Why TikTok is Facing Greater Scrutiny

The most downloaded app on the App Store for the last year makes almost no money, is barely understood by anyone over 25, and has already faced investigations, fines and bans on three continents.

TikTok’s success has taken regulators, parents and its competitors by surprise. But with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in the UK now investigating the company over its handling of young users’ private data, can reality catch up with the viral smash?

At its core, TikTok is a video-sharing app. Users film themselves in 15-second clips, typically set to music, and upload them to be viewed by followers and strangers alike. If it seems like it came out of nowhere, that’s because in part, it did: the app as it is today is a merger of the original TikTok, which was launched internationally in September 2017, and the earlier viral sensation Musical.ly.

The latter had already become one of the most popular social media platforms for UK and US teenagers by the time it was purchased by TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, in November 2017, and its influence still pervades the platform to this day. More importantly, the merger meant TikTok ended up on the smartphones of more than 60 million users overnight.

ByteDance had experience of that sort of scale, however. The Chinese startup was already famous in its homeland for viral news app Toutiao, which hit 120 million daily users in 2017, as well as Douyin, the China-only version of TikTok that has been kept separate to comply with Beijing’s strict censorship regime.

That pre-existing scale also gave TikTok another weapon: a huge war chest. Before ByteDance was even earning revenue from the app, the company was the single largest advertiser on Snapchat, spending nearly $1bn (£800m) on app install ads on the messaging platform, according to the Wall Street Journal. That spending was recreated on Facebook, Instagram, poster campaigns and TV adverts.

As a result, according to analytics firm SensorTower, TikTok has been the No 1 app on the worldwide App Store for five consecutive quarters, with an estimated 500 million users worldwide. Even if TikTok’s spending dies off, it now has the momentum to survive, according to Emma Worth of the marketing firm Ralph Creative.

“The app itself offers something no other app does and that’s why it has become so successful: paid acquisitions just help more people know about it,” she said. “Young people are fed up with the narcissistic influencer movement on other channels, seeing ‘the perfect life’, ‘the perfect body’, the ‘perfect relationship’ and that’s why they’ve moved to TikTok.”

But with increased scale has come increased scrutiny. In February, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the US fined the company $5.7m) £4.2m for collecting the personal data of children under 13 without parental consent. In April, TikTok was banned in India, where it claims to have more than 120 million monthly active users, over concerns that the app was being used to share sexually explicit material. The ban was lifted a week later.

The ICO is investigating because of the same data protection concerns as the FTC, but with additional focus on the controls available on the app’s direct messages. The UK watchdog fears that adults are able to send private messages to children they do not know.

It is the ability to live stream that worries the NSPCC and others.

by Alex Hern, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Danish Siddiqui/Reuters

Bansky, Extinction Rebellion, Marble Arch, London 2019
via:

The Chance for Peace

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. […] Is there no other way the world may live?

—Dwight David Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace,” speech given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Apr. 16, 1953.

via: (Harper's)

[ed. See also: "When asked if the United States should have a military parade to show off its might, this was then-President Eisenhower’s response: ‘Absolutely not. We are the pre-eminent power on Earth. For us to try and imitate what the Soviets are doing in Red Square would make us look weak.’" (PolitiFact).]

The Impossible Dream

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
—The Declaration of Independence

These words, from Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, are so familiar that it is easy to assume their meaning is obvious. The puzzle lies in the assertion that we have a right to pursue happiness. John Locke, in his Two Treatises of 1690, said we are all created equal and have inalienable rights, including those to life and liberty. But for Locke the third crucial right was the right to property. In Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, also published in 1690, he wrote about the pursuit of happiness, but it follows from his account there that there can be no right to pursue happiness because we will pursue happiness come what may. The pursuit of happiness is a law of human nature (of what we now call psychology), just as gravity is a law of physics. A right to pursue happiness is no more necessary than a right for water to run downhill.

Jefferson meant, I think, that we have a right to certain preconditions that will allow us to pursue happiness: freedom of speech, so we can speak our minds and learn from others; a career open to talents, so our efforts may be rewarded; freedom of worship, so we may find our way to heaven; and a free market, so we can pursue prosperity. Read this way, Jefferson’s right to the pursuit of happiness is an elaboration of the right to liberty. Liberty means not only freedom from coercion, or freedom under the law—or even the right to participate in politics—it is also a right to live in a free community in which individuals themselves decide how they want to achieve happiness. The “public happiness” to which Jefferson aspired can therefore be attained, since public happiness requires liberty in this expanded sense, as Hannah Arendt would later note.

