via:
Sunday, February 7, 2021
Saturday, February 6, 2021
Golf on the Moon: Remastered Images
Fifty years ago this week, NASA astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. made space history when he took a few golf swings on the Moon during the Apollo 14 mission, successfully hitting two golf balls across the lunar surface. Space enthusiasts have debated for decades just how far that second ball traveled. It seems we now have an answer, thanks to the efforts of imaging specialist Andy Saunders, who digitally enhanced archival images from that mission and used them to estimate the final resting spots of the golf balls.
Saunders, who has been working with the United States Golf Association (USGA) to commemorate Shepard's historical feat, announced his findings in a Twitter thread. Saunders concluded that the first golf ball Shepard hit traveled roughly 24 yards, while the second golf ball traveled 40 yards.
Shepard's fondness for cheeky irreverence had popped up occasionally during his successful pre-NASA naval career, most notably when he was a test pilot at the Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. He was nearly court-martialed for looping the Chesapeake Bay Bridge during a test flight, but fortunately, his superiors intervened. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower established NASA in 1959, Shepard was selected as one of the seven Mercury astronauts. (The others were Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, and Deke Slayton.)
Shepard beat out some fierce competition be chosen for the first American crewed mission into space. Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin famously became the first man in space on April 25, 1961, thanks to repeated postponements of NASA's Mercury mission, but Shepard wasn't far behind. He made his own flight into space one month later, on May 5. Alas, he was a grounded after being diagnosed with Ménière's disease, resulting in an unusually high volume of fluid in the inner ear.
Surgery four years later corrected the problem, and Shepard was cleared for flight. He narrowly missed being assigned to the famous Apollo 13 mission—NASA's "most successful failure" and the subject of the 1995 Oscar-winning film, Apollo 13 (one of my all-time faves). Instead, Shepard commanded the Apollo 14 mission, which launched on January 31, 1971, and landed on the Moon on February 5.
To the Moon!
The idea for Shepard's golfing stunt came out of a 1970 visit by comedian Bob Hope to NASA headquarters in Houston. An avid golfer, Hope cracked a joke about hitting a golf ball on the Moon, and Shepard thought it would be an excellent means of conveying to people watching back on Earth the difference in the strength of gravity. So he paid a pro named Jack Harden at the River Oaks Country Club in Houston to adapt a Wilson Staff 6-iron head so that it could be attached to a collapsible aluminum and Teflon sample collector. Once NASA's Technical Services division added some finishing touches, Shepard practiced his golf swing at a course in Houston while wearing his 200-plus-pound spacesuit to prepare.
Most popular accounts describe Shepard as "smuggling" two balls and a golf club onto the spacecraft, but according to a later interview with Shepard, that wasn't the case. The astronaut ran the idea past then-NASA director Bob Gilruth, who was initially opposed but relented once Shepard laid out the precise details. Shepard also assured Gilruth that the stunt would only be done once all the official exploration tasks had been completed and then only if the mission had gone off without a hitch.
On February 6, Shepard brought out the club and two balls. His spacesuit was too bulky to use both hands, so he swung the makeshift club with just his right hand. After two swings that were "more dirt than ball," he made contact with the ball on his third swing, "shanking" it into a nearby crater. ("Looked like a slice to me, Al," Apollo 13 pilot Fred Haise joked while watching from Mission Control.)
But Shepard nailed his fourth attempt. He sent the ball soaring out of camera range and declared that it traveled for "miles and miles and miles." And as he had anticipated, the impressive 30-second time of flight perfectly showcased the difference in gravity between the Earth and the Moon. Not to be left out, crewmate Edgar Mitchell used a pole from a solar wind experiment as a javelin, which landed near the first golf ball. Once back on Earth, Shepard donated his makeshift club to the USGA museum and had a reproduction made that is now on display at the Smithsonian.
The location of the first ball Shepard hit has been known for quite some time—it's sitting in a crater next to Mitchell's javelin, about 24 yards from where Shepard stood when he took his swing. Saunders' remastering of archival photos enabled him to locate the second ball that traveled farther, as well as one of the divots in the lunar soil.
"You can access Apollo imagery to very high quality online," Apollo historian and video editor W. David Woods told Ars. "These shots were taken at 55 millimeters, the negatives and transparencies, for 55 millimeters a side. The scans they've done on them that are available online are 11,000 pixels across. So they're enormous, huge pictures that you can really dive into, if you've got expertise in image processing."
Image tricks
Saunders has that expertise. He relied on recent high-resolution scans of the original flight film, and he also used a technique known as substacking, among others. (...)
Saunders, who has been working with the United States Golf Association (USGA) to commemorate Shepard's historical feat, announced his findings in a Twitter thread. Saunders concluded that the first golf ball Shepard hit traveled roughly 24 yards, while the second golf ball traveled 40 yards.
Shepard beat out some fierce competition be chosen for the first American crewed mission into space. Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin famously became the first man in space on April 25, 1961, thanks to repeated postponements of NASA's Mercury mission, but Shepard wasn't far behind. He made his own flight into space one month later, on May 5. Alas, he was a grounded after being diagnosed with Ménière's disease, resulting in an unusually high volume of fluid in the inner ear.
Surgery four years later corrected the problem, and Shepard was cleared for flight. He narrowly missed being assigned to the famous Apollo 13 mission—NASA's "most successful failure" and the subject of the 1995 Oscar-winning film, Apollo 13 (one of my all-time faves). Instead, Shepard commanded the Apollo 14 mission, which launched on January 31, 1971, and landed on the Moon on February 5.
To the Moon!
The idea for Shepard's golfing stunt came out of a 1970 visit by comedian Bob Hope to NASA headquarters in Houston. An avid golfer, Hope cracked a joke about hitting a golf ball on the Moon, and Shepard thought it would be an excellent means of conveying to people watching back on Earth the difference in the strength of gravity. So he paid a pro named Jack Harden at the River Oaks Country Club in Houston to adapt a Wilson Staff 6-iron head so that it could be attached to a collapsible aluminum and Teflon sample collector. Once NASA's Technical Services division added some finishing touches, Shepard practiced his golf swing at a course in Houston while wearing his 200-plus-pound spacesuit to prepare.
Most popular accounts describe Shepard as "smuggling" two balls and a golf club onto the spacecraft, but according to a later interview with Shepard, that wasn't the case. The astronaut ran the idea past then-NASA director Bob Gilruth, who was initially opposed but relented once Shepard laid out the precise details. Shepard also assured Gilruth that the stunt would only be done once all the official exploration tasks had been completed and then only if the mission had gone off without a hitch.
On February 6, Shepard brought out the club and two balls. His spacesuit was too bulky to use both hands, so he swung the makeshift club with just his right hand. After two swings that were "more dirt than ball," he made contact with the ball on his third swing, "shanking" it into a nearby crater. ("Looked like a slice to me, Al," Apollo 13 pilot Fred Haise joked while watching from Mission Control.)
But Shepard nailed his fourth attempt. He sent the ball soaring out of camera range and declared that it traveled for "miles and miles and miles." And as he had anticipated, the impressive 30-second time of flight perfectly showcased the difference in gravity between the Earth and the Moon. Not to be left out, crewmate Edgar Mitchell used a pole from a solar wind experiment as a javelin, which landed near the first golf ball. Once back on Earth, Shepard donated his makeshift club to the USGA museum and had a reproduction made that is now on display at the Smithsonian.
The location of the first ball Shepard hit has been known for quite some time—it's sitting in a crater next to Mitchell's javelin, about 24 yards from where Shepard stood when he took his swing. Saunders' remastering of archival photos enabled him to locate the second ball that traveled farther, as well as one of the divots in the lunar soil.
"You can access Apollo imagery to very high quality online," Apollo historian and video editor W. David Woods told Ars. "These shots were taken at 55 millimeters, the negatives and transparencies, for 55 millimeters a side. The scans they've done on them that are available online are 11,000 pixels across. So they're enormous, huge pictures that you can really dive into, if you've got expertise in image processing."
Image tricks
Saunders has that expertise. He relied on recent high-resolution scans of the original flight film, and he also used a technique known as substacking, among others. (...)
According to Saunders, given the known location of the TV camera, it was possible to identify Shepard's bootprints, showing his stance for his first two (failed) attempts. Using a known scale from images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, he was then able to measure the point between the divot and the second golf ball to come up with his estimate for 40 yards.
Saunders, whose forthcoming book is entitled Apollo Remastered, estimates that a professional US Open golfer like Bryson DeChambeau could, in theory, hit a ball as far as 3.41 miles on the Moon, with a hang time of 1 minute 22 seconds—much farther (and longer) than Shepard's feat. As he told the BBC:
Saunders, whose forthcoming book is entitled Apollo Remastered, estimates that a professional US Open golfer like Bryson DeChambeau could, in theory, hit a ball as far as 3.41 miles on the Moon, with a hang time of 1 minute 22 seconds—much farther (and longer) than Shepard's feat. As he told the BBC:
Unfortunately, even the impressive second shot could hardly be described as "miles and miles and miles," but of course this has only ever been regarded as a light-hearted exaggeration. The Moon is effectively one giant, unraked, rock-strewn bunker. The pressurized suits severely restricted movement, and due to their helmet's visors they struggled to even see their feet. I would challenge any club golfer to go to their local course and try to hit a six-iron, one-handed, with a one-quarter swing out of an unraked bunker. Then imagine being fully suited, helmeted, and wearing thick gloves. Remember also that there was little gravity to pull the clubhead down toward the ball. The fact that Shepard even made contact and got the ball airborne is extremely impressive.And of course, the astronaut's legacy as the first human to play golf on the Moon remains secure.
by Jennifer Quellette, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image: NASA
[ed See also: here with a picture of the club Mr. Shepard used (Golf Digest).]
Insurrectionist Truther Doesn’t Believe He Was At Capitol
by The Onion | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Top Gun 2 (Extended Trailer)
Top Gun 2 EXTENDED SUPER BOWL Trailer
[ed. Looks fun. Remember, this was from Feb. 3, 2020 (with a release date of June, 2020). So, who knows when we'll finally see it. Hope they kept Kenny Loggins' Danger Zone in the soundtrack.]
Pan Sushi
Ingredients
1 1⁄2 cupsushi rice
3 cupswater
3 tablespoonssushi vinegar
6 ouncescrab meat or imitation crab meat, shredded
2 tablespoonsmayonaise
1medium japanese cucumber, sliced 1/16 inch thick
1avocado, sliced thin
shiso furikake as needed
2 sheets roasted nori (seaweed)
Instructions
Note: 2 each 8" x 8" pans are needed for preparation
Cook the rice in rice cooker. Once done fold in the sushi vinegar.
Spread the rice out so it can cool.
