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Some Real Shock and Awe

[ed.  Follow-up to the Glenn Greenwald post from yesterday.  It really is worth reading the entire story at Ms. Hebshi's blog, Stories from the Heartland.]

by James Fallows

You may have seen the matter-of-fact reports yesterday about extra security sensitivity on the airlines, because of the tenth anniversary of 9/11. For instance, this is the entirety of a NYT description of one false-alarm scare:

Nearly the same circumstance [as in another case] -- multiple passengers holed up in the bathroom -- led to F-16s shadowing Frontier Airlines Flight 623 from Denver as it neared Detroit. No danger was found and no charges were filed, said Scott Wintner, a Detroit Metropolitan Airport spokesman.

And here is a further AP report, with the headline "No charges against 3 detained at Detroit airport."

Now, read this account from one of those three who escaped with the apparent good fortune of not being charged. Her name is Shoshana Hebshi, and she is an American citizen with a Saudi father and a Jewish mother. She is married and is herself a mother, and she lives in the Midwest. That's her picture, at right, from a column she did about her love of bicycles, two years ago while a graduate student in journalism at Iowa State.

To skip ahead to the punch line, on this flight she was sitting by chance in a row with two Indian-looking passengers, neither of whom knew the other or knew her. But collectively they aroused the suspicion of other passengers or crew, and when the plane landed, heavily armed troops stormed aboard, handcuffed the three of them, and took them off for extensive questioning. After which they were eventually released with "no charges filed." Which is fair enough, considering that like everyone else on the plane they were simply trying to travel from Denver to Detroit and had done absolutely nothing wrong except to have "suspicious" looks.

A sample of her account of what happened after the plane landed and was directed away from the normal gate area:

Then what looked like the bomb squad pulled up. Two police vans and a police communication center bus parked off the road. I started to get nervous and rethink my decision to fly on 9/11.
   [A Tweet she sent out: Cops in uniform and plainclothes in a huddle in rear of plane.]

We had been waiting on the plane for a half hour. I had to pee. I wanted to get home and see my family. And I wanted someone to tell us what was going on. In the distance, a van with stairs came closer. I sighed with relief, thinking we were going to get off the plane and get shuttled back to the terminal. I would still be able to make it home for dinner. Others on the plane also seemed happy to see those stairs coming our way.

   [Another Tweet: I see stairs coming our way...yay!]
Before I knew it, about 10 cops, some in what looked like military fatigues, were running toward the plane carrying the biggest machine guns I have ever seen-bigger than what the guards carry at French train stations.
   [My last tweet:
   Majorly armed cops coming aboard]

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How Fast Can China Go?

The world’s great powers have long declared themselves through their rail lines—think the 20th Century Limited, the Flying Scotsman, or the Orient Express—and on June 30 the Chinese made their bid for supremacy, with the first official run of a $32 billion high-speed line between Shanghai and Beijing. Faster (820 miles in 288 minutes) and sleeker than any other, the needle-nosed CRH380A symbolizes China’s accelerating pace, even as it faces questions about safety, and taps into an ancient rivalry with Japan.

by Simon Winchester

All month she had been practicing, standing for hours in front of the bathroom mirror in her tiny Shanghai flat, delicately gripping a chopstick sideways between her teeth as her supervisor had instructed her, and, by dint of some nimble dental gymnastics with it, learning how to smile in precisely the way that China High-Speed Railways had officially demanded of their new stewardesses. Make an Eight-Teeth Smile: that was the phrase; that was the order.

It took work: long hours, aching jaws, but gradually this pretty artifice of sincerity and amity became second nature to her—such that by June 30, the eve of the 90th anniversary of the founding of her country’s Communist Party (the Youth League of which she was a proud member), the 20-year-old Huang Yun had her Eight-Teeth Smile and her welcome face finally down pat and was nervously ready for her big day.

She stood before her approving parents in the doorway, primed to go: her back ramrod-straight, just like the soldiers outside the Forbidden City—who, unlike her, never smiled—her makeup flawless, her purple-and-white uniform impeccably ironed, her yellow-and-blue silk scarf neatly tied, her pumps gleaming, her cap, with its tiny red railroad badge, tilted forward just so.

An hour-long taxi ride later, and thus tricked out as a traveling ambassador like no other, Miss Huang presented herself at Platform 1 of her city’s vast, ultra-modern glass-and-steel Rainbow Bridge Station, ready at last to greet her passengers on the first official run of what would be the fastest, sleekest, and most peculiarly emblematic express train in China, between the immense southeastern city of Shanghai and the capital, Beijing—and, as the latest symbol of her country as the global supernova, the best train in the world.

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photos:  Rob Howard

Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult

by Mike Lofgren

Barbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten!"

Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten." -"Double Indemnity" (1944)

Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma.

But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.

It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.

The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel - how prudent is that? - in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization.

Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care. This fact, which ought to be obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among the professional pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob Dole era in terms of its orientation. For instance, Ezra Klein wrote of his puzzlement over the fact that while House Republicans essentially won the debt ceiling fight, enough of them were sufficiently dissatisfied that they might still scuttle the deal. Of course they might - the attitude of many freshman Republicans to national default was "bring it on!"

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.

-----

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable "hard news" segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the "respectable" media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew to the practice of false evenhandedness. Paul Krugman has skewered this tactic as being the "centrist cop-out." "I joked long ago," he says, "that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read 'Views Differ on Shape of Planet.'"

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(Photo: Carolyn Tiry / Flickr)

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Mobile Phone Novels

[ed.  I found this excerpt in an article this morning and thought about a post I made a while back.  So, I'm reposting the article for those who might have missed it.  Here's the excerpt:

"On a much larger scale, this is the same mentality that drives the Japanese "mobile phone novel" phenomenon, keitai shoushetsu. All the rage in Japan and China, stories and books written via cellphones are huge business, according to Wired UK: "The largest mobile phone novel site, Maho i-Land, features more than a million titles and is visited 3.5 billion times each month. In 2007, five out of the 10 best selling novels in Japan were originally mobile phone novels." This popularity has spurred Movellas, a Dutch company, to set up a similar model in Europe with its eyes on English-speaking markets. CEO Joram Felbert equates the books to diary entries." via:]

Wikipedia:  A cell phone novel, or mobile phone novel is a literary work originally written on a cellular phone via text messaging. This type of literature originated in Japan, where it has become a popular literary genre. Chapters usually consist of about 70-100 words each due to character limitations on cell phones.

"Sunday Morning"

by Barry Yourgrau

It’s Sunday morning. A dog wakes me up. I hear it barking under the window, I open the window and yell at it. The lady who owns the dog is gardening. She shouts at me to quit yelling at her dog. I shout at her, so knock off the noise!, and slam down the window.

I go downstairs later, it’s quiet, she is sitting in her kitchen. She’s crying. Her breasts are exposed. I feel guilty (because I actually like the dog) and lustful too, at the way she sits there, bent so intimately over a cup of tea. Inspired, I get down on all fours and bounce into her kitchen, barking “Bow wow! Bow wow!” The lady keeps on crying, she doesn’t want to smile but I can see the corners of her mouth begin to turn up. I crawl under her chair and turn over on my back and wag my tail. That does it, she’s really grinning now, and I get up behind her and slide my hands down over her breasts, they have the dark, spongy feel of soil.

“I’m sorry,” she sniffles, about her tears, “it’s all because—”

“Don’t worry,” I tell her, understanding everything. “I’ll help you repot them this afternoon.”

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My $10,000 Storage Unit Mistake

by Amy Gutman

Earlier this year, I cleared out a storage locker jammed with the accumulated overflow of almost two adult decades -- along with some boxes of college books tossed in for good measure. This was actually my second storage locker, the successor to the Manhattan mini-storage unit that I acquired to insert some breathing space in the Upper West Side one-bedroom I rented shortly after law school. It was intended as a temporary measure, a momentary regrouping. But eight years later, when I finally packed up, the unit was still mine.

This past April, another full decade later, I watched with anxiety as movers unloaded seemingly endless stacks of boxes to the basement of my new home in Northampton, Mass. Would my books have gathered mold? Would my clothing be moth-infested? Would my sturdy law school bicycle even be functional?

And in fact, there were some disheartening moments -- a silk dress passed down from my grandmother that had simply disintegrated -- but the main reaction as I unpacked: What a bunch of junk. Here's some of what I found: a desktop computer circa 1989, with its companion dot-matrix printer. A non-working halogen floor lamp. Cartons of music cassette tapes from bands I'd forgotten existed. Boxes of law school textbooks. (And yes, some of them were dusty with mold, but really, who cared?) The list goes on. And on.

It got me thinking about why I'd stashed all this stuff in the first place -- and I had plenty of time to think as I hauled mountains of papers and ancient electronics to the town dump. Over the decades, I'd paid well over $10,000 -- $10,000! -- to stockpile these motley items, an amount far exceeding their value. I couldn't stop imagining other uses for this vanished cash. How had I let this happen? To be sure, I was far from alone in this seeming lunacy. There are 51,000 storage facilities in the United States, more than seven times the number of Starbucks, and one in 10 American households now rents a storage unit, according to a 2009 New York Times Magazine report. But far from reassuring me, this just made the phenomenon seem stranger.

I remember shockingly little of what I learned in law school, but one article from my first-year property class has stayed with me over the years, in particular a quirky yet oddly profound observation that we'd be more distressed to return home and find our living room sofa gone than to learn that the value of our home had dropped by a few percentage points. This is because certain possessions are "self-constitutive." They are intimately bound up with our sense of who we are. "A person cannot be fully a person without a sense of continuity of self over time," wrote University of Michigan law professor Margaret Jane Radin in her seminal article "Property and Personhood." "In order to lead a normal life, there must be some continuity in relating to 'things'."

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An Immune System Trained to Kill Cancer

by Denise Grady

A year ago, when chemotherapy stopped working against his leukemia, William Ludwig signed up to be the first patient treated in a bold experiment at the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Ludwig, then 65, a retired corrections officer from Bridgeton, N.J., felt his life draining away and thought he had nothing to lose.

Doctors removed a billion of his T-cells — a type of white blood cell that fights viruses and tumors — and gave them new genes that would program the cells to attack his cancer. Then the altered cells were dripped back into Mr. Ludwig’s veins.

At first, nothing happened. But after 10 days, hell broke loose in his hospital room. He began shaking with chills. His temperature shot up. His blood pressure shot down. He became so ill that doctors moved him into intensive care and warned that he might die. His family gathered at the hospital, fearing the worst.

A few weeks later, the fevers were gone. And so was the leukemia.

There was no trace of it anywhere — no leukemic cells in his blood or bone marrow, no more bulging lymph nodes on his CT scan. His doctors calculated that the treatment had killed off two pounds of cancer cells.

A year later, Mr. Ludwig is still in complete remission. Before, there were days when he could barely get out of bed; now, he plays golf and does yard work.

“I have my life back,” he said.

Mr. Ludwig’s doctors have not claimed that he is cured — it is too soon to tell — nor have they declared victory over leukemia on the basis of this experiment, which involved only three patients. The research, they say, has far to go; the treatment is still experimental, not available outside of studies.

But scientists say the treatment that helped Mr. Ludwig, described recently in The New England Journal of Medicine and Science Translational Medicine, may signify a turning point in the long struggle to develop effective gene therapies against cancer. And not just for leukemia patients: other cancers may also be vulnerable to this novel approach — which employs a disabled form of H.I.V.-1, the virus that causes AIDS, to carry cancer-fighting genes into the patients’ T-cells. In essence, the team is using gene therapy to accomplish something that researchers have hoped to do for decades: train a person’s own immune system to kill cancer cells.

Two other patients have undergone the experimental treatment. One had a partial remission: his disease lessened but did not go away completely. Another had a complete remission. All three had had advanced chronic lymphocytic leukemia and had run out of chemotherapy options. Usually, the only hope for a remission in such cases is a bone-marrow transplant, but these patients were not candidates for it.

Dr. Carl June, who led the research and directs translational medicine in the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said that the results stunned even him and his colleagues, Dr. David L. Porter, Bruce Levine and Michael Kalos. They had hoped to see some benefit but had not dared dream of complete, prolonged remissions. Indeed, when Mr. Ludwig began running fevers, the doctors did not realize at first that it was a sign that his T-cells were engaged in a furious battle with his cancer.

------
To make T-cells search out and destroy cancer, researchers must equip them to do several tasks: recognize the cancer, attack it, multiply, and live on inside the patient. A number of research groups have been trying to do this, but the T-cells they engineered could not accomplish all the tasks. As a result, the cells’ ability to fight tumors has generally been temporary.

The University of Pennsylvania team seems to have hit all the targets at once. Inside the patients, the T-cells modified by the researchers multiplied to 1,000 to 10,000 times the number infused, wiped out the cancer and then gradually diminished, leaving a population of “memory” cells that can quickly proliferate again if needed.

The researchers said they were not sure which parts of their strategy made it work — special cell-culturing techniques, the use of H.I.V.-1 to carry new genes into the T-cells, or the particular pieces of DNA that they selected to reprogram the T-cells.

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The Nation's Business

What Should Food Stamps Subsidize?

by Peter Smith

In the spring of 1961, Alderson Muncy, a miner from West Virginia, traveled 22 miles to a grocery store where the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture awaited his arrival with a television crew and $95 in food stamps. The food allowance would need to cover meals for the jobless man, his wife, and their 13 children for a month. As Muncy loaded up his Jeep for the trip home, The New York Times reported that he had a shopping cart full of groceries “prominently including vanilla wafers and two boxes of cake mix.”

The historic occasion marked the birth of the modern era of food stamps, and provided an early glimpse at the attention devoted to the kinds of food poor people buy with them. To this day, critics contend that the government needs to tighten its grip on the money it doles out. They say poor people make bad choices when left to their own devices, and taxpayer money is better spent buying people just the food they need, not what the food they want. But do food stamps really subsidize junk food? And would adding restrictions on them inspire participants to make healthier purchases?

In the 50 years since President Kennedy expanded the food stamp program, federally-funded foods have become a permanent fixture in the American diet. Now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the program plays a key role in mitigating the United States’ “food insecurity” problem—the estimated 17.2 million Americans who’ve experienced trouble putting food on the table in the last 12 months. If Mr. Muncy were still around today, he’d be one of every six Americans receiving aid, and he’d be allowed to spend it on any food he wanted—anything except pet food, booze, or prepared foods.

As the program’s swelled in recent years, farmers markets and restaurants have jockeyed for a bigger slice of the $65 billion federal food stamp pie. (Currently, they make up only about .01 and .03 percent of SNAP spending, respectively). State and federal officials have worked with nonprofit organizations like Wholesome Wave to get SNAP’s required electronic terminals in the hands of farmers and market managers. Meanwhile, fast food giant Yum! Foods has lobbied to extend benefits to Pizza Huts, Taco Bells, and KFCs across America. The food stamp program was designed on the assumption that food is purchased and prepared at home, and aside from legislation permitting the homeless to make hot meal purchases or the elderly to use meal delivery services, long-standing limits prohibit most people from buying prepared foods with SNAP. Both of these recent efforts could further expand the options to better reflect how Americans actually shop for food today. If adopted, food stamp recipients would be free to choose between farm-fresh corn, corn-syrupy colas, fried chicken, or frou-frou salads at Whole Foods Market.

As KFC’s parent company jostles to dole out its wings to the hungry, nutritionists are arguing that if tobacco and alcohol can be excluded from SNAP on account of their health risks, so should soda and other junk foods. Research generally links enrollment in food assistance programs with a slight increase in obesity, especially among women; one recent study in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior found that food stamp participation correlated with larger waists. Data from 1999-2004 (PDF) suggests that food stamp users spent 40 percent more on soda than other consumers. Food stamps were used to purchase soda and sugar-sweetened beverages an estimated 6 percent of the time. That's half a million gallons of subsidized soda per year. Last October, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg attempted to translate these findings into policy when he proposed a two-year ban on using food stamps to buy soda and sugary drinks.

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Copyright Extortion and BitTorrent

by Keegan Hamilton

The bad news arrived in John Doe 2,057's mailbox in May. His wife unsealed a thick envelope from Comcast and read a carefully worded message explaining that a company called Imperial Enterprises, Inc. had filed a lawsuit against him in Washington, D.C., federal court. He stood accused of having illegally downloaded a copyrighted film five months earlier, at precisely 6:03 a.m. on the morning of January 27. The name of the Imperial Enterprises movie he purportedly purloined wasn't mentioned until four pages later. Though printed in tiny italic font in a court filing, it practically leapt off the page: Tokyo Cougar Creampies.

Yet when Mrs. Doe set eyes on that ignominious title, she couldn't help but crack a smile at the absurdity of the situation. Her husband is legally blind, with vision roughly 1/100th of that of a person with normal sight. He is physically incapable of watching any film, this particular porno included.

"To be honest, it's a little ridiculous," Doe 2,057 says with a rueful chuckle. "My movie-watching ability is nonexistent. My kids watch movies, but they are 4 and 6, so they don't watch porn either. Well, hopefully they don't."

Doe remains adamant that he is innocent. Seated in his Eastside apartment clad in black slacks and a black turtleneck, his eyes visibly disfigured from ocular illness that leaves him living his life in a literal blur, the network-security professional recounts the rookie mistake that got him into this mess.

"I didn't have time to set up the wireless network in my old apartment," he says. "I was working 18-hour days so I just told my wife to go to Best Buy and pick up a router. She installed it, hit next, next, finish, and boom, that was it. We lived in a very upscale building, there was no riffraff. We just assumed we didn't have anything to worry about."

In the following months, Doe says he contacted Comcast on numerous occasions to complain that his Internet connection was frustratingly slow. In hindsight, he believes his neighbors were using his unprotected wireless to download movies. But after researching his options online and consulting an attorney, he realized his predicament was thornier than he'd initially perceived. A simple mea culpa would not suffice.

To fight the case in court would set him back thousands of dollars in attorney's fees. Plus he'd be entangled in litigation in Washington, D.C., while living 2,700 miles away in Washington state. Finally, if he were to lose the case, he could be ordered to pay up to $150,000 under federal copyright law.

But it just so happens that the offices of Dunlap, Grubb, and Weaver—the D.C.-based attorneys who represent Imperial Enterprises—offer an easy alternative: Doe can pay a few thousand dollars in fees and the porn case will disappear. In exchange for the settlement, they will drop their lawsuit, and John Doe 2,057 can rest assured that he will remain blissfully anonymous.

He is hardly alone in his predicament: Number 2,057 is one of 3,545 John Does being sued in a mass lawsuit for allegedly infringing on the copyrights of Tokyo Cougar Creampies and/or Teen Paradise 4, another Imperial Enterprises production. This lawsuit isn't unique, either: Since January 2010, 194,345 John Does from across the country have been sued in 296 cases for alleged copyright violations, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit digital-rights advocacy organization. Virtually all the cases stem from the use of a popular file-sharing technology called BitTorrent, and all are the work of a handful of enterprising attorneys suing on behalf of independent film studios and distributors, purveyors of everything from Academy Award winners like The Hurt Locker to low-budget schlock and hard-core porn.

--------
In January 2010, Dunlap and Grubb trademarked the name US Copyright Group. Later that month, they filed the first large-scale copyright lawsuit against John Does in U.S. history, subpoenaing information about 749 IP addresses that had allegedly downloaded The Gray Man, a low-budget horror flick about a grandpa who cannibalizes children. Once they had the names and addresses of the presumed pirates, the lawyers mailed them a notice bearing the newly minted, official-looking seal of their US Copyright Group. The message made it clear that the John Does could do things the easy way or the hard way: fork over a settlement or risk getting slapped with a $150,000 judgment in federal court, plus the cost of attorneys' fees.

The tactic was not original. Starting in late 2007, a British law firm began suing thousands of alleged pirates in Europe and squeezing them for settlements. The scheme fell apart when two of the lawyers were convicted of six counts of professional misconduct, including charges that they were "acting in a way likely to diminish trust in the profession" and knowingly targeting innocent victims.

Nevertheless, the US Copyright Group broke new ground in American courts. Over the next five months they proceeded to sue nearly 15,000 John Does in Washington, D.C.—about 9,000 more people than had ever been sued for copyright infringement in all federal courts combined in a single year.

It remains unclear exactly how much cash the pirate hunters have reaped from their John Doe scheme. The settlements are private agreements, and the attorneys are not obligated to divulge their earnings. That being said, it's conceivable that a movie studio and their attorneys could turn a handsome profit on a film without ever selling a single ticket or DVD. In the case of The Expendables, for instance, if even half of the 23,322 John Does involved each doled out a $3,000 settlement, the total haul would have been nearly $35 million.

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We Refuse to Live in Fear

by Glenn Greenwald

President Obama, in his weekend radio address to the nation:

They wanted to terrorize us, but, as Americans, we refuse to live in fear.

ABC News, yesterday:

Fighter planes were scrambled, bomb squads were called, FBI command centers went on alert and police teams raced to airports today, but in the end two separate airline incidents were caused by apparently innocent bathroom breaks and a little "making out," federal officials said.

Earlier this year, the Obama White House reversed the Attorney General's decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for his alleged crimes in a federal court in New York, and Congress prohibited Guantanamo detainees generally from being tried on U.S. soil, due to fears that the Terrorists would use their heat-vision to melt their shackles and escape or would summon their Terrorist friends to attack the courthouse and free them into the community -- even though none of that has ever happened, and even though almost every other country on the planet that suffered similar Terrorist attacks (Britain, Spain, India, Indonesia) tried the perpetrators in their regular courts in the cities where the attacks occurred. In 2009, President Obama demanded the power to abolish the most basic right -- not to be imprisoned without having been convicted of a crime -- by "preventively detaining" people who, in his words, "cannot be prosecuted yet pose a clear danger." During the Bush years, The Washington Post quoted a military official warning Americans that the most extreme security measures are needed against Guantanamo detainees because these are "people who would chew through a hydraulic cable to bring a C-17 down."

Meanwhile, America continues to transfer hundreds of billions of dollars to a private Security State industry -- for the most ludicrous security systems -- to turn itself into what Kevin Drum last week called "Fortress America." Drum quoted from Bob Schieffer's book in which the CBS News host recounts how "the Pentagon, like most of official Washington, was still open to the public in the 1970s.…No one was required to show identification to enter the building, nor were security passes required." But now, writes Drum:

Ordinary office buildings require IDs before they'll let you in. Taking pictures is a suspicious activity. Airplanes return to the gate because someone in seat 34A got scared of a guy in a turban a couple of rows in front of them. Small children are swabbed down for bomb residue. . . . .

Now compare Schieffer's recollection with this passage from Wednesday's New York Times feature, "Fortress D.C.":

________________________

"Some things are obvious: the Capitol Hill police armed with assault rifles, standing on the Capitol steps; concrete barricades blocking the once-grand entrances to other federal buildings; the surface-to-air missile battery protecting the White House; the National Archives security guards, almost as old as the Declaration of Independence enshrined inside, slowly waving a magnetic wand over all who enter. But most of the post-9/11 security measures have simply been embedded in the landscape and culture of the nation's capital.

"From the reflecting pool at the foot of the Capitol to the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, government cameras take pictures of citizens, who smile for Big Brother and snap their own pictures of the government cameras. In the $561 million underground Capitol visitors center, completed in 2008, people clutching gallery passes from a senator's or representative's office are funneled through magnetometers, to witness a secure Congress in its sealed chambers." . . . .

________________________

The protective apparatus we've put in place, both the less visible surveillance state and the highly visible security state, will be with us forever. And they'll get worse and worse: If the past decade is any judge, Americans seem willing to put up with an almost unlimited amount of this stuff as long as it's done in the name of protecting us from terrorism. The only thing that's provoked any serious reaction at all has been backscatter scanners in airports -- and not because they represent any kind of real government overreach, but because people have a knee-jerk revulsion to the idea of having "nude" pictures of themselves taken.

That gets us upset. But hundreds of billions of dollars spent to relentlessly harden the routines of our daily lives? Our apparent attitude toward that, to paraphrase our former president, is "bring it on."

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Jackson Pollock,  Convergence, 1952 

“A shock trooper of modern painting… The heavyweight of Abstract Expressionism”
     Time Magazine

Although Pollock created some of the most highly valued works of art in the 20th-century, he lived most of his life in poverty. And despite his fame, toward the end of his life Pollock was bitter that his critical success had never translated into wealth, or even financial stability.

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Narrative Science

by Steve Lohr

“Wisconsin appears to be in the driver’s seat en route to a win, as it leads 51-10 after the third quarter. Wisconsin added to its lead when Russell Wilson found Jacob Pedersen for an eight-yard touchdown to make the score 44-3 ... . ”

Those words began a news brief written within 60 seconds of the end of the third quarter of the Wisconsin-U.N.L.V. football game earlier this month. They may not seem like much — but they were written by a computer.

The clever code is the handiwork of Narrative Science, a start-up in Evanston, Ill., that offers proof of the progress of artificial intelligence — the ability of computers to mimic human reasoning.

The company’s software takes data, like that from sports statistics, company financial reports and housing starts and sales, and turns it into articles. For years, programmers have experimented with software that wrote such articles, typically for sports events, but these efforts had a formulaic, fill-in-the-blank style. They read as if a machine wrote them.

But Narrative Science is based on more than a decade of research, led by two of the company’s founders, Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum, co-directors of the Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University, which holds a stake in the company. And the articles produced by Narrative Science are different.

“I thought it was magic,” says Roger Lee, a general partner of Battery Ventures, which led a $6 million investment in the company earlier this year. “It’s as if a human wrote it.”

Experts in artificial intelligence and language are also impressed, if less enthralled. Oren Etzioni, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, says, “The quality of the narrative produced was quite good,” as if written by a human, if not an accomplished wordsmith. Narrative Science, Mr. Etzioni says, points to a larger trend in computing of “the increasing sophistication in automatic language understanding and, now, language generation.”

The innovative work at Narrative Science raises the broader issue of whether such applications of artificial intelligence will mainly assist human workers or replace them. Technology is already undermining the economics of traditional journalism. Online advertising, while on the rise, has not offset the decline in print advertising. But will “robot journalists” replace flesh-and-blood journalists in newsrooms?

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The Narrative Science software can make inferences based on the historical data it collects and the sequence and outcomes of past games. To generate story “angles,” explains Mr. Hammond of Narrative Science, the software learns concepts for articles like “individual effort,” “team effort,” “come from behind,” “back and forth,” “season high,” “player’s streak” and “rankings for team.” Then the software decides what element is most important for that game, and it becomes the lead of the article, he said. The data also determines vocabulary selection. A lopsided score may well be termed a “rout” rather than a “win.”

“Composition is the key concept,” Mr. Hammond says. “This is not just taking data and spilling it over into text.”

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Chart: Average American Annual Diet

by Derek Thompson

What do you call 200 pounds of meat, 31 pounds of cheese, 16 pounds of fish, and 415 pounds of veggies? Just a year in the life of the American stomach. Graphic via Sarah Kliff. Full size here.
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Bubble Boys

by Christopher Beam

Feross Aboukhadijeh likes to tell the story of how he got famous. It happened last fall, as he was beginning his junior year at Stanford. Google had just unveiled a feature called Google Instant, which shows search results in real time, as you type. “I thought it was kind of gimmicky,” says Feross. But it gave him an idea: If Google could pop out instant search results, why couldn’t YouTube produce instant videos? He bet a friend he could slap something together in an hour. “I lost the bet,” he says. “It took me three hours.”

The result was YouTube Instant, a site that lets you flip through YouTube videos in real time. Say you type in the letter A: The top video that begins with that letter—currently the music video for Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep”—starts playing. Add a B to spell “Ab,” and you see a stop-animation set to the alphabet song. “Abd” gives you the trailer for the Taylor Lautner thriller Abduction. And so on.

YouTube Instant went live at 9:32 p.m. on a Thursday. When Feross woke up at eight the next morning, he had a bunch of missed calls. One of his transcribed voice-mails said, “interview washington post.” “I was like, Nah, that can’t be right,” he says. By the end of the day, YouTube Instant had tens of thousands of views, Feross’s name and grinning face had appeared on dozens of websites and TV shows, and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley had offered him a job over Twitter.

Feross politely declined. He wanted to continue his schoolwork at Stanford, plus he had other projects gestating. But the experience put him in the crosshairs of Silicon Valley’s heavyweights, if he wasn’t there already. He’d just finished a summer working at Facebook, where he and Mark Zuckerberg had hit it off. (Zuckerberg later came to speak to a Stanford class Feross was T.A.-ing and called him out by name.) After YouTube Instant launched, a Google recruiter made it clear its door was always open. “If there’s anyone more heavily recruited, I’d want to know their name,” says Sean Holbert, course adviser for Stanford’s ­computer-science department last year.

Feross wears his celebrity well. He speaks rapidly but exudes calm, like a presenter at a TED conference. “YouTube ­Instant changed my life,” he says. “People don’t talk to me the same way. It’s like I gained twenty ­badass points. Whether I deserved it or not, I don’t know, but I’ll take it.”

YouTube Instant hasn’t changed the world—it hasn’t even made money. But its story describes the template for Silicon Valley these days, which may be a bubble, but it hasn’t popped yet: If you have an idea for an app, do it now. Throw it up online. Find an audience. Worry about quality later. Best-case scenario, you create the next Facebook. Worst-case, you try again. Even then, chances are you’ll get a job offer you can brag about rejecting. Right this minute, Silicon Valley is America’s opposite: House prices are soaring and demand for young talent far outstrips supply. The ongoing cyberspace race between Facebook, Apple, and Google, among others, means computer engineers enjoy more freedom—and power—than ever before. The barriers to entry for web programming are almost nonexistent. Angel investors are blessing start-ups left and right, and launching a software company is cheaper than ever. Do I take the offer from Google, or take the venture capital to start my own thing? Only in this one little quadrant do people have the luxury to ask such questions. For ­Feross, the son of a schoolteacher and a Syrian-born electrical engineer, the forecast is bright, though indistinct. He may become the next Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs; he may not. But while most of the country is in economic darkness, the American Dream is beaming bright in Palo Alto.

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Amy Winehouse