, millions of lives might be spared. If it failed or was delayed, it would be Graham’s fault.

After the vaccine was tested in animals, it became clear that Graham’s design choices had been sound. The first human trial began on March 16th. A week later, Moderna began scaling up production to a million doses per month.

by Lawrence Wright, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Dr. Barney S. Graham, by Nikola Tamindzic for The New Yorker

[ed. It's all here, the big picture. The most complete accounting of the coronavirus pandemic, from beginning to present.]

Virus Disrupts College Football Playoffs Even Before Kickoff

The Sun Bowl, which has been played in El Paso, Texas, every year since 1935, is such a local institution that its organizers were determined to play the game even if teams arrived the day before the New Year’s Eve kickoff and attendance had to be capped at 8,600.

Then, as Thanksgiving arrived, the coronavirus pandemic overwhelmed their city and showed no signs of relenting.

“When our convention center was turned into a hospital and they were bringing in portable morgues to put bodies in and the National Guard was called in to help, we said do we really want to have a football game in this situation?” said Bernie Olivas, the executive director of the Sun Bowl. “Is it really worth it?”

After a few quick meetings, the answer became apparent. On Dec. 2 organizers canceled the game.

As the pandemic college football season limps to a conclusion — with players and coaches continually sidelined, games regularly wiped out, and nerves frayed after months of isolation and uncertainty — Olivas’s question is one that might be asked more broadly: Is it really worth it?

Consider where things stand: Sixteen bowl games (out of 44) have been canceled, including two this week that were called off days before they were to be played. More than two dozen schools — including Penn State, Southern California and Florida State — have chosen not to play, in some cases because players preferred to spend Christmas at home with families they had not seen since the summer. (This has left Mississippi State, at 3-7, in a bowl.)

The Rose Bowl — the bowl season’s marquee event, and this year the host of a playoff semifinal on Friday between Notre Dame (No. 4) and Alabama (No. 1) — has been moved from its home in Pasadena, Calif., to Arlington, Texas, after Notre Dame Coach Brian Kelly threatened a boycott. Kelly’s protest was because of health and safety — that state rules were so restrictive in California that his players’ families would not be able to attend the game

That won’t be a problem now; about 16,000 fans will be allowed to attend the game now that it’s in Texas.

by Billy Witz, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Michael Ainsworth/Associated Press

[ed. See also: Don’t Let the Games Begin, and Was the College Football Season Worth It? (NYT)]

Installations of Sound and Movement

Simple Objects Make Epic Art Installations of Sound and Movement (Aeon)

A Picture of Change for a World in Constant Motion

A Picture of Change for a World in Constant Motion (NYT)

"Today Hokusai stands — for Western audiences, and in Asia too — at the pinnacle of “Japanese art.” But if you told the grandees of 19th-century Edo that Hokusai would become the most famous artist in the country’s history, they’d never believe you.

Woodblock prints like his — called Ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world,” and turned out by the thousands in private printing houses — were considered vulgar, commercial images.

How does a single artist — of mass-market pictures, no less — come to embody a national culture?"
Image: Katsushika Hokusai: “Ejiri in Suruga Province.” It’s the 10th image in his renowned cycle “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.”

How China won 2020

China will end this year as the only major country in the world to see its economy grow rather than shrink.

Why it matters: China is operating from a position of great strength, with an economy expected to grow by 8.4% in 2021. If President-elect Joe Biden views China as a "serious competitor," then the competition will be fiercer during his presidency than at any point in history.

What they're saying: "However many times you hear the China growth story, it continues to have the capacity to shock and amaze," says Columbia historian Adam Tooze. "In scale and speed it is unlike any previous experience."

By the numbers: China's economy is projected to grow by 2% in 2020 and by another 8.4% in 2021. By the end of next year, its economy is expected to be 10.6% larger than it it was at the beginning of this year.

• By contrast, after shrinking by 3.6% this year and growing by a projected 4% next year, the U.S. economy is going to end 2021 just 0.25% larger than it was at the beginning of 2020.

What happened: Wuhan, China, was the first area in the world to get locked down in an attempt to get the coronavirus under control. Today, its nightclubs are packed with revelers, none of whom feel the need to wear masks or social distance.

The big picture: China managed to become a post-COVID economy within months of the virus striking.

• A Lancet study found that China made full and effective use of its centralized epidemic response system, as well as fresh memories of the SARS pandemic and a low incidence of nursing homes. 

