Mr. Spock at the “Sh*t Show”

Barack Obama, the rise of Trump and a world gone crazy

Barack Obama does not much appreciate being blamed for the rise of Donald Trump. But after reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s immense article on “The Obama Doctrine” in the Atlantic, which was based on several lengthy interviews with the president and his inner circle of advisors, I suspect Obama also knows that the charge contains a germ of truth, on a deep karmic or psychological level most of his critics are unlikely to grasp.

Goldberg’s Obama magnum opus is well written, highly intelligent and impressively researched. It’s also massively narcissistic and sycophantic, in vintage Beltway-insider style, marinating in details and locations and celebrating its author’s access to power. We’re in the White House dining room, or John Kerry’s private office at the State Department, or aboard Air Force One on the runway in Kuala Lumpur. We are discussing serious things: the perceived personality defects of Vladimir Putin, the contemporary relevance of Thomas Hobbes’ “Leviathan,” and the importance of America’s relationship to Asia — a question Obama hoped would be central to his presidency that got trumped, or Trumped, by other concerns.

Even as Goldberg sinks, little by little, into the swamp of Washington groupthink — honestly, he should know better than to refer to Hugo Chávez, the late Venezuelan president, as a “dictator” — he teases out an intriguing portrait of the blend of caution, calculation and hopefulness that have characterized Obama’s foreign policy. Through it all, we can also discern a depiction of the president’s central flaw. It may not be a flaw at all, depending on your view of such things; it is certainly preferable to other flaws we could name. (Obama is presumed to favor Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, but Clinton is portrayed throughout the Goldberg article as an incautious military interventionist who drove the administration’s disastrous Libya policy and wanted to compound the error in Syria. It’s a lot more like an indictment than an endorsement.)

Obama is frequently described as cool or sardonic or detached or analytical or deliberative; he is without doubt the most intellectually gifted American president in many decades. (Woodrow Wilson would be the most recent candidate, and before him probably Lincoln.) But what underlies Obama’s impressive book-learning and nuanced strategic thinking is a well-known failing of the intellectual class: He doesn’t seem to know much about human nature, and appears continually surprised by how stupid, fearful and irrational his fellow citizens and fellow planetary inhabitants are. He has read more than enough of Hobbes and John Locke, more than enough foreign-policy papers by officials of the George H.W. Bush administration. (His avatar in that field is, no kidding, Brent Scowcroft, which explains a lot.) He’s a little short, so to speak, on Freud and Nietzsche, on “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Apocalypse Now” and “Blue Velvet.”

To my mind, the most illuminating of Goldberg’s numerous Obama-up-close anecdotes is the one about the presidential press conference at a G20 summit in Turkey last November, a few days after the ISIS attacks in Paris that killed 130 people. Obama seemed increasingly exasperated and puzzled that the press corps never asked him about climate change or the conflict in Ukraine or the Iranian nuclear negotiations or any other possible summit topics. Every question was about ISIS and terrorism, culminating in a CNN reporter’s infamous outburst: “Why can’t we take out these bastards?”

That was the week when Trump first proposed barring all Muslims from entering the United States, a suggestion that all normal and reasonable people immediately rejected as outrageous — and that propelled him to a huge lead in the Republican campaign he has yet to surrender. Every Republican elected official everywhere in the country seized on the Syrian refugee crisis as a potential wedge issue, demanding that no more migrants be admitted under any circumstances (except maybe the Christians, in Ted Cruz’s iteration). Obama barely appeared to have noticed any of this. An unnamed official told Goldberg that it wasn’t until the next day, after a flight to Manila, that the president’s advisors figured out that “everyone back home had lost their minds.”

Whoever said that — it may have been Obama himself — was entirely correct. America’s reaction to the Paris attacks came pretty close to mass hysteria, and had nothing to do with the actual danger represented by ISIS, which was and is insignificant. There are many valid criticisms to raise about Obama’s approach to foreign policy and national security, including the dubious effects of the drone war and his administration’s obsessive crackdown on leakers and whistleblowers. But we have been very fortunate, in my judgment, to have had a president for seven-plus years who has valued logic over panic when it comes to the issue of Islamic terrorism, and who has consistently sought to frame that problem in global and historical terms and not to exaggerate its importance.

