Click Here to Kill Everybody

Smart gadgets are everywhere. The chances are you have them in your workplace, in your home, and perhaps on your wrist. According to an estimate from research firm Gartner, there will be over 11 billion internet-connected devices (excluding smartphones and computers) in circulation worldwide this year, almost double the number just a couple of years ago.

Many billions more will come online soon. Their connectivity is what makes them so useful, but it’s also a cybersecurity nightmare. Hackers have already shown they can compromise everything from connected cars to medical devices, and warnings are getting louder that security is being shortchanged in the stampede to bring products to market.

In a new book called Click Here to Kill Everybody, Bruce Schneier argues that governments must step in now to force companies developing connected gadgets to make security a priority rather than an afterthought. The author of an influential security newsletter and blog, Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and a lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Among other roles, he’s also on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is chief technology officer of IBM Resilient, which helps companies prepare to deal with potential cyberthreats.

Schneier spoke with MIT Technology Review about the risks we’re running in an ever more connected world and the policies he thinks are urgently needed to address them.

The title of your book seems deliberately alarmist. Is that just an attempt to juice sales?

It may sound like publishing clickbait, but I’m trying to make the point that the internet now affects the world in a direct physical manner, and that changes everything. It’s no longer about risks to data, but about risks to life and property. And the title really points out that there’s physical danger here, and that things are different than they were just five years ago.

How’s this shift changing our notion of cybersecurity?

Our cars, our medical devices, our household appliances are all now computers with things attached to them. Your refrigerator is a computer that keeps things cold, and a microwave oven is a computer that makes things hot. And your car is a computer with four wheels and an engine. Computers are no longer just a screen we turn on and look at, and that’s the big change. What was computer security, its own separate realm, is now everything security.

You’ve come up with a new term, “Internet+,” to encapsulate this shift. But we already have the phrase “internet of things” to describe it, don’t we?

I hated having to create another buzzword, because there are already too many of them. But the internet of things is too narrow. It refers to the connected appliances, thermostats, and other gadgets. That’s just a part of what we’re talking about here. It’s really the internet of things plus the computers plus the services plus the large databases being built plus the internet companies plus us. I just shortened all this to “Internet+.”

Let’s focus on the “us” part of that equation. You say in the book that we’re becoming “virtual cyborgs.” What do you mean by that?

We’re already intimately tied to devices like our phones, which we look at many times a day, and search engines, which are kind of like our online brains. Our power system, our transportation network, our communications systems, are all on the internet. If it goes down, to a very real extent society grinds to a halt, because we’re so dependent on it at every level. Computers aren’t yet widely embedded in our bodies, but they’re deeply embedded in our lives.

Can’t we just unplug ourselves somewhat to limit the risks?

That’s getting harder and harder to do. I tried to buy a car that wasn’t connected to the internet, and I failed. It’s not that there were no cars available like this, but the ones in the range I wanted all came with an internet connection. Even if it could be turned off, there was no guarantee hackers couldn’t turn it back on remotely.

Hackers can also exploit security vulnerabilities in one kind of device to attack others, right?

There are lots of examples of this. The Mirai botnet exploited vulnerabilities in home devices like DVRs and webcams. These things were taken over by hackers and used to launch an attack on a domain-name server, which then knocked a bunch of popular websites offline. The hackers who attacked Target got into the retailer’s payment network through a vulnerability in the IT systems of a contractor working on some of its stores.

True, but these incidents didn’t lead to loss of life or limb, and we haven’t seen many cases involving potential physical harm yet, have we?

We haven’t. Most attacks still involve violations of data, privacy, and confidentiality. But we’re entering a new era. I’m obviously concerned if someone steals my medical records, but what if they change my blood type in the database? I don’t want someone hacking my car’s Bluetooth connection and listening to my conversations, but I really don’t want them to disable the steering. These attacks on the integrity and availability of systems are the ones we really have to worry about in the future, because they directly affect life and property. (...)

What implications does all this have for our current approach to computer security, such as issuing patches, or fixes, for software flaws?

Patching is a way of regaining security. We produce systems that aren’t very good, then find vulnerabilities and patch them. That works great with your phone or computer, because the cost of insecurity is relatively low. But can we do this with a car? Is it okay to suddenly say a car is insecure, a hacker can crash it, but don’t worry because there will be a patch out next week? Can we do that with an embedded heart pacemaker? Because computers now affect the world in a direct, physical manner, we can’t afford to wait for fixes.

But we already have very strict security standards for software that’s used in sensitive cyber-physical domains like aviation, don’t we?

Right, but it’s very expensive. Those standards are there because there’s already strong government regulation in this and a few other industries. In consumer goods, you don’t have that level of safety and security, and that’s going to have to change. The market right now doesn’t reward secure software at all here. As long as you, as a company, won’t gain additional market share because of being more secure, you’re not going to spend much time on the issue

So what do we need to do to make the Internet+ era safer?

There’s no industry that’s improved safety or security without governments forcing it to do so. Again and again, companies skimp on security until they are forced to take it seriously. We need government to step up here with a combination of things targeted at firms developing internet-connected devices. They include flexible standards, rigid rules, and tough liability laws whose penalties are big enough to seriously hurt a company’s earnings.

But won’t things like strict liability laws have a chilling effect on innovation?

Yes, they will chill innovation—but that’s what’s needed right now! The point is that innovation in the Internet+ world can kill you. We chill innovation in things like drug development, aircraft design, and nuclear power plants because the cost of getting it wrong is too great. We’re past the point where we need to discuss regulation versus no-regulation for connected things; we have to discuss smart regulation versus stupid regulation.

by Martin Giles, MIT Technology Review |  Read more:

Image: An Rong Xu

Casper, Mattress Firm, and the Retail Lifecycle

Over the last few years, headlines about stores have looked a little something like this: Mall brands are screwed; retail jobs are disappearing; stores are shuttering by the hundreds; department stores might become extinct; bankruptcy is the new black; and everyone must kiss Jeff Bezos’s ass to survive.

Right alongside these stories that mourn retail’s demise though is news that digital-first companies are opening locations of their own — and lots of them, too.

These dual chronologies morph together to demonstrate an important narrative about the succinct future of stores: Retail isn’t dying, it’s being radically transformed. And those that don’t keep up with this lifecycle should remember companies like Blockbuster and Radioshack (yikes).

The latest sector to colorfully illustrate this? The mattress industry. Earlier this week, sources told Reuters that Mattress Firm, the largest mattress company in the country, is looking into filing for bankruptcy. The company, which is owned by Steinhoff International Holdings, bought competitor Sleepy’s in 2016 and is now deciding how many of its 3,000 stores to close. (Racked reached out to Mattress Firm, which declined to comment.)

Meanwhile, Casper, the brand that kickstarted the mattress-in-a-box craze, announced it will be opening 200 stores across the country this year. Casper already has 19 stores, and earlier this summer, it debuted a slightly absurd store concept called “The Dreamery,” where it charges $25 for 45-minute naps, complete with fancy pajamas, Instagram-brand-favorite facewash, and meditative soundtracks to plug in to.

Casper’s latest stores won’t have the luxurious snoozing accoutrements of the Dreamery, but will follow the general aesthetic of its existing stores, which are bright and airy, and include mock bedrooms to show off its mattresses, sheets, pillows, and duvets.

That Casper is getting aggressive about stores at a time when Mattress Firm is considering bankruptcy is telling, says Neil Saunders, the managing director of GlobalData Retail.

“Many mattress stores are old-fashioned and take a hard approach to selling,” Saunders says. “Fun is the main thing that’s lacking. Buying a mattress is a serious business, both because products are often expensive and because it is something that consumers are going to use for years. However, that doesn’t mean the experience should be boring or dull.”

Casper CEO Philip Krim tells Racked that his company is thinking about selling mattresses in an entirely different way than old-school stores. Retail done poorly, he adds flatly, “is on the way out.”

“Casper stores are the antithesis of traditional mattress store experience that is notorious for sky-high markups and aggressive sales tactics,” he says. “We are reimagining how people shop for sleep by listening to customers to create an atmosphere where they actually want to visit.”

Saunders notes that Mattress Firm hasn’t really adapted to the times. Casper has been around since 2013, and alongside it have launched competing mattress brands like Leesa, Allswell, Tuft & Needle, Layla, Purple, Helix, Nectar, Winkbeds, Snuz, and Tulo — I’ll stop there, but the list goes on.

Even though these brands have been threatening the mattress market for years, with Casper leading the way with $600 million in total revenue since its inception, a legacy company like Mattress Firm failed to innovate. On top of that, Saunders adds, “Mattress Firm has far too many stores and has grown rapidly through acquisition. Some of its stores have expensive leases which it now cannot afford, and it’s been caught off-guard with too many stores relative to the level of demand in the market.”

Mattress Firm’s store experience isn’t the only example of the company being stuck in old-age retail. It’s part of an industry that, as Krim points out, is “notorious for sky-high markups, commission-driven salesmen, confusing marketing jargon, and an uncomfortable in-store trial environment.”

On the flip side, while Casper is investing in stores, it’s also putting funds towards experience — money it can spend with the $239 million it has in funding. When it opened the Dreamery, for example, Casper senior vice president of experience Eleanor Morgan told Racked July that while rents are high in Soho, Casper wasn’t looking to the Dreamery store to help it sell products, but rather wanted to “build a community.”

“A big part of this is building a community of people that value sleep and want to share that with us,” she says. “They might join the brand family and ultimately become Casper customers, but the conversation around sleep is the main focus.”

All this isn’t to say Casper can kick back. As a true direct-to-consumer brand, Casper should now be focusing on building a store portfolio because retail is the necessary path for growth. Clara Sieg, a partner at San Francisco-based venture capital firm Revolution, which invests in startups, says that companies can only last doing digital-only for so long.

They can’t just rely on targeting the same pool of customers through Instagram and Facebook, and so retail is truly the inevitable next step. Just take a trip to New York City to see for yourself. As Inc pointed out earlier this summer, within a one-mile radius in Soho, there are a dozen brands that once boasted they were digital-only, and now have stores — Bonobos, Outdoor Voices, Everlane, Away, Allbirds, M.Gemi, and Warby Parker, just to name a few.

“As internet-native brands aim to grab market share, developing unique and tailored retail experiences creates more intimate connections with consumers and provides additional validation of the brand,” Sieg says. “We view it as an opportunity to contextualize products in ways older brands have not, while developing an in-store experience that leverages integrated technology to avoid the constraints that traditional retail faces.”

by Chavie Lieber, Racked | Read more:
Image: Casper

[ed. I'm thinking about getting a Casper. I'll tell you how it goes.]

Pigs Want To Feed at the Trough Again

After a decade of writing about the crisis, we are now subjected to an orgy of yet more chatter with not much insight. It speaks volumes that the likes of Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, and Hank Paulson are deemed fit to say anything about it, let alone pitch the need for the officialdom to have more bank bailout tools in a New York Times op-ed titled What We Need to Fight the Next Financial Crisis.

The fact that they blandly depict crises that demand extraordinary interventions as to be expected confirms that greedy technocrats like them are a big part of the problem. Their call for more help for financiers confirms that they have things backwards. How about doing more to make sure that future crises aren’t meteor-killing-the-dinosaurs level events, and foisting more costs and punishments on the financiers who got drunk and rich on too much risk-taking? The first line of defense should be stronger regulations, including prohibition of certain activities.

As the Financial Times’ Martin Wolf pointed out in a recent crisis retrospective, the response of central bankers and financial regulators to the crisis was to restore the status quo ante, and not engage in root and branch reform, as took place in the Great Depression. But as we’ve pointed out, the response to the crisis represented the greatest looting of the public purse in history. The post-crisis era of super-low interest rates represented an additional transfer of income from savers to the financial system. In the US, the so-called “get out of massive mortgage securitization liability for almost free” card otherwise known as the National Mortgage Settlement represented a not-widely recognized second bailout of banks and mortgage servicers. No wonder banksters are seeking a rinse and repeat.

An overfinancialized economy is good for no one save banksters and their paid retainers. Economists in recent years have been describing how larger financial systems hurt growth. For instance, the IMF found that the optimal development of a financial system was roughly where Poland is. The IMF conceded that it might be possible to have a larger banking system not drag down the economy if it were well regulated. Other studies have found that economies with large financial sectors typically have more inequality, and inequality is separately seen as a negative for growth. So there’s no sound policy reason to coddle banks rather than cut them down to size. (...)

And none other than the New York Fed’s William Dudley came up with a way to bring partnership-type incentive structures back to big banks by requiring executives and producers to have a high percentage of their bonuses retained in the firms as a type of junior equity to be the first funds tapped in the event of losses or large legal settlements. Not only would this lead key players to be far more concerned about risk, but as Dudley pointed out, it would also lead everyone to be far more concerned if they saw another business unit engaged in dodgy practices that they might wind up paying for, and apply pressure to have them shut down. Predictably, this idea made far too much sense to get any traction.

By contrast, Bernanke was a true believer in the Great Moderation, the mid-2000s self-congratulatory mainstream economist view that they had produced the best of all possible worlds. Bernanke in fact continued the so-called Greenspan put which incentivized investors and bankers to take on financial risks, since they knew if anything bad happened, the Fed would rush to their rescue. The Fed, and Bernanke in particular, were badly behind the curve. In May 2007, Bernanke said that subprime was contained, and in July 2008, gave Fannie and Freddie clean bills of health.

Geithner, when he was head of the New York Fed, did acknowledge that the brave new world of slicing, dicing, and distributing risk might make it more difficult to manage a crisis, but then insisted that there was no way to roll the clock back. Linear projections of trends is naive but a great excuse for inaction. Geithner said nary a peep when banks who had just been bailed out gave a raised middle finger to the American public by paying their executives and staffs record bonuses in 2009 and 2010 rather than rebuilding their balance sheets. The Bush Administration considerately left $75 billion of TARP monies unspent for the Obama Administration to use to fund mortgage modifications. Funny how the Treasury never took that up. Instead, Geithner instituted supposed mortgage assistance programs like HAMP whose purpose, as Geithner put it to SIGTARP head Neil Barofsky, was to “foam the runway” for banks by spreading out when foreclosures would happen rather than preventing them. Recall that 9 million homes were foreclosed upon. Many had missed only a payment or two due to job loss or hours cutbacks; some were victims of bad servicing. Giving borrowers with viable levels of income mortgage modifications would have been a win for investors too. But the Treasury never cared about borrowers and convinced itself that taking care of banks would help the real economy, in a Wall Street variant of trickle-down theory.

And Paulson? Although he wasn’t on the scene as long as Bernanke and Geithner, recall that Treasury staffer Neel Kashkari whipped up a 50,000 foot “How do we deal with a crisis” think piece that Paulson & Co. deemed to be just terrific and tossed in a drawer. Recall that Paulson’s first TARP proposal was a mere 3 pages demanding $700 billion, more than the hard costs of the Iraq War, and even worse, put the Treasury beyond the rule of law with this provision:

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

At the time, we called it a financial coup d’etat.

So the bailer-outers-in-chief are keen to prescribe more of what they foisted on the American public. It should come as no surprise that they didn’t pump for stronger financial reforms, were perfectly content to allow the Fed to authorize banks subject to stress tests to pay dividends and bonuses rather than have them build up much bigger capital cushions, and in Bernanke’s case, call for a resumption of austerity policies in 2012.

Each one of this terrible trio has a much longer rap sheet. But the mere fact that they have the temerity to subject the public to their cronyistic blather, and worse, the New York Times dignifies it, shows that, as Talleyrand said of the Bourbons, that policymakers and pundits have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

[ed. I had the same reaction, but less printable.]

