cyrus.mortazavi

Today’s Saga #20 is lovely. A beautiful book full of irresponsible parents, angry children, massacres, dancing and copious drugs taking. What’s not to love?

But in the back, Brian K Vaughan raises a spectre to come…

He tells how his early conversations with Robert Kirkman about the publication of Saga included that if the comic reached issue 25, at the time an impossibility, it should have 25 covers.

And now that time of deciding is upon them. Should they? If so who?

I’m going to go with yes – as long as if one of those twenty-five covers is by Fred Hembeck.

I think that’s something we could all get behind.

Not lying.

Comics courtesy of Orbital Comics, London, launching the lost SMASH! art exhibition in two days time.

Do You Want Saga #25 To Have 25 Covers?

Tanya Tate is an adult film actress from Liverpool who made it big in the USA. But she’s given her career an interesting twist. As well as moving into production, she’s also carved out a geek profile for herself, cosplaying, reviewing comics, films, toys, games and becoming a constant presence at comic cons.

Well, now she is literally carving out a profile for herself.

Seeing a gap in the market for female-specific blank vinyl figures that can be adapted to any superheroine identity.

As long as they fit a certain physical frame, with uncanny gravity defying breasts. Which, let’s face it most of them do. Or can be forced to.

Obviously there’s a lot of metatextuality to hand, treating women as interchangeable individuals with nothing more than skin deep differences to separate them. And all with a mockery of an ideal body shape that reinforces rather than challenges comic industry stereotypes.

But on the other hand, I can think of lots of women, and indeed men, who would really really like these to customise, Wonderbra inclusive or not.

Tanya Tate’s crowdfunding on Indigogo is currently up to $1365 of a $20,000 goal….

Click here to view the embedded video.

Adult Film Actress Launches Plastic Female Doll – But Not The Kind You Might Imagine

It looks like Image Comics has a new hit on their hands. I understand that not only has Outcast #1 by Robert Kirkman and Paul Azaceta sold out of its print run from Diamond Comic Distrubutors (out in stores tomorrow and going to second print for next month) but that its total sales dwarf both new arc jumping on point The Walking Dead #127 and the subsequent bump that gave to the even higher selling The Walking Dead #128.

And it managed that without any variant covers or getting included in a Loot Crate.

Well done, folks!

Outcast #1 Outsells The Walking Dead

I think this is just about everybody. Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam added a Frozen twist to the ending of their popular song Daughter last week at a concert in Madrid, delighting concertgoers and, subsequently, the internet.

This might just be my favorite version of Let It Go ever. If only we could get these guys into a studio to record it for real.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Pearl Jam Covers Let It Go From Frozen

The trades are differing in their opinions on quite what Rian Johnson will be doing for the new Star Wars trilogy but The Wrap‘s version is apparently the accurate one. He’ll write and direct Episode VIII and write the treatment for Episode IX.

What relationship JJ Abrams and Bad Robot will maintain with the series remains to be seen, and we certainly don’t know if Johnson will be working to anything like the old Lucas plan, the one that predates the Lucasfilm sale to Disney.

By writing the treatment of Episode IX, Johnson will get to decide how this whole shooting match pays off.

If you haven’t seen Johnson’s films Looper, The Brothers Bloom and particularly Brick, consider this yet another good reason to catch up.

Johnson just tweeted this video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Rian Johnson To Write And Direct Star Wars Episode VIII, Write Treatment For Episode IX

A lot of the movies Oliver Queen uses in the series Arrow are based on parkour or freerunning. Stephen Amell trains at Tempest Freerunning to get ready for the rigors of the stunts. I think the parkour is what makes the show seem so fast paced and brutal at times. It’s the same type of movements used in the opening scene of Casino Royale that set the tone for the whole relaunch of James Bond.

Tempest Freerunning is offering a discount at their South Bay location for anyone mentioning Amell.

Here are a few of his work out videos:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Stephen Amell Back In Training For Arrow Season 3

That’s Philip Jenkins’ claim in an essay explaining how the radical Islam we know today was a consequence of World War I:

When the war started, the Ottoman Empire was the only remaining Islamic nation that could even loosely claim Great Power status. Its rulers knew, however, that Russia and other European states planned to conquer and partition it. Seizing at a last desperate hope, the Ottomans allied with Germany. When they lost the war in 1918, the Empire dissolved. Crucially, in 1924, the new Turkey abolished the office of the Caliphate, which at that point dated back almost 1,300 years. That marked a trauma that the Islamic world is still fighting to come to terms with.

How could Islam survive without an explicit, material symbol at its heart?

The mere threat of abolition galvanized a previously quiet Islamic population in what was then British India. Previously, Muslims had been content to accept a drift to independence under Gandhi’s Hindu-dominated Congress party. Now, though, the Khilafat (Caliphate) movement demanded Muslim rights, and calls for a Muslim nation were not far off. That agitation was the origin of the schism that led to India’s bloody partition in 1947, and the birth of Pakistan.

How to live without a Caliph? Later Muslim movements sought various ways of living in such a puzzling and barren world, and the solutions they found were very diverse: neo-orthodoxy and neo-fundamentalism, liberal modernization and nationalism, charismatic leadership and millenarianism. All modern Islamist movements stem from these debates, and following intense activism, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood was formed in 1928.

(Image: Ottoman forces preparation for an attack on the Suez Canal in 1914, via Wikimedia Commons)

They could be coming:

Oil can be extracted from coffee grounds by soaking them in an organic solvent, before being chemically transformed into biodiesel via a process called “transesterification”.

The study, recently published in the ACS Journal Energy & Fuels, looked at how the fuel properties varied depending on the type of coffee used. As part of the study, the researchers made biofuel from ground coffee produced in 20 different geographic regions, including caffeinated and decaffeinated forms, as well as Robusta and Arabica varieties.

Dr Chris Chuck, Whorrod Research Fellow from our Department of Chemical Engineering, explained: “Around 8 million tonnes of coffee are produced globally each year and ground waste coffee contains up to 20 per cent oil per unit weight. This oil also has similar properties to current feedstocks used to make biofuels. But, while those are cultivated specifically to produce fuel, spent coffee grounds are waste. Using these, there’s a real potential to produce a truly sustainable second-generation biofuel.”

The movie news cycle is broken, especially in respect of big studio tentpoles, comic book adaptations and other eagerly anticipated genre movies. We see the same pattern repeated all too often.

Somebody will report involvement of a certain actor with a certain role. That actor will then get asked about that role and they’ll say how flattered they are for the association. This will get reported as a “Not so soon!” story. Then that actor will then get asked about that role and they’ll say how flattered they are for the association. This will get reported as a “Not so soon!” story. Then that actor will then get asked about that role and they’ll say how flattered they are for the association. This will get reported as a “Not so soon!” story…

Then my head will start to leak.

In the case of Jason Momoa, he absolutely put his foot down and said that he was sick of being asked about playing Aquaman in Warner Bros. upcoming Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League. Momoa wanted to make it very clear that he would not be in the film.

His comments launched three hundred blog posts. Was it the end of the story? Of course not, though admittedly because he seems to have been lying.

Now HitFix, who won’t be doing this casually, say that Momoa does indeed have the role. Unless Momoa really does bail or get sacked, this report should end it. It probably won’t.

More interesting, however, isn’t that Momoa is in, it’s how the character has been conceived. From Drew’s story:

Someone else who’s not particularly happy about what happened in that film [Man of Steel] is Aquaman. I’m not sure if that’s the actual name they’ll use or not, but what we’re hearing is that he is not pleased about the World Engine and what it did to the Indian Ocean. He will not have a major role in the film, but he will make an appearance, and it definitely sets him up to return.

There. Pretty much as expected.

Maybe that just squeezed the surprise out of a little cameo. It was worth it just to silence the spinning wheel, I think.

What Jason Momoa Will Be Mad About When He Shows Up As Aquaman In The DC Movieverse

Chuck Dixon is a prominent conservative comic book writer. Paul Rivoche is a comic book artist. Together, they fight liberals.

They wrote a joint article published in the Wall Street Journal taking comics, specifically superhero comics to task for being too liberal, taking the 2011 issue of Superman where he rejected his US citizenship as proof of this.

That issue, published in April 2011, is perhaps the most dramatic example of modern comics’ descent into political correctness, moral ambiguity and leftist ideology.

And they expressed fear that such expression would not be in the interests of young comic book readers. Running through the history of superheroes in the US, they saw the nineties as when it all changed.

The 1990s brought a change. The industry weakened and eventually threw out the CCA, and editors began to resist hiring conservative artists. One of us, Chuck, expressed the opinion that a frank story line about AIDS was not right for comics marketed to children. His editors rejected the idea and asked him to apologize to colleagues for even expressing it. Soon enough, Chuck got less work.