I’m delighted to learn, via Goldberg, that Obama often reminds his staff that far more Americans die every year from falls in the bathtub than die at the hands of Muslim terrorists. (John Kerry, on the other hand, comes off like a raving lunatic, envisioning a future in which ISIS destroys European society and leads to the return of 1930s-style fascism. Thank Christ he didn’t get elected.) I can understand why he doesn’t say this stuff in public, but Obama is justified in describing Syria — and, by extension, the larger quagmire of the Middle East — as a “shit show” that won’t be solved during his presidency or the next one or the one after that. On any logical basis, it’s difficult to challenge his argument that the least bad choice in Middle East policy is to disentangle and disconnect to the greatest extent possible and pivot toward America’s relationship with the developing nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America, where constructive change is far more achievable.

But Americans, as you may have noticed, don’t do logic all that well. We do fear and passion and soaring guitar chords and “freedom isn’t free.” We love tough talk and paranoid fantasies and bizarre, apocalyptic delusions. Obama is a master of political oratory, which is what got him elected in the first place. But given his apparent puzzlement that the stupid, primitive and seductive passions that run throughout human history — and the deranged current of jingoistic nationalism that runs throughout American history — have not been conclusively vanquished by the light of reason, he still adds up to the strangest and unlikeliest president ever. So I think it’s about halfway true that Obama’s persistent mode of cool drove us crazy and paved the way for the empty hotness of Trump, although it’s a lot more true to say that we were already crazy and Trump was ready and waiting.

Trump is the anti-Obama, the distorted reflection, the choleric abreaction to Obama’s phlegmatic calm. If Obama is the most Apollonian political figure ever, Trump is the Dionysian comeback. If Obama is the only president ever to be compared with Mr. Spock — Goldberg does it at least twice — then Trump is the sadistic, bearded Spock from that alternate-universe “Star Trek” episode. (As Obama probably knows, that would be season 2, episode 4: “Mirror, Mirror.”) Obama did not create Trump, because the Trumpian force has always been with us and within us. But in relying too much on his misguided assumption that humans are governed by reason more than emotion, and that the atavism, tribalism and nihilism Trump so perfectly embodies were in retreat, Obama may unwittingly have released Trump from his dungeon in the American unconscious.

As is customary when he feels that his fundamental worldview is under attack, Obama managed to sound bemused rather than outraged when Margaret Brennan of CBS News brought up what a Wall Street Journal editorial has called the “Obama-Trump dialectic” at a White House press conference this week. “I have been blamed by Republicans for a lot of things,” the president said, “but being blamed for their primaries and who they’re selecting is novel.” He went on to say, reasonably enough, that “Republican political elites” and the right-wing media have been pouring poison into the lagoon for years, and should hardly be surprised that a mutant monster has come crawling out of it. He’s neither Republican nor Democrat! Neither man nor crustacean!

by Andrew O'Hehir, Salon |  Read more:

Image: Pete Souza

10 Awkward Friendships You Probably Have

10 awkward friendships you probably have

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The Residents

The Theory of Obscurity
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[ed. See also: Third Reich and Gingerbread Man]

William Adolphe Bouguereau, Fishing For Frogs, 1882

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Pax, the 'iPhone of Vaporizers'

Josh, a banker at a hedge fund in Manhattan, loves his Pax vaporizer.

He uses the small, sleek gadget to heat up his stash of weed just to the right temperature in under a minute — hot enough so he can inhale it and feel the effects, but not so hot that it burns — a few times each week.

He presses a button to turn it on while it’s in his pocket, and about a minute later, pulls it out, puts it to his lips, and inhales.

“You breathe in, you breath out, and you’re done,” he recently told Tech Insider.

Josh (we're not using his real name for obvious reasons) said he’s used his Pax to get high outside of a movie theater, on the subway, at concerts, and even on his way into the office.

He likes it because it’s not only convenient, but also inconspicuous. Because you’re not actually smoking, there isn’t as much of an odor, and it doesn’t create a huge cloud of smoke that draws attention.

Pax, he said, “has truly pushed the envelope and brought [smoking weed] into the 21st century.”

The Pax vaporizer is made by Pax Labs, one of the leading — and certainly one of the buzziest — companies cashing in on the growing demand for small, handheld battery-powered vaporizers that have revolutionized how people smoke weed in public.

The second generation Pax, the Pax 2, came out last year and is packed with technology: It has multiple sensors to measure temperature and an accelerometer that detects movement. The mouthpiece recognizes when your lips touch it, telling the heater to turn on and start heating up whatever you've packed inside of it. Insulation keeps the smooth exterior cool while the oven heats up to temperatures as high as 455 degrees Fahrenheit.

It's been referred to as "the iPhone of vaporizers," and, like the iPhone, it comes with a premium price tag — the Pax 2 will set you back $289.99.

by Tim Stenovec, Tech Insider | Read more:
Image: Pax

The Facebook Breakup

For Kate Sokoloff, a brand strategist in Portland, Ore., the Facebook mirror of her breakup with her boyfriend of three years was like “an emotional sucker punch,” she said. “Not 15 minutes after we broke up four years ago, and probably while he was still parked outside of my house, he changed his status to ‘single.’”

This meant that all of the couple’s Facebook friends, including her teenage sons, were instantly notified. “There was no hiding or time to cry on my own,” said Ms. Sokoloff, now 55.

She did message friends, asking them to remove any photos of herself and her former partner from their own Facebook albums, but she remembers wishing “there was a Facebook vacuum cleaner that could suck every trace of our relationship off the Internet. Photos, in particular. In fact, some just popped up yesterday.”

Since last November, there has been such a tool, part of a kit the social network has designed to manage and curate the digital archive that is growing with each relationship. It’s like cleaning your closet, said Kelly Winters, a product manager on Facebook’s designated “Compassion Team,” a changing squad of product managers and designers, engineers, researchers, social scientists and psychologists. “You don’t want to keep anything around that doesn’t spark joy,” she said, echoing the mantra of Marie Kondo, the Japanese decluttering guru.

Three million users have already deployed some aspect of the breakup flow, as it’s called, by choosing to minimize what they see of an ex going forward, and similarly hide their own postings, settings that can easily be reversed if the future brings a change of heart or a dulling of the ache.

Undoing the vacuum tool (to use Ms. Sokoloff’s words for the engineering feat that harnesses what is known as distributed computing to untag hundreds or even thousands of images that no longer spark joy) is more laborious. (...)

Finding the right tone was a big part of the design process, Ms. Albert said, language being crucial in creating a tool kit that would be flexible enough to address a 14-year-old breaking up with her boyfriend of four weeks as well as longtime married couples with children.

It also had to be neutral, not familiar, and not in any way hortatory. “If designers are in charge of surprise and delight,” she said, “what does it mean to design for aspects of life that are painful?”

Facebook language isn’t lyric poetry, by any means, but it does the trick. If you’re able to stumble onto the breakup flow (not an easy task, at this point; it’s only available on mobile and only in the United States), you should discover, as Ms. Winters described, a bento box of options.

“Take a Break. Here are some changes that might be helpful. We won’t notify Taylor of any changes you make. See less of Taylor. See Taylor on Facebook only if you visit his profile.” And so on. Mostly the language is like that of an instruction manual — “Turn on tag approvals for posts and photos you’re tagged in” — though at the end, it veers into self-care: “Reach out to people you trust for support. Stay Active. …”

There were some ideas that were, as Ms. Albert said, “out of scope to build, the idea of locking yourself out, temporarily, from one person’s account, trying to prevent that stalking behavior.” Technologically, she said, it was a bridge too far, and it led to a bigger conversation about what role Facebook wants to play in people’s lives. “It would be like Starbucks not accepting your credit card,” she said.

And just maybe such stalking is productive for some, a step toward resilience that would never accrue from watching baby sloth videos or mash-ups of Donald Trump tweets.

Ms. Sokoloff, the brand strategist who yearned for a digital vacuum cleaner, wondered if there wasn’t some emotional cost in making all traces of a relationship disappear. “Is there something important in the healing process that would be lost if we can essentially have the Facebook equivalent of the dream removers from ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’?”

by Penelope Green, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: NY Times screenshots

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A Century of Fakers

In Chatuchak, Bangkok’s largest outdoor market, smells compete. A bleachy chemical tang replaces a foul suggestion of powdered prawn. This is where you’ll find luxury of spurious origin—Mulberry bags, Lacoste polos, and Tom Ford perfume. There are also pets (lordly tortoises and exhausted rats) and snacks (garlicky sour sausage and thick guava juice). And there are chickens, which, I guess, straddle the pet-snack conceptual divide.

Chatuchak is a great mass of torsos swivelling in response to an abundance of stimuli. All the bodies create a constant cascade of spatial problems, which are solved immediately and inelegantly by seemingly involuntary amoeba-like movements of the general throng. It never feels like you’ve chosen to be where you are.

On this day at Chatuchak, Jennifer, a felicitous middle-aged Welsh woman on vacation, was going through a scary ordeal. She was buying gifts for her nephews in London, who had humiliated her last Christmas, when she gave them fake Paul Smith socks that they immediately threw in the garbage. They instantly knew the socks weren’t genuine. She didn’t really understand any of this. She grew up pretty poor—when she was a kid, anything that wasn’t black with coal was a nice outfit. She had no idea what made a sock anything other than a foot containment device. She was sweating gallons, trying to think like a pubescent aristocrat.

Taylor was from Utah. He had one of those meaty faces that you immediately trust—I suppose because mass is inherently trustworthy. He was wearing a fanny pack below his sleeveless black tee so I assumed he wouldn’t care about the authenticity of the Louis Vuitton bag he was buying his sister. I was wrong. He wanted to give her “the fucking stupid thing she really wants”—luxury, he said, was all about stupidity. But what really confused Taylor was that the rich kids back in Utah cared less about being rich than he did. They ate 7-Eleven hot dogs leaning on their beautiful cars. Having real money meant money meaning less. “They were just okay with that stuff,” he said, with a zoological tone in his voice. “It’s almost like they had an inherent sense of self-worth, or something.”

Counterfeit clothing is illegal in Thailand theory, but in Thailand practice, all legality feels dangerously fluid. A drug possession charge will get you years of jail time, complete with leg irons, while tourists scream enthusiasm about bars in Pai where hallucinogens are available over the counter. Porn is largely censored, but the blowjob bars are many. If you’re an unscrupulous criminal resembling this writer not one bit, you can ride a motorbike without a license, ripping through humorously dangerous traffic along a snaky mountain road. So, regardless of the law, everyone wears counterfeit everything—like a trio of panhandling children I saw wearing beautiful matching New Balance shoes.

In downtown Bangkok, MBK mall is where the real action is. It’s a place where it’s actually difficult to buy something legitimate. If you’re tired of Starbucks coffee, you can go to Star Back Coffee, right next door. You can buy Dior shades that are totally believable except for the words “so real” stenciled on the insides of their arms. Y’know, in case you were wondering.

Some of the fakes at MBK are eerily accurate. There are imitation Burberry briefcases costing about as much as decent moisturizer that nevertheless exude British expensiveness. Others are as convincing as the paper version of a plane.

The really hallucinatory thing about MBK is that prices bear no relation to quality whatsoever. I saw, for example, maybe a dozen different fake pairs of a certain Prada shoe, which were all—despite being wildly various in quality—the exact same price. A silk fake Armani tie is no more expensive than a rayon fake Armani tie. This seemed absolutely insane at first—but it actually makes perfect sense.

Say we’ve got two counterfeiters: Larry and Curly. Larry sells excellent fake Chanel bags. He has them made by skilled people in Vietnam. He charges $50 for them, making a decent profit off each bag. They sell well. Meanwhile, at the next stall over, Curly sells positively abortive fake Chanel bags. They are essentially branded plastic boxes. Curly makes them in his garage with his nephew. However, he matches Larry’s price of $50, because price is a mark of legitimacy. If Curly’s bags were on sale for $5, nobody would buy them, for the same reason that you wouldn’t buy a jam roll for a penny: it would feel suspicious, like it was made by someone intent on poisoning children. Curly sells fewer bags than Larry, but Curly still manages to sell a few to people who aren’t paying much attention. Each shitty bag Curly sells nets him an outrageous profit. He’s a highly successful fraudulent fraud.

Quality also varies in Pantip Plaza, the place where the computer stuff goes: shiny new machines all over a squat dirty sprawl. It’s three malls over fromMBK—central Bangkok is basically a forest of vertical shopping opportunities. The smell of cat pee flows around its malfunctioning escalators. The day I was there, they were filming a commercial in which an American GI shoots at a bosomy Santa in booty shorts while a robot sulks sadly in the background. I was with Courtney, a clever woman with a sly smile who ran away with me to Thailand for no discernible reason. She wanted a fake iPhone after we met someone who bought a perfectly-operational-you’d-never-guess-it-wasn’t-real model for $20. We wondered what kind of subtle insinuation she’d have to mumble to obtain such a thing. “Do you have iPhones?” she said to a guy at the stall. “Real or copy?” he replied.

The product Courtney received seemed genuine at first. It looked as pretty as an iPhone should. But it soon refused to do much of anything. When she tried to open crucial applications, the phone responded with the koan-like error message “Resources are not shelves.” Bikini’d women appeared in unbidden windows. She had to hit the screen hard to make it acknowledge her. The phone invited her to play a game of Look After Your Stone, where you take care of a pebble, by, for example, buying a piece of meat for it to cuddle.

It was about this time, while Courtney was loudly considering maiming the unit, when I started wondering why I gave a shit about all of this.

by Sasha Chapin, Hazlitt |  Read more:

Image: via Flickr user Tim Lucas

For the Best

The Clavells weren’t the sort to play pranks, so the printed invitation to their annual Christmas party arrived after what Gerald and Charlotte’s son, Timothy, would call a “heads-up,” sent by e-mail, letting them know that both were invited to the event, at the Clavells’ apartment, on West Fifty-sixth Street. Gerald hadn’t seen Charlotte since their divorce, thirty-one years before, and this was the first time he’d seen her e-mail address. Whether she was on any social media he wouldn’t know, as he was not.

It was a rather jaunty message from the Clavells, who were not jaunty people. Intellectually, they were clear thinkers, and, as for jauntiness, Rorra Clavell had never totally recovered from a hip replacement years earlier, and her husband constantly fretted about why anyone would read a book on a Kindle. The brief e-mail message featured not one but two exclamation points, and offered no explanation as to why the Clavells had decided to invite them both. It seemed odd, but although Gerald did have some curiosity about how Charlotte looked and what she was doing, it did not keep him awake at night.

Gerald lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the East Side, next door to his oldest friend and former college roommate, Willers Caton, and his dog, Alexander the Great. A few days before the party, he happened to mention to Willers that he’d accepted an invitation to an event that Charlotte might also be attending. Without a second’s hesitation, Willers said, “She won’t show up. Watch.” Since Willers wasn’t usually a skeptic, Gerald asked how he could be so sure. To his great surprise, he found out that Charlotte and Willers had a psychiatrist in common, a Dr. Frederick Owls, known as the Owl, on Central Park West.

The day before the party, Gerald got a good jump on the season. He took a cab down to Kiehl’s, then worked his way back uptown, stopping at various stores, including the newly relocated Rizzoli. At each place, he picked out presents to be wrapped and mailed directly to his list of nineteen friends. (He counted his four cousins as friends, as he was not close enough to any of them to consider them family.) Outside the bookstore, he saw a man walking with a cane, his head bent in the wind. Was it Ned Farnsworth, his former accountant? He doubled back and managed to get a look at the man’s long, sharp nose as he was waiting for the light. He said Ned’s name, and the two warmly embraced. If such an embrace had happened with his son, Gerald would have had to suffer a series of violent thumps on the back, since young men who were affectionate in this way tended to act as if the other person were a baby in need of burping.

Gerald and Ned had coffee and caught up. (Ned had retired years before.) Ned said that he’d sold his beautiful Victorian upstate but was enjoying life on the twentieth floor of a new building in midtown that came complete with a dry cleaner’s, a lap pool, a gym he never used, and a concierge so eager for tips that he wrote thank-you notes for the simplest kindnesses—such as a resident remembering what team he wanted to win the World Series—then leaned them, in parchment envelopes, against the door to your apartment at night. Ned laughed heartily while telling him this. Years before, it had been Ned who’d recruited Gerald to pose in another client’s ad—almost to be mischievous, initially, but the ad had been so successful that Gerald had made a late career of modelling for others. As Ned gossiped, Gerald’s attention floated away. Might Ned also have been invited to the Clavells’? If memory served, he had been the Clavells’ accountant, too. But how to find out without risking making Ned feel excluded?

“Tell me the holiday party you’re most looking forward to!” Gerald exclaimed, thinking himself rather clever to have asked in such an open-ended way. “I don’t think I’m invited to any,” Ned replied, crestfallen. How rude of me, really unforgivable, Gerald thought, so he said, “Well, I’d like to invite you to dinner at my favorite Italian restaurant, on Fifty-fifth Street. Perhaps early January, when all the craziness has ended?” Oh, Ned said, he couldn’t eat much anymore; such an evening would be wasted on him, though he’d be happy to meet for coffee again. It would be something to look forward to. He produced his card, which Gerald pocketed with thanks. He found, to his surprise, that he had no card of his own in his wallet, so he jotted down his phone number on the back of a receipt. They parted with a firm handshake and a promise to meet again.

Late that same afternoon, Gerald had another thought. Or not so much a thought as a dream. He and Ned were swimming in the ocean, and he knew, though Ned did not, that a shark was lurking nearby. He tried to warn Ned, but some woman in the dream, an idiotic tourist, kept blocking his view, telling him that “Jaws” had scared an entire generation, and he really should shut up. However much he tried to look around her, or move to the side, no one seemed to notice him; nor was his shouting audible anymore. The dream ended abruptly when the heating turned on, with a series of little clicks, as it had been programmed to do, at 5 P.M. Gerald sat on the edge of the bed, sweating, distressed to have had such a vivid, disturbing dream, which he hoped was not a premonition.