Carbon Ideologies

Authors like to flatter themselves by imagining for their work an “ideal reader,” a cherubic presence endowed with bottomless generosity, the sympathy of a parent, and the wisdom of, well, the authors themselves. In Carbon Ideologies, William T. Vollmann imagines for himself the opposite: a murderously hostile reader who sneers at his arguments, ridicules his feeblemindedness, scorns his pathetic attempts at ingratiation. Vollmann can’t blame this reader, whom he addresses regularly throughout Carbon Ideologies, because she lives in the future, under radically different circumstances—inhabiting a “hotter, more dangerous and biologically diminished planet.” He envisions her turning the pages of his climate-change opus within the darkened recesses of an underground cave in which she has sought shelter from the unendurable heat; the plagues, droughts, and floods; the methane fireballs racing across boiling oceans. Because the soil is radioactive, she subsists on insects and recycled urine, and regards with implacable contempt her ancestors, who, as Vollmann tells her, “enjoyed the world we possessed, and deserved the world we left you.” (...)

Nearly every book about climate change that has been written for a general audience contains within it a message of hope, and often a prod toward action. Vollmann declares from the outset that he will not offer any solutions, because he does not believe any are possible: “Nothing can be done to save [the world as we know it]; therefore, nothing need be done.” This makes Carbon Ideologies, for all its merits and flaws, one of the most honest books yet written on climate change. Vollmann’s undertaking is in the vanguard of the coming second wave of climate literature, books written not to diagnose or solve the problem, but to grapple with its moral consequences. (...)

These qualities reach their fullest expression in the statements made by government and industry officials against charges of environmental menace. In Fukushima, objects in the fallout zone are not radiated but “contaminated.” In West Virginia, mountains do not have their summits chopped off but are granted “removal of overburden.” Fracking “is safer and has less environmental impact than driving a car,” a marketing director from Shale Crescent USA claims, while coal miners, according to the president of the West Virginia Coal Association, “are the greatest practicing environmentalists in the world.” Vollmann records such inanities alongside observations from figures such as Buddha (“People are ignorant and selfish”), Edmund Spenser (“Worse is the danger hidden than descried”), and Loren Eiseley (“Just as instincts may fail an animal under some shift of environmental conditions, so man’s cultural beliefs may prove inadequate to meet a new situation”). Vollmann longs to prove Buddha, Spenser, and Eiseley wrong, and submits softball questions to every industry executive he encounters; but outside of Japan, almost nobody in a position of authority agrees to comment.

Most of the extensive interviews that dominate Carbon Ideologies are thus conducted with men who work in caves or pits to produce the energy we waste. If “nothing is more frightful than to see ignorance in action” (Goethe), these encounters are a waking nightmare. Oil-refinery workers in Mexico, coal miners in Bangladesh, and fracking commissioners in Colorado are united in their shaky apprehension of the environmental damage they do, not to mention the basic facts of climate change and its ramifications. “Mostly their replies came out calm and bland,” Vollmann reports, though this doesn’t prevent him from recording them at length, nearly verbatim. On occasion his questions do elicit a gem of accidental lyricism, as when an Indian steelworker at a UAE oil company, asked for his views on climate change, replies, “Now a little bit okay, but in future it’s very danger.” It’s hard to improve on that.

Vollmann doesn’t blame the migrant steelworker for his complacency or ignorance, of course. He blames himself—often and profusely. He takes special delight in quantifying, in painstaking detail, the energy he burns in such activities as writing a draft of Carbon Ideologies, walking around the corner from his Tokyo hotel to buy a tray of convenience-store tonkatsu, and making a milkshake for his daughter. These passages are as instructive as they are tedious. They dramatize not only the tenacity of our reliance on fossil fuels, but the impossibility of truly comprehending our own culpability in our planet’s fate. How often do you pause to think about the amount of coal burned every time you take an elevator, charge your phone, or operate your blender? Even extravagant acts of self-denial are powerless in the face of such profligate consumption. Vollmann likens our most ambitious energy-conservation efforts to “a dieter who keeps eating his daily fill of cheese, pastries and ice cream … despite the laudable fact that he put broccoli on his lunch plate last Thursday.”

The global hunger for pastries grows more ravenous each year. Whatever Good Samaritan savings we can make by improving infrastructure or bicycling to work will be dwarfed by the billions who will leap onto the grid in the coming decades. About a third of the human population cooks meals over biomass—wood, charcoal, farm scraps, and animal dung. Nearly 1 billion people have no access to electricity. It will not take all of India’s adopting “the American way of life” to trigger gargantuan increases in global emissions. India’s ascending to the Namibian way of life will be enough.

The demand problem, the growth problem, the complexity problem, the cost-benefit problem, the industry problem, the political problem, the generational-delay problem, the denial problem—Vollmann scrupulously catalogs all the major unsolved problems that contribute to the colossus of climate change. “Whatever ‘solution’ I could have proposed in 2017,” he writes, “would have been found wanting before the oceans rose even one more inch!” (The title of a late chapter, “A Ray of Hope,” is to be read sarcastically.) Nor have his six years of traveling the world, tabulating data, and interviewing experts changed his mind about any major aspect of the issue. The reader who begins Carbon Ideologies hopeless will finish it hopeless. So will the hopeful reader.

But there exist other kinds of readers—those who do not read for advice or encouragement or comfort. Those who are sick of dishonesty crusading as optimism. Those who seek to understand human nature, and themselves. Because human nature is Vollmann’s true subject—as it must be. The story of climate change hangs on human behavior, not geophysics. Vollmann seeks to understand how “we could not only sustain, but accelerate the rise of atmospheric carbon levels, all the while expressing confusion, powerlessness and resentment.” Why did we take such insane risks? Could we have behaved any other way? Can we behave any other way? If not, what conclusions must we draw about our lives and our futures? Vollmann admits that even he has shied away from fully comprehending the damage we’ve done. “I had never loathed myself sufficiently to craft the punishment of full understanding,” he writes. “How could I? No one person could.” He’s right, though books like Carbon Ideologies will bring us closer.

The planet’s atmosphere will change but human nature won’t. Vollmann’s meager wish is for future readers to appreciate that they would have made the same mistakes we have. This might seem a humble ambition for a project of this scope, but only if you mistake Carbon Ideologies for a work of activism. Vollmann’s project is nothing so conventional. His “letter to the future” is a suicide note. He does not seek an intervention—only acceptance. If not forgiveness, then at least acceptance.

by Nathaniel Rich, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Michal Klimczak

“Best of all, he has this wonderful passion for life that he doesn’t expect me to share.”

via:

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Above It All: How the Court Got So Supreme

Nine mornings after Antonin Scalia died at Cíbolo Creek, the justices resumed work without their beloved, blustery colleague. The rich traditions of the Court continued unabated. After the justices all shook hands in the small robing room across the hallway from the back of the courtroom, they lined up to await the gavel of the marshal. The assembled throng grew silent, then arose. “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” the marshal chanted at the stroke of 10, as always. The eight justices emerged from behind the tall crimson velvet drapes and somberly took their upholstered swivel chairs on the bench. “All persons having business before the Honorable, the Supreme Court of the United States, are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the Court is now sitting,” the marshal continued. “God save the United States and this Honorable Court!”

It’s an opening worthy of “Hail to the Chief,” the introductory anthem for the leader of another branch of the federal government. It’s all carefully choreographed. The justices don’t merely walk in, and they’re not already seated when Court begins. From different curtains, they materialize in unison, in three groups based on where they sit. As institutional stagecraft goes, the Court puts on quite a show.

At the corner of East Capitol and First in Washington, D.C., across the street and a world away from the workaday Congress, resides the Court. Its proximity to Congress serves as a reminder of the looming power of the third branch of government. Built on the site of a prison for captured Confederates — the prison held Mary Surratt, Samuel Mudd and others arrested after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination — the Court is the closest thing we have to a secular shrine. When its cornerstone was laid in 1932, amid the Great Depression, Charles Evans Hughes, the chief justice, proclaimed, “The Republic endures and this is the symbol of its faith.” The Court is the most powerful in the history of the world.

In the old days (before heightened security screening), you entered by first walking up 44 broad majestic steps and then passing through two 6 1/2-ton sliding bronze doors centered behind columns of the front portico. High above the entrance, engraved across the facade, are the words equal justice under law. Inside, at the end of the Great Hall on the main floor, the courtroom is as magnificent a setting as exists in American government, a testament to the splendor of Italian and Spanish marble. The Oval Office at the White House is relatively small, decorated with furniture arranged on a human scale. By contrast, the gold-trimmed Supreme Chamber is a tableau of grandiosity — 82 feet long by 91 feet wide, flanked by massive windows and 24 columns, with richly colored coffers in the four-story-high ceiling. It’s no wonder that for decades they had a problem with echoes during oral arguments.

Above the columns are friezes depicting such historic lawgivers as Moses, Confucius and the Prophet Muhammad. On the elevated Honduran mahogany bench, the chief sits in the middle, with the eight associate justices alternating by seniority on both sides. (The most senior justice sits to the chief’s immediate right, the next most senior justice sits to the chief’s immediate left, and so forth.) Since 1972, the bench has formed a crescent so that justices can better see each other. Overlooking the bench is a stately clock with Roman numerals. The gates to side corridors are in sparkling bronze latticework. Each justice gets a pewter mug of water and a porcelain spittoon that now serves as a wastebasket.

The lawyers sit at tables in front of the bench. When it’s their turn to argue, they stand at a lectern in the center, barely nine feet from the bench, closer than at other courts. A red light on the lectern signals when time runs out. Ordinarily each side gets 30 minutes to make its case beyond the extensive briefs it has already submitted. Most presentations consist not of speeches but of the interruptions by justices and a lawyer’s responses to their questions. Counsel tables have white-goose-quill pens at the ready. They’re “gifts to you,” advises the Court’s Guide for Counsel, “a souvenir of your having argued before the highest Court in the land.”

A more important suggestion: “If you are in doubt about the name of a justice who is addressing you, it is better to use ‘Your Honor’ rather than mistakenly address the justice by another justice’s name.” A luckless lawyer who does get a justice’s name wrong might get needled by a justice — or rebuked by the chief. Once, when William H. Rehnquist, John Roberts’s predecessor as chief justice from 1986 to 2005, was addressed as the mere “Justice Rehnquist,” he leaned forward from the bench, wagged his finger, and snarled, “I am the chief justice!” Rehnquist, who had been an associate justice, even went so far as to ask the clerk of the Court to formally instruct lawyers about his proper title. The clerk also has cough drops at the ready, as well as sewing kits, hearing aids, and a spare necktie for the hapless counsel who spills his coffee right before going on stage.

Everything about the place signifies that “something different is going on here than what goes on in the Capitol Building or in the White House,” Roberts has said. Visitors to the Supreme Court instinctively whisper. Among the other rules during arguments: No arms extending out to other seats. No visible tattoos. And if you’re wearing a headdress, beware the chief justice noticing, then sending a guard over. That’s what happened in 2002 when Rehnquist saw a 24-year-old Indian-American woman with an orange scarf covering part of her head. He sent over a security guard, who asked, “Is that for religious purposes?”

“No, bad-hair day,” she replied, quite humiliated. She was told to remove the scarf. The case the justices were hearing at the time concerned the First Amendment, not that they were aware of the irony.

The solemnity of the courtroom is broken only by an occasional protester in the audience, or perhaps by the bounce of a basketball in the gym that’s right above the courtroom — the real “highest court in the land,” as everybody calls it. (A sign in the gym warns against playing when they’re hearing cases below. The sign supposedly dates to when Justice Byron R. White, recused from a case in the early 1980s, went up-stairs to shoot hoops. The noise so irritated Justice Sandra Day O’Connor that she had a note delivered to the ballplayer: “You’re fired.” Amused, White wrote back, “Please inform Sandy that she cannot fire me. I have life tenure.” O’Connor has said she has no memory of the episode, but “it’s such a good story — you should keep telling it.”)

Someone once remarked that if the gods had an office, it would look like the Supreme Chamber. By any other name in our constitutional system, the justices are a priesthood, with all the trappings. They certainly dress the part — that’s why they wear the black robes, a practice dating to the estimable John Marshall, chief justice in the early 19th century. “I’m sure we could do our work without the robes,” Scalia acknowledged in an interview, but they “impart the significance of what goes on here.” The justices wear them even at such nonjudicial events as the State of the Union by the president in the Capitol. For Rehnquist, austere black was not enough. He started wearing his robes with four personally designed gold stripes festooned on each sleeve, inspired by the Lord Chancellor in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Iolanthe.” (Roberts abandoned the self-congratulatory practice.) (...)

When justices keep their distance, it’s easier for them to make the case they are different. That is why none ever tweet. That’s also why they’ve never permitted TV cameras in the courtroom — visitors aren’t allowed to take still photos, even when the Court’s not in session. Congress likely could force the Court to televise oral arguments, but it has never taken on the justices on that issue. We’re well into the 21st century, but the only visual representations of what happens in the courtroom remain the quaint color sketches that publications and TV have used for decades. Courtroom sketches go back to the Salem Witch Trials in the 1690s, but one might have thought their utility had waned.

Most of the justices believe TV would diminish public understanding of their work more than enhance it. They like to say that sound bites offered up by Rachel Maddow and Sean Hannity could distort the meaning of a case. That might be true, but no more so than would an article on Page 1 of the Washington Post. A few justices cited a 2016 survey that showed 13 percent of Americans believed Judge Judy was on the Supreme Court, though that would seem to cut in favor of, not against, televised proceedings. Roberts has been candid enough to admit his view that “our job is not to educate the public” but only to decide cases. He insisted that cameras would inhibit justices in their questioning of lawyers during argument. “We might end up talking like they do in Congress — ‘with all due deference to my good friend from wherever,’ ” he told a college audience in 2017, taking a shot at the branch of government that many justices particularly scorn. But hubris better explains why the Court doesn’t allow TV. Appearing before the House Appropriations Committee in 2007, Kennedy justified the exclusion of cameras this way: “We teach, by having no cameras, that we are different.”

The justices do make one technological exception — for audio recordings of oral arguments. Before 2010, and back to 1955, the audio was normally available only at the beginning of the following term. Since 2010, the Court has agreed to release audio at the end of each week, as opposed to live-streaming them as many courts do. But that wasn’t a major concession. Audio from a case argued a few days ago isn’t likely ever to make it onto the evening news. In 2012, the justices did agree to same-day release of audio in the first Obamacare case. The Republican National Committee promptly released an ad that doctored the audio to exaggerate the halting performance by the government lawyer defending Obamacare. Several justices cited the RNC ad as Exhibit A why recordings of Court proceedings were best kept under wraps for a while. (Still, the Court has continued to allow same-day release of audio in certain high-profile appeals, most recently in a Trump travel ban case.)

The law clerks who serve the justices — usually four per chambers — might in theory be a weak link in the Court’s tight control over information. But the clerks treat their bosses as demigods. For one year, those top 36 recent law school graduates do research, draft opinions, act as sounding boards — and in return get a lifelong ticket to blue-chip law firm partnerships, corporate titles, teaching posts, and judgeships. Apart from having to work long nights and weekends, the first stipulation, spelled out in an internal code of conduct, is that clerks keep their mouths shut. Clerks who breach the vow of omertà, even years later, are forever ostracized within the cult of the Court. The bond between clerk and justice, and among clerks, is close and lasting — about the only way to break it is to be a talker.

by David A. Kaplan, Longreads |  Read more:

Image: Robert Alexander/Getty

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
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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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