Free climbers [Part II]

The New Neo Posted on by

[Part I here.]

I have come to conceptualize many of the people who are drawn most powerfully (and obsessively) to these extreme activities this way: they don’t want to live without them. And for some of the most extreme practitioners, engaging in these things is the only time they feel alive—during the activity and preparing for it both mentally and physically. Ordinary life holds no special charms for them (or for some, perhaps no charms at all). For such people, ordinary life is barely living (that’s why Wallenda said that life is on the wire and the rest is just waiting). So risking their lives is an easy decision to make, because without these activities they don’t really have lives at all.

Why they are this way I don’t know, but I think they are and for them that’s that. So their calculations make sense, and that’s why the deaths of so many friends cause them grief but do not stop them from engaging in the same activities.

Plus, they increase the risks by small increments over time. They get hooked on the activity itself immediately. But as they pursue it and practice it, they get better and better and soon activities that once seemed very risky seem very basic and simple to them and really aren’t all that risky. And all their friends are doing it; do they even have friends that don’t engage in the same activities?

So over time—and I’m talking years, ordinarily—they incrementally increase the risk factor to get the same high (to coin a phrase) and the same feeling of challenge. Along the way they must conquer any feelings of fear that they have, so they have become skilled at conquering fear and then at some point the usual calculations don’t kick in because by then they are so adept at conquering fear. From Potter again:

Potter was joined by a new companion on recent adventures: his miniature Australian cattle dog, Whisper. Bringing along his pet made him realize the danger of his calling, he said.

“It wasn’t until I started having to think through the likelihood of something happening to Whisper that I finally got it,” Potter told the Denver Post last month. “This is really serious stuff that we do.”

Whisper was not with Potter [when he died].

So perhaps Potter had reached the point where he had trouble assimilating the idea of risk for himself. Only for another being—his dog—could he see it.

Potter also wrote the following after a good friend had died base-jumping, indicating again that it was only through perceiving risks to other people that he could see the sport’s true riskiness:

“Though my body is warm inside the nylon suit I start to shiver and wonder if what we’re doing is right,” Potter wrote in the blog. “Wingsuit BASE-jumping feels safe to me but 25 wingsuit-fliers have lost their lives, this year alone. There must be some flaw in our system, a lethal secret beyond my comprehension.”

People who love these sports love the physical and mental challenges, but what appears to drive them is need. It is defined as a need for freedom, a need to pursue what one loves (from a piece about Mario Richard’s death):

Empinotti added that everyone in the BASE jumping community has been to the funerals of friends who succumbed to the risks of the sport. Richard had no illusions about his chosen activity, she said.

“This is your happiness and you have to pursue happiness and we are the kind of people who are not afraid to pursue happiness, though we know that the cost is high ”” if you get hurt then you get hurt badly, or you die,” she said.

“He wasn’t just out there not caring about his life or his life with his wife. You leave this tsunami behind you when you die, so you need to be aware of that, and he was.”

Puzzling that one over, it seems to me that it contains a contradiction. They know that it’s risky. There is not the slightest room for a mistake, and even the best (and Richard was one of the very best) can make mistakes if they jump enough. But the key to the whole thing is “this is your happiness.” Is it really their only happiness? Is there no other way for them to be happy? How do they define happiness? Does ordinary life not hold joy for them? Or is the joy that comes from free-climbing or base-jumping just so much greater that other joys pall, and they will risk everything—again and again and again—to feel that happiness again?

This poem by Yeats is about something quite different: a death in war. And yet I kept thinking of it as I read these articles and contemplated the state of mind that drives people to free-climb and base-jump. It seems to me that the poem expresses that state of mind perfectly [emphasis mine]:

AN IRISH AIRMAN FORESEES HIS DEATH

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

The Siena experience

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the places I’ve wanted to visit for quite some time is Siena. And yesterday, when I finally got there, I wasn’t disappointed.

