The Voters Finally Get Their Say

Finally we vote. Iowa is Monday, New Hampshire a week from Tuesday. I refuse to see the story as over. “Nothing is written.” Both big parties look set on making a mistake, but there’s time to turn it around.

Democrats on the ground are making a mistake in not rebelling against the inevitability of Joe Biden. He’s no longer up to the job, the vice president never was, and this doesn’t go under the heading National Security Secret Number 379, everybody knows.

The problem isn’t the Biden campaign, however lame it may or may not be. It isn’t that the president’s most important advisers are in the White House, not the campaign. It’s him, and it’s not only his age. His speeches are boring, he never seems sincere, he seems propped up. He doesn’t have a tropism toward intellectual content and likes things airy; his subject matter isn’t life as most people are experiencing it but something many steps removed. He often seems like he just met the text.

His advisers would think, “Then we’ll do more interviews,” but he’s not good there either—hesitant, lacking the confidence you must have to express your own thoughts as they arrive in your head. This means we have a president who, in an election year, has no way of communicating effectively, in person, with the American people. He hasn’t provided the sentence that makes the case for his being kept in office, and he hasn’t painted what a second term might look like, what its Great Intention might be.

Democrats on the ground should raise a ruckus, issue a mighty roar. They can do better than this. To win, I think, they must.

Republicans similarly shouldn’t accept the inevitability of Donald Trump. On the debate stage Wednesday Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis were the Bickersons, and seemed smaller. On Fox, in a counterprogramming coup, the former president was Big Daddy with a sinister side, and seemed big. He’s riding high. He thinks he’s got this thing.

In just the past seven days we learned that he refused to sign Illinois’s traditional candidate’s vow not to attempt to overthrow the U.S. government. Everybody signs it and always has. He warned of “bedlam” if he’s convicted in court and he loses the election. A few days before, Rep. Elise Stefanik, major MAGA mover, refused to say, on “Meet the Press,” that she would accept the outcome of the election. Is that all stubbornness and rhetorical posturing, or is it something more, something hiding in plain sight? If there is ever another day like Jan. 6, 2021, it will be led by people who were there the first time and are now better at it. Last time we didn’t wind up in full constitutional crisis, because systems held. Will they next time? Do we really want to find out?

Mr. Trump will say anything for attention; he wants the cameras on him. He says—again, confining ourselves to the past week—the Civil War could have been negotiated and avoided. Heroic figures in Congress for decades attempted precisely that, trying to thwart and limit the spread of slavery while keeping the nation together. Mr. Trump implied Lincoln wanted war: “If he negotiated it, you probably wouldn’t even know who Abraham Lincoln was.” Yes, Lincoln was a cynical, self-aggrandizing pol, not a genius deal maker like Mr. Trump. What an idiot he is.

What is behind a Republican voters’ decision to stick with him?

Hope—he’ll be better than Mr. Biden, he was good until the pandemic and 1/6, but he’s learned.

Pride—you took a lot of guff for past support, you’re not gonna back off now. Identification—he’s a nonelite. Anger—he’s a living rebuke of the system that has produced disorder. Cold calculation—“In a world full of animals, he’s our animal.”

Mischief, sheer humor—his antics make you laugh, and it isn’t a bad feeling to subvert things when you feel what you’re subverting is decadence.

Some other things, I think. Americans have long used political debate as a distraction from their real lives. Once Mr. Trump is in office again you have a job again. When he’s in power he dominates the stage, the national conversation. Everyone is forced to argue about Trump. Your job the next four years is to defend him. It’s a full-time job so you get to ignore your life and what needs fixing in it. These tend to be the hard parts—lost kids, loneliness, job problems. You can’t fix them, you’re too busy saving the nation! You have to avoid them!

The left does this too, maybe more so. But it all got turbocharged in the Trump era.

More seriously—most seriously—deep down a lot of hard-core Trump supporters, and many not so hard-core, think it’s all over. They love America truly and deeply but think the glue that held us together is gone. Religion and Main Street are shrinking into the past, and in the Rite Aid everything’s locked up. School shootings, mass shootings, nobody’s safe, men in the girls’ locker room, race obsessions, a national debt we’ll never control. China, Russia, nukes and cooked-up plagues. If they decide to do a mass cyberattack and take out our electricity for six months we’ll never get through it. Once we would.

I am always struck by how many jolly, kind, cheerful, constructive Americans hold this sense of impending doom in their hearts and go cheerfully through each day anyway.

But they figure if we’re at the end times, he’s the perfect end-times president, a guy who goes boom. (...)

A practical argument would be that whatever the nature or flavor of your conservatism, you surely want to make progress, urgently, with the next Congress. Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley would come in with the whoosh of the new, aim at conservative legislation, know how to use the levers of power, and get things done. Mr. Trump would come in a lame duck (provided he accepts Constitutional proscriptions), do his crazy-man antics, say his crazy-man things, and proceed with a mad blunderer’s imitation of sophistication.

If your intention is to stand and fight and make things better he’d be the least effective choice.

by Peggy Noonan, WSJ |  Read more:

Image: Kyle Mazza/Zuma Press

[ed. Youch. Funny/not funny. Iowa - the official start of the silly season (not that it ever fully goes away). I like to support smart people who actually have an interest in making government work better for reasons other than revenge, personal power, or shoveling more money to rich people (and are, therefore, usually never on the ballot), so my vote goes to -- Elizabeth Warren. See also: You Should Go to a Trump Rally (Atlantic).]

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The Spectacular Failure of Self-Checkout Technology

It's a common sight at many retail stores: a queue of people, waiting to use a self-checkout kiosk, doing their best to remain patient as a lone store worker attends to multiple malfunctioning machines. The frustration mounts while a dozen darkened, roped-off and cashier-less tills sit in the background.

For shoppers, self-checkout was supposed to provide convenience and speed. Retailers hoped it would usher in a new age of cost savings. Their thinking: why pay six employees when you could pay one to oversee customers at self-service registers, as they do their own labour of scanning and bagging for free?

While self-checkout technology has its theoretical selling points for both consumers and businesses, it mostly isn't living up to expectations. Customers are still queueing. They need store employees to help clear kiosk errors or check their identifications for age-restricted items. Stores still need to have workers on-hand to help them, and to service the machines.

The technology is, in some cases, more trouble than it's worth.

"It hasn't delivered anything that it promises," says Christopher Andrews, associate professor and chair of sociology at Drew University, US, and author of The Overworked Consumer: Self-Checkouts, Supermarkets, and the Do-It-Yourself Economy. "Stores saw this as the next frontier… If they could get the consumer to think that [self-checkout] was a preferable way to shop, then they could cut labour costs. But they're finding that people need help doing it, or that they'll steal stuff. They ended up realising that they're not saving money, they're losing money."

