And the Brand Played On: Bob Dylan at 80

It’s gonna take a hundred years before they understand me!” Bob Dylan once claimed, “they” being the cohorts of fans, critics and Dylanologists who have dogged his tracks ever since Robert Zimmerman, chippy teen of Hibbing, Minnesota, became Bob Dylan, world-famous singer, songwriter, and pop’s most enduring enigma.

“That’s exactly the quote James Joyce made about Ulysses,” points out Sean Latham, professor of English at the University of Tulsa and head of the institute for Bob Dylan Studies recently established there. “Joyce said, ‘I put so many puzzles and enigmas in Ulysses it will take the scholars 100 years to solve them’.”

With the centenary of his masterwork arriving in 2022, Joyce has perhaps been proved right. Whether it will take as long to decipher Dylan’s extensive oeuvre – 600-odd songs, 39 studio albums, a novel, a memoir, one film as director, several more as actor, a half-dozen documentaries, innumerable concerts, a cache of paintings – seems doubtful given the critical and biographical weight already bearing on him as he approaches his 80th birthday on 24 May. The anniversary coincides with a burgeoning of the Dylan industry being led as much by US academia as by Dylan’s faithful following of “Bobcats”. Next month sees the publication of three major new books and one reissue: a new account of Dylan’s early life by his renowned biographer Clinton Heylin; a collection of new writing on Dylan, edited by Latham; an idiosyncratic reassessment of Dylan’s life and work from the writer Paul Morley; and a re-edited version of Robert Shelton’s 1986 biography, No Direction Home.

Central to it all is the establishment of the Bob Dylan Archive in Tulsa, a depository of about 100,000 items bought from Dylan for a cool $20m by the George Kaiser Family Foundation, Kaiser being one of the billionaire philanthropists in which the US seems to specialise. Master tapes, photographs, set lists, notebooks, manuscripts (on all of which Dylan retains copyright) – the archive has the lot, along with the leather jacket Dylan wore onstage at the 1965 Newport folk festival, when he “went electric”, and, who knows, the odd leopard-skin pillbox hat. In Tulsa it joins the Woody Guthrie Centre already established by the foundation in 2011 in honour of Oklahoma’s most famous son, Guthrie being the major role model for Dylan in his folk-singing years, before an earlier, rocking and rolling ambition resurfaced – “To join Little Richard”, as he told his high school yearbook at age 18. (...)

The principal motor of the Dylan industry remains the man himself, who has long shown an aptitude for the business side of the music biz, having been, like so many, financially stung early in his career. Last year he sold the rights to his entire back catalogue to Universal Music for an estimated $300m, before which he had licensed songs for commercials for, among others, Apple, Cadillac, Pepsi, Budweiser, IBM and Victoria’s Secret, appearing in the last himself, apparently summoned by a seductive, scantily clad angel. These days Dylan markets his own brand of liquor, Heaven’s Door Whiskey, alongside prints of his artwork (about £5,000 a pop). In the Latham book, Devon Powers argues that “Dylan became a brand because brands aspired to become more like him: to matter, to delight, to enrapture and, above all, to last”. (...)

Dylan has certainly lasted extraordinarily well, rebounding from a career low in middle age – his role as a washed-up rock star in 1987’s Hearts of Fire and on disc with the Grateful Dead the same year marked his nadir – into a creative renaissance during his “third act”, a time when most pop stars have long since hung up their rock’n’roll shoes. A revival that began with 1997’s Time Out of Mind has continued with Love and Theft (2001) Modern Times (2006), Tempest (2012) and last year’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, a quartet interspersed with three albums inconsequentially covering the great American songbook (ie Porter, Sinatra and co), a somewhat preposterous Christmas record and a sizeable memoir, 2004’s Chronicles Volume One, not forgetting his brilliant radio series, Theme Time Radio Hour. All have arrived against the background of the “never-ending tour” that Dylan declared back in 1988 and which has since delivered more than 3,000 shows, its progress halted only by the Covid pandemic.

It’s an astonishing work rate that has surely taken its toll. Arthritis means that Dylan can no longer hold a guitar; onstage he plays, and is propped up by, an electric piano. His voice – rarely a thing of beauty and most often an abrasively compelling affair described by David Bowie as “like sand and glue” – is in tatters, obliging him to abandon singing altogether for gravelly, dramatic declamation on Rough and Rowdy Ways. Yet like Matisse, forced to give up oils and canvas for cut-outs around the same age, Dylan remains obstinately true to his art, “refusing to let his career become embalmed” as Paul Morley puts it in his new book, out next month. Once you stop creating, you’re in the past.

by Neil Spencer, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Shutterstock

Embedded at the Border

Republican senator Ted Cruz mocked for documentary-style trip to US-Mexico border (The Guardian)

Image: Go Nakamura/Reuters
[ed. Ah... I needed a laugh this morning. Sometimes politicians make the best comedians.]

Pepé Le Pew Apologizes

Pepe Le Pew won’t be appearing in Warner Bros’ “Space Jam” sequel. 

—Deadline Hollywood

Messieurs and mesdemoiselles, bonsoir! It is good to see so many attractive journalists here today. I would like to make love to each and every one of you! Ha ha! Oui, oui—my representatives are telling me not to get distracted. Is good advice, non? This is my problem! I have too much amour, non? Anyway, I have come before you today to make an apology.

Questions have been raised about some of my past interactions with cats and dogs whom I perceived to be highly attractive lady skunks. I never intended to offend anyone or cause any harm. It was all about the amour, non? But, still, my actions are not—how do you say—appropriate. Pepé is très sorry.

