“The Military Must ‘Unswervingly’ Back The Ruling Communist Party”

July 31, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

It’s not that China doesn’t hold military parades in any given calendar year, but the one that was led over the weekend by the fatigue-clad, pot-bellied President Xi Jinping rattled swords to an eye-popping degree. 

It makes sense the the financial capital and soft power China has amassed over the last few decades would eventually find its way into a more ambitious, state-of-the-art military. That was going to happen, Trump or not. But the vacuum created by the absence of a sane White House and the nativist language of our leadership seems to be causing a greater aggression in verbiage–for now, it’s just talk–in Asia and Europe.

From a Reuters report by Michael Martina and Ben Blanchard:

BEIJING (Reuters) – Chinese President Xi Jinping told the military on Sunday to transform itself into an elite force, as he oversaw a parade with flybys of advanced jets and a mass rally of troops to mark 90 years since the founding of the People’s Liberation Army.

China’s armed forces, the world’s largest, are in the midst of an ambitious modernization program, which includes investment in technology and new equipment such as stealth fighters and aircraft carriers, as well as cuts to troop numbers.

Xi presided over the large-scale military parade at the remote Zhurihe training base in China’s northern Inner Mongolia region, where he inspected troops from the back of a jeep, an event carried live on state television.

Traveling down a long strip lined with tanks, missile launchers and other military vehicles, Xi, wearing military fatigues and a field cap, greeted thousands of troops.

Xi, who oversees the PLA in his role as head of the powerful Central Military Commission, repeatedly shouted, “Hello comrades!” and “Comrades, you are working hard!” into four microphones fixed atop his motorcade as martial music blared in the background.

The troops bellowed back: “Serve the people!”, “Follow the Party!”, “Fight to win!” and “Forge exemplary conduct!”.

Tanks, vehicle-mounted nuclear-capable missiles and other equipment rolled by, as military aircraft flew above, including H-6K bombers, which have been patrolling near Taiwan and Japan recently, the J-15 carrier-based fighters and new generation J-20 stealth fighter.

“Today, we are closer to the goal of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation than any other time in history, and we need to build a strong people’s military more than any other time in history,” Xi told the assembled troops in a short speech that did not yield any new policy announcements.

Xi said that the military must “unswervingly” back the ruling Communist Party.

“Always listen to and follow the party’s orders, and march to wherever the party points,” he said.

Tags: ,

Old Print Article: Bat Masterson Dies An Ink-Stained Wretch (1921)

July 31, 2017 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

"

No one has ever told a bigger lie than F. Scott’s Fitzgerald with his oft-quoted whopper: “There are no second acts in American lives.” There have always been second acts and many more after that. I mean, not if you drink yourself to death, but for anyone who waits out the bad times with good humor. 

Bat Masterson was many things in his 67 years–buffalo hunter, Army scout, sheriff, gambler, boxing manager, etc.–until he was one final thing in his dotage: a New York City newspaper sportswriter. He died an ink-stained wretch at an editor’s desk, not a gunslinger in a saloon. The report of his death from the October 26, 1921 New York Times:

William Barclay Masterson, better known as Bat Masterson, sporting writer, friend of Theodore Roosevelt and former sheriff of Dodge City, Kan., died suddenly yesterday while writing an article at his desk in the office of the The Morning Telegraph. He had been connected with the paper for more than ten years, and for the last few years had been one of its editors.

At one time Masterson was said to have been the best known man between the Mississippi and the Pacific Coast, and his exploits and his ability as a gun fighter have become part of the tradition of the Middle West of many years ago. He was the last of the old time gun fighters.

He was born in Iriquios County, Ill., in 1854, the son of a farmer who came originally from St. Lawrence County, N.Y. Little more than a boy, Bat, his rifle across his knees, left the farm and rode into the then Fort Dodge and joined a party of buffalo hunters. Then his actual career began, and probably more weird and bloodthirsty tales have been written about him than of nearly any other man. His fights, however, were in the cause of justice, and he was one of a group of gunfighters who made that part of the country unhealthy for the bad men of the period.

While in the frontier town Bat heard one day that his brother had been killed across the street. Bat headed over. What happened he thus told later on the witness stand:

“The cowboys had been on the range for some time and were drinking. My brother was the Town Marshall. They were carrying six-shooters and he attempted to disarm one of them who was particularly mean. They shot and killed him and they attempted to kill me. I shot and killed them–one at any rate–and shot the other one.”

His second killing was a cowboy named Jim Kennedy, who had come to town seeking the life of the Mayor. Kennedy shot several times through the door of a Mayor’s house and killed a woman. Then Masterson started out to get him. And he did.

One of Masterson’s most famous exploits was the battle of Dobe Walls, when with nine companions he stood off 200 Indians in a siege of 29 days. The attacking force was composed of Arapahoes and Cheyennes. A fortunate accident–the fall of part of the dirt roof of a saloon in which the buffalo hunters were sleeping–prevented the party from being surprised by the Indians and murdered in their sleep, for the attack was not anticipated. In the gray light of a June morning, when the hunters were engaged in restoring the roof, the Indians descended upon them. The hunters abandoned the roof and took to their guns. Time after time the Indian attack was stopped and the enemy driven back to the shelter of a fringe of cottonwoods along the Canadian River.

Masterson was only 18 years old when he joined Lieutenant Baldwin’s civilian scouts under Colonel Nelson A. Miles. He participated in the battle of Red River, where the Indians were commanded by Geronimo, and in other Indian engagements. Masterson lived fifteen years in Denver. There he became interested in pugilism. He went broke backing Charlie Mitchell in his fight with James J. Corbett. He was an official in the fight between Fitzsimmons and Corbett.•

________________________________

Masterson officiating Fitzsimmons–Corbett in 1897:

This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

July 30, 2017 in Misc. | Permalink


10 search-engine keywords bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:

  1. liz smith gossip columnist interview
  2. humans will become massively connected
  3. george a. romero obituary
  4. billionaire savior complex
  5. timothy mcveigh hero worship
  6. leonard cohen you won’t like what comes after america
  7. frank pierson my battles with barbara and jon
  8. president andrew johnson bear chair
  9. vegan alien race
  10. kasparov vs deep blue

Highlights From Yet Another Week Of Afflictor

July 30, 2017 in Misc. | Permalink

This week, the President caused an uproar when he addressed the Boy Scout Jamboree, turning it into a politicized hate rally and telling off-color stories.

In summation, kids, I had a friend who sold his business for a lot of money and bought a yacht and, wow, the whores. Make America great again!

What, did I cross a line? No problem. I’ll get Scaramucci to fix it for me.

You little cocksuckers talk and I won’t give any of you cocaine or handguns.

 

• At the Youngstown rally, Trump was oddly focused on “young, beautiful girls…16 or 15” being murdered with knives.

• Mike Bloomberg thinks Donald Trump has a good shot at 8 years in the WH. I’ll bet the under.

• Liz Smith was at the center of the culture, when the culture still had a center.

• Governments are utilizing new tech tools to coax and control citizens.

• John Thornhill writes of how the battlefield is redefined in the Digital Age.

• Tristan Harris says smartphones have “hijacked” minds. That’s a misreading.

• Roombas, TVs, etc., are already in our homes collecting information about us.

• Siddhartha Mukherjee says the thorny future of genetics is already upon us.

• Tim Parks and Riccardo Manzotti debate whether the mind is just the brain.

• Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman conducted an AMA on their Claude Shannon bio.

• An item to add to Noah Smith’s list of causes leading to Americans living in a “mental fog”: tackle football.

• A note from 1908 about experiments in “electric sleep.”

• This week’s Afflictor keyphrase searches: Jeet Heer Abbie Hoffman, etc.

“Most People Have Forgotten About So-Called Powerful People Like Me”

July 29, 2017 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Liz Smith was at the center of the culture, when the culture still had a center. Then the long tail of the Internet snapped her from the spotlight, as almost everyone became a celebrity and countless outlets allowed gossip to achieve ubiquity. The louche location of a newspaper no longer needed a name reporter anymore than most blockbusters required a particular star. The pictures didn’t get smaller, but the people in them did. Like Walter Winchell, she outlived her fame.

No one deserved a steep decline more than Winchell, who Smith grew up listening to on radio when she was a girl in Texas in the Thirties. A figure of immense power in his heyday, Winchell was vicious and vindictive, often feared and seldom loved, the inspiration for the seedy and cynical J.J. Hunsecker in Sweet Smell of Success. 

By the time journalism matured in the 1960s and college-educated industry professionals began saying “ellipsis” rather than “dot dot dot,” Winchell had no power left, and people were finally able to turn away from him—and turn they did. The former media massacrist was almost literally kicked to the curb, as Larry King recalled seeing the aged reporter standing on Los Angeles street corners handing out mimeographed copies of his no-longer-syndicated column. By the time he died in 1972, he was all but already buried, and his daughter was the lone mourner in attendance.

Smith was of a later generation, and unlike Winchell or Hedda Hopper, she usually served her information with a spoon rather than a knife—the scribe loved celebrity and access and privilege so much—though she occasionally eviscerated someone who behaved badly. Frank Sinatra was her most famous foe, and you had to respect her for not pulling punches based on the size of her opponent. In the 1980s, she was a major player. A decade later, as we entered the Internet Age and Reality TV era, her empire began to crumble. Now, at 94, she wonders where it all went.

In one sense, Smith is like a lot of retirees pushed from a powerful perch. In another, because she worked in the media in a disruptive age, she has embedded in her the slings and arrows of a technological revolution that turned the page with no regard for the boldness of the bylines.

· · · 

From John Leland’s excellent NYT feature “The Rise and Fall of Liz Smith, Celebrity Accomplice“:

So when J-Lo sneezes, it is now up to someone else to make sure the public gets sick.

Facebook, maybe?

“I don’t think my name could sell anything now,” Ms. Smith said in the apartment where she moved after her stroke in January, from her longtime digs above a Tex-Mex restaurant in Murray Hill. She wore a white cable-knit sweater and bright orange lipstick.

“It used to mean — bylines used to mean something in journalism,” she said, her Texas accent still unbowed. But with the internet and social media, she said, “most people have forgotten about so-called powerful people like me; we served our time.”

Which put Ms. Smith at an existential crossroads: If a gossip columnist dishes in the forest and no one repeats it, does it make a sound? In a celebrity landscape that considers contestants on “The Bachelorette” to be celebrities, how does a star-chaser regain her star?

“I am in search of Liz Smith,” she said softly, musing at the thought. “After a lifetime of fun and excitement and money and feeling important and being in the thick of it, I am just shocked every day that I’m not the same person. I think that happens to all old people. They’re searching for a glimmer of what they call their real self. They’re boring, mostly.

“I’m always thinking falsely, expending what little energy I have, believing every day I may just rediscover that person. I try to be all of the things I was, but it inevitably fails. I don’t feel like myself at all.”•

Tags: ,

“It Is No Longer Debatable Whether Or Not There Is A Problem”

July 28, 2017 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

When Noah Smith recently published his excellent column “Too Many Americans Live in a Mental Fog,” I suggested one cause of U.S. cognitive impairment I believe he overlooked. The Bloomberg View writer noted that poverty, lead poisoning and drugs are key factors in our stupor, all certainly true, but I wonder if years of playing tackle football may also be causing mass brain-related decline in men.

That question extends far beyond the few who make it to the NFL since “1.23 million youth ages 6-12 played tackle football in 2015.” The issue has been raised again this week after a chilling study of CTE in football players in which 110 of 111 former pros were found to have the degenerative disease and the subsequent announcement by offensive lineman/mathematician John Urschel that he was retiring early–though it may be later than he thinks.

Two excerpts follow.

____________________________

From Joe Ward, Josh Williams and Sam Manchester’s NYT piece:

Dr. Ann McKee, a neuropathologist, has examined the brains of 202 deceased football players. A broad survey of her findings was published on Tuesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

Of the 202 players, 111 of them played in the N.F.L. — and 110 of those were found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., the degenerative disease believed to be caused by repeated blows to the head.

C.T.E. causes myriad symptoms, including memory loss, confusion, depression and dementia. The problems can arise years after the blows to the head have stopped. …

In addition to the 111 brains from those who played in the N.F.L., researchers also examined brains from the Canadian Football League, semi-professional players, college players and high school players. Of the 202 brains studied, 87 percent were found to have C.T.E. The study found that the high school players had mild cases, while college and professional players showed more severe effects. But even those with mild cases exhibited cognitive, mood and behavioral symptoms.

There is still a lot to learn about C.T.E. Who gets it, who doesn’t, and why? Can anything be done to stop the degeneration once it begins? How many blows to the head, and at what levels, must occur for C.T.E. to take hold?

“It is no longer debatable whether or not there is a problem in football — there is a problem,” Dr. McKee said.•

____________________________

The opening of Ken Belson’s NYT article:

One of the N.F.L.’s smartest players did the math and decided to retire after just three years in the league.

John Urschel, an offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens who received much publicity for his off-season pursuit of a doctorate in math at M.I.T., told the team on Thursday that he was hanging up his cleats at 26.

Urschel’s agent, Jim Ivler, said Urschel was overwhelmed with interview requests but would not be speaking to the news media. On Twitter, Urschel wrote that “there is no big story here” and that the decision to retire was not an easy one to make, but “it was the right one for me.”

He added that he planned to return to school full time in the fall, “to take courses that are only offered in the fall semester” and spend time with his fiancée, who is expecting their first child in December.

Urschel’s decision came two days after the release of a study in which all but one of 111 brains of former N.F.L. players showed signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated hits to the head.
 
The Baltimore Sun and ESPN, citing anonymous sources with the Ravens, said his retirement was related to the study.

Urschel, who had spoken about balancing concerns about the safety of the game and his love for it, left before the team’s first full practice of the coming season.•

Tags: , , , , ,

“I Believe The Probability Of Him Finishing At Least Four Years Is Very High”

July 28, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Had a bizarre exchange on Twitter with writer Elizabeth Bruenig last night after the fellatio-friendly interview that the perfectly sane and sober White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci gave to Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker in which he went on the record to profanely deride and threaten his colleagues–superiors, even–in the cabinet. I mean, Steve Bannon may be a white nationalist with a particularly pliable neck, but usually these things are kept in-house.

Bruenig’s tweet:

When you assert that a disgraceful person who happens to be Italian-American is the most authentically “Italian-American dude” on the planet, you’ve revealed you embody some truly ugly stereotypes. I don’t think someone is a hardcore bigot just because they make a dumb comment–we’re all flawed–but when I pointed out the wrongness of her statement, Bruenig told me that she was “not going to play my game” and blocked me, as if I was trolling her when she was actually the one trolling an entire ethnicity. Too bad she didn’t pause for a moment and think about what she’d written. It may have helped her become a better and fuller person. As someone who’s heard way too many times from supposedly educated people that they’re surprised I read a lot of books because I’m Italian-American, it would have been greatly appreciated.

· · ·

In the more widely important matters of the day, the clown show in the White House got worse, with much of the nation now feeling like the small children of a mentally ill parent who controls the fortunes of the family though he most definitely should not. The only thing that threatens to turn the GOP on Trump is if he would dare fire the Confederate statue known as Jefferson Beauregard Sessions. That’s the gutter where the party now rests.

I’ve gone on record as saying that Trump and his creepy cabal will gone down in flames, even if democracy may already be a pile of ashes when that occurs. Mike Bloomberg, however, believes the orange supremacist’s chances of lasting eight years in the Oval Office are actually quite good. At least, that’s what he’s saying for public consumption. Perhaps, but Trump has a mausoleum worth of skeletons in his closet.

From a Spiegel interview conducted by Juliane von Mittelstaedt:

Spiegel: 

One main driver for people to vote for Trump was their resentment of the establishment, the elites. Where is that coming from in your opinion?

Michael Bloomberg: 

A lot of the Trump voters thought: “The current stuff has not helped me. I want a change.” Trump got elected partly because he had a message: “Vote for America.” “Make America Great.” “America” is a good word. “Great” is a good word. Hillary never came up with a message other than “Vote for me because I’m a woman.” I make no secret of the fact that I was not a big Hillary Clinton supporter, but I thought in the two-way race between her and Donald Trump, that she should have been the president. But Trump promised a lot of things. And now he’s six months in and hasn’t passed a piece of legislation yet. Now, I personally have said we should help him. I didn’t vote for him. I didn’t think he was the right person. But once we have an election and he gets elected, then we have a responsibility as citizens to help him.

Spiegel: 

To help him? I thought you would have a very different opinion on basically everything?

Michael Bloomberg: 

Absolutely, I still don’t agree with him on most things. I disagree violently with a lot of things, for example regarding the elimination of Obamacare or cutting taxes. We need to have more taxes, not less, and we need the taxes we have, certainly, to provide services — for defense and education and health care. We should not cut money here in order to cut taxes.

Spiegel: 

So why wouldn’t you be happy if he fails with his agenda?

Michael Bloomberg: 

Because in the end, the message will be: Oh, Trump tried to do what he promised. It was the “liberals” who wouldn’t let him. Forget about the fact that it’s in the Republican Party that he can’t get through the votes. And for sure I’d like to change his views — for sure I hate a lot of things he does. But I live here. My kids, my grandkids live here. I don’t want him to fail. That’s sick and not good for my kids. I want Trump to be successful. I don’t think he will be, and when he does things that I believe are harmful, I will certainly try hard to stop that. But I don’t think that we should do what (the Republican Senator) Mitch McConnell said. When Obama was elected, he said: “We’re going to make him a one-term president.”

Spiegel: 

Do you think Trump is going to be elected for another term?

Michael Bloomberg:

First of all, I believe the probability of him finishing at least four years is very high. Impeachment is a political, not a legal process. And even in Nixon’s case, most of the Republicans didn’t vote to impeach him. It was the Democrats who were in power and impeached Nixon. He could have a heart attack, or he could do something that the public really gets up in arms about. If not, he’s likely to finish four years. And then I would say he has a 55 percent chance of getting re-elected. Why? Because incumbents always have an advantage. Plus, in 2020, the economy couldn’t be that bad, and there’s got to be 14 Democrats that have already said they’re going to run for office. So, you can see his opponents being very fractured.•

Tags: , , ,

“The Problem Is The Hijacking Of The Human Mind”

July 27, 2017 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Less than a dozen years separate these two images of commuters in the NYC subway system, the bottom one taken late in 2016, a reminder that the future can arrive frustratingly slowly and then all at once. 

While both groups have their heads buried in media, the difference in the tools they’re utilizing makes all the difference. It’s not that newspapers never tried to manipulate readers, but they were static, intermittent and allowed for reflection. Smartphones are incredibly useful, but they not only makes reading on any profound level difficult, they’re also the largest social and psychological experiments in human history, persuasion machines constantly updated in real time, ever-shifting in an attempt to stay a step ahead of consumers. The funny thing is, I don’t think we mind very much.

In the very smart Wired interview “Our Minds Have Been Hijacked By Our Phones. Tristan Harris Wants to Rescue Them,” Nicholas Thompson questions the activist about the problem and what he believes are the solutions. The title seems a misnomer: Is it really a hijacking if we’re complicit? Harris thinks we “lack awareness” of how the Big Three (Apple, Google and Facebook) are gaming us, but I believe it’s a tacit agreement in which we choose to ignore the fine print. 

Complicating matters is that the next level the Internet and social media extends far beyond a phone you can slide into your pocket: Tomorrow will be a much more ambient and pervasive time, and it’s unlikely anyone will be able to evade the chips and sensors. We will be endlessly logged on. Are there legislative solutions? Probably, though they’ll need to be limber and able to morph quickly, and with the jaw-dropping money involved, the public will have to demand them.

I’d feel more confident this could be achieved if we weren’t so deeply complicit, so desperately in need of attention. That’s one of the biggest shocks in the early years of the Digital Age: People don’t really mind so much that they’re being manipulated and surveilled. We not only like to watch, but we like being watched. For many, it’s a small price to pay for “friends” and “likes.” Big Brother now seems like just another member of the family.

An exchange in which Thompson probes Harris’ solutions for the new abnormal:

Nicholas Thompson:

How do we reform it?

Tristan Harris:

So the first step is to transform our self-awareness. People often believe that other people can be persuaded, but not me. I’m the smart one. It’s only those other people over there that can’t control their thoughts. So it’s essential to understand that we experience the world through a mind and a meat-suit body operating on evolutionary hardware that’s millions of years of old, and that we’re up against thousands of engineers and the most personalized data on exactly how we work on the other end.

Nicholas Thompson:

Do you feel that about yourself? I tried to reach you last weekend about something, but you went into the woods and turned off your phone. Don’t you think you have control?

Tristan Harris:

Sure, if you turn everything off. But when we aren’t offline, we have to see that some of the world’s smartest minds are working to undermine the agency we have over our minds.

Nicholas Thompson:

So step one is awareness. Awareness that people with very high IQs work at Google, and they want to hijack your mind, whether they’re working on doing that deliberately or not. And we don’t realize that?

Tristan Harris:

Yeah. And I don’t mean to be so obtuse about it. YouTube has a hundred engineers who are trying to get the perfect next video to play automatically. And their techniques are only going to get more and more perfect over time, and we will have to resist the perfect. There’s a whole system that’s much more powerful than us, and it’s only going to get stronger. The first step is just understanding that you don’t really get to choose how you react to things.•

Tags: ,

“The Battlefield Would Be ‘Everywhere'”

July 27, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Terrorism developed as a way for weak factions to disrupt war, to hack what had been a very centralized activity since the formation of discrete states. The thing is, such ad hoc chicanery hardly ever works, at least ultimately. Eventually the element of surprise is identified, neutralized.

Our new tech tools, however, have begun to level the playing field. Sure, ISIS still can’t hack its way to heaven in 2017, but a fully formed terror state like Russia managed for a very reasonable sum to successfully wage “memetic warfare” against America, a much wealthier and militarily superior nation, albeit, with what would appear to be aid and comfort from a cabal of traitors. As the world grows ever more computerized, perhaps eventually we’ll all have an army to do our bidding and every target, real and virtual, will be made vulnerable.

From John Thornhill of the Financial Times:

Most defense spending in NATO countries still goes on crazily expensive metal boxes that you can drive, steer, or fly. But, as in so many other areas of our digital world, military capability is rapidly shifting from the visible to the invisible, from hardware to software, from atoms to bits. And that shift is drastically changing the equation when it comes to the costs, possibilities and vulnerabilities of deploying force. Compare the expense of a B-2 bomber with the negligible costs of a terrorist hijacker or a state-sponsored hacker, capable of causing periodic havoc to another country’s banks or transport infrastructure — or even democratic elections.

The US has partly recognized this changing reality and in 2014 outlined a third offset strategy, declaring that it must retain supremacy in next-generation technologies, such as robotics and artificial intelligence. The only other country that might rival the US in these fields is China, which has been pouring money into such technologies too.

But the third offset strategy only counters part of the threat in the age of asymmetrical conflict. In the virtual world, there are few rules of the game, little way of assessing your opponent’s intentions and capabilities, and no real clues about whether you are winning or losing. Related article Donald Trump is the odd man out with Putin and Xi China and Russia co-operate in areas posing a challenge to western interests Such murkiness is perfect for those keen to subvert the west’s military strength.

China and Russia appear to understand this new world disorder far better than others — and are adept at turning the west’s own vulnerabilities against it. Chinese strategists were among the first to map out this new terrain. In 1999 two officers in the People’s Liberation Army wrote Unrestricted Warfare in which they argued that the three indispensable “hardware elements of any war” — namely soldiers, weapons and a battlefield — had changed beyond recognition. Soldiers included hackers, financiers and terrorists. Their weapons could range from civilian aeroplanes to net browsers to computer viruses, while the battlefield would be “everywhere.”

Russian strategic thinkers have also widened their conception of force.•

Tags:

“All Those Freshly Awake Devices Will Present An Entirely New Way To Interact With The World Around You”

July 26, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

In the future, you will never be alone again. Never.

Prelude to the Internet of Things, when nearly every last object will be a computer and society a machine with no OFF switch, is today’s proliferation of sensors and cameras, making their way into private homes as well as public spaces. You may barely notice them, which is the idea.

I doubt, though, most would care even if aware that the Roomba is doing a constant sweep for information and the TV may also be watching them. So many have willingly surrendered the most intimate details in exchange for a “friend” or a “like.” We essentially gleefully gave away what was always feared would be taken from us. We’ve acquiesced to a “soft” totalitarianism. 

What the Internet Era of Silicon Valley has perhaps done best of all is locating and massaging the psychological weak spots of their customers who crave not only convenience and “free” services but also attention. That they’ve divined unobtrusive ways to simultaneously follow and search us is a big part of the bargain. It’s out of sight, out of mind.

Three excerpts follow.

____________________________

From Maggie Astor at the New York Times:

Your Roomba may be vacuuming up more than you think.

High-end models of Roomba, iRobot’s robotic vacuum, collect data as they clean, identifying the locations of your walls and furniture. This helps them avoid crashing into your couch, but it also creates a map of your home that iRobot is considering selling to Amazon, Apple or Google.

Colin Angle, chief executive of iRobot, told Reuters that a deal could come in the next two years, though iRobot said in a statement on Tuesday: “We have not formed any plans to sell data.”

In the hands of a company like Amazon, Apple or Google, that data could fuel new “smart” home products.

“When we think about ‘what is supposed to happen’ when I enter a room, everything depends on the room at a foundational level knowing what is in it,” an iRobot spokesman said in a written response to questions. “In order to ‘do the right thing’ when you say ‘turn on the lights,’ the room must know what lights it has to turn on. Same thing for music, TV, heat, blinds, the stove, coffee machines, fans, gaming consoles, smart picture frames or robot pets.”

But the data, if sold, could also be a windfall for marketers, and the implications are easy to imagine. No armchair in your living room? You might see ads for armchairs next time you open Facebook. Did your Roomba detect signs of a baby? Advertisers might target you accordingly. …

Albert Gidari, director of privacy at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, said that if iRobot did sell the data, it would raise a variety of legal questions.

What happens if a Roomba user consents to the data collection and later sells his or her home — especially furnished — and now the buyers of the data have a map of a home that belongs to someone who didn’t consent, Mr. Gidari asked. How long is the data kept? If the house burns down, can the insurance company obtain the data and use it to identify possible causes? Can the police use it after a robbery?•

____________________________

From Devin Coldewey at Techcrunch:

As moviemaking becomes as much a science as an art, the moviemakers need to ever-better ways to gauge audience reactions. Did they enjoy it? How much… exactly? At minute 42? A system from Caltech and Disney Research uses a facial expression tracking neural network to learn and predict how members of the audience react, perhaps setting the stage for a new generation of Nielsen ratings.

The research project, just presented at IEEE’s Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Hawaii, demonstrates a new method by which facial expressions in a theater can be reliably and relatively simply tracked in real time.

It uses what’s called a factorized variational autoencoder — the math of it I am not even going to try to explain, but it’s better than existing methods at capturing the essence of complex things like faces in motion. …

Of course, this is just one application of a technology like this — it could be applied in other situations like monitoring crowds, or elsewhere interpreting complex visual data in real time.•

____________________________

The opening of David Pierce’s Wired piece “Inside Andy Rubin’s Quest To Create an OS For Everything“:

Here’s some free advice: Don’t try to break into Andy Rubin’s house. As soon as your car turns into the driveway at his sprawling pad in the Silicon Valley hills, a camera will snap a photo of your vehicle, run it through computer-vision software to extract the plate number, and file it into a database. Rubin’s system can be set to text him every time a certain car shows up or to let specific vehicles through the gate. Thirty-odd other cameras survey almost every corner of the property, and Rubin can pull them up in a web browser, watching the real-time grid like Lucius Fox surveying Gotham from the Batcave. If by some miracle you were to make it all the way to the front door, you’d never get past the retinal scanner.

Rubin doesn’t employ human security guards. He doesn’t think he needs them. The 54-year-old tech visionary (who, among other things, coinvented Android) is pretty sure he has the world’s smartest house. The homebrew security net is only the beginning: There’s also a heating and ventilating system that takes excess heat from various rooms and automatically routes it into cooler areas. He has a wireless music system, a Crestron custom-­install home automation system, and an automatic cleaner for his pool.

Getting the whole place up and running took Rubin a decade. And don’t even ask him what it cost. There’s an entire room full of things he bought, tried, and shelved, but the part that really drove him crazy was that it didn’t seem like automating his home ought to be this hard. Take the license-plate camera, for instance: Computer-vision software that can read a tag is readily available. Outdoor cameras are cheap and easy to find, as are infrared illuminators that let those cameras see in the dark. Self-opening gates are everywhere. All the pieces were available, but “they were all by different companies,” Rubin says. “And there was no UI. It’s not turnkey.”

At some point during his renovations, Rubin realized he was experiencing more than just rich-guy gadget problems. He was too far ahead of the curve. If anything, the problem is about to get much worse: The price and size of a Wi-Fi radio and microprocessor are both falling toward zero; wireless bandwidth is more plentiful and reliable; batteries last longer; sensors are more accurate; software is more reliable and more easily updated. As many as 200 billion new internet-connected devices are predicted to be online in just the next few years. Phones and tablets, certainly. But also light bulbs and doorknobs, shoes and sofa cushions, washing machines and showerheads.
 
In many cases, the effects of these connected devices will be invisible: better temperature optimization in warehouses or super-­efficient routes for UPS drivers. But at the same time, all those freshly awake devices will present an entirely new way to interact with the world around you.•

Tags: , ,

“They Slice Them And Dice Them With A Knife”

July 26, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Pretty much all credible studies show the crime rate among illegal immigrants in the United States to be lower than that of natural-born citizens, but people tend to fear what they don’t know most, so a QVC quisling like Donald Trump was able to successfully peddle his gutter-level demagoguery as if it were just another crate of mediocre steaks.

The leader of our country threw this same red meat to his base once again in a Youngstown rally a few hours ago, just a day after he managed to turn the Boy Scout Jamboree into something akin to an auto-da-fé. But if you’re a guy who spent the last two years projecting every last creepy desire of your own onto others, from accusing your opponent of rigging the election to calling undocumented immigrants sexual predators to decrying the “swamp” before causing it to overflow, the most unsettling thing you could possibly do would be to specifically detail bizarre child torture and murder scenarios that you believe are overrunning the country. An excerpt:

Donald Trump:

One by one, we are finding the illegal gang members, drug dealers, thieves, robbers, criminals, and killers. And we are sending them the hell back home where they came from. And once they are gone, we will never let them back in, believe me. 

The predators and criminal aliens who poison our communities with drugs and prey on innocent young people — these beautiful, beautiful, innocent young people — will find no safe haven anywhere in our country. And you’ve seen the stories about some of these animals. They don’t want to use guns, because it’s too fast and it’s not painful enough. So they’ll take a young, beautiful girl, 16, 15, and others, and they slice them and dice them with a knife, because they want them to go through excruciating pain before they die. And these are the animals that we’ve been protecting for so long. Well, they’re not being protected any longer, folks.•

I will never sleep again. 

Any working-class Republican hoping for more from Trump than talk of torches and pitchforks should be prepared to be disappointed. That’s all he has. Should he actually impact healthcare or tax reform in a meaningful way, it will be in a manner devastating to his most devout supporters–those who can least afford it. I’ve joked that I would play the world’s smallest violin for these folks if the GOP hadn’t just slashed the school music program, but this may be the first time in the history of American politics that a major political party has actively tried to kill off its base.

From Dake Kang’s Associated Press piece about struggling Youngstowners:

Judy Martin, 72, of McDonald, Ohio, “tosses and turns” in bed at night, wracked with leg pain and worried about her medical bills. 

Martin, a factory worker for 51 years, said she burned through her $20,000 in life savings on medical expenses a year after her retirement. She now relies on a monthly $1,500 social security check and Medicare subsidies, but still has to pay roughly $400 a month for medication and supplemental insurance.

“It feels like we’re getting punished as we’re getting older,” Martin said. “I earned my time out there. Here we are, stuck.”

Martin, who voted for Trump, “has faith” that Trump will make things more affordable for her, and is excited to hear what Trump has to say about health care when he comes to Youngstown, a 15 minute drive from her home. Though she won’t be there in person, she plans to watch his speech online and hear about it from her son who plans to attend.

“I believe that Trump can do it, and that he will take care of the little people,” Martin said.•

Tags: ,

“This Does Not Mean The Brain Is Creating Experience”

July 25, 2017 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Thomas Edison, who fluctuated between identifying himself as an atheist and some form of non-traditional believer, referred to the brain as being merely a machine. In today’s terms, gray matter is often called a computer. Tomorrow the metaphor will be different. We’ll continue to grasp for these analogies until when and if we can unlock the secrets of consciousness.

Tim Parks of the New York Review of Books conducted a new chapter in his continuing Q&A on the topic with roboticist and philosopher Riccardo Manzotti, an externalist who believes the mind is more than just the actions and reactions of the nervous system. He leads off the introduction with this question: Will we ever really know what, or even where, consciousness is?

I’m not a roboticist nor philosopher, but I’m fairly certain the answer is a definite “yes,” whether the mind is merely neural activity or something more, providing we don’t first become extinct by our own hand or the hand of…whatever. A run as good as the one the dinosaurs enjoyed would likely be enough for us to figure out the matter–the gray matter–and likely replicate consciousness in machines. Not happening in our lifetimes but happening if there are enough lifetimes.

An excerpt:

Tim Parks:

Internalists often mention Wilder Penfield’s experiments. He managed to get people to have hallucinations by stimulating parts of their brains electrically during open brain surgery. Other neuroscientists have even managed to relate stimulation of a particular neuron to “seeing” a particular face, obviously in the absence of that face. Again this suggests that experience is generated by the brain; we don’t need the world around to see something.

Ricardo Manzotti:

Have you checked out the hallucinations Penfield reports?

Tim Parks:

No.

Ricardo Manzotti:

They are all rather everyday ordinary experiences. Seeing one’s wife entering the room. Hearing a friend’s voice.

Tim Parks:

And so?

Ricardo Manzotti:

Well, if experience were actually generated freely by the brain, isn’t it odd that it remains so strictly tied to the world? Why no colors that have never been seen before? Sounds never heard in reality? Why no experiences that clearly have nothing to do with the outer world? Even when we dream we are aware that the bizarre aspects of dreams are due to their superimposition or mixing of different elements of known experience. An elephant that’s pink, or green. A dog that can talk. Whatever.

Tim Parks:

But surely the point is that we’re seeing something that’s not there.

Ricardo Manzotti:

Tim, we discussed this in our conversation on dreams. The question of what’s “there” or what’s “now” is complex. The objects that make up our experience can be milliseconds or years away from our bodies. Photons take time to travel, neurons take time to send electrical signals. We have already suggested that although ongoing ordinary experience of the world follows a privileged neural path that makes it possible for the body to deal with phenomena immediately around it, there are also other paths, eddies as it were, where neural activity mills, or is somehow delayed, then released later in dreams, or when a surgeon stimulates a part of the brain electrically. But this does not mean the brain is creating experience.

Tim Parks:

I’m not entirely convinced by this.•

Tags: ,

A Note From 1908 About “Electric Sleep”

July 25, 2017 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech | Permalink

In the early years of automobiles, electric models were favored, and even steam-driven cars were predominant over models powered by fossil fuels. Things change. Ultimately, the internal-combustion engine proved more stable and became the king of the road.

Interestingly, electricity had a chance to make inroads in another area in which gases had proven to be unstable: anesthesia. In the nascent years of the practice, miscalculations with ether and chloroform led to deaths. No one wanted to go back to the brutality of surgery during consciousness, but there had to be a better way. Enter Dr. Louise G. Rabinovitch, who experimented successfully (and chillingly and unethically, often) with bringing a blissful unconsciousness to animal and human test subjects with electric shock. A better understanding of anesthesia made this jolting scheme unnecessary, but the doctor’s jaw-dropping reports of her experiments likely would have prevented her methods from becoming popular in any case. From an article about “electric sleep” in the September 27, 1908 New York Times:

PARIS–Dr. Louise G. Rabinovitch, the well-known New York psychoclacist, and Dr. V. Magnan are preparing another stop in their series of discoveries in electric sleep experiments, which have been safely conducted on rabbits and dogs, will be made soon on human beings, patients in the insane hospital in Paris.

Dr. Rabinovitch has been conducting her experiments with hopes of finding the means of doing away entirely with the usual anaesthetics–ether and chloroform–and so far has been very successful.

The City of Paris early in the Summer fitted up a laboratory for the hospital of Sainte-Anne, and there she has been working steadily. Already she has put a patient to sleep by electricity without performing an operation. She has also in several cases used electricity as a local anaesthetic on a part of the arm or leg and has performed a slight operation. Her intention now is, in which she is encouraged by the veteran Dr. Magnan, to perform a serious operation made under the influence of electric sleep. This will be the first time that this has been done anywhere in the world.

Dr. Rabinovitch has made some remarkable discoveries while she has been working in her laboratory, and finds no difficulty in instilling life into animals which have died on the operating table. The immense value of this discovery to physicians when patients die because of an anaesthetic can be seen at once.“

One dog playing about the laboratory, the doctor told me, had been dead three times. “While under the influence of electric sleep I killed her instantly with chloroform. The heart stopped beating and respiration ceased. If the animal had been left alone then it would have remained dead, but I immediately instituted artificial respiration by means of electricity, and presently the animal started to breathe of its own accord. Again, after I had killed the dog and resuscitated it, hemorrhage set in, caused by an operation, and the dog bled to death. I brought it back to life again. The animal is at present perfectly healthy.”•

“It Is A World In Which An Omnipresent, All-Knowing Digital Mechanism Knows More About You Than You Do”

July 25, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

The Arab Spring demonstrated how the new technological tools could help bring down tyranny, but the dictators were also early adopters. If the anarchy could be redirected, it could be a virtual chaos agent–an army of them, in fact–or even a tireless oppressor. It’s a new way to wage war and quell revolution. China, becoming the new center of the world as America abdicates its authority, is leading the way in cyber-oppression, but the playing field knows many states.

Two excerpts follow.

From Bloomberg Technology:

Governments around the world are enlisting “cyber troops” who manipulate Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets to steer public opinion, spread misinformation and undermine critics, according to a new report from the University of Oxford.

Adding to growing evidence of government-sponsored efforts to use online tools to influence politics, researchers found 29 countries using social media to shape opinion domestically or with foreign audiences. The tactics are deployed by authoritarian regimes, but also democratically-elected governments, the authors said. 

“Social media makes propaganda campaigns much stronger and potentially more effective than in the past,” said Samantha Bradshaw, the report’s lead author and a researcher at Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Research Project. “I don’t think people realize how much governments are using these tools to reach them. It’s a lot more hidden.”

Online behavior of the government-backed groups varies widely, from commenting on Facebook and Twitter posts, to targeting people individually. Journalists are harassed by government groups in Mexico and Russia, while cyber troops in Saudi Arabia flood negative Twitter posts about the regime with unrelated content and hashtags to make it harder for people to find the offending post. In the Czech Republic, the government is more likely to post a fact-check response to something they see as inaccurate, said the report.

Governments also use fake accounts to mask where the material is coming from. In Serbia, fake accounts are used to promote the government’s agenda, and bloggers in Vietnam spread favorable information. Meanwhile, government actors in Argentina, Mexico, the Philippines, Russia, Turkey, Venezuela and elsewhere use automation software — known as “bots” — to spread social media posts in ways that mimics human users.

“Cyber troops are a pervasive and global phenomenon,” said the report published by the group that is studying how digital tools are being used to manipulate public opinion.•

The opening of “Creating the Honest Man,” Kai Strittmatter’s Süddeutsche Zeitung article:

It is actually very simple, the professor in Beijing says. “There are two kinds of people in the world: good people and bad people. Now imagine a world in which the good ones are rewarded and the bad ones punished”. A world in which those who respect their parents, avoid jaywalking, and pay all their bills on time are rewarded for good behavior. A world where such people enjoy special privileges, where they are allowed to buy “soft sleeper” tickets on a train or get easy access to bank loans. In contrast, the poorly behaved – the ones who cheat on university admissions tests, download films illegally, or have more children than the state allows – are denied this extra comfort. It is a world in which an omnipresent, all-knowing digital mechanism knows more about you than you do. This mechanism can help you improve yourself because it can tell you, in real time, where you failed and what you can do to become a more honest and trustworthy person. And who doesn’t want a world full of fairness and harmony?

Honesty. In Shanghai, there is an app for that: it’s called “Honest Shanghai”. You just download it and register. The app uses facial recognition software to recognize you and gain access to troves of your personal data, which is drawn from different government entities. According to the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization, where the data converge, the app can currently access exactly 5,198 pieces of information from a total of 97 public authorities. It knows whether you’ve paid your electricity bill, donated blood, or travelled on the subway without paying for a ticket. The software then processes the information and lets you know whether your recorded behavior is considered “good”, “bad” or “neutral”. Good Shanghaiers are currently allowed, for instance, to borrow books from the public library without paying the mandatory 100-yuan deposit.

While the app appears to be little more than a gimmick that people can sign up to voluntarily, the system behind it has far-reaching implications. Officially, it is called the “Social Credit System”; the Chinese title also translates as “System for Social Trustworthiness”. The digital mechanism it is based on is set to be gathering data on every single person in China by 2020. It already collects data on all residents of Shanghai. Shao Zhiqing of the Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization emphatically points out that his office doesn’t evaluate people. In Shanghai, he says, this job is done by third-party service providers that get access to the government data. It is their algorithms that evaluate the data and rate behavior accordingly. Without doubt though, Shao says, the Social Credit System that collects and provides the data will change China. “First of all, it will allow us to answer the question: are you a trustworthy person?” says Shao. “It’s all about bringing order to the market. And ultimately, it’s also about social order.”

Later, in the city of Rongcheng, a civil servant tells us: “We want to civilize people”. Once again, China is looking to create the new man.

Something big is happening in China. Something that has never happened before in the country, or anywhere else for that matter.•

Tags:

“Learn To Be By Yourself And In Quiet Places”

July 24, 2017 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I don’t imagine Claude Shannon was ever bored, not with the intellect of Einstein and the playful personality of a circus clown. He was the unicycling, juggling Bell Labs genius who co-created the first wearable and has rightly earned the title of the “Father of the Information Age.” (So, yes, we have some specific to blame.) The unicycle was a birthday gift from the scientist’s wife, Betty, who would struggle to come up with ideas for presents for her spouse, because what do you get for the man who has everything-–in his head?

Was mostly joking above about Shannon being to blame for modern problems related to information, but you have to wonder what he would have made of our ubiquitous surveillance, Russian bots, Fake News and some of the other ghosts he helped unloose.

Shannon was a notable figure in The Idea Factory but now Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman have dedicated an entire volume to him, publishing A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age. The authors just conducted a Reddit AMA. One exchange:

Question:

What can I take away from how Shannon thinks, works, and lives and apply today to think, work, or live better?

Jimmy Soni: 

That’s actually one of the most interesting things about his life and work: There’s a lot for us to take away from it. Sometimes when you’re think of figures like Einstein or Turing, they seem like they’re on Mount Olympus–and that all of us mere mortals can study them from afar but not embrace the way they did their wok because it was so unique.

Shannon’s work had similar scientific force and impact, but he was also down-to-earth. A few of the lessons that stood out to us:

1) Learn to be by yourself and in quiet places — Shannon was an introvert, but we think contributed to his scientific imagination. He was comfortable being alone and thinking hard for long stretches of time. He also did this in places that lent themselves to that kind of thought: spartan bachelor apartments, an office whose door was usually closed. We can’t imagine him trying to bang out information theory at Starbucks.

2) Study many disciplines — Yes, Shannon was a train mathematician and engineer. But he was an equally skilled machinist and gadgeteer, one of the early pioneers of artificial intelligence, a unicyclist, a juggler, and a lot of other things. He had an omnivorous curiosity and it served him well. He was able to use all these disparate things to create the work that he did.

3) Don’t worry about external recognition so much — Shannon could barely be bothered about awards and honors. He found them amusing diversions from the work. Sometimes his wife or a mentor had to force him to actually go to the trouble of accepting awards. And even when he did, he did it with levity. (For instance, he hung all the honorary degrees he won from a rotating tie rack!). Why does this matter? Because he was running his own race. He wasn’t trying to go after a specific award or honor, so he was free to do what he did his entire life: let his curiosity wander to the places it wanted to go.

That’s just some of the lessons. We wrote more of them up here, and happy to go into any of these in further depth.

Let me add one more that I think about a lot: work with your hands. This was something Shannon did for basically his entire life. He would take things apart, put them back together, and see if he could improve on how they worked. Even at the very end stages of his life, when he was in a nursing home battling Alzheimer’s, he would take apart his walker and try to imagine a better design for it.

Why does that matter? Because I think it gave him a quality that one engineer described as “not only the ability to think about things but through things.” It was a powerful part of his work–and I think it’s something we might take for granted in our own.

My guess is that the problem-solving and tactile pieces of working with your hands offer some brain-enhancing effects. But I also think there’s a broader point about appreciation and craftsmanship. There’s a great book on the topic called Shopclass as Soulcraft that’s worth checking out.

I think Shannon could anticipate future robotics because he didn’t just write papers, he built robots. He could imagine an artificially intelligent world because he built an artificially intelligent mouse. I don’t know how to reclaim that sort of thing exactly, but I know it’s a powerful part of what made him who he was.•

Tags: , ,

“This Is Not Tomorrow’s Tragedy”

July 24, 2017 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The heart is a lonely hunter. Also it’s the organ in your chest that pumps blood through your veins and arteries.

An old metaphor ran up against new medicine in 1982 when Dr. William DeVries performed the first artificial-heart transplant on patient Barney Clark, who lived 112 days with the battery-powered pumper. A stunning media circus ensued, with the Frankenstein factor riling many Americans, as cutting-edge technology was introduced before old dreams and superstitions had been put to rest. “I was surprised that people think it’s as big a deal as they think it is,” DeVries said later in the year.

Far thornier questions about reimagining nature are close at hand as our greater understanding of genetics promises to allow us to drive evolution. Let’s hope this time the debate is more rational, since the application of such information will have profound implications–for good and ill.

There’ll be the opportunity to “delete” sicknesses preemptively and the temptation to improve upon what’s already basically fine. If Homo sapiens isn’t done in first by a cold war or a heat wave, then we’ll almost definitely explore “human enhancement,” and these experiments will likely be decentralized, with not only states and corporations competing but also startups in garages.

In a conversation with David Remnick on the New Yorker Radio Hour, Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, a great science writer as well as a cancer specialist, talks about the gene, which he calls, in his most recent book, “one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in the history of all of science.” The host offers that new genetic knowledge has greater game-changing potential than the splitting of the atom–and the games will likely be messy and possibly dangerous. In fact, they’ve already begun.

An excerpt:

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

I draw a formal analogy between those two moments. The splitting of the atom really opened up the possibility of controlling energy and matter, so that opened up an immense technological possibility full of promise and peril. The promise being nuclear technology, the peril being Fukushima. 

The genome also opens up that idea of promise and peril. The promise being the curing of deadly diseases, the early diagnosis of breast cancer, the capacity of being able to predict, in our children, those that will carry devastating mutations that will make them, potentially, have lives of extraordinary suffering. 

But the peril is also questions of identity. What if we learn, and we are going to learn, not about one gene but multiple genes that govern sexual identity? What if we learn about genes that predispose to illness but don’t cause extraordinary suffering?

David Remnick:

And the decisions to abort or not abort that would come along with it.

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

That’s right. And just to give you one example, this is not fantasy: In India and China, based on very crude genetic diagnosis, whether you’re a boy or girl, that phenomenon is already in action and has skewed the selective abortion of those diagnosed genetically as female…has skewed the gender ratio in Indian and China to something absurd, 700 women to 1,000 men, in some parts of India and similarly in some parts of China. 

David Remnick:

So the tragic mistakes are already being made at an early stage.

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

That’s right. The tragedy is not tomorrow’s tragedy. It is today’s tragedy. In fact, it’s yesterday’s tragedy. Those societies have already been destabilized by genetics.•

Tags: ,

This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

July 23, 2017 in Misc. | Permalink


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

  1. clifford and edith irving
  2. abbie hoffman interviewing clifford irving
  3. f is for fake
  4. tasaday people
  5. is elvis really still alive?
  6. evel knievel death defying
  7. claus von bulow interview
  8. jeet heer and jean baudrillard
  9. bruno hauptmann electric chair
  10. donald trump could kill and eat a small child on the white house lawn

Highlights From Yet Another Week Of Afflictor

July 23, 2017 in Misc. | Permalink

This week, neckless SkyBridge slug Anthony Scaramucci was appointed White House Communications Director, leading to the resignation of Sean Spicer, who immediately secured a job as spokesperson for Hitler’s disembodied head.

We simply don’t know who built those Holocaust centers.

Herr Spicer is right. It could have been anyvone!

 

• Susan Glasser and Elizabeth Drew talk Watergate & our current political crisis.

• Brian Beutler and Timothy D. Snyder analyze Trump’s authoritarian dreams.

• Gormless pundit Chris Cillizza was asked suitably brutal questions in an AMA.

• The question James Surowiecki asked about automation isn’t the best one.

• Noah Smith addresses the costs of drugs, lead and poverty in America.

• Tom Simonite analyzes Elon Musk’s disproportionate fear of Intelligent AI.

• A look back at Norman Mailer’s dark interpretation of the moon landing.

• Old Print Article: The Icarians settle in America. (1853)

• A brief note from 1946 about Damon Runyon’s death.

• This week’s Afflictor keyphrase searches: left-wing militias, Einstein’s genome.

“He Seems To Have In Mind A Kleptocratic Authoritarianism”

July 21, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

The 1970s: Watergate, malaise, gas lines, etc. 

Ah, the good old days.

Elizabeth Drew, the great Nixon Era reporter has written also of this moment’s bookend scandal–likely the biggest political misconduct in our nation’s history–arguing that a consensus must slowly be built among both parties before an impeachment possible–or even desirable. 

In a vacuum, that’s right. Except we live in far more fractious times, with the country riven pretty strictly among party lines, apart from some resolute Never Trumpers on the right. The Mueller firing will likely come and so may pardons, with Republicans still unmoved to act, the retention of power more important than even nation. Just consider Newt Gingrich, who once compared Ronald Reagan to Neville Chamberlain for merely meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev but now serves as an enthusiastic apologist for an actual Kremlin stooge. 

That’s why authoritarianism is a real threat. Not due to soft spots in the Constitution or the great power of the office of the President, but because normal governance has already ceased. In one fashion or another, Trump will go down. Will America as well? That depends. This era isn’t the 1970s nor the 1930s despite resembling at moments an unholy amalgam of the two. An X factor is present that represents the response of the populace to a White House run amok.

Two excerpts follow.

From Timothy Snyder’s Guardian piece “Trump Is Ushering In a Dark New Conservatism“:

Thus the nostalgic moment for this White House is not the 1950s, usually recalled warmly by American conservatives, but the dreadful 1930s, when fascists of the new right defeated conservatives of the old right in Europe. Whatever one might think of conservative nostalgia for the 1950s, it is notable for what it includes: American participation in the second world war and the beginnings of the American welfare state. For conservatives, it all went wrong in the 1960s. 

For the Trump administration, it all went wrong rather earlier: in the 1940s, with the fight against fascism and the New Deal. Stephen Bannon, who promises us new policies “as exciting as the 1930s”, seems to want to return to that decade in order to undo those legacies.

He seems to have in mind a kleptocratic authoritarianism (hastened by deregulation and the dismantlement of the welfare state) that generates inequality, which can be channeled into a culture war (prepared for by Muslim bans and immigrant denunciation hotlines). Like fascists, Bannon imagines that history is a cycle in which national virtue must be defended from permanent enemies. He refers to fascist authors in defense of this understanding of the past.•

From “We’re On the Brink Of an Authoritarian Crisis“ by Brian Beutler of the New Republic:

Should Trump fire Mueller, with the tacit assent of Republicans in Congress and the DOJ leadership, there will be little recourse. It is feasible (though difficult) to imagine a GOP House and Senate passing an independent counsel statute to restore Mueller to his job; it is nearly impossible to imagine them doing so by veto-proof margins. And should Trump pardon himself and his inner circle, it is dispiritingly easy to imagine Republicans reprising their familiar refrain: The president’s power to pardon is beyond question.