The night of the party, Gerald nicked his cheek—with an electric razor, no less—and had to find the styptic pencil to stop the bleeding. He was perhaps more nervous than he’d thought. He showered, dried off, and dressed, making it a point not to care which of his white shirts he selected, except that regular cuffs seemed fine; hardly anyone still wore cufflinks.

Alonzo got him a cab with the first blow of his whistle. He might have walked to the party had he set out a little earlier, but it had rained all day, and more was predicted. Also, he didn’t want to arrive sweaty. It was early in the month for a Christmas party, though many people were sure to be out of town, or harder to get, closer to the holidays. His son had asked him to visit, but Seattle was too much for him in the winter—both the travel and the climate.

The Clavells’ lobby already had its Christmas tree up, resplendent in green and white lights, though it dangled no Christmas balls. At the top was an angel with sparkling white wings. She’d fallen forward a bit, so that it looked as if she were about to jump. “Darling!” Brenda Hampton called to Gerald, rushing in with a young woman she introduced as her goddaughter. They’d had their hair styled the same way, with a curly tendril hanging below one ear, and the rest neatly wound in a French twist. Each wore bright-red lipstick. “Brenda!” he exclaimed. The goddaughter extended her hand as if it were a gift. Indeed it was, with its slim fingers, absent of jewelry, its smooth skin, and glossy fingernails. He raised her hand and kissed it, which made her blush. “I’ll have to stick out my hand next time we meet, instead of hurling myself into your arms,” Brenda said, laughing.

by Ann Beattie, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: John Gall

Diarrhea Planet

[ed. Reminds me of Citizen Dick (in a good way)]

Obama the Divider

[ed. Thoughtful, articulate (and really kind of sad) response to this inane question/premise. See also: The Obama Doctrine.]

One of the most annoying habits of the right is their propensity for "I know you are but what am I" rhetoric. Among the stupidest is their obstructing every proposal and bringing the government to a crashing halt and then blaming President Obama for failing to achieve bipartisan nirvana after promising that he "would bring people together." It's a cute trick.

They've gone one step beyond that in recent times by proclaiming that Obama is a divider because he somehow "made" them act like barbarians. He was asked about this at his press conference today:

QUESTION: Some of your critics have pointed to the incredible polarized political climate as under your administration as contributing to the rise of someone as provocative as Donald Trump. Do you feel any responsibility for that, or for the protectionist rhetoric from some Democratic candidates. Do you have a timeline for when you may make a presidential endorsement?

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I have been blamed by the Republicans for a lot of things, but to be blamed for their primaries and who they are selecting, that is taking place in their primary is... novel. 

Look, I've said -- I said at the State of the Union that one of my regrets is the degree to which polarization and the nasty tone of our politics has accelerated, rather than waned over the course of the last seven and a half years, and I do all kinds of soul searching in terms of --- Are there things I can do better to make sure we're unifying the country, but I also have to say, Margaret, that objectively it's fair to say that the Republican political elites, and many of the information outlets, social media, television stations, talk radio, have been feeding the Republican base for the last seven years, a notion that everything I do is to be opposed, that cooperation or compromise somehow is a betrayal, that maximalist absolutist positions on issues are politically advantageous. 

That there's a them and us, and it's the them that are causing the problems we're experiencing, and the tone of that politics -- which I certainly have not contributed to -- I have not -- you know, I don't think that I was the one to prompt questions about my birth certificate, for example. I don't remember saying, hey, why don't you ask me about that. 

Why don't you question whether I'm American or whether I'm loyal or whether I have America's best interests at heart. 

Those aren't things that were prompted by any actions of mine, and so what you're seeing within the Republican party is to some degree all those efforts over a course of time creating an environment where somebody like a Donald Trump can thrive. (...)

I'm glad to hear the president answer that stupid question and answer it with the proper disdain. It's ridiculous.

by Digby |  Read more:

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‘Rented White Coats’ Who Defend Toxic Chemicals

How corporate-funded research is corrupting America’s courts and regulatory agencies

At 2:15 in the morning, an insomniac corporate defense lawyer in San Francisco finished crafting a “revolutionary” scientific theory.

Now Evan Nelson of the law firm Tucker Ellis & West needed a scientist willing to publish it in a medical journal. If his theory were given scientific validity, Nelson could use it to win lawsuits.

Nelson defended companies that had exposed people to asbestos, a heat-resistant, fibrous mineral. Asbestos causes several deadly diseases, including mesothelioma, a rare cancer that often drowns the lungs in fluid.

