Tiger in Twilight

Tiger Woods still has the most famous silhouette in sports, even after all these years.

From behind, the V-shaped back that tapers to the same 32-inch waist. From the front, the same muscular arms gripping a club, right hand over left, in that quiet moment before he coils. Relaxed in the fairway, one hand resting atop a club, the other on a hip, one foot crossed over the other.

All of them classically, identifiably Tiger Woods. Time and age haven’t altered the outline.

Woods is 42 now. He has not won a tournament in five years, a major in 10. He thought as recently as a year ago that he might never play competitive golf again because he could barely stand up. Golf would have to soldier on with stars named Dustin and Justin and Brooks. None of them Tiger, or anything like him.

Yet here he is, Tiger in twilight, and he looks the same, mostly acts the same, and is finally playing somewhat like the man everyone remembers, back in those good years before health and scandal took an ax to his growing legacy.

He even reintroduced the celebratory uppercut on the 18th green at the P.G.A. Championship in August, puncturing the steamy St. Louis air, and it was strange only because he did not win. But even in second place, it signaled that he was back.

He knew it. The swelling galleries and television audiences knew it. Those who started wearing red T-shirts with the silhouette of his uppercut and the words “Make Tiger Great Again,” they knew it, too.

Funny, that borrowed allusion. Woods rejoins the cultural landscape in 2018, a far different time and place than when he was last great — everywhere but a golf course, at least. That his re-emergence comes in the Age of Trump is a delicious coincidence, wrought with complexity that Woods would rather avoid.

A golfer who still may be the most famous multicultural athlete on the planet. A president cleaving the country on cultural and racial lines. Occasional golf partners, Woods designing a course that will have Trump’s name on it, Woods evading the subject of their relationship — “We all must respect the office” — while Trump tweets his appreciation.

Somehow, none of that matters. Not here. Not if Woods can help it.

He comes back into view with his familiar walk — purposeful, confident, shoulders up, eyes locked forward. Nobody walks like him, just like nobody swings like him or stands like him.

“Tiger!” cry the voices, too many to count. Nobody calls him “Woods,” even in middle age.

Fans freeze and go quiet as he gets close and stops, as if the Sunday school teacher just walked in. They aim eyes and cameras at him. That’s one change from a few years ago — everyone with a cellphone, as many cameras as faces, practically.

Zoom in. The only visible sign that he is older, beyond the faintest hint of age in his boyish face, comes after he completes the 18th hole.

The familiar applause carries him off the green, and he removes his “TW”-branded cap for a few moments, as golfers do as a gesture of decorum.

His hairline is in slow retreat. It is a thinning ring, like a faded halo.

More Approachable, But Better?

The working angle of his latest act, filled with presumption as much as proof, is that Woods is different now — humbled by the lost years, appreciative of the ongoing support, relieved at the opportunity to be here again.

But is he different? Maybe he’s more relaxed. Chattier during a round, though Woods disagrees. Veteran reporters and close friends say he’s lightened up, more like what they see in private. The testiness that used to accompany bad days has dissolved.

That all seems true, if you’re looking for it. Maybe it’s age and appreciation. Maybe the stakes and expectations haven’t been high enough yet.

To trail Woods at a golf tournament each day, from the moment he arrives to the moment he leaves, is to see two sides of a man who works hard to show only one. There is a person and a persona.

by John Branch, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Sam Hodgson

[ed. Sorry for the lack of posts lately. I'm in Alaska. You should probably just come back next week (or check out the Archives). Saw a bumper sticker yesterday: 'I support the rights of gay married couples to protect their marijuana plants with guns.' Pretty much sums up the local politics.]

Local News is Dying

Local News Is Dying, and It’s Taking Small Town America With It

Image: Joe Sohm/Getty

The Calm Before the Storm

A few times over the last month I’ve had the sense that I may actually struggle to acclimate to a post-Trump politics. That doesn’t mean I don’t want it or look forward to it. As basically every sensible person has argued, the rise of Trump has been a catastrophe for the United States and every day he remains in office inflicts greater damage. But recently I’ve been thinking back to the Obama years and – crazy as they often seemed – how comparatively placid they were, even though they were not really placid at all. But the sheer intensity, drama, bad-acting nature of Trump’s presidency is in an entirely different category.

As I wrote before Trump even became President, living with a Trump presidency, at least if your work is politics, is comparable to living in the home of an abuser or someone with a severe personality disorder. People who live in those settings develop tools, coping mechanisms to handle that level of emotional turbulence, aggression, craziness. They can require a degree of unlearning once they find a more healthy environment. The tools you develop living in close proximity to an abuser are usually mal-adaptive when the abuser is no longer present.

I should state explicitly that the Trump presidency is of course an entirely different experience for those who are its direct targets: undocumented immigrants as the central focus of Trump’s aggression, all immigrants, all non-whites, women, in differing degrees members of the LGBT community. But the ‘living in close proximity’ to an abuser still applies to a lesser degree to everyone who doesn’t view Trump as their champion. Indeed, living in close proximity to an abuser has an effect on those who are not even the primary targets of abuse.

I say all this as a preliminary to saying that I think it is all about to get, if not worse, than more intense, accelerated and more kinetic.

Part of this is the traditional kick off of the midterm election cycle proper, which is Labor Day. We’re gearing up for the two months’ sprint to election day, with all that usually entails. But there’s something more than President Trump on the ballot. Roughly since the middle of August both President Trump’s approval and the so-called congressional generic ballot have both begun to move clearly against the Republicans. The trend is clearer with the President than for the Congress. But is clear in both cases. It appears to be outside the realm of mere noise. Here’s the best place to visualize the trend for the President and Congress. History tells us that the trend in early September is usually, though not always, decisive.

This means more than that it looks likely, but by no means certain, Democrats will have a good cycle. There’s an increasing recognition that a change in control of the House will create a countervailing source of constitutional power in Washington – something that has been entirely lacking for the first two years of Trump’s presidency, in which Congress has deferred entirely to Trump’s power. This is addressed in shorthand as the threat of impeachment. But as I explained here that is both misleading as prognostication and misguided as strategy: the real issue, the real threat to the President is broad, public and constitutionally-empowered investigations, ones that would expose all manner of wrongdoing which has taken place in 2017 and 2018, as well as during the corrupted 2016 election. Over time, those revelations will likely trigger further criminal prosecutions and threaten the kind of collapse of public support which could lead to removal from office.

That prospect also comes as the Mueller probe appears to be accelerating. We don’t know precisely what is happening inside the probe. But we can best read its progress through President Trump’s actions and affect, which have become more threatened, antic and untethered. He is the most readable of men. Trump has already signaled that after the midterm election he will dismiss his White House Counsel and Attorney General, likely for the purpose of issuing obstructionist pardons and dismissing or defanging the Special Counsel investigation.

The United States has been gripped by a profound polarization for almost two years. Yes, the polarization predated Trump’s presidency. But having a maximalist representative of the right in power in the White House has intensified it massively. We’ve had public shouting matches, one-sided legislative fights, political mobilizations and protests. But in a constitutional sense the battle has really yet to be joined. The Courts have played some role restraining Trump. But that has been at the margins. Indeed, Trump’s additions to the Supreme Court signal that he is likely to be backed at the highest level, at least on the ground of presidential power if not immunity to the law. The President has vast powers which are matched, or potentially matched, by Congress. But Congress has been AWOL in the face of President Trump’s abuses and lawlessness for going on two years. There’s a decent chance that is about to change. It will change just as the Special Counsel investigation appears to be arriving at President Trump’s inner circle.

All of this suggests that the pace of events is likely to accelerate and become more kinetic, volatile and potentially dangerous.

by Josh Marshall, TPM |  Read more:

Tod Wizon, Points of Release, 1983
via:

The Heartbreakers at Chain Restaurants

Who is to blame for fattening up Americans and killing their hearts? McDonald’s, it seems, is not even in the running. In fact, when you compare the fare under the Golden Arches with many of the dishes served at chain restaurants around the country, a Big Mac with large fries and soda begins to sound like health food.

Hungry for a hearty breakfast? You could — if you dare to test the resilience of your heart — try the Cheesecake Factory’s Breakfast Burrito: “warm tortilla filled with scrambled eggs, bacon, chicken chorizo, cheese, crispy potatoes, avocado, peppers and onions, over spicy ranchero sauce.” Nutritional information: 2,730 calories (more than a day’s worth, so I hope you’ll skip lunch and dinner), 4,630 milligrams of sodium (two days’ worth) and 73 grams of saturated fat (more than three days’ worth).

You’d have to eat seven Sausage McMuffins from McDonald’s to equal the cardiovascular and waistline damage done by one burrito, according to the latest Xtreme Eating Awards bestowed by the Nutrition Action Healthletter, published by the nonprofit advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest, in Washington.

Or maybe you’d prefer another 2018 awardee to start your day: Chili’s Honey-Chipotle Crispers & Waffles that dishes up Belgian waffles topped with battered fried chicken, bacon, jalapeños and ancho-chili ranch sauce and fries with honey-chipotle sauce. With 2,510 calories, 40 grams of saturated fat, 4,480 milligrams of sodium and 105 grams (26 teaspoons) of sugar, it’s like eating five Krispy Kreme glazed doughnuts with 30 McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets and five packets of barbecue sauce.

Perhaps you’re a breakfast skipper and would rather dig into a super-hearty lunch like the Cheesecake Factory’s newest version of pizza: “Chopped chicken breast coated with bread crumbs, covered with marinara sauce and lots of melted cheese,” and get this, “topped with angel hair pasta in an Alfredo cream sauce.” It adds up to 1,870 calories, 55 grams of saturated fat and 3,080 milligrams of sodium. That’s like eating four pieces of Popeyes fried chicken and four biscuits, Nutrition Action calculated.

I suspect, though, that Red Lobster’s Create Your Own Combination shrimp meal is the all-time Xtreme Eating winner, an award bestowed on it in 2015. It delivers a whopping 2,710 calories and 6,530 milligrams of sodium; for that amount you could down a KFC meal of an entire eight-piece bucket of fried chicken, four side orders of mashed potatoes with gravy, four pieces of corn on the cob and eight packets of buttery spread.

For comparison’s sake, you might keep in mind that 2,000 calories is what the average person should be eating for an entire day including snacks, not just at a single meal.

But there’s some good news lurking behind all those extra calories and artery-damaging nutrients. After long delays, as of last May chain restaurants with 20 or more outlets must post calories on menus and menu boards for all their offerings, a regulation in the Affordable Care Act of 2010. (A number of big chains, including Panera Bread and Au Bon Pain, did not wait to be required to post calories, and in 2012 McDonald’s became the first fast-food company to do so.)

Although I once heard a Starbucks customer complain “Do I really have to know the calories in my Frappuccino?” there’s a better chance that, as a result of the menu listings, 1) diners who care will have an easier time and a greater incentive to choose lighter fare, and 2) restaurants may start competing to offer lower-calorie options of similar dishes.

A McDonald’s customer trying to decide between a Big Mac and a Double Quarter Pounder with cheese might be swayed by the fact that the Big Mac has 200 fewer calories. But diners faced with the seemingly healthier choice of the Southwest Salad with Crispy Chicken might be more tempted by the Double Cheeseburger, which has 10 fewer calories than the salad.

In New York City, menu calorie postings have been required since 2008, and a study by the Stanford Graduate School of Business found that Starbucks customers ordered food with 6 percent fewer calories, on average, as a result. This may not sound like much, but over time such small changes add up; this country’s obesity epidemic can be explained by a mere 100 extra calories a day for each person.

by Jane E. Brody, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Gracia Lam
[ed. See also: Good Fats, Bad Fats.]

The Monarchy of Fear

Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, appointed in the Law School and Philosophy Department. She is an Associate in the Classics Department, the Divinity School, and the Political Science Department, a Member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and a Board Member of the Human Rights Program.

Professor Nussbaum is internationally renowned for her work in Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, feminist philosophy, political philosophy, and philosophy and the arts and is actively engaged in teaching and advising students in these subjects. She has received numerous awards and honorary degrees and is the author of many books and articles. Here she discusses her latest book ‘The Monarchy of Fear.’

3:AM: You’ve written about the emotion of fear in US politics today. First can you sketch for us what you take this fear to be about, both on the left and the right?

Martha Nussbaum: On the right, fear is about the “American Dream,” the idea that your children will do better than you did. Lower middle-class income stagnation and the way that automation and technological change have changed the nature of employment — while college education is ever more costly — lead to a sense of helplessness in that group, manifest in declining health status. On the left, people had a sense that we were moving in the right direction under Obama, but were still very worried about economic inequality. Now, under Trump, people are much more worried about that, and worried anew about race and gender issues that seemed to be doing better before.

3:AM: So why do you say that fear is particularly bad for democratic government rather than all forms of government? Is it because you see it as eroding trust, and democracies need trust more than other forms of government?

MN: Exactly. In an absolute monarchy, the monarch thrives on fear, and usually finds many ways to engineer fear. But in a democracy we need to look one another in the eye as equals and to work together for common goals. This requires trust, the willingness to be vulnerable to what other people do. If I’m always defending myself against you I do not trust you. Trust breeds deceit and defensiveness rather than common efforts to solve problems. So the infantile reflex of running for comfort to an all-powerful figure is a great danger to democracy, as is the flip side of that fear, also infantile, the need to control other people. Babies can’t work with other people, they can only enforce their will by yelling. That is why Freud referred to the infant as “His Majesty the Baby.” Not a good model for democratic citizenship.

3:AM: Why is it fear that you pick out as the main emotion? Why not anger, for example?