Combine the crab with the mayonnaise.
Line the first 8x8 pan with aluminum foil. Lay down a sheet of nori, then cover with half the rice.
Add the avocado, then cucumbers, then crab mayo mix, sprinkle with the shiso furikake. Then top layer of rice and nori.
Cover the top with plastic wrap, then place the second 8×8 inch pan on top. Weigh it down and let sit, pressed, for an hour.
Turn the square of sushi out onto a cutting board. Slice evenly.
Notes: If you want to make a sushi that you can serve out of the pan, instead of using nori sheets, just use nori furikake so it easy to cut.
[ed. For your (socially distanced) Super Bowl party. See also: Sushi Bake Is the Lockdown Trend I’ll Never Stop Making (Basically). Another easy favorite: Shoyu Chicken (Foodland). And in other news: A Massive Chicken Wing Shortage is Brewing (Restaurant Business).]
Why Tom Brady is One of America’s Most Polarizing Athletes
It difficult to find someone with a lukewarm opinion of Tom Brady. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback and New England Patriots legend inspires strong feelings on both ends of the spectrum.
To some, Brady is the greatest quarterback to ever play the game, with the legendary resume and hardware to prove it. Others see a cheater, a shameless a brand builder who benefitted from playing for a football dynasty, who refused to take a personal stand on anything to avoid alienating fans, his consumers.
Like all things the truth likely falls somewhere in the middle. It makes Brady one of the most complicated figures in modern American sports, who can be viewed as the greatest athlete of our generation o tremendously overrated depending on your point of view.
Now, with his 10th Super Bowl appearance on the horizon, we dig into the legacy of one of the NFL’s most decorated players, and understand why he elicits such strong emotions.
Why do people love Tom Brady?
Brady represents the archetype of the underdog athlete. We don’t need to spend a great deal discussing this, because we’ve heard his story a million times, in a million different ways over the course of the last 20 years. Scouts didn’t believe in Brady entering the NFL from Michigan, and his average athletic showing at the combine cemented him as a sixth round pick.
He became a star due to circumstance. Taking over for an injured Drew Bledsoe, leading the Patriots to a Super Bowl in his rookie season in 2001 — it’s a story straight out of a sports movie. Brady’s ascension defied expectations in a way people love, and it perpetuated the dream that anybody with the smarts and drive could excel. I mean, if a slightly doughy, relatively unathletic Brady could win a Super Bowl, then the presumption is that anyone can — even if that’s not true.
Then Brady kept winning, kept succeeding, and in doing so cemented himself as the modern Joe Montana. The rest is history.
Why do people hate Tom Brady?
This one is a little more nuanced, because there isn’t a single overwhelming reason why people dislike Tom Brady. Obviously everyone’s reason for disliking an athlete are individual, but there are a few key buckets we can put people into.
The “Tom is a cheater” crowd
While Brady is certainly responsible for a lot of the Patriots’ success, he will be inexorably linked to two of the league’s biggest scandals: SpyGate and DeflateGate. Yes, tired names that are way too on-the-nose references to Watergate, but nonetheless impactful on his legacy.
You can look at recording the Rams’ practice, or using partially-inflated footballs as small competitive edges, but they raise questions. If these were the incidents that were caught, what lurked under the surface that we never learned about? There are the questions people ask when thinking of Brady as a cheater.
It’s perhaps a little unfair to levy the sins of an organization against one player, but heavy is the head that wears the crown. When you become the figurehead of an organization you take on the benefits, as well as the criticism. Quarterbacks in general get far too much credit and criticism for team results, so when a team is under fire for breaking the rules, naturally much of that will fall on the leader.
There were already debates about whether Brady was the vector for the Patriots’ success, or whether it was more on Bill Belichick — so when controversy swarmed the team there was was similar doubt. How much of this was on Belichick, and how much was on Brady? That alone soured the quarterback in a lot of peoples’ minds, and while perhaps not enough to add an asterisk to his rings, it was enough to raise doubt.
“Brady stands for nothing but his brand”
It’s impossible to separate athletes from their impact on society. That’s been true for decades. Normally this takes shape in frivolous things like product endorsements and sponsorships, with companies clamoring to leverage the facade of athlete approval into sales, but that changed substantially over the last four years.
Everyone in every field was asked for their stance on social justice and racial injustice. Some athlete chose to take a strong stand, turning their fame into activism and pressure for change — but Brady, much as he did throughout his career, sat on the fence and said little of substance.
In isolation this comment may seem innocuous enough, but it came at a time people were desperate for a stronger voice for someone of Brady’s stature. Considering it came not long after the quarterback was seen with a MAGA hat in his locker, which he claimed “found its way there” seemingly by magic, when questioned about it.
Brady has ensured his earning potential remained maximum by refusing to take a stand on just about anything off the football field. This often feels like a desire not to rock the boat, famously doing semantic gymnastics to say he supported his friend Donald Trump, but didn’t necessarily support his politics. The only area he seemed to take a strong stand was on his health and wellness brand TB12, which tells people not to eat tomatoes and live by a strict diet.
The cap to all this might have been the news that Brady, who has earned hundreds of millions of dollars over his NFL career, and is married to one of the highest-paid supermodels in history, took almost $1 million in Paycheck Protection Program funds, designed to insulate small businesses from Covid, in order to prop up his lifestyle brand. Money ran out of the fund for small mom and pop businesses struggling to stay afloat, while Brady’s pet project got funded.
To some, Brady is the greatest quarterback to ever play the game, with the legendary resume and hardware to prove it. Others see a cheater, a shameless a brand builder who benefitted from playing for a football dynasty, who refused to take a personal stand on anything to avoid alienating fans, his consumers.
Like all things the truth likely falls somewhere in the middle. It makes Brady one of the most complicated figures in modern American sports, who can be viewed as the greatest athlete of our generation o tremendously overrated depending on your point of view.
Now, with his 10th Super Bowl appearance on the horizon, we dig into the legacy of one of the NFL’s most decorated players, and understand why he elicits such strong emotions.
Why do people love Tom Brady?
He became a star due to circumstance. Taking over for an injured Drew Bledsoe, leading the Patriots to a Super Bowl in his rookie season in 2001 — it’s a story straight out of a sports movie. Brady’s ascension defied expectations in a way people love, and it perpetuated the dream that anybody with the smarts and drive could excel. I mean, if a slightly doughy, relatively unathletic Brady could win a Super Bowl, then the presumption is that anyone can — even if that’s not true.
Then Brady kept winning, kept succeeding, and in doing so cemented himself as the modern Joe Montana. The rest is history.
Why do people hate Tom Brady?
This one is a little more nuanced, because there isn’t a single overwhelming reason why people dislike Tom Brady. Obviously everyone’s reason for disliking an athlete are individual, but there are a few key buckets we can put people into.
The “Tom is a cheater” crowd
While Brady is certainly responsible for a lot of the Patriots’ success, he will be inexorably linked to two of the league’s biggest scandals: SpyGate and DeflateGate. Yes, tired names that are way too on-the-nose references to Watergate, but nonetheless impactful on his legacy.
You can look at recording the Rams’ practice, or using partially-inflated footballs as small competitive edges, but they raise questions. If these were the incidents that were caught, what lurked under the surface that we never learned about? There are the questions people ask when thinking of Brady as a cheater.
It’s perhaps a little unfair to levy the sins of an organization against one player, but heavy is the head that wears the crown. When you become the figurehead of an organization you take on the benefits, as well as the criticism. Quarterbacks in general get far too much credit and criticism for team results, so when a team is under fire for breaking the rules, naturally much of that will fall on the leader.
There were already debates about whether Brady was the vector for the Patriots’ success, or whether it was more on Bill Belichick — so when controversy swarmed the team there was was similar doubt. How much of this was on Belichick, and how much was on Brady? That alone soured the quarterback in a lot of peoples’ minds, and while perhaps not enough to add an asterisk to his rings, it was enough to raise doubt.
“Brady stands for nothing but his brand”
It’s impossible to separate athletes from their impact on society. That’s been true for decades. Normally this takes shape in frivolous things like product endorsements and sponsorships, with companies clamoring to leverage the facade of athlete approval into sales, but that changed substantially over the last four years.
Everyone in every field was asked for their stance on social justice and racial injustice. Some athlete chose to take a strong stand, turning their fame into activism and pressure for change — but Brady, much as he did throughout his career, sat on the fence and said little of substance.
“It’s certainly been an offseason to listen, learn, have more compassion, and more empathy for one another. Everyone should deserve the opportunity to reach their fullest potential. Being in the locker room for 20 years and being around guys with every different race, religion, skin color, background, and different state. Everyone something different to the table and you embrace those things.”On the surface this might sound like he’s taking a stand, but this is the definition of playing both sides. At a time where people of color were being marginalized and harassed, Brady was calling for “more empathy for one another,” as if it was an issue that flowed both ways.
In isolation this comment may seem innocuous enough, but it came at a time people were desperate for a stronger voice for someone of Brady’s stature. Considering it came not long after the quarterback was seen with a MAGA hat in his locker, which he claimed “found its way there” seemingly by magic, when questioned about it.
Brady has ensured his earning potential remained maximum by refusing to take a stand on just about anything off the football field. This often feels like a desire not to rock the boat, famously doing semantic gymnastics to say he supported his friend Donald Trump, but didn’t necessarily support his politics. The only area he seemed to take a strong stand was on his health and wellness brand TB12, which tells people not to eat tomatoes and live by a strict diet.
The cap to all this might have been the news that Brady, who has earned hundreds of millions of dollars over his NFL career, and is married to one of the highest-paid supermodels in history, took almost $1 million in Paycheck Protection Program funds, designed to insulate small businesses from Covid, in order to prop up his lifestyle brand. Money ran out of the fund for small mom and pop businesses struggling to stay afloat, while Brady’s pet project got funded.
by James Dator, SB Nation | Read more:
Image: Getty/NYT
Friday, February 5, 2021
Everything That's Wrong With Racoons
Too many people want you to dismiss a raccoon’s deal of “Oh they’re mischievous cat-dogs with friendly washed hands and a jewel-thief face” when it’s really an ALL-HANDS NO-FEET TRASH-CAT WITH A DOG’S STOMACH AND A POSSUM’S HEART.
It can put itself up in trees but it waddles on the ground, I can’t be in trustment of a beast that clambers and waddles both; either be graceful and lithe all of times, or be clumsy and relatable on the ground. Seals can barely pull off “limber in the water, silly on a rock” and raccoons, you are not seals, you do not have their wise old laugh-faces, you just seem creepy and duplicitous.