One of the nicest things about the city is the fact that its hilltop location can now be reached from parking lots by a series of escalators that make it possible for less-than-tough tourists to get there and begin walking around without having exhausted themselves climbing the hill before they even begin. The inside of the town itself is hilly enough to constitute a workout walking around and seeing the sights, which are considerable.

It was hot, as Tuscany has been the whole time I’ve been here. But it was shady for the most part, and the city that is rightly called “medieval” is astounding. Everywhere you look it seems as though you’ve stepped into a many-centuries’ old set of some sort, except this set is real. And the colors of the buildings (and their interiors) make you understand why the old 64-crayon crayola box had a crayon called “burnt sienna,” a sort of dark terra-cotta.

I’m not especially into medieval art or church art, but it’s impossible to be in Siena and not be in awe of both. Its big cathedral is the sort of place you enter and immediately think “Wow!”—which isn’t very articulate but certainly expresses the overwhelming nature of the ornate and yet never-too-busy harmony of its decorative abundance.

I have never been so fascinated by a floor, and that’s quite a feat considering how much else of beauty there is to see in this cathedral. But the floor, the floor!:

The inlaid marble mosaic floor is one of the most ornate of its kind in Italy, covering the whole floor of the cathedral. This undertaking went on from the 14th to the 16th centuries, and about forty artists made their contribution. The floor consists of 56 panels in different sizes. Most have a rectangular shape, but the later ones in the transept are hexagons or rhombuses. They represent the sibyls, scenes from the Old Testament, allegories and virtues. Most are still in their original state. The earliest scenes were made by a graffito technique: drilling tiny holes and scratching lines in the marble and filling these with bitumen or mineral pitch. In a later stage black, white, green, red and blue marble intarsia were used. This technique of marble inlay also evolved during the years, finally resulting in a vigorous contrast of light and dark, giving it an almost modern, impressionistic composition.

It was all that, and more. In addition (and something I hadn’t realized), I was highly fortunate in that the floor is only uncovered during a couple of months of the year. I happened to have visited during that time:

Siena Duomo floor uncovering 2018 dates: June 27 to July 31, 2018, and then again from August 18 to October 28, 2018.

That site I just linked has a lot more information on the floor.

And the ceilings are no slouch, either. So without further ado, here are a couple of photos I took of floor, ceiling, and in-between, as well as the ceilings of the old hospital building in Siena. It’s probably not like any hospital you’ve ever seen:

Trump talk

The New Neo Posted on by

And by “Trump talk” I don’t mean the chatter of the president. I mean the verbiage of those who talk a great deal about him, and who clearly hate his guts.

I know quite a few such people, although I only experience it when they get together in groups. The phenomenon is something like this:

President Trump is depicted as a monstrous usurper who seeks to destroy American democracy and impose authoritarian rule. John McNeill of Georgetown University awards Trump “26 out of 44 Benitos” on his scale of fascist tendencies, and public figures from Cher to Abraham Foxman have labeled Trump “Hitler.” Leftist documentarian Michael Moore insists that Trump will never give up power peacefully because he believes that his election entitles him to a lifetime office, and so he must be forced out; and New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg says that Trump “certainly would really like to” round up people and murder them.

But, as the author of that article I linked and quoted points out, if Trump’s a tyrant he’s a tyrant of a very odd sort:

But if victorious dictators typically wage such campaigns to punish their foes, why is it that Trump’s associates—and not the president’s enemies—are the ones facing life in prison for tax fraud? The same president accused of undermining democracy, of incipient authoritarianism, and of conducting Stalinist purges because he removed a former official’s security clearance complains haplessly on Twitter that he can’t control his own staff, and makes sarcastic, Borscht Belt-style jokes about what a terrible lawyer he has. If, as his critics allege, Trump really aspires to be a ruthless dictator, he isn’t doing a very good job at it.

All too true. But it doesn’t matter to most Trump critics.

And in fact, it doesn’t seem completely unusual these days in liberal circles for people to casually and approvingly discuss assassinating Trump (speaking of tyranny), or at least of wishing him dead. Among people I know, it’s just idle talk—they’re not about to do anything—but the depth of blood rage is stunning, and a topic that should be verboten about any president seems quite acceptable in many groups.

