A Pickup Truck Doing Ballet: Nikola Jokić is Making the NBA Finals His Masterpiece

Hybridity has always been in Nikola Jokić’s basketball DNA; after all, this is a player who was famously drafted by Denver in the middle of a Taco Bell commercial for the quesadilla-burrito mashup known as a quesarito. The pretty, historic town of Sombor, where Jokić grew up, is tucked into the northwestern pocket of Serbia, flush against the borders with Croatia and Hungary; the Hungarian, Habsburg, Ottoman and Austrian empires have all, at various points over the past half-millennium, laid claim to it. Jokić, perhaps fittingly given his origins, has emerged over this postseason as the NBA’s ultimate border-hopper: a center with the touch of a guard, a prodigious scorer who’s better as a passer, the embodiment of total basketball, infinitely adaptable, positionless but always in position, a crossroads in human form.

As Denver tightened their grip on the finals with a coolly commanding Game 3 win in Miami on Wednesday night, a talent that once threatened to go unrewarded with the hard currency of titles has come thrillingly into mint. Jokić’s numbers – 32 points, 21 rebounds, 10 assists – made him the first player ever to post a 30-20-10 game in the NBA finals. But most impressive was the way in which he accumulated these figures, with a freedom and variety that captured the best of his childhood heroes. (...)

The history of the NBA is replete with examples of small men who played against type to impose themselves in the paint: Spud Webb, Muggsy Bogues, Allen Iverson. Jokić is the rare big man who plays against type. Although he’s close to seven feet tall, his greatest skills are those more typically associated with players many inches his inferior: passing, dribbling, ball handling, court awareness. Instead of playing “above the rim” like someone of his immensity normally would, he operates below it; he plays above and around the heads of his opponents, across their backs, through their legs, under arms raised haplessly in defense. The staggering stats Jokić puts up, game to game, will always be the alpha of his claim to greatness, but it’s his refusal to do the things that basketball “bigs” are usually expected to – muscle up in the paint, wait for the ball to come to him, dunk – that form that claim’s omega, that make him so uniquely charming.

If Game 1 of these finals was a passing clinic and Game 2 highlighted his scoring touch, then Game 3 offered a stage for Jokić to demonstrate his mastery of game management. Whatever his team needed, Jokić was on hand to provide it, varying his output in line with the game’s fluctuations in momentum. Through a tight opening quarter he was a defensive monster, controlling the boards with bulky authority and starving the Heat of second balls; in the second quarter he began to take control on offense, deploying his full range of spins, hooks, fakes and dinks – off both hands – in the paint. (...)

Jokić is averaging 31 points, 13 rebounds and 10 assists a game so far this postseason. There’s little doubt he is the best player on the planet right now, an achievement that never ceases to amaze whenever you catch a glimpse of the man – his head pushed forward, the shoulders round and mouth gaping, that ham of a nose sniffing out routes to the basket. One of the world’s greatest athletes is now one of its least athletic-looking. Jokić’s body is like a mattress – blocky and enormous but somehow soft – and he has the upper arms of a management consultant; there is nothing chiseled or ripped about his physique. No matter how many accolades and rings he goes on to win in his career – and there are surely many more to come – Jokić will never, I imagine, stop seeming like a man who’s wandered onto the basketball court by accident on his way to a family barbecue.

Even in peak form Jokić’s machinations on the court seem somehow improbable. The NBA’s contemporary greats all have a signature style of movement. LeBron James thunders, James Harden ambles, Steph Curry bounces, Kevin Durant glides, Ben Simmons sits. Jokic happens – awkwardly, implausibly, and, it sometimes seems, unintentionally, but with a kind of inevitability. At times his limbs seem to get ahead of him like baseball bats spilling from a bag; at others there’s a kind of patterned tranquility about his movements that recalls stop motion animation. Many of his shots are taken off balance, with a single hand, from the waist, above the head, or in a position that suggests that Jokić is about to hit the deck.

Somehow, though, it all works. Surprise is the key to his mastery. Unorthodox, off-kilter and on fire, Jokić is the most delightfully effective gallumpher that basketball has ever seen. If Curry is the master of the half court, a long-range scoring threat from the moment the ball passes the halfway line, Jokic is the master of the full court: a man who can do it all, while never seeming on the cusp of doing anything. To observe him in full flow is like watching a pickup truck do ballet.

by Aaron Timms, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Wilfredo Lee/AP
[ed. Not a big NBA fan, but have been watching the playoffs this year. Jokic is all this and more; and, seemingly the most humble, non-drama player in sports. A worthy successor to LeBron and all the superstars who've preceded him.]

Can HBO’s ‘The Idol’ Bring Back ’80s Sleaze?

A slick executive drives a cherry red convertible.

A nightclub owner carries a coke spoon and wears his hair in a rat tail.

A troubled pop star masturbates while choking herself.

Those images might have come from an erotic thriller made by Brian De Palma, Paul Verhoeven or Adrian Lyne, directors who were prominent in the 1980s and 1990s thanks to movies like “Body Double” (Mr. De Palma), “Basic Instinct” (Mr. Verhoeven) and “9 ½ Weeks” (Mr. Lyne).

But those scenes were actually part of “The Idol,” the HBO series that made its debut on Sunday with the apparent intention of reviving an all but dead genre.

Filled with close-up shots of luxury goods and body parts, “The Idol” also recalled the works of lesser filmmakers whose R-rated creations populated the late-night lineups of HBO and its rivals long before the advent of prestige television.

It was a style that died out over the years — the death blow might have been Mr. Verhoeven’s infamous “Showgirls,” an expensive 1995 flop — and seemed highly unlikely to make a return to the cultural stage amid the #MeToo movement.

As Karina Longworth, the creator of the film-history podcast “You Must Remember This,” recently observed, today’s films are so devoid of steamy sex scenes that they “would pass the sexual standard set by the strict censorship of the Production Code of the 1930s.” (...)

The first episode begins with the pop star Jocelyn, played by Lily-Rose Depp, baring her breasts during a photo shoot as a team of handlers, crew members and an ineffectual intimacy coordinator look on.

Later, Ms. Depp’s character smokes in a sauna, rides in the back of a Rolls-Royce convertible and rubs up against a man she has just met (a club owner portrayed by Mr. Tesfaye) on a dance floor bathed in smoky red light. There will be no flannel PJs for Joss; a pair of wake-up scenes make it clear to viewers that she sleeps in a thong.

It isn’t only the show’s gratuitous nudity that harks back to Mr. Lyne and company, but the overall look and mood, which recall a louche glamour from the time of boxy Armani suits and cocaine nights. A main setting is a $70 million mansion in Bel Air that looks like something out of Mr. De Palma’s “Scarface” but is in fact Mr. Tesfaye’s real-life home.

A number of young viewers have said they find sex scenes embarrassing, but Mr. Levinson, who created the HBO drama “Euphoria,” and his fellow producers have made no secret of their desire to pay homage to the heyday of Cinemax (when it had the nickname Skinemax).

