That wonderful Wallace Shawn gathered all his guilt into an indigestible lump to write, in 1996, The Designated Mourner, about intellect under siege as society goes up in flames. Not as good as Aunt Dan and Lemon or Marie and Bruce, but interesting stuff in the run-up to the new millennium. In retrospect, Shawn seemed to have misfired a bit. It wasn’t the top that was vanishing but the middle.
Another thing we’ve lost besides the middle in our new normal is memory, that decidedly un-pliant thing. Even things from a few years ago seem like ancient history. Perhaps more than designated mourners what we need now are designated reminders, people who can point out that the world didn’t begin with downloads.
One of the most colorful of current reminders is Matt Novak, founder of Paleofuture. After moving that site at Gizmodo, Novak penned “Oregon Was Founded As a Racist Utopia,” a post that seems very timely right now. Not that Oregonians are responsible for the Bundy brigade of anti-government interlopers, but it does speak to the history of regional resistance to authority. The opening:
When Oregon was granted statehood in 1859, it was the only state in the Union admitted with a constitution that forbade black people from living, working, or owning property there. It was illegal for black people even to move to the state until 1926. Oregon’s founding is part of the forgotten history of racism in the American west.
Waddles Coffee Shop in Portland, Oregon was a popular restaurant in the 1950s for both locals and travelers alike. The drive-in catered to America’s postwar obsession with car culture, allowing people to get coffee and a slice of pie without even leaving their vehicle. But if you happened to be black, the owners of Waddles implored you to keep on driving. The restaurant had a sign outside with a very clear message: “White Trade Only — Please.”
It’s the kind of scene from the 1950s that’s so hard for many Americans to imagine happening outside of the Jim Crow South. How could a progressive, northern city like Portland have allowed a restaurant to exclude non-white patrons? This had to be an anomaly, right? In reality it was far too common in Oregon, a state that was explicitly founded as a kind of white utopia.•
Life has always been, in some sense, a tale of two cities, those who have and those who have not–or at least much less. Even granting that, however, we’re living in a wildly unequal world. In a Factor-Tech piece, Lucy Ingham analyzes the conditions that have made it possible for the 1% to own most of the assets. She traces concentrated wealth in the U.S. back to the Ronald Reagan economic policies (tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, etc.) and a less sexy salvo, a change in law allowing companies to buy back large amounts of their own stock. The writer thinks financialization, more than automation, is the problem, and the result of a growing underclass has been a rising police state. An excerpt:
Inequality has always existed, and there is an argument to say it’s an inherent part of human society. However, the level of inequality is now far beyond what we perceive it to be, and that’s a big problem.
“The American consciousness about inequality is frozen in a previous era,” says [Les] Leopold, citing the US results of an international poll about the perceived gap between entry level workers’ and CEOs’ pay as an example.
In the poll, people from all walks of life and political affiliation were asked to state what they thought the average gap was between the lowest and highest earners at a typical company.
“By and large, no matter what their age or background or political affiliation was, it sort of came out to about 40:1 – for every one dollar to the entry-level worker, 40 to the CEO,” says Leopold. “That’s kind of what it was in 1970.”
The reality, according to The Labor Institute’s data about the top 100 CEOs, is 829:1, making the inequality gap around 20 times larger that people perceived it to be. In 2016 the Institute believes it will be worse still, projecting 859:1.
Yet when asked in the poll what the ratio should be, participants consistently said it should be even lower that the imagined rate of 40:1.
“Strong Republicans in this survey think it ought to be 12:1, strong Democrats say 5:1, the average is about 8:1,” adds Leopold.
So how have we not noticed that the reality is so very far from our perceptions?•
Sean Penn screen performances often depend on quantity as much as quality–not the best acting, but the most acting–so it’s no surprise his attempt at gonzo journalism, a Rolling Stone feature he wrote about his facacta jungle interview of Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera (or “El Chapo” as he’s known to his business associates) is logorrheic. The short Q&A embedded within the long article is deeply unsatisfying and the piece as a whole is a mess, though not one without interest. It’s more fascinating, though, for allowing a close-up of the actor-director’s staccato brain droppings and the technological logistics of securing a clandestine meeting with Mexico’s most-wanted man than for any insight into the cartel kingpin. It only takes two paragraphs for Penn to describe his very own Oscar Zeta Acosta in this way: “Espinoza is the owl who flies among falcons.” Bless his editor.
Penn, unsurprisingly, has deep sympathy for El Chapo despite his beheadings of those he wanted to eliminate and murders of priests who refused extortion demands, arguing that American drug users are complicit in these crimes. In that case, Penn’s nose should be arrested for multiple homicide. Galling that the lightweight inquisition allows the subject to downplay his horrific violence and an odd way to protest the U.S. War on Drugs, which is an undoubtedly stupid thing. An excerpt:
It’s been about two hours of flight, when we descend from above the lush peaks to ward a sea-level field. The pilot, using his encrypted cellphone, talks to the ground. I sense that the military is beefing up operations in its search area. Our original landing zone has suddenly been deemed insecure. After quite a bit of chatter from ground to air, and some unnervingly low altitude circling, we find an alternate dirt patch where two SUVs wait in the shade of an adjacent tree line, and land. The flight had been just bumpy enough that each of us had taken a few swigs off a bottle of Honor tequila, a new brand that Kate is marketing. I step from plane to earth, ever so slightly sobering my bearings, and move toward the beckoning waves of waiting drivers. I throw my satchel into the open back of one of the SUVs, and lumber over to the tree line to take a piss. Dick in hand, I do consider it among my body parts vulnerable to the knives of irrational narco types, and take a fond last look, before tucking it back into my pants.
Espinoza had recently undergone back surgery. He stretched, readjusted his surgical corset, exposing it. It dawns on me that one of our greeters might mistake the corset for a device that contains a wire, a chip, a tracker. With all their eyes on him, Espinoza methodically adjusts the Velcro toward his belly, slowly looks up, sharing his trademark smile with the suspicious eyes around him. Then, “Cirugia de espalda [back surgery],” he says. Situation defused.
We embark into the dense, mountainous jungle in a two-truck convoy, crossing through river after river for seven long hours. Espinoza and El Alto, with a driver in the front vehicle, myself and Kate with Alonzo and Alfredo in the rear. At times the jungle opens up to farmland, then closes again into forest. As the elevation begins to climb, road signage announces approaching townships. And then, as it seems we are at the entrance of Oz, the highest peak visibly within reach, we arrive at a military checkpoint. Two uniformed government soldiers, weapons at the ready, approach our vehicle. Alfredo lowers his passenger window; the soldiers back away, looking embarrassed, and wave us through. Wow. So it is, the power of a Guzman face. And the corruption of an institution. Did this mean we were nearing the man?
It was still several hours into the jungle before any sign we were getting closer. Then, strangers appear as if from nowhere, onto the dirt track, checking in with our drivers and exchanging hand radios. We move on. Small villages materialize from the jungle; protective peasant eyes relax at the wave of a familiar driver. Cellphones are of no use here, so I imagine there are radio repeaters on topographical high points facilitating their internal communications.
We’d left Los Angeles at 7 a.m. By 9 p.m. on the dash clock we arrive at a clearing where several SUVs are parked. A small crew of men hover. On a knoll above, I see a few weathered bungalows. I get out of the truck, search the faces of the crew for approval that I may walk to the trunk to secure my bag. Nods follow. I move. And, when I do…there he is. Right beside the truck. The world’s most famous fugitive: El Chapo.•
Tom Chatfield, an uncommonly thoughtful commenter on the technological world we’ve built for ourselves, is interviewed by Nigel Warburton of Aeon about staying human in a machine age. In the seven-minute piece, Chatfield notes that games in the Digital Age have become more meaningful than work in many instances because the former builds skills in players while the latter looks to replace the messy human component.
A much more exiting model of human-machine interaction, Chatfield offers, is one where we maximize what people and AI are each good at. That would be great and is doable in the short run if we choose to approach the situation that way, but I do believe that ultimately, whatever tasks that both humans and machines can do will be ceded almost entirely to silicon. A freestyle-chess system to production will have a short shelf life in most applications. We may be left to figure out brand new areas in which we can thrive and define why we exist.
At any rate, smart stuff about automated systems. Watch here.
If you’d asked me what Charles Koch eats for lunch, I would have guessed pulled pork or jerk chicken. The billionaire industrialist and right-wing benefactor opted for the former when he sat down to dine and talk with Stephen Foley of the Financial Times for an interesting interview. Funny that Koch now regrets many of the policies he’s spent elephantine sums supporting in the new century. (Of course, it’s not the first time he’s voiced opinions at odds with the think-tanks, projects and politicians he bankrolls.) Something tells me he’ll be regretting the beliefs he currently supports in another decade.
An excerpt about the current slate of GOP 2016 hopefuls:
I ask about the rhetorical turn the race has taken when it comes to dealing with Islamist terror, and about Trump’s assertion that the US could require all Muslims in the country to register with the government.
“Well, then you destroy our free society,” Koch says of the idea. “Who is it that said, ‘If you want to defend your liberty, the first thing you’ve got to do is defend the liberty of people you like the least’?”
He then expounds on the war on terror. “We have been doing this for a dozen years. We invaded Afghanistan. We invaded Iraq. Has that made us safer? Has that made the world safer? It seems like we’re more worried about it now than we were then, so we need to examine these strategies.”
It’s a view that also contrasts with that of another Republican frontrunner; Ted Cruz’s plan to carpet-bomb Isis strongholds is anathema to Koch. “I’ve studied revolutionaries a lot,” he says. “Mao said that the people are the sea in which the revolutionary swims. Not that we don’t need to defend ourselves and have better intelligence and all that, but how do we create an unfriendly sea for the terrorists in the Muslim communities? We haven’t done a good job of that.” With about 1.6bn Muslims worldwide “in country after country. What,” he asks, “are we going to do: go bomb each one of them?”
These particular views could almost have come from the mouth of Bernie Sanders, the socialist challenger to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination and a regular basher of the Kochs.•
It’s usually better to worry too soon than too late about an ethical quandary, but the National Institute of Health is thinking far in advance when it expresses concern about scientists attempting to grow human organs in lab animals. It’s not that the NIH believes such experiments are bad for the creatures–that would be understandable–but the agency wants to halt the research because it feels injecting human cells into other species may invest them with a human level of understanding. It’s really difficult to believe that’s happening anytime soon.
In a MIT Technology Review report, Anthony Regalado reports that numerous American labs are pushing forward on this front despite threats of funding being pulled. An excerpt:
The experiments rely on a cutting-edge fusion of technologies, including recent breakthroughs in stem-cell biology and gene-editing techniques. By modifying genes, scientists can now easily change the DNA in pig or sheep embryos so that they are genetically incapable of forming a specific tissue. Then, by adding stem cells from a person, they hope the human cells will take over the job of forming the missing organ, which could then be harvested from the animal for use in a transplant operation.
“We can make an animal without a heart. We have engineered pigs that lack skeletal muscles and blood vessels,” says Daniel Garry, a cardiologist who leads a chimera project at the University of Minnesota. While such pigs aren’t viable, they can develop properly if a few cells are added from a normal pig embryo. Garry says he’s already melded two pigs in this way and recently won a $1.4 million grant from the U.S. Army, which funds some biomedical research, to try to grow human hearts in swine.
…
The worry is that the animals might turn out to be a little too human for comfort, say ending up with human reproductive cells, patches of people hair, or just higher intelligence. “We are not near the island of Dr. Moreau, but science moves fast,” NIH ethicist David Resnik said during the agency’s November meeting. “The specter of an intelligent mouse stuck in a laboratory somewhere screaming ‘I want to get out’ would be very troubling to people.”•
To many Americans, the sons of Bundy and their militia mates evoke one question: why? Why would a group of well-fed, so-called patriots think their own government, for whatever flaws it possesses, is the devil? It seems madness, alien to any rational interpretation. That could be because the terroristic behavior isn’t driven by facts but by faith, and one given to particularly violent tendencies. You don’t need religion to do something rash and scary, of course, but it can be a very potent ingredient in a toxic mix.
There has always been faith-fuelled madness in the country, as best demonstrated in Gilbert Seldes’ book The Stammering Century, and Jon Krakauer believes the Oregon occupation is powered by the same spiritual madness that abetted the murders committed by Dan and Ron Lafferty, which he investigated in Under the Banner of Heaven.
In a Medium article, the author excerpts two pieces of his 2004 book particularly pertinent to current events. An excerpt:
After Dan Lafferty read The Peace Maker in the early 1980s and resolved to start living the principle of plural marriage, he announced to his wife, Matilda, that he intended to wed her oldest daughter — his stepdaughter. At the last minute, however, he abandoned that plan and instead married a Romanian immigrant named Ann Randak, who took care of the horses on one of Robert Redford’s ranches up Spanish Fork Canyon, in the mountains east of the Dream Mine. Ann and Dan met when he borrowed a horse from her to ride in a local parade. She wasn’t LDS, says Dan, “but she was open to new experiences. Becoming my plural wife was her idea.” Ann, he adds, “was a lovely girl. I called her my gypsy bride.”
Living according to the strictures laid down in The Peace Maker felt good to Dan — it felt right, as though this really were the way God intended men and women to live. Inspired, Dan sought out other texts published by a well-known fundamentalist and Dream Mine backer, Ogden Kraut, about Mormonism as it was practiced in the early years of the church.
It didn’t take him long to discover that polygamy wasn’t the only divine principle the modern LDS Church had abandoned in its eagerness to be accepted by American society. Dan learned that in the 19th century, both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young had preached about the righteousness of a sacred doctrine known as “blood atonement:” Certain grievous acts committed against Mormons, as Brigham explained it, could only be rectified if the “sinners have their blood spilt upon the ground.” And Dan learned that Joseph had taught that the laws of God take precedence over the laws of men.
Legal theory was a subject of particular interest to Dan. His curiosity had first been aroused when he was training to be a chiropractor in California, following a run-in he had with state and county authorities. At the time, he supported his family primarily by running a small sandwich business out of their home. Dan, Matilda, and the oldest kids would get out of bed before dawn every morning in order to make and wrap stacks of “all natural” vegetarian sandwiches, which Dan would then sell to other chiropractic students during the lunch hour.
“It was a very profitable little hustle,” Dan says proudly. “Or it was until the Board of Health closed me down for not following regulations. They claimed I needed a license, and that I wasn’t paying the required taxes.” Just before he was put out of business, Matilda had given birth to a baby boy. Money was tight. Losing their main source of income was problematic. It also proved to be a pivotal event in Dan’s passage to fundamentalism.
“After they shut me down,” Dan recalls, “I didn’t know quite what to do. It didn’t seem right to me, that the government would penalize me just for being ambitious and trying to support my family — that they would actually force me to go on welfare instead of simply letting me run my little business. It seemed so stupid — the worst kind of government intrusion. In The Book of Mormon, Moroni talks about how all of us have an obligation to make sure we have a good and just government, and when I read that, it really got me going. It made me realize that I needed to start getting involved in political issues. And I saw that when it comes right down to it, you can’t really separate political issues from religious issues. They’re all tied up together.”•
Hanna Reitsch would have been a feminist hero, if it weren’t for the Nazism.
Like the equally talented Leni Riefenstahl, politics made her story the thorniest thing. Reitsch was a pioneering, early-20th-century test pilot, an aviatrix as she was called in that era, but her gifts and great daring were used in the service of the Nazi Party beginning in the 1930s. Her importance in the scheme of things was such that she visited Hitler in his bunker in 1945.
Although her reputation was always sullied—and, of course, should have been—Reitsch nonetheless did enjoy considerable standing despite her past, becoming a champion glider, and even being invited as a guest of the White House during the Kennedy Administration.
The text of “Girl Rode Robot Bomb To Test It, Nazis Reveal,” the July 27, 1944 Brooklyn Daily Eagle account of her most storied and dangerous mission, for which she received the Iron Cross:
In 1976, three years before her death, Reitsch was interviewed about her aerial exploits.
__________________________
Even though he remains one of the pantheon filmmakers, Fritz Lang had mixed feelings about the medium. Talkies initially left him cold and later on he found the Hollywood studio system a discombobulating compromise.
In 1972, Lang was interviewed by two reporters, Lloyd Chesley and Michael Gould, and confided in them that he had tired of directing movies by the advent of talking pictures and decided to recreate himself as a chemist. A disreputable money man dragged him back into the business and gave him the creative freedom to make the chilling classic, M. An excerpt from the interview:
Michael Gould:
Your themes changed from epic to intimate when you began making sound films.
Fritz Lang:
I got tired from the big films. I didn’t want to make films anymore. I wanted to become a chemist. About this time an independent man—not of very good reputation—wanted me to make a film and I said ‘No, I don’t want to make films anymore.’ And he came and came and came, and finally I said ‘Look, I will make a film, but you will have nothing to say for it. You don’t know what it will be, you have no right to cut it, you only can give the money.’ He said ‘Fine, understood.’ And so I made M.
We started to write the script and I talked with my wife, Thea von Harbou, and I said ‘What is the most insidious crime?’ We came to the fact of anonymous poison letters. And then one day I said I had another idea—long before this mass murderer,[Peter] Kurten, in the Rhineland. And if I wouldn’t have the agreement for no one to tell me anything, I would never, never have made M. Nobody knew Peter Lorre.•
In 1975, Lang and William Friedkin, two directors transfixed by extreme evil, engaged in conversation.
__________________________
John Cale sometimes seems exhausted talking about The Velvet Underground, and who could blame him? An unlikely rock star to begin with, the Welsh musician was a classically trained violinist with strong avant garde leanings who arrived in New York City just as its rock and art scenes were exploding into one another, collaborating almost immediately with volatile Lou Reed and soon enough vampiric Andy Warhol. Cale lasted two albums with the band, but has never escaped its reputation. How could he?
“In Chicago, I was singing lead because Lou had hepatitis, no one knew the difference. We turned our faces to the wall and turned up very loud. Paul Morrissey (later the director of Trash) and Danny Williams had different visions of what the light show should be like and one night I looked up to see them fighting, hitting each other in the middle of a song. Danny Williams just disappeared. They found his clothes by the side of a river, with his car nearby … the whole thing. He used to carry this strobe around with him all the time and no one could figure out why till we found out he kept his amphetamine in it.”
“We worked the Masonic Hall in Columbus Ohio. A huge place filled with people drinking and talking. We tuned up for about ten minutes, tuning, fa-da-da, up, da-da-da, down. There’s a tape of it. Played a whole set to no applause, just silences.”
“In San Francisco, we played the Fillmore and no one liked us much. We put the guitars against the amps, turned up, played percussion and then split. Bill Graham came into the dressing room and said, ‘You owe me 20 more minutes’. I’d dropped a cymbal on Lou’s head and he was bleeding. ‘Is he hurt?’ Graham said, ‘We’re not insured.'”
“Severn Darden brought this young chick up to meet me there and he introduced her as one of my ardent admirers. This was a long time ago and I didn’t know about such things, so I said, ‘Pleased to meet you,’ and walked off. Two days later in L.A., here comes Severn again with this girl. I say hello again and leave. We’re all staying at the castle in L.A., and things are very hazy, if you know what I mean. Well, this girl is there too. I smile but I still don’t understand. About two in the morning the door of my room opens and she walks in naked and gets into bed. Went on for five nights. I don’t think I even got her address.”
The Velvets suffered from all kinds of strange troubles. They spent three years on the road away from New York City, their home, playing Houston, Boston, small towns in Pennsylvania, anywhere that would pay them scale.
“We needed someone like Andy,” John says. “He was a genius for getting publicity. Once we were in Providence to play at the Rhode Island School of Design and they sent a TV newsman to talk to us. Andy did the interview lying on the ground with his head propped up on one arm. There were some studded balls with lights shining on them and when the interviewer asked him why he was on the ground, Andy said, “So I can see the stars better.” The interview ended with the TV guy lying flat on his back saying, “Yeah, I see what you mean.”•
A 21-year-old John Cale the year he arrived in NYC and the one before he met Reed, on I’ve Got a Secret.
Every political season has its boogeymen, those frightening figures raised to scare up votes, and this particularly vitriolic period in the U.S. has Muslims, Mexicans and Chinese manufacturers. The latter pair are supposedly responsible for the decline of American manufacturing, and by extension, the middle class.
Outsourcing the making of American products to other countries may have been somewhat of a problem over the last three decades, but it’s a different kind of challenge workers are facing today: Potentially widespread automation that goes far beyond the factory floor. It’s nothing new, but the current pace of robotics progress is unprecedented.
Technological unemployment has been paid scant attention by 2016 hopefuls, most of whom are promising a return to postwar American manufacturing, which is most definitely not going to happen. In a New York Times editorial, Emma Roller argues that trying to turn back the digital clock is “not an attainable, or even a desirable, goal.” An excerpt:
Republicans aren’t the only ones obsessing over reclaiming these factory jobs. Last month, Hillary Clinton mentioned factory closings when she released her own plan to restore manufacturing jobs through a network of tax credits and federal funding for research. Senator Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, in criticizing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, has argued that such international trade deals are to blame for the loss of manufacturing jobs in this country.
The problem with this sort of rhetoric is that a lot of the manufacturing jobs the United States lost over the past 50 years didn’t go overseas; they simply disappeared with the advent of new technology.
James Sherk, a research fellow in labor economics at the Heritage Foundation, said the trend in machines taking over factory work that was previously done by humans has been going on since the 1950s. But for presidential candidates, it’s a lot easier to blame other countries rather than robots.
“It’s those basically rote, repetitive tasks where you’re fixing the same thing,” he said. “It’s very hard to imagine any of those positions coming back. Basically, a robot is a lot more affordable than a human employee.”
The skills needed to work on a factory floor today are quite different than they were 20, 10 or even five years ago. Don’t blame stingy companies or over-regulation by the government; blame the rapid progress of technology.•
At some point this century, and probably sooner than later, sensors will live inside pretty much all manufactured objects, moving every last thing into an interconnected data-gathering and -crunching system. Part of the mission will be to make individual lives and entire cities more efficient, constantly upgrading, but much of it will be about consumerism, creating and selling “products that respond to their owner’s tastes,” as Quentin Hardy of the New York Times notes in his really smart article about technologist Adam Bosworth attempting to bring about “data singularity.” All the world will be a “smart object,” privacy will be compromised to an unprecedented degree, and there’ll be no way to opt out. The blessing will be mixed.
An excerpt:
Imagine if almost everything — streets, car bumpers, doors, hydroelectric dams — had a tiny sensor. That is already happening through so-called Internet-of-Things projects run by big companies like General Electric and IBM.
All those devices and sensors would also wirelessly connect to far-off data centers, where millions of computer servers manage and learn from all that information.
Those servers would then send back commands to help whatever the sensors are connected to operate more effectively: A home automatically turns up the heat ahead of cold weather moving in, or streetlights behave differently when traffic gets bad. Or imagine an insurance company instantly resolving who has to pay for what an instant after a fender-bender because it has been automatically fed information about the accident.
Think of it as one, enormous process in which machines gather information, learn and change based on what they learn. All in seconds.
“I’m interested in affecting five billion people,” said Mr. Bosworth, a former star at Microsoft and Google who now makes interactive software atSalesforce.com, an online software company that runs sales for thousands of corporations. “We’re headed into one of those historic discontinuities where society changes.”•
Donald Trump doesn’t want to force menstruating women to wear burqas, but what else can he do? I mean, he’s a businessman.
It’s amusing to listen to the hideous hotelier try to torpedo Bernie Sanders with cheap insults the way he does his fellow Republicans, the Vermont Senator impervious to taunts like “wacko” because of his gravitas, common sense and sheer likability. It’s difficult to envision Sanders faring well in Southern primaries, but perhaps he’s awakening a positive populist energy that won’t readily go away as Trump has awakened an enduring hatred. As the Occupy movement framed the 2012 election season, maybe Sanders will do the same now. Is he part of an elongated prelude to something significant?
In 2003 I wrote in my The New Ruthless Economythat one of the great imponderables of the twenty-first century was how long it would take for the deteriorating economic circumstances of most Americans to become a dominant political issue. It has taken over ten years but it is now happening, and its most dramatic manifestation to date is the rise of Bernie Sanders. While many political commentators seem to have concluded that Hillary Clinton is the presumptive Democratic nominee, polls taken as recently as the third week of December show Sanders to be ahead by more than ten points in New Hampshire and within single-figure striking distance of her in Iowa, the other early primary state.
Though he continues to receive far less attention in the national media than Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, Sanders is posing a powerful challenge not only to the Democratic establishment aligned with Hillary Clinton, but also the school of thought that assumes that the Democrats need an establishment candidate like Clinton to run a viable campaign for president. Why this should be happening right now is a mystery for historians to unravel. It could be the delayed effect of the Great Recession of 2007-2008, or of economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez’s unmasking of the vast concentration of wealth among the top 1 percent and the 0.1 percent of Americans, or just the cumulative effect of years of disappointment for many American workers.
Such mass progressive awakenings have happened before. I remember taking part in antiwar demonstrations on the East and West coasts in the Fall and Winter of 1967–1968. I noticed that significant numbers of solid middle-class citizens were joining in, sometimes with strollers, children, and dogs in tow. I felt at the time that this was the writing on the wall for Lyndon Johnson, as indeed it turned out to be. We may yet see such a shift away from Hillary Clinton, despite her strong performance in the recent debates and her recent recovery in the polls.
If it happens, it will owe in large part to Sanders’s unusual, if not unique, political identity.•
The Atlantic put together a predictably smart piece (“Can the Planet Be Saved?“) which asks scientists and thinkers what they feel most despairing and most hopeful about at year’s end. The first entry, by University of Arizona Law and Public Policy Professor Robert Glennon, speaks to a challenge made stark by the California droughts that worsened in 2015: water security. Our concept of H2O is baffling, as it’s priced cheap (and often wasted frivolously) yet along with oxygen the dearest thing. An excerpt:
Reason for despair: I despair that we don’t consider water to be scarce or valuable. A century of lax water laws and regulations has spoiled most Americans. We turn on the tap and out comes as much water as we want for less than we pay for cable television or cellphone service. When most Americans think of water, they think of it as similar to air—as infinite and inexhaustible. In reality, it’s both finite and exhaustible.
Because we don’t respect water as remarkable, we use needless quantities for frivolous purposes, such as growing grass in the desert. And because we don’t pay the real cost of water (only the cost of the infrastructure to provide it), we remove the incentive to conserve. Perhaps most important, our innovation economy has encouraged engineers and inventors to create water-saving technologies that extend our supply; but the price of water is so low that few of them have viable business plans.•
A BBC thought experiment proposes we carpet the Sahara with solar panels, asking experts in different fields about the feasibility of such a project. Seems like a no-brainer as a way to produce clean energy, but Helen Anne Curry, a lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University, points out that innovating our way out of pollution may cause new issues unless we also curb consumption. Skeptical soul that I am, I don’t see our hunger for energy being sated anytime soon. Better technology may be our only chance. An excerpt:
Helen Anne Curry: Technology alone is rarely the answer
“I am interested in exploring the persistent optimism that surrounds new technologies, even after multiple failures.
“The technological fix is appealing; it’s exciting to think we can solve problems without fundamentally having to change the way we live, the way we get to work every day or the number of cheap flights we take.
“But you can’t just take one point in the system and say ‘that’s solved’; there is much more that extends outwards.
“Think of the work that was done to solve local air pollution in the mid-twentieth century, which was to build super-tall smokestacks.
“But they don’t eliminate the pollution from the air. They just throw it up much higher in the atmosphere, so in fact it circulates further. One of the subsequent problems of building these was they created acid rain in places that didn’t have this kind of concentrated industry.
“We can use our science and technology knowledge to bring other peoples of the world into the quality of life that the global north has enjoyed for far longer.
“Yet if you look back on 60 years of policy work and intervention, there’s a lot of ways in which we’ve failed. We haven’t been able to deliver the social, scientific and technological progress which we envisioned.
“I think the only reason to pursue [solar panels in the Sahara] would be if it were a stopgap measure in which the long-term goal would be to reduce consumption of energy and to change our lifestyles to be more sustainable, so that subsequent generations don’t have to deal with as many problems as we’re going to leave them.”•
Catastrophist philosopher Nick Bostrom believes machine superintelligence may be the greatest existential risk facing humankind, that it could, perhaps sooner than later, be the end of us if we’re not careful. There’s nothing theoretically impossible about that, though I seriously doubt the sooner part. First maybe McDonald’s will be fully automated, and then much, much, much later on we face a robot-inspired endgame. I actually think it’s more likely that such computer intelligence will help us engineer our own evolution into whatever it is we become in the long run, though miscalculation leading to a cascading disaster might become a plausible scenario at some point.
In a Washington Post piece, Joel Achenbach explores the so-called Artificial Intelligence threat and the professional worriers who analyze it and exhort us to shape the future. MIT computer scientist Daniela Rus is presented as a counterpoint to Bostrom, physicist Mark Tegmark and other thinkers who fear an AI-inspired end is near. The opening:
The world’s spookiest philosopher is Nick Bostrom, a thin, soft-spoken Swede. Of all the people worried about runaway artificial intelligence, and Killer Robots, and the possibility of a technological doomsday, Bostrom conjures the most extreme scenarios. In his mind, human extinction could be just the beginning.
Bostrom’s favorite apocalyptic hypothetical involves a machine that has been programmed to make paper clips (although any mundane product will do). This machine keeps getting smarter and more powerful, but never develops human values. It achieves “superintelligence.” It begins to convert all kinds of ordinary materials into paper clips. Eventually it decides to turn everything on Earth — including the human race (!!!) — into paper clips.
Then it goes interstellar.
“You could have a superintelligence whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible, and you get this bubble of paper clips spreading through the universe,” Bostrom calmly told an audience in Santa Fe, N.M., earlier this year.
He added, maintaining his tone of understatement, “I think that would be a low-value future.”
Bostrom’s underlying concerns about machine intelligence, unintended consequences and potentially malevolent computers have gone mainstream. You can’t attend a technology conference these days without someone bringing up the A.I. anxiety. It hovers over the tech conversation with the high-pitched whine of a 1950s-era Hollywood flying saucer.•
In 1987, Omni invited Robert Heilbronerto speculate on the U.S. and global economy in 2007. He was very prescient about income inequality, the creative disruption of technology and the threats to American exceptionalism. He was also aware that a new superpower might emerge, though he believed it would be Japan, not China. His forecast:
There is an alarming possibility that our economy is moving in the direction of what some people call a two-tier society — a large population of people with middle-class or higher incomes and values, with a considerable bulge at the top. and a large number of people who have been economically and culturally uncoupled from the main society.
What’s most alarming is that the ladder that has connected the bottom to the top is now missing some important rungs. There were certain industries, like the steel and auto industries, that provided more or less continuous ladders of jobs from the bottom to the top. You could enter as an unskilled person, acquire new skills, and move up the ladder to secure, unionized, better-paying jobs. But now these industries have been seriously imperiled, and their place as employers has been replaced by what I call the McDonald’s employers. More people work for McDonald’s than work for U.S. Steel, but McDonald’s has no ladders. The problem is serious.
A great many economists, myself included, feel uneasy about the fact that 70 percent ol the economy does what is called service work and only 30 percent does what is called goods-related work. New technology keeps entering the economy and disrupting employment. When you look back at how the American economy developed, you see a migration off the farm into the factory and out of the factory into the office. The main push has come from technology. There has been relatively little new machinery to push people out of the office, but that’s changing now. If the computer creates jobs in the office, the service sector will increase and there will be no squeezing of employment. But if technology bumps service people out of work, I don’t know where they are going to go.
Personally. I think American optimism is in for a very severe challenge. We have always considered ourselves virtually to have a right to be number one in the world. But of course we don’t have any such right or assurance. And we have to resign ourselves to the unsettling fact that we are number two, or three, or four in many ways. In terms of health, for instance, we have fallen seriously behind, and that’s a big blow to our self-image.
In the next 20 years the government will have to take active steps in providing work and income tor the bottom one third of the population. The government grudgingly provides some sort of income, but it doesn’t provide work. And work is essential for people’s self-esteem and also for the building of many kinds of infrastructures that are needed in the country.
It is quite possible, it seems to me, that America will emerge from its present, wholly unaccustomed struggle for world position very worse off than it is today; that we will not find the right combination of talents and the right distribution of workforce in various occupations; that we will not develop the right technologies and will end up with a seriously disadvantaged economy. Not so long ago England was still regarded as one of Ihe most remarkable economies in the world, but it is now slightly less productive than Portugal. I think it is quite possible that the day of unquestioned American preeminence may be finished.
We could suddenly find that the way Americans live, their chances for life expectancy, their amenities of life are not as. good as, let’s just say, the Germans’ or the Swedes’. We might fail to produce the necessary output to bring our living standards and quality of life up to an acceptable level.
In the old days we tended to think about political possibilities in terms of left and right. Since Iran we’ve realized there is another dimension “up and down.” There is potential for a great deal of political mischief and sabotage in “underdeveloped” countries, and anyone who tries to think about the future has to consider that. There is going to be lots of trouble.
It is clear which countries are emerging as economic powers. It is entirely possible that Japan is going to be the England of the future — I mean the 1850’s England. Japan may be the organizer for a “Pacific Rim” economy — as England was for Europe a century ago. Japan may combine its leadership and technology with the inexpensive manpower and the intelligence of the Chinese, the Malaysians, the Taiwanese, the Indians, the Koreans. It is quite possible that there will be a new world economic “empire” out there, which will severely challenge the formerly undisputed hegemony of the West. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union, as far as I can see, will continue to be very bureaucratic and will be very unlikely to make any economic changes.
Sooner or later this terrific debt problem has to be resolved, and there is only one possible way to resolve it, and that is to “forget” it. The debt is unrepayable, and it is going to be swallowed by a number of people taking their lumps— banks, corporations, and governments. And some of the borrowers will have to swallow bitter pills. The decks have to be cleared. I suspect that under international agreements the old debts are going to be washed away, forgiven, or rephased — such wonderful jargon words!
I think everyone recognizes now that the achievement of a better world is more complicated and difficult than some of us thought 20 years ago.•
Vanderbilt historian Michael Bess, author of Our Grandchildren Redesigned, believes–fears, really–that we’re on the brink of a slew of technological and bioengineering breakthroughs which in the next few decades will do much good and be attended by many problems.
In the long run–if there is one–he’s right, but while these “games” will begin being played within his timeframe, I don’t really feel most of them will play out by then. For instance: Bess wonders what lifespans of 160 years or more will mean for marriage and family. That’s not likely to be a concern this century, and if life is eventually radically extended, family will have changed greatly numerous times by then.
But I do think he identifies many of the right questions in a History News Network article he adapted from his book. The opening:
Over the coming decades – probably a lot sooner than most people realize –the next great wave of technological change will wash over our lives. Its impact will be similar in sweep and rapidity to the advent of computers, cell phones, and the web; but this time around, it is not our gadgets that will be transformed – it is we ourselves, our bodies, our minds. This will be a shift that cuts even more deeply than the great industrial revolutions of the past. It will not only alter how we make a living, communicate, and interact with each other, but will offer direct and precise control over our own physical and mental states.
Through the use of pharmaceuticals, we are learning how to modulate our moods, boost our physical and mental performance, increase our longevity and vitality. Through the application of prostheses, implants, and other bioelectronic devices, we are not only healing the blind and the paralyzed, but beginning to reconfigure our bodies, enhance our memories, and generate entirely new ways of interacting with machines. Through genetic interventions, we are not only neutralizing certain diseases long thought incurable, but opening up the very real possibility of taking evolution into our own hands – redesigning the human “platform” of body and mind in a thoroughgoing way.
If you talk to the authors of this revolution – the scientists, doctors, and engineers who labor tirelessly at the vanguard of biotechnology – most of them will deny that this is what they have in mind. They are not seeking to bring about the transmogrification of the human species, they insist: they are simply doing their best to heal the sick, to repair the injured. But once you stand back and look at the big picture, sizing up the cumulative impact of all their brilliant efforts, a different conclusion emerges. Whether they intend it or not, they are giving our species the instruments with which to radically redesign itself. Those instruments are already becoming available in crude form today, and they will fully come into their own over the next few decades. By the time our grandchildren have grown to adulthood, this wave of change will have passed through our civilization.
The Chinese government is right to refurbish the nation’s many public restrooms which are in a state of disrepair, left in the past as the rest of the infrastructure was rapidly modernized. Internet access, ATMs and stall-based TV screens, however, are probably not necessary. The lavish remake is marked by another curiosity: While hi-tech gear is linked up everywhere, at least some of the loos are continuing the old-school tradition of a communal roll of toilet paper.
BEIJING — Li Wen had heard about the turbo-strength flush power and the lily-scented soap. He knew about the stalls equipped with personal television screens and wireless Internet access, the soothing cello soundtrack and the windows lined with aloe vera plants.
But Mr. Li, 39, a salesman, was skeptical when he set foot in the new public toilet at the corner of Fuqian Square in Fangshan, a district in southwest Beijing.
“What was wrong with the old one?” he said. “The government has too much money and doesn’t know how to spend it.”
Modern technology has changed nearly every facet of life in China in recent years, turning backwoods precincts into bustling cities and bringing cellphones to more than a billion people. But public restrooms in many areas have remained largely unchanged, equipped with the same squat toilets and concrete pits that Chinese people have used for generations.
As the government seeks to improve sanitation and reduce environmental waste across the country, it is planning a major overhaul of public toilets. Over the next three years, it will build or renovate 57,000 restrooms, including some that will resemble the high-tech facility in Fangshan, the first of its kind in China.•
Jealous President Obama is on Bear Grylls’ reality TV show, Donald Trump is building an internment camp for Shahs of Sunset.
America’s vulgar tweetbag may not be what the entire country deserves, but he sure is what the GOP has coming. For seven years, Republicans have obstructed the President and become a protest party, making immigration reform, to name one issue, impossible, allowing what should have been a moot point in 2015 to instead be the talking point. And the demographics don’t look kindly upon the nature that conversation has taken on. The GOP, in a sense, has turned itself and its voters into refugees, searching for a United States that no longer exists.
Inside the White House, poetic justice looks a lot like Donald Trump.
Past and present aides to President Barack Obama are gloating that a Republican leadership they say defined itself by blustery opposition — and used it to win the House, then the Senate, and stand in the White House’s way at every turn — is getting devoured by a candidate personifying the anger agenda.
Obama insiders would rather have immigration reform signed than lament knowingly on Sunday talk shows that the Republicans will keep losing elections until they deal with the issue. They’d rather have a longer-term approach to government spending, or more of the entitlement and tax reform deals Obama said he was eager to cut.
But on everything from guns to reproductive health to opening up Cuba, Obama’s team says it has been battling for years the very politics that paved the way for Trump’s ascendance this election cycle.
“It’s not so much a reaction to Obama,” said one person familiar with the president’s thinking about the Trump phenomenon. “It’s more of a reaction to their strategy that, ‘We’re just going to be antithetical to everything [Obama] stands for.’”
According to people in the White House, Obama doesn’t talk about Trump much. When he does, it’s with a combination of amusement and disgust at the rhetoric, occasionally mentioning his amazement at GOP leaders’ inability to understand Trump’s supporters and the long-term damage the president thinks Trump is doing to the party with the groups of voters who will decide future elections.•
I think Astra Taylor is wonderful, but I doubt her idealistic hopes for the Digital Age will be realized, not because of a lack of will, but because they’re antithetical to the very nature of a society interconnected by smart technology.
Getting rid of the corporate and government intrusion of personal data is probably as realistic as completely taming the Internet’s anarchic side. Those thorny things are with us for good. Unplugging will be all but impossible, especially as the actual plugs increasingly disappear. The Internet of Things will become thething, and going in another direction will be a bridge too far.
There’ll likely be a growing number of splinter societies that attempt to retreat from the mainstream, but they’ll be tenuous and not necessarily positive. A lack of oversight of all kinds will become the norm. I think it has already.
There are policy solutions for combating, say, the excesses of the Gig Economy and other elements of Techno-Libertarianism, but there’s really none for the larger machine we’ve placed ourselves within, one that isn’t only political or idealistic but literal as well. It’s beyond control.
Astra Taylor’s iPhone has a cracked screen. She has bandaged it with clear packing tape and plans to use the phone until it disintegrates. She objects to the planned obsolescence of today’s gadgetry, and to the way the big tech companies pressure customers to upgrade.
Taylor, 36, is a documentary filmmaker, musician and political activist. She’s also an emerging star in the world of technology criticism. She’s not paranoid, but she keeps duct tape over the camera lens on her laptop computer — because, as everyone knows, these gadgets can be taken over by nefarious agents of all kinds.
Taylor is a 21st-century digital dissenter. She’s one of the many technophiles unhappy about the way the tech revolution has played out. Political progressives once embraced the utopian promise of the Internet as a democratizing force, but they’ve been dismayed by the rise of the “surveillance state,” and the near-monopolization of digital platforms by huge corporations.
Last month, Taylor and more than 1,000 activists, scholars and techies gathered at the New School in New York City for a conference to talk about reinventing the Internet. They dream of a co-op model: people dealing directly with one another without having to go through a data-sucking corporate hub.
“The powerful definitely do not want us to reboot things, and they will go to great lengths to stop us, and they will use brute force or they will use bureaucracy,” Taylor warned the conferees at the close of the two-day session.•
Sweden is all but done with cash money, which is fascinating and frightening. Paper currency and coins aren’t, strictly speaking, necessary in a smartphone society, but the digital equivalent is trackable. As cookies can follow our online travels, these digital crumbs mark our every step.
“Now people can’t get away,” a Swedish street vendor tells Liz Alderman in her excellent New York Times piece on the topic. The opening:
STOCKHOLM — Parishioners text tithes to their churches. Homeless street vendors carry mobile credit-card readers. Even the Abba Museum, despite being a shrine to the 1970s pop group that wrote “Money, Money, Money,” considers cash so last-century that it does not accept bills and coins.
Few places are tilting toward a cashless future as quickly as Sweden, which has become hooked on the convenience of paying by app and plastic.
This tech-forward country, home to the music streaming service Spotify and the maker of the Candy Crush mobile games, has been lured by the innovations that make digital payments easier. It is also a practical matter, as many of the country’s banks no longer accept or dispense cash.
At the Abba Museum, “we don’t want to be behind the times by taking cash while cash is dying out,” said Bjorn Ulvaeus, a former Abba member who has leveraged the band’s legacy into a sprawling business empire, including the museum.
Not everyone is cheering. Sweden’s embrace of electronic payments has alarmed consumer organizations and critics who warn of a rising threat to privacy and increased vulnerability to sophisticated Internet crimes. Last year, the number of electronic fraud cases surged to 140,000, more than double the amount a decade ago, according to Sweden’s Ministry of Justice.•
By the 1960s, Glenn Gould believed the new technologies would allow for the sampling, remixing and democratization of creativity, that erstwhile members of the audience would ultimately ascend and become creators themselves. He hated the hierarchy of live performance and was sure its dominance would end. It was probably partly a rationalization that helped enable his reclusiveness, but rise up the audience did.
Mr. Gould himself seemed to grow out of no particular musical tradition. He stressed, in fact, that his musical goal was to rethink the repertory in a radically different fashion. Though he had a career of nine years as a popular and critical success on the concert stage, after a performance in Chicago in March 1964, he never played in public again; after 1967, he said, he never even attended a concert.
He said he considered the concert form an ”immensely distasteful” musical compromise that leads to ”tremendous conservatism” in musical interpretation. Mr. Gould contended that the concert’s aura of commerce, its performing stage and its listening audience interfere with music, turning the artist into a ”vaudevillian.”
”The concert is dead,” he proclaimed. For him, the recording represented the musical future. Mr. Gould was also among the first classical musicians to treat the recording as a distinct art form, with its own possibilities and requirements. The phonograph record, for Mr. Gould, was no more a ”record” of an actual continuous performance than a movie was a record of actual continuous events. It was a spliced construction, edited from recording tape.
”During the last 15 years,” Mr. Gould said in an interview last year, ”I spent very little time at a recording session actually recording.”
About eight minutes an hour were spent at the piano, he explained, producing perhaps four different versions of two minutes of music. The rest of the hour would be spent editing, choosing aspects of one version to merge with those of another. His recording of Sibelius’s works, for example, experiments with different aural atmospheres in each musical section. In his most recent recordings, he acted as producer, working in his own studio.
The musical result could be a concentrated interpretation, put together with as much care as a film editor might put together a movie. Mr. Gould believed such pastiche no more detracted from spontaneity and energy than editing would detract from a well-paced film.
The results, though, have been controversial.•
“I detest audiences,” Gould tells that magnificent bastard Alex Trebek (unseen) in 1966.
___________________________
From a1969 Life piece in which Oriana Fallaci recalls her misbegotten interview with Muhammad Ali:
Question:
Has anyone actually threatened to break your nose off for something you wrote?
Oriana Fallaci:
Something like it happened with Cassius Clay. I had seen him a couple of times, and I went back to his house in Miami to finish the interview. He was eating a melon. I said, Good Morning, Mr. Clay. He keeps on eating the melon and suddenly belches very loud. I think he is just being impolite and I sit down with my tape recorder. And then oooaaagh. He belches again. A big one. Well, I said, let’s go on anyway. And just at that moment, buurp, buurp, whoops, whoops. I turned to him and shouted, I am not going to stay with an animal like you. And I was undoing my recorder, when he took the microphone and threw it against the wall. My microphone! I saw it flying past my head and I took my fists and bam, bam. Went against him. He stood there. So enormous. So tall. And he watched me in a way an elephant watches a mosquito. Black Muslims suddenly came out of all the doors into the room. Evil. Evil. They began to chant. You came for evil. It was like a nightmare. I backed out to my cab, trying to keep my dignity, but really afraid, and went straight to the airport. After the interview was published, Cassius Clay said he was going to break my nose if he ever saw me again. I said, we’ll see, if he breaks my nose, he is going to jail and we will have beautiful news in the papers. I saw him later in New York. I passed with my nose in the air, and he went by without looking at me.•
In 1976, when he was already showing the early, subtle signs of Parkinson’s Syndrome, Muhammad Ali sat for a wide-ranging group interview on Face the Nation, in which he was mostly treated as a suspect by a panel of people who enjoyed privileges that were never available to the boxer. Fred Graham, the Arkansas-born correspondent who’s distinguished himself in other ways during his career, doesn’t come across as the most enlightened fellow here, asking at one point, “Is there ever going to be another Great White Hope, a white heavyweight who will come in and whip all you black heavyweights?” Hyper-political earlier in life, Ali dodged election-year questions as much as possible.
___________________________
Sailor, fisherman, OSS spy and all-around non-conformist, actor Sterling Hayden was ultimately as interesting just being himself as he was when inhabiting a character. In Kim Morgan’s 2014 LARB roundtable interview with Robert Altman collaborators Elliott Gould, George Segal and screenwriter Joseph Walsh, Hayden was discussed. An excerpt:
Question:
So you, George, and Elliott were both in movies with Sterling Hayden [Loving and The Long Goodbye].
Joseph Walsh:
I loved Sterling in the movies, but I never met him personally. [To Segal and Gould] Did you love Sterling?
Elliott Gould:
I loved him. Dan Blocker was supposed to play the part. He was a very good friend of Altman’s. Dan Blocker died and the picture almost went south. And so then we were talking about John Huston, who I loved. Bob cast Sterling Hayden. So Sterling had been in Ireland doing something with R. D. Laing, the poet and philosopher who wrote a book called Knots. And so I asked to spend a little time, a moment alone with Sterling in the house where we shot, where Kathryn and Bob lived, down in Malibu. So we spent that moment alone. And so I knew that Sterling knew that I knew that Sterling knew that I knew that Sterling knew that I understood him. So I just loved him.
I liked the way he wanted to live his life, Sterling Hayden.
Elliott Gould:
I visited him on his péniche, which is like a barge. He had it in France on the Seine and I saw him there. And then he had it sent to Northern California and I visited him there too. He was a great guy. I think he worked in the Yugoslavian Underground during World War II.
Joseph Walsh:
Did he really? Wow. Okay.
Question:
And what’s interesting in The Long Goodbye is this modernized Marlowe, from what Bogart or Powell did but …
Elliott Gould:
Oh, Humphrey Bogart was perfect. Our Marlowe was not perfect at all.
Question:
No, of course. But that’s what I love about it. And that Sterling Hayden, who is now an icon in film noir, he’s really this counterculture type of guy in real life. He fit perfectly in that Altman universe.•
In 1981, Hayden, a restless soul who began looking late in life like Tom Waits’ hobo uncle, visits with Tom Snyder for a long-form interview. In part one, Hayden discusses his failed attempts at writing an article for Rolling Stone about the funeral of Yugoslavia’s late dictator Marshal Tito.
John McAfee may be a little crazy, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong: The sky, sooner or later, will fall. In a recent IBT column he co-wrote with Rob Loggia, the online security expert asserts that “World War 3 will be a cyberwar,” which doesn’t seem a farfetched prognostication. In explaining our lack of preparedness for the new normal of battle, McAfee draws an analogy to the Civil War, when weapons had quietly become so advanced that timeworn strategies were rendered surprisingly useless. An excerpt:
Machines Turned Against Us
So what happens when an army or nation, even a seemingly well prepared army or nation, enters or is drawn into conflict unaware that the rules of engagement have changed?
One thing that happens can be seen by looking at the American Civil War. Advances in weaponry and equipment had rendered traditional tactics obsolete, and neither side was aware of it. The result of them not realizing this was tremendous bloodshed.
When the Civil War erupted, both sides entered into the engagement assuming an outmoded form of conflict. Generals on both sides had rigorously studied tactics and strategy manuals based in the Napoleonic era, and followed them during the first part of the war. The result was bloodbaths like Antietam and Fredericksburg.
What happened was that the weapons they had, though they looked much like weapons from Napoleon’s era, were in many cases far more advanced, accurate and deadly. Previously sound offensive tactics were now literally suicidal. Both armies had to learn this the hard way. As the war developed, later battles were characterized more by trenches and fortifications than open battlefields.•
George Pao at the Pew Research Center has published “15 Striking Findings from 2015,” which looks at counterintuitive truths, some of which comment on America’s xenophobic fears. Three examples:
3. For the first time since the 1940s, more immigrants from Mexico are leaving the U.S. than coming into the country. The shift is due to several reasons, including slow economic recovery after the Great Recession that may have made the U.S. less attractive, as well as stricter enforcement of U.S. immigration laws, particularly at the border.
8. People in countries with significant Muslim populations express overwhelmingly negative views of ISIS, according to our spring survey in 11 countries. Recent attacks in Paris, Beirut and Baghdad linked to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) have once again brought terrorism and Islamic extremism to the forefront of international relations. Majorities in most of the 11 countries express unfavorable views of ISIS, but the exception is Pakistan, where a majority offer no opinion.
10. Christians are declining as a share of the U.S. population, while the number of U.S. adults who do not identify with any organized religion is growing. While the U.S. remains home to more Christians than any other country, the percentage of Americans identifying as Christian dropped from 78% in 2007 to 71% in 2014. By contrast, religious “nones,” driven in large part by Millennials, have surged seven percentage points in that time span to make up 23% of U.S. adults last year.•
Blessed is the journalist who can make patent law interesting, and Christopher Mims of the Wall Street Journal is just such a writer. In his latest column, Mims thinks through the litigious hoverboard industry. While the sudden popularity of this personal-transportation device may ultimately be as fleeting as that of any other trendy merch, the welter of lawsuits surrounding it are meaningful. Mims explains how our patent system isn’t likely to protect Shane Chen, who claims to have invented the technology, but may actually make is easier to crush him.
An excerpt:
The original in this case would be the Hovertrax, made by Inventist, in Camas, Wash., near Portland, Ore. Inventist founder Shane Chen claims he invented the hoverboard, and holds a patent, having first filed an application in 2012. After a brief dalliance with entrepreneur Mark Cuban, Inventist last month licensed the Hovertrax to Razor USA, maker of the eponymous scooter.
One reason for the deal, says Joalene Jolivette, head of sales at Inventist, is that Razor has more resources to sue the biggest importers of hoverboards from China. “Razor has spent over $1 million inside of a week dealing with cutting off some of the knockoffs into the states,” she says.
Neither Inventist nor Razor would say how many lawsuits that represents, but theirlegal action against the maker of IO Hawk hoverboardsis public, and a lawyer for hoverboard company Swagway told me that company is being sued as well.
At this point it might sound like the patent system has done its job—to “allow someone to profit from inventions which are expensive to invent but easy to copy once made,” says Christina Mulligan, an assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School who specializes in Internet and intellectual-property law.
Well, this is rather macabre. In 1878, a decade prior to his Presidency, Benjamin Harrison investigated a number of Ohio medical colleges in search of the stolen corpse of a deceased family friend and was aghast to come face to face with his own freshly fallen father, John Scott Harrison. The jaw-dropping tale isn’t quite as surprising as you might think, asthat state was known in those years for the brisk business conducted by so-called resurrectionists, who were often in cahoots with academics in need of cadavers. Despite the public outcry caused by the scandal, the Dean of Ohio Medical College acknowledged he would likely continue buying stiffs from grave robbers. The full story from the March 13, 1910 New York Times:
One of the strangest, and at the same time the most gruesome stories that ever reached a newspaper office was told byH.E. Krehbiel, the musical critic, the other night. Though it reached a newspaper office and has been known to a few persons in the twenty years succeeding, it was not printed when the incidents happened, because those concerned took the precaution of narrating them in confidence. Here it is, however, as Mr. Krehbiel tells it, long after those most intimately concerned are dead:
“Many years ago I was at work one afternoon in the offices of a Cincinnati newspaper when Benjamin Harrison, afterward President of the United States, and his brother came into the office and began a long conversation with the city editor. They spoke in low tones, which did not reach beyond the desk where they were sitting.
“After nearly half an hour had elapsed the city editor called me over to him and introduced me to the two gentlemen, both of whom seemed to be laboring under strong emotion. Benjamin Harrison appeared to be especially affected. This did not surprise me very much, as I was aware that they had only buried their father, to whom they were both devotedly attached, a few days before. The city editor instructed me to take down their story, giving me also explicitly to understand that, whereas, I was to listen to all they had to say, I was to write no more, and the paper was to print no more than they should decide.
“Now,” continued Mr. Krehbiel, “this is what Benjamin Harrison told me. A few days before the death of his father, the husband of a dear old German woman who lived near their farm also died and was duly buried. When he came from the East to attend his own father’s obsequies this old woman went to him in great distress and told him that the grave of her husband had been opened and his body stolen. Those were the days of body snatchers or ‘resurrectionists,’ before the State had made provision for subjects for medical colleges.
“Mr Harrison went on to say that his old German friend’s distress was so intense that he and his brother had themselves undertaken a search for the body in Cincinnati. This search had occupied them two days and had just ended.
“‘We swore out a search warrant and took a constable with us,’ said Mr. Harrison. ‘One by one we have been to every medical school in the City of Cincinnati. It was a terrible ordeal for us, especially as our own grief was fresh and poignant. We kept up the search without inkling, clue or result, until we had visited every medical school in Cincinnati except one.
“‘The last one was the Ohio State Medical College. We went over there more as a formality than anything else. With search warrant and constable we were enabled there, as elsewhere, to have everything opened to us. We found nothing.
“’Just as we were about to leave the college the constable noted a shaft such as is used in apartment houses. Down this shaft hung the ropes of a hoist. The constable went up to the ropes of a hoist and took hold of the taut rope. He turned to me sharply, saying that there was a weight on the hoist. I told him to pull it up. He did so.
“’Attached to the rope by a hook was the body of my own father. They had known at the colleges whose the body was. They had taken this fiendishly ingenious method of moving it from floor to floor as we in our search had moved from one floor to another.’
“This,” said Mr. Krehbiel, “is the story in Benjamin Harrison’s own words just as he gave it to me.”•
