Mr. Personality

The New England Patriots defeated the Cleveland Browns 38-15 on Sunday, moving head coach Bill Belichick to 324 career wins between the regular season and playoffs.

Rookie Brenden Schooler played a big role in sealing the win for the Patriots with a key special teams play. (...)

After his fumble recovery, Schooler took the ball and attempted to present it to Belichick.

Given the significance of Belichick's victory — 324 wins moves him into a tie for second-most in NFL history with George Halas — it's not hard to imagine that Schooler might have thought his gesture might be received well.

It was not. (...)

Bill Belichick is a lot of things, but he is not very sentimental, especially not while there is still time left on the game clock, plays left to call, and refs left to yell at.

by Tyler Lauletta, Insider | Read more:
Image: YouTube

Moose Man

Memories of the man who knew moose like no other (ADN)

Image: Ned Rozell

During the last three decades, Van Ballenberghe and those who have worked with him have cranked out a library of published information about the Denali Park moose, including a nonfiction book, “In the Company of Moose.” Van Ballenberghe and others found that, in some years, eight out of 10 moose calves don’t make it to adulthood, with grizzlies eating half of them and wolves accounting for just 6% of calf loss.

Van Ballenberghe knows that Denali Park cow moose can live to be 20 — “it’s like a 100-year-old person” — and most of its bulls are gone by the age of 13. He once observed a cow that gave birth in almost the exact same spot for 12 consecutive years.

He knows moose prefer diamondleaf willow in summer and the frozen buds of feltleaf willow in winter, and they will gorge on mushrooms when they are available. He’s noticed that moose almost never sleep for more than five minutes at a time. He has seen a fall gathering of 22 cows and 12 bulls, and he knows that those bulls did not eat for more than two weeks until the rut ended in early October.

by Ned Rozell, ADN |  Read more:

Tár Takes on the Devastating Spectacle of ‘Cancellation’

Todd Field’s new film, Tár, opens with a scene that should feel inherently uncinematic: an onstage Q&A. The conversation, between Lydia Tár (played by Cate Blanchett) and Adam Gopnik (gamely playing himself), is the kind of hoity-toity event that’d be a coveted ticket for a certain highbrow milieu. Tár is the preeminent conductor of her generation. She leads the Berlin Philharmonic and has a list of accomplishments that Gopnik could rattle off for at least an hour. (Among other things, she has an EGOT!) But why start her story in staid territory, via a back-and-forth on classical music that mostly feels like a big pat on the back for a fictional character the viewer has just met?

For two reasons, both of which underline why Field’s movie is such a biting accomplishment. The first is to see Blanchett in her element, keeping an audience hanging on every word as her character ruminates on the difficulties of her vocation and the legacy of legends such as Leonard Bernstein. The second is to establish the tone of Tár’s tightly wound world, in which she’s shuttled from place to place in luxury while everyone orbits around her, eager for just a puff of her genius to waft their way. Over the course of 158 minutes, cracks start to emerge in that hermetic universe until it finally comes apart. Field charts Tár’s decline with devastating relish.

Tár’s “cancellation” (which is simply the easiest way to describe what happens to her reputation in the film) has its specifics, but Field seems most interested in the elemental process of watching someone with such power and poise veer out of control. The unraveling of Tár begins with just a few whispers before spiraling in unpredictable directions. Field isn’t exactly rooting for her downfall, and neither was I; instead, he’s depicting the way such scandals inspire rubbernecking from all walks of life.

In the first act, Tár is prideful. A protégé of Bernstein’s, she’s a professed believer in his mantra that classical music should be accessible to the people, not remote or academic. But an early scene sees her lecturing a group of students with withering superiority. She takes particular delight in ripping apart an aspiring conductor who dares to question Bach’s place in the pantheon. Tár has intellectual heft, and watching her deploy it is breathtaking. Blanchett pours equal parts charisma and intimidation into her career-best performance. 

by David Sims, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Tár/YouTube

A Memorable Season Ends With Spectacular 18-Inning Game

It was 21 years in the waiting, and then it became an eternity of frazzled nerves and broken dreams in one afternoon turned night.

It was nail-biting, gut-wrenching, gloriously exciting playoff baseball at its finest — and most excruciating.

It was a taste of what Seattle has been missing. Scratch that — a glorious, sumptuous feast in which every at-bat, every pitch crackled with meaning and tension, and the possibility of a hero’s turn.

As Mariners players shared hugs and fought back tears after their 18-inning, 1-0 loss at T-Mobile Park to Houston that ended their breakthrough season in a mixture of massive frustration and overwhelming pride, they had unanimity on one thing.

This playoff business is addicting. And now that they got a taste of it, they want more. And next time, they plan to make it last longer. (...)

Never before in the history of baseball had a postseason game gone so long — 17 innings — without a run being scored. Only twice had a postseason game gone longer on the clock — six hours and 22 minutes. But those who think a scoreless game is boring didn’t see the one the Mariners played against the Yankees in August, and certainly not this one. It was riveting stuff, even as the frustration kept mounting. The raucous crowd of 47,690, which kept trying to will the Mariners to victory, wanted desperately to erupt but never got the key hit that would have extended the series until Sunday.

by Larry Stone, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Jennifer Buchanan / The Seattle Times
[ed. What a game! Lots of heart. See also: The Mariners’ season didn’t end how they wanted, but they have plenty to be proud of (Seattle Times).]

Cracker

[ed. See also: Why Is The Central Valley So Bad? and, Highlights From The Comments On The Central Valley (Astral Codex Ten). And, more cracking Cracker - Eurotrash Girl - here and here.]

PayPal and its $2,500 Fines For Misinformation

Over the years, we’ve posted so many different stories about questionable decisions by PayPal to cut off services from users it objected to, or even seizing the money in their account that it’s impossible to dig up all of those stories. But, by now, we’ve seen well over a decade of PayPal acting as some sort of morality police. It has every legal right to do so, though we could point out that there is much less competition for easy to use, consumer-friendly payment options. It is also an example of the trickiness that ensues when people look to infrastructure layer providers to get involved in content moderation.