A wink to viewers comes when Joss, in the darkness of her private screening room, watches “Basic Instinct.” And then there is the pulsating score, which seems to conjure Tangerine Dream, the German electronic group who scored the sex scene on a train in “Risky Business.” In another nod to the show’s influences, the cast includes Elizabeth Berkley, the star of “Showgirls.”

While it may seem like an outlier, “The Idol” has seemingly tapped into a cultural moment that would have seemed unthinkable just a few years ago: Ms. Longworth recently devoted a season of her film-history podcast to the “Erotic ’80s”; no less a tastemaker than the Criterion Channel has recently presented a series on erotic thrillers from the same time period; and last month in Los Angeles, the American Cinematheque held a screening of “Basic Instinct.” 

by Steven Kurutz, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

[ed. Not sure what all the hyperventilating is about. It's not that bad (Lily Rose-Depp is fine), but it's not that good, either. Mostly what left the greatest impression was Jenny Kim/Jennie Ruby Jane (Dyanne in the movie) who is a first class dancer. See also: Can Jennie Ruby Jane save 'The Idol' from itself? (Mashable).]

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An interview with Ian McDonald

CCLaP: Okay, so that brings up my biggest question of this entire interview, the thing I've been intensely curious about since first becoming a fan, of just how much research and what type of research actually does go into writing these novels. They're known, in fact, for being unusually precise and detailed looks at these countries, not just the major issues but how local pop-culture is influencing these societies, the multiple tiers of differing views on religion, etc. As someone who's jealous of how well you do this, just how do you go about gathering in all these details in the first place?

IM: What, give away all my secrets? Well, I have this avatar body I can occupy...It takes years. I read a lot. I travel a lot -- and as much as I can afford. I talk to people, I read the papers. I cook the food. I buy the music, I follow the sports teams. I try to second-guess what the government will do in international politics. I learn a bit of the language. I study the religion. I study the etiquette. I try and work out what the day-to-day details are like. I watch people. I have a very strong visual memory and I can recreate an entire scene in my head and observe details. I cultivate an eye for detail. I take thousands of photographs of boring everyday things. I look at what's on sale in gas stations and what that tells you about a culture. I study the ads. I talk to more people. I get hammered on the local booze. I try to take the country's political position in the world news. I watch television. I read books for those tiny details. Is this like Method Acting? WTF are you doing with those lights?!? This takes time and intellectual and emotional commitment. I love it. Of course I get it wrong. Then again, I can write about what's going on at the bottom of my street and get it wrong...particularly my street. Oh, one other research tool. I tie bundles of memories to scents and smells. When I smell that scent again or something like it, everything in the bundle springs back into the forebrain.

by CCLaP, Chicago Center for Literacy and Photograhy  |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Always wondered how this happens. Nice explanation.]

I Love Electric Vehicles – and Was an Early Adopter. But Increasingly I Feel Duped

Electric motoring is, in theory, a subject about which I should know something. My first university degree was in electrical and electronic engineering, with a subsequent master’s in control systems. Combine this, perhaps surprising, academic pathway with a lifelong passion for the motorcar, and you can see why I was drawn into an early adoption of electric vehicles. I bought my first electric hybrid 18 years ago and my first pure electric car nine years ago and (notwithstanding our poor electric charging infrastructure) have enjoyed my time with both very much. Electric vehicles may be a bit soulless, but they’re wonderful mechanisms: fast, quiet and, until recently, very cheap to run. But increasingly, I feel a little duped. When you start to drill into the facts, electric motoring doesn’t seem to be quite the environmental panacea it is claimed to be.

As you may know, the government has proposed a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030. The problem with the initiative is that it seems to be based on conclusions drawn from only one part of a car’s operating life: what comes out of the exhaust pipe. Electric cars, of course, have zero exhaust emissions, which is a welcome development, particularly in respect of the air quality in city centres. But if you zoom out a bit and look at a bigger picture that includes the car’s manufacture, the situation is very different. In advance of the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021, Volvo released figures claiming that greenhouse gas emissions during production of an electric car are nearly 70% higher than when manufacturing a petrol one. How so? The problem lies with the lithium-ion batteries fitted currently to nearly all electric vehicles: they’re absurdly heavy, many rare earth metals and huge amounts of energy are required to make them, and they are estimated to last upwards of 10 years. It seems a perverse choice of hardware with which to lead the automobile’s fight against the climate crisis.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of effort is going into finding something better. New, so-called solid-state batteries are being developed that should charge more quickly and could be about a third of the weight of the current ones – but they are years away from being on sale, by which time, of course, we will have made millions of overweight electric cars with rapidly obsolescing batteries. Hydrogen is emerging as an interesting alternative fuel, even though we are slow in developing a truly “green” way of manufacturing it. It can be used in one of two ways. It can power a hydrogen fuel cell (essentially, a kind of battery); the car manufacturer Toyota has poured a lot of money into the development of these. Such a system weighs half of an equivalent lithium-ion battery and a car can be refuelled with hydrogen at a filling station as fast as with petrol.

If the lithium-ion battery is an imperfect device for electric cars, it’s a complete non-starter for trucks because of its weight; for such vehicles hydrogen can be injected directly into a new kind of piston engine. JCB, the company that makes yellow diggers, has made huge strides with hydrogen engines and hopes to put them into production in the next couple of years. If hydrogen wins the race to power trucks – and as a result every filling station stocks it – it could be a popular and accessible choice for cars.

But let’s zoom out even further and consider the whole life cycle of an automobile. The biggest problem we need to address in society’s relationship with the car is the “fast fashion” sales culture that has been the commercial template of the car industry for decades. Currently, on average we keep our new cars for only three years before selling them on, driven mainly by the ubiquitous three-year leasing model. This seems an outrageously profligate use of the world’s natural resources when you consider what great condition a three-year-old car is in. When I was a child, any car that was five years old was a bucket of rust and halfway through the gate of the scrapyard. Not any longer. You can now make a car for £15,000 that, with tender loving care, will last for 30 years. It’s sobering to think that if the first owners of new cars just kept them for five years, on average, instead of the current three, then car production and the CO2 emissions associated with it, would be vastly reduced. Yet we’d be enjoying the same mobility, just driving slightly older cars. (...)

Increasingly, I’m feeling that our honeymoon with electric cars is coming to an end, and that’s no bad thing: we’re realising that a wider range of options need to be explored if we’re going to properly address the very serious environmental problems that our use of the motor car has created. We should keep developing hydrogen, as well as synthetic fuels to save the scrapping of older cars which still have so much to give, while simultaneously promoting a quite different business model for the car industry, in which we keep our new vehicles for longer, acknowledging their amazing but overlooked longevity.

