Sunday, July 7, 2013
Awaiting Renewal
It’s maybe the shittiest photo of me ever taken, and now I have to carry it with me everywhere I go. On the bright side, my husband and I spend a good half-hour passing the licence back and forth, laughing at how hideous it is. But privately, I wonder if I have the face of a woman who missed out on something. This is the shape my mid-life crisis is taking: I’m worried about what I have time to accomplish before I get too old to do anything. I’m fixated on what my life should look like by now. I’m angry at myself, because I should look better, I should be in better shape, I should be writing more, I should be a better cook and a more present, enthusiastic mother.
I go online looking for inspiration, but all I find is evidence that everyone in the world is more energetic than me. Thanks to blogs and Twitter and Facebook, I can sift through the proof that hundreds of other people aren’t slouching through life. They’re thriving in their big houses in beautiful cities, they’re cooking delicious organic meals for their children, and writing timely thank you notes to their aunts and uncles and mothers for the delightful gift that was sent in the mail and arrived right on time for Florenza’s third birthday.
Forget those weary strangers at the DMV. This country is apparently populated by highly effective, hip professional women, running around from yoga class to writing workshop, their fashionable outfits pulled taut over their abs of steel, chirping happily at each other about the upcoming publication of their second poetry chapbook — which is really going to make the move to the remodelled loft a little hectic, but hey, that’s life when you’re beautifulish and smartish and hopelessly productive!
It’s not enough that I know all about their countless hobbies and activities and pet projects and book clubs. I’m also treated to professional-looking shots of their photogenic families, their handsome, successful husbands and their darling children who are always hugging kitty cats or laughing joyfully on pristine beaches, children who are filled with wonder around the clock. Their children never pee in their Tinker Bell undies by accident and then whine about going commando, just for example. But maybe that’s because their children have parents who never lose their tempers or heat up frozen fish sticks for dinner or forget to do the laundry. Their kids have parents who let them sleep under the stars at Joshua Tree, and no one soils her sleeping bag or has a bad trip from too many corn-syrup-infused juice boxes.
Dear sweet merciful lord, deliver me from these deliriously happy parents, frolicking in paradise, publishing books, competing in triathlons, crafting jewellery, speaking to at-risk youth, painting bird houses, and raving about the new cardio ballet place that gives you an ass like a basketball. Keep me safe from these serene, positive-thinking hipster moms, with their fucking handmade recycled crafts and their mid-century modern furniture and their glowing skin and their optimism and their happy-go-lucky posts about their family’s next trip to a delightful boutique hotel in Bali.
I am not physically capable of being that effective or that effusive. I can’t knit and do yoga and smile at strangers and apply mascara every morning. These people remind me that I’ll never magically become the kind of person who shows up on time, looks fabulous, launches a multimillion-dollar business, and travels the world. When I was younger, I thought I might wake up one day and be different: more sophisticated, more ambitious, more organised. Back then, my ambivalence, my odd shoes, my bad hair seemed more like a style choice. When you’re young, being sloppy and cynical and spaced-out looks good on you.
But my flaws are no longer excusable. I need to fix everything, a voice inside keeps telling me. It’s time to be an efficient professional human, at long last, and a great mother and an adoring wife. It’s time to shower on a predictable schedule.
No matter how fervently I try to will myself into some productive adult’s reality, though, I’m still that 43-year-old superfreak in my driver’s licence photo. Some day, one of my daughters will hold this licence in her hand and feel sorry for me, long after I’m gone. ‘She was only 43 in this one. But, Jesus, look at that awful hair. And that look on her face. Why does she look so down? Or is that fear? What was she so afraid of?’ I don’t want my daughters to look at me — then or now — and see someone who’s disappointed in herself. At the very least, I have to change that.
by Heather Havrilesy, Aeon | Read more:
Photo by Nadine Rovner/Gallery Stock
Deactivated
You have confirmed your selection to deactivate your account. Just something to keep in mind: if you deactivate your account, you’ll no longer have access to Rebecca Feinberg’s photo albums. I find it pretty interesting that this wouldn’t bother you, considering that you spend almost an hour every day looking at her albums “Cancun 2012,” “Iz my birthday yall,” “Iz my birthday yall Part II,” and “Headshots.” You know, if you deactivate your Facebook account, you’ll never be able to see her photograph “Bikiniz in the dead sea” in her album “We went on Birthright!” again, right?
You have confirmed your selection to deactivate your account. Hey, I just remembered—you know who else might miss you on Facebook? Your girlfriend, Sarah Werner. You know, the girl you’ve been in a relationship with for almost three years? You’re tagged in five of her seven profile pictures? Yeah, Sarah Werner might miss you. Probably not a good idea to deactivate your account, huh?
You have confirmed your selection to deactivate your account. It’s funny—you spend a lot more time looking at Rebecca Feinberg’s photo albums than the photo albums of your actual girlfriend, Sarah Werner. A lot more time. Even though you’re dating Sarah Werner. Just wanted to throw that out there, that I have all this information logged. It’s just sitting in our storage banks. Who knows what happens when things get deactivated. Probably nothing, but do you really want to take that chance?
by Ethan Kuperberg, New Yorker | Read more:
Illustration by Michael Kupperman
Reading the Web Alone, Together
Reader allowed its millions of users to quickly scan and read every story from any number of Web sites in a single, constantly updated stream. It worked fairly simply: many Web sites produce standardized feeds of their content. Users add the feeds of the sites they want to read—which can number dozens, hundreds, or thousands—to their list, and instead of visiting those however many different Web sites each day, they just wait for the sites’ content to come to them. Launched in 2005, Google Reader was not the first feed reader, but it became the most iconic.
The use of feed readers never became a truly mainstream Web habit, which is why Google is comfortable closing Reader over the shouts of its devoted user base. Moreover, the way we discover and read on the Web has changed dramatically since the birth of Google Reader, eight years ago. While Google Reader’s sharing features spawned an ersatz social network based on sharing feeds with other users, what most users read was largely self-directed.
Since 2005, social media has become the de facto way one keeps up with the Internet, and it has been repeatedly fingered over the years as the culprit in the demise of feed readers generally. Facebook transformed, from a place to stalk classmates, into an unending stream of things to view: links, photos, comments (and advertising). By July 2012, one billion things were shared daily on Facebook. At the same time, Twitter rapidly became more and more popular, creating personalized news—and not news—feeds. Twitter is the most efficient link-sharing medium on the Internet; there is always something to read, and it is almost always up to the minute, with four hundred million tweets per day. And while community-driven link-sharing Web sites have existed for a long time, there has been nothing that approaches Reddit’s current scale or scope as a community-driven link-sharing site. Over the last couple of years it has become a true internet juggernaut, with thirty seven billion page views and four hundred million unique visitors in 2012.
Nonetheless, in killing Reader, Google created a new product category overnight: the Google Reader replacement. A number of companies have sought to build the next Google Reader, in order to woo its millions of users to their Web sites. Good alternatives already exist, but press attention has largely been lavished on one built by Digg, a news Web site that was revived last year. Digg Reader, currently in its early stages, is explicitly intended as a successor to Google Reader; the first thing it asks new users to do is import their Google Reader feeds. It complements Digg’s Web site, which uses algorithms and human editors to surface news and interesting content from around the Web. The current interface is focussed and pleasantly minimal: a soft gray sidebar shows a list of feeds, while content appears in a larger pane on the right side. That’s it.
by Matt Buchanan, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: uncredited
The anonymous artist group ‘Luzinterruptus’ is back again, this time in Caracas, Venezuela for the urban festival ‘In the Middle of the Street’ that pays tribute to the coexistence of public spaces.
This piece entitled ‘Portable River’ consisted of 2,000 transparent illuminated bags that housed miniature aquariums. For one night only viewers could come gaze at these tightly packaged ecosystems and were encouraged to carry them home at the end of the night. It was meant to open up the dialogue about the precious element of water itself and the urgent topic of privatization of water from big companies, especially in cities.
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When Privacy Jumped The Shark
Here’s one dirty little secret about the revelations of domestic spying at the National Security Agency: Had Edward Snowden not embarked on a madcap escape that mashed up plot elements from Catch Me If You Can, The Fugitive, the O.J. Bronco chase, and “Where in the World Is Matt Lauer?,” the story would be over. The leaker’s flight path, with the Feds and the press in farcical flat-footed pursuit, captured far more of the public’s attention than the substance of his leaks. That’s not his fault. The public was not much interested in the leaks in the first place. It was already moving on to Paula Deen. (...)
The truth is that privacy jumped the shark in America long ago. Many of us not only don’t care about having our privacy invaded but surrender more and more of our personal data, family secrets, and intimate yearnings with open eyes and full hearts to anyone who asks and many who don’t, from the servers of Fortune 500 corporations to the casting directors of reality-television shows to our 1.1 billion potential friends on Facebook. Indeed, there’s a considerable constituency in this country—always present and now arguably larger than ever—that’s begging for its privacy to be invaded and, God willing, to be exposed in every gory detail before the largest audience possible. We don’t like the government to be watching as well—many Americans don’t like government, period—but most of us are willing to give such surveillance a pass rather than forsake the pleasures and rewards of self-exposure, convenience, and consumerism.
R.I.P. the contemplative America of Thoreau and of Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, who “would prefer not to”; this is the America that prefers to be out there, prizing networking, exhibitionism, and fame more than privacy, introspection, and solitude. And while it would be uplifting to believe that Americans are willing to sacrifice privacy for the sole good of foiling Al Qaeda, that’s hardly the case. Other motives include such quotidian imperatives as shopping, hooking up, seeking instant entertainment and information, and finding the fastest car route—not to mention being liked (or at least “liked”) and followed by as many friends (or “friends”) and strangers as possible, whether online or on basic cable. In a society where economic advancement is stagnant for all but those at the top, a public profile is the one democratic currency most everyone can still afford and aspire to—an indicator of status, not something to be embarrassed about. According to the Pew-Post poll, a majority of Americans under 50 paid little attention to the NSA story at all, perhaps because they found the very notion of fearing a privacy breach anachronistic. After the news of the agency’s PRISM program broke, National Donut Day received more American Google searches than PRISM. There has been no wholesale (or piecemeal) exodus of Americans from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Skype, or any of the other information-vacuuming enterprises reported to have, in some murky fashion, siphoned data—meta, big, or otherwise—to the NSA. Wall Street is betting this will hold. A blogger on the investment website Motley Fool noticed that on the day PRISM was unmasked, share prices for all the implicated corporate participants went up.
If one wanted to identify the turning point when privacy stopped being a prized commodity in America, a good place to start would be with television and just before the turn of the century. The cultural revolution in programming that was cemented by the year 2000 presaged the devaluation of privacy that would explode with the arrival of Facebook and its peers a few years later.
What we now call reality television had been around since the dawn of the medium. Allen Funt’s Candid Camera had its television debut in 1948 (and had been on radio before that as “Candid Microphone”). But the everyday Americans spied on in Funt’s wholesome Peeping Tom pranks were caught by surprise; they didn’t volunteer for public exposure. The twelve-hour 1973 PBS mini-series An American Family (supported by funding from the Ford Foundation, no less) was a breakthrough because the troubled Louds of Santa Barbara willingly submitted to parading their travails in close-up on-camera. By the time MTV unveiled its series The Real World in 1992, the advent of video, digitalization, and compact cameras had made projects emulating An American Family much easier to produce in quantity and at greater length. (...)
Big Brother began its fifteenth season last week. We now know that it was merely a harbinger of what was to come. In 2000, it and Survivor (also on CBS) were novelties. In 2013, more than 300 reality shows are airing on a profusion of networks, including some that have revised their identities to accommodate them. (History, formerly known as the History Channel, is home to Ax Men and Swamp People.) That count does not include YouTube, where home productions can rival the biggest TV reality hits in audience. The 2011 video of 6-year-old Lily Clem’s reaction to her birthday present, a trip to Disneyland, attracted 5 million viewers in just its first three weeks.
Reality television is not a showbiz fad but a national pastime whose participants are as diverse as America in terms of class, race, creed, and ethnicity. If redneck subjects are now the rage—Here Comes Honey Boo Boo outdrew Fox News coverage of the GOP convention in the prime 18-49 demographic—the desperate urban middle class is at the heart of shows like the Vegas-based smash Pawn Stars (another History hit). Though some participants cash in—the Robertson brood of Duck Dynasty has transformed an already prosperous rural Louisiana business selling duck calls into a multi-platform entertainment empire—money isn’t the only motive. Many reality-show performers receive nominal pay, and the workplace protections afforded to union members usually don’t apply. The Kardashians notwithstanding, the payoff in fame also can be slight, not even fifteen minutes’ worth on the lower-rated shows. More often, exhibitionism is its own reward. Many Americans simply want to be seen, even in financial or psychological extremis, by as many of their fellow citizens as possible. That the government may also be watching—whether in pursuit of terrorism, ordinary criminality, immigration violations, employee malfeasance, tax evasion, or whatever—seems no deterrent.
The same risk of surveillance is taken by the many more Americans who bare their lives online, trading off privacy for speedier transactions, self-expression, and self-indulgence. With the notable exception of Anthony Weiner, few are naïve about that bargain. It’s no surprise that 85 percent of the country thinks it is being snooped on: Uncannily precise recommendations of products, friends, and followers stalk our every keystroke on the web. Given that Facebook’s members are more than three times as numerous as the American population, all of them linked to multiple networks that often have little or nothing to do with friendship, it’s a no-brainer that the infinity of data will be trolled by outsiders, whether flesh-and-blood or algorithmic, and whether the motive be investigative, prurient, mercantile, masturbatory, altruistic, or criminal. And that trolling is so easy!
The truth is that privacy jumped the shark in America long ago. Many of us not only don’t care about having our privacy invaded but surrender more and more of our personal data, family secrets, and intimate yearnings with open eyes and full hearts to anyone who asks and many who don’t, from the servers of Fortune 500 corporations to the casting directors of reality-television shows to our 1.1 billion potential friends on Facebook. Indeed, there’s a considerable constituency in this country—always present and now arguably larger than ever—that’s begging for its privacy to be invaded and, God willing, to be exposed in every gory detail before the largest audience possible. We don’t like the government to be watching as well—many Americans don’t like government, period—but most of us are willing to give such surveillance a pass rather than forsake the pleasures and rewards of self-exposure, convenience, and consumerism.R.I.P. the contemplative America of Thoreau and of Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, who “would prefer not to”; this is the America that prefers to be out there, prizing networking, exhibitionism, and fame more than privacy, introspection, and solitude. And while it would be uplifting to believe that Americans are willing to sacrifice privacy for the sole good of foiling Al Qaeda, that’s hardly the case. Other motives include such quotidian imperatives as shopping, hooking up, seeking instant entertainment and information, and finding the fastest car route—not to mention being liked (or at least “liked”) and followed by as many friends (or “friends”) and strangers as possible, whether online or on basic cable. In a society where economic advancement is stagnant for all but those at the top, a public profile is the one democratic currency most everyone can still afford and aspire to—an indicator of status, not something to be embarrassed about. According to the Pew-Post poll, a majority of Americans under 50 paid little attention to the NSA story at all, perhaps because they found the very notion of fearing a privacy breach anachronistic. After the news of the agency’s PRISM program broke, National Donut Day received more American Google searches than PRISM. There has been no wholesale (or piecemeal) exodus of Americans from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Skype, or any of the other information-vacuuming enterprises reported to have, in some murky fashion, siphoned data—meta, big, or otherwise—to the NSA. Wall Street is betting this will hold. A blogger on the investment website Motley Fool noticed that on the day PRISM was unmasked, share prices for all the implicated corporate participants went up.
If one wanted to identify the turning point when privacy stopped being a prized commodity in America, a good place to start would be with television and just before the turn of the century. The cultural revolution in programming that was cemented by the year 2000 presaged the devaluation of privacy that would explode with the arrival of Facebook and its peers a few years later.
What we now call reality television had been around since the dawn of the medium. Allen Funt’s Candid Camera had its television debut in 1948 (and had been on radio before that as “Candid Microphone”). But the everyday Americans spied on in Funt’s wholesome Peeping Tom pranks were caught by surprise; they didn’t volunteer for public exposure. The twelve-hour 1973 PBS mini-series An American Family (supported by funding from the Ford Foundation, no less) was a breakthrough because the troubled Louds of Santa Barbara willingly submitted to parading their travails in close-up on-camera. By the time MTV unveiled its series The Real World in 1992, the advent of video, digitalization, and compact cameras had made projects emulating An American Family much easier to produce in quantity and at greater length. (...)
Big Brother began its fifteenth season last week. We now know that it was merely a harbinger of what was to come. In 2000, it and Survivor (also on CBS) were novelties. In 2013, more than 300 reality shows are airing on a profusion of networks, including some that have revised their identities to accommodate them. (History, formerly known as the History Channel, is home to Ax Men and Swamp People.) That count does not include YouTube, where home productions can rival the biggest TV reality hits in audience. The 2011 video of 6-year-old Lily Clem’s reaction to her birthday present, a trip to Disneyland, attracted 5 million viewers in just its first three weeks.
Reality television is not a showbiz fad but a national pastime whose participants are as diverse as America in terms of class, race, creed, and ethnicity. If redneck subjects are now the rage—Here Comes Honey Boo Boo outdrew Fox News coverage of the GOP convention in the prime 18-49 demographic—the desperate urban middle class is at the heart of shows like the Vegas-based smash Pawn Stars (another History hit). Though some participants cash in—the Robertson brood of Duck Dynasty has transformed an already prosperous rural Louisiana business selling duck calls into a multi-platform entertainment empire—money isn’t the only motive. Many reality-show performers receive nominal pay, and the workplace protections afforded to union members usually don’t apply. The Kardashians notwithstanding, the payoff in fame also can be slight, not even fifteen minutes’ worth on the lower-rated shows. More often, exhibitionism is its own reward. Many Americans simply want to be seen, even in financial or psychological extremis, by as many of their fellow citizens as possible. That the government may also be watching—whether in pursuit of terrorism, ordinary criminality, immigration violations, employee malfeasance, tax evasion, or whatever—seems no deterrent.
The same risk of surveillance is taken by the many more Americans who bare their lives online, trading off privacy for speedier transactions, self-expression, and self-indulgence. With the notable exception of Anthony Weiner, few are naïve about that bargain. It’s no surprise that 85 percent of the country thinks it is being snooped on: Uncannily precise recommendations of products, friends, and followers stalk our every keystroke on the web. Given that Facebook’s members are more than three times as numerous as the American population, all of them linked to multiple networks that often have little or nothing to do with friendship, it’s a no-brainer that the infinity of data will be trolled by outsiders, whether flesh-and-blood or algorithmic, and whether the motive be investigative, prurient, mercantile, masturbatory, altruistic, or criminal. And that trolling is so easy!
by Frank Rich, NY Magazine | Read more:
Photo: SplashNews
Why I Donated My Stool
This spring I saved a friend from a terrible illness, maybe even death. No, I didn’t donate a kidney or a piece of my lung. I did it with my stool.
About 18 months ago, my friend, whom I’ll call Gene to protect his privacy, fell sick with stomach pain, intestinal cramps and copious bloody diarrhea. He had ulcerative colitis, a colon riddled with bleeding ulcers.
His gastroenterologist started him on steroids and anti-inflammatories — standard treatment for these ulcers. He felt better and within a few weeks was able to taper off the steroids, which can be dangerous if used over the long term. But a month later, the bleeding and diarrhea were back. He was in horrible pain that worsened when he ate or drank. He couldn’t sleep at night.
The doctor put him back on the steroids, but this time the symptoms weren’t held in check. For the next excruciating year, my friend went through episodes where he could do nothing but lie writhing in bed in pain. He lost frightening amounts of weight, became anemic from the blood loss and was forced to take medical leave from a job he loved.
According to his doctors, he was left with two options: powerful immunosuppressant drugs (the kind they give people after organ transplants) or a total colectomy (the removal of the colon). The drugs might not be effective, and they raised the risk of lymphoma or fatal infections, while with the surgical option, the tissue left behind could and often did eventually become ulcerated itself.
That’s when Gene started reading about a procedure called fecal microbiota transplant, or F.M.T.
Transplanting the stool from one person into the digestive tract of another seems, well, repulsive, but it also makes sense. The majority of the matter in stool — roughly 60 percent — is bacteria, dead and alive, but mostly alive. While bacteria can make us sick, they also constitute a large part of who we are; the hundreds of trillions of cells in an individual’s microbiome, as this collective is known, outnumber human cells 10 to 1. The bacteria serve many functions, including in metabolism, hormone regulation and the immune system.
The microbiome of the digestive system is particularly important. At least a thousand strains of bacteria coexist in a healthy human bowel, and beneficial bacteria are involved in vitamin production, digestion and keeping “bad” bacteria in check. Thus, changes to the gut microbiome can precipitate disease. For instance, taking a powerful antibiotic wipes out both good and bad gut flora, which can lead to opportunistic bacteria taking over and causing infection.
Many people who suffer from clostridium difficile, a dangerous strain of bacteria that is becoming epidemic in hospitals and nursing homes, got it this way. The idea behind fecal transfers is that restoring colonies of healthy bacteria can either dilute or crowd out these harmful strains. And it seems to work: in January, The New England Journal of Medicine reported that the first randomized clinical trial of F.M.T.’s for clostridium difficile had been halted because the treatment worked so well that it was unethical to withhold it from the control group.
About 18 months ago, my friend, whom I’ll call Gene to protect his privacy, fell sick with stomach pain, intestinal cramps and copious bloody diarrhea. He had ulcerative colitis, a colon riddled with bleeding ulcers.
His gastroenterologist started him on steroids and anti-inflammatories — standard treatment for these ulcers. He felt better and within a few weeks was able to taper off the steroids, which can be dangerous if used over the long term. But a month later, the bleeding and diarrhea were back. He was in horrible pain that worsened when he ate or drank. He couldn’t sleep at night.The doctor put him back on the steroids, but this time the symptoms weren’t held in check. For the next excruciating year, my friend went through episodes where he could do nothing but lie writhing in bed in pain. He lost frightening amounts of weight, became anemic from the blood loss and was forced to take medical leave from a job he loved.
According to his doctors, he was left with two options: powerful immunosuppressant drugs (the kind they give people after organ transplants) or a total colectomy (the removal of the colon). The drugs might not be effective, and they raised the risk of lymphoma or fatal infections, while with the surgical option, the tissue left behind could and often did eventually become ulcerated itself.
That’s when Gene started reading about a procedure called fecal microbiota transplant, or F.M.T.
Transplanting the stool from one person into the digestive tract of another seems, well, repulsive, but it also makes sense. The majority of the matter in stool — roughly 60 percent — is bacteria, dead and alive, but mostly alive. While bacteria can make us sick, they also constitute a large part of who we are; the hundreds of trillions of cells in an individual’s microbiome, as this collective is known, outnumber human cells 10 to 1. The bacteria serve many functions, including in metabolism, hormone regulation and the immune system.
The microbiome of the digestive system is particularly important. At least a thousand strains of bacteria coexist in a healthy human bowel, and beneficial bacteria are involved in vitamin production, digestion and keeping “bad” bacteria in check. Thus, changes to the gut microbiome can precipitate disease. For instance, taking a powerful antibiotic wipes out both good and bad gut flora, which can lead to opportunistic bacteria taking over and causing infection.
Many people who suffer from clostridium difficile, a dangerous strain of bacteria that is becoming epidemic in hospitals and nursing homes, got it this way. The idea behind fecal transfers is that restoring colonies of healthy bacteria can either dilute or crowd out these harmful strains. And it seems to work: in January, The New England Journal of Medicine reported that the first randomized clinical trial of F.M.T.’s for clostridium difficile had been halted because the treatment worked so well that it was unethical to withhold it from the control group.
The causes of ulcerative colitis are more mysterious than those of clostridium difficile (doctors in Gene’s case did not hazard a guess), but there is some speculation that the condition can also be traced to pathogenic bacteria. A small study of children with ulcerative colitis, published this spring in The Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition, found that 78 percent had a reduction in symptoms within a week of being treated with fecal transfers. (...)
by Marie Myung-Ok Lee , NY Times | Read more:
Image: Katie Scott
Today, around 3,000 F.M.T.’s have been performed worldwide. No significant adverse reactions have been definitively attributed to the procedure (though there have been two F.M.T.’s that may have led to the transmission of the norovirus stomach bug, both of which cleared on their own within days).
Convinced that the potential benefits outweighed the risks, Gene decided, early this year, to try F.M.T. However, this turned out to be harder than he’d expected. There are only about 16 centers in the country that even offer the treatment. Gene finally secured an appointment with Dr. Lawrence Brandt, one of the most experienced F.M.T. practitioners, only to find out, just before his visit, that Dr. Brandt was suspending his F.M.T. practice for ulcerative colitis on the advice of the hospital’s lawyers, in order to comply with a new Food and Drug Administration decision. In April, the F.D.A. decided to classify human stool that is used therapeutically as a drug, and thus approved for use only within an F.D.A.-approved clinical study.
Gene tried tracking down other doctors, but found to his frustration that almost all of them had stopped doing F.M.T.’s as a result of the agency’s somewhat ambiguous restrictions. He found one remaining gastroenterologist, R. David Shepard, who had an excellent record of treating ulcerative colitis with fecal transfers and was still doing them. But Dr. Shepard was in Florida, and Gene was now too sick to travel.
Dr. Shepard, however, had a solution: he would help Gene with the mechanics of performing a do-it-yourself F.M.T., something he’d done successfully with a handful of other patients. Gene just had to find a donor.
Convinced that the potential benefits outweighed the risks, Gene decided, early this year, to try F.M.T. However, this turned out to be harder than he’d expected. There are only about 16 centers in the country that even offer the treatment. Gene finally secured an appointment with Dr. Lawrence Brandt, one of the most experienced F.M.T. practitioners, only to find out, just before his visit, that Dr. Brandt was suspending his F.M.T. practice for ulcerative colitis on the advice of the hospital’s lawyers, in order to comply with a new Food and Drug Administration decision. In April, the F.D.A. decided to classify human stool that is used therapeutically as a drug, and thus approved for use only within an F.D.A.-approved clinical study.
Gene tried tracking down other doctors, but found to his frustration that almost all of them had stopped doing F.M.T.’s as a result of the agency’s somewhat ambiguous restrictions. He found one remaining gastroenterologist, R. David Shepard, who had an excellent record of treating ulcerative colitis with fecal transfers and was still doing them. But Dr. Shepard was in Florida, and Gene was now too sick to travel.
Dr. Shepard, however, had a solution: he would help Gene with the mechanics of performing a do-it-yourself F.M.T., something he’d done successfully with a handful of other patients. Gene just had to find a donor.
by Marie Myung-Ok Lee , NY Times | Read more:
Image: Katie Scott
Saturday, July 6, 2013
A Matter of Life and Death
[ed. Repost. One of the best essays on cancer and dying you will ever read. Heartbreaking, yet fiercely life affirming.]
It was cancer—a brutally sudden death sentence: the doctors told the author she had probably less than six months. For a woman with two young children and a full life, that prognosis was devastating, but also, in some ways, oddly liberating. And so began more than three years of horror, hope, and grace, as she learned to live, and even laugh, on borrowed time.
The beast first showed its face benignly, in the late-June warmth of a California swimming pool, and it would take me more than a year to know it for what it was. Willie and I were lolling happily in the sunny shallow end of my in-laws’ pool when he—then only seven—said, “Mommy, you’re getting thinner.”
It was true, I realized with some pleasure. Those intractable 10 or 15 pounds that had settled in over the course of two pregnancies: hadn’t they seemed, lately, to be melting away? I had never gained enough weight to think about trying very hard to lose it, except for sporadic, failed commitments to the health club. But I’d carried—for so many years I hardly noticed it—an unpleasant sensation of being more cushiony than I wanted to be. And now, without trying, I’d lost at least five pounds, perhaps even eight.
I suppose I fell into the smug assumption that I had magically restored the lucky metabolism of my 20s and 30s, when it had been easy for me to carry between 110 and 120 pounds on a frame of five feet six inches. True, in the months before Willie’s observation, I’d been working harder, and more happily, than I had in years—burning more fuel through later nights and busier days. I’d also been smoking, an old habit I’d fallen into again two years earlier, bouncing back and forth between quitting and succumbing, working up to something like eight cigarettes a day.
Of course Willie noticed it first, I now think: children major in the study of their mothers, and Willie has the elder child’s umbilical awareness of me. But how is it that I didn’t even question a weight loss striking enough for a child to speak up about? I was too happy enjoying this unexpected gift to question it even briefly: the American woman’s yearning for thinness is so deeply a part of me that it never crossed my mind that a weight loss could herald something other than good fortune.
As it happened, I took up running about a month later, in concert with quitting smoking for good. By the end of the summer I was running about four miles a day, at least five days a week. And with all that exercise I found I could eat pretty much anything I wanted without worrying about my weight. So more weight melted away, and the steady weight loss that might have warned me something was going badly wrong disguised itself instead as the reward for all those pounding steps I was taking through the chill of early fall, the sting of winter, the beauty of spring’s beginning. I went from around 126 pounds, in the spring of 2000, to about 109 a year later.
Somewhere in there my period became irregular—first it was late, then it stopped altogether. Well, I’d heard of this: women who exercise heavily sometimes do become amenorrheic. I discussed it with my gynecologist in January, and he agreed it was no real cause for alarm. He checked my hormone levels and found I definitely hadn’t hit perimenopause, but what I most remember about that visit is the amazed approval with which he commented on the good shape I was in.
Around that time—I can’t pinpoint exactly when—I began to have hot flashes, almost unnoticeable at first, gradually increasing in intensity. Well, I said to myself, I must be perimenopausal after all; a gynecologist friend told me that hormone levels can fluctuate so much that the test my doctor had done wasn’t necessarily the last word on the subject.
Then one day in April I was lying on my back, talking idly on the telephone (strangely, I don’t remember to whom), and running my hand up and down my now deliciously scrawny stomach. And just like that I felt it: a mass, about the size of a small apricot, on the lower right side of my abdomen. My mind swung sharply into focus: Have I ever felt this thing before, this lump? Well, who knows, maybe this is a part of my anatomy I was just never aware of before—I had always had a little layer of fat between my skin and the mysteries of the innards. Maybe there was some part of the intestine that felt that way, and I had just never been thin enough to notice it before.
You know how you’ve always wondered about it: Would you notice if you had a sudden lump? Would you be sensible enough to do something about it? How would your mind react? For all of us, those wonderings have a luxuriantly melodramatic quality. Because surely that isn’t really how it works; you don’t just stumble onto the fact that you have a lethal cancer while you’re gabbing on the phone like a teenager. Surely you can’t have a death sentence so close to the surface, just resting there, without your being in some other way aware of it.
I thought about calling my doctor, but then remembered that I had a full checkup scheduled in about three weeks anyway; I would bring it up then. In the intervening weeks I often reached down to find this odd bump: sometimes it wasn’t there, and at other times it was. Once, I even thought it had moved—could I possibly be feeling it three inches up and two inches to the left, nearly underneath my belly button? Surely not. This must be just another sign that I was imagining things.
The beast first showed its face benignly, in the late-June warmth of a California swimming pool, and it would take me more than a year to know it for what it was. Willie and I were lolling happily in the sunny shallow end of my in-laws’ pool when he—then only seven—said, “Mommy, you’re getting thinner.”It was true, I realized with some pleasure. Those intractable 10 or 15 pounds that had settled in over the course of two pregnancies: hadn’t they seemed, lately, to be melting away? I had never gained enough weight to think about trying very hard to lose it, except for sporadic, failed commitments to the health club. But I’d carried—for so many years I hardly noticed it—an unpleasant sensation of being more cushiony than I wanted to be. And now, without trying, I’d lost at least five pounds, perhaps even eight.
I suppose I fell into the smug assumption that I had magically restored the lucky metabolism of my 20s and 30s, when it had been easy for me to carry between 110 and 120 pounds on a frame of five feet six inches. True, in the months before Willie’s observation, I’d been working harder, and more happily, than I had in years—burning more fuel through later nights and busier days. I’d also been smoking, an old habit I’d fallen into again two years earlier, bouncing back and forth between quitting and succumbing, working up to something like eight cigarettes a day.
Of course Willie noticed it first, I now think: children major in the study of their mothers, and Willie has the elder child’s umbilical awareness of me. But how is it that I didn’t even question a weight loss striking enough for a child to speak up about? I was too happy enjoying this unexpected gift to question it even briefly: the American woman’s yearning for thinness is so deeply a part of me that it never crossed my mind that a weight loss could herald something other than good fortune.
As it happened, I took up running about a month later, in concert with quitting smoking for good. By the end of the summer I was running about four miles a day, at least five days a week. And with all that exercise I found I could eat pretty much anything I wanted without worrying about my weight. So more weight melted away, and the steady weight loss that might have warned me something was going badly wrong disguised itself instead as the reward for all those pounding steps I was taking through the chill of early fall, the sting of winter, the beauty of spring’s beginning. I went from around 126 pounds, in the spring of 2000, to about 109 a year later.
Somewhere in there my period became irregular—first it was late, then it stopped altogether. Well, I’d heard of this: women who exercise heavily sometimes do become amenorrheic. I discussed it with my gynecologist in January, and he agreed it was no real cause for alarm. He checked my hormone levels and found I definitely hadn’t hit perimenopause, but what I most remember about that visit is the amazed approval with which he commented on the good shape I was in.
Around that time—I can’t pinpoint exactly when—I began to have hot flashes, almost unnoticeable at first, gradually increasing in intensity. Well, I said to myself, I must be perimenopausal after all; a gynecologist friend told me that hormone levels can fluctuate so much that the test my doctor had done wasn’t necessarily the last word on the subject.
Then one day in April I was lying on my back, talking idly on the telephone (strangely, I don’t remember to whom), and running my hand up and down my now deliciously scrawny stomach. And just like that I felt it: a mass, about the size of a small apricot, on the lower right side of my abdomen. My mind swung sharply into focus: Have I ever felt this thing before, this lump? Well, who knows, maybe this is a part of my anatomy I was just never aware of before—I had always had a little layer of fat between my skin and the mysteries of the innards. Maybe there was some part of the intestine that felt that way, and I had just never been thin enough to notice it before.
You know how you’ve always wondered about it: Would you notice if you had a sudden lump? Would you be sensible enough to do something about it? How would your mind react? For all of us, those wonderings have a luxuriantly melodramatic quality. Because surely that isn’t really how it works; you don’t just stumble onto the fact that you have a lethal cancer while you’re gabbing on the phone like a teenager. Surely you can’t have a death sentence so close to the surface, just resting there, without your being in some other way aware of it.
I thought about calling my doctor, but then remembered that I had a full checkup scheduled in about three weeks anyway; I would bring it up then. In the intervening weeks I often reached down to find this odd bump: sometimes it wasn’t there, and at other times it was. Once, I even thought it had moved—could I possibly be feeling it three inches up and two inches to the left, nearly underneath my belly button? Surely not. This must be just another sign that I was imagining things.
by Marjorie Williams, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Ultramundane
If we are what we consume, then nothing tells us more about who we are in the early 21st century than the energy drink. Caffeine delivery systems in a can, energy drinks promise to make us perform, whether this is on the bureaucratic terrain of spreadsheets and performance targets or the sports courts where we thrash out our fantasies of being all we can be. There is a multibillion-dollar industry built on the commodification of latent energy. For the protestant subtext of capitalism means that we can question our talent but never our work rate. A can of Relentless, a sugary stimulant sold under a gothic logo, is a step towards a life of “no half measures”. Relentless is the corner shop’s quick fix for flagging performance, the equivalent of a Duracell suppository. Relentless is a one-word manifesto.The great cliché of late capitalism is that ours is an age of excess. But an excess of what? Marc Augé defined what he called “supermodernity” as an excess of space — of airports, shopping malls and other spatial wastes. But if architecture is plagued by non-places and junkspace, then design indulges in a different kind of excess. Design is drowning in a surplus of performance. It is caught in a 2,000-rpm spin cycle set in motion by modernism. Relentless. The modernists gave us function as a credo, and once we got a taste for it the market took over and did what it does best. It took modernism’s obsession with function to its absurd conclusion. Brands heaped function on top of function, they honed and enhanced, they boosted and superseded, they spent millions on r&d in pursuit of infinitesimal advancements. We, the consumer, tried to keep up but we were always one step behind.
Condemned to longing and jealousy, we watched rapt as consumer products took on a spectral brilliance. Goods were no longer good, they were incredible. They didn’t just perform, they over-performed. Ours is the age of the ultramundane. Far from meaning what it sounds like it means (i.e. very boring), “ultramundane” refers to the otherworldly. Ultramundane products are both banal and yet too good for this world. Belonging to the realm of hyper-performance, they test the limits of our understanding. Where we fail, they succeed. They are the reification of all that we wish we could do, of our longing to perform. (...)
In furniture, hyper-performance achieved its apotheosis in the Aeron chair. What began as a process to design a comfortable chair for the elderly ended as a trophy of the boardroom and the dotcom boom. The Aeron’s unashamed technicality was its selling point. It mechanised comfort, stripping away the layers of foam and leather to leave mesh and a machinery of levers and tilt mechanisms. In fact, this technical system was never meant to result in just a chair. Its designers were developing a concept called Metaforms, which was supposed to produce a furniture system that could support any task, any human behaviour — but it was reduced to just a chair. As such, it did its job too well. It made it possible to sit for hours on end without interruption, rendering you a slave to your work. Cruelly anticipating your every move, it tied you to a life of hyper-performance.
Mechanisation was supposed to be liberating. The problem with technological determinism is that technology determines our behaviour as much as we determine its. Siegfried Giedion warned us about this 65 years ago. Mechanization Takes Command is full of “purely technical solutions” that “found no response in the emotional temper of the time”. In it, you’ll find the 19th-century ancestor of the Aeron, the Invalid Chair of 1838, a multi-hinged reclining number that is basically a less obese La-Z-Boy. (The La-Z-Boy is of course anything but lazy, but by over-performing it allows us to be.) And yet Giedion was clear that mechanisation was progress.
by Justin McGuirk, Domus | Read more:
Illustration by Danilo Agutoli
Friday, July 5, 2013
To Galt’s Gulch They Go
Chile learned the hard way about minding the feelings of the business-class god. In 1970 that country selected as president one Salvador Allende, a socialist of the old school who quickly set about nationalizing banks, telecom concerns, and so on. American companies naturally feared these developments and laid plans to push the country down a different path. They would withdraw investments, executives mused; they would halt purchases of Chilean goods; and they would persuade others to do the same. President Richard Nixon, who was clearly thinking along the same lines, told his CIA director to “make the economy scream.”
And scream it did. Still, these were the early days of collective capitalist action, and there was a certain brutality and clumsiness to the proceedings. Not every American firm doing business in Chile went along with the program—the high-minded banks, for example, squealed about their policy of “non-involvement in the political affairs of the countries where they do business.” And in the end, Atlas’s goals for the Southern Cone were achieved only by means of an ugly military coup.
In later years, Atlas would grow more subtle in expressing himself, more refined. When François Mitterrand was elected president of France in 1981—another socialist pursuing an array of nationalizations and expanded rights for labor—there was no need for a junta of generals to intervene. Mitterrand pumped the depressed French economy full of Keynesian stimulus, but his nationalizations were too much to take: the private sector simply refused to play along. The New York Times spoke of an “investment strike,” rich Frenchmen moved abroad, and Mitterrand himself moaned about a guerre sociale conducted by the bosses. This socialist was no Salvador Allende: he came into office at the head of a good-sized majority, he presided over one of the largest economies in the world, and he was fully committed to the American-led security program of the era. But none of that mattered to peevish Atlas.
It took only two years for Mitterrand to capitulate. In 1983 he embarked on his famous economic U-turn, one of the most depressing episodes in the entire gloomy history of the neoliberal conquest. Economic orthodoxy returned to France in triumph. Entrepreneurs were celebrated. Labor unions went into a decline from which they have never recovered.
A similar episode took place in those days in Jamaica, where the socialist prime minister, Michael Manley, pleaded with the business community to invest, but without result: their mistrust was simply too great. Another unfolded in Canada, where large national corporations, according to one witness, threatened to pick up their marbles and go home unless Pierre Trudeau’s government abandoned plans to close certain tax loopholes.
And finally America itself got a taste of Atlas’s power. The immortal remark Bill Clinton addressed to his economic advisers shortly after being elected president in 1992—“You mean to tell me that the success of the program and my reelection hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?”—will stand forever as testimony to the power of the visible hand. Seven years later, the administration had been converted to the cause so utterly that it now rationalized the things Atlas did to states that dared to regulate: “In a global economy where capital can be invested anywhere,” quoth vice president Al Gore in 1999, “red tape is like an economic noose that says: if you send your investments here, we’re going to strangle them with bureaucracy, inefficiency, and forms, fees, and requirements you can barely even understand.” Even for Americans, certain conventional acts of public administration were now beyond the horizon of the permissible. By 1999, not even a red-baiter like Richard Nixon would have been able to escape the wrath of the business god, thanks to his worshipful hours at the altar of Keynesianism. Just let the infidel try his wage and price controls in the decade of “globalization,” and it’d be his economy that would scream.
by Thomas Frank, Baffler | Read more:
Image: David Suter
Thursday, July 4, 2013
James Clapper, Play-acting, and Political Priorities
The NSA revelations continue to expose far more than just the ongoing operations of that sprawling and unaccountable spying agency. Let's examine what we have learned this week about the US political and media class and then certain EU leaders.
The first NSA story to be reported was our June 6 article which exposed the bulk, indiscriminate collection by the US Government of the telephone records of tens of millions of Americans. Ever since then, it has been undeniably clear that James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, outright lied to the US Senate - specifically to the Intelligence Committee, the body charged with oversight over surveillance programs - when he said "no, sir" in response to this question from Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"
That Clapper fundamentally misled Congress is beyond dispute. The DNI himself has now been forced by our stories to admit that his statement was, in his words, "clearly erroneous" and to apologize. But he did this only once our front-page revelations forced him to do so: in other words, what he's sorry about is that he got caught lying to the Senate. And as Salon's David Sirota adeptly documented on Friday, Clapper is still spouting falsehoods as he apologizes and attempts to explain why he did it.
How is this not a huge scandal? Intentionally deceiving Congress is a felony, punishable by up to 5 years in prison for each offense. Reagan administration officials were convicted of misleading Congress as part of the Iran-contra scandal and other controversies, and sports stars have been prosecuted by the Obama DOJ based on allegations they have done so.
Beyond its criminality, lying to Congress destroys the pretense of oversight. Obviously, members of Congress cannot exercise any actual oversight over programs which are being concealed by deceitful national security officials.
In response to our first week of NSA stories, Wyden issued a statementdenouncing these misleading statements, explaining that the Senate's oversight function "cannot be done responsibly if senators aren't getting straight answers to direct questions", and calling for "public hearings" to "address the recent disclosures," arguing that "the American people have the right to expect straight answers from the intelligence leadership to the questions asked by their representatives." Those people who have been defending the NSA programs by claiming there is robust Congressional oversight should be leading the chorus against Clapper, given that his deceit prevents the very oversight they invoke to justify these programs.
But Clapper isn't the only top national security official who has been proven by our NSA stories to be fundamentally misleading the public and the Congress about surveillance programs. As an outstanding Washington Post article by Greg Miller this week documented:
Beyond that, the NSA got caught spreading falsehoods even in its own public talking points about its surveillance programs, and were forced by our disclosures to quietly delete those inaccuracies. Wyden and another Democratic Senator, Mark Udall, wrote a letter to the NSA identifying multiple inaccuracies in their public claims about their domestic spying activities.
Defending the Obama administration, Paul Krugman pronounced that "the NSA stuff is a policy dispute, not the kind of scandal the right wing wants." Really? In what conceivable sense is this not a serious scandal? If you, as an American citizen, let alone a journalist, don't find it deeply objectionable when top national security officials systematically mislead your representatives in Congress about how the government is spying on you, and repeatedly lie publicly about resulting political controversies over that spying, what is objectionable? If having the NSA engage in secret, indiscriminate domestic spying that warps if not outright violates legal limits isn't a "scandal", then what is?
For many media and political elites, the answer to that question seems clear: what's truly objectionable to them is when powerless individuals blow the whistle on deceitful national security state officials. Hence the endless fixation on Edward Snowden's tone and choice of asylum providers, the flamboyant denunciations of this "29-year-old hacker" for the crime of exposing what our government leaders are doing in the dark, and all sorts of mockery over the drama that resulted from the due-process-free revocation of his passport. This is what our media stars and progressive columnists, pundits and bloggers are obsessing over in the hope of distracting attention away from the surveillance misconduct of top-level Obama officials and their serial deceit about it.
What kind of journalist - or citizen - would focus more on Edward Snowden's tonal oddities and travel drama than on the fact that top US officials have been deceitfully concealing a massive, worldwide spying apparatus being constructed with virtually no accountability or oversight? Just ponder what it says about someone who cares more about, and is angrier about, Edward Snowden's exposure of these facts than they are about James Clapper's falsehoods and the NSA's excesses.
The first NSA story to be reported was our June 6 article which exposed the bulk, indiscriminate collection by the US Government of the telephone records of tens of millions of Americans. Ever since then, it has been undeniably clear that James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, outright lied to the US Senate - specifically to the Intelligence Committee, the body charged with oversight over surveillance programs - when he said "no, sir" in response to this question from Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"That Clapper fundamentally misled Congress is beyond dispute. The DNI himself has now been forced by our stories to admit that his statement was, in his words, "clearly erroneous" and to apologize. But he did this only once our front-page revelations forced him to do so: in other words, what he's sorry about is that he got caught lying to the Senate. And as Salon's David Sirota adeptly documented on Friday, Clapper is still spouting falsehoods as he apologizes and attempts to explain why he did it.
How is this not a huge scandal? Intentionally deceiving Congress is a felony, punishable by up to 5 years in prison for each offense. Reagan administration officials were convicted of misleading Congress as part of the Iran-contra scandal and other controversies, and sports stars have been prosecuted by the Obama DOJ based on allegations they have done so.
Beyond its criminality, lying to Congress destroys the pretense of oversight. Obviously, members of Congress cannot exercise any actual oversight over programs which are being concealed by deceitful national security officials.
In response to our first week of NSA stories, Wyden issued a statementdenouncing these misleading statements, explaining that the Senate's oversight function "cannot be done responsibly if senators aren't getting straight answers to direct questions", and calling for "public hearings" to "address the recent disclosures," arguing that "the American people have the right to expect straight answers from the intelligence leadership to the questions asked by their representatives." Those people who have been defending the NSA programs by claiming there is robust Congressional oversight should be leading the chorus against Clapper, given that his deceit prevents the very oversight they invoke to justify these programs.
But Clapper isn't the only top national security official who has been proven by our NSA stories to be fundamentally misleading the public and the Congress about surveillance programs. As an outstanding Washington Post article by Greg Miller this week documented:
"[D]etails that have emerged from the exposure of hundreds of pages of previously classified NSA documents indicate that public assertions about these programs by senior US officials have also often been misleading, erroneous or simply false."Please re-read that sentence. It's not just Clapper, but multiple "senior US officials", whose statements have been proven false by our reporting and Edward Snowden's disclosures. Indeed, the Guardian previously published top secret documents disproving the claims of NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander that the agency is incapable of stating how many Americans are having their calls and emails invaded without warrants, as well as the oft-repeated claim from President Barack Obama that the NSA is not listening in on Americans' calls without warrants. Both of those assertions, as our prior reporting and Miller's article this week demonstrates, are indisputably false.
Beyond that, the NSA got caught spreading falsehoods even in its own public talking points about its surveillance programs, and were forced by our disclosures to quietly delete those inaccuracies. Wyden and another Democratic Senator, Mark Udall, wrote a letter to the NSA identifying multiple inaccuracies in their public claims about their domestic spying activities.
Defending the Obama administration, Paul Krugman pronounced that "the NSA stuff is a policy dispute, not the kind of scandal the right wing wants." Really? In what conceivable sense is this not a serious scandal? If you, as an American citizen, let alone a journalist, don't find it deeply objectionable when top national security officials systematically mislead your representatives in Congress about how the government is spying on you, and repeatedly lie publicly about resulting political controversies over that spying, what is objectionable? If having the NSA engage in secret, indiscriminate domestic spying that warps if not outright violates legal limits isn't a "scandal", then what is?
For many media and political elites, the answer to that question seems clear: what's truly objectionable to them is when powerless individuals blow the whistle on deceitful national security state officials. Hence the endless fixation on Edward Snowden's tone and choice of asylum providers, the flamboyant denunciations of this "29-year-old hacker" for the crime of exposing what our government leaders are doing in the dark, and all sorts of mockery over the drama that resulted from the due-process-free revocation of his passport. This is what our media stars and progressive columnists, pundits and bloggers are obsessing over in the hope of distracting attention away from the surveillance misconduct of top-level Obama officials and their serial deceit about it.
What kind of journalist - or citizen - would focus more on Edward Snowden's tonal oddities and travel drama than on the fact that top US officials have been deceitfully concealing a massive, worldwide spying apparatus being constructed with virtually no accountability or oversight? Just ponder what it says about someone who cares more about, and is angrier about, Edward Snowden's exposure of these facts than they are about James Clapper's falsehoods and the NSA's excesses.
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