F-35 Sustainment Costs: $1.27 Trillion

DOD Needs to Cut Billions in Estimated Costs to Achieve Affordability

DOD plans to acquire nearly 2,500 F-35 aircraft for about $400 billion. It projects spending another $1.27 trillion to operate and sustain them—an estimate that has steadily increased since 2012.

The military services collectively face tens of billions of dollars in sustainment costs that they project will be unaffordable. For example, the Air Force needs to reduce estimated annual per-plane costs by $3.7 million (47%) by 2036, or costs in that year alone will be $4.4 billion more than it can afford. (...)

F-35 mission capable rates—a measure of the readiness of an aircraft fleet—have recently improved, but still fall short of warfighter requirements. Specifically, from fiscal year 2019 to fiscal year 2020, the U.S. F-35 fleet's average annual (1) mission capable rate—the percentage of time during which the aircraft can fly and perform one of its tasked missions—improved from 59 to 69 percent; and (2) full mission capable rate—the percentage of time during which the aircraft can perform all of its tasked missions—improved from 32 to 39 percent. Both metrics fall below the services' objectives. For example, in fiscal year 2020 the Air Force F-35A full mission capable rate was 54 percent, versus a 72 percent objective.

Since 2012, F-35 estimated sustainment costs over its 66-year life cycle have increased steadily, from $1.11 trillion to $1.27 trillion, despite efforts to reduce costs. The services face a substantial and growing gap between estimated sustainment costs and affordability constraints—i.e., costs per tail (aircraft) per year that the services project they can afford—totaling about $6 billion in 2036 alone (see fig.). The services will collectively be confronted with tens of billions of dollars in sustainment costs that they project as unaffordable during the program.

by US Government Accountability Office (GAO |  Read more:

Image: US Air Force/Senior Airman Alexander Cook via

[ed. Why? See also: Flying the F-35 stealth fighter can leave pilots looking 'like they are 100 years old,' says test pilot (Business Insider).]

Will GPT Models Choke on Their Own Exhaust?

Until about now, most of the text online was written by humans. But this text has been used to train GPT3(.5) and GPT4, and these have popped up as writing assistants in our editing tools. So more and more of the text will be written by large language models (LLMs). Where does it all lead? What will happen to GPT-{n} once LLMs contribute most of the language found online?

And it’s not just text. If you train a music model on Mozart, you can expect output that’s a bit like Mozart but without the sparkle – let’s call it ‘Salieri’. And if Salieri now trains the next generation, and so on, what will the fifth or sixth generation sound like?

In our latest paper, we show that using model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects. The tails of the original content distribution disappear. Within a few generations, text becomes garbage, as Gaussian distributions converge and may even become delta functions. We call this effect model collapse.

Just as we’ve strewn the oceans with plastic trash and filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, so we’re about to fill the Internet with blah. This will make it harder to train newer models by scraping the web, giving an advantage to firms which already did that, or which control access to human interfaces at scale. Indeed, we already see AI startups hammering the Internet Archive for training data.

After we published this paper, we noticed that Ted Chiang had already commented on the effect in February, noting that ChatGPT is like a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Internet, and that copies of copies get worse. In our paper we work through the math, explain the effect in detail, and show that it is universal.

by Ross Anderson, Light Blue Touchpaper |  Read more:

Image: Reddit via:

[ed. Do read Ted Chiang's excellent essay - ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web; and also: The Age of Chat (New Yorker - excerpt below). I had to work with N.P.C's all my career and until now didn't have a good term for them, other than idiots...lol.]

"The gaming industry has long relied on various forms of what might be called A.I., and at G.D.C. at least two of the talks addressed the use of large language models and generative A.I. in game development. They were focussed specifically on the construction of non-player characters, or N.P.C.s: simple, purely instrumental dramatis personae—villagers, forest creatures, combat enemies, and the like—who offer scripted, constrained, utilitarian lines of dialogue, known as barks. (“Hi there”; “Have you heard?”; “Look out!”) N.P.C.s are meant to make a game feel populated, busy, and multidimensional, without being too distracting. Meanwhile, outside of gaming, the N.P.C. has become a sort of meme. In 2018, the Times identified the term “N.P.C.” as “the Pro-Trump Internet’s new favorite insult,” after right-wing Internet users began using it to describe their political opponents as mechanical chumps brainwashed by political orthodoxy. These days, “N.P.C.” can be used to describe another person, or oneself, as generic—basic, reproducible, ancillary, pre-written, powerless.

When I considered the possibilities of N.P.C.s powered by L.L.M.s, I imagined self-replenishing worlds of talk, with every object and character endowed with personality. I pictured solicitous orcs, garrulous venders, bantering flora. In reality, the vision was more workaday. N.P.C.s “may be talking to the player, to each other, or to themselves—but they must speak without hesitation, repetition, or deviation from the narrative design,” the summary for one of the talks, given by Ben Swanson, a researcher at Ubisoft, read. Swanson’s presentation promoted Ubisoft’s Ghostwriter program, an application designed to reduce the busywork involved in creating branching “trees” of dialogue, in which the same types of conversations occur many times, slightly permuted depending on what players say. Ghostwriter uses a large language model to suggest potential barks for N.P.C.s, based on various criteria inputted by humans, who then vet the model’s output. The player doesn’t directly engage the A.I.

Yet it seems likely that “conversations” with A.I. will become more common in the coming years. Large language models are being added to search engines and e-commerce sites, and into word processors and spreadsheet software. In theory, the capabilities of voice assistants, such as Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa, could become more complex and layered. Call centers are introducing A.I. “assistants”; Amazon is allegedly building a chatbot; and Wendy’s, the fast-food chain, has been promoting a drive-through A.I. Earlier this spring, the Khan Lab School, a small private school in Palo Alto, introduced an experimental tutoring bot to its students, and the National Eating Disorders Association tried replacing its human-run telephone helpline with a bot dubbed Tessa. (neda suspended the service after Tessa gave harmful advice to callers.)

Chatbots are not the end point of L.L.M.s. Arguably, the technology’s most impressive capabilities have less to do with conversation and more to do with processing data—unearthing and imitating patterns, regurgitating inputs to produce something close to summaries—of which conversational text is just one type. Still, it seems that the future could hold endless opportunities for small talk with indefatigable interlocutors. Some of this talk will be written, and some may be conducted through verbal interfaces that respond to spoken commands, queries, and other inputs. Anything hooked up to a database could effectively become a bot, or an N.P.C., whether in virtual or physical space. We could be entering an age characterized by endless chat—useful or skimmable, and bottomless by design."

This C.S. Lewis Novel Helps Explain the Weirdness of 2023

Recently I reread C.S. Lewis’s 1945 novel, “That Hideous Strength,” the last book in his Space Trilogy, and since I wrote about aliens last weekend it seems like a good week to talk a little bit about the novel’s contemporary relevance.

For those who haven’t read it, the book is a curious hybrid, mixing the anti-totalitarian style of dystopia familiar from Lewis’s contemporaries like George Orwell and Aldous Huxley with a blend of supernaturalism and science fiction that anticipates Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time,” among other works. (Lewis’s preferred subtitle for “That Hideous Strength” was “A Modern Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups.”)

The story introduces a near-future Britain falling under the sway of a scientistic technocracy, the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.), which looks like the World State from Huxley’s “Brave New World” in embryo. But as one of the characters is drawn closer to N.I.C.E.’s inner ring, he discovers that the most powerful technocrats are supernaturalists, endeavoring to raise the dead, to contact dark supernatural entities and even to revive a slumbering Merlin to aid them in their plans.

I’ll say no more about the plot mechanics except to observe that they boldly operate in the risky zone between the sublime and the ridiculous. But just from that sketch I’ll draw out a couple of points about the book’s interest for our own times.

First, the idea that technological ambition and occult magic can have a closer-than-expected relationship feels quite relevant to the strange era we’ve entered recently — where Silicon Valley rationalists are turning “postrationalist,” where hallucinogen-mediated spiritual experiences are being touted as self-care for the cognoscenti, where U.F.O. sightings and alien encounters are back on the cultural menu, where people talk about innovations in A.I. the way they might talk about a golem or a djinn.

The idea that deep in the core of, say, some important digital-age enterprise there might be a group of people trying to commune with the spirit world doesn’t seem particularly fanciful at this point. (For a small example of what I mean, just read this 2021 account of life inside one of the stranger tech-associated research institutes.) Although like some of the characters in “That Hideous Strength,” these spiritualists would probably be telling themselves that they’re just doing high-level science, maybe puncturing an alternate dimension or unlocking the hidden potential of the human mind.

Then, too, the book’s totalitarian dystopia is interesting for being incomplete, contested and plagued by inner rivalries and contradictions. Unlike in “Brave New World” and “1984,” we don’t see a one-party regime holding absolute sway; in Lewis’s story, we see a still-disguised tyranny taking shape but still falling prey to various all-too-human problems, blunders and failures that contrast with the smooth dominance of Orwell’s O’Brien or Huxley’s Mustapha Mond.

Lewis, no less than his fellow mid-20th-century speculators, feared the rise of what he dubbed the “controllers” — basically a hyper-intelligent, omnicompetent bureaucratic caste granted extraordinary powers by modern science and technology and bent on reshaping human nature to fit some ideal of stability or ideology or both. And that vision still informs a lot of contemporary anxieties, from Covid-era fears about biosurveillance and digital censorship to more recent anxieties about what the invention of super-intelligence might mean for human equality and freedom.

But the relative incompetence of the would-be controllers in Lewis’s novel, their prideful overestimation of their faculties and their reckless spiritual gambles seem better fitted to the world we inhabit — in which powerful institutions seeking global mastery are constantly frustrated by the blowback to their stratagems, and our elites are storm-tossed by social, political and psychic forces they don’t expect or recklessly unleash. (...)

I’m a defender of conspiracy theorizing as a legitimate form of speculation — because conspiracies and weird secrets really are part of the fabric of existence, official knowledge only goes so far, and if you leave certain kinds of speculation to the paranoid, you’ll be constantly surprised when it turns out they were on to something. But a typical folly of conspiracists is to leap from a weird pattern (which the U.F.O. phenomenon certainly presents) or a scattering of bizarre details to a scenario that requires everyone to be in on the secret, at least aware of the mind-blowing truth if not participating in the plot.

by Ross Douthat, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Alain Pilon
[ed. In a sense, everything is a conspiracy - business, politics, national security - everything - if one defines it as an act of people conspiring with each other to achieve some specific purpose. Propaganda is conspiracy. Advertising. The world is a complex place, and conspiracy thinking is fundamentally a response to the helplessness/ambivalence many people feel when buffeted by forces over which they have little or no control (and even then, perhaps, a hope that someone or something actually is in control). And, as Lauren Oyler has observed: "something of a misdirection... a tool for distraction and a way to manipulate people who might need a sense of purpose, clarity, or self-esteem. (...) You could say conspiracy theories are like bad fiction, which attempts to tie everything up and explain it all. Neither leave room for randomness or pointlessness or meaninglessness. But life is full of all these, and our desire to eliminate them leads us down narrower and narrower paths." See also: Does the U.S. Government Want You to Believe in U.F.O.s? (NYT):]

"The possibility of literal spacecraft stashed in U.S. government hangars, meanwhile, piles up two immense-seeming improbabilities. First, that inhuman species cross oceans of space or leap interdimensional barriers using unfathomable technology and yet somehow keep crashing and leaving souvenirs behind. Second, that human governments have been collecting evidence for generations without the truth ever being leaked or uncovered or just blurted out by Donald Trump.

But this whistle-blower’s mere existence is evidence of a fascinating shift in public U.F.O. discourse. There may not be alien spacecraft, but there is clearly now a faction within the national security complex that wants Americans to think there might be alien spacecraft, to give these stories credence rather than dismissal.

The evidence for this shift includes the military’s newfound willingness to disclose weird atmospheric encounters."

Turnpike Troubadours

[ed. A buddy's favorite. Texas honky tonk.]

Image: uncredited
via:
[ed. A strong disincentive to moving.]

Cultural Amnesia: Revisiting Doom-and-Gloom Forecasts

Netflix movies by decade

Last year I looked skeptically at the myth of the long tail—a theory that promised more cultural choices and options in the digital age.

“The Long Tail is a cruel joke,” I wrote. “It’s a fairy tale we’re told to make us feel good about all those marginalized creative endeavors. . . . We live in a Short Tail society. And it’s getting shorter all the time.”

And what’s happening now? (...)

Here’s a breakdown of movies on Netflix by decade—the online archive where cinema history goes to die. (above)

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: AdWeek

[ed. Interesting graphic. See also: Where Did the Long Tail Go? (THB):

"Not only has Netflix sharply reduced the number of movies it offers on its streaming platform, but now has a lot of competitors (Disney, Apple, Paramount, etc.) that are also tightly managing the titles they feature."

Also, this: I warned in December that TikTok may have already peaked. But new numbers show how quickly the decline is taking place.

AdWeek

Tom Gauld
via:

Travelers to Unimaginable Lands

The complex relationship between the mind of someone with dementia and the mind of the person caring for them.

Travelers to Unimaginable Lands is that rarity: true biblio-therapy. Lucid, mature, wise, with hardly a wasted word, it not only deepens our understanding of what transpires as we care for a loved one with Alzheimer’s, it also has the potential to be powerfully therapeutic, offering the kind of support and reorientation so essential to the millions of people struggling with the long, often agonizing leave-taking of loved ones stricken with the dreaded disease. The book is based on a profound insight: the concept of “dementia blindness,” which identifies a singular problem of caring for people with dementia disorders—one that has generally escaped notice but, once understood, may make a significant difference for many caregivers. (...)

Travelers is sorely needed, for several reasons. As of this moment, none of the mainstream drugs for dementia disorders does much to reverse cognitive decline, except to offer a few months of lessening symptoms. When it comes to the treatment of people with Alzheimer’s, all the promissory notes of medical science, and the monthly hype about a single magic bullet that will cure this disease, clash with real-world medicine. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly clear that the amyloid hypothesis upon which so many of these claims have been based—the idea that Alzheimer’s is caused by nothing but the buildup of plaque in the brain—is woefully inadequate to explain the disease.

In the meantime, it is up to family members and friends, where possible, to take care of their loved ones for much of the duration of their cognitive and physical decline. And yet there has been far too little clinical attention paid to the caregivers themselves. How can we help them through a process that is profoundly difficult, if not traumatic? Remember, alongside the rigors of providing day-to-day care, the caregivers often suffer from what might best be called “anticipatory grief,” as familiar aspects of their loved ones slip away. And this may be compounded by a fear, in family members, that they might inherit the disease unfolding in front of them. (...)

Alzheimer’s has different presentations and takes a different course in each patient, depending, in part, on where the process begins in the brain. That said, it’s often noted that Alzheimer’s interferes with short-term memory, leads to other deficits, includes a lot of denial, and, ultimately, leads many victims to gradually “lose their minds.”

The genius of this book is to show more precisely the process of resisting such losses as it unfolds between patient and caregiver, affecting not just one but both. To learn about this process is surprisingly helpful—not curative, but helpful.

Travelers to Unimaginable Lands clarifies why we, the caregivers, often behave like Sisyphus of the Greek myth, doomed eternally to roll a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll down again. In similar fashion, we find ourselves repeating the same errors, making the same requests, and getting pulled into the same power struggles, pointless quarrels, and seething ambivalences as we care for our patients. This is partly because Alzheimer’s patients seem unable to learn from their mistakes. But it is also because, weirdly enough, caregivers experience the same problem. In an uncanny mirroring, we get pulled into a parallel process with our charges, forgetting what happened yesterday, repeating what didn’t work last time, becoming ever more prone to agitation and impatience, even as we’re engaged in a trial of devotion that pushes love to its limit.

Why does this happen? Precisely because, as Kiper shows, the healthy brain has evolved to automatically attribute to other people the existence of a self that is sustained over time, has self-reflective capacities, and is capable of learning and absorbing new information. This attribution is the brain’s unconscious default position, or cognitive-emotional bias, and does not simply disappear when we become caregivers for people whose own brains begin to falter. It is the invisible projection upon which each human encounter begins, a projection that is implicit in our every conversation and even in the structure of human language itself.

When we say “you,” we believe we’re talking to another “self,” an essence, or perhaps process, that somehow persists over time. But this self—and the continuity it implies— depends on having the memory capacity to knit together our different mental states. This same capacity contributes to the ability to self-reflect, which is a key component of human consciousness. Alzheimer’s and related dementia disorders silently strip their victims of the cognitive infrastructure that helps construct this self.

The “loss of self” described in the Alzheimer’s literature can happen slowly—over a decade in some cases—and may be stealthy enough that neither the victim (and this is the key point) nor the caregiver appreciates its full extent. Alzhei­mer’s notwithstanding, the person remains in front of us, in their usual form and appearance, exhibiting the same expres­sions, carrying the same music in their voices, evoking in us thousands of familiar memories and emotional associations. There are better and worse days, and sometimes the old self seems to return, with strong will intact—a viable simulacrum of who they once were. Clearly, there is a person there.

Yet as the disease advances, we may come to see just the shell or the husk of the self we once knew. But this new understanding does not stop us from projecting a continu­ous self, because, as Kiper explains, it is the brain’s default position—that is, we cannot help but see what was once there. This brilliant insight is the entry point into the hitherto difficult-to-imagine land she goes on to describe.

We often say of people caught in this bind—knowing the loved one’s self is diminished but continuing to see it as whole—that they are “in denial,” as if this was only a defense mechanism at work. But that is a misapplication of the valuable term “denial.” Yes, there can be denial, and Kiper describes some of it. But those caught in the Sisyphean entanglement are not simply denying that their loved ones are ill—after all, they’re the ones accepting infirmity and trying to help. Though it may accompany denial or even reinforce it, dementia blindness isn’t simply the defense mechanism of a stressed mind; it is, as Kiper shows, a product of how the healthy mind normally works.

by Norman Doige, Tablet |  Read more:

Image: Alain Jocard/AFP/Getty Images

Crispy, Salty, Salmon Skin

Make salty, crispy skin the star of your salmon dinner

So, you go to start up the backyard grill, open it and find two dry, forgotten, charred salmon skins left from the last time someone grilled a couple fillets and forgot to clean up. Sound familiar? The other day, I came across a couple of these skins on a friend’s grill, and then I started thinking about how delicious crispy salmon skin is. What if instead of being something we leave on the grill, the crispy charred skin becomes the showpiece?

That’s what led me into a week of trying techniques for cooking salmon that get skin extra crispy and delicious. Per-pound prices on early summer red salmon are great, so if you’re curious, now’s the time to try it for yourself.

My favorite technique comes from Seattle-based J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, who wrote last month in The New York Times food section about dry-brining. This technique really blew my mind because it was so simple and made for glorious perfect bites of flavorful salmon with extra crispy skin. He offers the option of broiling the fish, but I went with his pan-fry technique. I modified his instructions slightly because of what I had on hand. The only essential tool is a good instant-read thermometer.

Here’s what I used, which was enough for four people:

• One red salmon fillet, weighing roughly a pound

• A teaspoon of sea salt

• Canola oil

Following Lopez-Alt’s instructions, I dried my fillet well, covered it with the salt and put it in a paper towel-lined lasagna pan. I then put it in the fridge uncovered for 8 hours. (My fridge smelled fine.) It came out dry and a little sticky on the outside — it reminded me of the smoking process when you dry salmon after a wet brine to form a pellicle.

When I was ready to cook, I cut the fish into individual portions. After that, I heated a large frying pan over medium-low heat, rubbed the portions down with a little neutral oil and fried them for about 5 minutes, skin-side down. When the skin was brown and crispy, I had no trouble separating them from the cooking surface with a spatula.

I flipped them and fried each flesh-side down until it reached about 110 degrees on my instant-read thermometer. That leaves the fish on the rare side. Well done, Lopez-Alt says, is 135 degrees. I did not try cooking salt-brined fish on the grill, but stands to reason it would be extra crispy, well-charred and good.

The next method I liked was to pan-fry the fish on parchment paper — a technique that’s making the rounds on the internet. This method also made for crispy skin — though not quite as flavorful or crispy as the Lopez-Alt method.

Here’s what I used to make roughly enough for two people:

by Julia O'Malley, ADN |  Read more:

Image: Julia O'Malley

Trapped Priors

Introduction and review

Last month I talked about van der Bergh et al’s work on the precision of sensory evidence, which introduced the idea of a trapped prior. I think this concept has far-reaching implications for the rationalist project as a whole. I want to re-derive it, explain it more intuitively, then talk about why it might be relevant for things like intellectual, political and religious biases.