The superheroes also changed. Batman became dark and ambiguous, a kind of brooding monster. Superman became less patriotic, culminating in his decision to renounce his citizenship so he wouldn’t be seen as an extension of U.S. foreign policy. A new code, less explicit but far stronger, replaced the old: a code of political correctness and moral ambiguity. If you disagreed with mostly left-leaning editors, you stayed silent.

Well… Frank Miller got work. If he wanted it. A famously conservative comic book creator, with the release of the trailer for Sin City 2, he took to Reddit to talk about comics and film. When asked,

What is one superhero or villain you have always wanted to write for but have never had the chance?

He replied,

Oooh. That’s a tough one. It changes a lot. Sometimes I love minor characters like the Flash or The Atom, he’s a hero who gets small, atomic sized, if he wants to. They’ve all funky powers that serve them well, same way they all run around in their underwear. They’ve done all the ones I like the best. I love what they’ve done with Iron Man, I love what they’ve done with Captain America. Captain America would probably be the one I would most want to do.

And when asked again,

Which legendary comic hero would you like to do a story for?

He stated,

Again, I get back to Captain America, because I find him such a wonderful anachronism. And also, I feel that he features virtues that my country has either lost or misplaced for a very long time. Especially at a time when the country is so clearly threatened, a hero like that is outstanding. I remember telling people at Marvel, just a few days after 9/11, that I hoped they realized what they had there, because Captain America’s reaction to 9/11 would have been pretty direct.

Would Marvel let Frank do a Cap story now? He’s expressed an interest, it should certainly be possible if a deal could be arranged. Mind you, his most recent Batman book, Holy Terror, was deemed too much for DC Comics and was published elsewhere, with the ears taken off.

For me, the superhero is an inherently conservative concept, even if born from the left wing ideology that informed  early Superman. The best selling comic, Batman, is about a successful businessman who takes personal responsibility for the state of his city and considers it his personal duty to take down the criminals who are destroying it.

An individual possessing extraordinary abilities who takes personal duty and responsibility to make the world a better place rather than relying on a government to do so, strikes me as a conservative fantasy, whatever twists and turns a left-leaning creator might add.

And to a varying extent that concept of personal responsibilty extends across the genre. With great power, comes great conservative idealism.

Only when the essence of that is criticised, such as in the work of Alan Moore or Warren Ellis, does it become something else.

But most superhero comic books are telling fantasy conservative stories to those who enjoy them – even if they don’t realise that’s what they are. But creators fall in and out of fashion. While Dixon complains that getting less work was down to being conservative, Alan Grant doesn’t complain that he doesn’t get work because he’s a bit of a lefty. But fashions change, editors like to chase the fashionable, leaving many adrift.

And that’s a far greater crime.

Frank Miller Would Like Another Stab At Captain America. Would Marvel Let Him?

Here’s a much better look at Sin City: A Dame to Kill For in the full length trailer released today. It looks like Jessica Alba may actually get to do more than just gyrate on a stage in a bikini top this time!

Of course, Eva Green looks poised to steal the show, both since she’s the titular Dame this time around and because she’s kinda been having that kind of year where her every performance (from 300 to Penny Dreadful) is stunning people. This certainly looks like it could be another.

Click here to view the embedded video.

New Trailer For Sin City: A Dame To Kill For

A reader quotes a previous one:

You want to get serious about preventing rape? Single-sex dorms, no visitors after ten, doors ajar when there are visitors, room checks by RAs, consumption of alcohol banned, sexual contact beyond first base punished by warning, then formal reprimand, then suspension, then expulsion. Yeah, college will be less fun. But you’ll learn more, and there’s no chance that progressive, sensitive, feminist men will ever rape you in your dorm room.

Rarely has your otherwise insightful, eloquent and attractive readership been so completely full of shit. Have you just not been following the sexual abuse scandals at Pensacola Christian College? Or Bob Jones? Patrick Henry College? And others.

I went to a school like that:

single-sex dorms, no opposite-sex visitors except on specially designated Saturday afternoons (about three a semester, if memory serves), doors ajar during any such visit, no alcohol on campus, no DANCING on campus, PDA reprimanded, and excessive violations expelled.

(On a side note, the expulsion?  Only applied to girls.  Of course the poor kids coming to my college came from crazy-ass Red State “good Christian families” and had no idea about contraception, so of course pregnancy was a problem, and pregnancy would get you expelled.  This was an abortion incentive, plain and simple.)

But buddy you better believe we had a rape problem, and the expulsion policy that your reader touts was a powerful weapon in the hands of an administration determined to cover it up. If you admit to being assaulted, you get expelled for having sex. That is the ONLY reason we hear of fewer rapes from colleges with this sort of policy – because they’re covered up.

This regressive horseshit does nothing more than to promulgate the notion of sexuality as bad, dirty and something to be hushed up and swept out of sight – in other words, rape culture – and these notions of purity always always ALWAYS play right into the hands of straight-up, old-school misogyny, whereby women are a property belonging to men, either their fathers or their future husbands.  Shockingly, men who are trained to view women in this way are much more likely to rape.

Koplow insists that Turkey’s best course of action right now is to support an independent state for the Kurds in northern Iraq:

The best way to neutralize ISIS as a threat is to strengthen the KRG, whose peshmerga already took Kirkuk in response to the ISIS takeover of Mosul, and can keep the conflict with ISIS in Iraq rather than having it cross the border into southeastern Turkey. In the past, even considering supporting the KRG as an independent state was not an option, but the circumstances have changed now that it is clear just how weak and ineffectual the Maliki government is. Ankara should be getting in front of this issue, recognizing that even if the Maliki government survives it will be only through the intervention and support of outside powers such as the U.S. and Iran (which is not a phrase I ever envisioned writing) and that the consequences of angering the Maliki government pales in comparison to the consequences of an actual radical jihadi state bordering Turkey.

Furthermore, if Turkey still subscribes to the theory that strengthening Barzani and the KRG sends the message to Turkish Kurds that Kurdistan already exists without them and thus they need to drop any hopes of separation or independence for themselves, then now is the time to test out whether this theory is actually correct.

Throwing our weight behind the Kurds is also on Adam Garfinkle’s list of policy recommendations for the US:

Above all, we should further tighten relations with the Kurds in what used to be northern Iraq but is now an independent state in everything but name.

We probably should try to get on the same sheet of music with the Kurds, offering support but counseling prudence—in other words, collecting some leverage so we can influence the behavior of Barzani et al. in future. Personally, I’m fine with the Kurds in Kirkuk, so long as they occupy and eventually stabilize the city with genuine justice for all of the city’s communities.

By the same token, we should begin private and earnest, if inevitably complex and difficult, talks with the Turks to discuss what conditions, if any, could lead to a mutual and simultaneous recognition of Kurdish independence from Washington and Ankara.

Mohammed A. Salih spells out why the Kurdish Peshmerga are Iraq’s best hope for defeating ISIS:

There are over 100,000 Peshmerga fighters, according to Halgurd Hikmat, a senior official at the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG)’s Ministry of Peshmerga. They are either veterans of the Kurdish struggle against Saddam’s regime or new recruits who have to go through an intensive training that lasts around 50 days. While they are officially under the command of Iraqi Kurdistan’s president, Masoud Barzani, in practice they answer to leaders aligned with the competing Kurdish political factions, the Barzani-led Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, led by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. But when it comes to protecting Kurdish territory, those divisions are meaningless. Nearly 40,000 of the Peshmerga forces divided into 16 battalions are united under the KRG’s Peshmerga Ministry. The rest have yet to be unified.  All Peshmerga are now mobilized in the fight against ISIS.

Update from a reader:

I’m an American doctor who has visited Iraqi Kurdistan several times since 2006. One of our projects was the first medical paper looking at the long-term psychological impact of the chemical weapons attacks launched by the Iraqi government on Kurdish civilians in Halabja. The argument we are having in America about who “lost” Iraq completely misses the point, because in truth there never has been one Iraq to lose. The American elite’s obsession with a multiethnic Iraq is something that’s not shared by any of the people who actually live in that country.

For Kurds the whole concept is ridiculous. They survived an attempted genocide at the hand of Sunni Arabs just 25 years ago. For the past decade they have cooperated with the American unity policy in Iraq, only to become targets of Al Qaeda inspired bombings, kidnappings, and ritual beheadings. Now they find themselves in the surreal position of having to protect thousands of these same good neighbors from their own home grown terrorist movement. If you were a Kurd, what would you think of a State Department hack telling you that you lack sufficient commitment to Iraq’s unity?

Kurds are right to reject any self-serving advise coming from the American government to cooperate with Maliki. A more creative American policy would acknowledge the reality of what the Kurds have built, which is a prosperous and peaceful nation state in the mountains of Northern Iraq. It’s a nation whose soldiers and diplomats worked amicably alongside Americans through all the darkest episodes of the Iraq wars. It’s a nation where not a single American soldier died during ten years of bloody military involvement in Iraq.

An ally that we don’t have to constantly sustain with billions of dollars of bribes would be a refreshing turn in our Middle East policy. We should embrace that opportunity.

Previous Dish on the Kurds here and here, and on Turkey’s Iraq policy here.

(Photo: Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga fighters stand to attention in the grounds of their camp in Arbil, the capital of the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq on June 14, 2014. By Safin Hamed/AFP/Getty Images)

Back in March, about three months before the release of Mastodon’s latest album, Once More ’Round the Sun, I spoke on the phone for 20 minutes with the band’s drummer, Brann Dailor. In the traditional rock-band hierarchy, the drummer is typically the fourth, fifth, or sixth member (depending on whether your band is a quartet, quintet, or Arcade Fire) to do interviews. If the drummer talks to the media at all, it’s usually with local newspapers in secondary markets where tickets aren’t selling well. The reason for this is obvious: Unless you’re Don Henley, Neil Peart, Phil Collins, or the guy who sang “Sister Christian” in Night Ranger, the drummer is not considered the star or focal point of a rock group.

This is not true for Mastodon — Dailor is arguably the most recognizable person in the world’s greatest (though only semipopular) metal band.⁴⁰ Dailor certainly stands out the most, due to his physical appearance (he’s the only member who doesn’t look like an actual mastodon) and instrumental prowess (he is currently rock’s most kinetic timekeeper). Dailor also occasionally sings and frequently contributes lyrics. But he and I didn’t talk about any of that. We instead talked about nothing for approximately 1,200 seconds.

It wasn’t anybody’s fault — we were discussing an album that I hadn’t heard yet and that Dailor didn’t want to parse so far out from the release date. Circumstances dictated that our conversation would be light on substance and heavy on clichés. (It was akin to an NFL writer talking to a running back in June about Week 1.) For instance, Dailor described the LP as “good” and “heavy” and “fast” and “rocking,” and promised that “it’s going to be an awesome thing for any Mastodon fan or any fan of heavy and interesting rock music to put on in the summertime and rock out to.” At the time, this sounded enticing but vague; now that I’ve played Once More ’Round the Sun repeatedly for the past few weeks, it’s still vague, but also accurate.

When I pressed Dailor for specifics, he demurred. He had suggested in previous interviews that Sun was inspired by a series of traumatic events that occurred recently in band members’ personal lives. When I asked if he could elaborate on that, Dailor replied flatly: “No. It’s really personal stuff. But it’s in the pudding, baby.” (Thankfully, the late addition of “baby” to this sentence made it suitably quotable.) Eventually, we changed the subject to our mutual affection for mid-’70s Stevie Wonder.⁴¹

I suspect there was another reason for Dailor’s reticence: He didn’t really need a person like me to promote his album. Mastodon has a loyal audience that will buy whatever the band puts out regardless of what music critics write. Also, because Mastodon is broadly defined as a metal band, it has little incentive to even attempt to reach nonmetal fans. This is how metal works now. No “pop” genre is more segregated from actual pop music. This separation, of course, is not entirely new; in her landmark 1991 book Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology, DePaul University professor Deena Weinstein refers to the metal audience as “proud pariahs,” which sounds like a Saxon album title from the early ’80s. This provincialism is primarily a reaction to a historically hostile music press, which in spite of recent strides continues to largely ignore metal as a topic worthy of serious discussion.

What’s different now in metal aren’t so much the flag-wavers at the core but the more approachable outliers — those “pop-metal” bands no longer appear to exist. Not that long ago, pop-friendly metal and hard rock ranked among the most popular music in the world. Up until the early ’00s, you could find ginormously successful examples of this music in the upper reaches of the pop charts going back more than 30 years, starting with the genre’s acknowledged originators, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. No matter how metal and hard rock changed over the years, there was always a version for the pop market. It could have been arena rock (AC/DC’s Back in Black), the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (Def Leppard’s Pyromania), L.A. glam (Quiet Riot’s Metal Health), post-NWOBHM (Def Leppard’s Hysteria), post–L.A. glam (Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction), thrash (Metallica’s … And Justice for All), post-thrash (Metallica’s “Black Album”), grunge (Soundgarden’s Superunknown), rap-rock (Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory), or post-grunge (Creed’s Human Clay). Some of these albums are masterpieces, and some are the opposite of masterpieces. But no matter the style of metal, they sold millions and millions of copies.

Now, hardly anything sells “millions and millions of copies” these days. But metal has been particularly averse to mass acceptance in the past decade. Pop-metal as a concept⁴² has been rendered virtually extinct. What happened?

Calling Mastodon the “world’s greatest metal band” doesn’t go far enough. Mastodon belongs on the short list of the very best American bands of any genre from the last 10 years. Over the course of six records, Mastodon has somehow managed to steadily grow its audience without getting any less weird. Mastodon’s most beloved LP (2004’s Leviathan) is a punk- and prog-fueled song cycle based on Moby-Dick that reimagines Slayer worshiping Genesis’s The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway instead of Satan. Ten years later, Mastodon is now signed to Warner Bros., which has positioned Once More ’Round the Sun as a Queens of the Stone Age LP cut with cheap trucker speed and paperback science fiction. In the context of the band’s discography, it’s a relatively “normal” record. But Mastodon’s singularity remains intact. The band’s 2002 debut, Remission, has grittier guitars and screamier vocals, but otherwise it’s not all that different from Sun. The latter might be more refined than the former, but not to the degree that the former would be embarrassed to ask the latter to shotgun a beer.

Mastodon still has never recorded a power ballad (unless you count the song on the last record about fucking on a spaceship). Mastodon did, however, write an album (2009’s Crack the Skye) about a paraplegic whose spirit leaves his body in order to explore intergalactic wormholes. Compared with that, Sun is a just straightforward rock record. Mastodon has by now more or less codified its method of attack. Each song will have a guttural guitar sound and a sparkly guitar sound playing off the growly bottom. Whichever time signature the song starts with will probably not be the time signature it ends with five to seven minutes later. The vocals are intense in a proactive sense; whoever is singing (whether it’s Dailor, guitarist Brent Hinds, or bassist Troy Sanders) sounds like a person perpetrating an ax-assisted slaughter, rather than a person running away from an ax-assisted slaughter.

If you like this kind of music, you probably own at least a few of Mastodon’s records by now. At a time when “riffs” have become a rare currency for rock bands — just try to find a memorable one on any self-described rock record released in the past 12 months — Mastodon is notable for stockpiling them like Krugerrands. But for those who don’t care about metal bands, Sun will be swiftly brushed aside into a marginalized ghetto.

It’s not even that Sun is abrasive or inscrutable; in fact, it’s probably the catchiest record Mastodon has ever made. My two favorite songs, “The Motherload” and “High Road,” streamline the band’s monstrous aggressiveness into sunny packages that deliver reliably shout-along choruses. But unlike the pop-metal blockbusters of the past, there’s no single track or marketing hook that’s going to sell Sun to the masses. In sound and form, Sun is essentially a Rush record, a collection of considerable but ultimately esoteric delights destined to be appreciated by a niche audience.⁴³ It’s like Moving Pictures without “Tom Sawyer.”

To better illustrate the historical downturn of pop-metal blockbusters, it’s helpful to compare the arc of Mastodon’s career to that of Metallica. Like Metallica, Mastodon established itself on its first three albums as the most respected underground metal group of its time. Like Metallica’s fourth album, 1988’s … And Justice for All, Mastodon’s fourth LP, Crack the Skye, was the band’s first to appear in the Billboard top 10. Where the comparison breaks down is record no. 5 — for Mastodon it was 2011’s tremendously fun The Hunter, which was an ideal gateway into Mastodon’s discography for antisocial Foo Fighters fans. For Metallica it was 1991’s “Black Album,” which was a gateway for basically everybody. The “Black Album” had “hard” songs, it had “pretty” songs, it had a song that quoted the score from West Side Story, it had a song that Kid Rock later sampled, it had (from a commercial standpoint) anything you could possibly want from a rock record. Incredibly, the “Black Album” even made (some) women care about Metallica, which therefore convinced guys who wanted to meet (some) women that seeing Metallica in concert was a good idea. For all these reasons, the “Black Album” went on to become the best-selling album of the SoundScan era, and it’s still selling, crossing the 16 million mark just last month.

Of course, it would be ridiculous to expect that Mastodon or any band could do what Metallica did with the “Black Album.” But the point remains: Even as the record industry has imploded and popular taste has splintered, there have still been recognizable superstars coming out of hip-hop, R&B, country, dance, folk, and mainstream rock. But the best metal bands — even relatively palatable ones like Mastodon — don’t attempt to go broad anymore. Metal instead has grown inward, spawning subgenre upon subgenre. It would rather cultivate eccentricity than new audiences. Now the closest thing to a consensus favorite in the scene is Behemoth’s The Satanist, one of the most acclaimed metal releases of 2014, a blackened blast of curdled noise that’s pretty glorious in places but will otherwise never make arenas full of foxy, jean-jacketed females swoon.

Consider another parallel between Mastodon and Metallica that’s somewhat simplistic but telling nonetheless: In a patronizing 1991 profile of Metallica, Spin predicted that the “Black Album” would “make it safe to like Metallica,” in part because the all-black cover shunned “goofy heavy metal cartoonery.” Here is the (awesome) cover for Once More ’Round the Sun.

I don’t think any of this is bad, necessarily. I argued last year that metal is in the midst of an extended golden age, with scores of bands kicking at the boundaries of rock by upending conventional song structures, experimenting with dynamics that veer between ethereal beauty and hellish brutality, and generally producing some of the most mind-blowing records of recent years. But I remain a stubborn supporter of aggressive music that’s also melodic, chorus-centric, and, above all else, proudly extroverted. In the past, hard rock has been the happy medium between metal and pop, and if you pay close attention, there are still plenty of bands (ranging from the epic brilliance of Baroness and Kylesa to the goofy outrageousness of Ghost B.C. and Steel Panther) making that kind of music. But it’s something you have to know to look for. It’s not going to just barge into your life and recalibrate your senses the way popular music can. This is the one thing metal is missing right now.

Metal’s isolationism is understandable given how shabbily it is still treated in most sectors of the entertainment press. Even among supposedly open-minded music writers who claim to abhor snobbery in a “post-taste” critical climate, metal still provokes ignorant judgments. Just last year, “dean of American rock critics” Robert Christgau called metal fans “jerks” and “rage heads.” It’s hard to imagine a scenario where classifying fans of any other genre in this way would be acceptable.⁴⁴

“Metal fans are very territorial, which I think is only natural when you’ve been historically ostracized from mainstream culture,” Albert Mudrian, editor-in-chief of the excellent monthly metal magazine Decibel, told me over email last week. “It’s, like, we’re part of a group that’s been told all of our lives that we can’t hang out with the cool kids.” Decibel has long been a gathering place for this ostracized demographic; it’s the rare publication in which the death of Gwar’s Dave Brockie merits a cover story rather than a brief, bemused obituary. But even Mudrian is eager to see a “bridge” band capable of producing an album in the vein of the pop-metal blockbusters of old.

“That last metal band I can remember that seemed to make any mainstream impact was System of a Down, and most of the underground metal community that I consider myself part of saw them as nu-metal joke,” Mudrian said. “The real problem might be that everything is compartmentalized these days; you’ve got the classic metal/rock of Metallica or AC/DC, the big, dumb, weenie roast rock of stuff like Alter Bridge and Five Finger Death Punch, and then virtually everything else falls into some kind of general ‘underground’ category, whether that’s Lamb Of God or Prostitute Disfigurement. And there is no bridge band that anyone can agree on to link those so-called underground bands with anything in the big, dumb, weenie roast genre. I feel like you’ve gotta make headway there before you join the Metallica or AC/DC echelon.”

Mastodon could still become that kind of band — Once More ’Round the Sun certainly seems like the rare record that fans of Alter Bridge and Prostitute Disfigurement might be able to agree on. But that’s still just talking about the metal/hard-rock tent. What about everybody else?

I asked Dailor about this, too. “Does Mastodon ever think about how popular it wants to be?” I inquired. “No,” was Dailor’s characteristically terse reply. He added that Mastodon’s ultimate career goal is to be a festival headliner, so that it can afford a “bigger, better” stage set.

“Something like that would be cool,” he said. “With Crack the Skye, we did a whole movie thing and that was really fun. We’d like to do more of that kind of stuff. I think it’s coming. I think we’re almost there, after 15 years. Well, who knows? Maybe we’re on the downturn. Only time will tell.”

Visions of an ambitious live show couched in modest career expectations — how metal.

The coming NBA summer may not bring as much upheaval as the famous summer of 2010, when Dwyane Wade recruited LeBron James and Chris Bosh to a Miami team that has made every Finals since. There may not be any single move that engulfs the league like The Decision, the voided Chris Paul trade, Melo’s drama, and the extended low-rumble fart that was the Dwightmare.

But every summer reshapes rosters and discussions about how the league should work. The next few weeks could mark a flashbulb moment in the latter regard, reigniting old debates, taking them in new directions, and sparking new discussions.

The questions will start in Miami, where three of the league’s starriest names, including the world’s best player, have choices to make. The early signals point to a triple return, and Bosh has been open to taking a discount to keep the gang together. Wade has swatted away talk that he might do the same, at least opening the door for some team hell-bent on instant improvement to toss a monster offer at him. LeBron has kept mum, and ESPN.com’s Brian Windhorst has hinted at the possibility of James taking considerably less money to construct a title contender somewhere.

That has raised the specter of Carmelo Anthony taking a pay cut to leave New York and make it a Big Four in Miami. The mere mention of that possibility, coupled with Kevin Love’s inevitable (and fairly ugly) departure from small-market Minnesota, have already reinvigorated long-held concerns about the NBA’s brass ring of competitive balance. At the center of it all lies a question: Can the NBA chase the dream of an even more robust free-agency market — more “player sharing,” as the league likes to say — while still helping teams, and especially small-market teams, keep their own stars?

Let’s set aside for now the question of whether the James-Wade-Bosh-Melo Big Four in Miami would be a smart basketball idea,⁴⁰ and the fact that this NBA Voltron would require the unprecedented step of four superstars in or near their primes taking giant pay cuts — including James and Anthony sacrificing perhaps as much as $10 million per year in salary.⁴¹

The formation of a new Miami super-team would be another signal that players are making the league their own. They are hatching plans, conceiving rosters, and kicking around salary structures outside of formal contract talks. And in joining rival cliques, they would be tilting the balance of power toward a few juggernauts at the expense of everyone else.

Fans have an ambiguous relationship with players controlling the situation. The summer of 2010 prompted an outcry in some corners that the players had rigged the game. Fans had no problem when tinkerers atop the Lakers and Celtics “built” the super-teams of the 1980s, but they raised hell when players did the same thing themselves. That is a weird incongruity.

On the flip side, fans appear to hate super-teams until the moment there are none. We recall the late 1970s, when the championship toggled among unremarkable clubs, as the league’s coke-infested nadir. There is an almost pathological determination to point out that today’s teams couldn’t possibly compete with Bird’s Celtics and Magic’s Lakers. There is overlap in the Venn diagrams displaying fans who deride today’s super-teams and fans who think the NBA reached its glorious height with the powerhouses of the 1980s.

At the intersection of all this chatter lies the magic-bullet solution to competitive balance, tanking, and the conspiratorial construction of the All-Star colossus: scrapping the ceiling on individual player salaries. Lots of smart thinkers both inside and outside the league have pitched this as a catch-all fix.

The theoretical Big Four, and perhaps the Big Three before them, wouldn’t be able to team up if rival suitors could toss $40 million per season at LeBron. That is closer to LeBron’s true value, and what he would “deserve” if the NBA functioned as a free-market economy. In that perspective, the league’s dozen best players are effectively subsidizing the much larger middle class. The salary ceiling keeps the majority of the players’ union members happy, and it might help general managers build deeper rosters. But it also places an artificial restraint on a player’s earning capacity and leads general managers to inevitably overpay mid-tier veterans.

Teams angling to sign a superstar at an unlimited salary wouldn’t tank, because no superstar in his prime is going to a roster designed to lose games. If there are a dozen players truly worth the max, it seems obvious the league would generate more parity by placing those players on a dozen different teams.

Removing salary limits is an appealing idea, and it would probably inject a bit more balance into the league. Players would have to make a real choice based on wildly divergent salary amounts, roster strength, and other variables. Capping max salaries today works to (almost) equalize what everyone can offer, and that allows players to choose teams based on other variables: market size, the appeal of a team’s city, tax laws, and the presence of another superstar. A certain subset of teams will always lose out in that choice.

But uncapping individual salaries is a complicated concept with ripple effects and unintended consequences, and it touches on every other part of the NBA system. You can’t move one branch of the tree — the player salary structure — without anticipating how it will shift every other branch.

For starters, just about everyone agrees that the league would have to introduce either a hard team salary cap or an ultra-punitive luxury tax at the same time it lifts the limit on individual player salaries. A hard team cap means a lockout. Ready to go through that again?

The goal is to push player sharing by splitting up the superstars among the largest possible number of teams. A soft cap like the one we have now defeats that purpose. If a team somehow builds a roster of stars and can go over the cap to re-sign them when they hit free agency, there is no enhanced player sharing. If a big-city team willing to pay the luxury tax just keeps trading for expensive borderline All-Stars, staying over the soft cap the whole time, there is no enhanced player sharing.⁴²

And that’s another ripple effect, one that worries a lot of executives around the league: An unlimited maximum salary wouldn’t just lift up the league’s dozen best players. It would have a similar gravitational effect on the second tier, players 20 through 40. A lot of those guys already get their current version of the max, and smaller-market teams have to overpay in free agency to sign them — the little-guy tax. How much would Charlotte have offered Al Jefferson if there were no individual salary limits and the league’s very best guys were earning $30 million? How crippling would Eric Gordon’s contract be?

Everyone assumes the union would oppose a move to an unlimited player max, since it would pummel the middle-class veterans who swell its ranks. But an unlimited max could be a boon for other segments of its membership below the very top guys, and the union has yet to take a position on the matter. “The concept has not been considered in detail by the players at this point,” says Ron Klempner, the union’s acting executive director.

Still, one mistake at this level could destroy a team for years. A Brandon Roy injury situation would be a death knell. Maybe that is how it should be. Introducing more risk in the form of salary variance puts even more of a premium on smart management. The max salary protects teams from themselves — you can only do so much self-inflicted damage in overspending on a blah talent. Maybe the league should reward teams who time their moves just right and pick the appropriate players, and punish those who choose poorly.

Some thinkers argue that the current system doesn’t really protect teams from themselves anyway. In a world with a limited max salary, every guy working as the best player on his team thinks he deserves it. “The max salary has hurt owners more than players,” says David Falk, once the power agent to Michael Jordan and Patrick Ewing, and an adviser who has the ear of some in the players’ union during every CBA negotiation. “Once you limit the max, everybody wants it.”

Blowing up the max salary would bring some uncomfortable changes in team-building. Take the Thunder. They were smart enough to draft four star players over a three-year span. They already traded one of them, James Harden, to duck the luxury tax. Imagine how they’d have to prep for Kevin Durant’s free agency in a world with no limit on maximum salaries and a hard team cap.

Other teams would clear the decks for Durant, and the Thunder might have to hoard as much as $40 million in space to keep him. Remember, they’d have no Bird rights in this scenario, since there is no going over the cap.

Maybe they’d just lose him outright to the highest bidder. Maybe they’d have to trade one of Serge Ibaka and Russell Westbrook to have the cash reserves for Durant. That’s the point, of course — to split up the stars. But not every team acquires its stars the same way. An unlimited max salary might derail a team like the Thunder before it gets rolling.⁴³

The Heat are the bogeymen in all of this, but think about the team that just whitewashed them in the Finals. All three of Tony Parker, Tim Duncan, and Manu Ginobili, all Hall of Famers, took less money than they might have received over multiple contracts to hang together and chase rings. Would the league really be better off had Parker bolted for, say, the Knicks at $25 million per season had he hit free agency in 2011?

Again: Fans despise super-teams until they vanish. This theoretical world might be one in which teams surround one star player with minimum-salaried flotsam. I’m not sure that’s a world fans want.

It would also shift more control of the league to players and agents, or at least create that perception. Choice is power, and in this scenario, superstars could choose among a much wider range of salaries. Players who leave a good situation to chase the maximum possible payday could face a level of backlash that just doesn’t exist today, since the maximum payday can only be so much. Adam Silver cares deeply about the perception of the league and its players. In this scenario, that could take a hit.

Then again, maybe unlimited player salaries wouldn’t change the playing field as much as we might expect. It is not unusual for star players, especially ones 30 and older, to take less money in pursuit of a championship. Maybe at a certain stage of a player’s career, earning $10 million to play for a good team feels more satisfying than piling up $30 million on a mediocre one. Dirk Nowitzki is still one of the league’s 15 best players, but he’ll probably earn less than Gordon and Joe Johnson next season.

Taking less money in a system with no artificial max would be an even more dramatic plot twist than it is today. There is a blurry line — and perhaps no line at all — between heroic sacrifice for the greater good and a cut so deep it looks like an unfair manipulation of the rules. Delimiting the max would make the line even blurrier.

That is what makes LeBron and the Heat situation so fascinating. They might be a test case of just how much in-their-prime stars might forfeit to win. If that number is higher than we think, perhaps there’s no easy fix for star clustering.

The “in their prime” part is important. The Heat situation involves guys who can ink their fourth NBA contracts. The more interesting implications of eliminating the max might emerge when players come off their rookie contracts and enter free agency for the first time. Those guys are restricted free agents today. They can earn only about $15 million in the first year of their new deals, and their incumbent team can match any rival offer for them. It’s a system that basically guarantees that any team that drafts a star will have him for at least seven or eight seasons.

Is that too long? Too short? Anthony Davis will be a free agent in July 2016, though the Pelicans will surely lock him up to a max-level extension before then. Imagine his free agency in this fake world with no max player salary and a hard team cap. What would the Knicks or Lakers offer 23-year-old Davis after his fourth year in the league?

Depending on the Pelicans’ cap situation, a team might be able to toss out a Godfather offer New Orleans could not match. Even if New Orleans might retain some home-court advantage — some remnant of Bird rights — it would be nearly meaningless if rival teams could tempt Davis with a salary approaching the full team cap.

Think about the implications of that. Maybe the Pelicans, anticipating Davis’s free agency, rush to surround him with quality veterans too early in his career, an unnatural acceleration of the franchise’s timetable. Perhaps they go the opposite way, avoiding expensive veterans to keep the cap sheet as clean as possible for that Godfather offer.

You could argue again that this simply motivates smart management. The Pelicans would have to prove to Davis that they are worthy of his continued presence. Under the current salary structure, Kyrie Irving has almost no choice but to stay in Cleveland at least three or four more seasons, regardless of the Cavs’ record in the draft and free agency during Irving’s time there.

Maybe there’s some in-between solution that would give teams leeway in keeping their own free agents coming off rookie contracts in a no-max world. Maybe players have access to unlimited salaries only after a certain number of years in the league. The league could create some designated salary slot outside the overall team cap that each franchise could use on one star player every decade. During the last CBA talks, Falk pitched a system in which teams would have two separate caps — one for their top two or three players, and one for everyone else.

The idea of an NFL-style “franchise tag” gained popular traction among the owners during the 2011 lockout, but the two sides never discussed a concept that would tether a player to a team so tightly. The two sides accidentally loosened the bond between player and team by changing the rules so that a star has no incentive to sign an extension with his own team.⁴⁴

The goal was noble: The NBA wanted to end the Melo-style prolonged drama in which a star agitates for a simultaneous max-level extension and trade to his new preferred team. The league did eradicate that option, but in the process it removed the extension as a viable tool for max-level players. There was probably a middle ground, but the two sides trampled over it in the frantic finish over Thanksgiving weekend.

That’s why Love is almost certainly leaving Minnesota. If the Wolves could offer him a meaningful extension, guaranteeing him immediate long-term security, they’d be having real conversations with Love instead of watching him yuk it up at Fenway Park.

In a world with unlimited maximum salaries, the league might have to give incumbent teams even more creative ways to protect against the departure of their own free agents — if the league really cares about teams having a fair shot to keep their own guys. There is some skepticism about whether the league actually values that sort of continuity, especially among executives at small-market teams, but to its credit, the NBA has built a system in which clubs get nearly a decade before stars they draft hit unrestricted free agency.

Extensions should be a more realistic option. In a no-max world, perhaps Davis and the Pelicans should even be able to tear up Brow’s rookie contract midway and ink a long-term extension on the spot. That would end Davis’s forced early-career underpayment and reward the Pelicans for convincing Davis that they are the franchise for him. That kind of reward would be more important in a world where the other 29 teams could offer Davis anything.

An unlimited max salary seems like a great idea. It probably is. But these are the consequences you have to consider. And for better or worse, it might grant an advantage to teams that ignore the dozen super-max guys and construct a group of very good players who fit together well. You know, kinda like the Spurs. 

“let the record show that the witness has… clarified his previous testimony, stating that in fact, he only likes a subset of larger women’s butts.”

“counselor, i have no idea what you’re trying to prove.”

“your honor i’m asking for a little latitude. i call to the stand… my own butt“

Iran Deploys Quds Forces To Support Iraqi Troops, Helps Retake Most Of Tikrit via /r/worldnews http://t.co/5P7szLbmwX pic.twitter.com/fe6zBPyjx1

— fa (@fa77775682) June 12, 2014

Farnaz Fassihi reports:

Two battalions of the Quds Forces, the overseas branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps that has long operated in Iraq, came to the aid of the besieged, Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki[.] Combined Iraqi-Iranian forces retook control of 85% of Tikrit, the birthplace of former dictator Saddam Hussein, according to Iraqi and Iranian security sources.

They were helping guard the capital Baghdad and the two Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, which have been threatened by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, an al Qaeda offshoot. The Sunni militant group’s lightning offensive has thrown Iraq into its worse turmoil since the sectarian fighting that followed the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Shiite Iran has also positioned troops along its border with Iraq and promised to bomb rebel forces if they come within 100 kilometers, or 62 miles, of Iran’s border, according to an Iranian army general. In addition, Iran was considering the transfer to Iraq of Iranian troops fighting for the regime in Syria if the initial deployments fail to turn the tide of battle in favor of Mr. Maliki’s government.

Beauchamp adds:

The Quds Force is one of the most effective military forces in the Middle East, a far cry from the undisciplined and disorganized Iraqi forces that fled from a much smaller ISIS force in Mosul. One former CIA officer called Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani “the single most powerful operative in the Middle East today.”

But the escalation from a country many Iraqis still remember fighting a war against could get out of hand, and fast:

Shia Iran’s intervention could infuriate the Sunni Muslims whose allegiance ISIS needs to win in the long run.  The internal Iraqi conflict is firmly sectarian: ISIS is a Sunni Islamist group, and the Iraqi government is Shia-run (a majority of Iraqis are Shia). … The perception that the Iraqi government is far too close to Iran is already a significant grievance among Sunnis. That’s part pure sectarianism and part nationalism.

Hayder al-Khoei observes that Iraq’s Shia don’t really have a choice but to accept the help:

[T]here is an ideological difference between the Shia of Iraq and the Shia of Iran. The religious establishment in Iraq and Iran don’t see eye to eye when it comes to the role of the clergy in the state. But in the south there is a sense—it’s not as desperate as in Baghdad—but the Shia in general now recognize the important [role] that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are going to play in making sure that their cities do not fall to ISIS. They may not like the Iranians, they may be ideologically opposed to the Iranians, but in terms of threat perception, it’s a matter of survival.

ISIS was definitely picking the fight:

The al Qaeda affiliated ISIS considers Shias heretics who deserve to be killed, and is taking forth its campaign to liberate Iraq from what it sees as Shia domination; the group has said it will destroy Shia shrines along the way, stoking fears in Tehran of an attack on Shia Islam’s holiest sites, Najaf and Karbala.

Social media sites have quoted Suleimani saying if ISIS destroys the holy shrines, it will face Iran’s ire. Asked what the manifestation of that rage will be, the former Iranian diplomat laughed nervously. “They [ISIS] know that we’re not kidding around, so we shouldn’t worry about them doing anything stupid. And if they’re foolish enough to even approach the shrines, they have to be prepared for anything.” The diplomat paused. “Battles, attacks, raids, massacre. All the options will be on the table.”

Ali Hashem notes that Iranian involvement might be as much about Syria as it is about Iraq:

What seems clear is that Iran wants to invest in the Iraqi crisis to help end the Syrian war. It hopes to do so by bringing together states fighting each other via proxy in Syria in a unified front in Iraq, given the international consensus on backing the Iraqi fight against ISIS.

Soccer’s US fan base is growing, especially among young people:

Soccer (in the form of U.S. Major League Soccer) has caught up to Major League Baseball among young sports aficionados—both sports have captured 18 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds as fans—according to the 2014 ESPN Sports Poll, which tracks interest in major league sports. The rise of soccer coincides with a surprising fall in the popularity of baseball, which had a 25 percent avid interest rate among that same audience just two years ago. (Football and basketball come in higher at 39 and 30 percent respectively, and hockey is the worst bet at just eight percent and falling.)

Andrés Martinez sees this as good news for Americans’ engagement with the world and a sign that our sports chauvinism may be on the wane:

It’s hard to exaggerate how much soccer’s incursion into American life threatens to erode American exceptionalism, not to mention our traditional geographic illiteracy. American kids now routinely wear the jerseys of teams in places like Barcelona and Munich, much like their counterparts in the rest of the world. Soccer offers American sports fans a sense of global, not just national, connectedness.

For most of the 20th century, even when so much of our culture was being adopted by others, Americans were adamant about not reciprocating by adopting the world’s sport. The prevailing culture was suspicious of the game, which at times could seem futile. Imagine going an entire match without scoring! Or, worse, tying! It seemed the duty of patriotic Americans was to avoid soccer, and even ridicule it, as much as it was to refuse measuring in centigrade or meters. We compensated for our sports provincialism by calling the champions of our domestic sports leagues “world champions.”

But all that is changing. With the World Cup in the Americas for the first time in 20 years, the United States will experience this year’s tournament in a big way, and the exciting narratives that spin out of it will help bind young American fans to cheese-eating kids in Normandy, and elsewhere.

Max Fisher examines the economic angle of ISIS’s machinations in Syria and Iraq:

There is reason to be skeptical that ISIS can really re-start eastern Syria or northern Iraq’s oil fields, much less move and sell the oil, but the fact that the group has this ambition at all is telling. As the chaos of Syria’s war breaks apart the state and its ability to function economically, ISIS is moving in to replace the state and its tax collectors, then using that revenue to launch its invasion of northern Iraq, which just so happens to be rich in oil itself. …

This money goes a long way: it pays better salaries than moderate Syrian rebels or the Syrian and Iraqi professional militaries, both of which have suffered mass desertions. ISIS also appears to enjoy better internal cohesion than any of its state or non-state enemies, at least for the moment. It rules over an area the size of Belgium.

The conflict is likely to drive up already high oil prices, but won’t necessarily result in a major market disruption:

So far, the only oil-related casualty of the fighting has been the pipeline that runs from Kirkuk to Ceyhan in Turkey. The pipeline, which has been out of commission since March because of sabotage, was expected to be repaired and back online and carrying up to 250,000 barrels a day.

That might remain the only petroleum casualty. Iraq’s biggest oil fields are far to the south, closer to Basra than to Baghdad. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) forces are modest in size, and any attempt to reach the south might stretch their supply lines and put them up against tougher foes. The 2.5 million barrels a day exported via terminals and tankers in the Persian Gulf seem relatively secure.

But ISIS is hardly the only reason oil supplies are on the rise:

[S]tarting in 2011, the disruptions often began to exceed 2 million barrels a day. Among the culprits were the Arab Spring and follow-on uprisings, the chaos in Nigeria, Iran sanctions and of course Russia president Vladimir Putin’s crypto-invasion of Ukraine.

Then last July, Libyan militants stormed oil export facilities and shut them down. As of now, the country pumps just one-eighth of the 1.6 million barrels of oil a day it produced before Muammar Qadhafi’s ouster in 2011. All in all, about 3.5 million barrels of oil a day have been off the market around the world since last fall. Those barrels have offset a 1.8 million-barrel-a-day surge of supply from the US.

Maybe it’s the sea air up here on the Cape but I spent last night again watching Fox News. It was like slipping into an alternative universe. Sure. I expected criticism of the president and a few outrageous zingers – but not the picture of reality that seemed to undergird the entire enterprise. But here’s the gist: the president is a lawless dictator, abetting America’s Islamist foes around the world, releasing Taliban prisoners to aid in his own jihad on America, fomenting a new caliphate in Iraq, and encouraging children to rush the Mexican border to up his vote-count, while effectively leaving those borders open to achieve his “fundamental transformation of America.”

I watched Megyn Kelly, who is regarded as more centrist than Sean Hannity. You could have fooled me. The guests were Brent Bozell, far right veteran, and Andy McCarthy, pro-torture activist touting his book calling for Obama’s impeachment. The only pushback Kelly provided to a relentless stream of hysteria was to ask whether the president sincerely wanted another terror attack on America – since it would hurt his approval ratings. And that provided the only qualification to the picture of a Jihadist in the White House determined to destroy the America he loathes. The “chaos” at the border and the emerging caliphate in Iraq may have been merely the unintended consequences of fecklessness rather than a deliberate attempt to destroy everything valuable in the United States.

At no point was any context provided to make sense of any of this. So, for example, it is axiomatic for Fox viewers that Obama has presided over a massive wave of illegals flooding the country. The truth is quite different:

If you compare [Bush's and Obama's] monthly averages [for deportations], it works out to 32,886 for Obama and 20,964 for Bush, putting Obama clearly in the lead. Bill Clinton is far behind with 869,676 total and 9,059 per month. All previous occupants of the White House going back to 1892 fell well short of the level of the three most recent presidents.

We wondered whether there might have been a surge of undocumented immigrants that explained the increase, but there wasn’t. During the first two years of Obama’s tenure, the Pew Hispanic Center estimated the illegal immigrant population nationwide at 11.2 million, compared to an average during Bush’s eight-year tenure of 10.6 million. And illegal immigration actually peaked late in Bush’s second term, at which point the recession hit and the numbers declined under Obama. Such patterns do not explain the 57 percent bump in monthly deportations that we found under Obama.

That data simply refutes the notion that we are somehow living in an era of lawlessness and massive illegal immigration. If a Republican president had done as much, he’d be a hero on Fox.

Look: I know I may be a total sucker for even hoping to see some semblance of fairness and balance on Fox. But it’s still shocking to see programming designed not to uncover reality, but to create a reality in which no counter-arguments are ever considered, and in which hysteria is the constant norm. MSNBC is almost as bad, of course, but with CNN as the new Discovery Channel, the entire possibility of a balanced newscast has disappeared from cable – and from the lives of most Americans. Again, this is not new. But as it continues, it intensifies. And as it intensifies, the possibility of governing all of the country recedes into the distance.

This is a civil war without violence. And we are two countries now.

Kim Ghattas paints Hillary Clinton as a secretary of state much more concerned than her boss with upholding American power and prestige around the world, and as her new book would have it, more realistic about the need to deal firmly with international threats:

Clinton was loyal and discreet, but within the confines of that loyalty, she sometimes chafed at Obama’s policy, perhaps never more so than over Syria. In Rabat in February 2012, we chatted after an interview that had focused on Syria’s revolution and Washington’s hands-off approach. She shook her head as she told me that Russia, Hezbollah, and Iran were all in, supporting Assad.

Her implicit question was: Where is the United States? We know now she was advocating internally for more robust support for the rebels, because she understood that America was leaving too much empty space for spoilers like Hezbollah to fill (there’s a separate debate to be had about whether it would have been the right policy). And with regard to dealing with Russia more directly, Clinton emphasizes in Hard Choices that she was more clear-eyed about Vladimir Putin than Obama, advising the president to turn down a summit with the Russian leader months before Obama ended up doing just that.

For me, it’s one fundamental worry about her: an instinct to meddle, and a barely reconstructed mindset about interventionism straight from the hubristic 1990s. Then there’s the question of Israel/Palestine and the settlements that continue apace. Aaron Blake pulls from the book one key foreign policy issue on which Clinton and Obama disagreed:

Clinton says that she differed with Obama on his push for a 2009 freeze on the construction of new Israeli settlements in disputed regions. Clinton suggests she wouldn’t have adopted such a hard-line stance and says that it increased tensions between the two sides. “I was worried that we would be locking ourselves into a confrontation we didn’t need,” she writes. Still, she says she toed the line as a loyal Cabinet secretary. “So that spring I delivered the President’s message as forcefully as I could, then tried to contain the consequences when both sides reacted badly,” Clinton writes.

The upshot: Obama’s occasionally rocky relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is no secret. This sounds like Clinton saying she’s a little less likely to rock the boat with the United States’ top ally in the region.

My fear is that this is tantamount to surrender to the Greater Israel lobby and to the entire project of Greater Israel. Thomas Wright praises Clinton for using her term at State to “shape the international order.” But Chotiner shrugs at her record:

It’s true that she put an admirable focus on women’s rights, and played a role in isolating Iran. But the Afghanistan surge didn’t seem to have a huge effect; Syria policy has been a failure, even if the alternatives were all bleak; Iraq has collapsed since our departure (again, good alternatives did not clearly present themselves); she was probably too cautious about the Egyptian people’s overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, although that didn’t keep him in power; she backed the Libyan campaign, which currently must count as a mixed bag …

Still, even if you want to argue that Clinton had no huge successes, her tenure had no gigantic managerial failures either. Her competence has rarely been called into question by anyone except those on the extreme right still frothing at the mouth over Benghazi. (She could have handled the fallout more adeptly, it is true.) If it seems odd that her most high-profile job tells us so little about what sort of president she would be, remember that Obama’s Senate career told us very little about his presidency.

Here’s the record: support for the disastrous intervention in Libya and for getting involved in one side in the Syrian civil war. Christian Caryl notes that Burma isn’t the success story Hillary is trying to sell it as:

After the initial euphoria of Thein Sein’s early moves toward change, Myanmar has stagnated. Aung San Suu Kyi and her small group of pro-democracy colleagues sit in parliament, but they have little real power. Aung San Suu Kyi has launched a campaign to amend the current constitution, which was designed by the military to allow for a liberalization of national political life that would nonetheless leave it firmly in charge of the parliament and all the other national institutions that count. But so far the generals show no inclination to budge — leaving the pro-democratic forces little chance of fielding a viable candidate in next year’s presidential election. In a word: The military remains firmly in control. Democracy remains a theory.

Noah Millman hopes for a dovish opponent to challenge Hillary in the primaries:

Hillary Clinton is going to run as an extremely hawkish Democrat, because that’s who she actually is. This is not what the country needs, and probably not what the country wants, but it may well be what the country is going to get. If Clinton runs essentially unopposed in the Democratic primary, and faces a mainstream Republican in the fall, voters will likely have a choice between two hawks. …

There’s good reason, therefore, for voters who favor a more restrained foreign policy to hope that Clinton faces at least token opposition in the primaries focused primarily on that issue. Then there would at least be one forum where the topic would be raised, and raised seriously, for Clinton to address. In the best-case scenario, such opposition would get more press attention than it deserved, which would force Clinton to make some kind of gesture to placate the doves in her coalition.

I really don’t like that hawk-dove paradigm. The real paradigm should be between those who have fully absorbed the terrible lessons of the first decade of the 21st century and those who see it as a mere, unfortunate blip in the maintenance of American global hegemony. And it looks distressingly likely we have have a choice between two candidates who intend to return to the meddling, expensive and counter-productive past.

(Photo: Win McNamee/Getty)

Ariel Zirulnick provides an update on the rogue Libyan general’s campaign to stamp out the country’s Islamist militias:

On Wednesday, that former general, Khalifa Haftar, survived an assassination attempt outside Benghazi, Libya’s second city. Meanwhile, in Sirte, a Red Cross worker was killed, and in Tripoli, a rocket-propelled grenade was fired at the prime minister’s office. Ahmed Maiteeq has only been in office since last month, and is Libya’s fifth prime minister since the removal of former dictator Muammar Qaddafi in 2011. Mr. Maiteeq was elected during a chaotic parliamentary session. Today he lost a court ruling on the legality of that election, Reuters reports.

Libya’s political instability has allowed armed groups to become as pivotal in the country’s direction as its elected leaders. Mr. Haftar says his unsanctioned campaign against Islamist militias is needed because the government is too weak to bring them to heel, but the government has decried his actions – which including airstrikes – as a coup. Haftar’s forces also stormed the parliament last week.

Mary Fitzgerald takes a closer look at Haftar’s motivations:

In interviews with Western media, Haftar has divulged few details on the goals of his campaign. The septuagenarian general refers to his effort as a “war on terrorism” and speaks vaguely about how this battle is “on behalf of the whole world.” When Haftar speaks to Arab media, however, it is evident he is targeting Islamists more generally.

“The main enemy,” he told the Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, “is the Muslim Brotherhood,” whose affiliated political party holds the second-largest number of seats in Libya’s elected national congress. Haftar vowed to purge the Islamist movement from Libya, referring to it as “this malignant disease that is seeking to spread throughout the bones of the Arab world.” He insisted he does not want to seize power, but would run for president if “the people demand it.”

As Hanan Salah sees it, Haftar’s campaign is a product of Libya’s total security breakdown, especially in Benghazi:

The steady drumbeat of violence over the past three years has undermined the authority of successive governments, and laid the groundwork for Haftar’s campaign. The earliest attacks were straightforward, targeting the Qaddafi-era state security forces and judiciary. But that has now changed: The victims now include journalists and activists who opposed former dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi during the 2011 uprising, but who dare to criticize the militias, Libya’s new masters.

I have heard dozens of judges, activists, and journalists in Benghazi express helplessness and fear of being next in line. Many have fled as a result. Some have also voiced concerns that inaction by authorities means acquiescence. “What are they [the government] waiting for?” one prominent former judge asked me. “Do they want us all to get killed before they respond?”

Noting that Haftar’s Islamist foes have labeled him an American agent, Wayne White warns that now might be a good time to evacuate the US embassy in Tripoli:

If the very core of governance can be struck so easily, any thought of meaningful local assistance to resist a violent attack against the US embassy is misplaced. And, with embassy staff shielded by defensive walls only meant to slow down attackers, plus a small US Marine security guard contingent not meant to resist a determined attack, reliable local government security is needed for protection. This is true for US embassies around the world. Moreover, aside from the endemic violence that’s now pervasive, it’s not even clear which parts of the government — let alone militias supposedly working for the government — currently answer to whom.

Previous Dish on Libya’s security woes here.

(Photo: A Libyan carries a portrait of retired general Khalifa Haftar during a rally in support of the rogue former general whose forces have launched a ‘dignity’ campaign to crush jihadist militias on May 23, 2014 in Benghazi, eastern Libya. By Abdullah Doma/AFP/Getty Images)

Earlier this week, Seattle’s city council approved a measure to raise the city’s minimum wage to $15 over the next seven years. Jordan Weissmann revisits the debate over whether this is a good idea:

The economics literature suggests that moderate increases in the minimum help workers more than they hurt them, because the raises outweigh the cost of lob losses. At $15, the effects might well be different. Some businesses may cut jobs. Others simply might not choose to open or expand in Seattle. Others could try to find ways to automate jobs. But, as Reihan Salam has written, the effects may also be more subtly damaging. As wages rise, businesses could simply seek to hire better educated and skilled employees, some of whom may well live outside the city limits but suddenly find themselves happy to commute for a fatter paycheck. … The upshot: the $15 minimum doesn’t have to turn Seattle’s labor market into a flaming wreck for it to cause harm.

Kevin Roose calls the minimum wage hike “a Kennedy School study in shifting the Overton window on contentious issues”:

Supporters of the bill are hoping it will spread. Already, labor activists in cities like Milwaukee, Providence, Chicago, L.A., San Francisco, and New York City are calling for similar wage hikes.

And crazier things have happened — even though economists warn that raising the minimum wage by such large amounts could wreak havoc in the labor markets, it’s still a political slam-dunk for progressive politicians hoping to play up their populist bona fides.

But taking the $15 minimum wage nationwide won’t be easy. Seattle’s experiment had a lot of factors in its favor: a progressive voter base; an already-high minimum wage above $9 an hour, which made $15 seem like a lesser jump; the timing of a mayoral race in which both candidates found it politically advantageous to back the wage hike. Not every city can replicate that. And on a federal level, the minimum wage seems stuck in the single digits — Congress and big business have so far successfully fought President Obama’s attempt to phase in a $10.10 minimum wage.

In the short term, it appears that the minimum-wage battle will be fought on a city-by-city basis. Which makes it much more interesting to watch.

Paul K. Sonn is hoping for that trend:

Looking abroad, Australia has a minimum wage of more than $15 per hour yet enjoys low unemployment and strong growth. Closer to home, Washington, D.C., instituted a substantially higher minimum wage and benefits standard for security guards in 2008, successfully transitioning an $8 occupation to one where guards now earn $16.50 in wages and benefits without evidence of ill effects on the commercial real estate industry, which pays the guards’ wages.

Similarly, Los Angeles, San Jose and St. Louis have all phased in minimum wages and benefits of more than $15 for airport workers without adverse effect. And San Francisco already requires all employers to provide minimum wages and benefits that together total $13.18 per hour for large employers, yet the restaurant industry has seen stronger growth in the city than in surrounding counties. Equally significant, it is not just workers but also growing numbers of business voices that are backing the need for transitioning our economy to a $15 minimum wage.

But Scott Shackford doesn’t approve:

There’s … already some information about how a $15 minimum wage may affect the area. Voters set a minimum wage for jobs at hotels and parking garages serving the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to $15 last fall. The change went into effect with the new year. The Seattle Times looked at some of the impact in February. While acknowledging that it’s still too soon to truly evaluate the consequences, the paper noted some price increases and “casualties” …  Several business leaders in Seattle’s Asian community submitted a commentary to the weekly warning about the terrible impact of the wage increase on immigrants and minority-owned small businesses. Read it here.

Scott Sumner, who prefers a low minimum wage supplemented with wage subsidies, explores some counterintuitive outcomes that may arise from the wage hike:

Liberals tend to argue that low wages are a huge problem for the poor.  Thus a $15 dollar wage would offer significant improvements in living standards (BTW, I agree with this, although I’d prefer the government paid the bill.)  Let’s say liberals are correct, and that the Seattle policy is a huge boon to the poor.  In that case low wage workers from other cities should flood into Seattle looking for one of those precious jobs.  Yes, the cost of living is high, but no higher than some other bigger affluent cities with minimum wage rates that are far lower.  The low-skilled workers will park themselves in the informal economy, or live off welfare, until they find one of those jobs.  Thus we have the odd situation where the law will be a boom to low wage workers if and only if it leads to a large rise in Seattle’s unemployment rate.

“But in the longer run,” John Aziz writes, “I highly doubt that a higher minimum wage is the right policy to ensure a decent standard of living for the poor”:

The key factor is the emerging economic phenomenon of robotics. Robots have already taken over many roles in the manufacturing industry, and are now moving into roles including food servers, bank tellers, telephone operators, receptionists, mail carriers, travel agents, typists, telemarketers, and stock market traders. The higher the minimum wage goes, the lower the threshold will go for robots to replace humans in many minimum wage roles.

While there are sure to remain many jobs that still require a human touch — think personal assistants, janitors, home health aides, and security personnel — and while lots of new human professions will likely emerge, the automation revolution is already putting lots of people out of work. To me, this suggests a better approach is universal basic income, a version of which was first advocated in America by Thomas Paine.

Previous Dish on Seattle’s minimum wage hike here and here.

“I’m only getting paid two and a half cents per click on this story. That’s more than what 99.9% of contributors on Medium get paid. I have a $60,000 graduate journalism degree from Medill, nearly a decade of writing experience, and, let’s be honest, I’m super smart and seriously good at what I do. I can write and report a kickass story with my eyes closed and one hand tied behind my back. But the algorithm that decides how much I get paid for all that badass-ness doesn’t put any value on how good I am. It cares not at all how well written this story is or how much experience I have. All that’s important is how many times you guys click,” – Erin Biba, Medium.

And there you have it: an economic ecology online that militates against good writing, thoughtful prose, serious engagement. And, look, we can all intend to produce content that lives up to that standard, but, in the end, the structural incentives for ADD-fueled crap will overwhelm us. That’s why shifting toward a subscription model has been such a revelation to me. Sure, I thought I was above pageview whoring, but I see now I wasn’t entirely. When you’re writing every day to gain pageviews – period – you’ll find yourselves looking for crowd-pleasers for complete strangers rather than interesting shit for a committed readership. To blog now with only a minor concern for traffic really is a different way to write online. It’s been a revelation to discover how subtly I’d been corrupted by the pageview metric, as I explained last night.

That’s why it’s such good news that Slate, for example, and TPM are moving in our direction. Josh is re-launching TPM Prime today for exactly those reasons:

In the history of publishing – publishing the printed word – there are very few examples of publications that are 100% dependent on advertising. Not only is it difficult to get enough revenue from advertising, as a revenue source it’s inherently unstable. Both are distinct and important. Advertisers are fickle; they change their schedules and goals, the amounts they’re ready to spend. It’s your core fans that are really invested in you being there every day and next month and next year. So it’s really important to build a reliance on people like you who want to be sure TPM is alive and well.

I think it also matters in wresting new media from the growing sense that it’s increasingly a corporate marketing scheme, rather than another independent part of the fourth estate. If you edit a site that has 100 percent of its revenue from advertisers and 0 percent from readers, who do you think will ultimately control the end-product? Even the best editor cannot get traction against that kind of advertiser power. What we may be seeing now is an evolution past this trashy, desperate period in online media.

Well, I can hope, can’t I? And if you want to help, subscribe!

I’m not proud of this.

A while back after making a sassy anime Bucko Bruce, I made a joke that someone should make all the logos into anime. Then implied that someone would be me. I waited. I waited a long time, hoping against hope that someone else would see that post and decide to beat me to the punch, thus saving me from my own terrible idea.

No one wanted to be a hero, so I must sacrifice myself for the greater gods of weeaboo. Time to get oh so kawaii, NFL.

And heaven save us all.

(Logos are organized by division in case you can’t figure one out)

Part of me broke making this, and nothing will ever fix it. My next logo happy fun time super redesign is going to need to be manly and strong.
Past 32 team/logo projects!
Hipsters
Fat
British
Manningface
Qbs as their team name
Uniforms

Bad/good/terrifying/delightful news, nerds! George R.R. Martin's editor Anne Groell mentioned in an interview that while A Song of Ice and Fire (that's the series Game of Thrones is based on, if you're some jock who prolly has sex or whatever) has long been planned and under contract as a seven-book series, there might be enough material for eight books.

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