Once when my dog died a passel of raccoons showed up in the backyard as if to say “Now that he’s gone, we own the night,” and they didn’t flinch when I yelled at them, and I found it disrespectful to 1) me personally and 2) the entire flow of the food chain. Don’t disrespect me if you can’t eat me, you false-night-dogs.
YOU SCRUBBLEMENT UP YOUR WITCH HANDS AND I DON’T TRUST IT, THAT IS A HUMAN ATTRIBUTE AND I WANT YOU TO LEAVE THAT TO US, STOP BEFORE-WASHING AND RUBBLE-SCRITCHING YOUR FUR-FINGERS, YOU MASHED-DOWN SMALLBEAR
They’re a dense badger lie
THEY CAN POINT THEIR FEET BACKWARDS TO CLIMB DOWN TREES, THEY CAN SWIM, THEY CAN SWEAT LIKE A YOU OR ME, A PERSON OR PANT LIKE A DOG TO COOL DOWN AS THEY CHOOSE, THEY IDLY AND INSOLENTLY SLIDE BETWEEN THE ANIMAL AND THE HUMAN WORLD AND IF THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU TAUGHT ME NOTHING ELSE IT’S THAT THAT IS FUCKED UPWARDLY
I don’t like the word “chittering” and that is the only sound a raccoon makes
MAYBE THEY ARE AN ASSEMBLAGE OF VERY CONDENSED SQUIRRELS THAT POWERED UP INTO A MEDIUM-SIZED BEASTIE AND THAT WOULD BE INAPPROPRIATE, IF SQUIRRELS HAD DEVELOPED POWER-RANGER-LIKE ABILITIES
I hate the way they wobble-squample across the street at night when you see a shadowy mass under a streetlight and then it turns out to be like seven fur-children
A raccoon is the child of a cat and a wizard and it walks in too many worlds for it to be allowed to stay in this one
STOP LOOKING AT ME, YOU RIVER-DABBLER
It can put itself up in trees but it waddles on the ground, I can’t be in trustment of a beast that clambers and waddles both; either be graceful and lithe all of times, or be clumsy and relatable on the ground. Seals can barely pull off “limber in the water, silly on a rock” and raccoons, you are not seals, you do not have their wise old laugh-faces, you just seem creepy and duplicitous.Once when my dog died a passel of raccoons showed up in the backyard as if to say “Now that he’s gone, we own the night,” and they didn’t flinch when I yelled at them, and I found it disrespectful to 1) me personally and 2) the entire flow of the food chain. Don’t disrespect me if you can’t eat me, you false-night-dogs.
YOU SCRUBBLEMENT UP YOUR WITCH HANDS AND I DON’T TRUST IT, THAT IS A HUMAN ATTRIBUTE AND I WANT YOU TO LEAVE THAT TO US, STOP BEFORE-WASHING AND RUBBLE-SCRITCHING YOUR FUR-FINGERS, YOU MASHED-DOWN SMALLBEAR
They’re a dense badger lie
THEY CAN POINT THEIR FEET BACKWARDS TO CLIMB DOWN TREES, THEY CAN SWIM, THEY CAN SWEAT LIKE A YOU OR ME, A PERSON OR PANT LIKE A DOG TO COOL DOWN AS THEY CHOOSE, THEY IDLY AND INSOLENTLY SLIDE BETWEEN THE ANIMAL AND THE HUMAN WORLD AND IF THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU TAUGHT ME NOTHING ELSE IT’S THAT THAT IS FUCKED UPWARDLY
I don’t like the word “chittering” and that is the only sound a raccoon makes
MAYBE THEY ARE AN ASSEMBLAGE OF VERY CONDENSED SQUIRRELS THAT POWERED UP INTO A MEDIUM-SIZED BEASTIE AND THAT WOULD BE INAPPROPRIATE, IF SQUIRRELS HAD DEVELOPED POWER-RANGER-LIKE ABILITIES
I hate the way they wobble-squample across the street at night when you see a shadowy mass under a streetlight and then it turns out to be like seven fur-children
A raccoon is the child of a cat and a wizard and it walks in too many worlds for it to be allowed to stay in this one
STOP LOOKING AT ME, YOU RIVER-DABBLER
by Mallory Ortberg, Toast | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. This has been getting a lot of clicks lately so it must have been re-posted somewhere. See also: So You've Decided to Drink More Water (Mallory Ortberg, The Hairpin)]
The N.F.L. Had Over 700 Coronavirus Positives. The Seahawks Had None.
On the N.F.L.’s march to complete a 269-game schedule amid a pandemic, more than 700 players, coaches and other team personnel tested positive for the coronavirus. It upended rosters, with the Denver Broncos starting a game without any of their three quarterbacks and the Cleveland Browns once fielding a team with nearly all of their receivers out, and it postponed games, with some outbreaks pushing them into midweek or to a bye week.
Through it all, only one of the league’s 32 teams remained untouched by the virus: the Seattle Seahawks. And how they made it through the long season virus-free, in Washington State, where the United States’ first positive case was reported, is a testament to innovative thinking and procedures. The team’s devotion to following health guidelines became a guidepost for the N.F.L. and other leagues grappling with how to proceed as the deadly virus continued to grip the country.
“They invented a playbook for a safe practice environment at a time when the future was deeply uncertain and people were questioning the wisdom of pro sports starting up,” said Vin Gupta, a pulmonologist who has helped organizations respond to the coronavirus and informally advised the Seahawks. “You have to be willing to absorb some costs, and you need leaders who can communicate in a crisis.” (...)
The Seahawks faced perhaps the most arduous circumstances in the N.F.L. Their 2020 schedule included five cross-country flights, which meant they would log more miles than any other N.F.L. team. And when they were home, the Seahawks trained not far from Kirkland, Wash., the nation’s first coronavirus “hot spot.”
This made the Seahawks witnesses to the pandemic well before the season kicked off, and its grim toll made them question whether football could be played safely. Sam Ramsden, the team’s director of player health and performance, cared for his wife, Lisa, in March, when, doctors believe, she had Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.
“I didn’t really imagine the N.F.L. being able to have a full season,” Ramsden said. “I wasn’t a Debbie Downer about it, I was just trying to be realistic.”
Starting in late spring, after the N.F.L. began plowing ahead with plans for the 2020 season, Ramsden, Coach Pete Carroll and other team leaders used a combination of pragmatism, flexibility and gamesmanship to duck, bob and weave through the pandemic.
With training camps, the first in-person football activities of the season, set to open in late July, each team appointed an infection control officer to coordinate efforts to reopen its facilities. Ramsden, who has worked for the Seahawks for 22 years, took on the role rather than giving it to the head athletic trainer, who he felt would be too busy handling injuries.
Ramsden has an easygoing patter that belies his attention to detail, and his quiet intensity is a counterpoint to that of Carroll, a hands-on coach known for out-of-the-box ideas. Throughout the pandemic, Carroll pushed Ramsden for answers to problems. At other times, he deferred to his expertise. Carroll also did his own research, and floated ideas to Ramsden and others about minimizing exposure.
Like other teams, the Seahawks installed dividers in the showers and between lockers. To avoid crowding, two auxiliary locker rooms were added, and large rooms and practice fields were turned into meeting spaces. Ventilation systems were upgraded. Tents were set up outside for safer dining. Carroll had windows that could open installed in his office to increase air flow.
People in the organization took on extra tasks. The team’s football operations department created a schedule for who would be tested and when. (Almost 36,000 tests were ultimately given.) Each morning, trainers and others handed out sensors made by a German company, Kinexon, that tracked how close players, coaches and staff members were to one another and for how long. The hospitality staff members who usually managed corporate and internal events collected health questionnaires from people arriving at the facility. The travel coordinator made sure the team’s drivers were tested and buses were disinfected. On the road, a total of 139 players, coaches and staff rode to and from games and airports in seven buses instead of the usual four.
“It was like a band of brothers,” said Ramsden, who wore a T-shirt a few days each week that read, “Stay Negative or Stay Home.”
When they were at their team facility, the Seahawks ordered food with the Notemeal app on their phones, rather than stand in line in the cafeteria (where congregating unmasked led to transmissions on other teams). On road trips, the team asked hotel kitchens to use the app as well, something other teams adopted. (...)
Wide receiver Tyler Lockett considered opting out before the season because of a heart condition. He was born with the aorta on the right side of his heart, instead of the left, and had needed medical clearance to play before he was drafted in 2015. Ultimately, he chose to play this season because the N.F.L. was testing players every day, a protocol that Carroll pushed the league on early and loudly when executives did not initially embrace the idea.
The Kinexon devices told Ramsden when players and staff members were within six feet of one another for more than five, 10 and 15 minutes. They even recorded interactions between people separated by walls. To keep people moving, Ramsden had the facility’s intercom chime every 12 minutes.
Still, remaining vigilant inside the facility and outside it by not eating out or shopping wore on Lockett and others. “For me, and for a lot of guys, it felt like we actually played two seasons,” he said. “That’s how stressful it is just to make sure that you have to live up to these protocols that we have just to make sure we’re safe.”
The Seahawks’ protocols, though, didn’t extend to family and friends, who still posed an exposure risk, and they didn’t prevent false positive tests, which occurred often at the start of the regular season in September. That set Carroll off on a search for a way to verify test results.
Around Labor Day, with three news channels playing on his office TVs, Carroll saw Gupta, who works at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, on MSNBC describing a device that provided reliable test results in under an hour. The coach later called the doctor to get more information on using the kit to provide a backup to the tests analyzed by BioReference Laboratories, the diagnostics company hired by the N.F.L.
“I was struck by how involved he was,” said Gupta, who advised the Seahawks during the season. “He really wanted to understand the science.”
The Seahawks bought four test kits made by Mesa Biotech, which cost several hundred dollars each, and had doctors at the Virginia Mason Medical Center in Bellevue, Wash., use them to test family and friends of the team more than 750 times. Out-of-town visitors had to be tested immediately upon arriving in Seattle, remain in a hotel for 24 hours and get a second test. Only those who tested negative twice could see a player, coach or staff member.
Through it all, only one of the league’s 32 teams remained untouched by the virus: the Seattle Seahawks. And how they made it through the long season virus-free, in Washington State, where the United States’ first positive case was reported, is a testament to innovative thinking and procedures. The team’s devotion to following health guidelines became a guidepost for the N.F.L. and other leagues grappling with how to proceed as the deadly virus continued to grip the country.
The Seahawks faced perhaps the most arduous circumstances in the N.F.L. Their 2020 schedule included five cross-country flights, which meant they would log more miles than any other N.F.L. team. And when they were home, the Seahawks trained not far from Kirkland, Wash., the nation’s first coronavirus “hot spot.”
This made the Seahawks witnesses to the pandemic well before the season kicked off, and its grim toll made them question whether football could be played safely. Sam Ramsden, the team’s director of player health and performance, cared for his wife, Lisa, in March, when, doctors believe, she had Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.