Given all that, it wasn’t necessarily unprecedented, but still a bit shocking, to hear that PayPal had notified users of an updated Acceptable Use Policy that included two things that people (reasonably) connected, and then worried about. The first, was a new policy saying that (among other things) promoting “misinformation” was a violation of the policy.

The misinformation part got all the attention, but the whole policy is pretty broad:

involve the sending, posting, or publication of any messages, content, or materials, that in PayPal’s sole discretion, (a) are harmful, obscene, harassing, or objectionable, (b) depict or appear to depict nudity, sexual or other intimate activities, (c) depict or promote illegal drug use, (d) depict or promote violence, criminal activity, cruelty, or self-harm (e) depict, promote, or incite hatred or discrimination of protected groups or of individuals or groups based on protected characteristics (e.g. race, religion, gender or gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.) (f) present a risk to user safety or wellbeing, (g) are fraudulent, promote misinformation, or are unlawful, (h) infringe the privacy, intellectual property rights, or other proprietary rights of any party, or (i) are otherwise unfit for publication.

So… this actually reads like a fairly typical set of terms or acceptable use policies for lots of different websites, giving the sites broad leeway to ban you for a bunch of different things, totally at the discretion of the company and its own morals. Of course, you can make arguments for why lots of it is crazy. Depicting illegal drug use? So if you have created a short film that includes someone smoking pot, they can lose their PayPal account? Is kissing an “otherwise intimate” activity? And, of course, misinformation can mean very different things to very different people.

Of course, where this became viral as news is because people realized that PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy already includes a claim that if you violate its policy they can take $2,500 from your account. While PayPal walked back some of these newly announced changes (we’ll get to that in a second), the policy about the $2,500 has existed for at least a year: (...)

So, some of the uproar over the weekend came from people seeing the new “misinformation” line and then the (already existing) claim about the $2,500 and assuming both were new and connected. Soon after much of this went viral (some driven by potentially disingenuous misinformation grifters who feared for their own livelihoods), PayPal insisted that the notice of the new policies “went out in error.”

“An AUP notice recently went out in error that included incorrect information. PayPal is not fining people for misinformation and this language was never intended to be inserted in our policy. Our teams are working to correct our policy pages. We’re sorry for the confusion this has caused,” a spokesperson told National Review in a written statement.

Lots of sites reported that PayPal had retracted its plan to fine people $2,500 for misinformation, but… the $2,500 amount is still in the policy. It’s just that the misinformation part is not going live… yet.

Of course, this raises another question: if the $2,500 liquidated damages thing has been in there since at least 2021… has PayPal ever actually done that? It seems like if it had, that would be a big story in its own right.

The fact that the $2,500 damages clause is still in the PayPal policy today still seems like a pretty big deal. Hiding the fact that a company might take $2,500 from you by burying it in an acceptable use policy no one is going to read seems like not a great thing, whether or not the policy includes “misinformation” as a triggering event.

PayPal’s statement about the misinformation bit is also… difficult to believe. The idea that it was “never intended to be inserted in our policy” doesn’t explain how it was inserted in the policy that was sent out to users. I would think that a company as large as PayPal has, you know, a few lawyers who look over this stuff before they update their policies. It seems clear that somewhere along the line someone at PayPal did very much intend to have this kind of policy, it’s just that they probably didn’t realize that they were putting it into the same section that included the threatened $2,500 cash grab.

by Mike Masnick, Techdirt |  Read more:

Image: Techdirt

Taylor Swift's Midnights

“I haven’t been on stage in a very long time,” she told the crowd. “It’s very nice!”

That impression was confirmed a month later when Swift announced the release of her 10th studio album, Midnights, onstage at the MTV Video Music awards. She later revealed it would tell “stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life … a journey through terrors and sweet dreams. The floors we pace and the demons we face.”

A week from its 21 October release date, she is yet to share a note of music – or do any interviews, leading to giddy speculation over its sound. Her understated pair of 2020 surprise albums, Folklore and Evermore, were made with members of the National and Bon Iver and billed as “alternative” on streaming services. Midnights, however, marks an official return to “pop” and features a guest appearance from the US alt-pop star Lana Del Rey. (...)

Whatever its sound, one thing is certain: despite being released in the last two months of the year, Midnights will easily become one of 2022’s biggest-selling albums. (...)

“She didn’t need it in my book but she got that final bit of critical respect off those albums,” said Dave Fawbert, the founder of Swiftogedden, a nationwide club night that plays exclusively Swift songs. “All those 50-year-old men who dismissed her were forced to admit how good she was.”

by Laura Snapes, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: The cover of Taylor Swift’s Midnights/Beth Garrabrant

[ed. An amazing talent (and industry professional). This is the song that brought me in (fabulous acoustic version here). See also (this repost): 

Yes, “The Last Great American Dynasty,” as upbeat and propulsive as this record gets, is a very explicit tribute to Rebekah West Harkness, the eccentric multiple divorceé and Standard Oil heiress/widow who filled her Rhode Island mansion’s pool with champagne and her fish tank with scotch; “stole her neighbor’s dog and dyed it key-lime green,” a splendid detail after Swift’s own master-songwriter heart; and upon her death in 1982, had her ashes placed in a $250,000 urn designed by Salvador Dalí. (This song is also your first opportunity to hear Swift sing the word “bitch.”) Naturally, Harkness has inspired multiple lengthy explainer blog posts in the past 72 hours, because Swift wrote a song about her, because Swift owns her house now. (The refrain “She had a marvelous time ruining everything” becomes “I had a marvelous time ruining everything.”) And wow is it impressive, genuinely impressive, how charming this song is given the fact that it’s a white pop star, in July 2020, singing a song about her $17.75 million Rhode Island mansion.