Jefferson was well aware that being free to pursue happiness does not mean that everyone will be happy. And yet, as Adam Sternbergh explains, we trick ourselves into thinking we know what is needed to be happy: a promotion, a new car, a vacation, a good-looking partner. We believe this even though we know there are plenty of people with good jobs, new cars, vacations, and attractive partners, and many of them are miserable. But they, too, imagine their misery can be fixed by a bottle of Pétrus or a yacht or public adulation. In practice, our strategies for finding happiness are usually self-defeating. There’s plenty of empirical evidence to suggest that much of what we do to gain happiness doesn’t pay off. It seems that aiming at happiness is always a misconceived project; happiness comes, as John Stuart Mill insisted, as the unintended outcome of aiming at something else. “The right to the pursuit of happiness,” wrote Aldous Huxley, “is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.”

This problem is particularly acute in our modern consumer economy, in which political institutions, the economic system, and popular culture are all now primarily dedicated to the pursuit of happiness. This has had the perverse effect of creating a world of frustration and disappointment in which so many discover that happiness is beyond their grasp. The economy fails to deliver for the majority but urges everyone to spend beyond their means. We engage in “retail therapy,” spending for the momentary gratification of acquisition. We encounter advertisements that wrap themselves around us like a blizzard of snow, each promising that if we spend, and go on spending, we will be rewarded with endless delights. This spending helps drive climate change, which threatens to make the planet uninhabitable. Moreover, our sense of who we are seems to be increasingly detached from reality; we live out fantasy versions of ourselves, playing our own private form of air guitar. To constantly pursue something you can never catch is a form of madness. We have built this madness into the very structure of our lives. Every society in the world aims at economic growth, and every society encourages the endless accumulation of wealth. When it comes to wealth, we have great difficulty in saying enough is enough, because it is hard to know when we can safely say we have enough to face down every possible catastrophe.

How then have we come to build a whole culture around an impossible, futile, self-defeating enterprise?

The word happy in English originally simply meant lucky. Are you lucky? It’s always too soon to tell, till death closes your account. For the Greeks and Romans, happiness was linked to success: the happy man (barbarians, slaves, and women hardly counted) was someone good at living up to the ideals of manhood. Virtue, happiness, and success were inextricably intertwined, so that in the end they amounted to the same thing, the ultimate objective. An impartial observer could best judge if someone was virtuous, happy, or successful, because the standards were objective, not subjective. And just as one should withhold judgment on someone’s luck until they are safely dead, so the Greeks held that you could really tell if someone had been happy only when they were securely buried.

This all changed during the seventeenth century, when a few thinkers, Thomas Hobbes foremost, redefined happiness as a subjective experience, an emotional state. “The felicity of this life,” Hobbes wrote in 1651, does not consist, as the Epicureans claimed, “in the repose of a mind satisfied”:

For there is no such finis ultimus (utmost aim) nor summum bonum (greatest good) as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers. Nor can a man any more live whose desires are at an end than he whose senses and imaginations are at a stand. Felicity is a continual progress of the desire from one object to another, the attaining of the former being still but the way to the latter.

To be happy, in Hobbes’ view, was to succeed in acquiring pleasurable experiences. And each individual was the sole judge of what is pleasurable. In order to acquire the means to future pleasure, we seek what Hobbes called power—money, status, influence, and friendship are all forms of power. There is no limit to our quest for pleasure and power, just as there is no limit to the merchant’s quest for money; Hobbes took Niccolò Machiavelli’s account of politics and generalized it as an account of human life. Machiavelli said human beings have insatiable appetites, and Hobbes constructed his psychology, moral philosophy, and political theory around this perception. We all, he claimed, endlessly compete with one another over limited resources. This statement seems obvious to us, so we are surprised to discover that the word competition was a new one in Hobbes’ time, as was the idea of a society in which competition is pervasive. In the pre-Hobbesian world, ambition, the desire to get ahead and do better than others, was universally condemned as a vice; in the post-Hobbesian world, it became admirable, a spur to improvement and progress.