On the Cohen plea

The New Neo Posted on by

I think this comment at Powerline is quite descriptive of the Michael Cohen plea situation:

So the real trick here is pretty simple. Threaten a man with 8 counts that would cost him millions to defend and could send him to prison for decades. Embed within them counts that implicate your true “target”, then accept a plea, which includes pleading guilty to the counts that implicate said target. So doing effectively makes the target appear to be guilty without ever going to trial, which is the real point of the exercise. Then delay sentencing until we see how strong his testimony is against the target…There is something fundamentally wrong with this.

It is a technique akin to that sometimes used to get known gangsters or organized crime figures convicted and put away. The prosecution decides who they want to get, then they nab some underlings and associates—often on technical violations that commonly involve tax evasion—and they throw the book at them to get them to squeal on the real target. “Squeal” must be language I got from some Grade B movie watched in my youth, but that was the sort of thing I recall, and it goes back a long way.

What I’ve never seen is this sort of general technique used by partisans of one party to get the president of the United States, although I’ve seen something like it on a lower level; Ted Stevens comes to mind. In Stevens’ case, the name of the Michael Cohen figure was Bill Allen, who (unlike Cohen) at least was not Stevens’ lawyer. A little tiny memory refresher here [emphasis mine]:

On July 29, 2008, Stevens was indicted by a federal grand jury on seven counts of failing to properly report gifts, a felony, and found guilty at trial three months later (October 27, 2008). The charges relate to renovations to his home and alleged gifts from VECO Corporation, claimed to be worth more than $250,000. The indictment followed a lengthy investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for possible corruption by Alaskan politicians and was based in part on Stevens’s extensive relationship with Bill Allen. Allen owned racehorses, including a partnership in the stud horse So Long Birdie, which included Stevens and eight others, and which was managed by Bob Persons. The FBI not only had calls between Allen and Stevens, made after Allen became a cooperating witness, but they had thousands of wiretapped conversations involving the phones of both Allen and VECO Vice President Rick Smith. They had also videotaped meetings between Allen and state legislators at VECO’s hotel suite in Juneau, the state capitol. Allen had testified in court that he bribed Ted’s son Ben, the former Alaska Senate president. A former VECO employee said he did campaign fundraising work for Stevens while on VECO’s payroll, a violation of federal law. Allen , then an oil service company executive, had earlier pleaded guilty—with sentencing suspended pending his cooperation in gathering evidence and giving testimony in other trials—to bribing several Alaskan state legislators. Stevens declared, “I’m innocent,” and pleaded not guilty to the charges in a federal district court on July 31, 2008. Stevens asserted his right to a speedy trial so that he could have the opportunity to clear his name promptly and requested that the trial be held before the 2008 election.

Stevens was found guilty, and just about everyone in both parties pressured him to resign from the Senate. That was the true goal of the prosecution, I believe—not to necessarily put him in prison, but to create a climate that would ruin him politically. But he lost his election instead.

What happened next was the discovery (initially through a whistleblower) of an enormous degree of prosecutorial misconduct, including the following:

the discovery of a previously undocumented interview with Bill Allen, the prosecution’s star witness, that raised the possibility prosecutors had knowingly allowed Allen to perjure himself on the stand. Allen stated that the fair market value of the repairs to Stevens’s house was around $80,000—far less than the $250,000 he said it cost at trial. More seriously, Allen said in the interview that he didn’t recall talking to Bob Persons, a friend of Stevens, regarding the repair bill for Stevens’s house. This directly contradicted Allen’s testimony at trial, in which he claimed Stevens asked him to give Persons a note Stevens sent him asking for a bill on the repair work. At trial, Allen said Persons had told him the note shouldn’t be taken seriously because “Ted’s just covering his ass.” Even without the notes, Stevens’s attorneys claimed that they thought Allen was lying about the conversation…

Stevens’s attorney, Brendan Sullivan, said that Holder’s decision was forced by “extraordinary evidence of government corruption.” He also claimed that prosecutors not only withheld evidence but “created false testimony that they gave us and actually presented false testimony in the courtroom”—two incidents that would have made it very likely that the convictions would have been overturned on appeal.

On April 7, 2009, federal judge Sullivan formally accepted Holder’s motion to set aside the verdict and throw out the indictment, declaring “There was never a judgment of conviction in this case. The jury’s verdict is being set aside and has no legal effect,” and calling it the worst case of prosecutorial misconduct he’d ever seen.

Disgusting. But these revelations came too late for Stevens, who had been narrowly defeated in his re-election bid. So the forces desirous of bringing Stevens down were fully successful, even though their duplicity was later discovered. The full report didn’t come out till 2012, two years after Stevens’ death in an airplane accident. But at least he lived to see some vindication.

I’ve gone into so much detail about the Stevens case because although it’s not a perfect analogy, it’s relevant, and it should anger every single person who reads about it, no matter what political side that person might be on.

The goal with Stevens was to force him to lose his election, resign, or face expulsion from the Senate. The goal with Trump is to get him impeached and even convicted, if possible. I happen to think the first option is very possible if the Democrats win the House, but I doubt conviction would occur in the Senate unless a great many GOP moderates went along, and I don’t quite see that happening.

Is Sessions on the way out?

The New Neo Posted on by

Perhaps:

Top Senate Republicans sent dueling signals on Thursday about whether it would be safe for President Donald Trump to fire the attorney general he can’t stand…

The back-and-forth on the Hill came just as Sessions took the rare step of defending himself and his leadership of the Justice Department after a withering attack from Trump in an interview with Fox News that aired early Thursday over Sessions’ recusal from the Russia probe now overseen by special counsel Robert Mueller: “Even my enemies say that ‘Jeff Sessions should have told you that he was going to recuse himself and then you wouldn’t have put him in.’ He took the job and then he said, ‘I’m going to recuse myself.’ I said, ‘What kind of a man is this?’

Sessions’ behavior regarding the investigations into Trump has long been puzzling, and it has angered a great many people on the right. I don’t know what’s going on with him, but I’ll hazard a guess, which is that Sessions was appointed for two reasons. The first was as a sort of thank-you for being one of Trump’s earliest supporters, and one of the few early supporters who was already a respected figure in the GOP. The second is that Sessions’ field of expertise was immigration and that’s what he expected to focus on. I don’t think he saw all this brouhaha (and certainly not the tangled mess of it) coming, and I don’t think he has the stomach for it, and so he took the first opportunity to recuse himself.

Sessions has said the following:

While I am attorney general, the actions of the Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations. I demand the highest standards, and where they are not met, I take action.

Nice sentiments. But I don’t think it’s possible in the current climate, and I think Sessions might be hopelessly naive about what’s going on. He wants to retreat to an ivory tower and not be in the messy position in which he finds himself.

And it might get a lot messier before it gets neater.

Is Fiat the world’s worst car or just one of the worst?

The New Neo Posted on by

Discuss among yourselves.

When you rent a car in Italy and want an automatic, the choices are very limited. For the duration of this trip so far I’ve been a passenger in a Fiat, and right from the start the transmission sounded like rattling junk and felt like a mildly bucking bronco.

Last night the car simply stopped. Made a dreadful sound for a moment, and then cut out. Fortunately, it happened as we arrived at a restaurant in a 2-car caravan, with one member who speaks fluent Italian. So the call to the car rental people went fairly smoothly, and someone actually came to take a look at it after about an hour and a half of relatively pleasant waiting in the restaurant.

The person who arrived pronounced the car unsalvageable on inspection, and towed it away (down a big long hill, of course). I waved that vehicle good-bye with nary a regret, happy to see it go.

Since I’m with so many other people I may not even need a car again in Italy, because the tail end of the trip will be spent in Rome and the plan all along was to drop the car off before the Rome segment.

So, what’s up with Fiats?

The Asia Argento saga and #MeToo

The New Neo Posted on by

My finger is not on the pulse of movies, and so I’d never heard of Asia Argento before the Weinstein scandal in which she was one of his earliest and most vocal accusers, a regular star of the #MeToo movement.

To very quickly summarize how I feel about that movement, (already expressed in some previous posts): sexual harassment and/or abuse is wrong, and threats to harm a career if someone tells about an assault are wrong—but I don’t believe the stories of any particular group of people on the basis of their membership in said group (for example, women), and I don’t think people should be tried in the court of gossip.

Argento was also briefly in the news in connection with Anthony Bourdain’s suicide, because she was his girlfriend.

A couple of days ago a bombshell dropped about Argento that made the #MeToo hashtag especially ironic, because Argento has also been accused of sexual abuse, this time of a minor in 2013 in the person of former child actor Jimmy Bennet, who was 17 at the time of the alleged sexual act. The age of consent in California is, surprisingly enough, 18, and that would make the act that allegedly occurred statutory rape.

Statutory rape is an odd crime in that it doesn’t matter whether the sex was consensual or not. But it’s really not odd if you realize that children by definition cannot give consent. Children are by definition presumed to not yet have the kind of judgment and maturity that would make consent meaningful and valid. Thus the law places the burden and responsibility on the adult.

The point at which a child attains that ability to give legal consent may seem arbitrary, especially when the act occurs close to the borderline of majority. But it’s no defense to say that the victim was almost 18, because “almost” doesn’t cut it.

It also seems odd to many people when a woman (Argento was 37 at the time) is the perpetrator because it is assumed that the boy (young man, whatever you want to call him) must have found it a very pleasant experience. But if true that the boy enjoys it (and it certainly isn’t always true), that’s irrelevant, as well.

Argento has alleged some contradictory things in connection with the accusations:

It led to an initial furious denial from the Italian actress, who claimed she “never had any sexual relationship” with Bennett.

But last night TMZ, the celebrity website, revealed text messages between Argento and a friend in which she admitted a sexual encounter, though she said the teenager “jumped me”.

Argento also claimed in the text messages that she did not know Bennett was a minor until she received a “shakedown” letter from his lawyer demanding money.

She reportedly wrote: “I had sex with him, it felt weird. I didn’t know he was a minor until the shakedown letter. The public know nothing, only what the NYT wrote. The shakedown letter. The horny kid jumped me.”

The actress added: “It (sic) wasn’t raped. but I was frozen. He was on top of me. After, he told me I had been his sexual fantasy since he was 12.”

Argento said in the text messages that she didn’t report the incident at the time because she “felt bad” for “this Hollywood failed child actor”.

Bennett has spoken out and said the 2013 incident was traumatic for him. Also, part of Argento’s tale is that the $350K payment made to Bennett to silence him was made by Bourdain, who talked her into it.

This story is complex. But it can be simplified down to this: Argento was the adult, and she needed to unfreeze herself and act like one, in order to make it clear to Bennett that this was not acceptable. If he had actually physically overpowered her in the face of that refusal, then it would have been Bennett who would have been guilty of non-statutory rape.

But Argento is not claiming that she was physically overpowered (despite the word “jumped”). And in fact we have little idea what actually happened between them, except that the two apparently had sex when Bennett was 17. That’s the problem with these MeToo accusations—the difficulty of sorting out competing stories—as Argento may be belatedly learning.

[NOTE: This business of a woman freezing, not knowing what to do, and/or general passivity is part of a great many of these assault stories. I wrote about the phenomenon in a previous post.]

Andrew C. McCarthy on the Michael Cohen plea

The New Neo Posted on by

McCarthy writes:

The Justice Department has a history of treating serious campaign-finance transgressions as administrative violations, not felonies. A prominent example: The 2008 Obama campaign accepted nearly $2 million in illegal campaign contributions, but was permitted to settle the matter with a $375,000 fine. Of course, the force of that argument is undermined considerably by the fact that Cohen’s infraction has been treated as a felony…

Still, as we’ve repeatedly pointed out, Justice Department guidance does not permit the indictment of a sitting president…The issue for President Trump is not whether he has committed a crime but whether he has committed a high crime and misdemeanor…

The conduct here is not of the egregious nature that rises to high crimes and misdemeanors — it is an infraction committed by many political candidates and often not even prosecuted. More to the point, it is remote from the core responsibilities of the presidency, implicating pre-election actions to conceal alleged indiscretions that occurred a decade earlier. And while the president has denied the indiscretions, it is not like the allegations come as any surprise to the public, who, while well aware of his flaws, elected Donald Trump nonetheless.

There’s much more at the link. Please read the whole thing.

To repeat something I’ve stated many times before, both Cohen and Manafort are only being prosecuted as a means to get to Trump. The campaign law violation of Trump’s that the Cohen case supposedly uncovers is so small and insignificant that, if impeachment were to occur on the basis of it, it would be transparently clear that prosecuting Cohen was merely a pretext to get to that particular end—impeachment.

Actually, that’s been pretty clear for a long, long time.

Tuscan update

The New Neo Posted on by

I was in Florence yesterday. I’m only about a half hour south of there, so it was a no-brainer to go, although I knew it would be crowded and very hot.

It was crowded and very very hot. Walking on the sunny side of the street was nearly impossible; shade was an absolute necessity. Replenishing lost water stores almost constantly was required—lots of sweat being shed and evaporated. And the crowds at places like the Uffizi made visiting that ordinarily-must-see sight impossible.

But how could I not go to Florence? I’d only been there once before, for a single day when I was 15 years old, on a teen budget tour where we were herded around but hardly saw a thing that I remembered except a guy on a motorcycle (or motor scooter?) who chased me and a bunch of my girlfriends up a flight of church steps.

So yesterday I walked Florence’s very uneven sidewalks (ouch!) and saw its ancient facades, fabulous Duomo (only from outside, but that was impressive enough), fashionable shops, evocative bridges, scrumptious gelato stores, surrounding hills, and the Bargello, a building whose insides (and especially ceilings) fascinated me as much as its art collection.

My general impression of Florence was of a beautiful city gone to seed and yet not to rack and ruin. There was a whiff (not literal) of decay, and yet the people seemed very vibrant and alive. An amazing and fascinating place.

One of the ceilings in the Bargello:

Manafort verdict: guilty on 8 counts, mistrial on 10

The New Neo Posted on by

The first sentence of this article is telling, isn’t it?:

President Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort on Tuesday was found guilty of eight of the 18 charges brought against him by special counsel Robert Mueller.

It’s really quite simple: if Manafort had not been “Trump’s former campaign manager” he’d be a free man today. That doesn’t mean he’s innocent—I happen to believe he’s guilty of some form of fraud. But it means that he was only prosecuted in hopes that he’d turn on Trump and implicate him, as well as to frighten other people who might want to work for Trump, and to embarrass and annoy Trump.

I’ve been trying to discover whether the verdict yesterday reflects the fact that the jury rejected the testimony of Rick Gates (see this) and convicted Manafort based on other evidence, or whether belief in Gates’ story was a necessary part of the mix. I’m not sure, but apparently the answer is that they didn’t need to believe Gates in order to convict Manafort:

Manafort’s lawyers sought to discredit Gates, revealing he embezzled what they said was millions of dollars from Manafort by falsifying expense reports and had an extramarital affair.

Andres, though, acknowledged to the jury that Gates was an imperfect witness, but challenged them to test his testimony against that of Manafort’s bookkeeper and tax preparer, and pair it with documents for verification.

“The star witness in this case is the documents,” he said.

It probably was exactly that.

It goes without saying—but I’ll say it again anyway—that all of Manafort’s fraud was committed before working for Trump and was completely unrelated to his campaign.

It also is the case that Manafort could be put away for a long, long time. And he faces still another trial connected with his actions, this one in a different venue. But there’s a little catch:

Manafort will likely appeal the verdict, but the case might not even get that far. Even before Manafort’s initial indictment, observers have speculated that President Donald Trump might pardon Manafort…

But pardoning Manafort would be especially controversial given Manafort’s place at the center of investigations into what Trump did or did not know about Russian intelligence’s efforts to influence the 2016 election, and whether Trump himself was involved in those efforts. Pardoning Manafort would look like, and perhaps be, an effort to use presidential power to cover up Trump’s own wrongdoing.

Those optics mean it might make political sense for Trump to hold off on pardons, as Vox’s Andrew Prokop explains here. What’s more, as multiple law professors told my colleague Sean Illing, pardoning Manafort might deprive him of his Fifth Amendment right not to testify when subpoenaed, potentially putting Trump in more legal jeopardy.

The article goes on to add that if the state of NY decides to pursue Manafort in addition, Trump would lack the power to grant him a pardon in any convictions at the state level.

So there are a lot of wildcards there, including what sort of punishment the present convictions end up drawing for Manafort (he faces a possible 80 years in this particular trial). If Manafort’s ultimate sentence is relatively mild, I doubt Trump would go the pardon route. But it all remains to be seen.

Pot use, pot abuse, and legalization

The New Neo Posted on by

Pot’s illegality hasn’t stopped it from being used with great frequency in recent years by a great deal of the American public. So why not legalize it?

Well, one reason might be that it would result in even higher use:

…[A]longside legalization, such problems [self-described cannabis-use disorder] are becoming more common: The share of adults with one has doubled since the early aughts, as the share of cannabis users who consume [pot] daily or near-daily has jumped nearly 50 percent—all “in the context of increasingly permissive cannabis legislation, attitudes, and lower risk perception,” as the National Institutes of Health put it.

Public-health experts worry about the increasingly potent options available, and the striking number of constant users. “Cannabis is potentially a real public-health problem,” said Mark A. R. Kleiman, a professor of public policy at New York University. “It wasn’t obvious to me 25 years ago, when 9 percent of self-reported cannabis users over the last month reported daily or near-daily use. I always was prepared to say, ‘No, it’s not a very abusable drug. Nine percent of anybody will do something stupid.’ But that number is now [something like] 40 percent.” They argue that state and local governments are setting up legal regimes without sufficient public-health protection, with some even warning that the country is replacing one form of reefer madness with another, careening from treating cannabis as if it were as dangerous as heroin to treating it as if it were as benign as kombucha…

“I do think that not legalization, but the legalization movement, does have a lot on its conscience now,” [Kleiman] said. “The mantra about how this is a harmless, natural, and non-addictive substance—it’s now known by everybody. And it’s a lie.”…

“The reckless way that we are legalizing marijuana so far is mind-boggling from a public-health perspective,” Kevin Sabet, an Obama administration official and a founder of the nonprofit Smart Approaches to Marijuana, told me. “The issue now is that we have lobbyists, special interests, and people whose motivation is to make money that are writing all of these laws and taking control of the conversation.”

As a member of the generation of Americans that grew up in the 60s and was probably the first cohort to experience fairly widespread pot use (although the drug was very very different back then in terms of strength), I’m not the least bit surprised at the drug’s capacity for fostering problematic dependence. It’s been clear for decades that it has a lot of potential in that direction, and that although it’s almost certainly less dangerous than alcohol that does not make it benign.

I’m trying to think whether there is another substance that has been banned in America for a long time and has then become legal, and if so what happened after that. I can’t think of one, however. Liquor is not a good example, because it was traditionally legal and its use commonplace, and then it became illegal for a very short time (Prohibition) before it became legal again.

Alcohol is an enormously problematic substance that was already so heavily used by the public at the time of its banning that Prohibition didn’t have a chance. It was an example of a cat that was already out of the bag and could not be put back in. I believe that marijuana use today has been approaching that level, and that previous criminalization has resulted in differential, spotty, and ultimately ineffective prosecution. There may be no putting that particular cat back in the bag, either. But that’s not to say it isn’t a dangerous cat.

I don’t have an solution, unfortunately. But I definitely see a problem.

