Phoenix, Ariz.–”Padre,” a big medicine man of the Yuma Indians, who lives on a reservation near Yuma, Ariz., has been offered as a sacrifice to the spirit in accordance with the custom of his tribe and has expiated the sins of the tribe, which are held responsible for an epidemic of smallpox.
The medicine man learned several days ago of the intention of the Indians to sacrifice him, and fled to the mountains. Being half starved he returned to the Indian village and pleaded for mercy. He was bound hand and foot and conveyed by a squad of Indians to Mexico, where he was bound to a tree and tortured to death.
“Padre” had a warm place in the hearts of his tribesmen, but their customs required them to make a heavy sacrifice.•
A great light of the nineteenth-century chess world who burned briefly, Harry Nelson Pillsbury was a brilliant player as well as an accomplished mnemonist capable of quickly absorbing and regurgitating seemingly endless strings of facts. In fact, according to his Wikipedia page, he could “could play checkers and chess simultaneously while playing a hand of whist, and reciting a list of long words.” Pillsbury never had the opportunity to become world champion because his mental health deteriorated, the result of syphilis which he contracted in his twenties. Anarticlein the April 9, 1906 Brooklyn Daily Eagle assigned his decline to more genteel origins.
Just as talkies were announcing themselves across America, genius Russian silent film director Sergei Eisenstein was dejectedly departing Hollywood, no richer financially or creatively for his failed attempts at pleasing U.S. movie producers. An article in the May 1, 1932 Brooklyn Daily Eagle made clear his disenchantment with the business end of show business and the automaton nature of the burgeoning studio system.
Racism and guns are never far away in America, but the bloodshed of the last few days has been particularly sickening, a reminder that African-Americans are still prone to an instant death penalty for minor or phantom offenses, and that the endless supply of powerful guns has made us all, even the police, sitting ducks.
Adding to the troubling nature of the carnage is the unprecedented domestic use of a “bomb robot” by Dallas officers to kill a suspected sniper, a tactic employed by U.S. soldiers in Iraq that’s the latest “dividend” to return home from that misbegotten war. I’m sure the police were just trying to keep any more innocent people from being murdered, but the precedent is chilling.
“Negotiations broke down. We had an exchange of gunfire with the suspect,” Dallas police chief David Brown explained in a press conference. “We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was.”
You read that correctly: “bomb robot.”
Typically, in violent standoffs involving gunfire, police wait out the suspects, or try to deploy snipers of their own to remove the threat. The general rule is that if police are not directly under threat of taking fire, they should try to bring home the suspect alive. Brown, though, said the robot was the only choice the force had.
“Other options would have exposed our officers to grave danger. The suspect is deceased,” he said.
The use of a robot to kill someone has taken police observers aback.•
A closer look at the numbers reveals our prosperity has grown increasingly top-heavy for decades, a failure that’s not an orphan. Among the factors suppressing the earnings of the vast majority are tax codes, the decline of unions, corporate pay structures, globalization and automation.
The future looks bright in the big picture, but only if we find a way to allow working-class people to participate in the wealth created. Otherwise we’ll develop a large underclass distracted intermittently by the few amazing, cheap gadgets in their pockets, by bread and Kardashians.
Investment in workers and infrastructure is key, as always. It’s worth noting that if too many jobs are automated out of existence too quickly, we may have a challenge that even education can’t remedy.
From Edward Alden and Rebecca Strauss’ smart Foreign Affairs article, “Is America Great?“:
In our own research, we have looked in detail at how the United States measures against other advanced economies on many of the attributes that underlie national competitiveness, from innovation to education. The picture is a pretty good one. On innovation, for example, which drives economic growth in wealthy nations, the United States is far ahead of any country in the world. Corporate taxes and regulations, although both in real need of reform and modernization, do not pose the serious competitive disadvantage that many Republicans have suggested. The United States has slipped in global education rankings, but there are encouraging signs of progress, with high school graduation rates recently reaching record levels.
So if the United States is doing so well compared to its economic rivals, what accounts for the political appeal of claims that it has been a loser in global competition? The answer lies in the growing disconnect between the macro-level performance of the U.S. economy, which has been reasonably good, and the economy as it is lived by many Americans, which has been far from good.
The economist Michael Porter and his colleagues at Harvard Business School have called it “an economy doing only half its job.” Porter defines a competitive economy as one in which companies can compete successfully in global markets while also supporting rising wages and living standards for ordinary citizens. U.S. companies such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google account more than half of the top 100 companies in the world by market value, and such firms have only gained ground over the past five years. But despite this competitive triumph, wages and living standards for the average American have stagnated for decades. Real wages have been flat since the 1970s, which roughly corresponds with the time when the United States began facing tougher overseas competition, first from Japan and Germany and later from China. Young men today, who have been hit particularly by the disappearance of manufacturing jobs, on average earn less than their fathers did.
Porter and his colleagues argue that the biggest cause of this growing divide is the failure of governments, and of companies themselves, to invest in Americans—to give them the education, skills, infrastructure, and access to capital they to need to prosper along with U.S. companies.•
Alvin Toffler just died, but Douglas Rushkoff, an intellectual descendant of the Future Shock author and Marshall McLuhan, continues on. The media and cultural theorist is driven more by politics–specifically politics from the Left–than his predecessors, though he’s also examining the same macro questions: What have we created with our cleverness? Is it good for us? How can we best manage the downsides?
In a smart 52 Insights Q&A, Rushkoff speaks to the American corporatocracy and what he sees as the intrusion of new tools in our lives. One comment he makes in regard to our gadgets: “Maybe they will just fade into the background. Maybe you’ll have smart devices that can get data from what you’re doing but they don’t affect you as much.”
On some level devices that gather information from us do have an impact on us, even if the process is stealthy. Much good will come from the Internet of Things, but it’s a system with no OFF switch, no escape hatch. At that point, we’re inside the machine for good.
An excerpt:
Question:
I get on the bus every morning and I am succumb to my technology addiction like everyone else, but sometimes I look up and check out how many people are actually looking out of the window rather than at their phones. It’s usually about 50/50. Do you think this trend will continue in 50 years?
Douglas Rushkoff:
It’s hard to know what will happen. I like the optimism implicit in your question, asking, what will we be like in 50 years rather than whether we will be here in 50 years. The question of how we will have adapted to technology seems to be a much smaller proportion of the impact of technology than all of the externalized impacts of technology that we don’t talk about.
I’m less concerned with how the iPhone is changing my vision than the two refrigerators’ worth of electricity the iPhone is using when it’s operating, or the African kids that are being sent into caves to get rare earth metals to put into my battery, or the electronic waste that’s being buried in South America and China, or the children of Pakistan who are being poisoned by old CRT monitors. These people are going to be impacted way more. In my own crowd and the young people I talk to, I actually don’t see people so enamoured of their technology as older people. It’s the boomer and maybe some Gen-X-ers or Gen-Y who love all of this stuff, their Internet of Things. Younger people either know they can’t afford that stuff or really just don’t care so much. They don’t see it as so central to their experience. Yeah there’s a lot of texting going on but even that. . . I look at my daughter’s class, they’re 10 or 11 years old and they don’t like the stuff. I think we’re going to see people using technology much more appropriately in the future and in a more limited fashion. That could mean a very big disruption for the growth of all these internet service companies that think we will just want to do more and more. Then again maybe they will just fade into the background. Maybe you’ll have smart devices that can get data from what you’re doing but they don’t affect you as much.
Question:
What really keeps you up at night? What are you most concerned about in society?
Douglas Rushkoff:
The thing that disturbs me most is when people accept the artifacts that have been left for them as the given circumstances of nature. When people look at corporate capitalism, or Facebook, or the religion they have, as if they were given by god and not invented by people. It’s this automatic acceptance of how things are that leads to a sense of helplessness about changing any of them. I am deeply concerned about the environment and the degree to which temperatures are rising, and how the worst expectations of environmentalists have already been surpassed.•
Gay Talese’s recent New Yorker story about voyeuristic Colorado motel owner Gerald Foos was disquieting for many reasons, not only because of the peeping Tom’s perverted behavior, which began in the 1960s. In the piece, the author writes that he learned the innkeeper witnessed–perhaps even unintentionally incited–a murder. For some reason, Talese didn’t immediately phone the police, just as he had failed to do repeatedly for many years while knowing of Foos’ repeated invasions of privacy. Maybe the killing was a lie that oozed from a deeply troubled brain–one can only hope–but the persistent sexual surveillance was clearly real.
It turns out Talese wasn’t nearly as circumspect about his creepy subject as he needed to be. Since the article’s publication, it’s come to light that Foos wasn’t the owner of the motel from 1980 to 1988, a fact he kept from the journalist. The events described during that period seem to have been fabricated, with Talese now forced to disavow his soon-to-be published book on the topic.
In his forthcoming book, The Voyeur’s Motel, acclaimed journalist and nonfiction author Gay Talese chronicles the bizarre story of Gerald Foos, who allegedly spied on guests at his Colorado motel from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s.
But Talese overlooked a key fact in his book: Foos sold the motel, located in Aurora, Colo., in 1980 and didn’t reacquire it until eight years later, according to local property records. His absence from the motel raises doubt about some of the things Foos told Talese he saw — enough that the author himself now has deep reservations about the truth of some material he presents.
“I should not have believed a word he said,” the 84-year-old author said after The Washington Post informed him of property records that showed Foos did not own the motel from 1980 to 1988.
“I’m not going to promote this book,” the writer said. “How dare I promote it when its credibility is down the toilet?”•
He used native business acumen to escape an impoverished youth in Kentucky through the establishment, in 1903, of a religious cult known as the House of David, which he cofounded with his wife, Mary. They claimed to be the final representatives of God who would be sent to Earth.
“King Ben,” as he came to be known, built a veritable empire of a commune, which bore fruit literally and figuratively, burnishing his brand by portraying himself as immortal and promising to confer everlasting life unto others who gifted him with their worldly possessions. It worked wonderfully well for a while. The community boasted a cannery, an electricity plant, bands, orchestras, a zoological garden and a barnstorming baseball team of wide repute.
By his last decade, though, Purnell was accused of having sex with numerous underaged girls who lived on the grounds and was also beset by other legal issues. As a royal, priest and CEO, his career was in tatters. He died soon after his fall from grace, mortal as the rest of us, with some followers splintering into smaller groups.
Alvin Toffler, the sociological salesman who anticipated and feared tomorrow, just died at 87.
Has there ever been a biography written about the man whose pants were forever being scared off? I’d love to know what it was about his life that positioned him, beginning in the 1960s, to look ahead at our future and be shocked. There was always a strong sci-fi strain to his work, though it’s undeniably important to think about how science and technology could go horribly wrong. By imagining the worst, perhaps we can avoid it. Like anyone else who toiled in speculative markets, Toffler was sometimes way off the mark, though he was also incredibly prescient on other occasions.
Below is an excerpt from his BBC obituary and a few Afflictor posts about Toffler from over the years.
From the BBC:
Online chat rooms
Although many writers in the 1960s focused on social upheavals related to technological advancement, Toffler wrote in a page-turning style that made difficult concepts easy to understand.
Future Shock (1970) argued that economists who believed the rise in prosperity of the 1960s was just a trend were wrong – and that it would continue indefinitely.
The Third Wave, in 1980, was a hugely influential work that forecast the spread of emails, interactive media, online chat rooms and other digital advancements.
But among the pluses, he also foresaw increased social alienation, rising drug use and the decline of the nuclear family.
Space colonies
Not all of his futurist predictions have come to pass. He thought humanity’s frontier spirit would lead to the creation of “artificial cities beneath the waves” as well as colonies in space.
One of his most famous assertions was: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”•
“Who Is To Write The Evolutionary Code Of Tomorrow?”
A passage about genetic engineering, a fraught field but one with tremendous promise, from a 1978 Omni interview with Toffler conducted by leathery beaver merchant Bob Guccione:
Omni:
What’s good about genetic engineering?
Alvin Toffler:
Genetic manipulation can yield cheap insulin. It can probably help us solve the cancer riddle. But, more important, over the very long run it could help us crack the world food problem.
You could radically reduce reliance on artificial fertilizers–which means saving energy and helping the poor nations substantially. You could produce new, fast-growing species. You could create species adapted to lands that are now marginal, infertile, arid, or saline. And if you really let your long-range imagination roam, you can foresee a possible convergence of genetic manipulation, weather modification, and computerized agriculture–all coming together with a wholly new energy system. Such developments would simply remake agriculture as we’ve known it for 10,000 years.
Omni:
What is the downside?
Alvin Toffler:
Horrendous. Almost beyond our imagination, When you cut up genes and splice them together in new ways, you risk the accidental escape from the laboratory of new life forms and the swift spread of new diseases for which the human race no defenses.
As is the case with nuclear energy we have safety guidelines. But no system, in my view, can ever be totally fail-safe. All our safety calculations are based on certain assumptions. The assumptions are reasonable, even conservative. But none of the calculations tell what happens if one of the assumptions turns out to be wrong. Or what to do if a terrorist manages to get a hold of the crucial test tube.
A lot of good people are working to tighten controls in this field. NATO recently issued a report summarizing the steps taken by dozens of countries from the U.S.S.R. to Britain and the U.S. But what do we do about irresponsible corporations or nations who just want to crash ahead? And completely honest, socially responsible geneticists are found on both sides of an emotional debate as to how–or even whether–to proceed.
Farther down the road, you also get into very deep political, philosophical, and ecological issues. Who is to write the evolutionary code of tomorrow? Which species shall live and which shall die out? Environmentalists today worry about vanishing species and the effect of eliminating the leopard or the snail darter from the planet. These are real worries, because every species has a role to play in the overall ecology. But we have not yet begun to think about the possible emergence of new, predesigned species to take their place.•
“Shut Down The Public Education System”
Toffler called for the dismantling of the U.S. public-education system in a 2007 interview at Edutopia. An excerpt:
Edutopia:
You’ve been writing about our educational system for decades. What’s the most pressing need in public education right now?
Alvin Toffler:
Shut down the public education system.
Edutopia:
That’s pretty radical.
Alvin Toffler:
I’m roughly quoting Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who said, “We don’t need to reform the system; we need to replace the system.”
Edutopia:
Why not just readjust what we have in place now? Do we really need to start from the ground up?
Alvin Toffler:
We should be thinking from the ground up. That’s different from changing everything. However, we first have to understand how we got the education system that we now have. Teachers are wonderful, and there are hundreds of thousands of them who are creative and terrific, but they are operating in a system that is completely out of time. It is a system designed to produce industrial workers….
The public school system is designed to produce a workforce for an economy that will not be there. And therefore, with all the best intentions in the world, we’re stealing the kids’ future.
Do I have all the answers for how to replace it? No. But it seems to me that before we can get serious about creating an appropriate education system for the world that’s coming and that these kids will have to operate within, we have to ask some really fundamental questions.
And some of these questions are scary. For example: Should education be compulsory? And, if so, for who? Why does everybody have to start at age five? Maybe some kids should start at age eight and work fast. Or vice versa. Why is everything massified in the system, rather than individualized in the system? New technologies make possible customization in a way that the old system — everybody reading the same textbook at the same time — did not offer.•
“This Technology Is Exacting A Heavy Price”
Orson Welles narrates this 1972 documentary that McGraw-Hill produced about sociologist Toffler‘s gargantuan 1970 bestseller, Future Shock. Toffler caused a sensation with his views about the human incapacity to adapt in the short term to remarkable change, in this case of the technological variety. The movie is odd and paranoid and overheated and fun.
When it comes to human-made material goods, it would seem that cheap abundance is within sight for the first time in our species’ history. The rub is that the cost of getting there has been sky-high environmentally, with scary repercussions staring us in the maw.
As we’ve witnessed in California, in the U.S. we haven’t made great decisions when it comes to safeguarding our water supply, that precious resource. Water economist David Zetland, author ofThe End of Abundance: Economic Solutions to Water Scarcity, just conducted anAsk Me Anythingat Reddit. A few exchanges are embedded below.
Question:
Yesterday, there was a picture on r/pics of a California lake (almost empty) in 2014 and the same lake with much more water in it from this year. How are things going in California? (I realize you no longer live there.) Are conditions improving there? What needs to happen now to get them even better?
David Zetland:
Yes, I did too. I hope that some of the 5000+ people who upvoted it see your comment :)
“Things” are ok. The environment is really under stress due to drought and climate change (hard to separate), and El Niño didn’t fix anything. The biggest problem in the State is groundwater, which is barely regulated and hardly measured (there are laws now, but it will take 5+ years to implement anything).
People in cities may say “nothing’s wrong” b/c their taps flow but they are missing the environmental and groundwater stress.
I’m not an optimist in terms of improvements, as the dominant perspective is growth of population, agriculture and urban landscapes. All of these are increasing demand in a system that’s “managed” to the hilt, meaning there’s very little space for safety if things go wrong. (The big nightmare is an earthquake that “disturbs” the Delta, thereby cutting off water to SF as well as half of SoCal. That could happen tomorrow.)
I’ve suggested for years that California needs to reduce water transfers, to get regions to focus more on local supplies (i.e., recycling wastewater, saving rainwater) rather than calling for more dams or transfers.
I moved to the Netherlands b/c I don’t trust California’s water management to do much more than get by, with a good chance it will fail (it already has for communities losing access to well water or facing polluted well water).
Question:
Do you view cities like LA and LV as unsustainable, or is there a way for large cities to exist in desert climates without robbing other regions?
David Zetland:
Good question. EVERY city is unsustainable in some way, due to the way they need to concentrate food, energy, water, etc. Those that are farther from those sources thus need to be smaller. LA was amazing back in the 30s, but grew off imported water (you can even go back earlier, to the 1913 LA Aqueduct if you want to pinpoint an issue).
The main idea is that ALL cities should pay the full cost of their resource use/environmental impact. Very few do, but it’s FAR worse when politicians allow them to get away with stuff/subsidize their growth.
Question:
If the planet is made up of mostly water, why are we concerned about the scarcity of water?
I’ve always wondered – why not just price water according to its scarcity? Give the first x gallons cheap or free to residential customers, then charge against an accelerating price scale? That would dissuade large inefficient users, but still allow people to stay clean and healthy in their homes.
David Zetland:
You’re right in principle, but the details should be implemented differently. More.
Question:
What little things can people do to help use less water ?
David Zetland:
Little: Turn off taps when not using water. Bigger: Don’t have a lawn. Fix leaks. Biggest: Don’t eat meat.
Mega: Get involved in regional water management, to help those who do not care as much change their habits (via changed incentives — prices — more than preaching).•
For those raised under capitalism who’ve absorbed the teachings of that system, a post-scarcity Second Machine Age sans labor is awfully difficult to envision. It’s essentially the technology-driven collapse that Karl Marx envisioned. Something has to replace the work that disappears, doesn’t it? Some mixed blessing for us to enjoy/endure? Even if intelligent machines can somehow make such a tiol-free scenario possible, we’re not even sure that we want it. Few aspire to drudgery. but genuine productivity feels good.
Eventually and maybe not gradually enough to make the transition smooth, we’ll be inside a new machine that operates under different rules, and we’ll have to likewise reinvent ourselves. Right now the spectre of mass technological unemployment has allowed the idea of Universal Basic Income to capture hearts and minds in Silicon Valley, discussion that has reverberated far beyond that well-appointed patch of Silicon Valley, even into the Oval office. Not all the plans are equal–or even good–but they are being discussed in halls of power.
Two excerpts below from: 1) President Obama discussing Basic Income in a Bloomberg interview, and 2) Ilana E. Strauss’ Atlantic piece about the possibility of a labor-free society that doesn’t promote ennui.
From Bloomberg:
Question:
Some economists suggest that globalization is going to start targeting all those services jobs. If you want to keep up wages in that area, doesn’t it push us toward something like a universal basic income?
President Obama:
The way I describe it is that, because of automation, because of globalization, we’re going to have to examine the social compact, the same way we did early in the 19th century and then again during and after the Great Depression. The notion of a 40-hour workweek, a minimum wage, child labor laws, etc.—those will have to be updated for these new realities. But if we’re smart right now, then we build ourselves a runway to make that transition less abrupt, because we’re still growing, and we’re beating the competition around the world. Look, for example, at smart cars, where the technology basically exists now. The number of people who are currently employed driving vehicles of some sort is enormous. And some of those jobs are pretty good jobs. You know, people are worried about Uber, but the fear is actually driverless Uber, right? Or driverless buses or what have you.
Now, there are all kinds of reasons why society may be better off if smart cars are the norm. Significant drops in traffic fatalities, much more efficient use of the vehicle, so that we’re less likely to emit as much pollution and carbon that causes climate change. You know, drastically reduced traffic, which means we’re giving back hours to families that are currently taken up in road rage. All kinds of reasons why we may want to do that. But if we haven’t given any thought to where are the people who are currently making a living driving transferring into, then there’s going to be deep resistance.
So trying to separate out issues of efficiency and productivity from issues of distribution and how people experience their own lives and their ability to take care of their families, I think, is a bad recipe. It’s not an either/or situation. It’s a both/and situation.•
From Strauss:
People have speculatedfor centuriesabout a future without work, and today is no different, with academics, writers, and activists once again warning that technology is replacing human workers. Some imagine that the coming work-free world will be defined by inequality: A few wealthy people will own all the capital, and the masses will struggle in an impoverished wasteland.
A different, less paranoid, and not mutually exclusive prediction holds that the future will be a wasteland of a different sort, one characterized by purposelessness: Without jobs to give their lives meaning, people will simply become lazy and depressed. Indeed, today’s unemployed don’t seem to be having a great time. One Gallup pollfoundthat 20 percent of Americans who have been unemployed for at least a year report having depression, double the rate for working Americans. Also, some researchsuggeststhat the explanation for rising rates of mortality, mental-health problems, and addiction among poorly-educated, middle-aged people is a shortage of well-paid jobs. Another study shows thatpeople are often happier at work than in their free time. Perhaps this is whymany worryabout the agonizing dullness of a jobless future.
But it doesn’t necessarily follow from findings like these that a world without work would be filled with malaise.•
In the same decade humans set foot on the moon, the most soaring technological achievement of our species, Sir Edmund Hillary went on an expedition to the Himalayas to search for the Abominable Snowman. There are still some among us all these years later who believe Yeti roams the Earth and the moonwalk was faked.
Great scientific knowledge and utter disregard for facts can exist in the same moment. There’s perhaps no more perplexing aspect of modern life than conspiracy theories mucking up the works, from chemtrails to 9/11 Truthers to Birthers to anti-Vaxxers. Endless information was supposed to set us free from such madness. It did not. The new tools have made it easier to spread lies, to conduct a war on info, to even run an essentially fact-free Presidential campaign.
Excerpts from two articles follow: 1) Christopher Mele’sNew York Times articleabout those who believe the Orlando massacre a staged or “false flag” event, and 2) William Finnegan’s New Yorker commentary on Trump’s appreciation for unhinged conspiracist Alex Jones, who believes pretty much every job an inside one.
From Mele:
Jesse Walker, the author of The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory,said fear, the human need to find patterns and tell stories, and the recognition that conspiracies are not impossible help fuel such theories. The stories — no matter how outlandish — can bring meaning and a measure of comfort in a world that can make no sense, he said.
False-flag theories have long been around. One focused on the assassination attempt in 1835 of President Andrew Jackson, during which the president fought off a gunman whose two weapons misfired. Conspiracy theorists at the time believed Jackson had hired the gunman as a way to drum up sympathy for himself, Mr. Walker said.
Unlike the 1800s, stories today benefit from instant delivery through the internet and social media. One of the better-known purveyors is Alex Jones, who hosts an internet show at the website infowars.com. The day of the Orlando shooting, he posted a videoin which he asserted that the government had let the massacre happen so it could pass “hate laws to deal with right-wingers” and to disarm gun owners. He did not respond to an email seeking comment.
Mike Rothschildof Pasadena, Calif., who has researched and written about conspiracy theories, described the world of false-flag believers as a “bank of awakened internet sleuths that has got it all figured out.” They see it as their duty to warn others about secret elites in government who are plotting against citizens, he said.•
From Finnegan:
On December 2nd, while the awful news from San Bernardino was erupting, bit by unconfirmed bit, I was surprised by the crisp self-assurance of a couple of bloggers whose names were new to me. They were on it—number of victims, names of shooters, police-radio intercepts. Soon, though, thebloggersveered offfrom the story that other news sources were slowly, frantically putting together. The information being released by the authorities did not match the information the bloggers were unearthing, and the latter quickly deduced that, like other “mass shootings” staged by the government, in Newtown, Connecticut, and elsewhere, this was a “false flag” operation. The official account was fiction. One Web site that carried the work of these “reporters” was called Infowars. I made do with other sources for news. But I kept an eye on Infowars and its proprietor, Alex Jones, who is a conspiracy theorist and radio talk-show host in Austin, Texas. Jones’s guest on his show the morning of the shooting had been, as chance would have it, Donald Trump. Jones had praised Trump, claiming that ninety per cent of his listeners were Trump supporters, and Trump had returned the favor, saying, “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down.”
Jones’s amazing reputation arises mainly from his high-volume insistence that national tragedies such as the September 11th terror attacks, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Sandy Hook elementary-school shooting, and the Boston Marathon bombing were all inside jobs, “false flag” ops secretly perpetrated by the government to increase its tyrannical power (and, in some cases, seize guns). Jonesbelievesthat no one was actually hurt at Sandy Hook—those were actors—and that the Apollo 11 moon-landing footage was faked. Etcetera. Trump also trades heavily in imaginary events and conspiracy theories. He gained national traction on the American right by promoting the canard that President Obama was born outside the United States—a race-baiting lie that the candidate stilltoys withon Twitter. But birtherism is only the best-known among Trump’s large collection of creepy political fairy tales. You’ve probably heard the one about vaccines and autism. He even pushed that during a Presidential primary debate, on national television. Do you really believe that Obama won the 2012 election fairly? Wrong.Fraud. (At the same time, it’s Mitt Romney, total loser, who let everyone down.) Bill Ayers,not Obama, wrote “Dreams from My Father.” There is no drought in California, and the Chinese, outwitting us per usual, invented the concept of global warming to undermine American manufacturing. And so on.
Jeannette Piccard, bold balloonist, is pictured directly above with her husband, Jean, and Henry Ford, the anti-Semitic automaker on hand to wish them–and their pet turtle–well on a daring 1934 trip via gondola into the stratosphere, which turned out to be a bumpy ride. Jeanette is usually credited as the first woman in space; her spouse was the twin brother of Auguste Piccard, the family’s most famous aeronaut. (The siblings would decades later inspire the name of Patrick Stewart’s Star Trek captain.) Jeannette traveled far not only up there, but also in here, following up her aviation exploits and a stint at NASA by being ordained an Episcopalian priest. An article in the October 23 Brooklyn Daily Eagle recorded the fraught moment when she reached the high point of her life, literally at least.
There’s no denying Kevin Kelly is a techno-optimist, something his new book, The Inevitable, speaks to. The Wired cofounder, who returned to Russ Robert’s podcast, EconTalk, to promote the title, said three years ago when guesting on the program: “We’re constantly redefining what humans are here for.” He’s further developed his thinking on that topic this time around.
I agree with Kelly and Roberts that our new tools and systems (Deep Learning, AI, etc.) will make us better off in the long run (though it will be complicated), but I’m concerned about the near- and medium-term, when industries will likely rise and fall with disquieting regularity and financial headaches may find those who aren’t, say, successful authors or research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Roberts briefly puzzles over people concerning themselves with technological unemployment at a time when the U.S. unemployment rate hovers around 5%. I don’t think it’s Trumpian to say that percentage doesn’t quite speak to the number of citizens struggling nor the long-stagnating wages. Wikipedia and smartphones are wonderful, but they’re not quite a substitute for a degree of economic security.
Two exchanges are embedded below.
Russ Roberts:
Just to play pessimist for a minute: We think about artificial intelligence, for example, today–and you mention both these kind of things in your book–is it really that exciting that our thermostat gets to know us? Is it really that exciting that my car beeps at me when I’m going out of my lane or can parallel park–which is great for my 16-year old worried about is his driver’s license test? But these are not transformative applications.
Kevin Kelly:
Yeah. This too. It seemed it at first, very invisible. Well, you might not recall, but in the 1920s or something Sears Roebuck, the mail-order catalog company, was selling the Home Motor. And the Home Motor was this immense, 15-pound motor that was going to sit in the center of your home and automate all the appliances and whatnot in your home. That industrial revolution thing worked because it became invisible–we don’t have the big motor turning everything; we have like 50 motors in our homes that became invisible. So, to some extent, this stuff is working because we don’t see it. Because it’s not something that is visible. And it succeeds to the extent that it transforms while we don’t see it. So, that’s one thing. And the second thing I would say about that is that, we’re sitting on this huge wave of the First Industrial Revolution which brought this incredible prosperity to us all, the fact that we see around us that we no longer in the agricultural hunter-gatherer era were–we had to do everything with human muscle or with animal muscle, animal power. We invented something called ‘synthetic artificial power.’ And we harnessed fossil fuels, and carbon fuels, to give additional power that we couldn’t do. And all that we see is basically a result of this artificial power. So when we drive down the road in your car, you have 250 horses working for you at that moment. Just turn a little knob, you’ve got 250 horses powering you down to do whatever you want to do. And then we distributed that power through a grid to every home and farm in the country; and so farmers could employ that artificial power to do all kinds of things; and factories could use that artificial power. And everything that we had built around us was because of the artificial power that we made. Well, now, we’re going to do the same thing with artificial intelligence. So, instead of–in addition to having 250 horses driving you down the road, you are going to have 250 minds–which we are going to get from AI, from artificial intelligence. And that, we’re also going to put that onto a grid and distribute it around the country so that like any farmer could just get and purchase as much artificial power and artificial intelligence as they want, to do things. And just as that artificial power, was this incredibly transformative, incredibly progressive, incredibly powerful platform to give us all that we enjoy now, this artificial minds that we are going to get on top of the artificial power is going to transform us in an equal way: it’s going to touch everything that we do. And I think actually it will transform us more than that first Industrial Revolution did.•
Russ Roberts:
A lot of people worry about the impact of artificial intelligence on employment. We’ve talked about this–it’s now becoming a recurring theme. And of course it’s ironic we’re having this theme when unemployment in the United States is 5%. But, put that to the side. I think people are legitimately worried about what might be replaced by what. And you talk about it at length. I just wondered about two points you make. You talk about the fact that there are jobs that we didn’t know we wanted done. I’m going to read a little excerpt here:
Before we invented automobiles, air-conditioning, flat-screen video displays, and animated cartoons, no one living in ancient Rome wished they could watch cartoons while riding to Athens in climate-controlled comfort. One hundred years ago not a single citizen of China would have told you that they would rather buy a tiny glass slab that allowed them to talk to faraway friends before they would buy indoor plumbing, but every day peasant farmers in China without plumbing purchase smart phones. Crafty AIs embedded in first-person-shooter games have given millions of teenage boys the urge, the need, to become professional game designers–a dream that no boy in Victorian times ever had. In a very real way our inventions assign us our jobs.
You want to add anything to that?
Kevin Kelly:
I think maybe I kind of maybe say it this way: Our jobs into the future will be to invent jobs that we can automate and give to the robots. So, we’re on a kind of a path, on an escalator–that we’re going to keep inventing new things that that we desire to be wanted to do; we’ll figure out how to do them, and once we figure out how to do them we’ll automate them–basically giving them to the AIs, and a box. So, in a certain sense our job is to invent jobs that we can automate. And I think that part of inventing jobs may be our job–human job–for a while, because we have better access to our latent desires than AIs do. Although eventually even perhaps that job is–at least assisted by AIs.
Russ Roberts:
I’m going to read another quote which says what you just said, but it’s so beautiful. You say,
When robots and automation do our most basic work, making it relatively easy for us to be fed, clothed, and sheltered, then we are free to ask, “What are humans for?” Industrialization did more than just extend the average human lifespan. It led a greater percentage of the population to decide that humans were meant to be ballerinas, full-time musicians, mathematicians, athletes, fashion designers, yoga masters, fan-fiction authors, and folks with one-of-a kind titles on their business cards. With the help of our machines, we could take up these roles; but of course, over time, the machines will do these as well. We’ll then be empowered to dream up yet more answers to the question “What should we do?” It will be many generations before a robot can answer that.•
A Texas millennial using apps and gadgets to disrupt Big Church doesn’t really seem odder than anything else in this hyperconnected and tech-happy entrepreneurial age, when the way things have been are threatened at every turn. At Experience Life in Lubbock, Soylent has yet to replace wine and there’s no Virtual Reality confessionals, but self-described “computer nerd” Chris Galanos has done his best to take the “Old” out of the Old Testament with his buzzing, whirring House of God 2.0. Is nothing sacred anymore?
The church’s casual, contemporary atmosphere drew a record 8,048 people to its ten services this past Easter. Outside the Southwest Campus, at the edge of town, where new homes rise from the windswept fields, a staffer played techno music at a booth that resembled a radio station remote broadcast. Greeters in shirts reading “Welcome Home” scanned the crowd for newcomers and escorted them to a VIP tent where they could pick up Dunkin’ Donuts and coffee. Inside, a volunteer with a glow stick escorted them from the lobby into the dark auditorium to reserved seats in the front row.
The cavernous space was lit only by the spotlights trained on the worship band and the screen behind it, which displayed the lyrics to the songs. By the time the band stopped playing, the room was packed with more than a thousand people, many of them wearing jeans. After some introductory remarks, the screen darkened, and a video began to play. A robed man portraying the disciple Peter—an eLife staffer, actually—appeared on the screen. “All I ever wanted to do was fish,” he began, explaining how he’d become one of Jesus’ disciples before recounting how Jesus was betrayed, crucified, and resurrected.
Near the end of the hourlong service, Chris Galanos, the church’s 34-year-old founding pastor, took the stage to preach on 1 Peter 1:18–20. Bespectacled, slight, and wearing jeans and an eLife polo shirt, he shifted his weight forward and back as he spoke, like a fencer preparing to lunge. “Peter’s reminding his readers, ‘You guys remember how Jesus ransomed you from your empty life? That ransom was the precious blood of Jesus.’ ” Galanos closed his Bible and looked at the crowd. “Have you ever asked God for ransom? Because people think they can get to heaven by being good, but we need a savior. You can’t pay your own ransom.”
At the end of his message, the band began to play, and row by row people rose to their feet, applauding. As spotlights twirled above the crowd and a fog machine hissed, the amplified bass reverberated through the crowd like a collective heartbeat. A woman held up her smartphone to film the scene as people lifted their hands in praise, a sea of outstretched palms silhouetted against the glowing screen.•
Almost five years ago, I wondered if China, with its present government, could successfully transition from opening fake Apple Stores to creating a company as globally popular as Steve Jobs’ giant. Well, the citizens certainly purchase more authentic iPhones these days, but there’s still no hot product to export, for all of the country’s new wealth. Perhaps it’s just too soon or maybe a society so controlled doesn’t foster entrepreneurship.
In the Evan Osnos AMA I posted some exchanges from earlier this week, one questioner noted that China is expanding its presence on the world stage, while longtime powers like England and the U.S. seem to want to recede from globalization and into the past. But at the same time, the new superpower of Asia is beginning to experience its own growing pains–and not just financially.
As Disney opens its first Shanghai theme park, it’s become clear to Chinese authorities and the citizenry that multinational entertainment-business deals with the West come with cultural and, perhaps, political concessions, even of it’s “China’s Disneyland” and not merely a “Disneyland in China,” as Bob Iger puts it with maximum politesse. The opening of “When Walt Went to China,” an article by Charles Clover at the Financial Times:
It is hard to think of two organisations that love synchronised dancing more than the Disney corporation and the Communist party of China. So when the two came together for the opening ceremony of Disney’s new $5.5bn theme park in Shanghai, the display was unsurprisingly choreographed to perfection.
Buzz Lightyear, Princess Elsa, Winnie the Pooh, Captain Jack Sparrow, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck: the full weight of Disney’s intellectual property holdings was arrayed in phalanx in front of the world’s largest Disney Palace — and China’s watching politburo — each dancing toy action figure, princess or superhero representing a discounted cash flow in the billions of dollars.
Fireworks, speeches, more fireworks, more speeches: there was not a lot of room for subtlety. This was, after all, the world’s biggest entertainment company celebrating its beachhead into the world’s fastest growing entertainment market. Everything was done to reinforce the impression that we were watching a salient event in the recent history of the world, the formation of a new strategic partnership or new power sharing agreement — that the global entertainment industry was now a US-China duopoly.
Yet Disney’s journey to Shanghai has been long and fraught, underlining Beijing’s schizophrenic relationship with mass American culture. Western brands are a particular neurosis for China — Mark Zuckerberg, for example, is treated as a celebrity whenever he comes to China, but Facebook remains blocked. Luxury brands such as Gucci count China and Chinese tourists as their main market, but also their most prolific copier and counterfeiter. That China has not yet created a globally successful brand is a peculiar source of humiliation in Beijing amid soul searching as to why.•
One of my favorite journalists at the New Yorker–anywhere, really–is Evan Osnos, who does wonderful work whether reporting on China or politics or whatever. His latest piece, “Making a Killing,” published in the wake of the horrific Orlando massacre, investigates the gun industry in America, now a “concealed-carry” country and home to an unofficial militia of millions with often-minimal firearms training.
He writes of this surprisingly recent phenomenon: “In 2015 fatalities from mass shootings amounted to just two per cent of all gun deaths. Most of the time, when Americans shoot one another, it is impulsive, up close, and apolitical.” Despite a marked decline in crime and hunting in recent decades, manufacturers have for a quarter century sold fear in order to peddle their lethal wares. It’s largely been wildly successful.
Osnos also conducted a companion Ask Me Anything at Reddit (a few exchanges are embedded below) in which he shares his belief that the nature of the debate is in flux, perhaps veering more toward stricter regulations. One aspect of the topic not discussed in either piece is the near-term future of 3D printers, which will probably be able to turn out an endless supply of perfectly workable handguns at some point over the next decade. When you have printers printing out other printers and so on, it’ll be difficult to get a grip on guns regardless of laws.
Question:
More than half of handgun deaths are suicides. A significant percent of the remainder are perpetrated by and against those willfully engaged in illegal gang and drug activity (not your stereotypical NRA member). And nearly all are due to handguns rather than rifles. Why is gun control focused on the low-hanging fruit of NRA and “assault weapons”?
Evan Osnos:
You’re absolutely right about the preponderance of gun deaths coming from handguns, not long guns. Often, this gets lost in the moments after a mass shooting that involves a long gun (usually semiauto, obviously). But I wouldn’t characterize the NRA as “low-hanging fruit.” They have been the most successful advocates for gun rights in the last century. The organization is essential to any discussion of guns, and they would agree with that (though not with criticism of them, of course).
Question:
I listened to a brief portion of your interview on Fresh Airand you said (paraphrasing) that the moment you introduce a gun to your house, you double the chances of a homicide. Is this not the fallacy of correlation and not causation? The moment I introduce a lawnmower to my house, I significantly increase my chances of accidents involving lawnmowers. If I have a swimming pool installed, I significantly increase the chance of drowning. You paint the picture of an uninformed gun owner by and far, responsible gun owners understand and take steps to minimize the risks of gun ownership.
Evan Osnos:
I hope you’ll have a chance to listen to the whole thing. The guns vs. swimming pool analogy has been dealt with pretty well elsewhere, so I won’t rehash other than to say that it’s difficult, but not impossible, to use a swimming pool to kill a spouse in a domestic dispute — or to use a swimming pool to kill your neighbor, or, if you’re unwell, to massacre people in a movie theatre. I’m not trying to be facetious; it’s an important point: Bringing a gun into the house raises your risks of homicide and that’s precisely the point. It’s not just the risk of homicide to a home invader, obviously.
Question:
In your reporting, what was the biggest myth about guns that you discovered?
Evan Osnos:
There are myths on both sides: Many gun-control advocates imagine gun-owners = NRA. They’re not the same. As I write in my piece many gun-owners are turned off by the fear-mongering, the insults to their intelligence. At the same time, I met a lot of gun owners who are convinced that urban elites want to confiscate their guns. The truth is that urban elites, if you want to call them that, could care less what others have stashed in their safes — they just don’t people getting shot all the time. There is so much room for people to meet in the middle on this, but it requires putting aside some myths we are convinced are true.
Question:
I’m in the process of reading your article, so I apologize if you covered this at length already, but in the research you’ve done, what would you say is the most impactful move that could be taken to immediately curb, to any extent, gun violence?
On a non-gun related point, what is your favorite piece that has been published by the New Yorker this year?
Evan Osnos:
Anybody — especially people who favor free markets — should conclude that the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act was a big mistake. Imagine if Exxon was protected from liability after the Valdez? That’s not how markets should work. It will probably be revised or repealed to make sure that companies are doing safe work — as with any industry.
What was the most difficult aspect of investigating the NRA at that depth?
Evan Osnos:
I appreciated the fact that the NRA welcomes journalists to the annual meeting etc. It’s a fair way of ensuring people understand the organization. But the leadership, and the businesses that support the NRA, are oddly secluded. Wayne LaPierre gives very few interviews, and gunmaker CEOs almost never talk. It’s too bad because they could make a case for themselves.
Question:
I’ve read about how, for the NRA, part of selling self-defense is marketing towards women. As you were reporting, did you encounter many “success stories” involving women who used their guns?
Evan Osnos:
The NRA is making a big push on marketing to women — and it’s been doing this consistently for two decades. But it’s been an uphill climb. The General Social Survey shows that gun ownership among women has barely budged. This data drives the industry crazy, because they say they are seeing more women customers. So what gives? Multiple gun dealers told me they think that women are coming in more often as part of a group or a family. But it’s hard to get them to buy in the long term. So the core gun owner remains: white, male, aging.
Question:
I am uneducated in the gun industry and try not follow politics but here’s a question. Do you think that with big Associations like the NRA there is even a chance to get any sort of reform? It seems like we are in a battle that cannot be won, they simply have too much money and too much influence on politics for any real change to happen IMO.
Evan Osnos:
Actually, strangely perhaps, I have a different view: Studying guns reveals just how NON-static American political history is. Nothing stays the same for long. The strength of our system is, in fact, the resilience and flexibility of it. It’s the gay-marriage principle. History happens slowly, then all at once. I’m increasingly convinced we’re on course for a rapid shift of opinion on guns.•
Newark, N.J.–There is trouble here between stockholders of the Universal Industrial Power Company, a corporation organized to furnish capital for manufacturing a machine for producing perpetual motion, and Michael Patrona, the inventor.
As a result of the trouble Patrona is now guarding with a shotgun the little shop where he claims to have the invention almost complete. He is afraid, he says, that capitalists who advanced the money will steal the design.
Patrona is an Italian and came to this country less than a year ago. Through Civela & Ceste of New-York he was introduced to capitalists here, among them Newark’s richest Italians. He represented to them that he had discovered the secret of perpetual motion.
The result of these representatives was the organization and incorporation of the Universal Industrial Power Company. Money was advanced from time to time to pay for castings, machinery, and other supplies, and also for $1 a day which Patrona was allowed while working on the machine. Thus far $8,000 has been advanced.
Patrona called a few days ago for more funds to put the machine together, claiming that all the parts were finished. The stockholders objected to putting up any more money until they had evidence of the success of Patrona’s labors. He refused this request on the ground that he might be robbed of his invention, on which he had been laboring for years. He assured the stockholders, however, that this would be the last call for funds.
The stockholders were just as obstinate as Patrona. As a result he has armed himself with a shotgun, and stands guard at the entrance to the building which holds what he calls his great invention.
Counsel for both sides will try to effect a compromise.•
Uber has gone to great and often-unsavory lengths to try to promote itself as a savior of Labor–that is, when CEO Travis Kalanick isn’t having a wet dream about firing all the drivers.
Some live in a Libertarian fantasy in which the typical rideshare employee is just spinning the wheel until seed money comes in for his or her Silicon Valley startup, but any closer inspection tells you that solid, regulated taxi jobs are being replaced by sketchy, unstable ones. That doesn’t mean that Uber and Lyft haven’t offered improvements over traditional car services or that they should be unduly restrained, but let’s be honest about what’s happening here: The Gig Economy is bad for working-class people, who are already besieged by a variety of woes.
An excellentBuzzFeed investigationby Caroline O’Donovan and Jeremy Singer-Vine has uncovered leaked documents that lay waste to the longstanding ridiculous contention that Uber drivers can make close to six figures if they keep their feet on the gas. An excerpt:
Detroit
“I like the job. But financially, it’s not doing it for me.”
This according to Steve Rogers, a 61-year-old driver who told BuzzFeed News that he’s been on the platform about a year. His experience jibes roughly with the data Uber gathered on Detroit, where the typical full-time driver barely earned more than Michigan’s current minimum wage of $8.50 per hour.
Of course, because Uber drivers are not employees of the company, Uber is not legally obligated to pay them the minimum wage.
Uber’s data represents all trips taken in Detroit between Dec. 7 and Dec. 21, 2015. During that period, Detroit drivers earned approximately $13.70 an hour before expenses and — given the assumptions above — about $8.77 an hour after expenses, according to BuzzFeed News estimates that were supplemented by additional data from Uber. That’s less than the $10 an hour Walmart promised to pay its employees in 2015.
Contract and wage work are not perfectly comparable. Uber argues that retail employees at companies like Walmart don’t enjoy the same independence and flexibility as Uber drivers. But as employees, Walmart workers are often entitled to benefits that contract Uber drivers don’t receive.•
It’s easier for builders to draw Utopia on a blank slate, what with all the imperfections that developed cities already possess, but urban centers that have grown organically from the bottom up offer lots of hidden stability. Perhaps because of new smart technologies and China’s top-heavy urbanization, some are still trying to create Shangri-La from scratch. Case in point: Songdo and Masdar, smart insta-cities that are supposed to show the rest of us the way it should be done. Things haven’t gone according to plan, however, because cities are at least as much biological as technological.
In a Demos Helsinki post, social psychologist Mikko Annala presents reasons why smart cities are antithetical to successful urban living. An excerpt:
”When we plan, we tend to think that we understand people and what they want and need. We don’t”, Annala explains. ”Cities are highly complex organisms.” According to Annala, turning cities smart will require systematic engagement of those who are expected to live in these environments. ”Without end-user testing and systematic learning, it is practically impossible to plan a smart city that is loved by its inhabitants.”•
Masdar City abandoned its plan for a fleet of driverless, electric pod cars to replace gas-guzzling taxis.
If you look through history, great inventors had their breaks from reality–Edison believing he could create a device to communicate with the dead, Marconi thinking he had the ability to exchange Morse Code with Martians. That seems to be part and parcel of large-scale technological dreamers. Elon Musk acknowledges that he’s sometimes given to delusions, but it’s possible that driverless electric cars, the near-term colonization of Mars and the Hyperloop are not among them. Time will tell.
At Recode’s Code conference, Musk announced the autonomous-car challenge essentially solved and commented on this poisonous U.S. political season. He remarked that the President is the “captain of a large ship with a small rudder.” Musk may be working with a smaller vessel, but he believes its rudder world-changing.
The South Africa-born entrepreneur is known for his unvarnished views on, say, how malevolent artificial intelligence could doom the human race or space exploration being key to humanity’s evolution. Musk — who said he occasionally succumbs to delusion — debated the best form of government (democracy) for a putative Mars colony, and the need for entrepreneurs to start businesses from iron-ore smelters to pizza delivery that can thrive in that planet’s harsh environment. But he also touched on matters far closer to home, including the divisive U.S. elections. Asked about controversial Republican candidate Donald Trump, Musk said no one person had the clout to affect the entire country, not even the Commander-in-Chief.
“I don’t think this is the finest moment for our democracy,” he said. “Being U.S. president is being the captain of a large ship with a small rudder. There is a limit to how much good or bad a president can do.”
Business-wise, Musk welcomed competition in what he called an increasingly crowded electric and self-driving arena, including from Apple Inc., which he expected to begin producing cars in volume by 2020. The iPhone maker however has never confirmed any plans on that front. Google Inc. on the other hand, which has spent years researching and testing autonomous vehicles, posed no direct threat.
“There’ve been so many announcement s of autonomous EV startups. I’m waiting for my mom to announce one,” he said. “Google’s done a good job of showing the potential of autonomous transport, but they’re not a car company.”•
Demand invites supply. Case in point: Medical schools need bodies for students to work on, so a trade arose in the nineteenth century that put grave robbers in cahoots with medical colleges. Shovel-ready entrepreneurs scanned local papers for death notices, headed to cemeteries, usually with doctors in tow, and welcomed back the recently departed. Sometimes the bodies of particularly wealthy citizenswould be ransomed, but the corpses would usually just be sold for a couple of bucks to universities. Aninside lookat an Ohio operation in this strange “recycling” business appeared in the November 18, 1878 New York Times. The story:
Cleveland – Joiner, the wretch who has been in all the recent grave robbing jobs in this section, continues to divulge the secrets of the trade. He pretends to be very contrite over what he has done, and ready to make amends by exposing his companions in guilt. His last story related to Mr. J.E. French, a son of the old gentleman who was ruthlessly torn from his grave, in Willoughby, on Sept. 16. The robbers watch the newspapers, and when death notices of persons thought to be available occur, the graves are visited and a resurrection takes place. In August last a young man fell over a ledge in Geauga County and broke his neck. The fact was published, and the night after the funeral Minor and Joiner repaired to Chardon, 30 miles distant, where the burial had taken place, with the intention of obtaining the body. As usual, the doctor was sought, who told them that the grave was watched by two men with shot-guns. This was unpleasant, but the robbers thought the doctor might be deceiving them with the intention of obtaining the body himself. They accordingly sought another doctor, who confirmed the story, and so they abandoned the scheme and returned. At Chester Cross Roads, in the same county, two robbers from this city were assisted by the Doctor and a medical student of that village. They went to get the body of an old lady who was very fleshy, and who had died of apoplexy. The coffin was reached and broken open without accident, and a hook fastened in the neck. Four men tugged and pulled in vain at the prize, but were unable to move it. They were in despair, when a happy thought struck them. Taking the reins from the harness and hitching the horse to the hook, the body was successfully brought to the surface. Another pull and the body was safely sacked and loaded. Another visit was made to Hampden, in this county, and this time the robbers were assisted by two doctors and a medical student. They did what Joiner calls a good night’s work, obtaining three bodies in a short time. One of these was that of a butcher, and as his body was sacked the home doctor remarked: ‘I’ve bought meat of this man many a time, and now I’ll sell him for meat.’ Some time after this the body of a young lady was stolen from the cemetery at Leroy, Lake County. After digging a certain distance they found water. This had to be bailed from the coffin before the body could be taken out. The corpse was found to be somewhat swollen but made a good subject. Mr. French, who is quite wealthy, expressed his determination to follow up this gang and will prosecute in every case. Dr. Carlisle, who is said to have assisted in the Willoughby job, has been indicted in the Lake County Court for disturbing the grave. The best counsel in this part of the State has been engaged on both sides, and important revelations will doubtless come out. The trial is set down for Thursday next.•
