Who’s Afraid of the DNC?

It took all of five minutes for Tom Perez to quote Hamilton. The DNC honcho was dispensing his stump speech—he had done about twenty of these events in the last couple weeks—to a gaggle of millennials at the DNC’s Young Professional Leadership Council Launch. The event’s aim was to tap into the organizing mojo (and cash reserves) of younger voters to rectify at least one enthusiasm gap afflicting the doddering 2016 campaign. The crowd of 250 tilted male, business casual, and was packed into the basement of Stout, a Manhattan chain bar of vaguely Irish sensibility. To the assembled faithful, Perez, his voice customarily hoarse, drew from his Hamiltonian reserves and shouted: “History has its eyes on us!”

Here in this bar? Probably not. But the audience members dutifully whooped back, their autonomic response having been triggered by the mention of the sacred text of latter day liberalism. These people had all paid at least $100 (and some, much more) to be here, so they might as well simulate excitement. Perez would be done with his speech soon, and then it would be back to the bar and the complimentary appetizers.

Some politics, some booze, some free apps—it wasn’t a bad scene at Stout last Monday night, but it was hardly the stuff of political revolution, much less any coherent political movement. Many of the attendees I talked to seemed as concerned with networking as with rejuvenating our beleaguered body politic. There was a lot of what Baffler contributor Scott Beauchamp calls “teeth checking”—those appraising looks of “Should I know you? Do you matter?” as someone studies your face and name tag, while none too subtly scouting the room for someone more important to talk to.

Still, a palpable impatience could be detected among many attendees, a familiar post-2016 sense that we should do something. Why not this?

For Perez, it was a moment for “optimism,” he explained, citing the recent election wins by progressive candidates in Virginia, New Jersey, Montana, and elsewhere. “When we’re united, we’re at our best,” he said.

Indeed, a recurring point among the DNC speakers was the importance of fielding candidates in every election. It seems that the Democratic leadership has discovered the value of showing up. As Grace Meng, a Congresswoman from Queens who spoke before Perez, said, “Sure, some people keep asking what our message is, but in some places we didn’t even have a messenger.” Now the party plans to have messengers everywhere. “The new DNC is from the school board to the Oval Office,” Perez intoned.

But what is the new DNC’s message? What does it stand for? You could be forgiven for coming away from Monday night without the foggiest idea. TV screens around the room proclaimed, in a riot of clashing graphics, “Rebuild, Modernize, Organize, Win.” For which policies or on whose behalf, it wasn’t quite clear. Perez invoked some issues of leftish concern—climate change, women’s reproductive rights, public schools—without speaking in any depth.

There were other signs that this was the same bloated corpse of a political racket that had stumbled through the 2016 election amid a steady stream of embarrassing revelations about its top-down, self-dealing managerial ethos. One corner of the bar had been cordoned off with velvet rope, behind which Perez, before he ascended the stage, schmoozed and took selfies with donors of a certain tier. Once he did take the mic, Perez praised his DNC colleague Meng and then for some reason saw fit to tell the room, “She knows that the most important title she’ll have in her life is ‘mom.’” (Again, Meng is a member of Congress.)

Beyond diminishing the achievements of his female colleagues and quoting blandly from a Broadway musical, Perez was an enthusiastic if not very inspiring speaker. (Another one of the lead-in acts, Michael Blake, a state legislator from the Bronx, served up far more charisma.) Perez offered vague bromides about liberal issues, but his language had the plastic feel of PR-speak. He spoke of “constitutional policing,” not Black Lives Matter. He didn’t rail against the odiousness of Trump; he cited a “culture of corruption.” There was no mention of any foreign policy, nor of the forever wars that have been the collective background music to these young professionals’ lives.

A central portion of Perez’s speech revolved around an elaborate anecdote—culled, he said, from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Albert Einstein—of a “gyroscope” that affects all society. The telling was muddled, hopelessly so, but apparently this gyroscope acts as a healing or progressive force. For instance, “it was that gyroscope that ended our country’s original sin, slavery.” The gyroscope is responsible for all kinds of other positive developments. But what is the gyroscope? The “gyroscope is we,” Perez said—Democrats, the good guys.

If none of this adds up for you, if denatured TED talks served alongside $8 beers and bad pico de gallo don’t excite your political sensibilities, fear not. This is the new Democratic Party, the one whose congressional representatives recently voted to loosen regulations on payday lenders. They’re still figuring it out. “We’ve got a heckuva lot of work to do,” Perez admitted, a comment that could have applied as much to his fumbling remarks as to his party’s waning electoral power. But of this he was certain: “The Democratic Party is back, folks.”

by Jacob Silverman, The Baffler |  Read more:
Image: DonkeyHotey

Pets or Livestock?

Say you're an overprivileged Tech Bro looking for a challenge. Sure, you could take another crack at vanquishing the Grim Reaper, or some variation of a seasteading Utopia. Or you could hack a bit further at the privatized space travel obsessions that put such a spring in Jeff Bezos’s step, or join up with Elon Musk’s transparently phallic quest for a continent-straddling super train. But honestly, doesn’t the whole moonshot shtick feel a little played out? How many times can you plausibly disrupt the basic fabric of our shared being, after all? And really, why bother engineering a pluperfect human future when it looks like the cryptocurrency fad alone will plunge the global climate into irremediable squalor? At some point, the fever dream of a quantum software-enabled cosmic upgrade simply becomes a sick cosmic joke.

Ah, but fear not, energetic code-happy millionaires: the dream is not yet dead. Anthony Levandowski, an engineering wizard behind the driverless car, has stepped forward to bring the ethos of innovation-at-all-costs to its logical culmination, by marshalling it into the basis of a bona fide religion. Behold, O weary pilgrim, the church of the Way of the Future; bow down before the burning bush of artificial intelligence, and proclaim the glory of the One True God!

Oh, scoffers and cynics will note that Levandowski’s startup carries with it a strong whiff of desperate opportunism. Yes, the prophet of the Future’s Way began just as his own personal future was beclouded with a gigantic lawsuit alleging that Levandowksi had purloined Google’s intellectual property when he brought his driverless-car portfolio over to Uber from Google’s parent company, Alphabet. Indeed, as Wired scribe Mark Harris notes, Levandowski drew up the bylaws for the fledgling church the day after Uber wrote him a letter last May informing him that he’d be fired if he failed to cooperate with the company’s investigation of Alphabet’s complaint.(As he was, two weeks later.) And yes, while he was at Google, Levandowski created a suite of shell companies to serve as repositories for his tech—and in a suitably daring twist, even got Google to pay out handsome subcontracting fees to the paper entities. (In the run-up to next week’s scheduled trial for the Google-Uber suit, both Levandowski and Uber deny any wrongdoing.) It takes no great stretch of the imagination to suppose that the Way of the Future might be little more than a way for Levandowski, already a multi-millionaire, to park his riches in a tax-free structure, in the great tradition of other Golden State visionaries.

But as any ardent Roy Moore supporter in Birmingham will tell you, God selects imperfect vessels to work out his will on the stage of global history. The least we could do, in fairness to the prophet, is to examine the basic catechism of the brave new cyberfaith. It first bears noting that Levandowski abjures the mantel of prophecy; his formal role in the Way of the Future church, according to its IRS filings, is “dean.” And that seems entirely fitting, since the church, like Silicon Valley at large, is devoted to the mystic worship of intelligence as the great motive force of Creation. The simple, syllogistic brunt of the WOTF gospel is that the development of serious, reality-bending artificial intelligence—“strong AI” in the argot of cybernetics adepts—is an already settled historical inevitability. And since the moment of Skynet-like sentience is already all but embedded in the coding protocols of the digital world, savvy humans had best start preparing for the millennial reign of the AI godhead now. Here’s how he explains the case to bow down before our AI overlords:

Humans are in charge of the planet because we are smarter than other animals and are able to build tools and apply rules. In the future, if something is much, much smarter, there’s going to be a transition as to who is actually in charge. What we want is the peaceful, serene transition of control of the planet from humans to whatever. And to ensure that the “whatever” knows who helped it get along.

The “whatever” in question will clearly possess the great primal reasoning powers of a God, Levandowski goes on to explain—which means that we, its human charges, will serve as a great body of nodal, just-in-time knowledge sherpas, dispensing an invaluable crowdsourced OS to the Universe’s new ruler. Small wonder that the church’s Scripture-in-the-making is termed “the Manual,” and that the quest for meaningful human experience in this scheme of things is downgraded into glorified concierge work:

Part of it being smarter than us means it will decide how it evolves, but at least we can decide how we act around it. I would love for the machine to see us as its beloved elders that it respects and takes care of. We would want this intelligence to say, “Humans should still have rights, even though I’m in charge.’’

In short order, though, the uplifting, exoticized talk of humans docenting the AI through its sovereign domain as respected tribal elders takes a darker turn, as Levandowski ponders the human prospect in this Matrix-like version of the singularity: “Do you want to be a pet or livestock?” he abruptly asks Harris. “We give pets medical attention, food, grooming, and entertainment. But an animal that’s biting you, attacking you, barking at you, and being annoying? I don’t want to go there.” (...)

This may strike more conventional believers as a bizarre prescription for worship, but neither it nor Levandowski’s broader account of AI’s likely cognitive dominion over the human future is remotely fringe, when viewed against the backdrop of the deeply gnostic cultural dispensation of the digital age. After all, it is by now a taken-for-granted precept of all things tech that the forward march of human history is a sustained study in quantum cognitive improvement. It only stands to reason that for us, as for the first-century Gnostics, this process should issue in a theology of self-created divinity.

It bears reminding in this context that, pace Levandowski and his many likeminded gnostic peers in Silicon Valley, neither humans nor gods in our tradition have commanded ostensible cosmic sovereignty on the basis of their intelligence. No, what in fact has inspired religious awe across the last few Western millennia was precisely the profound unknowability of divine aims and the grander cosmic divine. This is, famously, the lesson of the anti-Manichean spiritual tribulations recorded in the Book of Job. It’s also why, for instance, one of the great mystic texts in medieval Catholicism is called The Cloud of Unknowing—and why even a firebreathing colonial evangelical preacher like Jonathan Edwards ultimately set aside his lurid pulpit visions of eternal perdition in favor of a chastened acceptance of human limits that he called “Consent to Being in general.”

by Chris Lehmann, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: TheDigitalArtist

Luxury Socialized Medicine

The standard case for a single-payer health insurance system is pretty well known. Anyone can get care without courting financial ruin. Monumental personal decisions, like when to have a child or whether to leave or take a job, no longer hinge on the whims of an employer or the dysfunctions of the private insurance market. Surprise hospital bills, endless phone calls with insurance companies, juggling premiums, copays, and deductibles — all will be things of the past.

The case against single-payer often boils down to a single word: rationing. When critics peddle scare stories about Canadian or British “waiting lists,” they’re trying to conjure images of scarcity and austerity — the social-democratic equivalent of Soviet bread lines.

The truth, of course, is that you only have to look around to see that health care in America is already rationed. Try finding an in-demand specialist willing to take your “bronze-tier” insurance plan, or paying for high-priced specialty prescriptions out of pocket. Health care rationing is a fact of life in this country.

But there’s another important point to be made about single-payer and “rationing”: in many places around the world, national health insurance not only isn’t austere — it’s downright luxurious.

A Card up Their Sleeve

Americans, with our predatory health care system, can be easy to impress. The simple fact that the French can visit any health facility in the entire country, for example, seems astonishing. No provider is out of network, because there’s no such thing as a network. Instead, there’s a universal public insurance system that can’t turn applicants down, can’t terminate insurance, and almost never denies claims.

In France there’s no such thing as a deductible: insurance kicks in from the first euro billed. Since there’s no need to hire people to rifle through reams of paperwork and make judgment calls about denying claims and refusing coverage — and because the system has no stockholders to pay dividends to — the French insurance system spends next to nothing on paperwork.

Prices for treatments are fixed, and cost the patient next to nothing. For Americans accustomed to the need to change doctors every time they change plans, change plans every time they change jobs, and navigate things like claims denials, unpredictable charges, and endless paperwork, it seems extravagant.

But the conveniences don’t stop there. Since French providers aren’t carved up into networks, the government is able to issue what’s called a carte vitale, or “life card,” to all legal residents over the age of 15. With the patient’s permission, the card contains centralized information on the patient’s every medical visit, treatment, prescription, surgery and so on, going back to 1998. (Children’s records are stored on a parent’s card).

The physician inserts the carte vitale into a card-reader and the patient’s medical records pop up on a screen. Not only does it help doctors offer informed care, but it makes billing simple and eliminates much of the nightmare of transferring medical records. The physician logs the treatments, hits a button, and then waits roughly three days to be paid.

When doctors go on house calls, they take a portable card-reader with them. That’s right — in France they make house calls. Patients can request one anytime by calling a round-the-clock national hotline. The visit costs just thirty-one euros. (...)

Will You Still Feed Me?

Long-term care is another area where universal health care systems deliver the goods. Eight million Americans require long-term care services, most of them elderly. As many as two-thirds can’t afford to buy long-term care insurance, and Medicare doesn’t cover extended stays in nursing homes. Without coverage, the price of assisted living is comparable to private college tuition. As a result, many middle-class Americans’ best hope of affording long-term care is becoming eligible for Medicaid, which requires selling off assets and then draining nearly all personal savings to meet means-tested criteria. (...)

Japan implemented its long-term care insurance system when policymakers realized that changing family structures and rapid aging meant that relying on informal care would inevitably lead to a crisis like the one currently facing the United States. They made the choice to socialize care to avoid the dystopian scenario of millions of neglected, impoverished elderly moldering in underfunded institutions — preciselythe scenario that American conservatives equate with public care systems.

In a study of long-term care insurance recipients, one regular at a Japanese senior community center said, “Since I’m injured and can’t move as well, I used to just lay there, stare at the ceiling and listen to the radio, and feel the changing of the seasons. Then someone from the Hana House recommended to me if I would like to go to the day services.” He described becoming active in crafting workshops at the center, which he claims increased his mobility. “Because of this place I’ve become a lot healthier.”

“First and foremost,” said another survey respondent, “I feel a sense of safety.”

by Meagan Day, Jacobin |  Read more:

Image: Jan Steen, circa 1660

Walter Molino in La domenica del corriere - May 1958
via:
[ed. Veterinarians, or psycho sushi chefs.]

DRM's Dead Canary: How We Just Lost the Web, What We Learned from It, and What We Need to Do Next

EFF has been fighting against DRM and the laws behind it for a decade and a half, intervening in the US Broadcast Flag, the UN Broadcasting Treaty, the European DVB CPCM standard, the W3C EME standard and many other skirmishes, battles and even wars over the years. With that long history behind us, there are two things we want you to know about DRM:

1. Everybody on the inside secretly knows that DRM technology is irrelevant, but DRM law is everything; and
2. The reason companies want DRM has nothing to do with copyright.

These two points have just been demonstrated in a messy, drawn-out fight over the standardization of DRM in browsers, and since we threw a lot of blood and treasure at that fight, one thing we hope to salvage is an object lesson that will drive these two points home and provide a roadmap for the future of DRM fighting.

DRM IS TECHNOLOGICALLY BANKRUPT; DRM LAW IS DEADLY

Here's how DRM works, at a high level: a company wants to provide a customer (you) with digital asset (like a movie, a book, a song, a video game or an app), but they want to control what you do with that file after you get it.

So they encrypt the file. We love encryption. Encryption works. With relatively little effort, anyone can scramble a file so well that no one will ever be able to decrypt it unless they're provided with the key.

Let's say this is Netflix. They send you a movie that's been scrambled and they want to be sure you can't save it and watch it later from your hard-drive. But they also need to give you a way to view the movie, too. At some point, that means unscrambling the movie. And there's only one way to unscramble a file that's been competently encrypted: you have to use the key.

So Netflix also gives you the unscrambling key.

But if you have the key, you can just unscramble the Netflix movies and save them to your hard drive. How can Netflix give you the key but control how you use it?

Netflix has to hide the key, somewhere on your computer, like in a browser extension or an app. This is where the technological bankruptcy comes in. Hiding something well is hard. Hiding something well in a piece of equipment that you give to your adversary to take away with them and do anything they want with is impossible.

Maybe you can't find the keys that Netflix hid in your browser. But someone can: a bored grad student with a free weekend, a self-taught genius decapping a chip in their basement, a competitor with a full-service lab. One tiny flaw in any part of the fragile wrapping around these keys, and they're free.

And once that flaw is exposed, anyone can write an app or a browser plugin that does have a save button. It's game over for the DRM technology. (The keys escape pretty regularly, just as fast as they can be revoked by the DRM companies.)

DRM gets made over the course of years, by skilled engineers, at a cost of millions of dollars. It gets broken in days, by teenagers, with hobbyist equipment. That's not because the DRM-makers are stupid, it's because they're doing something stupid.

Which is where the law comes in. DRM law gives rightsholders more forceful, far-ranging legal powers than laws governing any other kind of technology. In 1998, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), whose Section 1201 provides for felony liability for anyone commercially engaged in bypassing a DRM system: 5 years in prison and a $500,000 fine for a first offense. Even noncommercial bypass of DRM is subject to liability. It also makes it legally risky to even talk about how to bypass a DRM system.

So the law shores up DRM systems with a broad range of threats. If Netflix designs a video player that won't save a video unless you break some DRM, they now have the right to sue -- or sic the police -- on any rival that rolls out an improved alternative streaming client, or a video-recorder that works with Netflix. Such tools wouldn't violate copyright law any more than a VCR or a Tivo does, but because that recorder would have to break Netflix DRM, they could use DRM law to crush it.

DRM law goes beyond mere bans on tampering with DRM. Companies also use Section 1201 of the DMCA to threaten security researchers who discover flaws in their products. The law becomes a weapon they can aim at anyone who wants to warn their customers (still you) that the products you're relying on aren't fit for use. That includes warning people about flaws in DRM that expose them to being hacked.

It's not just the USA and not just the DMCA, either. The US Trade Representative has "convinced" countries around the world to adopt a version of this rule.

DRM HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH COPYRIGHT

DRM law has the power to do untold harm. Because it affords corporations the power to control the use of their products after sale, the power to decide who can compete with them and under what circumstances, and even who gets to warn people about defective products, DRM laws represent a powerful temptation.

Some things that aren't copyright infringement: buying a DVD while you're on holiday and playing it when you get home. It is obviously not a copyright infringement to go into a store in (say) New Delhi and buy a DVD and bring it home to (say) Topeka. The rightsholder made their movie, sold it to the retailer, and you paid the retailer the asking price. This is the opposite of copyright infringement. That's paying for works on the terms set by the rightsholder. But because DRM stops you from playing out-of-region discs on your home player, the studios can invoke copyright law to decide where you can consume the copyrighted works you've bought, fair and square.

Other not-infringements: fixing your car (GM uses DRM to control who can diagnose an engine, and to force mechanics to spend tens of thousands of dollars for diagnostic information they could otherwise determine themselves or obtain from third parties); refilling an ink cartridge (HP pushed out a fake security update that added DRM to millions of inkjet printers so that they'd refuse remanufactured or third-party cartridges), or toasting home-made bread (though this hasn't happened yet, there's no reason that a company couldn't put DRM in its toasters to control whose bread you can use). (...)

WHICH BRINGS US TO THE W3C

The W3C is the world's foremost open web standards body, a consortium whose members (companies, universities, government agencies, civil society groups and others) engage in protracted wrangles over the best way for everyone to deliver web content. They produce "recommendations" (W3C-speak for "standards") that form the invisible struts that hold up the web. These agreements, produced through patient negotiation and compromise, represent an agreement by major stakeholders about the best (or least-worst) way to solve thorny technological problems.

In 2013, Netflix and a few other media companies convinced the W3C to start work on a DRM system for the web. This DRM system, Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), represented a sharp departure from the W3C's normal business. First, EME would not be a complete standard: the organization would specify an API through which publishers and browser vendors would make DRM work, but the actual "content decryption module" (CDM) wouldn't be defined by the standard. That means that EME was a standard in name only: if you started a browser company and followed all the W3C's recommendations, you still wouldn't be able to play back a Netflix video. For that, you'd need Netflix's permission.

It's hard to overstate how weird this is. Web standards are about "permissionless interoperability." The standards for formatting text mean that anyone can make a tool that can show you pages from the New York Times' website; images from Getty; or interactive charts on Bloomberg. The companies can still decide who can see which pages on their websites (by deciding who gets a password and which parts of the website each password unlocks), but they don't get to decide who can make the web browsing program you type the password into in order to access the website.

A web in which every publisher gets to pick and choose which browsers you can use to visit their sites is a very different one from the historical web. Historically, anyone could make a new browser by making sure it adhered to W3C recommendations, and then start to compete. And while the web has always been dominated by a few browsers, which browsers dominate have changed every decade or so, as new companies and even nonprofits like Mozilla (who make Firefox) overthrew the old order. Technologies that have stood in the way of this permissionless interoperabilty -- for instance, patent-encumbered video -- have been seen as impediments to the idea of the open web, not standardization opportunities.

When the W3C starts making technologies that only work when they're blessed by a handful of entertainment companies, they're putting their thumbs -- their fists -- on the scales in favor of ensuring that the current browser giants get to enjoy a permanent reign.

But that's the least of it. Until EME, W3C standards were designed to give the users of the web (e.g. you) more control over what your computer did while you were accessing other peoples' websites. With EME -- and for the first time ever -- the W3C is designing technology that takes away your control. EME is designed to allow Netflix -- and other big companies -- to decide what your browser does, even (especially) when you disagree about what that should be.

Since the earliest days of computing, there's been a simmering debate about whether computers exist to control their users, or vice versa (as the visionary computer scientist and education specialist Seymour Papert put it, "children should be programming the computer rather than being programmed by it" -- that applies equally well to adults). Every W3C standard until 2017 was on the side of people controlling computers. EME breaks with that. It is a subtle, but profound shift.

WHY WOULD THE W3C DO THIS?

Ay yi yi. That is the three billion user question.

by Cory Doctorow, EFF |  Read more:

Image: EFF

via:

A Survivor's Defense of Al Franken

I feel exploited. And I feel sick.

I’m sick of pedophiles. I’m sick of rapists. I’m sick of sexual violence and sexual predators. I am sick of being reminded moment after moment of the times — yes plural — that I have been shocked out of my body, stripped of my power and deprived of the right to defend my own body by a man sexually forcing himself onto me. More than that, I’m sick of my traumas and the traumas of other survivors being exploited for political gain and emotional satisfaction on both the left and the right. Physically. Sick.

I am sick to know that I cannot protect myself or my daughter from the pussy grabbing woman hater that controls every single law and policy that guides this nation. I am sick to know that Roy Moore exists on this planet and that there are millions of people supportive of a known pedophile holding power over millions upon millions of women and girls in the state of Alabama and the United States. I am sick that a member of the Trump campaign and former state Senator in Oklahoma plead guilty to child trafficking.

And I am sick that people like Leeanne Tweeden feel comfortable enough to take the traumas of the women and children that have been the true victims of sexual violence and used them for her own personal gains and the political goals of the Republican Party.

Leeanne Tweeden is the woman that recently accused Al Franken of sexually violating her at a rehearsal for a USO comedy show in 2006. Her decision to take her story public after 10 years of “silence” has been framed by both the left and the right as a survivor’s act of bravery that demands immediate attention and strict consequences.

I see Leeanne Tweeden’s actions quite differently.

What Leeanne Tweeden has done is stolen the very real traumas of very real survivors — people like me — and mocked them. What she has done is taken our pain and our bravery and our strength and exploited it on behalf of a network of people that actively prey on the women and children she is pretending to show solidarity with. What she is doing is vile and it is disgusting and it is dangerous on every personal and political level associated with sexual assault in the United States.

Perhaps if she was, in fact, a survivor of sexual assault she would understand the damage that is being caused by her actions. But she is not a survivor. And she is definitely not a victim of Al Franken.

Leeanne was never raped. She was never assaulted. And she was never the victim of sexual violence or harassment. She was a willing and active participant in a comedy show that involved sexualized behaviors. She consented to participating. She actively engaged in and invited similar behaviors with other performers other than Al Franken at the event.

As recently and clearly described by journalist S. Novi:

“Both SNL and USO stage skits are well-known to be over the top when it comes to topics such as sex, but the USO performances are even more so due to the audience of mostly military males. Since the days of Bob Hope, there have always been beautiful bombshell women showing up in scanty outfits and sexual dialogue running from innuendos to outright blatant views. If you are either a male or female performing in these shows you are expected to play along.

…. there are a number of images as well as videos appearing that show that Tweeden didn’t seem to have a problem with sexual performances on stage including that of her grabbing the butt of a Country and Western performer and rubbing her behind up against him and the singer grabbing at her butt. Additional videos of the tour have included a very sexual performance with the comedian Robin Williams as well as the real on-stage ‘kiss’ with Franken.

In this case, we have a woman that signed up for known sexually oriented skits and performances that she approved of, and rehearsed, and then performed many of them onstage in both a preplanned and ad hoc way.”

Leanne Tweeden was a consenting and contracted performer for the USO then, just as she is a contracted performer for the right wing now. She was not then and is not now a survivor. She was not then and is not now a victim of Al Franken.

Leanne Tweeden was a consenting and contracted performer for the USO then, just as she is a contracted performer for the right wing now. She was not then and is not now a survivor. She was not then and is not now a victim of Al Franken.

Al Franken’s tasteless joke didn’t make her fear for her life. It didn’t make her burn the clothes she was wearing that night. It didn’t make her scrub herself clean in the shower until her skin tore off. This joke didn’t keep her up shaking and puking and sobbing on the floor of a shower as she bled down a drainpipe. It didn’t send her to the clinic for STD tests.

Al Franken’s joke didn’t crush her notion of who she was or how she could walk in this world. This joke didn’t give her PTSD or depression or any of the lasting forms of struggle that true rape and assault victims must face minute by minute. It hasn’t informed every relationship she’s had since. And it wasn’t in any way what so ever a form of rape, assault or even harassment.

Leeanne Tweeden was not then and is not now a victim. A very large part of me wishes she had been, though. (...)

What Tweeden is, is a willing participant in a new skit in which the Republican Party uses her completely normal interaction with Al Franken as an excuse to accuse a Democratic Senator of sexual assault, deflect from the charges of rape and pedophilia in the highest ranks of their own party, and test drive a strategy by which they can gain increasing amounts of power by exploiting the sexual traumas of women and children.

And their plan is working. Almost inexplicably. (...)

That’s because one of the most common rhetorical strategies employed by the Republican Party is to deflect an accusation by turning the charges on them around to the accuser. And as common and predictable as this strategy is — the Democrats still haven’t come up with a consistent method to counter it.

Just as in any game of competition, and especially political competition, one side can only succeed if the other side fails to stop them. And fail is exactly what the Democrats are doing. Failing.

Rather than taking a stand against the exploitation of sexual assault survivors, they are allowing the Republican Party to use our trauma as a cover to advance their own political agendas. Worse, they have taken the political bait hook, line, and sinker and rather than launching a full-scale counterattack on the GOP, they have turned on themselves and started calling for the resignation of a member of their own party.

Rather than focusing on accusations against Donald Trump, Roy Moore or Ralph Shortey — the attention is turned onto Minnesota Senator Al Franken. Not only do the Republicans succeed in turning the attention away from themselves, but they succeed in turning the Democrats against each other. And the final narrative becomes:

It’s not the Republican Party supporting pussy grabbers and pedophilia. It’s the Democrats!

The Democratic Party is practically handing the nation’s women and children over to pedophiles and rapists simply because they asked them to. And if we let Senators like Al Franken — representatives that have voting records filled with support for women’s rights — fall to pedophiles like Roy Moore, then we are allowing the real traumas of exploited women be used as an excuse to put more women and girls in harm’s way.

This is what terrifies me most.

by Anonymous, SIIP |  Read more:

[ed. There's even a term for this strategy: DARVO.]

How to Customize Your Android Phone

You can live a perfectly delightful mobile existence using an Android phone without tweaking a single setting. But where's the fun in that? Especially when a handful of downloads and a few minutes of tinkering can turn, say, your Galaxy S8 from a TouchWiz minefield into a digital zen garden.

This has always been true. And if you're an Android power user, if you've installed a custom ROM (or even know what that means), this guide is not for you. But there are two billion active monthly Android devices in the world now. Lots of those devices are smartphones. One of them might be yours. And if there's anything about that Pixel or Moto or Galaxy or LG that bothers you even a little—the keyboard, the gestures, the app icons—know that you can make it better. Here's how.

Ready For Launch

Let's start big with the piece of software called the launcher, which dictates not just how your smartphone looks but how you interact with it. Your phone came with a launcher, although you likely just think of it as "the way my phone works."

A lot of the time, your out-of-the-box experience works just fine, especially if it hews close to the stock Android you'll find in a Pixel or Nexus phone. But sometimes manufacturers marry terrific hardware with clunky software, or include embellishments that feel more like bloat. Sometimes you want more tinkering choices; sometimes you want fewer. Sometimes you just want to try something new. For all of those times, you can simply install a launcher.

An extreme example might help contextualize this a little better. One Launcher transforms your Android phone into something that very much resembles iOS. A gimmick? Sure! But at the very least it gives you a small taste of how the other UI lives.

Even Microsoft, despite largely tapping out of its own mobile operating system aspirations, offered a darn good Android launcher called Arrow for two years; it freshens up your wallpaper every morning, and promises quick access to your most frequently used apps and contacts. It recently overhauled that into Microsoft Launcher, now in beta, which among other features lets you pick up where you left off on your PC. It's like the macOS Handoff feature, except between a Windows computer and an Android device. Neat!

And so on. The main knock against launchers is that they can slow your system down. It depends on how heavy a coat it puts on, but generally you either won't notice or, if you pick the right one, won't mind the trade-off.

But which one is best? Apologies for the copout, but it really depends on what you're looking for. And if you don't even know that, go ahead and download Nova Launcher, which leads practically every "best launcher" roundup you'll find. Nova's a delightful chameleon, giving you as many customization options as you could ever possibly want. Just clear out a little time on your calendar before you start; from gestures to themes to subgrids to notifications, you've got a lot of potential choices to make.

Personally, I had used the Google Now launcher to try to get as close to stock Android as I could on my Galaxy S7. But when Google pulled support earlier this year—and since it only makes its Pixel Launcher available to Pixel devices—I hopped over to Action Launcher, which prides itself on keeping pace with Pixel and Android Oreo features—even if you're still on Android Jellybean—with some extra customization built in and an emphasis on shortcuts for quick results. You know, action. Case in point? When Google relocated the search bar to the bottom of the display on the Pixel, Action alerted me that it offered that option within a few days.

That works for me! It might not for you. The good news is, most Android launchers come free, so you can experiment until you find one that suits you. Also, Google offers an Android "taste test" that recommends various set-ups you might like.

To the Window, To the Wallpapers

It's been so long since I've looked at the stock Android wallpaper, I don't even remember what it looks like. I'm sure it's ... fine? But you can do better! And it takes no time at all.

All you need to do to rotate in a new display background is tap and hold a blank spot on your homescreen. From there, a bottom row of options will appear: Wallpapers, Widgets, and Settings. Tap on Wallpapers, and from there you'll have the option to sift through My photos, or choose from your apps that provide "live wallpapers," animated backgrounds that liven up your screen time. (MLB At Bat, for instance, offers team-based wallpapers, while Shadow Galaxy puts your apps in front of a swirling nebula.) Be careful with live wallpapers, though; they can be hell on your battery.

In fact, be careful with wallpapers generally. There are countless apps to choose from, but not all of them are entirely reputable. In some cases, developers have even used wallpaper apps to sneak malware past Google Play's defenses. That's not to scare you off of wallpapers altogether; just try to stick to reputable vendors as best you can. Unfortunately, you mostly have to go by downloads and reviews, which obviously aren't foolproof.

At the very least, Google offers a separate Wallpapers app with a diverse array of images from Google Earth and beyond, and gives you the option of waking up each day with a freshly image. If that's not often enough, Wallpapers HD can cough up a new high-resolution wallpaper every hour, from a collection of over 80,000 images, tailored specifically to your screen size.

Icon Believe It

The look of your Android smartphone goes way beyond your wallpaper, or even your launcher. In fact, unless you're some sort of home-screen swiping maximalist, app icons cover the bulk of your display. Why tend to the other facets of your Android aesthetic but leave that real estate up to each app developer's whims?

Icon packs serve a dual purpose in that respect. First, they prettify ugly or boring standard app icons. Maybe more importantly, though, they give your home screen a unified look. I use Rugos Premium, which gives my apps a sort of retro rumpled paper look. Why not! There's also the Cornie Oldie pack, which is also vintage but flattened out and with less muted colors. There's the Revolution icon pack, for the minimalist in your life. Lines just straight-up uses a bunch of white-lined silhouettes. And on and on. You won't have to look long to find one that fits your mood.

There are a few important things to note before you venture into icon customization. First, not every pack has an icon for every app. If you have less popular downloads installed and on your home screen, you may be stuck using the default icon. It's a little jarring. You can always either just hide those outliers in the app drawer, or collect them on their own screen so that they at least have common company. Better still, some icon packs slap an icon mask on top of every single app, regardless of if it specifically designed a replacement, giving everything at least a somewhat similar vibe.

Along those same lines, after you download your icon pack of choice, you'll need to install it through your launcher, which may not be fully compatible. Brace yourself for some funky results if you opt for less fully developed versions of either. Which brings us to the last point: A lot of developers in the icon/wallpaper world are part-timers and hobbyists. You may not get the level of fit and polish you'd expect from, say, a Netflix or a Robinhood. And the same security cautions mentioned for wallpapers apply here as well.

by Brian Barrett, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Delicious

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How Does Costco Sell 18-Year-Old Single Malt Scotch for $38?

The geekiest factions of the online whiskey community can be particularly nasty, with insiders railing on “taters” (uninformed collectors) and lambasting the limited-edition releases they pursue. That makes it all the more surprising that, over the past year, there’s been a groundswell of support among geeks for the Kirkland Signature collection. These Costco house whiskies have likewise landed solid scores on Whisky Advocate and Wine Enthusiast of late; they even nabbed a top prize at the New York World Wine & Spirits Competition. They’re cheap, too—whether it be a 1.75 liter of Canadian whisky for $20 or an 18 Year Old Sherry Cask Finish Highlands Scotch for $38.

It’s this downright impossible price that has the online geeks playing a guessing game as to not only where, exactly, these whiskies are coming from, but how Costco gets the prices—specifically on age-statement whiskies—so low.

“It’s called undercutting their own undercutting,” the vice president of sales for a major spirits company told me [he didn’t wish to be identified]. What he means is, if Costco’s bottles of Jim Beam and Jack Daniel’s are already at cut-rate prices, the wholesale giant’s comparable house brands are intentionally sold for even cheaper than that. (And, that same VP claims, intentionally designed to look like well-known bottles from major brands.)

Likewise, many whiskey bloggers have noticed that Costco seems to obscure what they actually offer, with no master list available anywhere online. Most of their lower-end bottlings come in the popular 1.75 liter “handle,” like Kirkland Signature Blended Scotch Whisky ($18) and Kirkland Signature Tennessee Straight Bourbon Whiskey “Premium Small Batch” ($30). In the past few years they’ve also offered a rotating, limited selection of premium Scotch, like a blended 24-year-old for $70 and a Speyside 25-year-old for just $89.

Meanwhile, a typical Speyside 25-year-old from, say, Glenfarclas, hits shelves around $200. Laphroaig’s 27-year-old was just released at $750. And Highland Park’s 40-year-old comes out in minimal quantities each year for around $3,500.

by Aaron Goldfarb, Punch | Read more:
Image: Lizzie Monroe

I Had Never Touched a Gun...Then I Bought One.

The idea that gun regulations should be regarded as a threat to constitutional freedom is a treacherous hoax. And yet, it's patently unfair to paint all gun owners (roughly one-third of Americans) as crazy rubes tooling up for the day the revenuers show up to raid their compound.

Some people just like guns, and it doesn't make them crazy and it doesn't make them dangerous. It makes them gun enthusiasts, the same way some people like cars or guitars or cats.

That may be obvious to you. It wasn't to me. I've lived in cities my entire life, including a few (LA, NY, DC) with notorious criminal reputations, and I currently reside in the downtown Seattle neighborhood Pioneer Square, where I hear gunfire out my bedroom window on a regular basis. And still I found I had no idea what would motivate a rational civilian in a city like Seattle to want to own, and carry, a weapon designed to intimidate and kill other humans.

So I decided to buy one and find out.

Right on Target

My project was simple: Buy a handgun and carry it, loaded, on my person, for some period of time. My goal was even simpler: See how it felt. Prior to this experiment, I had never even held a handgun. The only one I ever saw up close belonged to my father, a Walther PPK; he showed it to me once when I was 18. I didn't pick it up because I was worried it might go off.

I didn't know the difference between one brand and another, I didn't understand that "caliber" referred to size of ammunition, and until I actually thought about it, I didn't realize why some guns were called pistols and others revolvers. I was a neophyte, verging on phobic. I thought of guns as dark magic, unpredictable talismans, better left alone.

I had no illusion that learning to hold, shoot, own, care for, and carry one would make me an expert in anything, only that it would bring me one step closer to being able to participate in the gun-control debate without having to say, "I mean, I've never even held a gun before, but..."

The first step was to apply for a concealed carry permit.

I walked two blocks from my apartment to the county courthouse, went through the metal detector, turned left, and entered the small, plain King County Sheriff's Office. There was one other person waiting. The clerk asked how he could help me. Making an effort neither to wince nor apologize, I said, "I'd like to apply for a concealed carry permit?"

I expected heads to turn, brows to furrow, needles to scratch off records. Instead, he handed me a clipboard with the application on it and a pen and gestured to an empty counter where I could fill it out. I filled it out. (...)

I spent a long time walking around that small store, pretending I had any idea what I was looking at or for. When the sales staff asked if I needed help, I said no, no, thanks, just looking. The truth was that I was scared to state my business, lest it be made clear how little I knew about what I was there to buy.

But by my third circuit around the accessories, I was afraid of coming off like a deranged person, so I finally caved and asked about the difference between the Glock series 19 Gen 4, retailing at $550, and the Gen 5, which went for $599. The salesman listed a bunch of features that I forgot at the precise instant I heard them, but I said, "I'll take it."

Next came a predictable barrage of accessory upselling: a holster, a case, a cleaning kit, ammunition, etc. I pretty much acquiesced to everything he recommended, but I drew the line at a gun safe, reasoning that there are no children anywhere near my life, and my dogs were unlikely to go snooping around the locking hard-shell briefcase in which I was planning to store the weapon.

I had to show my ID and concealed carry permit, and fill out a form very similar to the one I'd filled out at the sheriff's office. Then he entered me into the background check database. People always lament how easy it is to buy a gun, suggesting that the background check process is too lenient, so the moment he pressed send, for journalistic purposes, I started the timer on my phone. He apologized that it seemed to be running a little slow. Then he said, "Okay, you're good to go!" and began to ring me up. Elapsed time: four minutes, 58 seconds. It had taken me longer to pick out a holster. Total cost: $892.05.

Gun, Gun, Gun, Gun, Gun, Gun, Gun

When I got the gun home, I stared at it, held it, pondered it, and tried hard to think of it as mine. There it was, undeniably owned by me, in all its clunky, boxy, Glocky glory.

Sitting there on my kitchen table, unloaded but next to a box of bullets, it was almost as though the gun was pulsating. The center of gravity in the room changed unmistakably. It was now a room with a gun in it.

As I loaded the magazine with bullets (a bit of a squeeze, PS), I literally flinched as I imagined misfiring. What if one of these little brass and lead numbers went out the window and hit someone waiting for the bus across the street, or went through the wall and hit one of my neighbors, or went across the room and hit one of my dogs? How many lives could be ended, and how many more ruined, all because of this ugly L-shaped tool?

The design genius of a firearm is that everything about it bends toward functionality. You have to work to keep your finger off that trigger. Once the bullets are in the magazine, and the magazine is in the gun, a tense coil stands poised to push the first bullet into the chamber, and once it's there, the potential energy waiting behind it is massive. Once triggered, that energy has started wars, destroyed families, cut short the lives of artists, leaders, and ordinary people who did nothing to deserve it. It's a lot of destructive capability to be holding in your hand or wearing on your hip.

You could almost say that a gun wants to be shot. I know that sounds like a magic busload of hippie nonsense, and I have no doubt that experienced gun collectors would scoff at the idea, but I swear I felt it. Not like it was calling out to me or anything, but as soon as it was in the room, it was the main thing about that room, a temperature raiser, an undeniable source of power.

That became true everywhere I took it for the next several weeks, even though I almost never disclosed its presence to the people I was with. I took it off when I got to work and when I went places where they serve alcohol, but I wore it pretty much everywhere else, in a Eidolon graphite holster inside the waistband of my pants (the holster model I bought was designed as an "appendix carry"). Though the Glock is easy to shoot, it is extraordinarily impractical to carry if you don't want anyone to know you're carrying it.

It's also physically uncomfortable. Sitting down involves a good deal of futzing to keep it from pushing up into your kidneys. And wherever you go, there's a bunch of plastic and metal digging into your stomach, pelvis, and thigh. But you can get used to it if you're determined to.

The thing I found harder to get used to was this feeling: I'm carrying a gun. Holy shit. There's a gun in my pants. I wonder if anyone can see it poking through my shirt. Why would anyone be looking at my shirt? Because there's a gun underneath it! Because, as previously mentioned, I have a gun. Gun, gun, gun, gun, gun, gun, gun, gun, gun. (The inside of my head was starting to sound like the bumper on Law and Order: GUN-GUN!) The sensation of gun at the center of everything, the existence of which was known only to me, never subsided.

I could imagine how some people might feel emboldened or vindicated by the existence of this secret power. But to me, it never felt like that. I never felt glamorous, like a secret agent in a movie. I just felt furtive and untrustworthy, afraid of being found out. The few times I went out without carrying, having forgotten or just chosen not to bother, I didn't feel unsafe. I felt unburdened. (...)

I believe the NRA's rhetoric about "good guys with guns" is largely bullshit, the same as all marketing that tells you one thing in order to sell you another. Nonetheless, I thought that if my experiment was going to be fair, I should try a little harder to put myself in situations where I might have reason to feel, if not actually imperiled, then at least uneasy. Fortunately, I live right around the corner from what KIRO once called "the most dangerous block in Seattle."

The stretch of Third Avenue between Yesler and James has a vastly higher incidence of reported violent crime—including drive-by shootings, robberies, and homicides—than any other comparable block in the city. Though KIRO's reporting on the street was predictably hysterical, there's no denying the air of desperation and illness that pervades the area. I have walked down it countless times coming to or from home. It is, in fact, where I went to apply for my concealed carry permit. I now made a point of walking down the block, at several times of day, while exercising the right granted me by that permit. It felt ghoulish, like I was looking for trouble where trouble already abounds. (...)