Here are some proposals:

One extreme option would be to require markets to be noncommercial: The District of Columbia, for instance, does not allow recreational sales, but does allow home cultivation and the gifting of marijuana products among adults. “If I got to pick a policy, that would probably be it,” Kleiman told me. “That would be a fine place to be if we were starting from prohibition, but we are starting from patchwork legalization…

The government could run marijuana stores, as in Canada. States could require budtenders to have some training or to refrain from making medical claims. They could ask users to set a monthly THC purchase cap and remain under it. They could cap the amount of THC in products, and bar producers from making edibles that are attractive to kids, like candies. A ban or limits on marijuana advertising are also options, as is requiring cannabis dispensaries to post public-health information.

Then, there are THC taxes, designed to hit heavy users the hardest.

At this point, the states represent a natural laboratory for the study of various approaches and their effects, because there’s a great deal of variety there. It seems to be the best we can do right now.

Free-climbers [Part I]

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: It might help to have read this previous post of mine, about free-climbing El Capitan, before reading the present post.]

This article is about Dean Potter, a free-climbing star who died in a base-jumping accident in 2015. It was written before the mishap:

Potter doesn’t want to die, he just wants to come as close to the brink as possible. “I’m addicted to the heightened awareness I get when there’s a death consequence,” he says. “My vision is sharper, and I’m more sensitive to sounds, my sense of balance and the beauty all around me. A lot of my creativity comes from this nearly insane obsession. Something sparkles in my mind, and then nothing else in life matters.”

I’ve read quite a few interviews with folks who engage in these sorts of high-risk athletic adventure activities, and they nearly all say something akin to that last sentence.

We regulars can’t quite understand it. But I think that, if you feel that way, it makes a certain amount of sense to keep up the activity despite the risks—as Steph Davis, a free-climber and base-jumper who was married to Potter and divorced in 2006, and lost her second husband to a similar base-jumping accident in 2013, says:

She doesn’t like the water, for example. She says she would never surf and chance drowning or getting eaten by a shark, “because the reward I would get from the experience would be so minimal compared to the potential risks”…

“Base jumping’s not safe. Road biking isn’t safe. Driving cars isn’t safe. Living isn’t safe,” says Davis. “So if the perception of the value or benefit of any activity is based on whether it could be made ultimately safe – that’s sort of a losing battle ’cause we’re all going to die.”

We can all see the risk; it’s obvious. But they plan and train so that they reduce the risk, although it still remains high (Davis was base-jumping with her second husband when he crashed into the cliff and died, so she is well aware of it). What we don’t see are the rewards—and for the people who fall in love with these pursuits the rewards must be phenomenal. Some people take it up, feel a certain high (to coin a phrase), but not enough to overcome the perception of risk and they drop it. Others (me, for example), can’t even conceive of feeling a reward doing this activity and perceive the risks as so enormous as to be suicidal. For us, the decision is very very easy.

In that interview Potter gave in 2008, he also had this to say:

Potter’s plan goes like this: He’ll build strength by climbing tough routes and hone his focus by highlining, BASE-jumping and free-soloing projects that require him to enter a trancelike state. “I’ll be balanced mentally and physically, and hopefully it’ll all funnel together into this superheightened power to fly,” he says. “That’s all I think about.”…

Aerodynamically, of course, self-propelled human flight is a nutty proposition. Potter, like many BASE-jumpers, often wears a one-piece, bat-shape, nylon wing suit that allows him to extend his horizontal glide during a jump. Wing-suiting, or “bird-manning,” is the closest approximation humans have to real flight. But it’s not the sort of soaring Potter has in mind. What he’s picturing is an actual human body—his—taking a running start, achieving liftoff and, well, flying. With nothing but his own two arms as wings. Just like in his dream.

Seriously.

“I know it’s insane to think that I could fly,” Potter says. “But to make it possible, you truly have to believe in it – to go to a place that’s not accepted.”

You could call this crazy. But these people must go to a place where they exercise mental and physical powers that seem almost superhuman, so perhaps there’s an inherent tendency to go one step further and think they have actually, literally, defied the laws of gravity.

[Part II coming soon.]