Hiding in Plain Sight

Donald Trump Has Told Americans Exactly Who He Is

The biggest news to come out of the ninth and (for now) final hearing of the Jan. 6 committee, on Thursday afternoon, was obvious: A subpoena requiring a former president to testify about his role in a deadly insurrection that he incited in order to prevent the transfer of power to his lawful successor is, to put it mildly, not something you see every day.

It was the right thing to do, although even in the drama of the moment (Mr. Schiff? Aye. Ms. Cheney? Aye.) it felt somewhat obligatory. After more than a year of dogged investigation involving hundreds of witnesses; thousands of texts, emails and other documents; countless sickening videos and photographs; and breathtaking testimony about the events leading up to that horrific day — all pointing directly at Donald Trump — how else could the committee have wrapped things up?

“We want to hear from him,” Representative Bennie Thompson, the committee chair, said in justifying the extraordinary motion, which he and the other members proceeded to authorize by a 9 to 0 vote.

Whether we actually hear from Mr. Trump is another matter. Immediately after the hearing, he mocked the committee on his social media site, asking why it had not called him to testify months ago. Anyone who hasn’t been in a coma for the past seven years could tell you this is classic Trumpian misdirection. The man doesn’t take any oath he isn’t prepared to violate, and he goes to lengths to avoid appearing anywhere that he can be criminally charged for lying.

On the other hand, Mr. Trump craves the spotlight. If the committee were to agree to his reported demand that his testimony be aired on live TV, he might actually go through with it. After all, it would be free prepublicity for his likely presidential run — even if he did nothing but invoke his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself, as he did more than 400 times during a deposition last summer, part of a New York State investigation into whether he fraudulently inflated his real estate assets. (The state’s attorney general, Letitia James, determined that he had, suing Mr. Trump, his family business and three of his adult children for lying to lenders and insurers to the tune of billions of dollars.)

However the subpoena negotiations play out, it’s important to remember one thing: We already have heard from him. Again and again and again and again, Mr. Trump has told the American people who he is, what he wants and exactly how he plans to get it — the law, the Constitution and the Republic be damned.

Sometimes he says it directly; sometimes it comes through the remarks of his closest allies or administration officials. Consider just a sampling of quotations that the Jan. 6 committee summarized in Thursday’s hearing:

‘We want all voting to stop.’

Mr. Trump said this on national television, in the early morning hours of Nov. 4, after initial vote counts that showed him in the lead began to move toward Joe Biden as more votes rolled in. The phenomenon was so predictable that it already had a name: the blue shift. In fact, Mr. Trump was warned repeatedly that this was very likely to happen, in part because of his own actions. Throughout the summer of 2020, he discouraged his supporters from voting by mail, meaning that mail-in ballots, which some states don’t start counting until polls close, would skew toward Democrats. Rather than accept what he must have known to be true, Mr. Trump effectively called for the disenfranchisement of tens of millions of Americans. But it was worse than that.

‘What Trump’s going to do is just declare victory, right? He’s going to declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s the winner. He’s just going to say he’s a winner.’

That was Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and a former top White House adviser, speaking with a group of associates shortly before Election Day 2020. He was laying out in plain view the plan he knew was in the works. And it had been in the works for months. As the committee revealed on Thursday, Brad Parscale, who managed Mr. Trump’s 2020 bid, testified that the former president “planned as early as July that he would say he won the election even if he lost.”

‘There was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were.’

Bill Barr, Mr. Trump’s attorney general, said this in his testimony to the committee, describing his frustration with trying to bat away the unsubstantiated claims of voting fraud that Mr. Trump kept bringing to him — claims that were rejected by every federal and state court to consider them in the months after Election Day. When Mr. Barr resigned in December 2020, Mr. Trump attempted to replace him with Jeffrey Clark, an environmental lawyer in the Justice Department who had expressed a willingness to help Mr. Trump subvert the election. The plan failed only when top department officials threatened to resign if Mr. Clark got the job.

‘He knows it’s over. He knows he lost, but we’re going to keep trying.’

According to testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s last chief of staff, Mr. Meadows said this to her soon after Mr. Trump called Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and tried in vain to shake him down for 11,780 votes, exactly one more than Mr. Biden’s margin of victory in the state. That was on Jan. 2, four days before Mr. Trump stood before tens of thousands of his supporters at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., and repeated many of the claims of voting fraud that he had been repeatedly told were false. He knew that many of those supporters were armed, because they had refused to pass through the magnetometers that had been set up for Mr. Trump’s safety. But he didn’t care. As he said, according to Ms. Hutchinson, “They’re not here to hurt me.”

As the committee revealed on Thursday, the Secret Service was aware of the threat of violence and specifically of an armed attack on the Capitol more than a week before Jan. 6. “Their plan is to literally kill people,” one tipster wrote. Mr. Trump was informed of the threats, too, before he whipped the mob into a frenzy and urged them to march on the Capitol.

These are only a few examples pulled from the immense body of evidence that the Jan. 6 committee has compiled for the American people and the world to see. Together they paint a clear and damning picture of the man who sat in the Oval Office for four years and will almost certainly try to again. Before that happens, Mr. Trump must be “required to answer for his actions,” as Mr. Thompson rightly said. It sounds so basic and yet, with Mr. Trump, it has remained so elusive.

by Jesse Wegman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Damon Winter, NY Times 

[ed. See also: ‘It’s My Curse and My Salvation’: Trump’s Most Famous Chronicler Opens Up (Maggie Haberman - Politico)

Aja

Aja produced three excellent singles (“Peg,” “Josie,” and “Deacon Blues”) and sold millions of copies, becoming the group’s most commercially successful release. But it was a perplexing bestseller. Steely Dan spent the 1970s getting progressively more esoteric: jazzier, groovier, weirder. Even now, mapping the album’s melodic and harmonic shifts is impossible to do with confidence. Its songs are sprawling and fussy, populated by oddball characters with inscrutable backstories, like “Josie,” from the song of the same name (“She’s the raw flame, the live wire/She prays like a Roman with her eyes on fire”) or “Peg,” an aspiring actress headed who-knows-where, who’s “done up in blueprint blue.” “Blueprint blue”! It’s the kind of simple, perfect description prose writers pinch themselves over.

Outside of the studio, Becker and Fagen reveled in being a little rascally. They took long breaks from touring, and when they conceded to an interview, they often appeared self-satisfied, if not antagonistic. Their disdain for the record business occasionally bled into a disdain for their fans, itself a kind of merciless, punk-rock pose. When they did tour—like, say, in 1993, when, after a decade-long hiatus, they booked a few weeks of U.S. dates—they did not pretend to enjoy it. That year, when a reporter from The Los Angeles Times asked Becker how the tour was going, he said, “Well, not too good. It turns out that show business isn’t really in my blood anyway, and I’m looking forward to getting back to working on my car.”

Because the production on Aja is so expert—whole stretches are perfect, impenetrable, like the first 31 seconds of “Black Cow,” when that creeping bass line cedes passage to guitar and electric piano, and the backing vocals pipe up for “You were high!”—it’s easy to ignore the sophistication of its architecture. Becker and Fagen used obscure chords (like the mu major, a major triad with an added 2 or 9) and custom-built their own equipment (for 1980’s Gaucho, they paid $150,000 to build a bespoke drum machine). What they were doing was so particular and new, it was often difficult for critics to even find a vocabulary to describe it. On the title track, the verse shifts and dissolves as Fagen croons, “I run to you.” His voice thins as he finishes the line, a little gasp of tenderness. The minute-long drum solo that closes “Aja,” performed by the virtuosic session man Steve Gadd, is dressed with horns and synthesizers, and makes a person briefly feel as if they are being transported to a different dimension. Steely Dan reveled in making technical choices that would have hobbled a less ambitious outfit. That they succeeded still feels like some kind of black magic.

By 1977, it is possible that some corners of the culture had become desperate for music that was intellectually challenging but not exactly arduous to consume—something less predictable than Top 40, but not quite as hyperbolic or gnashing as punk. By the end of the 1960s, rock had been relentlessly and breathlessly defined as a frantic, bloody, all-consuming practice, for both performers and fans. Aja, though, doesn’t necessarily require any sort of deep emotional entanglement or vulnerability from its listeners. In that way, the record works as an unexpected balm, a break—a little bit of pleasure just for pleasure’s sake.

by Amanda Petrusich, Pitchfork | Read more:
Image: Aja

[ed. All their albums were great, including their under-appreciated (and one of my favorites) Two Against Nature. They were exceptional lyricists and musicians (see examples below). For more SD samples see: here and here.]

"I'm working on gospel time these days (Summer, the summer. This could be the cool part of the summer). The sloe-eyed creature in the reckless room, she's so severe. A wise child walks right out of here. I'm so excited I can barely cope. I'm sizzling like an isotope. I'm on fire, so cut me some slack. First she's way gone, then she comes back. She's all business, then she's ready to play. She's almost Gothic in a natural way. This house of desire is built foursquare. (City, the city. The cleanest kitten in the city). When she speaks, it's like the slickest song I've ever heard. I'm hanging on her every word. As if I'm not already blazed enough. She hits me with the cryptic stuff. That's her style, to jerk me around. First she's all feel, then she cools down. She's pure science with a splash of black cat. She's almost Gothic and I like it like that. This dark place, so thrilling and new. It's kind of like the opposite of an aerial view. Unless I'm totally wrong. I hear her rap, and, brother, it's strong. I'm pretty sure that what she's telling me is mostly lies. But I just stand there hypnotized. I'll just have to make it work somehow. I'm in the amen corner now. It's called love, I spell L-U-V. First she's all buzz, then she's noise-free. She's bubbling over, then there's nothing to say. She's almost Gothic in a natural way. She's old school, then she's, like, young. Little Eva meets the Bleecker Street brat. She's almost Gothic, but it's better than that." ~ Almost Gothic. 

-------

"Charlie Freak had but one thing to call his own. Three weight ounce pure golden ring no precious stone. Five nights without a bite. No place to lay his head. And if nobody takes him in he'll soon be dead. On the street he spied my face I heard him hail. In our plot of frozen space he told his tale. Poor man, he showed his hand. So righteous was his need. And me so wise. I bought his prize. For chicken feed. Newfound cash soon begs to smash a state of mind. Close inspection fast revealed his favorite kind. Poor kid, he overdid. Embraced the spreading haze. And while he sighed his body died. In fifteen ways. When I heard I grabbed a cab to where he lay. 'Round his arm the plastic tag read D.O.A. Yes Jack, I gave it back. The ring I could not own. Now come my friend I'll take your hand. And lead you home." ~ Charlie Freak.

Clare Woods (British, 1972), Silent Breakdown, 2022.

via: 

Baijiu

Baijiu (Chinese: 白酒; pinyin: báijiǔ; lit. 'white (clear) liquor'), also known as shaojiu (烧酒/燒酒), is a Chinese colourless liquor typically coming in between 35% and 60% alcohol by volume (ABV). Each type of baijiu uses a distinct type of qū for fermentation unique to the distillery for the distinct and characteristic flavour profile. (...)

Because of its clarity, baijiu can appear similar to several other East Asian liquors, e.g. Japanese shōchū (25%) or Korean soju (20–45%), but it often has a significantly higher alcohol content (35-60%). (...)

Global baijiu market

Baijiu is the world's bestselling liquor, with five billion litres sold in 2016, and 10.8 billion liters sold in 2018, more than whisky, vodka, gin, rum and tequila combined. As well as the most consumed liquor, with 1.2 billion nine-liter cases consumed in 2018, mostly in China - three times the global consumption of vodka.

Baijiu and Chinese business culture

Chinese business culture is known to be intense. It is believed that one's true colour is shown when intoxicated. Therefore, when negotiating a business partnership, there is a tradition of serving high-degree Baijiu on the dinner table, in order to judge one's trustworthiness. 