It would be easy to blame my behavior on having been insulated by privilege—the privilege of being a well-known celebrity skunk. But I will not do this. It would also be so easy to make some excuse. Like, other skunks have engaged in disreputable behavior for decades without getting caught. Or, only a few unreliable cats and dogs have complained, and they can’t even talk. And, yes, it would be très facile to cast the blame on others, like the painters who are always so sloppy with their painting, leading to white stripes down the backs of black cats and much, much confusion. Mon Dieu, why is it always white paint?

But Pepé knows that the time for excuses has passed.

I am sorry for letting everyone down—my family, my friends, my business associates, other skunks, other French animals, and, of course, the cats and dogs whom I confused with highly attractive lady skunks and relentlessly pursued through cities, forests, the Swiss Alps, and ocean liners. Je suis désolé.

I would also like to apologize to my “Looney Tunes” co-stars. Though I should say that I do not see Mr. Elmer Fudd or Mr. Yosemite Sam out here apologizing for glamorizing gun violence. Or Mr. Bugs Bunny apologizing for his propagation of racist stereotypes. Or Mr. Speedy Gonzales for . . . everything. But that is the way of the world, non? Tolerance for violence and racism in America is always higher than tolerance for amour. D’accord—once more, my representatives are reminding me not to get distracted. And that aggression and unwanted advances are not to be confused with love. C’est la vie.

You have to remember, I came of age in an era when a French animal who did not respond to obvious social cues was considered hilarious. But no more! At one time, there may have been a place for a talking skunk who walked on his hind legs and pursued the love of cats and dogs whom he misidentified as female skunks. But that time is not now.

by Jay Martel, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Everett

Joni Mitchell A Life Story: Woman of Heart and Mind

[ed. Excellent documentary of a musical genius.]

Larry McMurtry, Novelist of the American West, Dies at 84

Larry McMurtry, a prolific novelist and screenwriter who demythologized the American West with his unromantic depictions of life on the 19th-century frontier and in contemporary small-town Texas, died on Thursday at home in Archer City, Texas. He was 84.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said Diana Ossana, his friend and writing partner.

Over more than five decades, Mr. McMurtry wrote more than 30 novels and many books of essays, memoir and history. He also wrote more than 30 screenplays, including the one for “Brokeback Mountain” (written with Ms. Ossana, based on a short story by Annie Proulx), for which he won an Academy Award in 2006.

But he found his greatest commercial and critical success with “Lonesome Dove,” a sweeping 843-page novel about two retired Texas Rangers who drive a herd of stolen cattle from the Rio Grande to Montana in the 1870s. The book won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and was made into a popular television mini-series.

Mr. McMurtry wrote “Lonesome Dove” as an anti-western, a rebuke of sorts to the romantic notions of dime-store novels and an exorcism of the false ghosts in the work of writers like Louis L’Amour. “I’m a critic of the myth of the cowboy,’’ he told an interviewer in 1988. “I don’t feel that it’s a myth that pertains, and since it’s a part of my heritage I feel it’s a legitimate task to criticize it.’’

But readers warmed to the vivid characters in “Lonesome Dove.” Mr. McMurtry himself ultimately likened it, in terms of its sweep, to a Western “Gone With the Wind.”

Mr. McMurtry was the son of a rancher, and the realism in his books extended to the Texas he knew as a young man. His first novel, “Horseman, Pass By” (1961), examined the values of the Old West as they came into conflict with the modern world. Reviewing the novel in The New York Times Book Review, the Texas historian Wayne Gard wrote:

“The cow hands ride horses less often than pickup trucks or Cadillacs. And in the evening, instead of sitting around a campfire strumming guitars and singing ‘Git along, little dogie,’ they are more likely to have a game at the pool hall, drink beer and try their charms on any girls they can find.”

He added that Mr. McMurtry had “not only a sharp ear for dialogue but a gift of expression that easily could blossom in more important works.”

From the start of his career, Mr. McMurtry’s books were attractive to filmmakers. “Horseman, Pass By” was made into “Hud,” directed by Martin Ritt and starring Paul Newman. Mr. McMurtry’s funny, elegiac and sexually frank coming-of-age novel “The Last Picture Show” (1966) was made into a film of the same title in 1971 starring Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd and directed by Peter Bogdanovich. The movie of his 1975 novel, “Terms of Endearment,” directed by James L. Brooks and starring Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger and Jack Nicholson, won the Academy Award for best picture of 1983.

Mr. McMurtry relished his role as a literary outsider. He lived for much of his life in his hometown, Archer City, Texas, two hours northwest of Dallas. He had the same postal box for nearly 70 years. When he walked onstage to accept his Oscar for “Brokeback Mountain,” he wore bluejeans and cowboy boots below his dinner jacket. He reminded audiences that the screenplay was an adaptation of a short story by Ms. Proulx.

Yet Mr. McMurtry was a plugged-in man of American letters. For two years in the early 1990s he was American president of PEN, the august literary and human rights organization. He was a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, where he often wrote on topics relating to the American West. His friends included the writer Susan Sontag, whom he once took to a stock car race.

by Dwight Garner, NY Times | Read more:

Image: Rice University

Democrats Call For $1Bn Shift From Weapons of Mass Destruction to 'Vaccine of Mass Prevention'

Congressional Democrats are introducing legislation to transfer $1bn in funding from a controversial new intercontinental ballistic missile to the development of a universal Covid vaccine.

The Investing in Cures Before Missiles (ICBM) Act, introduced in the House and Senate on Friday, would stop funding on the proposed new missile, known as the ground-based strategic deterrent (GBSD) which is projected to cost a total of $264bn over its projected lifespan, and discontinue spending on a linked warhead modification program.

Instead, the life of the existing US intercontinental ballistic missile, the Minuteman III, would be extended until 2050, and an independent study commissioned on how best to do that.

“The United States should invest in a vaccine of mass prevention before another new land-based weapon of mass destruction,” Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts, co-author of the bill, said.

