We May Finally Know What Causes Alzheimer’s

If you bled when you brushed your teeth this morning, you might want to get that seen to. We may finally have found the long-elusive cause of Alzheimer’s disease: Porphyromonas gingivalis, the key bacteria in chronic gum disease.

That’s bad, as gum disease affects around a third of all people. But the good news is that a drug that blocks the main toxins of P. gingivalis is entering major clinical trials this year, and research published today shows it might stop and even reverse Alzheimer’s. There could even be a vaccine.

Alzheimer’s is one of the biggest mysteries in medicine. As populations have aged, dementia has skyrocketed to become the fifth biggest cause of death worldwide. Alzheimer’s constitutes some 70 per cent of these cases and yet, we don’t know what causes it.

Bacteria in the brain

The disease often involves the accumulation of proteins called amyloid and tau in the brain, and the leading hypothesis has been that the disease arises from defective control of these two proteins.

But research in recent years has revealed that people can have amyloid plaques without having dementia. So many efforts to treat Alzheimer’s by moderating these proteins have failed that the hypothesis has been seriously questioned.

However evidence has been growing that the function of amyloid proteins may be as a defence against bacteria, leading to a spate of recent studies looking at bacteria in Alzheimer’s, particularly those that cause gum disease, which is known to be a major risk factor for the condition.

Bacteria involved in gum disease and other illnesses have been found after death in the brains of people who had Alzheimer’s, but until now, it hasn’t been clear whether these bacteria caused the disease or simply got in via brain damage caused by the condition.

Gum disease link

Multiple research teams have been investigating P. gingivalis, and have so far found that it invades and inflames brain regions affected by Alzheimer’s; that gum infections can worsen symptoms in mice genetically engineered to have Alzheimer’s; and that it can cause Alzheimer’s-like brain inflammation, neural damage, and amyloid plaques in healthy mice.

“When science converges from multiple independent laboratories like this, it is very compelling,” says Casey Lynch of Cortexyme, a pharmaceutical firm in San Francisco, California.

In the new study, Cortexyme have now reported finding the toxic enzymes – called gingipains – that P. gingivalis uses to feed on human tissue in 96 per cent of the 54 Alzheimer’s brain samples they looked at, and found the bacteria themselves in all three Alzheimer’s brains whose DNA they examined.

“This is the first report showing P. gingivalis DNA in human brains, and the associated gingipains, co-lococalising with plaques,” says Sim Singhrao, of the University of Central Lancashire, UK. Her team previously found that P. gingivalis actively invades the brains of mice with gum infections. She adds that the new study is also the first to show that gingipains slice up tau protein in ways that could allow it to kill neurons, causing dementia.

The bacteria and its enzymes were found at higher levels in those who had experienced worse cognitive decline, and had more amyloid and tau accumulations. The team also found the bacteria in the spinal fluid of living people with Alzheimer’s, suggesting that this technique may provide a long-sought after method of diagnosing the disease.

When the team gave P. gingivalis gum disease to mice, it led to brain infection, amyloid production, tangles of tau protein, and neural damage in the regions and nerves normally affected by Alzheimer’s.

Cortexyme had previously developed molecules that block gingipains. Giving some of these to mice reduced their infections, halted amyloid production, lowered brain inflammation and even rescued damaged neurons.

by Debora MacKenzie, New Scientist | Read more:
Image: A. Dowsett/Public Health England

No One Is Prepared for Hagfish Slime

No One Is Prepared for Hagfish Slime (The Atlantic)

At first glance, the hagfish—a sinuous, tubular animal with pink-grey skin and a paddle-shaped tail—looks very much like an eel. Naturalists can tell the two apart because hagfish, unlike other fish, lack backbones (and, also, jaws). For everyone else, there’s an even easier method. “Look at the hand holding the fish,” the marine biologist Andrew Thaler once noted. “Is it completely covered in slime? Then, it’s a hagfish.”

via:

[ed. See also: The name is hagfish but you can call it a ‘slime eel’: Meet a fledgling Alaska fishery (ADN).]

Why Are Glasses So Expensive?

It’s a question I get asked frequently, most recently by a colleague who was shocked to find that his new pair of prescription eyeglasses cost about $800.

Why are these things so damn expensive?

The answer: Because no one is doing anything to prevent a near-monopolistic, $100-billion industry from shamelessly abusing its market power.

Prescription eyewear represents perhaps the single biggest mass-market consumer ripoff to be found.

The stats tell the whole story.

• The Vision Council, an optical industry trade group, estimates that about three-quarters of U.S. adults use some sort of vision correction. About two-thirds of that number wear eyeglasses.
• That’s roughly 126 million people, which represents some pretty significant economies of scale.
• The average cost of a pair of frames is $231, according to VSP, the leading provider of employer eye care benefits.
• The average cost of a pair of single-vision lenses is $112. Progressive, no-line lenses can run twice that amount.
• The true cost of a pair of acetate frames — three pieces of plastic and some bits of metal — is as low as $10, according to some estimates. Check out the prices of Chinese designer knockoffs available online.
• Lenses require precision work, but they are almost entirely made of plastic and almost all production is automated.

The bottom line: You’re paying a markup on glasses that would make a luxury car dealer blush, with retail costs from start to finish bearing no relation to reality. (...)

I reached out to the Vision Council for an industry perspective on pricing. The group describes itself as “a nonprofit organization serving as a global voice for eyewear and eyecare.”

But after receiving my email asking why glasses cost so much, Kelly Barry, a spokeswoman for the Vision Council, said the group “is unable to participate in this story at this time.”

I asked why. She said the Vision Council, a global voice for eyewear and eyecare, prefers to focus on “health and fashion trend messaging.”

And because it represents so many different manufacturers and brands, she said, it’s difficult for the association “to make any comments on pricing.”

Which is to say, don’t worry your pretty head.

What the Vision Council probably didn’t want to get into is the fact that for years a single company, Luxottica, has controlled much of the eyewear market. If you wear designer glasses, there’s a very good chance you’re wearing Luxottica frames.

Its owned and licensed brands include Armani, Brooks Brothers, Burberry, Chanel, Coach, DKNY, Dolce & Gabbana, Michael Kors, Oakley, Oliver Peoples, Persol, Polo Ralph Lauren, Ray-Ban, Tiffany, Valentino, Vogue and Versace.

Italy’s Luxottica also runs EyeMed Vision Care, LensCrafters, Pearle Vision, Sears Optical, Sunglass Hut and Target Optical.

Just pause to appreciate the lengthy shadow this one company casts over the vision care market. You go into a LensCrafters retail outlet, where the salesperson shows you Luxottica frames under various names, and then the company pays itself when you use your EyeMed insurance.

A very sweet deal.

by David Lazarus, LA Times |  Read more:

Image: Getty
[ed. This is not exactly new news.]

Goodbye Big Five

Week 1: Amazon

Apparently, I am a masochist.

I am on a mission to live without the tech giants—to discover whether such a thing is even possible. Not just through sheer willpower but technologically, with the use of a custom-built tool that would literally prevent my devices from accessing these companies, and them from accessing me and my data.

I start the experiment by eliminating the company I thought would be most challenging: the Everything Store.

Like millions of other Americans, we use a lot of Amazon products in our house. We have an Echo, an Echo Dot, two Kindles, two Amazon Prime Chase credit cards, Amazon Prime Video on our TV, and two Prime accounts. (Note to self: Why are my husband and I each paying Amazon $119/year?)

So, suffice to say, Amazon is getting a good chunk of my money and a lot of my data. I alone average about $3,000 a year in purchases on Amazon.com. I’ve become such a loyal shopper that I barely know where else to go online to buy things. It’s the first place I head when I need something, anything—sheets, diapers, toilet paper, a Halloween costume, Bluetooth headphones, roulette cufflinks for a friend who likes to gamble. Basically, anytime I need a random material object, I open up the Amazon app on my phone.

Yes, fuck, I have Amazon’s app on my phone. I’m that addicted to this company. And I’m not alone: Amazon reportedly controls 50 percent of online commerce, which means half of all purchases made online in America, which is obscene.

Amazon is not just an online store—that’s not even the hardest thing to cut out of my life. Its global empire also includes Amazon Web Services (AWS), the vast server network that provides the backbone for much of the internet, as well as Twitch.tv, the broadcasting behemoth that is the backbone of the online gaming industry, and Whole Foods, the organic backbone of the yuppie diet.

Keeping myself from walking into a Whole Foods is easy enough, but I also want to stop using any of Amazon’s digital services, from Amazon.com (and its damn app) to any other websites or apps that use AWS to host their content. To do that, I enlist the help of a technologist, Dhruv Mehrotra, who built me a custom VPN through which to route my internet requests. The VPN blocks any traffic to or from an IP address controlled by Amazon. I connect my computers and my phone to the VPN at all times, as well as all the connected devices in my home; it’s supposed to weed out every single digital thing that Amazon touches.

Ultimately, though, we found Amazon was too huge to conquer.

AWS is the internet’s largest cloud provider, generating 0ver $17 billion in revenue last year. Though Amazon makes much more in gross sales—over $100 billion—from its retail business, if you scrutinize its earnings reports, you’ll see that the majority of its profits come from AWS. Tech is where the money is, baby.

Launched in 2006, AWS has taken over vast swaths of the internet. My VPN winds up blocking over 23 million IP addresses controlled by Amazon, resulting in various unexpected casualties, from Motherboard and Fortune to the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s website. (Government agencies love AWS, which is likely why Amazon, soon to be a corporate Cerberus with three “headquarters,” chose Arlington, Virginia, in the D.C. suburbs, as one of them.) Many of the smartphone apps I rely on also stop working during the block.

Luckily, Yale Law’s website works, so I can download antitrust expert Lina Khan’s 2017 paper making the argument that Amazon is a monopoly that American antitrust law, as it is currently practiced, is ill-equipped to regulate—essential reading for the week.

With the VPN up and running, I start to wonder why so many sites still work. Airbnb, for example, is a famed user of AWS, but I can search for a Thanksgiving vacation home there. I email Airbnb to ask if it still uses AWS for hosting, and a spokesperson confirms the company does. (I also could have confirmed it with this cool tool, which tells you about the digital provenance of a website.)

That’s how Dhruv and I discover a major flaw in our blocking technique. It turns out many sites, in addition to using a company like AWS to host their digital content, employ a secondary service called a content delivery network, or CDN, to load web pages faster.

The internet may seem like invisible vapor in the air around us, but it has a crucial physicality, too. AWS has huge buildings of servers around the world, while CDNs have a larger number of smaller ones. Think of AWS as the central warehouse for a site’s digital packets; the CDNs are the storefronts around the world that help people get the packets faster so that web visitors don’t have to wait for their data to come all the way from the main warehouse. (...)

We speak in links, even for the most devastating of news, and tech giants have made themselves indispensable for link translation.

Dhruv keeps track of all the times my devices try to ping Amazon’s servers during the week. It happens nearly 300,000 times, probably in part because apps frustrated not to get a reply from the mothership keep pinging repeatedly until I close them. My devices try to reach Amazon via 3,800 different IP addresses, which suggests that there are a lot of different apps and websites attempting to connect to Amazon throughout the week.

My failure to succeed in a total Amazon ban doesn’t stop with the CDN problem. One day, my husband goes out to get lunch for us and comes back with sushi from Whole Foods. I eat a piece of inari before I remember I am consuming Amazon-produced food. (I am not willing to purge for the sake of the stunt.)

Another time I unintentionally patronize Amazon is when I realize we need a phone holder for our car, one of those little plastic things that attach to the air vents. I would usually immediately order a weird doodad, probably within two minutes of realizing I needed it, using the Amazon app on my phone, but not this week. I ultimately order it from eBay. When the package arrives, however, it is a yellow envelope with the tenacious “smile” logo alongside the words “Fulfillment by Amazon”—even the eBay seller relies on it.

Amazon has embedded itself so thoroughly into the infrastructure of modern life, and into the business models of so many companies, including its competitors, that it’s nearly impossible to avoid it.

by Kashmir Hill, Gizmodo | Read more:
Image: uncredited

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Crusher of Sacred Cows

One of the first things you learn covering American politicians is that they’re not terribly bright.

The notion that Hill denizens are brilliant 4-D chess players is pure myth, the product of too many press hagiographies of the Game Change variety and too many Hollywood fantasies like House of Cards and West Wing.

The average American politician would lose at checkers to a zoo gorilla. They’re usually in office for one reason: someone with money sent them there, often to vote yes on a key appropriation bill or two. On the other 364 days of the year, their job is to shut their yaps and approximate gravitas anytime they’re in range of C-SPAN cameras.

Too many hacks float to the capital on beds of national committee money and other donor largesse, but then — once they get behind that desk and sit between those big flags — start thinking they’re actually beloved tribunes of the people, whose opinions on all things are eagerly desired.

So they talk. What do they talk about? To the consternation of donors, all kinds of stuff. Remember Ted Stevens explaining that the Internet “is not a big truck”? How about Hank Johnson worrying that Guam would become so overpopulated it would “tip over and capsize”? How about Oklahoma Republican Jim Bridenstine noting that just because the Supreme Court rules on something, that “doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s constitutional”?

There’s a reason aides try to keep their bosses away from microphones, particularly when there’s a potential for a question of SAT-or-higher level difficulty in the interview. But the subject elected officials have the most trouble staying away from is each other.

We’ve seen this a lot in recent weeks with the ongoing freakout over newcomer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Lest anyone think any of the above applies to “AOC,” who’s also had a lot to say since arriving in Washington, remember: she won in spite of the party and big donors, not because of them.

That doesn’t make anything she says inherently more or less correct. But it changes the dynamic a bit. All of AOC’s supporters sent her to Washington precisely to make noise. There isn’t a cabal of key donors standing behind her, cringing every time she talks about the Pentagon budget. She is there to be a pain in the ass, and it’s working. Virtually the entire spectrum of Washington officialdom has responded to her with horror and anguish.

The mortification on the Republican side has come more from media figures than actual elected officials. Still, there are plenty of people like Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) doing things like denouncing “this girl, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whatever she is” for preaching “socialism wrapped in ignorance.” A group of GOP House members booed her on the floor, to which she replied, “Don’t hate me cause you ain’t me, fellas.”

The Beltway press mostly can’t stand her. A common theme is that, as a self-proclaimed socialist, she should be roaming the halls of Rayburn and Cannon in rags or a barrel. Washington Examiner reporter Eddie Scarry tweeted a photo of her in a suit, saying she didn’t look like “a girl who struggles.” (...)

Which brings us to elected Democrats, who if anything have been most demonstrative in their AOC freakout. We had Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) saying, “We don’t need your sniping in our Democratic caucus.” Recently ousted Sen. Claire McCaskill expressed alarm that she’s “the thing” and a “bright shiny new object.”

This is in addition to the litany of anonymous complaints from fellow caucus members, some of whom felt she jumped the line in an attempt to get a Ways and Means committee assignment. There were whispers she did this through some online-pressure sorcery she alone could avail herself of thanks to her massive Twitter following (nearly every news story about Ocasio-Cortez mentions her 2.47 million Twitter followers).

“It totally pissed off everyone,” one senior House Democrat said about the Ways and Means campaign. “You don’t get picked for committees by who your grass-roots [supporters] are.”

“She needs to decide: Does she want to be an effective legislator or just continue being a Twitter star?” said another Democrat, whom Politico described as being “in lockstep” with AOC’s ideology.

All of which brings us back to the issue of Washington’s would-be 4-D chess players. Time and again, they reveal how little they understand about the extent of their own influence, or anti-influence, as it were.

by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Andrew Harnik/AP/REX/Shutterstock

Opportunist to the Core

Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign has barely made its official start, and she’s continuing to show her unfitness for the job. Martin Luther King would be rolling in his grave if he were to learn that a former big city and then state prosecutor, with no known history of protesting but an anti-minorities rap sheet that includes criminalizing truancy, enthusiastically prosecuting drug-related activity, and pushed to keep nonviolent “second-strike” convicts in prison to assure California a continued supply of cheap labor, was misusing his name to try to burnish her sorry record.

If you missed them, these reviews of Harris’ record as a prosecutor should disabuse you of the notion that she’s a friend of the downtrodden:

Kamala Harris Was Not a ‘Progressive Prosecutor’ Lara Bazelon, New York Times 

A Problem for Kamala Harris: Can a Prosecutor Become President in the Age of Black Lives Matter? Intercept 

Reckoning With The Neoliberal Record Of Kamala Harris ShadowProof 

The Two Faces of Kamala Harris Jacobin

Readers may recall that last week, we addressed one Harris Big Lie about her record, that she was a big defender of abused homeowners by virtue of having gotten a less terrible deal than 48 other states in the 2012 National Mortgage Settlement, which we’ve regularly described as a “get out of liability almost free card” for the big mortgage servicers. Her lack of a commitment to homeowners, and her pliancy to big money interests, was confirmed by her failure to investigate One West Bank, ignoring a 2013 memo from attorneys in her office flagging the appearance of “widespread misconduct.” Her complacency was rewarded via One West’s former CEO, Steve Mnuchin, making Harris the recipient of his lone donation to a Democratic party Senate candidate.

Needless to say, if Harris had prosecuted Mnuchin, it’s hard to imagine he’d be Treasury Secretary now.

Harris’ book, The Truths We Hold, published earlier this month to help grease campaign skids, shows Harris applying lots of porcine maquillage to her record. It doesn’t work very well. As Teodrose Fikre writes in Black Agenda Report on one of the more measured reviews, by Hannah Giorgis in the Atlantic:

Kamala Harris’s memoir reads nothing like her actual record of locking up the poor and giving impunity to the rich… 

Checking off identity boxes and getting jiggy with it is not enough, we must demand more from politicians than soundbites and feigned indignation. Instead of addressing income inequalities and systematic imbalances that are the sources of most social ills, Harris tries to hide behind anecdotes and outlier stories in an attempt to minimize the disproportionate impact her decisions had on the poor and working class. After making a name for herself by aggressively locking up Californians and enhancing the inmate supply for the prison-industrial complex, she is now attempting an image makeover by using social justice and diversity hustles as launching pads…. 

Harris’s take every prisoner temperament was nowhere to be found when the time came for her to take on robber barons. She famously chose to look the other way when she had the chance to prosecute Steve Mnuchin and make an example of unscrupulous bankers. Her “progressive prosecution” reserved progress for the rich and doled out draconian measures for the poor and marginalized. It is worth repeating, Harris’s administration effectively argued for slave labor in order to enrich penal plantations. 

Kamala Harris is no activist, she is Hillary Clinton in a black face.This is precisely the reason why the corporate donor class are licking their chops and pushing Harris as a viable presidential candidate. She has proven her loyalty to Wall Street; when push comes to shove, CEOs know that they have an ally in Kamala. What Harris is banking on is an electorate that is so deranged by Trump’s puerility that we don’t inspect her positions and just accept her optics and rhetoric as a suitable alternative to the incumbent president. (...)

So Harris presents absolutely nothing in the way of policy stances. Apparently the reasons to want her as President is that she’s photogenic by the not-too-high standards of politics and she gets bonus points for not being a white man. (...)

It’s stating the obvious that Harris is yet another variant on the Obama formula: take an attractive, well-educated, mixed-race centrist and encourage the press and public to project that their “minority” background means that they’ll be staunch defenders of the downtrodden.

by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

[ed. Porcine maquillage! ha ha.. don't know much about her, but from what I've read she does remind me very much of Eric Holder, which is not good. See also: Kamala Harris presidential campaign attracts more donors in day one than Bernie Sanders’ first 24 hours in 2016 (The Independent) and Kamala Harris Assembles Campaign Staff Of Unpaid California Prison Laborers (The Onion). (If you've got the Onion on your case, you know you're pretty screwed).]

Renato Guttuso, Tre Operai e Una Prostituta, (1979)

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Francs and Beans

Russell Baker, Pulitzer-Winning Times Columnist and Humorist, Dies at 93 (NY Times)

As chance would have it, the very evening Craig Claiborne ate his historic $4,000 dinner for two with 31 dishes and nine wines in Paris, Lucullan repast for one was prepared and consumed in New York by this correspondent, no slouch himself when it comes to titillating the palate.

Mr. Claiborne won his meal in a television fund‐raising auction and had it professionally prepared. Mine was created from spur‐of‐the‐moment inspiration, necessitated when I discovered a note on the stove saying, “Am eating out with Dora and Imogene—make dinner for yourself.” It was from the person who regularly does the cooking at my house and, though disconcerted at first, I quickly rose to the challenge.

The meal opened with a 1975 Diet Pepsi served in a disposable bottle. Although its bouquet was negligible, its distinct metallic aftertaste evoked memories of tin cans one had licked experimentally in the first flush of childhood's curiosity.

To create the balance of tastes so cherished by the epicurean palate, I followed with a paté de fruites de nuts of Georgia, prepared according to my own recipe. A half‐inch layer of creamy‐style peanut butter is troweled onto a graham cracker, then half a banana is crudely diced and pressed firmly into the peanut butter and cemented in place as it were by a second graham cracker.

The accompanying drink was cold milk served in a wide‐brimmed jelly glass. This is essential to proper consumption of the pate, since the entire confection must be dipped into the milk to soften it for eating. In making the presentation to the mouth, one must beware lest the milk‐soaked portion of the sandwich fall onto the necktie. Thus, seasoned gourmandisers follow the old maxim of the Breton chefs and “bring the mouth to the jelly glass.”

At this point in the meal, the stomach was ready for serious eating, and I prepared beans with bacon grease, a dish I perfected in 1937 while developing my cuisine du dépression.

The dish is started by placing a pan over a very high flame until it becomes dangerously hot. A can of Heinz's pork and beans is then emptied into the pan and allowed to char until it reaches the consistency of hardening concrete. Three strips of bacon are fried to crisps, and when the beans have formed huge dense clots firmly welded to the pan, the bacon grease is poured in and stirred vigorously with a large screw driver.

This not only adds flavor but also loosens some of the beans from the side of the pan. Leaving the flame high, I stirred in a three‐day‐old spaghetti sauce found in the refrigerator, added a sprinkle of chili powder, a large dollop of Major Grey's chutney and a tablespoon of bicarbonate of soda to make the whole dish rise.

Beans with bacon grease is always eaten from the pan with a tablespoon while standing over the kitchen sink. The pan must be thrown away immediately. The correct drink with this dish is a straight shot of room‐temperature gin. I had a Gilbey's, 1975, which was superb.

For the meat course, I had fried bologna à la Nutley, Nouveau Jersey. Six slices of A&P bologna were placed in an ungreased frying pan over maximum heat and held down by a long fork until the entire house filled with smoke. The bologna was turned, fried the same length of time on the other side, then served on air‐filled white bread with thick lashings of mayonnaise.

The correct drink for fried bologna à la Nutley, Nouveau Jersey is a 1927 Nehi Cola, but since my cellar., ??, had none, I had to make do with a second shot of Gilbey's 1975.

The cheese course was deliciously simple‐‐a single slice of Kraft's individually wrapped yellow sandwich cheese, which was flavored by vigorous rubbing over the bottom of the frying pan to soak up the rich bologna juices. Wine being absolutely de rigueur with cheese, I chose a 1974 Muscatel, flavored with a maraschino cherry, and afterwards cleared my palate with three pickled martini onions.

It was time for the fruit. I chose Del Monte tinned pear, which, regrettably, slipped from the spoon and fell on the floor, necessitating its being blotted with a paper towel to remove cat hairs. To compensate for the resulting loss of pear syrup, dipped it lightly in hot‐dog relish which created a unique flavor.

With the pear I drank two shots of Gilbey's 1975 and one shot of Wolfschmidt vodka (non‐vintage), the Gilbey's having been exhausted.

by Russell Baker, NY Times |  Read more:
Image: Israel Shenker

[ed. Gave my mom Growing Up  when it came out and it was one of her all time favorite books. See also: Russell Baker: ‘When Writing Is Fun, It’s Not Very Good’]

Watching Brexit Fall Apart

If French voters, unsettled by the revolt of the Yellow Vests, are tempted to use referendums to enhance the democratic process, they should look at the sad spectacle across the Channel: the British people trying to pick up the shards of their future after their House of Commons rejected the Brexit deal that Prime Minister Theresa May had spent 18 months negotiating with the European Union — on the basis of a referendum.

It is hard to think of a more powerful deterrent. For three years, Continental Europe has watched with bewilderment, despair and exasperation as the world’s oldest democracy embarked on a path that no country has tried before: leaving the European Union.

We watched a young, ambitious British prime minister, David Cameron, gamble that the June 23, 2016, referendum would strengthen Britain’s position within the union because the vote would be to remain. We watched him fail, resign and disappear. After a referendum campaign marred by fake news, lies, false promises and attacks against immigrants, we watched Westminster’s lively political culture plunge into chaos.

We watched a former empire, winner of two world wars, aspire to become Singapore upon Thames. We watched Brexit ministers under Mrs. May, confused by incoherent policies and a nightmarish negotiation, throw in one towel after another. And we are now observing, dumbfounded, the growing possibility of a second referendum, promoted by smart but desperate people, convinced that it will undo the first one, which approved Brexit by 51.9 percent.

From the Continent rises a clamor of “Oh, no, not another one!”

Ironically, the Brexit referendum was won on the promise to “take back control.” Sometimes we wondered whether the British had lost not only control but also their minds. We came to dread conversations with our dearest friends from England, now so obsessed with Brexit that they would forget to mention the weather. As journalists, we felt sympathy for heartbroken British diplomats putting a brave face on a decision that they had to carry out, when deep down they knew they were heading to disaster.

But most of all, this process has taught us about the strength of the European Union in a way that we never suspected.

There was Mrs. May’s surrealistic, elegant love letter to the union, “our closest friend,” to ask for divorce, on March 28, 2017. You don’t so easily put an end to 44 years of shared life. Activating Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty to start the process of separation, the prime minister insisted that Europe should “remain strong and prosperous, capable of projecting its values, leading in the world.”

“Perhaps now more than ever,” she wrote, “the world needs the liberal, democratic values of Europe.” So, one wondered, why on earth leave it? Indeed, Mrs. May herself was initially a “Remainer” but would end up exhausting her meager political capital fighting to deliver the opposite: Such was her fate, and such was the absurdity of Brexit.

by Sylvie Kauffmann, NY Times |  Read more:
Image: Thomas Paterson

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Time to Break the Silence on Palestine

On April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stepped up to the lectern at the Riverside Church in Manhattan. The United States had been in active combat in Vietnam for two years and tens of thousands of people had been killed, including some 10,000 American troops. The political establishment — from left to right — backed the war, and more than 400,000 American service members were in Vietnam, their lives on the line.

Many of King’s strongest allies urged him to remain silent about the war or at least to soft-pedal any criticism. They knew that if he told the whole truth about the unjust and disastrous war he would be falsely labeled a Communist, suffer retaliation and severe backlash, alienate supporters and threaten the fragile progress of the civil rights movement.

King rejected all the well-meaning advice and said, “I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice.” Quoting a statement by the Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, he said, “A time comes when silence is betrayal” and added, “that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.”

It was a lonely, moral stance. And it cost him. But it set an example of what is required of us if we are to honor our deepest values in times of crisis, even when silence would better serve our personal interests or the communities and causes we hold most dear. It’s what I think about when I go over the excuses and rationalizations that have kept me largely silent on one of the great moral challenges of our time: the crisis in Israel-Palestine.

I have not been alone. Until very recently, the entire Congress has remained mostly silent on the human rights nightmare that has unfolded in the occupied territories. Our elected representatives, who operate in a political environment where Israel's political lobby holds well-documented power, have consistently minimized and deflected criticism of the State of Israel, even as it has grown more emboldened in its occupation of Palestinian territory and adopted some practices reminiscent of apartheid in South Africa and Jim Crow segregation in the United States.

Many civil rights activists and organizations have remained silent as well, not because they lack concern or sympathy for the Palestinian people, but because they fear loss of funding from foundations, and false charges of anti-Semitism. They worry, as I once did, that their important social justice work will be compromised or discredited by smear campaigns.

Similarly, many students are fearful of expressing support for Palestinian rights because of the McCarthyite tactics of secret organizations like Canary Mission, which blacklists those who publicly dare to support boycotts against Israel, jeopardizing their employment prospects and future careers.

Reading King’s speech at Riverside more than 50 years later, I am left with little doubt that his teachings and message require us to speak out passionately against the human rights crisis in Israel-Palestine, despite the risks and despite the complexity of the issues. King argued, when speaking of Vietnam, that even “when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict,” we must not be mesmerized by uncertainty. “We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.”

And so, if we are to honor King’s message and not merely the man, we must condemn Israel’s actions: unrelenting violations of international law, continued occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, home demolitions and land confiscations. We must cry out at the treatment of Palestinians at checkpoints, the routine searches of their homes and restrictions on their movements, and the severely limited access to decent housing, schools, food, hospitals and water that many of them face.

We must not tolerate Israel’s refusal even to discuss the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, as prescribed by United Nations resolutions, and we ought to question the U.S. government funds that have supported multiple hostilities and thousands of civilian casualties in Gaza, as well as the $38 billion the U.S. government has pledged in military support to Israel.

And finally, we must, with as much courage and conviction as we can muster, speak out against the system of legal discrimination that exists inside Israel, a system complete with, according to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, more than 50 laws that discriminate against Palestinians — such as the new nation-state law that says explicitly that only Jewish Israelis have the right of self-determination in Israel, ignoring the rights of the Arab minority that makes up 21 percent of the population.

by Michelle Alexander, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Hosam Salem

Worst Job In Showbiz

The loss of the Oscars’ latest host is, on the one hand, just another mishap to add to the list. From 2016’s #OscarsSoWhite to 2017’s wrong delivery of the best picture award, the ceremony now seems like a particularly slow bloopers reel. Yet the loss of Kevin Hart – who quit after old homophobic tweets resurfaced – is also a sign of something else. The fact that no one has replaced him, and that it’s difficult to think of many people who could, or would, reveals a much deeper malaise: a scary loss of nerve across showbiz’s top-tier events.

Within weeks, the Super Bowl half-time show will air. In the past, the American football final has been an epic showcase for the likes of Madonna, Prince and Beyoncé, a 20-minute, legacy-defining megamix. This year, though, with Rihanna and Cardi B having turned it down in solidarity with the activist NFL player Colin Kaepernick, we will be left with the hardly epochal sounds of Maroon 5.

A certain blandness seems to threaten all proceedings. Earlier this month the Golden Globes made do with the anodyne pairing of Andy Samberg and Sandra Oh as hosts, while the White House correspondents’ dinner – historically a raucous roast for America’s political class – has now asked a historian to host April’s televised event after the comedian Michelle Wolf was deemed to have taken last year’s proceedings too far. (...)

“It feels like a failure, and an ominous sign of our inability to sustain any kind of shared stage,” says Spencer Kornhaber, a pop culture journalist for the Atlantic. “No one is able to step up to the plate and just tell some jokes and get out of the way.”

This confusion is one place where the Oscars can claim a type of relevance, although not the type it wants. As its TV audience has dwindled, the Academy has tried to shake things up by hiring a variety of “edgy” hosts. Jon Stewart, Chris Rock, Seth Macfarlane, the bizarre pairing of James Franco and Anne Hathaway: you can’t say they haven’t tried. But the reception has been lukewarm. (...)

The loose expectation of an awards host is to act as a court jester among showbusiness royalty, poking fun at their foibles. The problem is that these events thrive on a sense of their own prestige, so it doesn’t do to jest too much. And this is the age of “wokeness”, where people – particularly that crucial younger audience – are more conscious of gags revolving around gender, sexuality and race.

“I think it’s a generational thing,” says Abramovitch, who is 46. “With my generation, it was still OK to poke some things, and the millennial generation are a lot more sensitive. It’s hard for them to understand context or satire.” Not that he thinks it is all political correctness gone mad. “This reckoning that’s happening, it’s all good.”

When causing offence is almost inevitable, it takes a strong stomach to want to give it a go. I spoke, on condition of anonymity, to an events organiser who helps put together an important awards ceremony in London. “I’ve found it trickier to find a host this year,” they said. “You want a big name – but they don’t need to do it.” The reasons for hosting an event have changed, the organiser suggests: comedians have other platforms to showcase their talents. Often they don’t need the money. And yes, there is the danger of saying the wrong thing. “You have to be so careful, don’t you? Because the backlash can be extreme.”

by Louis Wise, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image:Lucas Jackson/Reuters

Tons of Golf Balls Polluting the Ocean

A teen scientist helped me discover tons of golf balls polluting the ocean (Phys.org)

Images: Alex Weber

While My Guitar Gently Smirks

I love guitars, and I’ve had a few sitting in my office for years, but it took hip surgery for me to begin playing one of them.

Actually, one of them wasn’t a real guitar, but a wall clock in the shape of one, with an illustration of Elvis, in ’68-comeback black leather, on the body. Another was a junior guitar that I got on eBay, certified to be the one used by the actor playing a ten-year old Elvis in a TV movie about him.

The only playable one was a shiny black Epiphone—an Elvis model. You’re getting the picture: I fell in love with the guitar around the time I—and millions of other kids in the 1950s— became a Presley fanatic.

As a music journalist, at Rolling Stone and elsewhere, I interviewed Jerry Garcia, George Harrison, Bonnie Raitt, B.B. King, Carlos Santana, Jorma Kaukonen, Robert Cray, Stephen Stills, James Taylor, Ann Wilson, John Cipollina, Robby Krieger, Tom Petty, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, and Elvis’ first guy, Scotty Moore. And his second guy, James Burton.

I never met them, but I remember watching the Monterey Pop film and marveling at Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendrix; the windmill and the fire. I also dug Garcia, Kaukonen, and Michael Bloomfield. And I knew that I’d never learn to play guitar myself. As a kid in the ’50s and ’60s, I was trapped in my parents’ Chinese restaurants, juggling chores and homework, from grade school into college. “Do you play music?” someone would ask. “Yeah, I can play the radio.”

In recent decades, I thought about taking lessons, but never did. Visiting musician friends would pick up the Epiphone, get it in tune, and play it. Nice guitar, they’d say. Other than that, nothing, except one time when a couple of friends had a jam session at my house. One brought his guitar, another lugged in a portable keyboard; I would sing. But, wanting to do more, I fetched my guitar and sat in, trying to strum as lightly as I could, knowing that whatever sounds I made would be wrong ones. I was the not-so-great pretender.

And there was the time I appeared on a syndicated TV show called Your Big Break, featuring amateur singers impersonating music stars. After a tryout at a local club, I was called in to do . . . Bob Dylan. They assigned me “Like a Rolling Stone” and, on the set, gave me an electric guitar. This time, making sounds would be no problem; they’d be drowned out by the backing track and the noise of the rabid studio audience. My concern was the fingering of chords. I had no idea, so my fingers moved randomly up and down the frets, except when I had to concentrate to recall lyrics. Then they just stopped. Neither Dylan nor I won.

Flash forward to a few years ago, and to my hip surgery. I decided that, while recovering, I wouldn’t just watch TV and read, but would finally do something with that Epiphone. I told my plan to Todd Swenson, lead guitarist with a jam band I sing with, Los Train Wreck. Swenson teaches guitar when he’s not playing with the Train Wreck, the Soul Delights, or his own band, This Side Up. He’s taught students of all ages for 30 years. Any time, he said.

As it turned out, my recovery took far less time than expected, and I’d barely dug out my VHS tapes of guitar lessons when I was up and hobbling. But that shiny Epiphone seemed to look at me now and again, from its perch in the corner, saying, in an Elvis snarl, “You had your chance, man.”

I thought back to a saying I’d heard from Bob Neuwirth: If you don’t take a chance, you ain’t got a chance.

So I picked up the Elvis. Actually, the Epiphone felt too big, so I got a parlor guitar. Unwilling to spend a lot on what might well be a folly, I chose a Gretsch Jim Dandy and, in case I ever graduated from acoustic to amplified, an Accent, both purchased from Amazon, the first name in musical instrument stores.

by Ben Fong-Torres, Acoustic Guitar |  Read more:

Image: KAT

Queen & David Bowie

This Is Why Ghosting Hurts So Much

The opposite of love isn’t hate; it is indifference. Ghosting, for those of you who haven’t yet experienced it, is having someone that you believe cares about you, whether it be a friend or someone you are dating, disappear from contact without any explanation at all. No phone call or email, not even a text. Ghosting isn’t new—people have long done disappearing acts—but years ago this kind of behavior was considered limited to a certain type of scoundrel. In today’s dating culture being ghosted is a phenomenon that approximately 50 percent of men and women have experienced—and an almost equal number have done the ghosting. Despite ghosting's commonality, the emotional effects can be devastating, and particularly damaging to those who already have fragile self-esteem.

Why do people ghost?

People who ghost are primarily focused on avoiding their own emotional discomfort and they aren’t thinking about how it makes the other person feel. The lack of social connections to people who are met online also means there are less social consequences to dropping out of someone’s life. The more it happens, either to themselves or their friends, the more people become desensitized to it and the more likely they are to do it to someone else.

“I didn't understand exactly how I actually felt at the time, so instead of trying to talk it out, I ghosted.”  

“I used to disappear when it was all I thought it was [a fling], or I got scared of finding what I wanted…Or some kind of fear factor from a past relationship kicks in.”  

“Looking through the lens of a coward, passive withdrawal from dating seems like the easiest and nicest route…until it’s done to you.”  

“I kind of think that it's part of what makes the online dating scene so appealing. Since you don't have friends in common or weren't introduced through some other channel, it's not the end of the world if you just drop off the face of the earth.”  

“I, for one, consider myself to be an honest and straightforward person. And yet I’ve ghosted...And I’ve told myself, time and time again, that it’s all the fault of the toxic dating culture we’ve created. And at the end of the day, I think that’s what we’re all telling ourselves.” 

How does it feel to be ghosted?

For many people ghosting can result in feelings of being disrespected, used and disposable. If you have known the person beyond more than a few dates then it can be even more traumatic. When someone we love and trust disengages from us it feels like a very deep betrayal.

“I felt like an idiot. Like I had been played a fool. And more so I felt disrespected. Take the romantics away, to have a great connection with a new friend and then all of a sudden never hear from them again? That’s painful and really disappointing. No one deserves to be blown off.”  

“It still felt a bit like someone had punched me in the gut when it happened. The disregard is insulting. The lack of closure is maddening. You move on, but not before your self-esteem takes a hit. The only thing worse than being broken up with is realizing that someone didn’t even consider you worth breaking up with.”  

“Going from texting every day and seeing each other a couple times a week to nothing without the slightest hint of why was a kick in the gut.”  

“Ghosting is one of the cruelest forms of torture dating can serve up.” 

Why does it feel so bad?

Social rejection activates the same pain pathways in the brain as physical pain. In fact, you can reduce the emotional pain of rejection with a pain medication like Tylenol. But in addition to this biological link between rejection and pain, there are some specific factors about ghosting that contribute to the psychological distress.

Ghosting gives you no cue for how to react. It creates the ultimate scenario of ambiguity. Should you be worried? What if they are hurt and lying in a hospital bed somewhere? Should you be upset? Maybe they are just a little busy and will be calling you at any moment. You don’t know how to react because you don’t really know what has happened. Staying connected to others is so important to our survival that our brain has evolved to have a social monitoring system (SMS) that monitors the environment for cues so that we know how to respond in social situations. Social cues allow us to regulate our own behavior accordingly, but ghosting deprives you of these usual cues and can create a sense of emotional dysregulation where you feel out of control.

One of the most insidious aspects of ghosting is that it doesn’t just cause you to question the validity of the relationship you had, it causes you to question yourself. Why didn’t I see this coming? How could I have been such a poor judge of character? What did I do to cause this? How do I protect myself from this ever happening again? (...)

Ghosting is the ultimate use of the silent treatment, a tactic that has often been viewed by mental health professionals as a form of emotional cruelty. It essentially renders you powerless and leaves you with no opportunity to ask questions or be provided with information that would help you emotionally process the experience. It silences you and prevents you from expressing your emotions and being heard, which is important for maintaining your self-esteem.

Regardless of the ghoster’s intent, ghosting is a passive-aggressive interpersonal tactic that can leave psychological bruises and scars.

by Jennice Vilhauer Ph.D., Psychology Today |  Read more:

Image: Antonio Guillem/Shutterstock
[ed. Lasting scars.]

Why High-Fidelity Streaming Is The Audio Revolution Your Ears Have Been Waiting For

Digital audio enthusiasts, myself included, have been watching the fall and rise of sound quality closely over the last few years. Mass-market digital audio has been with us since the launch of storage media like the CD, but our migration towards files stored on portable devices or streamed from the cloud has been a rollercoaster in terms of quality.

The most significant developments have usually been at the behest of the largest tech companies, rather than record companies. Apple famously took the MP3 revolution mainstream with the birth of the iTunes Music Store in 2003, before launching a series of portable devices: the iPod, iPad, and the epoch-defining iPhone. But the MP3 revolution came at a cost, namely a degradation in audio quality compared to CDs.

A gradual clawback of audio quality mirrored the increase in data storage, and the iTunes Music Store doubled their default encoding rate in 2009. Similarly, streaming quality has increased in parallel with internet bandwidth. Once the digital audio genie was out of the internet bottle, factors as baroque as mobile bandwidth, on-device RAM, all-you-can-eat mobile data plans, and triple-play cable packages have arguably been as influential to the fortunes of the modern music business as the invention of the CD.

However, a recent technical development has triggered an entirely new wave of streaming digital audio quality. Bang & Olufsen’s most senior Tonmeister (sound engineer) Geoff Martin outlines what’s happened, and how. “For a time, streaming services, in general, made quality worse. But that time has passed. And that's because the way that streaming services work has changed. Initially, they were sending out low bitrate MP3 in the same way that Internet radio works these days. But what's happening now with services like TIDAL, Deezer HiFi and Qobuz is that they are pushing a FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) file out to the player.”

A codec (coder-decoder) is the mechanism by which the original master quality audio is encoded into a more portable format, and subsequently decoded for playback. While the "lossy" MP3 codec loses information which is deemed to be of less importance to the listener, FLAC files are lossless, so can deliver full CD quality audio. Geoff explains that this new development stretches the definition of streaming itself. “It looks like streaming, but it's not. It's a download for a one-time play; we can dance around the words if you want.”

While our ears may be attuned to lossy compressed audio in most everyday scenarios, the experience of rediscovering high-fidelity lossless digital audio can be nothing short of a revelation. Fine details reappear, performers have more space, sounds have more definition, audio feels warmer, sounds clearer, and is noticeably more pleasurable to listen to. The higher you go with audio file resolution, the better it gets.

Thanks to the new range of streaming apps delivering CD-quality or higher, our beloved “universal jukebox” is undergoing a significant upgrade. Consumer demand for high-resolution audio has been growing steadily, for example users of Deezer HiFi have increased by 71% in the past 12 months alone, and the product is now available in 180 countries and works with a wide range of FLAC streaming compatible devices.

by Oisin Lunny, Forbes | Read more:
Image: Bang & Olufsen

Max Ernst, Scallops flower
via:

The Legend of Sasquatch Won’t Die. Unless One Dies.

Like everyone else upright and breathing, I have heard all the (mostly fake) tales, seen all the (fake) footprint castings, viewed the (fake) videos, heard recent (real) podcasts, even perused the (fake) “field guides.” I’ve also read large numbers of Sasquatch sightings, and believe that many reporters probably thought they saw something.

It just wasn’t an elusive long-lost subhuman, ape or shape-shifting alien species. Of this I am dead-dog nearly certain.

Can I prove this? Of course not. That’s not my job. But I am happy to be the guy who publicly looks into the glassy eyes of the professional true believers — especially those profiting from the mossy-roofed cottage industry feeding off this remarkably resilient fantasy — and issues a long-overdue ultimatum:

Show me a dead one, and we’ll talk.

SERIOUSLY, FOLKS. This overripe argument about the hairy ape-beast out back has long ago passed its best-by date. And if that question is seen as a put-up-or-shut-up demand, well, it is.

The imaginary Squatch was cute for a while, and any legend that spawns generations of coloring books, postcards, plush stuffed animals and fantastically bad late-night cable TV is harmless in my book — to a point.

In the present era of post-truth, what once qualified as playful mythology increasingly feels like overlooked symptoms of early onset societal nutjobbery, which at some critical-mass level becomes a dangerous thing. So please forgive me for attempting here to point at least one little LED headlamp beam of reason upon the logic-suffocating rot behind the Bigfoot industrial complex.

(He pauses to clear throat and pen the requisite qualifiers.)

An underlying premise here is that trying to prove a negative is sheer folly. No one can scientifically prove, for example, that a giraffe has never risen from the depths of Lake Union, marched down Westlake and taken a big dump atop the grassy knoll at Gas Works Park. But a reasonable person can apply her/his own probability mathematics to the question.

Accordingly: It’s impossible to prove that forested areas of the Northwest are not home to stealthy, apelike creatures standing 8 feet tall; weighing up to 800 pounds; constantly emitting putrid, gaseous odors; and prone to issuing earsplitting, guttural, train-whistle screams — yet managing at all times to conceal themselves more effectively than a thimble-sized hummingbird.

It is equally impossible to prove that the Mariners won’t win the 2019 World Series.

Some things, the sane people just know to be true.

As mentioned, the burden of proof here is not on me, or anyone else who finds better things to do than stumble around in the dark in the soggy hills of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest wearing night-vision goggles and carrying an AR-15.

All that’s on Team Squatch. And to that organization, I reissue the plea:

Please, oh please, just show me a dead one.

by Ron Judd, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Maybe he just moved somewhere else?]