Wednesday, February 28, 2018
The Genesis of Blame
Genesis is a beautiful piece of writing: part poem, part folk tale, it is hard not to fall victim to the idea that here is something pure, which has been dirtied by celibates and misogynists to the subsequent ruin of womankind. As though there were such a thing as an original, Edenic text, in which man and woman were equal, and no one or nothing was to blame. For the first 66 lines of the Bible, this balance seems to exist, then Adam points the finger, says, ‘The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree,’ and God curses her into loving him anyway.
The story of the Fall is one of the most enduring stories we have, and it is never fair. You could use it as a template for a certain kind of novel: put a choice in there, tip the balance, make the consequences so disproportionate we doubt our sense of cause and effect, make them suffer, make them into better human beings. Visually, the narrative is brilliantly successful, for being so easy to hold within a single frame. There is nothing static about the way the viewer sees an image of the first couple considering apples. It is a moment of great tension, and they are wearing no clothes. So, to the rules for writing a successful fiction, we might add, pretend that it is not about sex, make the world symbolic, expand the small asymmetries. Here are two human beings who are slightly, but perhaps disastrously, anatomically different. She likes something long, he likes something round – what could possibly go wrong?
The story is a riddle about authority and predestination that has survived the theological palaver of generations because, simple to the point of transparency, it is also impenetrably self-enclosed. It is held in a brilliant web of balance and contradiction by a few hundred words; so it is worth looking at those words and what they actually mean.
Just to be clear: there was no seduction. There was no devil, nor any mention of Satan, who was, at this stage, an unimportant figure. Although he played a sporadic role in the torment of Job, or in the temptation of Christ in the desert, Satan was not a mythical force before the bestiary of Revelations, and the rebellious Lucifer was some other angel until Milton came along. The idea of a great battle between light and the forces of darkness did not get going until early Christian times, possibly because this small, persecuted sect needed to find a great spiritual enemy against which to pit themselves. The creature in Genesis was just a snake, and though he was crafty, he didn’t seduce, nor did he ‘tempt’ Eve – this last term means ‘to test’ and is used only once in Genesis, when God tests Abraham, requiring the sacrifice of his son Isaac. So Eve did not tempt Adam, either, nor was he seduced by her nakedness. There is, in fact, very little sex in the story. Our readings of it are all subtext, all interpretation, all error. (...)
The story of Adam and Eve (...) is an invitation to childhood curiosity. The question of whether they had belly buttons has occupied both great minds and small. They are not just naked: their story is about nakedness and the idea, puzzling to an infant, that we should hide our bodies from view. Whether they had sex in the garden and, if so, what was it like – these were proper theological concerns. In fact their story is also about curiosity, and it does not end well. Almost before we know what the question is, we have received a catastrophic sequence of answers: shame, exile, suffering, death itself. When, ‘Because I say so’ fails to work, God must, like an Irish mother, resort to the fully tragic: ‘Because all men must die.’ So now you know. No wonder we try to get back to the moment before the question started to form. We try to imagine what it might be like to live without the knowledge that we are naked, and what that nakedness implies.
‘Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.’ The word ‘naked’ is a translation of the Hebrew erom, which is used to describe a state of being stripped or vulnerable, and is without sexual connotation. As for ‘no shame’, Jerome in his translation into the Vulgate Latin uses ‘et non erubescebant’ implying that Adam and Eve did not blush – and this is sweet, for Jerome. It suggests a moment of virginal self-consciousness, full of possibility. It also, perhaps, reflects Jerome’s skill as a linguist. The original word in Hebrew, bosh, comes from a primitive root ‘to pale’, and is here used reflexively – ‘and they were not ashamed before one another.’ In the rest of the Old Testament, bosh is used in contexts that involve feeling confounded or disgraced, but it is rarely linked to ideas of impurity and abomination (when it comes to sex, the Old Testament is mostly worried about marrying out). Other Latin translations settled on the stronger pudere, a term for shame which conveys bashfulness, as well as a sense of decency. Pudor contains the idea of being caught out, but it also had social and ethical implications. It was, for the Romans, a manly difficulty and not something a slave could experience. A woman’s honour was usually limited to sexual respectability, and this was referred to by the more limited form pudicitia. The concept conveyed by the word pudor suffered a narrowing of meaning over time, becoming more sexualised and specific. By the 17th century the root had yielded ‘pudenda’, meaning ‘genitals’, usually female. This is where the shame of nakedness landed and got stuck.
The castrated horror that is the female form may provoke man’s impulse to point, jeer or debase but, as a psychoanalytical parable, it feels reductive here. In English, ‘shame’ indicates a kind of feeling bad: ostensibly about what you have done, but possibly about what you are. ‘Toxic shame’ is a term in popular psychology for the unbearable feelings of worthlessness that flood the infant when abandoned or alone. Called out by God, Adam says: ‘I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.’ His nakedness, erom, merely implies vulnerability. Perhaps Adam and Eve hid from God not because they were suddenly prudish, nor because their disobedience had been found out, but because they realised their fragility and insignificance. They were exposed, not as sexual beings but as mortal ones. (...)
Augustine’s ideal of voluntary desire is contradictory in a way that is hard to describe. It begs the question of where desire, or more properly arousal, comes from, and how it begins. What would sex be like with no sense of taboo? One answer is that sex without shame sounds a lot like sex, another is that sex without shame would be pretty dull stuff. A third might be that sex moves us through a series of hugely interesting, transgressive propositions to a less shame-bound place; the happier Eden of conjugal bliss.
According to Augustine, our pure affections become disobedient because wounded by the Fall. The uncontrolled or spontaneous nature of desire was both proof of, and the penalty for, Adam and Eve’s sin. The fact that mankind was subject to its vagaries was a sign that this sin did not die with them, but ran through us still, like three big letters through a stick of rock. The problem of concupiscence was also spiritual, but it lapsed repeatedly into the libidinal, partly because of the method of transmission – babies were made bad by the pleasure that made babies. This highly contagious idea became so central to Christian thought that it is worth noting the anxiety about performance and arousal that underlies it. This was not just a Catholic position, or a Catholic problem. Luther and Calvin were both proponents of original sin, and in 1563, the founding articles of the Church of England stated that it was ‘the fault and corruption of the Nature of every man’, and the resulting lust is ‘an infection of nature’.
It is a long way from talk of infection to the benign modern Anglican view that the story of Adam and Eve is about free will and the choices that face us all in our daily lives. There is a long humanist tradition in which Adam and Eve were made better by the Fall, not worse; that this was God’s plan all along. Without Adam there can be no redemption in Christ. For fundamentalist churches, this is not just a metaphor, the story of the Fall has to be as true as that of the Resurrection, and as historical. In 2017 a Gallup poll found that 38 per cent of Americans believe that humans were created, by God, in their present form, within the last ten thousand years. The Catholic Church agrees, a little surprisingly, not because salvation is real, or transubstantiation is by definition real, but because of the doctrine of original sin. According to the Catechism, Genesis 3 ‘uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man’. (...)
Neither fusion nor repetition can hold together this expanding sequence of separations. It ends in estrangement, of God from mankind, man from woman; of flesh from flesh and bone from bone. And so it comes, the final act of distinction which happens when he turns and blames. Not me. Her.
It might have been seen as a story about human betrayal. Instead it was, for centuries, taken literally. It was her fault. Woman was to blame for the fact that mankind must toil, suffer and die. Of course she was. Misogyny was also a moral position, it was seen as natural instead of a disordered point of view. Woman, according to Thomas Aquinas, is a vir occasionatus, a defective or mutilated man – this he got from Aristotle, but he used it to explain why Eve was created second, from a crooked bone: she was made to fall.
To be fair, Adam also blames God a little: ‘The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.’ Adam acts like a child: a toddler who blames his sister, or his shoe, or his own foot, perhaps, because to be less than perfect is unbearable. And, besides, God is very big now.
The whole thing was a trap, a plot, a conundrum about free will. It seems people only believe the story in order to point out how unfair it is. This is the way Adam and Eve played out on Twitter today: ‘God may have wanted to keep Adam and Eve innocent,’ says a woman called Jamie, a Trump-hating conservative from Tennessee. ‘But he still gave them free will which is why Eve ate the shit outta that apple, and her nakedness got Adam to agree.’ Meanwhile in Johannesburg a young man asks, ‘Is it ever considered that it wasn’t the woman’s fault, that it was the serpent, the devil, who coerced them?’ and his online friend Victoria weighs in with: ‘Didn’t he already know they’d eat the fruit anyway?’
The questions raised are familiar for being so ancient, but because they come from random believers, it is easier to see how entangled people become in their own riddles about authority. They don’t have to believe in this God, who is so unfair, but they do anyway. The wound of his omniscience is deeply felt. Adam and Eve were stooges, the story was over before it began, it swallows its own tail. There is some finger-wagging about disobedience, but also a fretfulness about the authority of the text: ‘If God said to Adam and Eve, “for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” why didn’t they die that day?’ Meanwhile, Nathan, Trump supporter and Mormon, moves towards Milton’s humanism when he says: ‘Has anyone ever had the thought that Adam and Eve would never have had children in the Garden of Eden and Eve figured this out first by her conversation with the “serpent”. And that all of this was part of God’s plan for us. Eve was one of the most brave people ever to have lived.’
The story of the Fall is one of the most enduring stories we have, and it is never fair. You could use it as a template for a certain kind of novel: put a choice in there, tip the balance, make the consequences so disproportionate we doubt our sense of cause and effect, make them suffer, make them into better human beings. Visually, the narrative is brilliantly successful, for being so easy to hold within a single frame. There is nothing static about the way the viewer sees an image of the first couple considering apples. It is a moment of great tension, and they are wearing no clothes. So, to the rules for writing a successful fiction, we might add, pretend that it is not about sex, make the world symbolic, expand the small asymmetries. Here are two human beings who are slightly, but perhaps disastrously, anatomically different. She likes something long, he likes something round – what could possibly go wrong?
The story is a riddle about authority and predestination that has survived the theological palaver of generations because, simple to the point of transparency, it is also impenetrably self-enclosed. It is held in a brilliant web of balance and contradiction by a few hundred words; so it is worth looking at those words and what they actually mean.Just to be clear: there was no seduction. There was no devil, nor any mention of Satan, who was, at this stage, an unimportant figure. Although he played a sporadic role in the torment of Job, or in the temptation of Christ in the desert, Satan was not a mythical force before the bestiary of Revelations, and the rebellious Lucifer was some other angel until Milton came along. The idea of a great battle between light and the forces of darkness did not get going until early Christian times, possibly because this small, persecuted sect needed to find a great spiritual enemy against which to pit themselves. The creature in Genesis was just a snake, and though he was crafty, he didn’t seduce, nor did he ‘tempt’ Eve – this last term means ‘to test’ and is used only once in Genesis, when God tests Abraham, requiring the sacrifice of his son Isaac. So Eve did not tempt Adam, either, nor was he seduced by her nakedness. There is, in fact, very little sex in the story. Our readings of it are all subtext, all interpretation, all error. (...)
The story of Adam and Eve (...) is an invitation to childhood curiosity. The question of whether they had belly buttons has occupied both great minds and small. They are not just naked: their story is about nakedness and the idea, puzzling to an infant, that we should hide our bodies from view. Whether they had sex in the garden and, if so, what was it like – these were proper theological concerns. In fact their story is also about curiosity, and it does not end well. Almost before we know what the question is, we have received a catastrophic sequence of answers: shame, exile, suffering, death itself. When, ‘Because I say so’ fails to work, God must, like an Irish mother, resort to the fully tragic: ‘Because all men must die.’ So now you know. No wonder we try to get back to the moment before the question started to form. We try to imagine what it might be like to live without the knowledge that we are naked, and what that nakedness implies.
‘Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.’ The word ‘naked’ is a translation of the Hebrew erom, which is used to describe a state of being stripped or vulnerable, and is without sexual connotation. As for ‘no shame’, Jerome in his translation into the Vulgate Latin uses ‘et non erubescebant’ implying that Adam and Eve did not blush – and this is sweet, for Jerome. It suggests a moment of virginal self-consciousness, full of possibility. It also, perhaps, reflects Jerome’s skill as a linguist. The original word in Hebrew, bosh, comes from a primitive root ‘to pale’, and is here used reflexively – ‘and they were not ashamed before one another.’ In the rest of the Old Testament, bosh is used in contexts that involve feeling confounded or disgraced, but it is rarely linked to ideas of impurity and abomination (when it comes to sex, the Old Testament is mostly worried about marrying out). Other Latin translations settled on the stronger pudere, a term for shame which conveys bashfulness, as well as a sense of decency. Pudor contains the idea of being caught out, but it also had social and ethical implications. It was, for the Romans, a manly difficulty and not something a slave could experience. A woman’s honour was usually limited to sexual respectability, and this was referred to by the more limited form pudicitia. The concept conveyed by the word pudor suffered a narrowing of meaning over time, becoming more sexualised and specific. By the 17th century the root had yielded ‘pudenda’, meaning ‘genitals’, usually female. This is where the shame of nakedness landed and got stuck.
The castrated horror that is the female form may provoke man’s impulse to point, jeer or debase but, as a psychoanalytical parable, it feels reductive here. In English, ‘shame’ indicates a kind of feeling bad: ostensibly about what you have done, but possibly about what you are. ‘Toxic shame’ is a term in popular psychology for the unbearable feelings of worthlessness that flood the infant when abandoned or alone. Called out by God, Adam says: ‘I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.’ His nakedness, erom, merely implies vulnerability. Perhaps Adam and Eve hid from God not because they were suddenly prudish, nor because their disobedience had been found out, but because they realised their fragility and insignificance. They were exposed, not as sexual beings but as mortal ones. (...)
Augustine’s ideal of voluntary desire is contradictory in a way that is hard to describe. It begs the question of where desire, or more properly arousal, comes from, and how it begins. What would sex be like with no sense of taboo? One answer is that sex without shame sounds a lot like sex, another is that sex without shame would be pretty dull stuff. A third might be that sex moves us through a series of hugely interesting, transgressive propositions to a less shame-bound place; the happier Eden of conjugal bliss.
According to Augustine, our pure affections become disobedient because wounded by the Fall. The uncontrolled or spontaneous nature of desire was both proof of, and the penalty for, Adam and Eve’s sin. The fact that mankind was subject to its vagaries was a sign that this sin did not die with them, but ran through us still, like three big letters through a stick of rock. The problem of concupiscence was also spiritual, but it lapsed repeatedly into the libidinal, partly because of the method of transmission – babies were made bad by the pleasure that made babies. This highly contagious idea became so central to Christian thought that it is worth noting the anxiety about performance and arousal that underlies it. This was not just a Catholic position, or a Catholic problem. Luther and Calvin were both proponents of original sin, and in 1563, the founding articles of the Church of England stated that it was ‘the fault and corruption of the Nature of every man’, and the resulting lust is ‘an infection of nature’.
It is a long way from talk of infection to the benign modern Anglican view that the story of Adam and Eve is about free will and the choices that face us all in our daily lives. There is a long humanist tradition in which Adam and Eve were made better by the Fall, not worse; that this was God’s plan all along. Without Adam there can be no redemption in Christ. For fundamentalist churches, this is not just a metaphor, the story of the Fall has to be as true as that of the Resurrection, and as historical. In 2017 a Gallup poll found that 38 per cent of Americans believe that humans were created, by God, in their present form, within the last ten thousand years. The Catholic Church agrees, a little surprisingly, not because salvation is real, or transubstantiation is by definition real, but because of the doctrine of original sin. According to the Catechism, Genesis 3 ‘uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man’. (...)
Neither fusion nor repetition can hold together this expanding sequence of separations. It ends in estrangement, of God from mankind, man from woman; of flesh from flesh and bone from bone. And so it comes, the final act of distinction which happens when he turns and blames. Not me. Her.
It might have been seen as a story about human betrayal. Instead it was, for centuries, taken literally. It was her fault. Woman was to blame for the fact that mankind must toil, suffer and die. Of course she was. Misogyny was also a moral position, it was seen as natural instead of a disordered point of view. Woman, according to Thomas Aquinas, is a vir occasionatus, a defective or mutilated man – this he got from Aristotle, but he used it to explain why Eve was created second, from a crooked bone: she was made to fall.
To be fair, Adam also blames God a little: ‘The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.’ Adam acts like a child: a toddler who blames his sister, or his shoe, or his own foot, perhaps, because to be less than perfect is unbearable. And, besides, God is very big now.
The whole thing was a trap, a plot, a conundrum about free will. It seems people only believe the story in order to point out how unfair it is. This is the way Adam and Eve played out on Twitter today: ‘God may have wanted to keep Adam and Eve innocent,’ says a woman called Jamie, a Trump-hating conservative from Tennessee. ‘But he still gave them free will which is why Eve ate the shit outta that apple, and her nakedness got Adam to agree.’ Meanwhile in Johannesburg a young man asks, ‘Is it ever considered that it wasn’t the woman’s fault, that it was the serpent, the devil, who coerced them?’ and his online friend Victoria weighs in with: ‘Didn’t he already know they’d eat the fruit anyway?’
The questions raised are familiar for being so ancient, but because they come from random believers, it is easier to see how entangled people become in their own riddles about authority. They don’t have to believe in this God, who is so unfair, but they do anyway. The wound of his omniscience is deeply felt. Adam and Eve were stooges, the story was over before it began, it swallows its own tail. There is some finger-wagging about disobedience, but also a fretfulness about the authority of the text: ‘If God said to Adam and Eve, “for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” why didn’t they die that day?’ Meanwhile, Nathan, Trump supporter and Mormon, moves towards Milton’s humanism when he says: ‘Has anyone ever had the thought that Adam and Eve would never have had children in the Garden of Eden and Eve figured this out first by her conversation with the “serpent”. And that all of this was part of God’s plan for us. Eve was one of the most brave people ever to have lived.’
by Anne Enright, LRB | Read more:
Image: detail from Hugo van der Goes, The Fall via:
How Defective Guns Became the Only Product That Can’t Be Recalled
Thomas “Bud” Brown makes his way out the back door and stops a few steps to the right, raising a trembling arm, pointing at something. It’s where he found his boy slumped against the cold back wall of the house around 7:15 a.m. on the last day of 2016, bleeding out.
Brown is telling the story now, about how he was sitting in his chair in the living room when he heard the shot. His son Jarred, 28, had just picked up Bud’s Taurus PT-145 Millennium Pro pistol and headed out to do some shooting near the house in Griffin, Ga., with his best friend, Tyler Haney. Bud figured Jarred had fired at something for the fun of it, like he did sometimes. “I was thinking I’d better go out there and tell him to be careful or something,” Bud, 54, says, his voice trailing off. But what he’d heard was the pistol going off without anyone pulling the trigger, sending a .45-caliber slug through Jarred’s femoral artery. “Oh shit, my leg, my leg,” Jarred yelled, loud enough for his father to hear. Haney, 26, rushed into the house in a panic, pleading for help. When Bud got out there, the pistol was still in the holster, tucked into Jarred’s waistband.
The rest is a blur for Bud. His wife, Sonie, recalls running out of the house in her nightgown. She’d grown close to Jarred since he moved into their home a year or so earlier, taking him to the stables to feed her two horses, cooking for him, and just talking with him. And now Jarred was on the ground, his father kneeling over him, applying pressure to the wound. Sonie wrapped Jarred’s belt around his leg as a tourniquet. It was hard to tell how bad the bleeding was because Jarred was wearing thick waterproof hunting pants. Sonie worked on Jarred, alternating between chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth, using the training she’d gotten during a career as a Georgia state parole and probation officer. Haney paced back and forth until Sonie ordered him to call 911. “Jarred was trying to say something, but then the words wouldn’t come out, and he stared,” Sonie says. By the time paramedics got there, she knew her stepson was gone. “I wasn’t going to say anything, because Bud was so torn up, but I knew,” she recalls today. “I can still taste the cigarettes on his breath.”
In the days after his son’s death, Brown couldn’t get his head around how that Taurus pistol went off. He’d spent his career in law enforcement, first as a Spalding County Sheriff’s Department deputy, then as a cop in Jackson, a little town nearby, and finally with a Drug Enforcement Administration task force in Macon. (He retired 10 years ago before having surgery to remove a softball-size cancerous tumor from his esophagus.) For years, Brown was a police shooting instructor. He started teaching Jarred how to shoot with a .22 rifle when he was 7 and drilled safety into his head on hunting trips and at the shooting range.
Sonie also knows guns, down to the .38 revolver she’s licensed to use and carry in her purse for work as a probation officer. Sonie and Bud have 12 firearms in their small brick home—seven rifles and five handguns—and Bud is a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association. The Browns refused to accept that Jarred had accidentally shot himself. “Jarred knew his way around guns and safety better than I did,” Bud says. “He never would have done anything that would have made that gun go off.”
In a given category, Taurus guns usually cost significantly less than models by more-storied companies. The materials and capabilities are generally comparable; the price differences reflect differences in manufacturing costs and the value of the brands. The Taurus 85 is the top-selling revolver in the U.S., according to Gun Genius.
Those doubts were gnawing at Haney, too. He watched Jarred come out of the house with the Taurus safely in a holster and swears his best friend didn’t touch the pistol when it fired. “I knew there was something wrong with that gun,” Haney says. “So I Googled it.” He found a curious announcement on Taurus’s website: The company was offering to fix or replace nine of its handguns. The pistol that killed his friend was on the list.
Haney kept Googling. He learned that the repair-or-replace offer was the result of the 2016 settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought by Chris Carter, a deputy in the Scott County, Iowa, sheriff’s department, against Brazilian gunmaker Forjas Taurus SA and two of its Florida-based units. In July 2013, Carter’s suit claimed, he was running down a suspected drug dealer when his Taurus PT-140 Millennium Pro pistol fell out of the holster at his hip, hit the ground, and fired, sending a slug into a nearby car. The suit further asserted that because of defects of design and manufacturing, nine different models of Taurus handguns can fire unintentionally when bumped or dropped or when the safety is on and the trigger is pulled. Taurus agreed to repair or buy back, for as much as $200, any of those models owned by people in the U.S. and its territories—an estimated 955,796 guns, according to the settlement. (The cut-off date for the offer was Feb. 6.) The company denied any negligence, wrongdoing, or defects in its firearms and also denied that its offer to fix its guns was a recall.
Haney sat Jarred’s dad and stepmother down in their living room to show them what he’d found. Sonie took down the name and number of Todd Wheeles, a state trooper turned lawyer in Birmingham, Ala., who’s handled 16 lawsuits against Taurus, including the class action in Iowa.
Two days later, Wheeles and another Birmingham lawyer, David Selby, were sitting at the Browns’ kitchen table. Wheeles showed them how the Taurus gun that killed Jarred would fire, even with the safety on. “In about 10 seconds he showed us three different ways that gun could go off on its own,” Sonie says.
Bud couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He’d never heard of any problem with Taurus guns. He never saw a notice at the pawnshop where he paid $250 for the gun that killed Jarred or at Walmart when he bought his ammunition. Before the kitchen table meeting was over, the Browns had hired Wheeles and Selby to sue Taurus for negligence and manufacturing defects. “I couldn’t believe that no one had warned us that those guns were bad,” Bud says. “Why didn’t Taurus warn us? Why did the government let them sell those guns?”
The simple answer is that no government entity has the power to police defective firearms or ammunition in America—or even force gunmakers to warn consumers. The Consumer Product Safety Commission can order the recall and repair of thousands of things, from toasters to teddy bears. If a defective car needs fixing, the U.S. Department of Transportation can make it happen. The Food and Drug Administration deals with food, drugs, and cosmetics. Only one product is beyond the government’s reach when it comes to defects and safety: firearms. Not even the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives can get defective guns off the market. If a gunmaker chooses to ignore a safety concern, there’s no one to stop it.
To understand how firearms makers escaped government oversight of the safety of their pistols, revolvers, and rifles, you need to go back to 1972, when Congress created the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Four years earlier, President Lyndon B. Johnson had signed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which regulated several aspects of firearm sales, and advocates of gun control hoped to give this new agency oversight of defective weapons. Representative John Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan and a hunter with an A-plus rating from the ascendant NRA, blocked them. In 1975 he did it again, when a colleague introduced a bill making a second run at giving the CPSC firearms authority. “We put in there an express prohibition against them getting their nose into the business of regulating firearms and ammunition,” Dingell said in debate in Congress. That second bill was crushed, 339-80, and the issue has never been seriously considered again.
Brown is telling the story now, about how he was sitting in his chair in the living room when he heard the shot. His son Jarred, 28, had just picked up Bud’s Taurus PT-145 Millennium Pro pistol and headed out to do some shooting near the house in Griffin, Ga., with his best friend, Tyler Haney. Bud figured Jarred had fired at something for the fun of it, like he did sometimes. “I was thinking I’d better go out there and tell him to be careful or something,” Bud, 54, says, his voice trailing off. But what he’d heard was the pistol going off without anyone pulling the trigger, sending a .45-caliber slug through Jarred’s femoral artery. “Oh shit, my leg, my leg,” Jarred yelled, loud enough for his father to hear. Haney, 26, rushed into the house in a panic, pleading for help. When Bud got out there, the pistol was still in the holster, tucked into Jarred’s waistband.
The rest is a blur for Bud. His wife, Sonie, recalls running out of the house in her nightgown. She’d grown close to Jarred since he moved into their home a year or so earlier, taking him to the stables to feed her two horses, cooking for him, and just talking with him. And now Jarred was on the ground, his father kneeling over him, applying pressure to the wound. Sonie wrapped Jarred’s belt around his leg as a tourniquet. It was hard to tell how bad the bleeding was because Jarred was wearing thick waterproof hunting pants. Sonie worked on Jarred, alternating between chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth, using the training she’d gotten during a career as a Georgia state parole and probation officer. Haney paced back and forth until Sonie ordered him to call 911. “Jarred was trying to say something, but then the words wouldn’t come out, and he stared,” Sonie says. By the time paramedics got there, she knew her stepson was gone. “I wasn’t going to say anything, because Bud was so torn up, but I knew,” she recalls today. “I can still taste the cigarettes on his breath.”In the days after his son’s death, Brown couldn’t get his head around how that Taurus pistol went off. He’d spent his career in law enforcement, first as a Spalding County Sheriff’s Department deputy, then as a cop in Jackson, a little town nearby, and finally with a Drug Enforcement Administration task force in Macon. (He retired 10 years ago before having surgery to remove a softball-size cancerous tumor from his esophagus.) For years, Brown was a police shooting instructor. He started teaching Jarred how to shoot with a .22 rifle when he was 7 and drilled safety into his head on hunting trips and at the shooting range.
Sonie also knows guns, down to the .38 revolver she’s licensed to use and carry in her purse for work as a probation officer. Sonie and Bud have 12 firearms in their small brick home—seven rifles and five handguns—and Bud is a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association. The Browns refused to accept that Jarred had accidentally shot himself. “Jarred knew his way around guns and safety better than I did,” Bud says. “He never would have done anything that would have made that gun go off.”
In a given category, Taurus guns usually cost significantly less than models by more-storied companies. The materials and capabilities are generally comparable; the price differences reflect differences in manufacturing costs and the value of the brands. The Taurus 85 is the top-selling revolver in the U.S., according to Gun Genius.
Those doubts were gnawing at Haney, too. He watched Jarred come out of the house with the Taurus safely in a holster and swears his best friend didn’t touch the pistol when it fired. “I knew there was something wrong with that gun,” Haney says. “So I Googled it.” He found a curious announcement on Taurus’s website: The company was offering to fix or replace nine of its handguns. The pistol that killed his friend was on the list.
Haney kept Googling. He learned that the repair-or-replace offer was the result of the 2016 settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought by Chris Carter, a deputy in the Scott County, Iowa, sheriff’s department, against Brazilian gunmaker Forjas Taurus SA and two of its Florida-based units. In July 2013, Carter’s suit claimed, he was running down a suspected drug dealer when his Taurus PT-140 Millennium Pro pistol fell out of the holster at his hip, hit the ground, and fired, sending a slug into a nearby car. The suit further asserted that because of defects of design and manufacturing, nine different models of Taurus handguns can fire unintentionally when bumped or dropped or when the safety is on and the trigger is pulled. Taurus agreed to repair or buy back, for as much as $200, any of those models owned by people in the U.S. and its territories—an estimated 955,796 guns, according to the settlement. (The cut-off date for the offer was Feb. 6.) The company denied any negligence, wrongdoing, or defects in its firearms and also denied that its offer to fix its guns was a recall.
Haney sat Jarred’s dad and stepmother down in their living room to show them what he’d found. Sonie took down the name and number of Todd Wheeles, a state trooper turned lawyer in Birmingham, Ala., who’s handled 16 lawsuits against Taurus, including the class action in Iowa.
Two days later, Wheeles and another Birmingham lawyer, David Selby, were sitting at the Browns’ kitchen table. Wheeles showed them how the Taurus gun that killed Jarred would fire, even with the safety on. “In about 10 seconds he showed us three different ways that gun could go off on its own,” Sonie says.
Bud couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He’d never heard of any problem with Taurus guns. He never saw a notice at the pawnshop where he paid $250 for the gun that killed Jarred or at Walmart when he bought his ammunition. Before the kitchen table meeting was over, the Browns had hired Wheeles and Selby to sue Taurus for negligence and manufacturing defects. “I couldn’t believe that no one had warned us that those guns were bad,” Bud says. “Why didn’t Taurus warn us? Why did the government let them sell those guns?”
The simple answer is that no government entity has the power to police defective firearms or ammunition in America—or even force gunmakers to warn consumers. The Consumer Product Safety Commission can order the recall and repair of thousands of things, from toasters to teddy bears. If a defective car needs fixing, the U.S. Department of Transportation can make it happen. The Food and Drug Administration deals with food, drugs, and cosmetics. Only one product is beyond the government’s reach when it comes to defects and safety: firearms. Not even the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives can get defective guns off the market. If a gunmaker chooses to ignore a safety concern, there’s no one to stop it.
To understand how firearms makers escaped government oversight of the safety of their pistols, revolvers, and rifles, you need to go back to 1972, when Congress created the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Four years earlier, President Lyndon B. Johnson had signed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which regulated several aspects of firearm sales, and advocates of gun control hoped to give this new agency oversight of defective weapons. Representative John Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan and a hunter with an A-plus rating from the ascendant NRA, blocked them. In 1975 he did it again, when a colleague introduced a bill making a second run at giving the CPSC firearms authority. “We put in there an express prohibition against them getting their nose into the business of regulating firearms and ammunition,” Dingell said in debate in Congress. That second bill was crushed, 339-80, and the issue has never been seriously considered again.
For Brown, none of that explains why he hadn’t heard that Taurus had sold bad guns. It’s one thing if the government didn’t do anything, but he reads every issue of American Rifleman, the NRA’s official magazine, and he never saw a warning about Taurus guns. “Why didn’t the NRA warn us? I guess there’s too much money and politics going into the NRA, so they had reason not to tell us,” he says.
by Michael Smith and Polly Mosendz, Bloomberg | Read more:
by Michael Smith and Polly Mosendz, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Joanna McClure
Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Job Interview 2018
[ed. Ok, I know Millennials are easy targets and unfortunate scapegoats for just about everything that's screwed up these days (... when actually it's their parents and Trump voters who are the real problem), but this cracks me up anyway. Great acting!]
Cipriani on Anitdepressants
The big news in psychiatry this month is Cipriani et al’s Comparative efficacy and acceptability of 21 antidepressant drugs for the acute treatment of adults with major depressive disorder: a systematic review and network meta-analysis. It purports to be the last word in the “do antidepressants work?” question, and a first (or at least early) word in the under-asked “which antidepressants are best?” question.
This study is very big, very sophisticated, and must have taken a very impressive amount of work. It meta-analyzes virtually every RCT of antidepressants ever done – 522 in all – then throws every statistical trick in the book at them to try to glob together into a coherent account of how antidepressants work. It includes Andrea Cipriani, one of the most famous research psychiatrists in the world – and John Ioannidis, one of the most famous statisticians. It’s been covered in news sources around the world: my favorite headline is Newsweek’s unsubtle Antidepressants Do Work And Many More People Should Take Them, but honorable mention to Reuters’ Study Seeks To End Antidepressant Debate: The Drugs Do Work.
Based on the whole “we’ve definitely proven antidepressants work” vibe in coverage, you would think that they’d directly contradicted Irving Kirsch’s claim that antidepressants aren’t very effective. I’ve mentioned my disagreements with Kirsch before, but it would be nice to have a definitive refutation of his work. This study isn’t really it. Both Kirsch and Cipriani agree that antidepressants have statistical significance – they’re not literally doing nothing. The main debate was whether they were good enough to be worth it. Kirsch argues they aren’t, using a statistic called “effect size”. Cipriani uses a different statistic called “odds ratio” that is hard to immediately compare.
[EDIT: Commenters point out that once you convert Cipriani’s odds ratios to effect sizes, the two studies are pretty much the same – in fact, Cipriani’s estimates are (slightly) lower. That is, “the study proving antidepressants work” presents a worse picture of antidepressants than “the study proving antidepressants don’t work”. If I had realized this earlier, this would have been the lede for this article. This makes all the media coverage of this study completely insane and means we’re doing science based entirely on how people choose to sum up their results. Strongly recommend this Neuroskeptic article on the topic. This is very important and makes the rest of this article somewhat trivial in comparison.]
Kirsch made a big deal of trying to get all the evidence, not just the for-public-consumption pharma-approved data. Cipriani also made such an effort, but I’m not sure how comparable the two are. Kirsch focused on FDA trials of six drugs. Cipriani took every trial ever published – FDA, academia, industry, whatever- of twenty-one drugs. Kirsch focused on using the Freedom Of Information Act to obtain non-public data from various failed trials. Cipriani says he looked pretty hard for unpublished data, but he might not have gone so far as to harass government agencies. Did he manage to find as many covered-up studies as Kirsch did? Unclear.
How confident should we be in the conclusion? These are very good researchers and their methodology is unimpeachable. But a lot of the 522 studies they cite are, well, kind of crap. The researchers acknowledge this and have constructed some kind of incredibly sophisticated model that inputs the chance of bias in each study and weights everything and simulates all sorts of assumptions to make sure they don’t change the conclusions too much. But we are basically being given a giant edifice of suspected-crap fed through super-powered statistical machinery meant to be able to certify whether or not it’s safe.
Of particular concern, 78% of the studies they cite are sponsored by pharmaceutical industries. The researchers run this through their super-powered statistical machinery and determine that this made no difference – in fact, if you look in the supplement, the size of the effect was literally zero:
I don’t want to come on too strong here. Science is never supposed to have to wait for some impossible perfectly-unbiased investigator. It’s supposed to accept that everyone will have an agenda, but strive through methodological rigor, transparency, and open debate to transcend those agendas and create studies everyone can believe. On the other hand, we’re really not very good at that yet, and nobody ever went broke overestimating the deceptiveness of pharmaceutical companies.
And there was one other kind of bias that did show up, hard. When a drug was new and exciting, it tended to do better in studies. When it was old and boring, it tended to do worse. You could argue this is a placebo effect on the patients, but I’m betting it’s a sign that people were able to bias the studies to fit their expected results (excited high-tech thing is better) in ways we’re otherwise not catching.
All of this will go double as we start looking at the next part, the ranking of different antidepressants.
This study is very big, very sophisticated, and must have taken a very impressive amount of work. It meta-analyzes virtually every RCT of antidepressants ever done – 522 in all – then throws every statistical trick in the book at them to try to glob together into a coherent account of how antidepressants work. It includes Andrea Cipriani, one of the most famous research psychiatrists in the world – and John Ioannidis, one of the most famous statisticians. It’s been covered in news sources around the world: my favorite headline is Newsweek’s unsubtle Antidepressants Do Work And Many More People Should Take Them, but honorable mention to Reuters’ Study Seeks To End Antidepressant Debate: The Drugs Do Work.Based on the whole “we’ve definitely proven antidepressants work” vibe in coverage, you would think that they’d directly contradicted Irving Kirsch’s claim that antidepressants aren’t very effective. I’ve mentioned my disagreements with Kirsch before, but it would be nice to have a definitive refutation of his work. This study isn’t really it. Both Kirsch and Cipriani agree that antidepressants have statistical significance – they’re not literally doing nothing. The main debate was whether they were good enough to be worth it. Kirsch argues they aren’t, using a statistic called “effect size”. Cipriani uses a different statistic called “odds ratio” that is hard to immediately compare.
[EDIT: Commenters point out that once you convert Cipriani’s odds ratios to effect sizes, the two studies are pretty much the same – in fact, Cipriani’s estimates are (slightly) lower. That is, “the study proving antidepressants work” presents a worse picture of antidepressants than “the study proving antidepressants don’t work”. If I had realized this earlier, this would have been the lede for this article. This makes all the media coverage of this study completely insane and means we’re doing science based entirely on how people choose to sum up their results. Strongly recommend this Neuroskeptic article on the topic. This is very important and makes the rest of this article somewhat trivial in comparison.]
Kirsch made a big deal of trying to get all the evidence, not just the for-public-consumption pharma-approved data. Cipriani also made such an effort, but I’m not sure how comparable the two are. Kirsch focused on FDA trials of six drugs. Cipriani took every trial ever published – FDA, academia, industry, whatever- of twenty-one drugs. Kirsch focused on using the Freedom Of Information Act to obtain non-public data from various failed trials. Cipriani says he looked pretty hard for unpublished data, but he might not have gone so far as to harass government agencies. Did he manage to find as many covered-up studies as Kirsch did? Unclear.
How confident should we be in the conclusion? These are very good researchers and their methodology is unimpeachable. But a lot of the 522 studies they cite are, well, kind of crap. The researchers acknowledge this and have constructed some kind of incredibly sophisticated model that inputs the chance of bias in each study and weights everything and simulates all sorts of assumptions to make sure they don’t change the conclusions too much. But we are basically being given a giant edifice of suspected-crap fed through super-powered statistical machinery meant to be able to certify whether or not it’s safe.
Of particular concern, 78% of the studies they cite are sponsored by pharmaceutical industries. The researchers run this through their super-powered statistical machinery and determine that this made no difference – in fact, if you look in the supplement, the size of the effect was literally zero:
In our analyses, funding by industry was not associated with substantial differences in terms of response or dropout rates. However, non-industry funded trials were few and many trials did not report or disclose any funding.This is surprising, since other papers (which the researchers dutifully cite) find that pharma-sponsored trials are about five times more likely to get positive results than non-sponsored ones (though see this comment). Cipriani’s excuse is that there weren’t enough non-industry trials to really get a good feel for the differences, and that a lot of the trials marked “non-industry” were probably secretly by industry anyway (more on this later). Fair enough, but if we can’t believe their “sponsorship makes zero difference to outcome” result, then the whole thing starts seeming kind of questionable.
I don’t want to come on too strong here. Science is never supposed to have to wait for some impossible perfectly-unbiased investigator. It’s supposed to accept that everyone will have an agenda, but strive through methodological rigor, transparency, and open debate to transcend those agendas and create studies everyone can believe. On the other hand, we’re really not very good at that yet, and nobody ever went broke overestimating the deceptiveness of pharmaceutical companies.
And there was one other kind of bias that did show up, hard. When a drug was new and exciting, it tended to do better in studies. When it was old and boring, it tended to do worse. You could argue this is a placebo effect on the patients, but I’m betting it’s a sign that people were able to bias the studies to fit their expected results (excited high-tech thing is better) in ways we’re otherwise not catching.
All of this will go double as we start looking at the next part, the ranking of different antidepressants.
by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex | Read more:
Image: Cipriani et al.
We All Must Live With Mitch McConnell’s Proudest Moment
Remember when the Senate confirmed Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, the veteran federal appeals court judge, to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, who died suddenly two years ago this month? It was a brilliant tactical move by Mr. Obama — picking a moderate, widely respected jurist who had won the highest praise from top Republicans, and giving the court a majority of Democratic-appointed justices for the first time in nearly half a century.
Oh, right. That’s not what happened.
Let’s pause to recall once again what did happen: Justice Scalia’s body wasn’t even in the ground before Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, said he would refuse to consider any nominee President Obama might put forward. The reason, he claimed, was the importance of letting Americans “have a voice in the selection” by voting in the presidential election, which at the time was nine months off. It was his coded way of saying he intended to preserve the court’s Republican-appointed majority at any cost.
Against long odds, Mr. McConnell won. Now parked for life in the seat where Judge Garland should be sitting is the ultraconservative Neil Gorsuch, who we’re supposed to believe represents the “voice” of a citizenry that preferred Hillary Clinton by a margin of nearly three million votes.
That enormously consequential swap is already having concrete effects on American society, and very likely will determine the outcome of a case the justices heard on Monday — a challenge to the ability of public-sector unions to charge nonmembers for expenses related to collective bargaining, such as negotiations over wages, hours and working conditions. The plaintiff says his First Amendment rights are violated by being forced to pay these so-called fair-share fees to a union whose political positions he disagrees with.
Legally, this should be an easy win for the unions. The Supreme Court upheld fair-share fees four decades ago in a unanimous ruling it has reaffirmed repeatedly, and on which more than 20 states have relied in negotiating thousands of contracts covering millions of public employees, including firefighters, teachers and police officers. The logic is simple: When the government is an employer, it has more control over its employees’ speech than over that of regular citizens. Any burden the fees impose on employees’ First Amendment rights is justified by the need to eliminate free riders — workers who enjoy union benefits without having to pay for them, which can deplete the unions’ resources in states where they are legally required to represent all workers, members and nonmembers alike. Anti-union advocates dismiss the free-rider concern, but it’s very real: In states that have ended the fees, more than one-third of public-school teachers are free riders.
None of this seems to register with Justice Samuel Alito Jr., who has made no secret of his dislike for that 1977 opinion, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, and has been searching for the votes to overturn it for at least six years, writing opinions intended to set up its demise. Justice Alito probably assumed he had victory in hand in 2016, when the court considered the same question in a case brought by California public-school teachers against their union. But when Justice Scalia, whose remarks during oral arguments strongly suggested he would provide the fifth vote against the union, died a few weeks later, the case deadlocked.
As it turned out, Justice Scalia’s death only briefly slowed the march of corporate interests that have sought for years to protect their huge profits and kill off the last remnants of organized labor in America. They and the right-wing groups that support them quickly regrouped around another plaintiff, a child-support specialist from Illinois named Mark Janus, who makes the same argument the California teachers did: Activities by public-sector unions are inherently political, so it’s impossible to separate the costs of collective bargaining from those of political lobbying. No matter what benefits the unions negotiate on his behalf, he shouldn’t have to pay a dime. Mr. Janus lost decisively in the lower federal courts for the same reason the teachers did: the Supreme Court’s precedent in the Abood case.
That precedent should guide the justices here, too. Beyond the court’s core principle of stare decisis, which keeps it from overturning its own prior decisions except in extraordinary circumstances, the Abood decision reasonably balanced workers’ First Amendment rights against the government’s interest in labor peace. Two notable conservative scholars go further, arguing in a supporting brief to the court that the First Amendment does not apply at all in this case. The government is allowed to compel subsidies of others’ speech all the time without violating the Constitution, they point out, such as by collecting and spending taxes.
In Monday’s arguments, several of the conservative justices seemed immune to such reasoning. Justice Alito referred to fair-share fees as “compelled speech” that infringes on a worker’s “dignity and conscience.”
But the true goal of this litigation strategy has never been to protect workers’ speech rights; it is, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor rightly said, “to do away with unions,” which not only make life a little harder for the world’s plutocrats, but have also become a potent organizing tool in Democratic politics. One recent paper by political scientists found Democrats’ share of the presidential vote fell 3.5 percentage points in states that eliminated fair-share fees. In Wisconsin, public-sector union membership fell by half after the state’s newly Republican leadership eliminated the fees in 2011.
Justice Gorsuch was silent on Monday, but it’s hard to imagine he will vote with the unions. Since joining the court last April, Justice Gorsuch has voted nearly all of the time with the other most conservative justice, Clarence Thomas. Had the seat he occupies been filled by Merrick Garland, it’s unlikely the case would have been brought at all.
Whatever the justices decide in Mr. Janus’s case, the drama that preceded it is another reminder of the importance of every Supreme Court appointment, and of the degree to which Mr. McConnell may have altered the course of history with his cynical ploy. After all, President Trump will be in power until 2025 at the latest, but Justice Gorsuch could easily be issuing opinions four decades from now.
Oh, right. That’s not what happened.
Let’s pause to recall once again what did happen: Justice Scalia’s body wasn’t even in the ground before Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, said he would refuse to consider any nominee President Obama might put forward. The reason, he claimed, was the importance of letting Americans “have a voice in the selection” by voting in the presidential election, which at the time was nine months off. It was his coded way of saying he intended to preserve the court’s Republican-appointed majority at any cost.
Against long odds, Mr. McConnell won. Now parked for life in the seat where Judge Garland should be sitting is the ultraconservative Neil Gorsuch, who we’re supposed to believe represents the “voice” of a citizenry that preferred Hillary Clinton by a margin of nearly three million votes.
That enormously consequential swap is already having concrete effects on American society, and very likely will determine the outcome of a case the justices heard on Monday — a challenge to the ability of public-sector unions to charge nonmembers for expenses related to collective bargaining, such as negotiations over wages, hours and working conditions. The plaintiff says his First Amendment rights are violated by being forced to pay these so-called fair-share fees to a union whose political positions he disagrees with.
Legally, this should be an easy win for the unions. The Supreme Court upheld fair-share fees four decades ago in a unanimous ruling it has reaffirmed repeatedly, and on which more than 20 states have relied in negotiating thousands of contracts covering millions of public employees, including firefighters, teachers and police officers. The logic is simple: When the government is an employer, it has more control over its employees’ speech than over that of regular citizens. Any burden the fees impose on employees’ First Amendment rights is justified by the need to eliminate free riders — workers who enjoy union benefits without having to pay for them, which can deplete the unions’ resources in states where they are legally required to represent all workers, members and nonmembers alike. Anti-union advocates dismiss the free-rider concern, but it’s very real: In states that have ended the fees, more than one-third of public-school teachers are free riders.
None of this seems to register with Justice Samuel Alito Jr., who has made no secret of his dislike for that 1977 opinion, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, and has been searching for the votes to overturn it for at least six years, writing opinions intended to set up its demise. Justice Alito probably assumed he had victory in hand in 2016, when the court considered the same question in a case brought by California public-school teachers against their union. But when Justice Scalia, whose remarks during oral arguments strongly suggested he would provide the fifth vote against the union, died a few weeks later, the case deadlocked.
As it turned out, Justice Scalia’s death only briefly slowed the march of corporate interests that have sought for years to protect their huge profits and kill off the last remnants of organized labor in America. They and the right-wing groups that support them quickly regrouped around another plaintiff, a child-support specialist from Illinois named Mark Janus, who makes the same argument the California teachers did: Activities by public-sector unions are inherently political, so it’s impossible to separate the costs of collective bargaining from those of political lobbying. No matter what benefits the unions negotiate on his behalf, he shouldn’t have to pay a dime. Mr. Janus lost decisively in the lower federal courts for the same reason the teachers did: the Supreme Court’s precedent in the Abood case.
That precedent should guide the justices here, too. Beyond the court’s core principle of stare decisis, which keeps it from overturning its own prior decisions except in extraordinary circumstances, the Abood decision reasonably balanced workers’ First Amendment rights against the government’s interest in labor peace. Two notable conservative scholars go further, arguing in a supporting brief to the court that the First Amendment does not apply at all in this case. The government is allowed to compel subsidies of others’ speech all the time without violating the Constitution, they point out, such as by collecting and spending taxes.
In Monday’s arguments, several of the conservative justices seemed immune to such reasoning. Justice Alito referred to fair-share fees as “compelled speech” that infringes on a worker’s “dignity and conscience.”
But the true goal of this litigation strategy has never been to protect workers’ speech rights; it is, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor rightly said, “to do away with unions,” which not only make life a little harder for the world’s plutocrats, but have also become a potent organizing tool in Democratic politics. One recent paper by political scientists found Democrats’ share of the presidential vote fell 3.5 percentage points in states that eliminated fair-share fees. In Wisconsin, public-sector union membership fell by half after the state’s newly Republican leadership eliminated the fees in 2011.
Justice Gorsuch was silent on Monday, but it’s hard to imagine he will vote with the unions. Since joining the court last April, Justice Gorsuch has voted nearly all of the time with the other most conservative justice, Clarence Thomas. Had the seat he occupies been filled by Merrick Garland, it’s unlikely the case would have been brought at all.
Whatever the justices decide in Mr. Janus’s case, the drama that preceded it is another reminder of the importance of every Supreme Court appointment, and of the degree to which Mr. McConnell may have altered the course of history with his cynical ploy. After all, President Trump will be in power until 2025 at the latest, but Justice Gorsuch could easily be issuing opinions four decades from now.
by Editorial Board, NY Times | Read more:
Monday, February 26, 2018
Free News Gets Scarcer as Paywalls Tighten
For those looking for free news online, the search is becoming harder.
Tougher restrictions on online content have boosted digital paid subscriptions at many news organizations, amid a growing trend keeping content behind a "paywall."
Free news has by no means disappeared, but recent moves by media groups and Facebook and Google supporting paid subscriptions is forcing free-riders to scramble.
For some analysts, the trend reflects a normalization of a situation that has existed since the early internet days that enabled consumers to get accustomed to the notion of free online content.
"I think there is a definite trend for people to start paying for at least one news source," said Rebecca Lieb, an analyst who follows digital media for Kaleido Insights. (...)
- Making the transition -
Newspapers seeking to make a transition from print to digital have found it difficult to replace the advertising revenues that were long the staple of the publications.
News organizations are unable to compete against giants like Google and Facebook for digital advertising, and are turning increasingly to readers.
"For large-scale news organizations whether they are national or regional, that want to have a large reporting staff, reader revenue needs to be the number one source," said Ken Doctor, a media analyst and consultant who writes the Newsonomics blog.
Doctor said some news organizations are getting close to 50 percent of revenues from subscriptions and sees that rising to as much as 70 percent.
The New York Times reported the number of paid subscribers grew to 2.6 million and that subscriptions accounted for 60 percent of 2017 revenues. The Washington Post last year touted it had more than one million paid digital readers.
Not surprisingly, the Times and Post have both tightened their online paywalls by limiting the number of free articles available. Similar moves have been made at The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times and elsewhere.
Magazines such as Conde Nast's Wired and The New Yorker also introduced new online pay models that limit free content.
The Atlantic, a media group bolstered by an investment from Laurene Powell Jobs, said this month it is experimenting with various subscription models as it expands.
Ad blockers used by some consumers have caused deeper revenue woes for online news.
One site, Salon.com, told its readers that if they used ad blockers, their computers would be used to mine cryptocurrency to offset the lost ad revenues.
While well-known national publications may be able to navigate digital pay models, it will be harder for smaller, regional and local news organizations on slimmer budgets, said Radcliffe.
"Smaller local organizations might find it harder to make their case to readers (to pay), and they have a smaller pool of customers," Radcliffe said.
Facebook and Google recently agreed to help support paywalls for news organizations on their platforms, and Apple agreed to waive its commission for subscription sign-ups from the big social network on its devices, according to Facebook's Campbell Brown.
These moves could be positive for news organizations after years of tensions with online platforms, according to Lieb.
"This means (online platforms) are trying to work for instead of passively against publishers," Lieb said.
"This is important because search and social are the way people discover news in the digital age."
- Walls keep people out -
According to a study by Digital Content Next -- formerly known as the Online Publishers Association -- news organizations only got around five percent of their digital revenues from the dominant online platforms but accounted for close to 30 percent of the content viewed.
The paywall trend may have some other consequences by limiting national "conversations" based on shared news.
"Content that is behind a paywall does not go viral," Lieb said, but noted that important news scoops can still spark national discussion.
Strict paywalls may also lead to a greater "digital divide" with a segment of the population having access to high-quality news, analysts note.
Tougher restrictions on online content have boosted digital paid subscriptions at many news organizations, amid a growing trend keeping content behind a "paywall."
Free news has by no means disappeared, but recent moves by media groups and Facebook and Google supporting paid subscriptions is forcing free-riders to scramble.For some analysts, the trend reflects a normalization of a situation that has existed since the early internet days that enabled consumers to get accustomed to the notion of free online content.
"I think there is a definite trend for people to start paying for at least one news source," said Rebecca Lieb, an analyst who follows digital media for Kaleido Insights. (...)
- Making the transition -
Newspapers seeking to make a transition from print to digital have found it difficult to replace the advertising revenues that were long the staple of the publications.
News organizations are unable to compete against giants like Google and Facebook for digital advertising, and are turning increasingly to readers.
"For large-scale news organizations whether they are national or regional, that want to have a large reporting staff, reader revenue needs to be the number one source," said Ken Doctor, a media analyst and consultant who writes the Newsonomics blog.
Doctor said some news organizations are getting close to 50 percent of revenues from subscriptions and sees that rising to as much as 70 percent.
The New York Times reported the number of paid subscribers grew to 2.6 million and that subscriptions accounted for 60 percent of 2017 revenues. The Washington Post last year touted it had more than one million paid digital readers.
Not surprisingly, the Times and Post have both tightened their online paywalls by limiting the number of free articles available. Similar moves have been made at The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times and elsewhere.
Magazines such as Conde Nast's Wired and The New Yorker also introduced new online pay models that limit free content.
The Atlantic, a media group bolstered by an investment from Laurene Powell Jobs, said this month it is experimenting with various subscription models as it expands.
Ad blockers used by some consumers have caused deeper revenue woes for online news.
One site, Salon.com, told its readers that if they used ad blockers, their computers would be used to mine cryptocurrency to offset the lost ad revenues.
While well-known national publications may be able to navigate digital pay models, it will be harder for smaller, regional and local news organizations on slimmer budgets, said Radcliffe.
"Smaller local organizations might find it harder to make their case to readers (to pay), and they have a smaller pool of customers," Radcliffe said.
Facebook and Google recently agreed to help support paywalls for news organizations on their platforms, and Apple agreed to waive its commission for subscription sign-ups from the big social network on its devices, according to Facebook's Campbell Brown.
These moves could be positive for news organizations after years of tensions with online platforms, according to Lieb.
"This means (online platforms) are trying to work for instead of passively against publishers," Lieb said.
"This is important because search and social are the way people discover news in the digital age."
- Walls keep people out -
According to a study by Digital Content Next -- formerly known as the Online Publishers Association -- news organizations only got around five percent of their digital revenues from the dominant online platforms but accounted for close to 30 percent of the content viewed.
The paywall trend may have some other consequences by limiting national "conversations" based on shared news.
"Content that is behind a paywall does not go viral," Lieb said, but noted that important news scoops can still spark national discussion.
Strict paywalls may also lead to a greater "digital divide" with a segment of the population having access to high-quality news, analysts note.
by Rob Lever, France24 | Read more:
Image: Rob Lever
The Epic Journeys of Migratory Birds
As the sun was setting over the Firth of Thames in New Zealand, dozens of bar-tailed godwits shuffled about lazily on the edge of the bay, the wind fluffing their feathers.
The tide was coming in, submerging the mudflats where the birds had been feeding, sticking their long bills into the soft earth to dig up worms and crabs. As the water advanced, they stopped foraging and waded ashore, inelegantly carrying their plump, butterball bodies on stilt-like legs. A bit homely and ungainly, with drab plumage, godwits appear quite ordinary. As the sky turned orange, they settled down to roost. Resting for hours on end, they can seem rather sedentary.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Six months earlier, these birds had made an epic journey to get here, flying all the way from Alaska. Astonishingly, they didn’t stop along the way. For eight or nine days straight, they flew, beating their wings the entire way: about 7,000 miles, more than a quarter of the way around the world.
When the godwits arrived, they were bedraggled and emaciated. They had fattened up now for their migration back to Alaska, where they breed during the summer. They were going to fly about 6,000 miles, to the Yellow Sea. There they would spend about six weeks along a coastline split between China, North Korea, and South Korea, feeding and resting before flying 4,000 more miles.
Bar-tailed godwits have made this migration for thousands of years, but a clear picture of their travels has emerged only in the past few decades. Although migrations by birds have been a source of wonder for centuries, new scientific findings are helping to demystify them while adding to our appreciation of these incredible feats. At the same time, scientists are discovering how human activity and climate change are disrupting and possibly imperiling these ancient journeys.
The disappearance of godwits from New Zealand during the months when they breed led the Maori to view godwits—which they call kuaka—as birds of mystery. The sentiment is reflected in a Maori saying about the unobtainable: “Who has ever held the egg of the kuaka?” By the 1970s bird-watchers and biologists suspected the godwits in New Zealand were the same ones that nested in Alaska. But it was only in 2007 that scientists were able to determine the migration routes.
Researchers Bob Gill and Lee Tibbitts, wildlife biologists with the U.S. Geological Survey, were part of a team that captured a small number of godwits and implanted satellite transmitters inside an air sac in their abdomens, leaving the antennas sticking out. Between March and May, they tracked a group on their northern migration. The batteries of the transmitters weren’t expected to last beyond the summer, and sure enough, one by one, they stopped working. Except one. On August 30, 2007, a godwit known as E7 departed from Alaska, still transmitting its position.
With a rising sense of excitement, the researchers followed the bird’s progress as it flew past Hawaii, past Fiji, and then, on September 7, past the northwestern tip of New Zealand. “It was a nail-biter because the battery was failing,” recalls Tibbitts. That night E7 landed in the Firth of Thames. At eight days and eight nights, and 7,150 miles, it’s still the longest nonstop migratory flight ever recorded. “It is a head-scratching, jaw-dropping feat,” says Gill, now an emeritus scientist with USGS.
The tracking of E7 served to deepen the curiosity that bird migrations have long inspired. Where do they go? How can they fly as far as they do? How are they able to find their way to the same winter and summer sites year after year? Advances in satellite tracking and other technologies are enabling researchers to explore those questions in unprecedented detail. (...)
Like other long-haul migrants, godwits prepare by building enormous reserves of fat in the weeks leading up to their departure. The equivalent of gasoline, fat is what fuels the birds. When the godwits leave, more than half their body weight is fat. They look like feathered croquet balls, with a layer of fat under the skin up to an inch thick and more fat encasing their abdominal organs. “I call them lard asses,” says Phil Battley, an ornithologist at Massey University in New Zealand.
As they fatten up, their pectoral and leg muscles also grow larger. Other long-distance migrants, such as red knots, shrink the gizzard and other organs in preparation for flight—the equivalent of jettisoning excess cargo.
Godwits, like other migratory species, don’t rely just on their own power; they also take advantage of winds. The birds tend to depart from Alaska on the tail end of storms that produce winds blowing south. Their departure from New Zealand also coincides with favorable conditions for traveling. “You get pretty benign winds when you leave New Zealand,” Gill says, “but then they are able to hook into others as they go north.” When they leave the Yellow Sea for Alaska, the winds once again have shifted to be with the birds.
Researchers assume that godwits, which are not known to soar, flap their wings for most of their journey, even when riding winds, while other species, such as albatrosses, do soar.
Some species possess an astonishing flexibility in regulating their sleep. Niels Rattenborg at the Max Planck Institute and his colleagues went to the Galápagos Islands to study the sleeping habits of great frigatebirds, which have seven-foot wingspans and fly hundreds of miles over the Pacific Ocean looking for food. The researchers, capturing frigatebirds in their nests, implanted sensors to track brain electrical activity and glued data-recording devices on their heads before releasing them. Besides keeping track of location and altitude, the devices helped the researchers determine sleep patterns.
After spending up to 10 days over the Pacific, the frigatebirds returned to their nests and Rattenborg’s group retrieved the devices. The data showed that the birds slept in short bursts lasting an average of 12 seconds, usually while soaring, that added up to an average of 42 minutes a day. That was a mere fraction of the 12 hours a day the birds slept when they were in their nests. For a substantial part of the time that they napped in the air, the birds only put half of their brain to sleep, while keeping the other half awake.
To learn whether godwits rely on similar sleep patterns in flight, researchers need considerably smaller batteries—a goal Rattenborg says is within reach. “It’s possible that they get some sleep on the wing, perhaps even while flapping,” he says.
by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, National Geographic | Read more:
Image: Jonathan Harrod, Minden Pictures
The tide was coming in, submerging the mudflats where the birds had been feeding, sticking their long bills into the soft earth to dig up worms and crabs. As the water advanced, they stopped foraging and waded ashore, inelegantly carrying their plump, butterball bodies on stilt-like legs. A bit homely and ungainly, with drab plumage, godwits appear quite ordinary. As the sky turned orange, they settled down to roost. Resting for hours on end, they can seem rather sedentary.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Six months earlier, these birds had made an epic journey to get here, flying all the way from Alaska. Astonishingly, they didn’t stop along the way. For eight or nine days straight, they flew, beating their wings the entire way: about 7,000 miles, more than a quarter of the way around the world.When the godwits arrived, they were bedraggled and emaciated. They had fattened up now for their migration back to Alaska, where they breed during the summer. They were going to fly about 6,000 miles, to the Yellow Sea. There they would spend about six weeks along a coastline split between China, North Korea, and South Korea, feeding and resting before flying 4,000 more miles.
Bar-tailed godwits have made this migration for thousands of years, but a clear picture of their travels has emerged only in the past few decades. Although migrations by birds have been a source of wonder for centuries, new scientific findings are helping to demystify them while adding to our appreciation of these incredible feats. At the same time, scientists are discovering how human activity and climate change are disrupting and possibly imperiling these ancient journeys.
The disappearance of godwits from New Zealand during the months when they breed led the Maori to view godwits—which they call kuaka—as birds of mystery. The sentiment is reflected in a Maori saying about the unobtainable: “Who has ever held the egg of the kuaka?” By the 1970s bird-watchers and biologists suspected the godwits in New Zealand were the same ones that nested in Alaska. But it was only in 2007 that scientists were able to determine the migration routes.
Researchers Bob Gill and Lee Tibbitts, wildlife biologists with the U.S. Geological Survey, were part of a team that captured a small number of godwits and implanted satellite transmitters inside an air sac in their abdomens, leaving the antennas sticking out. Between March and May, they tracked a group on their northern migration. The batteries of the transmitters weren’t expected to last beyond the summer, and sure enough, one by one, they stopped working. Except one. On August 30, 2007, a godwit known as E7 departed from Alaska, still transmitting its position.
With a rising sense of excitement, the researchers followed the bird’s progress as it flew past Hawaii, past Fiji, and then, on September 7, past the northwestern tip of New Zealand. “It was a nail-biter because the battery was failing,” recalls Tibbitts. That night E7 landed in the Firth of Thames. At eight days and eight nights, and 7,150 miles, it’s still the longest nonstop migratory flight ever recorded. “It is a head-scratching, jaw-dropping feat,” says Gill, now an emeritus scientist with USGS.
The tracking of E7 served to deepen the curiosity that bird migrations have long inspired. Where do they go? How can they fly as far as they do? How are they able to find their way to the same winter and summer sites year after year? Advances in satellite tracking and other technologies are enabling researchers to explore those questions in unprecedented detail. (...)
Like other long-haul migrants, godwits prepare by building enormous reserves of fat in the weeks leading up to their departure. The equivalent of gasoline, fat is what fuels the birds. When the godwits leave, more than half their body weight is fat. They look like feathered croquet balls, with a layer of fat under the skin up to an inch thick and more fat encasing their abdominal organs. “I call them lard asses,” says Phil Battley, an ornithologist at Massey University in New Zealand.
As they fatten up, their pectoral and leg muscles also grow larger. Other long-distance migrants, such as red knots, shrink the gizzard and other organs in preparation for flight—the equivalent of jettisoning excess cargo.
Godwits, like other migratory species, don’t rely just on their own power; they also take advantage of winds. The birds tend to depart from Alaska on the tail end of storms that produce winds blowing south. Their departure from New Zealand also coincides with favorable conditions for traveling. “You get pretty benign winds when you leave New Zealand,” Gill says, “but then they are able to hook into others as they go north.” When they leave the Yellow Sea for Alaska, the winds once again have shifted to be with the birds.
Researchers assume that godwits, which are not known to soar, flap their wings for most of their journey, even when riding winds, while other species, such as albatrosses, do soar.
Some species possess an astonishing flexibility in regulating their sleep. Niels Rattenborg at the Max Planck Institute and his colleagues went to the Galápagos Islands to study the sleeping habits of great frigatebirds, which have seven-foot wingspans and fly hundreds of miles over the Pacific Ocean looking for food. The researchers, capturing frigatebirds in their nests, implanted sensors to track brain electrical activity and glued data-recording devices on their heads before releasing them. Besides keeping track of location and altitude, the devices helped the researchers determine sleep patterns.
After spending up to 10 days over the Pacific, the frigatebirds returned to their nests and Rattenborg’s group retrieved the devices. The data showed that the birds slept in short bursts lasting an average of 12 seconds, usually while soaring, that added up to an average of 42 minutes a day. That was a mere fraction of the 12 hours a day the birds slept when they were in their nests. For a substantial part of the time that they napped in the air, the birds only put half of their brain to sleep, while keeping the other half awake.
To learn whether godwits rely on similar sleep patterns in flight, researchers need considerably smaller batteries—a goal Rattenborg says is within reach. “It’s possible that they get some sleep on the wing, perhaps even while flapping,” he says.
by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, National Geographic | Read more:
Image: Jonathan Harrod, Minden Pictures
The Semplica-Girl Diaries
Having just turned forty, have resolved to embark on grand project of writing every day in this new black book just got at OfficeMax. Exciting to think how in one year, at rate of one page/day, will have written three hundred and sixty-five pages, and what a picture of life and times then available for kids & grandkids, even greatgrandkids, whoever, all are welcome (!) to see how life really was/is now. Because what do we know of other times really? How clothes smelled and carriages sounded? Will future people know, for example, about sound of airplanes going over at night, since airplanes by that time passé? Will future people know sometimes cats fought in night? Because by that time some chemical invented to make cats not fight? Last night dreamed of two demons having sex and found it was only two cats fighting outside window. Will future people be aware of concept of “demons”? Will they find our belief in “demons” quaint? Will “windows” even exist? Interesting to future generations that even sophisticated college grad like me sometimes woke in cold sweat, thinking of demons, believing one possibly under bed? Anyway, what the heck, am not planning on writing encyclopedia, if any future person is reading this, if you want to know what a “demon” was, go look it up, in something called an encyclopedia, if you even still have those!
Am getting off track, due to tired, due to those fighting cats.
Hereby resolve to write in this book at least twenty minutes a night, no matter how tired. (If discouraged, just think how much will have been recorded for posterity after one mere year!)
SEPTEMBER 5th
Oops. Missed a day. Things hectic. Will summarize yesterday. Yesterday a bit rough. While picking kids up at school, bumper fell off Park Avenue. Note to future generations: Park Avenue = type of car. Ours not new. Ours oldish. Bit rusty. Kids got in, Eva (middle child) asked what was meaning of “junkorama.” At that moment, bumper fell off. Mr. Renn, history teacher, quite helpful, retrieved bumper (note: write letter of commendation to principal), saying he too once had car whose bumper fell off, when poor, in college. Eva assured me it was all right bumper had fallen off. I replied of course it was all right, why wouldn’t it be all right, it was just something that had happened, I certainly hadn’t caused. Image that stays in mind is of three sweet kids in back seat, chastened expressions on little faces, timidly holding bumper across laps. One end of bumper had to hang out Eva’s window and today she has sniffles, plus small cut on hand from place where bumper was sharp.
Lilly (oldest, nearly thirteen!), as always, put all in perspective, by saying, Who cares about stupid bumper, we’re going to get a new car soon anyway, when rich, right?
Upon arriving home, put bumper in garage. In garage, found dead large mouse or small squirrel crawling with maggots. Used shovel to transfer majority of squirrel/mouse to Hefty bag. Smudge of squirrel/mouse still on garage floor, like oil stain w/ embedded fur tufts.
Stood looking up at house, sad. Thought: Why sad? Don’t be sad. If sad, will make everyone sad. Went in happy, not mentioning bumper, squirrel/mouse smudge, maggots, then gave Eva extra ice cream, due to I had spoken harshly to her.
Have to do better! Be kinder. Start now. Soon they will be grown and how sad, if only memory of you is testy, stressed guy in bad car.
When will I have sufficient leisure/wealth to sit on hay bale watching moon rise, while in luxurious mansion family sleeps? At that time, will have chance to reflect deeply on meaning of life, etc., etc. Have a feeling and have always had a feeling that this and other good things will happen for us!
SEPTEMBER 6th
Very depressing birthday party today at home of Lilly’s friend Leslie Torrini.
House is mansion where Lafayette once stayed. Torrinis showed us Lafayette’s room: now their “Fun Den.” Plasma TV, pinball game, foot massager. Thirty acres, six garages (they call them “outbuildings”): one for Ferraris (three), one for Porsches (two, plus one he is rebuilding), one for historical merry-go-round they are restoring as family (!). Across trout-stocked stream, red Oriental bridge flown in from China. Showed us hoofmark from some dynasty. In front room, near Steinway, plaster cast of hoofmark from even earlier dynasty, in wood of different bridge. Picasso autograph, Disney autograph, dress Greta Garbo once wore, all displayed in massive mahogany cabinet.
Vegetable garden tended by guy named Karl.
Lilly: Wow, this garden is like ten times bigger than our whole yard.
Flower garden tended by separate guy, weirdly also named Karl.
Lilly: Wouldn’t you love to live here?
Me: Lilly, ha-ha, don’t ah . . .
Pam (my wife, very sweet, love of life!): What, what is she saying wrong? Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you love to live here? I know I would.
In front of house, on sweeping lawn, largest SG arrangement ever seen, all in white, white smocks blowing in breeze, and Lilly says, Can we go closer?
Leslie Torrini: We can but we don’t, usually.
Leslie’s mother, dressed in Indonesian sarong: We don’t, as we already have, many times, dear, but you perhaps would like to? Perhaps this is all very new and exciting to you?
Lilly, shyly: It is, yes.
Leslie’s mom: Please, go, enjoy.
Lilly races away.
Leslie’s mom, to Eva: And you, dear?
Eva stands timidly against my leg, shakes head no.
Just then father (Emmett) appears, says time for dinner, hopes we like sailfish flown in fresh from Guatemala, prepared with a rare spice found only in one tiny region of Burma, which had to be bribed out.
The kids can eat later, in the tree house, Leslie’s mom says.
She indicates the tree house, which is painted Victorian and has a gabled roof and a telescope sticking out and what looks like a small solar panel.
Thomas: Wow, that tree house is like twice the size of our actual house.
(Thomas, as usual, exaggerating: tree house is more like one-third size of our house. Still, yes: big tree house.)
Our gift not the very worst. Although possibly the least expensive—someone brought a mini DVD-player; someone brought a lock of hair from an actual mummy (!)—it was, in my opinion, the most heartfelt. Because Leslie (who appeared disappointed by the lock of mummy hair, and said so, because she already had one (!)) was, it seemed to me, touched by the simplicity of our paper-doll set. And although we did not view it as kitsch at the time we bought it, when Leslie’s mom said, Les, check it out, kitsch or what, don’t you love it?, I thought, Yes, well, maybe it is kitsch, maybe we did intend. In any event, this eased the blow when the next gift was a ticket to the Preakness (!), as Leslie has recently become interested in horses, and has begun getting up early to feed their nine horses, whereas previously she had categorically refused to feed the six llamas.
Leslie’s mom: So guess who ended up feeding the llamas?
Leslie, sharply: Mom, don’t you remember back then I always had yoga?
Leslie’s mom: Although actually, honestly? It was a blessing, a chance for me to rediscover what terrific animals they are, after school, on days on which Les had yoga.
Leslie: Like every day, yoga?
Leslie’s mom: I guess you just have to trust your kids, trust that their innate interest in life will win out in the end, don’t you think? Which is what is happening now, with Les and horses. God, she loves them.
Pam: Our kids, we can’t even get them to pick up what Ferber does in the front yard.
Leslie’s mom: And Ferber is?
Me: Dog.
Leslie’s mom: Ha-ha, yes, well, everything poops, isn’t that just it?
After dinner, strolled grounds with Emmett, who is surgeon, does something two days a week with brain inserts, small electronic devices? Or possibly biotronic? They are very small. Hundreds can fit on head of pin? Or dime? Did not totally follow. He asked about my work, I told. He said, Well, huh, amazing the strange, arcane things our culture requires some of us to do, degrading things, things that offer no tangible benefit to anyone, how do they expect people to continue to even hold their heads up?
Could not think of response. Note to self: Think of response, send on card, thus striking up friendship with Emmett?
Returned to Torrinis’ house, sat on special star-watching platform as stars came out. Our kids sat watching stars, fascinated. What, I said, no stars in our neighborhood? No response. From anyone. Actually, stars there did seem brighter. On star platform, had too much to drink, and suddenly everything I thought of seemed stupid. So just went quiet, like in stupor.
Pam drove home. I sat sullen and drunk in passenger seat of Park Avenue. Kids babbling about what a great party it was, Lilly especially. Thomas spouting all these boring llama facts, per Emmett.
Lilly: I can’t wait till my party. My party is in two weeks, right?
Pam: What do you want to do for your party, sweetie?
Long silence in car.
Lilly, finally, sadly: Oh, I don’t know. Nothing, I guess.
Pulled up to house. Another silence as we regarded blank, empty yard. That is, mostly crabgrass and no red Oriental bridge w/ ancient hoofprints and no outbuildings and not a single SG, but only Ferber, who we’d kind of forgotten about, and who, as usual, had circled round and round the tree until nearly strangling to death on his gradually shortening leash and was looking up at us with begging eyes in which desperation was combined with a sort of low-boiling anger.
Let him off leash, he shot me hostile look, took dump extremely close to porch.
Watched to see if kids would take initiative and pick up. But no. Kids only slumped past and stood exhausted by front door. Knew I should take initiative and pick up. But was tired and had to come in and write in this stupid book.
Do not really like rich people, as they make us poor people feel dopey and inadequate. Not that we are poor. I would say we are middle. We are very, very lucky. I know that. But still, it is not right that rich people make us middle people feel dopey and inadequate.
Am writing this still drunk and it is getting late and tomorrow is Monday, which means work.
Work, work, work. Stupid work. Am so tired of work.
SEPTEMBER 7th
Just reread that last entry and should clarify.
Am not tired of work. It is a privilege to work. I do not hate the rich. I aspire to be rich myself. And when we finally do get our own bridge, trout, tree house, SGs, etc., at least will know we really earned them, unlike, say, the Torrinis, who, I feel, must have family money.
Last night, after party, found Eva sad in her room. Asked why. She said no reason. But in sketch pad: crayon pic of row of sad SGs. Could tell were meant to be sad, due to frowns went down off faces like Fu Manchus and tears were dropping in arcs, flowers springing up where tears hit ground. Note to self: Talk to her, explain that it does not hurt, they are not sad but actually happy, given what their prior conditions were like: they chose, are glad, etc.
Very moving piece on NPR re Bangladeshi SG sending money home: hence her parents able to build small shack. (Note to self: Find online, download, play for Eva. First fix computer.Computer super slow. Possibly delete “CircusLoser”? Acrobats run all jerky, due to low memory + elephants do not hop = no fun.)
by George Saunders, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Martin Ansin
[ed. Repost]
Am getting off track, due to tired, due to those fighting cats.
Hereby resolve to write in this book at least twenty minutes a night, no matter how tired. (If discouraged, just think how much will have been recorded for posterity after one mere year!)
SEPTEMBER 5th
Oops. Missed a day. Things hectic. Will summarize yesterday. Yesterday a bit rough. While picking kids up at school, bumper fell off Park Avenue. Note to future generations: Park Avenue = type of car. Ours not new. Ours oldish. Bit rusty. Kids got in, Eva (middle child) asked what was meaning of “junkorama.” At that moment, bumper fell off. Mr. Renn, history teacher, quite helpful, retrieved bumper (note: write letter of commendation to principal), saying he too once had car whose bumper fell off, when poor, in college. Eva assured me it was all right bumper had fallen off. I replied of course it was all right, why wouldn’t it be all right, it was just something that had happened, I certainly hadn’t caused. Image that stays in mind is of three sweet kids in back seat, chastened expressions on little faces, timidly holding bumper across laps. One end of bumper had to hang out Eva’s window and today she has sniffles, plus small cut on hand from place where bumper was sharp.Lilly (oldest, nearly thirteen!), as always, put all in perspective, by saying, Who cares about stupid bumper, we’re going to get a new car soon anyway, when rich, right?
Upon arriving home, put bumper in garage. In garage, found dead large mouse or small squirrel crawling with maggots. Used shovel to transfer majority of squirrel/mouse to Hefty bag. Smudge of squirrel/mouse still on garage floor, like oil stain w/ embedded fur tufts.
Stood looking up at house, sad. Thought: Why sad? Don’t be sad. If sad, will make everyone sad. Went in happy, not mentioning bumper, squirrel/mouse smudge, maggots, then gave Eva extra ice cream, due to I had spoken harshly to her.
Have to do better! Be kinder. Start now. Soon they will be grown and how sad, if only memory of you is testy, stressed guy in bad car.
When will I have sufficient leisure/wealth to sit on hay bale watching moon rise, while in luxurious mansion family sleeps? At that time, will have chance to reflect deeply on meaning of life, etc., etc. Have a feeling and have always had a feeling that this and other good things will happen for us!
SEPTEMBER 6th
Very depressing birthday party today at home of Lilly’s friend Leslie Torrini.
House is mansion where Lafayette once stayed. Torrinis showed us Lafayette’s room: now their “Fun Den.” Plasma TV, pinball game, foot massager. Thirty acres, six garages (they call them “outbuildings”): one for Ferraris (three), one for Porsches (two, plus one he is rebuilding), one for historical merry-go-round they are restoring as family (!). Across trout-stocked stream, red Oriental bridge flown in from China. Showed us hoofmark from some dynasty. In front room, near Steinway, plaster cast of hoofmark from even earlier dynasty, in wood of different bridge. Picasso autograph, Disney autograph, dress Greta Garbo once wore, all displayed in massive mahogany cabinet.
Vegetable garden tended by guy named Karl.
Lilly: Wow, this garden is like ten times bigger than our whole yard.
Flower garden tended by separate guy, weirdly also named Karl.
Lilly: Wouldn’t you love to live here?
Me: Lilly, ha-ha, don’t ah . . .
Pam (my wife, very sweet, love of life!): What, what is she saying wrong? Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you love to live here? I know I would.
In front of house, on sweeping lawn, largest SG arrangement ever seen, all in white, white smocks blowing in breeze, and Lilly says, Can we go closer?
Leslie Torrini: We can but we don’t, usually.
Leslie’s mother, dressed in Indonesian sarong: We don’t, as we already have, many times, dear, but you perhaps would like to? Perhaps this is all very new and exciting to you?
Lilly, shyly: It is, yes.
Leslie’s mom: Please, go, enjoy.
Lilly races away.
Leslie’s mom, to Eva: And you, dear?
Eva stands timidly against my leg, shakes head no.
Just then father (Emmett) appears, says time for dinner, hopes we like sailfish flown in fresh from Guatemala, prepared with a rare spice found only in one tiny region of Burma, which had to be bribed out.
The kids can eat later, in the tree house, Leslie’s mom says.
She indicates the tree house, which is painted Victorian and has a gabled roof and a telescope sticking out and what looks like a small solar panel.
Thomas: Wow, that tree house is like twice the size of our actual house.
(Thomas, as usual, exaggerating: tree house is more like one-third size of our house. Still, yes: big tree house.)
Our gift not the very worst. Although possibly the least expensive—someone brought a mini DVD-player; someone brought a lock of hair from an actual mummy (!)—it was, in my opinion, the most heartfelt. Because Leslie (who appeared disappointed by the lock of mummy hair, and said so, because she already had one (!)) was, it seemed to me, touched by the simplicity of our paper-doll set. And although we did not view it as kitsch at the time we bought it, when Leslie’s mom said, Les, check it out, kitsch or what, don’t you love it?, I thought, Yes, well, maybe it is kitsch, maybe we did intend. In any event, this eased the blow when the next gift was a ticket to the Preakness (!), as Leslie has recently become interested in horses, and has begun getting up early to feed their nine horses, whereas previously she had categorically refused to feed the six llamas.
Leslie’s mom: So guess who ended up feeding the llamas?
Leslie, sharply: Mom, don’t you remember back then I always had yoga?
Leslie’s mom: Although actually, honestly? It was a blessing, a chance for me to rediscover what terrific animals they are, after school, on days on which Les had yoga.
Leslie: Like every day, yoga?
Leslie’s mom: I guess you just have to trust your kids, trust that their innate interest in life will win out in the end, don’t you think? Which is what is happening now, with Les and horses. God, she loves them.
Pam: Our kids, we can’t even get them to pick up what Ferber does in the front yard.
Leslie’s mom: And Ferber is?
Me: Dog.
Leslie’s mom: Ha-ha, yes, well, everything poops, isn’t that just it?
After dinner, strolled grounds with Emmett, who is surgeon, does something two days a week with brain inserts, small electronic devices? Or possibly biotronic? They are very small. Hundreds can fit on head of pin? Or dime? Did not totally follow. He asked about my work, I told. He said, Well, huh, amazing the strange, arcane things our culture requires some of us to do, degrading things, things that offer no tangible benefit to anyone, how do they expect people to continue to even hold their heads up?
Could not think of response. Note to self: Think of response, send on card, thus striking up friendship with Emmett?
Returned to Torrinis’ house, sat on special star-watching platform as stars came out. Our kids sat watching stars, fascinated. What, I said, no stars in our neighborhood? No response. From anyone. Actually, stars there did seem brighter. On star platform, had too much to drink, and suddenly everything I thought of seemed stupid. So just went quiet, like in stupor.
Pam drove home. I sat sullen and drunk in passenger seat of Park Avenue. Kids babbling about what a great party it was, Lilly especially. Thomas spouting all these boring llama facts, per Emmett.
Lilly: I can’t wait till my party. My party is in two weeks, right?
Pam: What do you want to do for your party, sweetie?
Long silence in car.
Lilly, finally, sadly: Oh, I don’t know. Nothing, I guess.
Pulled up to house. Another silence as we regarded blank, empty yard. That is, mostly crabgrass and no red Oriental bridge w/ ancient hoofprints and no outbuildings and not a single SG, but only Ferber, who we’d kind of forgotten about, and who, as usual, had circled round and round the tree until nearly strangling to death on his gradually shortening leash and was looking up at us with begging eyes in which desperation was combined with a sort of low-boiling anger.
Let him off leash, he shot me hostile look, took dump extremely close to porch.
Watched to see if kids would take initiative and pick up. But no. Kids only slumped past and stood exhausted by front door. Knew I should take initiative and pick up. But was tired and had to come in and write in this stupid book.
Do not really like rich people, as they make us poor people feel dopey and inadequate. Not that we are poor. I would say we are middle. We are very, very lucky. I know that. But still, it is not right that rich people make us middle people feel dopey and inadequate.
Am writing this still drunk and it is getting late and tomorrow is Monday, which means work.
Work, work, work. Stupid work. Am so tired of work.
SEPTEMBER 7th
Just reread that last entry and should clarify.
Am not tired of work. It is a privilege to work. I do not hate the rich. I aspire to be rich myself. And when we finally do get our own bridge, trout, tree house, SGs, etc., at least will know we really earned them, unlike, say, the Torrinis, who, I feel, must have family money.
Last night, after party, found Eva sad in her room. Asked why. She said no reason. But in sketch pad: crayon pic of row of sad SGs. Could tell were meant to be sad, due to frowns went down off faces like Fu Manchus and tears were dropping in arcs, flowers springing up where tears hit ground. Note to self: Talk to her, explain that it does not hurt, they are not sad but actually happy, given what their prior conditions were like: they chose, are glad, etc.
Very moving piece on NPR re Bangladeshi SG sending money home: hence her parents able to build small shack. (Note to self: Find online, download, play for Eva. First fix computer.Computer super slow. Possibly delete “CircusLoser”? Acrobats run all jerky, due to low memory + elephants do not hop = no fun.)
by George Saunders, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Martin Ansin
[ed. Repost]
Sunday, February 25, 2018
At the Olympics, Fans Became Walking Corporate Billboards
He didn't get the hashtag quite right on the first try, so they withheld the free stuffed bear he waited in line a half-hour to earn.
"Add play," the agent said. "It should be #CokePlay."
On the final night of the Pyeongchang Olympic Games on Sunday evening, this "agent" was policing Daniel Zabek's Instagram feed to make sure he branded his post to exactly match the corporation's chosen slogan.
Zabek and hundreds of others stood in a line that snaked around the Olympic Park in the hours before the closing ceremony just for this: to take a photo in front of a corporation's advertisements and post the pictures on social media with the company's predetermined hashtag.
In exchange, he would get a stuffed bear, the soda company's mascot with the brand name embroidered on a red scarf around its neck.
"Ok, done," he said and handed his phone back to the guard. "Good?"
The officer carefully inspected it, nodded and handed over the plush toy. Out into the digital world, Zabek had sent a promo for soda. In the real world, he walked away carrying another promo for soda.
He doesn't drink soda.
This was the reward for corporations that spend hundreds of millions on Olympic partnerships in the modern, millennial world: For two weeks, spectators were converted into walking billboards for watches, phones, beverages, cars.
"This is all a big marketing scheme," Zabek said. "But I'm so OK with that. Look at this place - everyone's happy."
Jaunty music played in the background, and all around him people posed in front of #cokeplay billboards, then handed their phones over to prove they got the hashtags right to receive their prize: another advertisement.
Want a photo of yourself in a bobsled? The line was short for a turn to hop in one right across the pavilion. If you posted your picture, you'd star in an ad for Omega, the official timekeeper of the Olympics. The logo was stamped on the side of the sled and on the wall behind it.
Inside a building down the way, acrobats suspended from the ceiling spun around on hoops during a laser light show. This was a building-sized trapeze ad for the Korean Electric Power Corporation, and wowed spectators inside happily held up their phones to snap photos and send them out into social media.
Outside the Hyundai building, a massive art exhibition painted the darkest shade of black on earth, black-coated workers checked visitors' phones. If the hashtag was exactly right, the reward was a pin: Soohorang, the Olympic mascot, dancing next to the Hyundai corporate logo.
Zabek, a 27-year-old New Yorker, is the ideal candidate for this brand of modern marketing. He proudly declares himself a millennial, and he often speaks in internet acronyms. To describe why he left the Olympics two weeks ago, only to decide at the spur of the moment to fly all the way back around the world for one day at the closing ceremony, he said this: "I had FOMO." Translation for non-millennials: fear of missing out.
"I love the Olympics that much," he said.
And for him, that is worth participating in a few advertising drives.
"At the end of the day, you've got look at it this way. The whole world is here, for two weeks, and no one is pissed off. It's nice to see that. The world is happy."
by Claire Galofaro, AP | Read more:
Image: Pinterest
[ed. Sometimes I wish I was reading fake news.]
"Add play," the agent said. "It should be #CokePlay."
On the final night of the Pyeongchang Olympic Games on Sunday evening, this "agent" was policing Daniel Zabek's Instagram feed to make sure he branded his post to exactly match the corporation's chosen slogan.
Zabek and hundreds of others stood in a line that snaked around the Olympic Park in the hours before the closing ceremony just for this: to take a photo in front of a corporation's advertisements and post the pictures on social media with the company's predetermined hashtag.In exchange, he would get a stuffed bear, the soda company's mascot with the brand name embroidered on a red scarf around its neck.
"Ok, done," he said and handed his phone back to the guard. "Good?"
The officer carefully inspected it, nodded and handed over the plush toy. Out into the digital world, Zabek had sent a promo for soda. In the real world, he walked away carrying another promo for soda.
He doesn't drink soda.
This was the reward for corporations that spend hundreds of millions on Olympic partnerships in the modern, millennial world: For two weeks, spectators were converted into walking billboards for watches, phones, beverages, cars.
"This is all a big marketing scheme," Zabek said. "But I'm so OK with that. Look at this place - everyone's happy."
Jaunty music played in the background, and all around him people posed in front of #cokeplay billboards, then handed their phones over to prove they got the hashtags right to receive their prize: another advertisement.
Want a photo of yourself in a bobsled? The line was short for a turn to hop in one right across the pavilion. If you posted your picture, you'd star in an ad for Omega, the official timekeeper of the Olympics. The logo was stamped on the side of the sled and on the wall behind it.
Inside a building down the way, acrobats suspended from the ceiling spun around on hoops during a laser light show. This was a building-sized trapeze ad for the Korean Electric Power Corporation, and wowed spectators inside happily held up their phones to snap photos and send them out into social media.
Outside the Hyundai building, a massive art exhibition painted the darkest shade of black on earth, black-coated workers checked visitors' phones. If the hashtag was exactly right, the reward was a pin: Soohorang, the Olympic mascot, dancing next to the Hyundai corporate logo.
Zabek, a 27-year-old New Yorker, is the ideal candidate for this brand of modern marketing. He proudly declares himself a millennial, and he often speaks in internet acronyms. To describe why he left the Olympics two weeks ago, only to decide at the spur of the moment to fly all the way back around the world for one day at the closing ceremony, he said this: "I had FOMO." Translation for non-millennials: fear of missing out.
"I love the Olympics that much," he said.
And for him, that is worth participating in a few advertising drives.
"At the end of the day, you've got look at it this way. The whole world is here, for two weeks, and no one is pissed off. It's nice to see that. The world is happy."
by Claire Galofaro, AP | Read more:
Image: Pinterest
[ed. Sometimes I wish I was reading fake news.]
MateBook X Pro: Huawei attempts to out-Pro Apple's MacBook Pro
Following Huawei’s attempts to directly challenge the dominant smartphone players Samsung and Apple, now the Chinese technology firm is going after laptops with the MateBook X Pro, attempting to out-“Pro” the MacBook Pro.
The new thin and light laptop follows on from Huawei’s MateBook X from 2017, released in 2017 and looks strikingly familiar to Apple’s top-of-the-line notebook, with an aluminium body that’s available in silver or “space grey” – just like the MacBook Pro – a chiclet keyboard and large trackpad.
But it is the 14in 3K LTPS screen that Huawei hopes to sell the MateBook X Pro, which the company says, manages to fit into the body of a more traditional 12in laptop.
“The MateBook X Pro has the world’s first full-view screen in a notebook, featuring a massive 91% screen to body ratio, which is down to the amount of engineering work we’ve done to reduce the bezels around the display,” said Peter Gauden, senior product marketing manager for Huawei. “With a 178-degree viewing angle range, if you’re working on confidential documents on a plane or train you’re going to have to invest in a privacy screen because everyone is going to be able to see what you’re working on – it’s that good.”
The MateBook X Pro comes with the latest Intel 8th generation quad-core i7 U series processor, up to 16GB of RAM and an Nvidia MX150 discrete graphics processor with 2GB of memory. It also supports Thunderbolt 3, has two USB-C ports, a USB-A port and headphones socket, squeezed into a wedge shape that tapers from 16.6mm to 4.9mm, weighing 1.33kg.
The power button doubles as a fingerprint scanner, which Huawei says will start and securely log into Windows from cold in under eight seconds. The laptop also has four speakers – two treble speakers at the back and two bass speakers at the front – supporting Dolby’s Atmos sound system.
The spill-proof chiclet keyboard resembles that fitted on Apple’s MacBook Pro, but has a trick up its sleeve: a recessed camera that hides under a key in the centre of the top function row.
Gauden said: “It’s hidden away so you can be completely comfortable with your privacy concerns over cameras – just pop it up when you want to use it.”
Huawei rates the battery life of the MateBook X Pro at 12 hours of video playback. The company is going to sell the machine with a new compact 65W USB-C charger, which is about the same size as smartphone fast chargers, describing it as “intelligent enough to charge anything safely”.
The new thin and light laptop follows on from Huawei’s MateBook X from 2017, released in 2017 and looks strikingly familiar to Apple’s top-of-the-line notebook, with an aluminium body that’s available in silver or “space grey” – just like the MacBook Pro – a chiclet keyboard and large trackpad.
But it is the 14in 3K LTPS screen that Huawei hopes to sell the MateBook X Pro, which the company says, manages to fit into the body of a more traditional 12in laptop.“The MateBook X Pro has the world’s first full-view screen in a notebook, featuring a massive 91% screen to body ratio, which is down to the amount of engineering work we’ve done to reduce the bezels around the display,” said Peter Gauden, senior product marketing manager for Huawei. “With a 178-degree viewing angle range, if you’re working on confidential documents on a plane or train you’re going to have to invest in a privacy screen because everyone is going to be able to see what you’re working on – it’s that good.”
The MateBook X Pro comes with the latest Intel 8th generation quad-core i7 U series processor, up to 16GB of RAM and an Nvidia MX150 discrete graphics processor with 2GB of memory. It also supports Thunderbolt 3, has two USB-C ports, a USB-A port and headphones socket, squeezed into a wedge shape that tapers from 16.6mm to 4.9mm, weighing 1.33kg.
The power button doubles as a fingerprint scanner, which Huawei says will start and securely log into Windows from cold in under eight seconds. The laptop also has four speakers – two treble speakers at the back and two bass speakers at the front – supporting Dolby’s Atmos sound system.
The spill-proof chiclet keyboard resembles that fitted on Apple’s MacBook Pro, but has a trick up its sleeve: a recessed camera that hides under a key in the centre of the top function row.
Gauden said: “It’s hidden away so you can be completely comfortable with your privacy concerns over cameras – just pop it up when you want to use it.”
Huawei rates the battery life of the MateBook X Pro at 12 hours of video playback. The company is going to sell the machine with a new compact 65W USB-C charger, which is about the same size as smartphone fast chargers, describing it as “intelligent enough to charge anything safely”.
by Samuel Gibbs, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Samuel Gibbs
Mary Tyler Moore
There was a scene that Robert Redford wanted for “Ordinary People” in which Beth Jarrett, played by Mary Tyler Moore, takes a cake out of the refrigerator. The cake has a circle of cherries on top, and the only action in the scene is Beth, the cold, bereaved mother, looking at the cake, adjusting the cherries, then putting the cake back in the fridge. Moore was alone in the kitchen. Redford wanted to capture Beth in an unobserved moment — what was this woman really like? How was she coping with the accidental death of her older son and the recent suicide attempt of her younger son? Had she escaped into her fastidiousness and her uptightness?
He shot it once; no good. He shot it again; no good. She tried to bring a motivation to each take: Was this cake good enough? Or, Did the cake need more cherries? And each time he’d say: “No, no, clear your mind. Let’s go again.” Every time the kitchen was set up for another scene, Redford used the opportunity to try the shot again. Moore called it “the bane of the production.” He shot it over and over, 26 times in total in front of a “mystified” crew, she wrote in her memoir.
Redford knew the role was a change from Moore’s sunny appearances as Mary Richards on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and Laura Petrie on “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” so much so that he was initially worried to even approach her. But when he did, he told her that when he read the Judith Guest novel that he was adapting, he couldn’t stop picturing Moore as Beth. Redford had a home in Malibu, and sometimes he’d look out on the beach and see her taking walks. She seemed like a sad figure on those walks, so different from the spunky and triumphant walks she took in the opening credits of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” He told her that it was the most important role in the film. He wanted someone to play her sympathetically. Moore agreed emphatically. Beth reminded Moore of her father. She also had a little of Beth in her herself — she would realize that eventually. She told Redford that she didn’t think of Beth as a villain but as just another victim in the story.
Moore called “Ordinary People” the “holy grail” of her career, not just because it had a remarkable script and production, or because of the Oscar nomination that she earned from it, but because it saved her from eternal typecasting just when she needed it. She had been so good in sitcoms. But what now? She was only in her early 40s, and it seemed as if she was sentenced to a life of short-lived series and celebrity guest appearances on sitcoms and game shows. Depth and mood and range weren’t things people associated with her.
When “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” debuted in 1970, no one could have predicted how iconic it would become for the way it portrayed women’s experiences in the workplace, and for the way its heroine, Mary Richards, remained plucky in the face of discrimination, both passive and aggressive. That was back when plucky seemed like a good solution to the constant insults of merely trying to function while female, when smiling with moxie at all the crap thrown in your direction seemed like the best way to survive and advance.
Mary Richards struck an exact balance of wit and intelligence with a kind of wise understanding of people’s natures. She was a perfect guide for navigating the a-wokening of the corporate American man (a project that is still ongoing, to say the least). The show’s cultural impact over its seven years was monumental. Mary Richards allowed women to ask themselves questions out loud about what exactly they were hoping for in life, why it was so important for them to marry and how the families we build for ourselves can be as important and sustaining as the families we’re born into.
Mary Richards was a hero for all she represented. But Moore wasn’t Mary Richards. She didn’t have her ease or confidence. She grew up in a house with distant parents; her mother was an alcoholic. Moore lived between her parents’ house and her grandmother and aunt’s house. When she was at her parents’ house, she slept on the couch, because there were only two bedrooms and she felt uncomfortable sleeping in the same room with her brother. She grew up to struggle with diabetes, with rejection, with alcoholism, with divorce, with another divorce, with the death of a grown, only child, with forgiveness. She left her second husband, Grant Tinker, with whom she had so little intimacy that they never undressed in front of each other except during actual sex. She moved to New York, away from him. At night, in her apartment, she made margaritas in her blender that were one-quarter drink mix, one-quarter ice and one-half tequila, so that they had the consistency of a milkshake. She got into her bed at night, next to the air-conditioner, and built a kind of fort around herself with pillows and drank until those margaritas began their work. (She would eventually marry a third time.)
People still mistook Moore for Richards, though. In 1980, Gloria Steinem asked Moore to speak at an Equal Rights Amendment rally in Washington. Moore said yes, but when the time came, she lied and said she had an ear infection and couldn’t fly. Steinem suggested she take a train instead. She told Moore that Tip O’Neill, the speaker of the House, had agreed to meet with Steinem’s group — Bella Abzug, Gloria Allred, etc. — only if Moore was in attendance. So Moore took the train, begrudgingly, now roped into a four-hour trip instead of an hourlong flight. She showed up to the meeting and submitted to the “big hug” that O’Neill demanded of her. (“Where’s that little cutie?” she remembered him saying.) But it was a waste of time. The amendment stalled, and she found the women rallying for equal rights well intentioned and intelligent but off-putting, with their shouting, like “angry children.” This, she believed, was one reason the amendment ultimately failed to become law. Yes, she saw the paradox in all this. Yes, she loved Mary Richards, too. But didn’t all the women in America know by now how exhausting it was to aspire to be Mary Richards?
So there she was, a few years after her show went off the air. She told people she ended it so that they could go out on top, but the real reason was that the producers, the writers and Tinker, who co-founded their production company, MTM Enterprises, saw so much potential in spinoffs — “Rhoda,” “Lou Grant” and others — that it seemed like the smart move. Great for the bottom line, yes, but what about Moore? She had these Maryisms, she called them — referring to the movements and speech patterns that she had absorbed into her own manner after so many years of playing Mary Richards.
She did some theater, including playing a quadriplegic who wants to end her own life, in “Whose Life Is It, Anyway?” for which she won raves and a special Tony. Then came Redford’s offer. But it wasn’t really an offer, in the end. After they spoke that first time, he took three months to consider if she was right for the role, auditioning just about every actress in town, from what Moore heard.
When he finally returned to her, saying, Yes, please, come be my Beth Jarrett, she nearly fell over with relief. Now she could show something of herself to as big an audience as she’d always had. She had been so afraid that people would find out that she wasn’t Mary Richards. But in the time she waited for Redford’s offer, she realized she was more afraid that they wouldn’t; she was more afraid that she’d never be seen or known or loved for who she was.
Redford continued to try to get the shot of Beth and the cake, but it was never to be. It appears nowhere in the movie. Moore said later that she believed that Redford had been looking for Beth’s soul. But Beth wasn’t the kind of person to reveal her soul. Beth was the kind of person who would rather give you a cake and a smile. She could mourn by overcoming sadness in a lifelong pursuit for perfectionism. Beth’s soul was the act of not showing her soul. How did Redford not see that? How did Redford not see that Beth’s soul was right in front of him the entire time?
He shot it once; no good. He shot it again; no good. She tried to bring a motivation to each take: Was this cake good enough? Or, Did the cake need more cherries? And each time he’d say: “No, no, clear your mind. Let’s go again.” Every time the kitchen was set up for another scene, Redford used the opportunity to try the shot again. Moore called it “the bane of the production.” He shot it over and over, 26 times in total in front of a “mystified” crew, she wrote in her memoir.
Redford knew the role was a change from Moore’s sunny appearances as Mary Richards on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and Laura Petrie on “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” so much so that he was initially worried to even approach her. But when he did, he told her that when he read the Judith Guest novel that he was adapting, he couldn’t stop picturing Moore as Beth. Redford had a home in Malibu, and sometimes he’d look out on the beach and see her taking walks. She seemed like a sad figure on those walks, so different from the spunky and triumphant walks she took in the opening credits of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” He told her that it was the most important role in the film. He wanted someone to play her sympathetically. Moore agreed emphatically. Beth reminded Moore of her father. She also had a little of Beth in her herself — she would realize that eventually. She told Redford that she didn’t think of Beth as a villain but as just another victim in the story.Moore called “Ordinary People” the “holy grail” of her career, not just because it had a remarkable script and production, or because of the Oscar nomination that she earned from it, but because it saved her from eternal typecasting just when she needed it. She had been so good in sitcoms. But what now? She was only in her early 40s, and it seemed as if she was sentenced to a life of short-lived series and celebrity guest appearances on sitcoms and game shows. Depth and mood and range weren’t things people associated with her.
When “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” debuted in 1970, no one could have predicted how iconic it would become for the way it portrayed women’s experiences in the workplace, and for the way its heroine, Mary Richards, remained plucky in the face of discrimination, both passive and aggressive. That was back when plucky seemed like a good solution to the constant insults of merely trying to function while female, when smiling with moxie at all the crap thrown in your direction seemed like the best way to survive and advance.
Mary Richards struck an exact balance of wit and intelligence with a kind of wise understanding of people’s natures. She was a perfect guide for navigating the a-wokening of the corporate American man (a project that is still ongoing, to say the least). The show’s cultural impact over its seven years was monumental. Mary Richards allowed women to ask themselves questions out loud about what exactly they were hoping for in life, why it was so important for them to marry and how the families we build for ourselves can be as important and sustaining as the families we’re born into.
Mary Richards was a hero for all she represented. But Moore wasn’t Mary Richards. She didn’t have her ease or confidence. She grew up in a house with distant parents; her mother was an alcoholic. Moore lived between her parents’ house and her grandmother and aunt’s house. When she was at her parents’ house, she slept on the couch, because there were only two bedrooms and she felt uncomfortable sleeping in the same room with her brother. She grew up to struggle with diabetes, with rejection, with alcoholism, with divorce, with another divorce, with the death of a grown, only child, with forgiveness. She left her second husband, Grant Tinker, with whom she had so little intimacy that they never undressed in front of each other except during actual sex. She moved to New York, away from him. At night, in her apartment, she made margaritas in her blender that were one-quarter drink mix, one-quarter ice and one-half tequila, so that they had the consistency of a milkshake. She got into her bed at night, next to the air-conditioner, and built a kind of fort around herself with pillows and drank until those margaritas began their work. (She would eventually marry a third time.)
People still mistook Moore for Richards, though. In 1980, Gloria Steinem asked Moore to speak at an Equal Rights Amendment rally in Washington. Moore said yes, but when the time came, she lied and said she had an ear infection and couldn’t fly. Steinem suggested she take a train instead. She told Moore that Tip O’Neill, the speaker of the House, had agreed to meet with Steinem’s group — Bella Abzug, Gloria Allred, etc. — only if Moore was in attendance. So Moore took the train, begrudgingly, now roped into a four-hour trip instead of an hourlong flight. She showed up to the meeting and submitted to the “big hug” that O’Neill demanded of her. (“Where’s that little cutie?” she remembered him saying.) But it was a waste of time. The amendment stalled, and she found the women rallying for equal rights well intentioned and intelligent but off-putting, with their shouting, like “angry children.” This, she believed, was one reason the amendment ultimately failed to become law. Yes, she saw the paradox in all this. Yes, she loved Mary Richards, too. But didn’t all the women in America know by now how exhausting it was to aspire to be Mary Richards?
So there she was, a few years after her show went off the air. She told people she ended it so that they could go out on top, but the real reason was that the producers, the writers and Tinker, who co-founded their production company, MTM Enterprises, saw so much potential in spinoffs — “Rhoda,” “Lou Grant” and others — that it seemed like the smart move. Great for the bottom line, yes, but what about Moore? She had these Maryisms, she called them — referring to the movements and speech patterns that she had absorbed into her own manner after so many years of playing Mary Richards.
She did some theater, including playing a quadriplegic who wants to end her own life, in “Whose Life Is It, Anyway?” for which she won raves and a special Tony. Then came Redford’s offer. But it wasn’t really an offer, in the end. After they spoke that first time, he took three months to consider if she was right for the role, auditioning just about every actress in town, from what Moore heard.
When he finally returned to her, saying, Yes, please, come be my Beth Jarrett, she nearly fell over with relief. Now she could show something of herself to as big an audience as she’d always had. She had been so afraid that people would find out that she wasn’t Mary Richards. But in the time she waited for Redford’s offer, she realized she was more afraid that they wouldn’t; she was more afraid that she’d never be seen or known or loved for who she was.
Redford continued to try to get the shot of Beth and the cake, but it was never to be. It appears nowhere in the movie. Moore said later that she believed that Redford had been looking for Beth’s soul. But Beth wasn’t the kind of person to reveal her soul. Beth was the kind of person who would rather give you a cake and a smile. She could mourn by overcoming sadness in a lifelong pursuit for perfectionism. Beth’s soul was the act of not showing her soul. How did Redford not see that? How did Redford not see that Beth’s soul was right in front of him the entire time?
by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, NY Times | Read more:
Image:Philippe Halsman
[ed. From the series The Lives They Lived. See also: Delia Graff Fara.]
Why Self-Taught Artificial Intelligence Has Trouble With the Real World
Until very recently, the machines that could trounce champions were at least respectful enough to start by learning from human experience.
To beat Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, IBM engineers made use of centuries of chess wisdom in their Deep Blue computer. In 2016, Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo thrashed champion Lee Sedol at the ancient board game Go after poring over millions of positions from tens of thousands of human games.
But now artificial intelligence researchers are rethinking the way their bots incorporate the totality of human knowledge. The current trend is: Don’t bother.
Last October, the DeepMind team published details of a new Go-playing system, AlphaGo Zero, that studied no human games at all. Instead, it started with the game’s rules and played against itself. The first moves it made were completely random. After each game, it folded in new knowledge of what led to a win and what didn’t. At the end of these scrimmages, AlphaGo Zero went head to head with the already superhuman version of AlphaGo that had beaten Lee Sedol. It won 100 games to zero.
The team went on to create what would become another master gamer in the AlphaGo family, this one called simply AlphaZero. In a paper posted to the scientific preprint site arxiv.org in December, DeepMind researchers revealed that after starting again from scratch, the trained-up AlphaZero outperformed AlphaGo Zero — in other words, it beat the bot that beat the bot that beat the best Go players in the world. And when it was given the rules for chess or the Japanese chess variant shogi, AlphaZero quickly learned to defeat bespoke top-level algorithms for those games, too. Experts marveled at the program’s aggressive, unfamiliar style. “I always wondered how it would be if a superior species landed on Earth and showed us how they played chess,” Danish grandmaster Peter Heine Nielsen told a BBC interviewer. “Now I know.”
The past year also saw otherworldly self-taught bots emerge in settings as diverse as no-limit poker and Dota 2, a hugely popular multiplayer online video game in which fantasy-themed heroes battle for control of an alien world.
Of course, the companies investing money in these and similar systems have grander ambitions than just dominating video-game tournaments. Research teams like DeepMind hope to apply similar methods to real-world problems like building room-temperature superconductors, or understanding the origami needed to fold proteins into potent drug molecules. And of course, many practitioners hope to eventually build up to artificial general intelligence, an ill-defined but captivating goal in which a machine could think like a person, with the versatility to attack many different kinds of problems.
Yet despite the investments being made in these systems, it isn’t yet clear how far past the game board the current techniques can go. “I’m not sure the ideas in AlphaZero generalize readily,” said Pedro Domingos, a computer scientist at the University of Washington. “Games are a very, very unusual thing.”
Perfect Goals for an Imperfect World
One characteristic shared by many games, chess and Go included, is that players can see all the pieces on both sides at all times. Each player always has what’s termed “perfect information” about the state of the game. However devilishly complex the game gets, all you need to do is think forward from the current situation.
Plenty of real situations aren’t like that. Imagine asking a computer to diagnose an illness or conduct a business negotiation. “Most real-world strategic interactions involve hidden information,” said Noam Brown, a doctoral student in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. “I feel like that’s been neglected by the majority of the AI community.”
Poker, which Brown specializes in, offers a different challenge. You can’t see your opponent’s cards. But here too, machines that learn by playing against themselves are now reaching superhuman levels. In January 2017, a program called Libratus created by Brown and his adviser, Tuomas Sandholm, outplayed four professional poker players at heads-up, no-limit Texas Hold’ em, finishing $1.7 million ahead of its competitors at the end of a 20-day competition.
An even more daunting game involving imperfect information is StarCraft II, another multiplayer online video game with a vast following. Players pick a team, build an army and wage war across a sci-fi landscape. But that landscape is shrouded in a fog of war that only lets players see areas where they have soldiers or buildings. Even the decision to scout your opponent is fraught with uncertainty.
This is one game that AI still can’t beat. Barriers to success include the sheer number of moves in a game, which often stretches into the thousands, and the speed at which they must be made. Every player — human or machine — has to worry about a vast set of possible futures with every click.
For now, going toe-to-toe with top humans in this arena is beyond the reach of AI. But it’s a target. In August 2017, DeepMind partnered with Blizzard Entertainment, the company that made StarCraft II, to release tools that they say will help open up the game to AI researchers.
Despite its challenges, StarCraft II comes down to a simply enunciated goal: Eradicate your enemy. That’s something it shares with chess, Go, poker, Dota 2 and just about every other game. In games, you can win.
From an algorithm’s perspective, problems need to have an “objective function,” a goal to be sought. When AlphaZero played chess, this wasn’t so hard. A loss counted as minus one, a draw was zero, and a win was plus one. AlphaZero’s objective function was to maximize its score. The objective function of a poker bot is just as simple: Win lots of money.
Real-life situations are not so straightforward. For example, a self-driving car needs a more nuanced objective function, something akin to the kind of careful phrasing you’d use to explain a wish to a genie. For example: Promptly deliver your passenger to the correct location, obeying all laws and appropriately weighing the value of human life in dangerous and uncertain situations. How researchers craft the objective function, Domingos said, “is one of the things that distinguishes a great machine-learning researcher from an average one.”
Consider Tay, a Twitter chatbot released by Microsoft on March 23, 2016. Tay’s objective was to engage people, and it did. “What unfortunately Tay discovered,” Domingos said, “is that the best way to maximize engagement is to spew out racist insults.” It was snatched back offline less than a day later.
To beat Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, IBM engineers made use of centuries of chess wisdom in their Deep Blue computer. In 2016, Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo thrashed champion Lee Sedol at the ancient board game Go after poring over millions of positions from tens of thousands of human games.
But now artificial intelligence researchers are rethinking the way their bots incorporate the totality of human knowledge. The current trend is: Don’t bother.
Last October, the DeepMind team published details of a new Go-playing system, AlphaGo Zero, that studied no human games at all. Instead, it started with the game’s rules and played against itself. The first moves it made were completely random. After each game, it folded in new knowledge of what led to a win and what didn’t. At the end of these scrimmages, AlphaGo Zero went head to head with the already superhuman version of AlphaGo that had beaten Lee Sedol. It won 100 games to zero.The team went on to create what would become another master gamer in the AlphaGo family, this one called simply AlphaZero. In a paper posted to the scientific preprint site arxiv.org in December, DeepMind researchers revealed that after starting again from scratch, the trained-up AlphaZero outperformed AlphaGo Zero — in other words, it beat the bot that beat the bot that beat the best Go players in the world. And when it was given the rules for chess or the Japanese chess variant shogi, AlphaZero quickly learned to defeat bespoke top-level algorithms for those games, too. Experts marveled at the program’s aggressive, unfamiliar style. “I always wondered how it would be if a superior species landed on Earth and showed us how they played chess,” Danish grandmaster Peter Heine Nielsen told a BBC interviewer. “Now I know.”
The past year also saw otherworldly self-taught bots emerge in settings as diverse as no-limit poker and Dota 2, a hugely popular multiplayer online video game in which fantasy-themed heroes battle for control of an alien world.
Of course, the companies investing money in these and similar systems have grander ambitions than just dominating video-game tournaments. Research teams like DeepMind hope to apply similar methods to real-world problems like building room-temperature superconductors, or understanding the origami needed to fold proteins into potent drug molecules. And of course, many practitioners hope to eventually build up to artificial general intelligence, an ill-defined but captivating goal in which a machine could think like a person, with the versatility to attack many different kinds of problems.
Yet despite the investments being made in these systems, it isn’t yet clear how far past the game board the current techniques can go. “I’m not sure the ideas in AlphaZero generalize readily,” said Pedro Domingos, a computer scientist at the University of Washington. “Games are a very, very unusual thing.”
Perfect Goals for an Imperfect World
One characteristic shared by many games, chess and Go included, is that players can see all the pieces on both sides at all times. Each player always has what’s termed “perfect information” about the state of the game. However devilishly complex the game gets, all you need to do is think forward from the current situation.
Plenty of real situations aren’t like that. Imagine asking a computer to diagnose an illness or conduct a business negotiation. “Most real-world strategic interactions involve hidden information,” said Noam Brown, a doctoral student in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. “I feel like that’s been neglected by the majority of the AI community.”
Poker, which Brown specializes in, offers a different challenge. You can’t see your opponent’s cards. But here too, machines that learn by playing against themselves are now reaching superhuman levels. In January 2017, a program called Libratus created by Brown and his adviser, Tuomas Sandholm, outplayed four professional poker players at heads-up, no-limit Texas Hold’ em, finishing $1.7 million ahead of its competitors at the end of a 20-day competition.
An even more daunting game involving imperfect information is StarCraft II, another multiplayer online video game with a vast following. Players pick a team, build an army and wage war across a sci-fi landscape. But that landscape is shrouded in a fog of war that only lets players see areas where they have soldiers or buildings. Even the decision to scout your opponent is fraught with uncertainty.
This is one game that AI still can’t beat. Barriers to success include the sheer number of moves in a game, which often stretches into the thousands, and the speed at which they must be made. Every player — human or machine — has to worry about a vast set of possible futures with every click.
For now, going toe-to-toe with top humans in this arena is beyond the reach of AI. But it’s a target. In August 2017, DeepMind partnered with Blizzard Entertainment, the company that made StarCraft II, to release tools that they say will help open up the game to AI researchers.
Despite its challenges, StarCraft II comes down to a simply enunciated goal: Eradicate your enemy. That’s something it shares with chess, Go, poker, Dota 2 and just about every other game. In games, you can win.
From an algorithm’s perspective, problems need to have an “objective function,” a goal to be sought. When AlphaZero played chess, this wasn’t so hard. A loss counted as minus one, a draw was zero, and a win was plus one. AlphaZero’s objective function was to maximize its score. The objective function of a poker bot is just as simple: Win lots of money.
Real-life situations are not so straightforward. For example, a self-driving car needs a more nuanced objective function, something akin to the kind of careful phrasing you’d use to explain a wish to a genie. For example: Promptly deliver your passenger to the correct location, obeying all laws and appropriately weighing the value of human life in dangerous and uncertain situations. How researchers craft the objective function, Domingos said, “is one of the things that distinguishes a great machine-learning researcher from an average one.”
Consider Tay, a Twitter chatbot released by Microsoft on March 23, 2016. Tay’s objective was to engage people, and it did. “What unfortunately Tay discovered,” Domingos said, “is that the best way to maximize engagement is to spew out racist insults.” It was snatched back offline less than a day later.
by Joshua Sokol, Quanta | Read more:
Image: maxuser
[Re: Naked Capitalism: As Cathy O’Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction, pointed out, “Algorithms are just opinions expressed in math.”]
[Re: Naked Capitalism: As Cathy O’Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction, pointed out, “Algorithms are just opinions expressed in math.”]
Saturday, February 24, 2018
How to Make the Case for a Better, Fairer Economy
Too often, people on the left seem to believe that their team is obviously more virtuous than the other side, and they seem to regard having to sell their case as somehow beneath them. The assumption of moral superiority also leads them to dismiss people who differ with them. That may be emotionally satisfying but it is a lousy political strategy.
While some are too deeply invested in their views to be open to new ideas, the reality is that despite “liberal” having been turned into a borderline dirty word, Americans for decades have polled as consistently supporting “progressive” positions, such as strengthening Social Security and Medicare, taxing the rich, reducing war spending, spending more on infrastructure, strengthening social safety nets. Even though the US has become more conservative, the press also depicts the US as more conservative than it really is. So there is more opportunity to move the debate than you might think.
Our interviews revealed several “cultural models” held by most members of the British public to understand how the economy works. We use the word “how” because cultural models show us how people think of the economy as a whole, rather than what they think about single issues – which is what opinion polls tell us. Cultural models are the durable, deep assumptions we hold to organise information and interpret the world around us. They are shared by all of us. Here are the main cultural models we found:
Cultural Models
What the economy is and how it works
Over the last forty years, our government has become a tool of corporations and banks, and as a result our society has served their interests while failing to provide the broad-based supports that our economy needs to work well. This has weakened our economy, so it doesn’t meet people’s needs.
Our economy is like a programme that is constantly being revised and updated. Corporate elites have gained the password to the economy, and have programmed the economy to work well for corporate users. But the public have been locked out, so the parts of the economy they rely on have been neglected. As a result, many users of the economy experience constant glitches, and the economy as a whole doesn’t run well.
By programming the economy for financial services rather than manufacturing, we’ve destroyed the types of good jobs that put money back into the economy. And cutting taxes and privatising industries has undermined our ability to invest in ways that strengthen the economy and keep it running smoothly.
As a society, we need to prioritise a strong economy over the desires of corporations and wealthy elites. We need to reset the password and give control of the economy back to the public. That way, we can reprogramme the economy so it works better. We can create a strong and durable economy by guaranteeing decent wages for the least well-off, investing in local communities, and restoring public ownership of common resources like energy and transport. Creating a good society means taking back the password to the economy from corporate elites and reprogramming the economy so it runs smoothly and makes a good life possible for all users.
by Rosie Baines NEON and Yves Smith via Naked Capitalism | Read more:
While some are too deeply invested in their views to be open to new ideas, the reality is that despite “liberal” having been turned into a borderline dirty word, Americans for decades have polled as consistently supporting “progressive” positions, such as strengthening Social Security and Medicare, taxing the rich, reducing war spending, spending more on infrastructure, strengthening social safety nets. Even though the US has become more conservative, the press also depicts the US as more conservative than it really is. So there is more opportunity to move the debate than you might think.
***
In 2010, the British right wing media and political parties told a very convincing story about the economy that persuaded the public we had no choice but to make massive cuts to public spending. You probably know it already: there was no money left, the economy was like a household budget, we’d maxed out the nation’s credit card, and it was time to tighten our belts. Anyone who watches the news will be familiar with this story, and if you’ve ever gone door knocking, you will have heard people repeat it back to you with total conviction. (...)Our interviews revealed several “cultural models” held by most members of the British public to understand how the economy works. We use the word “how” because cultural models show us how people think of the economy as a whole, rather than what they think about single issues – which is what opinion polls tell us. Cultural models are the durable, deep assumptions we hold to organise information and interpret the world around us. They are shared by all of us. Here are the main cultural models we found:
Cultural Models
What the economy is and how it works
- People only really understand the economy as the monetary system and expressed this through the metaphor of circulation. They don’t consider things like social care, for example, to be part of the economy.
- People think the economy is always on the edge of disaster, using language like ‘tumbling’, ‘falling’, and ‘rocketing’ to describe it.
- People conceive of the economy as a container, with people putting in (contributing) or taking out (draining). The government was assumed to control what goes in and out of the pot, as well as how its contents are distributed.
- People actually don’t understand how the economy works, by and large – except for in quite limited ways. They also lack confidence in talking about it.
- People think that the economy exists in competition with the environment – what is good for the environment is thought to be bad for the economy and vice versa.
- People think the system is rigged by elites in government, business, and the media who pull the strings of the economy for their own benefit.
- People viewed the media as having a hidden agenda and were very distrustful. Having said that, several of our participants who said they distrusted the media later dispensed arguments that correspond with popular news frames.
- People assumed greed is a basic part of human nature: all people are motivated by a desire to enrich themselves, even at the expense of others.
- People wanted Britain to have more national self- reliance, producing key products at home and be able to meet its basic needs without relying on other countries. Globalisation and, to a surprisingly small extent, Europe are the foil for this model.
- People often idealised an earlier time – typically the post-war period – when wages were high, jobs were more secure, inequality was low, there was a greater sense of community, and ‘we did more manufacturing’.
- People believe the government has overall responsibility for managing the economy.
- Overall people were extremely fatalistic and didn’t think the economy could be changed for the better. This meant that they often drew a blank when asked about different ways to run the economy.
Telling a New Story
Because we found so much fatalism in the responses of our interviewees, we felt that we could not make economic arguments to the public if there was a pervasive belief that change simply wasn’t possible. For that reason, the story we told argued that the economy had been designed as a result of human choices, made by a small elite, and could be redesigned with different choices. (...)
Story 1: Resisting corporate power
There are a lot of different ways to interpret the term “populism,” so it is important to be clear that when we use the term, we mean a story that pits elites against the people. Story 1 is a fundamentally populist story. It contains the following elements:
Because we found so much fatalism in the responses of our interviewees, we felt that we could not make economic arguments to the public if there was a pervasive belief that change simply wasn’t possible. For that reason, the story we told argued that the economy had been designed as a result of human choices, made by a small elite, and could be redesigned with different choices. (...)
Story 1: Resisting corporate power
There are a lot of different ways to interpret the term “populism,” so it is important to be clear that when we use the term, we mean a story that pits elites against the people. Story 1 is a fundamentally populist story. It contains the following elements:
- The value of equality or economic strength
- The explanatory metaphor of reprogramming the economy
- An explanation that connects the dots and explains: 1) how corporate elites have programmed the economy and how this has undermined equality/economic strength, and 2) how the economy can be reprogrammed to promote a strong/equal economy.
Over the last forty years, our government has become a tool of corporations and banks, and as a result our society has served their interests while failing to provide the broad-based supports that our economy needs to work well. This has weakened our economy, so it doesn’t meet people’s needs.
Our economy is like a programme that is constantly being revised and updated. Corporate elites have gained the password to the economy, and have programmed the economy to work well for corporate users. But the public have been locked out, so the parts of the economy they rely on have been neglected. As a result, many users of the economy experience constant glitches, and the economy as a whole doesn’t run well.
By programming the economy for financial services rather than manufacturing, we’ve destroyed the types of good jobs that put money back into the economy. And cutting taxes and privatising industries has undermined our ability to invest in ways that strengthen the economy and keep it running smoothly.
As a society, we need to prioritise a strong economy over the desires of corporations and wealthy elites. We need to reset the password and give control of the economy back to the public. That way, we can reprogramme the economy so it works better. We can create a strong and durable economy by guaranteeing decent wages for the least well-off, investing in local communities, and restoring public ownership of common resources like energy and transport. Creating a good society means taking back the password to the economy from corporate elites and reprogramming the economy so it runs smoothly and makes a good life possible for all users.
by Rosie Baines NEON and Yves Smith via Naked Capitalism | Read more:
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