• The lockdown, which lasted 76 days in Wuhan, was particularly strict, with only one member of each household permitted to leave home every couple of days for necessary supplies. It was also accompanied by an effective and efficient nationwide contact-tracing program. 

Today, China's factories are operating above capacity, Sinovation Ventures CEO Kai-Fu Lee tells Axios from Beijing. They're making up for pandemic-related reductions in manufacturing capacity in the rest of the world, as well as for the period of time they were shut down earlier this year.

by Felix Salmon, Axios | Read more:
Image: Eniola Odetunde/Axios

[ed. Can't be. We're No.1! Fake news!]

Mary Spender and Marty Schwartz

[ed. Since the pandemic began a lot of people have been rediscovering the guitar or deciding to give it a go for the first time. Here we have the incomparable Marty Schwartz giving a lesson to Mary Spender on how to properly use a pick (plectrum). Be sure to check out 0:55 - 2:45 for some cool riffs.]

via:

Dave Barry’s Year in Review 2020

And we thought past years were awful.

We’re trying to think of something nice to say about 2020.

Okay, here goes: Nobody got killed by the murder hornets. As far as we know.

That’s pretty much it.

In the past, writing these annual reviews, we have said harsh things about previous years. We owe those years an apology. Compared to 2020, all previous years, even the Disco Era, were the golden age of human existence.

This was a year of nonstop awfulness, a year when we kept saying it couldn’t possibly get worse, and it always did. This was a year in which our only moments of genuine, unadulterated happiness were when we were able to buy toilet paper.

Which is fitting, because 2020 was one long, howling, Category 5 crapstorm.

We sincerely don’t want to relive this year. But our job is to review it. If you would prefer to skip this exercise in masochism, we completely understand.

If, however, you wish, for some sick reason, to re-experience 2020, now is the time to put on your face mask, douse your entire body with hand sanitizer and then — to be safe — don a hazmat suit, as we look back at the unrelenting insanity of this hideous year, starting with …

[ed. JANUARY, FEBRUARY... (...)]

MARPRIL

… which starts off calmly enough, as the Democratic Party, desperate to find an alternative to 132-year-old White guy Bernie Sanders, settles on 132-year-old White guy Joe Biden, who cruises to a series of primary victories after replacing “No Malarkey” with a bold new campaign slogan: “Somewhat Alert at Times.” Biden is endorsed by most of his Democratic opponents, including “Mike” Bloomberg, who spent more than $500 million on his campaign, which seems like a lot of money until you consider that he won the American Samoa caucuses, narrowly edging out Tulsi Gabbard, who spent $13.50.