Friends with an environmental conscience often ask me, as a car person, whether they should buy an electric car. I tend to say that if their car is an old diesel and they do a lot of city centre motoring, they should consider a change. But otherwise, hold fire for now.

by Rowan Atkinson, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: A Volvo hybrid car undergoes emissions tests for the campaign group Transport & Environment in 2021. Photograph: Emissions Analytics/Reuters

Rich People Are Boring

Review of The Ruling Clawss: The Socialist Cartoons of Syd Hoff (New York Review Comics)

In an August 2000 letter to Philip Nel, a scholar of children’s books and comics, the cartoonist Syd Hoff recounted his history with the Left. Nel was working on a book about Crockett Johnson, the cartoonist behind the Barnaby comic and Harold and the Purple Crayon. In the 1930s, Johnson had been the art editor of New Masses, a left-wing magazine to which Hoff had contributed cartoons.

But Hoff, a longtime contributor to the New Yorker and the author of the kids book Danny and the Dinosaur, had done so under a pseudonym. In his work for New Masses, he used the name A. Redfield. According to Hoff, Clarence Hathaway came up with the pen name when he brought Hoff on as a cartoonist for the publication he edited, the Daily Worker. Hathaway was a member of the Communist Party, rising in the organization alongside eventual general secretary Earl Browder, and the Daily Worker was the party’s house organ. Pseudonyms were not unheard of among contributors: with Red Scares an ever-present threat, some artists kept their ties to the Left a secret.

That distance proved wise for Hoff. The FBI did indeed call on him in the 1950s. In a statement to the bureau in 1952, Hoff downplayed the cartoons he’d drawn as A. Redfield, as well as his staff position at the Daily Worker. (...)

The work he produced hardly feels its ninety years. If it weren’t for the attire in which Hoff’s oafish representatives of the ruling class are outfitted — tuxedos aplenty, modest gowns for the women — and his propensity for drawing the rich as almost uniformly overweight, the illustrations could be of the modern-day United States. After all, our era has much in common with that of “A. Redfield’s”: eye-popping inequality, rampant homelessness and police brutality, racism, and the many pompous, moronic captains of industry.

Hoff’s rich are a pathetic bunch. “Well! Well! Well! And how’s the Giant of Wall Street today?” asks a physically imposing personal trainer to his shrimpy client in one illustration. “Well, darling — I believe Fascism is coming,” a man tells his wife in another cartoon, reading from a newspaper. “Oh, my!” she responds, “And this is the maid’s night out!”

Yet another, with a tuxedoed young bourgeois lamenting to his date, glass of champagne in hand: “Papa says if I’m expelled from one more college I’ll have to take charge of one of his factories.” In another, an old capitalist spiffs himself up with cologne and a flower in his buttonhole, only for his maid, the object of his desire, to walk right by him, unnoticing.

While these people see themselves as paternalistic figures to their legion of workers, they resemble nothing so much as giant toddlers.

These industry titans are vindictive too, and stingy, but it’s unearned. Often, they’ve merely inherited their wealth.

A little boy berates a butler, “How the hell many times must I ring for you!” A boss stands on stage in front of a room of workers at a gathering organized to push a company union. He rattles on about “we who turn the wheels of industry,” and his employees stare back, stone-faced. One woman, draped in pearls and sitting on a couch, says to the other, “I’m against unemployment insurance — it’d make people lazy.”

These capitalists are a group living a delusion. They are shielded from the world by a coterie of protections: mansions, guards, servants. “I ain’t afraid of nothing!” one general says to another, never mind that he is not one of the soldiers who will have to risk their lives in the war. (...)

All of it rings true: when I encounter the rich, they are always speaking about themselves, even on the rare occasions that they seem to be talking about something larger. When the world rarely disturbs your domestic sphere, your interests tend to contract to, well, yourself.

It all makes for a very boring milieu. Without fetizishing hardship, one can observe that those whose every tribulation has been cushioned by enormous amounts of money don’t tend to be very interesting; they have nothing to say because they have experienced little. (...)

In his original 1935 introduction to The Ruling Clawss, Daily Worker writer Robert Forsythe (a pen name for Kyle Crichton) wrote that rather than being fueled by a hatred for “the ponderous-paunched females” and their capitalist husbands depicted in the cartoons, Hoff was driven by something else.

“To a man of Redfield’s apparent good sense, it would be extremely foolish to waste good rage over people as fundamentally ass-like as these,” he writes. “What actuates him, obviously, is a feeling of relief and gratitude and superiority. In great part, superiority.”

Such superiority, or arrogance, on the part of the working class, writes Forsythe, “is always a source of great concern to the upper classes.” He continues: “Acting on the assumption that their eminence in life constitutes a condition about which the rest of the world should be envious, they are perpetually nonplussed at discovering that the workers, and particularly the revolutionary artists, consider them not objects of envy but subjects of great comic importance.”

No amount of money can make a person cool: Elon Musk’s life is proof of that. It’s clear that Hoff saw the rich this way, too. Yes, they were the class enemy and inflicted severe harms on the working class and the planet, but they were fundamentally beneath him and his fellow workers, not worthy of hatred. Ninety years later, the buffoonery of the likes of Musk and his many wealthy counterparts have helped restore this view of the rich. 

by Alex N. Press, Jacobin | Read more:
Image: NYRB

Total Eclipse of the Sun, 1882. Chromolithograph after a pastel drawing by astronomer, artist, and amateur entomologist Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, who died on this day in 1895. 

More on his life and stunning astronomical art here:

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John Pack

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PGA Tour Agrees to Merge With Saudi-Backed Rival LIV Golf

The PGA Tour has agreed to merge with Saudi-backed rival LIV Golf in a deal that would see the competitors squash pending litigation and move forward as a larger golf enterprise.

The two entities signed an agreement that would combine the PGA Tour and LIV Golf’s commercial businesses and rights into a new, yet-to-be-named for-profit company. The agreement includes DP World Tour, also known as the European PGA Tour.

LIV Golf is backed by the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund, an entity controlled by the Saudi crown prince and has been embroiled in antitrust lawsuits with the PGA Tour in the last year. The deal announced Tuesday would end all pending litigation.

PIF is prepared to invest billions of new capital into the new entity, CNBC’S David Faber reported on Tuesday. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

The agreement — the second stunning sports deal in just months, following World Wrestling Entertainment’s merger with Endeavor Group’s UFC — will require the approval of the PGA Tour policy board, Commissioner Jay Monahan said in a memo to players that was obtained by CNBC.

“There is much work to do to get us from a framework agreement to a definitive agreement, but one thing is obvious: through this transformational agreement and with PIF’s collaborative investment, the immeasurable strength of the PGA Tour’s history, legacy and pro-competitive model not only remains intact, but is supercharged for the future,” he wrote in the memo. (...)

Rival lawsuits

Monahan said the tour looked at the game of golf “on a global basis,” as its seen more growth in the sport outside of the U.S.

Still, he acknowledged Tuesday on CNBC that there has been a lot of tensions between the two organizations, but said “the game of golf is better for what we’ve done today.”

The two organizations had filed a series of antitrust claims against the other in recent months. LIV Golf sued The PGA Tour alleging anti-competitive practices for banning its players. The tour countersued, claiming LIV was stifling competition. Disputes ensued regarding the discovery process for evidence.

The lawsuits were spurred as the upstart league had lured multiple high-profile players, such as Phil Mickelson and Bubba Watson, from the PGA Tour after the tour had banned the players from competing in LIV’s events.

