January 26, 2019 in 3,002 words

to set a mood • • •

The business of kidnapping: inside the secret world of hostage negotiation

_{^{Official policy in the UK and US – unlike in many other countries – is to never make concessions to kidnappers. Those taken sometimes die as a result. Is it time to rethink?}}

In 1982, a British insurance broker named Doug Milne set out in search of new markets. His speciality was kidnapping and ransom insurance, known in the industry as K&R. Milne enrolled in a Spanish-language course in London, and a month later, with rudimentary skills and only one or two solid contacts on the ground, he boarded a flight to Bogotá. On his first day in the Colombian capital, Milne was walking to a meeting with a potential client when, he recalled, “a guy pulled up alongside and this chap who was walking in front of me, his head just exploded”. It was a drive-by assassination.

Milne cancelled the meeting and spent the afternoon in a bar near Bogotá’s entertainment district. “I missed my meeting and I think I left there about 11pm after having drunk a couple of flagons of Tres Esquinas rum,” Milne told me. He was, of course, horrified. But he also realised that he’d come to the right place. While he knew nothing about the victim or the motive, the murder drove home to him the extent to which Colombian society was at the mercy of criminals and guerillas. His clients needed what he had to offer.

Kidnapping and ransom insurance was created in the 1930s, but it wasn’t until the 60s that it began to really catch on, following a spate of kidnappings in Europe by groups such as Eta in Spain, the Red Army Faction in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy. The appeal was simple: in the event of a kidnapping, the insurance would provide reimbursement for ransom payment.

There were caveats to prevent fraud and to ensure that the existence of the policy did not actually increase the risk of kidnapping. The first was that the policy had to be kept secret. In fact, it could be voided if its existence became public. The concern was that if the kidnappers knew of the policy, they would demand more money.

The second principle is that the policy will only reimburse the ransom once it is paid. The insurance company never fronts any money. In order to raise the cash, the victim’s family will probably have to liquidate assets – mortgage the house, sell stocks, pool money from other relatives. This process makes the negotiations credible by dragging them out. This is not just about minimising the payout by the insurance company. Quickly making good on a large ransom raises the expectations of future kidnappers. It can make hostage-taking more lucrative and more common. …

Prepare to spend a while; it’s The Long Read.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution: what it means, how to respond

We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before. We do not yet know just how it will unfold, but one thing is clear: the response to it must be integrated and comprehensive, involving all stakeholders of the global polity, from the public and private sectors to academia and civil society.

The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanize production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production. Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third, the digital revolution that has been occurring since the middle of the last century. It is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.

There are three reasons why today’s transformations represent not merely a prolongation of the Third Industrial Revolution but rather the arrival of a Fourth and distinct one: velocity, scope, and systems impact. The speed of current breakthroughs has no historical precedent. When compared with previous industrial revolutions, the Fourth is evolving at an exponential rather than a linear pace. Moreover, it is disrupting almost every industry in every country. And the breadth and depth of these changes herald the transformation of entire systems of production, management, and governance.

The possibilities of billions of people connected by mobile devices, with unprecedented processing power, storage capacity, and access to knowledge, are unlimited. And these possibilities will be multiplied by emerging technology breakthroughs in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing. …

Ubiquitous, mobile supercomputing. Artificially-intelligent robots. Self-driving cars. Neuro-technological brain enhancements. Genetic editing. The evidence of dramatic change is all around us and it’s happening at exponential speed.

Previous industrial revolutions liberated humankind from animal power, made mass production possible and brought digital capabilities to billions of people. This Fourth Industrial Revolution is, however, fundamentally different. It is characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.

The Weight I Carry

_{What it’s like to be too big in America.}

New Year’s Eve, 2014

I weigh 460 pounds.

Those are the hardest words I’ve ever had to write. Nobody knows that number—not my wife, not my doctor, not my closest friends. It feels like confessing a crime. The average American male weighs about 195 pounds; I’m two of those guys, with a 10-year-old left over. I’m the biggest human being most people who know me have ever met, or ever will.

The government definition of obesity is a body mass index of 30 or more. My BMI is 60.7. My shirts are size XXXXXXL, which the big-and-tall stores shorten to 6X. I’m 6 foot 1, or 73 inches tall. My waist is 60 inches around. I’m nearly a sphere.

Those are the numbers. This is how it feels.

I’m on the subway in New York City, standing in the aisle, clinging to the pole. I live in Charlotte, North Carolina, and don’t visit New York much, so I don’t have a feel for how subway cars move. I’m praying this one doesn’t lurch around a corner or slam to a stop, because I’m terrified of falling. Part of it is embarrassment. When a fat guy falls, it’s hard to get up. But what really scares me is the chance that I might land on somebody. I glance at the people wedged around me. None of them could take my weight. It would be an avalanche. Some of them stare at me, and I figure they’re thinking the same thing. An old woman is sitting three feet away. One slip and I’d crush her. I grip the pole harder.

My palms start to sweat, and all of a sudden I flash back to elementary school in Georgia, standing in the aisle on the school bus. The driver hollers at me to find a seat. He can’t take us home until everybody sits down. I’m the only one standing. Every time I spot an open space, somebody slides to the edge of the seat and covers it up. Nobody wants the fat boy mashed in next to them. I freeze, helpless. The driver glares at me in the rearview mirror. An older kid sitting in front of me—a redhead, freckles, I’ll never forget his face—has a cast on his right arm. He reaches back and starts clubbing me with it, below the waist, out of the driver’s line of sight. He catches me in the groin and it hurts, but not as much as the shame when the other kids laugh and the bus driver gets up and storms toward me—

and the train stops and jolts me back into now. …

5 Beloved Children’s Characters Out Of Your Worst Nightmares

Whether it’s due to a misunderstanding, some bad advice, or deliberate vengeance against children in general, many characters from kids’ shows are objectively horrifying. We’ve covered the problem before, but we only scratched the surface. Here are a few more disturbing creatures from kids’ TV shows that would be better suited to one of the seven circles of Hell.

5. Peppermint Park

Peppermint Park was a direct-to-VHS, direct-from-Hell puppet show released in the late ’80s by Televidics Productions. It was like Sesame Street, if Sesame Street was filmed in your creepy uncle’s basement and starred hallucinations that have turned on you. You can’t say it wasn’t effective; after learning about traffic safety from a pig-faced man in the throes of an existential crisis, kids will be far too terrified to go anywhere near a street.

_{Weird … this isn’t a GIF, but we keep seeing it flicker to the word “Dread.”}

The humans aren’t any less horrifying. Viewers learned more about the physical and emotional properties of the color blue from this miserable old man with a shrunken head than they ever did from Elmo.

_{The background says, “Let me tell you about colors!” His expressions says, “Let me tell you about ‘Nam.”}

Meanwhile, a soul singer illustrates the color red by performing what can only be some kind of Satanic summoning ritual. Look at those eyes. The Dark Lord has clearly taken over.

They’re all overseen by Ernie, an escapee from Tim Burton’s Planet Of The Apes poorly disguised as a man. He has a fondness for the letter M. Like, a deep fondness. We’d swear it was propaganda if we could figure out what for.

_{“So many words begin with ‘M’! Words like ‘maim,’ ‘maul,’ ‘masochism’ … we can learn about them all!”}

For some reason, Peppermint Park was swiftly canceled, and its videos soon fell out of print. But it did enjoy a brief resurgence once YouTube got their hands on it. Here’s what that particular nightmare looked like. …

HOW TO BE AN ETHICAL CONSUMER OF CANNABIS

_{HIGH MINDED}

For many consumers in US states where cannabis is legal, consumption of the plant sits squarely in the realm of luxury. In Los Angeles, for example, there are dispensaries where store associates wielding iPads assist customers in finding just the flower, tincture, topical, or edible to strike their fancies or ease their ailments. High-end shoppers have access to beautifully labelled jars and pre-rolled joints of organically grown buds, Sativa extracts in rose gold-tone vaporizers, and sugar-dusted CBD-enhanced gum-drops in Hermès-worthy boxes.

Many young consumers have come to expect that the companies selling them luxury products, whether artisan-made accessories or fair-trade coffee, have ethical standards that account for the social costs of the good they’re selling. This is one area where the cannabis industry has a great deal of catching up to do—and it’s starting from a troubled place.

For many consumers in US states where cannabis is legal, consumption of the plant sits squarely in the realm of luxury. In Los Angeles, for example, there are dispensaries where store associates wielding iPads assist customers in finding just the flower, tincture, topical, or edible to strike their fancies or ease their ailments. High-end shoppers have access to beautifully labelled jars and pre-rolled joints of organically grown buds, Sativa extracts in rose gold-tone vaporizers, and sugar-dusted CBD-enhanced gum-drops in Hermès-worthy boxes.

Many young consumers have come to expect that the companies selling them luxury products, whether artisan-made accessories or fair-trade coffee, have ethical standards that account for the social costs of the good they’re selling. This is one area where the cannabis industry has a great deal of catching up to do—and it’s starting from a troubled place.

And it was highly effective in doing so. The federal initiative demonized drugs, including marijuana, and those who used them, and has given the US the world’s highest incarceration rate. Between 1980 and 1989, the arrest rate for drug possession and use nearly doubled. And although surveys show that whites use drugs as much or more than blacks in the US, black people were arrested for drug-related offenses at five times the rate of whites in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Not much has changed: In 2018, some 90% of those arrested for smoking cannabis in New York City were either black or Latino. …

In the age of luxury cannabis, it’s time to talk about Drug War reparations

_{HIGHER PURPOSE}

Since California legalized recreational cannabis in January 2018, pot enthusiasts in posh sections of Los Angeles can sleep easily with a few drops of CBD oil under the tongue. They can stroll into dispensaries such as MedMen, the chain touted as the “Apple store of weed,” which recently reported quarterly revenues of $20 million. On Venice Boulevard, shiny sedans toting surfboards drive past posters for Dosist vape pens and billboards for delivery services such as Eaze, a San Francisco-based startup that has raised some $52 million in venture capital.

In places like this, weed is chic. But just a few freeway exits away, in largely black and Latino neighborhoods where cannabis was aggressively policed for decades, people saddled with criminal convictions for possessing or selling the plant still fight to clear criminal records standing in the way of basic necessities: employment, a rental apartment, or a loan. Marijuana legalization and the businesses that profit from it are accelerating faster than efforts to expunge criminal records, and help those affected by them participate in the so-called “Green Boom.” And the legal cannabis industry is in danger of becoming one more chapter in a long American tradition of disenfranchising people of color.

From reading breathless media reports, it’s easy to believe we’re on the brink of a golden age for legal cannabis. Over the past year, investor enthusiasm for cannabis stocks has helped the legal marijuana market outperform Bitcoin and gold; in June, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first drug based on compounds found in marijuana; and a recent Pew Research survey shows that public support of legalization has doubled since 2000. Consumers in Los Angeles, currently the country’s largest market for legal recreational cannabis, can order it as pre-rolled joints, starter plants for home hobbyists, and fruit-flavored ganja gummies—all for delivery to their doorsteps. New York appears poised to legalize it within months.

And yet, the Green Boom is leaving many Americans behind: in particular, those with cannabis convictions on their records. …

Video Goodnesses
_{and not-so-goodnesses}

Roy Wood Jr. goes to Compton, CA, to see how a group of horse enthusiasts helps keep kids from turning to gang violence by channeling their energy into the stables.

_{THANKS to HBO and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.}

You thought Sarah Huckabee Sanders was a lot!

Another White House insider wrote a tell-all book, this one detailing what Donald Trump wanted his robotic likeness to say in the Hall of Presidents.

_{THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.}

Bill recaps the top stories of the week, including Nancy Pelosi’s domination of Donald Trump, Roger Stone’s indictment, and smirking Catholic teenagers.

CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.

Political commentator and “Resistance is Futile” author Ann Coulter joins Bill to discuss how Trump’s base feels about their man.

In his editorial New Rule, Bill responds to Stan Lee fans upset over his recent blog post and says it’s time to put away childish things.

Bill Maher and his guests answer viewer questions after the show.

_{THANKS to HBO and Real Time with Bill Maher for making this program available on YouTube.}

CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.

After Skippy’s crushing defeat of Kangaroo Jack with a bloody beaut sleeper hold (link below), he’s faced with a new, fully dangerous opponent in Captain Kangaroo. Battleground – Street, Aussie Land.

箱とは…？What is the definition of a box?

FINALLY . . .

No One Is Prepared for Hagfish Slime

_{It expands by 10,000 times in a fraction of a second, it’s 100,000 times softer than Jell-O, and it fends off sharks and Priuses alike.}

_{A car is covered in hagfish, and slime, after an accident on Highway 101.}

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

Hagfish produce slime the way humans produce opinions—readily, swiftly, defensively, and prodigiously. They slime when attacked or simply when stressed. On July 14, 2017, a truck full of hagfish overturned on an Oregon highway. The animals were destined for South Korea, where they are eaten as a delicacy, but instead, they were strewn across a stretch of Highway 101, covering the road (and at least one unfortunate car) in slime.

Typically, a hagfish will release less than a teaspoon of gunk from the 100 or so slime glands that line its flanks. And in less than half a second, that little amount will expand by 10,000 times—enough to fill a sizable bucket. Reach in, and every move of your hand will drag the water with it. “It doesn’t feel like much at first, as if a spider has built a web underwater,” says Douglas Fudge of Chapman University. But try to lift your hand out, and it’s as if the bucket’s contents are now attached to you.

The slime looks revolting, but it’s also one of nature’s more wondrous substances, unlike anything else that’s been concocted by either evolution or engineers. Fudge, who has been studying its properties for two decades, says that when people first touch it, they are invariably surprised. “It looks like a bunch of mucus that someone just sneezed out of their nose,” he says. “That’s not at all what it’s like.” …

_{Ed. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not?}