Everything That Matters

“Did you ever replace that SxS (SxS refers to a side-by-side shotgun)?” I asked my buddy.

“No. Prefer over/unders primarily,” he responded.

Then, “SxS are cool, though.”

I knew he preferred over/under shotguns, just as I knew he hadn’t replaced the SxS he had tried some years back, and seemed to be fond of, and shot well. But mechanical issues ensued, and he was never able to get it to work to his satisfaction. But I had to double-check.

A fellow in Fairbanks, an ADN reader who often corresponds regarding these columns, offers thoughts and observations that often provide food for thought. Such was the case recently when I wrote of accumulating things. Being around my age, he wondered what he might do with the equipment he has accumulated, now that he and his dogs have retired from sprint skijoring.

I didn’t have an answer. But the exchange reminded me of some things I had promised myself not long ago.

Certainly, there are places to donate things like that. A venue exists for the disposal of most anything. But, when it comes to things that one has invested their heart and soul in, you don’t really want it to go into a pile where folks can pick through it and maybe use it, maybe not.

Organizations like the Salvation Army may put it to use, and for some things, that’s great. But I, for one, would like some of the things that are dear to me to go to someone I know who will “get it,” who understands the intrinsic value, and who will use it in good faith, carry on the tradition if you will. I don’t want the backpack I hunted so many mountain miles over to become someone’s diaper bag.

Perhaps this has become an old-fashioned sentiment, from the time I remember thinking about how cool it would have been to be able to keep all of the old saddle and tack from my grandparent’s days when horses were a part of life. The world is a much different place than many of us older folks grew up in. Carrying on traditions may even be an unrealistic sentiment today. At times I have trouble sorting it out.

Standing before a home full of things that composed my father’s life, and not knowing how to connect with all who might have wanted to share some of those things frustrated and even angered me. Being responsible for those things, I couldn’t reduce my father’s life to 50 cents at a time in a yard sale.

Last spring, on the wind-blown prairie of North Dakota, I decided that I didn’t want my end game to be like that. Which, given mainstream culture’s awful predisposition to reduce things to possession and never let go, it is not as easy as it sounds. 

by Steve Meyer, Anchorage Daily News |  Read more:

Image: Christine Cunningham

[ed. Not just guns. Anything with personal or family history. The flip side is dealing with accumulated junk. My dad left 70+ years of it for my brothers and I to dispose of - old rusted tools, broken useless sports equipment; old dried paint cans in the hundreds; dead appliances, water damaged furniture, moldy luggage, everything. Old folks, do your kids a favor - cleanout and downsize while you still can. You don't want your legacy to include a lot swearing.]

Book Play 11 - A Day In The Life

via:

LeBron’s Career Has Been a Quiet Rebuke to Michael Jordan’s

LeBron James’s 20-year NBA career has generated its fair share of memes—my favorite has to be him scolding J.R. Smith — but I think this one sums up the man best:

The image, which James posted to his Instagram page just hours after Fox host Laura Ingraham infamously told him to “shut up and dribble,” encapsulates him perfectly. There’s a little lack of self-awareness, some charming awkwardness, a dash of braggadocio, and, more than anything else, an understanding that, no matter what happens, everything’s going to turn out fine for LeBron James. Perhaps more than any other megawatt top-shelf superstar in recent decades, James seems … if not quite normal, at least content. Jordan was miserable even when he was winning championships and has grown only more embittered; Tom Brady simply cannot fathom a world where he isn’t the NFL’s top dog; Tiger Woods was as great at golf as he was bad at, well, anything that wasn’t golf. (Stephen Curry seems at peace with himself, but he still isn’t quite at James’s icon level.) The inner-circle legends are often tormented, driven to win at an almost psychotic level and largely unequipped to handle anything resembling real life. It’s their curse: brilliant on the field, forever lost off it.

But James has also carried himself as a man who, as much as he wants to win, knows deep down that he already has. He is known for diving head first into whatever endeavor piques his interest — finance, entertainment, politics (until recently anyway) — and, while you don’t become a global superstar like he has without minimizing at least some risk (witness his recent retreat from the political sphere), he has always spoken his mind about off-court endeavors in a way that that would have been unfathomable for Jordan. The never-ending, forever-exhausting Jordan-James “greatest of all time” debate has always rested a little bit on this dynamic. James’s career numbers dwarf Jordan’s in most ways (yes, he’s two titles short), but Jordan’s obsessions shaped the way a whole generation framed nearly every sports endeavor: Winning is the only priority, and to lose is to die. Jordan won, and he cut your heart out while doing it. He was so good at being ruthless that he made us all think that’s what you were supposed to do.

James’s career has served as a quiet but refreshing rebuke to this philosophy. To be clear, he is hardly comfortable with, or even all that familiar with, losing. He has won four NBA titles and reached ten NBA Finals, including eight in a row from 2011 to 2018, and he recently groused about the subpar roster that surrounds him in Los Angeles right now. (A roster he’s partly responsible for constructing, it should be noted.) But even when LeBron loses, even when he’s playing for a team as middling as the one he’s on right now, he doesn’t have the vibe of a man who needs the world to burn because he’s not getting what he wants, the way Jordan might have: His vibe remain very Smiling Through It All! Can’t Believe This Is My Life! about it. The all-time scoring record is perhaps the NBA’s most sacred: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has held it for nearly 40 years. (Since Jordan’s rookie season!) But LeBron’s chase for it has been almost low-key. His run at the record has felt less historical and more a logical inevitability.

by Will Leitch, Intelligencer |  Read more:

Image: LeBron James/Instagram

[ed. Yep. No contest.]

Is Tipping Getting Out Of Control?

Across the country, there’s a silent frustration brewing about an age-old practice that many say is getting out of hand: tipping.

Some fed-up consumers are posting rants on social media complaining about tip requests at drive-thrus, while others say they’re tired of being asked to leave a gratuity for a muffin or a simple cup of coffee at their neighborhood bakery. What’s next, they wonder -- are we going to be tipping our doctors and dentists, too?

As more businesses adopt digital payment methods, customers are automatically being prompted to leave a gratuity — many times as high as 30% — at places they normally wouldn't. And some say it has become more frustrating as the price of items has skyrocketed due to inflation, which eased to 6.5% in December but still remains painfully high.

“Suddenly, these screens are at every establishment we encounter. They're popping up online as well for online orders. And I fear that there is no end,” said etiquette expert Thomas Farley, who considers the whole thing somewhat of “an invasion.”

Unlike tip jars that shoppers can easily ignore if they don’t have spare change, experts say the digital requests can produce social pressure and are more difficult to bypass. And your generosity, or lack thereof, can be laid bare for anyone close enough to glance at the screen — including the workers themselves.

Dylan Schenker is one of them. The 38-year-old earns about $400 a month in tips, which provides a helpful supplement to his $15 hourly wage as a barista at Philadelphia café located inside a restaurant. Most of those tips come from consumers who order coffee drinks or interact with the café for other things, such as carryout orders. The gratuity helps cover his monthly rent and eases some of his burdens while he attends graduate school and juggles his job.

Schenker says it's hard to sympathize with consumers who are able to afford pricey coffee drinks but complain about tipping. And he often feels demoralized when people don’t leave behind anything extra — especially if they’re regulars.

“Tipping is about making sure the people who are performing that service for you are getting paid what they’re owed,” said Schenker, who’s been working in the service industry for roughly 18 years.

