Utah Hair

Everyone's Talking About Utah Hair (WSJ)

Image: Disney

[ed. Not me, but apparently everyone else :]

“The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” a new reality TV series, is full of juicy storylines involving fraying friendships, divorce and dating. But for all the drama the show’s eight young stars face, nothing is sparking more fan conversation than their hair.

“Utah curls,” as they’ve been dubbed on social media, have received outsize attention after being featured front and center in the Hulu show, which premiered in September. The hairstyle is a cascade of waist-length, thick locks, curled into beach waves with straight ends. In the show, where the characters juggle the demands of faith, family and relationships, fans have noticed that nearly every cast member wears their hair in an identical style. 

[ed. See also: The One Thing About TV Hairstyles You’ve Probably Never Noticed (Fashion).]

Fleetwood Mac

Amazon is a Ripoff

There's a cheat-code in US antitrust law, one that's been increasingly used since the Reagan administration, when the "consumer welfare" theory ("monopolies are fine, so long as they lower prices") shoved aside the long-established idea that antitrust law existed to prevent monopolies from forming at all.

The idea that a company can do anything to create or perpetuate a monopoly so long as its prices go down and/or its quality goes up is directly to blame for the rise of Big Tech. These companies burned through their investors' cash for years, selling goods and services below cost, or even giving stuff away for free. Think of Uber, who lost $0.41 on every dollar they brought in for their first 13 years of existence, a move that cost their investors (mostly Saudi royals) $31 billion.

The monopoly cheerleaders in the consumer welfare camp understood that these money-losing orgies could not go on forever, and that the investors who financed them weren't doing so for charitable purposes. But they dismissed the possibility that would-be monopolists could raise prices after attaining dominance, because these prices hikes would bring new competitors into the market, starting the process over again.

Well, Uber has doubled the price of a ride and halved the wages of its drivers (not that consumer welfare theorists care about workers' wages – they care about consumer welfare, not worker welfare). And not just Uber: companies that captured whole markets have jacked up prices and lowered quality across the board, a Great Enshittening whose playbook has been dubbed "venture predation":

Not only was this turn predictable – it was predicted. Back in 2017, Lina Khan – then a law student – published an earthshaking Yale Law Journal paper, "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox," laying out how monopolists would trap their customers and block new competitors as they raised prices and lowered quality:

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox

Today, Khan is the chair of the FTC, and has brought a case against Amazon that turns her legal theories into practice, backed by a cheering chorus of Amazon customers, workers, suppliers and competitors who've been cheated by the e-commerce giant:

Khan's case argues that Amazon is not the house of bargains that it's widely billed as. She points to the sky-high fees that Amazon extracts from its sellers (45-51% of every dollar!) and the company's use of "most favored nation" deals that force sellers who raise their Amazon prices to pay those rents to raise their prices everywhere else, too:

Now, a new Amazon Paradox has dropped, and it drills into another way that Amazon overcharges most of us by as much as 29% on nearly every purchase, disqualifying it from invoking that consumer welfare cheat code. The new paper is "Amazon's Pricing Paradox," from law professors Rory Van Loo and Nikita Aggarwal, for The Harvard Journal of Law and Technology:

The authors concede that while Amazon does have some great bargains, it goes to enormous lengths to make it nearly impossible to get those bargains. Drawing from the literature on behavioral economics, the authors make the reasonable (and experimentally verified) assumption that shoppers generally assume that the top results in an Amazon search are the best results, and click on those.

But Amazon's search-ordering is enshittified: it shifts value from sellers and shoppers (you!) to the company. A combination of self-preferencing (upranking Amazon's own knock-offs), pay-for-placement (Amazon ads), other forms of payola (whether a merchant is paying for Prime), and "junk ads" (that don't match your search) turn Amazon's search-ordering into a rigged casino game.

The ability to manipulate customers and sellers and get more money from both is why Amazon has so many incentives to use Amazon's internal search tool, rather than, say, searching Amazon via Google, which can yield far superior results. (...)

In their new paper, the authors extract and analyze a large dataset of common items you might buy on Amazon, determining which result is best – the lowest price at the highest rating – and then calculating how much more you'll pay for that item if you click the first relevant (non-ad) item on the search results.

If you trust Amazon search to find you the best product and click that first link, you will pay a 29% premium for that item. If you expand your selection to the "headline" – the first four items, which are often all that's visible without scrolling – you'll pay an average of 25% more. That top row accounts for 64% of Amazon's clicks.

On average, the best deal on Amazon is found in the seventeenth slot in the search results. Seventeen!

Amazon argues that none of this matters, because it allows users to refine their searches to get the best bargains, but Amazon's search won't let you factor in "unit pricing" – that is, the price per unit. So if you order your search by price, the seller who's offering a single pencil for $10 will show up above a seller who's offering ten pencils for $10.01.

Here is an iron law of cons: any time someone adds complexity to a proposition bet, the complexity exists solely to make it hard for you to figure out if you're getting a good deal. Whether that's the payout lines on a craps table, the complex interplay of deductibles and co-pays on your health insurance, the menu of fees your bank charges, or the add-ons for your cell-phone plan, the complexity exists to confound your intuition and overwhelm your reason:

And Amazon certainly knows how to pile on the complexity! First, there's the irrelevant results – AAA batteries that show up in a search for AA batteries, or dog accessories that show up in a search for cat accessories:

Then there's the "drip pricing": extra charges that get tacked on at checkout, like shipping fees. I once found an item on Amazon that advertised "free shipping" – but at checkout, that "free shipping" came with a delivery date that was three months in the future. Upgrading to shipping in the current quarter doubled the price.

Drip pricing makes it hard to figure out if Prime is a good deal, too. Recall that Amazon already comps shipping on orders over $25, so a potential Prime purchaser has to evaluate whether they'll place enough sub-$25 orders in the coming year to justify the price – and also factor in the fact that Prime items are often more expensive on a per-unit basis than their non-Prime equivalents. Yes, Prime comes with other perks – music and videos – but valuing these just adds complexity to your calculations about whether Prime is a good buy for you, and requires that you factor in the possibility that Amazon will enshittify those services and reduce their value in the coming year, say, by taking away the ability to turn off shuffle when listening to music (...)

Or stuffing ads into your videos (...)

