The Philosophy of Fly-Fishing

When I was seventeen, I drove to Missoula, Montana, to learn how to fly-fish. The town is one of the best places to fish in the country. Rivers with names like the Bitterroot and Blackfoot crisscross the valley harboring trout the size of walruses. I spent that summer learning to cast and looking for the eddies and pools where fish might be lurking. I tried a thousand different flies and a hundred different rivers, and though I tensed my entire body to be ready for a strike, though I was living with a friend who made his living as a fishing guide, in three months I didn’t catch a single fish. Not one.

Published in 1653, Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler might best be described as a curiosity cabinet of a pious Renaissance naturalist. Framed as a dialogue between a veteran angler, Pescator, and his eager student, Venator, the book came recommended by practiced anglers and seemed to promise some bit of knowledge I was lacking. Next to descriptions of fish like pike (“a solitary, melancholy, and a bold Fish”), and bream (“scales set in excellent order”), were poems by George Herbert. Alongside a cheery round of fishing songs, I found instructions for making fishing line from horse hair (“take care that your hair be round and clear, and free from galls or scabs or frets”). I discovered that it was better to be “a civil, well govern’d well grounded, temperate, poor Angler, than a drunken Lord,” and that the clever angler would keep about two thousand black beetles alive through the winter in a firkin. Wasps are good bait if you dip their heads in blood, and if you wish to fish with maggots (and you are likely to wish it), find a “fly-blown” dead cat and you will soon be well prepared. Also “the crumbs of white bread and honey made into paste is good bait for a Carp.”

My curiosity was pricked, but I doubted I was becoming a better fisherman. Modern fly-fishing is so different from what Walton practiced in the seventeenth century that the similarities perhaps begin and end with the fish. Whereas we have a cornucopia of expertly tied artificial flies, floating nylon line, and evolved casting techniques, Walton didn’t even have a reel—he just used a stick with hair tied to the end. To entice the trout, he might employ a fragrant oil; to seduce perch, he would select a minnow, a feather, or a cork, though he would not dare to try his luck before the mulberry trees were in bud. It seemed more like witchcraft than fishing.

On the mystery of how eels reproduce (a mystery that puzzles scientists still) I discovered the theory that they “are bred of a particular dew falling in the months of May or June on the banks of some particular Ponds or Rivers.” Of the frog I learned that he expresses “malice or anger by his swoln cheeks and staring eyes” and makes good bait if you put a hook through his mouth and then “with a fine needle and silk sow [sic] the upper part of his leg to the arming wire of your hook.” But do not do so hastily: “use him as though you loved him, that is, harm him as little as you may possibly, that he may live longer.”

What the hell was this book? I put it aside and kept fishing. But a few years later, while I was on a river in Idaho at dusk and found myself in the middle of a tremendous caddis-fly hatch, an answer occurred to me. Caddis flies, like many aquatic insects, pupate in little husks attached to rocks in rivers. At the right moment in the summer, they emerge as flies, swim to the surface and take off, but not before pausing to dry their wings. They do this by the thousands and, as Walton puts it, they make the trout “bold and lusty.” (...)

This is what the angler does: He observes and tries to imitate the world around him. He chooses the fly of a similar size, pattern, and color as those bugs he sees rising; he flicks his line back and forth over his head to lay his nearly weightless bait down without too much of a splash along the riffles where the fish are feeding. He notices the direction of the wind; he matches the length of her line with the depth of the water; he waits for the afternoon to cool off and rises early to beat the morning sun. He fishes little midges in the spring and thick hairy buggers in the summer and slim nymphs in the fall. He sees the natural world as a puzzle he tries to solve, and his success is measured absolutely: when the surface breaks, the fly disappears, and he feels that unmistakable tug. (...)

It has become increasingly difficult to say what qualifies as art today, but it certainly isn’t the perfect imitation of nature. Yet fishing does somehow feel artful. What I have grown to admire in Walton’s book most is the wonder he brings to the world, the way he converts the mysteries of the river into a tangible fish on his line. In Walton’s esteem for all the odd particularity of the fish and its environs, he seems to be attempting to merge two worlds that exist only in opposition to each other—the terrestrial and the aquatic. We know hardly anything of the vast empire that exists just below the surface of the water, but we know just enough that with a bit of study, a dash of faith, and a great deal of patience, we can, occasionally, break through. In these moments, the angler is the link between one world and the next. What could be more artful?

This might also help explain the disproportion between the amount of time I spend fishing and the number of fish I catch. Most of the time I hook only enough trout to keep me believing that I’m not chasing some myth, and even then just barely. Yet I find great solace in the sport. I delight in a day on the river, noticing all its features, trying to join its small dramas. Rarely do we have the excuse to sidestep the human perspective and become something else in a place where the only currency is camouflage and politics are straightforward. You can spend a small fortune on waders and nets and tackle boxes, but I have found that more often than not these things become a hindrance. The real task of fishing is not to try a thousand different flies and wade up to your ears; it’s to understand that you’re a stranger here. For all our prodigious technology and equipment, the necessary humility of a day spent fishing finds the angler reckoning with a world in which he has few answers and very little control. If these also happen to be the very circumstances of our lives, the measure of success lies not in dominance but in finding a place within what we don’t fully understand.

by John Knight, Paris Review |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. For Jerry, and my grandson Calvin, who has yet to catch his first fish.]

Human Nature
photo: markk

How To Meditate 101

Step One: Choose an object of attention. Standard Buddhist is your breath. Standard Hindu is a mantra – words you speak or think (move towards thinking them) while paying attention to the sound of them. If you use a mantra it should be something emotionally neutral or unalloyed positive (don’t meditate on God, say, if you fear going to hell.)

I suggest breath, but some mantras are:

• “Sunflower” (an emotionally neutral word)
• Om Mani Padme Hum
• Om Nama Shivaya
• Om Ah Bee Lah Hung Chit (Vairocana mantra)

If you use a mantra, you should do so with the breath. One syllable or word should be said or thought on the exhale or inhale.

If you use the breath, attention stays on the negative part of it: when you’re not breathing.

Step Two: intend to notice when you are no longer paying attention to the object of attention.

Step Three: put your attention lightly on the objection of attention.

Step Four: at some point you will notice that you are not paying attention to the object. Pat yourself on the back for noticing that you aren’t paying attention the breath. Be pleased. Then:

• Look at whatever you’re now paying attention to, appreciate it for a second or two without judgment, then think to yourself either “this isn’t important”, or “I’ll deal with this after meditating”.  

• Move your attention back to your object of attention.

REPEAT

Do this for either as long as you can stand to, or a predetermined time (set an alarm).

Notes:

You should do this with your spine straight. You can sit on the ground, in a stiff backed chair, on lie on your side with your knees drawn up. Sitting without support has the advantage that if you start to fall asleep, falling will make you wake up. That said, due to illness I did almost all my meditation lying flat on my back for years, which is not how you’re supposed to do it. It isn’t as important as doing it.

This style of meditation is training your meta-attention: training you to notice when you have stopped paying attention to the object of attention. You can do it with any object of attention: homework, your little finger, staring at a fire, watching a boring presentation, work you’d rather not do, the feeling of the position of your body as you walk, etc…

So you can do it during your daily life if you wish. Just decide what you should be paying attention to, intend to notice when you stop, be pleased that you notice, decide that whatever grabbed your attention isn’t important or can wait, and go back to your original object of attention.

by Ian Welsh |  Read more:

Image: via
[ed. You'll need this after reading the next post.]

The Scandal of Pentagon Spending

Here’s a question for you: How do you spell boondoggle?

The answer (in case you didn’t already know): P-e-n-t-a-g-o-n.

Hawks on Capitol Hill and in the U.S. military routinely justify increases in the Defense Department’s already munificent budget by arguing that yet more money is needed to “support the troops.” If you’re already nodding in agreement, let me explain just where a huge chunk of the Pentagon budget—hundreds of billions of dollars—really goes. Keep in mind that it’s your money we’re talking about.

The answer couldn’t be more straightforward: it goes directly to private corporations and much of it is then wasted on useless overhead, fat executive salaries, and startling (yet commonplace) cost overruns on weapons systems and other military hardware that, in the end, won’t even perform as promised. Too often the result is weapons that aren’t needed at prices we can’t afford. If anyone truly wanted to help the troops, loosening the corporate grip on the Pentagon budget would be an excellent place to start.

The numbers are staggering. In fiscal year 2016, the Pentagon issued $304 billion in contract awards to corporations—nearly half of the department’s $600 billion-plus budget for that year. And keep in mind that not all contractors are created equal. According to the Federal Procurement Data System’s top 100 contractors report for 2016, the biggest beneficiaries by a country mile were Lockheed Martin ($36.2 billion), Boeing ($24.3 billion), Raytheon ($12.8 billion), General Dynamics ($12.7 billion), and Northrop Grumman ($10.7 billion). Together, these five firms gobbled up nearly $100 billion of your tax dollars, about one-third of all the Pentagon’s contract awards in 2016.

And remember: the Pentagon buys more than just weapons. Health care companies like Humana ($3.6 billion), UnitedHealth Group ($2.9 billion), and Health Net ($2.6 billion) cash in as well, and they’re joined by, among others, pharmaceutical companies like McKesson ($2.7 billion) and universities deeply involved in military-industrial complex research like MIT ($1 billion) and Johns Hopkins ($902 million).

The real question is: How much of this money actually promotes the defense of the country and how much is essentially a subsidy to weapons makers and other corporations more focused on their bottom lines than giving the taxpayers value for their money?

“Modernizing” the Military-Industrial Complex

Let’s start with the obvious (but seldom said). Some arms company expenditures clearly have no more of a national security rationale than Tom Price’s air travel did for the promotion of American health. Take the compensation that defense company CEOs get, for example. The heads of the top five Pentagon contractors—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman—made a cumulative $96 million last year. These are companies that are significantly or, in the cases of Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, almost entirely dependent on government dollars. That means one thing: your tax dollars are basically paying their exorbitant salaries. And that $96 million figure doesn’t even count the scores of other highly paid executives and board members at major weapons contractors like these. Don’t you feel safer already? (...)

The arms industry’s investment in lobbying is even more impressive. The defense sector has spent a total of more than $1 billion on that productive activity since 2009, employing anywhere from 700 to 1,000 lobbyists in any given year. To put that in perspective, you’re talking about significantly more than one lobbyist per member of Congress, the majority of whom zipped through Washington’s famed “revolving door”; they moved, that is, from positions in Congress or the Pentagon to posts at weapons companies from which they could proselytize their former colleagues.

This process, of course, allows newly minted lobbyists to use their privileged contacts with former government colleagues to promote the special interests of their corporate clients. It also ensures that congressional staffers, military officers, and Pentagon bureaucrats nearing the end of their careers and looking toward a lucrative future will be inclined to cut major contractors some slack. Why not, when they are looking forward to a big payday with that same cast of characters after they leave government? (...)

In other words, what we’re getting in return for the hundreds of billions of dollars we shower on those weapons firms is a raw deal and that revolving door is but one example of it. Don’t forget the endemic waste, fraud, and abuse that is part and parcel of the Pentagon budget -- of that is, an outfit that has proven incapable of even auditing itself. As with influence peddling, when it comes to that trio there’s a scale that ranges from the criminal to the merely outrageous. In the first category, you might start with the “Fat Leonard” scandal, named for a corporate executive who bribed dozens of Navy officials with money, vacations, and prostitutes to get the inside track on contracts to help maintain U.S. ships based in ports in the Pacific. So far, 29 criminal indictments have been handed down in the case.

That one got the headlines, but the biggest sources of corporate waste when it comes to Pentagon dollars are such a part of everyday life in Washington that they go largely unnoticed. The Pentagon, for example, employs more than 600,000 private contractors. There are so many of them and they are so poorly monitored that the Pentagon (as it has reluctantly acknowledged) doesn’t even have an accurate count of how many of them it has hired. What we do know is that many are carrying out redundant tasks that could be done more cheaply by government employees. Cutting the contractor work force by 15% -- theoretically an easy task but light years beyond anything presently imaginable -- would save a quick $20 billion a year.

Then there are the big weapons programs. As the Project on Government Oversight has shown, the Lockheed Martin F-35 combat aircraft -- supposedly a state-of-the-art plane for the twenty-first century -- has had so many cost and performance issues that it may never be fully ready for combat. That, however, hasn’t stopped the Pentagon from planning to spend $1.4 trillion to build and maintain more than 2,400 of these defective planes during the lifetime of the program.

Last but hardly least, don’t forget the Pentagon’s misguided plan to spend more than $1 trillion in the next three decades on a whole new generation of nuclear-armed bombers, submarines, and land- and air-based missiles. The United States nuclear arsenal already has more than 4,000 nuclear warheads in its active stockpile, with 1,700 deployed and ready to be launched on a moment’s notice.

by William D. Hartung, TomDispatch | Read more:
Image:The Pentagon ( Frontpage / Shutterstock)

Why Bureaucrats Don't Seem to Care

In 1987, the software company Infocom released Bureaucracy, a text-based game scripted by Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Imagine you’ve just landed a great new job and are about to be sent to Paris for a training seminar and vacation. “What could possibly go wrong?,” the brochure accompanying the game asks. “The answer, of course, is everything.”

It all starts when your bank mishandles your change-of-address form. One thing leads to another and soon you find yourself drowning in rules that are confusing at first sight and plainly absurd upon closer consideration. You learn, for instance, that “you must file your change-of-address form at least two months, but no sooner than six weeks, before your moving date.” Trying to make sense of that, you are left scurrying for the help of customer-service representatives, who are “frequently available” during normal business hours. All the while, the game tracks fluctuations in your blood pressure. Let it rise above a certain level, and you may die.

Bureaucracy is so baffling that it can be funny—until of course it isn’t. Millions of people rely on public assistance to make ends meet. When rent, medical insurance, and personal dignity are in the balance, absurdity stops being comical and starts being terrifying.

The popular conception of bureaucracy is familiar. There are of course the rules: innumerable, entangled, often impenetrable. There are the stiff waiting rooms: white, fluorescent-lit, with rows of identical chairs and gray partition panels. Above all, perhaps, there are the people, the infamous bureaucrats. They are the supposedly human face of the state—cold, distant, unconcerned. Of all the ills of bureaucracy, they might be the worst. They look without seeing, they listen without hearing, and they proclaim decisions that can change people’s lives with the indifference of a butcher slicing a piece of steak.

Or so one might think. In preparation for my book, When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency, I spent eight months as a volunteer receptionist at a publicly funded anti-poverty agency, observing how my coworkers did their jobs. As a nonprofit contractor for the state, the agency helps low-income families apply for a range of public programs, such as food stamps, health services, fuel assistance, and early-childhood education. This is the new face of the administrative state: private provision of services with public funding and oversight.

Located in a large city in the northeastern United States, the agency operates a network of 16 neighborhood centers, each modest in size, but serving collectively close to 100,000 families annually. The center to which I was assigned employed eight to 10 full-time caseworkers, and relied on the unpaid, part-time support of an equal number of volunteers and interns. It catered primarily to African American and Hispanic clients, reflecting the demographics of the surrounding area.

While working there, I learned that the routine of everyday work at the front lines of public service is not quite what it seems from the outside. It is neither as simple, repetitive, nor rule-governed as one might believe. If frontline work is soul-sucking, it is less because bureaucrats must mechanically apply rules than because they must shoulder, day in and day out, the weight of difficult discretionary decisions which most people have the luxury to ignore.

Frontline bureaucrats are often portrayed as unthinking automata, yet they are in fact vested with a substantial margin of discretion. This is where the challenge of implementing policy starts. It is not that rules are absent; on the contrary, they abound. But they are often sufficiently ambiguous that they lend themselves to various plausible interpretations, or so numerous that they conflict with one another. When this is the case, bureaucrats must exert independent judgment to figure out what to do. If they were to stop doing so and adhere religiously to the scripts provided to them, public-service agencies would come to a halt.

Some uses of discretion are technical. In welfare agencies, for instance, caseworkers must draw on their expertise to determine which work-training program is most likely to be successful for a particular client. Other uses of discretion, however, are normative, or value-laden. Did clients have a “good reason” to miss their appointment? Did they exert “sufficient effort” to look for a job? Questions such as these call for moral or political judgment. And the stakes are high: When one is dealing with vulnerable clients, erring on one side or the other can make the difference between someone having food on the table, a safe place to sleep, and a bit of dignity left or not.

The moral dimension of street-level work has two sides, then. Empowering in one respect, it elevates bureaucrats beyond the tedium of applying rules, and imparts gravity to what they do. Yet it also makes them complicit in the shortcomings of the system they embody, for they become implicated in it not just as operators, but as thinking and reasoning agents as well. With this comes a more acute sense of personal responsibility.

* * *

Generally speaking, public-service agencies combine three core functions: processing clients, providing services, and applying the rules evenly. Bureaucrats must process incoming cases by sorting people as efficiently as possible into pre-defined administrative categories. They must provide clients with services that are tailored to their needs, taking into account their particular life circumstances. They must, finally, enforce program requirements and eligibility criteria meticulously, treating everyone impartially.

Taken individually, each of these demands is sensible. Who wouldn’t want the provision of public services to be efficient, responsive, and fair? Combined together, however, they often yield conflicting guidance. When resources are limited, they give rise to endless, morally draining dilemmas.

Consider the following two examples, which I witnessed unfolding before me, and imagine that you are the bureaucrat. It is the end of fuel-assistance season, and your office, which is already understaffed in normal circumstances, is crowded with applicants who need help keeping their houses warm during the winter. Most are in precarious situations, and many have taken time off from work to be here. Providing them with timely service is of the essence.

The client you are currently assisting, however, has arrived with incomplete paperwork and seems too confused and agitated to comprehend the instructions you give him. In leafing through the documents he did bring, you notice that he is eligible for other services, and urgently in need of them. You can devote the next hour to him or to those in the waiting room. Do you delve into the case? Or do you send the client off and proceed with the others, but risk releasing him into the world without the support he needs? The uncertainty gnaws at you, for as one caseworker put it to me, “We just don’t know who can get things done on their own and who can’t.”

And what about the young mother who has just fled an abusive relationship and is asking you to refer her to a shelter? The only one you could find is on the other side of the city from where her mother, whom she must also care for, lives. If you were to pick up the phone and make the rounds again, you might, just perhaps, be able to find something closer. However, it’s almost the end of the day and there are mountains of paperwork left to tackle so that benefits can actually be processed. What’s more, your boss has already told you that you shouldn’t prioritize domestic-violence cases because other centers specialize in them. If you set a precedent, who knows how many others you’ll have in the future. Do you grab the receiver or move on to the next person?

In cases such as these, frontline workers are forced to choose between an option that is bad and one that may be even worse. They have to make such difficult decisions, moreover, in view of the very people who will suffer the consequences, and watch as disappointment and despair color their faces. The clients bold enough to vent their frustration might prefer to direct it at their elected representatives, but in that moment, the only person they can scold is the one in front of them: the bureaucrat.

How do workers cope with that? Some, understandably, cannot or will not take it. “It used to feel like we were doing something for clients,” a woman named Angela Neville said to The Guardian last year in explaining why she left her job as an employment service advisor in the UK. “Now it [was doing] something to them.”

by Bernardo Zacka, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Randy Faris/Corbis/Getty/Zak Bickel/The Atlantic

[ed. And, remember, the "rules" bureaucrats are enforcing are laws passed by the idiot legislators you voted for.] 

Octopus-Inspired Material Can Change Its Texture

Octopuses change their texture using small regions in their skin known as papillae. In these structures, muscle fibers run in a spiderweb pattern, with both radial spokes and concentric circles. When these fibers contract, they draw the soft tissue in the papillae towards the center. And since that tissue doesn’t compress very well, the only direction it can go is up. By arranging the muscle fibers in different patterns, the octopus can turn flat, two-dimensional skin into all manner of three-dimensional shapes, including round bumps, sharp spikes, and even branching structures.

Octopus-Inspired Material Can Change Its Texture

via:

[ed. Aliens (but tasty).]

Vincent van Gogh, Wheat Field with a Lark (detail)

via:

Monopoly Men

Given our reality, it would be helpful to think of Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Twitter as the new “utilities” of the modern era. Today the idea of “public utility” conjures images of rate regulation and electric utility bureaucracies. But for Progressive Era reformers, public utility was a broad concept that, at its heart, was about creating regulations to ensure adequate checks and balances on private actors who had come to control the basic necessities of life, from telecommunications to transit to water. This historical tradition helps us identify what kinds of private power are especially troubling. The problem, ultimately, is not just raw “bigness,” or market capitalization. Rather, the central concern is about private control over infrastructure.

by K. Sabeel Rahman, Boston Review |  Monopoly Men

[ed. See more below, and: "Why is it so hard to ditch Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook?"]

Know Thy Futurist

Have you heard? Someday we will live in a perfect society ruled by an omnipotent artificial intelligence, provably and utterly beneficial to mankind.

That is, if we don’t all die once the machines gain consciousness, take over, and kill us.

Wait, actually, they are going to take some of us with them, and we will transcend to another plane of existence. Or at least clones of us will. Or at least clones of us that are not being perpetually tortured for our current sins.

These are all outcomes that futurists of various stripes currently believe. A futurist is a person who spends a serious amount of time—either paid or unpaid—forming theories about society’s future. And although it can be fun to mock them for their silly sounding and overtly religious predictions, we should take futurists seriously. Because at the heart of the futurism movement lies money, influence, political power, and access to the algorithms that increasingly rule our private, political, and professional lives.

Google, IBM, Ford, and the Department of Defense all employ futurists. And I am myself a futurist. But I have noticed deep divisions and disagreements within the field, which has led me, below, to chart the four basic “types” of futurists. My hope is that by better understanding the motivations and backgrounds of the people involved—however unscientifically—we can better prepare ourselves for the upcoming political struggle over whose narrative of the future we should fight for: tech oligarchs that want to own flying cars and live forever, or gig economy workers that want to someday have affordable health care.

With that in mind, let me introduce two dimensions of futurism, represented by axes. That is to say, two ways to measure and plot futurists on a graph, which we can then examine more closely.

The first measurement of a futurist is the extent to which he or she believes in a singularity. Broadly speaking a singularity is a moment where technology gets so much better, at such an exponentially increasing rate, that it achieves a fundamental and meaningful technological shift of existence, transcending its original purpose and even nature. In many singularity myths the computer either becomes self-aware and intelligent, possibly in a good way but sometimes in a destructive or even vindictive way. In others humans are connected to machines and together become something new. The larger point is that some futurists believe fervently in a singularity, while others do not.

On our second axis, let’s measure the extent to which a given futurist is worried when they theorize about the future. Are they excited or scared? Cautious or jubilant? The choices futurists make are often driven by their emotions. Utopianists generally focus on all the good that technology can do; they find hope in cool gadgets and the newest AI helpers. Dystopianists are by definition focused on the harm; they consequently think about different aspects of technology altogether. The kinds of technologies these two groups consider are nearly disjoint, and even where they do intersect, the futurists’ takes are diametrically opposed.

So, now that we have our two axes, we can build quadrants and consider the group of futurists in each one. Their differences shed light on what their values are, who their audiences are, and what product they are peddling.

Q1.

First up: the people who believe in the singularity and are not worried about it. They welcome it with open arms in the name of progress. Examples of people in this quadrant are Ray Kurzweil, the inventor and author of The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999); the libertarians in the Seasteaders movement who want to create autonomous floating cities outside of any government jurisdiction; and the people who are trying to augment intelligence and live forever.

These futurists enthusiastically believe in Moore’s Law—the observation by Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors in a circuit doubles approximately every two years—and in exponential growth of everything in sight. Singularity University, started by Kurzweil, has no fewer than twelve mentions of the word “exponential” on its website. Its motto is “Be Exponential.”

Generally speaking these futurists are hobbyists—they have the time for these theories because, in terms of wealth, they are already in the top 0.1 percent. They think of the future in large part as a way to invest their money and become even wealthier. They once worked at or still own Silicon Valley companies, venture capital firms, or hedge funds, and they learned to think of themselves as deeply clever—possibly even wise. They wax eloquent about meritocracy over expensive wine or their drug of choice (micro-dosing, anyone?).

With enormous riches and very few worldly concerns, these futurists focus their endeavors on the only things that could actually threaten them: death and disease.

They talk publicly about augmenting intelligence through robotic assistance or better quality of life through medical breakthroughs, but privately they are interested in technical fixes to physical problems and are impatient with the medical establishment for being too cautious and insufficiently innovative. They invest heavily in cryogenics, dubious mind­­–computer interface technology, medical strategies for living forever (here’s looking at you, Sergey Brin and Larry Page), and possibly even the blood of young people.

These futurists are ready and willing to install hardware in their brains because, as they are mostly young or middle-age white men, they have never been oppressed. For them the worst-case scenario is that they live their future lives as uploaded software in the cloud, a place where they can control the excellent virtual reality graphics. (If this sounds like a science fiction fantasy for sex-starved teenagers, don’t be surprised. They got most of these ideas—as sex-starved teenagers—from writers such as Robert Heinlein and Ayn Rand.)

The problem here, of course, is the “I win” blind spot—the belief that if this system works for me, then it must be a good system. These futurists think that racism, sexism, classism, and politics are problems to be solved by technology. If they had their way, they would be asked to program the next government. They would keep it proprietary, of course, to keep the hoi polloi from gaming the system.

And herein lies the problem: whether it is the nature of existence in the super-rich bubble, or something distinctly modern and computer-oriented, futurism of this flavor is inherently elitist, genius-obsessed, and dismissive of larger society.

Q2.

Next: people who believe in a singularity but are worried about the future. They do not see the singularity as a necessarily positive force. These are the men—majority men, although more women than in the previous group—who read dystopian science fiction in their youth and think about all the things that could go wrong once the machines become self-aware, which has a small (but positive!) probability of happening. They spend time trying to estimate that probability.

A community center for these folks is the website lesswrong.com, which was created by Eliezer Yudkowsky, an artificial intelligence researcher. Yudkowsky thinks people should use rationality and avoid biases in order to lead better lives. It was a good idea, as far as practical philosophies go, but eventually he and his followers got caught up in increasingly abstract probability calculations using Bayes’ Theorem and bizarre thought experiments.

My favorite is called Roko’s basilisk, the thought experiment in which a future superintelligent and powerful AI tortures anyone who imagined its existence but didn’t go to the trouble of creating it. In other words it is a vindictive hypothetical being that puts you in danger as soon as you hear the thought experiment. Roko’s basilisk was seen by its inventor, Roko, as an incentive to donate to the cause of Friendly AI to “thereby increase the chances of a positive singularity.” But discussion of it soon so dominated Yudkowsky’s site that he banned it—a move that, not surprisingly, created more interest in the discussion.

A different but related movement in the world of AI futures comes from the Effective Altruism movement, which has been advocated for in this journal by philosopher Peter Singer. Like Yudkowsky, Effective Altruists started out well. Their basic argument was that we should care about human suffering outside our borders, not just in our close proximity, and that we should take personal responsibility for optimizing our money to improve the world.

You can go pretty far with that reasoning—and to their credit, Effective Altruists have made enormous international charitable contributions—but obsessing over the concept of effectiveness is limited by the fact that suffering, like community good, is hard to quantify.

Instead of acknowledging the limits of hard numbers, however, the group has more recently spun off into a parody of itself. Some factions believe that instead of worrying about current suffering, they should worry about “existential risks,” unlikely futuristic events that are characterized by computations besieged by powers of ten and could thus cause enormous suffering. A good example comes from Nick Bostrom’s Future of Humanity Institute website: ". . . we find that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives."

As a group these futurists are fundamentally sympathetic figures but woefully simplistic regarding current human problems. If they are not worried about existential risk, they are worried about the suffering of plankton, or perhaps every particle in the universe.

I will shove Elon Musk into this Q2 group, even though he is not a perfect fit. Being an enormously rich and powerful entrepreneur, he probably belongs in the first group, but he sometimes shows up at Effective Altruism events, and he has made noise recently about the computers getting mean and launching us into World War III. The cynics among us might suspect this is mostly a ploy to sell his services as a mediator between the superintelligent AI and humans when the time inevitably comes. After all Musk always has something to sell, including a ticket to Mars, Earth’s backup planet.

by Cathy O'Neil, Boston Review |  Read more:

Image: Maurizio Pesce
[ed. From the Boston Review's series: Global Dystopias. See also: Monopoly Men, Schlesinger and the Decline of Liberalism.]

Nobel Prize awarded to Richard Thaler

This is a prize that is easy to understand. It is a prize for behavioral economics, for the ongoing importance of psychology in economic decision-making, and for “Nudge,” his famous and also bestselliing book co-authored with Cass Sunstein.

Here are previous MR posts on Thaler, we’ve already covered a great deal of his research. Here is Thaler on Twitter. Here is Thaler on scholar.google.com. Here is the Nobel press release, with a variety of excellent accompanying essays and materials. Here is Cass Sunstein’s overview of Thaler’s work.

Perhaps unknown to many, Thaler’s most heavily cited piece is on whether the stock market overreacts. He says yes this is possible for psychological reasons, and this article also uncovered some of the key evidence in favor of the now-vanquished “January effect” in stock returns, namely that for a while the market did very very well in the month of January. (Once discovered the effect went away.) Another excellent Thaler piece on finance is this one with Shleifer and Lee, on why closed end mutual funds sell at divergences from their true asset values. This too likely has something to do with market psychology and sentiment, as the same “asset package,” in two separate and non-arbitrageable markets, can sell for quite different prices, sometimes premia but usually discounts. This was one early and relative influential critique of the efficient markets hypothesis.

Another classic early Thaler piece is on a phenomenon known as “mental accounting,” for instance you might treat a dollar in your pocket as different from a dollar in your bank account. Or earned money may be treated different from money you just chanced upon, or won that morning in the stock market. This has significant implications for predicting consumer decisions concerning saving and spending; in particular, economists cannot simply measure income but must consider where the money came from and how it is perceived by consumers, namely how they are performing their mental accounting of the funds. Have you ever gone on a vacation with a notion that you would spend so much money, and then treated all expenditures within that range as essentially already decided? The initial piece on this topic was published in a marketing journal and it has funny terminology, a sign of how far from the mainstream this work once was. It is nonetheless a brilliant piece. Here is more Thaler on mental accounting.

Thaler, with Kahneman and Knetsch, was a major force behind discovering and measuring the so-called “endowment effect.” Once you have something, you value it much more! Maybe three or four times as much, possibly more than that. It makes policy evaluation difficult, because as economists we are not sure how much to privilege the status quo. Should we measure “willingness to pay” — what people are willing to pay for what they don’t already have? Or “willingness to be paid” — namely how eager people are to give up what they already possess? The latter magnitude will lead to much higher valuations for the assets in question. This by the way helps explain status quo bias in politics and other spheres of life. People value something much more highly once they view it as theirs.

This phenomenon also makes the Coase theorem tricky because the final allocation of resources may depend quite significantly on how the initial property rights are assigned, even when the initial wealth effect from such an allocation may appear to be quite small. See this Thaler piece with Knetsch. It’s not just that you assign property rights and let people trade, but rather how you assign the rights up front will create an endowment effect and thus significantly influence the final bargain that is struck.

With Jolls and Sunstein, here is Thaler on a behavioral approach to law and economics, a long survey but also constructive piece that became a major trend and has shaped law and economics for decades. He has done plenty and had a truly far-ranging impact, not just in one or two narrow fields.

Thaler’s “Nudge” idea, developed in conjunction with Cass Sunstein over the course of a major book and some articles, has led policymakers all over the world to focus on “choice architecture” in designing better systems, the UK even setting up a “Nudge Unit.” For instance, one way to encourage savings is to set up pension systems for employees so that the maximum contribution is the default, rather than an active choice people must make. This is sometimes referred to as a form of “soft” or “libertarian paternalism,” since choice is still present. Here is Thaler responding to some libertarian critiques of the nudge idea.

by Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution | Read more:

[ed. Lots of good links, even how economics affect the NFL draft. See also: The Making of Richard Thaler's Economics Nobel.]

John Severson, Surfer Magazine
via:

16 Ways QR Codes are Being Used in China

We’ve talked a lot about the rise of QR codes in Asia, but they may now finally be moving from being a “joke” to being more widely adopted in other places as well. Simply put, QR codes let you hyperlink and bookmark the physical world. Just as UPC barcodes allow machine-readable scanning of data (e.g., price) on items in stores, QR codes are a barcode-like vector between online and offline information. And unlike NFC (near-field communication), which is used for reading smart cards, keycards, and contactless payments, QR codes can be easily accessed by any phone in the world that has a camera. They enable everything from online to offline (O2O) marketplaces, which are huge in China, to augmented reality.

Some of the more obvious use cases for them include things like adding a WeChat friend in real life (IRL); subscribing to a WeChat official account (often representing media, stores, people, and others); paying a street vendor or at a convenience store; connecting to wi-fi in a shop; getting additional content from a magazine article; and learning more about styling or the brand from a clothing label. But there are also a number of less-obvious (or not as well covered) uses in China, which I share below, because they show the range of what’s possible everywhere when QR codes disintermediate existing use cases… and enable new ones.

Things people already do, but now with QR codes

#1 Give and collect gifts at a wedding
On wedding invitations, “no boxed gifts please” is basically code for “just give me cash”. And in many Asian cultures, cash is more standard and socially acceptable anyway compared to other gifts for auspicious occasions like marriage, births, etc. In China, these gifts come in the form of red envelopes — which were also a growth hack for increasing adoption of payments in messaging.

But here, a member of the bridal party wears a QR code as necklace to collect digital money from wedding guests who forgot to bring physical red envelopes… though this use case had a mixed reception.

#2 Give and collect alms
Bluntly, begging has gone digital in China thanks to the penetration of mobile wallets there. And no one can really claim that they don’t have spare change when they are almost always likely to have their cell phones on them.

In this case, the panhandlers collect physical change from kind strangers, but also (quite brilliantly) provide mobile payment QR codes as another payment option.

#3 Collect tithes
The penetration of QR codes is so deep in China that it includes other forms of social commerce besides gifting or begging. Even churches collect tithes through QR codes. Why only offer wooden collection boxes when you can offer a QR code, as with this temple in Hangzhou? (...)

Things that are now possible (or way easier to do now) because of QR codes

#7 Checking the source and authenticity of food and drinks
QR codes can already be found in restaurants in China for things like paying for or ordering a meal at a restaurant. But even food distributors are taking advantage of QR codes; supermarkets, for instance, use them in produce stands so that customers can learn about the supply chain behind a specific batch of fruits or vegetables: Which farm did it come from? How was it transported? Meanwhile, wine-makers use QR codes as a way of proving the authenticity of the bottle — source, vintage — as well as educating consumers (type of grape, suggested pairings).

by Connie Chan, Andreesen Horowitz |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

St. Vincent

Pills to wake, pills to sleep
Pills, pills, pills every day of the week
Pills to walk, pills to think
Pills, pills, pills for the family
Pills to grow, pills to shrink
Pills, pills, pills and a good stiff drink
Pills to fuck, pills to eat
Pills, pills, pills down the kitchen sink

Lyrics

[ed. See also: St. Vincent Breaks Down Every Song on Her New Album, Masseduction]

The Country Sausage That's Going to Town

It has come to my attention that within the dog-eat-dog underworld of the culinary industry, there is a clandestine movement afoot to discredit my food writing. The chief criticisms are that I don’t actually cook and my essays aren’t about food. This has gotten on my last nerve! I put forth that any creature in possession of an alimentary canal knows plenty about food. The basics are simple: If you don’t eat, you will die, and bacon tastes better than rice cakes. Nutrition is for the food writer as ornithology is for the birds!

To reassure the skeptics, my bona fides are as follows. For more than a decade I worked in seventeen different restaurants, cafés, and bars. My career began in Morehead, Kentucky, at a Burger Queen and ended at Doyle’s Cafe in Boston, Massachusetts. I worked as a dishwasher, busboy, prep cook, steward, breakfast cook, soda pop pourer, sandwich maker, barista, and waiter. I got fired often, although never for reasons related to job performance. The most common reason was a mysterious word—“insubordination”—essentially a pretext used by power-mad bosses to shed themselves of people they didn’t like. Or in my case, a person who resisted the lure of kissing the boss’s b-hole. Of all the professional sadness in the world, the most poignant is that of assistant managers at a restaurant. Their priority is scheduling shifts for a waitstaff that makes more money than managers. Their only recourse is firing people.

A deeply personal matter led to my decade in the restaurant business and subsequent “career” as a food writer. At age fifteen I met a girl. Nothing is as powerful as the extraordinary jolt of a teenager’s first love. It’s like seeing the world after a double-cataract surgery. Life is suddenly exquisite. Each leaf becomes the bearer of unbearable beauty. Romeo and Juliet were so deliriously happy that they embraced murder and suicide as an ideal solution. I didn’t go that far, but I fell deeply and totally in love with Kim. She was smart, pretty, and laughed at my jokes. I spent all my waking hours trying to talk to her, eventually moving up to walking around holding hands. Our six-week romance was the best of my life—virtuous, finite, and gloriously unprecedented. I never again knew such an all-encompassing joy.

We met doing summer stock theatre as part of a college recruitment program for promising high school students. This occurred before the advent of portable music devices, which meant we listened to the radio. Every lyric seemed to be about us, directed exclusively at the impermeable dome in which we lived. Our favorite song was “The Joker” by the Steve Miller Band, in which he spoke of the pompitous of love. Neither Kim nor I knew exactly what the phrase meant, but we felt it described what we had, a kind of purity and truth. We were pompitous. Our love embodied pompitousness. We sought pompity.

In mid-August Kim returned home to western Kentucky, two hours away. We wrote each other daily, a pace that dwindled in frequency to weekly, then monthly. We called each other a few times, long spells with each of us clutching the receiver silently, content to know the other person was on the line. She visited me once, driving with a couple of her friends who clearly evaluated me as deficient: too short, too poor, non-athletic. Plus I was from the hills and looked it. I didn’t even own a car to reciprocate her visit. We stopped writing. I never saw Kim again, but I never forgot her.

Her grandfather was Fred Purnell, a former railroad man who founded Purnell’s “Old Folks” Sausage company in Simpsonville, Kentucky. According to family lore, Fred loved listening to the elderly talk, a trait that earned him the phenomenal nickname of “Old Folks.” I deeply envy his sobriquet. As a child I also enjoyed hearing tales of the old days. This has evolved into a secret desire that young people would be interested in hearing me talk. As it is, I can’t even get my wife to listen to a word I say. My nickname could readily be “Husby Ignored” or “He Who Talks Too Much.”

Purnell’s Sausage began as a family company and still maintains that status, which is quite unusual in the corporate era of Big Pork. For example, Smithfield Foods began as a family operation in Virginia and was America’s biggest pork company until it was bought by a Chinese corporation for seven billion dollars. (Yes, that’s 7,000,000,000 bucks!) Industrialized pork created a lucrative side business, the never-ending disposal of hog feces. If you can withstand the dreadful smell, it’s a wide-open field for a “manure entrepreneur.”

The packaging of Purnell’s sausage features a drawing of a cheerfully grinning pig’s face. It’s a great design: simple, bold, and memorable. At least as long as you ignore the obvious—what the hell does that pig have to be happy about? His entire family is encased in frozen wrappers for sale! Setting aside the complex emotional life of a hog, what enthralled me most was the slogan: “The Country Sausage that’s Going to Town!”

When I was a child living on a dirt road in the country, there was nothing better than going to the nearest town. Morehead had paved streets, multiple two-story buildings, and sidewalks. One building was rumored to contain an elevator. A ten-cent store sold model cars and Hot Wheels. The corner drugstore had comic books and nickel Cokes. The prospect of going to Morehead on Saturday sustained me throughout the tedious week of attending school. My mother’s greatest punishment was forbidding her kids from accompanying her to town. Merely the threat impelled me to prompt obedience. (The worst period of my life was being banned from Morehead for a month. After reading that Daniel Boone had stained his skin with walnut juice to pass as a Shawnee, I smeared the brown inner oil all over my body. It didn’t wash out.)

The phrase “going to town” has another, more generalized and colloquial definition. It means to carry out something with great enthusiasm, fully committed and doing the best you can—such as eating. That boy is going to town on that sausage! As a food slogan, it connotes the ambition of a country staple that’s heading out, putting the farm behind, eager for the bright lights. Maybe that’s why the pig was so happy. The enthusiasm for departure was a form of ignorance at the true destination—the bloody fate of a slaughterhouse. Like me in later years, that pig would often wish it had stayed home, safe in the hills.

I recently learned that the Purnell motto was discontinued sometime in the mid-1970s. The new slogan, currently in use on all their products, is bland and innocuous: “It’s Gooo-od.” The phrase is better utilized in a verbal fashion, drawing out the syllable for emphasis. Written, it’s harder to comprehend, leading one to mentally pronounce it as “gew-odd.” Still, it sounds less old-fashioned and is faster to say on TV and radio. (I guess they had to go with an elongated form of “good” because Tony the Tiger had already appropriated “They’re Gr-r-reat!” to endorse Frosted Flakes.) Most important, it’s true. Purnell’s sausage is the best sausage in the world.

I began wondering if the new motto was a business decision or a family mandate due to Kim’s interest in me around the same time. Maybe the Purnells didn’t want my country sausage coming to Louisville. It’s gooo-od that we got rid of that bumpkin early! Feeling rejected, I realized I could simply call Kim and ask her what motivated the new motto. I immediately became terrified that she wouldn’t remember me, or that she’d consider me a stalker with a forty-year delay. The best-case scenario would be if we talked for hours, met in person, fell in love, and I left my wife to move to Louisville and eat sausage forever. That would also be the worst-case scenario.

by Chris Offutt, Oxford American | Read more:
Image: "Alice,” by Kevin Horan

Same Time, Another Planet

PRK24 is sitting at the kitchen table when KNT32 glides into the room. PRK24 is so beautiful that one could die from it, thinks KNT32; how, she thinks, as she hides her head in her hands, can one do something so painful, as she must, to something so handsome? Or someone? PRK24 looks at her with amazement, then a polaroid picture slides out of his head, he takes it down with his hands, gives it to her, it shows KNT32 as she is standing now, with her hands around her head. Then he pulls out another picture that is blank, but with this symbol: “?” KNT32 shakes her head. Then she pulls out a picture. It shows KNT32, naked, against this kitchen table, with PRK27 behind her. PRK24 slides slowly back from the chair while staring at the picture, which slowly dissolves before his eyes. KNT32’s heart is hammering. Then she pulls out a picture that shows a little embryo. It is so handsome. It is so little, and the light around it is so red. It is sucking its thumb. It looks as though it is dreaming. Things one cannot know. PRK24 closes his eyes, because it hurts! He is both furious and completely lost. He pulls a picture out of his head: PRK24 and KNT32 eating hotdogs at a hotdog stand. KNT32 has her mouth wide open around a gigantic hotdog with too much onion. PRK24 is laughing. A new picture: PRK24 has won a pink teddybear for KNT32, and KNT32 is hugging it. A new picture: PRK24 and KNT32 are walking hand in hand on a sandy beach, the sun is setting, they are not wearing shoes. KNT32’s heart is about to break. She takes out a picture that shows how her heart is breaking. But PRK24 does not see it. He sits with his eyes closed. He takes out a picture that shows the surface of a body of water. He sits for a little. Then he takes out a new picture: A large bubble of air is about to burst against the surface of the water. KNT32 throws herself toward the picture, trying to dive into it, but too late, it dissolves, she shakes PRK24, but he has disappeared into himself.

by Gunnhild Øyehaug, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: Santos Gonzales, via Flickr

Autopilot Wars

Sixteen Years, But Who’s Counting?

Consider, if you will, these two indisputable facts. First, the United States is today more or less permanently engaged in hostilities in not one faraway place, but at least seven. Second, the vast majority of the American people could not care less.

Nor can it be said that we don’t care because we don’t know. True, government authorities withhold certain aspects of ongoing military operations or release only details that they find convenient. Yet information describing what U.S. forces are doing (and where) is readily available, even if buried in recent months by barrages of presidential tweets. Here, for anyone interested, are press releases issued by United States Central Command for just one recent week:

September 19: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

September 20: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

Iraqi Security Forces begin Hawijah offensive

September 21: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

September 22: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

September 23: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

Operation Inherent Resolve Casualty

September 25: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

September 26: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

Ever since the United States launched its war on terror, oceans of military press releases have poured forth. And those are just for starters. To provide updates on the U.S. military’s various ongoing campaigns, generals, admirals, and high-ranking defense officials regularly testify before congressional committees or brief members of the press. From the field, journalists offer updates that fill in at least some of the details -- on civilian casualties, for example -- that government authorities prefer not to disclose. Contributors to newspaper op-ed pages and “experts” booked by network and cable TV news shows, including passels of retired military officers, provide analysis. Trailing behind come books and documentaries that put things in a broader perspective.

But here’s the truth of it. None of it matters.

Like traffic jams or robocalls, war has fallen into the category of things that Americans may not welcome, but have learned to live with. In twenty-first-century America, war is not that big a deal.

While serving as defense secretary in the 1960s, Robert McNamara once mused that the “greatest contribution” of the Vietnam War might have been to make it possible for the United States “to go to war without the necessity of arousing the public ire.” With regard to the conflict once widely referred to as McNamara’s War, his claim proved grotesquely premature. Yet a half-century later, his wish has become reality.

Why do Americans today show so little interest in the wars waged in their name and at least nominally on their behalf? Why, as our wars drag on and on, doesn’t the disparity between effort expended and benefits accrued arouse more than passing curiosity or mild expressions of dismay? Why, in short, don’t we give a [expletive deleted]?

Perhaps just posing such a question propels us instantly into the realm of the unanswerable, like trying to figure out why people idolize Justin Bieber, shoot birds, or watch golf on television.

Without any expectation of actually piercing our collective ennui, let me take a stab at explaining why we don’t give a @#$%&! Here are eight distinctive but mutually reinforcing explanations, offered in a sequence that begins with the blindingly obvious and ends with the more speculative.

Americans don’t attend all that much to ongoing American wars because:

1. U.S. casualty rates are low. By using proxies and contractors, and relying heavily on airpower, America’s war managers have been able to keep a tight lid on the number of U.S. troops being killed and wounded. In all of 2017, for example, a grand total of 11 American soldiers have been lost in Afghanistan -- about equal to the number of shooting deaths in Chicago over the course of a typical week. True, in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries where the U.S. is engaged in hostilities, whether directly or indirectly, plenty of people who are not Americans are being killed and maimed. (The estimated number of Iraqi civilians killed this year alone exceeds 12,000.) But those casualties have next to no political salience as far as the United States is concerned. As long as they don’t impede U.S. military operations, they literally don’t count (and generally aren’t counted).

2. The true costs of Washington’s wars go untabulated. In a famous speech, dating from early in his presidency, Dwight D. Eisenhower said that “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” Dollars spent on weaponry, Ike insisted, translated directly into schools, hospitals, homes, highways, and power plants that would go unbuilt. “This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense,” he continued. “[I]t is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” More than six decades later, Americans have long since accommodated themselves to that cross of iron. Many actually see it as a boon, a source of corporate profits, jobs, and, of course, campaign contributions. As such, they avert their eyes from the opportunity costs of our never-ending wars. The dollars expended pursuant to our post-9/11 conflicts will ultimately number in the multi-trillions. Imagine the benefits of investing such sums in upgrading the nation’s aging infrastructure. Yet don’t count on Congressional leaders, other politicians, or just about anyone else to pursue that connection.

3. On matters related to war, American citizens have opted out. Others have made the point so frequently that it’s the equivalent of hearing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” at Christmastime. Even so, it bears repeating: the American people have defined their obligation to “support the troops” in the narrowest imaginable terms, ensuring above all that such support requires absolutely no sacrifice on their part. Members of Congress abet this civic apathy, while also taking steps to insulate themselves from responsibility. In effect, citizens and their elected representatives in Washington agree: supporting the troops means deferring to the commander in chief, without inquiring about whether what he has the troops doing makes the slightest sense. Yes, we set down our beers long enough to applaud those in uniform and boo those who decline to participate in mandatory rituals of patriotism. What we don’t do is demand anything remotely approximating actual accountability. (...)

6. Besides, we’re too busy. Think of this as a corollary to point five. Even if the present-day American political scene included figures like Senators Robert La Follette or J. William Fulbright, who long ago warned against the dangers of militarizing U.S. policy, Americans may not retain a capacity to attend to such critiques. Responding to the demands of the Information Age is not, it turns out, conducive to deep reflection. We live in an era (so we are told) when frantic multitasking has become a sort of duty and when being overscheduled is almost obligatory. Our attention span shrinks and with it our time horizon. The matters we attend to are those that happened just hours or minutes ago. Yet like the great solar eclipse of 2017 -- hugely significant and instantly forgotten -- those matters will, within another few minutes or hours, be superseded by some other development that briefly captures our attention. As a result, a dwindling number of Americans -- those not compulsively checking Facebook pages and Twitter accounts -- have the time or inclination to ponder questions like: When will the Afghanistan War end? Why has it lasted almost 16 years? Why doesn’t the finest fighting force in history actually win? Can’t package an answer in 140 characters or a 30-second made-for-TV sound bite? Well, then, slowpoke, don’t expect anyone to attend to what you have to say.

7. Anyway, the next president will save us. At regular intervals, Americans indulge in the fantasy that, if we just install the right person in the White House, all will be well. Ambitious politicians are quick to exploit this expectation. Presidential candidates struggle to differentiate themselves from their competitors, but all of them promise in one way or another to wipe the slate clean and Make America Great Again. Ignoring the historical record of promises broken or unfulfilled, and presidents who turn out not to be deities but flawed human beings, Americans -- members of the media above all -- pretend to take all this seriously. Campaigns become longer, more expensive, more circus-like, and ever less substantial. One might think that the election of Donald Trump would prompt a downward revision in the exalted expectations of presidents putting things right. Instead, especially in the anti-Trump camp, getting rid of Trump himself (Collusion! Corruption! Obstruction! Impeachment!) has become the overriding imperative, with little attention given to restoring the balance intended by the framers of the Constitution. The irony of Trump perpetuating wars that he once roundly criticized and then handing the conduct of those wars to generals devoid of ideas for ending them almost entirely escapes notice.

by Andrew Bacevich, TomDispatch | Read more:
Image: America’s War for the Greater Middle East

By What Measure?

On Catalonia and the referendum

How did things in Catalonia end up the way they did? Under Francoism, the Spanish government committed itself to a shameful pattern of cultural and linguistic repression in Spain’s so-denominated “historical” communities—Galicia, the Basque Country, and Catalonia. The peaceful constitution (in both senses of the word) of post-dictatorial Spain depends in large part on the restoration (or concession) of a significant measure of autonomy to those same communities. But the response to Catalonia’s October 1 independence referendum suggests a crisis for the status quo.

From a merely “cosmetic” perspective—to borrow a turn of the phrase from our own current President—the footage was horrific: military and federal police forces decked out in riot gear breaking down the doors at polling places, clashing openly with members of the Catalan Mossos d’Esquadra, dragging voters and protesters by their hair and ears, beating them to the ground with their truncheons and then continuing to beat them after they’d fallen, breaking fingers, leaving children and elderly people bleeding and in tears. These events aren’t just embarrassing domestically: for a Spanish government hoping to keep its European allies lined up against the idea of Catalan secession, the violence can’t help but weaken its bargaining position.

But the whole lamentable mess—all the clubs and shattered glass and the approximately 900 injured—wasn’t unforeseeable. In October 2015, following the previous month’s electoral victory of the pro-independence alliance Junts pel Sí, the Catalan parliament set into motion an “hoja de ruta,” or roadmap, to independence, agreed upon by the alliance’s constitutive parties the previous month. In October 2016, in line with that original plan, a parliamentary resolution was passed calling for a binding and binary independence referendum to be convened no later than September 2017, followed by an immediate or virtually immediate declaration of independence in the (expected) case of a Yes victory.

The Spanish central government’s response to these circumstances was, for a long time, denial. Time and again, Spanish president Mariano Rajoy, leader of the ruling Partido Popular (a political party itself constructed from the legislative remnants of Francoism), stood there blinking through his rimless eyeglasses and declared that there would be no referendum.1 The referendum-day violence, then, can be understood as a mere extension of that attitude of denial from something that could happen to something that was, in fact, happening. And as “it won’t happen” began to transform into “it sure appears to be happening,” the Spanish government opted to criminalize the whole affair, sending in the military and federal police to conduct raids on the warehouses where ballots and ballot boxes had been stored. Less than a week before the referendum was scheduled to be held, the police arrested fourteen middle and high-ranking government officials for their involvement in its organization. Those who turned out to vote, to manage precincts, to collect and count ballots, were treated as dangerous criminals by the military and militarized police.

The Spanish government’s lengthy refusal to engage even rhetorically with the referendum—and its subsequent criminalization of it—were predicated on its unconstitutionality. And, thanks to various court rulings on the subject, its illegality. For months, El País, the newspaper of record of constitutional Spain, has described the Catalan referendum as “el referéndum ilegal” or “el referéndum independentista ilegal,” as though the one concept were literally unthinkable without the other. The problems with this approach are obvious. Under the Spanish constitution, and as confirmed by Spain’s highest court, calling the referendum, organizing the referendum, and voting in the referendum may have been illegal, but these actions were no more criminal than sitting at the front of the bus when the law dictates that you sit in the back. Arresting people for trying to organize a vote and bludgeoning people trying to vote doesn’t look to very many people like a democratically elected government fulfilling its obligation to protect its citizens. It looks instead like violent political repression, which is, of course, exactly what it was.

Yet the more fundamental problem is disingenuousness. To suggest that the issue with the referendum specifically, and the Catalan government’s pursuit of independence from Spain more generally, is that it is not legal under Spanish law presumes that under Spanish law there exists some legal and democratic path to independence. But the Spanish constitution makes no such provisions for secession. Under Spanish law, and under the Spanish constitution, illegality is effectively built into the pursuit of independence as such and so cannot, on its own, provide grounds for disqualifying this or that particular such pursuit.

... It is true that Catalonia pays more money in taxes to the Spanish government than it receives in return (and no less true that not all of this unreturned tax money is, as the Spanish government claims, redistributed to Spain’s needier communities). But it is also true that Catalonia is an extremely wealthy community with many exceedingly wealthy individuals (many of them current and former Catalan government officials, and many of them suspected of or charged with corruption of fraud). Whatever problems Catalonia may have with social and economic inequities owe as much to the disproportionate distribution of that wealth (when not the outright pillaging of it) by the Catalan government as to its partial appropriation by the even more deeply corrupt central government in Madrid. This is not, in other words, a straightforward case of exploitation.

by Elis S. Evans, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: Adolfo Lujan

Thoughts and Prayers

Thoughts and Prayers, The Game.
via:
[ed. See also: Thoughts and Prayers]