Nelson had expressed frustration with the argument that asbestos is the only known cause of mesothelioma. After scouring the scientific literature and applying his own logic, Nelson came up with a new culprit: tobacco.

Nelson sent a typo-ridden email to Peter Valberg of Cambridge, Massachusetts. A former professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, Valberg was by then a principal at the environmental consulting firm Gradient Corporation, with offices in Harvard Square.

“We can collaborate to publish several key, revolutionary articles that you will see unfold as I present this stuff to you,” the lawyer wrote in the 2008 email.

Citing a few scientific articles, Nelson drew a hypothetical link between the fact that cigarette smoke contains radioactive particles and limited evidence that people exposed to radiation had higher rates of mesothelioma.

“It is amazing that no one has pout [sic] this together before me, but I am confident that you will agree it is solid science that proves tobacco smoke causes mesothelioma — you just have to look at the tissue [sic] through the proper lense [sic].”

There was an obvious problem with Nelson’s “science.” Researchers for decades have exhaustively analyzed data on the health of hundreds of thousands of smokers. Since 1964, the U.S. Surgeon General has summarized the findings of study after study, none of which shows evidence that tobacco causes mesothelioma.

Valberg wrote back within hours, calling Nelson’s scientific theory “very intriguing.” He was game to try to disseminate it in peer-reviewed journals. He later sent Nelson a contract agreeing to write the first of three articles and even offered him a 10-percent discount. In the meantime, Valberg would adopt Nelson’s theory as an expert witness in lawsuits, using it against mesothelioma victims such as Pam Collins of Bellevue, Ohio.

The emails offer a rare glimpse into a world where corporate interests can dictate their own science and scientists for hire willingly oblige. It’s a phenomenon that’s grown in recent decades as government-funded science dwindles. Its effects are felt not only in courtrooms but also in regulatory agencies that issue rules to try to prevent disease.

The National Institutes of Health’s budget for research grants has fallen 14 percent since its peak in 2004, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. With scarce resources, there’s little money for academics to study chemicals that most already deem to be toxic. Yet regulatory officials and attorneys say companies have a strong financial interest in continuing to publish research favorable to industry.

Gradient belongs to a breed of scientific consulting firms that defends the products of its corporate clients beyond credulity, even exhaustively studied substances whose dangers are not in doubt, such as asbestos, lead and arsenic.

by David Heath, Center for Public Integrity |  Read more:

Image: Emilie Udell

Rene Burri  Mexique. Etat du Chiapas. 1982.
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The Power of Embracing Uncertainty

Moments of confusion can be pretty memorable, and not in a good way. How is this thing supposed to work? What is the teacher’s point? Where am I, and how do I get to where I am going? But confusion is greatly underrated, argues the journalist Jamie Holmes in his new book, “Nonsense.” Naturally, it is good to understand. Yet, Holmes writes, our discomfort with not knowing can lead us astray — to bad solutions, or to brilliant options never spotted. If we could learn to embrace uncertainty, we’d all be better off — and better prepared for modern life. Holmes answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.

Cook: How did you become interested in this unusual topic?
Holmes: My childhood was full of jarring experiences—jarring in a good way—that felt at once bizarre, confusing, challenging, and enlightening. The social world of the south side of Chicago, where I started high school, was much more diverse than the one in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I finished high school. My father threw me into a German school in Berlin, with two weeks of language lessons, when I was eleven. I went to high school in Budapest for a bit when I was 15. I taught high school classes in Romania after college. So I think one puzzle that I’ve always found really intriguing is how someone’s worldview changes when it’s challenged by radically unusual experiences, and how difficult and rewarding those time periods can be. The psychologist Dean Simonton calls them “diversifying experiences.” So, in a sense, one major theme of the book—what happens when beliefs collide with unexpected or unclear situations—is very personal to me.

More directly, I was looking into the psychologist Roy Baumeister’s research on willpower, which got me interested, more broadly, in how the mind handles mental conflicts. That led to me to the work of psychologist Arie Kruglanksi, and in particular a book called “The Psychology of Closed Mindedness.” And I realized very quickly that here was this rich vein of research on ambiguity and uncertainty from a highly-respected researcher, published in top journals, that had received almost no popular attention simply because Kruglanski hadn’t gotten around to writing a popular book about it. He joked to me that now he wouldn’t have to.

Cook: You write about our “need for closure.” Where does this come from, and why is it something that we should know about ourselves?
Holmes: Our need for closure is our natural preference for definite answers over confusion and ambiguity. The need-for-closure scale was developed by Kruglanski in the early 1990s, although forerunners of the concept appeared after World War II as psychologists struggled to understand Nazism. Every person has their own baseline level of need for closure. (Curious readers can test theirs, by the way, at my website.) It likely evolved via natural selection. If we didn’t have some capacity to shut down thinking, we’d deliberate forever. There must be some mechanism pushing us toward resolution, Kruglanski saw. We have to eliminate ambiguity.

What I find really fascinating is how our need for closure is affected by the situation we’re in. So, our need for closure rises when we have to act rather than just observe, and when we’re rushed, or bored, or tired. Any stress, really, can make our discomfort with ambiguity increase. And that matters, because a high need for closure negatively influences some of our most critical decisions: how we deal with perceived threats, who we decide to trust, whether we admit we’re wrong, whether we stereotype, and even how creative we are. So much of the book focuses on the dangers of a high need for closure, strategies for lowering it, and ways to learn from ambiguity rather than dismiss it.

by Gareth Cook , Scientific American | Read more:
Image: Nina Subin

Hedwig & the Angry Inch

Magic Leap

[ed. Can't wait to see this IRL. It'll be a game-changer.]

I’m sitting behind a workbench in a white-walled room in Dania Beach, Florida, in the office of a secretive startup called Magic Leap. I’m staring wide-eyed through a pair of lenses attached to what looks like metal scaffolding that towers over my head and contains a bunch of electronics and lenses. It’s an early prototype of the company’s so-called cinematic-­reality technology, which makes it possible for me to believe that the muscular beast with the gruff expression and two sets of swinging arms is actually in the room with me, hovering about seven feet in front of my face.

He’s not just visible at a set distance. I’m holding a video-game controller that’s connected to the demo station, and at the press of a button I can make the monster smaller or larger, move him right or left, bring him closer, or push him farther away.

Of course, I bring him as near as possible; I want to see how real he looks up close. Now he’s about 30 inches from my eyeballs and, though I’ve made him pocket-sized, looks about as authentic as a monster could—he seems to have rough skin, muscular limbs, and deep-set beady eyes. I extend my hand to give him a base to walk on, and I swear I feel a tingling in my palm in expectation of his little feet pressing into it. When, a split second later, my brain remembers that this is just an impressively convincing 3-D image displayed in the real space in front of me, all I can do is grin.

Virtual- and augmented-reality technologies used in movies, smartphone apps, and gadgets tend to underdeliver on overhyped promises with images that look crappy. Typically that’s because stereoscopic 3-D, the most commonly used method, is essentially tricking your eyes instead of working with the way you normally see things. It produces a sense of depth by showing each eye a separate image of the same object at a different angle. But since that forces you to look simultaneously at a flat screen in the distance and images that appear to be moving in front of you, it can make you dizzy and lead to headaches and nausea.

To be sure, stereoscopic 3-D has recently started getting better. The best system you can currently buy comes from Oculus VR, which Facebook purchased last spring for $2 billion; the $199 Gear VR, which was built in collaboration with Samsung and is aimed at software developers, lets you slide a Samsung smartphone into a headset to play games and watch videos.

But while Oculus wants to transport you to a virtual world for fun and games, Magic Leap wants to bring the fun and games to the world you’re already in. And in order for its fantasy monsters to appear on your desk alongside real pencils, Magic Leap had to come up with an alternative to stereoscopic 3-D—something that doesn’t disrupt the way you normally see things. Essentially, it has developed an itty-bitty projector that shines light into your eyes—light that blends in extremely well with the light you’re receiving from the real world.

As I see crisply rendered images of monsters, robots, and cadaver heads in Magic Leap’s offices, I can envision someday having a video chat with faraway family members who look as if they’re actually sitting in my living room while, on their end, I appear to be sitting in theirs. Or walking around New York City with a virtual tour guide, the sides of buildings overlaid with images that reveal how the structures looked in the past. Or watching movies where the characters appear to be right in front of me, letting me follow them around as the plot unfolds. But no one really knows what Magic Leap might be best for. If the company can make its technology not only cool but comfortable and easy to use, people will surely dream up amazing applications.

That’s no doubt why Google took the lead in an astonishingly large $542 million investment round in Magic Leap last October. Whatever it is cooking up has a good chance of being one of the next big things in computing, and Google would be crazy to risk missing out.

by Rachel Metz, MIT Technology Review |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

Yoshitaka Kashima (Jujo)
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Leos Carax, Paris, 2008 - David Balicki
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