MN: I devote a lot of space in the book to other emotions: a chapter each on anger, disgust, envy, and hope. But my new idea is that fear, which is likely the earliest emotion genetically and the most primitive in evolutionary terms, lies behind all the others and infuses them, rendering them politically toxic. When we feel terrified and powerless, for example, we often try to reestablish control by blaming and scapegoating others. A great deal of political anger is fed by fear. So what I do is to separate a healthy aspect of anger, namely protesting real wrongs, from an unhealthy aspect, retributive zeal for pain. I show how Dr. King made that same separation when he asked the angry members of his movement to “purify” and “channelize” their anger: they ought to protest, but not in a spirit of retributive payback. Rather their protest should look forward with hope and faith to common work.

3:AM: And what’s the connection between the emotions of envy, hatred and anger in politics?

MN: Envy (and everyone should look at John Rawls’s marvelous analysis of it, one of the most neglected parts of A Theory of Justice) is a painful emotion caused by noticing that others have the good things of life and you don’t, AND you feel despair and powerlessness about getting them by your own efforts. You therefore want to spoil the other party’s enjoyment of those good things. That emotion often leads to aggression, but it is not the same as anger, since anger requires the thought that the other person has done something bad to you. A good way to see this difference is to think of Aaron Burr, both in history and in Miranda’s wonderful depiction in Hamilton.

Here’s Hamilton, creative and beloved, “in the room where it happens.” And Burr feels powerless to get into that charmed circle by his own efforts. Hamilton hasn’t done anything to him, so he has no basis for anger, but he really wants Hamilton to disappear. The challenge to the duel was so odd because it didn’t really have any cogent accusation: it was pure envy. As Rawls says, the way to prevent envy from damaging democracy is, above all, by a social safety net so that everyone is assured of having all sorts of important good things. Then there may still be envy, but it will be much less toxic. But in a climate where fear is rampant, that security won’t be there, and then envy, too, will run wild.

3:AM: The third emotion you connect to anger in politics, alongside anger and envy, is disgust. How do you see the connections?

MN: Disgust is an emotion whose content is a refusal to be contaminated by substances that remind us of our animal mortality. (This is the result of a lot of detailed experimental work by Paul Rozin and others, which I describe in the book.) Its primary objects are feces, most bodily fluids, and corpses. But in every known society these primary disgust-properties, bad smell, decay, hyper-animality, are projected onto some group of people in a way that subordinates them: these are the animals, not we. These people have dirty animal bodies. We can see this reflex in so many different forms — racial hatred of African-Americans, the Indian caste hierarchy, disgust for women’s bodily fluids, and, as I’ve written elsewhere, disgust for gays and lesbians, which has been a primary source of homophobia. This “projective disgust” is already a type of fear, since it is a set of deceptive stratagems to avoid facing the dominant group’s own animality and mortality. And it can aid and abet political hatred, because if you see the other as basically an animal, it is much easier to countenance aggressive actions and policies. We see this sort of fear-driven disgust in today’s discourse about immigrants, in the resurgence of unashamed racial hatred, and in the widespread use of disgust rhetoric to denigrate women.

3:AM: How does your analysis help us understand racism and sexism and misogyny – you argue, for example, for a distinction between sexism and misogyny and find misogyny is much more strongly connected with anger, disgust and envy than just sexism don’t you?

MN: I devote an entire chapter to sexism and misogyny, partly because this was such a prominent theme in the recent campaign, partly because this case shows how fear, anger, disgust, and envy all come together, and partly because an important new book of feminist philosophy, Kate Manne’s Down Girl, had just appeared and I wanted to make her important arguments known to other people. Manne argues that there are two different things, to which she gives the names “sexism” and “misogyny,” aware that this doesn’t perfectly track ordinary usage, but there are two distinct phenomena to which we can somewhat artificially give these two different names. Sexism is a set of beliefs about female inferiority. Misogyny is, by contrast, an enforcement mechanism, a set of practical strategies for keeping women in their place. Her excellent point is that misogyny does not require sexism, and indeed often is all the more pronounced and intense when people sense or know that women are indeed equal in ability: otherwise what need of all the efforts to keep them out?

I accept this distinction, and I also accept one further diagnosis by Manne: that misogyny is driven by a kind of fear-infused anger that women are getting out of their traditional place and claiming men’s place. “They” are taking “our” jobs. The title of the book refers to what you say to an obstreperous dog: “down”, get back in your place. But I say that things are actually more complicated, since misogyny also feeds on envy at women’s astonishing success in education, a worldwide phenomenon, and also on disgust, a time-honored theme in discussion of women’s bodies. Sexism, as you say, is not so connected with any of these things. No reason for anxiety in sexism: if women can’t do X or Y or Z, they just won’t do it. But typically people put up all sorts of artificial barriers to women’s activity, even in sports — think of all the outrage against women who wanted to run marathons! And that was very likely because, deep down, people knew that women COULD run marathons, and maybe those same women would not want to stay at home with ten children.

3:AM: You end on an optimistic note, discussing aspects of hope, love and faith in humanity that are the good emotions we need to guide us rather than the bad ones. What is so nourishing and good about these emotions and how do they important for democratic governments?

MN: Well, they are not good in all circumstances. People with bad causes nourish these same emotions. But if a cause is good, we need hope to energize us. Here I draw on another excellent recent book by the philosopher Adrienne Martin, a philosophical analysis of hope. Again I do not agree with everything, but here’s the basic idea. Hope and fear are understood to be very similar: the Stoics always said that they went together because both relied on attachment to uncertain things. Where you have reason to fear you will have reason to hope. And what Martin contributes is an argument that it isn’t a question of the probabilities. You can have fear even though success is quite likely (think of great actors who have stage fright), and you can have hope even when a loved one’s illness has a very bad prognosis.

The difference is your attitude and how the emotion is bound up with action tendencies. Hope gets you going doing hopeful things. I accept that, and then I turn to Kant. Kant said that we have an obligation to act to make our world better. But in order to get ourselves going we need hope. So, we have an obligation to get ourselves into an attitude of practical hope, to support our efforts to do good. I believe that, and think there are things we can do to shift our perspective from seeing the glass as half empty to seeing it as half full. I suggest that this is always a personal matter but there are “practices of hope” that seem useful to me, some for some people, others for others: the arts, religion, protest movements, Socratic philosophy (a school of respectful interchanges), and various other types of local civic engagement. I also recommend a mandatory national service program for young people, so that our young people, usually so de facto segregated from people who differ by race and class, will go out into their country and learn about it, meanwhile doing useful work such as elder care and child care.o Other countries have tried this, and their problems of social ignorance are usually less troubling than ours.

By love I mean what Dr. King meant: not liking people as friends, but having good will toward them as human beings, even while one may protest against their actions; being ready to work with them for the common good. And by faith I again mean what he meant, an attitude of patient hopeful expectation, not of utopia, but of gradual change for the better.

by Richard Marshall, 3:AM | Read more:
Image: Oxford University Press

Amazon Sets Its Sights on the $88 Billion Online Ad Market

Verizon doesn’t sell its mobile phones or wireless plans over Amazon. Nor does it offer Fios, its high-speed internet service. But Verizon does advertise on Amazon.

On Black Friday last year, when millions of online shoppers took to Amazon in search of deals, a Verizon ad for a Google Pixel 2 phone — buy one and get a second one half off — could be seen blazing across Amazon’s home page. And on July 16, what Amazon calls Prime Day, an event with special deals for its Prime customers, Verizon again ran a variety of ads and special offers for Amazon shoppers, like a mix-and-match unlimited service plan.

Amazon, which has already reshaped and dominated the online retail landscape, is quickly gathering momentum in a new, highly profitable arena: online advertising, where it is rapidly emerging as a major competitor to Google and Facebook.

The push by the giant online retailer means consumers — even Prime customers, who pay $119 a year for access to free shipping as well as streaming music, video and discounts — are likely to be confronted by ads in places where they didn’t exist before.

In late August, some gamers were angered when Twitch, a video game streaming service acquired by Amazon in 2014, said it would soon no longer be ad-free for Prime members unless consumers paid an additional $8.99 a month for a premium service called Twitch Turbo.

Amazon derives the bulk of its annual revenue, forecast to be $235 billion this year, from its e-commerce business, selling everything from books to lawn furniture. Amazon is also a leader in the cloud computing business, with Amazon Web Services, which accounts for around 11 percent of its revenue but more than half of its operating income. But in the company’s most recent financial results, it was a category labeled “other” that caught the attention of many analysts. It mostly consists of revenue from selling banner, display and keyword search-driven ads known as “sponsored products.” That category surged by about 130 percent to $2.2 billion in the first quarter, compared with the same period in 2017.

Those numbers are a pittance for Google and Facebook, which make up more than half of the $88 billion digital ad market. But they come with big and troubling implications for those two giants.

Much of online advertising relies on imprecise algorithms that govern where marketing messages appear, and what impact they have on actual sales. Here, Amazon has a big advantage over its competitors. Thanks to its wealth of data and analytics on consumer shopping habits, it can put ads in front of people when they are more likely to be hunting for specific products and to welcome them as suggestions rather than see them as intrusions.

“Google and Facebook have been slow to create the standards that advertisers want to see,” said Collin Colburn, an analyst at the research and advisory firm Forrester. “They are concerned about what sort of content their ads are going to be placed next to.”

He added, “Amazon is different because it has a much more controlled environment on its e-commerce site where the products are being sold, and Amazon’s reach into the rest of the World Wide Web is pretty small.”

by Julie Creswell, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: John Ueland

[ed. Traveling.]

Southeast Missouri Nail Company Gets Hammered

President Trump’s tariff on steel imports that took effect June 1 has caused a southeast Missouri nail manufacturer to lose about 50% of its business in two weeks. Mid Continent Nail Corporation in Poplar Bluff – the remaining major nail producer in the country – has had to take drastic measures to make ends meet. The company employing 500 people earlier this month has laid off 60 temporary workers. It could slash 200 more jobs by the end of July and be out of business around Labor Day.

During a Finance Committee hearing this week on Capitol Hill, U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, sounded the alarm about the company going downhill and fast.

Mid Continent is one of the largest employers in Butler County and the second largest manufacturer in Poplar Bluff. If push comes to shove, slicing the remaining 440 jobs that pay an average of $12.50 an hour would add to the Bootheel’s struggling reputation marked by several of the poorest counties in the state.

Mid Continent is owned by Mexico-based Deacero. The parent company produces steel and ships the material to its Poplar Bluff plant. Spokesperson Elizabeth Heaton tells Missourinet Deacero is being hit with the 25% tariff for importing steel to its own company.

The manufacturer’s existence in Missouri is riding on whether the federal government will grant a tariff exemption on the steel wire it gets from Mexico. The U.S. Commerce Department is holding the fate of several American companies in its hands. The agency is dealing with a backlog from its more than 20,000 exemption requests.

“Something would have to happen very fast, within days in order for us to know that things were going to improve. We’re hoping that this could get pushed through very quickly,” Heaton says.

The company has also requested a meeting with U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Heaton says.

“There are only about 15 of these companies left and Mid Continent produces about 50% of the nails out of those 15. If you could imagine, if it were to go out of business and that is of course worse case scenario, we want to do everything that we can to make sure that does not happen, that would be a huge blow to that segment of the industry. It’s a big deal, not just for Missouri and for the economy there, but for the whole industry.”

by Alisa Nelson, MissouriNet |  Read more:

Image: Mid Continent Nail Corp

[ed. Who could imagine?]

Kazuki Okuda
via:

Why Did We Care About John McCain?

As John McCain moved toward the end of his terminal illness, I thought about how I would write about him when he died. I have been a great admirer of McCain’s but also a frequent and sometimes vociferous critic. When someone dies we should focus on the best things we can say about them. But we should, especially after a respectful interval, account for the fullness not only of their lives but the fullness of what we said about them while they lived. This isn’t simply a matter of not glorifying someone in death beyond what they merited in life. It’s also a matter of holding ourselves accountable.

The commentaries on his life have either praised McCain’s unique virtues or pointed out all the ways he never lived up to his billing. For me, the most interesting question to ask is what made McCain such a towering figure in our public life in the first place. Here I mean the term not in an evaluative but in a strictly descriptive sense. He was a towering figure, whether we think he should have been or not. McCain did not have a particularly lengthy or distinguished legislative record. The McCain-Feingold campaign finance law is a critical part of his public reputation. But it’s one law and it’s largely been washed away by Citizens United. Senators are not only legislators. They also have a specific constitutional responsibility for the conduct of foreign affairs. The scion of a distinguished military family, that was clearly his real passion. But the invasion of Iraq, the defense and national security decision he is probably most closely tied to — both before and after 9/11 — is now widely seen as a mistake of catastrophic and historic proportions, a fact even he conceded by the end of his life.

It is often said that a President’s first decision is the choice of a Vice President. In this sense, though McCain never became President, this sole presidential decision turned out to be amazingly and consequentially bad. In bringing Sarah Palin to the center of American public life, McCain played a major part in shaping the resentment-fueled culture-war Tea Party extremism of the early Obama years and the politics we now recognize as Trumpism.

Yet, look at the flood of tributes and retrospectives along with the backdraft of critiques in the wake of his death. I can think of no other political figure (and few public figures), other than Ted Kennedy, who was not a President and got anywhere near this sort of response to his passing. It’s not even close. Kennedy served in the Senate for nearly 50 years and was responsible for numerous pieces of high profile legislation. Critically, he was the last surviving Kennedy brother, so his passing brought a close to an era with all that historical mystique and baggage.