The appetite for pleasure, as understood by Hobbes, has two disturbing features. First, it never ends until death. There is no stable condition that counts as being happy; there are only fleeting experiences that must be renewed constantly. We are (though Hobbes doesn’t use the phrase) in an endless pursuit of happiness, and in order to attain happiness, we are in pursuit of the power and wealth that we believe will make it possible. Second, we take an imaginary pleasure now in our future pleasures. And since happiness is subjective, imaginary pleasures are just as authentic as real ones. Thus fantasy and reality become interchangeable.

by David Wootton, Lapham's Quarterly |  Read more:

Image: John Trumbull

Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Regulating Big Tech Makes Them Stronger, So They Need Competition Instead

It is hard to find anyone cheering for a world dominated by a few giants. It is even harder to find anyone who thinks that Big Tech stands any chance of being toppled. Both the right and the left clamour for a break-up of the biggest web platforms, notably in America—from the trustbusting manifesto pledge by Elizabeth Warren, a democratic senator, to the followers of Alex Jones, a right-wing commentator, who was recently banned from several social-media sites.

Monopoly break-ups are the disused weapons of antitrust. Like stone pyramids, they seem a relic of history, a lost art from a fallen civilisation. Yet they are exceptionally hard to do politically. So if break-ups belong to the past, how can society tame Big Tech? The question has fresh salience as America’s Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission divvy up which agency will handle possible antitrust investigations of companies like Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon.

In the absence of a political faith in break-ups, modern trustbusters are operating on the assumption that Big Tech will dominate in perpetuity—and placing upon the incumbents the state-like duties to police bad user activities, from fomenting terrorist violence to infringing copyright. Yet this raises a new problem: complying with these rules would be so expensive that only a handful of (mostly American) companies could afford it. This snuffs out any hope of a big incumbent being displaced by a nascent competitor.

As a creator who derives the bulk of his living from giant media companies, it has been hard for me to watch those companies—and other creators who should really know better—act as cheerleaders for a situation in which the Big Tech firms are being handed a prize beyond measure: control over what is, in effect, a planetary, species-wide electronic nervous system. (...)

Creating state-like duties for the big tech platforms imposes short-term pain on their shareholders in exchange for long-term gain. Shaving a few hundred million dollars off a company's quarterly earnings to pay for compliance is a bargain in exchange for a world in which they need not fear a rival growing large enough to compete with them. Google can stop looking over its shoulder for the next company that will do to it what it did to Yahoo, and Facebook can stop watching for someone ready to cast it in the role of MySpace, in the next social media upheaval.

These duties can only be performed by the biggest companies, which all-but forecloses on the possibility of breaking up Big Tech. Once it has been knighted to serve as an arm of the state, Big Tech cannot be cut down to size if it is to perform those duties.

Over the past 12 months there has been a radical shift in the balance of power on the internet. In the name of taming the platforms, regulators have inadvertently issued them a “Perpetual Internet Domination Licence”, albeit one that requires that they take advice from an aristocracy of elite regulators. With only the biggest tech companies able to perform the regulatory roles they have been assigned because of complexity and cost, they officially become too big to fail, and can only be nudged a little in one direction or another by regulators drawn from their own ranks.

by Cory Doctorow, The Economist |  Read more:

Image: Getty Images

Everything is Written in Stone

Another topic is on health insurance. Harris jumped in early saying that she favored abolishing private health care insurance, or rather programs that would insure all Americans under an expanded Medicare system but would ban all but supplement health care insurance. She’s been wrestling with explaining that ever since – even back and forth a few times during and after last week’s debate.

Short point from me. The whole system of private insurance is something this country is cursed with. We’d be far better if we had the system in Germany or France or Switzerland. But advocates saying that Medicare for All is overwhelmingly popular and would save lots of money are living in a dream world. Polls show pretty clearly that people support Medicare for All because most assume it is a voluntary buy-in system. When they hear that everyone now on private insurance would be moved into expanded Medicare support drops rapidly. It still has a lot of support but it’s not majority support.

You can say no one likes their insurance company. And that’s definitely true in a way, and rhetorically. But the reality is that lots of people are wary of giving up what they have and think that what they’d get in exchange would be worse. You can’t disprove people’s risk aversion with a logic argument.