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

Image: Xiaomage de - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org

Fen, Bog & Swamp

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx may be best known for her works of fiction, titles like The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain.

But the 87-year-old author's newest book, Fen, Bog & Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis, is a love letter to ecosystems that are rapidly disappearing — America's wetlands.

"Before the last wetlands disappear I wanted to know about this world we are losing," Proulx writes. "What was a world of fens, bogs and swamps and what meaning did these peatlands have, not only for humans but for all other life on Earth?" (...)

On what she learned in her research on fens, bogs and swamps

We tend to tag everything in the natural world in terms of what use it is to humans. And I was curious to know how it fits in with the great scheme of life, how it belonged to other parts of the world, how land and water and creatures and weather and climate change were all knit together. So that was the thing. I wasn't looking for benefits to humans as an explanation of anything. I was looking for how these guys work with each other. But also, I was very curious about human responses to these wetlands. So that took me into the history. And that, of course, was the fun part. Poking around with the people of the fen, the battle in the bogs and the various swamps in North America that were drained and made into productive soil.

On the history of peatland destruction

The peatlands have never been regarded as something that's a necessary part of life, but as an obstruction, something that's in the way. The ideal, of course, is agriculture. For most people, it wasn't a measure of any kind of utility to talk about a peat-producing wetland as helpful. So it was really a change of attitude more than anything else that I stumbled on. It's really hard to read about this sort of thing because people insist on thinking of the natural world only in terms of utility to humanity. We don't see ourselves as part of this system, but as lords and rulers of the natural world.

by Julie Depenbock, NPR |  Read more:

Image: Stephen B. Morton/AP

Loren Holmes, A fisherman picks salmon from his setnet at Pederson Point near Naknek, AK
via:

Porn on Tumblr is a Complicated Subject

In 2018, Tumblr announced a ban on "adult content." That call was made by Verizon, Tumblr's erstwhile owner, and to call the resulting mess "a shitshow" is an insult to good, hardworking shitshows all over the world.

Verizon enforced this policy with an automated filter, which was charged with analyzing images and categorizing them as "sexual" or "nonsexual." This is risible enough, like asking a computer to sort videos into "virtuous" or "sinful" but that was just for starters.

Verizon's ban included a ban on "female-presenting nipples" – a canonically hard-to-define category – but included exceptions for non-sexual nipple images. Hard to imagine that any serious, disinterested computer scientist promising that an algorithm could cleave "female-presenting nipples" from "male-presenting" ones, let alone decide which ones were "sexual" or not.

The filters were…not good. Verizon posted a selection of images that were explicitly permitted under its policies. That post was blocked by Tumblr's filter.

https://gizmodo.com/tumblrs-porn-filter-flags-its-own-examples-of-permitted-1831151178

It wasn't just that Tumblr's AI couldn't turn its unblinking eye upon the nipples casting their shadows upon the wall of Plato's Cave and divine their true nature. Tumblr's AI thought everything was a nipple – or some other potentially "adult" body-part. (...)

Verizon was not good at running Tumblr, which isn't a surprise, because Verizon's core competencies are lobbying and union-busting. Eventually the company wrote down its online media assets, taking a $4.6B loss...

Tumblrites didn't know what to make of the writedown. There was a lot of trepidation, sure, because even after years of mismanagement by Yahoo and then Verizon, Tumblr was still a community that mattered to its members.

What's more, with the writedown, there was the possibility that someone else – someone less Verizony – would buy the company. That happened! Automattic, creators of WordPress, announced that they would buy Tumblr. Tumblr's filter blocked the announcement...

When Automattic took over Tumblr, there was a lot of hope that the adult content ban would be reversed. Tumblr's adult communities had been hugely important in creating and promulgating a sex-positive, queer-positive, sex-worker-respecting platform, utterly unlike anything else online.

The impact of contributing to and participating in these adult communities can't be overstated. In Tumblr Porn, Ana Valens offers a memoir of how profoundly Tumblr's sex-positive spaces ("vanguard of a user-generated sexual revolution") affected her life:

Verizon's sex ban didn't just shut those communities down – it consigned them to the memory-hole, blocking the archivists who scrambled to preserve them...

But despite the importance of sex to Tumblr's success and the manifest idiocy of Verizon's ban, Automattic did not bring back the adult content, and made it clear they had no immediate plans to change that position.

Now, five years later, Tumblr has made its first tentative moves to open the platform to NSFW materials, with a new dashboard that lets views opt into adult content and a labeling system that lets posters flag their uploads:

https://photomatt.tumblr.com/post/696578252906659840/staff-introducing-community-labels-as-you

This is a far cry from Tumblr's original full-throated, wide-open NSFW policy, and there's a reason for that. In a new post, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg describes why Tumblr's old "go nuts, show nuts" policy can't work today:

It all comes down to chokepoints and liability. It's an open secret that Verizon's Tumblr porn ban was triggered by Apple's threat to block the Tumblr app for iOS users, in the name of preserving the App Store's "child friendly" policy. Remember when Steve Jobs announced that "Folks who want porn can buy an Android phone?" (...)

Playing chicken with Apple's App Store censors is a losing proposition. As Mullenweg describes, the interpretation of the App Store rules varies from day to day, depending on which person is evaluating your app. If you submit an app update, Apple might arbitrarily change its position on whether you're crossing a line and block your app instead. When that happens, it's a big deal. Mullenweg: "If Apple permanently banned Tumblr from the App Store, we’d probably have to shut the service down."

But it's not just the mobile duopoly that holds Tumblr's future in its hands. Mullenweg actually ranks payment processors as more powerful than mobile companies. Credit-card companies hate porn. Adding adult content back to Tumblr threatens Automattic's ability to process payments for all its services, from WordPress hosting to ad-free Tumblr subscriptions. Without money, the company couldn't last long, and its 2,000+ employees would be out of a job. (...)

But even if you bypass the mobile dupology and find a way to live without payment processing, setting up an adult-content-friendly site is still fraught. New rules (including SESTA/FOSTA) create civil and criminal liability for adult content hosting; as do rules against nonconsensual pornography (AKA "revenge porn"). (...)

Today, hosting adult content means finding specialized network connections, hosting, DDoS mitigation and more, because every layer of the "stack" of services other kinds of sites can rely on has been turning into an oligopoly with uniform anti-sex policies.

by Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic |  Read more:

Image: allanthall: CC Attribution-ShareAlike License

Now Comes the Hard Part

"Given the damage already wrought on the Nasdaq, there is a natural inclination to buy the dip. We believe that there is little merit in doing so. The current market climate is characterized by extremely unfavorable valuations, unfavorable trend uniformity, and hostile yield trends. This combination is what we define as a Crash Warning, and this climate has historically occurred in less than 4% of market history. That 4% of market history includes the 1929 crash and the 1987 crash, as well as a number of less memorable crashes and panics. We prefer to hedge until there is a rational prospect for market gains. When valuations are favorable, stocks are attractive from the standpoint of ‘investment’ – meaning that stock prices are attractive compared to the conservatively discounted value of cash flows which will be thrown off in the future. When trend uniformity is favorable, stocks are attractive from the standpoint of ‘speculation’ – meaning that regardless of valuation, investors are displaying an increased tolerance for risk which favors a further advance in prices.”– John P. Hussman, Ph.D., Hussman Investment Research & Insight, November 15, 2000

Surveying the current condition of the financial markets, we presently observe a combination of still historically-extreme valuations, rising yet still only normalizing interest rates, measurably inadequate risk-premiums in both equities and bonds, and ragged, unfavorable market internals, suggesting continued risk-aversion among investors. In this context, it’s worth repeating what I’ve noted across decades of market cycles – a market collapse is nothing but risk-aversion meeting an inadequate risk-premium; rising yield pressure meeting an inadequate yield.

Emphatically, short-term oversold conditions can be followed anytime by fast, furious advances to clear those conditions. As I discuss in more detail below, we also pay ongoing attention to the uniformity or divergence of market internals (what I used to call “trend uniformity”). The above quote from 2000 explains why. “When trend uniformity is favorable, stocks are attractive from the standpoint of ‘speculation’ – meaning that regardless of valuation, investors are displaying an increased tolerance for risk, which favors a further advance in prices.” In that context, the only thing a decade of zero-interest policy did was to remove any reliable upper “limit” to valuations or risk-taking. Even we’ve adapted our discipline to reflect that reality. The danger comes when investors continue to ignore extreme valuations even after investor psychology has shifted to risk-aversion.

The opening quote is from November 15, 2000. From its March 24, 2000 bull market peak of 4816.35, the technology-heavy Nasdaq 100 index had already plunged by -36%. Yet from that lower level, it would go on to lose another -68% by October 2002. That outcome should not have been a surprise. On March 7, 2000, I observed, “Over time, price/revenue ratios come back in line. Currently, that would require an 83% plunge in tech stocks (recall the 1969-70 tech massacre). The plunge may be muted to about 65% given several years of revenue growth. If you understand values and market history, you know we’re not joking.”

At the 2000 market peak, a broad range of reliable valuations implied negative estimated S&P 500 total returns for over a decade, as they did in 1929, and as they unfortunately do today. This is what a decade of zero interest rate policy has set up for investors.

The chart below shows our best estimate of the expected 12-year total return for a conventional passive investment portfolio invested 60% in the S&P 500, 30% in Treasury bonds, and 10% in Treasury bills. Notice that recent market losses have markedly improved prospective returns for a passive investment allocation, yet only to a level of about 1% annually. Indeed, the expected return of the S&P 500 component is still negative.

A decade of deranged Federal Reserve zero-interest rate policy has exerted what former FDIC chair Sheila Bair recently described as a “corrosive” effect on the financial markets and the economy. Faced with zero interest rates, investors became convinced that they had no alternative but to speculate. As speculation drove valuations far beyond their historical norms, investors embraced the idea that valuations simply did not matter. Advancing prices in the rear-view mirror seemed to provide evidence that zero-interest rate cash was an unacceptable alternative to passively investing in stocks, regardless of price.

In 1934, following an 89% market collapse during the Great Depression, Benjamin Graham and David Dodd detailed the beliefs that investors had adopted during the speculative runup to the 1929 peak. They are identical to what we’ve observed in recent years. First, “that the records of the past were proving an undependable guide to investment”; second, “that the rewards offered by the future had become irresistibly alluring”; and third, “a companion theory that common stocks represented the most profitable and therefore the most desirable media for long-term investment.” Taken together, these beliefs ultimately contributed to “the notion that the desirability of a common stock was entirely independent of its price.” Surveying the rubble, Graham and Dodd observed, “The results of such a doctrine could not fail to be tragic.”

Encouraged by the same beliefs, investors drove S&P 500 valuations to levels even beyond the 1929 and 2000 extremes – levels that we associate with over a decade of negative expected returns even from current levels. At present, the stock and bond markets have declined enough to restore positive expected returns for a diversified portfolio that includes both stocks and bonds, but just barely. (...)

Keep in mind that periods of hypervaluation are not resolved in one fell swoop. To imagine otherwise is to minimize the discomfort, uncertainty, and alternation between fear and hope that the collapse of a bubble entails. The way that bubbles unfold into preposterous losses – 89%, 82%, 50%, 55%, and I expect this time between 50-70% – is through multiple periods of decline and even free-fall, punctuated by fast, furious “clearing rallies” that offer hope all the way down. By the time investors experience the second or third free-fall – and we’ve hardly experienced the first one yet – the psychology of investors is not “this is the bottom” – but rather, “there is no bottom.”

Aside from ignoring valuations and market internals, one of the behaviors that will get you eaten in a bear market is placing too much confidence in any single ‘capitulation.’ Speculative episodes typically unwind in waves. The steeper the starting valuations, the more waves one typically observes.– John P. Hussman, Ph.D., Making Friends with Bears Through Math, June 1, 2022

Very little confidence in the equity market has been shaken – yet. Consider the surveys from the American Association of Individual Investors (AAII). Sentiment – talk – is lopsided at 60.9% bearish and just 17.7% bullish. Portfolio allocations – actions – are an entirely different story, with an above-average 64.5% allocation to equities, nowhere close to the 40% equity allocations that AAII respondents reported at the 1990, 2002, and 2009 market lows. Put simply, investors are clearly becoming uncomfortable, but in practice, they continue to defend the hill of extreme valuations, in the apparent belief that whatever risk remains must be short-term in nature. “After all,” investors have been trained to repeat, “it always comes back.” It’s easy to forget that the speculative valuations can be followed by S&P 500 returns below T-bills, and even below zero, for more than a decade. (...)

My advice for those who insist that profit margins are inexorably rising over time is simple: quantify it. Even if one runs an upward-sloping trendline through S&P 500 profit margins, one can only justify valuations 20-30% above historical norms, not 2.3-2.5 times those norms. For those that go further and insist that S&P 500 reported profit margins will remain at permanent record highs above 12%, despite a historical average of less than 7%, never exceeding 10% except amid trillions of dollars in pandemic subsidies since 2020, I can’t really help much, because these investors have already decided that history doesn’t matter.

by John P. Hussman, Ph.D, Hussman Funds |  Read more:

Image: Hussman Strategic Advisors

No Turning Back

World’s largest radioactive waste melter starts in Central WA

There’s no turning back at the Hanford site’s vitrification plant after the heat-up of the world’s largest melter for radioactive waste started Saturday, 20 years after construction of the plant began.

The 300-ton melter now must remain hot continuously around the clock as it initially makes practice glass and eventually starts glassifying radioactive waste for the first time at the nuclear reservation.

Glassification prepares the waste for permanent disposal. (...)

The Department of Energy’s goal is to start vitrifying radioactive waste stored in underground tanks, some since World War II, by the end of 2023.

The 580-square-mile Hanford nuclear reservation near Richland in Central Washington produced about two-thirds of the nation’s plutonium for its nuclear weapons program from World War II through the Cold War.

Uranium fuel irradiated at Hanford was chemically reprocessed to remove plutonium. The mix of radioactive and other hazardous chemical waste from reprocessing has been stored in underground tanks, many of them prone to leaking. They hold 56 million gallons of the waste until it can be treated for disposal.

The melter that is being heated up is the first of two at the $17 billion plant’s Low Activity Waste Facility and is expected to operate continuously for at least five years. 

by Annette Cary, Tri-City Herald/Seattle Times |  Read more:
Image: Anna King/Northwest News Network via:

[ed. See also: Turning Hanford’s nuclear waste into glass logs would emit toxic vapors, says document (OPB):]

Miller: I noted that amount of radioactive waste, a number I can’t really fathom, 56 million gallons of this waste. How is it being stored right now?

Stang: It is stored in 177 huge underground tanks that are located in the central part of the site.

Miller: One big fear is that this waste could leach out into the ground, the groundwater, potentially into the Columbia River. How much is that happening?

Stang: At least one million gallons has leaked out into the ground. It takes a while for it to seep down to the ground water, the aquifer, which is 100-200ft beneath the surface, and then it flows toward the Columbia River which is about seven miles away. Some of it’s already reached the Columbia River.

The Honest Broker

This particular project brought me to China. I was trying to set up an operation in a remote province, far outside my comfort zone, and couldn’t seem to figure out how to maneuver among the various interests and stakeholders. My patron was one of the wealthiest men in Hong Kong, and by using his contacts, I gained access to people who normally operate behind layers of intermediaries and gatekeepers. But even these contacts led me on an endless runaround. My sources gave me conflicting advice and confusing directions. Everything felt wrong and nothing seemed quite on the level.

I knew I needed help, but had run out of options. Then I met the drunk Australian.

He wasn’t a contact on my list, and I can’t even remember his name. This was a chance encounter in a hotel bar late at night. But this hard-drinking Australian was talkative and had interesting things to say. He had spent most of his life bouncing around the capitals of Asia, and was a high-level operator in his own spheres. He bragged about his insider’s knowledge, and claimed—with some accuracy, as I came to discover—that he knew how to maneuver in China better than the clueless Westerners who were now appearing on the scene. He had traced the secret paths to power and knew all the dangerous mistakes amateurs always make.

He reeled off a list of them. “You go into a province or city and flash around some money, then expect the local officials will help you? Forget it. They’ll rob you blind, and even make you bribe them for the privilege. Same goes for the party leaders. From each according to his ability, and all that, my friend. And forget about lawyers—the legal protections here are like this”—he held up his empty glass, then flipped it over as if to emphasize the nothingness of what he was offering to the gods of Marx and Mao. “As for the bankers, you might as well call them wankers.”

The empty glass was also a sign that I needed to order another round of the local brew, and I quickly complied. My new friend fell into a meditative silence until further libations arrived. Finally, after another sip on the stomach-destroying glass of baijiu that passed for spirits at our watering hole, I asked the obvious question.

“So what do I do? Who can I trust?”

“That’s easy, mate. You need to find the Honest Broker.”

This sounded appealing enough, but I had zero idea what my new acquaintance was talking about. He might just as well have told me to go to Oz and consult with the Wizard.

“Who, exactly, is this Honest Broker?”

“There’s at least one in every city. But don’t expect their business cards to say ‘Honest Broker’—that’s just what I call them. But that’s exactly what they are. Sometimes they don’t even have an official position. But they are the key to everything.”

