Secrecy, Cigars and a Venetian Wedding: How the PGA Tour Made a Deal with Saudi Arabia

Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, had gone unnoticed in Venice last month.

With luck, he thought over breakfast near the Palazzo Ducale, his confidential talks in Italy with Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s more than $700 billion sovereign wealth fund, might stay secret. A leak would endanger what only a handful of insiders knew: that the PGA Tour was considering going into business with al-Rumayyan’s LIV Golf league, whose monthslong clash with Monahan’s tour had become a fight as much over golf’s soul as its future.

Then Stefano Domenicali, Formula 1’s chief executive, strolled into view. He was in town for the same wedding that had brought al-Rumayyan to Venice. If the motor sports executive spotted the PGA Tour’s leader, he would assuredly connect the presences of Monahan and al-Rumayyan, and golf’s greatest secret might get out. All Monahan could do, he told people later, was try to dodge Domenicali’s gaze.

But Domenicali never seemed to notice him. What would ultimately amount to seven weeks of clandestine meetings and furtive calls stayed hidden until a stunning announcement last Tuesday: The PGA Tour, the dominant force in men’s elite golf for decades, planned to join forces with LIV, the upstart that had provoked debate over the morality of Saudi money in the game.

The agreement was a singular moment in the history of the professional game. The civil war that had disrupted and defined the once genteel sport — for example, Monahan once publicly asked whether PGA Tour players had ever felt compelled to apologize for competing on the circuit — was abruptly suspended. The tour’s reputation was stained and many of its loyalists were furious, but its coffers were poised to overflow.

The deal, though not yet closed, was also a breakthrough for Saudi Arabia’s ambitions in golf. The culmination of a years-old plan called “Project Wedge,” the agreement gives al-Rumayyan, one of the kingdom’s most influential officials, a seat in the sport’s most rarefied rooms. And for a country that has craved a greater global profile, an economy based on more than oil and a distraction from its gruesome human rights abuses, the agreement was another step in its rapprochement with the West.

This account is based on interviews with nine people with knowledge of the negotiations. Most of them spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the lead-up to an extraordinary transaction — one so closely held that most of golf’s eminent bankers, lawyers and broadcast partners had no warning that it was even being discussed.

It was not until this spring that even golf’s most connected power brokers grew confident a deal could happen this year, if ever. But there seemed enough conspicuous pressure points, some much more severe than others, that prodded both sides into secret talks.

LIV had enticed some of golf’s most talented and bankable stars, including Brooks Koepka and Phil Mickelson, with contracts that sometimes promised them $100 million or more. The league’s television deal, though, had been meager, and its lawyers had acknowledged that its revenues were “virtually zero.” Federal judges in California added to LIV’s turmoil when they showed limited interest in shielding the Public Investment Fund from the kind of scrutiny it had generally avoided in other court battles in the United States.

But the PGA Tour, a tax-exempt nonprofit with an aging audience and a stiff reputation, was in greater peril. As part of a federal antitrust inquiry, Justice Department investigators were asking questions about heavy-handed tactics the tour used to discourage player defections and examining whether tour leaders were too cozy with other powerful golf organizations, like Augusta National Golf Club, the organizer of the Masters Tournament.

More precariously, the tour’s efforts to retain the loyalty of players, which included raising prize purses by tens of millions of dollars, were severely straining its finances. The tour’s television contracts had been constructed before it was facing one of the richest conceivable rivals. And the tour’s legal fees had swelled to more than $40 million a year — up more than twentyfold from the start of the decade — as it waged fights some thought could last until at least 2026.

Monahan had foretold something like this.

“If this is an arms race and if the only weapons here are dollar bills, the PGA Tour can’t compete,” he said last June in Connecticut.

Late in the year, the PGA Tour said a veteran deal maker, James J. Dunne III, would join its board, and some involved in the wealth fund wondered whether he would someday emerge as an emissary.

He did on April 18, when a WhatsApp message flashed on al-Rumayyan’s phone. (...)

‘Let’s see how that would work.’

London was neutral ground, only hours from golf’s birthplace in Scotland. The men decided they would meet there less than a week later, joined by Edward D. Herlihy, the chairman of the PGA Tour’s board. Herlihy was not any ordinary board member; more than a half-century after he earned his law degree, he was a partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and one of Wall Street’s most sought-after counselors for mergers and acquisitions.

Even without nondisclosure agreements, the men concluded that any prospective deal would have to be weighed in private. Most members of the tour’s board, including Rory McIlroy, one of the world’s most renowned golfers and a ferocious critic of LIV, and the former AT&T chairman Randall Stephenson, would be largely shut out. Greg Norman, the two-time British Open winner who had envisioned something like LIV long before he became its commissioner, would not be at the bargaining table, nor would most of the seasoned bankers and lawyers the two parties had worked with over the years.

But the negotiators also knew that an accord would not be reached at the initial gathering in London, in part because Monahan would not be in attendance as some of his allies took stock of the Saudis.

In a meeting, and later at dinner and over cigars, Dunne, Herlihy and al-Rumayyan discussed their approaches to golf and their own lives, testing whether their budding rapport would endure across hours of face-to-face conversations.

by Alan Blinder, Lauren Hirsch, Kevin Draper and Kate Kelly, NY Times | Read more:

Image: Brooks Koepka at this year’s Masters tournament. Doug Mills/The New York Times

[ed. See also: All About the Deep-Pocketed Saudi Wealth Fund That Rocked Golf (NYT).]

Ted Kaczynski, ‘Unabomber’ Who Attacked Modern Life, Dies at 81

Theodore J. Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, who attacked academics, businessmen and random civilians with homemade bombs from 1978 to 1995, killing three people and injuring 23 with the stated goal of fomenting the collapse of the modern social order — a violent spree that ended after what was often described as the longest and most costly manhunt in American history — died on Saturday in a federal prison medical center in Butner, N.C. He was 81.

A spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons said Mr. Kaczynski was found unresponsive in his cell early in the morning. The bureau did not specify a cause, but three people familiar with the situation said he died by suicide.

The bureau had announced his transfer to the medical facility in 2021.

Mr. Kaczynski traced a singular path in American life: lonely boy genius to Harvard-trained star of pure mathematics, to rural recluse, to notorious murderer, to imprisoned extremist.

In the public eye, he fused two styles of violence: the periodic targeting of the demented serial killer, and the ideological fanaticism of the terrorist.

After he was captured by about 40 F.B.I. agents in April 1996, Mr. Kaczynski’s particular ideology was less the subject of debate than the question of whether his crimes should be dignified with a rational motive to begin with.

Victims railed against commentators who took seriously a 35,000-word manifesto that he had written to justify his actions and evangelize the ideas that he claimed inspired them.

Psychologists involved in the trial saw his writing as evidence of schizophrenia. His lawyers tried to mount an insanity defense — and when Mr. Kaczynski rebelled and sought to represent himself in court, risking execution to do so, his lawyers said that that was yet further evidence of insanity.

For years before the manifesto was published, Mr. Kaczynski (pronounced kah-ZIN-skee) had no reputation beyond that of a twisted reveler in violence, picking victims seemingly at random, known only by a mysterious-sounding nickname with roots in the F.B.I.’s investigation into him: “the Unabomber.” It became widely publicized that some of his victims lost their fingers while opening a package bomb. Simply going through the mail prompted flickers of nervousness in many Americans.

After his arrest, Mr. Kaczynski’s extraordinary biography emerged. He had scored 167 on an I.Q. test as a boy and entered Harvard at 16. In graduate school, at the University of Michigan, he worked in a field of mathematics so esoteric that a member of his dissertation committee estimated that only 10 or 12 people in the country understood it. By 25, he was an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Then he dropped out — not just from Berkeley, but from civilization. Starting in 1971 and continuing until his arrest, he lived in a shack he built himself in rural Montana. He forsook running water, read by the light of homemade candles, stopped filing federal tax returns and subsisted on rabbits.

Mr. Kaczynski’s manifesto — published jointly by The New York Times and The Washington Post in 1995 under the threat of continued violence — argued that damage to the environment and the alienating effects of technology were so heinous that the social and industrial underpinnings of modern life should be destroyed.

A vast majority of Americans determined that the Unabomber must be a psychopath the moment they heard of him, and while he was front-page news, his text did not generally find receptive readers outside a tiny fringe of the environmental movement. The term “Unabomber” entered popular discourse as shorthand for the type of brainy misfit who might harbor terrifying impulses.

Yet political change and the passage of time caused some to see Mr. Kaczynski in a new light. His manifesto accorded centrality to a healthy environment without mentioning global warming; it warned about the dangers of people becoming “dependent” on technology while making scant reference to the internet. To young people afflicted by social media anomie and fearful of climate doom, Mr. Kaczynski seemed to wield a predictive power that outstripped the evidence available to him. (...)

In June, The Times and The Washington Post received a 35,000-word manuscript. Citing a recommendation from the F.B.I. and the Department of Justice, the papers took the Unabomber’s offer. They split the cost of printing the essay, titled “Industrial Society and Its Future.” The Post distributed it online and as an eight-page supplement with the Sept. 19 print paper.

The manifesto claimed that the current organization of society gives “politicians, corporation executives and remote, anonymous technicians and bureaucrats” control over “the life-and-death issues of one’s existence.” That makes modern people depressed, unlike “primitive man,” who gained satisfaction from determining his own “life-and-death issues” and found “a sense of security” in what the Unabomber called “WILD nature.”

The Unabomber justified his murderous campaign on the grounds that it got “our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression.”

The unique circumstances of the manifesto’s distribution — William Finnegan, writing in The New Yorker, called it “the most extraordinary manuscript submission in the history of publishing” — prompted a debate about the ethics of disseminating a terrorist’s views. The publicity seemed vindicated, however, after news of the Unabomber reached Linda Patrik, an associate philosophy professor vacationing in Paris. At first jokingly, then insistently, she told her husband that the manifesto reminded her of what he had said about his eccentric loner brother.

Ms. Patrik’s husband was David Kaczynski. When he read the manifesto online, his “jaw dropped,” he later told The Times. The language was reminiscent of letters Ted had written to David. He soon reached out to the authorities.

Since 1979, an F.B.I. team that grew to more than 150 full-time investigators, analysts and others had gone through tens of thousands of leads without getting close to a real suspect. After hearing from David Kaczynski, the authorities zeroed in on a 10-by-12-foot wooden shack in rural Montana. The area was so remote that during an 18-day stakeout, one agent saw a cougar kill a deer.

The home had two windows set on high; they caught light but kept the home hidden. Agents could not see inside. On April 3, 1996, one of them shouted that a forest ranger needed help. A thin, shaggy man emerged from the cabin. He was grabbed from both sides.

A ‘Walking Brain’

Theodore John Kaczynski was born in Chicago on May 22, 1942. His father, Theodore Richard Kaczynski, worked at his family’s business, Kaczynski’s Sausages, a factory on the city’s South Side. His mother, Wanda (Dombek) Kaczynski, was a homemaker. They both descended from Polish immigrants in the Chicago area, dropped out of high school to work and obtained diplomas at night school. By all accounts they were gregarious, kind, diligent and thoughtful. Each sent letters to newspapers in support of progressive causes.

From boyhood, Teddy, as he was known, felt his brilliance to be alienating. When an aunt of his visited, his father asked, “Why don’t you have some conversation with your aunt?” Teddy replied, “Why should I? She wouldn’t understand me anyway.”

In school, he skipped two grades. He later blamed his parents for seeming to prize and cultivate his intellect over his emotions.

“He was never really seen as a person, as an individual personality,” a high school classmate, Loren De Young, told The Times. “He was always regarded as a walking brain.”
During his imprisonment, Mr. Kaczynski copied his correspondence by hand and forwarded it to the University of Michigan’s Joseph A. Labadie Collection, an archive devoted to radical protest, which has amassed dozens of boxes of Kaczynskiana.

According to New York magazine, Mr. Kaczynski’s papers became one of the collection’s most popular offerings. In an interview with the magazine, Julie Herrada, the collection’s curator, declined to describe the people so intrigued by Mr. Kaczynski that they visit the library to look through his archive. She said just one thing: “Nobody seems crazy.”

by Alex Traub. NY Times | Read more:
Image: AP
[ed. A complicated and troubled man. See also: Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber for years of attacks that killed 3, dies in prison at 81 (Yahoo News).]

Shotei Takahashi, Mice, Radish, and Carrot, 1926
via:

Woolly Mammoth Burgers

[ed. Once you have a process and product figured out, the next thing is to carve out a profitable niche and scale it, right? - (Lion Burger, Tiger Steak From Lab-Grown Meat Hit the Market); but some people obviously aren't thinking big enough: A company says it added mammoth DNA to plant-based burgers and that they tasted much more 'intense' and 'meatier' than the cow version (Business Insider).]

Images: Twitter/Primeval Foods; Paleo; Andreas Arnold/picture alliance/Getty Images

No Amount of Evidence Will Make a Difference: A Paranoid Party and Its Mobster-Loving President

A reasonably healthy party might give its indicted leader some benefit of the doubt, while calling for judgment to be withheld before he has his day in court. But Republicans correctly understand that their party will consider Trump an innocent martyr regardless. The sickness of the Republican Party as it is presently constituted is that there is no conceivable set of facts that would permit it to acknowledge Trump’s guilt.

What has brought the party to this point is the convergence of its decades-long descent into paranoia with its idiosyncratic embrace of a career criminal.

Without belaboring the point, consider each of these dynamics in turn. The Republican Party’s internal culture has been shaped by what Richard Hofstadter famously described as “the paranoid style” in American politics. Hofstadter specifically attributed this description to the conservative movement, which, at the time, was a marginalized faction on the far right but has since completely taken control of the party and imposed its warped mentality on half of America. To its adherents, every incremental expansion of the welfare state is incipient communism, each new expansion of social liberalism the final death blow to family and church. Lurking behind these endless defeats, they discern a vast plot by shadowy elites.

In recent years, the Republican Party’s long rightward march on policy has ground to a halt, and it has instead radicalized on a different dimension: ruthlessness. Attributing their political travails to weakness, Republicans converged on the belief that their only chance to pull back from the precipice of final defeat is to discard their scruples. A willingness to do or say anything to win was the essence of Trump’s appeal, an amorality some Republicans embraced gleefully and others reluctantly.

Trump, by dint of his obsessive consumption of right-wing media, grasped where the party was going more quickly than its leaders did. This aspect of Trump’s rise was historically necessary. All Trump did was to hasten it along.