And then, sprinkled in amid all the political coverage, we begin to see reports that this coronavirus thing might be worse than we have been led to believe, although at first the authorities still seem to be saying that it’s basically the flu and there is no reason to panic, but all of a sudden there seems to be no hand sanitizer for sale anywhere, which makes some sense although there is also no toilet paper, as if people are planning to be pooping for weeks on end (ha), and then we learn that Tom Hanks — Tom Hanks! — has the virus, and now they’re saying it’s a lot worse than the flu and we need to wash our hands and not touch our faces and maintain a social distance of six feet and use an abundance of caution to flatten the curve (whatever “the curve” is), but they’re also saying we don’t need face masks no scratch that now they’re saying we DO need face masks but nobody HAS any face masks but hey here’s a funny meme about toilet paper but ohmigod look at these statistical disease models WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE but Trump says maybe this hydroxysomething medicine will work no it won’t work yes it will work no it won’t and now they’re saying there won’t be enough ventilators or hospital beds or PPE and Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx are saying everybody has to shelter at home or else WE ARE ALL DEFINITELY GOING TO DIE hey here’s another funny toilet-paper meme but seriously what is PPE and is that different from PPP and where will we get the ventilators and there won’t be enough hospital beds and there is still no hand sanitizer and I keep touching my face and they just canceled the NBA can they even DO that wait now they canceled ALL the sports and closed all the schools the colleges the stores the restaurants the bars the theaters the hair salons the parks the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and now they’re saying we need to stay at home for HOW LONG what about the toilet paper I can’t stop touching my damn face are you seriously telling me all this is because somebody ate a freaking bat maybe Amazon has toilet paper ohmigod they’re sold out too WHAT IS THE DEAL WITH THE TOILET PAPER not another Zoom meeting I am so tired of shouting at people in little boxes maybe I should take a shower but what’s the point hey here’s a bunch more funny memes ohmigod look at the stock market the price of oil maybe I’ll just take a peek at my 401(k) oh NOOOOOOOO and WHAT ARE PEOPLE DOING WITH ALL THIS TOILET PAPER and how long do we have to keep being abundantly cautious what did Trump say about the ventilators and what did Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci say about what Trump said about the ventilators and what did Trump say about what they said about what he said about the ventilators ventilators ventilators LOOK AT THESE MODELS WE ARE STILL GOING TO DIE but do we really want to go on living in a world where there’s no toilet paper and every single TV commercial sounds like “as we navigate these difficult times together, the National Association of Folding Chair Manufacturers wants you to know that we are committed to running these TV commercials with a somber narrator voice telling you how committed we are” and WHY WOULD SOMEBODY EAT A DAMN BAT these memes are getting old hey do you think that Carole Baskin woman actually fed her husband to a tiger maybe we should order pizza tonight wait I think we had pizza last night are you sure it’s Tuesday because it feels more like Thursday no please God not another freaking Zoom meeting stop already with the memes if the tiger ate her husband shouldn’t there be a skeleton somewhere are we flattening the curve yet Dr. Fauci Dr. Birx because we’re in a recession no wait maybe it’s a depression look at the unemployment numbers we are never going to recover from this if the virus doesn’t kill us we will starve to death we need more money from the government we need billions no we need trillions no we need MORE trillions where is this money coming from we have to open the economy up but if we do WE WILL ALL DIE hey I found some toilet paper oh no it’s one-ply which is basically the same as using your bare hand thank God I also found some hand sanitizer and speaking of good news Bernie Sanders is endorsing Joe Biden so apparently they’re both still alive if I see one more meme I am going to puke in my face mask I’m afraid to get on a scale my thighs are basically two armadillo-sized wads of pizza dough hey Dr. Birx Dr. Fauci when will we have a vaccine when will we have herd immunity when can we go outside when can we go back to work what is the “new normal” good lord what did Trump say about disinfectants DON’T INJECT CLOROX YOU IDIOTS what about the food chain what about reinfection what about the second wave hey they’re showing the NFL draft and Georgia is opening the tattoo parlors and holy crap now it’s …

MAY

… and we are, as a nation, exhausted. We are literally sick and tired of the pandemic. But amid all the gloom, there is a ray of sunshine: As we go through this harrowing experience — affecting all Americans, in both red states and blue states — we are starting to realize that our common humanity is more important than our political differences.

Ha-ha! Seriously, we hate each other more than ever. We disagree about everything — when to reopen the economy, whether to wear masks, whether to go to the beach, whether it’s okay to say “China” — everything. Each side believes that it is motivated purely by reason, facts and compassion, and that the other side is evil and stupid and sincerely wants people to die. Every issue is binary: My side good, other side bad. There is no nuance, no open-mindedness, no discussion.

On the other hand, there is starting to be more toilet paper. (...)

Long term, the economic outlook remains troubling, with the U.S. economy being kept afloat mainly by consumers making monthly payments to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Disney Plus, CBS All Access, HBO Now, Peacock, HBO Max, Discovery Plus, Starz, Chickadee, Eyeballz, Amazon Super Deluxe, HBO Medium Rare, Chickadee Plus, Disney Extra Special, Amazon Supreme Unleaded, HBO Gluten Free and a bewildering array of other streaming services that consumers rarely watch but keep paying for because they can’t figure out how to cancel their subscriptions.

“These people are pumping millions of dollars a month into the economy,” states Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. “God help us if they ever remember their passwords.”

by Dave Barry, Desert News |  Read more:

Image: Brendan Smialowski, Getty Images via TNS

Best Bargain Wines From Costco

These are the best bargain wines from Costco (Seattle Times)

Image: Ken Lambert

[ed. Glad to see Cotes du Rhone Villages given the highest rating for a red ($7.99/bottle!). Sad to see it advertised (they ran out pretty quickly last year).]

via:

Dark Genies, Dark Horizons: The Riddle of Addiction

In 2014, Anthony Bourdain’s CNN show, Parts Unknown, travelled to Massachusetts. He visited his old haunts from 1972, when he had spent a high school summer working in a Provincetown restaurant, the now-shuttered Flagship on the tip of Cape Cod. “This is where I started washing dishes …where I started having pretensions of culinary grandeur,” Bourdain said in a wistful voiceover. For the swarthy, rail-thin dishwash - er-turned-cook, Provincetown was a “wonderland” bursting with sexual freedom, drugs, music, and “a joy that only came from an absolute certainty that you were invincible.” Forty years later, he was visiting the old Lobster Pot restaurant, cameras in tow, to share Portuguese kale soup with the man who still ran the place. 

Bourdain enjoyed a lot of drugs in the summer of 1972. He had already acquired a “taste for chemicals,” as he put it. The menu included marijuana, Quaaludes, cocaine, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, Seconal, Tuinal, speed, and codeine. When he moved to the Lower East Side of New York to cook profession - ally in 1980, the young chef, then 24, bought his first bag of heroin on the corner of Bowery and Rivington. Seven years later he managed to quit the drug cold turkey, but he spent several more years chasing crack cocaine. “I should have died in my twenties,” Bourdain told a journalist for Biography. 

By the time of his visit to Provincetown in 2014, a wave of painkillers had already washed over parts of Massachusetts and a new tide of heroin was rolling in. Bourdain wanted to see it for himself and traveled northwest to Greenfield, a gutted mill town that was a hub of opioid addiction. In a barebones meeting room, he joined a weekly recovery support group. Everyone sat in a circle sharing war stories, and when Bourdain’s turn came he searched for words to describe his attraction to heroin. “It’s like something was missing in me,” he said, “whether it was a self-image situation, whether it was a character flaw. There was some dark genie inside me that I very much hesitate to call a disease that led me to dope.” 

A dark genie: I liked the metaphor. I am a physician, yet I, too, am hesitant to call addiction a disease. While I am not the only skeptic in my field, I am certainly outnumbered by doctors, addiction professionals, treatment advocates, and researchers who do consider addiction a disease. Some go an extra step, calling addiction a brain disease. In my view, that is a step too far, confining addiction to the biological realm when we know how sprawling a phenomenon it truly is. I was reminded of the shortcomings of medicalizing addiction soon after I arrived in Ironton, Ohio where, as the only psychiatrist in town, I was asked whether I thought addiction was “really a disease. (...)

Addiction is powered by multiple intersecting causes — biological, psycho - logical, social, and cultural. Depending upon the individual, the influence of one or more of these dimensions may be more or less potent. Why, then, look for a single cause for a complicated problem, or prefer one cause above all the others? At every one of those levels, we can find causal elements that contribute to excessive and repeated drug use, as well as to strategies that can help bring the behavior under control. Yet today the “brain disease” model is the dominant interpretation of addiction.

I happened to have been present at a key moment in the branding of addiction as a brain disease. The venue was the second annual “Constituent Conference” convened in the fall of 1995 by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, or NIDA, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. More than one hundred substance-abuse experts and federal grant recipients had gathered in Chantilly, Virginia for updates and discussions on drug research and treatment. A big item on the agenda set by the NIDA’s director, Alan Leshner, was whether the assembled group thought the agency should declare drug addiction a disease of the brain. Most people in the room — all of whom, incidentally, relied heavily on NIDA-funding for their professional survival — said yes. Two years later Leshner officially introduced the concept in the journal : “That addiction is tied to changes in brain structure and function is what makes it, fundamentally, a brain disease.” Since then, NIDA’s concept of addiction as a brain disease has penetrated the far reaches of the addiction universe. The model is a staple of medical school education and drug counselor training and even figures in the anti-drug lectures given to high-school students. Rehab patients learn that they have a chronic brain disease. Drug czars under Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama have all endorsed the brain-disease framework at one time or another. From being featured in a major documentary on HBO, on talk shows and Law and Order, and on the covers of Time and Newsweek, the brain-disease model has become dogma — and like all articles of faith, it is typically believed without question. (...)

Thomas De Quincey consumed prodigious amounts of opium dissolved in alcohol and pronounced the drug a “panacea for all human woes.” For Anthony Bourdain, heroin and cocaine were panaceas, defenses against the dark genie that eventually rose up and strangled him to death in 2018. But not all addicts have a dark genie lurking inside them. Some seek a panacea for problems that crush them from the outside, tribulations of financial woes and family strain, crises of faith and purpose. In the modern opioid ordeal, these are Americans “dying of a broken heart,” in Bill Clinton’s fine words. “They’re the people that were raised to believe the American Dream would be theirs if they worked hard and their children will have a chance to do better — and their dreams were dashed disproportionally to the population as the whole.” He was gesturing toward whites between the ages of 45 and 54 who lack college degrees — a cohort whose life-expectancy at birth had been falling since 1999. They succumbed to “deaths of despair,” a term coined by the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton in 2015, brought on by suicide, alcoholism (specifically, liver disease), and drug overdoses. Overdoses account for the lion’s share. The white working class has been undermined by falling wages and the loss of good jobs which have “devastated the white working class,” the economists write, and “weakened the basic institutions of working-class life, including marriage, churchgoing, and community.” 