To review: the brain combines raw experience (eg sensations, memories) with context (eg priors, expectations, other related sensations and memories) to produce perceptions. You don’t notice this process; you are only able to consciously register the final perception, which feels exactly like raw experience.

A typical optical illusion. The top chess set and the bottom chess set are the same color (grayish). But the top appears white and the bottom black because of the context (darker vs. lighter background). You perceive not the raw experience (grayish color) but the final perception modulated by context; to your conscious mind, it just seems like a brute fact that the top is white and the bottom black, and it is hard to convince yourself otherwise.

Or: maybe you feel like you are using a particular context independent channel (eg hearing). Unbeknownst to you, the information in that channel is being context-modulated by the inputs of a different channel (eg vision). You don’t feel like “this is what I’m hearing, but my vision tells me differently, so I’ll compromise”. You feel like “this is exactly what I heard, with my ears, in a way vision didn’t affect at all”. 

This is called the McGurk Effect. The man is saying the same syllable each time, but depending on what picture of his mouth moving you see, you hear it differently. Your vision is context-modulating your hearing, but it just sounds like hearing something.

The most basic illusion I know of is the Wine Illusion; dye a white wine red, and lots of people will say it tastes like red wine. The raw experience - the taste of the wine itself - is that of a white wine. But the context is that you're drinking a red liquid. Result: it tastes like a red wine. (...)

The placebo effect is almost equally simple. You're in pain, so your doctor gives you a “painkiller” (unbeknownst to you, it’s really a sugar pill). The raw experience is the nerve sending out just as many pain impulses as before. The context is that you've just taken a pill which a doctor assures you will make you feel better. Result: you feel less pain. (...)

The cognitive version of this experience is normal Bayesian reasoning. Suppose you live in an ordinary California suburb and your friend says she saw a coyote on the way to work. You believe her; your raw experience (a friend saying a thing) and your context (coyotes are plentiful in your area) add up to more-likely-than-not. But suppose your friend says she saw a polar bear on the way to work. Now you're doubtful; the raw experience (a friend saying a thing) is the same, but the context (ie the very low prior on polar bears in California) makes it implausible.

Normal Bayesian reasoning slides gradually into confirmation bias. Suppose you are a zealous Democrat. Your friend makes a plausible-sounding argument for a Democratic position. You believe it; your raw experience (an argument that sounds convincing) and your context (the Democrats are great) add up to more-likely-than-not true. But suppose your friend makes a plausible-sounding argument for a Republican position. Now you're doubtful; the raw experience (a friend making an argument with certain inherent plausibility) is the same, but the context (ie your very low prior on the Republicans being right about something) makes it unlikely.

Still, this ought to work eventually. Your friend just has to give you a good enough argument. Each argument will do a little damage to your prior against Republican beliefs. If she can come up with enough good evidence, you have to eventually accept reality, right?

But in fact many political zealots never accept reality. It's not just that they're inherently skeptical of what the other party says. It's that even when something is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, they still won't believe it. This is where we need to bring in the idea of trapped priors.

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: YouTube/uncredited

[ed. Do check out the McGurk video above to get a good sense of how hard-wired this concept is. Going deeper into the weeds, see also: The Canal Papers (ACX).]

Pat Metheny

Steely Dan

A Conservation Group’s Lawsuit Closed an Iconic Alaska Fishery. Now, it’s Pushing for Endangered Species Act Protections for King Salmon.

‘It’ll be a disaster’: Southeast Alaska fishermen fear looming closure of king salmon fishery (ADN).

Images: James Poulson/Daily Sitka Sentinel via AP; Emily Mesner / ADN.
[ed. The southeast Alaska troll fishery is not an existential threat to Washington's orca whales, but some little-known conservation group managed to convince at least one judge. Now they want to shut down nearly all chinook fishing in Alaska: A conservation group’s lawsuit already closed an iconic Alaska fishery. Now, it’s pushing for Endangered Species Act protections for king salmon. (ADN):]

"A Washington-based conservation group whose actions have already caused the closure of an iconic Southeast Alaska fishery is now planning to ask the federal government to list several Alaska king salmon stocks under the Endangered Species Act.

The Wild Fish Conservancy, last month, formally notified the state of Alaska of its plans to file the Endangered Species Act petition for multiple populations of king salmon, also known as chinook — in Southeast Alaska, Southwest Alaska and Cook Inlet. [ed. basically, nearly all of Alaska).]

The Failed Affirmative Action Campaign That Shook Democrats

The 2020 campaign to restore race-conscious affirmative action in California was close to gospel within the Democratic Party. It drew support from the governor, senators, state legislative leaders and a who’s who of business, nonprofit and labor elites, Black, Latino, white and Asian.

The Golden State Warriors, San Francisco Giants and 49ers and Oakland Athletics urged voters to support the referendum, Proposition 16, and remove “systemic barriers.” A commercial noted that Kamala Harris, then a U.S. senator, had endorsed the campaign, and the ad also suggested that to oppose it was to side with white supremacy. Supporters raised many millions of dollars for the referendum and outspent opponents by 19 to 1.

“Vote for racial justice!” urged the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.

None of these efforts persuaded Jimmie Romero, a 63-year-old barber who grew up in the working-class Latino neighborhood of Wilmington in Los Angeles. Homelessness, illegal dumping, spiraling rents: He sat in his shop and listed so many problems.

Affirmative action was not one of those.

“I was upset that they tried to push that,” Mr. Romero recalled in a recent interview. “It was not what matters.”

Mr. Romero was one of millions of California voters, including about half who are Hispanic and a majority who are Asian American, who voted against Proposition 16, which would have restored race-conscious admissions at public universities, and in government hiring and contracting.

The breadth of that rejection shook supporters. California is a liberal bastion and one of the most diverse states in the country. That year, President Biden swamped Donald Trump by 29 percentage points in California, but Proposition 16 went down, with 57 percent of voters opposing it.

That vote constitutes more than just a historical curiosity. The U.S. Supreme Court is soon expected to rule against, or limit, affirmative action in college admissions, which the court supported for decades. (...)

The No Vote: ‘Why Do We Need This?’

Gloria Romero, a Democrat and former majority leader of the State Senate, was term-limited and left politics in 2010 out of frustration with the poor health of public education and her party’s opposition to charter schools.

Ten years later, she voted against affirmative action.

“Why are we going back to the past?” she said. “We’re no longer in a ‘walk over the bridge in Selma’ phase of our civil rights struggle.”

Like many Hispanic voters interviewed, Ms. Romero worried less about blatant discrimination and more about health care, education and housing.

The Hispanic populations is at an inflection point in California, progress vying with lingering disparity. Slightly more than half of public school students are Hispanic, and the percentage of Hispanic undergraduates in the elite University of California system is roughly half that. The well-regarded if less competitive California State system has 23 four-year campuses and almost 460,000 students, and those who are Hispanic make up almost half of the total.

“We’re debating affirmative action when we have more Latinos than ever in college,” Ms. Romero said. (...)

Valerie Contreras, a crane operator, is a proud union member and civic leader in Wilmington, where half the voters were against the referendum. She had little use for the affirmative action campaign.

“It was ridiculous all the racially loaded terms Democrats used,” she said. “It was a distraction from the issues that affect our lives.”

Asian voters spoke of visceral unease. South and East Asians make up just 15 percent of the state population, and 35 percent of the undergraduates in the University of California system.

Affirmative action, to their view, upends traditional measures of merit — grades, test scores and extracurricular activities — and threatens to reduce their numbers. (...)

Kevin Liao, a consultant and former top Democratic Party aide, supported the affirmative action referendum, arguing it would help Asian American small businesses and was the only way universities could deliver diverse classes. High-achieving Asian students will succeed, he said, even if they settle for third or fourth choices in colleges.

He was not surprised, however, that many Asian Americans balked. “The notion that you would look at anything other than pure academic performance is seen by immigrants as antithetical to American values,” he said.

by By Michael Powell and Ilana Marcus, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Voters. Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Anybody Got a Request?

When Someone Requests Fleetwood Mac and This Waitress Steals The Show

[ed. Weird and wonderful (and what's with those diners? really out to lunch... lol). Starting around 2:15]

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).]