But there was a second aspect of Trump’s rise that was more or less accidental. The party was searching for a strongman to crush its enemies, and it could have found him in a politician, a general, a movie star, or an athlete. Instead, Republicans located their warlord in a crooked real-estate heir.

Trump was not raised in a traditional conservative milieu. He came into a seedy, corrupt world in which politicians could be bought off and laws were suggestions. He worked with mobsters and absorbed their view of law enforcement: People who follow the law are suckers, and the worst thing in the world is a rat.

That ethos ultimately explains Trump’s approach to classified information. He casually discarded all the rules concerning government secrecy as president — using an unsecured mobile phone, tearing up official documents, sharing highly classified information with Russian officials, and conducting state affairs at his loosely secured Florida resort. After leaving office, he naturally assumed he could continue flouting regulations about government secrecy. If the government was demanding its documents back, that was not an order but a negotiation. And why should he give up his leverage? He had something they wanted.

You can imagine the futility of trying to explain to Trump the seriousness and national security implications of the laws he was brazenly flouting, if any of his aides even bothered trying to get it across to him.

It is the interplay of the two forces, the paranoia of the right and the seamy criminality of the right’s current champion, that has brought the party to this point. Trump’s endlessly repeated “witch hunt” meme blends together the mobster’s hatred of the FBI with the conservative’s fear of the bureaucrat. His loyalists have been trained to either deny any evidence of misconduct by their side or rationalize it as a necessary countermeasure against their enemies.

The concept of “crime” has been redefined in the conservative mind to mean activities by Democrats. They insist upon Trump’s innocence because they believe a Republican, axiomatically, cannot be a criminal.

by Jonathan Chait, Intelligencer/NY Mag |  Read more:

Image: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

[ed. Sounds about right. See also: The Craziest Details From the Trump Documents Indictment (Intelligencer).]

The Binge Purge

If you call a slew of Hollywood’s most powerful showrunners, studio chiefs, agents, and operators and ask them to describe the state of the television business, they will say things like:

“This is the single worst time to be making anything in the history of the medium. It’s just as dark as it’s ever been.”

“It’s such a fucking disaster, isn’t it?”

“It’s like the entire system has snapped.”

“These companies took what was an extraordinarily successful economic model and they destroyed it in favor of a model that may or may not work — but almost certainly won’t work as well as the old model.”

“Everything became big tech — the Amazon model of ‘We don’t actually have to make money; we just have to show shareholder growth.’ Everyone said, ‘Great. That seems like the thing to do.’ Which essentially was like, ‘Let’s all commit ritual suicide. Let’s take one of the truly successful money-printing inventions in the history of the modern world — which was the carriage system with cable television — and let’s just end it and reinvent ourselves as tech companies, where we pour billions down the drain in pursuit of a return that is completely speculative, still, this many years into it.’”

“The reason nobody really wants to open the books on this is because if Wall Street got a look, they’d have a collective stroke.” (...)

“I think we may be in the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme.”

It’s been a little more than a year since the Great Netflix Freak-out, when the streaming pioneer’s first-ever loss of subscribers and ensuing stock drop sparked overdramatic proclamations that TV as we’d come to know it was finished. In that time, it’s become clear that the business model dominating modern Hollywood is deeply broken but also that it probably isn’t going anywhere — at least not yet.

Across the town, there’s despair and creative destruction and all sorts of countervailing indicators. Certain shows that were enthusiastically green-lit two years ago probably wouldn’t be made now. Yet there are still streamers burning mountains of cash to entertain audiences that already have too much to watch. Netflix has tightened the screws and recovered somewhat, but the inarguable consensus is that there is still a great deal of pain to come as the industry cuts back, consolidates, and fumbles toward a more functional economic framework. The high-stakes Writers Guild of America strike has focused attention on Hollywood’s labor unrest, but the really systemic issue is streaming’s busted math. There may be no problem more foundational than the way the system monetizes its biggest hits: It doesn’t.

Just ask Shawn Ryan. In April, the veteran TV producer’s latest show, the spy thriller The Night Agent, became the fifth-most-watched English-language original series in Netflix’s history, generating 627 million viewing hours in its first four weeks. As it climbed to the heights of such platform-defining smashes as Stranger Things and Bridgerton, Ryan wondered how The Night Agent’s success might be reflected in his compensation.

“I had done the calculations. Half a billion hours is the equivalent of over 61 million people watching all ten episodes in 18 days. Those shows that air after the Super Bowl — it’s like having five or ten of them. So I asked my lawyer, ‘What does that mean?’” recalls Ryan. As it turns out, not much. “In my case, it means that I got paid what I got paid. I’ll get a little bonus when season two gets picked up and a nominal royalty fee for each additional episode that gets made. But if you think I’m going out and buying a private jet, you’re way, way off.” (...)

Nobody is crying for Ryan, of course, and he wouldn’t want them to. (“I’m not complaining!” he says. “I’m not unaware of my position relative to most people financially.”) But he has a point. Once, in a more rational time, there was a direct relationship between the number of people who watched a show and the number of jets its creator could buy. More viewers meant higher ad rates, and the biggest hits could be sold to syndication and international markets. The people behind those hits got a cut, which is why the duo who invented Friends probably haven’t flown commercial since the 1990s. Streaming shows, in contrast, have fewer ads (or none at all) and are typically confined to their original platforms forever. For the people who make TV, the connection between ratings and reward has been severed.

So who is getting rich off hits like The Night Agent? Not streaming services, no matter how many global viewing hours they accumulate. Many streamers have spent themselves into billions of dollars of debt building their content libraries, and subscription fees haven’t grown fast enough to close the gap. If platforms like Netflix make any money at all, it is only a fraction of what entertainment companies used to make back when more than 105 million U.S. households spent an average of $75 per month on cable.

“The entire industry,” says the director Steven Soderbergh, who has been navigating structural changes in Hollywood since 1989’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape, “has moved from a world of Newtonian economics into a world of quantum economics, where two things that seem to be in opposition can be true at the same time: You can have a massive hit on your platform, but it’s not actually doing anything to increase your platform’s revenue. It’s absolutely conceivable that the streaming subscription model is the crypto of the entertainment business.” (...)

If you’re wondering whom to blame for TV’s predicament, that’s easy: It was Netflix. “Netflix completely revolutionized a 100-year-old industry,” says Mike Schur, who created The Good Place. “Everything changed, and everything changed the way they changed it.” In 2013, Netflix released the entire first season of House of Cards on the same day, overthrowing the time-honored orderliness of weekly schedules and giving viewers a brand-new way to spend 13 consecutive hours. Then the company embarked on what was probably the biggest spending spree in entertainment history. Wall Street treated Netflix not like the next HBO but more like the next Tesla, ignoring the profit factor to focus on growth. 

by Josef Adalian and Lane Brown, Vulture | Read more:
Image: Jess Ebsworth

Lana Del Rey

[ed. “Why wait for the best when I could have you?” Ouch.]

Notes on Nigeria

Nigeria is chaos. The cities are extremely crowded, dirty (more on that later), noisy, and lively. Everyone seems to be talking all the time, often over each other. Outside the few modern sections of Lagos (and probably the capital, Abuja), Nigerian cities are made of endless winding roads and alleys periodically packed with open-air markets. Middle class and rich people all live behind walls topped with barbed wire or broken glass, and are protected by guards. Poor people live in slums that sprawl eternally in and around the cities, consisting of concrete, wood, or metal hovels stuffed into every square inch of space. A significant chunk of Lagos holds slums built on stilts on the water populated by fisherman and boat people.

I wasn’t sure if Nigeria or India is the poorest country I’ve been to by sheer number of impoverished people. It turns out there is much tighter competition here than I thought (...)

You really do feel it on the ground. I’ve been to a lot of poor countries, but Nigeria felt just a bit poorer. Part of it was the omnipresent shacks and slums in the major cities, but it was also the constant haggling over extremely small amounts of money (often under $0.50), or how even decent restaurants have ugly florescent fluorescent lighting, or how a chair collapsed under me in the airport, or how my driver in Kano stopped for a 30 minute detour to buy a bag of rice. I’ve encountered plenty of child beggars, but I’ve never had two (a boy and girl) grab each of my hands and refuse to let go as they followed me down the street for 100 yards until a helpful onlooker yelled at them.

Or maybe it’s the literal piss and shit that makes Nigeria seem so poor, though in my experience, this is another area where Nigeria has a close rivalry with India. There is no other way to say this – I saw a lot of people pissing and shitting, and not in bathrooms. I saw them do it on the side of the street, in alleyways, basically anywhere. I actually saw it on my first night, when a guy pissed out the side of a boat in the open, and then I saw it again on my final day, when a guy was squatting on the side of the road leading out of Nigeria and into Benin. (...)

Different parts of Nigeria look and feel extremely different. Lagos is a megatropolis reminiscent of Manila or cities in India, while Kano looks like it could be in the Middle East. Lagos is the NYC of Nigeria, the bustling heart of commerce with lots of waterways and canals and some extreme luxury areas. It’s definitely more socially liberal (there are advertisements for alcohol, women sometimes show cleavage) and has a tropical climate with a nice breeze from the ocean. There are KFCs and Domino’s, though oddly no McDonalds. I saw one white guy my entire time in the city.

Kano, the capital of the Islamic northern desert; it’s quieter, dusty, dry, the women are almost all covered in headscarves (they almost never spoke to me), and the men wear long Islamic robes and those little fez-like hats. Throughout the day, you’ll see people praying by the side of the street in little groups, and my driver had to pull over at one point for one of his prayers. The marketplace sells camels even though no one rides them and almost no one eats them, but my guide said Muslims love them. I didn’t see any white people in Kano (but a few Chinese and Arabs) and thus stood out more than in Lagos, but Kanoans love when I hit them with a little “as-salaam-alaikum.” (...)

The Savant Dictator

I want to preemptively acknowledge that Sani Abacha was a terrible human being who killed, imprisoned, and tortured thousands of people while engaging in an unprecedented amount of national looting. And he did all this about 20-25 years ago, so his victims and their descendants are mostly still alive.

With that said, I can also say that Abacha is probably my favorite African dictator. Not “favorite” in the sense that he was good or heroic or even tragic, but favorite in the sense of being interesting.

I don’t know if Abacha was literally autistic or something, but that’s how he seems based on his depictions, and Paul Kenyon even calls him an “idiot savant.” Kenyon relates that when Abacha was a child, he was so shy and reserved that some people thought he was mentally challenged.  Adult Abacha is described as:

“Unemotional, often mute, always difficult to read.”

“Some interpreted his personality as a sign he should be feared. Others thought he was just stupid.”

A savant is basically someone who has innate mental challenges but is extremely competent in a particular narrow domain. Some savants become obsessed with trains and become great engineers. Some become obsessed with computers and build software wonders. One of Abacha’s predecessors said of him:

“He might not be bright upstairs, but he knows how to overthrow governments.”

Kenyon elaborates:

“It was as if Abacha was an idiot savant. Dull, even gormless, he filled his days with cowboy movies and sleeping off the previous night’s indulgences in alcohol and prostitutes. But he was prossessed of a prodigious flair when it came to coups.” (...)

Abacha proved to possess one of the most unfortunate attributes of a cruel African dictator – competence. His strategy was simple – the oil must flow. He made deals and gave bribes to some of the more prolific oil thieves (more on that later), and deployed the military and his death squad to the Niger Delta to protect Nigerian and foreign oil drilling operations. Early in his reign, Abacha chose an old schoolmate to lead the crackdown and promised him an ongoing cut of the oil revenue in exchange. Together, Abacha and his friend devised a strategy wherein they regularly deployed some undercover black ops soldiers into the Niger Delta, the soldiers would randomly slaughter villagers, and then some other soldiers would spread rumors that the slaughter was done by a rival ethnic group. This would typically spark local tribal wars that would both sap the strength of potential oil thieves and redirect anti-Abacha sentiment.

The result was an increase in oil production by about 50% during Abacha’s reign, which, on paper at least, pointed Nigeria in the right direction. Under Abacha, foreign currency reserves rose from $494 million to $9.6 billion, external debt was reduced from $36 billion to $27 billion, inflation fell from 54% to 8.5%, and Nigeria’s roadways were considerably expanded.

While the Nigerian economy did pretty well, Abacha and his family did much better. A 2004 report ranked Abacha the fourth most successful kleptocratic African dictator, with his family stealing up to $5 billion in government funds, $480 million of which would later be seized by the American government.

Abacha accomplished this staggering level of theft in a mere five years, and all while being a reclusive weirdo. 

by Matt Lakeman | Read more:
Image: Matt Lakeman
[ed. Just found Matt's site from another reference. I doubt anyone even knows where Nigeria is, let alone anything about it. This and the following essay are, I think, fascinating.]

Everything You Might Want to Know about Whaling

I think whaling is really cool. I can’t help it. It’s one of those things like guns and war and space colonization which hits the adventurous id. The idea that people used to go out in tiny boats into the middle of oceans and try to kill the biggest animals to ever exist on planet earth with glorified spears to extract organic material for fuel is awesome. It’s like something out of a fantasy novel.

So I embarked on this project to understand everything I could about whaling. I wanted to know why burning whale fat in lamps was the best way to light cities for about 50 years. I wanted to know how profitable whaling was, what the hunters were paid, and how many whaleships were lost at sea. I wanted to know why the classical image of whaling was associated with America and what other countries have whaling legacies. I wanted to know if the whaling industry wiped out the whales and if they can recover.

This essay is the result. It is over 30,000 words long, a new record for my blogging. It’s broken into seven parts linked here:

Part I – Economic Value of a Whale

• Breakdown of the parts of a whale which have been harvested and commercially traded throughout history
• Description and valuations of whale oil, meat, baleen, and other resources
• Attempts at estimating quantities of resources extracted from a single whale

Part II – Hunting

• Breakdown of the whale hunting methods throughout history
• Shore hunting, ocean hunting, and technological evolutions in hunting
• The many ways whale hunting can go wrong

Part III – Early Whaling History (6,000 BC-1700 AD)

• Overview of the origins of whaling
• Estimated value of a beached whale
• The commercial success of Basque whaling

Part IV – The Anglo Whaling War (1700-1815)

• Tracking the ascendancy of British whaling based on subsidies, tariffs, and military dominance
• Tracking the challenge of early American whaling based on innovation
• Explanation of why American whaling triumphed

Part V – The Golden Age of Whaling (1815-1861)

• Examination of the high point of global whaling, when whaling was one of the most important industries on earth
• Most in depth description of the economics and experience of whaling – 50% labor desertion rate, highly inconsistent payout matrix, 6% of voyages never returned, etc.
• Golden Age whaling did not have a significant impact on global whaling populations

Part VI – The Industrial Age (1865-1986)

• Fall of US dominance, rise of Norway and then European competition
• Overview of early attempts to restrict whaling for environmental purposes, and why they failed
• Collapse of whaling population, estimated species populations before and after industrial whaling

Part VII – Modern Whaling (1987-Present)

• Present state of whaling legality and population impacts
• Norway and Japan continue to hunt whales for opaque cultural reasons
• Commercial whaling can return, but I’m not sure if it should

As with my deep dive into K-pop, I advise that if you are interested in whaling, but not that interested, you should skip some sections and focus on others. Parts I and II are short and get into the fun nitty-gritty details of the practice of whaling. Parts III and IV are more about the history of the industry and how it interacted with politics, trade policy, etc, and are the most easily skipped sections. Part V is the longest and (IMO) most interesting section; it’s both an overview of American whaling and a deep dive into the economics of the industry, including crew payouts, profitability, venture earnings, and the impact of whaling on the global whale population. Part VI and VII bridge the gap between the high point of whaling and its near death in the modern age.

by Matt Lakeman |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Excellent (and packed with all kinds of whale-related minutiae and pictures). Here are a couple excerpts, selected randomly:]

"The stereotypical whaler crewman was uneducated, illiterate or barely literate, and had no hope for work beyond manual labor. He joined a whaling venture either because he was highly risk-tolerant, ignorant of the payout matrix, in debt to the whaling company, or was literally tricked into signing up. He may have purposefully been targeted by a whaling agent because he was too dumb to understand the lay system and how bad of a deal he was getting. He was very likely malnourished, missing teeth, an alcoholic by modern standards, and there was a good chance he had a venereal disease. He was a nominal Christian, but never prayed unless he was in a storm at sea. He had close to a 50% chance of deserting the voyage before it finished." (....)

The Norweigan Revival

Norway is a country of 5 million people sitting on the 22nd largest oil reserve in the world. Their annoyingly efficient oil-backed sovereign wealth fund currently holds over $1 trillion in assets, or $195,000 per Norwegian citizen. Norwegians love oil.

That appreciation for black goopy stuff started in the late 1880s when its whaling industry kicked off. They had whaled before then, but on a small scale. The problem wasn’t a lack of willingness or experienced crewmen, but a matter of speed. The Norwegian coastline was teeming with rorquals, a group of baleen whales which includes blues, minkes, and fins. While sperm whales lumber along at an average of 4 knots/hour (4.6 mph), minkes swim about 3X faster, which makes tracking their surfacing “sporadic” and “hard to follow.” The old 19th century whaleships were barely faster than sperm whales, and had no hope of pursuing rorquals, let alone successfully harpooning one. Blues and fins were occasionally caught, but only if they were sick or by sheer monumental luck.

By the turn of the 20th century, technology had leveled the playing field. As explained in Part II, ships were significantly faster, and hand-thrown harpoons were replaced by harpoon cannons tipped with explosives. Experimental forms of these weapons were developed in the mid-1800s, but largely ignored by a stalwart and declining American whaling industry. For reasons not clear to me, they became more popular in Europe despite the apparent downside of rendering unsalvageable a far higher number of whales.

Norway had all the factors for a whaling revival. It had a large (relative to its population) and experienced fishing industry with highly skilled laborers used to working in the frigid and harsh seas that whales frequented. Being poor at the time, Norway could harvest home-grown whale oil more cheaply than it could import petroleum from the crowded European market, plus whale oil derivatives were becoming an increasingly viable crop fertilizer. And though Norway has famously beautiful terrain, it is also infamously unsuited to farming and raising livestock, hence its large fishing industry, and hence whales emerging as a new and highly-valued source of meat."

The Great Filter & Global Catastrophic Risk

The Great Filter is the idea that in the development of life from the earliest stages of abiogenesis to reaching the highest levels of development on the Kardashev scale, there is a barrier to development that makes detectable extraterrestrial life exceedingly rare. The Great Filter is one possible resolution of the Fermi paradox.

The concept originates in Robin Hanson's argument that the failure to find any extraterrestrial civilizations in the observable universe implies that something is wrong with one or more of the arguments (from various scientific disciplines) that the appearance of advanced intelligent life is probable; this observation is conceptualized in terms of a "Great Filter" which acts to reduce the great number of sites where intelligent life might arise to the tiny number of intelligent species with advanced civilizations actually observed (currently just one: human). This probability threshold, which could lie in the past or following human extinction, might work as a barrier to the evolution of intelligent life, or as a high probability of self-destruction. The main conclusion of this argument is that the easier it was for life to evolve to the present stage, the bleaker the future chances of humanity probably are.

The idea was first proposed in an online essay titled "The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It?", written by economist Robin Hanson. The first version was written in August 1996 and the article was last updated on September 15, 1998. Hanson's formulation has received recognition in several published sources discussing the Fermi paradox and its implications. (...)

Fermi paradox

There is no reliable evidence that aliens have visited Earth; we have observed no intelligent extraterrestrial life with current technology, nor has SETI found any transmissions from other civilizations. The Universe, apart from the Earth, seems "dead"; Hanson states:

Our planet and solar system, however, don't look substantially colonized by advanced competitive life from the stars, and neither does anything else we see. To the contrary, we have had great success at explaining the behavior of our planet and solar system, nearby stars, our galaxy, and even other galaxies, via simple "dead" physical processes, rather than the complex purposeful processes of advanced life.

Life is expected to expand to fill all available niches. With technology such as self-replicating spacecraft, these niches would include neighboring star systems and even, on longer time scales which are still small compared to the age of the universe, other galaxies. Hanson notes, "If such advanced life had substantially colonized our planet, we would know it by now." (...)

The Great Filter

With no evidence of intelligent life in places other than the Earth, it appears that the process of starting with a star and ending with "advanced explosive lasting life" must be unlikely. This implies that at least one step in this process must be improbable. 

Hanson's list, while incomplete, describes the following nine steps in an "evolutionary path" that results in the colonization of the observable universe:

1. The right star system (including organics and potentially habitable planets)
2. Reproductive molecules (e.g. RNA)
3. Simple (prokaryotic) single-cell life
4. Complex (eukaryotic) single-cell life
5. Sexual reproduction
6. Multi-cell life
7. Tool-using animals with intelligence
8. A civilization advancing toward the potential for a colonization explosion (where we are now)
9. Colonization explosion

According to the Great Filter hypothesis, at least one of these steps—if the list were complete—must be improbable. If it is not an early step (i.e., in the past), then the implication is that the improbable step lies in the future and humanity's prospects of reaching step 9 (interstellar colonization) are still bleak. If the past steps are likely, then many civilizations would have developed to the current level of the human species. However, none appear to have made it to step 9, or the Milky Way would be full of colonies. So perhaps step 9 is the unlikely one, and the only things that appear likely to keep us from step 9 are some sort of catastrophe, an underestimation of the impact of procrastination as technology increasingly unburdens existence, or resource exhaustion leading to the impossibility of making the step due to consumption of the available resources (for example highly constrained energy resources). So by this argument, finding multicellular life on Mars (provided it evolved independently) would be bad news, since it would imply steps 2–6 are easy, and hence only 1, 7, 8 or 9 (or some unknown step) could be the big problem.

***

Global Catastrophic Risk

A global catastrophic risk or a doomsday scenario is a hypothetical future event that could damage human well-being on a global scale, even endangering or destroying modern civilization. An event that could cause human extinction or permanently and drastically curtail humanity's potential is known as an "existential risk." (...)

Defining global catastrophic risks

The term global catastrophic risk "lacks a sharp definition", and generally refers (loosely) to a risk that could inflict "serious damage to human well-being on a global scale".

Humanity has suffered large catastrophes before. Some of these have caused serious damage but were only local in scope—e.g. the Black Death may have resulted in the deaths of a third of Europe's population, 10% of the global population at the time. Some were global, but were not as severe—e.g. the 1918 influenza pandemic killed an estimated 3–6% of the world's population. Most global catastrophic risks would not be so intense as to kill the majority of life on earth, but even if one did, the ecosystem and humanity would eventually recover (in contrast to existential risks).

Potential sources of risk
Main article: Global catastrophe scenarios

Potential global catastrophic risks are conventionally classified as anthropogenic or non-anthropogenic hazards. Examples of non-anthropogenic risks are an asteroid impact event, a supervolcanic eruption, a natural pandemic, a lethal gamma-ray burst, a geomagnetic storm from a coronal mass ejection destroying electronic equipment, natural long-term climate change, hostile extraterrestrial life, or the predictable Sun transforming into a red giant star engulfing the Earth.

Anthropogenic risks are those caused by humans and include those related to technology, governance, and climate change. Technological risks include the creation of artificial intelligence misaligned with human goals, biotechnology, and nanotechnology. Insufficient or malign global governance creates risks in the social and political domain, such as global war and nuclear holocaust, biological warfare and bioterrorism using genetically modified organisms, cyberwarfare and cyberterrorism destroying critical infrastructure like the electrical grid, or radiological warfare using weapons such as large cobalt bombs. Global catastrophic risks in the domain of earth system governance include global warming, environmental degradation, extinction of species, famine as a result of non-equitable resource distribution, human overpopulation, crop failures, and non-sustainable agriculture.

by Wikipedia |  Read more: here (Great Filter); and here (Global Catastrophic Risks)

Image: NRAO/AUI/NSF; J. Hellerman via:

[ed. Several links removed to enhance readability. Eventually somebody is going to figure out how to use AI to mine Wikipedia for interesting stuff that nobody is aware of. Maybe they already have and I'm just not aware of it. Bonus link from this topic: Self-replicating spacecraft.]

@hary_k_photo
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Andrezj Dudzinzki
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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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