Unexpected problems in the bagging area

Many retail companies have invested millions – if not billions – of dollars in self-checkout technology, which Andrews says was first developed during the 1980s, and started appearing in stores in the 1990s. They're not exactly cheap to get into stores: some experts estimate a four-kiosk system can run six figures. (...)

Some retailers cite theft as a motivator for ditching the unstaffed tills. Customers may be more willing to simply swipe merchandise when using a self-service kiosk than they are when face-to-face with a human cashier. Some data shows retailers utilising self-checkout technology have loss rates more than twice the industry average.

In addition to shrink concerns, experts say another failure of self-checkout technology is that, in many cases, it simply doesn't lead to the cost savings businesses hoped for. Just as Dollar General appears poised to add more employees to its check-out areas, presumably increasing staffing costs, other companies have done the same. Despite self-checkout kiosks becoming ubiquitous throughout the past decade or so, the US still has more than 3.3 million cashiers working around the nation, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Humans or machines?

Consumers want this technology to work, and welcomed it with open arms. However, years later, they're still queueing for tills; waiting for store-staff assistance with errors or age checks; and searching high and low for the PLU code of the Walla Walla Sweet Onions they're trying to purchase.

In a 2021 survey of 1,000 American shoppers, 60% of consumers said they prefer to use self-checkout over a staffed checkout aisle when given the choice, yet 67% of consumers have had the technology fail while trying to use it.

The bottom line is businesses want to cut costs, and shoppers want to get in and out of a store. If self-checkout isn't the answer, they'll find another avenue.

"It's not that self-checkout technology is good or bad, per se… [but] if we try self-checkout and realise we're not benefitting from it, we might switch back to not using it," says Amit Kumar, an assistant professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Texas, who studies consumer behaviour and decision-making.

That appears to be happening in many cases, as customers' frustrations with the technology persist. But Andrews says that while stores may change up their strategies – as seen with Dollar General and others – many large retail chains are likely to keep kiosks in stores due to sunk costs. "They spent billions putting it in stores, and are hoping they can still get the public to buy into it," he says. (...)

"It was part of a larger experiment in retail in trying to socialise people into using it," he says. Simply, "customers hate it".

by Sam Becker, BBC |  Read more:

Image: Alarmy

[ed. The technology sucks because too little thought was put into human psychology. It worked for gas stations, sure, but that's just a nozzle in a tank. A shopping cart full of groceries (with different vegetables and fruits)? Forget it. (I'm still not over Costco installing mostly unused kiosks, making their lines even worse).]

Psychedelics - Possible “Master Key”

If I told you psychedelics might help people with everything from depression to blindness to anorexia to autism to stroke, you might think that’s just pure hype.

Fair enough. The claim does sound hyperbolic.

Yet there’s scientific evidence pointing in that direction.

For the past few years, Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Gul Dolen has been busy experimenting with psychedelics. She’s dosed octopuses with MDMA. She’s given mice LSD. And her groundbreaking research has found that all psychedelics have something special in common: They can hit a “reset” button in the brain, temporarily bringing it back to a childlike state, where the mind is super malleable and good at learning new things.

So she wondered: What can psychedelics do for human brains? Can they help people relearn all sorts of things they’ve lost the ability to do because of a health condition? For example — can they help stroke patients move or walk again, even if the stroke occurred years earlier?

Dolen is now testing just that. If she’s right that psychedelics are the “master key” that can unlock all kinds of healing, they could change life for millions of people — which is why Dolen was recently named one of our Future Perfect 50, Vox’s annual list of trailblazers working on solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems.

I invited Dolen onto The Gray Area to discuss what she learned from octopuses and mice, how she’s currently using psychedelics to try to help humans, and how she thinks psychedelic-assisted therapy will change in the coming years. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Sigal Samuel
You’ve become known for researching something called a critical period in the brain. What is that?

Gul Dolen
A critical period is this window of time where you’re really, really sensitive to the environment around you, and what you learn during that time period kind of becomes locked in for the lifetime. It’s a really strong period of learning and sensitivity to your environment.

Sigal Samuel
I want to talk about your lab’s research on using psychedelics to reopen these critical periods. And I want to start with the octopuses. What was going on in your octopus experiments?

Gul Dolen
Octopuses are not social. They are actually viciously asocial. Outside of brief periods when they’re mating, they will attack another octopus that’s in the same tank with them. But every other cephalopod that we know of is social. So it occurred to us that maybe they have the neural circuitry for social behavior, but that under normal circumstances, for whatever adaptive evolutionary reason, they’ve suppressed that sociality — and that maybe a drug like MDMA could bring that back.

That was the hypothesis we were testing. And remarkably, that’s exactly what happened.

Sigal Samuel
So you basically dosed some octopuses with MDMA, and ... what did you see?

Gul Dolen
We were measuring how much time they spent in one of three chambers, one a center neutral chamber, another chamber that had a little Star Wars figurine in it, and then the other side had another octopus in it. And before they got the MDMA, they spent all their time with the Star Wars toy, not because it was so interesting but because it was maximally far away from the other octopus.

After MDMA, they basically spent most of their time right up against the flower pot where the other octopus was, and they completely changed their body posture and became relaxed and almost draping all eight arms over the the flower pot that had the other octopus in it. Almost like a hug. We saw them doing a lot of play behavior. One was doing backflips. Another one looked like it was dancing like a ballerina.

Sigal Samuel
But you weren’t satisfied with just the octopus. You also went on to do some experiments with giving psychedelics to mice. And you published a groundbreaking paper about this mouse experiment. Can you tell me what you did there?

Gul Dolen
What we were measuring was how well the animals are able to learn an association between one type of social condition and one bedding and a different social condition and a different bedding. So it’s like, here’s two new types of bedding that you’ve never been on before. And then we’re going to pair one of them with hanging out with your buddies. And then the other one we’re going to pair with hanging out by yourself.

In juvenile animals, they learn that association really well. They really love hanging out with their friends, and they will spend significantly more time in the bedding that they associate with hanging out with their friends compared to the bedding where they spend time by themselves. But as they get older, they don’t do that anymore. They spend equal amounts of time in both bedding.

Sigal Samuel
So, in your experiment, you gave the mice MDMA and what did you see? How could you tell that a critical period had been reopened?

