Book Review: Two Arms and a Head

Content warning: body horror, existential devastation, suicide. This book is an infohazard that will permanently alter your view of paraplegia.

In May of 2006, philosophy student Clayton Schwartz embarks on a Pan-American motorcycle trip for the summer before law school. He is 30 years old and in peak physical condition.

He makes it as far south as Acapulco in Mexico before crashing into a donkey that had wandered into the road.

 

The impact crushes his spinal cord at the T5 vertebra, rendering him paralyzed from the nipples down.

On Sunday, February 24, 2008, he commits suicide.

In the year and a half in between, he writes Two Arms and a Head, his combination memoir and suicide note.

Writing under the pseudonym Clayton Atreus, he lays out in excruciating detail how awful it is to be paralyzed, and how his new life is but a shadow of what it once was. He concludes that his life is no longer worth living, and proceeds to end it.

Along the way, he addresses the obstacles that society has put in his way of dying on his own terms—the biggest of which is the fact that physician-assisted suicide for his condition is illegal at the time.

But there are other factors. Smaller, more insidious roadblocks. Our society doesn't just condemn suicide; we do a great disservice to newly disabled patients in refusing to let them voice their misery and grief about being disabled. The book is a scathing indictment of how our society enables the lifelong disabled at the expense of the newly disabled and terminally ill.

Looking back from ~15 years in the future, when we have a patchwork of states and countries that have legalized physician-assisted suicide, Clayton's story stands as a cautionary tale for why it must become—and stay—legal.

Being Paralyzed Sucks

As a student of philosophy, Clayton is heavily influenced by the writings of Nietzsche and Camus. He analyzes the experience of being paralyzed primarily through the lens of Existentialism. It’s hard to imagine a more apt philosophy for interpreting body horror.

Two Arms and a Head comes from one of those rare moments in history when an individual’s circumstances so perfectly intersect with their skills that they leave a mark on the world. What better cosmic tragedy than to have a strong, fit, arrogant philosophy buff suddenly find himself paralyzed? His memoir is an exploration of what it means to exist in a body that is no longer entirely his own.

The full ramifications of being paralyzed are rarely discussed in polite company. Rest assured, he omits no details:

Everything below my nipples is no longer me. Hence the title of this work, “Two Arms and a Head”. [...] I am two arms and a head, attached to two-thirds of a corpse. The only difference is that it’s a living, shitting, pissing, jerking, twitching corpse. [...] What was once my beloved body is now a thing. [...]

Two arms and a head. Period. Additionally, I will be using a sort of shorthand in this book when I refer to parts of “my” body. So when I say “my penis”, for instance, what I really mean is “the unfeeling, alien piece of flesh that used to be my penis, but is now just part of the living corpse I will push or drag around forever until I am dead.” [...]

As far as I feel about my body, who do you love more than anyone else in the world? Think of that person. Now picture being chained to their bloated corpse—forever.

No, Really, It's Way Worse Than You Think

I had limited exposure to paraplegics until I read this book. Growing up, I only knew them from pop culture—usually as side characters who would appear on Very Special Episodes of Saturday morning cartoons. Professor X. The glider kid from that one episode of Avatar. The main character from the other Avatar.

The tropes gave me a mental model of being paraplegic that boiled down to "you can't use your legs, so you have to drag yourself in and out of a wheelchair to use the toilet. But you're still an ordinary person sitting upright in a wheelchair."

Clayton wastes no time in dispelling this myth:

> I am devastatingly, cataclysmically physically disabled. [...]

> There is a tremendous difference between me and an able-bodied person sitting in a wheelchair. Tremendous.

Spinal cord injuries affect everything downstream of the injury—not just "the legs" but also the pelvis, bowels, genitals, and abdomen. Depending on where the injury occurs, that can include all the trunk muscles that keep someone sitting upright. (...)

To start off, that means that he has no use of the muscles that hold him upright.

Nothing keeps me sitting up—no hip flexors, erector spinae, hamstrings, or abdominal muscles. I am arms-and-a-head on a column of Jell-O.

He can't put both arms out in front of him, lest he fall over. He has to continuously prop himself up with one arm while doing anything at arm's length. After only 1.5 years of being paralyzed, this has already caused significant repetitive strain injuries in his elbows, shoulders, and ulnar nerves.

Clayton still has to deal with all the logistics of life, despite two-thirds of his body being a hunk of corpse-flesh. He dedicates huge swaths of the text to all the little time-wasting tasks he now has to do. How much of his life is ticking away with every delay, every piece of effort, every task that is trivial for an able-bodied person but monstrously difficult for him. Something as simple as getting out of a car is an entire production—let alone running errands, cleaning, doing laundry, cooking.

Since the lower two-thirds of his body no longer sends pain signals to his brain, he must proactively tend to all of its physical needs. Complications include pressure sores, infections, and a high chance of blood clots. Aside from suicide, the leading causes of death among paraplegics are all related to poor circulation.

In addition to the loss of conscious sensation and muscle control, problems with the autonomic nervous system—heart rate, orthostatic blood pressure, temperature regulation—are common. This is even more pronounced in cervical spine (neck) injuries. Some quadriplegics black out or the blood rushes to their head when being moved from lying down into reclining in a wheelchair. A spinal cord injury wreaks havoc on the body's functioning. (...)

The Decision to Die

I am absolutely and heartbreakingly in love with life. But this is not life. [...]

For those who like to say this one: “Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” I reply that suicide in my case is a permanent solution to a permanent problem. [...] I have only one serious problem in life and it’s being paralyzed.

Clayton does not come to this decision lightly. He considers it exhaustively and systematically. When deciding whether to keep living, he starts from the premise that there is some amount of suffering past which life stops being worth it. He evaluates where that dividing line is by examining the sources of meaning in his life. (...)

Reading this book should prompt a moment of introspection. If you disagree with Clayton’s list above, then reflect on what does give your life meaning. No, seriously, make a list: family, friends, partners, children, hobbies, skills, etc. Write them down.

Cross out one entry at random. How would you feel if you lost that entry? Would you still have enough left over to carry on? Probably.

Now cross out a few more. Lose your partner. Lose your children. Lose your parents. Your siblings. Your best friend. Your favorite hobby. How do you feel? Still worth it?

Add in some physical negatives: chronic pain. Constant nausea every time you eat. Losing feeling and control of your bowels, your legs, your genitals, your diaphragm, your non-dominant hand, your dominant hand, both arms. What about loss of sight? Hearing? Speaking? Communicating at all? (...)

How much would you have to lose before your life stops being worth living?

That list—and the dividing line between "worth it" and "not"—is different for everyone. The decision to end one's life is deeply personal. Clayton happened to draw the line at a particular point. Others may agree or disagree, but Clayton’s judgment was his own.

Decision in hand, next comes the hard part.

 
The Roadblocks

I did not want much from the world in dying. To be able to put my affairs in order without fear of being taken prisoner and treated like I was insane. To say goodbye to those I loved without the same fear. To die a painless death without worrying about leaving behind something gruesome. And to be comforted as I died. When a person has absolutely nothing left and is facing annihilation, all he wants is not to be alone.

For Clayton, killing himself is not a simple matter. At the time only one US state, Oregon, had any kind of “Death With Dignity” law on the books. However, this law only allowed assisted suicide for terminally ill patients with less than six months to live, while Clayton’s condition was stable.

The slightest whisper of suicidal ideation would have gotten him locked up in the psych ward. He has to write his book in secret, he has to lay his thoughts out for the world in secret, and he has to die in secret.

Becoming paralyzed destroys him on two fronts—the disability itself, and the fact that he is completely, utterly, devastatingly alone with his feelings. He writes Two Arms and a Head because he needs to show the world how agonizing it is to face death alone and how important it is for physical-assisted suicide to become—and stay—legal.

How empty to exist in this universe and share your feelings and experience with nobody! But that is how you, the world, have left me to die, alone. But what you don’t realize is this: in turning your backs on me, you have turned your backs on yourselves. [...]

Someday you will be on your deathbed and maybe you will remember me. What I say to the world is that if you don’t do something about the way death and assisted suicide are dealt with, you may someday find yourselves in an unimaginably horrible situation with no way out. [...]

Beware! There could be a horrible fate waiting for you and if you don’t all get together, look each other in the eye, recognize the insanity, and change the laws, you could wake up tomorrow as a head on a corpse with no way out for the next thirty years. (...)

The State of MAiD

Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) is currently legal in a patchwork of countries and US states.

The exact rules, restrictions, and methods vary. In most places that have legalized it, the patient’s condition must be considered terminal (i.e. death is expected within six months) to be eligible for MAiD. The procedure itself is typically either an IV injection administered by a nurse, or a prescription cocktail of benzodiazepines, digoxin, and opioids which patients drink themselves.

In Canada and the Netherlands, MAiD is also available to patients with a disability that does not present as immediately terminal. The Netherlands currently includes severe treatment-resistant mental illness as a qualifying condition, and Canada will follow suit in 2027.

So it sounds like Clayton got his wish, at least in Canada and parts of Europe. Now, when a Canadian ends up in a terrible accident, they have a choice in the matter of whether they want to spend the next few decades as a quadriplegic head-on-a-corpse. Phew.

However, it’s not all smooth sailing. It seems like every few months there’s another horror story in the press coming out of Canada or Europe. Two news stories came out in quick succession in late March/early April 2024—one from Canada, the other from the Netherlands. (...)

Not Dead Yet

Clayton had a particular amount of ire directed at one prominent anti-MAiD disability rights org: Not Dead Yet.

Not Dead Yet (NDY) was founded in 1996 by the same people who lobbied to get the Americans with Disabilities Act passed a few years prior. As the name implies, they reject the notion that death could ever be an acceptable response to living with a disability.

When terminally ill patients get polled on why they are choosing MAiD, it turns out that avoiding pain isn’t the primary motivation. In Oregon, where MAiD is only available for the terminally ill, every patient fills out a questionnaire when they apply for the program. Tallying up all the surveys from 1998–2023, to top reasons are:

• “Losing autonomy” (90%)

• “Less able to engage in activities” (90%)

• “Loss of dignity” (70%)

• “Losing control of bodily functions” (44%)

• “Burden on family” (47%)

• “Inadequate pain control, or concern about it” (29%)

• “Financial implications of treatment” (7%)

The top five all relate to the disabling symptoms that come with dying. “Less able to engage in activities” sounds remarkably similar to Clayton’s reasoning of, “the things that gave my life meaning are no longer possible, therefore it’s time to die.”

This isn’t surprising when considering that palliative care is legal in all 50 states. If someone’s condition is judged to be terminal, as Oregon requires, they already get a bottomless supply of morphine. Pain is not really the problem anymore.

The problem is that a failing body is, well, failing. Patients become weak and frail. They struggle to walk and use the bathroom. They may become dependent on a feeding tube or a respirator. Somewhere along the way they might lose their minds to dementia. All of these are serious, debilitating symptoms that can suck the meaning out of life, so many patients choose to die before they get to that point.

Not Dead Yet condemns this status quo.

There’s a lot to unpack here. NDY is starting from the premise that the desire to end one’s life is always and necessarily the product of an irrational mind, Claytons of the world be damned. Medical professionals, given that they’ve sworn an oath to protect life, have an obligation to treat all suicidal ideation with “suicide prevention” care (i.e. involuntary commitment until the patient comes to their senses).

A society that has legalized MAiD still extends this preventive care to the able-bodied who want to die, but then turns around and gladly assists disabled patients in ending their lives. This is discrimination! Doctors are murdering the undesirables! (...)

Un-Assisted Suicide

The final argument that anti-MAiD proponents fall back on is that anyone can just commit suicide; why do they need help from doctors?

The glaringly obvious answer is: because patients cannot “just” commit suicide.

Clayton could not “just” ask for help putting his affairs in order. He could not “just” say goodbye to his loved ones. He could not “just” die peacefully without anyone trying to stop him. He could not “just” publish his memoir before his death—not if he wanted to avoid being committed.

Young people would prefer not to think about such things, but what everyone does not see is that those old people are you. You are them, it’s just a matter of time.

Until we defeat death in the glorious transhumanist future, it’s coming for all of us. Some of us may die suddenly in a tragic accident. Some may be diagnosed with a terminal illness that kills in a matter of months.

But most of us will die by very slow decay.

The counterfactual world—where the elderly are kept alive as shriveled husks for years, slowly withering away—is gruesome and ghastly.

by Anonymous, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. When you see someone suffering, someone you've loved all your life, and your only hope is that they die as soon as possible, you'll understand why this issue is so important. It doesn't appear much will change soon (until Boomers start going in greater numbers), but hopefully in another generation or two the barbaric idea of preventing people from leaving peacefully on their own terms will just be a shameful artifact of the past. You can read the complete version of Two Arms and a Head online here.]

Democrats Need a Better Answer on Affordability. Here’s One.

Donald Trump has transformed the Republican Party on all kinds of issues — trade, foreign policy, immigration. He has challenged, even upended, the old consensus by giving people a very different story about what was wrong in America, about why they were struggling.

To be clear, I think most of Trump’s policies and many of his stories are quite different, bad and often false. But to give some credit to the Republicans, they are having these big internal policy debates, and the people coming up behind Trump are having even more of them. The world has changed, their party has changed, their voting base has changed, and so they need to change.

On the Democratic side, you haven’t seen as much change. That would be normal for a party running an incumbent president. There wasn’t a presidential primary this year in which candidates hashed out their different visions in front of the voters. Biden has not been a strong messenger. Kamala Harris hasn’t had much time to build out an agenda of her own. The Democratic Party has been unified the past few years, but it has been unified against Trump, against MAGA. It’s not been — in its communications, in the way it runs elections — primarily about its policy vision.

Brian Schatz is the senior senator from Hawaii and one of the Democrats doing the most work on these issues. He’s been a very influential policy voice. Over the past few years, he’s had a bit of a political evolution trying to change the party on the issues that matter most to voters — particularly affordability.

Schatz joined me for a conversation on my podcast. This is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Democrats Need a Better Answer on Affordability. Here’s One. Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii discusses policies that can make housing and college more affordable.

What’s it been like to be a Democratic senator over the past month or two?

There’s a saying in Hawaii that everything in Hawaii is political except politics, which is personal. And that’s what it felt like. It was obviously politically difficult. But more than anything, a lot of us really revere Joe Biden. To accomplish everything that we’ve accomplished together and then to say, “Hey, thank you very much. We don’t think you’re our standard-bearer anymore” — it’s just deeply, deeply painful.

But people have been underestimating Kamala Harris all along and underestimating the pent-up demand of the anti-Trump coalition, which basically was just sitting there latent. I actually thought the algorithm wasn’t going to permit us to feel hope anymore. And suddenly the internet was fun again, and fund-raising was going crazy, and people were making jokes. I always think the campaign that’s having fun is the one that’s likely to win. And we are definitely having fun now.

The level of anger about prices, about affordability, feels to me like something Democrats have not fully faced up to. It’s something that you’ve begun to talk a lot more about over the past couple of years. I’m curious about your evolution on this.

The fact is we passed the biggest climate action in human history, and basically nobody knows about it. And whether it’s the biggest climate action we’ve ever taken or the biggest investment in Native American communities that we’ve ever taken, it’s true to say those are the biggest actions ever taken. It’s also true to say that that’s not enough.

So I do think Kamala puts us in a better position to just talk about the future. And it’s very, very challenging, I think, for Donald Trump and JD Vance to talk about the future at all.

Let me show you how they’re talking about this particular part of, if not the future, the past.

[Audio clip of JD Vance] Months ago, I heard some young family member observe that their parents’ generation, the baby boomers, could afford to buy a home when they first entered the work force. “But I don’t know,” this person observed, “if I’ll ever be able to afford a home.” The absurd cost of housing is the result of so many failures, and it reveals so much about what’s broken in Washington. I can tell you exactly how it happened. Wall Street barons crashed the economy, and American builders went out of business. As tradesmen scrambled for jobs, houses stopped being built. The lack of good jobs, of course, led to stagnant wages. And then the Democrats flooded this country with millions of illegal aliens. So citizens had to compete with people who shouldn’t even be here for precious housing. Joe Biden’s inflation crisis, my friends, is really an affordability crisis. And many of the people that I grew up with can’t afford to pay more for groceries, more for gas, more for rent, and that’s exactly what Joe Biden’s economy has given them.

What do you think of that diagnosis?

I think there are parts of it that are pretty effective, right? He basically touches on what people are experiencing, and then he goes straight to racism and xenophobia and a bunch of right-wing tropes. But I think your point is well made by that clip, which is to say, we don’t really talk about the affordability crisis. Not all of us, right? And we don’t talk about struggling families.

I don’t think it’s that hard for us to live where people are, which is: You are actually struggling to make ends meet. That is not imaginary. We are not going to talk you out of it. But I think all they do is scapegoat. And what we need to do is talk about solutions going forward.

There’s some reason that not enough homes have been built, and that’s been particularly bad in places Democrats have power. It’s bad in Hawaii, where you’re from. It’s very bad in San Francisco, where Kamala Harris had the beginning of her political career. So what is your diagnosis? What has happened in housing?

We have created the scarcity on purpose. We have elevated something called community engagement, but it’s not actually objectively community engagement. It’s the ability for a few people who already have homes to hijack the whole process above the needs of the many. We’re actually making it nearly impossible for people to build anything.

And I think the premise here is that we can have nice things. We can have enough of the things that we want. If you operate under the assumption that there will only be 100 homes built, it is not unreasonable to say, “Well, listen, I want 35 of the 100 homes to be capital-A affordable.” That’s a totally reasonable, progressive approach. But the truth is, if you require that, it’s likely that zero homes will be built and nobody gets any housing.

When you’re out making this argument, how do people in Hawaii respond?

My district, when I was in the State Legislature, was Makiki, Manoa, sort of by Punahou School, by the University of Hawaii — a very nice, beautiful suburb. And those are some of the folks that are most worried about what a deregulatory environment would look like, in terms of their neighborhood.

So after the Hawaii Legislature passed some aggressive housing reforms this session — and I’m strongly behind it — I was at Safeway, and I was running into people who contributed to my first campaign with 15 bucks, people with whom I went to high school, and they were not happy.

I don’t think it’s unforgivable, but this is an uncomfortable conversation among friends. And that’s one of the things that I think the progressive movement has to grapple with, that there are a lot of communities that are 70-30 or 80-20 Biden and are pro-immigrant and pro-L.G.B.T.Q. and certainly pro-choice and pro-climate action. And on housing, they’re [expletive]. And I don’t think that can stand.

I think there’s a real tension on this inside progressivism, because it pits two values against each other. There’s a real feeling that in post-New Deal liberalism, the government ran over marginalized communities and the people didn’t have any democratic input. And then on the other hand, there’s this other dimension that I always call the firefighter test: Can firefighters who work and risk their lives to keep a city from burning down live in the city that they keep from burning down? How do those come into conflict, and how do they get unwound?

I think the constituency for proceduralism is small but vocal. And it’s not that there should be zero public input. When it comes to housing in the state of Hawaii, we have extraordinary protections for natural and cultural resources, as we should.

One of the last standing bowling alleys in the primary urban center of Honolulu, called Stadium Bowl-O-Drome — it was the old stadium, not an ecologically significant site, still subject to all the same environmental review that some of our most precious places in the state of Hawaii were subject to. And I think most regular people are able to kind of go, “If you’re going to throw up a 10-story building with apartments, then you maybe don’t need the same sort of environmental, cultural analysis that you would if you’re a building in coastal Maui.”

And when I make that argument, everybody nods. Now, who doesn’t nod? The people who live adjacent to the Stadium Bowl-O-Drome. So I agree that there’s this tension sort of superficially. But I actually think you can kind of puncture it by talking to regular people and then finding out that the proceduralists are, like, 11 people who just consistently show up.

But the procedure is so profound here. I find a lot of people in your place are starting to wonder, “Are these environmental bills doing as much to stop clean energy as they are to stop fossil fuels? Are they doing more to stop clean energy than they are to stop fossil fuels?” What’s been your intellectual evolution on liberal proceduralism?

It’s been rapid, and it’s been sort of almost radical. We did pass the biggest climate action ever, but as you know, we need transmission and distribution, and that is going to be stopped by local communities and state governments and oppositional mayors and other NIMBYs. And what’s really clear is that right-wing groups and fossil-funded groups are now funding the so-called left-wing proceduralists to stop good stuff from happening.

We are going to have to make it easier to meet our clean energy goals. All of these environmental safeguards were about stopping bad stuff, and now the new progressive movement is not just about stopping bad stuff; it’s about building good stuff. We’re going to have to be the party of construction. We’re going to have to be the party of financing things. We’re going to have to be the party of breaking ground.

A couple of years ago, in some bills you passed, there was a ton of money for rural broadband. Let me read you a story from The Washington Times: “Residents in rural America are eager to access high-speed internet under a $42.5 billion federal modernization program, but not a single home or business has been connected to new broadband networks nearly three years after President Biden signed the funding into law, and no project will break ground until sometime next year.”

The Washington Times ends up blaming this on various requirements for obtaining the funds, climate change mandates, preferences for union workers, that sort of thing. I don’t know if that is why, but I do often find this problem where something big gets passed and then you check in on it a couple years later and actually people aren’t benefiting from it. These big priorities are exciting to people when they pass and then not that exciting when they’re being slowly implemented. What’s going on there?

Well, I think you pointed out one of the failures that we have, both governance-wise and politically. I don’t think we just, like, administer harder, implement better.

I think about the state historic preservation division of the state of Hawaii. The federal law says that you may consider something historic if it meets these criteria in the state of Hawaii. The assumption is everything more than 50 years old is historic. Now, the problem is we just have old houses. And so now they’re all potentially for state historic preservation division review. And so for four years, everyone was like, “We’ve got to get more bodies over there so they can process more applications.” And I sort of raised my hand and said there should just be fewer things on these people’s pile.

We have to clear the thicket here, and we have to be unapologetic about clearing the thicket. And by the way, this is really good for results, but it also is quite attractive to moderate swingy voters who just want government to kick ass and accomplish things. And they’re really looking for an effective mayor of the country.

The Covid relief plan, there were lots of really good things in it. But the thing that resonated with people was the checks. And I was kind of anti-U.B.I. and anti-direct-cash-assistance because I did think it was, like, the Silicon Valley way to wave a wand at the disintermediation of employment that they were causing. But I saw it impact people.

And I’ve got to say, boy, fast really works. It works on policy. It works for people. And the politics works. I think we should have the kind of impatience that regular people have, which is like, “What the hell? I thought you did this thing. Where’s my stuff?” And I don’t think we have that impatience. I think we have this sense that we enact, and then we take credit. (...)

Across the domains we’re talking about — housing, clean energy, I could name a bunch more — how do you deal with the fact that there are these national and actually global issues but the power is fractured down to the state level, to the local level, across a variety of condominium boards? It’s fractal, almost.

Well, the way I look at this is, I guess, two things. First, I do whatever I can on federal policy. But second, I do think we have to actually change the politics of this while we’re working on the policy.

I think the most important thing we can do is create a movement of young progressives articulating that in our collective progressive future, we’re all going to live together and in a Hawaii clean energy future — which probably polls at, I would say, 85 percent in the state of Hawaii — you think you’re not going to see a windmill? You think you’re not going to see a solar farm? You think we’re not going to do any geothermal? We’re a small place with 1.5 million-odd people. And if we are going to house the people we care about and if we are going to address the climate crisis, we’re going to see it. It can’t all be someplace else. And I think one of the most important things I can do is just say that as much as I can, as unapologetically as I can.

One of the things that I think is encouraging is that I’ve gotten pushback but it hasn’t been that ferocious. Because I do think, in a lot of people’s heart of hearts, they go, “Huh. He’s probably right.”

On the left, people talk a lot about affordability, and what they think about is subsidy. But affordability is a mixture of how much people have to pay for something and then how much of the thing there is. The supply side feels to me like something where the policy muscle of the Democratic Party is not what one might wish.

One hundred percent. I think it’s a couple of things. First of all, it’s just habits of the mind and habits of the political ecology of Washington and every other place.

But I think the truth is there are shortages for various reasons. Sometimes the government creates a shortage. Sometimes a corporation is creating the shortage. My own judgment here is that we need to tell people that they can have nice things. And we need to operate under the assumption that — whether it’s housing or clean energy, in particular, or the affordability of prescription drugs — we need to look people in the eye and say, “All of these scarcities are created either by corporations or by governments.”

And sometimes the solution is deregulatory. Sometimes the solution is more aggressive regulation. Sometimes the problem is a not big-enough subsidy. Sometimes the problem is that we’re subsidizing the wrong thing. But the premise here is that we do get to have enough of the things that we say we want and that the government should be working on that.

by Ezra Klein with Sen. Brian Schatz, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: NY Times

[ed. What's the matter with this guy... sounds too sensible for a politician. See also:
The Democrats' new sunny vibes (Noahpinion).]

Where's the Love?

Show of hands: Who’s fed up with human resources?

Maybe you’re irked by the endless flow of memos and forms, many of which need to be filled out, pronto. Maybe you’re irritated by new initiatives that regularly emerge from H.R., which never seems to run out of new initiatives, not all of them necessary or especially wise, in your opinion. Or you’ve got some problem with management and you don’t trust that H.R. representatives will actually help. They sure are friendly, but they get paid by the suits. In a crunch, it’s pretty clear whose side they are on.

The H.R. department bugs a lot of employees and managers, and it seems to have more detractors than ever since the pandemic began. That’s when H.R. began to administer rules about remote work and pay transparency, programs to improve diversity, equity and inclusion and everything else that has rattled and changed the workplace in the last four years.

But if the H.R. department is bothering you, here’s a fact you might find perversely consoling: You are not as aggravated or bummed out as the people who work in H.R.

That was obvious at Unleash, an annual three-day conference and expo held this year at Caesars Forum, an immense convention hall near the Las Vegas Strip. In May, the event brought together some 4,000 H.R. professionals from across the country. It was billed as a place where “global H.R. leaders come to do business and discover inspirational stories.”

“For years, we have been fighting fires with cans of gasoline,” he said. “And now, here we are, after literally giving everything we could, and it’s like: ‘Oh, thanks for everything, but’” — and here’s the G-rated version, get lost — “‘Don’t make too much work for me. I’m not going to dot those I’s and cross those T’s. I’m the business, and you’re H.R.’”

Part of the frustration is that office behavior post-Covid has become notably less civil, which means that H.R. is being called in far more often to referee disputes. Everyone at Unleash had a story about explaining basic etiquette to boorish colleagues. No, you can’t microwave fish at lunch. Stop cutting your toenails on your desk.  (...)

H.R. knows that employees and managers are annoyed by its memos, by its processes, by just about anything that interrupts life as it was. When an email is sent nudging everyone to take that 45-minute online course in, say, data security, H.R. can almost hear the eye rolls.

That said, don’t expect apologies. The consensus at Unleash was that most of these new ideas are designed with the goal of a more equitable workplace; like greater diversity, for instance, or standardized workplace reviews.

So get used to the memos.

Also, while you’re whining, get used to human capital management software programs. A recent Business Insider story, titled “Everyone Hates Workday,” asked why half of the Fortune 500 uses this particular piece of software — which handles benefits and recruiting and facilitates pay equity analysis — despite creating “mountains of busywork for everyone.”

It’s not the software’s fault, H.R. veterans say. It’s the fault of your company, which hasn’t configured it wisely or trained you adequately. Workday is here to stay, and one Unleash attendee had this bit of advice for its legions of haters: “Buckle up, buttercup.” (...)

In quieter settings, attendees lamented the low pay, the churn and the increasing workload. One discussed a work-induced mental breakdown. There was a lot of fretting about artificial intelligence, which seems poised to take jobs on the recruitment side of their business. (A number of vendors at the expo were selling software designed for that very purpose.)

Many H.R. executives have left the field in recent years, or they are looking for better offers. In 2022, LinkedIn found that H.R. had the highest turnover rate of any job it tracked.

“Everybody hates us,” said Hebba Youssef, the chief people officer at Workweek who has a podcast and a newsletter for H.R. professionals called “I Hate it Here.” Recent posts have included “Why Does Working in H.R. Feel So Lonely?” and “Everybody Hates Their Jobs Right?”

“Everything feels like a fool’s errand,” said Kyle Lagunas, a former H.R. executive at General Motors who now works at Aptitude Research, an H.R. advisory company based in Boston. He had just finished a highly animated presentation about H.R. tech in front of an audience of about 50 people. Now he sat in the designated media room and ranted a bit about the maddening challenges of running H.R. during and after the tumult of the pandemic.

Ms. Youssef especially bemoaned the mistrust employees feel toward H.R. It’s dispiriting, she said, because most people go into the field to be helpful.

“People in H.R. tend to be very compassionate, very empathetic,” she said. “But a lot of employees look at us as inherently evil.”

Let’s ‘Humanize’ the Company...

“It was initially known as ‘welfare work’ because it was employers demonstrating an interest in the welfare of workers,” said Gary Hoover, executive director of the American Business History Center in Tyler, Texas. After World War II, when the model of lifetime employment became the norm, the job was to ensure that workers stuck around.

“That starts to fade in the 1980-1981 recession,” said Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. “Companies were facing an existential threat from Japan, which was building better cars, better steel. Executives started laying off people and, in downsizing mode, you don’t care too much about keeping employees happy.”

By then, “personnel department” had been rebranded as “human resources.”

“The idea was to stop thinking of employees as people that needed to be taken care of,” said Professor Cappelli. “People became resources, assets like any other, like machinery. The priority wasn’t to help people. It was to help the business.”

The question of the H.R. department’s priorities and purpose has festered ever since. When the #MeToo reckoning began, many wondered why H.R. hadn’t forestalled many of the worst misdeeds with timely, forceful interventions. Critics contend that the department’s first mission has long been the quiet and smooth operation of a company, and before the epidemic of sexual harassment became a national scandal, that often meant quashing conflicts.

More recently, H.R. has been in charge of dealing with the fallout of epochal events. When offices closed down because of Covid, H.R. administered remote work rules, which kept evolving as back-to-work dates were repeatedly pushed into the future. Tens of millions of U.S. workers quit their jobs starting in 2021 in what became known as the Great Resignation. H.R. found replacements. When diversity, equity and inclusion programs were mandated by upper management in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, which brought renewed efforts to address racial disparities, H.R. had yet another mission.

Some of these missions have since changed, yet again. (...)

Other jobs in the H.R. portfolio have not changed so much as multiplied. There are now so many workplace grievances that companies are calling in outside counsel to investigate more and more internal complaints, producing a robust source of billable hours at law firms.

One of those firms is Ogletree Deakins, which has offices in 32 states. After the start of the pandemic, so many corporate clients hired the firm to conduct internal investigations that in 2021 it created a dedicated practice group. Since then, the group has doubled its head count to 50 lawyers, from 25.

Many are looking into complaints by low-level H.R. employees against ones at higher levels.

Yes, the H.R. department wants help investigating itself.

by David Segal, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times
[ed. Back in the day we had the Personnel Department,  which mostly just processed employment applications. Responsibility for interviewing and vetting applicants, dealing with behavioral and performance issues, managing work assignments, etc. were a managers role. That's what managers are supposed to do, right? Apparently not. From the comments section:

***

"I worked in HR for nearly 40 years. The problem with HR is they have no power. They say they are there for the employee, but if a problem has to do with management, they are useless. This applies to any area of HR where they think, at least initially, that they are there to solve problems by relaying useful information, which is necessary for improvements both to management and to employees. That's a myth. Management is not interested in making improvements that impact employees. The only thing that might get their attention is if an employee's issue could get them sued with the outcome most likely going to be in the employee's favor. They pay lip service to whatever mission statement about "one for all and all for one" someone in HR wrote up for them to sign off on. Employees don't expect much from management, but they do, at least at first, expect something better from HR, and they don't get it."

---

"I'm long retired and I've yet to meet or have heard of HR person worth a lick of salt to the employees they're theoretically there to help. In the firm I worked in most of my career, it was worse, a couple managers were corporate psychopaths and they played HR for suckers as much as they did the staff they were managing. Indeed, one routinely told us to tell them what they wanted to hear, then ignore it, here's what I want..... I even have an issue with the profession's title... I know practitioners are caring people, but my gosh, HR is a term that took over and replaced "personnel officer" .... that was at least more honest about the core of the job. As a wise person who was an expert in labor arbitration once told me — humans are NOT RESOURCES, gold, silver, oil, etc. are resources. Human are people with human needs, desires, emotions and all that, even HR people we're now told, no surprise. Resources on the other hand have always been natural stuff we dig up, grow, process, chew up and promptly discard whatever's left, moving on without skipping a step to the next batch. Maybe the HR people need to begin with a news philosophy. But I won't be holding my breath. Corporate bosses will always be king, no matter how unwise...."

Erik Witsoe, untitled
via:

John Mayall (1933–2024)

[ed. See also: John Mayall - G0dfather of British Blues - Documentary (YT).]

The Domination Tour

Five years ago, Britney Spears was rehearsing for her tenth concert series in 20 years when she suggested a tweak to one of the choreographer’s proposed dance moves. “It was as if I planted a huge bomb somewhere,” she said later under oath. Her tour managers, choreographers, and dancers disappeared into a room for 45 minutes. “I feel like they’re going to come back and be mean to me or punish me or something,” she remembered telling her assistant at the time.

Days later, Spears’s psychiatrist switched out her medication for a lithium prescription, advising that she wasn’t cooperating and was refusing to take her medication. The “Domination” residency, which had been announced to great fanfare months earlier, was quickly canceled, and Spears was once again involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric facility by handlers who—according to a paralegal who spoke to the podcast Britney’s Gram—theorized that the media buzz would boost ticket sales when she returned to the stage.

But the pandemic intervened, and Spears, for once freed from a punishing work schedule that entailed seven-day workweeks for all but one or two family vacations per year, began praying and researching her legal options, triggering the unlikely chain of events that ultimately led to the public unraveling of her jaw-dropping conservatorship. According to her public testimony and other reports, for 13 years the pop star had been quite literally trafficked by a shadowy clique of entertainment industry fixers and professional parasites who wiretapped her bedroom, medicated her, outfitted her with an IUD against her will, and monitored every morsel of food (no dessert) and keystroke, using a sophisticated surveillance apparatus one of the operation’s nine-year employees described as typical “counterterrorism.”

A half dozen streaming documentaries and Lord knows how many true-crime podcasts would ultimately chronicle the courtroom drama through which Spears emancipated herself from her indentured servitude. And yet three years after Spears detailed how she was imprisoned in her own home by a battalion of leeches who institutionalized her (at her own expense) in retaliation for attempting to tweak her own choreography, the pop music industry remains more thankless and constricting than ever.

Just as summer was beginning, both Jennifer Lopez and the Black Keys were forced to cancel tours in which they had invested considerable sums of their own cash, due to lukewarm demand for tickets that had been priced too aggressively. The prolific hit machine Bebe Rexha unleashed a torrent of social media posts about how “hopeless” she felt working in an industry she claimed had repeatedly conspired to “undermine” her. And Spotify, as if on cue, announced it was tweaking its “mechanical royalties” compensation formula; songwriters could expect to receive $150 million less in 2025 than they had in 2024. The Guardian convinced 12 musical acts, including two with recent album releases that had charted in the top ten, to share their balance sheets from their most recent concert tours. Just one had turned a profit, of only about $7,000 for 29 performances.

These problems are more connected than they might seem, because power and resources in the music industry are so unbelievably concentrated. Since the demise of recorded music sales in the early 2000s, pop music in America has increasingly become a single-payer system, in which virtually every working musician relies for the majority of his or her earnings on a concert promotions cabal, anchored by Live Nation/Ticketmaster and its former CEO, the diminutive mogul Irving Azoff. Collectively, they own or control nearly 500 of the nation’s most important concert venues, sell more than 80 percent of the nation’s concert tickets, and perversely also solely or jointly manage the careers, brands, and business affairs of hundreds of artists, from U2 and Dua Lipa to Drake and The Weeknd.

Readers of the Prospect are well aware that the Biden Justice Department brought a case against Live Nation in May, seeking to unwind the 2009 Azoff-brokered deal that merged it with Ticketmaster. The lawsuit has much to say about Azoff, arguing that his new venue management company Oak View Group operates as a “pimp” for Live Nation. But the action was inspired in part by the intergalactic backlash after ticket-buying algorithms infested a supposedly fan-only presale of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in November 2022 and drove prices up a thousand percent and more.

As flashpoints in protracted struggles against tyranny go, the Eras-trophe left something to be desired. Media coverage tended to focus on the plight of spoiled 13-year-old daughters of affluent white women—many of whom ultimately solved the problem by purchasing more accessibly priced tickets in Dublin or Vienna and mentally reclassifying the expense as an educational enterprise—which in turn enabled Live Nation and its legions of surrogates to spend the ensuing year and a half proposing legislation to crack down on ticket-hoarding bots. A far more illustrative media event for the purpose of illustrating the dangers of unchecked concert monopolies was probably the 2021 mass casualty event at Travis Scott’s Astroworld concert, which numerous settled lawsuits alleged was the predictable result of combining Scott’s feral live persona with Live Nation’s relentless cost-cutting and outsourcing.

But to truly grasp the terrifying insidiousness of the concert cartel’s control over the music industry and the artists who are its lifeblood—and why even a successful antitrust case may not change much of anything—one must peruse the work of the leading scholar of the #FreeBritney movement, namely a Northern Virginia anti-monopoly activist named Melanie Carlson, whose deeply researched Substack explores the corporate and para-political relationships behind celebrity drama.

A licensed clinical social worker who is currently working on a doctoral dissertation about the institutional failures of domestic violence shelters, Carlson was originally drawn to #FreeBritney out of a combination of pandemic boredom and domestic abuse expertise. But upon diving into the court documents, she quickly realized that there was nothing “domestic” about Britney’s house arrest.

For starters, it was abundantly clear from business records, court filings, and Britney’s public appearances that a Nashville-based bookkeeper-turned-talent management specialist named Louise Taylor—dubbed #Loucifer by the movement—had played the most conspicuous role in orchestrating the conservatorship. But Loucifer herself was just one in a long list of seemingly interchangeable music managers turned mini-moguls (Scooter Braun, Sal Slaiby) who appeared to trade the same blue-chip clients every few years. And in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Taylor named Irving Azoff and current Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino as her biggest mentors. (...)

The conservatorship was further codified by Caesars, the gaming conglomerate that hosted Spears’s “Piece of Me” residency in its Planet Hollywood casino and reportedly included a clause in its contract with the singer allowing it to cancel the residency if the conservatorship ended. (...)

Today, Live Nation manages the careers of some 2,000 artists through a dizzying collection of subsidiary management firms co-founded by such legendary managers as Guy Oseary, Scooter Braun, Jack Rovner, and the aforementioned Larry Rudolph, who discovered Spears when she was just 13 years old.

Unlike many of her contemporaries, Spears had plenty of revenue streams other than concert tours to tap into. (She is, for example, estimated to have sold $1.5 billion in licensed perfume alone during the period of her conservatorship, and she made a reported $15 million a season as a reality show judge.) But by the mid-2000s, the music industry was in a state of existential despair. Recorded music sales had plunged two-thirds from the peak they hit in 1999, the year “Baby One More Time” sold most of the 25 million copies it moved. Britney’s critically lauded Blackout album, which had been released early in 2007 after getting leaked to the blogger Perez Hilton, sold just 2.5 million copies. “After her divorce, all her rehab expenses and her constant nights on the town at pricey L.A. restaurants,” opined one Fox News gossip columnist in April 2007, “Spears had better get back to work. And just an album won’t cut it. She’s got to figure out a way to tour. It’s the only way left to make money in what was once known as the music business.”

In hindsight, the conservatorship appears to have turned Spears, who at that point was far more interested in hanging out with her children than performing night after night, into a touring machine. And it worked: Spears brought in nearly $400 million in ticket revenue between 2009 and 2017, all while the battalion of lawyers, business managers, financial advisers, and medical professionals on her payroll continued to insist she was unable to care for herself.

It was while recording Blackout that Britney Spears began to report she was being stalked by a “crazy lady” who had been FedExing her strange gifts, photos of herself with butterflies and letters in which she advised the superstar, using a creepily maternal tone, that she was “possessed” and needed to exorcise her “demon spirits.” As Spears wrote in an email to her then-lawyer Gary Stiffelman, “We told her a million times to leave me alone and now she is saying she is going to visit my drunk fucking father in Kentwood [Louisiana].”

The crazy lady was Lou Taylor, who specialized in a certain kind of pseudo-faith-based celebrity crisis management. Unbeknownst to Spears, Taylor had been working behind the scenes for at least four years to insinuate herself into the family business: managing little sister Jamie Lynn’s budding career as the star of the popular Nickelodeon show Zoey 101, “praying and fasting” with their estranged father Jamie, hiring a ghostwriter for the memoir Lynne Spears announced she was writing shortly after Jamie Lynn became pregnant at age 16 with the child of a boy she’d met at a church camp, even loaning Jamie Spears $40,000 shortly before his daughter was involuntarily hospitalized. Taylor exchanged emails with Jamie Spears’s lawyers, brainstorming about who would manage the conservatorship, even agreeing to postpone the request until a particular judge who was known to frown upon giving conservators the power to administer psychotropic drugs to their charges went on vacation.

#FreeBritney activists have spent years researching Taylor’s role in the conservatorship, attempting to assess her actions and quantify how much she extracted from the Britney Spears brand, a figure that has ranged from $18 million to $600 million. Taylor, for her part, told The New York Times that she “did nothing wrong” in the Spears case; the Prospect sought comment from her but did not receive a response.

But the most alarming thing about Taylor and the rest of “Team Con,” which is short for conservatorship in the #FreeBritney world, is the way their careers link some of the tawdriest episodes of institutionalized abuse to the uppermost echelons of corporate America. Just two years after Britney was conserved, Lindsay Lohan’s parents told X17 Online that Taylor had approached them to manage a conservatorship for the former child actress. Around the same time, Kurt Cobain’s widow Courtney Love revealed in social media posts that Taylor had attempted to impose a “muted strain of a conservatorship” on her as part of an elaborate plot—masterminded, Love claimed, by Azoff and Lester Knispel—to secure control over Cobain’s publishing rights, which she held.

For most of Taylor’s clients, a “spiritual” connection is one of the selling points: She and her pastor husband Rob have controlled many churches, to which most of her clients seem to tithe a large portion of their paychecks. (Jamie Spears contributed hundreds of thousands of the dollars he made as his daughter’s conservator to Rob Taylor’s Cavalry church.) The Kardashians and Biebers were reported to be tithing 10 percent of their income to a megachurch called Churchome on whose board Taylor served; rumors have since swirled that P. Diddy, now hit with nine separate lawsuits for alleged sex trafficking, tithed large portions of his income to churches Taylor controlled. Diddy has denied all of the allegations. (...)

Last year, Britney Spears published a best-selling memoir, The Woman in Me, about her life in the gilded gulag of her conservatorship. The details were somehow even more dystopian and heartbreaking than all the documentaries and magazine narratives had conveyed. Spears vividly described the process of repeatedly making peace with the arrangement so she could spend time with her sons, only to have the tiny pleasures she was still allowed—french fries and desserts, over-the-counter energy supplements, vacations with her children—taken away for tiny perceived infractions. And she wrote with disarming wistfulness about 2007, the year of the head shaving and serial meltdowns before she turned into a “robot doll,” when she was still allowed to sleep in and drink shots with Paris Hilton when she wanted.

She describes rediscovering her love for performing over the course of a three-year “Piece of Me” residency in Las Vegas, only to be driven insane by her handlers’ refusal to let her make even minor tweaks to the performance. She sang the same 22 songs in the same order 248 times. “It was so lazy it was actually odd,” Spears wrote. “I worried what my fans would think of me. But as always the answer was no. Because if I actually took control of my show, it could awaken people to the fact that I might not need my dad as a conservator. I feel like he secretly liked me feeling ‘less than.’ It gave him power.”

Spears’s specific predicament was so exotic that it’s easy to forget her imprisonment was just a more intense version of the control that middlemen like Lou Taylor and Live Nation exert over all of their “product offerings,” no matter how famous and uniquely beloved. (...)

At this point, they all know the sordid backstory of the original Las Vegas residency, wherein Elvis Presley’s personal Loucifer, his longtime manager “Colonel” Tom Parker, leashed the King to the exhausting seven-year, 837-performance contract at the International Hotel that would arguably cause his early death, all to sustain the Colonel’s own vicious gambling addiction. (The International would send a roulette wheel to Colonel Parker’s room so he could gamble away.)

When Britney’s “Piece of Me” residency debuted shortly after her 32nd birthday in 2013, it was immediately hailed as a transformative event in the annals of the “Las Vegas musical landscape,” historically the realm of past-their-prime easy-listening talents. Britney’s engineered Sin City enslavement may seem in the modern day far more cynical than the King’s, because she was a young mom of two little boys. But Elvis had a one-year-old at home when his Vegas residency began, and he was just two years older than Britney at 34. The history of the music industry has been one of artist exploitation, even as the names of the exploiters have changed.

by Maureen Tkazic, The American Prospect |  Read more:

Image: James Nielsen/AP

[ed. I don't pay much attention to celebrities so didn't realize how venal her conservatorship actually was, and the whole industry appears similarly infected. What a surprise. See also: The New Pornographers (Tik Tok):]

***

"The influencers, yes, with their perfect makeup and strategic camera angles and professional lighting, all to make their lives seem enviable while narrating their days in a strange monotone. They show off massive homes with the house numbers in the font of gentrification. They travel around the world, mostly in first or business class, discussing their enjoyment of champagne and caviar and perfectly cooked fish and sumptuous desserts. They review hotels and lie out on beautiful beaches overlooking crystalline waters. They adventure and ride camels and visit rainforests. The world, for these TikTokkers, is an abundant oyster, from which they pluck pearls of audience engagement.

There is a young woman, Nara Smith, who is a model and influencer married to a model and influencer named Lucky Blue Smith. They are zygotes, relatively speaking, and already have four children (one from Lucky’s previous marriage). Though they rarely say it, they are Mormon (and there are a lot of similar influencers on TikTok). I am chagrined to know this, and yet. … Most days, Nara makes videos, speaking in that ubiquitous monotone people on the platform use, as she makes the most ludicrous things from scratch. She makes her own marshmallows and Turkish pizza and granola and mozzarella cheese. She can make Snickers bars from scratch and ice cream and also chewing gum. Clearly, she is doing this, in part, to mess with her very large audience, who often express bewilderment, admiration, and/or disdain as she appears in her perfectly appointed kitchen and starts cooking while wearing a lacy evening gown or other outfit that is not conducive to cooking. She is selling an enviable lifestyle — one where she is unencumbered by how the dishes are washed or who is tending to the children while she makes her videos, one where the particulars of her financial situation are inscrutable as she surrounds herself with the trappings of conspicuous consumption. Don’t get me started on Ballerina Farm, but it’s a whole thing.

Families with 10 or more children, often evangelical, who own innumerable coordinated outfits, and think quite highly of themselves even though they are never doing much of anything on camera. Parents sharing a day in the life, sometimes with medically complex children. Throuples sharing a day in the life. Pet owners sharing a day in the life. People getting ready to go out for a night on the town or to a birthday party or work. Couples sharing, in precise detail, what they’re wearing from underwear to the scent of the day. Makeup artists offering tutorials or showing off their skills. People sharing what they eat every day or doing meal prep for the week. Aestheticians and dermatologists cleaning pores and pulling viscera from body cavities. Hairdressers and barbers performing their services on a range of people from weekly clients to people who haven’t washed their hair in months or years and need a little care and tenderness to undo the damage. Doctors and nurses offering medical advice, or dancing or sharing what a shift is like or making fun of annoying patients, which, I’ll admit, doesn’t always inspire a lot of confidence in the medical establishment. (...)

There are so many “viral” dances. So many. These dances are usually created by Black creators and end up as memes that Kansas grandmothers and everyone else try to mimic to great or not so great effect. And there are the many, many niche communities. So many. Women who pack lunch for their husbands and detail everything, including the silverware and napkins. The quantity of food these men take to work is staggering, in case you were wondering. Housewives with a yen for organization and clear plastic storage goods. As in, you can watch videos of people bringing groceries home, emptying their refrigerators, cleaning them, and refilling their refrigerators, with everything neatly organized. People will remove things from one container only to place them in another, with a neatly printed label. It’s hypnotic but also deeply distressing when you start to think about the environmental impact.

TikTok is creative and sprawling and often strange and anarchic, which mirrors the internet more broadly. There are few rules; the platform takes all comers. Chaos is inevitable. You can find absolutely anything; it’s incredible to witness how many different ways there are to be, how creative (or uncreative) people are, how we crave attention, hoping that if we make the perfect video, we might be catapulted to some version of fame. It is also … haunting, how so many of us yearn to be seen, to be understood."

High Tech/Low Tech

Kim Yeji

Yusuf Dikeç,

[ed. One looks like they stepped out of The Matrix, the other a Turkish KGB officer. See also:]

Kim Yeji: The Paris Olympics’ coolest athlete and a South Korean superstar (The Athletic)

Viral Olympic shooters Yusuf Dikec and Kim Ye-ji unfazed by internet storm (Al Jazeera)

***

"Aside from his medal win, fans were quick to notice Dikeç’s attire during the event, which consisted of a white T-shirt and black pants. While shooting, the Olympian also adopted a very laid-back stance, with one hand in his pocket and another hand holding up his pistol as he stared directly at the target.

On his head, he was only wearing his pair of glasses, rather than using specific lenses that are worn by other athletes when shooting. He also wasn’t wearing ear protectors during the event, which competitors often use to block out the loud noises.

On X, formerly known as Twitter, many fans were impressed by Dikeç’s casual stance and relaxed demeanor when winning a silver medal. They also applauded Dikeç’s competitor, South Korean Olympic shooter Kim Yeji, who fans have called a “movie character” for her all-black attire and stance during the event.

“I think I’m gonna have to take a closer look at the Olympic Pistol competition. First we got South Korean Kim Yeji, who’s a total bada**,” one wrote. “Then comes Turkish competitor Yusuf Dikeç, who casually goes out and wins the silver with one hand in his pocket!” (Independent)

via:

David Byrne, Stop Making Sense
via:

Falling Stars Observed from the Balloon, illustration by Albert Tissandier for the second edition of James Glaisher's Travels in the Air, 1871

via:

99 Years After the Scopes ‘Monkey Trial,’ Religious Fundamentalism Still Infects Our Schools

Almost a century has passed since a Tennessee schoolteacher was found guilty of teaching evolution to his students. We’ve come a long way since that happened on July 21, 1925. Haven’t we?

No, not really.

The Christian fundamentalism that begat the state law that John Scopes violated has not gone away. It regularly resurfaces in American politics, including today, when efforts to ban or dilute the teaching of evolution and other scientific concepts are part and parcel of a nationwide book-banning campaign, augmented by an effort to whitewash the teaching of American history.

The trial in Dayton, Tenn., that supposedly placed evolution in the dock is seen as a touchstone of the recurrent battle between science and revelation. It is and it isn’t. But the battle is very real.

Let’s take a look.

The Scopes trial was one of the first, if not the very first, to be dubbed “the trial of the century.”

And why not? It pitted the fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan — three-time Democratic presidential candidate, former congressman and secretary of State, once labeled “the great commoner” for his faith in the judgment of ordinary people, but at 65 showing the effects of age — against Clarence Darrow, the most storied defense counsel of his time.

The case has retained its hold on the popular imagination chiefly thanks to “Inherit the Wind,” an inescapably dramatic reconstruction — actually a caricature — of the trial that premiered in 1955, when the play was written as a hooded critique of McCarthyism.

Most people probably know it from the 1960 film version, which starred Frederic March, Spencer Tracy and Gene Kelly as the characters meant to portray Bryan, Darrow and H.L. Mencken, the acerbic Baltimore newspaperman whose coverage of the trial is a genuine landmark of American journalism.

What all this means is that the actual case has become encrusted by myth over the ensuing decades.

One persistent myth is that the anti-evolution law and the trial arose from a focused groundswell of religious fanaticism in Tennessee. In fact, they could be said to have occurred — to repurpose a phrase usually employed to describe how Britain acquired her empire — in “a fit of absence of mind.”

The Legislature passed the measure idly as a meaningless gift to its drafter, John W. Butler, a lay preacher who hadn’t passed any other bill. (The bill “did not amount to a row of pins; let him have it,” a legislator commented, according to Ray Ginger’s definitive 1958 book about the case, “Six Days or Forever?”)

No one bothered to organize an opposition. There was no legislative debate. The lawmakers assumed that Gov. Austin Peay would simply veto the bill. The president of the University of Tennessee disdained it, but kept mum because he didn’t want the issue to complicate a plan for university funding then before the Legislature.

Peay signed the bill, asserting that it was an innocuous law that wouldn’t interfere with anything being taught in the state’s schools. The law “probably ... will never be applied,” he said. Bryan, who approved of the law as a symbolic statement of religious principle, had advised legislators to leave out any penalty for violation, lest it be declared unconstitutional.

The lawmakers, however, made it a misdemeanor punishable by a fine for any teacher in the public schools “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man had descended from a lower order of animal.”

Scopes’ arrest and trial proceeded in similarly desultory manner. Scopes, a school football coach and science teacher filling in for an ailing biology teacher, assigned the students to read a textbook that included evolution. He wasn’t a local and didn’t intend to set down roots in Dayton, but his parents were socialists and agnostics, so when a local group sought to bring a test case, he agreed to be the defendant.

The play and movie of “Inherit the Wind” portray the townspeople as religious fanatics, except for a couple of courageous individuals. In fact, they were models of tolerance. Even Mencken, who came to Dayton expecting to find a squalid backwater, instead discovered “a country town full of charm and even beauty.”

Dayton’s civic boosters paid little attention to the profound issues ostensibly at play in the courthouse; they saw the trial as a sort of economic development project, a tool for attracting new residents and businesses to compete with the big city nearby, Chattanooga. They couldn’t have been happier when Bryan signed on as the chief prosecutor and a local group solicited Darrow for the defense.

“I knew that education was in danger from the source that has always hampered it — religious fanaticism,” Darrow wrote in his autobiography. “My only object was to focus the attention of the country on the programme of Mr. Bryan and the other fundamentalists in America.” He wasn’t blind to how the case was being presented in the press: “As a farce instead of a tragedy.” But he judged the press publicity to be priceless.

The press and and the local establishment had diametrically opposed visions of what the trial was about. The former saw it as a fight to protect from rubes the theory of evolution, specifically that humans descended from lower orders of primate, hence the enduring nickname of the “monkey trial.” For the judge and jury, it was about a defendant’s violation of a law written in plain English. (...)

The play and movie turned a couple of courtroom exchanges into moments of high drama, notably Darrow’s calling Bryan to the witness stand to testify to the truth of the Bible, and Bryan’s humiliation at his hands.

In truth, that exchange was a late-innings sideshow of no significance to the case. Scopes was plainly guilty of violating the law and his conviction preordained. But it was overturned on a technicality (the judge had fined him $100, more than was authorized by state law), leaving nothing for the pro-evolution camp to bring to an appellate court. The whole thing fizzled away.

The idea that despite Scopes’ conviction, the trial was a defeat for fundamentalism, lived on. Scopes was one of its adherents. “I believe that the Dayton trial marked the beginning of the decline of fundamentalism,” he said in a 1965 interview. “I feel that restrictive legislation on academic freedom is forever a thing of the past, ... that the Dayton trial had some part in bringing to birth this new era.”

That was untrue then, or now. When the late biologist and science historian Stephen Jay Gould quoted that interview in a 1981 essay, fundamentalist politics were again on the rise. Gould observed that Jerry Falwell had taken up the mountebank’s mission of William Jennings Bryan.

It was harder then to exclude evolution from the class curriculum entirely, Gould wrote, but its enemies had turned to demanding “‘equal time’ for evolution and for old-time religion masquerading under the self-contradictory title of ‘scientific creationism.’”

For the evangelical right, Gould noted, “creationism is a mere stalking horse ... in a political program that would ban abortion, erase the political and social gains of women ... and reinstitute all the jingoism and distrust of learning that prepares a nation for demagoguery.”

And here we are again. Measures banning the teaching of evolution outright have not lately been passed or introduced at the state level. But those that advocate teaching the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific hypotheses are common — language that seems innocuous, but that educators know opens the door to undermining pupils’ understanding of science. (...)

That doesn’t seem to matter to the culture warriors who have expanded their attacks on race and gender teaching to science itself. They’re playing a long game. They conceal their intentions with vague language in laws that force teachers to question whether something they say in class will bring prosecutors to the schoolhouse door.

Gould detected the subtext of these campaigns. So did Mencken, who had Bryan’s number. Crushed by his losses in three presidential campaigns in 1896, 1900 and 1908, Mencken wrote, Bryan had launched a new campaign of cheap religiosity.

“This old buzzard,” Mencken wrote, “having failed to raise the mob against its rulers, now prepares to raise it against its teachers.” Bryan understood instinctively that the way to turn American society from a democracy to a theocracy was to start by destroying its schools. His heirs, right up to the present day, know it too.

by Michael Hiltzik, LA Times | Read more:
Image: Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times/Los Angeles Times
[ed. Which side of history do you want to be on when your grandchildren think of you. See also: H.L. Mencken's famous Reports from the Scopes Trial: 

***

July 9
"On the eve of the great contest Dayton is full of sickening surges and tremors of doubt. Five or six weeks ago, when the infidel Scopes was first laid by the heels, there was no uncertainty in all this smiling valley. The town boomers leaped to the assault as one man. Here was an unexampled, almost a miraculous chance to get Dayton upon the front pages, to make it talked about, to put it upon the map. But how now?

Today, with the curtain barely rung up and the worst buffooneries to come, it is obvious to even town boomers that getting upon the map, like patriotism, is not enough. The getting there must be managed discreetly, adroitly, with careful regard to psychological niceties. The boomers of Dayton, alas, had no skill at such things, and the experts they called in were all quacks. The result now turns the communal liver to water. Two months ago the town was obscure and happy. Today it is a universal joke.

I have been attending the permanent town meeting that goes on in Robinson's drug store, trying to find out what the town optimists have saved from the wreck. All I can find is a sort of mystical confidence that God will somehow come to the rescue to reward His old and faithful partisans as they deserve--that good will flow eventually out of what now seems to be heavily evil. More specifically, it is believed that settlers will be attracted to the town as to some refuge from the atheism of the great urban Sodoms and Gomorrah.

But will these refugees bring any money with them? Will they buy lots and build houses? Will they light the fires of the cold and silent blast furnace down the railroad tracks? On these points, I regret to report, optimism has to call in theology to aid it. Prayer can accomplish a lot. It can cure diabetes, find lost pocketbooks and retain husbands from beating their wives. But is prayer made any more officious by giving a circus first? Coming to this thought, Dayton begins to sweat. (...)

July 10 (the first day)
The town boomers have banqueted Darrow as well as Bryan, but there is no mistaking which of the two has the crowd, which means the venire of tried and true men. Bryan has been oozing around the country since his first day here, addressing this organization and that, presenting the indubitable Word of God in his caressing, ingratiating way, and so making unanimity doubly unanimous. From the defense yesterday came hints that he was making hay before the sun had legally begun to shine--even that it was a sort of contempt of court. But no Daytonian believes anything of the sort. What Bryan says doesn't seem to these congenial Baptists and Methodists to be argument; it seems to be a mere graceful statement to the obvious....

July 11
The selection of a jury to try Scopes, which went on all yesterday afternoon in the atmosphere of a blast furnace, showed to what extreme lengths the salvation of the local primates has been pushed. It was obvious after a few rounds that the jury would be unanimously hot for Genesis. The most that Mr. Darrow could hope for was to sneak in a few bold enough to declare publicly that they would have to hear the evidence against Scopes before condemning him. The slightest sign of anything further brought forth a peremptory challenge from the State. Once a man was challenged without examination for simply admitting that he did not belong formally to any church. Another time a panel man who confessed that he was prejudiced against evolution got a hearty round of applause from the crowd....

In brief this is a strictly Christian community, and such is its notion of fairness, justice and due process of law. Try to picture a town made up wholly of Dr. Crabbes and Dr. Kellys, and you will have a reasonably accurate image of it. Its people are simply unable to imagine a man who rejects the literal authority of the Bible. The most they can conjure up, straining until they are red in the face, is a man who is in error about the meaning of this or that text. Thus one accused of heresy among them is like one accused of boiling his grandmother to make soap in Maryland...."

July 13 (the second day)
It would be hard to imagine a more moral town than Dayton. If it has any bootleggers, no visitor has heard of them. Ten minutes after I arrived a leading citizen offered me a drink made up half of white mule and half of coca cola, but he seems to have been simply indulging himself in a naughty gesture. No fancy woman has been seen in the town since the end of the McKinley administration. There is no gambling. There is no place to dance. The relatively wicked, when they would indulge themselves, go to Robinson's drug store and debate theology....

Fentanyl Supply Chain

We bought everything needed to make $3 million worth of fentanyl. All it took was $3,600 and a web browser

A cardboard box half the size of a loaf of bread bore a shipping label declaring its contents: “Adapter.” It was delivered in October to a Reuters reporter in Mexico City.

There was no adapter inside that package. Instead, sealed in a metallic Mylar bag was a plastic jar containing a kilogram of 1-boc-4-piperidone, a pale powder that’s a core ingredient of fentanyl. It was enough to produce 750,000 tablets of the deadly drug.

A Reuters reporter had ordered the chemical six weeks earlier from a seller in China. The sales assistant, “Jenny,” used a photo of a Chinese actress as her screen avatar. The price was $440, payable in Bitcoin, delivery by air freight included.

“We can ship safely to Mexico,” Jenny had written in Spanish on the encrypted message platform Telegram in July 2023, when the reporter first inquired about the chemical. “No one knows what we ship.”

Transactions like this are part of the biggest upheaval in the global narcotics trade since the war on drugs began half a century ago. The manufacturing of fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that’s killing tens of thousands of Americans a year, has become an endlessly inventive and ruthlessly efficient global industry.

The trade hinges on chemicals known as “precursors,” which are the drug’s essential ingredients. Compounds called piperidines are the core of fentanyl’s structure. Other precursors provide the remaining building blocks. Combined through chemical reactions, these precursors create a drug 50 times stronger than heroin.

The problem for regulators: Many of the same chemicals used to make fentanyl are also crucial to legitimate industries, from perfumes and pharmaceuticals to rubber and dyes. Tightly restricting all of them would upend global commerce. And because of fentanyl’s potency, even small quantities of these precursors can produce vast numbers of tiny pills using a simple manufacturing process – rendering the ingredients, the final product and the supply chain easy to conceal from authorities.

Anyone with a mailbox, an internet connection and digital currency to pay the tab can source these chemicals, a Reuters investigation found.

To learn how this global industry works, reporters made multiple buys of precursors over the past year. Though a few of the sales proved to be scams, the journalists succeeded in buying 12 chemicals that could be used to make fentanyl, according to independent chemists consulted by Reuters. Most of the goods arrived as seamlessly as any other mail-order package. The team also procured secondary ingredients used to process the essential precursors, as well as basic equipment – giving it everything needed to produce fentanyl.

The core precursors Reuters bought would have yielded enough fentanyl powder to make at least 3 million tablets, with a potential street value of $3 million – a conservative estimate based on prices cited by U.S. law enforcement agencies in published reports over the past six months.

The total cost of the chemicals and equipment Reuters purchased, paid mainly in Bitcoin: $3,607.18.

Turning these precursors into fentanyl would have required just modest lab skills and a basic grasp of chemistry. One Mexican fentanyl cook who dropped out of school at age 12 told Reuters he learned the trade as an apprentice at an illegal lab.

“It’s like making chicken soup,” said the cook, an independent producer based in the cartel stronghold of Sinaloa state. “It’s mega-easy making that drug.”

The Reuters reporters didn’t make fentanyl, had no intention to do so, and arranged for safe destruction of the chemicals and other materials they purchased. They also followed the guidance of lawyers before making the buys in an effort to ensure they complied with the law. Reuters is withholding detailed instructions and other information that could aid in synthesizing the drug. [ed. barely]

The dominant players in the illicit opioid trade – the Mexican cartels that manufacture most of the drugs and smuggle them into America– have been the subject of detailed reporting over the years. Now, as the first news organization to buy and test fentanyl’s essential ingredients, Reuters has penetrated the hidden sub-industry that makes the cartel operations possible: the international supply chain of precursor chemicals.

by Maurice Tamman, Laura Gottesdiener and Stephen Eisenhammer, Reuters |  Read more:

Image: Reuters

[ed. How coy. The article does everything but make the pills for you. Ingredients, messaging apps, websites, company names, transport options, alternative precursors, and every other option you can imagine. Nice.]

Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead

You can see the future first in San Francisco. 

Over the past year, the talk of the town has shifted from $10 billion compute clusters to $100 billion clusters to trillion-dollar clusters. Every six months another zero is added to the boardroom plans. Behind the scenes, there’s a fierce scramble to secure every power contract still available for the rest of the decade, every voltage transformer that can possibly be procured. American big business is gearing up to pour trillions of dollars into a long-unseen mobilization of American industrial might. By the end of the decade, American electricity production will have grown tens of percent; from the shale fields of Pennsylvania to the solar farms of Nevada, hundreds of millions of GPUs will hum. 

The AGI race has begun. We are building machines that can think and reason. By 2025/26, these machines will outpace college graduates. By the end of the decade, they will be smarter than you or I; we will have superintelligence, in the true sense of the word. Along the way, national security forces not seen in half a century will be unleashed, and before long, The Project will be on. If we’re lucky, we’ll be in an all-out race with the CCP; if we’re unlucky, an all-out war. 

Everyone is now talking about AI, but few have the faintest glimmer of what is about to hit them. Nvidia analysts still think 2024 might be close to the peak. Mainstream pundits are stuck on the willful blindness of “it’s just predicting the next word”. They see only hype and business-as-usual; at most they entertain another internet-scale technological change. 

Before long, the world will wake up. But right now, there are perhaps a few hundred people, most of them in San Francisco and the AI labs, that have situational awareness. Through whatever peculiar forces of fate, I have found myself amongst them. A few years ago, these people were derided as crazy—but they trusted the trendlines, which allowed them to correctly predict the AI advances of the past few years. Whether these people are also right about the next few years remains to be seen. But these are very smart people—the smartest people I have ever met—and they are the ones building this technology. Perhaps they will be an odd footnote in history, or perhaps they will go down in history like Szilard and Oppenheimer and Teller. If they are seeing the future even close to correctly, we are in for a wild ride. 

Let me tell you what we see.

I. From GPT-4 to AGI: Counting the OOMs 

AGI by 2027 is strikingly plausible. GPT-2 to GPT-4 took us from ~preschooler to ~smart high-schooler abilities in 4 years. Tracing trendlines in compute (~0.5 orders of magnitude or OOMs/year), algorithmic efficiencies (~0.5 OOMs/year), and “unhobbling” gains (from chatbot to agent), we should expect another preschooler-to-high-schooler-sized qualitative jump by 2027. 

GPT-4’s capabilities came as a shock to many: an AI system that could write code and essays, could reason through difficult math problems, and ace college exams. A few years ago, most thought these were impenetrable walls. 

But GPT-4 was merely the continuation of a decade of breakneck progress in deep learning. A decade earlier, models could barely identify simple images of cats and dogs; four years earlier, GPT-2 could barely string together semi-plausible sentences. Now we are rapidly saturating all the benchmarks we can come up with. And yet this dramatic progress has merely been the result of consistent trends in scaling up deep learning. 

There have been people who have seen this for far longer. They were scoffed at, but all they did was trust the trendlines. The situational awareness 8 trendlines are intense, and they were right. The models, they just want to learn; you scale them up, and they learn more. 

I make the following claim: it is strikingly plausible that by 2027, models will be able to do the work of an AI researcher/engineer. That doesn’t require believing in sci-fi; it just requires believing in straight lines on a graph.

In this piece, I will simply “count the OOMs” (OOM = order of magnitude, 10x = 1 order of magnitude): look at the trends in 1) compute, 2) algorithmic efficiencies (algorithmic progress that we can think of as growing “effective compute”), and 3) ”unhobbling” gains (fixing obvious ways in which models are hobbled by default, unlocking latent capabilities and giving them tools, leading to step-changes in usefulness). We trace the growth in each over four years before GPT-4, and what we should expect in the four years after, through the end of 2027. Given deep learning’s consistent improvements for every OOM of effective compute, we can use this to project future progress. 

Publicly, things have been quiet for a year since the GPT-4 release, as the next generation of models has been in the oven— leading some to proclaim stagnation and that deep learning is hitting a wall.1 But by counting the OOMs, we get a peek at 1 Predictions they’ve made every year for the last decade, and which they’ve been consistently wrong about. . . what we should actually expect. 

The upshot is pretty simple. GPT-2 to GPT-4—from models that were impressive for sometimes managing to string together a few coherent sentences, to models that ace high-school exams—was not a one-time gain. We are racing through the OOMs extremely rapidly, and the numbers indicate we should expect another ~100,000x effective compute scaleup—resulting in another GPT-2-to-GPT-4-sized qualitative jump—over four years. Moreover, and critically, that doesn’t just mean a better chatbot; picking the many obvious low-hanging fruit on “unhobbling” gains should take us from chatbots to agents, from a tool to something that looks more like drop-in remote worker replacements.

While the inference is simple, the implication is striking. Another jump like that very well could take us to AGI, to models as smart as PhDs or experts that can work beside us as coworkers. Perhaps most importantly, if these AI systems could automate AI research itself, that would set in motion intense feedback loops—the topic of the the next piece in the series.

Even now, barely anyone is pricing all this in. But situational awareness on AI isn’t actually that hard, once you step back and look at the trends. If you keep being surprised by AI capabilities, just start counting the OOMs.

by Leopold Aschenbrenner, Situational-Awareness AI |  Read more (pdf):

Image: the author

[ed. See also: How to Know If You're Living in a Doom Loop (HB).]

Scale of Life: Everyday Life in Real Time

Scale of Life (link)

What is The Scale of Life?

Our site is a "real-time" visualization of the relative scale of different life events and natural phenomena (details on what real-time means below). You can select from various categories, time periods, and some unique units of measure that we created in the dropdowns to modify the counter lists.

Each counter counts up in sync with the event listed unless the pause button is selected. You can also click each counter to get sources as well as thought provoking articles and videos that explore the topic in depth. (...)

We make a point of generally choosing statistics that are researched by professional agencies or institutions or are provided directly from a company, person, etc. involved (e.g. production volume of a product). Many of these types of statistics like births, commercial flights, red blood cells created, legos manufactured, the speed of light, etc. are very well tracked or researched.

While this site is intended primarily for a lay audience, we make our best efforts to obtain the most accurate data available; if we can't find data for a statistic that meets our (patent pending) "Scale of Life Data Trustworthiness" standards, we don't use it.

When creating a final calculation, we will generally weight and average multiple data sources depending on their percieved quality. In some cases we select a single, most authoritative data point. This is a highly subjective process, which is why we make the "per day" calculation and sources available so you can evaluate for yourself.

via:

Image: Kalen Emsley, Wet Mountain Valley, via Wikimedia Commons