On Tuesday, Mickelson tweeted, “Awesome day today” as part of a post sharing the news of the merger.

The deal comes soon after LIV golfer Brooks Koepka won the PGA Championship, one of four major titles in men’s golf.

As part of the agreement, the groups will establish “a fair and objective process for any players who want to re-apply for membership with the PGA Tour or DP World Tour” following the end of the 2023 season, according to a release. 

Global golf

LIV didn’t see its matches distributed on TV in the U.S. until a few months ago, when the league signed a deal with CW Network as the exclusive U.S. broadcast partner. The CW had agreed to air 14 global events, which began in February. Terms of the multiyear deal had not been disclosed. (...)

LIV Golf, which launched in 2022 and has been spending top dollar to lure golfers, has also been the subject of controversy, criticism and political intrigue in the U.S. PIF has reportedly invested $2 billion into LIV already, and had aspirations of creating franchises and teams that could one day be sold.

Critics of LIV have also accused PIF of “sportswashing” by using the league to distract from the kingdom’s history of human rights violations.

by Lillian Rizzo, CNBC | Read more:
Image: Charles Laberge | LIV Golf | Getty Images

[ed. Wow. Wow. Wow. Historic. But nowhere do you hear clearly what this means for players that have already accepted (or rejected!) LIV money (some in the hundreds of millions of dollars), or formally resigned from the PGA Tour. Some very hard feelings for sure. Wonder if there's a clawback option? And how does this affect the LPGA Women's Tour (if at all)? Or US Anti-trust laws and policies?  Stay tuned.  See also: Phil Mickelson sent exactly the tweet you'd think upon news of the PGA Tour-LIV merger (GD).]

Eunkyoung Son
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Fast Fashion's Dumping Ground

"Dead white man's clothes" (obroni wawu)
‘It’s like a death pit’: how Ghana became fast fashion’s dumping ground (The Guardian)

Image: Muntaka Chasant/REX/Shutterstock

The Assisted Dying Debate Is Really About How We Treat the Living

Between December 2022 and April 2023, 184 randomly selected French citizens assembled to reflect on a central problem of the nation’s health care system: Is the current model of end-of-life care working and, if not, what changes should be introduced? On April 3, the group, known as the Citizens’ Assembly on the End of Life, presented the French president, Emmanuel Macron, with its final report. The vast majority of the Assembly, 97 percent, deemed the current model of end-of-life care in France insufficient, and more than three-quarters said they would support new measures to legalize euthanasia, assisted suicide, or both.

The French public and media have latched on to that last point, portraying the Assembly’s work as a referendum on assisted dying. In a recent issue of the French weekly news magazine L’Obs, prominent public intellectuals — including actors, filmmakers, university professors, and the mayor of Paris — penned an open letter calling on French president Emmanuel Macron and prime minister Elisabeth Borne to legalize assistance in dying. “Every year,” they wrote, “French men and women suffering from serious and incurable diseases are confronted with physical and moral suffering that treatments can no longer relieve.” The national discourse, however, misses an important point: The rising public support for assisted dying reflects our deeper failure, as a society, to adequately care for the living.

The provision of palliative care — care that seeks to maximize the quality of life for people living with serious or terminal illnesses, without hastening death — remains markedly underfunded and undersupported in France. The concept was first discussed in legislative settings in the mid-1980s, but it was not until 1999 that palliative care became a right for every French citizen. In 2005, the so-called Léonetti Law expanded these end-of-life rights to allow patients with severely life-limited prognoses the option to forego treatment — or to stop treatments that were already underway. In 2016, France introduced the Claeys-Léonetti Law, which remains the governing principle for contemporary palliative care in France. This law, presented as a specifically “French response” to a rising demand to legalize assistance in dying, permits physicians, at the request of the patient, to administer palliative sedation to people who are in the final stages of a terminal illness, or who have decided to cease treatment and face the prospect of “unbearable suffering.” With the law, France became one of the first countries in the world to make terminal sedation legal.

The rising public support for assisted dying reflects our deeper failure, as a society, to adequately care for the living.

However, palliative sedation — currently the final recourse for French palliative care physicians — is distinct from assisted dying. It is administered to alleviate suffering, not to hasten death, whereas assisted dying is an active decision, on the part of the patient and their physicians, to bring life to an end. The French terminology, “aide active à mourir,” or “active assistance in dying,” captures this well. (By contrast, francophone Canada has opted for “aide médicale à mourir ,” or “medical assistance in dying” — although the anglophone acronym, MAID, undoubtedly played a role in that choice.)

Some argue that palliative sedation does not go far enough and that current eligibility requirements for the procedure are too strict. But a more fundamental question is whether existing palliative care services receive adequate support. (...)

Proponents of legalizing assisted dying argue that that issue is philosophically and politically distinct from the matter of improving palliative care. But the two ideas are connected: The reasons that many French people give for wanting a change in the law are intimately related to the distressing ways in which they are seeing people die today. (...)

As sociologist Nicolas Menet recently argued, “We mustn’t reduce the question of end of life to a debate around whether or not to legalize euthanasia.” Rather, he said, “we need to discuss the financing of palliative care and value that care provision. We also need to discuss what palliative sedation really means.”

The reasons that many French people give for wanting a change in the law are intimately related to the distressing ways in which they are seeing people die today.

In other words, improving end-of-life care in France, or anywhere for that matter, will require us to think holistically about the issues at hand, rather than look to assisted suicide and euthanasia as panaceas. (Writer and journalist Abnousse Shalmani also makes this point in a recent column for L’Express.)

by Anna Magdalena Elsner & Jordan McCullough, Undark |  Read more:

Image: Julien de Rosa/AFP via Getty Images
[ed. Glad to see this (and as an adjunct, see this prior post: Fake Consensualism). As Woody Allen said: "I'm not afraid of death. I just don't want to be there when it happens." Denying a person's autonomy and forcing them to suffer needless, and frequently horrible deaths is, in my view, torture. At present, even states that allow assisted dying have made the process so convoluted as to be prohibitive. Perhaps this might account for part of it (from the comments section at NC:)

Props to the French for having what sounds like a very sober societal conversation on these issues. (...)

***

Every day a person’s existence persists equates to more billable hours, receivables… whether from The State, or in America, the Insurors. ...

It’s been said that the last six months of ‘life’ dissipate the average persons life savings and wealth. And, after all, that is what we aspire to… more money, more wealth…. what’s yours is now mine.

***

As others have noted, the religious fundamentalists and the insurance/BigPharma extortion racket want to maintain the status-quo in the US. Health extortion is big business: 18-19% of GDP. No incentive to kill the golden goose.

The dysfunctional health extortion in the US is just getting more dysfunctional. Medicare does not cover skilled nursing or other long-term care. The conditions in these places, while obscenely expensive, are appalling – I have seen quite a few. I can look forward to bankruptcy, debt and a horrific end of life unless I am blessed with a quick death.

