The Song That Launched the Beatles

Twenty Flight Rock (lyrics)

"The barely 15-year-old Paul McCartney used "Twenty Flight Rock" as his first song when he auditioned for John Lennon on July 6, 1957, in Liverpool, England. The 16-year-old Lennon, introduced that day to McCartney at St. Peter's Church Hall prior to a church garden fete, was impressed by his new acquaintance's ability to play the song on the guitar. The good first impression of McCartney's performance led to an invitation to join the Quarrymen—Lennon's band that would eventually evolve into the Beatles. On The Beatles Anthology, McCartney noted that: "I think what impressed him most was that I knew all the words."  (Wikipedia) [ed. whole song '92 performance here]

Some Country For Some Women

As women stretch themselves thin, homesteader influencers sell them an image of containment.

On the question “how are we to live in an atomic age?” the writer C.S. Lewis declared, in a 1948 essay, that we think “a great deal too much” about atomic annihilation. Referencing this on her podcast, Homemaker Chic—dedicated to “rescuing the art of homemaking from the daily grind with red lips”—the homesteader Shaye Elliott describes taking comfort from Lewis whenever she feels overwhelmed by the state of the world. “If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things,” Elliott quotes, audibly moved, “not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.” Her voice quavers as she slows to emphasize Lewis's final resolution: “They may break our bodies…but they need not dominate our minds.”

Elliott is just one particularly public figure within the growing network of contemporary homesteaders who have embraced some form of subsistence farming. With 84.5K followers on Instagram and over 290K subscribers on Youtube—not to mention the podcast, a blog, and five cookbooks, in addition to selling photography of the farm and The Elliott Homestead branded apparel—Elliott also epitomizes the group of largely women homesteaders, most of them homesteader wives, who have simultaneously cultivated and capitalized on this growth by documenting their lives on social media. On Instagram, the 4.4 million posts hashtagged #homestead still comprise only a small slice of the 17.1 million #farmlife posts, though they likely perform better because of their distinctly romantic aesthetic: in this idealized pastoral, the grain of a hand-crafted kitchen table complements that of a hand-shaped sourdough loaf; linen-clad children roam free-range amongst the livestock, cheeks rosy and feet bare; milk is unpasteurized, eggs are pale blue, and pie crusts are kneaded from scratch, always with love.

The term “homestead” itself has a far longer, more complicated history in the Homestead Act of 1862, which granted 160-acre parcels of land to “American citizen[s] willing to settle and cultivate their plot for five consecutive years. Legislated during the Civil War, the act was an effort of the new Republican Party which, unconstrained by the succeeding South, aimed to empower independent “yeoman farmers” rather than wealthy, slave-owning planters, following Abraham Lincoln’s belief that “the wild lands of the country should be distributed so that every man should have the means and opportunity of benefitting his condition.” Under the act, 270 million acres—or almost ten percent of American land—was parceled off for applicants. While much of this was distributed to those who could not afford it otherwise, including poor European immigrants and formerly enslaved people, the act did not exactly democratize land ownership. On the prairie, settlers faced biblical conditions—winds, fires, swarms of locusts, and devastating droughts—in addition to the persistent threat of debt foreclosure: though land was free, resources like livestock, tools, and fertilizer were costly to acquire in remote locations, conditions which banks exploited by offering high interest loans. As a result, only forty percent of settlers managed to develop their homesteads within the required timeframe, most of them land speculators, cattle owners, miners, loggers, or otherwise equipped with start-up capital and experience; many of those for whom the act was ostensibly intended were forced to declare bankruptcy or simply abandon their land claim altogether.

In spite of this history, the prospect of owning a farm of one’s own has remained alluring to Americans, who have periodically returned to versions of homesteading particularly in the aftermath of paradigm-shifting events: the Great Depression, the Vietnam War, the anticipation of Y2K, the Great Recessions, and now the pandemic. As a balm to these crises and their various upheavals, homesteading offers the material security of self-sufficiency, namely access to food and shelter that is unmediated by supermarkets or landlords. Though it might also be said that our culture’s enduring interest in homesteading points to the more chronic, all-encompassing crisis of capitalism, to which homesteading offers not only material but also spiritual transformation: an opportunity to shed the requisite role of consumer, by effectively seizing the means of production and exiting the capitalist economy altogether. “Fresh bread & homegrown veggies are great,” tweeted “Homestead Mentor” Jill Winger earlier this year, “but the part I love most about homesteading are the transformations: From consumer to creator/From passive to active/From industrial to intentional/From sedated to alive.”

This kind of promise seems to have resonated particularly in recent years, as the American population reconsiders its relationship to work. While the pandemic exposed how “essential work” and the people who perform it are critically undervalued, the vacuum where the long-fallen girlboss once stood is now occupied by “quiet quitting” and actual quitting, amounting to what others have called “The Great Resignation.” In the absence of viable solutions to this widespread discontent, online homesteaders like Hannah Neeleman, better known as the face of @ballerinafarm, have supplied the next best thing: seemingly attainable fantasy.

In a TikTok from last year, Neeleman forms and fries buttermilk sourdough donuts to a breezy Ella Fitzgerald tune, exhibiting in the process the various accouterments which comprise her signature style: copper utensils and unbleached parchment strewn over a wood-slat table; the kelly green AGA stove that her “family treasures'' adorned with a spray of artfully wilted wildflowers; an audience of flaxen-haired children, perched on a stool, on the table, on her hip. To appreciate the true impact of this scene, one might look beyond the sheer quantity of Neeleman’s 9.8M TikTok and 10M Instagram followers, which indicates less than the kind of reaction represented by the top comment on this video: “I do not want a career. I want this life.”

From that phrasing arises the question: what exactly is “this life”? Ostensibly, a life of sourdough starter and adoring children and twenty thousand dollar stoves that is crucially liberated from the treachery of professional striving. Though this translates, more broadly speaking, into a life contained within a little house on a prairie, removed entirely from professional existence or responsibility for anyone outside of the immediate family unit— in other words, tradlife. (...)

The Homestead Act also subjected pioneer women to exploitation, where their domestic labor, romanticized as a “labor of love,” was not recognized by any proprietary right but instead, rewards like “pleasure,” “pride,” and “purpose,” which transcended quantification. If second-wave feminism worked to expose this narrative, then contemporary homesteader wives have renewed its purchase by framing their domestic labor in neat squares and 280-character anecdotes: portrayed in videos like Neeleman’s and photographs like Elliott’s, cooking isn’t a “chore,” as Winger recently retweeted, but “an amazing daily opportunity to tap into a sensory experience, to be creative, and to nourish yourself and loved ones.”

That style of rhetoric approaches defensiveness in one of Neeleman’s more recent posts, a vague non-response to a Times profile that disturbingly pulled back the curtain on Ballerina Farm. In the profile, Neeleman reflected that she “[gave] up a piece of [herself]” with her first pregnancy, which marked the end of her Juilliard career, and a gradual shift toward her farm-bound existence: one in which she abstains from birth control, delivered seven of her eight children without pain relief (she indulged in an epidural on the one occasion when her husband wasn’t present), and competed in a beauty pageant twelve days after birthing her youngest; put simply, an existence that requires week-long spells of bedrest to combat exhaustion-induced sickness. In the aftermath of the controversy that ensued—with comments urging, "Girl, run”—Neeleman posted a video to her account on July 29 in collaboration with her husband’s, @hogfathering. It shows the couple kissing, in cowboy boots, with their cattle field as background and newborn as prop. Through a disembodied voice over, Neeleman describes how they “snuck over” to their new dairy for date night, presumably built to supply the Ballerina Farm store with an expanded arsenal of artisanal goods. “When we started to farm, I was swept up in the beauty of learning to make food from scratch,” she continues. “It’s the world we created, and I couldn’t love it more.”

As an opportunity for tradlife to further its own anti-feminist cause, these idyllic depictions of domestic work are pitched to, as well as against, the disillusioned career woman. It is through this “gloomy figure of the working woman,” writes Zoe Hu in Dissent, that tradwives conflate “their rejection of both capitalism and feminism.” By suggesting that a woman’s fulfillment might be found beyond the home, feminism has, to the tradwife, degraded homemaking as a form of drudgery, as well as those women who find fulfillment from being wives and mothers. There is no possibility of peaceful coexistence from this perspective, notes Rebecca Klatch in Women of the New Right, only a zero-sum game in which traditional values and the wives that uphold them have either defeated, or been defeated by, feminism. As such, the disillusioned career woman might provide affirmation to the homesteader wife while supplying crucial ammunition to the tradwife seeking her vindication; cast in stark relief against the burned-out career woman, the tradwife’s domestic existence is rendered not only as an alternative, but as the only solution to the abasement of capitalism. “It was such a transition going from working in finance to sahm [stay at home mom],” begins one comment on a TikTok video posted by @gwenthemilkmaid, whose content revolves around “homemaking,” “homesteading,” and “holistic health.” “I don’t wake up anxious anymore, I wake up grateful to make brekky for my family.”

Yet despite her comprehensive retreat, not only from the workplace but also market pressures in general, the tradwife ironically becomes the ultimate capitalist subject by insisting that her labor is priceless. This dynamic is further complicated by the current wave of homesteading wives, many of whom enjoy profitable careers through social media, ironically by selling the idea of unpaid labor. In a recent post, Elliott mused that “if all of this went away, the phones, the computers, the videos, the microphones, the noise…our life would still be what it is”—“our life” meaning the curated version “of gardens, of sourdough, of lambs each spring.” But this post, which exists alongside others promoting the efficacy of geranium oil for a duck’s infected foot, lemongrass for pest control, and Roman chamomile for hives, belies the fact that Elliott became her family’s breadwinner within a year of being recruited by a fellow blogger to sell essential oils for the multilevel marketing company doTerra. With a similar sleight of hand, Neeleman has framed her Instagram profile in the following terms, as a candid record of one ordinary family’s journey: “With the ink still wet on the real estate contract for our new little farm, we drove to the nearest farm goods store…we had zero experience. Zero background in farming. Didn’t own a shovel or single animal ... .Already short on sleep, we did the only thing we knew how to do: tell our story and document the journey for all to see.”

While this version of events nicely lends itself to the sponsored #FedExSmallBusiness campaign to which it was attached, it patently glosses over the fact that Neeleman’s father-in-law is the founder and former CEO of JetBlue, as well as four other airlines. This inheritance is particularly relevant given the fact, as Anne Helen Peterson has identified, that there is no possible way for the Neeleman’s 328-acre farm to cover the costs of its own operation, let alone break a profit. Listing the variety of goods available for purchase through the Ballerina Farm website (everything from vacuum sealed “mountain raised meat” and baggies of “high protein farm flour,” to gingham aprons and clogs photographed with a smattering of grass), Gaby Del Valle has observed in The Baffler that Neeleman’s content functions as advertisement for these wares, as well as for her life—in other words, that homespun fantasy and the commercial reality are two sides of the tradwife’s coin.

by Kim Hew-Low, New Inquiry |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Moai

1956 excavation of a Moai on the Easter Island by Thor Heyerdahl (via:)

The production and transportation of the more than 900 statues is considered a remarkable creative and physical feat. The tallest moai erected, called Paro, was almost 10 metres (33 ft) high and weighed 82 tonnes (81 long tons; 90 short tons). Statues are still being discovered as of 2023.