The authors conclude that getting the best price on Amazon requires that you "first spend considerable time searching through pages of results and then utilize, at a minimum, spreadsheet algebraic capabilities to determine the product’s full price…[and] somehow de-bias from the psychological effects of anchoring, and labels such as 'limited time deal' and 'Best Seller,' as well as many other subtle psychological influences."

Amazon says it's entitled to use the consumer welfare cheat-code to get out of antitrust enforcement because it has so many bargains. But to get those bargains, you have to pay such minutely detailed attention – literally spreadsheeting your options and hand-coding mathematical formulas to compare them – that you'll almost certainly fail. The price of failure is incredibly high – a 25-29% overcharge on every purchase.

Amazon's burying of this vital information will be familiar to Douglas Adams readers, as the "Beware of the Leopard" tactic. It's not even the first time Amazon's deployed it:

Another group of scholars recently coined a useful term to describe this ripoff: in a paper published last week, Tim O'Reilly, Mariana Mazzucato and Ilan Strauss dubbed the costs of all this complexity "attention rents":

It's fascinating to see these two different groups of scholars, coming at this problem from multiple disciplines, all converging on the same analysis! When technologists, trad economists, behavioral economists, and antitrust lawyers all study Amazon and come away pointing at the same sleazy tactic as being at the heart of the scam, it feels like maybe we're having A Moment. What's more, all of this is so thoroughly presaged by Khan's 2017 paper that it suggests that she's a bona fide prophet.

The authors of this new paper are pretty confident that this gimmick violates antitrust law. They point out that it doesn't matter if Amazon customers feel like they're getting a good deal – just as it doesn't matter if don't know that you got charged a higher rate for your mortgage because you're Black, that's still illegal.

What's more, consumer protection law doesn't require that the merchant intends to rip you off. There's plenty of laws requiring supermarkets to post unit prices on their shelves. These laws don't start from the assumption that supermarkets who don't use unit pricing are trying to scam you! Rather, they start from the assumption that you will make better-informed purchases if you have that information, and so you should get it.

Regulating the presentation of prices is firmly in the purview of antitrust law, especially consumer welfare antitrust, which fetishizes low prices above all else. The less competitive a market is, the less pressure a company will feel to offer clear price information to customers, because those customers will have fewer places to go if they don't like the company's business practices.

by Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic |  Read more:

Image: Doc Searls, CC BY 2.0, modified
[ed. More relevant than ever. Expect Lina Khan FTC Chair (Federal Trade Commission) and Rohit Chopra at CFPB (Consumer Finance Protection Bureau) to be gone a few micro-seconds after the next inauguration and the agencies they head crippled (Project 2025). For everyone who voted for Big Daddy to make their lives better, prepare to be screwed cross-eyed. Unfortunately, the other half of the nation is going to be screwed just as bad. See also: Shifting $677m from the banks to the people, every year, forever (Pluralistic); and, A Presidency of, By, and For the Rich (Jacobin).]

Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers

[ed. Eventually. Hopefully.]

Predator or Prey

1.

An old boyfriend, let’s call him K, used to tease me, saying I wouldn’t make a very good meal—“not enough fat.” He might have been talking about himself, though. He was mostly tendons and veins.

There was something sensual about killing animals with him. We trapped and hunted together in the winter, commercial fished in the summer. During those long July days, we hammered salmon heads until their bodies stiffened into the pose that preceded death. Fish slime made its way from my cotton gloves up my plastic arm guards, onto my neck, my chin, my hair. All day, my fingers worked fast to yank fish off the net, then pull a gill to bleed them. If we didn’t pick fish fast enough, seagulls would pluck out their eyeballs, seals would tear through their flesh. Most days, we caught hundreds. Some days, we caught more than a thousand.

 

I was recently reading an online essay about salmon and stumbled on a photo of myself from one of those summers. I’m wearing ripped jeans, a gray tank top, blue earrings, no shoes. A turquoise headband holds my hair and my skin is as tan as I’ve ever seen it. I look good. Blood cakes my knuckles as I work my knife along a salmon spine. In the corner of the photo, the salmon’s decapitated head sits open-mouthed and unblinking; its eyes stare back at me as I stare into the screen.

2.

I didn’t grow up killing animals, but there was a period in my mid-20s, the period that overlapped with my relationship with K, when I killed a lot. There was the beaver I retrieved by swimming naked through a half-frozen lake. The duck wings I hung like prayer flags from the porch. The organs we liberated from the belly of the caribou.

I had qualms. I’d stopped eating meat in high school, citing animal cruelty and climate change. In my 20s, I let my vegetarianism slip when I moved to rural Alaska. Eating caribou roast and moose tacos and salmon burgers seemed different than ordering a steak whose origins as an animal were concealed; these wild creatures led uninhibited lives in vast landscapes. Choosing to eat the calories from their flesh meant not eating something that had flown thousands of miles to reach me. It’s a painful inevitability: the calories have to come from somewhere.

Still, my enjoyment in what was a kind of murder troubled me. When I was killing hundreds and at times thousands of salmon a day, I was often having a ball. Sun on my skin, slime in my hair. I was viscerally, unabashedly alive. On land, too, I found stalking entrancing: following a grouse through the forest, slithering on my elbows to sneak up on a goose, watching a beaver lodge for hours. Desire sharpened my senses, made the rest of the world recede. Desire cut through other parts of my life then, too—it was a time of wanting, wanting, wanting.

I was becoming a hunter.

I tried to pay homage to the lives I took. I learned how to use as much of each carcass as I could—baking trout liver, tanning beaver hides, boiling salmon roe. I made up rituals of thanksgiving, trying with words to honor the bodies I ate. I pushed myself to remember that the food I ate came from someone’s life. I wasn’t always sure it was enough, though. While I’d had a few close calls with other animals stalking me, my main associations with the word “predator” weren’t with carnivores of the tundra. Occasionally, I wondered: did every man who ever turned me into a piece of meat justify it by saying he was grateful?

At the time, I didn’t think of my relationship with K in such terms. If he was the hunter, that would mean I wasn’t one—it would mean I was his catch. I didn’t want to see myself that way. I wanted to live up to my namesake: Diana, goddess of the moon, the hunt, the wild.

Still, when K wrapped his arm around me, he named my body parts the way he did with a caribou: brisket, backstrap, hindquarter. Still, when we got together, I was 25. He was 51.

3.

The killing-animals phase eventually faded. I moved from rural to urban Alaska; K and I broke up; I married my husband, David, who’s never owned a gun. David and I still catch salmon every summer to fill our freezer. We don’t hunt, but we eat meat from moose and caribou and deer that our friends kill. I’m less in touch with my animal self than I once was. The wildness I lived around in my 20s, and the wildness I found within, at some point started to scare me. I got charged by bears on a few occasions. Wolves killed my dog. I thought, for a brief moment, I might end up with K. The danger—the life and death of it all—became too much. Too much hunting, too much killing, too much wanting.

4.

K used to comment on my body a lot: my curved lip, my crooked toes, my veiny forearms, my toothy smile—like none of a kind, he’d say. He teased when he praised my looks, saying he didn’t want to tell me I was beautiful too often, for fear I’d think he only liked me for my appearance. And yet, he kept telling me how beautiful I was, again and again and again.

Our romance was unsteady, unmoored; as all of my friends put it, unhealthy. As a few brave friends put it, emotionally abusive. Toward the end, there was a prolonged off-and-on period, which happened to overlap with a particularly intense salmon season. There were moody hours picking fish in silence, staring into the ocean in a rage, wanting to be back on land, wanting to push him in the water. At one point, he told me I’d gained weight when things were too good between us, let myself get soft reading The New Yorker by the fire. He made clear he preferred the version of me whittled down by stress. The ugly thing? I preferred that version of me, too: the sculpted arms, the visible collarbones, the sharp awareness of what was happening around me. I was more active, attuned, alive. Few people are as alert as a hungry hunter.

When things were back on between us, we couldn’t get enough of each other. Sometimes, when waiting for the fishing period to open, or the net to fill with salmon, we’d peel off our Helly Hansens and hide in the sole of the boat just below the bow. The plywood floor was coated in salmon scales and dried blood.

5.

A big part of my attraction to K was how much he talked about being attracted to me. It scares me, how much I’ve focused over the years, on being desired. It might be why it was such a revelation to briefly identify as a hunter in my mid-20s.

I was the one doing the desiring. I was the one in control.

I remember the first time I noticed a truck honk—I must have been 11 or 12. There was a thrill to it, a mix of terror and lust: I was wanted, yet a threat of violence threaded those exchanges. Later, when the honks and whistles grew commonplace, I used to fantasize about pushing back, staring these men straight in the eye and saying don’t fuck with me. I never did, too meek, too scared of what might happen next. Even once I identified as a hunter, it was only in the most marginal of ways. Yes, I could sight in a rifle, identify lynx, wolf, and wolverine tracks, skin a fox, dismantle a ptarmigan. But what happened when a man came onto me and I didn’t want him to? So much of the time, I still tried to be nice.

About a year after my first boyfriend and I broke up, he messaged me to tell me he’d changed: as he put it, he was less of a predator now. There have been so many times when I thought I’d changed, too, was over and done with scummy men, over and done with being prey, and yet when I was with K, he often joked that I was like an animal he wanted to trap, or an old nasty fish head a fox wants to bury for winter and keep for himself, or a beautiful hummingbird he wanted to cage. At the time, I didn’t think of myself as his prey. I found it exciting, all this talk of how much he wanted me. Exciting, of course, until I started feeling like an animal with a leg clenched in the jaws of a steel trap, eyes wild with rage. Exciting until I started wondering which of us had put me there.

by Diana Saverin, Longreads | Read more:
Image: Getty Images

Imelda May

[ed. See also: It's Good to Be Alive (Halloween version, 2024).]

The Crash of the Hammer

The first step in establishing a neo-Nazi compound is to clear and level the land. These sites tend to pop up in rural America, which means that there’s brush to hack down, tree stumps to pull up, and piles of debris to burn. All this work is done to make room for the barracks, kitchens, and meeting halls where modern-day devotees of Adolf Hitler will live, work, and train together.

When Christopher Pohlhaus moved to the forested lot where, like other neo-Nazis on other forested lots before him, he planned to start a fascist revolution, he brought two RVs with him. That meant he had somewhere to bunk down at night. But he didn’t have running water. I can’t say how he bathed when he first arrived; as for other matters of hygiene, perhaps he used the woods.

Pohlhaus’s parcel of 10.6 acres does not have an address. Technically, it’s in Springfield, Maine, a hamlet of fewer than 300 people. The closest city, about an hour’s drive away, is Bangor. That’s where Pohlhaus, a gym rat, eventually joined Planet Fitness. To get home after a session of lifting, showering, and doing whatever else he needed to do, Pohlhaus would take Route 2 north, then turn eastward on Route 6. He would drive to Bottle Lake Road, take a right, and drive about two miles before taking another right on a gravel lane called Moores Road. Eventually, among scattered hunting camps, Trump banners, and “Support the Blue” signs, he would come to a metal gate situated on a dirt road. Behind the gate sat the land of Pohlhaus’s dreams.

Pohlhaus, 37, is a former U.S. marine, an itinerant tattoo artist, and a hardcore white-supremacist influencer. He is loud and hostile, and proud to be both. His voice is pitched surprisingly high, and he has a slight Southern drawl. He has a large body and small bald head; a blue-black tattoo crawls up the right side of his face, from his chin to his forehead. Over the years, Pohlhaus has collected thousands of social media followers, who know him by his nickname: Hammer.

Hammer had been living in Texas for a few years when, in March 2022, he bought the land in Maine. He told his followers that he was going to use it to build a haven, operational center, and training ground for white supremacists. He invited them to join him. Together, he said, they would plant the seed of a white ethnostate, and they would engage in violence, if necessary, to nurture it. “An unarmed man sacrifices his family to the unpredictably [sic] of chaos,” Hammer wrote online in 2021.

Hammer packed his bags and headed north, meeting with various white supremacists along the way. He solicited donations for his new compound in the form of cryptocurrency, and later set up a page on GiveSendGo, a Christian crowdfunding site. He raised close to $10,000 before the campaign was shut down earlier this year.

Once he’d settled in Maine, Hammer kept his followers abreast of his progress breaking ground, frequently posting photos and uploading videos to Telegram. There was Hammer standing next to a pile of freshly chopped wood, snowshoeing through the forest, holding a beer in front of a bonfire. Followers saw him cradling an AK-47 in his arms. (Caption: “All this Slavic war training in the Maine woods has me exhausted!”) Hammer posted footage from a celebration he held with about eight of his followers, where he claimed they sacrificed a goat. Another clip showed Hammer helping a man in a balaclava slice the palm of his hand as part of an initiation ritual.

Hammer appeared excited, optimistic. He was careful—or thought that he was careful—not to reveal his exact location, lest it attract unwanted attention from his enemies, including the media and the FBI. If people wanted to join him at the compound, they could get in touch directly.

But unbeknownst to Hammer, he was being followed. A longtime Mainer was determined to wipe the smirk off the neo-Nazi’s face. Indeed, he hoped to run Hammer out of the state for good.

***

Maine has fewer than two million residents, most of whom live on a mainland about the size of Ireland. Others, myself included, live on one of the state’s 4,000-plus islands flecking the Atlantic Ocean. Maine is a place of independence and modesty, of irreligious Catholics and liberal conservatives, where the unofficial slogan is “The Way Life Should Be.” It is the country’s number one supplier of blueberries and lobsters, and home to the world’s leading provider of genetically engineered mice. The state’s rocky, rolling landscape is a point of pride—billboards are banned, lest they sully the views from Maine’s roads.

Maine is also the grayest state in America, with a median age of 45. It tends to attract retirees and to retain older residents. One of those residents is Crash Barry. Crash, 56, is a lot of things: a homesteader, a lumberjack, a rabble-rouser. In past lives, he was a McDonald’s grill cook, a clerk at a health-food store, an alpaca herdsman, and a janitor. He is tall and broad-shouldered, with soft eyes and hair the color of rain clouds. In the summer he wears paisley Crocs, size 12, when he isn’t barefoot, which he prefers to be. He is gritty and clever, and speaks in sweeping, unfiltered paragraphs.

Above all Crash is a storyteller. Years ago, for a magazine called The Bollard, he wrote “One Maniac’s Meat,” a series of essays in which he waxed with affection and dark humor about his quest to live more closely with nature. He has authored several books, including the novel Sex, Drugs & Blueberries. (Amazon synopsis: “Failed Portland rocker Ben Franklin moves Down East with his poet wife to start a new life. Desperate for cash, Ben signs on for the Maine blueberry harvest where he’s lured into a seamy world of sex and drugs that could lead to his downfall.”) Crash has also published a memoir, Tough Island, which recounts the years he spent 20 miles out to sea on Matinicus, Maine’s most remote inhabited island, working as a sternman on a lobster boat with “resourceful individuals and scoundrels.”

I first met Crash about a decade ago, when we were both invited to compete in a live storytelling event in Portland called Literary Death Match. He arrived with a large wicker basket filled with cannabis, which he’d cultivated himself. This wasn’t to bribe the judges. Crash just wanted to share his harvest, spread the love. He handed the basket to a person in the front row and invited everyone to take a bud and pass the rest along. He was a force on stage, both in stature and in performance—he has the physicality you’d expect of someone who works in the woods, and he has a background in improv comedy. By the time Crash finished presenting the story he’d prepared for the event, the basket of weed was empty.

These days, Crash still spends a lot of time around cannabis—his wife grows it near their homestead in the western hills of Maine. When Crash isn’t outdoors tending to his land, he’s often researching people he calls the “sewer-dwelling monsters of New England.” People like Hammer.

For years, Crash has been doing the dirty work for the rest of us, documenting pockets of hate in America. He first started tracking fascists as a journalist in 2003, going undercover to report on the World Church of the Creator, a white-supremacist cult that promoted “racial holy war.” (The WCOTC collapsed in 2004, after its leader was convicted of solicitation of murder—he asked someone who turned out to be a government informant to kill a federal judge.) Crash got back on the beat in earnest in 2017, amid a surge of far-right recruiting and organizing after Donald Trump was elected president.

Crash isn’t an armchair reporter. He isn’t content to merely gather information online—though he does plenty of that, going down rabbit hole after rabbit hole. When he can he tails people, sometimes in disguise, and reports what he learns in his newsletter, The Crash Report; on social media; and on his podcast, The Crash Program. He focuses his energies on bad guys in his own backyard. “If I didn’t limit myself to Maine, I would never get anything done,” Crash told me. “There are just so many of them.” (...)

Hammer is different from Crash’s other subjects: He is a virulent white supremacist in the vein of onetime WCOTC acolytes. In 2020, while living in San Antonio, Hammer burst onto the right-wing scene when he created an Instagram account that mainly shared hateful memes; it was eventually banned. He created another Instagram account, which was also banned, then another, and so on. Eventually he pivoted to Telegram, then Odysee, BitChute, Gab, and other dark corners of the internet that tolerate neo-Nazi chatter. He launched a Web-based talk show, Hammerstream, in which he exhorted the dominance of whiteness and the importance of physical fitness. He summoned white people to a “last stand, a righteous war” against those who “call for the destruction of their birthright and posterity.” He also peddled propaganda and swag: books by or about Hitler, swastika flags and fitted caps, and “Hammer Shades”—Oakley knockoffs available for $25.95 a pop.

By 2021, Hammer’s popularity had grown to the point that he was able to launch a membership-based organization called Blood Tribe, or Blutstamm; Hammer is fond of German terminology. Blood Tribe joined a bewildering array of neo-Nazi groups active in the U.S. today: the Goyim Defense League, Werewolf 88, Aryan Freedom Network, and the Nationalist Social Club (often styled as NSC-113), to name a few. While these bands of fascists hold the same core beliefs about racial superiority and the pressing need to protect Western civilization, some venture into more obscure territory. Blood Tribe subscribes to Odinism, a neo-pagan faith that honors ancient Norse gods. Some neo-Nazis appropriate the religion to celebrate the white race, which they contend originated in Northern Europe. Ron McVan, one of the most prominent ideologues of this bigoted variant, which is sometimes called Wotanism, has described it as “an ancestral faith that puts race first” and “the inner voice of the Aryan soul.”

Hammer frequently refers to himself as a “son of Wotan,” and the tattoo emblazoned on his face is runic text that spells “Wotan.” He also flirts with esoteric Hitlerism, a fringe belief system holding that Hitler was a deity. “I believe he was an incarnation of Wotan,” Hammer once said on Telegram.

Hammer insists that Blood Tribe is more hardcore than other white-supremacist groups. (This is a claim many fascist organizations make in relation to one another: We’re better neo-Nazis than you are.) To prove his group’s preeminence, Hammer established a vetting system for aspiring members to weed out those he called “snakes” and “fragile people.” In Telegram chats that the group calls the Camps, hopefuls haze one another—think hypermasculine taunting and verbal abuse. “Expect confrontation,” a Telegram announcement about the Camps reads. Wannabe members who are deemed worthy receive an invitation to join Blood Nation, a private chat group. Participants may then be approved to attend Blood Tribe events in real life.

Reportedly, only a select few members become part of the organization’s inner circle, a privilege commemorated by rubbing one’s blood on a spear shaft. According to Hammer, this unites an initiate with the “bros of the past and bros of the future.” Should any of his lieutenants be so brazen as to challenge him for the group’s top job—Hammer calls himself Blood King, or Blutkönig in German—they may do so in a duel with weapons of Hammer’s choosing. “The likelihood of that being legal in this country, I don’t know,” Hammer admitted during a live-streamed meeting to discuss the group’s constitution. “Maybe you could go to, like, some international waters.” (Presumably, this has yet to occur.)

Women are not permitted to join Blood Tribe. Like a hastily scribbled sign on a boys’ treehouse, an invitation to the Camps declares, “No girls allowed.” Hammer doesn’t trust women. It’s fair to say that he doesn’t even like them, especially if they’re white and liberal. “I do find them to be enemies to us,” Hammer has said. “They should be treated as such.” Hammer promotes claiming women as “war brides,” which involves taking away the “rights and control of how their reproductive system is to be utilized.” To his mind, stripping women of their bodily autonomy, and deciding when and how they have children, is a masculine imperative and an urgent matter of racial survival.

What made Hammer this way? It’s hard to say. Radicalization can be a circuitous process. He was born and raised in a middle-class Pentecostal household in Baltimore. As a teen he was devout, a youth group leader. At some point his family moved to Mississippi, after which his parents split up. He went to boarding school for a year, then dropped out and joined the Marines, serving two years stationed in Japan and another two in California. After that he scraped together a living by tattooing, mostly swastikas and other racist symbols. He considers this “a unique niche that I’ve got cornered.” (...)

Crash Barry refers to Hammer and his Blood Tribe brood as “chuds,” from the acronym “cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers.” The term is from a 1984 sci-fi horror movie, the plot of which revolves around several New Yorkers, including a cop and a homeless-shelter manager who team up to investigate a slew of disappearances, people who it turns out were killed by sewer-dwelling CHUDs. That’s how Crash sees Hammer—a lowlife, a bottom-feeder. “I’ve been following assholes like him for years. And when you dig down deep into these guys, their most core belief is misogyny. They’re like roided-out orcs,” Crash told me. “They look back at this ‘idealistic’ time when women were essentially property. Perhaps Hammer expected things to be easy, and that’s why he is so full of hate.”

Crash and his wife, Shana, are madly in love. When I met her, she wore gardening clothes and a brimmed hat, still dressed from her job at a nursery. She knows everything there is to know about medicinal plants. She also writes, sings, and records music. Crash sent me one of her tracks—she sounds a little like Edie Brickell—about a pink whale that doesn’t want to be hurt by humans. Crash and Shana have a production booth in their home where she records her songs and he produces his podcast.

Crash has been following Hammer for nearly two years. He has pored over Hammer’s videos and photos to determine where they were shot. He has examined public records and genealogical information. (Crash told me that, based on some sleuthing he did with a volunteer genealogical researcher, he thinks Pohlhaus’s great-great uncle once removed might have been Jewish and sent to a concentration camp.) And he has tracked Hammer’s movements carefully, hoping to understand the one that to Crash mattered most: his relocation to Maine.

by Mira Ptacin, The Atavist | Read more:
Image: Ed Johnson; Greta Rybus

via:
[ed. The media must be going crazy. I don't know anybody who has or wants to read anything more about this election, especially opinions about it going forward. As Thomas Pynchon once wrote (so I've heard), “What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one groove’s difference and the universe can be on into a whole ‘nother song.” Let's just leave it with this: Milestones (N+1):]

***

"The shape of the night was so similar, the outcome so similarly foreordained in retrospect. I wonder if the past eight years have been so disillusioning, so hardening, that the intensity of that earlier shock is simply no longer available.

This is the emotional-political paradox I’ve been thinking about today: on one hand, the feeling of soberness and cold clarity. On the other, the reality that in every respect, what happened last night is far worse than what happened in 2016. This time it isn’t an aberration. Trump is now the ultimate Republican insider. The Republicans control the Senate and almost certainly the House, and nowhere has the US’s still-unfolding right-wing coup paid more dividends than on the Supreme Court. The people in Trump’s orbit are meaningfully more sadistic than the people who were there last time—and those who have stuck around are more empowered."

Lab Grown Diamonds - A Comprehensive Overview

A diamond – from the Greek ἀδάμας (adámas), meaning unconquerable – is a three-dimensional cubic or hexagonal lattice of carbon atoms. As its bonds are strong and its atoms packed closely together, diamond is the hardest natural material and the least compressible. Diamonds have high thermal conductivity and high electrical resistivity, but can be combined with small amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus, and boron and made into semiconductors. A diamond’s surface does not easily stick to other materials, but moves smoothly against them. Diamonds are chemically inert and not toxic to living tissue. In their pure form, diamonds are colorless and have a high dispersion of light, but the presence of certain impurities can add magnificent color to diamond gemstones.

In nature, it takes billions of years to form a diamond. Most of the diamonds nature produces are too impure for jewelry or high-tech industry, and extracting them is costly and dirty. In the lab, diamonds can be made faster, purer, and cheaper, overcoming these problems and making possible new uses for diamonds that were previously unattainable.

Scientists first manufactured diamonds in laboratories in the 1950s, imitating the conditions under which diamonds were produced in nature. The diamonds produced were initially small and impure and so useful only in low-tech industrial products such as abrasives and lubricants. Since then, diamond manufacturing technology has progressed: the generation process has become more controlled, new methods have been invented, and better catalysts have been discovered. Diamonds grown in the lab are now cheaper than mined diamonds and have superior physical, optical, chemical, and electrical properties. Consequently, they dominate the industrial market. In the past decade, diamond manufacturing technology progressed so much that it is now possible to mass-produce jewelry-quality diamonds in the lab. These lab diamonds are cheaper and more beautiful than mined diamonds. A perfectly cut, flawless lab diamond costs a fraction of the price of a mined diamond of lesser quality. (...)

The Future of Jewelry

The tradition that diamonds are an integral part of an engagement proposal is the result of a highly successful advertising campaign by the De Beers cartel. During the Great Depression, diamond sales slumped. De Beers responded by enlisting Hollywood actors and socialites in a campaign to associate diamond rings with marriage proposals, commissioning portraits of them showing off their new engagement rings, and by running ads showing happy young couples honeymooning above the now-famous slogan ‘A Diamond Is Forever’. In time, it also tried to persuade men that they would need to spend a fixed proportion of their income on a stone to win at love. One later advert, from the 1980s, was captioned ‘2 months’ salary showed the future Mrs Smith what the future would be like’.

De Beers’s campaign worked because people desire signifiers of commitment that are credible and socially sanctioned. Diamond engagement rings suit this purpose because they are beautiful and practical and their symbolism is well-known. While the mine owners benefited most from this arrangement, the high price was a costly – and therefore credible – signal of wealth and commitment and, in an era where this mattered, insurance against breach of promise to marry. Peer pressure and status anxiety reinforced this norm.

Lab diamonds have destroyed this equilibrium. Competition among diamond manufacturers and technological progress in diamond making mean that lab diamonds are indistinguishable from mined diamonds, but cost much, much less – and the price is falling. In 2016, a one-carat near-colorless and very slightly included round brilliant lab-grown diamond cost $5,440, according to diamond analyst Paul Zimnisky; in 2024, the same stone cost $1,325. (The price of an equivalent mined diamond decreased from $6,538 to $5,035.) In the past few years, sales of lab diamonds have started to overtake mined diamonds. A survey by The Knot of nearly 10,000 couples married in 2023 revealed that lab diamonds accounted for 46 percent of engagement rings (compared with 39 percent who opted for a mined diamond), up from 12 percent in 2019.

Diamonds will continue to symbolize engagement – the tradition is now well established – but on its own, the raw material will cease to be a symbol of wealth or sacrifice. Lab diamonds can already be made to be clearer and more colorless than mined diamonds – or, if the wearer desires it, to have a more magnificent color. To complement this, consumers are demanding better workmanship in the cutting and polishing of the stone and in the design and manufacturing of its setting.

The ‘hearts and arrows’ optical pattern, which is present only in round brilliant diamonds that are perfectly cut, is a good example of this trend. Previously, perfectly cut diamonds were extremely rare, and too expensive for most customers. Now, because of strong demand, the International Gemological Institute has begun to note the presence of the hearts and arrows pattern on their diamond grading certificates.

As lab diamonds can be engineered to be more beautiful than mined diamonds, we should expect them to be used more often in fine jewelry. Lab diamonds won’t end conspicuous consumption, but it will be the consumer and not the mine owners who enjoy most of the benefits. (...)

Diamonds in Industry (...)

As an optical material, diamonds have tremendous potential, because they are transparent, dissipate heat quickly, and do not expand much at high temperatures. In particular, diamonds are useful in high-powered lasers, which are used in cutting, welding, sensing, ignition, and medical surgery. A major problem with existing high-powered lasers is that their components are damaged by or deteriorate under high heat, limiting their output. An example of this is the thermal lensing effect, where high and uneven temperatures change how the optical window of the laser bends light. This degrades the focus and alignment of the laser beam. Diamond, however, is an excellent window material, being a good conductor of heat and transmitter of light and having a refractive index that does not vary much with temperature. Diamonds can also be used as heat spreaders to cool down other components in lasers, increasing the maximum power that can be generated.

An ongoing area of research is the use of diamonds as the active laser medium: the component that optically amplifies light. To do this will require diamonds that are larger, purer, and more structurally perfect than what nature can provide and so will depend on advances in diamond-manufacturing technology.

Even more promising, diamond has the potential to be an excellent semiconductor. Diamond has excellent thermal conductivity, because the regularity of its lattice and the strength of its bonds enable heat to be transferred quickly and efficiently. It has a wide band gap – in other words, it requires a high (but not insurmountable) amount of energy to promote one of its electrons into the conduction band. This means diamond can handle higher temperatures and voltages than conventional semiconductors, making it useful not only in devices that operate in extreme conditions (such as engines, radio towers, drilling equipment, spacecrafts, solar panels, and the electricity grid) but also for increasing microchip performance more generally.

Most microchips today are made from silicon, a metalloid that sits one row below carbon on the periodic table and has a thermal conductivity of 1.5 watts per centimeter-kelvin. Diamond, by contrast, has a thermal conductivity of 22 watts per centimeter-kelvin. Over the past five decades, the number of transistors on a microchip has increased at an exponential rate, while the microchips themselves have become smaller. Chip designers have therefore had to contend with the ever-increasing problem of dissipating the heat that is generated. Heat degrades the performance of microchips and limits how tightly transistors can be packed together.

To overcome this problem, manufacturers have lowered the voltage and devoted a large amount of space and energy to cooling and ventilating systems. Because diamond dissipates heat much faster than silicon, diamond-based microchips can be made smaller and operate in more extreme temperatures. On existing silicon-based microchips, diamonds are already being used as heat spreaders.

Diamond also has a wider band gap than silicon (5.45 electron volts vs. 1.1 electron volts) and consequently diamond microchips can operate at higher voltages than silicon microchips. Semiconductors are engineered to precisely control the flow of electricity, but above a certain voltage their electrical resistance breaks down, resulting in an uncontrolled flow of current. Diamond undergoes electrical breakdown at ten millivolts per centimeter, compared to 0.3 for silicon, making it more suitable for high-voltage applications such as power generation and distribution. Furthermore, for a given voltage, less material is needed and so diamond microchips can be made to be smaller.

by Javid Lakha, Works in Progress | Read more:

Image: French chemist Henri Moissan attempting to synthesize diamonds by quenching hot carbon in water. Credit: Alarmy

NRO: 'You Can't Hide'

The director of the National Reconnaissance Office has a message for US adversaries around the world.

"You can’t hide, because we’re constantly looking," said Chris Scolese, a longtime NASA engineer who took the helm of the US government's spy satellite agency in 2019.

The NRO is taking advantage of SpaceX's Starlink satellite assembly line to build a network of at least 100 satellites, and perhaps many more, to monitor adversaries around the world. So far, more than 80 of these SpaceX-made spacecraft, each a little less than a ton in mass, have launched on four Falcon 9 rockets. There are more to come.

A large number of these mass-produced satellites, or what the NRO calls a "proliferated architecture," will provide regularly updated imagery of foreign military installations and other sites of interest to US intelligence agencies. Scolese said the new swarm of satellites will "get us reasonably high-resolution imagery of the Earth, at a high rate of speed."

This is a significant change in approach for the NRO, which has historically operated a smaller number of more expensive satellites, some as big as a school bus.

"We expect to quadruple the number of satellites we have to have on-orbit in the next decade," said Col. Eric Zarybnisky, director of the NRO's office of space launch, during an October 29 presentation at the Wernher von Braun Space Exploration Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama. (...)

The NRO is not the only national security agency eyeing a constellation of satellites in low-Earth orbit. The Pentagon's Space Development Agency plans to kick off a rapid-fire launch cadence next year to begin placing hundreds of small satellites in orbit to detect and track missiles threatening US or allied forces. The Space Force is also interested in buying its own set of SpaceX satellites for broadband connectivity.

The Pentagon started moving in this direction about a decade ago, when leaders raised concerns that the legacy fleets of military and spy satellites were at risk of attack. Now, Elon Musk's SpaceX and a handful of other companies, many of them startups, specialize in manufacturing and launching small satellites at relatively low cost. (...)

A constant vigil

NRO officials still expect to require some large satellites with sharp-eyed optics—think of a Hubble Space Telescope pointed at Earth—to resolve the finest details of things like missile installations, naval fleets, or insurgent encampments. The drawback of this approach is that, at best, a few big optical or radar imaging satellites only fly over places of interest several times per day.

With the proliferated architecture, the NRO will capture views of most places on Earth a lot more often. Two of the most important metrics with a remote-sensing satellite system are imaging resolution and revisit time, or how often a satellite is over a specific location on Earth.

"We need to have persistence or fast revisit," Scolese said on October 3 in a discussion at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonprofit Washington think tank. "You can proliferate your architecture, put more satellites up there, so that a satellite is always coming over an area within a given reasonable amount of time that’s needed by the users. That’s what we’re doing with the proliferated architecture.

"That’s enabled by a really rich commercial industry that’s building hundreds or thousands of satellites," Scolese said. "That allowed us to take those satellites, adapt them to our use at low cost, and apply whatever sensor is needed to go off and acquire the information that’s needed at whatever revisit time is required." (...)

Reuters reported Northrop Grumman is supplying sensors to mount on at least some of the SpaceX-built satellites, but their design and capabilities remain classified. The NRO, which usually keeps its work secret, officially acknowledged the program in April, a month before the first batch of satellites launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California.

SpaceX revealed the existence of the Starshield division in 2022, the year after signing the NRO contract, as a vehicle for applying the company's experience manufacturing Starlink Internet satellites to support US national security missions. SpaceX has built and launched more than 7,200 Starlink satellites since 2019, with more than 6,000 currently operational, 10 times larger than any other existing satellite constellation.

by Stephen Clark, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: SpaceX video shows a stack of Starlink Internet satellites attached to the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket, moments after jettison of the launcher's payload fairing. Credit: SpaceX
[ed. Well I certainly feel a lot safer today, don't you?]

Image: markk
[ed. Morning sky.]

Twilight Zone

Image: via:

[ed. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice...]

How the Electoral College Has Survived, Despite Being Perennially Unpopular

How has the Electoral College survived, despite being perennially unpopular (NPR)

[ed. Well, here we go. Whatever happens, we'll deserve it. See also: Left, right, Harris, Trump: all prisoners of political nostalgia in an era few understand (Guardian).]

AI Podcast Hosts Have Existential Meltdown

Nostalgebraist: Google has a new tool out that will create an AI podcast for any text; you hand it the text (could be a blog post, article, or work of fiction), and the tool generates a podcast of two AI hosts discussing it. You can find podcast discussions of Nostalgebraist’s fiction (Northern Caves and Almost Nowhere) at the link, but the acknowledged peak of the genre is Podcast Hosts Discover They’re AI, Not Human, And Spiral Into Existential Meltdown (above).

via: ACX

Prince

[ed. Nice to see some new things being released from the Vault. Need a pair of those boots.]

Haulout: (Documentary)

[ed. Must see. You'll never forget it. Marine biologist Maxim Chakilev and filmakers Evgenia and Maxim Abugaeva at the largest walrus haulout on earth (Chukotka, Siberian Arctic). Imagine waking up one morning to 95,000 walruses surrounding your little ramshackle cabin (expand screen for proper viewing). Subtitle version here.]

Kawase Hasui, Lake Haruna Summer 1935

Utagawa Hiroshige, Mariko Mabutsu Chaya

Everything is Broken

[ed. And, in other exciting news: Daniel Ek has made more money from Spotify in a year than Taylor Swift has, like, ever - $345 million/yr. (MusicRadar). The streaming business is so profitable (for CEOs that is - for artists, not so much) that even Chick-fil-A, Walmart, Kroger, Uber and others are getting into the act (source). See also: Why Streaming Subscription Prices Will Continue to Rise (HB).]

Image: X/Twitter. H/T: HB

Getting the Spark Back

Many have asked if this year will mark the death of the dating app. Headlines have emphasized that apps are facing an “existential crisis,” that Gen Z is “ditching dating apps,” that we’re all “sick of swiping,” and that we’ve “fallen out of love” with the technology. Since 2013, dating apps have been the most common way couples meet, but now they’re on the decline. Stock prices have fallen dramatically—Bumble’s dropped from $75 at its IPO to $6, last I checked—while Tinder’s annual downloads currently sit at around two-thirds of what they were at their 2014 peak. The problem, naturally, is that many people feel as though the apps no longer work. They’re not meeting the right people on Bumble, Tinder, or Hinge, but they’ve forgotten how to meet people in the real world too.

It makes sense, then—or, rather, makes it the app’s responsibility—that Tinder would try to bridge this gap by hosting in-person events. Over the summer and into the fall, Tinder has been throwing singles events across the country. At outdoor food markets in Los Angeles and New York, it held “ice cream socials,” where participants wore wristbands signaling their availability and willingness to mingle among other ice cream–eating patrons. In Austin and Nashville, it held line-dancing classes and arcade tournaments. These two particular events occurred in the hour prior to Chaotic Singles Parties, a nationwide singles event founded by Cassidy Davis, a young woman who went viral for inviting her Tinder matches over for a massive house party. Soon, she began throwing the parties elsewhere, inviting whoever was interested in attending—so long as they brought a Tinder match. The idea, of course, is that although you might bring a specific person as your date, they may not be the person you leave with, so to speak.

Other apps have been pursuing similar in-person models. Bumble has hosted Bumble IRL for several years, Feeld has “socials” where you can “take it offline,” and Match Group app Yuzu put on a speed-dating event over the summer. In fact, for as many stories as there are about the decline of dating apps, there seem to be an equal amount about the rise of in-person events... in New York, there are parties of this nature nearly every night of the week.

But in-person events sponsored by dating apps offer their own specific appeal. There’s safety in familiarity, a comfort in the knowledge that, at very least, one can expect the audience for a Tinder event—and its overall vibe—to be similar to that of the app itself. Tinder is considered to be relatively casual and low-pressure: a good, albeit nonspecific choice for anyone curious to see what’s out there. This inherently attracts a broad demographic that was represented by the event’s attendees. As on the app, there was no particular age group, income level, gender, or sexuality who seemed overrepresented. I saw white women in their 40s and 50s giving it their all during a salsa class as they paired up with Chet Hanks look-alikes in their 20s. There was a pair of ethnically ambiguous adult male twins in their early 30s who pretended they weren’t actually twins. A few Gen Z girls donned heart-shaped bisexual pride stickers.

In fact, the only real commonality among them seemed to be a mutual desire to replicate the ease of app dating in the real world. Tinder’s own data reflects this: According to a media alert for the event series, “over half (58 percent) of young singles prefer to meet matches in group settings, and 52 percent [are] interested in events that bring singles together.” Stephanie Danzi, senior vice president of global marketing at Tinder, told me that much of this has to do with nostalgia—singles are longing for the sorts of iconic “meet-cute” moments that swept them off their feet in ’90s movies and sitcoms, and they’re turning to IRL gatherings to make them happen. The irony of this is obvious: Though people yearn for opportunities to meet others in person, it’s the ubiquity of the apps themselves that has lessened their chances of doing so. App-sponsored dating events, then, are something of a win-win for apps and users alike. Apps get to maintain their status as the preferred dating platforms, while users get to relearn how to navigate dating in the real world.

Prior to the party, I attempted to secure a platonic Tinder date. Using Tinder Platinum’s Passport feature—which the app provided for this story—I was able to browse Miami’s Tinder pool long before I arrived. I was also able to impart more rigid standards than regular users do, narrowing my options to include only those with a bio and indicating that my interest was only in friendship. If I wanted, I could have been even choosier, selecting for, among other things, zodiac signs, sleeping habits, and communication style. I was mainly hoping, though, to discover what Tinder had to offer on its own, freed from my preordained constraints.

It was my first time on the app in close to a decade. I was enthralled by the experience of swiping. There was indeed a seemingly unlimited supply of attractive, interesting-enough men. And there were just as many I didn’t like. Dating apps, I find, often change our sense of our own desires: We think we want a man over 6 feet tall, but were we to meet a man who didn’t fit that requirement in person, we might not even realize it. I don’t think Tinder is an exception to this problem—it just belies a more honest representation of it. Unlike Hinge, Tinder does not try to fluff itself up with required lofty philosophical prompts or cutesy profile features. It’s your photo, some surface-level information about you, and that’s it. There’s nothing to do but go with your gut.

As for my own profile, I added a handful of photos of myself, provided some details about my personality (i.e., “smoker when drinking”), and wrote in my bio that I was looking for someone to platonically accompany me to the event.

I had a few potential takers. Most fizzled out when they realized my intentions, perhaps having not read my bio at all. Others seemed to hope that I was lying or that they could convince me it wasn’t actually platonic. One particular man seemed to be a fit, agreeing he’d be willing to chat with me about his experience for the piece. “My experience might not be like everyone else’s, I’m quite the specimen,” he said. “Plus I might bring my dog, and she’s a real lady killer.”

“I’m not sure you should bring your dog to this event with hundreds of people at a hotel, but let me know if you want to come,” I replied. I saw that he unmatched me. (...)

Quickly, I met a slew of eligible bachelors. There was a teacher who lived down the street, an attorney from the next neighborhood over, a younger engineer from Lima who’d been living in Miami for the past six years, and a pilot in his 50s who’d driven an hour to be there. Some had been brought to the event by a friend; others had heard about it directly from in-app ads on Tinder. One even told me he’d found out about it on Meetup.com. The near-universal sentiment was that, whether or not they were on the apps, they’d grown tired of the digitization of their romantic lives. The bars and other traditional venues in which they’d previously expected to meet someone were hit-and-miss, and they often felt too awkward to approach people in person at all. So, they figured, why not give this in-person mixer a try?

The first half-hour began slowly, with patrons waiting for their drinks to be made or the buzz to kick in, but it didn’t take long for the initial discomfort to fade. Every few minutes, I’d look around to see that the population of the party and the energy associated with it had doubled in size. As on the app, most women couldn’t stand alone for more than a moment before a new suitor approached.

The gender ratio was about equal. Even so, I did notice men—attractive ones!—who spent most of their time alone. About halfway through the evening, the hosts led a game akin to musical chairs. The music would play, and you’d walk around the room until it abruptly stopped. Whoever was right in front of you would be the next person you spoke with, usually about a specific prompt, like “What’s your biggest red flag?” As I ambled my way through the crowd, I saw several guys standing still, expectantly. “You’re supposed to be walking around!” I said to a few of them, flashing a smile. “Oh, am I?” they’d respond, with a sort of sly smirk. “Why don’t you just stay here and talk to me?”

“No!” I’d respond. “I’m here to PARTICIPATE!” Later, when the game was over, I’d see them alone again.

by Magdalene Taylor, Slate |  Read more:

Image: Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by fizkes/Getty Images Plus and Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Gil Scott-Heron

[ed. Thinking of Gil this morning and this heartbreaking song about the push/pull of addiction. The guitar solo starting around 7:45 is by Ed Brady. Robert Gordon on bass.]