To make sense of this question we have to go back to the 1990s when McCain first became the McCain we’ve known for the last quarter century. For most of his first decade in Congress McCain was a garden variety Republican. Elected to the House in 1982, he served two terms before making the jump to the Senate to replace Barry Goldwater in 1986. He was a hard-edged conservative with an irascible reputation. McCain had no history or family ties to Arizona. He spent the years after his release from captivity in Washington. He divorced his first wife in 1980, married Cindy McCain, an Arizona heiress, a few months later and settled in Arizona. Two years later he won a seat in the House. He was a man on the make.

His first decade was unremarkable and indeed worse than unremarkable since he managed to become the sole Republican to win a named part in the Keating Five scandal, a seminal scandal of the era which presaged the sub-prime financial collapse two decades later. But in the 1990s, and especially with the election of Bill Clinton, McCain became a central player in what is probably best seen as a public conversation men of the baby boom generation were having with themselves about ego, sacrifice and the Vietnam War.

A key pivot point came with Bill Clinton’s push to normalize relations with Vietnam, something that as a Democrat who had conspicuously and cagily evaded the draft made him uniquely vulnerable politically. In a much-discussed exchange, McCain promised Clinton that if he normalized relations he would back him publicly, leveraging his credibility as a veteran and a POW. Clinton did and McCain did. And from this point forward McCain became a symbol of reconciliation, not only about the Vietnam War but also the psychodramas and life experiences of the baby-boomer men who lived through that era.

This was particularly so for men who had not themselves served in Vietnam but found his service and his indisputable sacrifice as a POW something both alien and deeply inspiring. McCain espoused what could seem like an almost archaic form of patriotism but leveraged toward more reconciliation than political division — something that made him seem distinct and attractive compared to the already dominant Gingrich GOP. McCain, of course, was a Vietnam veteran. But it’s important to remember he was a good decade older than the great majority of men who served or didn’t serve in the war. When he returned to the U.S. in 1973 he was a few months shy of his 37th birthday.

Michael Lewis, who was not nearly as prominent a writer as he would become over subsequent decades, likely played a bigger role in birthing this myth of John McCain than any other writer, and perhaps any other person than McCain himself. In the mid-90s he wrote a series of profiles of McCain in a number of different publications. Here is a key one from The New Republic about McCain’s reconciliation with a Vietnam War protester named David Ifshin. Ifshin would later be stricken by a terminal illness. The article revolves around their friendship. Another example is this one from a couple of years later in the New York Times Magazine. Here’s yet another from this genre by James Carroll in The New Yorker.

I should note here that when I use the word “myth” I do not mean it as a fairy tale or cover story. To say something is a myth is not to say it is either true or false. Myths are stories we tell to make sense of and give meaning to the unorganized facts of existence, which themselves are mute and have nothing to tell us. As humans, we can only really understand things through stories. Read those profiles and you’ll see that there was a lot of reality to the story they tell.

The key point in my mind is that the origin of the McCain myth, his towering figure-ness, is this very particular fact: through his story and his actions he had a profound appeal to a generation of men who had guilty or angry or unresolved experiences with the Vietnam War and who were, at this point in McCain’s career, themselves moving into mid-life. (Bill Clinton turned 50 in 1996.) Soon after McCain started to show a political heterodoxy he’d seldom shown much evidence of in the past, particularly in his at first quixotic efforts on behalf of campaign finance reform with former Senator Russ Feingold. Again, he identified with conservative values but seemed unchained from the venality of his own party. This set the stage for his 2000 presidential run which is in many ways the centerpiece of his career. It was always a kind of corny enterprise with his “Straight Talk Express.” But the key here is something that is critical to understanding McCain. Reporters simply liked him. He broke from character, didn’t mind upsetting orthodoxies, even possibly relished it. He was accessible and was always good for a snappy quote. He was also clearly a charmer, something you can see from all the tributes from reporters. This was also clearly a pose and a posture he most enjoyed.

This part of the story is so well known there’s not much for me to add to it. The more interesting point is that after that campaign, the sting of the defeat and what he regarded as dirty tricks against him accelerated his move in an increasingly heterodox direction. People rightly remember his staunch support for the Iraq War. They remember less the fact that he was one of the few Republicans who voted against the Bush tax cut, first in 2001 and again in 2003. There were consistent rumors during Bush’s first term that McCain might switch parties and become a Democrat. It’s never been clear to me how much reality there was to those rumors. But I do know at least that he had real conversations with his friends John Kerry and Joe Biden about doing just that. Whether he was seriously considering it or more humoring or yessing good friends I have no way of telling. The possibility seemed more plausible because a handful of his key advisers did move in this direction.

Of course, McCain didn’t become a Democrat. He remained a Republican. And as the prospect of running for President again came into view he methodically began re-conforming to conservative orthodoxies he’d shunned. When the Bush tax cuts came up again for extension in 2006 he voted for them. In the wake of his death, people have revisited key moments in the 2008 campaign in which he conspicuously refused to tolerate the racist proto-birtherism that would be synonymous with the Republican right during Obama’s presidency. But in a broader sense, McCain’s 2008 effort was a mostly cringe-worthy effort in which he methodically undid or repudiated virtually every heterodox stand or penchant for “straight talk” he’d built his post-90s reputation on. His statements were often canned. He retreated to consultant-speak to make sense of his change of heart on climate change, taxes and a bunch of other issues. The moral was simple. For political power, McCain would once again turn himself into the garden variety Republican politician he’d been for his first decade in Washington. The fact that after all that he lost only made it a sadder spectacle. Throughout Obama’s presidency there were hints of the earlier McCain. But he was mainly back to the conventional Republican of 2008 and years before.

We each have a myth we tell about ourselves. Much of the drama of our lives is played out in how we do or don’t live up to that story we tell, both to ourselves and those around us. For a public figure, this is all the same but played out before a far larger audience. McCain spent a decade and a half building his public myth and then half as many years thoroughly dismantling it. Looking back on McCain’s political life it is hard not to conclude that the public fascination with him was essentially a matter of this conversation baby-boom men have been having for decades about their youth, the Vietnam War and the meaning of their lives. The other is essentially one for Democrats and the reporters whose main political identity is hostility to ideology who were beguiled by his supposed “maverick” status and political heterodoxy — either praising him for it or chiding him for not living up to it.

These folks loved the idea of McCain’s heroism, his sacrifice (all real) and his charm but just wished he wouldn’t support policies they hated. In this sense, it’s hardly surprising that so many Republicans hated McCain. He was a Democrat’s idea of what a Republican should be. For Democrats, being a Republican who consistently voted as Republicans do amounted to a betrayal of who they thought he was supposed to be. But that’s who he was, a fairly conservative Republican. All these contradictions are really to me the root of public fascination with the man, the endless drama of the mismatch between his professed ideals and the actual man. He never really lived up to them but he had enough moments to keep up the tension. He had a deep devotion to country and to service to country. He was an arch-hawk; he was a consistent opponent of torture. He was different and his difference made him interesting and worth listening to.

The public fascination with McCain remains largely an enigma to me, though in many ways I share it. The Myth of McCain as a straight-talking maverick politician was consistently belied by his own actions and votes. I remember him now mostly for that dramatic thumbs down, killing Obamacare repeal in the Senate, leaving Mitch McConnell crestfallen and President Trump enraged. Was it over the human toll of the bill? Its slapdash process? Or simply spite? I’m really not sure. Similarly, I always thought simple anger played a key role in his seeming move to the left during Bush’s first term in office. But somehow his own years of suffering and resilience as a young man remained an anchor, setting him apart from almost every contemporary politician as someone who had experienced and survived something so alien and all but unimaginable to almost all of us. The through-line, as best as I can divine it, through the last two decades was a deep, traditionalist devotion to country, a deep patriotism which for all of McCain’s faults never seemed to be a vehicle for demonizing domestic enemies, something that sets him apart from most of today’s Republican party and certainly from the President who now embodies it.

by Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo |  Read more:

Image: Tobias Hase/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

Anastasia Samoylova, Rainy Windows 2013
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"It Seems Like Iowa in 2007": Beto O'Rourke

By now you’ve probably heard a lot about Beto O’Rourke and his surprisingly durable challenge against Ted Cruz in bright red Texas. You’ve heard about how he’s visited all 254 Texas counties in his Toyota Tundra. You’ve seen videos of him sweating through a button-down shirt at one of his jam-packed town halls. You’ve watched the rangy 45-year-old congressman skateboard through a Whataburger parking lot in Brownsville. And if you’re following the 2018 midterms, you know that O’Rourke only trails Cruz by a single digit while running an unabashedly progressive campaign, making Democrats around the country salivate at the prospect of a blue wave crashing everywhere from Galveston to El Paso.

That’s still a long shot. Texas is Texas, after all. But the hype emerging from the Democrat’s campaign points to something rather obvious: O’Rourke is good at this, way better than most of the Democrats sniffing around the next presidential race from the boring hallways of Capitol Hill. Whether he wins or loses his race—and yes, even if he loses—O’Rourke should be included in every conversation about the 2020 Democratic primary. That’s because, unlike most of the paint-by-numbers politicians in his party, O’Rourke actually understands how politics should be conducted in the Donald Trump era: authentic, full of energy, stripped of consultant-driven sterility, and waged at all times with a social-media-primed video screen in mind. O’Rourke is making a bet that running on his gut and giving voters a clear choice against Cruz, rather than just a mushy alternative, offers not just a path to victory in Texas but an antidote to the entire stupid artifice of American politics in the Trump era.

The most appealing thing about O’Rourke is both delightfully uncomplicated and extremely powerful: he talks about politics like you and your friends do. “I am so sick of the stuff that’s been made safe for politics,” O’Rourke told me earlier this month as we drove in his truck through South Texas, between a pair of town halls in Beeville and Corpus Christi. “It’s so bad. It has no impact. It doesn’t register. It doesn’t excite me. I want to do what excites me. That’s my goal at least.”

“Democrats in Texas have been losing statewide elections for Senate for 30 years,” he said. “So you can keep doing the same things, talk to the same consultants, run the same polls, focus-group drive the message. Or you can run like you’ve got nothing to lose. That’s what my wife, Amy, and I decided at the outset. What do we have to lose? Let’s do this the right way, the way that feels good to us. We don’t have a pollster. Let’s talk about the things that are important to us, regardless of how they poll. Let’s not even know how they poll.”

I was following O’Rourke and Cruz around Texas for an episode of Good Luck America, Snapchat’s political documentary series. Cruz, too, is working hard and not taking the race for granted. He’s accessible to the media and packing in supporters at meat ’n’ threes across the state. Cruz’s theory of the race is that Texas is fundamentally red, that there simply aren’t enough Democrats in the state for him to lose. “There are many more conservatives than liberals, and many more common-sense Texans,” he told me. And he has a point: in modern times, no Democratic candidate has hit more than 42 percent in a statewide election. But O’Rourke’s theory is that he can yank new voters out of the woodwork, and when we arrived in Corpus Christi after our drive, on a muggy Wednesday afternoon, there were some 4,000 people waiting for him in a bingo hall on the outskirts of town. For a midterm candidate. In August.

O’Rourke riffed on climate change, background checks, teacher pay, health care for veterans, cost-of-living adjustments for public-sector retirees, and the importance of a free press. He lashed the idea of a border wall and the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents. And unlike Washington consultants who say that Democrats should only be talking about health care this election season, and not the scandals swirling around Trump, O’Rourke seems to understand that it isn’t really that hard to do both. Because Democrats want to hear about both, and it would be silly to pretend otherwise. He blasted Trump’s obsequious press conference with Vladimir Putinin Helsinki. “He actively, on a stage in another country, defends the interests of another country against the interests of the United States of America,” O’Rourke said. “The collusion in action taking place right in front of our eyes.” It was the second-biggest applause line of the night, after his boast about refusing to take corporate campaign donations.

“I would like Texas to be the example, to be the bridge over the small stuff, the partisanship, the bickering, the pettiness, the meanness, the name-calling, the bigotry, the racism, the hatred, the anxiety, and the paranoia that dominates so much of the national conversation today,” he implored them, catching his breath. “I would love for us to be the big, bold, confident, ambitious, big-hearted, aspirational answer to all that small, weak crap that dominates the national news every single night that has kept us from who we are supposed to be as a country.”

His communications director, Chris Evans, live-streamed shaky, grainy video of the whole event, as he does with every town hall, as the crowd rose with applause. There were college kids and veterans and old women standing up out of their wheelchairs to catch a glimpse of him. One woman cried at the touch of his hand. Afterward, O’Rourke stayed for more than an hour posing for selfies with giddy fans, as he does after every event, then stayed even longer to chat with a local reporter. A few days later, I e-mailed a Texas beat-reporter friend to ask her about O’Rourke’s crowds. It seemed like a silly question. In our data-focused world, crowd sizes aren’t supposed to be meaningful political guideposts. But that’s also the same logic all of us smarty-pants reporters used to dismiss Trump’s early crowds.

“I wasn’t in Iowa in 2007,” she responded, a reference to the early buzz around Barack Obama back then. “But it seems like Iowa in 2007.”

I was in Iowa in 2007. And yeah, it feels a lot like that.

O’Rourke’s growing appeal to Democrats beyond Texas was confirmed once again last week when a NowThis video of him defending the N.F.L. player protests rocketed around the Internet. “I can think of nothing more American,” he said of the protests, responding to a Fort Worth voter who was clearly uncomfortable with the idea of players taking a knee. The O’Rourke clip was viewed over 44 million times across Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube as of Tuesday, according to a NowThis spokeswoman.

The clip simply captured O’Rourke speaking off the cuff at one of his town-hall meetings, all without pandering or poll-tested varnish, and it was enough to land him a re-tweet from LeBron James and a guest spot on Ellen next month. The Legend of Beto is growing bigger than Texas. He’s already a bona fide political celebrity among Democrats, and he’s just a candidate for Senate in a state that shouldn’t be competitive. It’s not a stretch to say that he’s more famous among Democrats than probably 95 U.S. senators, most of his fellow congressmen, and pretty much every sitting governor in the country. Which is exactly why he can’t be ignored in conversations about the next presidential race.

Ask yourself this question: today, looking at the likely Democratic primary field, who is the person most able to fill stadiums, command attention in both traditional and social media, sell T-shirts, suck in small-dollar donations, stir up genuine excitement among millennials, and throw a haymaker at Trump in the process? Is it a U.S. senator who occasionally sends out sternly worded e-mails about Mitch McConnell? Or is it the cool Texas guy you read about in your News Feed who used to play in a punk band and who’s now taking the fight to Ted Cruz in the deep red cradle of American conservatism? (...)

In little over a year, O’Rourke has built a thriving political movement in the country’s second-largest state, with a strategy built purely on hustle, grassroots organizing, and his hunch that the standard-issue campaign playbook met its final demise in 2016. O’Rourke has raised over $23 million so far, all from small donors and a lot it from out of state. But his campaign money hasn’t gone to television ads or consultants. It’s gone to online advertising (Sanders’s digital firm, to be precise) and a T-shirt vendor in Austin tasked with pumping out thousands of heather gray “Beto for Senate” shirts. He’s Spanish-fluent and hails from a border city, El Paso, in a moment when immigration has become the hottest-burning political issue in the country. And at a time when Americans view politics through their mobile screens, O’Rourke passes the ever-fetishized “authenticity” test by a mile. That’s partly because he has a habit of sharing almost every moment of his day, from his morning runs to his burrito lunches, on Snapchat and Instagram and Facebook. But it’s also because, so far, O’Rourke doesn’t appear to be performing a version of himself. Nothing feels practiced. The voters I spoke with in East Texas all said the same thing when I asked why they liked him: he seems “real.”

by Peter Hamby, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Image: Suzanne Cordeiro/REX/Shutterstock.
[ed. See also: House Republicans Have a Secret List of Trump Scandals They’re Covering 
Up and Republicans Secretly Study Their Coming Hell.]

Programming My Child

and errors can happen to you and computers
’cause you are . . . a computer!

go and do it!
 program yourself!
just do it!

explore your toes, explore your nose,
explore everything you have goes
and if you don’t want to do that

you can’t even live

not even houses, ’cause houses are us

                           —Eleanor Auerbach (age four), “The Blah Blah Blah Song”

A few years after leaving Google, I had a daughter, and thus began another long-term engineering project—one that is still ongoing. Parents program their children, after all—and vice versa—and it was in those early months of parenting that my child—unable to make a facial expression, unable to express anything but varying levels of comfort or discomfort—seemed most like a machine. Her responses were, if not predictable, closely circumscribed. I imagined coding up a stochastic algorithm, one that relies partly on chance, to cause her to move her arms and legs jerkily, cry when hungry or uncomfortable, sleep nonstop, and nurse—not completely predictable, but rarely doing the wholly unexpected.

The stimulus-response cycle is out in the open with a child, at least initially, and the feedback loop created between parent and child is tight, controlled, and frequently comprehensible. I trained my child to know that certain behaviors would get her fed, put to sleep, hugged, rocked, burped, and entertained. And my child trained me, in turn, to respond to her cries with what she wanted. You come to an accommodation; both your systems have synchronized, at least roughly, for mutual benefit (though mostly, for hers).

So much of that behavior in infancy appears hard-coded, from crying to nursing to crawling to grabbing everything in sight, that I often felt like we were playing out a scripted pageant of upbringing that had been drawn up over many millennia and delivered to me through the telegrams of my DNA.

Yet programming is an iterative process. When I wrote software, I would code, test, and debug my code. After fixing a bug, I would recompile my code and start it again in its uncorrupted state, before the next bug emerged. The idea of initial conditions—the ability to restart as many times as you like—is integral to software development and to algorithms. An algorithmic recipe presumes a set of initial conditions and inputs. When an algorithm terminates, only the outputs remain. The algorithmic process itself comes to an end. Every time an algorithm runs, it starts afresh with new inputs. Colloquially, we can call this the reset button.

The scientific process depends on the reset button: the ability to conduct an experiment multiple times from identical starting conditions. In the absence of precisely identical starting conditions—whether in the study of distant stars or extremely rare circumstances or many varied human beings—the goal is that initial conditions are as close as possible in all relevant aspects.

But you cannot reset a human being. A child is not an algorithm. It is a persistent, evolving system. Software too is becoming a persistent system. Algorithms themselves may remain static, but they are increasingly acting on large, persistent systems that are now as important to computing as the algorithms themselves. The names of these systems include Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter. These companies write software, but the products they create are systems or networks. While Microsoft had to carry over a fair amount of code from one version of Windows to the next to ensure backward compatibility, each version of Windows was a discrete program. Every time a user started up Windows, the memory of the computer was cleared and reassembled from scratch, based on the state that had been saved to disk. If Windows got into a strange state and stopped behaving well, I could reboot and, more often than not, the problem fixed itself. In the worst cases, I could reinstall Windows and have a completely fresh start.

That’s not possible with systems. Constituent pieces of Google’s search engine are replaced, rebooted, and subject to constant failures, but the overall system must be up all the time. There is no restarting from scratch. Google, Amazon, and Facebook are less valuable for their algorithms than for their state: the sum total of all the data the system contains and manipulates. None of these companies can clear out its systems and “start over,” algorithmically.

As with children, we don’t debug these networks; we educate them.

***

In the first months of her life, I kept a spreadsheet of my daughter’s milestones. Hardware upgrades to her height and weight were ongoing, but I declared a new “version” whenever my wife and I deemed her sufficiently different to appear as though a software upgrade had been installed.

It was tempting to see these changes as upgrades because I wasn’t doing anything to trigger them. My daughter was just figuring it out on her own. Having spent two decades of our lives in front of computers, my wife and I weren’t used to seeing our “projects” alter their behavior without long and hard intervention. “Maintenance” was required (nutrition came in, waste went out), but there was no clear connection between these efforts and the changes taking place in our daughter.

The “upgrades,” however, became more difficult to track as my daughter’s skills expanded and her comprehension of the world around her developed. As she learned more sounds and began to experiment with using words to mean more than just “I want that!” I let go of the fantasy that any sort of “upgrades” were taking place at all and I came to see her as a mysterious, ever-evolving network.

The leap from observational data to thought is one of the most amazing and incomprehensible processes in nature. Any parent will know how baffling it is to see this happening in stages. There are limits past which a child cannot go in understanding, until one day those limits mysteriously vanish, replaced by new and deeper ones. When, at two and a half, my daughter said, “Worms and noodles are related by long skinny things,” she lumped together two entities based on superficial appearance, but she hadn’t yet learned what a relation was.

Before long, she had learned to use logic to argue her position when she needed to. Sometimes it took the form of threats, particularly at bedtime: “If you don’t give me any milk, I’ll stay awake all night. Then you’ll never get any sleep and you’ll die sooner.”

And then, by three and a half, Eleanor was modeling our motives, and not always flatteringly, as when she said to her blanket, “Now I will raspberry you. You will not like it but I enjoy it and that is why we will do it.” At this point, she was able to determine that everyone around her had goals and that sometimes those goals conflicted with hers. She couldn’t necessarily determine others’ motivations, but she knew they were there.

Eventually, most children come to the same shared understanding that we all possess. But what remains a puzzle to me, and to researchers in general, is how children leap from superficial imitation and free association to reasoning. The brain grows and develops, with billions of neurons added year after year—but no matter how much memory or processing power I add to my desktop server, it never gains any new reasoning capabilities.

As an ever-evolving network, there are algorithms that guide the development of the child, chief among them the workings of DNA. But those algorithms are the builders, not the building itself, and they are hidden from us. Some small clues to what is happening, however, may lie in thinking about what happens to software programs when we don’t shut them down and restart them, but let them linger on and evolve.

***

Algorithmic systems or networks such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter create a persistent system (or network) that modifies its behavior over time, in response to how it is used. In essence, these systems rely on feedback: their outputs affect the environment in which these systems exist, and the systemic environment—its users and also other algorithmic systems like it—provides new inputs that change the system further.

Algorithms establish and maintain these systems, but they can’t predict how a system will behave at a given point in time. For that, one must know the ongoing state of the system. The result is an evolving ecosystem. Once a network is in play, evolving over time and never reset to its initial state, it gains a complex existence independent of the algorithms that produced it, just as our bodies and minds gain a complex existence independent of the DNA that spawned them. These independent systems are not coded. Rather, they are trained, and they learn. This means that these networks are not fundamentally algorithmic and they cannot be wholly reset, for to do so would be to return the system to its starting point of ignorance and inexperience.

There are many different types of networks coming into existence besides giant informational systems such as Google and Facebook. There are neural networks, deep learning networks, and belief networks, among others. All these fall under the broad rubric of machine learning.

by David Auerbach, Boston Review |  Read more:

Image: Na Kim/NY Times

[ed. See also: Attempting the Impossible: A Thoughtful Meditation on Technology]

Stefan Exler, untitled 1994-2
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Depeche Mode

How Flat Tummy Co Gamed Instagram to Sell Women the Unattainable Ideal

Got Cravings?” asked the billboard from its perch above a Times Square pizzeria. “Girl, Tell Them To #SUCKIT”.

The image was arresting: a pretty young woman sucking an “appetite suppressant” lollipop splashed across a canvas of millennial pink. Flat Tummy Co, an online retailer that had previously existed almost exclusively within the digital confines of Instagram, arrived in New York City like Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita updated into a 21st-century boss babe.

The product for sale – 35 calories worth of flavored cane sugar laced with an extract of saffron that supposedly curbs hunger – sparked immediate backlash for a company that had built its brand selling so-called “detox” teas. Good Place actor Jameela Jamil called out Kim Kardashian West for promoting the lollipops to her 116 million Instagram followers (“You terrible and toxic influence on young girls,” Jamil tweeted), and more than 100,000 people signed an online petition calling for the billboard’s removal.

Flat Tummy Co’s response has been to keep calm and ’gram on. The company is the ultimate Instagram brand success story: a perfect example of how unregulated social media marketing practices can repackage questionable science in the feelgood trappings of a wellness brand and spin women’s insecurities into cash. And Instagram, which claims to want to be “one of the most kind and safe” places on the internet, has neither the power nor the will to police it.

Indeed, Instagram is such a crucial factor in Flat Tummy Co’s value that when the company was sold for $10m in 2015, its “significant social media presence” was highlighted in a press release ahead of actual assets or sales figures. Armies of “influencers” – including Kim, Khloe and Kourtney Kardashian and Kylie and Kris Jenner – promote its products to their followers. Most of the influencers are strictly Instagram-famous: semi-professional models with tens of thousands of female followers who almost always fail to disclose that their endorsements are bought and paid for.

“It’s not a positive message for women, is it? It’s pretty bad,” said one former Flat Tummy Co employee, who spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity, about the company’s move into selling appetite suppressants. “The ex-employees are all quite close … Everyone’s just kind of, ‘Ugh, we were a part of that.’”

The former employee argued that the outrage toward the Kardashians was misdirected: “Why is no one calling out the company? This isn’t about them. It’s the company that’s the problem.”

‘We thought we’d struck gold’

Flat Tummy Tea debuted on Instagram on 14 June 2013. It took time for the company to develop its current Instaesthetic: the tea was originally sold in transparent plastic bags that showed off the product’s earthiness; the label was a purplish blue; the font had yet to lose its serifs.

But the beginnings of a brand identity were apparent from the outset: aspirational images of beautiful women with tiny stomachs and big butts, before and after shots of customers’ bloated and deflated bellies, and a studied mix of pseudo-feminist millennial boss bitch attitude: mason jar smoothies, jokes about alcohol, girl power slogans, an assortment of healthy-ish dishes, junk food and pink workout gear, and the odd inspirational quote from Nelson Mandela. (...)

‘You’re not worth that much money’

In interviews with the Guardian, two former Flat Tummy Co employees described the process by which the company flooded Instagram with thousands of paid-for posts.

Each week, they were tasked with identifying and contacting between 150 and 200 new influencers, with the goal of getting 50 to 60 of them on board for a series of four promotional posts each. The ideal model was a woman with at least 100,000 followers.

“They had a rating system, depending on how ‘on brand’ you were,” explained one of the former employees. “You don’t want someone who already has a six pack. You want a mum who is on her fit journey trying to lose weight after having kids.”

African American and Latina models were prized because their posts “converted” well into sales, while models were downgraded if they were too “slutty” on the assumption that their followers would be mostly male.

“If someone is a little bit bigger, they get a higher rating than if someone’s skinny,” one former employee said. “No one is going to a listen to a skinny white girl say that she bought this tea and it’s great.”

Added the other former employee: “If they were sexier, showed a lot of skin, or showed too much boobs, it was like, ‘Don’t pay them, try to get free posts.’”

Valentina Barron, a spokeswoman for Flat Tummy Co, told the Guardian by email: “The ambassadors we collaborate with are a mix of all different types of women, because that’s what our customers are. Women can experience bloating, digestive issues or anything else in between no matter what their size.”

The former employees said they were pressured to keep the cost of influencer posts down. While the Kardashians reportedly earn six-figure fees for their Instagram ads, the influencers that the former employees worked with were “lucky to get $25 to $50”, one of the former employees said. “You basically had to cut them down and say, ‘You’re not worth that much money.’”

by Julia Carrie Wong, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Sophie Vershbow

Two for the price of one

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