It certainly says something about a country’s leadership when it decides to build the new capital city in the middle of the desert, a suburb of sand. That’s what the Egyptian government has announced its doing, and it says that they aren’t exactly enamored with the nation as it is; they look at chaotic Cairo and dream of dashing Dubai. The utopian quest seems a heated response to the booming population and unpredictable nature of the current capital, though it remains to be seen if a technocratic development in the dunes will be able to effect a cure for what elites believe ails the surrounding areas.
The Egyptian government has decided to build a new capital city east of Cairo, smack in the middle of the desert. “A global capital,” the building minister announced at a conference on the Red Sea in March. At the event, investors from the Gulf states, China and Saudi Arabia gathered around a model of the new metropolis, admiring the business quarter, with its Dubai-style skyscrapers, the small residential homes in greenbelts and the football stadium. The city is to be situated on 700 square kilometers of land, with an airport larger than London’s Heathrow. President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi even wooed investors himself. He recently announced that construction would begin in January.
It is to be a capital created in accordance with the wishes of the country’s leadership elite. It may not fit well with the country as it currently exists, but it will conform to their visions of Egypt’s future — a planned, manageable city conceived from the top down in the same way the pharaohs once created the pyramids. The new Cairo will be a beautiful place, an “innovation center,” environmentally sustainable, with a high quality of life, city planners are pledging. They want it to be a city where people can breathe without having to cough.
The old Cairo is an ugly city, an affront to the senses. Even as you begin heading into the city from the airport, the buildings are already blackened from pollution. The cacophony of car horns is painful to the ears and during winter months, the smog hangs like thick fog over the Nile. The city suffers from thrombosis, with streets so crammed with cars they’re like clogged arteries. Yet women in high-heel shoes saunter along the banks of the Nile smiling. Even though the place seems unbearable, Cairo is loved.•
Donald Trump is really busy right now trying to sell bibles to Iowans he clearly sees as rubes, so he paid a ghostwriter to knock out a quickie volume for him so he could make a few dollars. By all accounts, it’s thin gruel, more cheap, mediocre product from America’s leading vulgarian, which wouldn’t be such a damning descriptor if he wasn’t also racist, xenophobic, sexist, etc.
In a Financial Times column, Edward Luce analyzes not just the Reality TV realtor’s book but also Michael D’Antonio’s title about him, Never Enough, a work he praises. An excerpt:
Donald first came to public attention in 1973, when the civil rights division of the US Justice Department launched a case against the Trumps for allegedly discriminating between black and white tenants in the public housing that he ran. Donald hired Roy Cohn, a notorious lawyer who had once worked for Joe McCarthy, the senator who spearheaded the “Red Scare” of the 1950s. It was a classic Trump response. If someone attacks you, hit back 10 times harder. If you are accused of something, label your accuser with something far worse. (It is a tactic he is putting to good use on the 2016 campaign trail.) Cohn hit the government with a $100m damages lawsuit claiming that federal officials were like “storm troopers” who had used “Gestapo-like tactics” to defame their client. The case was settled. Trump went on to win far bigger contracts. In Trump’s world, money is the measure of success. According to his own book, he has made “more than $10 billion”. According to Bloomberg, his net wealth is around $2.9bn.
D’Antonio aims to do more than explain the life of America’s best known property developer. He also links it to the unfolding story of Trump’s times. Trump was reared on the kind of self-help and get-rich-quick books that he now so frequently churns out himself (starting with The Art of the Deal, which came out in 1987, Trump has written more than a dozen). Raised on Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), the young Trump was taught that life was all about winning. His biggest influence was Norman Vincent Peale, a Presbyterian pastor whose book The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) sold 2m copies in its first two years. Trump and his father regularly attended Peale’s Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan. Peale’s theology was devoid of sin or guilt. The only belief it commanded was in oneself. Confidence was the key. Prosperity would follow. “Learn to pray big prayers,” advised Peale. “God will rate you according to the size of your prayers.”•
One thing that was sensible in the past but isn’t anymore is spending the early part of our lives being educated and then coasting on that knowledge across a lifetime. In the Industrial Revolution, things changed slowly enough for such an arrangement to sustain a society, but continuous education and reeducation must be the norm now in the Digital Revolution. It’s not that there’s no value in our current educational institutions, but they need to be merely prelude.
In a TED Talk just given in Istanbul, futurist Thomas Frey predicted two billion jobs will vanish by 2030. I can’t speak to that number or timeframe being correct, but certainly industries are going to rise and fall at an uncomfortable clip. From Frey’s Futurist Speaker post about the five sectors he thinks will be radically remade in the next 15 years:
3.) Education
The OpenCourseware Movement took hold in 2001 when MIT started recording all their courses and making them available for free online. They currently have over 2080 courses available that have been downloaded 131 million times.
In 2004 the Khan Academy was started with a clear and concise way of teaching science and math. Today they offer over 2,400 courses that have been downloaded 116 million times.
Now, the 8,000 pound gorilla in the OpenCourseware space is Apple’s iTunes U. This platform offers over 500,000 courses from 1,000 universities that have been downloaded over 700 million times. Recently they also started moving into the K-12 space.
All of these courses are free for anyone to take. So how do colleges, that charge steep tuitions, compete with “free”?
As the OpenCourseware Movement has shown us, courses are becoming a commodity. Teachers only need to teach once, record it, and then move on to another topic or something else.
In the middle of all this we are transitioning from a teaching model to a learning model. Why do we need to wait for a teacher to take the stage in the front of the room when we can learn whatever is of interest to us at any moment?
Teaching requires experts. Learning only requires coaches.
With all of the assets in place, we are moving quickly into the new frontier of a teacherless education system.
The U.S.-Cuba stalemate that became entrenched in 1960 with the embargo looks in retrospect like needless collateral damage of the Cold War. The peoples always liked each other, but the politics didn’t match up.
USA Today Immigration Reporter Alan Gomez just returned from a trip to Havana, and has done a Reddit AMA. The journalist comments on the things that have changed since the return of relations between the two countries and those that haven’t. The country certainly seems to be much freer in terms of expression, though it still isn’t a beacon of civil rights. You won’t be able to buy Cuban cigars in your neighborhood bodega for the foreseeable future, so lip cancer will have to wait. A few exchanges follow.
__________________________________
Question:
How do the Cuban people generally feel about Americans?
Alan Gomez:
The Cuban people loooooooove the American people. The disagreements lie strictly between our governments.
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Question:
Is there any sign of political repression among the people? Do they feel free to express negative opinions about the government?
Alan Gomez:
To be absolutely clear, political repression still exists to a large degree. In fact, the number of people arrested or detained as political prisoners has increased in recent months. So that’s still happening. But on the street, it’s amazing how much people are expressing themselves now. Before, people who held the most highly-desired jobs (basically, anything where you have access to tips from foreigners, like bartenders, hotel workers, taxi drivers) would always tell you how great things are. Nowadays? They’ll tell you eeeeeeeeeeeverything that’s wrong. It’s really stunning.
_________________________________
Question:
What changes do you foresee happening in the near and far future when it comes to US/Cuba relations?
Alan Gomez:
The most immediate change you might see is in the Cuban Adjustment Act, a U.S. law that allows any Cuban who simply touches U.S. soil to stay. It’s more commonly known as the “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy. Cubans are the only immigrants who get that kind of treatment, so now that President Obama is normalizing relations with Cuba, many people want to change that policy.
Changing the U.S. embargo on Cuba will probably take longer
_________________________________
Question:
Many people are excited about the prospect of being able to legally obtain Cuban Cigars here in the states now.Are there any other major exports that you foresee coming out of Cuba?
Alan Gomez:
For now, the only change that Obama implemented is that Americans can bring back up to $100 worth of rum and cigars when they travel to Cuba. And trust me, I’ve been taking full advantage of that!
But it’s going to be a while before you can buy any of those in a U.S. store. Cuba’s private entrepreneurs are now allowed to export their products to the U.S., but the rum and cigars are produced by companies run by Cuba’s state government. So as long as the embargo is in place, the only way you’re getting your hands on those is by going to the island.•
The Dear Leader boldly pledged he wouldn’t take any money for his asshole campaign from billionaire donors, right after they refused to give him any. This guy has the ethics of Lincoln. George Lincoln Rockwell, I mean.
Trump’s courtship of Adelson, a Las Vegas casino mogul and ardent Zionist, involved “a very clear ask for money,” said a source close to Adelson, who noted the request came even as Trump was publicly declaring that he didn’t need donors’ money. “It was an odd ask.”
Trump personally called Adelson and had his staff attempt to set up a meeting in Vegas.
Afterdeclaring his candidacyfor the Republican presidential nomination in June, Trump called Adelson to tout his pro-Israel bona fides, according to sources familiar with the call. They say Trump mentioned that he lives in heavily Jewish New York and that his daughter married a Jewish man, real estate developer Jared Kushner.
Two separate sources close to Trump’s campaign added that his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, reached out to Adelson’s political adviser, Andy Abboud, to set up a face-to-face July meeting in Las Vegas between their bosses.
Adelson later backed out. And last month, when POLITICO reportedthat Adelson was leaning toward supporting the GOP presidential campaign of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, whose hawkish foreign policy views align closely with Adelson’s, Trump lashed out at the senator and his potential patron.
“Sheldon Adelson is looking to give big dollars to Rubio because he feels he can mold him into his perfect little puppet. I agree!”Trump tweeted.•
Fast-casual dining will be automated, in small towns as well as tech hubs. From touchpad ordering to robotic food prep to drone table bussing, it’s all becoming possible now and will be increasingly cost-efficient. Sure, some establishments will retain human workers for a while and used it as a selling point–dine the way your tubercular great-grandfather did!–but this aspect of affordable dining will be going and then gone. It’s good for the bottom line and horrible for Labor.
Panera’s CEO Ron Shaich recently frankly expressed doom for the sector’s workers, announcing tech initiatives aimed at supplanting them. Hopefully the chain will employ a robot capable of making coffee drinks that don’t taste like watery graves. From Bob Bryan at Business Insider:
According to Ron Shaich, founder and CEO of Panera Bread, a tech revolution is coming, and it will be bad news for many workers.
“Labor is going to go down,” Shaich said Wednesday in aquarterly earnings call. “And as digital utilization goes up — like the sun comes up in the morning — it is going to continue to go up. Digital utilization. You are seeing it happen in Panera today.
“As it happens, it’s going to benefit larger organizations like Panera, who already have the technology in place.”
Shaich’s company, Panera Bread, is in the middle of the rollout forPanera 2.0, which includes installing touch-screen ordering stations for customers at tables and the to-go line.
While rising labor costs were not the explicit impetus for the change, Shaich recognizes it is a side benefit and “one of the reasons” for the rollout.
“When we think about 2.0 — we think about digital utilization,” Shaich said according to a transcript of the call.•
Talk about unintended consequences: The success of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957 helped birth the Internet. America’s chagrin over being bested by our Cold War combatants led to the formation of DARPA, and some of that department’s money was used to seed Arpanet. Just three decades later, everyone had convenient access to cat photos and pornography.
The intended consequence of the U.S. spending spree on technology in the late ’50s and ’60s was, of course, for America to surpass the Soviets in space exploration, something that didn’t seem a good bet at the time. The Economist dug into its archives for its reportage about the success of Sputnik 2 and the death of its canine cosmonaut, Laika. The article incorrectly asserted it was almost a sure thing that Russia would reach the moon first. The opening:
AMID the awed silence in which the world has followed the progress of the second Soviet satellite it has been possible to hear the pounding heartbeats not only of the small dog inside but also of the Western statesmen and scientists left far down below. This is not merely because Sputnik II is six times as big as its pipsqueak predecessor (and fifty times bigger than the first still-to-be-launched American satellite) and therefore so many times more impressive. If the first artificial moon had not been followed into space by a fellow-traveller, it might just conceivably have been a lucky experiment that came off. Now that there are two of them, this is no longer thinkable.
If the Russians can self-confidently throw half a ton of equipment and a living creature into their proper orbit in the sky so soon after the first satellite was despatched, they must hold an even longer lead over the Americans than was first thought. Indeed, there have been hints of new rocket designs and new kinds of missile fuel which suggest that the Americans are not only lagging behind but in certain respects may not yet even be on the same road. If it turns out that the Russians can add to all this the further achievement of ejecting the dog from the satellite and bringing it to earth at a time and (even very roughly) a place of their own choosing, the military implications will be horrendous. In addition to the probability that they will have “ordinary” intercontinental missiles ready for use very soon, some years ahead of the West, they would then be able also to girdle the earth with a fleet of incredibly fast and long-lasting bomb-carriers which, unlike the missile-launching sites, would be quite free from the threat of counter-attacks.
This vista of a period of majestic Soviet superiority is not confined to the earth and its suburban space. Man is quite probably going to land on the moon before many years are past, to set up observation posts and to establish a jumping-off ground for further ventures among the planets. As The Economist goes to press, there is speculation that the 40th anniversary of the revolution may be further commemorated by the sight of a Russian missile knocking chips off the moon’s face. In any case, at the present rate of progress it is almost certain to be a Russian who first puts foot to ground there—and he looks like doing it a good many years before anyone else. It is this thought that provides the proper context for the protests of animal-lovers against the use of a dog in Sputnik II.•
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Public Service Broadcasting performing “Sputnik” in Ottawa.
Some people aren’t polite about their drug addictions, and some of us are rude in return. They’re called names, like “crackheads.” How messy that such substances are purchased on streets. When these folks are minorities, the meanest among us assign blame to them based on race. It’s appalling and counterproductive.
I’ve thought for the past decade that white Americans of what used to be called the middle class have a very polite and well-mannered drug epidemic in oxycodone and the like. The whole undertaking is as neat and clean as a prescription pad. Reports of a spiked usage would regularly be published, but I worried that maybe I suffered from confirmation bias because I’ve spent so much time visiting relatives in hospitals the last few years. In these facilities, it’s easy to assume an oxy epidemic. The same goes for other self-destructive behaviors (obesity, alcoholism, etc.) appearing to be rampant.
It’s worth wondering how much opioid use is causing the alarming trend in the U.S. of the increasing deaths in white, middle-aged citizens, which has just been reported in a stunning paper by Anne Case and Angus Deaton. Why are people in this group drugging, eating and drinking themselves to death? Why have they become the walking dead? Some of it is overt suicide, some buried in risky behaviors.
The mortality rate for whites 45 to 54 years old with no more than a high school education increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014.
“It is difficult to find modern settings with survival losses of this magnitude,” wrote two Dartmouth economists, Ellen Meara and Jonathan S. Skinner, in a commentary to the Deaton-Caseanalysisto be published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Wow,” said Samuel Preston, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on mortality trends and the health of populations, who was not involved in the research. “This is a vivid indication that something is awry in these American households.”
Dr. [Angus] Deaton had but one parallel. “OnlyH.I.V./AIDSin contemporary times has done anything like this,” he said. …
David M. Cutler, a Harvard health care economist, said that although it was known that people were dying from causes like opioid addiction, the thought was that those deaths were just blips in the health care statistics and that over all everyone’s health was improving. The new paper, he said, “shows those blips are more like incoming missiles.”•
I’ve argued that Donald Trump isn’t a true Presidential candidate but rather an impetuous baby-man who desperately needs attention but desires none of the very real responsibility that comes with such a job.
Of course, running for the GOP nomination for reasons other than politics isn’t something novel to 2015. For quite a while and for quite a few “candidates,” the process has been merely a stepping-stone to more lucrative businesses, from FOX News correspondent to right-wing think-tank appointments to speaking tours. The losers now will be later to win.
How many of the Republican swarm this time are really just Herman Cain without the pizza and the 999s? In a New York column, Jonathan Chait nominates Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon who’s worked on a lot of brains, though, it would seem based on his ideas about America, not his own. One of the polling leaders, Carson seems less concerned with whistle-stop tours than the gravy train.
Chait’s opening:
On February 7, 2013, Ben Carson appeared at a National Prayer Breakfast, where he visibly annoyed President Obama by delivering a right-wing speech denouncing Obamacare and cultural liberalism, and calling for a flat tax based on the biblical tithe. Conservatives, still devastated by Obama’s reelection, took delight in the appearance on the scene of a surprising new presidential antagonist, who until that point had no political profile. “Finally, a self-reliant conservative decided to make this every bit as political as Obama does,” tweeted conservative pundit David Limbaugh. The Wall Street Journal celebrated Carson’s remarks in a shorteditorial, headlined “Ben Carson for President.” The headline was obviously hyperbolic; nothing in the text that followed proposed that Carson run for public office.
But now Carson actually is running for president. Or is he? It is hard to tell. Conservative politics are so closely intermingled with a lucrative entertainment complex that it is frequently impossible to distinguish between a political project (that is, something designed to result in policy change) and a money-making venture. Declaring yourself a presidential candidate gives you access to millions of dollars’ worth of free media attention that can build a valuable brand. So the mere fact that Carson calls himself a presidential candidate does not prove he is actually running for president rather than taking advantage of the opportunity to build his brand. Indeed, it is possible to be actually leading the polls without seriously trying to win the presidency.
And the notion that Carson could be president is preposterous.•
In the 1930s, there were prominent Americans in awe of Mussolini, even Hitler, for their fascistic rule, believing authoritarian technocracy an unbeatable system. Now that’s a way to run a country. Some now speak with a similar reverence of China, a nation able to move mountains, a moonshot of capitalism “unencumbered” by democracy. Of course, they conveniently elide the world’s-worst cancer rates and air pollution, as well as political imprisonments that attend oppression.
But there’s an alternative narrative, if a controversial one: China is, in fact, a meritocratic system, even if it doesn’t allow for a one-vote, one-person arrangement. Philosopher Daniel A. Bell is the leading proponent of this theory, believing the country needs reform but has a basic structure that can work in an ideal situation. Except that basic structure would seem to be a permanent impediment to achieving the ideal.
Capitalism has its limits for sure (something China will also learn), but democracy, flawed as it is, is still the best alternative, with far less potential for large-scale abuse. A lack of gridlock can be wonderful or lead a massive nation into a major misstep. From Eric Fish at The Atlantic:
Since the collapse of several authoritarian regimes in the 1980s and 1990s—most notably the Soviet Union—conventional wisdom in political science has held that dictatorships inevitably democratize or stagnate. This wisdom has even been applied to China, where the Communist Party (CCP) has presided over 26 years of economic growth since violently suppressing protests at Tiananmen Square. In 2012, the political theorist and Tsinghua University philosophy professor Daniel A. Bell aroused controversy among many China-watchers for challenging this idea. In several op-eds published in prominent Western publications, Bell argued that China’s government, far from being an opaque tyranny, actually presented a “meritocratic” alternative to liberal, multiparty democracy. In a new book titled The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy, Bell expands on that idea.
“I disagree with the view that there’s only one morally legitimate way of selecting leaders: one person, one vote,” Bell said at a recent debate hosted by ChinaFile at Asia Society in New York.•
Unless it stops being such a homogenous culture, Japan, with its graying population, will need someone–or something–to do the work, including ferrying older folks to the grocery store. One benefit among the many downsides to hosting the Olympics is the development of infrastructure, and in the case of Tokyo 2020, the nation is aiming to retrofit a fleet of thousands of taxis with driverless capacity to handle the overflow of visitors. It would be quite a scene, and the nation sees it as a chance to announce a renewed technological prowess on a world stage.
I’ve blogged before about Robot Taxi conducting a very small-scale experiment with autonomous cabs in 2016, and the development will have to be accelerated greatly after that if the unmovable deadline is to be met. From Dan Frommer at Quartz:
Japan is planning to use the 2020 Tokyo Olympics as an opportunity to show the world it’s still a tech leader. One of those efforts—if the technology and regulatory clearances shape out—could be an autonomous, self-driving taxi service, currently in development.
Tokyo-basedRobot Taxi(link in Japanese) is still on track to startfield tests of its driverless taxi servicein one region of Japan by the end of next March, its chief executive Hiroshi Nakajima told Quartz today (Nov. 2). The company, a joint venture betweenDeNA(one of Japan’s mobile internet pioneers) andZMP(a robotics firm; tagline “Robot of Everything”) is not building its own cars from scratch. Instead, it’s focusing on adding driverless capabilities to existing cars and designing, creating, and marketing the taxi service.
One key market for the service, Nakajima says, is Japan’s increasingly elderly population, especially in rural areas where there may be driver shortages.•
Donald Trump wants you to believe he’s not such a terrible guy, the way a drug-resistant strain of gonorrhea would like you to think it’s merely syphilis. Sure, you’ll have ulcerous lesions on your genitals, but you won’t develop any tumor-like balls of inflammation in your liver if you’re promptly treated with penicillin. That’s what gonorrhea would have you believe.
The hideous hotelier also recently tried to convince Nevada Republicans that his candidacy isn’t only about celebrity. Holy fuck, what else does he have? Valuable foreign-policy experience gained in Westchester?
“It’s not about being a celebrity,” Trump said. “It’s about having a view that’s captivating the people in this country, because they’re tired of being taken advantage of, they’re tired of being stupid, they’re tired of having their leaders be outnegotiated on every single deal. They’re tired of it. They’re tired of having China rip us off on every trade deal — and Japan and Mexico and everybody else. They’re tired of it.”
Absent from Trump’s speech was the usual blizzard of barbs about his opponents, such as questioning Carson’s religion, mocking Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) for profusely sweating or accusing former Florida governor Jeb Bush of being “low energy.” Trump instead praised Rubio and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) for their strong debate performances the previous night. The only time he mentioned Carson was to describe how they partnered up to pressure CNBC to limit the debate length.
And Trump thanked former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who barely made it onto the debate stage, for defending him the night before when debate moderators asked the governor to comment on Trump’s morals.
“There aren’t a lot of people that would do that,” Trump said. “He had a perfect opportunity to talk about himself, and he didn’t do that, so he’s a special guy.”
The softened tone was welcomed by many in the audience.
“He needs to cool it,” said Les Birch, 77, a retired elevator builder who lives in Carson City and defends Trump’s policy positions in Facebook conversations but doesn’t weigh in on Trump’s critiques of other candidates. “He needs to stop attacking people personally.”•
It’s no secret that avuncular cryptkeeper Stephen King is on the left politically, feeling the greatest horror of all is opportunists cloaked in faux religion and patriotism. As you might imagine, the current Halloween parade of GOP candidates has left him dismayed. From Angela S. Allan’s Los Angeles Review of Books Q&A with the author:
Question:
You’ve also been very outspoken in your nonfiction on issues like gun control and taxation. Do you think of your novels as making political statements?
Stephen King:
I always get some letters from some people who are disgruntled because they feel like the right wing has been dissed and that’s probably true. I’ve been left of center my entire life. Well, not entirely. My wife will tell you that I voted for Richard Nixon in 1968 in the first election I could vote in, because Richard Nixon said he planned to get us out of Vietnam. Tabby will say, “And Steve believed him!” Well, I did! Nixon would say, “Yes, I have this plan, but it wouldn’t be proper to say anything before the election.” So, I voted for him and his plan was to escalate things further.
I got more and more radicalized. My politics have described a course of being somewhere on the right. Because I grew up in Maine, all my folks were Republicans. They swore by the Republican Party and they swore at the Democrats. Vietnam radicalized me. It radicalized a lot of kids. Never to the point where I joined SDS or burned buildings or anything like that, but I understood the people who did. And I’m still left of center. There are still things on the right-wing side that make me crazy. You know, especially the people who profess to be Christians. I just can’t understand the double standard.
What makes me particularly crazy is that you’ll see these Republican candidates, and Ben Carson is the worst. He talks about the national debt and he talks about how our grandchildren are going to inherit this debt. All of these guys talk about their grandchildren when it’s about money. None of them talk about them when it comes to the environment and how their grandchildren are all going to be wearing fucking gas masks. That makes me crazy.•
I think Steve Wozniak is great because how can you not, but I am willing to wager there will still be some humans driving cars in 20 years, though the Woz predicted there won’t be in his keynote speech at the Gartner Symposium. Hyperbole aside, he is right that driverless is gaining speed, even if the ETA is MIA. The Apple co-founder also gave voice to his concerns about surveillance enabled by technologies, though he acknowledges that war has likely been lost. Two excerpts about the address from Divina Paredes at Computerworld.
________________________
“It was a magical experience… like Disneyland all the time.”
This is how Steve Wozniak described his experience driving his Tesla car on autopilot for two nights in a row.
The co-founder of Apple and chief scientist at Fusion-IO, said the car was making decisions on on the road, and his hands need not be on the wheel. “It was just a wonderful feeling.”
“Self driving cars is the biggest technology for the future,” said Wozniak during his keynote at theGartner Symposium/ITxpo at the Gold Coast.
“In the future, self driving cars will avoid problems humans make,” he said. They will have artificial intelligence. They will see speed limits, red lights and people walking across their path and even any kind of obstacles.
“In 20 years, no human drivers will be allowed except for the young kids at Disneyland.”
________________________
“Every purchase you make, every place you go, your face is being recognised, every keystroke you type on your computer, somebody could be looking at your computer at what you are doing.”
“It bothers me…I am very much on the side of civil liberties and protecting privacy,” he said, adding that he is one of the founders of the US Electronic Frontier Foundation that advocates for these rights.
“Humans should be much more important than technology,” he said. “But we lost the battle to machines 200 years ago. We will always fire a human but not fire a machine that makes our cheap clothing.”•
A piece from Frank Deford’s 1986SI profileof a most troubling artist, Hitler’s favorite filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, as an obstinate octogenarian:
Leni Riefenstahl is remarkably hale for 83. Her hair is an ingenue’s strawberry blonde, and she flirts with as much proficiency as ever. Her eyes are clear, a fawn brown with a ring of gray-green fringing the iris. Her mind is a well-lighted room, her will as unyielding as it was down all the interrogations and trials. She will not give an inch, growing testy now, then rude, to snoopers who would dare to trespass on those olden times she shared with evil men.
Only her hip, injured in a skiing accident, troubles her. For therapy she swims, diving with a camera as far as 50 meters down, alone amid the rocks and the coral and the sand. ”Underwater, I have no pain,” she says.
Above the water she works ceaselessly, carving out her memoirs, to finish them, for they are, she dreams, the one last proof of her innocence. For all the courts that cleared her, American and French and German alike, there was no public absolution for her and certainly no redemption in the world of film. Still, some consider her the greatest female director who ever lived, the creator of the greatest sports film ever made. It is 50 summers now since she shot Olympia and, like the athletes, won a gold medal for it. But after that there would be only one more movie, a fairy tale, named Tiefland. It’s ironic; all Leni Riefenstahl ever wanted was to tell fairy tales.
She looks at a photograph of herself, one taken a half-century ago. In it she is peering over folded arms, her shoulders are bare, her delicately beautiful face luminous–Germany’s Garbo, she was called–the woman at her most gorgeous. Riefenstahl taps the photograph. ”They killed me then,” she explains. ”I am a ghost.” Before I died. . . .
When World War II ended and the true horror of the Nazi regime–Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau- was revealed to the world, thousands of Germans were called to account for their associations, great or small, with the fascist government: There was execution for some, imprisonment for others, self-exile for a few, living ghosthood for Leni Riefenstahl. Has anyone else ever posed the question of an artist’s justification quite like Riefenstahl? The celluloid artifacts from the ’30s and ’40s cannot tell us for sure how much it was that she served herself or served art or served Adolf Hitler.•
This video is a really interesting 1965 CBC interview with the wonderful, terrible Riefenstahl, before she assumed her petulant late-life posture, still rationalizing but not yet resentful.
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A funny and prescient piece of performance art by the great prankster Alan Abel, a blend of Lenny Bruce and Allen Funt, in which he responded to an ad placed by a 1999 HBO show seeking men willing to discuss their genitalia. Abel presented himself as a 57-year-old musician with a micro-penis. The hoaxer was ridiculing the early days of Reality TV, in which soft-headed pseudo-documentaries were offered to the public by cynical producers who didn’t exactly worry about veracity. Things have gotten only dicier since, as much of our culture, including news, makes no attempt at objective truth, instead encouraging individuals to create the reality that comforts or flatters them. Language is NSFW, unless you work in a gloryhole.
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Alanna Nash’s 1997NYT articlecovered the making of the HBO biopic about Gia Carangi, recalling how uncomfortable the model was in the clothes the industry laid out for her. In retrospect, I’m sure the paper wishes it hadn’t referred to her as an “aggressive lesbian.” An excerpt:
In the late 70’s, as the dark-haired, dark-eyed teen-age daughter of a South Philadelphia hoagie shop owner, Gia began modeling almost by accident. A local photographer saw her on the dance floor and asked her to pose. Soon she was sought out as a startling alternative to the blond, blue-eyed standard of the day, and by the time she was 18, when she landed her first major advertisement, for Gianni Versace, she was earning $100,000 a year. In 1980, after she had become the ”top girl” at Wilhelmina Models in New York, she was expected to earn five times that much.
But inside, haute couture’s reigning ideal of feminine beauty felt like a fraud. Away from the camera, she dressed in black leather motorcycle jackets and men’s apparel from vintage clothing stores. She was an aggressive lesbian, coming on to models who roomed with her on faraway photo shoots. And once her drug problem got out of hand, she funneled her anger into frightening macho behavior, jumping through a car windshield when she found a female lover with a male friend, and pulling a knife on anyone she thought had slighted her.
When the track marks on her arms started showing up in pictures (other models called her Sister Morphine), only Mr. Scavullo continued to use her. Toward the end of her life, she was reduced to selling jeans in a Pennsylvania shopping mall and finally to living on the streets of New York.
In her prime, Gia sparked a rough-and-tumble reputation for walking out of sessions when a photographer kept her waiting, or when the hypocrisy of an assignment ticked her off. But to some, her free-spirited attitude was symptomatic of her search for truth, and every bit as seductive as her beauty. It’s that attitude that Ms. Jolie, the 22-year-old daughter of Jon Voight, hoped to get on film.
”When she’s free and just being herself, she’s unbelievable; that’s the tragedy of her story,” Ms. Jolie adds, sitting in her trailer beneath a poster bemoaning the death of Sid Vicious, the heroin-addicted bass player of the Sex Pistols. ”You think, ‘God, she didn’t need drugs — she was a drug.’ ”•
This 1978 video is a fun look inside the studio of legendary fashion and portrait photographer Francesco Scavullo, as he worked with the star-crossed model, a complicated subject to be sure.
Sepp Blatter, a legitimate businessman, stepped down earlier this year as President of FIFA, which is essentially Tweed’s Tammany Hall with soccer balls. The deposed chairman sat for lunch with Malcolm Moore of the Financial Times and allowed that he is dishonest but not in the exact way people think he’s dishonest. Oy vey! An excerpt:
As we settle into our conversation, he quickly pinpoints the moment when Fifa’s troubles — and his downward spiral — began. “It is linked to this now famous date: December 2, 2010,” he says, referring the day he pulled Qatar’s name out of the envelope as host of the 2022 World Cup.
“If you see my face when I opened it, I was not the happiest man to say it is Qatar. Definitely not.” The decision caused outrage, even among those who do not follow football. “We were in a situation where nobody understood why the World Cup goes to one of the smallest countries in the world,” he says.
Blatter then drops a bombshell: he did try to rig the vote but for the US, not for Qatar. There had been a “gentleman’s agreement”, he tells me, among Fifa’s leaders that the 2018 and 2022 competitions would go to the “two superpowers” Russia and the US; “It was behind the scenes. It was diplomatically arranged to go there.”
Had his electoral engineering succeeded, he would still be in charge, he says.
“I would be [on holiday] on an island!” But at the last minute, the deal was off, because of “the governmental interference of Mr Sarkozy”, who Blatter claims encouraged Michel Platini to vote for Qatar. “Just one week before the election I got a telephone call from Platini and he said, ‘I am no longer in your picture because I have been told by the head of state that we should consider . . . the situation of France.’ And he told me that this will affect more than one vote because he had a group of voters.”
If you hear a politician or community organizer tout the employment opportunities provided by Uber, realize that person is either misinformed or likely on the payroll in one form or another. The rideshare service may be temporarily using the posture of “job creator” for publicity purposes and to dodge regulation, but it has no interest in employing drivers. In fact, it’s business model pretty much demands it remove human hands from the wheel.
Whether Uber is Napster or not (and increasingly it seems to not be), this new app-enabled arrangement is here to stay, and it’s a major reckoning for the taxi industry in particular and, more broadly, Labor.
“The natural end point has to rely on autonomous driving technology”—not humans, says Emilio Frazzoli, director of the Transportation@MIT Initiative. He thinks robots could be taking the wheel in the next 15 years, certainly within the next 30. The reasons, he says, are economical and cultural.
First, as much as 50 percent of an Uber ride’s cost goes toward paying the human behind the wheel, Frazzoli says, and that’s money that could be going into Uber’s pocket. Replacing human operators has already begun in Singapore, a city that relies heavily on public transit. It’s not widely advertised, Frazzoli says, but the subway trains there “are completely automated. They are just horizontal elevators.”
Felix Oberholzer-Gee, a professor at Harvard Business School, agrees. Uber, he says, is a perfect example of a business that benefits from network effects, where the value of its service increases with more use. But, unlike other companies that benefit from strong network effects, such as Facebook, Uber has to deal with bringing two different types of users—and networks—together: drivers and riders. The network effects of getting rid of human drivers, he says, “will make the platform even stronger.”
Plus, for reasons from supply to quality control, Oberholzer-Gee says getting drivers will likely always be more of a headache than finding more riders. With autonomous vehicles, he says, “You could have a guaranteed supply of one of the sides, and particularly of the side that is harder to manage.”•
When a small child, I thought Peter Sellers’ Dr. Strangelove character was based on Henry Kissinger, not yet understanding of the chronology involved. He certainly seemed a fictional character, and one who could not have existed in the same way at any other time but during the Cold War, when information-gathering was far less than ideal and bold strokes based on half-knowledge seemed (to some) necessary.
Tom Carson has written an excellent Barnes & Noble review of Niall Ferguson’s 1000-page biography (part one!) of Nixon’s urbane henchman, a book that is frankly not yet on my must-read list and may never make it there, given the brevity of life. Carson judges the title absorbing if not unbiased (Kissinger sought out Ferguson to write his story), reminding that while the erstwhile Secretary of State was despised by the Left, he also wasn’t liked or trusted by the Right, and his often grandiose attempts at diplomacy have had ramifications for better and worse ever since. The opening:
Still craggily with us at age ninety-two, which certainly puts him one-up on countless Vietnamese, Cambodians, Chileans, and Bangladeshis in no position to volunteer their opinions of his foreign policy skills, Henry Kissinger isn’t someone too many people have ever been able to view with equanimity. Between early 1969 and early 1977, first as Richard Nixon’s uncommonly prominent NSC adviser and then as secretary of state under both Nixon and Gerald Ford, he was a figure unique in our history: a self-styled geopolitical maestro whose cachet exceeded that of the presidents he nominally worked for. If that often left Nixon seething — something he had a lot of practice at, of course — poor Ford, a newbie at international affairs when Nixon’s Watergate-driven resignation parked him in the Oval Office, didn’t have much choice except to keep Henry plummily running the show.
It’s a backhanded tribute to Kissinger’s mystique that even his enemies end up aggrandizing “the American Metternich” — his standard appellation back then, though maybe not in the Appalachians — as the ultimate wicked mastermind. If you ask almost any leftist of a certain vintage, he’s plainly destined to end up sharing a lake of fire with Darth Vader and Lord Voldemort. Nixon is despised, occasionally pitied, and sometimes cautiously respected, Ford is a historical nullity — but Kissinger? Kissinger is clammily loathed, as Hillary Clinton was reminded by the liberal old guard’s “Say it ain’t so” groans when Obama’s new secretary of state publicly embraced her most notorious predecessor.
Nobody ever calls him a mediocrity, although perhaps they should.•
Donald Trump stands with Jesus Christ, but so did Judas Iscariot, and how did that turn out? Don’t let Trump kiss you, JC!
The thrice-married liar, braggart and casino owner is baffled that Iowa voters who identify as evangelicals seem to be turning away from his brand. How can they forsake him when he’s arguably slightly more moral than fellow entrepreneur Dennis Hof?
The usual grab bag of GOP zealots and loudmouths (the Huckabees, Christies and Santorums) have fallen by the wayside this campaign season, unable to gain any helium, because Trump preemptively out-crazied them with the hardcore wingnuts of the party with his hateful brand of xenophobia, racism and sexism.
Alas, someone even wackier came along in the form of Dr. Ben Carson, who divides his enemies into neat piles of Nazis and slaveowners. While Trump is a panderer to the worst impulses, Carson is a true believer in them. I mean, this is a guy who thinks there’s actually a devil with a pitchfork. Game on!
This was Trump’s second rally in less than a week in Iowa. But he returned to a far different landscape than the one he’d left days earlier. Since he was last here, Trump has seen his solid lead in the state evaporate as four new polls reported Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon, surging to claim the top spot. Trump was in standard campaign mode as he addressed a crowd of nearly 2,400 and took a few questions — but his usual complaints about illegal immigration, corporate inversion and jobs moving overseas were punctuated with new self-deprecating comments, humanizing details and a plea to voters here for the chance to be their president.
He also ran through some reasons why the polls might have shifted, placing a lot of blame on evangelicals.
“I do well with the evangelicals, but the evangelicals let me down a little bit,” Trump said. “I don’t know what I did.”
Trump told the crowd he’s “a great Christian” and described his favorite Bible, one inscribed by his mother. Each audience member was given a card showing two black-and-white photos, including one taken at Trump’s 1959 confirmation. Amid listing off his religious credentials, Trump stopped and begged once again: “Will you get the numbers up, Iowa, please? It’s ridiculous.”•
Once a thing is developed and the dollar signs are in sight, venture capital is a really effective means of bringing it all home. But in those early days when it’s just risk without reward, government plays a crucial role. For political means, Mitt Romney excoriated the Obama Administration in 2012 for investing in alternative energy companies like Solyndra (a bomb) and Tesla (a boom), but as the philanthropic Bill Gates 2.0 recently pointed out, federal investment in such technologies is vital. Even far-less-essential tools like the Internet would not have gotten off the ground without DARPA dollars.
In a smart Alternet Q&A, Lynn Stuart Parramore asks economist Mariana Mazzucato about the interdependence of public and private sectors in birthing new industries and devices, including the ever-present iPhone. An excerpt:
Lynn Parramore:
We constantly hear that anything to do with government is incompetent and inefficient. Yet as you show, many of the industries and products that make our lives better wouldn’t exist without government-funded research. The whole process of economic growth is hugely interdependent with governmental action.
What about something like the iPhone? Is it a product of Silicon Valley magic and the genius of Steve Jobs? Or is there more to the story?
Mariana Mazzucato:
Economists have recognized that government has a role to play in markets, but only to fix failures, like monopolies, for example. Yet if we look at what governments have done around the world, they have not just stepped in to address failures. They have actually actively shaped and created markets. This is the case in IT, biotech, nanotech and in today’s emerging green economy. Public sector funds have not only supported basic research, but also applied research and even early-stage, high-risk company finance. This is important because most venture capital funds are too short-termist and exit-driven to deal with the highly uncertain and lengthy innovation process.
I often use the iPhone as an example of how governments shape markets, because what makes the iPhone “smart” and not stupid is what you can do with it. And yes, everything you can do with an iPhone was government-funded. From the Internet that allows you to surf the Web, to GPS that lets you use Google Maps, to touchscreen display and even the SIRI voice activated system —all of these things were funded by Uncle Sam through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), NASA, the Navy, and even the CIA.
These agencies are allmission driven, which matters to their success, including who they are able to hire. The Department of Energy was recently run by Steve Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, who wanted the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to do for energy what DARPA did for the Internet. Would he have bothered leaving academia to join the civil service just to “fix” markets? Surely not. That’s boring.•
There were three people ahead of me at the checkout line at Best Buy yesterday, and it took 45 minutes to pay for my purchase, so I hope human beings are soon replaced by superintelligent robots. We had our shot. Didn’t pan out.
I’m not one who thinks conscious machines are on the verge of “awakening” and destroying us, but I acknowledge that as AI assumes more responsibilities and is permitted to teach itself via Deep Learning, ghosts within those systems can lead to a cascading disaster.
Forbesreported this month: “The vision of talking to your computer like in Star Trek and it fully understanding and executing those commands are about to become reality in the next 5 years.” Antoine Blondeau, CEO at Sentient Technologies Holdings, recently toldWiredthat in five years he expects “massive gains” for human efficiency as a result of artificial intelligence, especially in the fields of health care, finance, logistics and retail.
Blondeau further envisions the rise of “evolutionary intelligence agents,” that is, computers which “evolve by themselves – trained to survive and thrive by writing their own code—spawning trillions of computer programs to solve incredibly complex problems.”
While Silicon Valley enthusiasts hail the potential gains from artificial intelligence for human efficiency and the social good, Hollywood has hyped its threats. AI-based enemies have been box office draws at least since HAL cut Frank Poole’s oxygen hose in 2001: A Space Odyssey. And 2015 has truly been the year of fictional AI provocateurs and villains with blockbuster movies including Terminator Genisys, Ex-Machina, and The Avengers: Age of Ultron.
But are the risks of AI the domain of libertarians and moviemakers, or are there red flags to be seen in the specter of “intelligence agents?” Silicon Valley cannot have “exponential” technological growth and expect only positive outcomes. Similarly, Luddites can’t wish away the age of AI, even if it might not be the version we see in the movies.•
Katie Allen has written a Guardian piece about a recent Deloitte study which suggests machines won’t be stealing our jobs. Fucking lazy robots! Get to work!
The research argues that machines have always taken on the worst of jobs, creating better new ones, leaving us with more disposable income for luxuries and grooming and such. I don’t think the report is controversial in its historical view: Technology has traditionally been a job-creating force. The Industrial Revolution was boon, not bane, for workers.
But the past isn’t necessarily prologue. What if it truly is different this time, employment becomes too scarce and the distribution of wealth is exceedingly uneven? In the aggregate, it would be great if AI did a lot of the work, but would you want to be a truck driver right now?
The opening:
In the 1800s it was the Luddites smashing weaving machines. These days retail staff worry about automatic checkouts. Sooner or later taxi drivers will be fretting over self-driving cars.
The battle between man and machines goes back centuries. Are they taking our jobs? Or are they merely easing our workload?
A study by economists at the consultancy Deloitte seeks to shed new light on the relationship between jobs and the rise of technology by trawling through census data for England and Wales going back to 1871.
Their conclusion is unremittingly cheerful: rather than destroying jobs, technology has been a “great job-creating machine”. Findings by Deloitte such as a fourfold rise in bar staff since the 1950s or a surge in the number of hairdressers this century suggest to the authors that technology has increased spending power, therefore creating new demand and new jobs.
Their study, shortlisted for the Society of Business Economists’ Rybczynski prize, argues that the debate has been skewed towards the job-destroying effects of technological change, which are more easily observed than than its creative aspects.•
Kurt Waldheim had a past, and it caught up to him, if belatedly. The stunning reveal of his Nazi-linked wartime activities was remembered at the time of his death in James Graff’s 2007 Time article “The Skeletons of Kurt Waldheim“:
When I went to visit Waldheim in 1994, he was ensconced in his opulent offices at the Austrian League for the United Nations — but he was still under siege. Freedom of Information Act requests had pried open the 1987 Washington report that put Waldheim on the Justice Department’s “watch list.” The document placed him in Banja Luka in the summer of 1942, when the Nazis had rounded up the city’s Jews and the Wehrmacht was fighting an anti-partisan offensive in the Kozara Mountains to the north. Reprisal killings against civilians were part of the Germans’ brutal efforts to quell armed dissent in the region. The report didn’t prove any direct personal responsibility of Waldheim, who was serving as a quartermaster’s deputy, but its author, Neal Sher, argued that “one doesn’t have to pull the trigger to be implemented in crimes.” Waldheim was having none of that: “unfounded allegations and accusations, with no proof given,” he told me.
The question of guilt in a command structure is no less complex now than it was then; Waldheim was no card-carrying Nazi, but he had been an officer in a unit that had a very dirty war in the Balkans. His clean-vest spiel particularly rankled me because I’d been spending a fair amount of time in Banja Luka myself. Less than a year before my interview with Waldheim, the city’s principal mosque had been totally razed by Serbs, and most of the Muslim population driven out of the city. In the summer of 1992, Serbs in Banja Luka had taken me on a bizarre tour of the camps further west where they held Muslim prisoners. The cruelty of the conflict, the suffering of thousands languishing in refugee camps, had already left a permanent mark on me. Could the conflict have been any less gutting in 1942?•
Before the Waldheim Affair became an international fiasco during the 1980s and he was banned from the United States, the future Austrian president with the Nazi past spoke with PBS talk show host James Day in New York in 1973.
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In a science-centric 1978 issue of Penthouse, a periodical published by the leathery beaver merchant Bob Guccione, there’san interviewby Richard Ballad with the late NASA astronomerRobert Jastrow, who possessed an interesting mix of beliefs. A staunch supporter of the Singularity, he saw computers as a new lifeform, and he was also a denier of human-made climate change. An excerpt:
Robert Jastrow:
I say that computers, as we call them, are a newly emerging form of life, one made out of silicon rather than carbon. Silicon is chemically similar to carbon, but it can enter into a sort of metal structure in which it is relatively invulnerable to damage, is essentially immortal, and can be extended to an arbitrarily large brain size. Such new forms of life will have neither human emotions nor any of the other trappings we associate with human life.
Penthouse:
You use the term life to describe what we usually think of as lifeless creatures. One might call them “computers with delusions of grandeur.” How can you say they are a form of life?
Robert Jastrow:
They are new forms of life. They react to stimuli, they think, they reason, they learn by experience. They don’t, however, procreate by sexual union or die — unless we want them to die. We take care of their reproduction for them. We also take care of their food needs, which are electrical. They are evolving at a dynamite speed. They have increased in capabilities by a power of- ten every seven years since the dawn of the computer age, in 1950. Man, on the other hand, has not changed for a long time. By the end of the twentieth century, the curves of human and computer growth will intersect, and by that time, I am confident, quasi-human intelligences wilt be with us. They will be similar in mentality to a fresh- ly minted Ph.D.: very strong, very narrow, with no human wisdom, but very powerful in brute reasoning strength. They will be working in combination with our managers, who will be providing the human intuition. Silicon entities will be controlling and regulating the complex affairs of our twenty-first-century society. The probability is that this will happen virtually within our own lifetime, What happens in the thirtieth century, or the fortieth? There are 6 billion years left before the sun dies, and over that long period I doubt whether biological intelligence will continue to be the seat of intelligence for the highest forms of life on this planet. Nor do I think that those advanced beings on other planets, who are older than we are, if they exist, are housed in shells of bone on a fish model of carbon chemistry Silicon, I think, is the answer. …
Penthouse:
Will humans as we know them die out like the dodo?
Robert Jastrow:
It may be that a symbiotic union will exist between humans and new forces of life, between biological and nonbiological intelligence — and it may now exist on other planets. We might continue to serve the needs of the silicon brain while it serves ours.
Penthouse:
Do you think that the computer beings will triumph in the end?
Robert Jastrow:
Yes. Not “triumph” in the sense of a war but triumph in the same sense that the mammals triumphed over the dinosaurs. It will be the next stage of perfection.•
Jastrow discussing his ideas about the Big Bang and theology:
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The 1970s video below has comments by Randolph Hearst made to NBC News about his daughter Patty, who was at the time doing a walkabout through the Radical Left. The heiress was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, (perhaps) brainwashed, and ultimately joined in the group’s acts of domestic terrorism. “I think she’s staying underground just like a lot of kids stay underground,” her father said, accurately assessing the situation. Before the end of the decade, she was captured, convicted, imprisoned and saw her sentence commuted. In January 2001, Bill Clinton granted her a full pardon.
I don’t think there’s ever been a richer time for books of all kinds than right now. Perhaps that’s just the loudest crack of thunder before the skies dry up, but I would bet not. The traditional publishing business being disturbed has welcomed in many more voices, and while it’s difficult for a single title to fully permeate the culture, there so much more variety whether we’re talking fiction or nonfiction.
In Part II of their conversation published in the New York Review of Books, President Obama and Marilynne Robinson speak to the fears that the novel’s place in the culture is diminishing. The author believes fiction is bursting with variety now, while the President worries about narrowcasting. One thing I’ll say about Obama linking great fiction to great empathy is that there are some very well-read people who have little of the latter. An excerpt:
President Obama:
Are you somebody who worries about people not reading novels anymore? And do you think that has an impact on the culture? When I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president, and the most important set of understandings that I bring to that position of citizen, the most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels. It has to do with empathy. It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays, but there’s still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it’s possible to connect with some[one] else even though they’re very different from you.
And so I wonder when you’re sitting there writing longhand in some—your messy longhand somewhere—so I wonder whether you feel as if that same shared culture is as prevalent and as important in the lives of people as it was, say, when you were that little girl in Idaho, coming up, or whether you feel as if those voices have been overwhelmed by flashier ways to pass the time.
Marilynne Robinson:
I’m not really the person—because I’m almost always talking with people who love books.
President Obama:
Right. You sort of have a self-selecting crew.
Marilynne Robinson:
And also teaching writers—I’m quite aware of the publication of new writers. I think—I mean, the literature at present is full to bursting. No book can sell in that way that Gone with the Wind sold, or something like that. But the thing that’s wonderful about it is that there’s an incredible variety of voices in contemporary writing. You know people say, is there an American tradition surviving in literature, and yes, our tradition is the incredible variety of voices….
And [now] you don’t get the conversation that would support the literary life. I think that’s one of the things that has made book clubs so popular.•
Fred Trump had many things–money, cars, houses–but sadly lacked a vasectomy scar.
That absence unfortunately led to the existence of his deplorable son Donald, a vicious bullshit artist who seems to have been fertilized more with venom than semen. While Beefsteak Charlie is currently sliming one set of politicians and minorities, the act is nothing new–only the targets have changed.
Trump once directed his adult-baby hatred at Republican icon Ronald Reagan, before he decided to belatedly deify the 40th American President and instead vomit his vitriol against more convenient foes. Nothing is sincere about this cretin except his copious self-loathing that’s wholly free of self-examination and directed outward.
Of course, Trump isn’t alone in his Reagan flip-flop. Newt Gingrich once compared Ronald Reagan meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev with Neville Chamberlain visiting with Adolf Hitler in 1938. The Speaker became close friends again with Reagan after the former President died. But not even Gingrich is as dishonest as Trump.
In 2016, there are 14 Republican presidential candidates for whom Ronald Reagan is both the benchmark for conservative values and the lodestar of conservative ideas. There’s also one who wrote, in the second to last year of Reagan’s presidency, that he had been “so smooth, so effective a performer” that “only now, seven years later, are people beginning to question whether there’s anything beneath that smile.”
The gadfly was Donald Trump, writing in his book The Art of the Deal. But it wasn’t just a glancing blow; to promote the book, Trump launched a political campaign that tore into Reagan’s record, including his willingness to stand up to the Soviet Union. Advised by the notorious Roger Stone, a Nixon-era GOP trickster, in 1987 Trump took out full-page ads inthe New YorkTimes, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post blasting Reagan and his team.
In the text, which was addressed “To the American people,” Trump declared, “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.” The problem was America’s leading role in defending democracy, which had been fulfilled by Republicans and Democrats all the way back to FDR. Foreshadowing his 2015 argument that would have Mexico pay for an American-built border wall, Trump then said that the United States should present its allies with a bill for defense services rendered.
The ads, which cost more than $90,000, came after Trump had visited the Soviet Union and met with Mikhail Gorbachev. (A few years earlier, Trump had offered himself as a replacement for Reagan’s nuclear arms control negotiators, whom he considered too soft.) Trump followed his letter to America with a trip to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where voters were eyeing the candidates in the 1988 primary. There he spoke to the Rotary Club, which met at Yoken’s restaurant, where the sign out front featured a spouting whale and the slogan, “Thar she blows!” In his talk, Trump sounded some of the same themes he offers today, except for the fact that the bad guys who were laughing at the United States were the Japanese and not the Mexicans or Chinese.•