Traditionally, consumers have taken pride in being good tippers at places like restaurants, which typically pay their workers lower than the minimum wage in expectation they’ll make up the difference in tips. But academics who study the topic say many consumers are now feeling irritated by automatic tip requests at coffee shops and other counter service eateries where tipping has not typically been expected, workers make at least the minimum wage and service is usually limited. (...)

The final tab might also impact how customers react. Karabas said in the research he did with other academics, they manipulated the payment amounts and found that when the check was high, consumers no longer felt as irritated by the tip requests. That suggests the best time for a coffee shop to ask for that 20% tip, for example, might be on four or five orders of coffee, not a small cup that costs $4.

Some consumers might continue to shrug off the tip requests regardless of the amount.

“If you work for a company, it's that company's job to pay you for doing work for them,” said Mike Janavey, a footwear and clothing designer who lives in New York City. “They're not supposed to be juicing consumers that are already spending money there to pay their employees.”

by Haleluya Hadero, Yahoo News |  Read more:

Image: AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh
[ed. Glad to see this latest little irritant getting some traction. Sometimes there's not even a no-tipping option.]

All My Relations

It’s been so long.

I look at the stringer of fish: some weke nono, an uku, a scattering of kole. The weke’s vibrant stripes contrast with the uku’s darker colour. Out in the water, I said the ritual words. Then I feasted. Even a predator recognises those above him. I devoured two bright green uhu before I came in, making short work of their thick scales. The edge of my hunger is dulled, but still cutting. Gnawing. Whispering. Insisting.

I walk across the grass, stringer and spear in one hand, the rest of my gear tucked under my arm or balanced across my chest. I stash the rest of the fish in the cooler in the back of my truck for later, and head towards the hose.

 

A young boy splashes his slippers idly in the puddle on the asphalt by the spigot. This is the beach I dive at most and I see him around with his dad and some other folks. I’ve even traded fish with the father a few times.

The boy’s wearing a stained and tattered pair of red surf shorts. Someone, maybe his mom, has added elastic to the waistband to make it fit his skinny brown frame better. As I approach, he turns and stares at me unashamedly, as children do.

My breathing quickens and my muscles tense. I force myself to relax. His stare is not a challenge. I flick my eyes over him. He’s a little runt, hair turned ‘ehu from the sun. He might be twelve. Maybe he’s eight. I don’t know his age, but that’s more because I can’t be bothered to pay attention to the developmental stages of your whelps rather than some ageless quality about him.

“Uncle, my dad says that you should never dive alone.”

And now he’s talking to me. “I’m not your uncle, boy,” I grumble, brushing past him to get to the hose. Uncle. As if we could be related.

I am a glorious kupua, a niuhi even. A ravening killing machine, sending your ape-descended ancestors into the never-ending night. Leaving their entrails to twist in the salty currents of the sea. I am the tax your people pay for living by the shores of the great sea Moananuiākea.

“My dad said you can get shallow water blackout if you hold your breath too long!”

“I’ll be careful next time,” I snort, not mentioning that I can breathe underwater. That the feel of water rushing across my gills as I chase down prey is one of my greatest pleasures in life. That if this was two hundred years ago, I would already know what his liver tastes like.

“Plus my dad said that the sharks feed at dawn and dusk!”

Feed. My irises widen and my heart begins a relentless thudding. My feet pace out circles, with the hose in my hand, one eye fastened on the boy.

Some of my shark kin feel that fear spoils your flavour, taints your meat, so they strike quickly, from the murky depths. But me? I love the actinic savour that bowel-chilling terror imparts to your flesh. So I let you see me coming. Dorsal rising like the sail of a voyaging canoe as I circle. The whites of your eyes before you turn and try to scratch for shore. “Ka liu o ka pa‘akai,” as we used to say, the savour of the salt.

I sluice the cold hose water over my face, feeling slightly diminished as I wash the salt water from my skin. Less like me and more like one of you. I peel out of the sleeves and torso of my green camo wetsuit and continue to rinse off.

  

“Ho, Uncle, that’s a nice tat on your back! What is that? Shark teeth? I like get one like that too, but my dad said I too young yet.”

I don’t answer. Godsdamn, that fucking kid does not shut up. I shake my head and chuckle to myself, giving in a little bit.

“It’s a family design. Everyone in my family has it.” I turn my back to him so he can see the stylized black triangles stretching between my shoulders in an oval, a lei of teeth. I’m a little puzzled at myself. Maybe I’m being nice to him or maybe I’m just a little vain. (...)

Two hundred years ago, the sharks of Hawai‘i had a great battle at Pu‘uloa. A place you people so brilliantly renamed Pearl Harbor… because it was a harbour with pearls in it. Skin-sack ingenuity.

Ka‘ahupāhau and her brother Kahi‘ukā were amongst our most powerful leaders. But they betrayed us. They refused to be what they are: Predators. They wanted to be more like you soft dull-toothed ape-children. So they led a group of sharks who had forsaken eating people.

Against their own kin.

The battle was terrible and glorious at the same time. The sea of Pu‘uloa was filled with flashing teeth and blood and death. As we fought, we shifted through shark, and human, and in-between, but death found us no matter our form. When the fighting ceased, the dead on both sides lay bloated and rotting in the sun, and we niuhi, the maneaters, had been defeated.

Ka‘ahupāhau and Kahi‘ukā were the protectors of Pu‘uloa, and after their victory, they declared that no shark shall eat human flesh in the seas around O‘ahu ever again. And do you know how your chimp forebears repaid that boon? Your leaders built a military base on their home. They even built a dry dock right atop Ka‘ahupāhau’s cave.

Though no one has seen Ka‘ahupāhau or Kahi‘ukā since the base was constructed, I follow their mandate. Even though they broke with our traditions to defeat us, I still adhere to our traditions and our hierarchy. They were victorious, and I will obey the law they decreed. When I am a shark and the hunger hits, nothing can stay my jaws. There are none of the weaknesses brought by your flabby human form to hold me back. I stay in this lowly human form so the hunger does not overwhelm me.

Two hundred years. 

Anger flares when I remember the last time I swam as a shark. Entangled by Ka‘ahupāhau’s net, held still and slowly suffocating. Battle hunger fading, my powerful fins separating and shrinking into these willowy little ape paws. But I burn at the thought that some mob of flesh sausages thought it would be okay to build on top of the home of Ka‘ahupāhau and Kahi‘ukā. Yes, they were my enemies but there is no justice in that.

I shove the weke’s head into my mouth, biting down and feeling skull crunch. Fishermen say that if you eat the head of a weke, you get nightmares. But I am the nightmare: That feeling on the back of your neck. The movement out of the corner of your eye. The shadow in the sea.

Now I have been relegated to eating only fish. Sometimes, your ancestors used to sacrifice ulua to the kini akua in place of people, a fish standing in for a man. Let me tell you though: fish are no replacement for a sawn femoral and the long slender thigh of a kanaka. Eating all this fish, I may as well start eating vegetables too, like a godsdamned sea cow or some idiot pescatarian in Kaka‘ako obsessing over coffee and asking if his golden tilapia filet was harpooned or line-caught.

My knuckles are white, clutching my threeprong. It would be so easy to use it to put a hole in one of these meat sacks lounging on the beach around me and drink the life from them. To say the ritual words and then tear them to pieces. I feel my pupils dilating to let in more light, more information for the hunt, my foot twitching, wanting to propel me into action like a sweep of my giant tail.

“Uncle, you doing okay?”

My eyes snap to the boy, unrecognising, seeing only flesh and vulnerable spots to drive my jaws into. Belly. Throat. Face. Anywhere on this whelp actually.

“Uncle!” Instead of retreating, the boy hurries closer. “You okay or what, Uncle?”

Most prey runs, rather than approaching. I cock my head and he starts to separate from the background, coming into focus from the frenzy.

“Eh, boy,” I say slowly, words thick in my mouth. “Yeah, I’m fine. And stop calling me Uncle. What’s your name?” I ask, starting to feel a little calmer. I grudgingly appreciate that the boy is bringing me back. “You know what, never mind. I’m just going to call you Uncle so you know what it feels like.”

The boy giggles loudly and comes closer. “So what are you doing here, Uncle?” I ask, eliciting another giggle. (...)

The boy’s eyes glitter as he eyes my spear, maybe even a spark of hunger. Once more, I look him over, with an appraising eye, not as meat, but as something else. He’s not much to look at. More like a trumpetfish or a fence pole than anything, but perhaps this boy is a hunter too.

“Next time I come, ask your father if you can come dive with me. We’ll get some fish for them throw on the grill.”

“Uncle” beams. “Shoots!”

I walk past him to get in my truck, flicking his hat off his head, ‘‘kay, Uncle.’ 

He giggles again as he catches his hat against his chest before it falls to the ground. My engine coughs to life and I drive off, seeing him in my rear-view walking towards the little flock of tents.

Uncle runs up to my truck when I pull into the lot early in the morning. He has a three-prong in his little boy hand, and I can see his dad and the others by the tents yelling at him to stop running, ‘bumbye you fall and poke your eye out.’ He’s standing right outside my window, making shaka, bouncing up and down.

“You did come back today!

“I told my dad you was going come back!

“He had to go back home to get my spear!

“See, Dad, he’s back!

“When are we going to go diving?

“Do I need a wetsuit like you?”

I try to keep a look of disgust off my face. Regret surges for my lapse yesterday. What was I thinking? This wet paper bag a hunter? I get out of my rusty red truck and nudge Uncle toward the back, where I have all my gear stored. I lift the rear window of the camper top, hinges screeching. I reach in with one hand, using the other to pass gear to him, all the while trying to ignore his steady stream of conversation. (...)

“We probably just stay in the shallows today,” I tell the dad, beckoning to his son with my head. “We go.”

Uncle grabs all his gear excitedly and his dad takes a picture of him with his phone.

“Dad! Send that to me!

“I’m going to put it on Instagram!

“Are you on Instagram? You should just post pictures of your tat!”

If he asks me to take a selfie with him, I am going to eat him right now. 

by Brian Kamaoli Kuwada, Hawaii Review of Books |  Read more:

Images: Amelia Barklid, Alexander Kondriyanenko, and Laura Chouette.Portraits by Jocelyn Kapumealani Ng

Buzz Gets Married

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin marries longtime love on 93rd birthday (Yahoo News)

Image: Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File
[ed. Geez... what a great outfit. To the moon (again).]

The Emptying Hourglass

You probably have that person in your life who is on the forgetful side.

The family member who might now and again leave the burner on after boiling water for tea. Now imagine if that person left the burner on, without fail, every time he used the stove. Now imagine that he doesn’t even need hot water, but just walks over, turns on the burner, and walks away. That’s my dad.

Ten years ago my father was diagnosed with a rare form of early-onset dementia known as Pick’s Disease. I was teaching on the Big Island of Hawai‘i at the time and my parents were in Washington State, the Pacific between me and his slow slide into dementia.

During the first two years following his diagnosis, the occasional video call left me acutely aware of the velocity with which I was losing my dad. He’d be mid-sentence and suddenly go quiet, forgetting a word or his train of thought. He’d ask about my baby boy, even though my wife had recently given birth to a girl. A curtain was closing over his mind.

 

My wife, Kristin, and I had fled the omnipresent grey of Seattle with the dream of raising a family in Hawai‘i. I’d found a job teaching at Hawai‘i Preparatory Academy, we had an apartment at the foothills of Kohala mountain, and our one-year-old, Matilda, was taking her first steps on soft sand beaches. The decision to move back to Spangle, Washington, the tiny farm town of my childhood, was not an easy one, but I felt compelled to squeeze in a little more time with Dad before his mind left him completely. We would trade in sunset beach dinners and volcano hikes for rodeos and wheat fields.

Waimea, Hawai‘i is no major metropolis, but it sure feels like one juxtaposed with Spangle and its 300 inhabitants. After nearly two decades of globetrotting and putting as many miles as I could between my small-town roots and me, I suddenly found myself moving into my deceased grandmother’s house and living a mere three blocks from my folks.

Presently, Mom has a professional caregiver at home with her seven days a week. She can no longer haul Dad up off the carpet herself when he has one of his seizures, can’t lift him from the toilet when he forgets how to straighten his legs, can’t coerce him into releasing the randomly applied vice grip to her wrist while attempting to feed him. But eight years ago, when we first moved to Spangle, and before things had gotten so bad, when Mom was off at work the TV was Dad’s caregiver. His days were dedicated to such reality show juggernauts as Man vs. Wild, Dirty Jobs, Deadliest Catch, and of course, Shark Week. I’d swing by in the afternoons, sit and watch some TV with him.

At that point he could still get out a few words before synapses crashed into a forest of plaque. He never finished a sentence, which made for a fun game of context clue. The old fill-in-the-blank. A shark would chomp a surfer’s foot and he’d say, “Now that’s a…”

And the game would begin. “...tasty appetizer?” He’d shake his head no. “...rough start to the day?” No. “...sign you should probably re-enroll in community college?” He’d laugh, but no.

With any brand of dementia things progress and regress at odd intervals, more ebb than flow, but with a strange sort of consistency nonetheless. Some days go well, some not so well, but it’s easy to slip into thinking you know where things stand. Yet, just when you think you’ve got it sorted out, and maybe you’re at peace with the current state of confusion and complexities, out of the blue something will happen, and you realize that your loved one has entered a new stage, more disturbing than the last.

Following a few months of afternoon pop-ins, I opened the front door and was met by a new stage: Dad, standing in a panic. Before I could get to the kitchen and turn off a burner, a wall of noise stopped me cold—the TV turned up to the highest possible volume. It blared something about a Florida boy and his sister dragged out from the shallows. Dad’s pallid face was more terror-stricken than that of the Shark Week siblings.

Completely overwhelmed, he tried, but could not, form a sentence. Holding the remote in his loose grip, he eyed the thing as if it were a coiled snake ready to strike at any sudden movement.

I grabbed it, pointed it at the TV, and turned down the volume.

He stared at the television, at the remote in my hand, then to me. Finally, he closed his eyes and sighed the long, empty sigh of a man lost to the woods, resigned to the likelihood of not being found.

I helped him back to his chair. Even with the television at a reasonable volume his hands continued to shake. A drop of sweat slid past his temple. That’s when I took note of another issue. He smelled of shit. In all the bedlam, he’d lost control of his bowels. It was another first. I hurried to the kitchen and turned off two of the four burners. They were bright red and the scorched metal smell, combined with that of his shit, left me struggling for breath. I stood there staring at the red stovetop for a long time, appreciating that, yes, we had just crashed into the next stage of his dementia. (...)

A particularly sinister aspect of dementia is that, over time, it begins to erode your own memories of the afflicted. A cloud of disquiet coats the rearview mirror, leaving you squinting for clarity. It took a concerted effort for my mind’s eye to travel back to when he was himself, to see past this fog, so pressing and ever present it left little room for the good old days. (...)

Roles shift. It’s part of the aging process. But when the dynamic flips too quickly it’s the emotional equivalent of quicksand. I wasn’t ready for this, and the more I struggled, the more his disease seemed to pull me down with it. I had imagined this day might arrive, someday, but not until my parents were in their 80’s or 90’s… certainly not in their 50’s. I shouldn’t be cleaning up after his incontinence, holding him up on walks, nursing cuts and scrapes.

The shift took place at a dizzying pace. No time to make peace with it. No time to prepare. I’d left a good job, a good life in Hawai‘i to sneak in this quality time with my hero, but there was little quality to this time. We weren’t communicating much. Not for lack of want. He just couldn’t anymore.

He wasn’t able to spend the time I’d envisioned with his granddaughter. She made him nervous. If Matilda toddled towards him he looked pleadingly at us, hoping we would stop her. If she sat in his lap, his hands shook. If she swiveled around to look at him, he turned his gaze out the window. He didn’t know what to do with her. He’d flinch and stiffen with her touch, seemingly afraid of accidentally injuring her.

Matilda would never know her grandfather. Not really. Not as himself. Rather, she would only ever remember this ever-nervous, confused version of a grandpa, a man whose once rich brown eyes had turned to grey. She grew fearful of him and they would never bond.

Following two years of small-town living, it was time for us to go. More to the point, it was time for me to go. Some people, like my mom, can caretake for a loved one for years on end with no finish line in sight. But I could no longer do it. Though she never spoke of it, she must’ve noticed the heaviness that I began to carry around with me; a heaviness that I tried to keep hidden from her. Of even greater concern, our own relationship began to grow strained. We no longer joked around or playfully gave each other a hard time, as was our way.

My wife, Kristin, remained saintly throughout our time in Spangle, assuring me that she would give eastern Washington as much of a go as I needed, but I’d come to the realization that a healthy space between Dad’s disease and my own family’s path was vital.

Through a former colleague, I was told of an opening at my old school, Hawai‘i Preparatory Academy. The teaching position came with a three-bedroom cottage on a breathtaking 26-acre campus.

I applied and got the job. We would be moving back to the islands in a month.

After putting off telling my parents for over a week, understanding that it would shatter my mom, I broke the news. Sitting out on their back patio, I struggled to explain why I would be taking my family back across the Pacific and landing on the same volcanic island from which we’d come.

“It’s a great school. With Matilda starting kindergarten soon, she’ll have access to a world-class education in a safe, beautiful place.”

“You know I won’t be able to travel as Larry gets worse.”

“I know. I’m sorry, Mom. But we’ll head back on breaks. Nice thing about teaching, we get months off at a time. We can still spend summers with you.”

She’d fiercely bonded with Matilda over the last two years. “You just miss so much over those long stretches. You miss everything.”

“We’ll Facetime every week.”

“Can’t hug a computer.” She began to cry.

At that stage, it was rare that my dad could get out more than a word at a time, if that. But there on the patio, he suddenly blurted, “I would! I would if I were you!”

Mom wiped her eyes and stared at him. Then, “Well, look who’s come to the party.” She leaned into him and with her fingers stroked his hair.

I was trying not to cry. “Thanks, Dad.”

He nodded.

“Love you, Dad.”

He looked at Mom and smiled. She kissed the stubble of his cheek.

He turned back to me. “Just…”

And dementia-Dad was back. I gave it a go. “Eat lots of pineapple?” It was his favorite fruit.

He shook his head no.

“Get Matilda into Hula lessons? Already looked into it.”

No.

“Watch out for sharks.”

He nodded, laughed. 

by Jeffery P. Mix, Hawaii Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: The author

[ed. Dementia (I hate that term). It erodes the memory of loved ones, and becomes a part of how you'll always remember them. Like the author, I was lucky to share a moment of clarity with my mother before she disappeared completely, I'll always treasure that.]

Media and Politics: Ezra Klein Interviews Nicole Hemmer

Let me state the question of this episode clearly. What the hell has happened to the Republican Party? When I began covering politics 20-ish years ago, the cliche was that Democrats were this barely organized collection of squabbling interest groups — barely a party. But Republicans — Republicans were this disciplined, ideological, unified political force. Their majority leader at the time, Tom DeLay, he had the nickname “The Hammer.” If that was ever true, it’s not now. (...)

Republicans aren’t a party anymore. They’re a riot, a movement. But they’re one that is often at war with itself. And that’s not normal. All political parties — they have internal dissent and conflict. What is distinctive about Republicans in this era is they have lost control. I date that to around 2010 with the rise of the Tea Party. But that’s just a moment the dynamics of the party tipped out of balance. It’s not the moment those dynamics began. So when did it begin and why? Who profits from this version of the Republican Party? Who perpetuates it?

Nicole Hemmer is a historian at Vanderbilt who studies the Republican Party, and she studies it particularly through the lens of its media. She’s the author of two great books about the conservative movement: “Messengers of the Right” and her new one, “Partisans,” which I highly recommend. And she’s a perfect person for this conversation. As always, my email ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

Nicole Hemmer, welcome to the show.

NICOLE HEMMER: Thanks for having me, Ezra. (...)

EZRA KLEIN: 1992 is so extraordinary to me. It’s one of these moments where the entire egg that is the Republican Party just seems to me to be hatching.

NICOLE HEMMER: Yes.

EZRA KLEIN: Because you have Buchanan, you have Limbaugh, you have Newt, you have Perot. But I want to go back to something you mentioned, which is this moment where Rush Limbaugh endorses Pat Buchanan. And the George H.W. Bush White House has a, I think, a fairly extraordinary response to that. Can you talk through that story?

NICOLE HEMMER: Absolutely. So the Bush administration is looking out over the political landscape in 1992. The threat from Pat Buchanan is much larger than they thought that it would be. Buchanan, even though he loses the New Hampshire primary to Bush by 16 points, he got a lot closer than any of the people in the Bush White House were comfortable with.

And as they were surveying the sources of Buchanan’s popularity, they lit upon Rush Limbaugh, who by 1991, ’92, was a juggernaut in right wing media. He was something that no one had ever seen before. He was making millions of dollars. He had millions of listeners. He was about to launch a new television show. He had best-selling books.

He was this very singular figure. And nobody knew how much influence he might have on the conservative base. But what the Bush administration knew was that Limbaugh liked Buchanan, and Buchanan was doing better than expected. And so they needed to harness some of that Limbaugh energy.

And so in order to do that, they tap the person who is going to be Limbaugh’s television producer and who has been a consultant to the Republican Party and to several Republican presidents — Roger Ailes. And they invite Roger Ailes, who would later become one of the founders of Fox News — they invite Roger Ailes and Rush Limbaugh to the White House to have a night at the Kennedy Center with George and Barbara Bush, to stay over at the Lincoln bedroom and really to court him.

And there is this one moment that Rush Limbaugh will talk about for the next 30 years where President Bush picks up his bag and carries it in. And in many ways, Limbaugh latches onto that moment not as Bush being this generous blue-blooded WASP from New England, but as the president carried my bags. I have the power in this situation. The president waits on me.

And that dynamic is going to define a lot of Limbaugh’s career, but also is pointing to some things that are shifting within the conservative movement and the Republican Party where candidates and presidents are becoming more reliant on the conservative media systems that people like Rush Limbaugh are building. (...)

EZRA KLEIN: I want to spend some real time here on the asymmetry in media structures because obviously it’s something that I’ve experienced to some degree. And I want to give some credit to the right-wing view that there is — I don’t exactly want to call it a bias, but there’s a liberal culturation in a lot of the media, that the people in major newsrooms are themselves much more liberal than they are conservative.

And there’s an integration, in a funny way, between what you might think of as liberal media, an MSNBC, or an “American Prospect,” which is a small magazine I started out at, and mainstream media. MSNBC is part of NBC. And I know, from having worked there, that if MSNBC is getting liberal in a way that NBC feels reflects badly on it, that the hammer comes down and people get very upset and it becomes a big internal political problem.

And there’s a way in which, of course, there is a liberalism, particularly a cultural liberalism in the mainstream media, but there’s also a restraint built around these business models and these organizations that at least have this self-conception of themselves as for everybody. The New York Times desperately wants to be a paper for everybody. NBC wants to be for everybody.

And they have business models, traditionally, from these local geographic monopolies and airwave monopolies, all the way up to these mass subscription operations, that put this pressure to try to be palatable to virtually every kind of consumer. And that’s become harder and harder and harder in recent years, but it is still a very, very present intention. And then as you go into the further reaches of liberal or left media, people who want to work at these organizations are somewhat restrained by knowing what it looks like to be in these organizations.

And I say all that to serve up to you the counterquestion, which is conservative media, because it isn’t intertwined, with the exception of maybe The Wall Street Journal, with these mainstream more establishment organizations that have these business models that are about appealing to everybody, develops a very different business model that I think helps create a different ideology instead of practices. How would you describe the business incentives of conservative media?

NICOLE HEMMER: I think that’s right. There’s both a difference in terms of the professional practices — ideas like objectivity are professional practices that have continued on at places like NBC News or at The New York Times, since the 1920s and 30s and 40s, that are not necessarily the same constraints on conservative media. But the economic question is really important, because in some ways, conservative media figured out the media landscape and the shifts that were happening in the business of media much better than some of these more mainstream institutions.

And that idea that if you have a devoted fraction of the potential viewing or listening audience, that that devotion means people are going to keep coming back, that they are going to trust the people who are speaking to them — so they’re going to trust somebody like Rush Limbaugh, they’re going to buy the products that are sold during the advertisements. And so you have this different conception of what it takes to make profitable media.

And Rush Limbaugh is really an innovator in this front. The conservative media that I was talking about earlier, like National Review, like the “Smoot Report,” they had not cracked the business code. So it’s not just about messaging to conservatives, but it is about offering a political message that seems like it is going to have a real effect on how elections turn out and how people govern while they are in office, and that triggers a set of emotions and attachments that make people fervent fans. (...)

So that idea of microtargeting or understanding narrowcasting, that you want a small devoted audience and you can make a lot of money that way, the right figure that out much more quickly, in part, as you noted, because they weren’t necessarily constrained by those professional practices that a place like CBS News would have.

EZRA KLEIN: I think part of it is that they figured it out. And I wonder how much they were forced into it. And something I think about here is about what attracts people to a media organization. When they come to you, what are they coming for? And in a lot of conservative media and some liberal media, they’re really coming for the politics. If you watch Fox News, if you listen to, back in the day, Rush Limbaugh, maybe today Ben Shapiro, if you watch MSNBC, you’re coming for the politics.

And so if that politics is conservative, that’s really, really important. If it’s liberal, it’s really important. A lot of other kinds of media organizations, more mainstream organizations, I think something that often gets missed and is really important is that politics is one of the things they do, often not the main one, often definitely not the one that keeps people coming back.

In local newspapers, the sports section and the classifieds were really, really important. At “The New York Times,” how do you feel about our cooking content or recipes? What do you think of Wordle? It really matters. That’s a big part of the business. It’s not the only thing. The Styles section is important. The Book Review is important. These things that are really not in that way political.

It’s a reason, I think, The Wall Street Journal has always been a different kind of institution than a lot of what we think of as conservative media. It is conservative in the sense that it is a place where you have more conservatives working. It’s owned now by Rupert Murdoch.

But it’s a business newspaper first. And so it has this other set of things it is doing before it gets into the question of its own politics. NPR is another good example of this where culturally, I think it’s fair to say, it is a liberal. But is what NPR is doing, is it first politics? No. They’re trying to be a news organization and have these local affiliates. It’s a bunch of other things.

So I wonder how much one of the things that has also happened here is that a lot of the space of these organizations that are crosspressured in their missions, crosspressured in their offerings, and so a little held back from going all in on politics — those organizations had taken up a lot of that room. And so as conservative media emerges, it is more explicitly conservative. The market niche it is filling is not a counternews or media establishment, but an unfilled political conservative niche.

NICOLE HEMMER: It’s such a smart observation, Ezra, because that’s exactly right. The kinds of stories that make their way into conservative media, they’re not always about electoral politics. But the hump that you have to get over to talk about a story on, say, Fox News, is that it has to have a politics to it, right? It has to fit into a broader narrative about politics, about the right, about conservatism and culture. (...)

If that is your identity and your mission from the start, that shapes why people come to you, but it also shapes the content that you put on. And if you stray too far from that, people might go with you a little bit if they are really attached to a particular host. So I think you’re exactly right about looking at the mission and the purpose of these outlets in order to understand why they function so differently.

by Ezra Klein, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Ezra Klein, NYT

[ed. Sorry Republicans.... but nuts is nuts. Not saying Dems don't have their own baggage to deal with, but this is next level. Well worth a read. As usual, this will help with paywalls (including NYT).]

How Smart Are the Robots Getting?

The Turing test used to be the gold standard for proving machine intelligence. This generation of bots is racing past it.

The Turing test is a subjective measure. It depends on whether the people asking the questions feel convinced that they are talking to another person when in fact they are talking to a device.

But whoever is asking the questions, machines will soon leave this test in the rearview mirror. (...)

ChatGPT, a bot released in November by OpenAI, a San Francisco lab, leaves people feeling as if they were chatting with another person, not a bot. The lab said more than a million people had used it. Because ChatGPT can write just about anything, including term papers, universities are worried it will make a mockery of class work. When some people talk to these bots, they even describe them as sentient or conscious, believing that machines have somehow developed an awareness of the world around them.

Privately, OpenAI has built a system, GPT-4, that is even more powerful than ChatGPT. It may even generate images as well as words.

And yet these bots are not sentient. They are not conscious. They are not intelligent — at least not in the way that humans are intelligent. Even people building the technology acknowledge this point.

These bots are pretty good at certain kinds of conversation, but they cannot respond to the unexpected as well as most humans can. They sometimes spew nonsense and cannot correct their own mistakes. Although they can match or even exceed human performance in some ways, they cannot in others. Like similar systems that came before, they tend to complement skilled workers rather than replace them. (...)

“These systems can do a lot of useful things,” said Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist at OpenAI and one of the most important A.I. researchers of the past decade, referring to the new wave of chatbots. “On the other hand, they are not there yet. People think they can do things they cannot.”

As the latest technologies emerge from research labs, it is now obvious — if it was not obvious before — that scientists must rethink and reshape how they track the progress of artificial intelligence. The Turing test is not up to the task. (...)

ChatGPT is what researchers call a neural network, a mathematical system loosely modeled on the network of neurons in the brain. This is the same technology that translates between English and Spanish on services like Google Translate and identifies pedestrians as self-driving cars weave through city streets.

A neural network learns skills by analyzing data. By pinpointing patterns in thousands of photos of stop signs, for example, it can learn to recognize a stop sign.

Five years ago, Google, OpenAI and other A.I. labs started designing neural networks that analyzed enormous amounts of digital text, including books, news stories, Wikipedia articles and online chat logs. Researchers call them “large language models.” Pinpointing billions of distinct patterns in the way people connect words, letters and symbols, these systems learned to generate their own text.

They can create tweets, blog posts, poems, even computer programs. They can carry on a conversation — at least up to a point. And as they do, they can seamlessly combine far-flung concepts. You can ask them to rewrite Queen’s pop operetta, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” so that it rhapsodizes about the life of a postdoc academic researcher, and they will.

“They can extrapolate,” said Oriol Vinyals, senior director of deep learning research at the London lab DeepMind, who has built groundbreaking systems that can juggle everything from language to three-dimensional video games. “They can combine concepts in ways you would never anticipate.” (...)

The result is a chatbot geared toward answering individual questions — the very thing that Turing envisioned. Google, Meta and other organizations have built bots that operate in similar ways. (...)

Turing’s test judged whether a machine could imitate a human. This is how artificial intelligence is typically portrayed — as the rise of machines that think like people. But the technologies under development today are very different from you and me. They cannot deal with concepts they have never seen before. And they cannot take ideas and explore them in the physical world.

ChatGPT made that clear. As more users experimented with it, they showed off its abilities and limitations. One Twitter user asked ChatGPT what letter came next in the sequence O T T F F S S, and it gave the correct answer (E). But it also told him the wrong reason it was correct, failing to realize that these are the first letters in the numbers 1 to 8.

At the same time, there are many ways these bots are superior to you and me. They do not get tired. They do not let emotion cloud what they are trying to do. They can instantly draw on far larger amounts of information. And they can generate text, images and other media at speeds and volumes we humans never could.

Their skills will also improve considerably in the coming years. (...)

In the months and years to come, these bots will help you find information on the internet. They will explain concepts in ways you can understand. If you like, they will even write your tweets, blog posts and term papers.

They will tabulate your monthly expenses in your spreadsheets. They will visit real estate websites and find houses in your price range. They will produce online avatars that look and sound like humans. They will make mini-movies, complete with music and dialogue.

“This will be the next step up from Pixar — superpersonalized movies that anyone can create really quickly,” said Bryan McCann, former lead research scientist at Salesforce, who is exploring chatbots and other A.I. technologies at a start-up called You.com.

As ChatGPT and DALL-E have shown, this kind of thing will be shocking, fascinating and fun. It will also leave us wondering how it will change our lives. What happens to people who have spent their careers making movies? Will this technology flood the internet with images that seem real but are not? Will their mistakes lead us astray?

by Cade Metz, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Ricardo Rey

11 Ways You Can Use ChatGPT To Write Code

"Simplifying code This is one of my favorite tricks: Ask ChatGPT to simplify complex code. The result will be a much more compact version of the original code. Notice the explanation and how it tells us this is simpler but not the most efficient."
11 ways you can use ChatGPT to write code (Santiago) 

[ed. But! ... see also:]

[ed. Human nature. Interesting technological insight immediately gets sidetracked by banal threat (or something). Image via: Twitter. 

But it does highlight another issue I've been wondering about: intellectual property rights for anything AI produces, based on previously copyrighted material: For example:] 

Who Ultimately Owns Content Generated By ChatGPT And Other AI Platforms? (Forbes)

Before we all get too deep into using ChatGPT or other AI tools to create things for us, we need to address some of the questions raised around content custody, ownership, and attribution.

Some have breathlessly proclaimed ChatGPT to be the most important development since the invention of the printing press or the splitting of the atom. We’ll see. But there are issues with the accuracy, truthfulness, and inherent bias of the materials that AI platforms such as ChatGPT generate. In another matter, since there is speculation that ChatGPT or other AI platforms could take over at least some of the work of writers, analysts, and other content creators, we need to also understand its legal ramifications.

There’s no issue around personal use of ChatGPT as a conversational assistant. And the rules around using ChatGPT to generate term papers seem pretty clear (don’t even think about it). But when it comes to applying AI-generated prose in content intended for wider distribution — say marketing materials, white papers, or even articles — the legalities get a little murky. When it comes to intellectual property, the model for ChatGPT “is trained on a corpus of created works and it is still unclear what the legal precedent may be for reuse of this content, if it was derived from the intellectual property of others,” according to Bern Elliot, analyst at Gartner.

Foodie Fever Dreams Can’t Keep Restaurants Afloat

When René Redzepi announced he would close Noma, his Michelin three-star restaurant/work camp in Copenhagen, food magazines and newspapers treated the inability to run a profitable business as Mr. Redzepi’s problem. That is, a problem that emerges only when you call your kitchen a lab and your cooks will work without pay, just to have your name on their résumé. But extremist fine dining’s challenges are just the amuse-bouche in a multicourse menu of the rotting state of the restaurant business.

A large part of the hospitality industry is ravaged, thanks to the pandemic and its fallout. Even spots that pivoted through the initial crisis were soon suffocated by labor shortages or a mucked-up supply chain. But restaurants were struggling with losses in staffing, momentum and revenue long before 2020. The pandemic merely made obvious the archaic and limited nature of our gerbil wheel of a business model.

I recently closed my flagship restaurant in Kinston, N.C. For more than 15 years, Chef & the Farmer was a star in the farm-to-table sky. Our food exalted my region’s little-known cuisine, and the level of service we provided was an anomaly for miles. Chef & the Farmer wasn’t Noma. Our average check hovered around $60 per person. (At Mr. Redzepi’s? It’s $500 a pop.) We did not bury, dehydrate or reconcentrate things in our kitchen, but everyone — even the interns — got paid.

Even so, Chef & the Farmer closed, in large part because the inefficiencies, stress and fatigue brought by an unsustainable business model became impossible to ignore. Our industry needs to evolve or else more full-service, cuisine-driven restaurants like mine will languish their way to extinction.

Chef & the Farmer belonged to a corner of the industry where carrot dishes cost $16 and menus were printed nightly because said carrots were reimagined by a tweezer-bedecked wizard on a whim. We didn’t just serve cocktails, coffee and wine — we had a “beverage program,” and a director to oversee it. From the outside, our candlelit symphony of sophisticated servers, sommeliers and hosts looked just as we intended, bearing knowing smiles as they made round trips to the kitchen to fetch magic from the wizard herself.

But while guests sipped and savored their painstakingly created foodie fever dreams, the people behind the scenes got slammed — or, to apply some of the other words we used to describe our experience as we put together yours, we got crushed, pummeled and murdered.

Paper-thin margins make a career in this industry either a distinct choice or a dead end. Restaurateurs depend on alcohol sales to pay a large portion of our staff, and we rely largely on our guests’ tips to pay everyone else. Even when sales couldn’t be better, many independently owned restaurants have to overwork salaried employees and underpay hourly ones. It’s all but impossible to offer meaningful benefits like health insurance or paid leave. That’s perhaps why you so rarely hear a parent say: “You should get into the restaurant business. It looks like a nice life.”

Why are our margins so small? For starters, several people spent hours transforming in-a-husk corn into that artfully plated smoked corn agnolotti. Many restaurants have prep cooks, butchers, sous chefs, bakers, managers and custodians who spend hours on the clock before the restaurant opens and begins taking in revenue.

Restaurants also require expensive specialized equipment. Our staff needs to cook on a range, fry in a fryer and do dishes in the dish pit. None of that is possible without a robust hood system. Pricey equipment, even pricier infrastructure, all the small things (plates, linens, flatware, pots and pans) and the not-so-small things (tables, chairs, light fixtures and signs) turn dinner into an experience worth remembering. A restaurant is a hefty investment that looks terrible on paper — but when we have a spitfire talent at the helm, we convince ourselves that it just might work.

I’m not the first to recognize the fallacies of our business model. Fast food, counter service and drive-throughs proliferate for a reason. Think about your region’s most noteworthy chef, the one with a James Beard Award and a custom apron. I bet at a certain point, after being anointed a creative genius by diners and journalists, your favorite magician decided to pull a burger joint, a taco shop or a fried chicken shack out of his or her toque.

by Vivian Howard, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Noma via:

CSN&Y

[ed. David Crosby has died. Beautiful voice... not a particularly nice person though, apparently. That's all I'll say about that. See also: mercurial musical genius who thrived through the chaos; and, David Crosby obituary (The Guardian).]

Fatboy Slim ft. Bootsy Collins

[ed. Rabbit hole review. I saw some reference to Fatboy Slim this morning and while I'd heard the name before (not completely comatose), I didn't know a thing about his music. So, found this recent video of a visit to the US in 2022. Then this one, a classic with Christopher Walken (which I do remember). Ok, popular DJ. Got it. See also: Sunset (Bird of Prey); and, Praise You.]

Why Golf Saudi Sees Women's Golf As Ripe For Disruption

It was time to talk about the future, the commissioner wrote. In a letter dated Sept. 12, 2022, Mollie Marcoux Samaan—then 16 months into her new role as head of the LPGA—sent a note to players congratulating them on a successful season, expressing her gratitude for the opportunity to lead their tour and optimism for where it was headed. However, Marcoux Samaan said, the LPGA could only get where it wanted to go by having everyone headed in the same direction. “This is your tour and our success depends on your passion, your actions and your commitment to both your individual success and that of the organization,” Marcoux Samaan wrote.

A former athlete and athletic director at Princeton, Marcoux Samaan said she would be providing information on conversations the LPGA was having with players on the Ladies European Tour and with LET officials, “and hope we can share perspectives on the changing global golf landscape.” The letter did not state the series, organization or monarchy that was spurring this change although the implication was clear: If LPGA players had the same reservations about dealing with the Saudis as their PGA Tour counterparts, this was the time to talk about it.Marcoux Samaan went on to outline that she would be at six of the remaining eight events on the 2022 LPGA schedule, starting that week in Portland, Ore., for roundtable discussions to share information, thoughts, concerns and ideas. “I know it’s hard to make time during a tournament, but I can’t stress how important it is for us to communicate,” Marcoux Samaan wrote. “Your legacy is more than just how you play on the course or how much money you earn.” The first meeting was scheduled at noon on Wednesday, Sept. 14, in the player dining area at Columbia Edgewater Country Club.

No players showed up.

Some of the attendance issues could be attributed to miscommunication. Months later, miscommunication was blamed for players skipping a sponsored dinner at the CME Group Tour Championship, leading to the sponsor’s CEO publicly blasting Marcoux Samaan. Players did attend other meetings in the fall with LPGA brass; still, while no one is sure of Saudi Arabia’s long-term aspirations with the women’s game, few expect resistance to the kingdom’s efforts from LPGA leadership like those encountered by LIV Golf on the men’s side. Or, as the incidents above illustrate—along with snafus at this week’s season-opening Tournament of Champions, where players were initially denied locker-room access by the host course—whatever resistance exists may be rudderless.

It’s already been documented that Golf Saudi’s genesis is tied to the kingdom’s Vision 2030 blueprint, a plan to diminish the country’s reliance on oil by diversifying the economy, modernizing its public services and improving its global reputation. Golf was seen as a vessel to those ambitions with projects like developing courses and hosting professional competitions. It is this last point that sparked the Saudi International into existence in 2019, a tournament that was initially sanctioned by the European Tour. But Golf Saudi—and, as an extension, crown prince Mohammed bin Salman—were rebuffed in their attempts to become a more permanent fixture of golf’s political matrix with the PGA Tour and DP World Tour. This is what led the Saudis to start their own tour, which beget LIV Golf and the current schism in men’s professional golf.

However, Golf Saudi has had far more success making inroads into the women’s game. In just two years, Golf Saudi has gone from hosting one event on the Ladies European Tour to six, with one of those events played in the United States. Unlike LIV Golf—which is composed largely of players a notch or two below the game's elite—Golf Saudi’s women’s events have attracted in-their-prime talent. (...)

So why is Golf Saudi interested in the LPGA and the women’s game?

Like much of the Saudi involvement in golf, a clear answer is elusive. The uncomfortable truth is that women’s professional golf garners nowhere near the amount of attention—and by extension, money—as its male counterpart, so it’s doubtful Golf Saudi is investing millions and millions into this realm solely for financial reasons. Chalking up the Saudi’s efforts as mere sportswashing seems to be an elementary distillation of the matter, and yet that observation rings louder here than other Vision 2030 sports undertakings. (...)

After Marcoux Samaan said she would listen to Golf Saudi, activist Lina Alhathloul—whose sister, Loujain al-Hathloul, is a two-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee and current political prisoner of Saudi Arabia—implored the LPGA to reconsider. “I am sounding the alarm on the consequences of such actions,” Alhathloul wrote in an open letter. “I urge you to consider the human rights aspect of your potential involvement with LIV Golf and use your influence to positively raise the situation of women in the country and to publicly distance yourself from the Saudi regime."

So far, many of the best women pros have not been deterred by the stigma of association with the Saudi regime. There have been dissidents, though most, including Hall of Famer Karrie Webb, are no longer active players. Unlike their male counterparts, this is not the rich getting richer. It's the upper- to middle-class players becoming rich, or ensuring stability to those just getting by. The case can be made that some don’t have a choice: The Aramco series is roughly 20 percent of the LET schedule. If a player on that tour sits out those events, there’s a good chance they risk losing their card.

“To be honest with you, it’s hard to compare what the partnership that Aramco Series has with the women versus what’s going on with the men,” Lee told Golfweek. “It’s apples and oranges. The women on the LET, they play for almost nothing. It’s very similar purse sizes on the [Epson] Tour. A million-dollar purse for them is huge, absolutely huge. It’s almost life-changing for some of those girls when they make a big check at the end of the week. I feel like on the men’s tour, you don’t have guys rooming every week with another player; you don’t have them sharing an AirBnb; you don’t have them sharing a rental car, staying at host families every week.”

There’s also the air of inevitably, that the LPGA doesn’t have the means for a fight and resistance is futile. “I hope we survive it,” Stacy Lewis told Golfweek last summer. “I’m scared for this tour. I’m scared to lose all the opportunities that we’ve created … I think you have a majority [of players] that would ask, ‘What’s the number?’ Should we talk to them? Absolutely. Ultimately, I think we have to find a way to co-exist.”

by Joell Beall, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image:Amer Hilabi

[ed. So, LIV just got a tv golf deal (in a do or die situtation). I don't know... I read this whole story and still can't figure out what's going on. There's a lot of people (and a lot of money) working at cross purposes and it's hard to know where the momentum is going. Some golfers will benefit for sure, but the game not so much. See also: The PGA Tour vs. LIV: Inside the battle between a giant that won't budge and a startup that won't stop; and, The $153 million question: Breaking down the PGA Tour’s response to LIV (GD).]