Looking far into the future, what so many of these low income, under-educated whites see are dark horizons. When communal conditions are dire and drugs are easy to get, epidemics can blossom. I call this dark horizon addiction. Just as dark genie addiction is a symptom of an embattled soul, dark horizon addiction reflects communities or other concentrations of people whose prospects are dim and whose members feel doomed. In Ironton, clouds started to gather on the horizon in the late 1960s. Cracks appeared in the town’s economic foundation, setting off its slow but steady collapse. 

Epidemics of dark horizon addiction have appeared under all earthly skies at one time or another. The London gin “craze” of the first half of the eighteenth century, for example, was linked to poverty, social unrest, and over-crowding. According to the historian Jessica Warner, the average adult in 1700 drank slightly more than a third of a gallon of cheap spirits over the course of a year; by 1729 it was slightly more than 1.3 gallons per capita, and hit 2.2 gallons in 1743.A century later, consump - tion had declined, yet gin was still “a great vice in England,” according to Charles Dickens. “Until you improve the homes of the poor, or persuade a half-famished wretch not to seek relief in the temporary oblivion of his own misery,” he wrote in the 1830s, “gin-shops will increase in number and splendor.” During and after the American Civil War, thousands of men needed morphine and opium to bear the agony of physical wounds. In his Medical Essays, the physician Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., a harsh critic of medication, excepted opium as the one medicine “which the Creator himself seems to prescribe.” The applications of opium extended to medicating grief. “Anguished and hopeless wives and mothers, made so by the slaughter of those who were dearest to them, have found, many of them, temporary relief from their sufferings in opium,” Horace B. Day, an opium addict himself, recorded in The Opium Habit in 1868. In the South, the spiritual dislocation was especially profound, no doubt explaining, to a significant degree, why whites in the postbellum South had higher rates of opiate addiction than did those in the North — and also, notably, one reason why southern blacks had a lower rate of opiate addiction, according to the historian David T. Courtwright. “Confederate defeat was for most of them an occasion of rejoicing rather than profound depression.” (...)

The germ theory of addiction: that is my term for one of the popular if misbegotten narratives of how the opioid crisis started. It holds that the epidemic has been driven almost entirely by supply — a surfeit not of bacteria or viruses, but of pills. “Ask your doctor how prescription pills can lead to heroin abuse,” blared massive billboards from the Partnership for a Drug-Free New Jersey that I saw a few years ago. Around that time, senators proposed a bill that would have limited physician prescribing. “Opioid addiction and abuse is commonly happening to those being treated for acute pain, such as a broken bone or wisdom tooth extraction,” is how they justified the legislation. 

Not so. The majority of prescription pill casualties were never patients in pain who had been prescribed medication by their physicians. Instead, they were mostly individuals who were already involved with drugs or alcohol. Yes, some actual patients did develop pill problems, but generally they had a history of drug or alcohol abuse or were suffering from concurrent psychiatric problems or emotional distress. It is also true, of course, that drug marketers were too aggressive at times and that too many physicians overprescribed, sometimes out of inexperience, other times out of convenience, and in some cases out of greed. 

As extra pills began accumulating in rivulets, merging with pills obtained from pharmacy robberies, doctor shopping, and prescription forgeries, a river of analgesia ran through various communities. But even with an ample supply, you cannot “catch” addiction. There must be demand — not for addiction, per se, but for its vehicle. My year in Ironton showed me that the deep story of drug epidemics goes well beyond public health and medicine. Those disciplines, while essential to management, will not help us to understand why particular people and places succumb. It is the life stories of individuals and, in the case of epidemics, the life story of places, that reveal the origins. Addiction is a variety of human experience, and it must be studied with all the many methods and approaches with we which we study human experience.

 

by Sally Satel, Liberties |  Read more (pdf):

Image: Katherine Streeter for NPR

Takeuchi Itsuka, #7675
via: