The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys and the Shrub

Prologue: Who Cares?

Since you’re reading Rolling Stone, the chances are you’re an American between say 18 and 35, which demographically makes you a Young Voter. And no generation of Young Voters has ever cared less about politics and politicians than yours. There’s hard demographic and voter-pattern data backing this up … assuming you give a shit about data. In fact, even if you’re reading other stuff in RS, it’s doubtful you’re going to read much of this article – such is the enormous shuddering yawn that the Political Process evokes in us now, in this post-Watergate-post-Iran’Contra’ post’Whitewater ‘post’ Lewinsky era, an era when politicians’ statements of principle or vision are understood as self-serving ad copy and judged not for their sincerity or ability to inspire but for their tactical shrewdness, their marketability. And no generation has been marketed and Spun and pitched to as ingeniously and relentlessly as today’s demographic Young. So when Senator John McCain says, in Michigan or South Carolina (which is where Rolling Stone sent the least professional pencil it could find to spend the standard media Week on the Bus with a candidate who’d never ride higher than he is right now), when McCain says “I run for president not to Be Somebody, but to Do Something,” it’s hard to hear it as anything more than a marketing angle, especially when he says it as he’s going around surrounded by cameras and reporters and cheering crowds … in other words, Being Somebody.

And when Senator John McCain also says – constantly, thumping it at the start and end of every speech and THM – that his goal as president will be “to inspire young Americans to devote them- selves to causes greater than their own self-interest,” it’s hard not to hear it as just one more piece of the carefully scripted bullshit that presidential candidates hand us as they go about the self-interested business of trying to become the most powerful, important and talked-about human being on earth, which is of course their real “cause,” to which they appear to be so deeply devoted that they can swallow and spew whole mountains of noble – sounding bullshit and convince even themselves that they mean it. Cynical as that may sound, polls show it’s how most of us feel. And it’s beyond not believing the bullshit; mostly we don’t even hear it, dismiss it at the same deep level where we also block out billboards and Muzak.

But there’s something underneath politics in the way you have to hear McCain, something riveting and unSpinnable and true. It has to do with McCain’s military background and Vietnam combat and the five-plus years he spent in a North Vietnamese prison, mostly in solitary, in a box, getting tortured and starved. And the unbelievable honor and balls he showed there. It’s very easy to gloss over the POW thing, partly because we’ve all heard so much about it and partly because it’s so off-the – charts dramatic, like something in a movie instead of a man’s life. But it’s worth considering for a minute, because it’s what makes McCain’s “causes greater than self-interest” line easier to hear.

You probably already know what happened. In October of ’67 McCain was himself still a Young Voter and flying his 23rd Vietnam combat mission and his A-4 Skyhawk plane got shot down over Hanoi and he had to eject, which basically means setting off an explosive charge that blows your seat out of the plane, which ejection broke both McCain’s arms and one leg and gave him a concussion and he started falling out of the skies right over Hanoi. Try to imagine for a second how much this would hurt and how scared you’d be, three limbs broken and falling toward the enemy capital you just tried to bomb. His chute opened late and he landed hard in a little lake in a park right in the middle of downtown Hanoi, Imagine treading water with broken arms and trying to pull the life vest’s toggle with your teeth as a crowd of Vietnamese men swim out toward you (there’s film of this, somebody had a home – movie camera, and the N.V. government released it, though it’s grainy and McCain’s face is hard to see). The crowd pulled him out and then just about killed him. U.S. bomber pilots were especially hated, for obvious reasons. McCain got bayoneted in the groin; a soldier broke his shoulder apart with a rifle butt. Plus by this time his right knee was bent 90-degrees to the side with the bone sticking out. Try to imagine this. He finally got tossed on a jeep and taken five blocks to the infamous Hoa Lo prison – a.k.a. the “Hanoi Hilton,” of much movie fame – where they made him beg a week for a doctor and finally set a couple of the fractures without anesthetic and let two other fractures and the groin wound (imagine: groin wound) stay like they were. Then they threw him in a cell. Try for a moment to feel this. All the media profiles talk about how McCain still can’t lift his arms over his head to comb his hair, which is true. But try to imagine it at the time, yourself in his place, because it’s important. Think about how diametrically opposed to your own self-interest getting knifed in the balls and having fractures set without painkiller would be, and then about getting thrown in a cell to just lie there and hurt, which is what happened. He was delirious with pain for weeks, and his weight dropped to 100 pounds, and the other POWs were sure he would die; and then after a few months like that after his bones mostly knitted and he could sort of stand up they brought him in to the prison commandant’s office and offered to let him go. This is true. They said he could just leave. They had found out that McCain’s father was one of the top-ranking naval officers in the U.S. Armed Forces (which is true – both his father and grandfather were admirals), and the North Vietnamese wanted the PR coup of mercifully releasing his son, the baby-killer. McCain, 100 pounds and barely able to stand, refused, The U.S. military’s Code of Conduct for Prisoners of War apparently said that POWs had to be released in the order they were captured, and there were others who’d been in Hoa Lo a long time, and McCain refused to violate the Code. The commandant, not pleased, right there in the office had guards break his ribs, rebreak his arm, knock his teeth out. McCain still refused to leave without the other POWs. And so then he spent four more years in Hoa Lo like this, much of the time in solitary, in the dark, in a closet-sized box called a “punishment cell.” Maybe you’ve heard all this before; it’s been in umpteen different media profiles of McCain. But try to imagine that moment between getting offered early release and turning it down. Try to imagine it was you. Imagine how loudly your most basic, primal self-interest would have cried out to you in that moment, and all the ways you could rationalize accepting the offer. Can you hear it? If so, would you have refused to go? You simply can’t know for sure. None of us can. It’s hard even to imagine the pain and fear in that moment, much less know how you’d react.

But, see, we do know how this man reacted. That he chose to spend four more years there, in a dark box, alone, tapping code on the walls to the others, rather than violate a Code. Maybe he was nuts. But the point is that with McCain it feels like we know, for a proven fact, that he’s capable of devotion to something other, more, than his own self-interest. So that when he says the line in speeches in early February you can feel like maybe it isn’t just more candidate bullshit, that with this guy it’s maybe the truth. Or maybe both the truth and bullshit: the guy does – did – want your vote, after all.

But that moment in the Hoa Lo office in ’68 – right before he refused, with all his basic normal human self-interest howling at him – that moment is hard to blow off. All week, all through MI and SC and all the tedium and cynicism and paradox of the campaign, that moment seems to underlie McCain’s “greater than self-interest” line, moor it, give it a weird sort of reverb that’s hard to ignore. The fact is that john McCain is a genuine hero of the only kind Vietnam now has to offer, a hero not because of what he did but because of what he suffered – voluntarily, for a Code. This gives him the moral authority both to utter lines about causes beyond self-interest and to expect us, even in this age of Spin and lawyerly cunning, to believe he means them. Literally: “moral authority,” that old cliche, much like so many other cliche’s – “service,” “honor,” “duty,” “patriotism” – that have become just mostly words now, slogans invoked by men in nice suits who want something from us. The John McCain we’ve seen, though – arguing for his doomed campaign-finance bill on the Senate floor in ’98, calling his colleagues crooks to their faces on C-SPAN, talking openly about a bought-and-paid-for government on Charlie Rose in July ’99, unpretentious and bright as hell in the Iowa debates and New Hampshire Town Hall Meetings – something about him made a lot of us feel the guy wanted something different from us, something more than votes or money, something old and maybe corny but with a weird achy pull to it like a whiff of a childhood smell or a name on the tip of your tongue, something that would make us think about what terms like “service” and “sacrifice” and “honor” might really refer to, like whether they actually stood for something, maybe. About whether anything past well-Spun self-interest might be real, was ever real, and if so then what happened? These, for the most part, are not lines of thinking that the culture we’ve grown up in has encouraged Young Voters to pursue. Why do you suppose that is? (...)

Who Even Cares Who Cares

It’s hard to get good answers to why Young Voters are so uninterested in politics. This is probably because it’s next to impossible to get someone to think hard about why he’s not interested in something. The boredom itself preempts inquiry; the fact of the feeling’s enough. Surely one reason, though, is that politics is not cool. Or say rather that cool, interesting, alive people do not seem to be the ones who are drawn to the political process. Think back to the sort of kids in high school who were into running for student office: dweeby, overgroomed, obsequious to authority, ambitious in a sad way. Eager to play the Game. The kind of kids other kids would want to beat up if it didn’t seem so pointless and dull. And now consider some of 2000’s adult versions of these very same kids: Al Gore, best described by CNN sound tech Mark A. as “amazingly lifelike”; Steve Forbes, with his wet forehead and loony giggle; G. W. Bush’s patrician smirk and mangled cant; even Clinton himself, with his big red fake-friendly face and “I feel your pain.” Men who aren’t enough like human beings even to hate—what one feels when they loom into view is just an overwhelming lack of interest, the sort of deep disengagement that is often a defense against pain. Against sadness. In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians make us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about. It’s way easier to roll your eyes and not give a shit. You probably don’t want to hear about all this, even.

One reason a lot of the media on the Trail like John McCain is simply that he’s a cool guy. Nondweeby. In school, Clinton was in student government and band, whereas McCain was a varsity jock and a hell-raiser whose talents for partying and getting laid are still spoken of with awe by former classmates, a guy who graduated near the bottom of his class at Annapolis and got in trouble for flying jets too low and cutting power lines and crashing all the time and generally being cool. At 63, he’s witty, and smart, and he’ll make fun of himself and his wife and staff and other pols and the Trail, and he’ll tease the press and give them shit in a way they don’t ever mind because it’s the sort of shit that makes you feel that here’s this very cool, important guy who’s noticing you and liking you enough to give you shit. Sometimes he’ll wink at you for no reason. If all that doesn’t sound like a big deal, you have to remember that these pro reporters have to spend a lot of time around politicians, and most politicians are painful to be around. As one national pencil told Rolling Stone and another nonpro, “If you saw more of how the other candidates conduct themselves, you’d be way more impressed with [McCain]. It’s that he acts somewhat in the ballpark of the way a real human being would act.” And the grateful press on the Trail transmit – maybe even exaggerate – McCain’s humanity to their huge audience, the electorate, which electorate in turn seems so paroxysmically thankful for a presidential candidate somewhat in the ballpark of a real human being that it has to make you stop and think about how starved voters are for just some minimal level of genuineness in the men who want to “lead” and “inspire” them.

by David Foster Wallace, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Christopher Morris/VII/Redux

[ed. John McCain: a conflicted legacy: John McCain, Legendary Republican Senator, Dead at 81]

Mario Pucic
via:

Rage Against the Machine

via:

[ed. Apparently directed by Michael Moore.]

The Booming Business of Fraud

Why They Think They Can Get Away With It

Oh, the audacity of dopes. The crimes of Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen are notable not just for how blatant they were but also for their lack of sophistication. The two men did little to hide their lying to banks and the Internal Revenue Service. One can almost sympathize with them: If it wasn’t for their decision to attach themselves to the most unlikely president in modern history, there’s every reason to think they might be still working their frauds today.

But how anomalous are Mssrs. Manafort and Cohen? Are there legions of K Street big shots working for foreign despots and parking their riches in Cypriot bank accounts to avoid the IRS? Are many political campaigns walking felonies waiting to be exposed? What about the world of luxury residential building in which Cohen plied his trade with the Trump Organization?

The answer is more disturbing than the questions: We don’t know. We don’t know because the cops aren’t on the beat. Resources have been stripped from white-collar enforcement. The FBI shifted agents to work on international terror in the wake of 9/11. White-collar cases made up about one-tenth of the Justice Department’s cases in recent years, compared with one-fifth in the early 1990s. The IRS’ criminal enforcement capabilities have been decimated by years of budget cuts and attrition. The Federal Election Commission is a toothless organization that is widely flouted.

No wonder Cohen and Manafort were so brazen. They must have felt they had impunity.

How could they not? Any person in any bar in America can tell you who was held accountable for the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, which peaked 10 years ago next month: No one. No top officer from any major bank went to prison.

But the problem goes beyond big banks. The Department of Justice — in both Democratic and Republican administrations — has lost the will and ability to prosecute top executives across corporate America, at large industrial firms, tech giants, retailers, drug makers and so on. Instead the Department of Justice reaches settlements with corporations, which pay in dollars instead of the liberty of their top officers and directors.

Beginning with a charge to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election, special counsel Robert Mueller has fallen upon a rash of other crimes. In doing so, he has exposed how widespread and serious our white-collar fraud problem really is, and how lax enforcement has been for years.

At least he is also showing a way out of the problem. He and his team are demonstrating that the proper attention, resources, technique and experience can go a long way to rectify the white-collar prosecution crisis.

What’s Mueller’s secret? For one thing, he has a focus. He and his team have sufficient resources to go after a discrete set of investigations. In the early 2000s, the Justice Department had similar success setting up the Enron Task Force, a special SWAT team of government lawyers that prosecuted top executives of the failed Texas energy trader. That contrasts with the financial crisis, when the Justice Department never created a similar task force. No single department official was responsible for the prosecutions of bankers after the global meltdown.

The investigation’s techniques are also instructive. The Southern District of New York, which was referred the Cohen case by Mueller, raided President Trump’s former attorney’s offices and fought for access to the materials, even as Cohen asserted attorney-client privilege. When federal prosecutors investigate large companies, out of custom and deference they rarely use such aggressive tactics. They place few wiretaps, conduct almost no undercover operations and do almost no raids. Instead government attorneys reach carefully negotiated agreements about which documents they can review, the product of many hours of discussion with high-powered law firms on behalf of their clients. All the battles over privileged materials happen behind closed doors and without the benefit of a disinterested special master, as the Cohen case had.

Indeed it’s worse than that. The government has essentially privatized corporate law enforcement. The government effectively outsources the investigations to the companies themselves. The companies, typically trying to appear cooperative or to forestall government action, hire law firms to do internal investigations. Imagine if Mueller relied on Trump to investigate whether he colluded with the Russians or violated any other laws, and Trump hired Rudy Giuliani’s firm to do the probe.

The aggressive Mueller techniques have yielded the most crucial element for white-collar cases: flippers; i.e., wrongdoers who agree to testify against their co-conspirators. Rick Gates, the Manafort protégé, helped tighten his mentor’s noose. We are going to see in the next few months how many people flip and what they will say. No wonder President Trump mused that flipping “almost ought to be illegal.”

Mueller’s experience has given him the courage to take cases to trial, where juries are mercurial and the federal bench has turned hostile. Mueller’s prosecutors tried a “thin case” against Manafort, as the expression goes, boiling their evidence down to a few elements that the jury could absorb easily. They even managed to overcome the open hostility of U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis. Good prosecutors are used to that in white-collar cases. Judges and justices have not looked favorably upon white-collar prosecutions for more than a decade now, overturning verdicts and narrowing statutes. But with well-marshaled evidence and clear presentation, prosecutors can surmount the difficulties.

Moreover, Mueller isn’t looking to go soft in order to preserve his professional viability. I’m assuming that at age 74, he’s not going to go through the revolving door after this. That hasn’t been true for most top Justice Department officials in recent years. Many of them come from the defense bar and when they leave government they go back to defending large corporations. The same goes with the younger prosecutors who negotiate those corporate settlements. Almost all go on to become corporate defense attorneys. In those negotiations, they are auditioning for their next jobs, wanting to display their dazzling smarts but also eventually needing to appear like reasonable people and avoid being depicted by the white-collar bar as cowboys unworthy of a prestigious partnership.

Of course, we don’t know whether Mueller can go all the way to the top. The big issue in white-collar crime is whether the Justice Department can prosecute CEOs. Sure, it occasionally brings charges against lower-level executives of major corporations, but hasn’t held the chief of a Fortune 500 company accountable in more than a decade. While most observers believe Mueller will adhere to policy and not indict the president, will his report to Congress implicate the chief executive of the United States, if the evidence warrants it?

One man cannot fix the large problem on his own, however. “For these individual episodic financial crimes, the government can muster the capacity and courage to investigate and prosecute,” says Paul Pelletier, a former federal prosecutor who recently ran for Congress in a Democratic primary. “The real question is whether, in the context of a national economic crisis, the Department of Justice has sufficient experience, resources and leadership to effectively tackle it. I’d argue that it’s pretty obvious it does not.”

by Jesse Eisinger, ProPublica |  Read more:

Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

California Lawmakers Steal Hawaii’s ‘Official’ Sport, Snub State’s Own

The California poppy, the quail, the coastal redwood — when it comes to selecting official icons, this state has made lots of wise choices.

But Sacramento politicians made a big mistake this week. By designating surfing as the state’s official sport, they tried to steal the creation of another state. They also overlooked the real official sport of California.

Surfing is a spectacular sport, don’t get me wrong. It’s been popular on the California coast for decades, and as an experience, it offers everything you could possibly want: athleticism, grace, visual beauty and the poetic kind of lifestyle that includes a beach.

These are the reasons why people want to be surfers. These are the reasons why the global surfing industry generates billions of dollars every year.

But surfing belongs to Hawaii. For centuries, native Hawaiians practiced and perfected the art of riding waves. The Hawaiian coast, with its warm water and constant waves, remains the sport’s spiritual and social home.

Trying to pretend otherwise is just a bad look for California. For crying out loud, the U.S. overthrew Hawaii’s government and snatched the island for itself. Now some state politicians want to snatch away one of the greatest gifts Hawaii offered to the world?

Meanwhile, California’s actual state sport has never been more exciting.

Look around, and you’ll see it everywhere — children bombing hills in San Francisco, kids massing under freeway overpasses in Fresno, adults successfully lobbying politicians to build the sport’s infrastructure in San Diego. It debuts as an Olympic sport in Tokyo’s 2020 program. Like surfing, it also generates billions of dollars every year.

Unlike surfing, this is a sport that Californians can claim with absolute honesty. Its origins are in the streets, the curbs and the abandoned pools of Southern California.

I’m speaking of skateboarding.

By overlooking the sport, Sacramento didn’t just insult the skateboarding community, it missed an important opportunity to honor the California spirit in front of the entire world.

“The great irony of this is that there’s no other sport that represents the spirit of California as well as this one,” Stacy Peralta told me. “If you think about the California ethos — going it alone, making it happen yourself — that’s what skateboarding is all about.”

There are few people on the planet who understand the importance of surfing and skateboarding to California’s identity better than Peralta. As he was a teenage surfer in Venice (Los Angeles County), in the early 1970s, he joined the Zephyr team, also known as the Z-Boys.

The Z-Boys were volatile, aggressive young men who are widely acknowledged for inventing what we now call contemporary skateboarding— the speed, the aerials and the tricks. The Z-Boys are legends in the skateboarding community, but their inspiration was all from surfing.

Peralta, now 60, was one of the first professional skateboarders and one of the first to launch a skate gear company.

“It is indigenous to California,” Peralta said. “It could not have been invented and developed anywhere but here.”

With some exceptions, coastal access in California is a luxury of the affluent. So many kids don’t have access to surfing — but it’s pretty easy to get ahold of a skateboard and a sidewalk. (...)

Skateboarding tends to attract children who need an escape from rigid hierarchies and adult expectations. It’s most appealing to youth who need to try something for themselves. Many adults find this attitude to be threatening in young people. That’s a big part of the reason why skateboarding, for all of its popularity, has never been able to rid itself of a slight stigma.

“It’s subversive, it’s noisy, and it’ll always be partially illegal because skateboarders ride in places where they’re not invited,” Peralta said. “But so many people don’t understand that young people need something that allows them to be civilly disobedient without hurting others. And skateboarding provides them with that.”

What’s interesting is that California prides itself on these kinds of values. The Golden State, originally the land of going your own way to find gold, is more recently the land of personal enrichment via “disruptive” innovation.

by Caille Millner, SF Chronicle | Read more:
Image:Spud Hilton / The Chronicle

Delbert McClinton & Roy Buchanan

I Worked With Richard Russell at Horizon Air, and I Understand Why He Did What He Did

I was surprised to wake up last Saturday morning to the headlines. Not completely shocked, but surprised nonetheless. I was a ground service agent at Horizon Air for the better part of 2016, and I worked alongside Richard "Beebo" Russell [ed. who stole and crashed a Horizon Q400 turboprop]. As ground service agents, we handled luggage, walked through planes for final inspection, and pushed them out onto the taxiway.

We weren’t close, barely acquaintances, which seems odd considering the tight quarters and the foxhole mentality that is required to work in these particular roles. But with the high turnover (if you follow Horizon Air jobs, you will know they are always hiring that position for SeaTac), it’s not that hard to imagine.

Day-to-day survival on The Ramp (the area between the terminal and the taxiway, where passengers are loaded and unloaded, baggage is handled, planes fueled, etc.) requires a lot of sacrifice to keep the planes moving. It would be difficult enough if the inadequate break room didn’t always resemble a crowded, sweatbox college party—but without any drugs or alcohol, and nobody having fun. Brought your lunch to save spending $10 buying a meal in the terminal? Sure hope it’s still in the fridge when you get your lunch break. Nasty emails directed to anonymous lunch bandits were a common occurrence. There was a locker room, but not enough lockers for everyone. Think about how many layers are required to work in the weather in Seattle, and then think about where you might put your jacket, gloves, etc., when you don’t need them without them getting stolen, if you don’t have a locker. These things aren’t luxuries; they are a basic part of work life.

Going into the job, I knew that there was a sharp disconnect between the shiny happy side of the terminal, and the grit on the ground. What I didn’t realize was how much like a military base it was run. Which makes sense, historically, and which is why Horizon and other airlines recruit heavily from military bases. I went through initial training with a guy who had just spent 10 years in the army.

"How was that?" I asked him.

"Well, I didn’t blow my brains out," was his reply.

So I supposed working at Horizon was an upgrade for him. When a lot of your supervisory staff and co-workers are ex-military you begin to realize what being expendable is. I believe Beebo was acutely aware of that—because we all were. It's the kind of dehumanizing situation that could lead to what happened on August 10.

If the environment itself isn’t enough to persuade you that you are nothing more than a cog to the upper management/shareholders, there are plenty of other, even more exasperating reminders. You are making around $3 less per hour than anybody else at SeaTac (including other airline employees, restaurant employees, car rental employees, bus drivers, etc.), although there are benefits! Health insurance and stock options might be nice, but they don’t pay the rent. However, a vast majority of the ground service agents are men under age 30, so insurance and stock options mean nothing to them. They become empty gestures from a management who knows you’ll never use them, and thus cost the company little.

But that's only one part of the picture. To be clear, the people I worked with were dedicated, hard working, safety-conscious, attempting to be loyal—all of the things that are supposed to get you ahead in America. But the workers on the ground and our immediate supervisors could barely keep our heads above water. As a subsidiary of Alaska Air Group, Horizon Air is the proverbial red-headed stepchild. It is glaringly clear to everyone who works there that cost-cutting by the executive team(s) in order to keep the shareholders happy is the main goal, and Horizon is the first stop on the belt-tightening train.

We the lowest level employees knew that when the record quarterly earnings report came out there wasn’t going to be any trickle down. When I worked for Horizon, we were cursing our low-wage fate in the break room, while Alaska was spending $2.5 billion acquiring Virgin America (gotta keep up with Delta), and then investing another $2.5 billion upgrading their turboprop airplane fleet to jets. Acquisitions and sexy new jets play well at the stockholder meeting; increased labor costs do not.

The first thing I thought when I heard the news about a plane being stolen by a Horizon employee was, "Ah yes, the end of summer. Of course." Summer is nearly constantly as busy as the holiday season.

My summer of 2016 kicked off with a new schedule (we bid on shifts every 3-4 months), which as it turns out was literally generated by a computer program. X number of flights, X number of employees, some advanced mathematics, and poof! Perfection. Except the schedule that summer was so out of touch with what was going on on the ground that a handful of veteran employees went to management and successfully lobbied for a "do-over," because the schedule as presented was unrealistic, and featured far too many new employees at a given time compared to experienced ones.

An important perk are monthly bonuses, which can range from $50-200 a month depending on whether "target numbers" are hit. About halfway through my summer tenure at Horizon Air, we were informed that the bonus structure was being revamped. It now included delays caused by weather and Air Traffic Control, circumstances completely out of our control. This was described as "more realistic to the situation on the ground." It was more like a morale murderer.

This is all to say that I can understand what could drive a normal person to do what Richard Russell did: He saw his chance for relevance—to be simply acknowledged as an individual human being—and grabbed it. I don’t condone it, and wish it would have turned out with a spectacular landing that he could've walked away from as a folk hero to some (myself included). I'll leave the question of exactly how he did it to the investigators.

Richard's situation was not unusual for what has morphed into a wage-slave economy. The fact that he had access to a plane makes it sensational. There are plenty of people out there making not-enough money, and they keep plugging along, not stealing multi-million dollar aircraft and crashing them.

by Todd Bunker, The Stranger |  Read more:

Image: Dave Allen/Getty

Pain Town

Agent-based modelling offers opportunities to explore the complex social interactions at the heart of the addiction crisis.

With the tip of her syringe, Brandi pokes at a grey lump of heroin in a spoon. It’s a new variety of the drug that has shown up on the market in the past few days, and Brandi likes it. “I feel this more, I feel more of the pain resistance,” she says.

Once it has dissolved into a liquid, she injects it into her arm, then uses a fresh needle to inject the skinny arm of another woman. “She does it better than the hospital,” the woman comments.

“I’ll help anybody who needs it,” Brandi explains to public-health researcher Daniel Ciccarone of the University of California, San Francisco, who has been filming the entire process.

Ciccarone’s team has embedded with Brandi — whose name has been changed for this story — in Charleston, West Virginia, documenting her interactions without judgement or interference. Later, the group will analyse this video, in addition to half a dozen other videos of drug users from across the city, logging details big and small. Brandi does not heat the solution on the spoon, for instance, and that may increase the likelihood of spreading viruses such as HIV. And tests reveal that what she’s taking has been laced with fentanyl, a synthetic drug up to 50 times more powerful than heroin.

The researchers will plug these data into powerful computer simulations of Charleston, populated by thousands of virtual Brandis — heroin users and dealers going about their daily routines. They will watch these digital agents buy more heroin as their tolerance increases, form networks with sellers and users and, in some cases, accidentally overdose.

Ciccarone’s is one of several groups using agent-based models to understand what is driving the US opioid epidemic — the dramatic rise over the past two decades in the use of opioids, including prescription pain medications and illegal drugs such as heroin. By studying the motivations and practices of real drug dealers and users, the researchers hope to build agents whose behaviour in the virtual world mimics that in real life.

Agent-based models promise to provide a more granular view of the opioid crisis than standard modelling, which is based on average populations, and to capture some of the complexity of the driving forces. This could prove important for demonstrating the effects of opening or closing methadone clinics or needle exchanges. The models allow scientists to compare interventions at almost no cost and could help policymakers to decide how to proceed in the real world. “It’s a very classic and useful way to try and see where is the best place to deploy an intervention to have the biggest effect,” says John Brooks, a medical adviser for the division of HIV/AIDS prevention at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia.

Although such simulations have long been used to model disease outbreaks and have, in some instances, guided public policy, their track record with more complex social behaviour such as drug use is limited, largely owing to sparse data and the breadth of parameters to consider. (...)

To create an agent-based model, researchers first ‘build’ a virtual town or region, sometimes based on a real place, including buildings such as schools and food shops. They then populate it with agents, using census data to give each one its own characteristics, such as age, race and income, and to distribute the agents throughout the virtual town.

The agents are autonomous but operate within pre-programmed routines — going to work five times a week, for instance. Some behaviours may be more random, such as a 5% chance per day of skipping work, or a 50% chance of meeting a certain person in the agent’s network. Once the system is as realistic as possible, the researchers introduce a variable such as a flu virus, with a rate and pattern of spread based on its real-life characteristics. They then run the simulation to test how the agents’ behaviour shifts when a school is closed or a vaccination campaign is started, repeating it thousands of times to determine the likelihood of different outcomes. (...)

In response to the opioid epidemic, Bobashev’s group has constructed Pain Town — a generic city complete with 10,000 people suffering from chronic pain, 70 drug dealers, 30 doctors, 10 emergency rooms and 10 pharmacies. The researchers run the model over five simulated years, recording how the situation changes each virtual day.

During this time, the patients’ drug tolerance increases, leading them to find different ways of acquiring drugs. Their behaviour is driven by variables such as the chance that a doctor will increase their prescription, or the likelihood that a dealer will have enough heroin. At a certain threshold, patients become addicted or more likely to overdose. Bobashev’s early data suggest, for example, that requiring doctors to track patients’ medication history can be effective over the long term, but not immediately.

The model contains many assumptions and simplifications, Bobashev says. For example, it doesn’t capture the fact that the rate at which people develop tolerance and addiction can depend on factors such as genetics, and that whether a person switches from prescription drugs to heroin can depend on the relative availability of the two drugs.

But researchers can adjust models such as Pain Town to test various interventions, such as increasing access to emergency rooms, arresting a dealer or equipping police with naloxone (a drug that reverses opioid overdoses), to see how the system reacts and whether it affects the number of deaths over time. And as models become more sophisticated, the researchers may be able to incorporate more factors, such as people who are not taking pain medications but are susceptible to trying opioids for the first time. (...)

Data drought

The models face numerous challenges before they will be ready for widespread adoption, primarily data gaps. Marshall says that researchers struggle to get access to data on opioid prescriptions that are held by manufacturers, pharmacies and law-enforcement agencies. It is also difficult to obtain government information on drug cartels and the type and rate of drugs flowing into the country. Other data simply do not exist in usable form: agencies may record deaths due to drug overdose, for instance, but fail to specify which drug was responsible.

Observing drug users such as Brandi can provide certain types of information more quickly and accurately. “Drug users know their chemicals intimately,” Ciccarone says.

Lee Hoffer is a cultural anthropologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, who studies heroin markets and collaborates with Bobashev. He says the ethnographic data that his group and others are collecting could help to fill some of the information gaps: “We’re trying to enter their world as interlopers to see how they see their life.” After an initial awkward period, he says, drug users tend to become more honest with the researchers, telling them crucial information such as how they form networks with dealers and the cost of drugs.

Understanding the psychology of drug users is also crucial, says Epstein. Most decision-making models assume rational behaviours. In reality, emotions, misinformation and irrational calculations play a major part. “When you put them together you get collections of dynamics that are very dysfunctional.”

by Sara Reardon, Nature | Read more:
Image: Jerome Sessini/Magnum

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

New Tom Petty Video Blends Old Photos With Fan Submissions

The Other Side of “Broken Windows”

In the nineteenth century, British researchers began studying the variation in crime rates between and within cities. Some of these studies offered relatively simple accounts of the variance, in which concentrated poverty led to higher crime. Others went further, asking what explained the disparities in crime rates among poor neighborhoods. Most of this work “offered theories,” the University of Pennsylvania criminologist John MacDonald wrote in a recent paper, “but did not attempt to provide guidance on how to curb crime.” He compared this tradition, unfavorably, with the work of British health scholars, most notably John Snow, whose research on cholera “noted the importance of the spatial environment,” and who “suggested the separation of sewers and drinking water wells to prevent water-borne diseases.”

Of course, social scientists have long influenced crime policies. Consider the “broken windows” theory, which the Harvard political scientist James Q. Wilson and the Rutgers criminologist George Kelling introduced, in a piece in the Atlantic, in 1982. According to Wilson and Kelling, criminals perceive broken windows and other forms of disorder as signs of weak social control; in turn, they assume that crimes committed there are unlikely to be checked. “Though it is not inevitable,” Wilson and Kelling argue, “it is more likely that here, rather than in places where people are confident they can regulate public behavior by informal controls, drugs will change hands, prostitutes will solicit, and cars will be stripped.”

“Broken Windows” is one of the most cited articles in the history of criminology; it’s sometimes called the Bible of policing. Since the nineteen-eighties, cities throughout the world have used Wilson and Kelling’s ideas as motivation for “zero tolerance” policing, wherein officers monitor petty crimes, such as graffiti, loitering, public intoxication, and even panhandling, and courts severely punish those convicted of committing them. “If you take care of the little things, then you can prevent a lot of the big things,” the former Los Angeles and New York City police chief William J. Bratton has said. (Bratton has also applied the theory in overseas consulting work.) In practice, this meant stopping, frisking, and arresting more people, particularly those who live in high-crime areas. It also meant a spike in reports that police were unfairly targeting minorities, particularly black men.

Broken-windows theory always worked better as an idea than as a description of the real world. The problems with the theory, which include the fact that perceptions of disorder generally have more to do with the racial composition of a neighborhood than with the number of broken windows or amount of graffiti in the area, are numerous and well documented. But more interesting than the theory’s flaws is the way that it was framed and interpreted. Consider the authors’ famous evocation of how disorder begins:

A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up, a window is smashed. Adults stop scolding rowdy children; the children, emboldened, become more rowdy. Families move out, unattached adults move in. Teenagers gather in front of the corner store. The merchant asks them to move; they refuse. Fights occur. Litter accumulates. People start drinking in front of the grocery; in time, an inebriate slumps to the sidewalk and is allowed to sleep it off. Pedestrians are approached by panhandlers.

Things get worse from there. But what’s curious is how the first two steps of this cycle—“A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up”—have disappeared in the public imagination. The third step—“a window is smashed”—inspired the article’s catchy title and took center stage. Debates about the theory ignored the two problems at the root of its story, jumping straight to the criminal behavior. We got “broken windows,” not “abandoned property,” and a very different policy response ensued.

But what if the authors—and the policymakers who heeded them—had taken another tack? What if vacant property had received the attention that, for thirty years, was instead showered on petty criminals?

A few years ago, John MacDonald, the Penn criminologist, and Charles Branas, the chair of epidemiology at Columbia University, began one of the most exciting research experiments in social science. Branas is a leading scholar of gun violence, having become interested in the subject while working as a paramedic. He met MacDonald in the aughts, when they were both working at the University of Pennsylvania, in a seminar on gun violence at the medical school’s trauma center. Both were frustrated by the science that linked crime to neighborhood disorder. “A lot of it, from ‘broken windows’ on, was just descriptive,” Branas told me. “You didn’t know exactly what counted as disorder. And it wasn’t actionable. Outside of policing, which was obviously complicated, there wasn’t much you could do about it.”

The two began meeting on campus. While they were brainstorming, Branas was invited to discuss his research at a conference in Philadelphia. During his presentation, he briefly mentioned his interest in running an experiment on the physical factors related to gun violence. “When I finished, someone from the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society approached me,” Branas recalled. That person was convinced that vacant properties—Philadelphia had tens of thousands of empty lots—were driving up violent crime in poor neighborhoods. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, or P.H.S., had incredible data, and offered to help.

Branas and MacDonald were excited about the idea. There was, after all, an established literature on the relationship between abandoned properties and crime. In 1993, the criminologist William Spelman published a paper showing that, in Austin, “crime rates on blocks with open abandoned buildings were twice as high as rates on matched blocks without open buildings.” In 2005, the sociologist Lance Hannon showed that, in New York City’s high-poverty areas, the number of abandoned houses in a given census tract correlated with homicide levels. But Branas and MacDonald wanted to draw from an even deeper study, which required collecting an enormous amount of data and designing an experiment. They invited more scientists to join them: a health economist, a professor from Penn’s Department of Emergency Medicine, and a medical anthropologist.

On a warm and windy day in September, I visited Philadelphia to observe the sites that P.H.S. had remediated. Keith Green, a P.H.S. employee with a salt-and-pepper beard, picked me up in his blue Ford pickup truck, and told me that we’d begin by driving to West Philadelphia, where P.H.S. maintains 2.3 million square feet of vacant land. Green, who grew up in a part of Philadelphia that’s so gray it’s known as “the concrete city,” started working at P.H.S. twenty-one years ago, first as an intern and then on community-garden projects. “I never thought I’d be doing this for so long,” he told me. “But I found my niche when we started fixing up abandoned property.”

As we drove, Green told me about one of his first jobs. “The city asked us to clean up a two-block area in North Philadelphia where there was a flea infestation. We got there, and it was like the entire area had turned into a jungle. Weeds, tall grass, messed-up trees. People were using it as a dumping ground.” The team ended up treating a hundred and twenty-five empty lots. “It was a horrible job, but when we finished you could tell that the neighborhood was going to be different,” he said. “And people were so happy. I’d have kids running up to my truck, yelling, ‘Mr. Keith! Mr. Keith! Can you come back tomorrow?’ They treated me like I was Mister Softee.”

Green drove slowly up Fortieth Street, on the west side of the city. “You’re gonna want to keep your eyes open,” he said. The area looked a lot like Englewood and North Lawndale, neighborhoods I’d studied in Chicago, where row houses and apartment buildings, some empty, some well-kept, sat adjacent to large, open lots that were thick with weeds, debris, and six-foot-high grass. “See that?” He pulled over at a corner lot with a low-lying wooden fence, two benches, trimmed trees, and a neatly cut lawn. “That’s one of our treated sites. You can tell because it’s so well maintained.”

We got out and walked through the pocket park to a vacant house and large lot a few steps away. There, the grass had grown both high and wide, so that it came through the sidewalk and out to the curb. “Now this—this is a disaster,” Green said. “It’s probably got an owner who wouldn’t let us work here, or someone we couldn’t track down. If you live here, you’ve got to deal with all the problems this attracts into the neighborhood: pests, insects, garbage, crime. And you know it’s gonna make it hard for new development to work here. People see that and they want to run.”(...)

Green and his colleagues at P.H.S. suspected that fixing up the empty lots and buildings was improving Philadelphia’s poor neighborhoods, but they weren’t certain. Branas and MacDonald had a more specific hypothesis: that remediation would reduce violent crime nearby. “It’s not simply that they are signs of disorder,” Branas told me. “It’s that the places themselves create opportunities for gun violence; they take what might just be a poor neighborhood and make it poor and dangerous.”

The reasons are straightforward. Abandoned houses are good places for people involved in crime to hide when on the run. They’re also good places to store firearms. Untended lots are notoriously useful for drug dealing—in part because most law-abiding residents avoid them, and in part because dealers can hide their products in the weeds and tall grass if the police drive by. For communities, and for the police, they are hard places to monitor and control.

Green and his colleagues at P.H.S. suspected that fixing up the empty lots and buildings was improving Philadelphia’s poor neighborhoods, but they weren’t certain. Branas and MacDonald had a more specific hypothesis: that remediation would reduce violent crime nearby. “It’s not simply that they are signs of disorder,” Branas told me. “It’s that the places themselves create opportunities for gun violence; they take what might just be a poor neighborhood and make it poor and dangerous.”

The reasons are straightforward. Abandoned houses are good places for people involved in crime to hide when on the run. They’re also good places to store firearms. Untended lots are notoriously useful for drug dealing—in part because most law-abiding residents avoid them, and in part because dealers can hide their products in the weeds and tall grass if the police drive by. For communities, and for the police, they are hard places to monitor and control.

Compelling theories, as critics of broken-windows policing know all too well, are often betrayed by evidence. That’s why Branas was so surprised by the findings from their first study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, which showed a thirty-nine-per-cent reduction in gun violence in and around remediated abandoned buildings and a smaller—but still meaningful—five-per-cent reduction in gun violence in and around remediated lots. These are extraordinary numbers, at a level of impact one rarely sees in a social-science experiment.

Equally powerful, Branas said, was that there was no evidence that the violence had simply shifted to nearby places. The declines were real. And they lasted from one to nearly four years, making the benefit far more sustainable than those of other crime-reduction programs. “Honestly, it was a bigger effect than we’d expected to find,” he said.

For Branas, the results pointed toward a new approach to crime prevention. Early in his career, he worked on what, in hindsight, he views as a failed experiment—conventional anti-violence research that focussed on the people most likely to commit crimes. “When I started at Penn, we had been working hard to reduce gun crime in Philadelphia. We had the interpreters, the social workers, the community leaders,” he said. “Some of them were amazing, and we had some successes. But they were always short-lived. . . . In the end, it wound up helping only, I don’t know, about fifty kids, just the ones who were there at the time.”

To this day, most policies that aim to reduce crime focus on punishing people rather than improving places. The President has called for a national “stop and frisk” police program; the Attorney General wants more severe sentencing; advocates of “law and order” are resurgent. We invest little in housing and neighborhood amenities like libraries, senior centers, and community gardens, which draw people into the public realm and put more eyes on the street. And we spend even less to address criminal “hot spots”—the empty lots and abandoned buildings that, according to Branas’s team, account for fifteen per cent of city space in America.

by Eric Klinenberg, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Mark Makela

The Problem With ‘Hey Guys’

“Okay, guys,” a female coworker of mine recently began, as she addressed me and a female colleague. Then she stopped herself, said she was making an effort to use more gender-neutral language, and carried on talking.

It was a small self-correction, and a glimpse at the conflicted feelings stirred up by one of the most common greetings in the English language. Guys is an easygoing way to address a group of people, but to many, it’s a symbol of exclusion—a word with an originally male meaning that is frequently used to refer to people who don’t consider themselves "guys."

My coworker is one of many who have started editing themselves in response to this exclusion. In the course of reporting this story, I heard from teachers who wanted a better way to get students’ attention, an ice-cream scooper who wanted a better way to greet customers, and a debate coach who specifically encourages his students to use y’all. These are representatives of a broad coalition of people who have contemplated, and often gone through with, excising guys from their vocabularies.

There are, of course, plenty of people—including many women—who have no problem being addressed as “guys,” think the word has evolved to be entirely gender-neutral, and don't see a reason to change their usage. But others aren’t so sure. “I think there's a really serious and welcome reconception of gender lines and relationships between sex and gender going on,” says John McWhorter, who teaches linguistics at Columbia University and has written several books about language. He says “something has crested in particular over about the past 10 years”—something that has people examining their everyday communications.

In my reporting I heard from several people who said that the word is particularly troubling for trans and gender-nonconforming people. “As a transgender woman, I consciously began trying to stop using guys some years ago,” says Brad Ward, a college counselor at a high school in Atherton, California. She added, “When I’m included with a group that is called guys, there’s some pain, since it takes me back to my male days in a way that I’d rather not go.”

I also heard that guys could grate on women working at male-heavy companies. In tech in particular, some told me they saw the word as yet another symptom of a female-minimizing industry. “There are a lot of guys in tech and ‘guys’ is used all the time in my work and social environments by both men and women, but since it doesn't resonate with me anymore, I do feel like I'm not part of the group,” says Amy Chong, a 29-year-old user-experience researcher in San Francisco.

In some workplaces, people have used technology to gently push back against the gender-neutral guys so that they themselves don’t have to speak up. A group of government employees wrote a custom response for the messaging app Slack that would have a bot ask questions like “Did you mean friends?” or “Did you mean you all?” whenever a user wrote “Hey guys”; a Spotify employee embraced the idea, and the professional network Ladies Get Paid has a similar feature in its Slack group of some 30,000 members.

As these examples indicate, there’s additional scrutiny these days on communications that happen within or emanate from organizations. This is likely why, after I put out calls for opinions on guys, I heard from many people who worked in education or customer-facing jobs. I heard from one teacher who switched to using folks after thinking about the inclusive-learning environment he’d like to create, and another who opted for peeps or scholars. Similarly, an employee at an outdoor-goods store told me that her company’s human-resources department had encouraged the use of more-inclusive terms when addressing customers. “Folks and y’all were determined to be more acceptably neutral and you guys was asked to be toned down,” she said.

Many people are trying to phase guys out of their vocabulary in social settings as well as at work. Coby Joseph, a 26-year-old urban planner currently living in the San Francisco Bay Area, told me that he no longer uses the term after considering “how much of our language centers men”; he found guys “lazy and inconsiderate” and stopped using it four or five years ago, except in cases when he’s communicating with people whom he knows identify as male.

This crowd of guys-objectors is not alone historically. People have been resisting the term for decades, and perhaps the most passionate opponent of the word is Sherryl Kleinman, a former professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In a 2002 essay in the journal Qualitative Sociology, she wrote about the problem with male-default terms such as “chairman,” “congressman,” and “mankind.” Kleinman saw them together as “another indicator—and, more importantly, a reinforcer—of a system in which ‘man’ in the abstract and men in the flesh are privileged over women.”

She reserved a special disapproval for “you guys,” which she considered the “most insidious” of these phrases, and with the help of former students made a small card that anyone could print out and, for instance, leave behind at a restaurant to communicate their dislike of the term to a waiter who had used it. “When you’re talking to a group of customers, gender doesn’t really matter, so why not replace ‘you guys’ with ‘you all,’ ‘folks,’ or ‘y’all,” it reads in part.

by Joe Pinsker, The Atlantic | Read more:

Image: DI Studio/Shutterstock/The Atlantic

Much Ado About Nothing

Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson confirm high-stakes, winner-takes-all match

The story broke—if you want to use that word—late last week: Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson are negotiating to play a $10 million “winner-take-all” match. The reason “winner-take-all,” is in quotation marks is because you can be sure that, if the deal comes off, both players will make money. The prize money might be winner-take-all but there will be plenty of money for both players in appearance fees and, perhaps, a percentage of the TV rights and the corporate money that would be on the table.

Here’s another thing: It’s meaningless, unless you think that exhibition golf is something to pant over the way one online golf writer did when he wrote this past weekend: “This will be the golf event of the year.”

No, the golf event of the year will be the Ryder Cup. Right behind will be the four majors. Then the PGA Tour playoffs and all the real events on tour where there’s actually something at stake.

That doesn’t mean the event won’t get a high TV rating—it will because sports fans love big names and because there is still a fascination with everything Woods does among most of the golf media and many golf fans.

There’s nothing wrong with exhibition golf—it’s been part of the landscape forever. Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf—especially the old version with Jimmy Demaret and Gene Sarazen doing the announcing—was, in fact, wonderful. The old CBS Golf Classic, when the late, great Frank Chirkinian came up with the idea to mic the players, was a lot of fun to watch during the winter when there was snow on the ground outside.

Even the Skins Game was worthwhile at the beginning because of the big names who came to play. When it died though, it did so for one major reason: People realized there was really nothing at stake; corporate America was paying the players. It wasn’t as if the other players were taking out their wallets to pay Fred Couples off on the 18th green.

There were also the Woods prime-time exhibitions played against guys like David Duval and Sergio Garcia when he was TIGER WOODS. Those mercifully ended after a couple of years.

Woods and Mickelson have both said they want to play for an amount that makes the other one “uncomfortable.” How is it uncomfortable if you aren’t playing for YOUR OWN MONEY? Remember Lee Trevino’s line about pressure? He always said real pressure was having to make a putt for $1,000 when you had about $10 in your wallet. That’s pressure.

If Woods and Mickelson each put up $5 million—even though that amount wouldn’t come close to breaking either one—there would be some real pressure. But they’re not going to do that and both will get paid to show up.

So where’s the pressure? (...)

Woods’ return this year has been a mixed blessing for golf. His presence has certainly spiked ratings, especially in those events where he’s contended on the weekends. But it has also meant that a lot of very good stories—like the two guys who have won majors this year—have been largely overlooked.

The irony in this is that if Woods and Mickelson had ever had a REAL rivalry, an exhibition like this wouldn’t be looked at as that big a deal.

The fact is, Woods—who is five-and-a-half years younger than Mickelson—had already won eight of his 14 majors by the time Mickelson won his first of five. The two never really battled down the stretch man-a-mano at a major. There was never a Nicklaus-Palmer playoff like at Oakmont in 1962 or Nicklaus-Trevino at Merion in 1971 or the three classic Watson-Nicklaus duels (Masters ’77; Open Championship ’77; U.S. Open ’82).

The rivalry was more about their differing personalities and about the very real fact that they didn’t like one another. Now, they’re buddies. Or, at the very least, two businessmen who get along well enough to know a gold mine when they see it.

by John Feinstein, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: Sam Greenwood/Getty Images

[ed. See also: $10m Tiger Woods v Phil Mickelson showdown would be in poor taste.]

What I Miss: A List

by Liana Finck, Catapult | Read more:

Image: Liana Finck
[ed. See also: The Moment Your Life Crashes and Burns: On Divorce, Injury, and Questions Without Answers.]

Brett Amory, Waiting 222, 2014
via:

Hume the Humane

Socrates died by drinking hemlock, condemned to death by the people of Athens. Albert Camus met his end in a car that wrapped itself around a tree at high speed. Nietzsche collapsed into insanity after weeping over a beaten horse. Posterity loves a tragic end, which is one reason why the cult of David Hume, arguably the greatest philosopher the West has ever produced, never took off.

While Hume was lying aged 65 on his deathbed at the end of a happy, successful and (for the times) long life, he told his doctor: ‘I am dying as fast as my enemies, if I have any, could wish, and as easily and cheerfully as my best friends could desire.’ Three days before he died, on 25 August 1776, probably of abdominal cancer, his doctor could still report that he was ‘quite free from anxiety, impatience, or low spirits, and passes his time very well with the assistance of amusing books’.

When the end came, Dr Black reported that Hume ‘continued to the last perfectly sensible, and free from much pain or feelings of distress. He never dropped the smallest expression of impatience; but when he had occasion to speak to the people about him, always did it with affection and tenderness … He died in such a happy composure of mind, that nothing could exceed it.’

In his own lifetime Hume’s reputation was mainly as a historian. His career as a philosopher started rather inauspiciously. His first precocious attempt at setting out his comprehensive new system of philosophy, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), published when he was 26, ‘fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots’, as he later recalled, with self-deprecating exaggeration.

Over time, however, his standing has grown to the highest level. A few years ago, thousands of academic philosophers were asked which non-living philosopher they most identified with. Hume came a clear first, ahead of Aristotle, Kant and Wittgenstein. Scientists, who often have little time for philosophy, often make an exception for Hume. Even the biologist Lewis Wolpert, who says philosophers are ‘very clever but have nothing useful to say whatsoever’ makes an exception for Hume, admitting that at one stage he ‘fell in love’ with him.

Yet the great Scot remains something of a philosopher’s philosopher. There have been no successful popular books on him, as there have been for the likes of Montaigne, Nietzsche, Socrates, Wittgenstein and the Stoics. Their quotes, not his, adorn mugs and tea towels, their faces gaze down from posters. Hume hasn’t ‘crossed over’ from academic preeminence to public acclaim.

The reasons why this is so are precisely the reasons why it ought not to be. Hume’s strengths as a person and a thinker mean that he does not have the kind of ‘brand’ that sells intellectuals. In short, he is not a tragic, romantic figure; his ideas do not distil into an easy-to-summarise ‘philosophy of life’; and his distaste for fanaticism of any kind made him too sensible and moderate to inspire zealotry in his admirers.

Hume had at least two opportunities to become a tragic hero and avoid the cheerful end he eventually met. When he was 19, he succumbed to what was known as ‘the disease of the learned’, a melancholy that we would today call depression. However, after around nine months, he realised that this was not the inevitable fate of the wise but the result of devoting too much time to his studies. Hume realised that to remain in good health and spirits, it was necessary not only to study, but to exercise and to seek the company of friends. As soon as he started to do this he regained his cheer and kept it pretty much for the rest of his life.

This taught him an important lesson about the nature of the good life. As he later wrote in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748): ‘The mind requires some relaxation, and cannot always support its bent to care and industry.’ Philosophy matters, but it is not all that matters, and although it is a good thing, one can have too much of it. ‘Abstruse thought and profound researches I prohibit,’ says Hume, ‘and will severely punish, by the pensive melancholy which they introduce, by the endless uncertainty in which they involve you.’ The life ‘most suitable to the human race’ is a ‘mixed kind’ in which play, pleasure and diversion matter as well as what are thought of as the ‘higher’ pursuits. ‘Be a philosopher,’ advised Hume, ‘but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.’

In 1770, Hume was also presented with an opportunity for martyrdom, in somewhat bathetic circumstances. The Nor’ Loch in Edinburgh, where Princes Street Gardens now stands, was being drained as part of the expansion of the city. Walking across it one day, Hume fell into the bog that still remained. He cried for help but unfortunately for him, the women who heard him recognised him as ‘the great infidel’ and were not inclined to save him. Hume reasonably pointed out that all Christians should help anyone irrespective of their beliefs, but their understanding of the parable of the Good Samaritan was not as up to scratch as his and they refused to save him unless he became a Christian there and then, reciting the Lord’s Prayer and the creed.

A Socrates would perhaps have refused and died in the name of truth. Hume, however, was not going to allow the stupidity of others to cut his own life short, so he did what any sensible person should do: he went along with their request without any intention of keeping his promise.

In this he was following the example of the only other philosopher to rival Hume for all-time greatness: Aristotle. Here is another thinker whose stock among cognoscenti couldn’t be higher, but who has failed to capture the public’s imagination (although Edith Hall’s recent book Aristotle’s Way (2018) is trying to change that). Not coincidentally, I think, Aristotle also refused to play the martyr. Like Socrates, he was condemned to death for impiety. Also like Socrates, he had the opportunity to flee the city to safety. Unlike Socrates, that is exactly what he did. So while everyone knows how Socrates died, few know that Aristotle, like Hume, died in his 60s, probably also of stomach cancer.

It is somewhat perverse that the attractiveness of a philosophy seems to be directly correlated with how miserable its author’s life was. However, that is not the only reason why there are few self-ascribed Humeans outside academe. Hume’s philosophy does not add up to an easily digestible system, a set of rules for living. Indeed, Hume is best known for three negative theses.

by Julian Baggini, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Petra Eriksson at Handsome Frank
[ed. See also (recommended): Defining Philosophy.]

The Millennial Socialists Are Coming

In May, three young progressive women running for the state Legislature in Pennsylvania, each endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, won decisive primary victories over men heavily favored by the political establishment. Two of the women, Summer Lee, 30, and Sara Innamorato, 32, ousted incumbents, the distant cousins Dom Costa and Paul Costa, members of an iconic Pennsylvania political family.

Elizabeth Fiedler, 37, announced her run three months after giving birth to her second child, and she had a nursery in her Philadelphia campaign office so other parents could drop off their kids before canvassing shifts. Talking to voters, she spoke of depending on Medicaid and CHIP for her kids’ health insurance, and of the anxiety she felt during two weeks when their insurance lapsed.

Lee was open about the more than $200,000 in student loans that have weighed on her since graduating from law school, which gave her a visceral sense, she told me, of the “need for free, quality education for everybody.” (An African-American woman running in a largely white district, she ended up with 68 percent of the vote.) Innamorato spoke about how her father’s opioid addiction had pushed her and her mother from the middle class. “I’ve lived the struggles of my district,” she told me.

Their races were part of a grass-roots civic renewal that is happening across this country, something that is, for me, the sole source of optimism in this very dark time. Marinating in the news in New York City, I’m often sick with despair. An authoritarian president of dubious legitimacy and depraved character is poised to remake America for generations with a second Supreme Court pick. The federal government is a festival of kleptocratic impunity. Kids the same age as my own are ripped from their migrant parents.

But all over the nation, people, particularly women, are working with near supernatural energy to rebuild democracy from the ground up, finding ways to exercise political power however they can. For the middle-aged suburbanites who are the backbone of the anti-Trump resistance, that often means shoring up the Democratic Party. For younger people who see Donald Trump’s election as the apotheosis of a rotten political and economic system, it often means trying to remake that party as a vehicle for democratic socialism. (...)

On Twitter, Trump has fantasized about a red wave that will sweep even more Republicans into power in November and reinforce his rule. But the real red wave may be democratic socialism’s growing political influence, especially among young people. “She really showed that you can run on these issues and win,” Maria Svart, national director of the Democratic Socialists of America, said about Ocasio-Cortez’s platform, which includes Medicare for All, abolishing the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, and a federal jobs guarantee.

The D.S.A., to which Ocasio-Cortez belongs, is the largest socialist organization in America. Its growth has exploded since the 2016 election — when, of course, avowed democratic socialist Bernie Sanders ran in the Democratic primary — from 7,000 members to more than 37,000. It’s an activist group rather than a political party, working with Democrats in the electoral realm while also agitating against injustice from the outside.

Many of the D.S.A.’s goals, reflected in Ocasio-Cortez’s platform, are indistinguishable from those of progressive democrats. But if the D.S.A. is happy to work alongside liberals, its members are generally serious about the “socialist” part of democratic socialist. Its constitution envisions “a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial equality and non-oppressive relationships.”

Talk of popular control of the means of production is anathema to many older Democrats, even very liberal ones. It plays a lot better with the young; one recent survey shows that 61 percent of Democrats between 18 and 34 view socialism positively. The combination of the Great Recession, the rising cost of education, the unreliability of health insurance and the growing precariousness of the workplace has left young people with gnawing material insecurity. They have no memory of the widespread failure of Communism, but the failures of capitalism are all around them. (...)

Indeed, while there’s a lot of talk about an ideological civil war among Democrats, on the ground, boundaries seem more fluid. In Pennsylvania recently, I met with moderate suburban resistance activists who’d volunteered for Innamorato, thrilled to support a young woman who could help revitalize the Democratic Party.

Barry Rush is a 63-year-old retiree who used to vote for both Democrats and Republicans, but who, horrified by Trump, now devotes himself full time to a liberal group called Progress PA. His main concern is electing Democrats — “I’m gonna pull the Smurf lever till this gets fixed,” he says of voting blue — and he knows that the Democratic Party needs young people. He was heartened by all the millennials at Innamorato’s victory celebration: “There were 500 kids there!” he said. It gave him hope for his grandkids.

The young members of the D.S.A., meanwhile, are hopeful because their analysis helps them make sense of the Trump catastrophe. They often seem less panicked about what is happening in America right now than liberals are, because they believe they know why our society is coming undone, and how it can be rebuilt.

“The Trump disaster is that everyone feels threatened individually, and feels like they have to fight Trump and fight this administration,” Arielle Cohen, the Pittsburgh D.S.A.’s 29-year-old co-chair, told me as I sat with her and two other chapter leaders in a small coffee shop in the city’s East End. “And socialists are saying, this has actually been going on for a long time. It’s not just Trump. It’s not just who’s in office.”

There is a strange sort of comfort in this perspective; the socialists see themselves as building the world they want to live in decades in the future rather than just scrambling to avert catastrophe in the present.

by Michelle Goldberg, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Seth Wenig/Associated Press

[ed. I wonder how many people who profess to be against socialism actually understand the differences between it and communism (or capitalism for that matter). See here and here and here. It's the natural yin to neoliberalism's yang.]

Contemplating Woman Machine by Server Demirtaş
via:

Iggy Pop and Anthony Bourdain
via:
[ed. Bonus:]

How to Completely Delete Facebook From Your Life

[ed. It ain't easy.]

Buh-bye, Facebook. It's been real.

So you've had it with endless scrolling through the News Feed, notifications that wake you up in the middle of the night, memories that remind you how little your life has changed over the years, and groups that are just too big and you don't even know why you joined in the first place.

In short, you want to delete Facebook from your life.

It's a big decision, and it can be pretty scary, but we assure you: It can be done.

Before you start, though, think long and hard on whether you want to delete or merely deactivate your Facebook account.

Deactivating Facebook is fairly easy and painless. If you do it, your Timeline and other info will disappear from Facebook — but only until you reactivate your account. Yes, this means all your data will remain stored somewhere on Facebook's servers.

Deleting Facebook means you can never access your account again or retrieve any of your content or data. That means you need to take additional steps to remove traces of your Facebook data (as well as preserve it for yourself) before you delete your account.

To deactivate your account, follow these steps:

1. Click on the down arrow in the upper right corner of Facebook and click on Settings
2. Click on General
3. Click on Manage Account
4. Click on Deactivate your account
5. Enter your Facebook password and confirm deactivation

Yup, it's that easy. You're now gone from Facebook, but as we said, it's just a temporary measure that doesn't really delete your data on the service. You've just deactivated your Facebook account. To permanently erase yourself from Facebook, you'll need to delete your account altogether.

But, before you do that, it's prudent to take a few additional steps.

You may be done with Facebook, but you probably want to keep the data you've amassed on the service. Think about it: Posts, photos, videos, messages, likes, list of friends — it's all potentially valuable, and it really doesn't hurt to preserve it. To back up your data, do the following:

1. Open Facebook settings
2. Click on Your Facebook Information
3. Click on Download Your Information

Here, you'll be able to choose the date range, what types of data you'd like to backup, and media quality. Our advice: Just keep it all, and leave the media quality on high.

You can also choose between a HTML format, which will make the file easier to view, and JSON format, which will make it easier to import the data into another service (yes, it's quite possible that there will be another popular social network after Facebook one day). Now, click on "Create File," and store the resulting file safely.

This may sound a little paranoid, but getting rid of any trace of your existence on Facebook is harder than you think and requires more steps than just hitting that delete button. So before you do so, we suggest you do the following three steps, and an optional fourth step:

1. Remove associations between third party apps and Facebook
2. Turn off Facebook platform
3. Check how much of your data is held by third party apps
4. Clear your Facebook history

Parts 1) and 2) are easy, and consist of the following:

1. Go to Settings
2. Click Apps and Websites,
3. Check all apps and then clicking "Remove."

To turn of Facebook's platform, do this:

1. Go to Settings
2. Click on "Edit" under "Apps, Websites and Games"
3. Click on "Turn Off."

Important: Facebook might be the only way you can log in into some third-party apps (such as Tinder) and websites. Make sure you check those services and switch to a different type of login (email and password, for example) before you cut all ties to Facebook.

Check how much of your data is held by third-party apps

Now comes the tough part.

by Stan Schroeder, Mashable | Read more:
Images: Stan Schroeder and Bob Al-Greene
[ed. I can see real value in some kind of app that would do all this for you. Probably be sued out of business in a micro-second.]