The Masters of the Universe Think They're Do-Gooders

Has there ever been a “meeting that should have been an email” so glaring as Davos? Each year, the world’s masters of politics and finance ride carbon-spewing jets to the World Economic Forum in a lavish Swiss resort town bristling with armed guards, where they opine somberly about solving poverty and climate change. The very act of attendance exposes all the subsequent dialogue as hypocrisy. The event serves primarily as a rare point of unity for political right and left wings, both of whom agree that everyone there should be in jail. If all of these professional decision-makers were really good at decision-making, they would replace the whole farce with an annual quick chat. “So then, we’ll carry on with global capitalism for another year. Agree? Right. Cheerio.”

Davos and similar conclaves can only be understood as performances. They are the stage upon which the Masters of the Universe act out the dramatic narrative of their own lives. They are exercises in mutual self-affirmation: we’re here, and we are important. What good is a powerful position without a rapt audience to listen to one’s pronouncements? Anyone can be rich, but only a select few can be influencers.

It is this intoxicating allure of performative influence that lends Davos its underlying absurdity. There is nothing very remarkable about officials who control the world getting together in private to make self-serving decisions; they do that all the time. That’s the job. The fatal flaw of the Davos crowd is that they are not satisfied simply with being in control of everything. They also want to be good, or at least to give the public impression of being good. Thus the typical CEO and presidential interviews and panels of economic and geopolitical predictions – the real things – are leavened with piles of other cultural and do-gooder content meant to convey the idea that at the center this crowd of the world’s most cut-throat plutocrats and cold-blooded status-seekers lies a heart of gold.

Yes, they are here to dominate all aspects of your life, but they are doing so with the best interests of humanity in mind. Trust them! Would people who didn’t genuinely care about morality sit through a panel entitled “Profit and Purpose: Accelerating the Equity of Opportunity?” Checkmate, Marxists! The word “equity” is right there in the description!
Anyone can be rich, but only a select few can be influencers

The pastry-munching crowds of Davos want to have their Swiss chocolate and eat it, too. And that is their fatal flaw. The supreme irony is that this event that claims to identify and analyze global trends – and which has, for years now, been fretting over the rise of what is inexactly termed “populism”, which threatens to consume the political order that has facilitated corporate capitalism’s postwar dominance – is itself one of the most perfect fuels on earth for populist anger. If the minds of Davos actually believed their own bullshit, they would shut the conference down immediately, understanding that it is a threat to the values they purportedly believe. It is no exaggeration to say this monstrosity of opulence playing out amid the ominously reduced snowpack of the Alps is such a powerful symbol of all that is wrong with the neoliberal era of the world that it will help to bring about its own downfall.

It is a symbol of cloistered elites boldly pampering themselves as they lecture on the need for sustainability; it is a symbol of exclusivity draping itself in the language of democracy; it is a symbol of the unaccountable financiers and bureaucrats and intellectuals who went to the right schools and work for the right institutions and are therefore allowed to lock themselves in an impermeable bubble, gaze out in ignorance at a world whose problems they have never experienced, and prescribe a course of action that will, coincidentally, perpetuate the dominance they have enjoyed for generations.

The utility of any actually worthwhile networking or communication or information-sharing that occurs in the halls of Davos pales in comparison to the inferno of disgust that its existence stokes among millions of angry, mistreated, locked out people around the world who will never set foot inside its security cordon. If nothing else, the attendees of Davos should shut it down out of pure self-interest. They’re making everyone mad.

by Hamilton Nolan, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
[ed. Exactly. Tell me again why we need something like Davos when we have a UN? Like the recent COP27 Climate Change Conference, Davos turns 50 now and after generations of happy talking, backslapping dog and pony shows our world's climate and economic inequalities are worse than ever. Why is that? See also: Davos elites need to wake up to ‘megathreats’ the world is facing (Guardian); and, Is Davos As Bad As Critics Say? Global Leaders Weigh In (NPR); and World’s billionaires have more wealth than 4.6 billion people (Oxfam).]

Biodiversity Heritage Library

Biodiversity Heritage Library (flickr)
via:

Does the War Over Abortion Have a Future?

In decades past, as the calendar turned to January, the anniversary of Roe v. Wade would come into view. Abortion opponents would be planning to acknowledge the date with the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C. Supporters of abortion rights would schedule seminars or meet for quiet conversations about whether and when the Supreme Court might actually go so far as to repudiate the decision it issued 50 years ago on Jan. 22, 1973.

There will, of course, be no Roe to march against this year, the right to abortion having died a constitutional death in June at the hands of five Supreme Court justices. There has been ample commentary on how anger at the court for its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization helped to block the predicted “red wave” in the midterm elections. Not only did Dobbs-motivated voters enable the Democrats to hold the Senate, but they also, given the chance to express themselves directly, accounted for abortion rights victories in all six states with an abortion-related question on the ballot (California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana and Vermont).

But the justifiable focus on the role of abortion in the country’s politics has crowded out much talk about what this unexpected political turn actually means for the future of abortion. There is a case to be made, it seems to me, that abortion access has won the culture war.

I know that might sound wildly premature, even fanciful: Abortion access has vanished across the South in the wake of the Dobbs decision, and anyone anywhere in the world remains free to pursue Texas women seeking abortions, along with anyone who helps them, for a minimum $10,000 bounty under the state’s S.B. 8 vigilante law. The picture is bleak indeed. But it’s when it appears that things couldn’t get worse that weakness can become strength. (...)

The full dimension of the post-Dobbs world will come into ever clearer view, as news accounts mount up of what happens when women whose wanted pregnancies have gone drastically wrong are denied the prompt terminations that barely seven months ago would have been the obvious treatment. People who have regarded abortion as something that befalls wayward teenagers will come to realize that abortion care is — or was — an ordinary and necessary part of medical care. And while all the justices in the Dobbs majority were raised in the Catholic church, nearly two-thirds of American Catholics believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. (...)

What I mean is that the polarity has shifted. The anti-abortion position that was so convenient for Republican politicians for so long is, with surprising speed, coming to seem like an encumbrance. The once-comfortable family-values rhetoric no longer provides cover for the extremism that the Dobbs decision has made visible. Yes, the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives this week passed two anti-abortion measures, both recognized as dead on arrival. The important point about this bit of legislative theater was the label a conservative South Carolina Republican, Representative Nancy Mace, affixed to it: “tone-deaf.” Even so, she voted for the two bills.

In a recent article published by ProPublica, Richard Briggs, a Tennessee state senator and cardiac surgeon who co-sponsored the state’s exceptionally strict abortion ban in 2019, now says he had assumed the law would never actually take effect and believes it is too harsh “because the medical issues are a lot more complex.” Not incidentally, 80 percent of Tennessee voters believe that abortion should be legal at least under some circumstances.

Abortion is surely not going away as an issue in politics. But it will be just that: an issue, like food safety, reliable public transit, affordable housing and adequate energy supplies. All these, and countless others, are issues in politics, too. We need these things, and if the government won’t provide them, we assume at least that the government won’t stand in the way of our getting them.

Democrats played defense on abortion for so long (remember the apologetic Clinton-era mantra “safe, legal and rare”?) that defense became part of the Democratic DNA. What this posture ultimately led to was Dobbs. And now the midterm elections have made Dobbs not an end point but an opportunity, a gift, albeit an unwelcome one, in the form of a national admonition on what extremism looks like.

by Linda Greenhouse, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Kenny Holston for The New York Times

We Live In The Age of The Bullshitter

We Live In The Age of The Bullshitter (Current Affairs)

Image: Current Affairs

[ed. Lots of depressing links.]