“The ICBM Act makes clear that we can begin to phase out the cold-war nuclear posture that risks accidental nuclear war while still deterring adversaries and assuring allies, and redirect those savings to the clear and present dangers presented by coronaviruses and other emerging and infectious diseases.”

Arms control experts say static intercontinental ballistic missiles, of which the US has 400 in silos across the northern midwest, are inherently destabilizing and dangerous, because a president would have just a few minutes to launch them on the basis of early warning signals of an impending enemy attack, or risk losing them to a pre-emptive strike. They point to a history of near-launches based on defective data, and the risk of cyber-attacks distorting early warning systems.

“With all of the global challenges we face, the last thing we should be doing is giving billions to defense contractors to build missiles we don’t need to keep as a strong nuclear deterrence,” Ro Khanna, Democratic congressman from California and the bill’s co-author in the House, said.

In September 2020, Northrop Grumman was awarded an uncontested bid for the $13.3bn engineering, manufacturing and development phase of GBSD, after its only rival for the vast contract, Boeing, pulled out of the race complaining of a rigged competition.

The Biden administration’s intentions on the GBSD’s future are unclear, but an early signal may come in its first defence budget expected in the next few weeks.

The new ICBM bill would transfer of $1bn in funding for the GBSD to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Niaid) for development work on a universal coronavirus vaccine. It would also divert money from the program to modify the W87-1 nuclear warhead to fit the GBSD, and dedicate it to research and preparations to combat future bio-threats. And it would launch an independent study to “explore viable technical solutions to extend the Minuteman III” intercontinental ballistic missile to 2050.

When Khanna tried to introduce a similar bill last July it was killed in the House armed services committee by a decisive bipartisan vote of 44-12. A proposed Minuteman extension study was also voted down.

“Rarely is a congressional study controversial. This just shows how afraid Northrop Grumman is about the results of the independent study,” Khanna told the Guardian. “They lobbied to kill a simple study, to see if the Minuteman III could be extended.”

by Julian Borger, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Clayton Wear/AFP via Getty Images

[ed. Readers will recall (New Nukes Are Coming), these missles are largely sacrificial and intended to draw fire away from other targets.]

Aboutness

T.J. Clark on Hieronymus Bosch (LRB)

Image: Detail from ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ (c.1490-95)

[ed. I'd love to see a modern take on Earthly Delights. See also: Paradise in Paintings (ELC)]

Suez Canal Drama Inspires Wave of Memes

Suez canal drama – and a tiny bulldozer – inspire wave of memes (The Guardian)

Image: Reuters

[ed. Reminds me of the rock polishing crews Exxon employed early in the Exxon Valdez oil spill to give the impression they were actually doing something.]

Competitive Slapping

Hawaii’s Koa Viernes, “Da Crazy Hawaiian”, looks to be a trailblazer in the world of slap fighting (HNN); and, Competitive Slapping Is the World’s Greatest Sport (Vice).

Image: Koa Viernes

The rules are simple, you walk up to a white table, stand across from your opponent and slap his face, then, if he so chooses to return fire, you take a slap in the face. The two of you repeat this as many times as necessary until one bows out of the beautiful slap dance either on your own volition or by being knocked out. Also, it seems they put chalk on their hands to… better show the slap power, I guess?

[ed. Learn something new everyday.]

The Dream of the '90s Died in Portland

A typical night in Portland 2020. The sun is down and a few hundred people, nearly all in their 20s and 30s, start to congregate, by twos and threes, at a prearranged location, usually a city park but sometimes at the U.S. Immigration and Customs building, or City Hall, or, as they are tonight, on the strip of downtown that is home to local and federal courthouses and the city's central police station, known as Justice Center. The drumming starts, there are some Black Lives Matter slogans shouted but mostly it's calls of "FUCK THE POLICE," none of whom are in evidence. They almost never are during the nightly protests, or not until things get hot, when windows are smashed and, for what will end up being nearly 200 nights in a row, fires started.

On this night, I do see one officer. He is sitting alone inside the lobby of the back entrance to Justice Center. Beside him is an industrial fan. When I ask why, he explains that the night before, a group of protesters sloshed in a giant bucket of diarrhea into the room where he sits. The fan is to try to get the stench out. Behind me, five teenagers stand at the curb gawping.

"What happened? What happened?" they ask. They're not black bloc—the darkly clad anarchists roaming the streets—but random teens with random energy who came downtown, maybe, to see what all the fuss was about, to lightly taunt a police officer before running off. The J.V. team.

In their stead there soon appears a young couple. They are outfitted in the black bloc uniform of head-to-toe black; the boy carries a steel baton and wants me to know it. There is nonetheless something patrician about them, as if under different circumstances one might encounter them at cotillion. The uniform conceals their identities, but it can't hide the sense of entitlement that allows them a cheap laugh at the cop, at the fan. What I want to know is, why do they think throwing human shit as a tactic is OK?

"Do you believe that property is worth more than human lives?" asks the boy.

"Do you believe the police should be allowed to murder people?" asks the girl.

I do not mention that, at this point in the year, there has been only one deadly police shooting in Portland. I do not mention it because, after 15 years of living in Portland, I know the city's fledgling anarchists do not deal in facts, that they instead keep a set of platitudes up those black sleeves.

"We've tried for 20 years to do it another way. It hasn't worked. Nothing changes except with violence," says the boy, who is maybe 22. Then he flips me the bird.

* * *

The dream of the '90s is alive in Portland
Sleep till 11, you'll be in heaven
The dream of the '90s is alive in Portland
The dream is alive
—Portlandia

Around the turn of the century, Portland was the new belle on the block, not despoiled like San Francisco or in bed with high tech like Seattle. Oregon was not known nationally for much more than Nike and pinot noir and former Republican Sen. Bob Packwood, but maybe (with the exception of Packwood) that was OK. Maybe the city could debut as a fresh canvas, eco-friendly and affordable, a place to achieve your achievable dreams.