Unauthorized Bread

Real rebellions involve jailbreaking IoT toasters

The way Salima found out that Boulangism had gone bankrupt: her toaster wouldn’t accept her bread. She held the slice in front of it and waited for the screen to show her a thumbs-up emoji, but instead, it showed her the head-scratching face and made a soft brrt. She waved the bread again. Brrt.

“Come on.” Brrt.

She turned the toaster off and on. Then she unplugged it, counted to ten, and plugged it in. Then she menued through the screens until she found RESET TO FACTORY DEFAULT, waited three minutes, and punched her Wi-Fi password in again.

Brrt.

Long before she got to that point, she’d grown certain that it was a lost cause. But these were the steps that you took when the electronics stopped working, so you could call the 800 number and say, “I’ve turned it off and on, I’ve unplugged it, I’ve reset it to factory defaults and…”

There was a touchscreen option on the toaster to call support, but that wasn’t working, so she used the fridge to look up the number and call it. It rang seventeen times and disconnected. She heaved a sigh. Another one bites the dust.

The toaster wasn’t the first appliance to go (that honor went to the dishwasher, which stopped being able to validate third-party dishes the week before when Disher went under), but it was the last straw. She could wash dishes in the sink but how the hell was she supposed to make toast—over a candle?

Just to be sure, she asked the fridge for headlines about Boulangism, and there it was, their cloud had burst in the night. Socials crawling with people furious about their daily bread. She prodded a headline and learned that Boulangism had been a ghost ship for at least six months because that’s how long security researchers had been contacting the company to tell it that all its user data—passwords, log-ins, ordering and billing details—had been hanging out there on the public internet with no password or encryption. There were ransom notes in the database, records inserted by hackers demanding cryptocurrency payouts in exchange for keeping the dirty secret of Boulangism’s shitty data handling. No one had even seen them.

Boulangism’s share price had declined by 98 percent over the past year. There might not even be a Boulangism anymore. When Salima had pictured Boulangism, she’d imagined the French bakery that was on the toaster’s idle-screen, dusted with flour, woodblock tables with serried ranks of crusty loaves. She’d pictured a rickety staircase leading up from the bakery to a suite of cramped offices overlooking a cobbled road. She’d pictured gas lamps.

The article had a street-view shot of Boulangism’s headquarters, a four-story office block in Pune, near Mumbai, walled in with an unattended guard booth at the street entrance.

The Boulangism cloud had burst and that meant that there was no one answering Salima’s toaster when it asked if the bread she was about to toast had come from an authorized Boulangism baker, which it had. In the absence of a reply, the paranoid little gadget would assume that Salima was in that class of nefarious fraudsters who bought a discounted Boulangism toaster and then tried to renege on her end of the bargain by inserting unauthorized bread, which had consequences ranging from kitchen fires to suboptimal toast (Boulangism was able to adjust its toasting routine in realtime to adjust for relative kitchen humidity and the age of the bread, and of course it would refuse to toast bread that had become unsalvageably stale), to say nothing of the loss of profits for the company and its shareholders. Without those profits, there’d be no surplus capital to divert to R&D, creating the continuous improvement that meant that hardly a day went by without Salima and millions of other Boulangism stakeholders (never just “customers”) waking up with exciting new firmware for their beloved toasters.

And what of the Boulangism baker-partners? They’d done the right thing, signing up for a Boulangism license, subjecting their process to inspections and quality assurance that meant that their bread had exactly the right composition to toast perfectly in Boulangism’s precision-engineered appliances, with crumb and porosity in perfect balance to absorb butter and other spreads. These valued partners deserved to have their commitment to excellence honored, not cast aside by bargain-hunting cheaters who wanted to recklessly toast any old bread.

Salima knew these arguments, even before her stupid toaster played her the video explaining them, which it did after three unsuccessful bread-authorization attempts, playing without a pause or mute button as a combination of punishment and reeducation campaign.

She tried to search her fridge for “boulangism hacks” and “boulangism unlock codes” but appliances stuck together. KitchenAid’s network filters gobbled up her queries and spat back snarky “no results” screens even though Salima knew perfectly well that there was a whole underground economy devoted to unauthorized bread.

She had to leave for work in half an hour, and she hadn’t even showered yet, but goddamnit, first the dishwasher and now the toaster. She found her laptop, used when she’d gotten it, now barely functional. Its battery was long dead and she had to unplug her toothbrush to free up a charger cable, but after she had booted it and let it run its dozens of software updates, she was able to run the darknet browser she still had kicking around and do some judicious googling.

She was forty-five minutes late to work that day, but she had toast for breakfast. Goddamnit.

The dishwasher was next. Once Salima had found the right forum, it would have been crazy not to unlock the thing. After all, she had to use it and now it was effectively bricked. She wasn’t the only one who had the Disher/Boulangism double whammy, either. Some poor suckers also had the poor fortune to own one of the constellation of devices made by HP-NewsCorp—fridges, toothbrushes, even sex toys—all of which had gone down thanks to a failure of the company’s cloud provider, Tata. While this failure was unrelated to the Disher/Boulangism doubleheader, it was pretty unfortunate timing, everyone agreed.

The twin collapse of Disher and Boulangism did have a shared cause, Salima discovered. Both companies were publicly traded and both had seen more than 20 percent of their shares acquired by Summerstream Funds Management, the largest hedge fund on earth, with $184 billion under management. Summerstream was an “activist shareholder” and it was very big on stock buybacks. Once it had a seat on each company’s board—both occupied by Galt Baumgardner, a junior partner at the firm, but from a very good Kansas family—they both hired the same expert consultant from Deloitte to examine the company’s accounts and recommend a buyback program that would see the shareholders getting their due return from the firms, without gouging so deep into the companies’ operating capital as to endanger them.

It was all mathematically provable, of course. The companies could easily afford to divert billions from their balance sheets to the shareholders. Once this was determined, it was the board’s fiduciary duty to vote in favor of it (which was handy, since they all owned fat wads of company shares) and a few billion dollars later, the companies were lean, mean, and battle ready, and didn’t even miss all that money.

Oops.

Summerstream issued a press release (often quoted in the forums Salima was now obsessively haunting) blaming the whole thing on “volatility” and “alpha” and calling it “unfortunate” and “disappointing.” They were confident that both companies would restructure in bankruptcy, perhaps after a quick sale to a competitor, and everyone could start toasting bread and washing dishes within a month or two.

by Cory Doctorow, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Tor Books

[ed. Goes hand in hand with Right to Repair. See also: What is IoT? (Oracle); and, Internet of Things (Wikipedia).

The World is Ready for Rose Zhang. Is She Ready for the World?

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Let’s start with the tour, because if you can keep up with this, you can keep up with Rose Zhang. It’s moving. We’re moving. She’s five paces ahead, slipping through the Stanford campus like some sort of prodigious pontoon. Everything is fast. Moving. Talking. Walking. Her giant Nike backpack is fastened tight, holding on for the ride. She points over there. “Look at that!” She points over here. “Isn’t that amazing?”