Another big problem with Medicare for All. Medicare is much more efficient than the private insurance system. We should expand it. But much of our health care system – hospitals, doctors – are supported by the private system reimburseing at significantly higher rates than Medicare. If you moved immediately to everyone being in Medicare at the same reimbursement rates you have today lots of hospitals would simply go under. These aren’t impossible problems. A lot of the problem with the current system is that hospitals, even when nominally non-profit, have become massive profit centers and have collusive relationships with the insurers. So from one perspective if they take it on the chin that’s great. But even if you think it’s a good idea in principle, the level of dislocation and disruption is immense.

The argument I’m making here isn’t against single payer. It is to understand the scale of the challenge on the front end. It’s pressing some realism about the massive challenges of transitioning from one to the other if your plan is not some version of buy-in to Medicare. It’s also not to be fooled by polls that don’t approach the question the way it will be approached in political terms. But circling back to Harris, she seems to have a tendency to make seemingly off-handed commitments with very big implications for a potential general election. Not a huge thing maybe, small data set. But it’s recurred a few times now.

You can run an audacious campaign. Or you can run a cautious campaign. The worst mixture is to think you’re running one and find out in the fall of 2020 that you’re running the other without a clear plan on how to do it.

by Josh Marshall, TPM |  Read more:
[ed. See also: How to Straighten Out the Medicare Maze (NY Times).]

Harry Nilsson

Coconut

Brother bought a coconut, he bought it for a dime
His sister had another one she paid it for the lime

She put the lime in the coconut, she drank 'em bot' up
She put the lime in the coconut, she drank 'em bot' up
She put the lime in the coconut, she drank 'em bot' up
She put the lime in the coconut, she call the doctor, woke 'I'm up

And said "doctor, ain't there nothin' I can take?"
I said "doctor, to relieve this belly ache"
I said "doctor, ain't there nothin' I can take?"
I said "doctor, to relieve this belly ache"

Now lemme get this straight
You put the lime in the coconut, you drank 'em bot' up
Put the lime in the coconut, you drank 'em bot' up
Put the lime in the coconut, you drank 'em bot'up
Put the lime in the coconut, you call your doctor, woke 'I'm up

Said "doctor, ain't there nothing' I can take?"
I said, "doctor, to relieve this belly ache"
I said "doctor, ain't there nothin' I can take?'
I said, "doctor, to relieve this belly ache"

You put the lime in the coconut, you drink 'em bot' together
Put the lime in the coconut and you'll feel better
Put the lime in the coconut, drink 'em bot' up
Put the lime in the coconut and call me in the morning"

Woo-oo-ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh
Woo-oo-ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh
Woo-oo-ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh

Brother bought a coconut, he bought it for a dime
His sister had another one she paid it for a lime
She put the lime in the coconut, she drank 'em bot' up
She put the lime in the coconut, she called the doctor, woke 'I'm up

And said, "doctor, ain't there nothin' I can take?'
I said, "doctor, to relieve this belly ache"
I said "doctor, ain't there nothin' I can take?"

I said, "doctor, now lemme get this straight

You put the lime in the coconut, you drink 'em bot'up
Put the lime in the coconut, you drink 'em bot' up
Put the lime in the coconut, you drink 'em bot' up
Put the lime in the coconut, you're such a silly woman

Put a lime in the coconut and drink 'em bot' together
Put the lime in the coconut, then you'll feel better
Put the lime in the coconut, drink 'em both down
Put the lime in your coconut, and call me in the morning

Woo, ain't there nothin' you can take?
I say, woo, to relieve your belly ache
You say, well woo, ain't there nothin' I can take?
I say woo, woo, to relieve your belly ache
You say ya, ain't there nothin' I can take?

I say wow, to relieve this belly ache
I said "doctor, ain't there nothing I can take?"
I said, "doctor, ain't there nothing I can take?"
I said, "doctor, ain't there nothing I can take?"
I said, "doctor you're such a silly woman"

Put the lime in the coconut and drink 'em both together
Put the lime in the coconut, and you'll feel better
Put the lime in the coconut, drink 'em bot' up
Put the lime in the coconut and call me in the morning

Yes, you call me in the morning, you call me in the morning
I'll tell you what to do if you call me in the morning
I'll tell you what to do if you call me in the morning
I'll tell you what to do if you call me in the morning
I'll tell you what to do and if you call me in the morning
I'll tell you what to do

[ed. Genius.]