Gul Dolen
In the animals that were treated with MDMA, they were able to learn that association just like they were a teenager again. So we returned them to their teenage levels of learning after we gave them the MDMA.

Sigal Samuel
And at first you thought that was because MDMA makes us super social, but that was kind of a red herring, right?

Gul Dolen
Yes. It turned out when we tried all the other psychedelics we had in our in our pocket, like LSD and ketamine and ibogaine and psilocybin, they all opened this critical period as well — even though they don’t have these pro-social properties. That was our first clue that it wasn’t about the social. It was about the opening of critical periods and that what generalizes across psychedelics is the ability to reopen a critical period.

If we’re right about that, then it might be the case that just by changing the context, we can reopen a different critical period. So if we want to reopen a social critical period, we give a social context. But if we want to change it to, say, a motor critical period or visual critical period, then we give a motor or a visual context.

Sigal Samuel
This seems really related to what’s called, in the psychedelic world, “set and setting”: “set” being your mental state or your intentions and expectations going into a trip, and “setting” being your physical environment.

Looking at your results initially, I might have just thought, oh, the mechanism that makes psychedelics open critical periods is just a neurochemical one — like, presto, it’ll happen automatically [after taking the drug]. But it sounds like the opening of a critical period is maybe just as susceptible to set and setting as the rest of a trip.

Gul Dolen
Exactly. It’s just like how MDMA-assisted psychotherapy requires psychotherapy as the context to get the cure. It’s not that you’re taking MDMA and just going to a rave and getting cured for PTSD. The context really matters for the therapeutic effects.

This is the way that psychedelics are disrupting all of neuropsychiatric treatment approaches right now, because up until psychedelics came on the scene, the dominant model for how drugs work with the brain was the biochemical one. We had this model for the last 50 years or so that depression is just a biochemical imbalance in serotonin and all we have to do to cure depression is to restore that biochemical imbalance.

But what our results are suggesting is that, no, if you want to cure these neuropsychiatric diseases like PTSD, what you need is the learning model [which focuses on unlearning behaviors built around trauma that are no longer adaptive, and learning more adaptive behaviors]. I really think that the psychedelics are telling us that it’s the learning model that is responsible for these remarkable therapeutic effects that last for years and years after just one, two, three doses.

So rather than the biochemical imbalance model, which essentially medicalizes these people for life — you have to take a pill for as long as your depression symptoms last, and all it’s doing is treating the symptoms — the critical period reopening explanation is saying, no, what we’re doing is restoring the ability to learn, and that is what’s going to give you the durable therapy that’s going to last potentially forever.

by Sigal Samuel, Vox | Read more:
Image: National Aquarium of New Zealand/CNET via

What Would Authoritarian America Look Like?

Nobody can say they weren’t warned.

Donald Trump has pledged to become a dictator “on day one.” He proudly boasted that voters most anticipate that a second Trump term will bring “revenge” and “dictatorship.” Trump recently vowed to shoot shoplifters, give the death penalty to drug dealers, and called to execute America’s top general. He’s planning to search for, round up, and deport millions of undocumented migrants—and again echoed the worst dictators in history when told his baying supporters that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”

For the past 12 years, I’ve studied authoritarian politics and the breakdown of democracy by conducting field-based research around the globe, from Madagascar to Thailand and from Tunisia to Zambia. Then, in 2015, as Trump took charge of the Republican primary, I began to see worrying parallels with what I had witnessed in far more broken countries than the United States.

In 2017, I wrote a book called The Despot’s Apprentice: Donald Trump’s Attack on Democracy, in which I warned about Trump’s growing authoritarianism. I was repeatedly called an “alarmist,” because the mainstream pundit consensus was that such concerns were overblown. Now, after Trump’s botched plot to seize power after losing an election—and a failed insurrection at the Capitol—few outside of Trump’s MAGA base see concerns of Trump’s authoritarianism as overblown.

But the conversation usually ends there. Trump pledged to become a dictator. Okay, that’s terrifying, but what does that actually mean in the United States? After all, Washington is hardly Pyongyang. The United States, a flawed democracy, still has robust democratic institutions. Do checks and balances just disappear on January 20, 2025 if Trump wins and takes power?

Fear is warranted. The threat to democracy in the United States is real and existential. America could realistically cease to be a democratic country.

But what many people picture when they imagine a dictatorship—tanks on every corner, the total abolition of elections, and systematic mass killing—is less likely in the United States in the short-term precisely because America already has a comparatively robust democratic system, which is not usually the case when democracy dies. So, what would happen if Trump won?

From dictatorship to democracy

To understand the risks of modern authoritarianism, you must first understand modern democracy. Many people wrongly think of democracy as a binary—a country is either democratic or it’s not—instead of as a system of governance that exists along a spectrum. Similarly, there is a common false belief that holding an election makes a country democratic. That’s completely wrong. Elections are a necessary but not even close to a sufficient ingredient for a country to become a democracy.

If you were to chart regime types around the world, you’d have a bell curve.

On one side, there would be the full-blown democracies—what political scientists like me call consolidated democracy. These are the Norways and Japans of the world. The system works well and the quality of democracy, while never perfect, is ranked among the best in the world.

On the other extreme, there are the full dictatorships—North Koreas and Saudi Arabias and Turkmenistans—places where nobody believes that the country is remotely democratic. There’s no fig leaf; it’s just a dictatorship.

Then, in the middle, there’s the largest group of countries, which are between dictatorship and democracy. I call these counterfeit democracies, because they all try to masquerade as something they aren’t. They are fake democracies, where elections are rigged, the law becomes a weapon against opponents and a shield to protect political allies, and the trappings of democracy are merely a fig leaf to cover up a seedier semi-authoritarian reality. But they’re not full-blown dictatorships. Most countries exist somewhere in this grey area. (I previously wrote a full article about these regimes and why they function as they do, which you can read here).

The rise of authoritarianism 2.0

Counterfeit democracies became the dominant system of governance across the globe after the end of the Cold War. Before 1991, vast numbers of countries didn’t even bother trying to pretend to be democratic. They were happy to be one-party autocracies, authoritarian regimes that were protected from international criticism purely because they were allies of one of the two major international patrons: the United States or the Soviet Union.

That broadly changed when the Soviet Union collapsed. Suddenly, the only superpower was a democracy—the United States—and it began to flex its international muscles. A new norm emerged: countries were expected to move toward democracy. A considerable amount of foreign aid became conditional on some form of democratic governance. The number of multi-party elections surged. Dozens of countries became quasi-democratic in a comparative blink of global history.

But that surge largely stalled in counterfeit democracy, as most countries did the bare minimum simply to avoid international condemnation or the loss of aid.

This gave rise to what I call authoritarianism 2.0, which is more sophisticated and savvy than the Cold War-era incarnation of autocracy. Rather than just ban elections, they held elections, but rigged them. They established the mirage of judicial oversight, but stacked the courts with loyalists. Rather than only allowing state propaganda, they allowed a press, but muzzled or intimidated journalists who went too far.

This has given rise to two distinct regime types under my umbrella term of counterfeit democracies: competitive authoritarian regimes and electoral authoritarian regimes.

by Brian Klass, The Garden of Forking Paths |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

[ed. Either way, we're too damn close. See also: Trump II: How Bad Could It Be (MJ.)] 

What Happened to My Search Engine?

Technology is getting worse.

Did it change? Or did I?

I once loved new technology. I lived in the heart of Silicon Valley for 25 years, and was bursting with enthusiasm for its free-wheeling mission to transform the world—and have some fun along the way.

When the Worldwide Web made its debut, I thought I’d found Nirvana. It was like tech was turning everything into a game.

This is a story about the birth of the search engine.

There were no commercial search engines back in 1993. But a Stanford student named David Filo compiled a list of his 200 favorite websites.

His buddy Jerry Yang helped turn this into an online list. They called it “Jerry’s Guide to the Worldwide Web.” Filo and Yang added new websites every day to their list—and classified them according to categories.

This turned into Yahoo.

Here’s my favorite part of the story: These two students didn’t even know they were running a business.

They did it for fun. They did it out of love. They did it because it was cool. “We wanted to avoid doing our dissertations,” Yang later explained.

But a venture capitalist named Mike Moritz heard about Filo and Yang, and tracked them down. The founders of Yahoo were living in total squalor in a trailer littered with stale food and pizza boxes, strewed alongside sleeping bags and overheating computers. A phone rang constantly—but nobody bothered to pick it up.

Moritz was dismayed by this dorm-room-gone-wild ambiance, but he was impressed with the students’ web searching technology. So he asked them the obvious question: How much did they plan to charge users?

Filo and Yang had no answer for this. They wanted to give their tech away for free.

Yahoo wasn’t even selling ads back then. It wasn’t tracking users and selling their private information. It didn’t even have a bank account.

But it was a community and had millions of users.

That was a word you heard frequently in Silicon Valley in the early days. People didn’t build web platforms—they formed online communities.

It was a FUN community. People enjoyed being a member. Even the absurd name Yahoo was part of the game—although early investors hated it.

Yang’s job title was “Chief Yahoo.” Filo’s position was “Cheap Yahoo.”

Investors always hate those kinds of things.

Moritz wanted to turn Yahoo into a business. And the founders realized that their fun community was growing faster than they could handle in their down-and-out trailer. So they sold out 25% of Yahoo for $1 million.

That was the origin of web culture.

It was free and fun, benevolent and empowering. The goal wasn’t profit maximization. People really wanted to make the world a better place. And they created technology that could do it.

Even when Google launched a few months later (which I witnessed firsthand, as described here), they imitated the goofy name of their leading competitor. Google’s motto “Don’t be evil” sounded like a superhero’s vow.

Even at that point, Yahoo might have prevailed. But it turned into a case study in stupidity. Maybe it just wasn’t evil enough.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: gaut/Twitter/X

[ed. I'd propose making Google or some iteration of it a public utility or service, like libraries. What could be more important than objective, unbiased search results? See also: 30 Signs You Are Living in an Information Crap-pocalypse (HB). Not just search engines: How the state could take control of the banking system (Economist).]

Why Zero Tolerance for Airline Safety Lapses Doesn’t Extend to Other Industries

Last Friday, January 5, the day a door plug flew off an Alaska Airlines airplane in mid-flight, was a day in which approximately 120 Americans died in motor vehicle crashes. Roughly 136 died from opioids. Perhaps 150 died as hospital inpatients due to preventable medical errors. About 230 died of COVID-19. And zero died in aircraft accidents.

Why it matters: Air travel is the one part of American daily life where the general public has zero tolerance for any kind of safety lapse.As we saw so vividly, the aviation industry is far from perfect in that regard. But it's still astonishingly good.

Where it stands: Journalist James Fallows calls air travel's safety record "an under-appreciated miracle of modern society."

• "On a statistical basis, being aboard a North American or Western European airliner is about the safest thing you can do with your time," he writes, "compared even with taking a walk or sitting in a chair."

How it works: Precisely because flying is so inherently dangerous, the industry has developed an obsession with safety, as epitomized in the famous reports painstakingly put together after every incident.

• Writes the NYT's Zeynep Tufekci: "A National Transportation Safety Board investigation report reads like a how-to book for pulling off miracles and achieving seemingly incredible levels of safety. These reports renew one's faith in what humanity can achieve if we apply our brainpower and resources to it."
  
• A "but" follows, of course: "these exceptional levels of commercial airline safety require eternal vigilance against the usual foes."

Reality check: Nothing remotely similar exists with regard to auto safety. As David Zipper reports for Slate, auto manufacturers such as Tesla self-certify their vehicles as safe, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration needs to launch and conclude an in-depth investigation before it can intervene and ask for a recall.

Between the lines: Buy-in from the public is crucial. When hundreds of planes were grounded in the wake of the Alaska Airlines incident, causing thousands of flights to be canceled, there were surely grumbles but there was no real opposition, like there was to seatbelt laws or safer streets or mask mandates. No one called loudly for the flights to be reinstated immediately, saying that safety culture had gone too far.

• Public attitudes toward Boeing track the manufacturer's safety record — unlike, say, attitudes toward Tesla, which has a pretty dismal safety record for both employees and drivers but whose reputation in the public mind is mostly a function of what people think about the company's technology and CEO.

Be smart: The public is so accepting of safety protocols in aviation mainly because flyers want all the reassurance they can get. (...)

by Felix Salmon, Axios |  Read more:

Image: via
[ed. Probably because everyone can imagine intuitively what it might be like to fall from 30,000 ft. to their deaths; that's a pretty primal fear, while other more likely forms of accidents seem less visceral. From the links above:]

***

"A National Transportation Safety Board investigation report reads like a how-to book for pulling off miracles and achieving seemingly incredible levels of safety. These reports renew one’s faith in what humanity can achieve if we apply our brainpower and resources to it.

But they also remind us that, much like liberty, these exceptional levels of commercial airline safety require eternal vigilance against the usual foes: greed, negligence, failure to adapt, complacency, revolving doors at regulatory agencies and so on."

~ The Truth About Airplane Safety (NYT - Zeynep Tufekci)

***

The connecting theme is how to learn from mistakes — as individuals, as companies and organizations, as a larger culture. Today I’ll discuss what happens when individuals and institutions do learn. Next, what happens when they don’t.

Summary version: Modern aviation is so incredibly safe because aviation has been so thorough and unsparing about facing and learning from its errors. (...)

A big-picture illustration: Over the past 13-plus years, U.S. airlines have conducted well over ten billion “passenger journeys” — one person making one trip. And in those years, a total of two people, of the ten billion, have died in U.S. airline accidents. For comparison: on average two people in the U.S. die of gunshot wounds every 25 minutes around the clock. And two more die in car crashes every half hour. (Around 45,000 Americans died last year of gunshots, and around 42,000 in car crashes.)

How could the aviation system possibly have managed this? Airplanes weighing close to one million pounds hurtle into the sky, carrying hundreds of passengers who are separated by sheets of aluminum and plastic from air so cold and thin it would kill them quickly on exposure. Passengers gaze out at engines each up to 1/10th as powerful as those that sent Apollo 13 toward the moon. At the end of the journey the pilots bring the plane down on a precise strip of pavement—perhaps 60 seconds after the plane ahead of them in the queue, 60 seconds before the next one. And we take it all for granted—grumbling about the crowds and the hassle and the pretzels and the leg room, but safe.

The origins of this ongoing safety revolution is well chronicled; I spent several chapters on it in my book China Airborne. My point for now involves the aviation world’s relentless, unsparing, de-personalized, and highly systematized insistence on learning from whatever makes the system fail.

~ Learning From Disasters (James Fallows)

xkcd

xkcd, Free Fallin'

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xdcd, Inspiration

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[ed. Newton's less successful theory.]

xkcd, Runtime

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Gianmarco Magnani

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[ed. Really like his work. Prints available here.]

Top 100 Most Viewed U.S. YouTube Channels - December 2023

In 2023, three different types of channels ruled our U.S. charts. Kid-friendly hubs, content aggregators, and world-beating creators took turns in the #1 spot in our U.S. Top 100 charts.

That trend held during the final month of the year, when the top creator of them all hit the top spot in our all-American chart.

Chart Toppers

MrBeast settled for second place in the November edition of the U.S. Top 100, but he did one better during the final month of the year. The creator also known by his birth name (Jimmy Donaldson) wrapped up one of his strongest years on YouTube with a 31-day sprint to the finish. The main MrBeast channel collected 1.93 billion monthly views in December, which put it in front of the U.S. Top 100. If Donaldson’s view count had been 10% lower, he would have finished the month in fourth instead of first. That’s how close things are near the top.

Toys and Colors followed up a stellar November with a solid December. After sweeping the #1 positions in last month’s Global and U.S. Top 100s, the kid-friendly channel added a runner-up finish in the latter of those two charts. Toys and Colors’ December total tallied 1.83 billion monthly views. That represented a 31% month-over-month dip that booted the all-ages content destination from the top spot. Toys and Colors will look to rebound next month, when it is expected to surpass 50 million subscribers on its main YouTube home.

The other family-friendly channel in this month’s U.S. top five is CoComelon – Nursery Rhymes. Thanks to this month’s dump of viewership data from Netflix, we know that CoComelon ranks among the most-watched children’s shows in the streaming world. Its haul on YouTube ain’t too bad, either. Thanks to familiar characters like J.J. and his friends, CoComelon pulled in 1.78 billion monthly views on its primary YouTube hub. Its 169 million subscribers give it the second-biggest audience among the U.S. Top 100 entrants (trailing only MrBeast).

One of the most surprising YouTube success stories of 2023 ended the year on a high note — and not the kind he usually sings. Jason Derulo first gained fame as a singer and dancer, but these days, YouTube audiences may recognize him as a content aggregator. Derulo collects short-form hits on his YouTube channel, where he picked up 1.72 billion monthly views in December. Despite what his song may suggest, Derulo isn’t riding solo on YouTube, as he is followed by more than 26.1 million subscribers.

MaviGadget rounds out the final U.S. Top 100 ranking of 2023. The machinery-focused Shorts hub concluded a strong year with 1.55 billion monthly views.

Top Gainers

There’s no shortage of suspicious children’s content on YouTube, but Ms. Rachel‘s brand of kid-friendly fun includes certified learning techniques. Her take on edutainment combines her teaching background with her multiformat acumen, and her class is pulling in more students every day.

First, let’s shout out some of Ms. Rachel’s most impressive numbers. The kids she teaches probably can’t count up to 336.1 million, but that’s how many views her primary YouTube channel received during the final month of 2023. That total was good for a 23% month-over-month uptick, which pushed Ms. Rachel to her highest-ever finish in the U.S. Top 100. She landed in 90th place and finished the year just short of five billion lifetime views. (Her channel dates back to 2019). (...)

Channel Distribution

This month, 77 channels in the Top 100 are primarily active on YouTube Shorts.

by Sam Gutelle, tubefilter | Read more:
Image: Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images via
[ed. Pretty depressing, given everything else on there. Full list follows.]

Gianmarco Magnani

via:

Picasso, “Ulysses et les sirènes” (1946)
via:

The New Romantic Age

Who can know where we are or where we’re going? The passage of time, and eras themselves, become obvious only in hindsight. Living in the gyre of the present is the best way to be blind. But against all of that, I tried—I wrote about the new romantic age that might be upon us. This wasn’t a value judgement (good, bad, neither) but rather an assessment, an attempt to reckon with change. Here we are and here’s how we got here. Here’s what it might mean, if the fire burns brighter.

From my new writing in the Guardian:

The new romanticism has arrived, butting up against and even outright rejecting the empiricism that reigned for a significant chunk of this century. Backlash is bubbling against tech’s dominance of everyday life, particularly the godlike algorithms – their true calculus still proprietary – that rule all of digital existence. 

The famed mantra of the liberal left in the early months of the pandemic – trust the science – has faded from view, as hero worship ceases for the bureaucrat scientists (Anthony Fauci) and even for the pharmaceutical behemoths that developed, with federal assistance, the Covid vaccines.

Church attendance, long the barometer of the US’s devotion to the unseen, has continued to plummet, but taking its place isn’t any of the pugnacious New Atheism that tugged at the discourse for a stretch of the 2000s. Instead, it’s what can be loosely termed “spirituality” – a devotion to astrology, witchcraft, magic and manifestation – that has emerged, particularly among the young. Online life, paradoxically enough, has only catalyzed this spirituality more, with teenage TikTok occultists and “manifesting” influencers racking up ever more followers.

Credit to Ted Gioia for helping me formulate this. The first romantic age was a backlash to the enlightenment and the nascent industrial revolution, when new technologies were ascendant and upending daily life. Suddenly, time was a commodity; the great machines, if they weren’t replacing flesh labor, were forcing a disorienting pace of work. Newtonian law and capitalist law did not seem so different. The natural order of things pointed toward progress. More mystery would be quantified.

But what kind of progress awaited the human race? It was no coincidence Frankenstein arrived in the second decade of the nineteenth century or Beethoven, at the same time, broke open Western music. Or that a greater unease and even mysticism took hold. Anger is as much a part of the romantic mood as love. Luddites torched factories.

The poets and painters, the influencers of their age, lashed the old gods of logic and gentility. There were William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, blasting away at British cultural elites in Lyrical Ballads, and Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron hurling between profound ecstasy and crepuscular sorrow in their poetry. William Blake, beset by visions of trees glittering with angels, believed imagination was the most vital element of human existence, and became the herald for generations of metaphysical insurgents and revolutionaries. Ralph Waldo Emerson lectured about the invisible eyeball and the over-soul.

Not all of the old romantics were opposed to Judeo-Christian religion, but they were drawn, like the youth of today, to spiritual realms that operated far beyond any biblical teachings or rationalist precepts. They were deeply wary of technology’s encroachment on the human spirit. They feared, ultimately, an inhuman future – and hence their rebellion. Today’s romantics, still nascent, sense something similar. Why else, in such an algorithmic and data-clogged age – with so much of existence quantifiable and knowable – would magic suddenly hold such sway?

Today’s algorithmic age will breed its own backlash. What form it takes, in the longer run, remains to be seen. We are too soon into this shift, from the techno-optimism of the 2000s and 2010s to now, too early to know if there will be a revolt against the technology of convenience that wraps itself around us. There’s the nagging sense that little of this stuff has made existence better. Indoor plumbing saved us from disease and the outhouse. Electricity delivered eternal light. The steam engine and the automobile and the airplane made the very far near, and changed forever how we would relate to the rest of the nation and the world. The smartphone, in turn, has delivered us screen addictions and teen depression. The tech giants seized control of the internet and herded us into our silos. Facebook and Twitter are losing their grip. TikTok rises, but will last only so long. Instagram hums through its strange middle period, no longer a place for genuine photography, reflecting unreality back to us. None of these platforms will vanish. But I would bet they will all matter less in ten years. (...)

Trust in the science did not curdle at the same instance as trust in the tech conglomerates, but they are not so dissimilar when weighed against the hype of progress. The new romantics wonder: what good has any of this done for us? Were hyper-sophisticated GPS devices, cameras and video recorders worth it? It is too soon to predict a revival of the Luddites, but there has been at least one press report of a teen group ditching smartphones altogether because “social media and phones are not real life”.

Science now promises a great leap forward with A.I., which seems intent on replacing the arts themselves—machines will now manufacture mediocre art, music, literature and even fact-challenged journalism. Little of it, after a while, amuses. Digital technology, of course, has radically cheapened music, television and cinema.

Will this new romantic age deliver new revolutions in art? That I don’t know. Popular culture, for now, is static. There are rebellions below, since old distribution channels have been broken. Perhaps these rebellions will burst into view. Perhaps we are ready to be surprised and amazed again.

by Ross Barkan, Political Currents |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. Perhaps, and I'd like to think so, but I'm not so sure. There's the possibility we could be going in a completely different direction, as articulated recently by Ross Douthat in the NY Times: Is Trump an Agent or an Accident of History?, "... above all my shift reflected a reading of our times as increasingly and ineradicably populist, permanently Trumpy in some sense... that it would eventually produce some further populist escalation, ever-deepening division, not peace but the sword." Nevertheless, do read Mr. Barkan's recent Guardian article: The zeitgeist is changing. A strange, romantic backlash to the tech era looms; and, also: A curious tech rebellion is brewing amongst young people (KHON).]

Why We Can't Have Nice Things

[ed. Beautiful. Reminds me of this: "Why We Can't Have Nice Things" (Ben Landau-Taylor):]

"The things around us have become plainer. In 1923, or 1823, the fashion was for intricate and richly ornamented architecture, furniture, clothes, dishware, or whatever else. In 2023, fashionable objects are plain and minimalist, if not outright utilitarian. Steve Jobs believed that every object should look as much like a featureless white sphere as possible, and the rest of us follow in his footsteps."

Image: via

Billionaires Building Bunkers

Off the two-lane highway that winds along the northeast side of the Hawaiian island of Kauai, on a quiet stretch of ranchland between the tourist hubs of Kapaa and Hanalei, an enormous, secret construction project is underway.

A 6-foot wall blocks the view from a nearby road fronting the project, where cars slow to try to catch a glimpse of what’s behind it. Security guards stand watch at an entrance gate and patrol the surrounding beaches on ATVs. Pickup trucks roll in and out, hauling building materials and transporting hundreds of workers.

Nobody working on this project is allowed to talk about what they’re building. Almost anyone who passes compound security—from carpenters to electricians to painters to security guards—is bound by a strict nondisclosure agreement, according to several workers involved in the project. And, they say, these agreements aren’t a formality. Multiple workers claim they saw or heard about colleagues removed from the project for posting about it on social media. Different construction crews within the site are assigned to separate projects and workers are forbidden from speaking with other crews about their work, sources say.

“It’s fight club. We don’t talk about fight club,” says David, one former contract employee. WIRED has agreed to withhold his real name because he was not authorized to speak to the press. “Anything posted from here, they get wind of it right away.” (...)

Tall tales about the compound and its owner run rampant on the local rumor mill—known colloquially as the “coconut wireless.” One person heard that Zuckerberg was building a vast underground city. Many people speculate that the site will become some sort of postapocalyptic bunker in case of civilization collapse. What’s being built doesn’t live up to the coconut wireless chatter, but it’s close. Detailed planning documents obtained by WIRED through a series of public record requests show the makings of an opulent techno-Xanadu, complete with underground shelter and what appears to be a blast-resistant door.

According to plans viewed by WIRED and a source familiar with the development, the partially completed compound consists of more than a dozen buildings with at least 30 bedrooms and 30 bathrooms in total. It is centered around two mansions with a total floor area comparable to a professional football field (57,000 square feet), which contain multiple elevators, offices, conference rooms, and an industrial-sized kitchen.

In a nearby wooded area, a web of 11 disk-shaped treehouses are planned, which will be connected by intricate rope bridges, allowing visitors to cross from one building to the next while staying among the treetops. A building on the other side of the main mansions will include a full-size gym, pools, sauna, hot tub, cold plunge, and tennis court. The property is dotted with other guest houses and operations buildings. The scale of the project suggests that it will be more than a personal vacation home — Zuckerberg has already hosted two corporate events at the compound.

The plans show that the two central mansions will be joined by a tunnel that branches off into a 5,000-square-foot underground shelter, featuring living space, a mechanical room, and an escape hatch that can be accessed via a ladder. “There’s cameras everywhere,” David says—and the documents back this up. More than 20 cameras are included on plans for one smaller ranch operations building alone. Many of the compound’s doors are planned to be keypad-operated or soundproofed. Others, like those in the library, are described as “blind doors,” made to imitate the design of the surrounding walls. The door in the underground shelter will be constructed out of metal and filled in with concrete—a style common in bunkers and bomb shelters.

According to sources and planning documents reviewed by WIRED, the compound will be self-sufficient, with its own water tank, 55 feet in diameter and 18 feet tall—along with a pump system. A variety of food is already produced across its 1,400 acres through ranching and agriculture. Brandi Hoffine Barr, spokesperson for Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, declined to comment on the size or bunker-like qualities of the project.

The cost rivals that of the largest private, personal construction projects in human history. Building permits put the price tag for the main construction at around $100 million, in addition to $170 million in land purchases, but this is likely an underestimate. Building costs on the remote island are still higher than pre-pandemic levels.

That price for a private residence is unparalleled in the local construction industry—as is the level of secrecy and security. “The only other time you see that is when you’re doing secure military installations,” says one local construction industry official affiliated with the site. “For a private project to have an NDA attached to it is very rare.” (...)

Many locals view the billionaire as a part of a larger machine, the same one that has been buying up Hawaiian land since the “Great Mahele” authorized private land ownership in 1848. Before this, the concept of private property did not exist in Hawaii. Though he has the highest net worth, Zuckerberg is far from the only wealthy outsider—or even the only billionaire—to purchase land and call Kauai their part-time home. Just south of the Zuckerberg property, Melaleuca billionaire Frank VanderSloot recently dropped $51 million on 2,000 acres of ranchland. As land becomes more desirable to wealthy mainlanders, properties increase in value, forcing locals to leave. “The people who are born and raised here can’t afford to live here,” says Laurel Brier, a former vocational counselor who lives a few miles south of the Zuckerberg compound. “And we have this whole new economy that is basically serving at the rich peoples’ whims. I don’t know how stable those kinds of jobs are.” (...)

It's been happening, and not just on Kauai. As the amount and total net worth of billionaires continues to grow in the US, many have used their wealth to purchase island seclusion and security.

This year, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos spent $147 million buying two mansions on Indian Creek Island in Florida, which is also home to the likes of Tom Brady, Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner. The smaller Hawaiian island of Lanai, off the coast of Maui, is now almost completely owned by Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison.

New Zealand, considered by some to be the ideal place to wait out an apocalyptic event, is now riddled with bunkers for the tech elite. Recently reinstalled OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has an arrangement with Peter Thiel, first revealed to The New Yorker, where the pair will take a jet to one of Thiel’s New Zealand properties in the case of an apocalyptic event. In his book Survival of the Richest, media theorist Douglass Rushkoff describes meeting with a group of billionaire preppers who bombarded him with questions about how best to configure their bunkers to survive the end times.

WIRED showed some of the planned bunker-esque elements of the Zuckerberg compound to Rushkoff earlier this year. “In order to justify having a palace, you’ve got to show you’ve done basic due diligence on its bunker capabilities,” Rushkoff says of the plans. “It shows it’s not just luxury. This is your skin in the game.”

by Guthrie Scimgeour, Wired |  Read more:

Images: Phil Jung

Dick Dale - The King Of Surf Guitar

[ed. Check out 3:40 - 4:05, where he mentions Freddie Tavares and his influence on Fender designs (see below). Also, this demonstration of Dick's seemingly simple but complex 'surfy' technique: World's Most Iconic Riff.]

All About… Freddie Tavares

Even if you’ve never heard of Freddie Tavares, you’ve almost certainly heard him. That was Freddie playing the iconic pedal-steel glissando at the start of the Looney Tunes theme tune in 1942, and he can also be heard strumming the ukulele on Elvis Presley’s Blue Hawaii. But there was much more to him than that.

Freddie Tavares was a Hawaiian designer, engineer and multi-instrumentalist who also played for Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, The Andrews Sisters, Henry Mancini and Lawrence Welk among countless others. What’s more, he was also a key figure behind the scenes at Fender across four decades.

Man of steel

Frederick Theodore Tavares was born on Maui Island, Hawaii, 18 February 1913. He began singing early on and when he was 12, Freddie’s eldest brother gave him a guitar. He clearly had natural ability because three years later he landed the rhythm guitar chair in Mary Kunewa’s orchestra. Having finished school, Freddie moved to Oahu, playing guitar three nights per week in Larry Bellis’ dance orchestra at the Alexander Young hotel. Soon after, Harry Owens offered Freddie the chance to play electric steel with the dance orchestra of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, Waikiki.

At the time, Freddie couldn’t actually play the instrument that he would become most closely associated with, but Freddie told Owens, “I could easily learn to play one”. Armed with the arrangements, it took Freddie less than two weeks to learn all the steel guitar parts. (...)

In 1949, Freddie joined Wade Ray and his Ozark Mountain Boys on steel guitar, and began playing regularly at a club in Los Angeles called Cowtown. Over the next few years Freddie would write all the group’s arrangements, build their amplifiers and even figure out a way to amplify Ray’s violin. This facility with electronics led to a meeting with Leo Fender.

The fateful meeting

By 1953 the Fender factory was running at full capacity and Leo Fender was getting a bit burned out. He needed an assistant, preferably a professional musician, who could provide technical feedback from a player’s perspective. In March 1953, a mutual friend called Noel Boggs introduced the two men at Cowtown.

Freddie clearly wasn’t a fan of Fender amps and after the show he spent some time telling Leo what he thought was wrong with them. Rather than take offence, Leo took a screwdriver out of his infamous leather pocket pouch and opened up Freddie’s home-built amp on stage to check out how he had put it together. Leo was sufficiently impressed to offer Freddie a job as his assistant engineer.

Although Freddie was hired for his electronics expertise, at that time the Fender company was primarily focused on designing a new guitar to accompany the Telecaster. On Freddie’s second day at Fender he began his “first real project… to put the Stratocaster on the drawing board”. Working with Leo, Bill Carson and guitarist Rex Gallion, Freddie helped to refine and finalise the shape and contours of the Stratocaster body. However, it is widely accepted that Freddie’s most significant contribution to the Strat was his involvement with the design of the vibrato system.

Leo’s first design attempt was much closer to the vibrato that ended up on the Jazzmaster and Jaguar. Although it functioned pretty well, its roller bridge saddles reduced sustain and it had the tonal qualities of a banjo. Having already spent six months on development and $5,000 on tooling, this must have been a bitter pill for Leo, but the forthright Freddie talked him around.

Freddie realised that the bridge needed more mass, and he also advocated an integrated design based on a mechanical gram scale rather than one with a separate bridge. Freddie’s redesign was so effective, it has remained a feature of Stratocasters ever since, and the basic design principle was adopted for all the locking trems that came after.

For Freddie, it was a flying start and he went on to play a significant part in the development of the Jazzmaster, Jaguar, Jazz Bass and Bass VI. Despite Leo reverting to his original vibrato design for the Jazzmaster, it seems that model was the design Freddie liked best because he retained one from the first batch of three prototypes as his personal guitar.
Back to amps

Freddie was also heavily involved in amplifier design while at Fender, and was pivotal in the development of the 4×10 Bassman – arguably the most iconic and influential of all Fender amplifiers. Having helped to create the quintessential American rock amp, it’s ironic that Freddie disapproved of overdrive. In fact, it’s probably what bugged him most about TV front tweeds back in 1953.

His son, Terry Tavares, recalls Freddie complaining, “I’ve put my integrity and heart into the design of Fender amps, and they produce crystal-clear sound. These snot-nosed three-chord wonders now want them to sound like $39.95 Sears catalogue amps. One of these days I’m going to design a 10,000-watt amp and not tell them. When they turn the volume up to max and play their first chord, poof, they’ll just disappear.”

Freddie said that “all of the guitars were essentially Leo’s design”, and this natural self-effacement tallies with Dan Smith’s recollection of Freddie as “the most humble man I have ever known”. It’s probably fair to say he didn’t always get the credit or recognition he deserved, but Smith also described him as “outgoing by nature, funny and entertaining, articulate to a fault, continually in search of knowledge and unbelievably caring.” Others who worked closely with Freddie certainly did recognise his contribution to Fender’s history. John Page, who once headed up Fender’s Custom Shop, got his big break when Freddie recruited him as a design assistant in 1978.

“What a freakin’ honour, 23 years old and I was made a guitar designer at Fender working side-by-side with Freddie Tavares. Freddie became like a father to me. He even called me his third son. He taught me the ins and outs of guitar design, told lots of historical stories, made me take vitamins, and told lots and lots of really bad, old jokes. He would even do one-arm pushups when artists stopped by just to show them how spry he was. I loved him. What a great man”.

Guitarist and Fender executive Bill Carson, who was one of Leo Fender’s trusted consultants, said it all: “In my opinion, he was the greatest man in both musical talent and personal integrity that I ever worked with”. Even so, by the early 1980s, the management had stopped listening to Freddie, and some within the company regarded him as little more than a symbolic figurehead.

Life after Fender

Freddie stayed musically active throughout his career, keeping up the session work, recording movie soundtracks and playing with his brother Eddie in The South Sea Islanders. He was also a founder and long-serving treasurer of the Polynesian Society in California. Following his retirement in 1985 Freddie stepped up his gigging schedule, playing mostly for older people in nursing and retirement homes. It’s doubtful that any of them would have known that their entertainment was being provided by an inductee of the Fender Hall of Fame and the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame.

Referring to his mixed lineage, Freddie would proudly remark that, “the Portuguese makes me stubborn; Chinese makes me smart; English makes me high-class; Hawaiian gives me the music; Tahitian gives me the beat – I couldn’t ask for more.” Freddie died in Anaheim, California on 24 July 1990 at the age of 77 and he is buried in Nuuanu cemetery on Oahu.

by Huw Price, Guitar.com |  Read more:

Images: Fender Stratocaster (uncredited); and, Fred Tavares – Hawai`i’s Les Paul (Ho`olohe Hou Radio)

[ed. See also: Freddie & Ernest Tavares and their influence on modern music and the Stratocaster (Maui News)]

My Resignation

I have resigned as poetry editor of The New York Times Magazine.

The Israeli state's U.S-backed war against the people of Gaza is not a war for anyone. There is no safety in it or from it, not for Israel, not for the United States or Europe, and especially not for the many Jewish people slandered by those who claim falsely to fight in their names. Its only profit is the deadly profit of oil interests and weapon manufacturers.

The world, the future, our hearts—everything grows smaller and harder from from this war. It is not only a war of missiles and land invasions. It is an ongoing war against the people of Palestine, people who have resisted through decades of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation, surveillance, siege, imprisonment, and torture.

Because our status quo is self-expression, sometimes the most effective mode of protest for artists is to refuse.

I can’t write about poetry amidst the "reasonable" tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.

If this resignation leaves a hole in the news the size of poetry, then that is the true shape of the present.

by Anne Boyer, Mirabilary |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Link credit: LitHub.]

Cannabinoids Block Cellular Entry of SARS-CoV-2 and the Emerging Variants

Abstract

As a complement to vaccines, small-molecule therapeutic agents are needed to treat or prevent infections by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) and its variants, which cause COVID-19. Affinity selection-mass spectrometry was used for the discovery of botanical ligands to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. Cannabinoid acids from hemp (Cannabis sativa) were found to be allosteric as well as orthosteric ligands with micromolar affinity for the spike protein. In follow-up virus neutralization assays, cannabigerolic acid and cannabidiolic acid prevented infection of human epithelial cells by a pseudovirus expressing the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and prevented entry of live SARS-CoV-2 into cells. Importantly, cannabigerolic acid and cannabidiolic acid were equally effective against the SARS-CoV-2 alpha variant B.1.1.7 and the beta variant B.1.351. Orally bioavailable and with a long history of safe human use, these cannabinoids, isolated or in hemp extracts, have the potential to prevent as well as treat infection by SARS-CoV-2.

by Richard B van Breemen, Ruth N Muchiri et al., PubMed/NIH |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

[ed. Good news for stoners. Also, in other research news: Experimental antibiotic kills deadly superbug, opens whole new class of drugs (ArsTechnica):]

The English Beat

[ed. One of my favorite 80s groups. See also: I Confess; Save It For Later; and End of the Party (... and many others).]