“I didn’t really imagine the N.F.L. being able to have a full season,” Ramsden said. “I wasn’t a Debbie Downer about it, I was just trying to be realistic.”
With training camps, the first in-person football activities of the season, set to open in late July, each team appointed an infection control officer to coordinate efforts to reopen its facilities. Ramsden, who has worked for the Seahawks for 22 years, took on the role rather than giving it to the head athletic trainer, who he felt would be too busy handling injuries.
Ramsden has an easygoing patter that belies his attention to detail, and his quiet intensity is a counterpoint to that of Carroll, a hands-on coach known for out-of-the-box ideas. Throughout the pandemic, Carroll pushed Ramsden for answers to problems. At other times, he deferred to his expertise. Carroll also did his own research, and floated ideas to Ramsden and others about minimizing exposure.
Like other teams, the Seahawks installed dividers in the showers and between lockers. To avoid crowding, two auxiliary locker rooms were added, and large rooms and practice fields were turned into meeting spaces. Ventilation systems were upgraded. Tents were set up outside for safer dining. Carroll had windows that could open installed in his office to increase air flow.
People in the organization took on extra tasks. The team’s football operations department created a schedule for who would be tested and when. (Almost 36,000 tests were ultimately given.) Each morning, trainers and others handed out sensors made by a German company, Kinexon, that tracked how close players, coaches and staff members were to one another and for how long. The hospitality staff members who usually managed corporate and internal events collected health questionnaires from people arriving at the facility. The travel coordinator made sure the team’s drivers were tested and buses were disinfected. On the road, a total of 139 players, coaches and staff rode to and from games and airports in seven buses instead of the usual four.
“It was like a band of brothers,” said Ramsden, who wore a T-shirt a few days each week that read, “Stay Negative or Stay Home.”
When they were at their team facility, the Seahawks ordered food with the Notemeal app on their phones, rather than stand in line in the cafeteria (where congregating unmasked led to transmissions on other teams). On road trips, the team asked hotel kitchens to use the app as well, something other teams adopted. (...)
Wide receiver Tyler Lockett considered opting out before the season because of a heart condition. He was born with the aorta on the right side of his heart, instead of the left, and had needed medical clearance to play before he was drafted in 2015. Ultimately, he chose to play this season because the N.F.L. was testing players every day, a protocol that Carroll pushed the league on early and loudly when executives did not initially embrace the idea.
The Kinexon devices told Ramsden when players and staff members were within six feet of one another for more than five, 10 and 15 minutes. They even recorded interactions between people separated by walls. To keep people moving, Ramsden had the facility’s intercom chime every 12 minutes.
Still, remaining vigilant inside the facility and outside it by not eating out or shopping wore on Lockett and others. “For me, and for a lot of guys, it felt like we actually played two seasons,” he said. “That’s how stressful it is just to make sure that you have to live up to these protocols that we have just to make sure we’re safe.”
The Seahawks’ protocols, though, didn’t extend to family and friends, who still posed an exposure risk, and they didn’t prevent false positive tests, which occurred often at the start of the regular season in September. That set Carroll off on a search for a way to verify test results.
Around Labor Day, with three news channels playing on his office TVs, Carroll saw Gupta, who works at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, on MSNBC describing a device that provided reliable test results in under an hour. The coach later called the doctor to get more information on using the kit to provide a backup to the tests analyzed by BioReference Laboratories, the diagnostics company hired by the N.F.L.
“I was struck by how involved he was,” said Gupta, who advised the Seahawks during the season. “He really wanted to understand the science.”
The Seahawks bought four test kits made by Mesa Biotech, which cost several hundred dollars each, and had doctors at the Virginia Mason Medical Center in Bellevue, Wash., use them to test family and friends of the team more than 750 times. Out-of-town visitors had to be tested immediately upon arriving in Seattle, remain in a hotel for 24 hours and get a second test. Only those who tested negative twice could see a player, coach or staff member.
by Ken Belson, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Sam Ramsden by Nicole Boliaux for The New York Times[ed. This is one of those articles where it really pays to watch the accompanying video. If you're having trouble with the paywall, try cookie remover.]
Thursday, February 4, 2021
The Senate Has Become a Dadaist Nightmare
This week, congressional Democrats advanced a budget resolution — the first step in using the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process to pass President Biden’s $1.9 trillion fiscal rescue plan. I recognize that is not the most thrilling start to a column. But now that Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have pledged their undying fealty to the filibuster, the budget reconciliation process is where Biden’s agenda will live or die. Oy, is that depressing.
Budget reconciliation reveals the truth of how the Senate legislates now. To counter the minority’s abuse of the filibuster rule, the majority abuses another rule, ending in a process that makes legislation systematically and undeniably worse. The world’s greatest deliberative body has become one of its most absurd, but that absurdity is obscured by baroque parliamentary tricks that few understand.
“Budget reconciliation.” It sounds sober, important and official. But it’s farcical — or it would be, if the consequences weren’t so grievous.
It’s understood, by now, that the filibuster has mutated into something it was never intended to be: a 60-vote supermajority requirement on almost all legislation considered by the United States Senate. I have made my case against the filibuster in detail before, and I won’t repeat it here. Suffice to say, in a closely divided Senate, with highly polarized parties, it’s almost impossible to get 60 votes on major legislation. But there’s a workaround, and that workaround is getting both wider and dumber.
The budget reconciliation process was created in the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. It was an afterthought: an optional process to let Congress quickly clean up its spending plans so they matched the budget. No one even used it until 1980. But as the Senate was stalled by more frequent filibusters, clever legislators realized that the budget reconciliation process was immune to the filibuster, as it was limited to 20 hours of debate, and all kinds of bills could be routed through it.
In response, Senator Robert Byrd persuaded his colleagues to pass new rules to ensure budget reconciliation remained true to its original purpose. These rules, formally enshrined in the Budget Act in 1990, impose a series of tests on budget reconciliation bills. The most consequential are that every individual provision of the bill must alter taxes or spending, and not in a “merely incidental” way; the bill cannot increase deficits after the budget window, which is usually around 10 years; and the bill cannot muck with Social Security. Any senator can challenge any provision of any budget reconciliation bill for violating these rules. The parliamentarian then rules on the question, and if the parliamentarian rules for the challenger, the provision is struck from the bill. (The Senate can choose to ignore the parliamentarian, just as they can vote to change any Senate rule. That hasn’t happened yet where budget reconciliation is concerned, but it may soon. More on that later.)
Byrd’s reforms didn’t work as he intended. The problem of the filibuster demanded a solution, and even covered in “Byrd droppings,” budget reconciliation was the closest thing to an alternative. The Byrd rules didn’t prevent non-budgetary legislation from being passed through reconciliation, but they did make that legislation worse, and weirder, and the Senate has simply decided to live with the ridiculous results, and make the rest of us live with them, too.
President George W. Bush’s tax cuts, for instance, were designed to expire — expire! — after 10 years because otherwise they would have increased deficits after 10 years, and so been ineligible for reconciliation. President Donald Trump’s tax cuts employ the same trick. This is a legacy of budget reconciliation: Massive chunks of our tax code are just set to disappear at an arbitrary point in the future, and what happens then is anybody’s guess.
The distortions don’t end there. Budget reconciliation warps policy design by pushing away from regulation and toward direct spending and taxation. An example: If you were designing a health care bill in budget reconciliation, you couldn’t pass a rule saying private insurers had to cover pre-existing conditions. But you could add a trillion dollars to Medicaid funding so it could cover anyone with pre-existing conditions who couldn’t get private insurance. Or to use an example that is actually in the reconciliation package Democrats are designing now: You can pass $1,400 checks through budget reconciliation, but you can’t pass emergency paid leave. When Congress writes laws through budget reconciliation, it writes them with one arm tied behind its back.
Even worse is the way budget reconciliation quietly decides which kinds of problems the Senate addresses, and which it ignores, years after year. Both House and Senate Democrats have said that their first bill will be the “For The People Act,” a package making it easier and safer to vote, and weakening the power big donors wield in politics by matching small donor donations at a 6:1 rate. But the “For The People Act” can’t pass through the budget reconciliation process, so it’s a dead letter.
“Why should it only take a simple majority to do tax cuts for the rich but it takes a supermajority to address the integrity of our elections?” Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, told me. “That makes no sense. Access to the ballot shouldn’t have a higher hurdle than helping the rich get richer.” But in today’s Senate, it does. The same is true for gun control or immigration reform.
But budget reconciliation doesn’t just alter liberal priorities. Social conservatives often complain that when Republicans hold Congress, their legislative asks are shunted aside for tax cuts and health care repeal laws. That is, in part, a budget reconciliation issue: You can pass tax cuts and (partially) repeal Obamacare through budget reconciliation. You cannot regulate pornography or push school prayer through the process.
You can also only do a limited number of budget reconciliation packages each fiscal year. That forces legislators to craft giant bills that jam every legislative priority into one rushed package, rather than crafting one bill, debating and modifying it, and then passing it and moving onto the next.
“I find it ironic that people suggest reconciliation is somehow better for the institution,” Adam Jentleson, former deputy chief of staff to the former Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, and the author of the excellent new book, “Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy,” told me. “It’s terrible for the Senate!” As he notes, budget reconciliation decreases the power of committees and increases the power of the Senate leadership, “since leadership drives the assembly line for putting together these mega-packages. There’s no transparency and it creates a field day for lobbyists.”
In 2012, Steven Teles, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, published a paper arguing that American public policy had become defined by kludges. “The term comes out of the world of computer programming, where a kludge is an inelegant patch put in place to be backward compatible with the rest of a system,” he wrote. “When you add up enough kludges, you get a very complicated program, one that is hard to understand and subject to crashes. In other words, Windows.”
Or, the Senate. The modern use of budget reconciliation is a kludge. The institution has become paralyzed by the filibuster and rather than rewriting its rules to solve that problem, senators have instead patched it through budget reconciliation. The Senate gets just enough done that no one can say it is actually impossible to pass big bills through the body. But budget reconciliation narrows the range of problems Congress can solve, the number of bills it can pass and the policy mechanisms it can use. No one would ever design a legislative body that worked this way, but this is how the Senate has come to work, one kludge on top of another. “For any particular problem we have arrived at the most Gerry-rigged, opaque and complicated response,” Teles wrote. That is both an apt description of today’s Senate and of the kind of policy budget reconciliation produces.
All of this is a choice. Every Senate rule can be changed by a simple majority vote. A simple majority could end or reform the filibuster — as we saw when Democrats ended it for most executive branch nominations and most judicial nominations in 2013, and when Republicans ended it for Supreme Court nominees in 2017. The details quickly get complicated, but a simple majority of senators could vote to loosen some of the limits on budget reconciliation, as Senator Bernie Sanders, the new chair of the Budget Committee, has suggested. The Senate is bound by nothing but its own convictions.
But this is a Senate that, collectively, has no convictions. It does not believe enough in the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold to simply abide by it. It does not believe enough in passing bills by a simple majority to make that the standard. It is the self-styled moderates, like Manchin and Sinema, who freeze the institution in dysfunction, but there is nothing moderate about the modern Senate: It is radical in its inanity, a legislative chamber designed by dadaists.
Budget reconciliation reveals the truth of how the Senate legislates now. To counter the minority’s abuse of the filibuster rule, the majority abuses another rule, ending in a process that makes legislation systematically and undeniably worse. The world’s greatest deliberative body has become one of its most absurd, but that absurdity is obscured by baroque parliamentary tricks that few understand.
“Budget reconciliation.” It sounds sober, important and official. But it’s farcical — or it would be, if the consequences weren’t so grievous.
The budget reconciliation process was created in the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. It was an afterthought: an optional process to let Congress quickly clean up its spending plans so they matched the budget. No one even used it until 1980. But as the Senate was stalled by more frequent filibusters, clever legislators realized that the budget reconciliation process was immune to the filibuster, as it was limited to 20 hours of debate, and all kinds of bills could be routed through it.
In response, Senator Robert Byrd persuaded his colleagues to pass new rules to ensure budget reconciliation remained true to its original purpose. These rules, formally enshrined in the Budget Act in 1990, impose a series of tests on budget reconciliation bills. The most consequential are that every individual provision of the bill must alter taxes or spending, and not in a “merely incidental” way; the bill cannot increase deficits after the budget window, which is usually around 10 years; and the bill cannot muck with Social Security. Any senator can challenge any provision of any budget reconciliation bill for violating these rules. The parliamentarian then rules on the question, and if the parliamentarian rules for the challenger, the provision is struck from the bill. (The Senate can choose to ignore the parliamentarian, just as they can vote to change any Senate rule. That hasn’t happened yet where budget reconciliation is concerned, but it may soon. More on that later.)
Byrd’s reforms didn’t work as he intended. The problem of the filibuster demanded a solution, and even covered in “Byrd droppings,” budget reconciliation was the closest thing to an alternative. The Byrd rules didn’t prevent non-budgetary legislation from being passed through reconciliation, but they did make that legislation worse, and weirder, and the Senate has simply decided to live with the ridiculous results, and make the rest of us live with them, too.
President George W. Bush’s tax cuts, for instance, were designed to expire — expire! — after 10 years because otherwise they would have increased deficits after 10 years, and so been ineligible for reconciliation. President Donald Trump’s tax cuts employ the same trick. This is a legacy of budget reconciliation: Massive chunks of our tax code are just set to disappear at an arbitrary point in the future, and what happens then is anybody’s guess.
The distortions don’t end there. Budget reconciliation warps policy design by pushing away from regulation and toward direct spending and taxation. An example: If you were designing a health care bill in budget reconciliation, you couldn’t pass a rule saying private insurers had to cover pre-existing conditions. But you could add a trillion dollars to Medicaid funding so it could cover anyone with pre-existing conditions who couldn’t get private insurance. Or to use an example that is actually in the reconciliation package Democrats are designing now: You can pass $1,400 checks through budget reconciliation, but you can’t pass emergency paid leave. When Congress writes laws through budget reconciliation, it writes them with one arm tied behind its back.
Even worse is the way budget reconciliation quietly decides which kinds of problems the Senate addresses, and which it ignores, years after year. Both House and Senate Democrats have said that their first bill will be the “For The People Act,” a package making it easier and safer to vote, and weakening the power big donors wield in politics by matching small donor donations at a 6:1 rate. But the “For The People Act” can’t pass through the budget reconciliation process, so it’s a dead letter.
“Why should it only take a simple majority to do tax cuts for the rich but it takes a supermajority to address the integrity of our elections?” Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, told me. “That makes no sense. Access to the ballot shouldn’t have a higher hurdle than helping the rich get richer.” But in today’s Senate, it does. The same is true for gun control or immigration reform.
But budget reconciliation doesn’t just alter liberal priorities. Social conservatives often complain that when Republicans hold Congress, their legislative asks are shunted aside for tax cuts and health care repeal laws. That is, in part, a budget reconciliation issue: You can pass tax cuts and (partially) repeal Obamacare through budget reconciliation. You cannot regulate pornography or push school prayer through the process.
You can also only do a limited number of budget reconciliation packages each fiscal year. That forces legislators to craft giant bills that jam every legislative priority into one rushed package, rather than crafting one bill, debating and modifying it, and then passing it and moving onto the next.
“I find it ironic that people suggest reconciliation is somehow better for the institution,” Adam Jentleson, former deputy chief of staff to the former Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, and the author of the excellent new book, “Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy,” told me. “It’s terrible for the Senate!” As he notes, budget reconciliation decreases the power of committees and increases the power of the Senate leadership, “since leadership drives the assembly line for putting together these mega-packages. There’s no transparency and it creates a field day for lobbyists.”
In 2012, Steven Teles, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, published a paper arguing that American public policy had become defined by kludges. “The term comes out of the world of computer programming, where a kludge is an inelegant patch put in place to be backward compatible with the rest of a system,” he wrote. “When you add up enough kludges, you get a very complicated program, one that is hard to understand and subject to crashes. In other words, Windows.”
Or, the Senate. The modern use of budget reconciliation is a kludge. The institution has become paralyzed by the filibuster and rather than rewriting its rules to solve that problem, senators have instead patched it through budget reconciliation. The Senate gets just enough done that no one can say it is actually impossible to pass big bills through the body. But budget reconciliation narrows the range of problems Congress can solve, the number of bills it can pass and the policy mechanisms it can use. No one would ever design a legislative body that worked this way, but this is how the Senate has come to work, one kludge on top of another. “For any particular problem we have arrived at the most Gerry-rigged, opaque and complicated response,” Teles wrote. That is both an apt description of today’s Senate and of the kind of policy budget reconciliation produces.
All of this is a choice. Every Senate rule can be changed by a simple majority vote. A simple majority could end or reform the filibuster — as we saw when Democrats ended it for most executive branch nominations and most judicial nominations in 2013, and when Republicans ended it for Supreme Court nominees in 2017. The details quickly get complicated, but a simple majority of senators could vote to loosen some of the limits on budget reconciliation, as Senator Bernie Sanders, the new chair of the Budget Committee, has suggested. The Senate is bound by nothing but its own convictions.
But this is a Senate that, collectively, has no convictions. It does not believe enough in the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold to simply abide by it. It does not believe enough in passing bills by a simple majority to make that the standard. It is the self-styled moderates, like Manchin and Sinema, who freeze the institution in dysfunction, but there is nothing moderate about the modern Senate: It is radical in its inanity, a legislative chamber designed by dadaists.
by Ezra Klein, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Not All Millennials: Generational Wealth and the New Inequality
Peddlers of self-help and pop-psychology are quick to assure us that we’re each our own toughest critic. In fact, it’s often our peers who will exact the harshest judgments, being best positioned to sniff out the social cues and latent hierarchies that are most legible within a shared milieu. Last year, Pete Buttigieg, the only millennial candidate in the Democratic Presidential field, failed to win the support of other members of his generation (which is also mine) — a February 2020 poll of 18-34 year olds placed him at a pitiful 6%. The résumé stacked with institutional achievement felt a little too polished, and he was widely regarded with the kind of disdain reserved for teachers’ pets. Columbia students called him “the old man’s millennial,” the kind of ideal young person that our parents measure us against: Harvard, Rhodes scholarship, military service, McKinsey, not quite so politically radical.
Pitted against AOC for the title of Anointed Millennial Politician, he simply didn’t stand a chance. Setting aside the charisma differential, Ocasio-Cortez is an avatar of the leftist politics that has become de rigueur for a large chunk of our economically disenfranchised generation. Her commitment to progressive issues is the product of a lived experience that can’t be replicated by the shrewdest political strategists: famously, she was working as a bartender when she was elected to Congress; when she moved to DC, she struggled to afford rent. Critics have investigated the value of her childhood home and other such clues in an effort to challenge this narrative of precarity, but the specifics hardly matter. Where Buttigieg represents an outdated fantasy of meritocratic accomplishment, Ocasio-Cortez’s story is millennial realism. (...)
Generational insiders have worked hard at narrativizing this predicament: Anne Helen Petersen most recently posited “burnout” as the dominant affective response to skyrocketing precarity and worsening prospects amid constantly multiplying demands on our time, attention, and labor in her viral article-turned-book Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. If our toothbrushes (Quip), mattresses (Casper), suitcases (Away), and novels (Sally Rooney) match, so too, we are given to believe, do our emotional states. “The weight of living amidst that sort of emotional, physical, and financial precarity is staggering,” she writes, describing a condition of exhaustion battling the steady impetus to do more. In 2017, Malcolm Harris’s Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials offered the most thorough accounting yet of the structures underpinning millennial psyches. He explains the way that the forces of neoliberalism, with its imperative to optimize profitability in every facet of life, have set millennials on an impossible and unending racecourse. His book is now frequently cited alongside Petersen’s; in The Nation in November, Jeremy Gordon wrote that the two “draw on a similar body of evidence to demonstrate how and why we got here, because the facts aren’t really up for debate.” Many bleak statistics, which hardly need repeating at this point, bear that sentiment out. Millennials control 4 percent of aggregate wealth, compared to the Baby Boomers’ 21 percent at the same age, and in the era of precarious employment (47 percent of millennials freelance either some or all of the time), we can’t and won’t earn our way out of that hole.
These books, and the slew of accompanying articles, have illuminated the millennial experience and identified the structural barriers we face, drawing a direct line from our debts, wages, and shattered expectations to policy choices made in the last few decades. They have also been used in service of a flattening narrative that creates a frame around our generation and a shorthand for a shared experience that is frequently gestured at, even when it’s not necessarily earned. Last summer, Rachel Connolly put her finger on the way that a distinct “we’re all in this together” ethos papers over intra-generational class distinctions. “Those who stand to inherit substantial wealth will complain they are crippled by the high cost of rent,” she writes, “and those with rich and famous parents will speak, darkly, of “hustling” their way into the industries in which their relatives work.” I immediately recognized in her description the discreet millennial landlords and “broke” trust-funders I’ve met, and I’d venture to guess that I’m not alone.
The millennial social condition is analogous to the one that has arisen during the pandemic: despite a wildly unequal material reality, essential workers, the unemployed, and those with cushy remote jobs have all experienced a brutal lifestyle disruption, a severe narrowing of options, and a blow to mental health and happiness. Almost across the board, millennials will do worse than their parents, inheriting a harsher and more difficult world, but not all of us will experience this in the same way. For a generation that has developed a complex language and conceptual rubric for privilege, it’s curious that this phenomenon has yet to receive as much attention, that the authenticity tests we’ve administered to Buttigieg and Ocasio-Cortez have not yet translated to a broader reckoning with what’s coming.
***
Some millennials are already receiving financial help from their parents (in fact, many: the Times reported one estimate that “more than half (53 percent) of Americans ages 21 to 37 have received some form of financial assistance from a parent, guardian or family member since turning 21.”) Others can soon expect a life-altering infusion of cash, either in the form of posthumous bequests or transfers — like help with a down payment — made while parents are still alive. These gifts have become more significant than ever now that the wage labor market can no longer serve as a corrective to unevenly distributed parental wealth. Yet another group may see its economic position shift later in life: after struggling to pay the bills until age 50 or later, outcomes will suddenly diverge even among those who hold the same job. The financial industry is calling the coming shift a “great wealth transfer.” Morgan Stanley has referred to it as the “$30 Trillion Challenge” after one study specified that amount as the sum of wealth that will pass into millennials’ hands between 2031 and 2045. Their advisors are standing at the ready: “Morgan Stanley is committed to helping this generation prepare for its inheritance and achieve the amazing,” reads their website. CapitalOne/United Income predicts $36 trillion; Cerulli Associates places their estimate at $68 trillion; PNC Bank predicts $59 trillion; Wealth-X says $15 trillion by 2030. Regardless, The Economist wrote in October, “Wall Street will soon have to take millennial investors seriously.” Forbes wrote in 2019 that “Millennials Will Become Richest Generation In American History As Baby Boomers Transfer Their Over Wealth,” the same year that the Times asked, “A ‘Great Wealth Transfer’ Is Coming. What Will It Mean for Art?”
by Kiara Barrows, Drift | Read more:
Image: Emma Kumer
Wednesday, February 3, 2021
Inside the Mind of Jeff Bezos
Inside the mind of Jeff Bezos and the World Amazon Made (The Guardian)
Amazon robots transport packages from workers to chutes at an Amazon warehouse in Goodyear, Arizona, 2019. Photograph: Ross D Franklin/AP
Amazon robots transport packages from workers to chutes at an Amazon warehouse in Goodyear, Arizona, 2019. Photograph: Ross D Franklin/AP
Listen to a Forest: Tree.fm
Tree.fm is a website where you can listen to a randomly-selected forest.
Remember Forests? People around the world recorded the sounds of their forests, so you can escape into nature while in lockdown or unable to travel. Use this site to chill, meditate or do some digital shinrin-yoku.
Image: USA, Alaska, East area of Denali National Park and Preserve, recorded by Davyd Halyn Betchka
[ed. And: if cities and police scanners are more your thing (with ambient music), check out You Are Listening To...]
The Secret to Getting Rid of Snakes: You Can’t
We homeowners spend thousands of dollars, dozens of hours and thousands of gray hairs trying to eliminate the destructive household pests to which we are not related by blood or marriage. While mice, termites and squirrels can frequently be managed using conventional extermination methods, I recently learned that one household pest won’t be managed.
As pests go, snakes don’t cause much property damage, but there is no reliable way to stop them from hanging out and terrorizing you.
I have always hated snakes. They, unfortunately, love Shed Mahal, the renovated horse shed where I began working remotely during the pandemic. One day, a snake slithered across the rug and scared the bejesus out of me. Another snake visit happened several days later. Then they started showing up daily.
With total snake annihilation top of mind, I called Exterminator Guy, with whom, due to our home’s mouse and ant situations, we enjoy a committed, long-term relationship. I suggested burning the Shed Mahal to the ground, or detonating a small neutron bomb that would take out the Snake Family but leave Shed Mahal intact. Amazingly, such a thing doesn’t exist.
Exterminator Guy said the proven solution was a “snake gate.” It is a device that lets the snakes check out of the crawl space they colonized under the Shed but not back in, like a Roach Motel® in reverse. He sealed up the holes in the Shed Mahal’s foundation using an expanding foam-type stuff, installed the gate in the main hole I’d seen the little buggers use and bid me “bonne chance.”
Two weeks and zero snake sightings later, Guy returned victorious, removed the snake gate, and filled the final hole with the expanding foam-type stuff. I returned to my desk, one eye constantly scanning the re-caulked baseboards for snake incursions.
A week passed. No snakes. I began to relax.
Then the smell started—the aroma, I believed, of a village of dead snakes. It appeared that the snake gate wasn’t the one-way passage to snake freedom we were sold, but instead confined the entire Snake Family under the Shed to die a slow and extremely smelly death.
Fortunately, both the smell and my guilt were gone within a week.
Then one day, I saw it: the biggest Daddy Snake I have ever seen. It was lying in the grass, watching me as I approached the Shed. He was about 6 feet away from the door. Would he lunge? Could he lunge? I paused.
“Sorry about the family,” I said.
Then, I swear on all things holy, the snake gave me stink eye.
Snake gates weren’t gonna cut it. I needed the big guns.
I phoned J. Whitfield “Whit” Gibbons, one of the world’s leading snake experts and professor emeritus at the University of Georgia, a state that knows what’s up when it comes to snakes. I described my predicament and asked what more I could do to stop what was clearly shaping up to be some sort of a coordinated assault on Shed Mahal by the snake community to exact retribution for their blood sacrifice.
“There is no way you can seal up a foundation tight enough to keep them out or in. That wasn’t snakes you were smelling,” Dr. Gibbons said between snorts. “It was probably mice. Those snakes are still in there for sure. They can go for months without eating, so why would they die? The record for a snake in captivity is two years without any food. Why are you afraid of them?”
“They are snakes,” I said. “In my office.” (...)
The conversation proving less than fruitful for my purposes of total snake annihilation, I called Steve A. Johnson, an associate professor and snake expert at the University of Florida. I asked him what I should do.
“Move your office back into the main house,” said Dr. Johnson. “You’re asking for it. A horse barn is a perfect place for wildlife.”
“Really?” I asked. “I should just give up?”
“Ya. Or you could stay, and if you see the same snake twice, you can name it. We have to learn to live with wildlife. They’re part of our environment. They’re just trying to make a living and get by just like we are. We have our spaces and they have theirs and usually everyone can get along when everyone stays on their side of the wall.
“But have you thought about putting up a sign that says ‘No snakes allowed in here?’ ” he asked through a barely stifled giggle.
They say that you must be the change you want to see in the world. So I went back to working in the Shed with my new legless, armless office-mates, Fluffy, Snuggles and Jeff. I treat them as unpredictable, potentially dangerous pets, or relatives whose political views differ from mine. I am learning to accept differences that once felt insurmountable and to live in peace. But I swear if one of them slithers over my feet, I’m burning Shed Mahal to the ground.
by Kris Frieswick, WSJ | Read more:
Image: Christina Spano
As pests go, snakes don’t cause much property damage, but there is no reliable way to stop them from hanging out and terrorizing you.
I have always hated snakes. They, unfortunately, love Shed Mahal, the renovated horse shed where I began working remotely during the pandemic. One day, a snake slithered across the rug and scared the bejesus out of me. Another snake visit happened several days later. Then they started showing up daily.
Exterminator Guy said the proven solution was a “snake gate.” It is a device that lets the snakes check out of the crawl space they colonized under the Shed but not back in, like a Roach Motel® in reverse. He sealed up the holes in the Shed Mahal’s foundation using an expanding foam-type stuff, installed the gate in the main hole I’d seen the little buggers use and bid me “bonne chance.”
Two weeks and zero snake sightings later, Guy returned victorious, removed the snake gate, and filled the final hole with the expanding foam-type stuff. I returned to my desk, one eye constantly scanning the re-caulked baseboards for snake incursions.
A week passed. No snakes. I began to relax.
Then the smell started—the aroma, I believed, of a village of dead snakes. It appeared that the snake gate wasn’t the one-way passage to snake freedom we were sold, but instead confined the entire Snake Family under the Shed to die a slow and extremely smelly death.
Fortunately, both the smell and my guilt were gone within a week.
Then one day, I saw it: the biggest Daddy Snake I have ever seen. It was lying in the grass, watching me as I approached the Shed. He was about 6 feet away from the door. Would he lunge? Could he lunge? I paused.
“Sorry about the family,” I said.
Then, I swear on all things holy, the snake gave me stink eye.
Snake gates weren’t gonna cut it. I needed the big guns.
I phoned J. Whitfield “Whit” Gibbons, one of the world’s leading snake experts and professor emeritus at the University of Georgia, a state that knows what’s up when it comes to snakes. I described my predicament and asked what more I could do to stop what was clearly shaping up to be some sort of a coordinated assault on Shed Mahal by the snake community to exact retribution for their blood sacrifice.
“There is no way you can seal up a foundation tight enough to keep them out or in. That wasn’t snakes you were smelling,” Dr. Gibbons said between snorts. “It was probably mice. Those snakes are still in there for sure. They can go for months without eating, so why would they die? The record for a snake in captivity is two years without any food. Why are you afraid of them?”
“They are snakes,” I said. “In my office.” (...)
The conversation proving less than fruitful for my purposes of total snake annihilation, I called Steve A. Johnson, an associate professor and snake expert at the University of Florida. I asked him what I should do.
“Move your office back into the main house,” said Dr. Johnson. “You’re asking for it. A horse barn is a perfect place for wildlife.”
“Really?” I asked. “I should just give up?”
“Ya. Or you could stay, and if you see the same snake twice, you can name it. We have to learn to live with wildlife. They’re part of our environment. They’re just trying to make a living and get by just like we are. We have our spaces and they have theirs and usually everyone can get along when everyone stays on their side of the wall.
“But have you thought about putting up a sign that says ‘No snakes allowed in here?’ ” he asked through a barely stifled giggle.
They say that you must be the change you want to see in the world. So I went back to working in the Shed with my new legless, armless office-mates, Fluffy, Snuggles and Jeff. I treat them as unpredictable, potentially dangerous pets, or relatives whose political views differ from mine. I am learning to accept differences that once felt insurmountable and to live in peace. But I swear if one of them slithers over my feet, I’m burning Shed Mahal to the ground.
by Kris Frieswick, WSJ | Read more:
Image: Christina Spano
Off The Rails
Last month, Axios published "Off the rails," a series taking you inside the end of Donald Trump's presidency, from his election loss to the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection that triggered his second impeachment — and a Senate trial set to begin next week.
In this bonus edition, we take you back into those final weeks — to one long, unhinged night a week before Christmas, when an epic, profanity-soaked standoff played out with profound implications for the nation.
Four conspiracy theorists marched into the Oval Office. It was early evening on Friday, Dec. 18 — more than a month after the election had been declared for Joe Biden, and four days after the Electoral College met in every state to make it official.
"How the hell did Sidney get in the building?" White House senior adviser Eric Herschmann grumbled from the outer Oval Office as Sidney Powell and her entourage strutted by to visit the president.
President Trump's private schedule hadn't included appointments for Powell or the others: former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, and a little-known former Trump administration official, Emily Newman. But they'd come to convince Trump that he had the power to take extreme measures to keep fighting.
As Powell and the others entered the Oval Office that evening, Herschmann — a wealthy business executive and former partner at Kasowitz Benson & Torres who'd been pulled out of quasi-retirement to advise Trump — quietly slipped in behind them.
The hours to come would pit the insurgent conspiracists against a handful of White House lawyers and advisers determined to keep the president from giving in to temptation to invoke emergency national security powers, seize voting machines and disable the primary levers of American democracy.
Herschmann took a seat in a yellow chair close to the doorway. Powell, Flynn, Newman and Byrne sat in a row before the Resolute Desk, facing the president.
For weeks now, ever since Rudy Giuliani had commandeered Trump’s floundering campaign to overturn the election, outsiders had been coming out of the woodwork to feed the president wild allegations of voter fraud based on highly dubious sources.
Trump was no longer focused on any semblance of a governing agenda, instead spending his days taking phone calls and meetings from anyone armed with conspiracy theories about the election. For the White House staff, it was an unending sea of garbage churned up by the bottom feeders.
Powell began this meeting with the same baseless claim that now has her facing a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit: She told the president that Dominion Voting Systems had rigged their machines to flip votes from Trump to Biden and that it was part of an international communist plot to steal the election for the Democrats.
[Note: In response to a request for comment, Powell said in an emailed statement to Axios: “I will not publicly discuss my private meetings with the President of the United States. I believe those meetings are privileged and confidential under executive privilege and under rules of the legal profession. I would caution the readers to view mainstream media reports of any such conversations with a high degree of discernment and a healthy dose of skepticism.”]
Powell waved an affidavit from the pile of papers in her lap, claiming it contained testimony from someone involved in the development of rigged voting machines in Venezuela.
She proposed declaring a national security emergency, granting her and her cabal top-secret security clearances and using the U.S. government to seize Dominion’s voting machines.
"Hold on a minute, Sidney," Herschmann interrupted from the back of the Oval. "You're part of the Rudy team, right? Is your theory that the Democrats got together and changed the rules, or is it that there was foreign interference in our election?"
Giuliani's legal efforts, while replete with debunked claims about voter fraud, had largely focused on allegations of misconduct by corrupt Democrats and election officials.
"It's foreign interference," Powell insisted, then added: "Rudy hasn't understood what this case is about until just now."
In disbelief, Herschmann yelled out to an aide in the outer Oval Office. "Get Pat down here immediately!" Several minutes later, White House counsel Pat Cipollone walked into the Oval. He looked at Byrne and said, "Who are you?"
The meeting was already getting heated.
White House staff had spent weeks poring over the evidence underlying hundreds of affidavits and other claims of fraud promoted by Trump allies like Powell. The team had done the due diligence and knew the specific details of what was being alleged better than anybody. Time and time again, they found, Powell's allegations fell apart under basic scrutiny.
But Powell, fixing on Trump, continued to elaborate on a fantastical election narrative involving Venezuela, Iran, China and others. She named a county in Georgia where she claimed she could prove that Dominion had illegally flipped the vote.
Herschmann interrupted to point out that Trump had actually won the Georgia county in question: "So your theory is that Dominion intentionally flipped the votes so we could win that county?"
As for Powell's larger claims, he demanded she provide evidence for what — if true — would amount to the greatest national security breach in American history. They needed to dial in one of the campaign's lawyers, Herschmann said, and Trump campaign lawyer Matt Morgan was patched in via speakerphone.
By now, people were yelling and cursing.
The room was starting to fill up. Trump's personal assistant summoned White House staff secretary Derek Lyons to join the meeting and asked him to bring a copy of a 2018 executive order that the Powell group kept citing as the key to victory. Lyons agreed with Cipollone and the other officials that Powell's theories were nonsensical.
It was now four against four.
Flynn went berserk. The former three-star general, whom Trump had fired as his first national security adviser after he was caught lying to the FBI (and later pardoned), stood up and turned from the Resolute Desk to face Herschmann.
"You're quitting! You're a quitter! You're not fighting!” he exploded at the senior adviser. Flynn then turned to the president, and implored: "Sir, we need fighters."
Herschmann ignored Flynn at first and continued to probe Powell's pitch with questions about the underlying evidence. "All you do is promise, but never deliver," he said to her sharply.
Flynn was ranting, seemingly infuriated about anyone challenging Powell, who had represented him in his recent legal battles.
Finally Herschmann had enough. "Why the fuck do you keep standing up and screaming at me?" he shot back at Flynn. "If you want to come over here, come over here. If not, sit your ass down." Flynn sat back down.
by Jonathan Swan, Zachary Basu, Axios | Read more:
Image: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Getty Images photos: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post, George Frey/Bloomberg
In this bonus edition, we take you back into those final weeks — to one long, unhinged night a week before Christmas, when an epic, profanity-soaked standoff played out with profound implications for the nation.
Four conspiracy theorists marched into the Oval Office. It was early evening on Friday, Dec. 18 — more than a month after the election had been declared for Joe Biden, and four days after the Electoral College met in every state to make it official.
"How the hell did Sidney get in the building?" White House senior adviser Eric Herschmann grumbled from the outer Oval Office as Sidney Powell and her entourage strutted by to visit the president.
As Powell and the others entered the Oval Office that evening, Herschmann — a wealthy business executive and former partner at Kasowitz Benson & Torres who'd been pulled out of quasi-retirement to advise Trump — quietly slipped in behind them.
The hours to come would pit the insurgent conspiracists against a handful of White House lawyers and advisers determined to keep the president from giving in to temptation to invoke emergency national security powers, seize voting machines and disable the primary levers of American democracy.
Herschmann took a seat in a yellow chair close to the doorway. Powell, Flynn, Newman and Byrne sat in a row before the Resolute Desk, facing the president.
For weeks now, ever since Rudy Giuliani had commandeered Trump’s floundering campaign to overturn the election, outsiders had been coming out of the woodwork to feed the president wild allegations of voter fraud based on highly dubious sources.
Trump was no longer focused on any semblance of a governing agenda, instead spending his days taking phone calls and meetings from anyone armed with conspiracy theories about the election. For the White House staff, it was an unending sea of garbage churned up by the bottom feeders.
Powell began this meeting with the same baseless claim that now has her facing a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit: She told the president that Dominion Voting Systems had rigged their machines to flip votes from Trump to Biden and that it was part of an international communist plot to steal the election for the Democrats.
[Note: In response to a request for comment, Powell said in an emailed statement to Axios: “I will not publicly discuss my private meetings with the President of the United States. I believe those meetings are privileged and confidential under executive privilege and under rules of the legal profession. I would caution the readers to view mainstream media reports of any such conversations with a high degree of discernment and a healthy dose of skepticism.”]
Powell waved an affidavit from the pile of papers in her lap, claiming it contained testimony from someone involved in the development of rigged voting machines in Venezuela.
She proposed declaring a national security emergency, granting her and her cabal top-secret security clearances and using the U.S. government to seize Dominion’s voting machines.
"Hold on a minute, Sidney," Herschmann interrupted from the back of the Oval. "You're part of the Rudy team, right? Is your theory that the Democrats got together and changed the rules, or is it that there was foreign interference in our election?"
Giuliani's legal efforts, while replete with debunked claims about voter fraud, had largely focused on allegations of misconduct by corrupt Democrats and election officials.
"It's foreign interference," Powell insisted, then added: "Rudy hasn't understood what this case is about until just now."
In disbelief, Herschmann yelled out to an aide in the outer Oval Office. "Get Pat down here immediately!" Several minutes later, White House counsel Pat Cipollone walked into the Oval. He looked at Byrne and said, "Who are you?"
The meeting was already getting heated.
White House staff had spent weeks poring over the evidence underlying hundreds of affidavits and other claims of fraud promoted by Trump allies like Powell. The team had done the due diligence and knew the specific details of what was being alleged better than anybody. Time and time again, they found, Powell's allegations fell apart under basic scrutiny.
But Powell, fixing on Trump, continued to elaborate on a fantastical election narrative involving Venezuela, Iran, China and others. She named a county in Georgia where she claimed she could prove that Dominion had illegally flipped the vote.
Herschmann interrupted to point out that Trump had actually won the Georgia county in question: "So your theory is that Dominion intentionally flipped the votes so we could win that county?"
As for Powell's larger claims, he demanded she provide evidence for what — if true — would amount to the greatest national security breach in American history. They needed to dial in one of the campaign's lawyers, Herschmann said, and Trump campaign lawyer Matt Morgan was patched in via speakerphone.
By now, people were yelling and cursing.
The room was starting to fill up. Trump's personal assistant summoned White House staff secretary Derek Lyons to join the meeting and asked him to bring a copy of a 2018 executive order that the Powell group kept citing as the key to victory. Lyons agreed with Cipollone and the other officials that Powell's theories were nonsensical.
It was now four against four.
Flynn went berserk. The former three-star general, whom Trump had fired as his first national security adviser after he was caught lying to the FBI (and later pardoned), stood up and turned from the Resolute Desk to face Herschmann.
"You're quitting! You're a quitter! You're not fighting!” he exploded at the senior adviser. Flynn then turned to the president, and implored: "Sir, we need fighters."
Herschmann ignored Flynn at first and continued to probe Powell's pitch with questions about the underlying evidence. "All you do is promise, but never deliver," he said to her sharply.
Flynn was ranting, seemingly infuriated about anyone challenging Powell, who had represented him in his recent legal battles.
Finally Herschmann had enough. "Why the fuck do you keep standing up and screaming at me?" he shot back at Flynn. "If you want to come over here, come over here. If not, sit your ass down." Flynn sat back down.
by Jonathan Swan, Zachary Basu, Axios | Read more:
Image: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Getty Images photos: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post, George Frey/Bloomberg
Tuesday, February 2, 2021
Wall Street Thanks You For Your Revolution
I’m on record having said I am thrilled to see small investors having made some big money on GameStop and AMC and the rest of the heavily-shorted stocks they’ve ridden to glory this year. It’s about time some of the spoils of the stock market rally have been better distributed.
But that doesn’t mean this will necessarily end well. And it certainly doesn’t mean that all (or even most) large Wall Street firms are mad about what’s going on. In fact, some of them are downright elated.
Let’s start with high frequency traders (like Virtu Financial) and market makers (like Citadel) – they love this. Millions of random people coming in to trade stocks for the first time, without regard to spreads, prices, time of day, order routing, etc. It’s Sesame Street meets Wall Street. This is where these firms make all their money.
Virtu Financial is publicly traded and the company feasts on two things – volatility and the easily harvestable trading mistakes of other players. They’re getting a major influx of both things at once right now and you can see the company’s stock price racing back up to its prior high, which occurred during the massive volatility of 2018. (...)
For HFT firms and market makers, volatility + volume = profits. Wall Street does not feel attacked by this, outside of the long-short hedge fund complex (which definitely does). If anything, Wall Street’s entrenched interests are very heavily rewarded by all this activity – because Wall Street does not pick sides. They get paid by both sides of the trade and make even more money when there is a scramble to lay off risk. “Wall Street” is not one of the roosters in this cockfight, Wall Street is the f***ing ring.
And then off Wall Street there’s this whole other complex of large players who are also feasting on this recent barrage of retail trading acrobatics. They’re not appearing on television or tweeting, they’re ringing the register. “Sold to you, Reddit and TikTok, and by all means please keep buying.” You will not hear anyone say this out loud. They don’t need even need to say it among themselves. There’s a lot of smiling and winking going on; there will be no electronic traces of a knowing smirk when the inevitable crash happens and the regulators shout CUI BONO? for the television cameras.
Petition writes about the supposed stock market “revolution” brought about on internet message boards these past few weeks. It turns out that a few unimportant hedge funds were blown up, but most of the real beneficiaries of the madness are not kids. They’re gigantic private equity firms, bondholders and landlords.
For example, the massive technology and media-oriented PE firm Silver Lake Partners just saw their AMC debt holdings swing from a loss of $200 million to a gain of $100 million on paper, as a result of the stock’s rapid rise. The company was able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars by selling stock and then re-engineer their various loans and liabilities thanks to the enthusiasm of the amateur equity buyers.
But that doesn’t mean this will necessarily end well. And it certainly doesn’t mean that all (or even most) large Wall Street firms are mad about what’s going on. In fact, some of them are downright elated.
Virtu Financial is publicly traded and the company feasts on two things – volatility and the easily harvestable trading mistakes of other players. They’re getting a major influx of both things at once right now and you can see the company’s stock price racing back up to its prior high, which occurred during the massive volatility of 2018. (...)
For HFT firms and market makers, volatility + volume = profits. Wall Street does not feel attacked by this, outside of the long-short hedge fund complex (which definitely does). If anything, Wall Street’s entrenched interests are very heavily rewarded by all this activity – because Wall Street does not pick sides. They get paid by both sides of the trade and make even more money when there is a scramble to lay off risk. “Wall Street” is not one of the roosters in this cockfight, Wall Street is the f***ing ring.
And then off Wall Street there’s this whole other complex of large players who are also feasting on this recent barrage of retail trading acrobatics. They’re not appearing on television or tweeting, they’re ringing the register. “Sold to you, Reddit and TikTok, and by all means please keep buying.” You will not hear anyone say this out loud. They don’t need even need to say it among themselves. There’s a lot of smiling and winking going on; there will be no electronic traces of a knowing smirk when the inevitable crash happens and the regulators shout CUI BONO? for the television cameras.
Petition writes about the supposed stock market “revolution” brought about on internet message boards these past few weeks. It turns out that a few unimportant hedge funds were blown up, but most of the real beneficiaries of the madness are not kids. They’re gigantic private equity firms, bondholders and landlords.
For example, the massive technology and media-oriented PE firm Silver Lake Partners just saw their AMC debt holdings swing from a loss of $200 million to a gain of $100 million on paper, as a result of the stock’s rapid rise. The company was able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars by selling stock and then re-engineer their various loans and liabilities thanks to the enthusiasm of the amateur equity buyers.
Except none of this seems to be taking into account that while, sure, shorts like Melvin Capital and Citron Research got smoked by a bunch of RedBull-IV’d basement traders,** plenty of other Wall Street-y institutions are having what seems like heaps of fun getting in on the F*cking. We mean, we’re looking at Silver Lake Partners — a private equity firm WITH $72B UNDER MANAGEMENT — and, call us crazy, but they’re, like, a private equity firm. They seem to be right up there with those targeted by WSB. We’re sure they were thinking about the “little guy” when they converted their debt into equity and systematically dumped their equity holdings (as the price ascended, of course) into the market while also ridding themselves of their $100mm 10.5% first lien notes, completely severing ties to AMC while the market drooled all over itself…
Note the average price per share! Reuters tallies the sale proceeds at $713mm. We would check that math and/or calculate the IRR but, frankly, we are afraid our tech will spontaneously combust and/or Johnny may throw himself out the window in a fit of disbelief, frustration and jealousy (with maybe a pinch of admiration). Suffice it to say, they did alright.
Sold! To the man-child eating chicken tenders at 2 o’clock in the afternoon! Next auction!
by Joshua M. Brown, The Reformed Broker | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: Five questions for the Congressional hearings on GameStop, Reddit and Robinhood (RB); and, just generally: Stimulus, More Stimulus and Taxes (Big Picture).]
What is Reconciliation?
Reconciliation is a rule that was included when Congress rewrote budget rules in 1974. The goal was to allow Congress to pass a new budget resolution with new spending priorities and quickly pass the legislation to reflect the needs of the moment. The Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan research group in Congress, reports reconciliation was first used in 1980 and has been used to pass 25 reconciliation bills.
That process allows the party in control of Congress to pass most big-dollar legislation with a simple 51-vote majority in the Senate without having to worry about a filibuster.
Congressional Democrats say they've heard Biden's calls for bipartisanship, but they're setting up a budget work-around — just in case.
"By the end of the week, we will be finished with the budget resolution, which will be about reconciliation, if needed," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told reporters last week. "I hope we don't need it. But if we need it, we will have it."
For years, Congress mostly used reconciliation for deficit reduction, said Zach Moller, deputy director of economic programs at the center-left think tank Third Way and a former Democratic staffer on the Senate Budget Committee.
In recent years, though, reconciliation has become a popular tool to get big partisan bills passed when one party has full control of Washington. Democrats used reconciliation to pass some health care changes in 2010, and Republicans used it to pass tax cuts in 2017, as well as in their failed attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act during Donald Trump's presidency.
"This is a way to find a way to change spending and revenue that does not have to deal with the partisan gridlock," Moller said. "It's not a backdoor process; it's more like express lanes on the highway. It's a way to get you where you want to go, sometimes faster, oftentimes with less congestion."
But there are some pretty significant road blocks along the road to reconciliation.
A speedy but treacherous path
Budget reconciliation isn't as simple as adding policies to a budget bill and passing that legislation with 51 votes in the Senate.
The process starts with a budget resolution that includes special rules and procedures for reconciliation.
Typically, Congress only gets one shot at reconciliation each year, because they are only allowed to pass one budget for each fiscal year.
This year is different. The previous Congress did not pass a budget for 2020, which means Democrats have the chance to attach reconciliation instructions to a 2020 budget and a 2021 budget, if they can agree on what those budgets should include.
Once they agree on a budget, simple majorities in the House and the Senate have to pass the same language. Then, the clock starts for reconciliation and things can move quickly.
There's a time limit on debate in the Senate, and there's no filibuster when the clock runs out.
"This is the secret sauce of budget reconciliation — the fact there's a 20-hour time clock for the budget reconciliation measure," Moller said. "It's a lot smoother, and you don't have to deal with the filibuster, because at the end of the time, they just start taking votes."
Has to be about government spending
There are a few things that lawmakers have to keep in mind. Reconciliation only applies to policies that change spending — the money the federal government pays out — or revenue — the money the federal government takes in.
Some things, like the Social Security program, can't be altered.
Those initial guard rails are important because if the lawmakers writing the reconciliation bill get them wrong, the whole process can fall apart.
[ed. See also: GOP senators release details of $618 billion COVID relief package (Axios); and The Senate Has Become a Dadaist Nightmare (NYT).]
That process allows the party in control of Congress to pass most big-dollar legislation with a simple 51-vote majority in the Senate without having to worry about a filibuster.
Congressional Democrats say they've heard Biden's calls for bipartisanship, but they're setting up a budget work-around — just in case.
For years, Congress mostly used reconciliation for deficit reduction, said Zach Moller, deputy director of economic programs at the center-left think tank Third Way and a former Democratic staffer on the Senate Budget Committee.
In recent years, though, reconciliation has become a popular tool to get big partisan bills passed when one party has full control of Washington. Democrats used reconciliation to pass some health care changes in 2010, and Republicans used it to pass tax cuts in 2017, as well as in their failed attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act during Donald Trump's presidency.
"This is a way to find a way to change spending and revenue that does not have to deal with the partisan gridlock," Moller said. "It's not a backdoor process; it's more like express lanes on the highway. It's a way to get you where you want to go, sometimes faster, oftentimes with less congestion."
But there are some pretty significant road blocks along the road to reconciliation.
A speedy but treacherous path
Budget reconciliation isn't as simple as adding policies to a budget bill and passing that legislation with 51 votes in the Senate.
The process starts with a budget resolution that includes special rules and procedures for reconciliation.
Typically, Congress only gets one shot at reconciliation each year, because they are only allowed to pass one budget for each fiscal year.
This year is different. The previous Congress did not pass a budget for 2020, which means Democrats have the chance to attach reconciliation instructions to a 2020 budget and a 2021 budget, if they can agree on what those budgets should include.
Once they agree on a budget, simple majorities in the House and the Senate have to pass the same language. Then, the clock starts for reconciliation and things can move quickly.
There's a time limit on debate in the Senate, and there's no filibuster when the clock runs out.
"This is the secret sauce of budget reconciliation — the fact there's a 20-hour time clock for the budget reconciliation measure," Moller said. "It's a lot smoother, and you don't have to deal with the filibuster, because at the end of the time, they just start taking votes."
Has to be about government spending
There are a few things that lawmakers have to keep in mind. Reconciliation only applies to policies that change spending — the money the federal government pays out — or revenue — the money the federal government takes in.
Some things, like the Social Security program, can't be altered.
Those initial guard rails are important because if the lawmakers writing the reconciliation bill get them wrong, the whole process can fall apart.
by Kelsy Snell, NPR | Read more:
Image: Doug Mills/Pool/Getty Images[ed. See also: GOP senators release details of $618 billion COVID relief package (Axios); and The Senate Has Become a Dadaist Nightmare (NYT).]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)