The Stanford campus moves under our feet and you can feel it. A combination of person and place that’s damn-near intrinsic.

In what amounted to a period of deferred destiny, Rose arrived here two years ago and proceeded to win everything. All of it. Two years in college golf rewriting the NCAA record book. Teenage years spent becoming one of the greatest amateur players — male or female — ever; yes, ever. Rose, as she’ll be referred to here, because prodigies operate mononymously, became the world’s No. 1-ranked women’s amateur in September 2020 — nearly 33 months ago. Hasn’t budged since. She won the 2020 U.S. Women’s Amateur at 17, enrolled at Stanford, won 12 of 20 college tournaments, claimed the 2023 Augusta National Women’s Amateur, and capped things off nicely by becoming the first female golfer to win consecutive NCAA individual titles.

Yet, trekking across campus, she looks back to tell me the other kids at Stanford — the ones we’re blurring past — they’re the special ones.

“The people that I’m friends with?” she says. “I’m constantly like, you guys are incredible. I can’t even show my face here.”

There’s no known data for how many prodigies operate with an inferiority complex, but there’s at least one. Which makes this all the more tricky. Because, folks, it’s time.

With some words that will carry, Rose announced last week that she is, at last, turning professional. Her unmatched amateur career is over. She’s heading to Liberty National Golf Club this week for a news conference and her pro debut at the inaugural Mizuho Americas Open. She’ll play a course where millions of tons of clay and fill were once laid to offer better views of Lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty. Seems appropriate. She’ll arrive prepackaged, complete with millions of dollars in sponsorship contracts with Callaway, Adidas, Delta, East West Bank, Rolex, USwing, Beats by Dre and others. She’ll be billed as a generational talent with global appeal. Oh, and that swing. Everyone will swoon. Then, this summer, she’ll play in the remaining four majors and, if all goes to plan, use a series of tournament exemptions to secure her LPGA Tour card.

This has all felt so inevitable for so long. The same way the NBA is waiting for Victor Wembanyama, and the NFL is waiting for Caleb Williams, golf has been waiting for Rose Zhang.

But here, she stops. No, Rose says. She is not like them. She’s just like everyone else. “I don’t think players on tour know who I am,” she tells me. “I’m just going to be a newbie out there.”

Maybe that’s what she needs to tell herself. Rose has had to figure out a lot in her life — how to embrace her talent, how to be coached, how to handle the contours of a father-daughter relationship, how to be the star of a superteam at Stanford, how to turn pro, how to find some control, how to be … normal.

That, truth be told, is why she’s pushed this off for so long. But now, “There’s not a lot of ambition left for, like, where my career is right now. Because I basically won the events that there are to win.” (...)

CS106A: Programming Methodologies.The teacher’s aide leading the lecture is barely older than the students. He’s wearing a Patagonia hat and answering correct responses with: “Yes, sick,” “That’s chill,” and, when one student is unsure of a solution, responds, “Super valid question.”

Rose is behind a MacBook Pro, following along. The TA reads out a formula while scribbling on a whiteboard, “… equals, input, parenthesis, input, parenthesis, enter third number, colon, space, parenthesis …”

Fifty incalculably boring minutes of computer coding.

Class wraps up around 5 p.m. and we’re off. Stanford is a place that often feels staged, like some AI-generated postcard of Gen Z college life, packed with polymaths and geniuses, with virtuoso artists and future billionaire computer programmers. An odd mix of chaos and academic pedigree. We see visiting high school students and Rose says they look so young. A rogue student a cappella group assembles from nowhere and starts performing in front of the bookstore. We watch for a moment. Rose is thrilled by the randomness of it all.

But Rose laments. She was warned not to take that coding class. Especially not in-season. “It’s too much.” She’s regretting it, just as she regretted taking 21 units last quarter. “The dumbest thing I’ve ever done.” When we spoke in March, she had a five-page paper due on the causes of the Cold War (“Which is ridiculous,” she said. “How can you write that in five pages?”) and a 4,000-word paper due on integrating discipline into children’s books. On top of all this, Rose is regularly taking Mandarin. She’s fluent, but cannot read or write. This is common. There are over 5,000 characters to memorize.

“I find Chinese to be very interesting,” she says. “It’s a very beautiful language. Especially when you learn to write. It’s very pretty — the characters. But it is very hard, requires a lot of brain work. You have to be proactive in your learning or you’ll forget everything. It’s like math, except I hate math.”

The catch is, none of this is necessary. Future Millionaire Golfer Rose Zhang does not need to take computer programming or learn about the Cold War.

“Literally,” she stresses, smiling, “And I’m here suffering, learning to code.”

So, why? There’s no moral hand-wringing over golfers or tennis players or soccer players ditching high school to pursue professional sports. Rose could’ve made the jump years ago. Her parents wouldn’t have stopped her and her talent was without question. She played in the 2019 U.S. Women’s Open as a 16-year-old and made the cut. That week, on a patio at the Country Club of Charleston (S.C.), Haibin suggested it might be time for his daughter to make the leap then. “She’ll know when she’s ready,” George responded.

by Brendan Quinn, The Athletic/NYT |  Read more:

Image: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; photos: Justin Tafoya / NCAA Photos via Getty Images)
[ed. From last week. Is she ready? - we all know the answer now ($412,500 of them). See also: Rose Zhang makes history, wins LPGA debut, matching feat last accomplished 72 years ago (Golf Digest):]

"Where Rose Zhang walks, history follows. Her celebrated golf journey continued Sunday at the LPGA's Mizuho Americas Open while surviving a slog at Liberty National, shooting a closing 74 that was good enough to get into a playoff and beat Jennifer Kupcho on the second extra hole.

Zhang, 20, became only the second player to win her professional debut on the LPGA, joining Beverly Hanson, winner at the 1951 Eastern Open in the second year of the tour's existence. (...)

The full Rose Zhang experience of humility can be encapsulated by the fact her only goal to start the week was to play on the weekend."

How to Hire a Pop Star for Your Private Party

A private, as it’s known in the music business, is any performance off limits to the public; the term applies to a vast spectrum of gigs, from suburban Sweet Sixteens and Upper East Side charity galas to command performances in the Persian Gulf. For years, the world of privates was dominated by aging crooners, a category known delicately as “nostalgia performers.” Jacqueline Sabec, an entertainment lawyer in San Francisco, who has negotiated many private-gig contracts, told me, “Artists used to say no to these all the time, because they just weren’t cool.”

But misgivings have receded dramatically. In January, Beyoncé did her first show in more than four years—not in a stadium of screaming fans but at a new hotel in Dubai, earning a reported twenty-four million dollars for an hour-long set. More than a few Beyoncé fans winced; after dedicating a recent album to pioneers of queer culture, she was plumping for a hotel owned by the government of Dubai, which criminalizes homosexuality. (As a popular tweet put it, “I get it, everyone wants their coin, but when you’re THAT rich, is it THAT worth it?”) Artists, by and large, did not join the critics. Charles Ruggiero, a drummer in Los Angeles who is active in jazz and rock, told me, “The way musicians look at it, generally speaking, is: It’s a fucking gig. And a gig is a gig is a gig.”

