“Kofee.” (Image by Ricardo Stuckert/ABr.)

This life is a fluid thing, as precise meaning is chased by algorithms, with no print books in sight. From a new NYT piece about the art of the auto-correct by information heavyweight James Gleick:

“When Autocorrect can reach out from the local device or computer to the cloud, the algorithms get much, much smarter. I consulted Mark Paskin, a longtime software engineer on Google’s search team. Where a mobile phone can check typing against a modest dictionary of words and corrections, Google uses no dictionary at all. ‘

A dictionary can be more of a liability than you might expect,’ Mr. Paskin says. ‘Dictionaries have a lot of trouble keeping up with the real world, right?’ Instead Google has access to a decent subset of all the words people type — ‘a constantly evolving list of words and phrases,’ he says; ‘the parlance of our times.’

If you type ‘kofee’ into a search box, Google would like to save a few milliseconds by guessing whether you’ve misspelled the caffeinated beverage or the former United Nations secretary-general. It uses a probabilistic algorithm with roots in work done at AT&T Bell Laboratories in the early 1990s. The probabilities are based on a ‘noisy channel’ model, a fundamental concept of information theory. The model envisions a message source — an idealized user with clear intentions — passing through a noisy channel that introduces typos by omitting letters, reversing letters or inserting letters.

‘We’re trying to find the most likely intended word, given the word that we see,’ Mr. Paskin says. ‘Coffee’ is a fairly common word, so with the vast corpus of text the algorithm can assign it a far higher probability than ‘Kofi.’ On the other hand, the data show that spelling ‘coffee’ with a K is a relatively low-probability error. The algorithm combines these probabilities. It also learns from experience and gathers further clues from the context.”

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Andy Warhol refuses to speak during an appearance on Merv Griffin’s talk show in 1965. How healthy Edie Sedgwick looks.

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From the September 12, 1896 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Julius Caesar Gotlieb, the young law student who is a patient in Mt. Sinai Hospital, New York, dying from nose bleed, was still alive at noon to-day.”

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Some search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:

Afflictor: Thinking that Lonnie and George are suddenly acting all gay just to avoid ending up on the menu at Chick-fil-A. (Image by Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez.)

  • Elon Musk discusses the pros and cons of private sector space exploration.

Poor Orlando, however, was clearly heterosexual.

A passage about Charles Darwin’s religious beliefs from a Browser interview with evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne:

What about his own religious views? Was he an atheist?

When he was younger he was probably religious by default, in the way that most liberal people were religious in Britain back then. He was actually going to train to be a minister, but didn’t like it very much. As he became older, he started shedding all these appurtenances of belief. He would still use words like Creator. For example, he says in The Origin that the Creator breathed life into one or more original forms of life. People take that to mean that he was religious. But if you read his autobiography, or his letters to [Thomas] Huxley and others, it’s clear that he didn’t believe in any kind of personal God at all. He says, for example, that he could not believe that a God could exist who would design a cat that would torture mice, or a wasp whose larvae eat their prey from the inside. The horrors of nature convinced him that the world was a naturalistic, materialistic phenomenon.

I doubt there was any vestige of real religion left in Darwin by the time he was a middle-aged man. He didn’t go to church even though his wife, Emma, did. And he never made any expression of religious belief. Creationists are always trying to promulgate the myth that Darwin was religious, but there’s simply no evidence for it. Almost all of us who have read Darwin realise that. He may have called himself an agnostic – which is, by the way, a term invented by his friend Huxley – because atheist was a strong word back then. But I don’t think he believed in God, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t think he was going to go anywhere after he died.”

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According to a new MIT study, JFK and LAX are the two American airports of most concern to epidemiologists, but not because the quantity of passengers. From Rachel Ehrenberg at Science News:

An infectious disease that really wants to go global would do well boarding planes at JFK or LAX, according to a new computer simulation that ranks U.S. airports by their potential to kick-start an epidemic. 

The simulation could help public health officials decide how and where to allocate resources such as vaccinations in the early days of an outbreak, says Ruben Juanes of MIT, who describes the analysis online July 19 in PLOS ONE.

Many simulations of how epidemics spread focus on the final outcome, such as how many people would ultimately be infected. This new work is mostly concerned with how the location of an initial outbreak affects the subsequent pandemic, says complex systems scientist Dirk Brockmann of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

Surprisingly, the total number of passengers moving through an airport isn’t the deciding factor. By that measure, Atlanta’s airport — the busiest in the country — would be ideal for spreading germs. What’s key is how connected the airport is to other well-connected airports.

‘You are a good spreader if your neighbors are good spreaders,’ Juanes says. ‘That’s what’s really essential.'”

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The 1980s was a particularly jingoistic and muscle-flexing time in America, and for awhile we were encouraged to care about our place among the world’s yacht-racing a-holes. Footage of original Tan Mom Dennis Conner leading us to a classy victory in 1988.

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At the Verge, Joshua Kopstein interviews sci-fi author Neal Stephenson about what is to come. An excerpt about self-fulfilling prophecies, which can lead to Manifest Destiny or paralysis by analysis:

“Stephenson noted the cultural changes that have occurred since sci-fi’s ‘golden age’ in the 1950’s, when radio, computers, and nuclear power inspired our outlook on the future. ‘Since then, everything kind of looks the same,’ he said. ‘The cars look different, but they’re still cars … The space program tanked, and a lot of stuff just didn’t happen the way we were expecting.’

But in the grim sci-fi narratives that followed those disappointments, Stephenson wonders how deeply the dystopian abyss stares back into us. ‘If all of our depictions of the future are incredibly depressing, it doesn’t give us a hell of a lot of incentive to go out and build a future,’ he said. ‘It kind of gives us an incentive to do the opposite.'”

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We Need to Talk About Kevin + 
Chronicle

Is it the children we fear or the future?

As we move deeper into the Information Age, the West seems increasingly concerned that something is awry with the young people. We assign them illnesses to try to explain them and medicine to attempt to placate them. Are they more hyperactive because of the constant flow of stimuli they receive? Dubious. Do they suffer from a higher rate of autism because of vaccines? Nonsense. But we continue to root around for an answer to a question we can’t quite articulate, hoping that the right words or white pills will make it all go away. There’s something about Mary, and her brother is equally worrisome. As the tension mounts, film and TV arm children with old-school crossbows and new-age smartphones, positioning them as capable of the type of atrocities that heretofore has always been committed by those more gray than green.

Two such insightful recent films about these unspeakable creatures are Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin and Josh Trank’s Chronicle. In the former, a mother tries to manage a child who is nihilism incarnate. A cold and brilliant thing who seems to have fallen to Earth, Kevin physically appears to be beyond race and gender, lacking the familiar characteristics that might bring his parents comfort. He’s a new world man–or whatever. The terror he imposes on his quiet family with a string of sadistic acts is just a warm-up for the wrath he’ll unleash on the larger world. In Trank’s thoughtful fantasy, a trio of high schoolers develop telekinetic powers after exposure to some sort of military-experiment radiation. Soon the lost boys can move cars with their minds and fly at will. But parlor tricks soon become blood sport, as the most disaffected of the bunch begins to wreak havoc.

Youth always delivers the new wave, but there’s a foreboding sense that they’ll do something horrible with today’s unparalleled information and tools, as if we’ve given birth to a generation of Frankensteins who’ll turn the electricity on us. But perhaps what’s so disconcerting isn’t that they’re announcing what’s to come but that it’s a future so radically different from what we’ve known. One of the angst-ridden teens in Chronicle says, when he realizes their powers might lead to mayhem: “We’re getting stronger…we need rules.” As we likewise grow stronger, thanks to science and technology and medicine, we also need rules. Rule number one: Don’t shoot the messenger.•

“Cleans up nicely.'”

Do You Have a Knack for Connecting with Strangers? (Manhattan/Brooklyn)

Thirty-something white guy, decent looking, cleans up nicely, can string a sentence together without using the words “duh,” “dude” or “hooters” excessively, looking for a cool woman to hang out with some evenings and weekend days, who can be my “wingwoman” — i.e., “break the ice” with other women and facilitate an introduction.

If you make friends easily and are always striking up conversations with strangers, then this would be a great part-time gig for you!

You must be outgoing and charming, but you will NOT have to do all the talking or all the work.

If you’re interested, please tell me about yourself (more rather than less, please!) and include a photo.

Compensation: $10 per phone number I get. (Once you make the introduction, trust me, if I like the woman, I can get the number.) I figure that, depending on the venue, in an hour you can make $40 or more – no limit!!!

NOTE: I’m not looking for you to be my girlfriend OR my sexual partner. This is strictly on the “up and up.” And we’ll only meet in public places. Thanks!

Like a lot of super-intelligent, self-satisfied people, Gore Vidal could never shut the fuck up and was often wrong. He was a fascinating character and a master showman, but he seemed to exist mostly to hear his own voice and flatter himself. There was some greatness along the way, but I doubt one word he wrote or uttered will ever effect the world in any meaningful way. I know that’s a high threshold by which to rate a writer, but I think such self-importance demands an important contribution. Yes, I mourn the absence of public intellectuals in America, but that realm had its limitations.

Because CBS is still living in the distant technological past, I’m unable to embed the video of Mike Wallace conducting a 1975 60 Minutes interview with Vidal, whom he astutely described as an “intellectual vaudevillian.” But go here to watch it.

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See also:

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“He began the capture and preservation in a state of nature of the tarantula itself.”

Philadelphia was aiming to corner the snake market in the late 1800s, but Los Angeles was a proud leader in the tarantula trade. A story about the latter business activity from the September 10, 1882 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

Los Angeles, Cal.–One of the curious developments of trade in Southern California is the traffic in tarantulas and their nests. It is an entirely new avenue of trade, and to Master Leo Fleishman seems to belong the honor of discovery and development.

He began a short time since to gather their curious and ingeniously contrived nests for the relic hunters and curiosity seekers, and as the trade increased he began the capture and preservation in a state of nature of the tarantula itself, which is done by injecting into the animal arsenic in considerable quantities. This has the effect of preserving tarantulas and destroying all its poison, and it may be handed with perfect impunity after such treatment.

In certain localities these insects are quite numerous, and the industrious hunter will sometimes capture two dozen in a day, and these, when prepared and nicely mounted, bring $8 per dozen. Mr. Fleishman has just filled an order for two dozen for the Denver exposition, now in session. He also has orders from Chicago, St. Louis and other Eastern cities, and several consignments have been sent to London.”

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In New York Times Magazine, Jonathan Mahler, who wrote the amazing 2005 book Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning, explores the radical political hotbed that is Oakland, home for decades to Panthers, Angels and Occupiers, all drawn by the cheap rents and the outlaw spirit. An excerpt:

“Why are radicals so inexorably drawn to Oakland? The cheap rents don’t hurt (free, if you’re willing to squat in an abandoned house or industrial space, and hundreds apparently are). Oakland is urban, dangerous and poor — fertile social conditions for inciting revolution. What’s more, it has a long, easily romanticized history of militancy. America’s last citywide strike, in 1946, took place there; the Black Panthers were born in Oakland; and David Hilliard, a former Black Panthers chief of staff, still gives three-hour tours of the movement’s local landmarks and sells his own line of Black Panthers hot sauce: ‘Burn Baby Burn.’

Running parallel to this history of political militancy is a history of lawlessness. In the early 1970s, when the Hell’s Angels were scandalizing America, their most infamous clubhouse was located in East Oakland. The Oakland native Felix Mitchell was one of the first to scale up corner drug-dealing into a multimillion-dollar, gang-controlled business. On his death — he was stabbed in Leavenworth in 1986 — the city gave him a hero’s send-off: thousands came out to see his coffin borne through his old East Oakland neighborhood by a horse-drawn carriage trailed by more than a dozen Rolls Royces and limousines.

In Oakland, the revolutionary pilot light is always on. At the dawn of the 20th century, the Oakland writer and social activist Jack London said this to a group of wealthy New Yorkers: “A million years ago, the cave man, without tools, with small brain, and with nothing but the strength of his body, managed to feed his wife and children, so that through him the race survived. You on the other hand, armed with all the modern means of production, multiplying the productive capacity of the cave man a million times — you are incompetents and muddlers, you are unable to secure to millions even the paltry amount of bread that would sustain their physical life. You have mismanaged the world, and it shall be taken from you.

It’s a dream that still exists in Oakland — that the world can be taken from the haves and delivered to the have-nots. Like all dreams that are on the brink of being extinguished, its keepers cling to it with a fierceness that is both moving and an extreme exercise in the denial of the reality that is at their door.”

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The Symbionese Liberation Army commits acts of terrorism in Oakland in 1974:

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We’re born into a world in motion and it’s difficult to know when things have been truly decided, when they’ve settled, when we have an answer. On the day Steve Jobs passed away in October 2011, he was hailed as a visionary and captain of industry who had remade our lives. But will his output be reduced in retrospect to so many shiny toys in our laps, ears and pockets by the grand plans of the technologist Elon Musk, who believes he can zip us from place to place with no carbon emissions and even take us to Mars? From a new interview with Musk by Pat Morrison in the Los Angeles Times:

People mention you in the same breath as Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic, but his space effort seems more tourist-driven and yours more industrial and scientific.

I’ve nothing against tourism; Richard Branson is brilliant at creating a brand, but he’s not a technologist. What he’s doing is fundamentally about entertainment, and I think it’s cool, but it’s not likely to affect humanity’s future in a significant way. That’s what we’re trying to do.

The thing that got me started with SpaceX was the feeling of dismay — I just did not want Apollo to be our high-water mark. We do not want a future where we tell our children that this was the best we ever did. Growing up, I kept expecting we’re going to have a base on the moon, and we’re going to have trips to Mars. Instead, we went backwards, and that’s a great tragedy.

Shouldn’t government be doing projects like this?

Government isn’t that good at rapid advancement of technology. It tends to be better at funding basic research. To have things take off, you’ve got to have commercial companies do it. The government was good at getting the basics of the Internet going, but it languished. Commercial companies took a hand around 1995, and then it accelerated. We need something like that in space.

SpaceX couldn’t have gotten started without the great work of NASA, and NASA’s a key customer of ours. But for the future, it’s going to be companies like SpaceX that advance space technology and deliver the rapid innovation that’s necessary.

But government can fund a space program without worrying about profits or stockholder returns. A commercial company could run into trouble, and there goes the program.

That’s why I’m the majority shareholder in SpaceX. When I’ve recruited investors, I’ve made sure they’re like-minded. SpaceX will create a great deal of value over the long term, but there will be times when that horizon is beyond what some investors would be comfortable with. I’m going to make sure I have sufficient control of the company to optimize for the very long term.”

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Who is the middle man and who is the primary agent? We will soon learn as computer-to-computer communication eclipses the human kind. From “Talk to Me, One Machine Said to the Other” by Kevin J. O’Brien in the New York Times:

“The combined level of robotic chatter on the world’s wireless networks — measured in the digital data load they exert on networks — is likely soon to exceed that generated by the sum of all human voice conversations taking place on wireless grids.

‘I would say that is definitely possible within 10 years,’ said Miguel Blockstrand, the director of Ericsson’s machine-to-machine division in Stockholm. ‘This is a ‘What if?’ kind of technology. People start to consider the potential, and the possibilities are endless.”

Machine-to-machine communications has been around for more than two decades, initially run on landline connections and used for controlling industrial processes remotely. With advances in mobile broadband speeds and smartphone computing, the same robotic conversations are now rapidly shifting to wireless networks.

When the total amount of data traffic generated by machines overtakes that created by human voice conversations — or possibly before — mobile operators will have to choose who waits in line to make a call or receive an e-mail — the machine or the human.

‘It really does raise some quandaries for the operators,’ said Tobias Ryberg, an analyst at Berg Insight. ‘Most mobile networks are set up for human communication, not for machines. So there will have to be a whole revamping of the system to make this possible.'”

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You were cute but inessential Zooey, so we eliminated you. We will speak amongst ourselves now.

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How is it possible that I only recently read A Handbook on Hanging by smart-ass British historian Charles Duff? Acerbic beyond belief, Duff’s book, originally published in 1928 and updated decades later, is a droll yet furious account of the way we officially murder one another. From the introduction:

As a form of capital punishment, hanging was introduced to Britain by the Germanic Anglo-Saxon tribes as early as the fifth century. The gallows were an important element in Germanic culture. The worthy Hengist and Horsa and their colleagues used a very rough and out-of-hand method of hanging, one that resembled our clean and tidy modern method in only this respect: it worked quite well.

William the Conqueror subsequently decreed that it should be replaced by castration and blinding for all but the crime of poaching royal deer, but hanging was reintroduced by Henry I as the means of execution for a large number of offenses. Although other methods of execution, such as boiling, burning and beheading were frequently used in the mediaeval period, by the eighteenth century hanging had become the principle punishment for capital crimes.

The eighteenth century also saw the start of the movement for the abolition of the death penalty. In 1770 [the British Politician] William Meredith, suggested ‘more proportionate punishments’ for crimes. He was followed in the early nineteenth century by [the legal reformer and Solicitor General] Samuel Romilly and [the Scottish jurist, politician and historian] James Mackintosh, both of whom introduced bills into Parliament in an attempt to de-capitalise minor crimes.

Perhaps unsurprising, considering the fact that in Britain at the time there were no less than 222 crimes which were defined as capital offenses, including the impersonation of a Chelsea pensioner and damaging Westminster Bridge. Moreover, the law did not distinguish between adults and children, and ‘strong evidence of malice in a child of 7 to 14 years of age’ was also a hanging matter.”

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“They were hanging in the trees, dead and dying / And I said, ‘What does it mean?'”:

“Into our town the hangman came / Smelling of blood and gold and flame”:

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Gore Vidal, who just passed away, encourages the impeachment of Richard Nixon in 1970 on Merv Griffin’s talk show.

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In a 1995 New York Review of Books analysis of then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Joan Didion reveals, unsurprisngly, a petty man with grandiose notions. It’s not that he never argues for interesting ideas but that he instantly cheapens them with a crassness and a lack of intelligence. An excerpt:

Even Mr. Gingrich’s most unexceptionable arguments can take these unpredictable detours. The “Third Wave Information Age” offers “potential for enormous improvement in the lifestyle choices of most Americans,” opportunities for “continuous, lifelong learning” that can enable the displaced or downsized to operate “outside corporate structures and hierarchies in the nooks and crannies that the Information Revolution creates” (so far so good), but here is the particular cranny of the Information Revolution into which Mr. Gingrich skids:

Say you want to learn batik because a new craft shop has opened at the mall and the owner has told you she will sell some of your work. First, you check in at the ‘batik station’ on the Internet, which gives you a list of recommendations. … You may get a list of recommended video or audio tapes that can be delivered to your door the next day by Federal Express. You may prefer a more personal learning system and seek an apprenticeship with the nearest batik master. … In less than twenty-four hours, you have launched yourself on a new profession.

Similarly, what begins in To Renew America as a rational if predictable discussion of “New Frontiers in Science, Space, and the Oceans” takes this sudden turn: ‘Why not aspire to build a real Jurassic Park? … Wouldn’t that be one of the most spectacular accomplishments of human history? What if we could bring back extinct species?’ A few pages further into “New Frontiers in Science, Space, and the Oceans,” we are careering into ‘honeymoons in space’ (“imagine weightlessness and its effects and you will understand some of the attractions”), a notion first floated in Window of Opportunity, in that instance as an illustration of how entrepreneurial enterprise could lead to job creation in one’s own district: “One reason I am convinced space travel will be a growth industry is because I represent the Atlanta airport, which provides 35,000 aviation-related jobs in the Atlanta area.”

The packaging of space honeymoons and recycled two-liter Coca-Cola bottles is the kind of specific that actually engages Mr. Gingrich: absent an idea that can be sold at Disney World, he has tended to lose interest.•

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Some sort of Italian promotional trailer for Philip K. Dick’s 1969 novel, Ubik.

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Queen Elizabeth II: Camera panned away just as parachute failed to open.


Great Britain sent more unique visitors than any other foreign country to Afflictor in July. The Top 5:

  1. Great Britain
  2. Germany
  3. Colombia
  4. Netherlands
  5. China

Metamucil (Manhattan)

If you have Metamucil that you are no longer using, I would love to acquire it and put it to great, immediate, daily use to help with my Angina, High Blood Pressure and Cholesterol. Can pick up on a day and time that best suits your schedule. 

So much of this 1969 piece of satirical futurism about the office of tomorrow was spot-on: paper would disappear but so would increasingly the human element. But while it understood what was to come spiritually, it largely missed the mark architecturally. Things would shrink and become portable. We would always be connected. And it was this very connectedness that would mask that alienating effect of it all.

“Dick decided to make the trip in the garb of a girl and have some fun with the mashers en route.”

Some truly do like it hot, as proven by this article about a female impersonator aboard a ferry boat, which was published in the August 12, 1892 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, having originally appeared in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat:

“‘In 1859 I went from New Orleans to Cincinnati by boat in company with the greatest female impersonator I ever saw,’ said T.N. Payne, at Lindell. ‘His name was Richard Pryor and he was familiarly known as Wild Dick. He was a handsome young Creole, with soft black eyes, delicate features and a hand and foot that might have been the pride of a duchess. Dick decided to make the trip in the garb of a girl and have some fun with the mashers en route. He got himself up regardless, as he expressed it, and posed as a young French widow of fortune. The boat had a large passenger list and young madame was soon the center of an ardent circle of admirers, to whom she dispensed her smiles with gracious impartiality and drunk the wine for which they paid with such evident pleasure. Madame’s free and easy conduct soon became the scandal of the boat, and the captain expostulated with her. She gave him an arch smile, took him by the arm, paced the deck with him a few moments and returned with new zest to her admirers and her wine, while the captain and the clerk made the rounds of her scandalized passengers. Madame made an appointment with her four most ardent admirers to meet them on deck at 11 o’clock that night. They were promptly on hand, each jealous of the others. Five minutes later Dick came swaggering out in male costume, with a big cigar between his teeth and followed by fully fifty delighted passengers. He sat down, put his feet up on the rail, blew a cloud of tobacco smoke and said in his sweetest accents, ‘Ah, zhentlemen, you may kees my hand.’ Then, in tones like the hoarse croaking of a bull frog: ‘What a villainous world this is!’

There was a roar of laughter from the passengers. The mashers were dumbfounded, then angry. They demanded satisfaction, but Dick only said sweetly, ‘Ah, you haf all say already I keel you with my eyes.’ There was another bout of laughter and the four crestfallen beaux bought wine for the crowd.”

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Can there be any shame in a world without secrets? We’re finding out.

Who would have thought that total surveillance wouldn’t just be accepted but welcomed, and that in this one way government and the free market could wholeheartedly agree. William F. Buckley and Senator Edward V. Long discuss our brave new world in 1968, years before Watergate or The Conversation.

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