Archaeologists believe that the statues were a representation of the ancient Polynesians' ancestors. The moai statues face away from the ocean and towards the villages as if to watch over the people. The exception is the seven Ahu Akivi which face out to sea to help travelers find the island. 

The more recent moai had pukao on their heads, which represent the topknot of the chieftains. According to local tradition, the mana [ed. universal life force/energy] was preserved in the hair. The pukao were carved out of red scoria, a very light rock from a quarry at Puna Pau. Red itself is considered a sacred color in Polynesia. The added pukao suggest a further status to the moai. [more]

The Rise of the Drones

The Drone Explosion

Drones are experiencing an evolutionary explosion as they invade every domain of military conflict. In the air, on land, at sea, and even in space, drones promise to change dramatically the character of armed conflict. (...)

The complete replacement of human combatants by drone forces is a technologically feasible end state for the evolution of drone weaponry. There is no reason why the command hierarchy of human armed forces cannot be emulated and improved upon by appropriate software, with every level of operational units responsive to commands from above it and directing the levels below. The greater decision-making bandwidth of automated control nodes would likely result in a highly efficient and flexible organization of forces. Thus, under competitive evolutionary pressure, it is likely that the current hybrid human/drone order of battle will steadily shift its composition toward a full drone force, with considerable autonomy, operating under high-level human directives.

The reason why drones are evolving so rapidly and unpredictably is that both microchip power and AI software technology are on exponential growth curves. The cheap and capable cameras and processors in our phones are providing the eyes and brains for inexpensive drones. At the same time, fierce competition in AI development is pushing out the frontiers of machine vision, problem solving, and adaptive behavior for drones. Weapons designers can now use COTS (commercial off the shelf) hardware and software that dramatically reduces the cost of drones. Moreover, the ability to upgrade the “intelligence” of drones via software downloads means that, unlike conventional military hardware, the capabilities of a drone arsenal can continue to grow after the hardware is deployed.

[ed. I read somewhere about "drone swarms" (maybe a Neal Stephenson book), no bigger than small birds, or in some cases, bees. Hundreds, guided in sync. Imagine that.]

Eastern Promises

The yen is low, and everybody is coming to Tokyo. If that sounds familiar, it’s not because I’m being coy or hedging my bets; it is the only information to be found in most English-language coverage of Japan’s capital in the aftermath of the pandemic. I can’t stop reading these accounts. After nine years in the country, you’d think I would have learned enough Japanese to liberate myself from the Anglo-American internet, but I’m afraid I’m stuck with flimsy stories about the tourist uptick for the time being. Sure, I can extract the basics of a television news report or a newspaper article, but that’s asking for too much concentration to pleasurably distract me.

Part of the reason that so much coverage of the city where I live errs on the side of optimism is that Tokyo remains lodged in the postwar American imagination as a place of sophistication and wealth, good taste and cultural authenticity, with a reputation for deferential hospitality. Never mind that this was the calculated effect of bilateral postwar public relations campaigns, a boom in exportable middlebrow culture, and fearmongering about Japanese industrial dominance. Now, some eighty years after the American invasion, Tokyo is accessible to anyone with a couple thousand dollars. Just as, in the popular telling, Mexico City is an oasis for digital nomads, or Yiwu is a modern-day Alexandria—a cosmopolitan shipping hub, attracting dealers in durables and Third World middlemen—the travel-brochure-as-think piece only comes as a surprise to those who have managed to remain innocent of a century of complete transfiguration. It is perhaps unintentional that the authors of such pieces suggest, always in the mildest, most consumer-friendly terms, that calling budget tourism down on Tokyo is the last hope for a country burnt to the filter economically, culturally, and demographically. Japan’s economy never regained the heights of the asset price bubble of the late 1980s; wage increases have all but vanished for the past three “lost decades,” and the number of citizens has plummeted over the past fifteen years (the population is estimated to become half its current number by 2100). Hence, every tourist delivered to Haneda or Narita counts, whether they are purchasing frocks on Omotesando, pornographic manga in Akihabara, or fried dough at the FamilyMart.

Or maybe, the next story in the cycle will venture, the real problem is that there are too many tourists. An ambitious author might draw parallels between the struggles against overtourism in Venice or Bali and Japan’s panicky municipal schemes to address vacationers thronging formerly sedate neighborhoods or trawling red-light districts for teenaged prostitutes, citing editorials about foreigners yanking on cherry trees and eating so much rice they’ve endangered domestic supplies. I cringe when the television set in the kissaten airs a story about foreign hooligans in Shibuya; if I’m in a coffee shop, I feel the eyes of the Japanese patrons on me as they consider my criminal predilections, but alone in my bedroom I actually savor the reports of congestion on public transit and interviews with outraged local residents making noise complaints. Most reports are helpfully followed by a commentator bold enough to bring up kanko kogai, or “tourism pollution,” a term born in the academy before becoming ubiquitous in coverage of Chinese tourists since around 2018.

Tokyo’s race toward peak tourism hasn’t been all bad. In this massive city, with an economy surpassing that of almost every country in Europe and an area of around five thousand square miles, the ebb and flow of tens of millions of tourists can be better accommodated than in more boutique tourist traps abroad. The real estate market has received a modest jolt from developers buying up property for hotels, and tight restrictions on short-term rentals introduced six years ago have saved Tokyo from the market distortion of cities like Florence, where Airbnb and predatory landlords have been blamed for an affordability crisis.

Still, mass tourism is as demoralizing and demeaning here as anywhere. Tourists disrupt the rhythm of the city, agents of minor turmoil set loose in familiar spaces. There may be no way to describe these transgressions without sounding like a crank—I know it is not maliciousness on their part—but I have lived in Japan long enough that the surprise of encountering a broad, looming American, with their transparent expressions and flashy Lycra pants, stuns me out of the daze into which the city has lulled me. I am rankled by offenses invisible to outsiders. While part of me sympathizes with the family of sightseers blundering their way onto a crowded Yamanote Line train with their suitcases or the young women filming TikToks in the aisles of a Ministop, my Tokyo training means I know infringement of its unwritten rules when I see it. This is a city that expects people to suffer in peculiar ways. You would need to live here to know that using a bicycle bell is anathema when you can simply squeeze the brakes by way of warning. There is no way to explain that the cement curbs around the overgrown green spaces carved out of the sidewalk at many intersections are not for sitting. I couldn’t say for sure why the rumble of the plastic wheels of rolling suitcases is more frightening than jackhammers.

Apart from making the city uglier and less orderly, the tourist is a reminder of an unhappy history in which the native population has been perpetually relegated to a vassal class. In recent years, the concept of omotenashi—basic hospitality, reconfigured as essentially Japanese—has been popularized by domestic tourism boosters as a national responsibility akin to wartime thrift. As a result, the tourist acts as though they are among staff members in a grand resort or actors in a stage show; the whole hospitable nation is at their service. (It can be funny to stand on an Asakusa corner and watch American or European tourists asking for directions from harried but unfailingly courteous office drones, Chinese tourists, or old men staggering toward the off-track betting parlor.) The tourist reminds the citizen that, as far as the future of the city is concerned, they are an afterthought.

by Dylan Levi King, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Yue Zhang

Pat Metheny

DOGE Is Replacing Fired Workers With a Chatbot

"Hey senator. Did you read my shirt?"

"Yeah, I saw that."

"It says TECH SUPPORT. That's funny, right? It's because I know computers."

"Yeah. That's.... that is definitely a t-shirt."

"And it's a joke! I saw it on Red.... I made it up! Hey Marco! Did you read my shirt!? It's because I'm the computer guy. Do you know computers?"

"Yes, Elon. I know computers. Would you please excuse me, I have to be... anywhere else."

"Hey Kristi! Did you see my..."

"Get away from me, Elon."

via:

Image: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

Every Studio Ghibli Film, Ranked From Worst to Best

Every Studio Ghibli Film, Ranked From Worst to Best (Wired)

Images: My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away (Deviant Art)

[ed. Gotta say, Spirited Away is my favorite.]

Music Therapy

‘She couldn’t walk, she couldn’t talk’: music therapy helped Joni Mitchell recover from a stroke – could it ward off depression and dementia too?

In 2015, Joni Mitchell suffered a catastrophic stroke. According to her friend, the musician and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, “when she got back from the hospital, she couldn’t walk and she couldn’t talk, and the doctors were so pessimistic about her recovery, they hadn’t scheduled any follow-ups”. For a while it looked as though one of the most gifted songwriters of the 20th century would be permanently silenced.

One day, though, the nurses caring for her at her home found Levitin’s number on a piece of paper in the kitchen, and called him. They had noticed that Mitchell perked up when she heard music coming from their phones, and wondered if he had any suggestions for songs she might respond to. Remarkably, he’d helped her compile a CD of her favourite tracks for a series of albums called Artist’s Choice back in the early 2000s (it was a short-lived project from Starbucks, which had bought a record label in order to pipe music into its coffee shops). Their picks ranged from Debussy to Marvin Gaye and Leonard Cohen.

Here was the perfect solution, then: a tailor-made music therapy programme. The personalised aspect is something Levitin, whose new book is called Music As Medicine, knows to be all-important. As he explains to me from his home office in Los Angeles, “If you’re talking about therapeutic effects, you have to like the music. If you don’t like it, your walls are going to go up, your cortisol levels will spike. [You’ll say] ‘Get me away from this.’” As luck would have it, Mitchell had set down exactly what she’d need in these circumstances while she was well, and Levitin knew precisely where the nurses could find it – in the corner of the bookcase at the far end of her living room. He sent some extra material because he understood how getting in touch with a sense of herself would speed things along – Herbie Hancock’s River: The Joni Letters, and Our House, the song Graham Nash had written for and about her, with its opening lines: “I’ll light the fire / You place the flowers in the vase / That you bought today.”

Mitchell made steady progress with the help of speech and physical therapists, but Levitin sees music as a crucial part of the picture. “One of the things we know is that music you like increases dopamine, and dopamine is the neurochemical that motivates you to do things … having that music as a reminder of who she is, who she was, and what she cares about, helped her to do the very difficult job of recovery, and to follow through with the protocols of the therapists.”

In a touching anecdote from the book, Levitin describes how, a year after Mitchell’s stroke, he brought flowers on one of his regular visits. “She walked over to a cabinet by herself to get a vase for them,” he writes. “She moved some vases out of the way to find a particular one in the back, a glass vase with a single handle and flowers painted on it. ‘That’s a beautiful vase, where did you get it?’ I asked. ‘I bought it when I was living in Laurel Canyon with Graham.’ Oh. That vase.” (...)

In 2006 he published This Is Your Brain on Music, a mix of the technical and personal that became a runaway bestseller and was translated into 18 languages. It covered the gamut of musical theory – from rhythm, harmony and pitch (including the “Levitin effect” – the fact that even non musicians usually remember songs in the correct key) to their neural correlates and why our musical preferences are defined by what we hear up to the age of 18.

Music As Medicine marks a return to his core subject, after successful books on the neuroscience of ageing and the psychology of misinformation. “When I wrote This Is Your Brain on Music, I wanted to have at least a chapter on medical benefits of music, but there really wasn’t any good science about it – and I’m not one of those who doesn’t let the facts get in the way of a story. So I couldn’t write about it until now, because there’s actually been some good work,” he tells me. “We’re learning enough about the underlying mechanisms of music and brain and body that we can apply them, not just in the laboratory, but in clinics and hospitals and care facilities and outpatient treatments.” (...)

Since prevention is better than cure, is there any evidence that engaging with music can protect against dementia? Yes and no. “It’s not going to prevent Alzheimer’s, but it will prevent you from seeing the effects or symptoms of Alzheimer’s for some time.” And the more active your engagement, the better. “Playing an instrument is neuroprotective, because you’re creating something. You’re orchestrating your limbs and your fingers and your vocal cords in ways that you haven’t before. No two performances are ever identical, and so they’re creating new neural pathways.” This is the concept of cognitive reserve: “I think of it as being like an athlete. If you can bench press 250 pounds on a regular basis, even with a cold and a sore arm, you’re going to be able to bench press more than I can.”

So is music a bit like a workout for the brain? “Yeah: it engages every part of the brain that we know of. It invokes memory, emotion, reward systems, eye-hand coordination, planning. There’s a lot going on there, and even if you’re not a professional musician or particularly good at it, you get all the benefits.”

That’s why Levitin recommends (prescribes?) playing music, whatever your ability or age. For anyone who can’t see the point when someone like Yo-Yo Ma has a 65-year head start, he has a clear message: the idea that you need to emulate professionals or be well trained in theory is “bullshit”. “It was 500 years ago or so, when the Europeans built the first concert halls, that we created this artificial distinction between the performers and the audience. But for tens of thousands of years, music was participatory. Still, in most cultures on the planet – not in our hyper-success-oriented western culture – people are singing unselfconsciously in groups, and nobody’s making a big deal out of it.”

by David Shariatmadari, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Jack Robinson/Getty Images

[ed. See also: Ted Gioia's excellent (and free) serialized book Music to Raise the Dead (HB).]

Robert Rauschenberg, Nectar (Waterworks), (inkjet dye transfer on paper), 1993

via:

How New York Drove a Steak Through the Heart of Texas

They say everything’s bigger in Texas, and that’s certainly true regarding the job of lieutenant governor. It’s an express train to obscurity in most states; in Texas, the lieutenant governor controls the state Senate and chairs the budget process. So when the incumbent, Dan Patrick, sketched his legislative priorities the other day, people paid heed — even when he was trolling the state of New York.

Patrick called on lawmakers to declare that a certain cut of beef, taken from the short loin behind the ribs, shall be known, by law, as the “Texas strip” steak. It is an outrage, he maintained, that the effete coastal snobs of Manhattan have put their brand on the delectable cut, which appears on menus across the nation as the “New York strip” — or worse, to haters of the Yankees baseball club, the “N.Y. strip.”

“Liberal New York shouldn’t get the credit for our hard-working ranchers,” Patrick wrote on X after meeting with Texas cattle raisers last week.

Readers of a certain age might be thinking that this would have been catnip to satirist Molly Ivins, whose cheerful disdain for Texas politics was evident when she wrote of one legislator: “If his IQ slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day.” (...)

In fairness to the lieutenant governor, I do have a bone to pick over the etymology behind this popular bar steak — just not the same one. It’s not right that Texas should swipe the name of the New York strip because neither state is the rightful owner to begin with. Proper speakers of American English (which is, by presidential decree, the official language until we switch to Russian) should know that this much-loved beefsteak is in fact the “Kansas City strip.” Or, if you must, the “K.C. strip.”

How did a cut from the heartland come to be hijacked to Gotham and rudely rebranded? The story starts, interestingly enough, in Texas just after the Civil War. The Texas ranchers for whom Patrick wrings his hankie raised more cattle than they could eat. When the railroads entered the West, they figured they could walk the animals to Kansas or Missouri, connect with the rails, and ship the beef to Eastern cities by train.

But there was a catch: It was a long walk, and cows are not big hikers. The longhorn breed is an exception. They are good at hoofing it over long distances, at least compared with other cattle. Ranches across Texas filled up with longhorns.

But there was another catch: Longhorns walk so well because they are by nature sinewy and slender. And the steak-eating public of the Eastern cities had no appetite for tough, stringy beef. The answer to this problem was Kansas City, which became a way station between the ranchers and the diners. In sprawling stockyards on the Missouri River, the weary hikers from the Chisholm Trail gathered to feast on grasses and grains until they were nice and fat.

And then they got killed.

Butchers had a variety of ways to disassemble a steer. One popular approach involved sawing through a bone that, when sectioned, resembled the letter T, with beef of slightly different characteristics on each side of the upright. Though sometimes called a “porterhouse steak” for the beer-and-beef establishments where it was often served, this cut became widely known, for obvious reasons, as the “T-bone.” Another way of slicing things up, however, separated the marbled beef on one side of the bone into steaks known as “ribeyes” while rendering the leaner steaks on the other side into “strips.”

Simple justice demands giving credit where it’s due. The steaks aren’t “Texas strips,” because they arrived from Texas about as chewy as a cowboy’s boot. And they shouldn’t be “New York strips,” because New Yorkers contributed nothing to the process but their pieholes. They are “Kansas City strips,” in honor of the city where the beef got its flavor and the men in bloody aprons who popularized the cut.

Alas, America’s first upscale restaurant, complete with menus, was located on the island of Manhattan. Delmonico’s catered to the well-fed rich of the Gilded Age who, as everyone knows, plundered without pause. Among the things stolen in those rapacious years were the names of both the ribeye (dubbed the “Delmonico steak”) and the Kansas City (dubbed the “New York strip”).

by David Von Drahle, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: Michelle Kondrich/The Washington Post

[ed. Some days it feels like we're living in a Saturday Night Live skit. See also: No harm, no fowl: Trump recommends a return to subsistence farming (WSJ):]

***

Egg prices have skyrocketed, recently surpassing $8 for a dozen wholesale large eggs. Stores are rationing cartons to customers and still getting cleared out. These phenomena are primarily driven by the spread of bird flu, which is forcing farmers to cull their flocks. That’s not Trump’s fault, though it doesn’t help that he accidentally fired bird flu experts at the Agriculture Department — setting off a scramble to rehire them — and deliberately suppressed research on the disease’s transmission. (...)

Perhaps most eg(g)regiously, the Trump administration is encouraging Americans to cope with high prices by raising their own flocks.

“How do we solve for something like this?” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins asked on Fox News. “People are sort of looking around and thinking, ‘Wow, maybe I could get a chicken in my backyard,’ and it’s awesome.”

In no universe does it make economic sense for every American household — many of whom live in urban areas or even suburbs where it’s illegal to keep live poultry — to start farming their own food. The fact that we humans don’t have to spend all our time growing our own sustenance, and can instead specialize in other fields where we’re more productive, is a tremendous victory for our species. (...)

Encouraging millions of Americans who are completely inexperienced with animal husbandry to become amateur bird farmers in the middle of a bird flu epidemic also seems like a great way to expose more humans to bird flu.

This DIY egg production stratagem also raises questions about how the administration expects Americans to grapple with other grocery items that have grown more expensive. [ed. Cow in every garage?]

NFL Teams See Aaron Rodgers Opportunity

NEW YORK—Leaping at the opportunity to make their intentions clear, numerous NFL front offices expressed interest this week in quarterback Aaron Rodgers playing elsewhere, sources confirmed Tuesday. “Aaron Rodgers feels like he could be a great fit for the culture of other places,” said an anonymous NFC general manager among the flurry of teams across the NFL frantically stating their commitment to keeping Rodgers off their roster. “We immediately reached out to his agent to improve our chances of keeping Aaron Rodgers as far away as possible from our franchise. This puts us in a much better position than many of the other teams in the league who now risk acquiring the former Jets quarterback because they waited too long to make an insultingly low salary offer or mock his weird beliefs and idiotic conspiracy theories.” At press time, several NFL teams reportedly entered a bidding war offering high draft picks to any franchise willing to suffer Aaron Rodgers.

by The Onion |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Ferenc Lantos (Hungarian, 1929-2014) - Shift in balance

via:

Chris Ware
via:

[ed. Anywhere, USA.]

Barbarians at the Gate

Ten days or so ago, at the end of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, I found myself at a party. I’ve been to these sorts of things before, and more often than not they have been insufferable affairs: sweaty frat basements reeking of stale beer, bright young men outnumbering bright young women whose attention they desire. Starry-eyed, badly-dressed, trying way too hard — the essence of DC.

(Incidentally, Democrats are no better — every bit the caricature as their opposite. But these CPAC afterparties usually nail the Washington striver stereotype in singular fashion.)

This party was very different, however. It wasn’t even a CPAC party. It was billed as a “DOGE appreciation party.” And while that may sound plenty dorky, it surfaced something else that’s novel in Trump’s DC. It surfaced a kind of gleeful barbarism that I’ve just not seen before.

Everything about the party was over the top. After you RSVP’d, you needed to get vetted. (For whatever reason, I was approved fairly quickly.) An email went out the day of the party saying that the whole thing was “strictly off the record” — presumably because journalists had breached the defenses. The note was intentionally edgy. “Security will be tight, so arrive prepared.” There were guard goons at the door. Word had spread on social media that the party was hard-right, so a handful of cops were called in to protect attendees from a dozen or so people out front chanting “Fuck off, fascists!” in that familiar protester cadence. I couldn’t help but wonder whether this resistance was being paid by the organizers to be there, for ambience. It all felt curated.

The space was rented, I was told; Meta had apparently held a party there earlier in the week. Walking up to the third floor, you were confronted by a massive stuffed bison by the entrance. The whole place was shabby chic — a penthouse loft, with a massive split-level living room that no one would ever live in, with dusty bookshelves and odd furniture scattered about. There was an industrial-sized kitchen that looked unused. A bar in the living room and a second one at the exit to the rooftop were further tip-offs that this is an event space and not a home. (That said, I did wander into a bedroom decorated Buddhist-style, so who knows?)

Respecting the “off the record” injunction, I’ll stick with the mood, as in truth it was more instructive than any conversation I had.

The mood was jubilant. But it wasn’t just that sense of liberating triumph that Trump’s victory has injected into many conservatives. It was a kind of agitated truculence. The DOGE theme had everyone drunk on destruction. There certainly was a lot of camaraderie, you could feel it in all the conversations. But there was no sense of restraint, and no sense of positive mission. The mission itself was to tear down, to punish.

The evening was not free of cliché: At one point, I overheard a group of young men eagerly talking about the Roman Empire. My mind turned to the sack of Rome, a point of no return. Edward Gibbon, describing the moment when the Visigoths entered the city in 410AD, retold the instructions of Alaric, their Christian king:

He encouraged his troops boldly to seize the rewards of valour, and to enrich themselves with the spoils of a wealthy and effeminate people; but he exhorted them at the same time to spare the lives of the unresisting citizens, and to respect the churches of the apostles St. Peter and St. Paul, as holy and inviolable sanctuaries.

Today, the barbarians have also entered the gates. But King Trump has no Christian virtues to speak of, and he has counseled no restraint. His taunting address last night to a joint session of Congress brooked no pity for the vanquished. There will certainly be much plunder and self-enrichment as the wealthy and effeminate stand by helplessly and watch. But unlike back then, it feels like no denizen, and no institution, will be spared.

I don’t want to pretend that I somehow stand above and apart from all of this. The giddy glee feels in part driven by the prospect of smashing decadence. And I feel it too. Moreover, I suspect that the feeling is shared much more broadly across the country — and that it’s what keeps Trump’s revolutionary radicalism still above-water in the polls. Only a slim majority voted for Trump, but the rejection of the progressive identity agenda — call it “wokeness” or “DEI” or whatever you want — feels broader. (...)

I saw a familiar face at the party at one point later in the evening. I drunkenly tried to communicate the above to him. “These people are having fun right now, but they don’t know what’s coming. This is not an organized army, these are bandits and vandals, and no one has full control. They’ll turn on each other eventually. Everyone is backslapping tonight, but they’ll all be swimming in each others’ blood in a year’s time!” Yes, drunkenly. But I still can’t shake the feeling.

by Damir Marusic, Wisdom of Crowds |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Happily tearing the country apart and ruining people's lives over something as insignificant as political correctness. See also: 50 Thoughts on DOGE (Statecraft). And, There Is a Liberal Answer to the Trump-Musk Wrecking Ball (NYT).]

How AI Takeover Might Happen in Two Years

How AI Takeover Might Happen in Two Years 
Image: uncredited

I’m not a natural “doomsayer.” But unfortunately, part of my job as an AI safety researcher is to think about the more troubling scenarios.

I’m like a mechanic scrambling last-minute checks before Apollo 13 takes off. If you ask for my take on the situation, I won’t comment on the quality of the in-flight entertainment, or describe how beautiful the stars will appear from space.

I will tell you what could go wrong. That is what I intend to do in this story.

Now I should clarify what this is exactly. It's not a prediction. I don’t expect AI progress to be this fast or as untamable as I portray. It’s not pure fantasy either.

It is my worst nightmare.

It’s a sampling from the futures that are among the most devastating, and I believe, disturbingly plausible – the ones that most keep me up at night.

I’m telling this tale because the future is not set yet. I hope, with a bit of foresight, we can keep this story a fictional one.

by joshc, LessWrong |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Life Lessons From a Coastal Wolf Pack

Pleasant Island is two miles from the town of Gustavus, Alaska, and less than 30 miles from where we’d anchored. A wolf pack arrived there in 2013, after swimming across the narrow channel from the mainland. Initially, they did what wolves typically do: eat every ungulate they could clamp their jaws around. After they’d decimated the island’s limited deer population, their next act seemed obvious: The pack would move, or starve. Several decades earlier, an ill-fated and ethically dubious ecological experiment on Alaska’s far-flung Coronation Island demonstrated what happens when introduced wolves eat all the local deer and have nowhere else to go: In the absence of prey, the wolves starved, resorting to cannibalism before eventually dying out entirely.

But, as Juneau-based biologist Gretchen Roffler and her colleagues revealed in a pair of studies published in 2021 and 2023, the Pleasant Island wolves found another way. When deer disappeared from the menu, the pack shopped around, and did so with remarkable success.

Roffler’s first glimpse of a Pleasant Island wolf eating a sea otter seemed like an anomaly. But when she observed the same behavior again, she suspected a larger phenomenon might be at play. To test this, she and her colleagues began the unglamorous work of scooping poop from the island’s beaches and forested trails. By analyzing the scat using a technique called DNA metabarcoding — akin to a prey fingerprinting tool for feces — Roffler, Taal Levi and other partners at Oregon State University could determine whether the wolves were eating terrestrial herbivores, like deer, or marine predators, like seals or otters. Combining this research with on-the-ground field observations and GPS collars that tracked the wolves, they found that the pack was not merely sampling otters; they were devouring them en masse. Despite being fierce adversaries, with sharp teeth and claws, otters provided the wolves with a reliable alternative to venison.

The sea otters were relative newcomers themselves. After near-extirpation throughout much of the North Pacific, otters were reintroduced to the outer islands of Southeast Alaska in the 1960s, and their population rapidly expanded. Whether the first Pleasant Island otter meal was a lucky accident or the result of a strategically planned hunt, the pack wasted no time in capitalizing on this now-abundant resource. In 2015, wolf scats collected from the island consisted of approximately 98% deer; by 2018, deer had disappeared entirely and sea otters made up more than two-thirds of their diet.

Though what wolves eat for lunch might not seem revolutionary, this demonstration of their flexibility is, particularly when it comes to shaping our scientific understanding of their lives. Wolves are known to be opportunistic, but this pack’s quick and dramatic prey shift sent shock waves through the wildlife world: in just three years, they’d upended classic predator-prey dynamics and bent the supposed “rules” of their lives.

Most wolves specialize on ungulates, including deer, moose and elk. Pleasant Island’s wolves seemed no different until they amended the core tenets of this long-standing exchange, and did so in a matter of just a few years. By crossing a dietary threshold, they had propelled themselves across ecotones and trophic levels — switching their primary food source from a bottom-up terrestrial herbivore (deer) to a top-down marine carnivore (otters). This isn’t just a matter of semantics; conserving the health of wildlife populations requires knowledge about what animals eat, where they live, and what they might do next. And these island-hopping wolves were full of surprises. (...)

The idea that carnivores’ dietary habits can influence their environments isn’t new. However, as our awareness of wolves’ ability to shift what they eat — quickly and sometimes dramatically — grows, so does the need for a more nuanced scientific approach. Traditionally, ecological theory has prioritized models that simplify relationships in the wild: Wolves dine on ungulates, predators need prey, and the lives of deer, beavers and otters have little in common. However, otter-eating wolves and other so-called exceptions may actually be teaching us just how capable some species are of responding rapidly when the need arises. Ecologists sometimes refer to this potential to pivot as “adaptive capacity;” i.e., how fast a species can change the rules of its own game.

by Caroline Van Hemert, High Country News |  Read more:

Image: Nature Picture Library/Alamy

[ed. Taking down a full grown otter would be quite a feat. They can grow up to nearly 5 ft. long and 100 lbs., with clam cracking jaws. Here's one (below) being cleaned of oil (took six people to hold him down, even moderately sedated):]

Image: markk

Spruce Pine Powers the World's Electronics

We have already identified some key resources involved in AI development that could be restricted. The economic bottlenecks are mainly around high energy requirements and chip manufacturing.

Energy is probably too connected to the rest of the economy to be a good regulatory lever, but the U.S. power grid can't currently handle the scale of the data centers the AI labs want for model training. That might buy us a little time. Big tech is already talking about buying small modular nuclear reactors to power the next generation of data centers. Those probably won't be ready until the early 2030s. Unfortunately, that also creates pressures to move training to China or the Middle East where energy is cheaper, but where governments are less concerned about human rights.

A recent hurricane flooding high-purity quartz mines made headlines because chip producers require it for the crucibles used in making silicon wafers. Lower purity means accidental doping of the silicon crystal, which means lower chip yields per wafer, at best. Those mines aren't the only source, but they seem to be the best one. There might also be ways to utilize lower-purity materials, but that might take time to develop and would require a lot more energy, which is already a bottleneck.

The very cutting-edge chips required for AI training runs require some delicate and expensive extreme-ultraviolet lithography machines to manufacture. They literally have to plasmify tin droplets with a pulsed laser to reach those frequencies. ASML Holdings is currently the only company that sells these systems, and machines that advanced have their own supply chains. They have very few customers, and (last I checked) only TSMC was really using them successfully at scale. There are a lot of potential policy levers in this space, at least for now. LessWrong (...)

***

High-quality quartz is the cornerstone of the semiconductors operating nearly every tech gadget worldwide. Cellphones, solar panels and artificial intelligence all rely on this resource.

However, such pure quartz is rare—it can only be found at a handful of places on Earth. And a North Carolina town home to the world’s biggest deposit of the mineral was just hit by Hurricane Helene.

Sitting an hour northeast of Asheville, the small town of Spruce Pine, also known as Mineral City, is home to about 2,000 people. It also contains a crucial supply of the natural high-purity quartz required for the computers and devices that run our modern world.

When Hurricane Helene struck, Spruce Pine was doused in more than two feet of rain, flooding its downtown, knocking out power and forcing businesses to shutter. The quartz mines in Spruce Pine, owned by Belgian mining company Sibelco and the local Quartz Corp, supply 80 to 90 percent of all high-quality quartz in the world, per CNN’s Clare Duffy and Dianne Gallagher. But the two companies closed down operations a day before the storm crossed the region, with no word on when work would resume.

“I don’t think the nation really realizes how this little, small town is so critical,” Michael Vance, a local real estate developer who has been informally coordinating some relief efforts after the storm, tells the Washington Post’s Eva Dou. ~ Smithsonian

***

Ultra-high-purity quartz is an essential component to semiconductor chips, and the only places in the world that can meet this need are two mines in a small North Carolina town. The mines' owner, Sibelco, is investing $700 million to expand capacity, but is that enough to keep up with AI-fueled chip demand?

Spruce Pine is a small town about two hours drive northwest of Charlotte, NC. You can get to the general area via a number of ways, depending on your point of origin, but for the last stretch of the trip, you need to travel down Fish Hatchery Rd. It's a two-lane rural highway, as depicted in Google Maps, set amid a pleasant scenic backdrop.

It's on this road that the modern economy rests, according to Wharton associate professor Ethan Mollick, who teaches innovation and entrepreneurship and also examines the effects of artificial intelligence on work and education. That's because the road runs to the two mines that are the sole supplier of the quartz required to make the crucibles needed to refine silicon wafers.

This is not the first time these mines – owned by Sibelco, which mines, processes, and sells specialty industrial minerals – have been highlighted as integral not only to the global semiconductor industry but also to the solar photovoltaic markets.

It is an alarming prospect to contemplate, and it is fair to wonder whether Mollick is indulging in a bit of hyperbole. But there is no denying the fact that digital devices around the world contain a small piece of Spruce Pine's unique ultra-high-purity quartz. "It does boggle the mind a bit to consider that inside nearly every cell phone and computer chip you'll find quartz from Spruce Pine," Rolf Pippert, mine manager at Quartz Corp, a leading supplier of high-quality quartz, tells the BBC.~ TechSpot

by LessWrong, Smithsonian, TechSpot |  Read more: here, here and here.

Image: uncredited via

[ed. So of course, guess what: Trump calls for an end to the Chips Act, redirecting funds to national debt (TechSpot). And, for once, Republicans finally find a backbone and say NO.]

The Natural History of Vacant Lots (University of California Press, 1987)

via:

Tobacco Field on the Philippines. American vintage postcard

via: