Jean-Pierre Lourdeau - Emigrations, 2019
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Experts on Warren's $100 Billion Opioid Plan: 'There's a Tremendous Amount to Like'

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has become known for her lengthy policy proposals ahead of the 2020 election. Her latest one is a detailed plan to tackle the nation’s opioid addiction problem.

In a recent Medium post, Team Warren described the plan as “a comprehensive plan to end the opioid crisis by providing these resources needed to begin treating this epidemic like the public health crisis that it is.”

Warren is partnering with Rep. Elijah Cummings for the CARE Act, which would give $100 billion in federal funding over the next decade to states and communities that have been hit the hardest by opioid addiction because, she stated, “that’s what’s needed to make sure every single person gets the treatment they need.”

‘There’s a tremendous amount to like’

Drug policy experts who spoke with Yahoo Finance praised Warren’s opioid plan.

“There’s a tremendous amount to like here,” said Bradley Stein, director of RAND’s Opioid Policy Center. “The magnitude of the investment really matches the needs of the crisis. A lot of the investment prior to this everyone has recognized as being insufficient or a drop in the bucket. For a crisis of this magnitude, it’s going to take that type of investment.”

States, territories, and tribal governments would receive $4 billion. Another $2.7 billion would go towards the hardest hit counties and cities, with over half of it towards those with the highest overdose levels. Health professionals would get $1.7 billion for public health surveillance, research, and improved training. About $1.1 billion would go towards public and nonprofit entities “on the front lines,” while another $500 million would be given to expanding naloxone access and providing it to first responders, public health departments, and the public.

Warren’s plan would pay raise funds from a proposed ultra-millionaire tax on the richest 75,000 American families. (...)

‘This crisis has been driven by greed‘

In her post, Team Warren singled out OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma — founded and owned by the Sackler family — for its key role in the rise of opioid addiction.

“This crisis has been driven by greed, pure and simple,” the plan stated. “If you don’t believe that, just look at the Sackler family. They own Purdue Pharma, a privately-held pharmaceutical company. Started by three brothers in the 1950s, the Sacklers grew their company into an empire — and got very rich along the way.”

While Marino agreed that greed is a factor, he made it clear that the blame for the number of opioid overdose deaths cannot solely be placed on the Sackler family and Oxycodone.

“There’s also been a lot of other problems,” he said. “Specifically, the government has criminalized opioid use and addressed the supply side, but hasn’t addressed the demand side at all.” (...)

“For Purdue Pharma, we know they did bad things and should be held accountable,” Marino said. At the same time, “focusing on just pharmaceutical companies and criminalizing people [isn’t] going to solve the crisis. I’m not saying they should get a free pass, but there are other issues that we need to focus on, too.”

‘A big deficiency in this proposal’

The primary issue with Warren’s plan, according to experts, involves the number of restrictions on medications for opioid treatment.

The same criticism arose after President Trump signed opioid legislation in October 2018. At the time, RAND’s Drug Policy Research Center co-Director Dr. Rosalie Pacula noted that the bill didn’t eliminate the requirement for physicians to obtain a waiver needed to prescribe buprenorphine, a medication that is crucial for treating opioid addiction.

The reason why she found that to be “really crazy” is because physicians don’t need a special waiver to prescribe addiction-causing opioids to begin with.

“If the issue is fear of getting addicted, we should have a waiver on every opioid prescribed — but we don’t,” Pacula said. “Why make it harder for them to do treatment than for the drug that causes the problem in the first place?”

Marino, the emergency medicine physician, argued that the current restrictions on methadone and buprenorphine medications — two of the best addiction-treating medicines — is “the biggest single issue that could be addressed by our federal government and create the most amount of change with one action.”

He explained: “There’s still significant restrictions where the people I work with, who are physicians or other practitioners, can’t prescribe medications for addiction even if they know it’s safe and know how to do it. Whereas, they could prescribe as much Oxycodone as they want, essentially, with no restrictions.”

Marino added that a situation in which “medicine like buprenorphine that are much safer than Oxycodone are unavailable … it’s a big deficiency in this proposal.” (...)

For the most part, though, Marino said Team Warren’s opioid proposal is “definitely a significant step in the right direction. I don’t think it’s necessarily the perfect solution, but it makes me very happy as someone who sees these patients [with] these problems and has been hoping to get some of these solutions for quite a while.”

by Adriana Belmonte, Yahoo Finance |  Read more:

Image: AP Photo/John Minchillo

[ed. Personally, I think financing should be extracted from the pharmaceutical companies responsible (if it wouldn't take years of litigation) or from our bloated $700 billion annual military budget, but that's a minor quibble. Nice to see someone finally get it that politicians and state and federal governments are making the problem worse by focusing on supply side restrictions rather than demand (thereby forcing more and more people out of doctor's offices and medical oversight into risky, unregulated alternatives, and punishing legitimate patients that can no longer obtain their medications).]     

US Press Reaches All-Time Low on Venezuela Coverage

As famed Latin American author Eduardo Galeano once wrote, “every time the US ‘saves’ a country, it converts it into either an insane asylum or a cemetery.” Of course, as we look over the wreckage left by the US in countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, we see that this statement is demonstrably true. And yet, now that the US is poised for another intervention, this time in Venezuela, the press is right there again to cheer it along.

Analyzing 76 total press articles of the “elite” press from January 15 to April 15, 2019, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) could find not one voice that opposed Trump’s regime plans in Venezuela. Meanwhile, 54 percent openly supported these plans. Of course, this should not be all too surprising given the press’s usual complicity in past US war efforts — e.g., by pushing such war lies as the Gulf of Tonkin, the killing of babies in Kuwait, the WMDS of Iraq and the alleged Viagra-fueled rapes in Libya. The current war lies are coming fast and furious from such outlets as CNN which lied about seeing Maduro forces lighting aid containers on fire at the Colombian border (it was in fact opposition forces which did so as the NYT admitted two weeks later), and which claimed that US puppet Juan Guaido actually won the presidential election against Nicolas Maduro when in fact Guaido never even ran for president.

What is quite stunning, however, is the total unanimity of the press in uncritically covering and supporting the ongoing coup in Venezuela. This is baffling because the same press outlets which have been rightly critical of Trump for all of his stupidity, lying and meanness, have suddenly found him brilliant, true and benevolent when it comes to Venezuela. This is particularly remarkable given that his partners in this crime are Neo-Con John Bolton; former CIA Director Mike Pompeo who recently joked that the CIA’s true motto is “We lied, We Cheated, We Stole”; and convicted liar Elliott Abrams. As for Abrams, he is infamous for his role in the illegal funding of the Nicaraguan Contras; his covering up of the El Mazote massacre in El Salvador in which around 1000 civilians, mostly women and children, were killed by US-backed forces; and his aiding and abetting the US-backed genocide in Guatemala.

And yet, somehow, we are to believe from our “free” press that this band of rogues is going to deliver democracy and human rights to Venezuela. Never mind the fact that Trump himself is President after losing to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes, and that the US, in the words of former President Jimmy Carter, no longer has a functioning democracy. As for Venezuela, on the other hand, Carter has said that its electoral system is “the best in the world.”

Meanwhile, this same captive press incessantly tells of us of all the deprivations and travails in Venezuela while refusing to explain how, as UN Expert Dr. Alfred de Zayas has concluded, this state of affairs is largely the result of brutal US sanctions. Recently, respected economist Jeffrey Sachs co-authored a report showing that, since August of 2017, over 40,000 Venezuelans have died due to the US sanctions which have deprived Venezuela of food and life-saving medicines. But few would know any of this because the voices of de Zayas and Sachs are never heard in the mainstream press.

Also unheard are any of the 6 million Venezuelans who voted for Nicolas Maduro in May of 2018, many of whom turn out for massive pro-government demonstrations. Instead, the press gives ink and air time only to mostly white, well-off and English-speaking individuals who support the opposition, giving the false impression that Maduro has no support.

Moreover, in Orwellian fashion, the press refuses to call the current push for a military uprising in Venezuela a “coup,” while the same time referring to Maduro invariably as “repressive” and as a “dictator,” and his government as a “regime.”

In short, instead of giving two sides of the story, the press gives us one, ignores crucial facts and tells us how we should be viewing the situation in Venezuela. This is not journalism at all, but naked propaganda, and it is shameful.

The fact that, despite all of the US pressure and threats, and despite all of the lies, the Venezuelan people have not risen up en masse in support of Juan Guaido – a man 80 percent of Venezuelans never heard of until he declared himself president with the US’s urging – should tell one that things are not as we are being led to believe.

by Daniel Kovalik, Counterpunch | Read more:
Image: Nathaniel St. Clair
[ed. See also: U.S. federal agents arrest protesters occupying Venezuelan Embassy (Reuters) and, Is John Bolton the most dangerous man in the world? (The Guardian).]

Winston Smith
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The Iron Law of Oligarchy

The iron law of oligarchy is a political theory, first developed by the German sociologist Robert Michels in his 1911 book, Political Parties. It asserts that rule by an elite, or oligarchy, is inevitable as an "iron law" within any democratic organization as part of the "tactical and technical necessities" of organization.

Michels's theory states that all complex organizations, regardless of how democratic they are when started, eventually develop into oligarchies. Michels observed that since no sufficiently large and complex organization can function purely as a direct democracy, power within an organization will always get delegated to individuals within that group, elected or otherwise.

Using anecdotes from political parties and trade unions struggling to operate democratically to build his argument in 1911, Michels addressed the application of this law to representative democracy, and stated: "Who says organization, says oligarchy." He went on to state that "Historical evolution mocks all the prophylactic measures that have been adopted for the prevention of oligarchy."

According to Michels all organizations eventually come to be run by a "leadership class", who often function as paid administrators, executives, spokespersons or political strategists for the organization. Far from being "servants of the masses", Michels argues this "leadership class," rather than the organization's membership, will inevitably grow to dominate the organization's power structures. By controlling who has access to information, those in power can centralize their power successfully, often with little accountability, due to the apathy, indifference and non-participation most rank and file members have in relation to their organization's decision-making processes. Michels argues that democratic attempts to hold leadership positions accountable are prone to fail, since with power comes the ability to reward loyalty, the ability to control information about the organization, and the ability to control what procedures the organization follows when making decisions. All of these mechanisms can be used to strongly influence the outcome of any decisions made 'democratically' by members.

Michels stated that the official goal of representative democracy of eliminating elite rule was impossible, that representative democracy is a façade legitimizing the rule of a particular elite, and that elite rule, which he refers to as oligarchy, is inevitable.

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

Image: Robert Michels

AI Defends Itself Against Malicious Messages Hidden in Speech

Computer scientists have devised a way of making computer speech recognition safer from malicious attacks — messages that sound benign to human ears but hide commands that can hijack a device, for example through the virtual personal assistants that are becoming widespread in homes or on mobile phones.

Much of the progress made in artificial intelligence (AI) in the past decade — driverless cars, playing Go, language translation — has come from artificial neural networks, programs inspired by the brain. This technique, also called deep learning when applied at a large scale, finds patterns in data on its own, without needing explicit instruction. But deep-learning algorithms often work in mysterious ways, and their unpredictability opens them up to exploitation.

As a result, the patterns that AI uses to, say, recognize images, might not be the ones humans use. Researchers have been able to subtly alter images and other inputs so that to people, they look identical, but to computers, they differ. Last year, for example, computer scientists showed that by placing a few innocuous stickers on a stop sign, they could convince an AI program that it was a speed-limit sign. Other efforts have produced glasses that make facial-recognition software misidentify the wearer as actress Milla Jovovich. These inputs are called adversarial examples.

Sounds suspicious

Audio adversarial examples exist, too. One project altered a clip of someone saying, “Without the data set, the article is useless” so that it was transcribed as, “Okay Google, browse to evil.com.” But a paper presented on 9 May at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) in New Orleans, Louisiana, offers a way of detecting such manipulations.

Bo Li, a computer scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and her co-authors wrote an algorithm that transcribes a full audio clip and, separately, just one portion of it. If the transcription of that single piece doesn’t closely match the corresponding part of the full transcription, the program throws a red flag — the sample might have been compromised.

The authors showed that for several types of attack, their method almost always detected the meddling. Further, even if an attacker was aware of the defence system, attacks were still caught most of the time.

Li says that she was surprised by the method’s robustness, and that — as it often happens in deep learning — it is unclear why exactly it works.

by Matthew Hutson, Nature |  Read more:
[ed. We're already playing catch-up.]

Are Voters Just Lemmings?

In 2008, the political scientists Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller released a book called The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform. The basic argument is that, despite the ostensible democratic machinery of state primaries, party elites were the ones who really made the decisions. The authors showed that even after the presidential primary reforms in the late ’60s and early ’70s made the nomination process more reliant on voters, the candidate who collected the most endorsements from party grandees still ultimately locked up the nomination.

A semi-bastardized version of this argument quickly became conventional wisdom among the pundit class. Although The Party Decides itself contained extensive caveats and qualifications (especially concerning its minuscule sample size), the book came to be treated as all but ironclad proof that the voters had no say whatsoever in the selection of their party’s nominee. When it comes to presidential primaries at least, The Voters Are Stupid. They might think they have some say in choosing their party’s nominee—said the wonks, nodding sagely to one another—but in reality, they were merely validating the pre-existing choices of the elite class.

But by 2015, this consensus was melting like snow before a stream of hot urine, as Donald Trump contemptuously bulldozed the Republican establishment and locked up that party’s nomination. Indeed, not only did he casually brush aside unified opposition of nearly the entire Republican elite, but he did it despite having no formal political experience of any kind. It seemed the voters had some kind of a voice after all.

But this changed political context did not spell the end of the Stupid Voter narrative: It merely changed form. Whereas voters were previously deemed stupid because they had no influence on political outcomes, they were now deemed stupid because they had too much influence, influence that thwarted the wise and sensible aims of political elites who otherwise would have governed in the public interest. In 2016, political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels published a much more ambitious book called Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. It is, basically, The General Theory of Stupid Voters. It has become the latest conventional wisdom about democracy, garnering near-universal praise in the elite press, from the London School of Economics to Foreign Affairs to the New York Review of Books. The Economist deems it “the most influential recent book on voting.” (...)

First, let’s take a look at the central argument of Democracy for Realists. Achen and Bartels assemble a huge body of evidence to demonstrate that the voting public is vastly ignorant about policy, tends to rationalize pre-existing biases, and blames the incumbent party for things they could not possibly control, like shark attacks. Even when voters can be shown to be making a sort of judgment about political success on the merits—namely, voting the bums out during times of economic crisis—their decision tends to be severely myopic. Voters generally judge economic performance only on the last few months before election day, not based on how the whole last electoral term has gone.

The authors take aim at something they call the “folk theory” of democracy, which they define as the idea that democracy is about simply representing the will of the voters. The “folk theory” of democracy is the animating force behind initiatives to increase popular participation in decision-making by adding ballot initiative and referendum procedures to various constitutions, so that “the people” can have a direct voice on policy matters. The authors demonstrate many severe problems with this sort of direct democracy — most notably, that it is at least as vulnerable to elite influence as any other sort of democracy, if not more so. Ordinary citizens really are not equipped to make decisions on complicated policy questions, and have often shot themselves in the foot by voting down water fluoridation measures and so forth (often egged on by well-funded right-wing extremists).

The trouble starts with their formal model of the folk theory, which they represent with an elaborate mathematical system descended from neoclassical economics called the “median voter theorem.” By this view, voters select candidates closest to their own ideology, and assuming voter preferences are represented by a single left-right spectrum with two equal-sized peaks, parties will rationally appeal to the median voter directly in the political middle. This predicts that each party will have the exact same centrist platform. The “rationally ignorant” median voter doesn’t have to do anything to see his preferences validated by the political system.

This model was directly based on similar economic models, which take a lot of assumed background conditions, run them through some intimidating math, and produce a result demonstrating that free market institutions automatically produce the best of all possible worlds. Voting, it’s just like buying peanut butter! It’s sort of an appealing notion, so long as it doesn’t make any close contact with reality.

Achen and Bartels blow this theory out of the water, thus defeating their conception of the folk theory of democracy. Most obviously, the parties do not have the same platform and never have, not even during the mid-20th-century period of relative political consensus when this kind of model was somewhat plausible. But since 1980 especially, the idea that the parties don’t have strong and increasingly stark disagreements is prima facie ridiculous.

The authors have a lot of smart things to say about the negative influence economics-style reasoning has had on political science. But they don’t consider the idea that using the median voter theorem to represent the folk theory may itself be misleading.

This can best be seen in their implicit theory of reasoning, which is based on the same neoclassical bullshit. They define it in exclusively individual terms—a fundamental premise of this style of economics. By their lights, political reasoning happens when someone has pre-existing, fully worked-out ideology, and perfect knowledge of how the political system has affected their personal well-being , who then calculates the most rational political decision in terms of their own pocketbook and principles.

It is true that virtually nobody behaves in this way. Many people don’t have a clue what each party stands for, while others are egregiously mistaken about who believes what. But more importantly, Achen and Bartels argue that even very well-informed people tend to rationalize their group identities by adopting whatever the consensus view is—and then argue that, by definition, adopting a consensus view cannot be a “reasoned” decision: “[T]he political preferences and judgments that look and feel like the bases of partisanship and voting behavior are, in reality, often the consequences of party and group loyalties … the more information a voter has, often the better able she is to bolster her identities with rational-sounding reasons.”

There are a lot of problems with the premise of this argument.

by Ryan Cooper, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: Matt Lubchansky

Bill Nye On The Green New Deal

[ed. I don't usually watch John Oliver, but Bill Nye at 18:20 - 19:10 goes all Pulp Fiction on climate change. MFs. (Also check out: 10:10 - 11:45. I want to do this with my grandkids.] 

Ramadan

Introduction

Ramadan is considered the holiest month of the year for Muslims. In Ramadan, Muslims fast from food and drink during the sunlit hours as a means of learning self-control, gratitude, and compassion for those less fortunate. Ramadan is a month of intense spiritual rejuvenation with a heightened focus on devotion, during which Muslims spend extra time reading the Qur’an and performing special prayers. Those unable to fast, such as pregnant or nursing women, the sick, or elderly people and children, are exempt from fasting.

When does Ramadan take place?

Ramadan is the 9th month of the Islamic calendar, which is based on a 12 month lunar year of approximately 354 days. Because the lunar year is 11 days shorter than the solar year, each lunar month moves 11 days earlier each year. It takes 33 solar years for the lunar months to complete a full cycle and return to the same season. This year, the month long fast of Ramadan is set to begin on May 6th, 2019. The month traditionally begins and ends based on the sighting of the first crescent of the new moon. Starting on May 4th, Muslims throughout the United States and the rest of the world will begin to search the sky for the new crescent, or in some cases, they will follow a pre-determined date based on astronomical calculation. During this month, Muslims fast from pre-dawn until sunset, as a means to grow in God-consciousness and moral excellence.

The Length and Purpose of Fasting

Muslims fast from pre-dawn to sunset, a fast of between 11-16 hours depending on the time of year for a period of 29-30 days. The fast of Ramadan entails forgoing food and drink, and if married, abstaining from sex during the fasting hours. For Muslims, Ramadan is a time to train themselves both physically and spiritually by avoiding any negative acts such as gossiping, backbiting, lying or arguing. Muslims welcome Ramadan as an opportunity for self-reflection, and spiritual improvement. Ramadan is also a highly social time as Muslims invite each other to break fast together and meet for prayers at the mosque.

The ultimate goal of fasting is gaining greater God-consciousness, in Arabic, taqwa, signifying a state of constant awareness of God. From this awareness a person should gain discipline, self-restraint and a greater incentive to do good and avoid wrong. In commemoration of the revelation of the Qur’an, Muslim’s holy book, which began during the month of Ramadan, Muslims attempt to read the entire book during Ramadan and gather nightly at mosques to hold special prayers during which the entire Qur’an is recited by the end of the month. (...)

Family Routines

A Muslim family usually rises about 5:00 a.m. before the first of dawn and eats a modest, breakfast-like meal called suhur. After the meal, the family performs the morning prayer, and depending on the circumstances, the family goes back to bed or begins the day. Particularly during the long summer months, people often take a nap in the late afternoon after work or school. At sunset, family members break the fast with a few dates and water, and depending on the culture, other light foods such as soup, appetizers or fruit. This is referred to as iftar which means “breaking the fast.” After performing the sunset prayers, the family eats dinner. Inviting guests to break the fast or going to someone else’s house for iftar is very common in Ramadan. Many families then go to the mosque for the night prayer and a special Ramadan prayer called taraweeh. After completing their prayers, the families return home around 11:45 p.m. (All of these times vary depending on the time of year, with shorter days in the winter and longer days in the summer.)

by ING |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: IHOP And Ramadan: A Uniquely American-Muslim Tradition (WAMU 88.5).]

Amazon Offers Employees $10K and 3 Months’ Pay to Start Their Own Delivery Businesses

Following news of Amazon’s plans to reduce Prime shipping down to one day, the company this morning announced an expansion of its Delivery Service Partner program, which now includes a new incentive that encourages existing Amazon employees to start their own package delivery company. The partner program, first announced last year, includes access to Amazon’s delivery technology, hands-on training and a suite of other discounts for assets and services like vehicle leasing and insurance. For employees, it now includes a $10,000 incentive, too.

The retailer says it will fund startup costs up to $10,000, as well as the equivalent of three months of the former employee’s last gross salary, to give the employees the ability to get their new business off the ground without worrying about a break in pay.

Amazon said last year that people were able to start their own delivery business with only $10,000. At the time, military veterans were able to get that $10K reimbursed, as Amazon was investing a million into a program that funded their startup costs.

The new incentive to do the same for any employee — and offer them three months’ pay on top of that — is a much broader commitment. And it’s one that makes sense, given Amazon’s lofty ambitions to double the speed of its shipments.

Employees — or any other entrepreneur — who wants to become a delivery partner, are able to lease customized blue delivery vans with the Amazon smile logo on the side, and take advantage of other discounts, including fuel, insurance, branded uniforms and more.

Before the launch of the partner program, Amazon had relied on its Amazon Flex crowdsourced workforce to help it deliver packages to help it reduce costs. But these gig workers often faced too much uncertainty with regard to their pay because of things like fluctuating gas prices that cut into profits, lack of insurance and the general logistical challenges that come from trying to deliver packages from a smaller, unbranded personal vehicle.

Delivery partners, meanwhile, could earn as much as $300,000 in annual profit by growing their fleet to 40 vehicles, Amazon claims. The company said last year it expected that hundreds of small business owners will come to hire tens of thousands of drivers across the U.S.

That is already happening. Since the launch of the program in June 2018, more than 200 small businesses have hired “thousands” of local drivers, Amazon says this morning. It expects to add hundreds more small businesses this year, as well.

by Sarah Perez, TechCrunch |  Read more:

Image: Amazon

[ed. Hello, FedEx and UPS. See also: Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs (Reuters) and, since we're talking about corporations that exploit the gig economy: Democrats have an ambitious plan to save American labor unions (Vox).]

Inside a Golden Basketball Sunset

Is This the Warriors' Last Stand? Inside a Golden Basketball Sunset (SI)

Image: John W. McDonough/Sports Illustrated

If God Is Dead, Your Time Is Everything

At a recent conference on belief and unbelief hosted by the journal Salmagundi, the novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson confessed to knowing some good people who are atheists, but lamented that she has yet to hear “the good Atheist position articulated.” She explained, “I cannot engage with an atheism that does not express itself.”

She who hath ears to hear, let her hear. One of the most beautifully succinct expressions of secular faith in our bounded life on earth was provided not long after Christ supposedly conquered death, by Pliny the Elder, who called down “a plague on this mad idea that life is renewed by death!” Pliny argued that belief in an afterlife removes “Nature’s particular boon,” the great blessing of death, and merely makes dying more anguished by adding anxiety about the future to the familiar grief of departure. How much easier, he continues, “for each person to trust in himself,” and for us to assume that death will offer exactly the same “freedom from care” that we experienced before we were born: oblivion. (...)

Or James Baldwin, that great recovering Christian, who once wrote, “I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being.” Or Primo Levi, who, when faced with death in Auschwitz, was briefly tempted to pray for rescue, and then did not pray, lest he blaspheme his own secularity. Or Camus, especially in “The Myth of Sisyphus” (a philosophical articulation of the atheistic world view), and in his rapturous unfinished novel, “The First Man” (a novelistic embodiment of the secular world view), in which his alter ego is possessed, from childhood, of “a love of bodies” that exalted him when he was able “just to enter into their radiance, to lean his shoulder against his friend’s with a great sensation of confidence and letting go, and almost to faint when a woman’s hand lingered a moment on his in the crowd of the trolley—the longing, yes, to live, to live still more, to immerse himself in the greatest warmth this earth could give him.”

A systematic articulation of the atheistic world view, the one Marilynne Robinson may have been waiting for, is provided by an important new book, Martin Hägglund’s “This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom” (Pantheon). Hägglund doesn’t mention any of the writers I quoted, because he is working philosophically, from general principles. But his book can be seen as a long footnote to Pliny, and shares the Roman historian’s humane emphasis: we need death, as a blessing; eternity is at best incoherent or meaningless, and at worst terrifying; and we should trust in ourselves rather than put our faith in some kind of transcendent rescue from the joy and pain of life. Hägglund’s book involves deep and demanding readings of St. Augustine, Kierkegaard, Marx, and Martin Luther King, Jr. (with some Theodor Adorno, Charles Taylor, Thomas Piketty, and Naomi Klein thrown in), but it is always lucid, and is at its heart remarkably simple. You could extract its essence and offer it to thirsty young atheists.

His argument is that religious traditions subordinate the finite (the knowledge that life will end) to the eternal (the “sure and certain hope,” to borrow a phrase from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, that we will be released from pain and suffering and mortality into the peace of everlasting life). A characteristic formulation, from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians, goes as follows: “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” You die into Christ and thus into eternity, and life is just the antechamber to an everlasting realm that is far more wondrous than anything on earth. Hägglund, by contrast, wants us to fix our ideals and attention on this life, and more of it—Camus’s “longing, yes, to live, to live still more.” Hägglund calls this “living on,” as opposed to living forever. (...)

The problem with eternity is not that it doesn’t exist (Hägglund is uninterested in the pin dancing of proof and disproof) but that it is undesirable and incoherent; it kills meaning and collapses value. This is a difficult truth to learn, because we are naturally fearful of loss, and therefore attached to the idea of eternal restoration. Hägglund, who was born and reared in Sweden and now teaches comparative literature at Yale, begins his book by telling us that he returns every summer to the northern-Swedish landscape he knows from his childhood. His love of the place is premised on the knowledge that he will not always be able to return; that he, or it, will not be there forever:

When I return to the same landscape every summer, part of what makes it so poignant is that I may never see it again. Moreover, I care for the preservation of the landscape because I am aware that even the duration of the natural environment is not guaranteed. Likewise, my devotion to the ones I love is inseparable from the sense that they cannot be taken for granted. . . . Our time together is illuminated by the sense that it will not last forever and we need to take care of one another because our lives are fragile.

Once we seriously consider the consequences of existence without end, the prospect is not only horrifying but meaningless (as the philosopher Bernard Williams argued years ago). An eternity based on what Louise Glück calls “absence of change” would be not a rescue from anything but an end of everything meaningful. Hägglund puts forth his eloquent case: “Rather than making our dreams come true, it would obliterate who we are. To be invulnerable to grief is not to be consummated; it is to be deprived of the capacity to care. And to rest in peace is not to be fulfilled: It is to be dead.”

A liberal rabbi or pastor might object that Hägglund is unhelpfully hung up on eternity. Eternity is not at the heart of what such people care about; they hardly ever spend time envisaging it. But Hägglund’s central claim is that a good deal of what passes for religious aspiration is secular aspiration that doesn’t know itself as such. He wants to out religionists as closet secularists. When we ardently hope that the lives of people we love will go on and on, we don’t really want them to be eternal. We simply want those lives to last “for a longer time.” So his reply would probably be: Just admit that your real concerns and values are secular ones, grounded in the frailty, the finitude, and the rescue of this life. He makes a similar point in relation to Buddhism. He is happy to welcome, as essentially secular, those popular forms of meditation and mindfulness which insist on our being “present in the moment”; but he chides as religious and deluded those doctrinal aspects of Buddhism which insist on detachment, release from anxiety, and an overcoming of worldly desire. (...)

It is the same when Augustine, in the “Confessions,” mourns the loss of a close friend—of a friendship that was “sweet to me beyond all the sweetness of life that I had experienced”—only to remind his readers that, as a good Christian, he should not have loved someone who could be so easily lost, rather than loving God, who can never be lost. It is the same when Martin Luther, grieving the death of his daughter in 1542, reminds his congregation after the funeral that “we Christians ought not to mourn.” And the same when Kierkegaard, in “Fear and Trembling,” praises Abraham for being ready to sacrifice his son Isaac at God’s command, sure in the knowledge that God will redeem his loss. In all these cases, Hägglund identifies the true dynamic, the true anguish, as secular desire—a natural anxiety about loss, a natural mourning of the lost one—horribly distorted by its corrective religious gloss. The supposed attraction of eternity, Hägglund writes, is that you cannot lose anything there. “But if you can lose nothing in eternity,” he goes on, “it is because there is literally nothing left to lose.”

by James Wood, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Deanna Halsall
[ed. And if there is an afterlife? See: Don Juan in Hell (Act III), Man and Superman (George Bernard Shaw)].

Table For One: How Eating Alone is Radically Changing Our Diets

Eating alone has become a defining feature of modern life: the breakfasting commuter; the household members with conflicting schedules; the widower who receives few visitors. Almost a third of British adults are eating alone “most or all of the time”, according to the latest Wellbeing Index, compiled with data from more than 8,000 people for Sainsbury’s by Oxford Economics and the National Centre for Social Research. Similarly, a Mintel survey of 2,000 UK consumers aged 16 and over has found that one in three are “regularly eating every meal alone”. In London, the figure rises to almost half.

Much of this solitary munching takes place behind closed doors. Single-occupancy homes are the second-most-common household size in Britain and a record 35% of over-16s are single, according to the Office for National Statistics. This is why, in 2018, Tesco announced plans to stock more than 400 single-portion products including burgers, steaks and vegetables.

As a nation, we have also become less self-conscious about solo dining. The bookings website OpenTable recently reported that reservations for one have increased across the UK by 160% since 2014. Bar seating and communal tables are increasingly popping up in restaurants.

While destigmatising solo dining in all its manifestations is liberating, our new dietary habits steer us into uncharted territory. Until now, eating in groups has been a universal human ritual. Not only is it practical (many hands make light work – and also reduce our vulnerability to predators) but meals have, traditionally, been used to meet our fundamental need for connection with others. It wouldn’t be making a giant leap to link eating alone with the current loneliness epidemic. One might also wonder if it is only a coincidence that this new phase is happening at the same time as rising obesity rates.

On a micro level, deciding what to have for dinner after a long day can be a challenge. “Eating alone has not only hugely changed how and what we eat but also how we talk to ourselves about eating,” says Bee Wilson, the author of The Way We Eat Now. “There’s a constant mismatch between a sense of how we should be eating and how we’re actually eating.” The multi-generational family meals of the Dolmio television ads are presented as the ideal, she says, but how many of us eat like that in real life, except for at Christmas? The default number that cookbook recipes serve is still four or six, but at least recipe writers have had to meet demand for meals you can throw together in minutes. Many of us are time-poor now, but when you are cooking for one you have to do the washing up as well. (...)

Increasingly, ready meals are aimed at single households but, “as with any form of eating, there’s probably huge diversity in the ways people eat when they’re alone,” says Wilson. One way that younger generations are “squaring the circle of eating alone, enjoying food but not being enslaved to the kitchen is through the rise of meal prepping”, she says. Meal prep does not simply mean “preparing meals”. Rather it is a hashtag for an Instagram craze (10m posts and counting) for a borderline neurotically health-conscious version of batch cooking. “That has been a huge phenomenon,” says Wilson. “So many young millennials I speak to are going on about that book The Green Roasting Tin – you throw lots of delicious vegetables and herbs into a roasting tray, cook up a huge batch of it, then portion it up into tupperware boxes.” (...)

There is another factor that plays into the rise of solo dining. “In this world of convenience,” says Edward Bergen, global food and drink analyst at Mintel, “what we find is that mealtimes are becoming quicker. In Britain especially, consumers are spending less and less time, year on year, on meals.” In fact, he says, we are a nation of snackers, with 37% of us eating snacks instead of having a proper meal at least once a week. Millennials are the biggest snackers, taking shorter lunch breaks and relying instead on grab-and-go offerings (a booming market), from stodgy pastry products to porridge pots and healthy vegan wraps.

The glory of solitary eating is that you are free to savour your guilty pleasure without judgment. The New Yorker writer Rachel Syme recently triggered a mammoth confessional Twitter thread by admitting that when working from home alone she enjoys “a pickled beet in between a mini Babybel cheese sliced in half, eaten like a tiny sandwich”. Respondents shared their love of everything from tuna salad mixed with a packet of crisps to sucking bacon grease out of kitchen roll.

As the food and hospitality industries compete to service lone diners, the trend is increasingly presented as an aspirational consumer choice. Bergen says: “Of the people who often eat meals on their own, two thirds say mealtimes are a great way to have quality time to yourself.” In these busy times with blurred boundaries between work and leisure, me-time is certainly at a premium. However, as the 2017/18 Waitrose Food and Drink Report found, rather than luxuriate in our own company and take a moment to watch the world go by, many of us (23% of the 2,000 people surveyed) commune with our smartphones when eating out.

The rise of “food television” disturbingly encapsulates this disconnect. Otherwise known by its original South Korean name of mukbang, the phenomenon has become a source of fascination for Wilson. “People are watching videos of other people eating while they’re eating something completely unrelated,” she says. “It has also taken off in the US and people do it in the UK, too.” Usually, the presenters are beautiful young women who webcast themselves eating improbable quantities of food while inanely chatting about how delicious it is. “It’s about being kept company in some way we crave,” says Wilson, “and it’s a vicarious thing where you’re looking at someone eating this 6,000-calorie meal and that makes you feel better about the takeaway pizza that you’re eating by yourself at home.”

by Amy Fleming, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Steve West/Getty Images

U.S. Farmers to Get $15 Billion in Aid Amid China Trade War

President Donald Trump said on Monday that his administration was planning to provide about $15 billion in aid to help U.S. farmers whose products may be targeted with tariffs by China amid a deepening trade war.

“We’re going to take the highest year, the biggest purchase that China has ever made with our farmers, which is about $15 billion, and do something reciprocal to our farmers so our farmers can do well,” Trump told reporters at the White House.

He did not provide any more details on what kind of an aid package it would be.

American farmers, a key constituency of Trump, have been among the hardest hit in the trade war. Soybeans are the most valuable U.S. farm export, and shipments to China dropped to a 16-year low in 2018, while soybean futures prices last week fell this week to 11-year lows.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said on Friday that Trump had asked him to create a plan to help American farmers cope with the heavy impact of the U.S.-China trade war on agriculture.

A new aid program would be the second round of assistance for farmers, after the Department of Agriculture’s $12 billion plan last year to compensate for lower prices for farm goods and lost sales stemming from trade disputes with China and other nations.

by Jeff Mason, Tim Ahmann and Humeyra Pamuk, Reuters |  Read more:

[ed. So, $27 billion in subsidies over two years to prop up Big Ag (ie. "farmers") and buy votes. What happens to products that can't be sold? Are they thrown away? Does agribusiness just close up shop for a year or two and collect free money? Is this just another version of what the government and Federal Reserve did propping up Financials and Wall Street (who also have large stakes in agribusiness)? Free market capitalism has become a joke. Think about that when Republicans start fear-mongering over "democratic socialism". It's already here, just for corporations and one-percenters. Stay tuned for updates. For example: Trump pushes for new bailouts for farmers hurt by his trade war (Vox).]

Victor Brauner, L'acteur [The Actor], June 1956
via:

The State of Affairs

The Modern Model

Marriage is a lot like physics – it runs into trouble when a third body is introduced.

Both fields also experienced a revolution in the last century or two, with old ideas being replaced by new conceptions of how things work. For marriage, what was once a mostly economic and societal arrangement is now a romantic one, and is subject (at least in the West) to the “Modern Model of Marriage”.

The modern model goes something like this: a couple meets, feels strong chemistry, discovers shared interests, and starts having sex. The next step is emotional intimacy, as the partners are expected to become each other’s best friends and confidants. Next comes economic partnership: living together, making and spending money together, getting ready for parenthood. A spiritual dimension is added as each partner finds meaning and transcendence in their shared love. Finally, the wedding vows lock in the final requirement: that all of the above will now be provided exclusively within the couple, forever.

This exclusivity is meant to provide security, which has to take precedence in the trade-off against the other benefits of marriage. A union that scores a B grade on chemistry, engagement, sex, meaning, intimacy, and economics with an A+ on security is considered a great marriage, about as good as one can hope for. We accept that couples may face financial troubles, a drifting apart of interests and hobbies, decreased intimacy, and lackluster sex. But it’s an oxymoron to say: “my marriage is great, there’s just a bit of infidelity”.

And yet, as Esther Perel quips:

Infidelity has a tenacity that marriage can only envy.

(...) The State of Affairs is a close inspection of the reality of marriage and adultery. For the most part it relies not on p<0.05 studies but on Perel’s three-decade career as a therapist in a dozen countries. The diversity of perspectives in the book is its great strength; it does not offer a single Theory of Relationships and is skeptical of all such attempts. Instead, Perel explores how affairs happen, what it means for all three people involved, and what we can learn from them about the foundation of human desire, fear, sexuality, and love.

The book is subtitled “Rethinking Infidelity”, but I read it as a primer for rethinking relationships more broadly. The multitude of affairs recounted in the book happen in good marriages and bad, new marriages and old, gay and straight, Morrocan and Swiss. Combined, the point to myriad structural weaknesses of the modern model, to the point where launching into a relationship guided by it seems as reckless as sailing into the ocean on a leaky ship. (...)

Perel explains that infidelity today is not a threat to our economic or physical security, but to our emotional security. It’s a threat to our very identity.

At so many weddings, starry-eyed dreamers recite a list of vows, swearing to be everything to each other, from soul mate to lover to teacher to therapist.

It is a grand ambition, and infidelity tells the betrayed partner that they failed at it. A prerequisite for romantic marriage is succumbing to the illusion that one can make their partner happy like no one else can, that the union is unique and special. The marriage ceremony fuses this illusion into one’s identity, reinforced by the social proof of friends and family offering their tearful congratulations. Infidelity shatters this illusion in a moment.

Affairs can also unmoor the betrayed partner from their own past. Realizing that they lived a lie forces them to reassess their entire personal history for the length of the relationship. The loss of personal history is also experienced as a loss of identity.

The trauma caused by affairs is real, as both the cheater and the betrayed know. Infidelity certainly deserves moral condemnation. And yet, Perel suggests that a focus on moralizing isn’t the most productive reaction to the discovery of an affair.

First, she considers cheating in the context of all other marital misdemeanors. The book recounts the stories of people who cheated on spouses who for years ignored them, bullied and belittled them, emotionally abused them, sacrificed their relationships for work or gambling or crystal meth. It is strange that in all those cases we support the right of the abused partner to find love and comfort with someone else, but only on the condition that they first go through the drawn-out and potentially ruinous process of official divorce. If someone seeks an escape from loneliness and misery before the final papers are signed we turn them from victim to villain.

More importantly, the more moral opprobrium a society has for cheating, the harder life becomes for the betrayed partner.

by Jacobian, Less Wrong |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

via:

Swarms of Drones, Piloted By Artificial Intelligence, May Soon Patrol Europe's Borders

Imagine you're hiking through the woods near a border. Suddenly, you hear a mechanical buzzing, like a gigantic bee. Two quadcopters have spotted you and swoop in for a closer look. Antennae on both drones and on a nearby autonomous ground vehicle pick up the radio frequencies coming from the cell phone in your pocket. They send the signals to a central server, which triangulates your exact location and feeds it back to the drones. The robots close in.

Cameras and other sensors on the machines recognize you as human and try to ascertain your intentions. Are you a threat? Are you illegally crossing a border? Do you have a gun? Are you engaging in acts of terrorism or organized crime? The machines send video feeds to their human operator, a border guard in an office miles away, who checks the videos and decides that you are not a risk. The border guard pushes a button, and the robots disengage and continue on their patrol.

This is not science fiction. The European Union is financing a project to develop drones piloted by artificial intelligence and designed to autonomously patrol Europe’s borders. The drones will operate in swarms, coordinating and corroborating information among fleets of quadcopters, small fixed-wing airplanes, ground vehicles, submarines, and boats. Developers of the project, known as Roborder, say the robots will be able to identify humans and independently decide whether they represent a threat. If they determine that you may have committed a crime, they will notify border police. [ed. Until we 'advance' to the point where you're just shot on the spot.] (...)

“The development of these systems is a dark step into morally dangerous territory,” said Noel Sharkey, emeritus professor of robotics and artificial intelligence at Sheffield University in the U.K. and one of the founders of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, a nonprofit that advocates against the military use of robotics. Sharkey lists examples of weaponized drones currently on the market: flying robots equipped with Tasers, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and other weapons. He warns of the implications of combining that technology with AI-based decision-making and using it in politically-charged border zones. “It’s only a matter of time before a drone will be able to take action to stop people,” Sharkey told The Intercept. (...)

Roborder won its funding grant in 2017 and has set out to develop a marketable prototype — “a swarm of robotics to support border monitoring” — by mid-2020. Its developers hope to build and equip a collection of air, sea, and land drones that can be combined and sent out on border patrol missions, scanning for “threats” autonomously based on information provided by human operators, said Stefanos Vrochidis, Roborder’s project manager.

The drones will employ optical, infrared, and thermal cameras; radar; and radio frequency sensors to determine threats along the border. Cell phone frequencies will be used to triangulate the location of people suspected of criminal activity, and cameras will identify humans, guns, vehicles, and other objects. “The main objective is to have as many sensors in the field as possible to assist patrol personnel,” said Kostas Ioannidis, Roborder’s technical manager. (...)

The documents obtained by The Intercept show Roborder responding to some ethical concerns about the project but not about the technology itself. In their grant application, Roborder’s developers conceded that their research “may be exploited by criminal organizations and individual criminals when planning to perpetrate acts of serious crime or terrorism” but wrote that the consortium of public and private companies developing the technology would work to keep their data safe. That group includes drone manufacturing companies, several national police departments, two national guards, a defense ministry, a port authority, a cyberdefense company, a company that specializes in developing equipment for electronic warfare, and another that provides “predictive analytics” for European police forces.

As for the technology’s possible modification for future clients, the answers were less clear. The developers would not comment on the potential for military sales after the project cycle ends. Developers added that their work is delayed because one of Roborder’s key consortium partners, Portuguese drone manufacturer Tekever, has left the project. Spokespeople for Roborder, Tekever, and Horizon 2020 would not explain the rationale for Tekever’s departure.

by Zach Campbell, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Soohee Cho/The Intercept

[ed. Coming soon to a backyard near you (wait until the cops get this).]

What Is Writing and Does This Count as It?

As culture evolves, it becomes ever more difficult to answer the question “What is art?” If you spill spaghetti sauce, is that a painting? Does a squeaky floor count as a song? If you say, “You, too,” when a T.S.A. agent says, “Safe travels,” is that a comedy-inflected performance piece?

Writing is among the art forms most difficult to define, most complicated to pin down, most synonym to yet another synonym. Fortunately, I have developed a helpful guide for the next time you find yourself asking, “Is the thing I have just done technically writing?” (Spoiler: the answer, almost always, is yes.)

• Writing is when you rearrange your pencils on a table until the café closes.

• Writing is when you sit—fingertips hovering over your keyboard, cursor blinking on a fresh blank document—and open Twitter for the twenty-eighth time.

• You can tell that someone is a writer because she’ll have a pencil behind her ear, a Moleskine notebook in her hand, a pen behind her other ear, coffee on her breath and shirt, eyes that beg for your approval, and a Sharpie she’s somehow hidden in her hair. (...)

• You officially become a writer when you own more than one laptop sticker. (If the first sticker is from a local NPR station, just the one will do.)

• A key sign of writing is letters happening in a specific order. If you can read the letters, that’s prose. If the letters are a little jumbled, that’s poetry. If the letters are grouped in threes with other symbols, that’s actually a pay phone which, if you think about it, is kind of spoken-word writing.

by Mia Mercado, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Iya Forbes / Getty

Squirrel King

The city didn’t put stop signs at our suburban corner until I was thirteen. The intersection wasn’t particularly busy. It was, however, just tree-lined enough, and the neighborhood drivers just careless enough, that more than a few quiet afternoons were shattered by wrecks outside. Each time we heard squealing tires and crashing metal, Mom dutifully called 911 and then rushed to help. Despite the reckless driving, no one was ever killed. Pet dogs and stray cats weren’t so lucky. Neither were the squirrels.

Roadkill on our neighborhood’s streets was ever-present. Dad joked about free dinner. Mom insisted we keep the family dog away. She was always looking out for our safety and well-being. Sometimes this meant protective hugs, like after the time a bigger kid sat on me while eating a Klondike Bar. Sometimes this meant harsh words, like when I threw myself out of a moving car. And sometimes this meant saying nothing at all. But it definitely meant keeping us from playing with the street’s dead animals, especially the Squirrel King.

When I was nine, His Bushy-Tailed Majesty, the ruler of the Acorn Throne, was struck down immediately in front of our home. He must’ve been leading a crusade, because his fallen body, smooshed flat against the pavement, was surrounded by a host of chittering companions, a retinue of brave knights. Compared to them, he was huge. And more than that, he was getting treatment I’d never before seen. Staring wide-eyed out our front window, I spied a secret and sacred squirrel-rite: Royal Mourning.

The Squirrel King’s funeral wasn’t the first I attended, though it was the most frenetic. After my childhood friend Caleb was killed by a drunk driver, we stood quietly in church, our bodies nearly as still as his. When it was time to go, I begged to stay near his casket awhile longer, believing he was somehow more alive the longer I remained. The Squirrel King’s mourners had no such illusions: they’d rush into the street, pressing their bodies prone just like their King’s, and after a few moments’ pause, they’d scurry away, into the nearby trees. Soon others would take their place, lying flat to pay their respects before running away, too.

Mom eventually joined me at the window. Together we watched the squirrels grieve their lost leader, me providing enthusiastic commentary and squirrely speculation, her standing behind me quietly. After a few minutes, she gave me a tight squeeze, pulled us away, and said it was time for grocery shopping. I spent most of our trip wondering aloud at the splendors we’d seen. Squirrels must’ve been coming from across the city just to visit our street. Who’d known we’d had such an important resident in the leaves above.

by Steven A. Miller, Guernica |  Read more:
Image: Anne Le Guern
[ed. Happy Mother's Day.]