Southward Ho!

Quote of the Day

“The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.”

• Ralph Waldo Emerson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Beethoven, Violin Concerto, 3. Rondo

Link

Warning: There’s about 8 seconds of silence before it begins.

Did Everyone Buy a Guitar in Quarantine or What?

A good-news lockdown story from Rolling Stone…

All three retailers report that the guitar was the most popular product they sold in quarantine. “Based on what we saw in 2020, one thing is certain: The guitar is thriving,” says Reverb’s Mandelbrot. “Orders and searches for guitars have been up significantly — including an increase in searches for popular guitar brands like Fender, Gibson, and Taylor — as well as searches for music gear that you pair with your guitar, like amps, guitar straps, effects pedals, and more.” Both searches for acoustic guitars and acoustic guitar amps were up by 50 percent year over year.

He adds that living-room-friendly acoustic guitars like the Taylor GS-Mini have been undeniably popular, but Reverb “continued to sell some really rare vintage guitars — like a beautiful 1965 Fender Stratocaster that Brian Setzer sold through his Reverb Shop.” Limited edition, boutique pedals also did particularly well. Mandelbrot says the selling price of classic and rare effects pedals from vintage brands like Klon and Mu-Tron went up “significantly” in 2020. And drops of limited-edition pedals on Reverb sold out within minutes and, in one case, in less than a minute.

Lupin, Van Gogh and Arles

This is about one of those nice rabbit-holes one finds on the Web…

I came on a nice NYT article about Lupin, a French Netflix series of which I’d never heard, and started reading.

The article is based on an extended interview with John Kay, the British author of the series’ screenplay. Here is the bit that caught my attention:

The Louvre figures prominently in the first block of episodes released in January (a second batch is due later this year). But it was another Parisian institution that stirred Kay’s imagination: the Musée d’Orsay. While “Lupin” is set in contemporary Paris, Kay looked at the time period of the original books for inspiration. A natural destination was Orsay whose collections focus on the turn of the 20th century. “It was a place to go and relax and enjoy the paintings,” Kay said. “But what started to happen — and you’ll see it more and more across ‘Lupin’ — is that the museum became a real inspiration as a place for ideas for the series.” One of the holdings, van Gogh’s “Starry Night Over the Rhône,” inspired an episode in the next set of shows (though it ended up being switched for a Pissarro painting) and the museum is responsible for the name of a forthcoming character. Featuring the Normandy beach town, Étretat, whose signature cliffs figure prominently in the Leblanc novel “The Hollow Needle” and in the show’s fifth episode, can also be traced to the museum, which has period renderings of the town in its collection. “It’s the most Lupin building,” Kay said, laughing, of Orsay.

Which (of course) led me to a search for the Van Gogh painting and 10 Facts You Don’t Know About Van Gogh’s Starry Night Over the Rhone, which tells me that it was painted at a spot on the banks of river which was only a minute or two’s walk from the The Yellow House on the Place Lamartine which Van Gogh was renting at the time. The night sky and the effects of light at night provided the subject for some of his more famous paintings, including The Starry Night, the most famous Van Gogh night stars painting.

The challenge of painting at night intrigued Van Gogh. The vantage point he chose for “Starry Night Over the Rhone” allowed him to capture the reflections of the gas lighting in Arles across the glimmering blue water of the Rhone. In the foreground, two lovers stroll by the banks of the river. Here his stars glow with a luminescence, shining from the dark, blue and velvety night sky. Dotted along the banks of the Rhone houses also radiate a light that reflects in the water and adds to the mysterious atmosphere of the painting.

This rang a bell for me. Until the pandemic made it impossible, my wife and I drove down to Provence every summer and the final waypoint before we got to the house was always Arles. Our habit was to stay in the same hotel every year — one just out from the centre within easy walking distance. And then in the evening we would walk in, wander around looking for a restaurant (with me taking photographs), have a leisurely dinner and then walk back along the Rhone. And of course I suddenly realised that we had always walked past the spot where Van Gogh set up his easel!

And of course now I’ll have to watch Lupin.

The paradox of Facebook: hated — and rich

Interesting cri de coeur from Shira Ovide…

The company said on Wednesday that its sales — nearly all of which come from the ads it sells on Facebook, on Instagram and its other apps — reached nearly $86 billion in 2020 and are growing rapidly…. Each day, 2.6 billion people use at least one of Facebook’s apps, and the user numbers are still rising.

This is a company that’s embroiled in a different scandal each week and that people say they dislike, yet its products are used by billions of people, and businesses spent like crazy on ads during a pandemic to reach them.

I’ve been writing about corporate finances for a long time. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this combination of popularity, fast-growing sales, fat profits — and complete revulsion. “The gap between Facebook’s public reputation and its financial success has never been greater,” Kurt Wagner of Bloomberg wrote this week.

Historians, tell me if there’s a comparable company that was so reviled and yet so widely used and successful….

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• The GameStop stock frenzy, explained. If you neither knew nor cared about GameStop, then this isn’t for you. But if you’re interested in the craziness of the stock market, then it’s right up your street. Link
• Danny MacAskill – The Slabs. If you suffer from vertigo, avoid. But it you want to know what can be done on a mountain bike, then it’s unmissable. And it has great drone photography. Link.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Remember bookstalls?

The pre-pandemic past is indeed looking like a different country.

Quote of the Day

”Freedom is the right to do anything the laws permit.”

• Montesquieu, De ‘’Esprit des lois, 1748

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler – Going Home (Theme of Local Hero)

This is his performance at the Goodwood Memorial event for Stirling Moss. Audio quality is not as good as studio and concert versions, but it has what sound engineers call ‘atmos’.

Link

Three Weeks Inside a Pro-Trump QAnon Chat Room

An unmissable, astonishing, troubling and revelatory piece of reportage by Stuart A. Thompson. Takes you to places you would prefer not to exist in a democracy. The danger is that it encourages one to lurch towards epistocracy, which is not the way to go either. But it helps to explain the size of the task now facing Biden and his Administration.

Make sure the audio isn’t muted when you start on the piece btw.

Computing the Sorrow

Wonderful post by David Vincent:

January 27. Boris Johnson says it is ‘hard to compute the sorrow’ after the official covid-19 death rate passes 100,000 in the UK.

In fact there is a perfectly simple calculation that can be made. Grief professionals work on the basis of at least five bereaved people for every death. On current figures that gives us a population of half a million in the UK facing a lonely future. If we take the more accurate figure of those dying with covid-19 on their death certificates, the number is already 600,000. Globally there are now 100 million deaths, generating a population of half a billion coming to terms with traumatic loss.

Estimating the length of the sorrow is a more difficult task. There seems to be an inverse ratio at work: the more rapid the event of dying, the more extended the process of grieving.

The struggle to come to terms with a loss begins more uncertainly and is likely to proceed more slowly that is the case for non-pandemic bereavements. In this sense Johnson was for once correct in his account. It will be a long time before we can take a measure of the suffering generated by a death rate that is the fifth highest in the world, and the second highest as a proportion of the population.

Worth reading in full.

Liberal Property Law vs. Capitalism

There’s an interesting venture, the Law and Political Economy (LPE) project, (based, I think in Yale Law School). One of the things they do is to pick an interesting or important book and hold a running online symposium on it as one blog post a day from different members of the project.

The symposium I’ve been following is on Hanoch Dagan’s book, A Liberal Theory of Property. Today’s blog post was by Professor Katharina Pistor from Columbia Law School.

Pistor turns out to have some pretty serious disagreements with Dagan, but her piece is a great example of how to disagree respectfully. Here’s how it begins…

Hanoch Dagan has written a wonderful, thoughtful, and thought-provoking book. Its publication could have hardly come at a more prescient time. Many observers and commentators rightly despair over the lack of opportunities the current economic and legal regime offers to the many while it privileges the few. Calls for socialism are growing louder as there seems to be no alternative given the realities of the neoliberal order.

Against this background, Hanoch develops a theory of private property that is truly liberal in the original meaning of the term: a theory built on the principle of individual autonomy, or “self-authorship,” but also on structural pluralism and relational justice. This requires a legal order, a commitment to recognize and enforce only rights that meet these fundamental norms, which is why his is a theory of property law and not merely property. Property law confers rights on individuals, which they can use against the state, but, critically, also against fellow humans. A liberal property law, Hanoch argues forcefully, shall not condone the use of property rights to suppress others.

From this normative vantage point it is impossible to endorse private property rights as a Blackstonian “sole and despotic dominion.”…

I wish more debates were as good as this. I remember someone advising me that the best way to have a productive argument with someone is first of all to state (or re-state) his or her argument in the clearest way you can before commencing to explain why you disagree with it.

Hard to do, but always worth trying. Doesn’t work on social media, though.

J. M. Keynes and the Visible Hands

One of my favourite books — as readers of my Lockdown diary will know — is John Maynard-Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace, an excoriating attack on the Treaty of Versailles and the statesmen who drafted it. Not surprisingly, then, I was a drawn to this  essay about it by Kent Puckett who is less enamoured of the book than I was/am, largely on the grounds that Keynes’s predictions about the economic consequences of the treaty were wrong. But Puckett does find an original angle — Keynes’s fascination with other people’s hands.

Published in December 1919, Keynes’s book was a sensation. Running quickly into several editions in Britain and America, the book caught fire not only as a wickedly smart condensation of the political and economic doubts that had been forming on both sides of the Atlantic but also—maybe even more so—for its ruthlessly personal depictions of Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau, and Woodrow Wilson. After all, where else could one read about the thickness of Clemenceau’s boots or the shape of Wilson’s hands (figure 1)?

It’s those ‘ruthlessly personal depictions’ that I first loved about the book. His caricature of Lloyd George is great, but he reserved most of his fire for Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson — the “blind and deaf Don Quixote” of Versailles.

“His head and features were finely cut and exactly like his photographs, and the muscles of his neck and the carriage of his head were distinguished. But, like Odysseus, the President looked wiser when he was seated; and his hands, though capable and fairly strong, were wanting in sensitiveness and finesse.”

The essay is part of a series. Intro here.

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Quote of the Day

There are living systems; there is no “living matter”.

• Jaques Monod, lecture to the College de France, 1967

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Max Richter’s Tiny Desk (Home) Concert

Link

I love this but ‘Who He?’ I hear you say. (I said it too.) Explanation here.

Long Read of the Day

 The enduring allure of conspiracies

Longish essay from the Nieman Lab about conspiracy theories.

If conspiracy theories are as old as politics, they’re also — in the era of Donald Trump and QAnon — as current as the latest headlines. Earlier this month, the American democracy born of an eighteenth century conspiracy theory faced its most severe threat yet — from another conspiracy theory, that (all evidence to the contrary) the 2020 presidential election was rigged. Are conspiracy theories truly more prevalent and influential today, or does it just seem that way?

Actually it looks as though they’re evolving, in the sense that much of the recent manifestations of conspiracist thinking have jettisoned theory and concentrated merely on repetition and the amplification provided by social media. At least that’s what Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum argue in an intriguing book that’s quoted in the essay. The danger now comes from conspiracy without — a new kind of conspiracism that moved from the lunatic fringe to the heart of government with the election of Donald Trump. This is very different from classic conspiracy theory, which typically didn’t do much to undermine democracy (and perhaps even kept nutters off the streets). The new manifestations — like QAnon and its like — do seem to pose a danger to democracy, as the events of January 6 suggest.

Oh, and btw, there’s a very interesting post  on Reddit by a former (and recovered) QAnon believer on how to help others who have fallen down this particular rabbit-hole.

Also interesting: After January 6 Twitter deleted 70,000 Qanon accounts. That’s 7 followed by four zeroes.

Hinges of history

Chris Bertram poses an interesting question on Crooked Timber:

Thinking back over the past two decades, which of the following events that took place since the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) are the important moments when something different could have been done that might have saved us from being in the situation we are in? How might history have unfolded differently? Are there key events to notice in Asia, Africa and Latin American that ought to be on the list? What is cause and what is merely symptom?

* The decision of the US Supreme Court to award the Presidency to George W. Bush instead of Al Gore (2000)
* The attacks on the Twin Towers (2001)
* The decision by Bush, supported by Blair, to invade Iraq (2003)
* The failure of policy-makers to anticipate and avert the financial crisis (2008)
* The failure of European leaders to manage the Eurozone crisis so as to avert mass unemployment etc (2009- )
* The Arab spring (2010- )
* The “migrant crisis” in Europe (2015-)
* The Brexit vote (2016)
* The election of Donald Trump (2016)

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• 23-bed detached house for sale near Portsmouth Only one snag. Link. (HT to Ben Evans)
• Why hardware is hard. Don’t tell me. Quentin and I once had a start-up which produced both excellent hardware and innovative software. But we ran out of runway because it takes longer and costs more to get hardware earning its keep. Link

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

As you may have gathered, it’s been snowing round here.

Avoiding “the sociology of the last five minutes” is difficult, sometimes

This yellow warning over my Observer column dated November 28, 2020 is factually correct but epistemologically nonsensical. One of the things I’ve always tried to do in the column is to escape from what the Berkeley sociologist Michael Mann once called “the sociology of the last five minutes” — something that, IMO, bedevils too much tech coverage. This particular column was trying to do just that in the context of the disputes currently going on between tech giants and the governments of Australia and France. Its argument was that the Silicon Valley ideology — that tech drives history and society’s role is simply to mop up afterwards — is pernicious, anti-democratic nonsense. Facebook and Google have profited mightily by hoovering up the advertising revenue that supported local as well as national journalism — journalism that’s critically important for a functioning liberal democracy. So it’s perfectly reasonable for democracies to require these companies to provide restitution for the damage they’re doing.

So here was a column that was trying to provide some historical and constitutional context for a contemporary controversy. The fact that it was a month — or even a year — old happens to be irrelevant in this particular case.

I know that the Guardian means well, and that in many cases it’s helpful to point out that particular online items are hoary old misconceptions. But you can’t do that intelligently simply by algorithmic inspection of calendar dates.

Quote of the Day

”An aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken whose head has been cut off: it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead.”

• Nancy Mitford, Noblesse Oblige, 1956.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Glenn Gould | Bach – Goldberg Variations| Aria

Link

Biden and the Tech Giants

From the Bloomberg ‘Fully Charged’ newsletter:

Nothing like a blockbuster quarter to draw unwanted attention from lawmakers and regulators. Over the next week or so, Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc. are each expected to report record-breaking quarterly revenue of $100 billion or more. Holiday advertising and lockdown-enhanced online engagement are also likely to drive big earnings for Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc., whose stock prices have soared since the pandemic’s March nadir.

Normally, the holiday quarter is a moment for celebration, but this is no time to spike the football. Success for the tech industry now serves as a stark reminder of its dominance. While brick-and-mortar retailers and restaurants go under, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google have collectively delivered a stunning $67 billion in net profit over the past two quarters.

The companies will be wary of antagonising Biden, largely because nobody has any idea yet of what — if anything — he’s likely to do. On the campaign trail, as Bloomberg points out, he was vague about his plans for big tech.

He has generally derided the industry’s “overwhelming arrogance,” criticized the recklessness and abuses of social-media platforms and said he supports a repeal of Section 230, the legal shield that protects internet companies from liability for user-generated content published on their services. At the same time, many members of his administration have close ties to the biggest players in tech, and questions remain about how far he’ll go on antitrust enforcement.

On the other hand, there’s was a Reuters report that the new President is considering appointing an “antitrust Czar”. And there’s nervousness in the industry about speculation that Biden might make Lina Kahn  — one of the brains behind the House Subcommittee fiercely critical report on tech monopolies — an FTC commissioner.

Everything depends, I’d guess, on where controlling tech giants ranks in the new Administration’s priorities. Given all the other stuff on its plate, my (pessimistic) guess is: not high. On the other hand, if Biden makes Ms Kahn a Commissioner then I’ll happily eat my hat.

Long Read of the Day

 Why the iPhone is today’s Kodak Brownie Camera

If you’re a photographer, then you’ll enjoy this reflective essay by Om Malik.

Photography as we know it has been around for about 150 years, though its origins can be traced to earlier civilizations. But it has never been so visceral, and so much a part of our daily lives, as it is now. In short, the arc of photography’s history is that it has always been about getting more and more people to take photographs. Our desire to know more about ourselves means we must have more of them, more often, in more places, and of many more things. Whether it was new chemicals or new film or new sensors, technological advances in this area have — by and large — been about making it simpler for us to capture the moment. All of it has brought us to today, when we have quietly passed the cultural tipping point where taking a photo is as second nature as breathing. There’s no art to it. It is just something we are always doing.

Lovely stuff.

Bets, bonds and kids

One of the things I’m grateful for during this pandemic is that our children are all grown up. I know that many of my colleagues who have young children are having a really toughh time trying to combine childcare with remote working. So I was very struck by this blog post by Jeff Kaufman. Here’s the gist:

A few weeks ago Anna (4y) wanted to play with some packing material. It looked very messy to me, I didn’t expect she would clean it up, and I didn’t want to fight with her about cleaning it up. I considered saying no, but after thinking about how things like this are handled in the real world I had an idea. If you want to do a hazardous activity, and we think you might go bankrupt and not clean up, we make you post a bond. This money is held in escrow to fund the cleanup if you disappear. I explained how this worked, and she went and got a dollar:

Then: When she was done playing, she cleaned it up without complaint and got her dollar back. If she hadn’t cleaned it up, I would have, and kept the dollar.

Some situations are more complicated, and call for bets. I wanted to go to a park, but Lily (6y) didn’t want to go to that park because the last time we had been there there’d been lots of bees. I remembered that had been a summer with unusually many bees, and it no longer being that summer or, in fact, summer at all, I was not worried. Since I was so confident, I offered my $1 to her $0.10 that we would not run into bees at the park. This seemed fair to her, and when there were no bees she was happy to pay up.

Over time, they’ve learned that my being willing to bet, especially at large odds, is pretty informative, and often all I need to do is offer. Lily was having a rough morning, crying by herself about a project not working out. I suggested some things that might be fun to do together, and she rejected them angrily. I told her that often when people are feeling that way, going outside can help a lot, and when she didn’t seem to believe me I offered to bet. Once she heard the 10:1 odds I was offering her I think she just started expecting that I was right, and she decided we should go ride bikes. (She didn’t actually cheer up when we got outside: she cheered up as soon as she made this decision.)

I wish I’d been that inventive when mine were the same age.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Marques Brownlee on how he built (and is now expanding) his YouTube channel. Interesting throughout, even if you’ve no interest in running a YouTube channel. It isn’t as easy as the good ones make it look. Link
• Photopea: a really powerful, free, photo editor that runs in your browser. Link
• Watch Arnold Schwarzenegger getting his Covid-19 vaccine jab. Link

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Constable @ f5.6

North Norfolk a decade ago. I was trying to imagine how John Constable might have portrayed the East Anglian countryside if he’d been a photographer.

Snow

Yesterday afternoon, it began to snow, and for a time the world was briefly transformed. I opened the window to make a video for two members of our family who are sweltering in Sydney. The snow had deadened most sounds, except for the cries of delighted children of our neighbours who were improvising a snowman and giving him an outsized carrot for a nose.

And then, what came into my mind in the way unbidden thoughts do, was the closing passage of James Joyce’s wonderful short story, The Dead. Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta have just returned to their Dublin hotel after a convivial party in his aunts’ house. Gretta is strangely subdued. One of the songs sung at the party had deeply moved her. As they prepare for bed, Gretta tells her husband that the song reminded her of Michael Furey, a frail boy who had loved her as a teenager and had died because he had come out in the freezing rain on the night before she was due to return to Dublin to plead with her not to leave Galway. And he had died from exposure. She then falls on the bed and sobs herself to sleep, leaving Gabriel to his own mortified thoughts.

This is how the story ends:

Link

John Huston made a beautiful film of the story, which I’m astonished (and delighted) to find is on YouTube. It was Huston’s last film. His son John wrote the screenplay, and his daughter Anjelica played Gretta. Huston directed it from a wheelchair, breathing with the aid of an oxygen tank, and died shortly after its completion.

Make an appointment to view. It’s worth it, especially if you like Joyce’s work.

Quote of the Day

“Aren’t women prudes if they don’t and prostitutes if they do?”

• Kate Millett, speaking at the Women’s Writers Conference, march 1975.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Loose Marbles | Burgundy Street Blues

Link

Can facial recognition technology really reveal political orientation?

My Observer column this morning:

Three things about the research paper stopped me in my tracks. The first was the title: Facial recognition technology can expose political orientation from naturalistic facial images. The second was that the author was Michal Kosinski, someone who used to be at Cambridge University, is now at Stanford and whose work I’ve followed for years. And the third was that it was published in Scientific Reports, one of the journals published by the Nature group and definitely not an outlet for nonsense.

The paper reports a research project that suggests that facial recognition technology can accurately infer individuals’ political orientation in terms of whether they have liberal or conservative views…

Long Read of the Day

Inside the Brexit deal: the agreement and the aftermath

The inside story of how the Brexit ‘deal’ was done, told by four terrific Financial Times journalists — George Parker, Peter Foster, Sam Fleming and Jim Brunsden. It’s a scarifying story of arrogance, ineptitude and wilful blindness. None of which comes really as a surprise, but it’s fascinating to see how much damage a fanatical attachment to a single idea — ‘sovereignty’ — can do.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Quote of the Day

”The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”

• George Orwell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn & Mark Knopfler – An Droichead (the Bridge)

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Covid and me: 10 days on life support 

Tim Hayward is a very good writer. He damn nearly died from Covid. More extraordinarily, he remembers enough of the experience to write this mesmerising article.

Pull up a chair, because you won’t want to look away until you’ve finished it.

And if you have any doubts about getting vaccinated, for God’s sake get real.

Now what?

From Venkatesh Rao in a long essay of his on Ribbonfarm:

So where does that leave us now, on the first day of the Permaweird, with Joe Biden, a blast from decades of neoliberal governance past, at the helm of world affairs, as veterans of the Clinton-Bush-Obama years stream back into the institutional rubble of Washington, DC, to “build back better”?

I don’t know.

Me neither. I have a sinking feeling that Joe Biden’s administration, for all the brave talk, is going to look a lot like the kind of government Hilary Clinton would have assembled had she won in 2016. And that’s really not good news.

An interesting paradox

On the one hand, Google is threatening to shut down search in Australia if the proposed digital news code goes ahead.

On the other hand, Google agrees to pay French news sites to send them traffic.

So what has France got? Answer: a state that won’t be bullied by a mere corporation. Google and Facebook are about to discover that the Australians are made of the same stuff. Couldn’t happen to a nastier crowd.

Inside Mar-a-Lago: the secret history of Trump’s Florida retreat | openDemocracy

Fine piece by Seth Thévoz …

As Donald Trump leaves office, the place that has come to symbolise Brand Trump is Mar-a-Lago – his 20-acre, 128-room private members’ club in Palm Beach, Florida. With much of the Trump business empire heavily indebted and losing money, Mar-a-Lago is one of its few genuine cash cows.

According to the Government Accountability Office, the US taxpayer has paid $1m a day for each of the days Trump has spent at Mar-a-Lago. “How much US taxpayers’ money was spent on ‘non-security improvements’ to Mar-a-Lago and Trump’s Bedminster [another private members’ club in New Jersey] residence?” the presidential historian Michael Beschloss recently asked, suggesting that the federal government could ask to be reimbursed, as it did with Richard Nixon’s California mansion after he left office.

Mar-a-Lago is what first made Trump ‘respectable’ in high society, and it has subsidised his lifestyle since well before he reached the presidency. All the while, as a private member’s club with hundreds of members and guests milling around during Trump’s visits, it has been cloaked in secrecy. ..

Not a club you’d want to belong to. But some of Trump’s neighbours are unhappy about the idea of him being there full-time.

Can Joe Biden make America great again?

I think you know the answer. But this terrific essay by Fintan O’Toole is the most insightful thing I’ve read about Biden to date. O’Toole’s argument is that what might give Biden the ability to weather what lies ahead is his personal experience of coping with tragedy.

This is how the piece begin…

Every year after 1975, Joe Biden, his second wife Jill, his sons Beau and Hunter and their growing families, would gather for Thanksgiving on Nantucket island off Cape Cod. Part of the annual ritual was that the Bidens would take a photograph of themselves in front of a quaint old house in the traditional New England style that stood above the dunes on their favourite beach.

In November 2014, when Biden was serving as Barack Obama’s vice-president, he found, where the house should have been, an empty space marked out by yellow police tape. The building, he wrote in his memoir Promise Me, Dad had “finally run out of safe ground and run out of time; it had been swept out into the Atlantic”.

O’Toole sees Biden as someone who views the world through the lens, not just of history, but of eternity — an impulse that comes with the territory of Biden’s Irish Catholicism, its fatalistic view of this earthly existence as, in the words of the rosary, a “valley of tears”. This is, as Biden sees it, “the Irishness of life”.

This rueful stoicism is, however, primarily shaped by intimate experience: the road crash that killed his first wife, Neilia, and their daughter, Naomi, in December 1972, shortly after Biden was elected to the Senate at the age of 29; Beau’s death from cancer in 2015. When he was a young senator, the journalistic in-joke was to refer to him as “Joe Biden (D-Del, TBPT)”. Those last four letters stood for “touched by personal tragedy”, a label that clung to him like a clammy mist of perpetual mourning.

The odd thing is that this tragic vision just might be what his country needs right now. Perhaps the way that the old house acts as both a political metaphor and a personal memory points to a confluence of the man and the moment. Perhaps the dark shadow of TBPT that walks beside the triumphantly ascendant Potus is not so much a ghost and more a guardian angel. Great piece. Read it through.

Another, hopefully interesting, link 

•  Dr. Martens boot prices have risen more than gold since 1960. Link

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Easy Riding

Quote of the Day

”Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

• H.L. Mencken

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Antonio Salieri | Piano Concerto in C (1773)

Link

Salieri has always had a bad press, especially after Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. But this is pretty good. Worth leaving it to play over breakfast.

Long Read of the Day

Why Do We Assume Extraterrestrials Might Want to Visit Us?

The controversial astronomer Avi Loeb thinks that any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial beings wouldn’t find us any more interesting than we find ants.

Our sun formed at the tail end of the star formation history of the universe. Most stars are billions of years older than ours. So much older, in fact that many sunlike stars have already consumed their nuclear fuel and cooled off to a compact Earth-size remnant known as a white dwarf. We also learned recently that of order half of all sunlike stars host an Earth-size planet in their habitable zone, allowing for liquid water and for the chemistry of life.

Since the dice of life were rolled in billions of other locations within the Milky Way under similar conditions to those on Earth, life as we know it is likely common. If that is indeed the case, some intelligent species may well be billions of years ahead of us in their technological development. When weighing the risks involved in interactions with less-developed cultures such as ours, these advanced civilizations may choose to refrain from contact. The silence implied by Fermi’s paradox (“Where is everybody?”) may mean that we are not the most attention-worthy cookies in the jar.

Hang on: ants are very interesting. Just ask E.O. Wilson.

But I digress. Loeb is a distinguished astronomer who has acquired a certain notoriety by arguing that a strange object (now called ‘Oumuamua’) travelling at 200,000 mph that was detected by a big telescope designed to hunt for “near-Earth objects — mostly asteroids which travel at an average velocity of 40,000 mph — was actually the handiwork of an alien civilisation. It seems that most of his professional peers are very annoyed by this, especially since he has doubled down on his theory in a new book,  Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth that comes out on February 4. Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker has an interesting essay on the controversy.

I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I am tempted to buy the book nonetheless. The only problem is that there are only 24 hours in our terrestrial day. Sigh.

I Am a Disappointed Biden Voter Who Was Told He’d Immediately Implement Communist Rule

From Chandler Dean…

I consider myself to be a high-information voter. I follow a variety of sources — FOX News, One America News Network, Newsmax, the Epoch Times, Dan Bongino’s Parler feed, and whatever I overhear construction workers talking about on my morning commute.

Throughout the 2020 election cycle, I kept getting told the same thing: “Joe Biden wants to defund the police,” “Joe Biden is a socialist.” “Joe Biden loves Antifa,” “Joe Biden wants to take the money from defunding the police and equally distribute it among all Antifa members.”

When I heard those accusations, as an active member of a Brooklyn-based Marxist commune, I thought, Finally! So I proudly cast my vote for the Biden-Harris ticket, kicked back, and waited for our kleptocratic capitalist system to instantly crumble upon his inauguration.

And then?

My friend just got an invoice for next month’s rent in her mailbox — so, evidently, landlords still exist. The means of production at my office job? Noticeably un-seized. And don’t get me started on all the scarcity I still see out there. There’s an abundance of scarcity.

I tried to forward my water bill to the White House with the memo “incurring charges for natural resources is theft?” but no one has gotten back to me. Now, if that’s because the White House employees have collectively bargained that they don’t need to respond to my letters, I will retract that particular complaint…

Why cats love catnip

Lovely piece of research…

The researchers hypothesized that when felines in the wild rub on catnip or silver vine, they’re essentially applying an insect repellant.

They first showed cats can transfer the chemical to their skin, and then conducted a live mosquito challenge—similar to when people’s arms are used to evaluate insect repellants. They put the nepetalactol-treated heads of sedated cats into chambers full of mosquitoes and counted how many landed on them—it was about half the number that landed on feline heads treated with a neutral substance, they report today in Science Advances.

Most scientists and pet owners assumed the only reason that cats roll around in catnip was for the euphoric experience, Miyazaki says. “Our findings suggest instead that rolling is rather a functional behavior.”

I’ve communicated these findings to our two cats. They seem unimpressed.

Facebook Has Referred Trump’s Suspension to Its Oversight Board. Now What?

Evelyn Douek, writing on Lawfare…

On Jan. 7, the day after the riot in the U.S. Capitol, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the “indefinite” suspension of Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts. It remained unclear whether Trump would be banned from the platforms forever: Zuckerberg wrote at the time that Facebook would block Trump at least until the inauguration, “until the peaceful transition of power is complete.” Since then, the ultimate fate of Trump’s accounts has hinged, more or less, on how the Facebook CEO happened to feel whenever he got around to considering whether the decision should be permanent.

But now, the decision is now out of Zuckerberg’s hands. Facebook has referred the suspension to the Facebook Oversight Board: an external court-like institution that Facebook set up to review its “most difficult and significant content decisions” and that, under its bylaws, has the power to issue binding decisions on the platform. The board now has more power over the former president’s future ability to communicate with a large part of his base than either Zuckerberg or Trump himself.

It’ll be interesting to see if the Board take it on, and what they make of it if they do.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Bernie Sanders Reacts to Inauguration Mittens Memes. The Vermont senator told reporters on Thursday that the viral photo of him from President Joe Biden’s Inauguration the day prior “makes people aware that we make good mittens in Vermont.” Link
• The Complete List of Trump’s Twitter Insults (2015-2021). Link
• Alphabet shuts down Internet balloon company. Like most balloons, it eventually burst. Still, it was worth a try. Link

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My favourite beach in Donegal this afternoon.

Many thanks to John Darch for the image.

Kübler-Ross, grief and dying from Covid.

My friend and colleague, David Vincent, picked up on my post the other day in which I used Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s ‘five stages of grief’ model as a metaphor for analysing how our societies have responded to the pandemic.

David never touches anything without adding value, and — true to form — he reached for his copy of Kübler-Ross’s famous book, On Death and Dying and began to re-read it.

Here’s an excerpt from his subsequent diary post:

“If a patient has had enough time”, Kübler-Ross writes, “(i.e., not a sudden, unexpected death) and has been given some help in working through the previously described stages, he will reach a stage during which he is neither depressed nor angry about his ‘fate.’” (p. 123).

The whole enterprise assumes the resources of a well-found (American) hospital, with teams of professionals including not only doctors and nurses but psychiatrists, social workers and chaplains, ready and able to spend long periods communicating with the patients as their disease takes its course over months or years.

The essence of dying with Covid-19 is that neither patients, nor their families, nor the staff of hospitals or hospices have remotely enough time to work through any sequence of emotional expression or support. The common experience of those who are infected is for little to happen for the first few days, and then for the unlucky minority there is a sudden descent into breathlessness and other symptoms which leads rapidly to an intensive care unit. Even if they ultimately survive the mechanical ventilators, they will have been unconscious throughout that part of their treatment. Hospital staff are overwhelmed by the sheer pressure of numbers, radically reducing staff/patient ratios whilst at the same time trying to stand in for the presence of next of kin excluded by quarantine regulations.

It is the absence time for death and dying which more than the pathogens and the remedies most connects the Covid-19 pandemic with the flu and plague outbreaks that preceded it down the centuries.

I was very struck by this because, as readers of my Lockdown Diary will know, my beloved mother-in-law, Elsie, died of Covid early in April 2020. She had dementia and was in a care home which was — like most others — left completely unprotected from the virus. Here’s the relevant part of the audio diary I kept for the first 100 days of lockdown.

Link

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Van Morrison and the Chieftains | On Raglan Road

Link

A lovely version of a song based on Paddy Kavanagh’s poem

Undoing Trumpism

Cory Doctorow has a fabulous post about an obscure American statute called the Congressional review Act. You never heard of it? Me neither. But stay tuned.

Trump was a very specific kind of disaster: a chaos agent, who lacked the wit, patience and executive function to recruit the powerful institutions of the US military-industrial complex to fight his corner.

The kind of guy who demands the impossible and then fires and publicly humiliates any allies who fail to deliver – or dare to contradict him – is not the kind of guy who can build new, enduring, evil institutions.

The best he can hope for is to get some trumpalike goblins into positions of power (where they will replicate his chaos, but without the broad impunity of the presidential office, resulting in a series of resignations and prosecutions), back by executive orders.

The last months of the Trump admin were an orgy of executive branch rulemakings that dismantled public safety, health, labor, anticorruption and (especially) environmental protections.

Trump is a debt kingpin. His MO is running across a river on the backs of alligators, hoping to move so fast that none of them takes a leg: borrow, refinance, restructure, borrow, blow town, borrow, restructure, bribe, blow town.

He’s an improviser, a bullshitter, a pantser and not a planner. That’s why so many of his worst ideas got turned into regulations at the very end of his term, and that’s why they are vulnerable to being swiftly undone by the obscure, rarely used Congressional Review Act.

The CRA allows Congress to void administrative-branch regulations and to prohibit any substantively similar regulation from ever being enacted.

Just the tool a Biden administration might find useful.

Now there’s a cheery thought.

QAnon believers struggle with inauguration.

This NYT piece by Kevin Roose has made my day.

Followers of QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory, have spent weeks anticipating that Wednesday would be the “Great Awakening” — a day, long foretold in QAnon prophecy, when top Democrats would be arrested for running a global sex trafficking ring and President Trump would seize a second term in office.