It's one thing for an active-duty soldier to live in a state of being mentally prepared to kill at any time. It's something else for an accountant, or a programmer, or a bus driver. I believe living in a state of constant readiness for disaster invites disaster. I believe the presence of a gun invites problems for which a gun seems like a solution.

I knew there was an element of this experiment that was playing with fire. I knew I was carrying around the power to kill anyone I saw.

by Sean Nelson, The Stranger |  Read more:

Image: Rob Dobi

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My Dinner With Andre

[ed. Enjoy this while you can before the copyright police set in. If you're of short attention span, skip over the first third about mysticism in the theater arts (although quite interesting) and start around 40:00. If you're a fan of the Princess Bride, check out (1:05 - 1:06:20). And, don't miss these segments: (1:06:20 - 1:11:20) and (1:13 - 1:24:50). See also: How Wallace Shawn Found His Voice.]

A Public Option for Food

I know it is a contentious position these days, but I have always been in favor of public schools. I went to a public school. I enjoyed myself there. I believe it taught me some things. I’ve also always been suspicious of privatization schemes. That’s because I tend to think that when a service is for profit rather than for the public’s benefit, all sorts of perverse incentives arise. If schools operated for profit, with education subsidized by vouchers, the companies running the schools would have an interest in spending as little as possible actually educating the students, because every dollar they could save would be a dollar they could keep. That strikes me as dangerous, and I can’t help but think that it will lead inexorably in the direction of giving children iPads rather than teachers.

Once, though, when I voiced my dubiousness about “voucherization,” a gentleman challenged me. Why, he said, did I think private schools with vouchers would be worse than public schools? We entrust other areas of life to the private sector and they work just fine. Consider, for example, grocery stores. We don’t have government-run grocery stores like we have government-run schools. And yet most people in the country seem pretty happy with their grocery stores. They can get whatever they want there, and if they can’t afford it, we subsidize it with a “voucher” (i.e. food stamps). The profit motive hasn’t led to a rapacious system of exploitation. In fact, it has given consumers the ability to get an astonishing variety of goods for incredibly low prices. Why are you uniquely suspicious of what the private sector would do to education, when it provides us so efficiently with our food?

The gentleman’s argument was a strong one. I will confess that I felt a bit stumped by it. He was right. Every week I go to the grocery store and I get relatively tasty things for relatively low prices. And so I found myself tempted by his idea that education could be provided by “learning stores” just like nutrition is provided by grocery stores.

Then I remembered that nutrition in America is a total disaster, that ⅔ of the country is obese or overweight, and that half of the country either has diabetes or is at high risk of having diabetes soon. If we start providing education like we provide nutrition, then God help the little children…

Food is actually the perfect example of a system in which the presence of a profit motive is having incredibly destructive human consequences. That’s because it introduces a terrible incentive: to sell people the products they’ll get addicted to rather than the products that are good for them. Americans live on junk food; they have terrible diets, with too much sodium, too many calories, too much sugar, and too few fruits and vegetables.

And as food companies seek to increase their revenue, the problem is spreading internationally. The New York Times recently reported that “multinational food companies like Nestlé, PepsiCo and General Mills have been aggressively expanding their presence in developing nations, unleashing a marketing juggernaut that is upending traditional diets from Brazil to Ghana to India.” Nestlé, for instance, hired legions of Brazilians to sell its products door to door, and regularly sent a barge down the Amazon river offering pudding, cookies, and candy. The result, according to the Times, has been “more obese Brazilians,” with “a new epidemic of diabetes and heart disease.” In places that “struggled with hunger and malnutrition just a generation ago” there are now “soaring rates of obesity,” with “the growing availability of high-calorie, nutrient-poor foods” causing more people to be “both overweight and undernourished.” In poor Brazilian towns, one can find 17-year-olds who weigh 250lbs and suffer from hypertension, problems once unknown in the developing world.

We know precisely why this happens. Bob Drane, the former Kraft Foods executive who invented Lunchables, described the logic of the industry:

“Discover what consumers want to buy and give it to them with both barrels. Sell more, keep your job! How do marketers often translate these ‘rules’ into action on food? Our limbic brains love sugar, fat, salt. . . . So formulate products to deliver these. Perhaps add low-cost ingredients to boost profit margins. Then ‘supersize’ to sell more. . . . And advertise/promote to lock in ‘heavy users.’”

Lunchables themselves were the result of this logic. They’re bad for kids, since they’re largely comprised of baloney and cheese, but Oscar Mayer realized that parents with little time would snap up something that eliminated the need to make lunch, and kids would crave them because it came with a big block of fatty cheese. (Experiments with healthier Lunchables were called off due to poor sales.)

Food and beverage executives are fairly open about how they think. “Half the world’s population has not had a Coke in the last 30 days,” said the president of Coca-Cola International. “There’s 600 million teenagers who have not had a Coke in the last week. So the opportunity for that is huge.” According to the Times, a former Coke vice president said that “the goal became much larger than merely beating the rival brands; Coca-Cola strove to outsell every other thing people drank, including milk and water. The marketing division’s efforts boiled down to one question… ‘How can we drive more ounces into more bodies more often?’” Coke has specifically targeted poor areas around the world. Coke’s former North American president, Jeffrey Dunn, was horrified by what he saw when he toured one of the impoverished districts the company was targeting: “A voice in my head says, ‘These people need a lot of things, but they don’t need a Coke.’ I almost threw up.” But when Dunn raised his concerns and tried to change the business, he encountered “very aggressive” resistance and was fired.

The usual response here is to blame the consumers: if people get fat and die from eating garbage and drinking poison, perhaps they shouldn’t be buying it. If companies are selling products loaded with sugar and fat, it’s because people really like sugar and fat. This is is always the way the industry responds. At a meeting of food executives in which a Kraft vice president tried to convince his peers to step up on nutrition, discussion came to a close when the CEO of General Mills vigorously defended existing practice. As the Times summarized:

“[Consumers were fickle.] Sometimes they worried about sugar, other times fat. General Mills, he said, acted responsibly to both the public and shareholders by offering products to satisfy dieters and other concerned shoppers, from low sugar to added whole grains. But most often, he said, people bought what they liked, and they liked what tasted good. “Don’t talk to me about nutrition,” he reportedly said, taking on the voice of the typical consumer. “Talk to me about taste, and if this stuff tastes better, don’t run around trying to sell stuff that doesn’t taste good.” To react to the critics, Sanger said, would jeopardize the sanctity of the recipes that had made his products so successful. General Mills would not pull back. He would push his people onward, and he urged his peers to do the same.”

The former CEO of Philip Morris (now Altria), which owns Kraft, affirmed this, adding that it partially arises from the pressure of a highly competitive market:

“People could point to these things and say, ‘They’ve got too much sugar, they’ve got too much salt… Well, that’s what the consumer wants, and we’re not putting a gun to their head to eat it. That’s what they want. If we give them less, they’ll buy less, and the competitor will get our market. So you’re sort of trapped.”

This has been the consensus view. Those within the industry who have pushed for reform have gotten nowhere, and it’s obvious why: as the Philip Morris CEO points out, a company that unilaterally decided to make its products healthier would not actually make the world healthier. It would just watch its market share plummet. So long as a company is concerned primarily with revenue and profit, asking it to care about nutrition is asking it to stop caring about its entire institutional purpose. It is like asking a drug pusher to sign on to an initiative to make heroin less addictive. Good luck.

It’s long past time to discard the idea that companies just give people “what they want,” and that blame for the popularity of inferior products rests with consumers. First, it’s easy to understand why there needs to be a conceptual difference between “what people buy” and “what people want.” That’s because people don’t want to die of heart disease, and yet they buy things that make them more likely to die of heart disease. And it’s not enough to say that they must simply prefer “eating badly” to “not dying”: if you ask them, they’ll tell you they’d much rather not have diabetes. But they do. And part of the reason they do is that an entire multibillion dollar industry is dedicated to finding ways to make sure they keep eating poorly. (...)

The harms of a corporate food system do not affect everyone equally. Instead, they fall disproportionately on the poor, who have less time for food preparation and information gathering, and thus default to fast food for its convenience. Disparities in health consequences reflect that fact: less well-off people have worse diets and suffer obesity, heart disease, and diabetes in greater numbers. A privatized system of nutrition delivery, predictably, delivers the worst outcomes to those with the least money.

Examining the food system in detail is instructive because it reveals a lot about how free markets work and don’t work. We can imagine how things would play out if the same system were relied upon to deliver education: a few big companies would end up running most of the schools. Individuals could go to whichever school they could pay for. But since school companies would be competing with each other, and trying to maximize profits, they would be incentivized to spend as little as possible educating students, while deceiving parents into thinking their children were learning more than they actually were. Just as food companies do better not when they offer health but when they offer the appearance of health, school companies would adopt branding techniques that made them appear high-quality (use of the word “academy,” fancy seal, uniforms, etc.) while trying to spend as little money as possible on actually educating the child. For-profit education will be as “educational” as for-profit products like Coca-Cola are “nutritional.”

My friend Sarah likes to describe capitalism by comparing it to the “paperclip maximizer.” The paperclip maximizer is a thought experiment used to warn about the potentially deadly effects of artificial intelligence. It’s about how a machine given the wrong instructions will produce the wrong results. You have an intelligent robot, and you’d like him to collect paperclips. So you program the robot with the following instruction: “Maximize the number of paperclips in your possession.” Then you set it loose. The robot first goes around the world collecting all the existing paperclips. But once it has them all, it still isn’t finished. After all, it must maximize the number of paperclips it has. So it begins turning everything it finds into paperclips. Soon, the entire planet is nothing but a wasteland of paperclips. Eventually, the universe itself will be a vast cosmic heap of paperclips. A seemingly benign instruction, carried out with precision and efficiency, destroyed the world. [ed. Parable of the paperclip maximizer.]

Corporations can operate similarly. The Coca-Cola company follows a mandate: “raise revenue by selling drinks.” It sounds innocent. But the result is perverse: the company simply tries to get “as many ounces as possible into as many bodies as possible.” Every additional Coca-Cola sold is an additional dollar of revenue. There is no upper limit, then. “Growth potential” is all that matters, regardless of other consequences. And the lives of people only matter to the extent that keeping them alive longer will allow them to drink more Coke. I’m not exaggerating here. Those are the words of the Coca-Cola executives. And they flow perfectly rationally from the structure of the institution.

Capitalism is very effective at increasing production. Even Karl Marx was impressed with its achievements. But it also only works to the extent that the institutional incentives will, when followed, produce good results. People who defend capitalism do think it produces good results, because the incentive is to sell as many goods as possible, and that means selling the products that people want to buy. But, like the paperclip maximizer, “sell the goods that people will buy” is a benign rule that leads to a perverse result. A company that takes a poll of the things people want in a snack, and sells a snack with those qualities, will probably do well. But a company that researches ways to trigger biological cravings, and use subtle branding cues to trick people into thinking the product is better than it is, will do even better. The theory of a free market works at the “lemonade stand” level. Yet the paperclip robot, too, works at first: it’s what happens when the imperatives are carried to their endpoint that is so destructive. Capitalism, carried to its endpoint, will devour the earth, because that’s what its programming requires.

So it would be best if the school system did not operate like the food system. But perhaps we should be thinking about the opposite as well: what if the food system operated more like the public school system? What if there was a “public option” for food?

Public schools are an “option” because they already exist within a market for schools. If you’d like to, you can opt out of the public school system and send your children to a private school. Even Britain’s single-payer health service, the NHS, is a public “option” of a kind, because people can still pay for private health insurance and private hospitals if they choose. (Because most people are satisfied with the NHS, however, only a fraction of people do this.) A public option is useful because it doesn’t have to think about profit, it can just think about providing the public with what they need.

Let us imagine a public option for food. It is a state-funded restaurant called the American Free Diner. At the American Free Diner, anyone can show up and eat, and the food is free. It’s designed to be as healthy as possible while still being pretty tasty. It’s not going to be tastier than McDonalds fries, but the aim of the American Free Diner is not to get you to hooked on having as many meals as possible, it’s designed to get you to have a satisfying and nutritionally complete meal. And there are options. For breakfast you can have eggs and (veggie?) bacon with fruit, oatmeal, avocado on toast, or a smoothie. Lunch is soups, salads, and sandwiches. Oh, and you can also always stop by and grab free fruit or other snacks. Now, you have to eat your meal during the time you’re in the restaurant, so there’s no smuggling food away and selling it. Anyone can have up to three meals a day there; you sign up with an ID and then you get a card. If you ate at the American Free Diner for every meal, you’d be meeting every possible recommended nutritional guideline. Every town has an American Free Diner in it. The music is great and there’s a buzzing neon sign. but it’s nothing too fancy. ​

​Our “public option” for food does not mean people can’t go elsewhere, just as our public school system doesn’t mean that people can’t enroll in private schools. But it does ensure that anyone who wants to can turn up and get a high-quality meal for free, without having to have much information on their own, without having to have any money, and without having to do very much. Now, the question is: what would happen? I think you’d see a lot of people taking their meals at the American Free Diner. That’s because the food is free. And that would be a very good thing indeed, because every meal eaten there is a healthy meal. Who wouldn’t eat at the American Free Diner? Well, rich people wouldn’t eat there, because they can afford even nicer food. But rich people also enroll their children in private schools. They’re not the target population here. What we’re trying to do is make sure that everyone has access to a baseline level of nutrition, just like everyone should have access to a baseline level of education.

Personally, I think the Free Diner is our best way of solving our national nutrition crisis. Currently, we try to provide nutrition to the poor with a “voucher” system. That has a couple of problems. First, people don’t know what to buy, so they are highly susceptible to being manipulated. Second, buying groceries and making meals at home is incredibly time-consuming, which is one reason people tend toward fast food. The Diner solves these problems. It doesn’t restrict your choices, you can still buy whatever you want on the free market. But it does offer you one more choice: eat free, healthy meals at the Free Diner.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

Longest S&P 500 Rally Ever? That's Wall Street’s Forecast

by Lu Wang, Bloomberg |  Read more:
Image: Bloomberg
[ed. Gravity. Everything is broken.]

Peyton's Place

Practically every day, cars stop in front of our house and people get out to take pictures of it, and of us—me and my wife and daughter—if we happen to be outside. Or they'll take one of Tony, who cuts half the neighborhood's grass. Tony loves it. He poses for them, with his rake and lawn bags, grinning, one arm thrown wide as if to say, "All this, my friends." I've told him several times to start charging, but he won't even hear it. He does it, he says, because it makes him feel famous. Usually it's only one or two cars. Other times it's eight or nine in a day. It depends what time of year it is, and what's happening on the Internet. Once there was an event of some kind in town, and we got more than twenty. I go for long stretches when I forget it's even happening. I really don't see them, since I don't leave the house that much, and they're always quiet, they never make trouble. But a month ago my new neighbor, Nicholas, who just moved in next door, came over to introduce himself. He's a tall thin guy in his fifties, glasses and a white beard. Very nice, very sociable. Before he left, he said, "Can I ask you something? Have you noticed that people are always taking pictures of your house?"

"Yeah," I said—pressing play on my spiel—"it's silly, I know, but our house used to be on TV, not anymore, those people are fans.… Isn't that funny?"

"I mean, it is constant," he said.

"I know!" I said. "Hope it doesn't bother you. Tell me if it ever gets annoying."

"No, no, I don't mind," he said. "They're always polite. They almost seem embarrassed."

"Well, tell me if that changes," I said.

"Okay," he said. "I just can't believe how many there are."

Nicholas and I have now had some version of that conversation three times, one for each week he's lived next door. Every time, I've wanted to tell him it's going to end, except I don't know if it will. It may increase.

···

My brother-in-law sells trailers in the Arizona desert—indeed, he professes to "have the trailer game in a choke hold" in that part of the world. Not long ago he told me about the Stamp. He had a boss whose office was across from his in the trailer they worked out of. The boss had a huge specially made rubber stamp on his desk that read APPROVED. Whenever things were getting tense in my brother-in-law's office, when the boss could hear that negotiations were becoming sticky, usually on the matter of the prospective buyer's gaining loan approval, in he would saunter with the Stamp. Saunter doesn't describe his walk, which my brother-in-law imitated. The boss was a little guy, and his legs sort of wheeled out from his body as he walked, like something you'd associate with a degenerative hip condition. He'd come wheeling up to the desk like that and BAM bring down the Stamp on the application, APPROVED. Then he wheeled away, leaving the buyers stunned and, as it dawned on them, delighted. "You understand," my brother-in-law said, "a lot of the people I was selling to were Gypsies. As in literal Gypsies. They didn't have mailing addresses."

The story goes some way toward explaining how my wife and I got permission from a bank to buy a giant brick neocolonial house—also how the world economy went into free fall, but that's for another time and a writer with nothing to do but an enormous amount of careful research. My wife was eight months pregnant, and we lived in a one-bedroom apartment, the converted ground floor of an antebellum house, on a noisy street downtown, with an eccentric upstairs neighbor, Keef, from Leland, who told me that I was a rich man—that's how he put it, "Y'er a rich man, ain't ye?"—who told us that he was going to shoot his daughter's boyfriend with an ultra-accurate sniper rifle he owned, for filling his daughter full of drugs, "shoot him below the knee," he said, "that way they cain't get you with intent to kill." Keef had been a low-level white supremacist and still bore a few unfortunate tattoos but told us he'd lost his racism when, on a cruise in the Bahamas, he'd saved a drowning black boy's life, in the on-ship pool, and by this conversion experience "came to love some blacks." He later fell off a two-story painting ladder and broke all his bones. A fascinating man, but not the sort I wanted my daughter having unlimited exposure to in her formative years. Not my angel. We entered nesting panic. We wanted big and solid. We wanted Greatest Generation, but their parents, even greater. We found it. It had a sleeping porch, and a shiplike attic where I in my dotage would pull objects from a trunk and tell their histories to little ones. We asked for the money, and in some office somebody's boss came forward with the Stamp.

Around the time it became clear that we'd gotten ahead of ourselves financially—and thinking back, that was a seismic twinge in advance of the market meltdown, a message from the bowels that people like the guy with four cell phones and a Jersey accent working out of a storage unit in Charlotte, who'd loaned us the money, probably shouldn't have been loaning hundreds of thousands of dollars to people like me—that was when we remembered something our buyer's agent, Andy, had said. Something about a TV show that might want to use the house. Somebody might be calling us. We had written it down. A guy named Greg.

Often I think of Greg. What an amazing guy. Truly amazing, as in he brought us into a maze. We only ever saw him once. I've never seen him since. And this is a small town—you see people. It was like they flew him in for this meeting. He was a big guy in a loose Hawaiian shirt. Goatee, sunglasses. Did he tell me he played rugby, or did he look exactly like someone I knew who played rugby? He sat across from us at our kitchen table, a thirteen-foot dark wood table that purportedly came in pieces from a Norwegian farmhouse, relic of nesting panic (long table, order). Greg sat across from us. He explained that they'd mostly be using only the front two rooms of the house. This was the place they mainly shot. The rest of our character's house had been re-created on a set, and the transitions would be made seamless in editing.

He laid out the deal they'd struck with the previous owners. We move you into a Hilton. Meals and per diem. We put everything back the way it was. We take Polaroids of your bookshelves to make sure we've put the books in order. That's how thorough we are. We even pay people to come in afterward and clean up. The house looks better than you left it.

We'll pay you $—— for an exterior shoot, $—— for interiors. The combined amount equaled our mortgage.

Yes, I think we can work something out.

"The front two rooms"—that phrase, in particular, we heard repeated: It has a poetic density to it, like "cellar door," so I remember. The front two rooms.

···

A lot of movies and TV shows are shot here, in our adopted coastal hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina—Wilmywood. It started when the late Frank Capra Jr. came here to make Firestarter in the early '80s. He liked the place and stayed, and an industry evolved around him. Dennis Hopper bought property. Now half the kids who wait on you downtown are extras, or want to be actors. You'll be in Target and realize you're in line behind Val Kilmer. We have studios and a film school, and we're known in the business for our exceptionally wide variety of locations. You can be doing beachy beachy and suddenly go leafy established suburb, go country hayride, then nighttime happening street, pretty much whatever.

For the last several years, the big ticket in town has been the teen melodrama One Tree Hill, which was on the WB and is now on the CW Network. Don't let the off brands fool you, though; a surprising number of people watch it, maybe even you, for all I know. It's one of the worst TV shows ever made, and I seriously do not mean that as an insult. It's bad in the way that Mexican TV is bad, superstylized bad. Good bad. Indeed, there are times when the particular campiness of its badness, although I can sense its presence, is in fact beyond me, beyond my frequency, like that beep you play on the Internet that only kids can hear. Too many of my camp-receptor cells have died. Possibly One Tree Hill is a work of genius. Certainly it is about to go nine seasons, strongly suggesting that the mother of its creator, Mark Schwahn, did not give birth to any idiots, or if she did those people are Schwahn's siblings.

The One Tree character who supposedly lived in our house was Peyton, played by one of the stars, Hilarie Burton, a striking bone-thin blonde. Think coppery curls. I'd seen her on MTV right at the moment when I was first feeling too old to watch MTV. Superfriendly when we met her, superfriendly always. Hilarie has a golden reputation in Wilmington. She's one of the cast members who've made the place home, and she gets involved in local things. When we met, she gave us hugs, complimented the house, thanked us for letting them use it. She disarmed us—good manners had not been what we'd expected. (...)

Now Peyton lived here, and they needed to bring over her stuff. Greg had given us a choice: Either we can switch our furniture out with yours every time—load up your stuff and haul it away; haul in our stuff, use it, haul it away; reload your stuff—we’re actually willing to do that before and after each shoot. Or we can just leave our stuff here. Treat it as your own. We’ll take it away when the show is over. Let us decorate your new house for you. They may let you keep a few pieces.

Theoretically that made sense. In reality (a word I can hardly use without laughing), it meant that we lived on a TV set. Of course, they consulted us on everything, showing us furniture catalogs, guiding us toward choices that both suited our taste and looked like something Peyton would have in her home. It meant more tasteful floral patterns than I’d expected, but that was okay. Maybe there was a little Peyton in me. (...)

I had a high school Latin teacher named Marcia Markopolos, an enormous person—she often needed a wheelchair to get about, for her girth and what it had done to her knees—also a brilliant teacher. She married young, but her husband was killed in Vietnam. Bottle-blond beehive hairdo. She schlepped between public schools, teaching the few Latin courses they could still fill, using a medical forklift thing that moved her in and out of her van. She was captivating on the ancient world. She told us how the Roman army at its most mercilessly efficient used to stop every afternoon, build a city, live in it that night, eat and fuck and play dice and argue strategy and sharpen weapons and go to the toilet in it, pack it up the next morning, and march.

That description came to mind when the show arrived for the season’s first shoot. With the baby barely two weeks old, we’d felt that she was too small to be moving back and forth from house to Hilton. They did a series of scenes with us in the house, sequestered upstairs.

Boxy light trucks appeared in a row down the street, a line of white buffalo. It was very E.T., the scene where they take him away. Cops were parked on the corners, directing traffic and shooing gawkers. In a nearby field they pitched the food tent, which soon buzzed with crew. The stars ate in a van. I looked out the window—miles of cable, banks of lights, porta-potties, walkie-talkies.

It was a day shoot, but a night scene. They had blacked most of the windows. Upstairs, where we were, it was afternoon. Downstairs it was about ten o’clock at night. From the sound, I guessed there were twenty strangers in the house. Silence. We listened.

Peyton’s voice.

I can’t remember the line. It was something like "That’s not what I wanted." And then another character said something. Footsteps. The director was having Hilarie do the line different ways.

"That not what I wanted."

"That’s NOT WHAT I WANTED."

"That’s not what I WANTED."

You got a sense, even through the floorboards, of former-kid-star work ethic from Hilarie, giving 100 percent. And rolling. And rolling. No brattiness, every take usable.

We heard general chatter and could tell they were breaking off the scene. As the baby nursed, we listened for the next one.

No next one. They were done, moving out. Gone by midnight, traffic barriers picked up. The city vanished. It had existed for about twenty seconds of footage.

The second shoot followed close on the first period an exterior this time. We had family in town: that was fun. It gratified us to see them get a little thrill from it all, the occasional celebrity sighting. Of course, it also meant that some memorable life-changing moments from my first days of being a father—of holding my own child in the kitchen and seeing the generations together—happened while Peyton was on the back patio having equally intense times. One of her fathers, who’d been a merchant marine, had come to port and was trying to get back into her world. I may be slightly off on that; I had to put it together from dialogue fragments.

You could see Hilarie’s sweetness in the way she humored our families. The scene called for her to run through the backyard, up the steps to the back screen door, say, "No, Dad!" and slam the door behind her. Each time she executed a take, my mother and 90-year-old Cuban grandmother-in-law, their faces squeezed together in the window of the porch door, would smile and furiously wave at her through the glass as we begged them to sit. Hilarie waved back, just absorbing it into her process. "No, Dad." (Slam, smile, wave, turn.) "Dad, no!" (Slam, smile, wave, turn.)

Did she want some black beans? Abuela asked. She was so skinny! "No, no, I’m fine. Thank you, though." (To my wife, behind the hand, "They’re so sweet.")

She had a barbecue going out back. A grill, burgers. Picnic tables. All gone by dark. And at some point the next morning, a check flew in at the door without a sound. As the ending voice-over of a One Tree episode might have put it, things were a little crazy, but we were going to be all right.

One thing did happen during the set-decoration phase. It was small, but the symbolism of it was so obvious, so articulate, I really should have paid more attention. They wallpapered the stairwell and put up light sconces. It was the first little toe-wander across the Greg Perimeter, that line around the front two rooms. It was the first shy tentacle-tap, the first tendril-nuzzle.

by John Jeremiah Sullivan, GQ | Read more:
Image: One Tree Hill