He proceeded to explain how Honest Brokers play a hidden but vital role in communities without a history of legal protections and stable institutions. Their influence and power is built solely on a reputation for straight talk and trustworthy dealings. “They are true brokers, intermediaries between others. They aren’t going to participate in your deal, no matter what it is. They are go-betweens, really. But do not underestimate the power of this kind of brokerage. Whatever you need—a loan, a building permit, political influence, a place to land a private jet, whatever—they will introduce you to the right people and steer you away from the sharks.

“And they do this for a very simple reason: their prestige is enhanced by making these connections. In many cases, they don’t even want to be paid. Or let me put that differently—you repay them by becoming a trusted contact for them in future dealings. The Honest Broker may help you for free right now, but don’t be surprised to get asked for assistance on something completely different months or even years later. You Yanks have a hard time grasping it, and are always looking for shortcuts. But the Honest Broker plays the long-term game, mate.

“Find your Honest Broker, and your problems will be solved.”

This proved to be valuable advice, worth far more than the cost of drinks. Over the next few weeks, I changed my approach completely. I made inquiries, compared notes, and finally found my Honest Broker—who did solve my problems, just as promised. My mission accomplished, I returned back home to California and tried to forget all about it.

I put my passport out of sight. My world shrank back to manageable dimensions, and my days were spent at the two keyboards, the piano and the word processor. I was getting back into my music groove again.

A long time went by before I realized the real importance of what I had learned in China, and how it applied to the other half of my split and fractured life. 

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: Ted Gioia

One Take

[ed. This is awesome. Expand and keep rewinding/replaying to see all the details.]

Even when “Kidding” executive producer Michel Gondry isn’t directing an episode of Jim Carrey’s new Showtime show, the auteur’s presence can be felt. Case in point: Last Sunday’s episode, which featured a long, complicated scene shot in one take.

In the scene, guest star Riki Lindhome plays Shaina, a woman who’s inspired to turn her life around after watching an episode of “Mr. Pickles’ Puppet Time,” the kids’ show hosted by Carrey’s character. In one take, viewers see Lindhome’s world evolve as she renovates her apartment, starts exercising, invites friends over and celebrates her new life.

Behind the scenes, the “Kidding” crew physically transformed the set multiple times in real time. In this exclusive clip, the network gives a side-by-side comparison to how the scene looked on camera, vs. the hairy moments behind the camera as Lindhome and the show’s crew managed to pull it off.

by Michael Schneider, IndieWire | Read more:
Video: Kidding

[ed. I went searching for this post to show to a friend... clicked on the Movies category to the right and up it came, along with a few other interesting posts I'd forgotten about (below) - My Dinner With Andre; Network/Picketty; Jane Fonda, etc. Check out the other categories too, there's a lot of good stuff in there.]

My Dinner With Andre

Same As It Ever Was: Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, Minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime.”

― from Network, screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky

And thus spoke “Arthur Jensen”, CEO of fictional media conglomerate “CCA” in what is for me the most defining scene in director Sidney Lumet’s prescient 1976 satire. Jensen (wonderfully played by Ned Beatty) is calling “mad prophet of the airwaves” Howard Beale (Peter Finch) on the carpet for publicly exposing a potential buyout of CCA by shadowy Arab investors. Cognizant that Beale is crazy as a loon, yet a cash cow for the network, Jensen hands him a new set of stone tablets from which he is to preach (the corporate cosmology of Arthur Jensen). It is screenwriter Chayefsky’s finest monologue. (...)

So how did the world become “…a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business”? And come hell, high water, or killer virus, why is it that “Thou shalt rally the unwashed masses to selflessly do their part to protect the interests of the Too Big to Fail” (whether it’s corporations, the dynastic heirs of the 1% or the wealth management industry that feeds off of them) remains the most “immutable bylaw” of all?

It’s not like “the people” haven’t tried through history to level the playing field between the “haves” and the “have-nots”. Take, for example the French Revolution, which ultimately did not change the status quo, despite the initial “victory” of the citizenry over the power-hoarding aristocracy. As pointed out in Justin Pemberton’s documentary Capital in the Twenty-First Century, while there was initial optimism in the wake of the revolution that French society would default to an egalitarian model, it never really took.

Why? Because the architects of the revolution overlooked what is really needed to establish and maintain true equality: strong political institutions, an education system, health care (*sigh*), a transport system, and a tax system that targets the highest incomes.

Same as it ever was. (...)

As the film was produced before Covid-19 shut down much of the world’s economy, it does not delve into the possibilities of a post-pandemic restructuring. As luck would have it though, a fitting postscript for my review presented itself the day after I screened the film when Thomas Piketty popped up as a guest on The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah. Curiously, he was not there to promote the documentary, but did share some interesting thoughts on possible post-pandemic shifts in current economic models:

[Piketty] I think this is one of these crises we see that can really change people’s views about the world and how we should organize the economy. What we see at this stage is a big increase in inequality. […]

With this crisis right now, I think people are going to be asking for proof that we can also use this power of money creation and the Federal Reserve in order to invest in people; investing in hospitals, in public infrastructure, increasing wages for unskilled workers…all the low-wage and middle-wage people which we see today are necessary for our existence and our society.

In the longer run, of course we cannot just pay for everything with public debt and money creation…so we have to re-balance our tax system. […]

In the past three decades in America, we’ve seen a lot more billionaires; but we’ve seen a lot less growth. So in the end, the idea that you get prosperity out of inequality just didn’t work out. […]

[Noah] What do you think about the “worst case scenario”, then…if you live in a world where the inequality just keeps growing; the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, what do we inevitably get to?

[Piketty] Well to me the worst scenario is that some skilled politicians like Donald Trump, or [President of the National Front Party] Marie Le Pen in my country in France will use the frustration coming from wage and income stagnation and rising inequality in order to point out some foreign workers or “some people” [are] to blame. […] And this is what really worries me-that if we don’t change our discourses, if we don’t come up with another economic model that is more equitable, more sustainable…then, in effect we re-open the door for all this nationalist discourse.

by Dennis Hartley, Den of Cinema |  Read more:
Image: Network/YouTube