But as President Biden took office and Mr. Trump landed in Florida, with no mass arrests in sight, some believers struggled to harmonize the falsehoods with the inauguration on their TVs.

Some QAnon believers tried to rejigger their theories to accommodate a transfer of power to Mr. Biden. Several large QAnon groups discussed on Wednesday the possibility that they had been wrong about Mr. Biden, and that the incoming president was actually part of Mr. Trump’s effort to take down the global cabal.

“The more I think about it, I do think it’s very possible that Biden will be the one who pulls the trigger,” one account wrote in a QAnon channel on the messaging app Telegram.

Now what does this remind me of? Yes — you guessed it! — the End of the World sketch in The Secret Policeman’s Ball in 1979.

Link

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A volcanic plug near Puy-en-Velay. I’ll never forget the first time I saw this. The idea that this is all that remains of an ancient volcano seemed mind-blowing to a chap who grew up in rural Ireland.

Quote of the Day

“He believed in sudden conversion, a belief which may be right, but which is peculiarly attractive to the half-baked mind.”

• E.M. Forster in Howards End.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Bob Dylan and Joan Baez | Blowing In The Wind

Link

I never heard them sing this together before.

Long Read of the Day

An Oral History of Wikipedia

Lovely — and done in an interesting way. Link

The near-death experience of the American republic

Martin Wolf in today’s Financial Times:

We have come to a hinge moment in history. The US is the world’s most powerful and influential democratic republic. For all its mistakes and flaws, it was the global model and protector of democratic values. Under Mr Trump, this vanished. He was a consistent opponent of the values and aspirations embodied in a republican ideal.

Mr Trump failed. Moreover, after his attempted coup, nobody can deny his threat was real. But this is not enough. If US politics unfolds as seems likely, there will be more Trumps. One of them, more competent and ruthless, may succeed. If that is to be prevented, US politics must now shift to respect for truth and an inclusive version of patriotism.

Rome was arguably the last republican superpower. But the rich and powerful destroyed that republic, bringing forth a military dictatorship, 1,800 years before the US was born. The US republic has survived the test of Trump. But it still needs to be saved from death.

Watching the Republican senators who, after the Capitol invasion had been cleared, still voted to reject the Electoral College returns, it’s clear that we were watching Trump Mk2 in the making.

Singapore on Thames?

Jonty Bloom has some useful advice for the Brexiteers who dream of turning the UK into Singapore on steroids.

For a start if you want to be like Singapore you’d better start nationalising things quickly, Singapore’s government and its sovereign wealth funds hold shares in huge swathes of the economy, among which are telecommunications, media, public transportation, defence, ports, banking, shipping, airlines, infrastructure and real estate. Many of those shares are held by its two sovereign wealth funds which are independent from Government, in the sense that the Prime Minister and his wife sit on their boards.

The Government owns 90% of Singapore’s land and 80% of all housing and although income taxes are low, a maximum of 22%; there is also a compulsory savings rate of 20% (invested with the Government) that pays for your pension and health insurance. Singapore also has a high level of income inequality, is a tax haven and imports 99% of its food.

More work for Johnson and Carrie.

Trump’s pro-tem exit

Nice comment from Dave Pell: Donald Trump went out like he came in. An unAmerican, narcissistic, childish loser. He served up one more helping of international shame as he skipped the inauguration on the way to Mar a Lago, where he’s promised to find the real killers of democracy. It would have been more fitting if he and Melania had left in a White Ford Bronco. Before boarding the aircraft, Trump said, “So just a goodbye. We love you. We will be back in some form.” (Hopefully in an orange jumpsuit.) As a last pathetic attempt to garner attention, the WSJ reports that Trump Has Discussed Starting a New Political Party. (It should be called the Defendants.)

The other time private US media companies stepped in to silence the falsehoods and incitements of a major public figure

As the commentariat struggled with the problem and implications of social-media companies de-platforming Trump it was nice to see someone looking at this with an historical perspective. He’s Bill Kovarik, a Professor of Communication, and he tells a good story. This is how it begins…

In speeches filled with hatred and falsehoods, a public figure attacks his enemies and calls for marches on Washington. Then, after one particularly virulent address, private media companies close down his channels of communication, prompting consternation from his supporters and calls for a code of conduct to filter out violent rhetoric.

Sound familiar? Well, this was 1938, and the individual in question was Father Charles E. Coughlin, a Nazi-sympathizing Catholic priest with unfettered access to America’s vast radio audiences. The firms silencing him were the broadcasters of the day.

As a media historian, I find more than a little similarity between the stand those stations took back then and the way Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have silenced false claims of election fraud and incitements to violence in the aftermath of the siege on the U.S. Capitol – noticeably by silencing the claims of Donald Trump and his supporters.

Worth reading in full.

Other, hopefully interesting or useful, links

• Guy Kawasaki: The Art of Web Conferencing. What you need if you want to project your Zoom image well. Link
• Animals interrupting wildlife photographers. It’s hard to earn a living, sometimes. Link
• Eszter Hargittai on Amazing Marvin. Link. It’s not often you find academics writing about tech tools. Amazing Marvin is one such tool.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!