If you have a few million dollars to spare, you can hire Drake for your bar mitzvah or the Rolling Stones for your birthday party. Robert Norman, who heads the private-events department at the talent agency C.A.A., recalls that when he joined the firm, a quarter century ago, “we were booking one or two hundred private dates a year, for middle-of-the-road artists that you’d typically suspect would play these kinds of events—conventions and things like that.” Since then, privates have ballooned in frequency, price, and genre. “Last year, we booked almost six hundred dates, and we’ve got a team of people here who are dedicated just to private events,” Norman said. An agent at another big firm told me, “A lot of people will say, ‘Hey, can you send me your private/corporate roster?’ And I’m, like, ‘Just look at our whole roster, because everybody’s pretty much willing to consider an offer.’ ”

The willingness extends to icons who might seem beyond mortal reach, including three Englishmen honored by Her Late Majesty: Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Elton John, and Sir Rod Stewart. “We just did Rod Stewart for $1.25 million here in Las Vegas,” Glenn Richardson, an event producer, told me. It was a corporate gig for Kia, the car company. “He’ll do those now, because Rod’s not doing as many things as in his heyday,” Richardson added. A random selection of other acts who do privates (Sting, Andrea Bocelli, Jon Bon Jovi, John Mayer, Diana Ross, Maroon 5, Black Eyed Peas, OneRepublic, Katy Perry, Eric Clapton) far exceeds the list of those who are known for saying no (Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift, and, for reasons that nobody can quite clarify, AC/DC).

Occasionally, the music press notes a new extreme of the private market, like hits on the charts. Billboard reported that the Eagles received six million dollars from an unnamed client in New York for a single performance of “Hotel California,” and Rolling Stone reported that Springsteen declined a quarter of a million to ride motorcycles with a fan. But privates typically are enveloped in secrecy, with both artists and clients demanding nondisclosure agreements and prohibitions on photos and social-media posts. Sabec told me, “They don’t want anybody to know how much they paid the artist, for example, or the details of the party. And the musician might not necessarily want it to be discussed, either.” (After the news of Beyoncé’s fee leaked, Adam Harrison, a veteran manager, told me, “That is my nightmare.” Then he reconsidered the effect on Beyoncé’s operation: “It probably raises their rates.”)

Until recently, the stigma extended beyond style. A prominent music executive said, “There was a phase where artists would take a private show—a cancer benefit—and somebody would find out that they’re getting paid to perform, and then they look like complete cocks in the media, because they took money and some child was dying of cancer. There was risk in the money.”(...)

The opprobrium dissipated before long. In 2015, when critics urged Nicki Minaj to forsake a reported fee of two million dollars for a concert sponsored by a company linked to Angola’s dictator, she dismissed them with a tweet: “every tongue that rises up against me in judgement shall be condemned.” The music executive told me that there is even a sense of commercial competition among stars, who now measure themselves as entrepreneurs. “If you’re Kevin Durant, and you don’t have five businesses, you’re a schmuck,” he said. “ ‘I made twenty-five million dollars playing ten birthday parties.’ That used to be seen as ‘You fucking piece-of-shit sellout.’ Now it’s ‘How do I get me some of those?’ ”

At bottom, the boom in private gigs reflects two contrasting trends. One has to do with the music industry. For more than a century after sound was first captured on wax cylinders, in the eighteen-eighties, the money came mostly from selling recordings. But that business peaked in 1999, and, as CDs vanished, revenue sank by more than fifty per cent. It has recovered on digital subscriptions, but the new giants—Spotify, Apple, YouTube—pay artists only a fraction of what physical sales once delivered.

The other trend is the birth of a new aristocracy, which since 2000 has tripled the number of American billionaires and produced legions of the merely very rich. As musicians have faced an increasingly uncertain market, another slice of humanity has prospered: the limited partners and angel investors and ciphers of senior management who used to splurge on front-row seats at an arena show. Ruggiero, the drummer, told me, “People didn’t use to do this, because they couldn’t afford to have, like, the Foo Fighters come to their back yard. But now they can. They’re, like, ‘I can blow a hundred and fifty grand on a Thursday.’ ” (...)

Despite all the luxuries, “corporate events can be sort of soul-destroying,” Viecelli said. “It’s not really an audience. It’s a convention or a party, and you just happen to be making noise at one end of it.” When musicians are uncertain, he has some reliable tools to help them decide: “If you can say, ‘Hey, I’m going to go have a bad time for an afternoon, but it’s going to pay for my kid’s entire college education,’ then that’s a trade-off I think most responsible adults will make.” But these days he has less persuading to do. “If you talk to a twenty-year-old in the music business now, and you bring up this idea of the weirdness of doing corporate events, they’ll just stare at you, like, ‘What are you talking about?’ You might as well say, ‘Don’t you feel guilty for eating pizza?’ ” (...)

Even as streaming has diminished the returns on recording, social media has created an expectation of accessibility. Fans no longer assume that their favorite artists are remote figures. Viecelli told me, “I’ll get e-mails from people saying, ‘I live in Philadelphia, and I see that they’re coming to town, and my daughter is a big, big fan. Could you stop off at our house to play a few songs?’ ” He laughed. “It’s, like, ‘Are you nuts?’ But if that person says, ‘And I’d be happy to pay five hundred thousand dollars for the privilege,’ well, then, actually it begins to change.”

by Evan Osnos, New Yorker |  Read more:
Image: Victor Llorente for The New Yorker

Swingless Golf Club

[ed. A buddy told me about this (re: handicapped players). I have mixed feelings. If it helps someone get out and socialize with friends (and that's the most important thing to them) then great. But golf is fundamentally about refining and controlling your swing. That's what makes it challenging.]

Yayoi Kusama, “Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away,” 2013

via:

The War We’re Finally Allowed to See

The War We’re Finally Allowed to See (Consortium News)

Mogelson shows us the war a few independent journalists have written of but a war we have not heretofore read about in mainstream media. This is the war the propaganda machine has kept from us. And now we know that what correspondents reporting for independent media have been describing is by and large the war as it is.

Among much else we can now see the obvious indifference the Kiev regime and its Western backers display for those doing the fighting — who, Mogelson tells us, are now working-class Ukrainians, the more privileged having dodged the draft or otherwise avoided service. (...)

What is different now?

This is hard to say. But the larger picture suggests publication of this eye– and mind-opening piece reflects a creeping recognition in all sorts of places —among the policy cliques, at the Pentagon, in corporate media — that Ukraine is not going to win this war and the time has come to prepare for this eventuality.

The new drift on the vaunted counteroffensive is that it is not going to make much difference. There is more talk now about the conditions necessary to begin negotiations. NATO officials, per Steven Erlanger, the Times’ Brussels correspondent, are now thinking about doing in Ukraine what the allies did in postwar Germany: Divide it such that the West joins the alliance and the east is left to the East, so to say.

Mogelson’s intent, surely, was to do good work, full stop, and he has. But read in this larger context, its publication looks to me the start of an effort to get all those people with blue-and-yellow flags on their front porches ready for a dose of the reality from which they have been shielded all these months. The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, Business Insider, Forbes: They have all recently run pieces not nearly as good as Mogelson’s but in the let’s-get-real line.

by Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News |  Read more:

Image: Maxim DondyukUkrainian trenchline at the Battle of Bakhmut, November 2022. (Mil.gov.ua, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

[ed. Definitely check out the original source material: Two Weeks at the Front in Ukraine (New Yorker). Some of the best (and most vivid) war reporting/photography to date.]

The Military-Industrial Complex Doesn’t Run Washington

A little while ago I found myself interested to read a frustrated Glenn Greenwald argue that, given the context of the “enormous” $858 billion U.S. defense budget recently passed by Congress along with an additional $44 billion in military aid for Ukraine, the only thing anyone can now inevitably rely on from Washington D.C. is that “the U.S. budget for military and intelligence agencies will increase every year no matter what.”

I felt this merited some reflection. Greenwald’s explanation for why perpetual growth of the defense budget is an inevitability (which it basically is), and for why American foreign policy is relentlessly hawkish more broadly, is a popular one: that the American arms manufacturing industry, the military, and our politicians are all engaged in a circle of corruption and collusion to make each other rich. The big defense contractors bribe the politicians with large donations and the generals and other government officials with board seats and other lucrative positions, and they in turn come up with reasons to justify shoveling ever-increasing piles of taxpayer money into buying new weapons from the arms makers. This, Greenwald says, is precisely the “unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex” that President Eisenhower gravely warned our country to guard against in his famous farewell address some 62 years ago.

Eisenhower was, I must point out, attempting to draw attention to an even broader issue, i.e. the rise of an unaccountable technocratic administrative state, which accelerated in the wake of the technological-managerial revolution produced by WWII, and the “danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” The influence of this transformation of American republican governance, of which a military-industrial complex was but one part, was likely, he predicted, to be “economic, political, even spiritual” in scope, and threaten to change “the very structure of our society.” But I will leave all that aside for the time being, as “military-industrial complex” is the phrase that stuck in public memory, along with the narrower, more common understanding of what Eisenhower was warning about that Greenwald is using in this case.

As described above, this understanding of the military-industrial complex – and a common understanding of how politics in Washington works in general – is essentially conspiratorial. Its primary mechanism is individuals, or groups of individuals, cynically manipulating the procedures of the state to advance their material self-interests. Thus Washington has turned into a “multi-tentacle war machine,” Greenwald says, because “No matter what is going on in the world, they always find – or concoct – reasons why the military budget must grow no matter how inflated it already is.” (Emphasis mine.)

Let’s call this the Corrupt Conspiracy Model of how Washington functions (or dysfunctions). It is a model that can be powerfully convincing, because it taps into the truth that people really are naturally flawed and self-interested creatures, demonstrably prone to corruption. Applying Lenin’s maxim – “who benefits?” – appears to provide players (the “they”) and the motive. Combine that motive with the means and opportunity produced by systems of collusion, and you seem to have a straightforward explanation for most of the policy that comes out of Washington: it’s all basically a con game led by a pack of greedy psychopaths. As Greenwald notes with some frustration and confusion, this used to be a characteristically left-wing critique of government and corporate power, but following the Great Political Realignment it’s now become common to the disaffected right instead.

Reading his argument made me recall how, back when I was younger and left-leaning, I too believed in this model, at least implicitly. As noted, it can be quite persuasive, even satisfying, in its simplicity. It’s also actually a subtly idealistic and optimistic theory: the American system would work great, just as it was designed to do, if not for all the selfish bad actors taking advantage of the system, etc. The only problem was that, after enough time in Washington, I had no choice but to reevaluate. Because what I found is that the swamp is populated almost wholly not by cynics, but by true believers.

True believers in what? Answering that will require trying to nail down a second, more complex model to explain how people in the Imperial City make decisions – and why it’s still always a good bet to invest in Lockheed Martin.

First, let me qualify by acknowledging that yes, Washington is indeed awash with lobbyists, corrupt politicians, psychopathic executives, cynical operators, and backstabbing climbers. It is a veritable hive of scum and villainy. They just aren’t what really makes the place tick. In fact all of these people conform themselves parasitically to that which does.

The real issue to contend with is that almost no one in Washington actually thinks in the terms of the Corrupt Conspiracy Model. I.e. they don’t think “I will advocate for a hawkish, interventionist foreign policy so that the resulting wars will benefit the arms industry and make me and my friends rich…” – even the people with seats on the boards of defense contractors. The reality is more disturbing than that, honestly.

What runs Washington is a Spirit. Or, alternatively, a Story. Let me try to explain.

There is a useful saying in Washington, which is: “Where you sit is where you stand.” This refers to how individuals’ interests, and even their values, almost inevitably come to be determined by their position within and among bureaucracies. Whatever motivations they may enter with, they soon find themselves defending and advocating for whatever will most benefit the bureaucracy of which they have become a part. It is a relatively common phenomenon for even loyal top-level political appointees, dispatched by a new president to head a particular department or agency specifically so as to bring it into line with the president’s policy goals, to quickly be coopted into acting against that president’s wishes and working to advance their bureaucracy’s self-interests instead. Even those who enter and discover the truth that “the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy,” as Oscar Wilde memorably quipped, find they desire nothing so much as to help it do so. Their own interests and incentives have been subsumed by the bureaucracy’s interests and incentives.

How does this happen? And what is a bureaucracy, really? How is it that, as the critic Brooks Atkinson once wrote, bureaucracies are organizations “designed to perform public business,” but seemingly “as soon as a bureaucracy is established, it develops an autonomous spiritual life and comes to regard the public as its enemy”?

by N.S. Lyons, The Upheaval |  Read more (with Trial):

Image: uncredited

[ed. Paywalled unfortunately, but even this much helps.]

Our Disappearing Shoreline

The cycle of land erosion

Notice in the image above that the sea doesn’t have to rise much for quite a bit of land behind it, the land it newly touches, to erode and collapse. As John Englander points out in this TED Talk (3:36):

It makes sense that every time sea level goes higher, the shoreline is going to move inland. But the ratio is surprising. For each foot of rise, the average global shoreline moves inland about 300 feet — the length of a football field.

Keep that ratio in mind. To answer our original question, one foot of sea level rise moves the shoreline inland by something like 300 feet, or more if you live in a low coastal zone like most of Florida. (...)

When Will We Start?

So no, we’re not safe during “modest” sea level rise. A rising sea level shouldn’t be counted in vertical inches and feet, but in horizontal feet, yards and miles, measured from the previous shoreline to where our towns and cities will be safe for the next 100 years or so.

How long will it take to effectively move New York City? Mumbai? Jakarta? Shanghai? San Diego? Forever, if the planning never starts.

by Thomas Neuburger, God's Spies |  Read more:

Image: Life cycle of a landslide on a bluff composed of sediment (modified from Kelley and others, 1989) via: