Excerpts

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“It Is Predicated On A Radical And Deeply Un-American Notion That Housing Is A Right”

August 28, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The main difference between rich people and poor people is that rich people have more money. 

That’s it, really. Those with wealth are just as likely to form addictions, get divorces and engage in behaviors we deem responsible for poverty. They simply have more resources to fall back on. People without that cushion often land violently, land on the streets. Perhaps they should be extra careful since they’re in a more precarious position, but human beings are human beings: flawed. 

In the same ridiculously simple sense, homeless people are in that condition because they don’t have homes. A lot of actions and circumstances may have contributed to that situation, but the home part is the piece of the equation we can actually change. The Housing First initiative has proven thus far that it’s good policy to simply provide homes to people who have none. It makes sense in both human and economic terms. But it’s unpopular in the U.S. because it falls under the “free lunch” rubric, despite having its roots in the second Bush Administration. Further complicating matters is the shortage of urban housing in general.

In a smart Aeon essay, Susie Cagle looks at the movement, which has notably taken root in the conservative bastion of Utah, a state which has reduced homelessness by more than 90% in just ten years. An excerpt:

A new optimistic ideology has taken hold in a few US cities – a philosophy that seeks not just to directly address homelessness, but to solve it. During the past quarter-century, the so-called Housing First doctrine has trickled up from social workers to academics and finally to government. And it is working. On the whole, homelessness is finally trending down.

The Housing First philosophy was first piloted in Los Angeles in 1988 by the social worker Tanya Tull, and later tested and codified by the psychiatrist Sam Tsemberis of New York University. It is predicated on a radical and deeply un-American notion that housing is a right. Instead of first demanding that they get jobs and enroll in treatment programmes, or that they live in a shelter before they can apply for their own apartments, government and aid groups simply give the homeless homes.

Homelessness has always been more a crisis of empathy and imagination than one of sheer economics. Governments spend millions each year on shelters, health care and other forms of triage for the homeless, but simply giving people homes turns out to be far cheaper, according to research from the University of Washington in 2009. Preventing a fire always requires less water than extinguishing it once it’s burning.

By all accounts, Housing First is an unusually good policy. It is economical and achievable.•

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“He Said He Hopes His ‘Master Plan’ Is Accepted By NASA And The Country”

August 28, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The square-jawed hero astronauts of 1960s NASA went through marriages at a pretty ferocious clip, as you might expect from careerist monomaniacs, but none has had a more colorful, complicated life than Buzz Aldrin, who successfully walked on the moon but failed at selling used cars after he fell to Earth with a thud. Dr. Aldrin, as he prefers to be called, is now spearheading a plan to build Mars colonies. 

From Marcia Dunn at the AP:

MELBOURNE, Fla. (AP) — Buzz Aldrin is teaming up with Florida Institute of Technology to develop “a master plan” for colonizing Mars within 25 years.

The second man to walk on the moon took part in a signing ceremony Thursday at the university, less than an hour’s drive from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The Buzz Aldrin Space Institute is set to open this fall.

The 85-year-old Aldrin, who followed Neil Armstrong onto the moon’s surface on July 20, 1969, will serve as a research professor of aeronautics as well as a senior faculty adviser for the institute.

He said he hopes his “master plan” is accepted by NASA and the country, with international input. NASA already is working on the spacecraft and rockets to get astronauts to Mars by the mid-2030s.

Aldrin is pushing for a Mars settlement by approximately 2040. More specifically, he’s shooting for 2039, the 70th anniversary of his own Apollo 11 moon landing, although he admits the schedule is “adjustable.”

He envisions using Mars’ moons, Phobos and Deimos, as preliminary stepping stones for astronauts. He said he dislikes the label “one-way” and imagines tours of duty lasting 10 years.•

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“Yes, We Are ‘The Product’ In Ad-Supported Businesses”

August 28, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

There are many reasons, some more valid than others, that people are wary of so-called free Internet services like Facebook and Google, those companies of great utility which make money not through direct fees but by collecting our information and encouraging us to create content we’re not paid for.

Foremost, there are fears about surveillance, which I think are very valid. Hacks have already demonstrated how porous the world is now and what’s to come. More worrisome, beyond the work of rogue agents it’s clear the companies themselves cooperated in myriad ways with the NSA in handing over intel, some of which may have been necessary and most of which is troubling. Larry Page has said that we should trust the “good companies” with our information, but we shouldn’t trust any of them. Of course, there’s almost no alternative but to allow them into our lives and play by their rules.

Of course, the government isn’t alone in desiring to learn more about us. Advertisers certainly want to and long have, but there’s never before been this level of accessibility, this collective brain to be picked. These companies aren’t just looking to peddle information but also procure it. Their very existence depends on coming up with better and subtler ways of quantifying us.

I think another reason these businesses give pause isn’t because of something they actually do but what they remind us of: Our anxieties about the near-term future of Labor. By getting us to “work” for nothing and create content, they tell us that even information positions have been reduced, discounted. The dwindling of good-paying jobs, the Gig Economy and the fall of the middle class all seem to be encapsulated in this new arrangement. When a non-profit like Wikipedia does it, it can be destabilizing but doesn’t seem sinister. They same can’t be said for Silicon Valley giants.

In his latest Financial Times blog post, Andrew McAfee makes an argument in favor of these zero-cost services, which no doubt offer value, though I believe he gives short shrift to privacy concerns.

An excerpt:

Web ads are much more precisely targeted at me because Google and Facebook have a lot of information about me. This thrills advertisers, and it’s also OK with me; once in a while I actually see something interesting. Yes, we are “the product” in ad-supported businesses. Only the smallest children are unaware of this.

The hypothetical version of the we’re-being-scammed argument is that the giant tech companies are doing or planning something opaque and sinister with all that data that we’re giving them. As law professor Tim Wu wrote recently about Facebook: “[T]he data is also an asset. The two-hundred-and-seventy-billion-dollar valuation of Facebook, which made a profit of three billion dollars last year, is based on some faith that piling up all of that data has value in and of itself… One reason Mark Zuckerberg is so rich is that the stock market assumes that, at some point, he’ll figure out a new way to extract profit from all the data he’s accumulated about us.”

It’s true that all the information about me and my social network that these companies have could be used to help insurers and credit-card companies pick customers and price discriminate among them. But they already do that, and do it within the confines of a lot of regulation and consumer protection. I’m just not sure how much “worse” it would get if Google, Facebook and others started piping them our data.•

 

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“The Funeral Business Is A Great Training Ground Because It Teaches You Service”

August 27, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Impresario is what they used to call those like Steve Ross of Warner Communications, whose mania for mergers allowed him a hand in a large number of media and entertainment ventures, making him boss and handler at different times to the Rolling Stones, Pele and Dustin Hoffman. One of those businesses the erstwhile funeral-parlor entrepreneur became involved with was Qube, an interactive cable-TV project that was a harbinger if a money-loser. That enterprise and many others are covered in a brief 1977 People profile. The opening:

In our times, the courtships and marriages that make the earth tremble are no longer romantic but corporate. The most legendary (or lurid) figures are not the Casanovas today. They are the conglomerateurs, and for sheer seismic impact on the popular culture, none approaches Steven J. Ross, 50, the former slacks salesman who married into a mortuary chain business that he parlayed 17 years later into Warner Communications Inc. (WCI). In founder-chairman Ross’s multitentacled clutch are perhaps the world’s predominant record division (with artists like the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and Joni Mitchell); one of the Big Three movie studios (its hot fall releases include Oh, God! and The Goodbye Girl); a publishing operation (the paperback version of All the President’s Men, which was also a Warner Bros, film); the Atari line of video games like Pong, which inadvertently competes with Warner’s own TV producing arm, whose credits include Roots, no less. The conglomerate is furthermore not without free-enterprising social consciousness (WCI put up $1 million and owns 25 percent of Ms. magazine) or a redeeming sense of humor (it disseminates Mad).

Warner’s latest venturesome effort is bringing the blue-sky of two-way cable TV down to earth in a limited experiment in Columbus, Ohio. There, subscribers are able to talk back to their TV sets (choosing the movie they want to see or kibitzing the quarterback on his third-down call). An earlier Ross vision—an estimated $4.5 million investment in Pelé by Warner’s New York Cosmos—was, arguably, responsible for soccer’s belated breakthrough in the U.S. this year after decades of spectator indifference. Steve is obviously in a high-rolling business—Warners’ estimated annual gross is approaching a billion—and so the boss is taking his. Financial writer Dan Dorfman pegs Ross’s personal ’77 earnings at up to $5 million. That counts executive bonuses but not corporate indulgences. On a recent official trip to Europe in the Warner jet, Steve brought along his own barber for the ride.

En route to that altitude back in the days of his in-laws’ funeral parlor operation, Ross expanded into auto rentals (because he observed that their limos were unprofitably idle at night) and then into Kinney parking lots. “The funeral business is a great training ground because it teaches you service,” he notes, though adding: “It takes as much time to talk a small deal as a big deal.” So, come the ’70s, Ross dealt away the mortuary for the more glamorous show world. Alas, too, he separated from his wife. •

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“Bush, Like Michael Jackson In His Days At Neverland Ranch, Was Living In A Bubble”

August 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

“Mission Accomplished,” the words that hung like nooses behind our most unwitting President, George W. Bush, in 2003, as he prematurely announced “victory” in Iraq after invading the wrong country for no good reason, may be the phrase most associated with the gross incompetence of his Administration, but “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job” is just as damning and telling.

That’s what Dubya uttered in support of FEMA administrator Michael D. Brown as New Orleans sank not only in the waters of Hurricane Katrina but also in federal fecklessness and neglect. All while the President fiddled–or, more accurately, strummed.

Historian Douglas Brinkley believes it was the latter tragedy that was Bush’s greatest undoing. An excerpt from his writing in Vanity Fair:

What a weird moment in U.S. presidential history.

Hurricane Katrina, a Category 3 storm, had smashed into the Gulf South. People were drowning. And the president of the United States played guitar in San Diego, egged on by country singer Mark Wills.

Even George W. Bush’s most stalwart supporters cringed at his disconnect from reality. Bush, like Michael Jackson in his days at Neverland Ranch, was living in a bubble. By contrast, when Hurricane Betsy had struck the Louisiana coast in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson had immediately flown to New Orleans to see the flood zone firsthand. The difference was glaring. Bush was, quite simply—as Coast Guard first-responder Jimmy Duckworth phrased it—“out of the game.”

On the 10th anniversary of Katrina, with the advantage of hindsight, it’s clear that Bush’s lack of leadership in late summer of 2005 cost his presidency mightily. Unlike Ronald Reagan, after the Challenger explosion, or Bill Clinton, after the Oklahoma City bombing, Bush had failed to feel the profound implications of the moment as his predecessors had. He didn’t scramble into action. He didn’t touch the nation’s heartstrings by using epic oratory to inform the disaster. What we got, instead, were guitar chords and terse speeches void of human pathos. No matter how the Bush library in Dallas tries to spin Bush’s Katrina performance, we all know he deserved an F in crisis management.•

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“There’s Going To Be A Transition Phase”

August 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If driverless cars were improved markedly and all vehicles were autonomous, accidents and fatalities would likely experience a steep decline. But a shift to robocars will be a gradual one, and highways and streets will long be a mix of both humans and computers at the wheel. How will those two forces learn to share the road? It’ll take time and research.

From Aviva Rutkin at New Scientist:

IN THE near future, you may have to share the road with a robot. Or perhaps we should say that a robot will have to share the road with you.

At the University of California, Berkeley, engineers are preparing autonomous cars to predict what we impulsive, unreliable humans might do next. A team led by Katherine Driggs-Campbell has developed an algorithm that can guess with up to 92 per cent accuracy whether a human driver will make a lane change. She is due to present the work next month at the Intelligent Transportation Systems conference in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain.

Enthusiasts are excited that self-driving vehicles could lead to fewer crashes and less traffic. But people aren’t accustomed to driving alongside machines, says Driggs-Campbell. When we drive, we watch for little signs from other cars to indicate whether they might turn or change lanes or slow down. A robot might not have any of the same tics, and that could throw us off.

“There’s going to be a transition phase,” she says.•

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“It Is Kind Of Dehumanizing”

August 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada, who’ve done brilliant work (here and here) on the NFL’s existential concussion problem and yet still somehow are passionate Niners fans, have written an excellent ESPN The Magazine piece about Chris Borland, the football player who retired after his rookie season to safeguard his health.

The former San Francisco linebacker’s preemptive attempt at self-preservation was a shot across the bow, a shocking move the league hadn’t experienced since the 1960s, when so-called Hippie players voluntarily left the game and its militaristic nature during Vietnam Era. Borland’s decision made news, as you might expect, and he became something of a reluctant political football.

The ESPN article reveals the NFL’s response to Borland’s decision was, well, NFL-like: tone-deaf, corporate and petty. Although he’d left the game, the former player was asked to take a “random” drug test almost immediately. It seems the league wanted to deflate his stance and prove he retired to avoid detection over illegal substances. Unless it was a remarkable coincidence, the NFL hoped to paint Borland a fraud and thereby negate his very valid concerns.

There’s no way humans can safely play football. No helmet can preserve a head from whiplash–in fact the modern one is a weapon that increases the occurrences. People who profit from the sport can make believe otherwise, but there’s no way out but down. Borland and others who’ve made a quick exit, and the stalwarts who’ve awakened to the game’s toll, have underlined that reality.

An excerpt:

Borland has consistently described his retirement as a pre-emptive strike to (hopefully) preserve his mental health. “If there were no possibility of brain damage, I’d still be playing,” he says. But buried deeper in his message are ideas perhaps even more threatening to the NFL and our embattled national sport. It’s not just that Borland won’t play football anymore. He’s reluctant to even watch it, he now says, so disturbed is he by its inherent violence, the extreme measures that are required to stay on the field at the highest levels and the physical destruction 
he has witnessed to people he loves and admires — especially to their brains.

Borland has complicated, even tortured, feelings about football that grow deeper the more removed he is from the game. He still sees it as an exhilarating sport that cultivates discipline and teamwork and brings communities and families together. “I don’t dislike football,” he insists. “I love football.” At the same time, he has come to view it as a dehumanizing spectacle that debases both the people who play it and the people who watch it.

“Dehumanizing sounds so extreme, but when you’re fighting for a football at the bottom of the pile, it is kind of dehumanizing,” he said during a series of conversations over the spring and summer. “It’s like a spectacle of violence, for entertainment, and you’re the actors in it. You’re complicit in that: You put on the uniform. And it’s a trivial thing at its core. It’s make-believe, really. That’s the truth about it.”

How one person can reconcile such opposing views of football — as both cherished American tradition and trivial activity so violent that it strips away our humanity — is hard to see. Borland, 24, 
is still working it out. He wants to be respectful to friends who are still playing and former teammates and coaches, but he knows that, in many ways, he is the embodiment of the growing conflict over football, a role that he is improvising, sometimes painfully, as he goes along.•

 

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“You’re Going To See It All There”

August 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Capitalism run amok is a scary thing. It creates the horrid air quality and high cancer rates in China just as readily as it can create opportunities for the previously underprivileged.

In visiting a couple of the modern Gold Rush towns in fracking-friendly North Dakota, Henrietta Norton and Dan Dennison of the Guardian witnessed many of the social costs of the of rapid transformation of former farmland, but they also find a more complicated story in the wake of the oil price collapse, one in which striving Americans try to remake their fortunes in a tumultuous landscape during a time of economic uncertainty.

The opening:

“You’re going to see it all there – gang banging, sex trafficking, gambling, drugs, all the dark stuff, they’ve ruined the place,” says the man on the front desk at the Super 8 Motel where we stop for the night en route from Fargo.

The Bakken region has been at the heart of the latest oil boom since the early 2000s, when new technology enabled horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing to access minerals found in the layers of rock beneath the ground. It occupies 200,000 square miles, and stretches from Montana and North Dakota across into Saskatchewan and Manitoba in Canada.

In the past five years, there has been a dramatic influx of people in North Dakota. Many towns have become synonymous with the term “man camp”, as tens of thousands of men have arrived in search of work in the rigs, or to lay the pipeline. There’s a joke amongst them: “There’s a woman behind every tree in North Dakota … it’s just that there aren’t any trees.”•

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“They Are Collecting Data From Both Workers And Customers”

August 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Prelude to layoffs in the media industry (and all others) is the influx of efficiency experts and consultants. Conde Nast employees are preparing for just such a plague of analysts, in which each of them will have to account for every hour of their day. Scary for them that they’ll be quantified, even if in such a quaint, old-fashioned way.

The new normal is, of course, to let algorithms measure us at work and, ultimately, at home. Human management in all levels of business is so godawful, plagued by pettiness, bias and incompetence, it’s valid to ask whether algorithms could really do a worse job. Maybe not. But you know when a supervisor is messing with you, and you can appeal to a sense of fairness, even if that’s sometimes futile. It’s really difficult to argue with computer code, which can certainly contain its own biases. In fact, they almost certainly do. Further, there’s no way current AI can truly judge the dynamics of office space, the little things that go into making a company successful or even just a pleasant place to be, something important to us if not our silicon brothers and sisters.

In a smart Aeon essay, Frank Pasquale wonders about the quiet insinuation into our lives of this next-level judge, jury and executioner. He has more hope than I do that these new tools of accountability will themselves be held accountable. An excerpt:

The infancy of the internet is over. As online spaces mature, Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, and other powerful corporations are setting the rules that govern competition among journalists, writers, coders, and e-commerce firms. Uber and Postmates and other platforms are adding a code layer to occupations like driving and service work. Cyberspace is no longer an escape from the ‘real world’. It is now a force governing it via algorithms: recipe-like sets of instructions to solve problems. From Google search to OkCupid matchmaking, software orders and weights hundreds of variables into clean, simple interfaces, taking us from query to solution. Complex mathematics govern such answers, but it is hidden from plain view, thanks either to secrecy imposed by law, or to complexity outsiders cannot unravel.

Algorithms are increasingly important because businesses rarely thought of as high tech have learned the lessons of the internet giants’ successes. Following the advice of Jeff Jarvis’s What Would Google Do, they are collecting data from both workers and customers, using algorithmic tools to make decisions, to sort the desirable from the disposable. Companies may be parsing your voice and credit record when you call them, to determine whether you match up to ‘ideal customer’ status, or are simply ‘waste’ who can be treated with disdain. Epagogix advises movie studios on what scripts to buy, based on how closely they match past, successful scripts. Even winemakers make algorithmic judgments, based on statistical analyses of the weather and other characteristics of good and bad vintage years.

For wines or films, the stakes are not terribly high. But when algorithms start affecting critical opportunities for employment, career advancement, health, credit and education, they deserve more scrutiny.•

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“Ultimately, Robots Would Drive A Social Revolution…But Not The One People Fear”

August 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

When the sanguine view is that only 7% of American jobs will disappear in the next ten years, we probably need to brace ourselves. Forrester Research reports that figure, saying some employment loss will be offset by the creation of new positions. Probably true enough, but there’s no guarantee low-skilled workers will be able to be retrained for them, and it’s not like 2025 is some important end date. In the longer run, the truth may end up somewhere between the Forrester number and the more troubling Oxford one of 47% jobs being susceptible to automation.

From Elizabeth Dwoskin at WSJ:

Before a robot takes your job, you’re likely to be working with one side-by-side.

That’s the takeaway from a new report by Forrester Research, Inc.

The report wades into a heady and long-running debate over whether, how, and to what extent will robots take over human jobs – a hotly discussed topic amid recent progress in robotics and artificial intelligence. Most experts agree that machines will depress the job market in coming decades, possibly by as much as 47%, according to a widely reported 2013 Oxford paper.

Forrester takes a less dire view. Examining workforces at large companies across industries, including Delta Airlines Inc., Whole Foods Market Inc., and Lowe’s Companies Inc. as well as many startups, analyst J.P. Gownder estimated that automation would erase 22.7 million US jobs by 2025 — 16% of today’s total. However, that decline would be offset somewhat by new jobs created, making for a net loss of 7%, or 9.1 million jobs.

Ultimately, robots would drive a social revolution, Mr. Gownder found, but not the one people fear.•

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“Uber Is Setting Up A New Self-Driving Car Project”

August 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Uber has shamelessly tried to reposition itself as a job creator when it actually destabilizes good jobs and CEO Travis Kalanick has previously been open about wanting to eliminate all its drivers. Perhaps that’s the future, but let’s be honest about it: Uber is good in many ways, but it isn’t good for Labor. So when the rideshare pretends for publicity purposes that the hiring of military veterans or minorities is central to its mission, it’s an outright lie.

From Russell Brandom at the Verge:

Uber is setting up a new self-driving car project at the University of Arizona, according to an email sent out today to university employees. The new project will focus on self-driving car technology, particularly the mapping and optics challenges involved in developing a fully autonomous vehicle. An official statement from Uber confirmed the news, saying, “we’ll work with some of the world’s leading experts in lens design at the University to improve the imagery we capture and use to build out mapping and safety features..” The project comes just months after a major hiring push for Uber’s Pittsburgh center, which many complained had hired so many experts away from the local robotics lab that they had effectively gutted competing projects.

According to a statement from Arizona’s governor, the partnership will focus on the optics systems necessary for mapping and safety, and will result in a number of Uber’s test vehicles taking up permanent residence in Arizona. Uber will donate $25,000 to the university’s College of Optical Sciences.…•

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“Plumbing Trump’s Psyche Is As Productive As Asking American Pharoah, The Winner Of The Triple Crown, Why He Runs”

August 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Celebrity Sightings In New York City - August 23, 2015

The early success of the disgracefully bigoted Donald Trump Presidential campaign is the result of two forces: 1) Some white Americans sensing (correctly) that their unfair privilege is fading, and 2) Politics, tax codes, shifting global fortunes and new technologies combining to devastate the middle class in recent decades.

Someone must be held accountable, but it’s not a sure bet that the right people will be. Currently, one who’s most benefited from the rigged system, Trump himself, is leading in the Republican polls, a full-of-shit performer posing as a mad-as-hell reformer. He certainly has no economic expertise, but he does have a surfeit of anger. For now, that’s enough.

As always, it’s far easier to blame them than us. Not too long ago, Trump co-opted the Birther movement, an effort to label our first African-American President as them. In retrospect, it was the transition period from the soft, coded language of Gingrich and Rove to the overt and odious. That’s the new abnormal.

Those Americans cheered by a petulant, foot-stomping adult baby reminds me of a piece of marginalia George Saunders scribbled as he reconsidered CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: “Some issues: Life amid limitations; paucity. Various tonalities of defense. Pain; humiliation inflicted on hapless workers – some of us turn on one another.”

Evan Osnos, who wrote Age of Ambition, one of my favorite books of 2014, takes measure of Trump’s stump speeches and their eager listeners, in a New Yorker piece. The American Pharaoh line is the best sentence I’ve read in 2015. An excerpt:

What accounts for Donald Trump’s political moment? How did a real campaign emerge from a proposition so ludicrous that an episode of The Simpsons once used a Trump Presidency as the conceit for a dystopian future? The candidate himself is an unrewarding source of answers. Plumbing Trump’s psyche is as productive as asking American Pharoah, the winner of the Triple Crown, why he runs. The point is what happens when he does.

In New Hampshire, where voters pride themselves on being unimpressed, Fred Rice, a Republican state representative, arrived at a Trump rally in the beach town of Hampton on an August evening, and found people waiting patiently in a two-hour line that stretched a quarter of a mile down the street. “Never seen that at a political event before,” he said. Other Republicans offer “canned bullshit,” Rice went on. “People have got so terribly annoyed and disenchanted and disenfranchised, really, by candidates who get up there, and all their stump speeches promise everything to everyone.” By the night’s end, Rice was sold. “I heard echoes of Ronald Reagan,” he told me, adding, “If I had to vote today, I would vote for Trump.”

To inhabit Trump’s landscape for a while, to chase his jet or stay behind with his fans in a half-dozen states, is to encounter a confederacy of the frustrated—less a constituency than a loose alliance of Americans who say they are betrayed by politicians, victimized by a changing world, and enticed by Trump’s insurgency. Dave Anderson, a New Hampshire Republican who retired from United Parcel Service, told me, “People say, ‘Well, it’d be nice to have another Bush.’ No, it wouldn’t be nice. We had two. They did their duty. That’s fine, but we don’t want this Bush following what his brother did. And he’s not coming across as very strong at all. He’s not saying what Trump is saying. He’s not saying what the issues are.”•

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“The First Order Of Business Should Be Creating A Fair Tax System”

August 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Months before the first 2011 Occupy protest in Zuccotti Park, economist Joseph Stiglitz was bemoaning the 1%, doggedly working to put a spotlight on wealth inequality and the rigged system that abets it. These days, he feels the discussion has evolved but there haven’t been any real material changes. 

Gawker took a break from being yeesh! long enough to allow Hamilton Nolan to do his typically smart work, interviewing Stiglitz about how disparity can be mitigated. Simply put, he doesn’t believe fairness can be achieved through charitable donations but will require systemic changes. An excerpt:

Question:

Is there a red line level of inequality past which you think there will be some sort of tipping point?

Joseph Stiglitz:

We’re always gonna have some inequality. There is a small enough level of inequality that, while you might worry about it, it doesn’t have a corrosive effect. We’ve reached a level of inequality where it’s unambiguously clear to me and to most observers that it’s interfering with our economic performance. It’s having a corrosive effect on the way our democracy works. It’s having a corrosive effect on the way our society functions. So we’re in the bad regime. We’re facing very large costs.

The other question that you’re asking is, “Is there a tipping point, a dynamic where things get more and more unequal and increasingly hard to pull back?” I would say yes, and what that point is depends on a number of factors, including the political landscape. I believe a lot of inequality is a result of the policies we make. Those policies are a result of political processes. Political processes are affected by the rules that [govern] how money gets translated into politics. So if you have a political system like the US, where money talks more than in Europe, that is going to have a more corrosive effect—a lower tipping point. I try to be optimistic. I wouldn’t be working so hard if I believed we were over that tipping point. There’s some chance we are over it, but there’s some chance that we’re not. The fight right now is to make sure we don’t go further over it.

Question:

Is it possible to rein it in with our current campaign finance system?

Joseph Stiglitz:

It’s possible, and difficult. We’ve seen successes in the minimum wage campaign. We’ve seen successes in when the Republicans try to restrict voting rights in Pennsylvania, it backfired and people got so angry that they came out and voted. So every once in a while you see an outpouring of democratic forces.

Question:

Where would you set the income tax rates, if it was up to you?

Joseph Stiglitz:

The first order of business should be creating a fair tax system, so that we tax dividends and speculators at the same rate that we tax ordinary income.•

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“It Was Not Like The Hallucinatory State Of The ’60s”

August 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

033-anjelica-huston-jack-nicholson-theredlist

Image by Julian Wasser.

As one of the principals behind Easy Rider, Jack Nicholson came of age creatively as movies became “important” in America–well, important in a way they hadn’t consistently been before–in a sociological and political sense. That put them and their makers at the center of the picture. By the 1980s, the actor-writer-director was bemoaning the loss of this cultural importance. He still gave great performances, but they mattered less by the standards he’d become accustomed to. The game had changed, and it’s never changed back.

In 1979, Peter Lester of People profiled Nicholson at the time of The Shining, when he was still feeling it. An excerpt:

He reigns from his aerie carved high into a hillside, with all of L.A. breathtakingly at his feet. “I pick spots,” beams Jack of his home of 10 years, reachable only by a well-secured road shared by neighbor Marlon Brando. The living room and dining room open onto a wide deck, whose centerpiece is a large swimming pool. A black open-air Jacuzzi bath that took three years to gouge into the rock commands another overlook. “The Jacuzzi was my original symbol of achievement, status and luxury,” says Nicholson, who steps from the tub every evening at twilight to dry in balmy breezes.

The rooms are lined with art—Rodin, Magritte, Tiepolo. The den boasts a wall-size TV screen. “I don’t like it in my living room,” he says. “I’m still holding out for a world in which people talk.” Looking out the window of the small master bedroom upstairs, Jack deadpans: “I built a balcony on here as an escape route. You can jump into the pool.” Down the corridor is the one feminine enclave in the rustically masculine surroundings: girlfriend Anjelica Huston’s bedroom, with a pair of sculpted golden wings (a gift from Jack) suspended in the corner.

“I certainly would say she’s the love of my life,” declares Nicholson of Anjelica, 29, the actress daughter of esteemed director-actor John Huston. Nicholson concedes that “we’ve striven for a straightforward, honest, yet mature relationship.” He does not deny that during their seven years together “she has had to do the hardest work in that area because I’m the one who is so easily gossiped about.” What does that mean? Nicholson explains candidly: “I live with Anjelica, and there are other women in my life who are simply friends of mine. Most of the credit for our wonderfully successful relationship has to do with her flexibility.”

The honesty is characteristic. Anjelica, who strayed for a highly publicized 1976 fling with Ryan O’Neal, shares it. “I wouldn’t describe Jack as a jealous man,” she says. “Possessive more than jealous. Jealousy involves insecurity. My father,” she adds, “is mad about him.” It was Anjelica who helped nurse Nicholson through the grueling 10-month London filming of The Shining for perfectionist Kubrick, who even made 70-year-old co-star Scatman Crothers do 40 takes of being hit with an ax (finally Nicholson suggested wrapping the scene). “He would lurch into the house around 10 p.m., exhausted,” Anjelica remembers. “The one time we went out we were an hour and a half late to meet Princess Margaret.”

For now, neither Jack nor Anjelica is rushing toward marriage. “I ask her to get married all the time,” says Nicholson. “Sometimes she turns me down, sometimes she says yes. We don’t get around to it.” Which leads to Jack’s one regret: “I’ve always wanted more children. That’s one area of my life that I haven’t done as well as I wanted to by my original standards.”

He would never be a sheltering father, as his only child, Jennifer, now 16, can testify. His daughter from a six-year marriage to former actress Sandra Knight that ended in 1968, Jennifer lives with her mother in Hawaii but vacations with Dad and is interested in acting. “I don’t know what she’s going to do,” Jack says. “I’m like every other parent—trying to see she gets as broad-based an education as possible. I think she trusts me,” Nicholson continues. “I never adjusted my life for her presence. If she comes here in the middle of a party, the party goes on.”

In Jack’s case, that can be some blowout. His circle includes such close friends and social heavies as Beatty and his steady, Diane Keaton, plus record mogul Lou Adler, actor Harry Dean Stanton, director Bob Rafelson, writers Carol Eastman and Robert Towne, and his business manager, Harry Gittes (whose name Jack coyly used in Chinatown). “I do entertain a lot, but run a pretty tough policy. I’ve never had a party of mine crashed,” Nicholson reports. “To be successful, a party has to have a completely private atmosphere.”

At functions these days he usually avoids alcohol except for champagne (“It keeps my mouth fresh”), but his taste for other stimuli, specifically cannabis, has mellowed only slightly. “I still love to get high, I’d say, about four days a week. I think that’s about average for an American,” Nicholson winks. “Last year on a raft trip I had a little flavor of the season—peach mescaline—but it was not like the hallucinatory state of the ’60s. This was just kind of sunny. I don’t advocate anything for anybody,” Jack quickly adds. “But I choose always to be candid because I don’t like the closet atmosphere of drugging. In other words, it ain’t no big thing. You can wreck yourself with it, but Christ, you can wreck yourself with anything.” What’s his attitude as a parent? “My daughter knows all the drugs I do. She’s seen me do ’em. She doesn’t do any drugs. She’s a vegetarian!”•

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“The Pundits Think Americans Are Stupid. I Don’t.”

August 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig is crowdfunding in the hopes of financing a run for President not as a protest candidate but as a referendum candidate, one who would resign and cede the office to his Veep after a very brief first act of fixing our troubled political system (campaign finance, gerrymandering, etc.). We certainly need these things to occur, but it almost definitely won’t happen, at least not directly, because of Lessig’s quixotic campaign. Elizabeth Warren was really the only potential candidate who had a chance of undoing at least some of this wrong-mindedness, but she isn’t running.

I’m hopeful that Lessig and other campaigns will make these important issues central in the way the Occupy movement pushed wealth inequality into the mainstream. However, Lessig himself doesn’t believe just making reform one of many major issues will work–it needs to be a candidate’s number one and perhaps only concern. Let’s hope that’s not true, because a person running to reform and resign isn’t likely getting elected. What would make for a spellbinding TED Talk doesn’t necessarily translate into a real-life solution.

Lessig and his supporter Jimmy Wales (a “foreigner,” as President Trump would call him) just did an AMA at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

___________________________

Question:

What led you to decide to run yourself instead of remaining an advisor to Sanders’ campaign? Don’t you think that the MOST LIKELY scenario would be that, by some (increasingly likely) miracle, Sanders overtakes Clinton for the nomination? Why can’t Sanders introduce the Citizens Equality Act and do the same things you want to do, but remain president?

Lawrence Lessig: 

I became convinced that Sanders has been seduced by the consultants, whose aim (this is why they’re hired) is to elect him rather than run a campaign that might be harder, but would give him the mandate to lead. I believe Bernie can get elected. But if he runs his campaign as he has, it will be Obama v2.0 (not in the substance but in the inability to pass or even propose reform).

___________________________

Question:

Could Elizabeth Warren be your Vice President?

Lawrence Lessig:

Yes, absolutely. Politically, it would make sense for one of us to move out of MA (and that would be me since she’s the senator). That’s because the constitution wouldn’t permit MA to cast its votes for both of us, and so if the election were close, that would risk one of us not making it. But constitutionally, there is no bar (except the rule that forbids a state to vote for two people from that state).

___________________________

Question:

How can we connect issues of campaign finance and voter equality with the day-to-day practical & emotional realities of regular Americans?

Lawrence Lessig:

The pundits think Americans are stupid. I don’t. I think that if you connect the dots, they’ll get it. Start with the issues they care about — health care, social security, student debt, minimum wage, the environment, network neutrality, copyright (ok, a guy can dream) — and show them how EVERY ISSUE is linked to this one issue. Try an obvious metaphor: An alcoholic could be losing his liver, his job, his wife. Those are the worst problems someone can have. But unless you solve the alcoholism, none of those problems is going to be solved.

___________________________

Question:

Why did you decide to create the Citizens Equality Act instead of trying to get a Constitutional amendment passed like Wolf PAC is trying to do?

Lawrence Lessig:

Because (1) we need reform NOW (not 3 years from now), (2) a majority in Congress is more likely than 2/ds (to propose), or 3/4ths (to ratify), (3) because changing the way campaigns are funded is something Congress could do tomorrow, and should. An amendment may well be necessary — if the Supreme Court doesn’t fix the superPAC problem it is certainly necessary — but we can’t afford to wait. We need to act through Congress now.

___________________________

Question:

Say you’re elected, and the Citizen Equality Act of 2017 isn’t passed by Congress. Now What?

Lawrence Lessig:

Not an option. With 50 referendum representatives, and a president that doesn’t care about what’s next, it gets passed.

I get the anxiety here. I really do. But here’s the reality: We have a government that doesn’t work. We need the best shot to getting a government that does work. Making “reform” one of 8 issues on a platform is not a plan. It’s a wish.

___________________________

Question:

A healthy democracy requires the enforcement of law. But today, law enforcement officials are able to routinely violate citizen’s legal and Constitutional rights with impugnity.

Do you believe Campaign Zero’s policy proposals (link) are adequate to provide communities adequate means to hold their police departments accountable, safeguard individual’s rights, and eliminate racial bias? Do you believe the adequately safeguard the disabled, the non-neurotypical, and the mentally ill?

If not, what additional policies would you support?

Lawrence Lessig:

Agreed. This ties to the culture of inequality that is America today. We don’t have equal citizens, and that spreads to every aspect of social life. The stupid war on drugs turns police into drill sergeants, and they treat citizens as grunts in boot camp. The only way we change this is to reaffirm the basic equality of citizens, and use that power to undo these idiotic laws.•

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“It Houses About 250,000 Individual Animals”

August 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

As Ben Crair reports in a colorful Businessweek piece, on a typical Saturday, about 12,000 visitors make their way to the Zoo Zajac, a ginormous German pet store that houses a quarter-million animals, many of which are exotic or unusual. It’s the Harrods of hamsters and hares.

Not everybody is there to buy; most just want to spend the day gawking in wonder. It’s a great free show, but the business would go belly up if it tried to exist by selling live animals–the real money is in accessories and merchandise. Being located in the European country with the lowest birthrate is a plus: Empty nests have room for birds and such.

The owner, Norbert Zajac, has been threatened and protested for selling puppies, but his greater concern is that a Chinese entrepreneur will eventually create a larger outlet than his, erasing him from the Guinness World Book of Records.

An excerpt:

Today, Zajac’s pet shop fills a 130,000-square-foot warehouse in an industrial part of Duisburg. It’s called Zoo Zajac, and it unfurls, like an airport terminal, along a horseshoe in the road. It’s more than twice the size of the White House and three times as large as a Whole Foods Market. It is, according to Guinness World Records, the biggest pet shop in the world. A visitor can spend as much as €9,000 ($10,000) on a two-toed sloth or as little as €1.19 on a box of crickets. She can buy armadillos, meerkats, coatis, and monkeys; or fill aquariums with jellyfish, tetras, shellfish, and piranhas. Zoo Zajac sells 50 species of tarantula and maintains one of the finest reptile collections in western Europe—better, even, than many zoos. It houses about 250,000 individual animals of 3,000 different species. A walk around the place is essentially an endurance sport, which is why Zajac, a heavy man with two bad knees, zips up and down the aisles on a black moped. The vehicle never leaves the premises and logs more than 2,500 miles a year.•

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“Trump Headed For A Prime Location, The City’s Red-Light District”

August 24, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Grandpa Friedrich Trump was a “whoremaster,” and in retrospect, he was the classy one.

After leaving Germany as a lad and rechristening himself as the more-Americanized “Frederick,” Donald’s pop-pop burnished his bank account by selling liquor, gambling and women to miners in rooming houses he built in boomtowns before they went bust. He always managed to stay just ahead of the law.

In a Politico piece, Gwenda Blair, who authored a book about Trump history, writes that his grandfather was the template for Donald, who has been most influenced by the “family culture of doing whatever it takes to come out on top and never giving up.”

The opening:

One hundred and thirty years ago, in 1885, Friedrich Trump stepped off a boat in lower Manhattan with a single suitcase. Only sixteen years old, he had left a note for his widowed mother on the kitchen table back in Kallstadt, a village in southwestern Germany, and slipped off in the middle of the night. He didn’t want to work in the family vineyard or get a job as a barber, the profession for which he’d been trained. He wanted to become rich, and America was the place to do it.

Friedrich wasted no time, and he did it by pushing the behavioral boundaries of his time, much as his grandson Donald would a century later. By the early 1890s, Friedrich had learned English; morphed from a skinny teenager into an adult man with a handlebar moustache; become a naturalized U.S. citizen, an easy matter at a time when there were no immigration quotas (much less debates about “birthright”); changed the spelling of his name to the more American-sounding Frederick; and made his way to Seattle, a wide-open city filled with single, rootless newcomers who’d arrived expecting to make their fortunes but found themselves facing the same uncertain economic prospects they’d wanted to leave behind.

A quick study, Trump headed for a prime location, the city’s red-light district, known as the Lava Beds. There he leased a tiny storefront restaurant named the Poodle Dog, which had a kitchen and a bar and advertised “private rooms for ladies”–code for prostitutes. It would allow the resourceful Trump, who renamed it the Dairy Restaurant, to offer the restless, frustrated public some right-now satisfaction in the form of food, booze and easily available sex.•

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“When Isis Destroys Ancient Sites It Is Not Just Attacking Buildings”

August 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

What’s most maddening about the Islamic State is that if the rest of the world decided it was not going to allow this atrocious behavior, the group could be put down quite readily. But, of course, that’s not how global politics works, it’s a more fractious and complicated thing, and sometimes that can be galling.

While I’m no longer shocked by the brutal murders committed by these deviants, they still hit me harder than the trashing of antiquities, though that’s another horror. In a Guardian article, Julian Baggini argues that if you inversely feel more outraged about the ISIS assaults on dead cities than living humans, you’re not necessarily being inhumane. An excerpt:

Caring about how people live also means caring about those aspects of human culture that speak to more than our needs for food, shelter and good health. It involves recognising that there are human achievements that transcend our own lives and our own generations. We come and go, but we are survived by the fruits of our peers and those who came before us. There is a humility in seeing, as Rick did in Casablanca, that the problems of a few “little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world”.

When Isis destroys ancient sites it is not just attacking buildings, it is attacking the values their preservation represents, such as a recognition of the plurality of cultures that precede and surround us, as well as a respect for the achievements of past generations and a sense that we are custodians for the generations to follow. The destruction of the Temple of Baal Shamin is a brutally shocking sign that this is an organisation that has no respect for the diverse history and culture of civilisation but seeks instead to erase everything except what it holds dear. It shows that even when Isis does not kill, it doesn’t let people live as they legitimately desire to do, which is a particular kind of terror of its own.

The destruction of people and places might appear to be quite different, but the distinction is not as neat as it first seems.•

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“Current Laws Never Envisioned A Vehicle That Can Drive Itself”

August 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In what’s an otherwise very good Fast Company article about autonomous cars, Charlie Sorrel conveniently elides one really important fact: not all the kinks have yet been worked out of the driverless experience. While Google has done extensive testing on the vehicles, inclement weather is still poses a challenge for them and visual-recognition systems need further enhancement. So, yes, legislation and entrenched human behaviors are significant barriers to be overcome, but the machines themselves continue to need fine-tuning.

Still, it’s an interesting article, especially the section about the nature of future cities that await us should we perfect and accept this new normal. An excerpt:

Famously, Google’s self-driving cars have clocked up 1.7 million miles over six years, all without major incident.

“In more than a million miles of real-world testing, autonomous vehicles have been involved in around a dozen crashes (with no major injuries),” says John Nielsen, AAA’s Managing Director of Automotive Engineering and Repair, “all of which occurred when a human driver was in control, or the vehicle was struck by another car.”

Self-driving cars are already way better than people-piloted cars, so what’s the trouble?

“Current laws never envisioned a vehicle that can drive itself, and there are numerous liability issues that need to be ironed out,” Nielsen says. “If an autonomous vehicle gets in a collision, who is responsible? The “driver,” their insurance company, the automaker that built the vehicle, or the third-party supplier that provided the autonomous control systems?”

How will the laws adapt? And how will we adapt? People are hesitant to embrace change, but the change that driverless cars will bring to our cities and lifestyles is enormous. What will it take to get there?•

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“Imagine Such A Weapon Enhanced By An A.I. Technology”

August 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Jerry Kaplan, author of Humans Need Not Apply, thinks technology may make warfare safer (well, relatively). Perhaps, but that’s not the goal of all combatants. He uses the landmine as an example, arguing that a “smarter” explosive could be made to only detonate if enemy military happened across it. But any nation or rogue state using landmines does so precisely because of the terror that transcends the usual rules of engagement. They would want to use new tools to escalate that threat. The internationally sanctioned standards Kaplan hopes we attain will likely never be truly universal. As the implements of war grow cheaper, smaller and more out of control, that issue becomes more ominous.

In theory, robotized weapons could make war less lethal or far more so, but that will depend on the intentions of the users, and both scenarios will probably play out. 

From Kaplan in the New York Times:

Consider the lowly land mine. Those horrific and indiscriminate weapons detonate when stepped on, causing injury, death or damage to anyone or anything that happens upon them. They make a simple-minded “decision” whether to detonate by sensing their environment — and often continue to do so, long after the fighting has stopped.

Now imagine such a weapon enhanced by an A.I. technology less sophisticated than what is found in most smartphones. An inexpensive camera, in conjunction with other sensors, could discriminate among adults, children and animals; observe whether a person in its vicinity is wearing a uniform or carrying a weapon; or target only military vehicles, instead of civilian cars.

This would be a substantial improvement over the current state of the art, yet such a device would qualify as an offensive autonomous weapon of the sort the open letter proposes to ban.

Then there’s the question of whether a machine — say, an A.I.-enabled helicopter drone — might be more effective than a human at making targeting decisions. In the heat of battle, a soldier may be tempted to return fire indiscriminately, in part to save his or her own life. By contrast, a machine won’t grow impatient or scared, be swayed by prejudice or hate, willfully ignore orders or be motivated by an instinct for self-preservation.•

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“Free Love And The Psychedelic Style Made Good Copy”

August 23, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Image by Ted Streshinsky.

In his New Yorker piece about Tracy Daugherty’s Joan Didion biography, The Last Love Song, Louis Menand states that “‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ was not a very good piece of standard journalism.” Well, no. Nor was the Flying Burrito Brothers very good classical music, but each of those assessments is probably beside the point.

Menand claims Didion poorly contextualized the Hippie movement, but the early stages of his own article suffers from the same. He asserts the Flower Child craze and the thorny period that followed it was similar to the Beats of the previous decade, just weekend faddists lightly experimenting with drugs. But the counterculture of the late-1960s blossomed into a massive anti-war movement, a much larger-scale thing, and the youth culture’s societal impact wasn’t merely a creation of opportunistic, screaming journalism. Menand wants to prove this interpretation wrong, but he doesn’t do so in this piece. He offers a couple of “facts” of indeterminate source about that generation’s drug use, and leaves it at that. Not nearly good enough.

I admire Menand deeply (especially The Metaphysical Club) the way he does Didion, but I think her source material approaches the truth far more than this part of Menand’s critique does. Later on in the piece, he points out that Didion wasn’t emblematic of that epoch but someone unique and outside the mainstream, suggesting her grasp of the era was too idiosyncratic to resemble reality. But detachment doesn’t render someone incapable of understanding the moment. In fact, it’s often those very people who are best positioned to.

The final part of the article which focuses on how in the aftermath of her Haight-Ashbury reportage, Didion had a political awakening from her conservative California upbringing, though not an immediate or conventional one. This long passage is Menand’s strongest argument.

An excerpt:

“Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is not a very good piece of standard journalism, though. Didion did no real interviewing or reporting. The hippies she tried to have conversations with said “Groovy” a lot and recycled flower-power clichés. The cops refused to talk to her. So did the Diggers, who ran a sort of hippie welfare agency in the Haight. The Diggers accused Didion of “media poisoning,” by which they meant coverage in the mainstream press designed to demonize the counterculture.

The Diggers were not wrong. The mainstream press (such as the places Didion wrote for, places like The Saturday Evening Post) was conflicted about the hippie phenomenon. It had journalistic sex appeal. Hippies were photogenic, free love and the psychedelic style made good copy, and the music was uncontroversially great. Around the time Didion was in San Francisco, the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and soon afterward the Monterey Pop Festival was held. D. A. Pennebaker’s film of the concert came out in 1968 and introduced many people to Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Ravi Shankar. Everybody loved Ravi Shankar.

Ravi Shankar did not use drugs, however. The drugs were the sketchy part of the story, LSD especially. People thought that LSD made teen-age girls jump off bridges. By the time Didion’s article came out, Time had run several stories about “the dangerous LSD craze.” And a lot of Didion’s piece is about LSD, people on acid saying “Wow” while their toddlers set fire to the living room. The cover of the Post was a photograph of a slightly sinister man, looking like a dealer, in a top hat and face paint—an evil Pied Piper. That photograph was what the Diggers meant by “media poisoning.”•

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“He Must Be Taken Seriously”

August 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

If there’s one person Jesus Christ would not approve of, it would be a racist, adulterous, thrice-married braggart who builds gaudy buildings and casinos and vomits gold paint onto them. Christian conservatives who support Donald Trump have shown their so-called faith never had anything to do with religion. It’s always been about race and privilege. 

More worrisome is how the U.S. press has handled his odious campaign, treating it like a summer blockbuster full of fun special effects. Riveting! A joyride! Fun for the whole family!

It behooves journalists to cover any candidate making xenophobic comments seriously. When CNN announced Trump drew 30,000 spectators in Alabama to hear him speak when the 45,000-seat stadium was more than half-empty, they aren’t doing their job but instead feeding a monster. When Maureen Dowd of the New York Times yukked it up with the vulgar hatemonger, it’s clear Trump wasn’t the only wealthy, out-of-touch person involved in the interview. (Thankfully, others at the Times are treating the matter more soberly.)

Even if the miserable magnate is deflated and floats away like a Thanksgiving Day balloon that backed into a pin, the paraders following him will still be there, full of rage and bigotry.

From Edward Luce at the Financial Times:

It is February 2016 and the sky is falling on our heads. Donald Trump has just won the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary. Those who predicted he would have long since imploded are scrambling to fallback positions. He will flame out on Super Tuesday, they insist. He will be ejected by primary voters in Jeb Bush’s Florida in March, they add.

If worst comes to worst, he will meet his Waterloo at the Republican convention in July — the first such brokered event in decades. Fear not, wise heads will reassure us, that man could never be president of the United States.

Like a stopped clock, conventional wisdom must eventually be right on Mr Trump. It goes without saying that sane people should hope so. Last week two of the billionaire’s more inflamed supporters beat up a homeless Hispanic man. All Mr Trump could initially say was that his followers were “passionate”. Make no mistake, the property tycoon who would be president is an unpleasant piece of work.

Conservatives should be especially worried. His plans to round up and deport the estimated 11.5m undocumented immigrants would require the federal power of a police state. His plan to scrap the 14th amendment’s birthright to US citizenship would corrode America’s soul.

Yet he must be taken seriously.•

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“Dr. Ayers Noticed A Screw Missing From One Of The Trio Of Legs Extending From The Right Side Of The Lobster’s Abdomen”

August 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

bigdogrun

In between GE’s clumsy 1968 Pedipulator, an elephant-esque walking truck, and Boston Dynamics’ stunningly agile Big Dog and Cheetah, biomimetics went through plenty of growing pains. It’s a smart concept: Examine how land and marine creatures overcome obstacles and ape it with AI. Easier said than done, though. In “They’re Robots? Those Beasts!” a 2004 New York Times article, Scott Kirsner profiled Northeastern University’s Joseph Ayers and other roboticists exploring nature for inspiration. The opening:

JOSEPH AYERS was crouched over a laptop in a cool cinder block shed barely big enough to house a ride-on lawn mower, watching a boxy-shelled black lobster through a rectangular acrylic window.

Dr. Ayers’s shed is adjacent to a fiberglass saltwater tank that looks like a big above-ground swimming pool, and through the window, he observed as the seven-pound lobster clambered across the sandy bottom and struggled to surmount small rocks.

”He’s pitched backwards onto his tail, and his front legs aren’t really touching the ground,” said Dr. Ayers, a professor of biology at Northeastern University in Boston, sounding vexed.

A few minutes later, Dr. Ayers noticed a screw missing from one of the trio of legs extending from the right side of the lobster’s abdomen. Were this lobster not made of industrial-strength plastic, metal alloys and a nickel metal hydride battery, Dr. Ayers — the author of several lobster cookbooks, including ”Dr. Ayers Cooks With Cognac” — seemed frustrated enough to drop the robotic lobster into a boiling pot of water and serve it up for dinner.

Dr. Ayers was at his university’s Marine Science Center on the peninsula of Nahant, which pokes out into Massachusetts Bay. He was trying to get his robotic lobster ready for a demonstration in late September for the military branch that funds his work, the Office of Naval Research. By then, he hopes to have the lobster using its two claws as bump sensors.

”When it walks into a rock,” he explained, ”it’ll be able to decide whether to go over it or around it, depending on the size of the rock.”

Dr. Ayers is one of a handful of robotics researchers who regard animals as their muses.•

 

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“Our World Is Different”

August 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The Nobel Physicist Frank Wilczek, author of A Beautiful Question, thinks CERN may soon go a long way beyond the discovery of the Higgs-Boson particle and prove supersymmetry. In a Spiegel Q&A conducted by Johann Grolle, the scientist also explains what the consistency of natural laws says to him:

Spiegel:

Are you astonished that nature obeys laws that we humans are able to understand?

Frank Wilczek:

This fact has deep meaning, and is not at all guaranteed. As a thought experiment, let us assume that the whole world is just a simulation on a gigantic supercomputer, where we are also just part of this simulation. So, roughly speaking, we are talking about a world in which Super Mario thinks that his Super Mario world is real. The laws in such a world wouldn’t necessarily be beautiful or symmetric. They would be whatever the programmer put in there, which means these laws could be arbitrary, they could suddenly change or be different from place to place. And there would be no simpler description of these laws than a very long computer program. Such a world is logically possible, but our world is different. It is a glorious fact that in our world, when we go really deep, we can understand it.•

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“The Longest I’ve Ever Watched A Reality Television Show Was 20 Seconds”

August 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

It’s no surprise documentarian Frederick Wiseman was asked about Reality TV in his Reddit AMA, since that form perverts his observational mode and cinéma vérité to communicate a simulacrum of truth, though it’s not true at all. Unsurprisingly, Wiseman is not a fan of the genre. 

If I had one question to ask the filmmaker, it would be this: When making Titicut Follies, did you feel like slapping the cigarette from the mouth of the hospital worker who was tube-feeding a patient, his ashes hanging precariously over the funnel? Fly on the wall or not, it must have been hard to resist.

A few exchanges follow.

_________________________

Question:

Were there any of the early ‘reality shows’ that you were curious about? Do they fit in a tradition, in terms of TV or were people correct to think it was a new kind of thing?

Frederick Wiseman:

The longest I’ve ever watched a reality television show was 20 seconds. And that was once.

_________________________

Question:

Has the proliferation of media (especially documentaries, news magazine shows, and reality TV) in the last 25 years changed the way subjects interact with a camera? Are they more rehearsed?

Frederick Wiseman:

In my experience, there is no difference between in shooting films now than when I started in 1966. Most people – 99% of people – don’t have any problem with being photographed and do not act for the camera.

_________________________

Question:

Where do you draw the line when editing? Would you pull speech or sounds out of context, would you cut two shots together to look continuous if they were filmed weeks apart? Do you have explicit rules, or go with your gut?

Frederick Wiseman:

All editing requires compression of the sequence from its original length. I never change the order of events within a sequence, but necessarily have to condense the sequence while trying to remain faithful to my understanding of what is going on among the participants.

_________________________

Question:

What do you think of personality driven documentaries? (e.g. Michael Moore)

Frederick Wiseman:

I don’t comment on other people’s work.

_________________________

Question:

When you watch a documentary, are there any hack things people do that make you cringe?

Frederick Wiseman:

I don’t watch many movies of any sort – documentaries or fiction.

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Question:

What are some of your favorite films?

Frederick Wiseman:

Ivan the Terrible, To Be Or Not To Be, A Day at the Races. And: Duck Soup.

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Question:

What made you chose to focus on documentaries rather than fiction films?

Frederick Wiseman:

Technological advances in the late 1950s made it possible to make a movie about any subject where there was enough light to shoot film. Therefore, every aspect of contemporary life could be explored on film. There is great drama, tragedy, comedy in ordinary experience, which if you happen to be lucky enough to be present when it occurs, you can use in film. My goal is to make films of as many different aspects of life as I can.•

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