Death of a Political Junkie

"Political Junkie" doesn't rate an entry in William Safire’s New Dictionary of Politics, the final and much-expanded revision of a book Safire first published in 1968. Perhaps that’s just because its meaning was already too obvious to be worth unpacking by 1993, when Richard Nixon’s onetime speechwriter, by then a Pulitzer-winning New York Times columnist and part-time language maven, updated his labor of love for the last time. I wish that Safire had at least tried to shed some light on who coined the term in the first place or when it passed into popular usage, two things nobody seems to know. But I can certainly recall using it early and often, hearing it tossed around as both pejorative and brag, and applying it to myself and my similarly minded pals back when Rachel Maddow was still a zygote.

The Beltway-bred likes of me must have had to call ourselves something in the 1970s, after all. We were making the leap from high school to college when what I still call our Watergate summers exfoliated from third-rate burglary to John Dean’s cancer on the presidency to Nixon giving one last stiff V-fingered salute before boarding Marine One after he’d resigned. Ever since, we’ve held one truth to be self-evident. If you’ll forgive me for paraphrasing Safire’s fellow lexicographer Samuel Johnson, we know that anyone tired of Watergate is tired of life.

No doubt, we’d have caught the bug no matter what. But to us, Watergate was unquestionably what America’s most exuberant political junkie, Chris Matthews, later called it: “Carnival in Rio.” Talk about letting the cat out of the bag, even if he only did so long after the fact. (...)

Once Watergate ebbed, we newly minted political junkies went right back to being oddball members of a subculture that was viewed with suspicion, not to say bemusement, by most of our compatriots. Back in the days when Donald Trump was a flashy would-be casino mogul with only one bankruptcy to brag about and no reality show on NBC to lend him gravitas, longtime Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. could write a book called Why Americans Hate Politics with no worry that anyone would gainsay his title’s premise. (It came out in 1991.) On top of that, as far as I could tell, Americans always had. Almost anywhere outside Washington itself, to my considerable surprise in my tenderer years, people like me were instant Martians.

Discovering that my immediate family and friends’ predilection for smack disguised as political news wasn’t universally shared—and was, indeed, despised—was a major shock the first time my State Department parents took the kids to visit our Oregon relatives after we’d been raised mostly abroad. In our various unwittingly exotic homes, which by then included McLean, Virginia, we’d imbibed constant chatter about politics. Our stalwart aunts and uncles were downright scandalized when they heard my sister and I—mere children!—making cynical jokes about, say, Hubert Humphrey when the evening news was on.

In their placid America, which we dazedly gathered was the agreed-upon one, politics—like religion—was taboo as a subject for opinionated discussion. Attending nightly to Walter Cronkite or The Huntley-Brinkley Report while waiting for Gunsmoke or I Dream of Jeannie was a civic duty to them, not a half-hour feast combining the best elements of Western shootouts with the allure of softcore sitcom porn. They weren’t that crazy about hearing us debate the merits of Gunsmoke or I Dream of Jeannie, either, because what on earth was the point?

What I think struck our Oregon relatives as most alienating of all—and in this, they were stand-ins for Mr. and Mrs. White America writ large—was the dawning recognition that our passion wasn’t rooted solely in a belief that political disputes are consequential to the nation’s well-being. Horrifically, it soon sank in that gabbing endlessly about what was up and who was down on Capitol Hill or in the latest Presidential sweepstakes was these goddamn Martians’ idea of fun, sort of like rotisserie football with the nuclear codes thrown in to add spice.

What makes the comparison apt is that your true, hardcore political junkie is more closely akin to a sports nut than anything else. Most of us thrive on being partisan—we want our team to not only reach but win the Super Bowl every year, even an odd-numbered one when only a few governorships are in play—and yet we’re also the kind of buffs who can say “Great game” and mean it even when our guy has just been out-quarterbacked by the opposition’s version of Tom Brady.

We dote on stats, team lore, and league history, discussing ancient contests and long-gone gridiron superstars as avidly as this year’s NFL season—er, election cycle. To this day, nothing makes Chris Matthews happier than a chance to time-warp over to Arlington Cemetery and dig up Jack Kennedy, his all-time favorite QB. You can practically see the Hardball host’s eyes glaze over with bliss and his chuckle grow beatific as the Camelot syringe nosedives toward his forearm for the thousandth or millionth time. (...)

Only in New York City is political junkiedom not only unabashed but somehow organic to the milieu, at least if you know the right parts of town. But it’s also intellectualized and more ideological than partisan, which usually wrecks everything. True ideologues are never in it simply for love of the game, and often disdain those who are. I imagine that many of my New York friends—from mere liberals to ardent leftists—would be confounded by how easily and happily I can bond with conservative P.J.’s elsewhere in the country once it’s established that we delight in the same lore.

Then again, I should probably have found a way to put the foregoing and not only my Oregon memories in the past tense. That’s because, in the Trump era, the creature I’m describing—and, for that matter, the creature I was—has become virtually extinct. And right, I know that sounds counterintuitive. Nationwide, aren’t we all obsessed with Trump’s latest outrage pretty much 24/7, no matter how much we’d give to go cold turkey? (...)

A spectatorial addiction to politics that’s bereft of any sort of pleasure principle somewhere in the mix—e.g., the way that, albeit from a safe distance, we can exult in the untrammeled LBJ-ness of LBJ or even, more recently, the finesse of Obama’s “long game”—is a recipe for misery. Nowadays, the only people who get any pleasure out of Trump’s presidency are the MAGA zealots at his rallies, and as we all know, their idea of fun is on the scary side.

For us recovering P.J.s, keeping up with Trump’s latest atrocity has become an ordeal, not our favorite recreational drug. And yet, as Pete Buttigieg recently put it, “It is the nature of grotesque things that you can’t look away.” That’s virtually the opposite of the zesty interest we used to take in the spectacle for its own sake, even in eras when the game’s potential consequences were no joke.

One refuge from 24/7 Trumpism is escaping into blather about the 2020 Democratic field: who’s electable, who’s running the brainiest campaign or showing the most intriguing flashes of welcome wit and nimbleness, and who’s ahead in the horse race at this meaninglessly early stage of things. Briefly, we get to imagine that we’re back in P.J. business at the old stand again, because this kind of “the rain in Spain falls mainly on Mansplain” musical interlude is the sort of fake-insider prattle that turned us into Beltway nuts to begin with.

But it’s a very temporary treat, because the only reason we can indulge ourselves this way is that the race for the nomination truly is at a meaninglessly early stage. Once the choice of which of these contenders will be the Democrats’ anointed challenger to go up against our nightmare president goes from hypothetical to white-knuckle imminent to, come convention time, irreversible, soul-crushing anxiety about the need to defeat Trump is guaranteed to end our paradoxical vacation—or recidivist retreat into hobbyism, anyhow.

To whatever extent this is a lament, I realize it’s one unlikely to rate much sympathy from people who didn’t need Trump’s advent—or any earlier administration’s depredations, for that matter—to remind them that politics is a deadly serious business, not a source of entertainment. That Trump himself is, among other roles, our Entertainer-in-Chief is exactly what makes the thought of being entertained so toxic.

Nor, sadly enough, do I expect to ever be entertained again, even after Trump leaves office. Except for Joe Biden, for whom getting back to business at the old stand is both his major selling point and his mission in life, does anyone really believe the country will return to “normal” once our forty-fifth POTUS departs the scene? I doubt that any of the other 2020 Democratic candidates think so, and I bet that Mitch McConnell isn’t planning on it either. More likely, we’re in for something like a generation of strange, wracked, unnerving times, which won’t have much resemblance to how we used to think the U.S.A. was supposed to work. (...)

Maybe I’m no better than a kid who discovers that his favorite electric toy-train set was crammed with tiny, live, terrified passengers when it went off the rails. But I don’t think so, and not only because getting off on politics as spectacle hardly precludes an absorption in politics as deadly serious business. (If anything, it’s more like the spoonful of sugar that always made the medicine go down.) More tellingly, not that many of us realized it until it was no longer the case in Trump’s U.S.A., the pleasures of being a political junkie always depended on an innate belief that America’s democratic system was too resilient to be at more than temporary risk from any demagogue, crook, or would-be despot.

Rather more naively, we also took it for granted that democracy itself was something we could rely on both parties, no matter how opportunistic or scheming, to preserve and protect. Even the scandal so many of us were weaned on didn’t shake that confidence, since the last and most pious of the Watergate clichés was everybody’s affirmation that, ultimately, “the system worked.” (...)

In other words, the reason people like me can’t be happy political junkies anymore is that our superficially frivolous addiction always depended more than we knew on a secret ingredient: idealism. When I try to imagine what a desperate struggle American politics must look like to youngsters shaped primarily by resisting the Trump era—that is, people whose own idealism takes the form of outraged disbelief, not unwitting complacency—I sometimes think of my favorite quote from Talleyrand, that ultimate political survivor: “Only those who lived before the Revolution know how sweet life can be.”

by Tom Carson, The Baffler |  Read more:
Image: via
[ed. "Superficially frivolous addiction", "unwitting complacency". Destroying democracy is fun! (but really, it's the system's fault).]

Macsime Simon
via:

The Revenge of the Poverty-Stricken College Professors

“Two half-time adjunct jobs do not make a full-time income. Far from it,” Ximena Barrientos says. “I’m lucky that I have my own apartment. I have no idea how people make it work if they have to pay rent.”

We are not sitting on a street corner, or in a welfare office, or in the break room of a fast food restaurant. We are sitting inside a brightly lit science classroom on the third floor of an MC Escher-esque concrete building, with an open breezeway letting in the muggy South Florida air, on the campus of Miami Dade College, one of the largest institutions of higher learning in the United States of America. Barrientos has been teaching here for 15 years. But this is not “her” classroom. She has a PhD, but she does not have a designated classroom. Nor does she have an office. Nor does she have a set schedule, nor tenure, nor healthcare benefits, nor anything that could be described as a decent living wage. She is a full-time adjunct professor: one of thousands of members of the extremely well-educated academic underclass, whose largely unknown sufferings have played just as big a role as student debt in enabling the entire swollen College Industrial Complex to exist.

As Barrientos chatted with another adjunct in the empty classroom, the conversation turned to horror stories: the adjuncts forced to sleep in their cars; the adjunct who was sleeping in classrooms at night; the adjunct who had a full mental breakdown from the stress of not being able to earn a living after all of the time he had put in getting his PhD. Such stories are common, from campus to campus, whispered by adjuncts who know deep down that they themselves are living constantly on the edge of personal, professional, and financial disaster. Other than academic credentials, most adjunct professors don’t have much. But recently, Ximena Barrientos, and her 2,800 colleagues at Miami Dade College, and thousands of others just like them throughout the state of Florida, have acquired, at shocking speed and on a grand scale, something of great value—a union. And they want nothing less than dignity.

When thinking about the struggles of thousands and thousands of people who are both employed as college professors and hardly able to pay their own bills, it is useful to keep in mind the fact that, as a rule, none of these people are supposed to exist. The accepted story of what an “adjunct professor” is—the myth that has drawn so many hopefuls into the world of professional academia—is that adjuncting is not a full-time job at all. It is something that retirees do to keep themselves busy; something that working professionals do on the side to educate people in their field; something that, perhaps, a young PhD might do for a year or two while looking for a full-time professorship, but certainly nothing that would constitute an actual career in itself.

In fact, this is a big lie. The long term trend in higher education has been one of a shrinking number of full-time positions and an ever-growing number of adjunct positions. It is not hard to see why. University budgets are balanced on the backs of adjunct professors. In an adjunct, a school gets the same class taught for about half the salary of a full-time professor, and none of the benefits. The school also retains a god-like control over the schedules of adjuncts, who are literally laid off after every single semester, and then rehired as necessary for the following semester. In the decade since the financial crisis, state governments have slashed higher education funding, and Florida is no exception. That has had two primary consequences on campus: students have taken on ever-higher levels of debt to pay for school, and the college teaching profession has been gutted, as expensive full-time positions are steadily eliminated in favor of cheaper adjunct positions. Many longtime adjuncts talk of jealously waiting for years for a full-time professor to die or retire, only to see the full-time position eliminated when they finally do.

Students at Florida’s enormous community colleges (Miami Dade College alone has more than 165,000 students) may not be conscious of this dynamic, but they sit at its center, and they pay the price—not only in their student loan bills, but by sitting in classes taught by teachers who are overworked, underpaid, given virtually no professional resources or continuity of scheduling, and who are often forced to rush from job to job in order to make ends meet, leaving little time for helping students outside of classroom hours, much less for publishing work in their fields to advance their careers. Now, Florida’s higher education system sits at the center of another trend as well: the unionization of those well educated but miserably compensated adjunct professors.