A lot of people were willing to take the chance, including my family. We moved from Los Angeles to Portland in 2004, and for a while, everything seemed on the up. The city in 2009 was, according to The Wall Street Journal, attracting "college-educated, single people between the ages of 25 and 39 at a higher rate than most other cities in the country." New residents built the city they wanted to live in: farm-to-table restaurants and 40 million brewpubs and too many bike paths and aggressively progressive politics. When then–Illinois Sen. Barack Obama swung through on the campaign trail in 2008, more than 75,000 people lined Portland's waterfront to see him.

Portland had entered the national stage. Was it a little bit goofy, a little bit twee? Sure, but also energetic in the way a young city can be, with people cutting what seemed to be genuinely new paths. Would the dudes slinging Korean barbecue out of an old R.V. take it brick-and-mortar? Who knew? Who cared? The dynamism of what-could-be hung in the very air.

Air, it turned out, a lot of people wanted to share. Soon, some who'd come to Portland expecting the city to deliver their dreams grew restless. They couldn't find their footing, or couldn't settle on who they were supposed to be, or both.

"I sometimes think we're the scatterbrained generation," a 26-year-old barista with a degree in anthropology told me for a 2010 article I wrote called "Is Portland the New Neverland?" "You have so many choices, and you know what you end up doing? Nothing. You become the D.J.-fashion-designing-knitting-coffee-maker." (...)

Out of instability, good things nevertheless grew—including Portlandia. The comedy series debuted in 2010 and served up the city at its most parodic, with real-life Mayor Sam Adams playing a bumbling mayoral assistant and restaurant diners demanding the life story of the chicken they were about to eat.

The show riffed on slacktivism and five-hour yoga classes and men whose only "safe space" was Reddit. It was often genuinely funny. Who didn't like to laugh at themselves?

As it turned out, a lot of Portlanders. 

by Nancy Rommelmann, Reason |  Read more:

Image: Scott Green/©IFC/Everett Collection; Right: Photo, John Rudoff/Sipa/AP Images)

The Hollies

Romare Bearden, Mother and Daughter, 1971
via:

Thoughts On The Iraq Invasion

It has now been eighteen years since the Iraq invasion, and I’m still not done raging about it. Nobody should be.

The reason it’s so important to stay enraged about Iraq is because it’s never been addressed or rectified in any real way whatsoever. All the corrupt mechanisms which led to the invasion are still in place and its consequences remain. It isn’t something that happened in the past.

The Iraq invasion feels kind of like if your dad had stood up at the dinner table, cut off your sister’s head in front of everyone, gone right back to eating and never suffered any consequences, and everyone just kind of forgot about it and carried on life like it never happened. The US-centralized empire is full of willful amnesiacs pretending they don’t remember Iraq because it’s currently politically convenient, and we must not let them do this.

No institutional changes were made to ensure that the evils of the Iraq invasion wouldn’t be repeated. It’s one of those big, glaring problems people just decided to pretend is resolved, like racism.

There’s this weird implicit default assumption among the political/media class that US government agencies have earned back the trust they lost with Iraq, despite their having made no changes whatsoever to prevent another Iraq-like horror from reoccurring, or even so much as apologizing. The reason nobody responsible for the Iraq invasion suffered any consequences for the great evil they inflicted upon the world is because the western empire had no intention of changing and has every intention of repeating such evils. The lies and killing continue unabated.

No changes were made after the Iraq invasion to keep the US government from deceiving Americans into war. No new laws were made, no policies changed; no one was even fired. And indeed, the government did deceive Americans into war again: the Libya and Syria interventions were both based on lies. It’s happened since, and it will happen again unless the murderous US war machine is stopped.

Don’t take life advice from people who are miserable. Don’t take career advice from people whose careers aren’t where you want to be. Don’t take creative advice from people who don’t create things. Don’t take foreign policy advice from people who supported the Iraq invasion. (...)

So much establishment loyalism ultimately boils down to an entirely faith-based and unquestioned belief that the corrupt, depraved power establishment which facilitated the Iraq war completely evaporated as soon as George W Bush and Tony Blair left office. There is literally no reason to believe this besides it feeling more psychologically comfortable to believe it.

It’s essential to keep in mind that western propaganda hasn’t gotten less advanced since the Iraq invasion, it has gotten more advanced. The Russiagate psyop and the smear campaigns against Assange and Corbyn make this abundantly clear. You need to be more critical of western narratives than with Iraq, not less.

Manipulating public thought at mass scale is a science. Scientific fields don’t magically become less sophisticated over time, they become more sophisticated. Every time they run a new mass-scale manipulation, whether it succeeds or fails, they learn from it. And they evolve. (...)

Supporting the Vietnam war was dumb. Supporting the Iraq invasion after being lied to about Vietnam was an order of magnitude dumber. Supporting any US war agendas after being lied to about Iraq is an order of magnitude even dumber than that.

by Caitlin Johnstone, Medium | Read more:
Image: misplaced

It's All Just Displacement

Things are bad folks:

Life in the “content” industry already sucks. A small handful of people make bank while the vast majority hustle relentlessly just to hold on to the meager pay they already receive. There are staff writers at big-name publications who produce thousands of words every week and who make less than $40,000 a year for their trouble. There are permanent employees of highly prestigious newspapers and magazines who don’t receive health insurance. Venues close all the time. Mourning another huge round of layoffs is a regular bonding experience for people in the industry. Writers have to constantly job hop just to try and grind out an extra $1,500 a year, making their whole lives permanent job interviews where they can’t risk offending their potential bosses and peers. Many of them dream of selling that book to save themselves financially, not seeming to understand that book advances have fallen 40% in 10 years - median figure now $6,080 - and that the odds of actually making back even that meager advance are slim, meaning most authors are making less than minimum wage from their books when you do the math. They have to tweet constantly for the good of their careers, or so they believe, which amounts to hundreds of hours of unpaid work a year. Their publications increasingly strong arm them into churning out pathetic pop-culture ephemera like listicles about the outfits on Wandavision. They live in fear of being the one to lose out when the next layoffs come and the game of media musical chairs spins up once again. (...)

I want media workers to have higher pay and better benefits and more job security and powerful unions. In part because if they did they’d be more independent and media desperately needs more independence.

But how do things get better in that way? Only through real self-criticism (which Twitter makes impossible) and by asking hard questions. Questions like one that has not been credibly confronted a single time in this entire media meltdown: why are so many people subscribing to Substacks? What is the traditional media not providing that they’re seeking elsewhere? Why have half a million people signed up as paying subscribers of various Substack newsletters, if the establishment media is providing the diversity of viewpoints that is an absolute market requirement in a country with a vast diversity of opinions? You can try to make an adult determination about that question, to better understand what media is missing, or you can read this and write some shitty joke tweet while your industry burns to the ground around you. It’s your call.

Substack might fold tomorrow, but someone else would sell independent media; there’s a market. Substack might kick me and the rest of the unclean off of their platforms tomorrow, but other critics of social justice politics would pop up here; there’s a market. Establishment media’s takeover by this strange brand of academic identity politics might grow even more powerful, if that’s even possible, but dissenters will find a place to sell alternative opinion; there’s a market. What there might not be much of a market for anymore is, well, you - college educated, urban, upwardly striving if not economically improving, woke, ironic, and selling that wokeness and that irony as your only product. Because you flooded the market. Everyone in your entire industry is selling the exact same thing, tired sarcastic jokes and bleating righteousness about injustices they don’t suffer under themselves, and it’s not good in basic economic terms if you’re selling the same thing as everyone else. You add that on to structural problems within your business model and your utter subservience to a Silicon Valley that increasingly hates you, well…. I get why you’re mad. And I get that you don’t like me. But I’m not what you’re mad about. Not really.

In the span of a decade or so, essentially all professional media not explicitly branded as conservative has been taken over by a school of politics that emerged from humanities departments at elite universities and began colonizing the college educated through social media. Those politics are obscure, they are confusing, they are socially and culturally extreme, they are expressed in a bizarre vocabulary, they are deeply alienating to many, and they are very unpopular by any definition. The vast majority of the country is not woke, including the vast majority of women and people of color. How could it possibly be healthy for the entire media industry to be captured by any single niche political movement, let alone one that nobody likes? Why does no one in media seem willing to have an honest, uncomfortable conversation about the near-total takeover of their industry by a fringe ideology?

by Freddie de Boer, FdB | Read more:
Image: uncredited

[ed. Quite a rant, whether you care about the current Substack wars or not. Basically, Substack (publishing platform) is subsidizing some writers for a year (with big salaries) to get them to migrate to their platform. After that, payments are structured according to a subscription model (maybe with some other incentives, I'm not sure). The issue seems to be who gets selected for subsidizing, and how it affects the 'objective media/broad range of viewpoints' narrative. And that's probably all you need to know.]

Novel Defense Tactic

In a motion to dismiss a complaint by the large US-based voting machine company Dominion, lawyers for Sidney Powell argued that elaborate conspiracies she laid out on television and radio last November while simultaneously suing to overturn election results in four states constituted legally protected first amendment speech.

“No reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact,” argued lawyers for Powell, a former federal prosecutor from Texas who caught Trump’s attention through her involvement in the defense of his former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Powell falsely stated on television and in legal briefs that Dominion machines ran on technology that could switch votes away from Trump, technology she said had been invented in Venezuela to help steal elections for the late Hugo Chávez.

Those lies were built on empty claims that apparently originated in anonymous comments on a pro-Trump blog, only to be amplified on a global scale by Trump himself in a 12 November tweet in which he wrote in part “REPORT: DOMINION DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE.”

Citing lost business and reputational damage, Dominion filed a $1.3bn defamation lawsuit against Powell and her colleague on Trump’s legal team, Rudy Giuliani. A Dominion employee separately sued the Trump campaign after receiving death threats.

Thousands of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on 6 January in an effort to stop the certification of an election they considered invalid, killing a police officer in violent clashes in which four others died.

But lawyers for Powell argued her false statements about election fraud in the months preceding the Capitol insurrection were unmistakably not presented as true facts.

“It was clear to reasonable persons that Powell’s claims were her opinions and legal theories on a matter of utmost public concern,” her legal motion says. “Those members of the public who were interested in the controversy were free to, and did, review that evidence and reached their own conclusions – or awaited resolution of the matter by the courts before making up their minds.”

The filing brought expressions of disbelief from Trump critics.

by Tom McCarthy, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: 

[ed. Pleading insanity would be a more believable defense.]

Market Manias Galore, But Long-Term Interest Rates Smell a Rat

Everyone can see what’s going on: speculative manias everywhere. This includes the most worthless delisted stocks of companies that had no activity for years that suddenly surged several hundred percent in hours, driven by pump-and-dump schemes in the social media, before re-collapsing.

And it goes all the way via real estate, junk bonds, the most-shorted stocks, cryptos, and well, sneakers, to the newest thingy, so-called NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, that are now being hyped to high heaven.

But facing these manias are long-term US Treasury bonds and high-grade corporate bonds that have been getting crushed for months – as their yields have surged. (...)

The Fed has been unanimous in accepting and even welcoming the rise in long-term interest rates as a sign of economic growth and rising expectations of inflation – as long as it remains “orderly,” and doesn’t veer into “disorderly” markets, as Jerome Powell emphasized.

And Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen has chimed in, also welcoming rising long-term bond yields as a sign of economic growth and rising inflation expectations.

The Fed sees these manias too. While it cannot admit to seeing them, and while it can never say that it would let the steam out of them, it is letting long-term yields rise because that is a form of tightening, and it will take some steam out of the manias. And letting long-term yields rise is a prelude to tapering its bond purchases, which is a prelude to raising its short-term interest rates.

So, there is the latest craze, the non-thing called “NFT” – the non-fungible token. Which means it is unique. It is unique like every dollar bill is unique because every dollar bill has a unique serial number. Every car is unique because it has a unique VIN number. Serial numbers have been around forever.

But now new hype has broken out about non-fungible tokens because these are essentially serial numbers combined with digital entities, such as a PDF file or a video clip, and instead of being in a database somewhere, the code is part of a blockchain, usually the Ethereum blockchain.

And how do you get everyone to talk about NFTs and spread the stuff all over the front pages of the big papers, and how do you get it to show up on TV news and on Google, Facebook, Twitter, various discussion bords, and what not?

You create a big hoopla deal that blows everyone’s socks off, and you do that systematically, and you get one of the biggest art auction houses in the world, Christie’s, to help you promote this non-thing, and voila.

It was masterfully done by some crypto hype mongers. And a crypto hype monger that goes by the handle of Metakovan, whose legal name Christie’s refused to disclose, bought a digital collage created by an artist who goes by Beeple – and the work of art is a PDF file combined with a fancy serial number, and the whole thing is an NFT.

Metakovan paid $69.3 million in ETH, the cryptocurrency on Ethereum, for the PDF file after a two-week online auction whose purpose was to drive up the price and create a sensation. And it worked.

NFTs can be anything digital. People have turned video clips on YouTube and Tweets into NFTs and sold them and traded them, and prices of these digital files have soared.

Obviously, since it’s digital, you can still endlessly copy the video clip, a tweet, or the $69-million PDF file, and you can download it, and share it a million times, for free.

You can copy a Picasso too, but it’s either a photograph of a real Picasso, or a painted fake of a real Picasso. And they’re physically different from the real Picasso. Alas, the digital copies of videos and PDF files are exactly the same as the original, and that $69-million PDF can be copied a million times.

I mean, it’s great to support living artists. The more the better. But a tweet that has been around for years? Or video clips that have been around for years? So now we have an inexplicable speculative mania in NFTs.

Then there’s bitcoin and the many thousands of other cryptos that have cropped up, whose prices soar to unimaginable highs on nothing but hype, with their combined valuations now approaching $2 trillion. This is serious money. Some of these positions are leveraged, in various ways, from buying cryptos on credit cards or with the proceeds from cash-out mortgage refis, to institutional borrowing against cryptos, such as by hedge funds.

And there are the SPACs. These Special Purpose Acquisition Companies are blank-check outfits that go public with no operations and no employees and no nothing, and people who buy these shares to fund the SPAC hope that the SPAC will acquire some startup over the next 18 months. Everyone is doing SPACs now and selling them to the public – star athletes, Hollywood celebrities, rappers, former politicians, including the former Speaker of the House….

It boils down to this: if you’re not doing your own SPAC, you’re no one. (...)

There’s Tesla, a small automaker with a market capitalization that is worth more than that of the biggest automakers in the world combined. The Tesla mania has been going on for years.

There are the other EV stocks, or anything related to EVs, often tiny companies with nearly no revenues, that suddenly and inexplicably skyrocket. The auto industry is a brutal industry with two decades of no growth in unit sales in the US and the rest of the developed world. Automakers have relied on price increases and China to get their revenues up. EVs are precisely in that space, and now all legacy automakers are making them. And yet there has been a mania in EV stocks. And it even pulled along the legacy automakers stocks. (...)

Then there’s the current mania in real estate, where people buy houses sight-unseen by bidding over asking price, and home prices have skyrocketed across the nation, with double-digit year-over-year increases. In some areas, year-over-year gains clocked in at 20% or more.

And there’s the mania in junk bonds, the riskiest end of the bond market. Junk bond prices have skyrocketed, thereby pushing yields down to record lows. The peak was likely in mid-February, and prices have edged lower since then, and yields have come up, but are still very low.

These manias have a few things in common:

by Wolf Richter, Wolf Street |  Read more:

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Las Vegas and the American Nightmare

The name of the neighborhood is Prominence.

From its vantage high above the landscape, you can see where the I-15 leaves Nevada to dog-ear Arizona and stretch into Utah, and the sagebrush and Joshua trees yield to cottonwoods and sego lilies. Chalky-peach mesas impassively preside over a vast desert, flat and steely, reaching out past nowhere. You can see hills pixelated by ranks of stucco houses, each more or less identical. The place exudes an air of sameness and ersatz invariance: an eerie suspension, like the dummy-towns built for nuclear ruin at the Nevada Test Site, a hundred miles west of here in Mesquite. That day, no children played in the street. Wind chimes hung above some neighbors’ porches, but they didn’t ring. The only sound I heard as I parked my car on the corner of Cool Springs and White Water was an intermittent popping from behind a ridge, in an undeveloped area. Construction, most likely, though there is a gun range nearby. The open desert offers plenty of space to fire wildly into nothing.

I thought there might have been press, or that I would have been glared at by locals who knew what I’d come to see. But I was alone as I sidled toward 1372 Babbling Brook Court, steno pad tucked between my arm and ribs like a football. The house is a one-story, mocha brown with beige accents. There are a handful of shrubs and budding palms out front, along with some rocks neatly piled around the base of a mesquite tree. And then there’s gravel, white and bright in the beating sun. No one lives in the house, and there’s no gate closing off the backyard. I could have gotten closer, but couldn’t overcome its repellant force, like trying to push together the matching ends of magnets.

I left the neighborhood and found a walking trail that wrapped around behind it, offering a full view of the backyard. The adjacent houses have pools and barbecues, tables and chairs, decorative clocks and other ornaments. But here there are only more shrubs and immaculate gravel—a blankness, ordered but unsignifying, like a curveless Zen garden. All the blinds were drawn. No way to see inside.

The last man who lived here, Stephen Paddock, is remembered as the person who, on the night of October 1st, 2017, opened fire into a crowd of 22,000 people at a country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip. He killed 59 people including himself, and shot nearly 500 more, injuring over 800 in total (accounting for the wounds incurred in frantic attempts to escape, victims of trampling and barbwire lacerations), and traumatized untold thousands more for untold years to come. Prior to that night, though, homeowners in Prominence knew him as typically “reclusive,” “a real loner,” but, on the whole, a good neighbor, in that he never bothered talking to them much. His family had much the same opinion of him. Shortly after the massacre, Paddock’s brother Eric told reporters “this is like you called me up and told me my next door neighbor did this and I’d go ‘wow…well all I’ve ever seen him do is mow his yard.’” Around that same time, one of Paddock’s next door neighbors put a sign on their door that read: “We do not have anything to provide relating to the actions of our neighbor or insight into his behavior. We did not know him.” (...)

The details of Paddock’s life aren’t uninteresting, but in the light of his crime they somehow manage to neither provide good answers nor raise good questions. Stephen was the eldest son of Benjamin Paddock, a bank robber who spent eight years on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. You might think this could suggest possible childhood trauma or inherited psychopathy, but Benjamin was largely a nonentity in his life. “We didn’t grow up under his influence,” Eric assured his interviewers. Stephen Paddock worked for the U.S. Postal Service, then as an IRS agent, then as an auditor for Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and eventually opened a real estate business with his mother. For the last half of his life, though, he made most of his money gambling. “He did it because it was a way to have a fun life, and he didn’t go poor doing it,” Eric told reporters. However, in that same interview he claimed that his brother “didn’t love the casino,” that it was merely “a means to an end…a place where you lived and they were nice to you, and you could get it paid for by playing slots.” The best summation he could give of his brother’s life, delivered with such bewildered sincerity that he might have believed it to be a sufficient epitaph, was this: “He’s a guy who lived in a house in Mesquite. He’d go down and gamble in Las Vegas. He did stuff. Ate burritos.”

“Something happened,” Eric said, “that drove him into the pit of hell.” (...)

I write this as I sit at a bar in the Eureka Casino, one of Paddock’s old haunts. It’s a Saturday, late in the morning. In the parking lot there’s a red, prism-shaped tower holding signs that read

Thank you for voting us
Best Casino
Best Table Gaming
Best Hotel
Best Customer Service
Best Seafood
Best Buffet
Best Restaurant
Best Prime Rib
Best Breakfast

Inside, the light is dim and the air smells like any other locals’ casino: like chlorinated shampoo intermixed with liquor and smoke, strangely redolent of some kind of embalming fluid. Frankie Valli’s scratchy falsetto soars from the oldies station, above the warbling of the machines and spasmodic hooting from the craps tables. The clientele is turkey-necked, shuffling across the casino floor in bulky orthopedic shoes and thong sandals, in Bermuda shorts, cargos, polo shirts and visors, sunglasses perched on foreheads. The patrons at the bar, fiddling with the thin little straws in their cocktails and idly tapping on the video blackjack screens, look as though they were animatronic fixtures, their expressions weary and unvarying. The mood is purgatorial. This is where some people come to enjoy the twilight of their lives, and there’s a certain grotesquerie to them, to their looks of quiet indignation. There’s a bald man in wire-frame glasses sitting at a poker machine with one leg crossed over the other, distended gut pouring over his belt and an arm draped over the back of his chair. Two cocktail waitresses in black fishnets and heels have flitted by to ask if he’d like another drink and he’s waved them both away without a word. It occurs to me that he could be somebody who might have known Paddock on at least a superficial level, regular to regular. I think of going up and talking to him, but he comes off as someone who takes his leisure time seriously and wouldn’t take kindly to interruptions.

People come to Vegas looking for an experience: for risk and disinhibition, all highly monitored and controlled without seeming so. They go to the poker tables to test their confidence against that of strangers, and the thrill comes from reading their intentions and the compounding misjudgments. Video poker tends to attract locals. It’s quiet, solitary, unglamorous, but in many ways less intimidating, and that’s why I think they like it. It’s also one of the worst culprits when it comes to gambling addiction. The computer doesn’t make mistakes, and it can’t lie. It’s designed solely to let you win just enough to keep hope alive—in the language of behaviorism, the reinforcement is variable and intermittent, the kind most likely to get you to keep playing and keep losing.

There are some people, though, who are canny enough with numbers to know the odds of any particular machine paying out to a few hundredths of a percent, game it to their advantage, and make a living doing it. Stephen Paddock was one of them. David Walton was another. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Walton recalled one day in 2007 at the Mandalay Bay—ten years before Paddock would ascend to the 32nd floor of that very same hotel to carry out his massacre—when Paddock sat at the sole Jacks-or-better 9-6 machine in the casino, offering the best odds out of any other machine in the casino, and gambled for 24 hours straight. Paddock would gamble over $120,000 an hour to win tickets to enter the $100,000 raffle, hardly speaking at all.

There’s an episode of The Twilight Zone titled “A Nice Place to Visit,” where Rocky Valentine, “a scared, angry little man,” “tired now, tired of running or wanting, of waiting for breaks that come to others but never to him,” is shot dead by police after robbing a pawn shop. He wakes up, apparently unharmed, greeted by a man in a white tuxedo who introduces himself as Pip. Rocky asks him what he’s after, to which Pip answers, “Only one thing, Mr. Valentine: your comfort. My job is to see to it that you get what you want. Whatever it may be.” Pip brings Rocky to a posh hotel room, which he’s told now belongs to him, and that his every wish—for money, for women, anything and everything—will be granted. Rocky asks if Pip is his guardian angel; “Something like that,” Pip responds. Rocky goes to the casino and finds that he can’t lose. Rapturous with his good fortune, he asks Pip if he can see his other friends who’ve died, and is told that he’s the only person who actually lives in the place. After a month, Rocky can’t stand it anymore:

“I’m bored! Bored!…There’s no excitement around here. No kicks…When you win every time that ain’t gambling, that’s charity…it don’t mean anything if it’s all set up in advance. Everything’s great here. Just the way I always imagined it, except that I don’t think I belong here. I don’t think I fit in. I don’t belong in Heaven, see? I want to go to the other place!”

“Whatever gave you the idea you were in Heaven, Mr. Valentine?” Pip exclaims. “This is the other place!”

Stephen Paddock was no Rocky Valentine. Towards the end of his life, reports show that losing might have finally caught up to him. He hadn’t made it to Hell quite yet. But it’s possible to imagine his life as one long, solipsistic delusion, just like Rocky’s. He was considered what’s known as a “comp hustler,” playing and winning enough to be rewarded with free suites, meals, and other perks and special attention from casinos. For Paddock, this may have been enough to convince him he had invalidated the idea that there are some things money can’t buy. “It was fun to hang out with Steve because he was a rich guy who hung out in hotels,” Eric said. He wasn’t like those other rubes, frittering away their savings in games rigged for their failure. He was smarter than them. He beat the system, and did it all on his own; he was self-made. He didn’t need other people—though he didn’t mind if people needed him.

Americans in general are preoccupied with self-reliance, but Nevada in particular—and even more particularly Las Vegas—engenders and encourages that mindset.

by Andrew Cardenas, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. For future reference: Jacks or better 9/6 strategies here and here. See also: Six Leading Rationalizations for Doing Nothing About Gun Violence (NY Mag)]

Phil Greenwood, Snow Stream

via:

Is the Media Fueling Asian American Hate Crimes?

On a cold evening last month, a Chinese man was walking home near Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood when a stranger suddenly ran up behind him and plunged a knife into his back.

For many Asian-Americans, the stabbing was horrifying, but not surprising. It was widely seen as just the latest example of racially targeted violence against Asians during the pandemic.

But the perpetrator, a 23-year-old man from Yemen, had not said a word to the victim before the attack, investigators said. Prosecutors determined they lacked enough evidence to prove a racist motive. The attacker was charged with attempted murder, but not as a hate crime.

The announcement outraged Asian-American leaders in New York City. Many of them protested outside the Manhattan district attorney’s office, demanding that the stabbing be prosecuted as a hate crime. They were tired of what they saw as racist assaults being overlooked by the authorities.

“Let’s call it what it is,” said Don Lee, a community activist who spoke at the rally. “These are not random attacks. We’re asking for recognition that these crimes are happening.”

The rally reflected the tortured public conversation over how to confront a rise in reports of violence against Asian-Americans, who have felt increasingly vulnerable with each new attack. Many incidents have either not led to arrests or have not been charged as hate crimes, making it difficult to capture with reliable data the extent to which Asian-Americans are being targeted.

That frustration erupted on a national scale this week after Robert Aaron Long, a white man, was charged with fatally shooting eight people, including six women of Asian descent, at spas in the Atlanta area on Tuesday night.

Investigators said it was too early to determine a motive. After Mr. Long’s arrest, he denied harboring a racial bias and told officials that he carried out the shootings as a form of vengeance for his “sexual addiction.”

The Atlanta shootings and other recent attacks have exposed difficult questions involved in proving a racist motive. Did the assaults just happen to involve Asian victims? Or did the attackers purposely single out Asians in an unspoken way that can never be presented as evidence in court? (...)

In the past month alone, several assaults on Asian victims have been reported to the police, including an attack on an older woman who was pushed outside a bakery in Queens. None of the incidents has been charged as a hate crime.

In fact, the only person who has been prosecuted for an anti-Asian hate crime in New York City this year is Taiwanese. He was accused of writing anti-Chinese graffiti outside several businesses in Queens. (...)

In the Chinatown stabbing last month, prosecutors said there was no evidence that the defendant, Salman Muflehi, targeted the victim because he was Asian or saw the victim’s face before stabbing him. Mr. Muflehi did tell the police afterward that he did not like the way the victim had looked at him.

Mr. Muflehi immigrated from Yemen to New York as a teenager. He has suffered from severe mental health issues for years, often getting into fights and landing in jail, according to interviews with his brother and mother. They say he has never expressed any hatred against Asians.

He has previously been arrested on accusations that he assaulted both his brother and his father. Most recently, he was charged in January with punching a Hispanic man in the head, prosecutors said. (Prior news reports incorrectly identified that victim as Asian.)

by Nicole Hong and Jonah E. Bromwich, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: CNN

[ed. The last part of this article is telling. I've been watching this issue build ever since a Chinese woman got mugged in SF Chinatown last month. It didn't appear at the time to be racially motivated or a hate crime, but the media was quick to jump on it as such. Now we have a national epidemic (which Asian Americans seem more than happy to exploit) of escalating copycat crimes and national marches. I blame the media for inciting this violence and sensationalizing something that just didn't exist in any significant measure until they made it a big issue, and Asian Americans themselves who were so eager to jump on the victimization bandwagon (btw, I'm Asian American).]