If this crisis unfolds as depicted here, the country’s final hope for avoiding a terminal slide into authoritarianism would be the midterm election, contesting control of a historically gerrymandered House of Representatives. That election is 16 months away. Between now and then, Trump’s DOJ and his sham election-integrity commission will seek to disenfranchise as many Democratic voters as possible, while the president himself beseeches further foreign interference aimed at Democratic candidates. Absent the necessary sweep, everything Trump will have done to degrade our system for his own enrichment and protection will have been ratified, and a point of no return will have been crossed.•

Tags: ,

Old Print Article: The Icarians Settle In America (1853)

July 20, 2017 in Books, Old Print Articles, Politics | Permalink

Was recently reading something about the Icarians, the French Utopian socialist sect based on the teachings of Étienne Cabet, which left small footprints on U.S. soil during the “stammering century.” The members first immigrated to America in 1848, purchasing small parcels in Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, California and, very disastrously, in Texas, on which to build their communities based on “technological innovation.”

In a 2016 New Republic article by Chris Jennings about the Lone Star State debacle, he describes the tenets of the group put forth in the Cabet novel Voyage en Icarie:

In Icaria, there is no private property or money. Food, shelter, clothing, and all of life’s comforts are produced and distributed by the state. Men and women are considered equal and receive the same comprehensive public education, although women do not vote. When an Icarian family runs low on food, they place a specially designed container into a specially designed niche outside of their specially designed apartment. When they return home after a day working in collective workshops, they find their bin topped off with healthful victuals. The sources of Icarian abundance are technological innovation and the fact that everyone works for the wealth of the republic. There are no idle rich or landed aristocracy to draw off the wealth of the nation. As a result of these reforms, many old occupations have been rendered obsolete. In Icaria there are no domestic servants, cops, informants, middlemen, soldiers, gunsmiths, or bankers.

Even if the Icarians had be experienced homesteaders rather than urban ideologues, it wasn’t perhaps the most propitious moment to establish an alternative colony in America, with Mormons, for instance, on numerous occasions having their towns razed to the ground. In fact, the first permanent Icarian settlement was founded in Nauvoo, Illinois, on the literal ruins of a Mormon community.

Despite sometimes unwittingly purchasing unfortunate tracts and meeting with withering stares, the Icarians were particularly persistent, with the group often splintering, but surviving in some form, until nearly the fin de siècle era. 

From the July 30, 1853 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Space Travel Proposed A Future World Of Brains Attached To Wires”

July 20, 2017 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

On the 48th anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the moon, here’s a repost of some writing on the topic by Norman Mailer, who viewed the mind-blowing mission in terms of Icarus, believing it doomed, in an elemental way, our species. That belief seems less paranoid in retrospect.

Norman Mailer pursued immortality through subjects as grand as his ego, and it was the Apollo 11 mission that was Moby Dick to his Ahab. He knew the beginning of space voyage was the end, in a sense, of humans, or, at least, of humans believing they were in the driver’s seat. In If The Sun Dies, he addresses the disorienting moment when technology, that barbarian, truly stormed the gates.

_________________________

“It Was Not A Despair He Felt, Or Fear–It Was Anesthesia”

When he wrote about the coming computer revolution of the 1970s at the outset of the decade in Of a Fire on the Moon, Norman Mailer couldn’t have known that the dropouts and the rebels would be leading the charge. An excerpt of his somewhat nightmarish view of our technological future, some parts of which came true and some still in the offing:

Now they asked him what he thought of the Seventies. He did not know. He thought of the Seventies and a blank like the windowless walls of the computer city came over his vision. When he conducted interviews with himself on the subject it was not a despair he felt, or fear–it was anesthesia. He had no intimations of what was to come, and that was conceivably worse than any sentiment of dread, for a sense of the future, no matter how melancholy, was preferable to none–it spoke of some sense of the continuation in the projects of one’s life. He was adrift. If he tried to conceive of a likely perspective in the decade before him, he saw not one structure to society but two: if the social world did not break down into revolutions and counterrevolutions, into police and military rules of order with sabotage, guerrilla war and enclaves of resistance, if none of this occurred, then there certainly would be a society of reason, but its reason would be the logic of the computer. In that society, legally accepted drugs would become necessary for accelerated cerebration, there would be inchings toward nuclear installation, a monotony of architectures, a pollution of nature which would arouse technologies of decontamination odious as deodorants, and transplanted hearts monitored like spaceships–the patients might be obliged to live in a compound reminiscent of a Mission Control Center where technicians could monitor on consoles the beatings of a thousand transplanted hearts. But in the society of computer-logic, the atmosphere would obviously be plastic, air-conditioned, sealed in bubble-domes below the smog, a prelude to living on space stations. People would die in such societies like fish expiring on a vinyl floor. So of course there would be another society, an irrational society of dropouts, the saintly, the mad, the militant and the young. There the art of the absurd would reign in defiance against the computer.

_________________________

“Doubtless, Everybody Would Be Easier To Monitor”

Some more predictions from Norman Mailer’s 1970 Space Age reportage, Of a Fire on the Moon, which have come to fruition even without the aid of moon crystals:

Thus the perspective of space factories returning the new imperialists of space a profit was now near to the reach of technology. Forget about diamonds! The value of crystals grown in space was incalculable: gravity would not be pulling on the crystal structure as it grew, so the molecule would line up in lattices free of  shift or sheer. Such a perfect latticework would serve to carry messages for a perfect computer. Computers the size of a package of cigarettes would then be able to do the work of present computers the size of a trunk. So the mind could race ahead to see computers programming go-to-school routes in the nose of every kiddie car–the paranoid mind could see crystal transmitters sewn into the rump of ever juvenile delinquent–doubtless, everybody would be easier to monitor. Big Brother could get superseded by Moon Brother–the major monitor of them all might yet be sunk in a shaft on the back face of the lunar sphere.

_________________________

“A Robot That Is Designed To Play Chess Might Also Want To Build A Spaceship”

In his 1970 Apollo 11 account, Of a Fire on the Moon, Norman Mailer realized that his rocket wasn’t the biggest after all, that the mission was a passing of the torch, that technology, an expression of the human mind, had diminished its creators. “Space travel proposed a future world of brains attached to wires,” Mailer wrote, his ego having suffered a TKO. And just as the Space Race ended the greater race began, the one between carbon and silicon, and it’s really just a matter of time before the pace grows too brisk for humans.

Supercomputers will ultimately be a threat to us, but we’re certainly doomed without them, so we have to navigate the future the best we can, even if it’s one not of our control. Gary Marcus addresses this and other issues in his latest New Yorker blog piece, “Why We Should Think About the Threat of Artificial Intelligence.” An excerpt:

It’s likely that machines will be smarter than us before the end of the century—not just at chess or trivia questions but at just about everything, from mathematics and engineering to science and medicine. There might be a few jobs left for entertainers, writers, and other creative types, but computers will eventually be able to program themselves, absorb vast quantities of new information, and reason in ways that we carbon-based units can only dimly imagine. And they will be able to do it every second of every day, without sleep or coffee breaks.

For some people, that future is a wonderful thing. [Ray] Kurzweil has written about a rapturous singularity in which we merge with machines and upload our souls for immortality; Peter Diamandis has argued that advances in A.I. will be one key to ushering in a new era of “abundance,” with enough food, water, and consumer gadgets for all. Skeptics like Eric Brynjolfsson and I have worried about the consequences of A.I. and robotics for employment. But even if you put aside the sort of worries about what super-advanced A.I. might do to the labor market, there’s another concern, too: that powerful A.I. might threaten us more directly, by battling us for resources.

Most people see that sort of fear as silly science-fiction drivel—the stuff of The Terminator and The Matrix. To the extent that we plan for our medium-term future, we worry about asteroids, the decline of fossil fuels, and global warming, not robots. But a dark new book by James Barrat, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, lays out a strong case for why we should be at least a little worried.

Barrat’s core argument, which he borrows from the A.I. researcher Steve Omohundro, is that the drive for self-preservation and resource acquisition may be inherent in all goal-driven systems of a certain degree of intelligence. In Omohundro’s words, “if it is smart enough, a robot that is designed to play chess might also want to build a spaceship,” in order to obtain more resources for whatever goals it might have.

_________________________

“Hippies Will Be Refused Tourist Cards To Enter Mexico Unless They Take A Bath And Get Haircuts”

While Apollo 11 traveled to the moon and back in 1969, the astronauts were treated each day to a six-minute newscast from Mission Control about the happenings on Earth. Here’s one that was transcribed in Norman Mailer’s Of a Fire on the Moon, which made space travel seem quaint by comparison:

Washington UPI: Vice President Spiro T. Agnew has called for putting a man on Mars by the year 2000, but Democratic leaders replied that priority must go to needs on earth…Immigration officials in Nuevo Laredo announced Wednesday that hippies will be refused tourist cards to enter Mexico unless they take a bath and get haircuts…”The greatest adventure in the history of humanity has started,” declared the French newspaper Le Figaro, which devoted four pages to reports from Cape Kennedy and diagrams of the mission…Hempstead, New York: Joe Namath officially reported to the New York Jets training camp at Hofstra University Wednesday following a closed-door meeting with his teammates over his differences with Pro Football Commissioner Pete Rozelle…London UPI: The House of Lords was assured Wednesday that a major American submarine would not “damage or assault” the Loch Ness monster.

_________________________

“There Was An Uneasy Silence, An Embarrassed Pall At The Unmentioned Word Of Nazi”

Norman Mailer’s book Of a Fire on the Moon, about American space exploration during the 1960s, was originally published as three long and personal articles for Life magazine in 1969: “A Fire on the Moon,” “The Psychology of Astronauts,” and “A Dream of the Future’s Face.” Mailer used space travel to examine America’s conflicted and tattered existence–and his own as well. In one segment, he reports on a banquet in which Wernher von Braun, the former Nazi rocket engineer who became a guiding light at NASA, meets with American businessmen on the eve of the Apollo 11 launch. An excerpt:

Therefore, the audience was not to be at ease during his introduction, for the new speaker, who described himself as a “backup publisher,” went into a little too much historical detail. “During the Thirties he was employed by the Ordinance Department of the German government developing liquid fuel rockets. During World War II he made very significant developments in rocketry for his government.”

A tension spread in this audience of corporation presidents and high executives, of astronauts, a few at any rate, and their families. There was an uneasy silence, an embarrassed pall at the unmentioned word of Nazi–it was the shoe which did not drop to the floor. So no more than a pitter-patter of clapping was aroused when the speaker went quickly on to say: “In 1955 he became an American citizen himself.” It was only when Von Braun stood up at the end that the mood felt secure enough to shift. A particularly hearty and enthusiastic hand of applause swelled into a standing ovation. Nearly everybody stood up. Aquarius, who finally cast his vote by remaining seated, felt pressure not unrelated to refusing to stand up for The Star-Spangled Banner. It was as if the crowd with true American enthusiasm had finally declared, “Ah don’ care if he is some kind of ex-Nazi, he’s a good loyal patriotic American.”

Von Braun was. If patriotism is the ability to improve a nation’s morale, then Von Braun was a patriot. It was plain that some of these corporate executives loved him. In fact, they revered him. He was the high priest of their precise art–manufacture. If many too many an American product was accelerating into shoddy these years since the war, if planned obsolescence had all too often become a euphemism for sloppy workmanship, cynical cost-cutting, swollen advertising budgets, inefficiency and general indifference, then in one place at least, and for certain, America could be proud of a product. It was high as a castle and tooled more finely than the most exquisite watch.

Now the real and true tasty beef of capitalism got up to speak, the grease and guts of it, the veritable brawn, and spoke with fulsome language in his small and well-considered voice. He was with friends on this occasion, and so a savory and gravy of redolence came into his tone, his voice was not unmusical, it had overtones which hinted of angelic super-possibilities one could not otherwise lay on the line. He was when all was said like the head waiter of the largest hofbrau in heaven. “Honored guests, ladies and gentlemen,” Von Braun began, “it is with a great deal of respect tonight that I meet you, the leaders, and the captains in the mainstream of American industry and life. Without your success in building and maintaining the economic foundations of this nation, the resources for mounting tomorrow’s expedition to the moon would never have been committed…. Tomorrow’s historic launch belongs to you and to the men and women who sit behind the desks and administer your companies’ activities, to the men who sweep the floor in your office buildings and to every American who walks the street of this productive land. It is an American triumph. Many times I have thanked God for allowing me to be a part of the history that will be made here today and tomorrow and in the next few days. Tonight I want to offer my gratitude to you and all Americans who have created the most fantastically progressive nation yet conceived and developed,” He went on to talk of space as ‘the key to our future on earth,’ and echoes of his vision drifted through the stale tropical air of a banquet room after coffee–perhaps he was hinting at the discords and nihilism traveling in bands and brigands across the earth. “The key to our future on earth. I think we should see clearly from this statement that the Apollo 11 moon trip even from its inception was not intended as a one-time trip that would rest alone on the merits of a single journey. If our intention had been merely to bring back a handful of soil and rocks from the lunar gravel pit and then forget the whole thing”–he spoke almost with contempt of the meager resources of the moon–“we would certainly be history’s biggest fools. But that is not our intention now–it never will be. What we are seeking in tomorrow’s trip is indeed that key to our future on earth. We are expanding the mind of man. We are extending this God-given brain and these God-given hands to their outermost limits and in so doing all mankind will benefit. All mankind will reap the harvest…. What we will have attained when Neil Armstrong steps down upon the moon is a completely new step in the evolution of man.”•

“Many Of Us Have Tried To Educate Him”

July 20, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

I’m not entirely convinced Elon Musk doesn’t have more in common with Donald Trump in regard to politics than we know. Not saying that he is a raging Libertarian monster like his pal Peter Thiel, but it’s not likely he’s the lovable billionaire that Iron Man cameos would have us believe.

Now that his harebrained attempt to “stage manage” the orange supremacist is happily over, the entrepreneur has fully returned to his normal chores, which are, of course, abnormal. There are two different Musks at work.

Good Elon creates gigafactories and gives people the opportunity to power their homes with solar. As these tools spread, through his efforts and those of his competitors, the Silicon Valley magnate will have made a major contribution to potentially saving our species from the existential threat of climate change. 

Bad Elon is a sort of lower-case Nikola Tesla, whose name he borrowed, of course, for his EV company. And it’s the worst of the Serbian-American inventor that he emulates: grandiose, egotistical, desperate to awe with brilliance even when the logic doesn’t quite cohere. Like Tesla’s final patented invention, the Flivver Plane, which would never have been able to fly even if it was built, Musk often concentrates his attention where it’s not most needed on things that won’t happen.

Much of this baffling overconfidence can be seen in his near-term plan to become a Martian. Some of it is also on view in his deathly fear of killer robots, a stance he developed after going on a Bostrom bender. Intelligent machines are a very-long-term risk for our species (if we’re not first done in by our own dimness or perhaps a solar flare), but they shouldn’t be a primary concern to anyone presently. Not when children even in a wealthy country like America still drink lead-contaminated water, relatively dumb AI can cause employment within industries to collapse and new technological tools are exacerbating wealth inequality.

In a Wired piece, Tom Simonite contextualizes Musk’s foolhardy sci-fi AI fears as well as anyone has. The opening:

IMAGINE YOU HAD a chance to tell 50 of the most powerful politicians in America what urgent problem you think needs prompt government action. Elon Musk had that chance this past weekend at the National Governors Association Summer Meeting in Rhode Island. He chose to recommend the gubernatorial assembly get serious about preventing artificial intelligence from wiping out humanity.

“AI is a fundamental existential risk for human civilization and I don’t think people fully appreciate that,” Musk said. He asked the governors to consider a hypothetical scenario in which a stock-trading program orchestrated the 2014 missile strike that downed a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine—just to boost its portfolio. And he called for the establishment of a new government regulator that would force companies building artificial intelligence technology to slow down. “When the regulator’s convinced it’s safe to proceed then you can go, but otherwise slow down,” he said.

Musk’s remarks made for an enlivening few minutes on a day otherwise concerned with more quotidian matters such as healthcare and education. But Musk’s call to action was something of a missed opportunity. People who spend more time working on artificial intelligence than the car, space, and solar entrepreneur say his eschatological scenarios risk distracting from more pressing concerns as artificial intelligence technology percolates into every industry.

Pedro Domingos, a professor who works on machine learning at the University of Washington, summed up his response to Musk’s talk on Twitter with a single word: Sigh. “Many of us have tried to educate him and others like him about real vs. imaginary dangers of AI, but apparently none of it has made a dent,” Domingos says. America’s governmental chief executives would be better advised to consider the negative effects of today’s limited AI, such as how it is giving disproportionate market power to a few large tech companies, he says. Iyad Rahwan, who works on matters of AI and society at MIT, agrees. Rather than worrying about trading bots eventually becoming smart enough to start wars as an investment strategy, we should consider how humans might today use dumb bots to spread misinformation online, he says.

Rahwan doesn’t deny that Musk’s nightmare scenarios could eventually happen, but says attending to today’s AI challenges is the most pragmatic way to prepare. “By focusing on the short-term questions, we can scaffold a regulatory architecture that might help with the more unpredictable, super-intelligent AI scenarios.”•

Tags: ,

“A Number Of Things Interfere With Americans’ Ability To Think Clearly”

July 19, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve never felt nostalgic about “Mean Streets” New York, even if I don’t particularly like what’s replaced it, with runaway gentrification and a tourist-trap Times Square. When I was a child growing up in Queens during a rougher time in NYC history, incinerators spewed “black snow” over us when we played outside. The grade school I went to and apartment building we lived in were coated in asbestos until it was removed at some point. Usually really nice neighbors would stagger down the street completely drunk a couple times of week or get into fights when they were high, when they weren’t busy working or trying to care for their families.

These things come back to me sometimes. Like when I learned that fellow Queens native Stephen Jay Gould suffered from mesothelioma or when the news first broke that Flint children were essentially being raised on lead water or when the opioid crisis took hold. 

In “Too Many Americans Live in a Mental Fog,” a wise Bloomberg View column, Noah Smith wonders about the silent costs of environmental problems, drug use and poverty. It’s a topic that’s discussed infrequently in the public realm since it’s easier (though costlier) to react to effects than causes. Occasionally someone will write an article about the far higher percentage of past traumatic brain injuries among convicts and wonder about causality, but that’s the exception. I’d love to read a study that traces the outcomes of those who play several years of tackle football in childhood and those who don’t. 

Smith looks at the situation mostly from the economic costs of a brain-addled populace in the time when America has become chiefly an information culture, but successfully treating the foundational issues would relieve personal pain as well as better us broadly in a globally competitive business world.

An excerpt:

In the 21st century, rich countries’ economies depend more and more on knowledge industries like technology, finance and business services. Even outside of those industries, almost every worker now has to know how to use office-productivity software, interact with websites or perform other complex tasks. In this new world, humans are being asked to think all the time.

That means U.S. policy makers need to be looking at better ways to upgrade the mental capabilities of the labor force. Unfortunately, a number of things interfere with Americans’ ability to think clearly.

The biggest threat to clear-headedness comes from drugs. The twin epidemics of opioid-painkiller dependence and heroin abuse destroy people’s lives and harm productivity. There is a strong correlation between opioid use and unemployment, and it’s no great stretch to assume that the former helps cause the latter. A recent Goldman Sachs report concluded that drug abuse resulted in large productivity losses throughout the economy. Even when opioid and opiate users stay at their jobs, they probably become less productive.

A second, much-discussed problem is lead pollution. A flood of research is finding that even small amounts of lead exposure in childhood can lead both to worse academic performance later in life, and to more criminal behavior. Furthermore, recent evidence suggests that American children are far more exposed to lead than most people realize. Lead paint contaminates soil, lead pipes contaminate drinking water, and a variety of commercial products from cosmetics to electronics contain bits of lead. The U.S. is allowing its people to be poisoned with heavy metals, and both their intelligence and their self-control is being degraded as a result.

But drugs and lead aren’t the only forces preventing Americans from being able to think clearly. Poverty is another.•

Tags:

“My Question Is How Could You Have Possibly Thought That This Would Be A Good Idea?”

July 18, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

If you ever find yourself in a wistful, David Brooks kind of mood, believing America a meritocracy in which the best and brightest strive and thrive just remember that Lou Dobbs attended Harvard, Chris Cillizza is a millionaire and Donald Trump is the President of the United Fucking States.

Perhaps Jesse Ventura put it more aptly when he said, “The scum always rises to the top of the water.” And he should know since he became governor of a fairly significant state despite his busy career of pretending to wrestle, peddling idiotic conspiracy theories and hosting a show for RT, Vladimir Putin’s TV propaganda channel.

On Cillizza: This brainiac was employed by the Washington Post initially during its winter of discontent and somehow survived during a sunny revival fostered by Marty Baron’s editorial chops and Jezz Bezos’ considerable couch-cushion change. The quasi-journalist treats politics as if it were all just a game, which might be useful if he were an astute critic of the rules of engagement. He is not. An upchucker of hot takes and clickbait who seems to not care at all that lives are saved or lost depending on policies chosen, Cillizza is in the media merely to give opinions, regardless of their rightness or wrongness, slobber over Ivanka Trump, and get paid. 

In December 2016, he wrote in the Post that he was puzzled that Trump received so much flak for his cabinet picks since, as he stated, all Presidents appoint a few loyalists. Cillizza conveniently overlooked that Bannon, Flynn and Sessions were extraordinarily atypical when compared to appointees of previous Presidents. It’s not the quantity of the loyalists that was disturbing but their qualities.

It’s amazing it took so long for Jeff Zucker to pluck Cillizza from the stupid tree, but he ultimately made sure the commentator was a jewel in CNN’s jester cap. It’s the finest marriage since the von Bulows, except this time both parties are holding a bulging syringe of insulin and America is Sunny. Even though the network is now considered an EoT (Enemy of Trump), it did as much as any entity to normalize the bigot, ignoramus and traitor during the campaign, all for some free content and a ratings boost; and Cillizza’s type of vapid punditry and dumbing down of the news qualifies him as complicit in the odious rise of Trump.

Cillizza, being three times as dense as the planet Neptune, thought it a good idea to conduct a Reddit AMA, in which he was gleefully excoriated by questioners. Below are a dozen inquiries he didn’t answer.

____________________________________

Question:

Hi, I’m Libby Watson, I’m a staff writer at Fusion. Why do you think so many other journalists think you suck?

____________________________________

Question:

You, Wolf Blitzer and S. E. Cupp play Jeopardy. Do any of you end with a positive amount of money?

____________________________________

Question:

You did an emoji analysis of the Republican health care bill. How can you even justify that?

____________________________________

Question:

Chris, have you considered the fact that your reporting style of repeated and absurd focus on completely inane subjects, like “an analysis of the Trump-Macron handshake” not only makes us all collectively stupider, but fundamentally devalues the role politics has in shaping our lives in favor of absurd horse race coverage that focuses on inside baseball to the exclusion of real working families?

____________________________________

Question:

I’d like to present to you some of your headlines from last year during the election.

I’m wondering if you think that your relentless hammering of Hillary Clinton over a bunch of supposed “scandals” that went nowhere (along with your obvious Bernie-bias) helped turn people against Clinton, and put Trump in the White House?

Some of your articles:

  • Hillary Clinton’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad answer on whether she’s ever lied
  • Hillary Clinton can’t make you love her if you don’t
  • Hillary Clinton’s week just went from bad to worse Drip, Drip, Drip.
  • Hillary Clinton’s campaign needs a slogan. Here’s your chance to help. It’s time to think up a message for Hillary!
  • Hillary Clinton’s biggest campaign problem may be, well, Hillary Clinton Sometimes the problem is you.
  • Why ignoring Hillary Clinton’s emails might cost Bernie Sanders Iowa An opportunity, missed.
  • Why we shouldn’t give Hillary Clinton a pass for losing New Hampshire
  • Why Hillary Clinton should be worried about Nevada
  • Why Hillary Clinton won’t release transcripts of her paid Goldman Sachs speeches She has her reasons.
  • Hillary Clinton’s email defense just hit a major bump in the road Cue Democratic worry.
  • Note to Bernie Sanders: Negative ads are good. Negative ads work.
  • Hillary Clinton STILL doesn’t have a good answer for questions about her emails
  • Why Bernie Sanders should talk A LOT more about Hillary Clinton and Goldman Sachs
  • What a tuxedo tells you about the race between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton Authenticity.
  • Hillary Clinton says she’s ‘not nervous at all’ about Bernie Sanders. She should be. Danger, Hillary Clinton. Danger!
  • Here’s exactly how Bernie Sanders can beat Hillary Clinton
  • Why aren’t Hillary Clinton’s exaggerations of her life story bigger news?
  • Bill de Blasio’s ‘Okay fine, I will endorse her’ endorsement of Hillary Clinton
  • Why Joe Biden must destroy Hillary Clinton
  • Just when you thought the e-mail story couldn’t get worse for Hillary Clinton … Drip. Drip. Drip.
  • Hillary Clinton’s e-mail issues have become a massive political problem It’s not getting better.
  • It might be time for Hillary Clinton to start panicking
  • Hillary Clinton finally apologizes for her private e-mail server. What took so long?
  • The reinvention of Hillary Clinton almost certainly won’t work
  • Hillary Clinton’s new approach to her e-mail controversy? It’s complicated.
  • Hillary Clinton’s e-mail problem isn’t going away FBI!
  • Hillary Clinton’s Worst Week in Washington
  • Hillary Clinton’s honesty problem just keeps getting worse
  • Maybe Hillary Clinton just isn’t a very good candidate
  • Hillary Clinton is trying to make the e-mail controversy political. But, really, it isn’t.
  • This isn’t a good trend line for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 prospects The more people see, the less they like.
  • These 9 words prove that Bill Clinton still doesn’t get it on the Clinton Foundation

____________________________________

Question:

Why does CNN insist on bringing on some partisan stooge who would defend Trump for killing and eating said stooge’s own child? What good does having such a person do, especially when you treat their ludicrous opinion as a valid counterpoint to the truth? I would say, “You wouldn’t run a story about Flat Earthers and treat their opinion as the equal and opposite counterpoint to every available piece of scientific evidence for the past 1000 years,” but you probably would and that’s a real problem.

Is it all about the ratings? Is that why, in 2016, you became the Trump News Network and aired almost every single one of his rallies? Are you afraid of being called biased? Are CNN anchors just incapable of spotting bullshit in real time? I don’t get it.

____________________________________

Question:

You said “My job is to assess not the rightness of each argument but to deal in the real world of campaign politics in which perception often (if not always) trumps reality. I deal in the world as voters believe it is, not as I (or anyone else) thinks it should be.”

Do you seriously believe that neither you nor any other media figure have any impact on the perceptions of voters? Does the observer effect not exist in political media?

____________________________________

Question:

Are you aware that real, actual horse races exist? I ask this because you seem desperate to cover a horse race, to the point that you take life-and-death political struggles that affect a nation of 300 million people and a planet of billions and treat them like they’re a horse race.

Why not just “cut out the middle man”, so to speak, and cover an actual horse race?

____________________________________

Question:

Do you regret your monomaniacal focus on the emails story in 2015-16, a focus with a clickbait orientation that both leaned heavily on emerging stories with insufficient information at hand and arguably gave other stories (ones equally or more important) short shrift?

____________________________________

Question:

Why is it that journalists and pundits who habitually get things wrong are rewarded with higher paying, more prestigious jobs rather than being forced out of the national conversation?

____________________________________

Question:

What is your obsession with Ivanka Trump and do you think it affects your reporting?

____________________________________

Question:

Hi Chris, it’s Ashley Feinberg. My question is how could you have possibly thought that this would be a good idea?•

Tags:

“The Subject Is Gathering Increasing Urgency”

July 18, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

James Surowiecki, a very bright guy, asked on Twitter which jobs have been completely automated out of existence in the last 50 years. I think the final tally included just elevator and telephone operators, though you could probably add anyone who worked a dictaphone or in a typing pool. The bowling-alley pin boy just exceeds the time frame he uses. 

The thing is, if we’re talking about automation as a threat to human employment, this question is the wrong one, even if it’s an amusing intellectual exercise. Factories that have been reshored to America in the past decade still employ workers in many of the same positions as when they left, but the numbers needed are far fewer thanks to improved machinery and systems. It’s a thinning of the herd, not it’s utter elimination, that’s most troubling. The argument that a lack of productivity increase proves that automation isn’t killing jobs doesn’t really make sense because manufacturing positions in America certainly have seriously diminished and that’s not all due to globalization.

The right question to ask is this: Will AI and automation cause enough jobs to disappear and rapidly shift to the point that trying to get by becomes too chaotic for most? That’s really all that’s required for things to go haywire. It’s not a an all-or-nothing type of situation. Not every position has to go the way of the pin boy for all of us to wind up toppled.

Two excerpts follow from new Guardian pieces, one about the impact on small American towns of Walmart’s decline in the face of Amazon’s algorithmic might and the second a Paul Mason essay about robots and Brexit that’s interesting if probably too dire.

From “What Happened When Walmart Left,” an Ed Pilkington article:

Much has been written about what happens when the corporate giant opens up in an area, with numerous studies recording how it sucks the energy out of a locality, overpowering the competition through sheer scale and forcing the closure of mom-and-pop stores for up to 20 miles around. A more pressing, and much less-well-understood, question is what are the consequences when Walmart screeches into reverse: when it ups and quits, leaving behind a trail of lost jobs and broken promises.

The subject is gathering increasing urgency as the megacorporation rethinks its business strategy. Rural areas like McDowell County, where Walmart focused its expansion plans in the 1990s, are experiencing accelerating depopulation that is putting a strain on the firm’s boundless ambitions.

Hit hard by the longterm decline in coal mining that is the mainstay of the area, McDowell County has seen a devastating and sustained erosion of its people, from almost 100,000 in 1950 when coal was king, to about 18,000 today. That depleted population is today scattered widely across small towns and in mountain hollows (pronounced “hollers”), accentuating the sense of sparseness and emptiness.

The Walmart supercenter is located about five miles from the county seat, Welch, which still boasts imposing brick buildings as a memory of better times. But the glow of coal’s legacy has cooled, as the boarding up of many of the town’s shops and restaurants attests.

When you combine the county’s economic malaise with Walmart’s increasingly ferocious battle against Amazon for dominance over online retailing, you can see why outsized physical presences could seem surplus to requirements. “There has been a wave of closings across the US, most acutely in small towns and rural communities that have had heavy population loss,” said Michael Hicks, an economics professor at Ball State University who is an authority on Walmart’s local impact.

On 15 January 2016, those winds of change swept across the country with a fury.•

The opening of Mason’s “Brexit Won’t Help Britain Survive the Rise Of the Robots“:

What do a Japanese robot and the world’s first tidal turbine have in common? They are not in Britain. While the British government destroys itself over Brexit, the parts for a third industrial revolution are being assembled elsewhere. This is an industrial revolution where you don’t “catch up” – you catch the economic backwash. This is what would keep ministers awake at night – if they were serious.

In the past 12 months, Japan has started to produce a lot of robots. Its production index for industrial robots stood at 25 in 2009, achieved 175 last year and rocketed to 225 in June this year. Three-quarters of the units made were exported, helping Japan boost its total exports by 11% in the past year. In turn, the industrial surge of robots has stimulated a surge in semiconductor production in Japan and South Korea. This is big and real.

Japan is ahead in robotics not only because it has a decades-old semiconductor industry and an ageing population, but because it has an industrial strategy. Its government demanded a new industrial revolution in 2014. In 2015, its Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry issued a “New Robot Strategy,” stipulating sales targets for robotics in various sectors and urgent measures to train and retain technologists.

In robots for nursing care, for example, the strategy spells out a detailed five-year plan – from supporting manufacturers and changing International Organization for Standardization regulations to new health regulations and the creation of a marketplace between healthcare providers and robotics firms. The policy was not made in a vacuum. Japan’s industrial strategists were worried about big US spending commitments on robot research and development and a €2.8bn (£2.5bn) robotics project, funded by the European commission, called Sparc.

Tags: ,

« Older entries § Newer entries »