It has long been common for full time college faculty members to be unionized. Over the past decade, adjuncts (and grad student workers) across America have begun unionizing in earnest as well, as they come to realize that their stories of woe are not unique. In just the past few years, one union has organized close to 10,000 Florida adjuncts, in what is one of the most remarkable and little-noticed large scale labor campaigns in the country.

Carolina Ampudia was a practicing physician in Mexico. She moved to the U.S. for health reasons, and in 2009, she became an adjunct professor at Broward College in Fort Lauderdale, teaching pre-med science classes. She was told that she would have a full-time position in two years. Ten years later, she is still an adjunct. She makes around $18,000, with an M.D. While the number of full-time jobs never seemed to grow, the sheer number of other adjuncts at the school has become overwhelming. “We have been growing in numbers of adjuncts these past 10 years. It’s become very, very crazy, to the point that you start the semester and there’s a bunch of people there you don’t know,” she says. “It’s almost like a first day of class, when you’re like—OK, what happened here?”

Even though a large majority of teachers at Broward, as at other schools, are adjuncts like Ampudia—67 percent of the Broward faculty in 2015 was reportedly part-time—she still felt isolated and neglected after a decade in the same job. Five years ago, the school had formed an adjunct committee to advise it on improving conditions. (“The provost that the college had back then came in the room and said we could come up with any idea we wanted, as long as it didn’t involve any money,” Ampudia laughs.)She continued looking for ways to improve the lot of adjuncts. In the summer of 2017, an organizer from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU’s) Faculty Forward higher education campaign showed up at her house. She was ready.

Five months later, 92 percent of Broward’s 1,700 eligible adjuncts voted “yes” to unionize. The SEIU’s Florida higher ed campaign was rolling.

In April of 2018, contract negotiations began. Little progress was made for the rest of the year. This year, the negotiating climate has gotten a bit more positive, but the two sides haven’t gotten to money issues yet. And for adjuncts everywhere, money is the issue above all else. The scramble to earn a minimal living wage is what forces thousands of professors to live lives of constant desperation.

“I would work morning, noon, and night. That is my problem—to be able to make a living, that’s what I had to do,” says Renee Zelden, who adjuncts at both Broward and Miami Dade Colleges. “I teach more than full-time faculty.” Indeed. This summer, Zelden is “only” teaching five classes at two schools—fewer than her usual six to eight classes at three schools per semester. Most schools cap adjuncts at four classes per semester, hence the multiple institutions. The gas money Zelden spends to commute from her home to Miami can eat up more than the $50 she is paid for a single hour of class, so she must be sure to get multiple classes on the same day just to make teaching worth her time. Fifty dollars for an hour-long class sounds decent, until you break down the time it takes to prep for class, commute, teach, and then grade papers for 25 or more students. “If I figured it out, I’d be afraid I’m only making like five dollars an hour,” says Zelden, “so I don’t want to figure it out.”

She needn’t be so negative. Other Florida adjuncts who have figured it out told me that, factoring in all of the time they spend on teaching and related work, they make as much as seven dollars an hour—less than Florida’s minimum wage. (...)

The overwhelming victory of the union vote at Broward came with little formal opposition. At Miami Dade College (MDC), on the other hand, the school did its best to scare its adjuncts away from SEIU. Between the time that the adjuncts filed for a union election in July of 2018 and the time the election was held in March of this year, the administration sent a stream of ominous anti-union warnings, culminating with a multi-page letter mailed to everyone’s house urging them to vote “no,” offering rationales such as “The SEIU would certainly want every adjunct to pay union dues,” and “The SEIU organizers do not know academia. They have never been faculty.” By this logic, college professors should also never allow themselves to be represented by attorneys or accountants—they have never been faculty.

Miami Dade is known as “Democracy’s College,” a title that purports to capture the school’s noble mission of educating everyone, no matter who they are. The hugeness of the student body certainly backs up this characterization. The hugeness of the underpaid and stepped-on academic work force—which includes 2,800 adjuncts—seems to undercut the message. At MDC’s Wolfson campus downtown, a hunk of the Berlin Wall is on display. The school says that this symbolizes how it is “Walking the walk as ‘Democracy’s College’ in each and every one of its endeavors”; several adjuncts, on the other hand, brought it up as a tangible, irony-drenched reminder of the gulf between the school’s lofty rhetoric and its determination to block their own democratic organizing if at all possible. (...)

SEIU can reach 10,000 unionized adjunct faculty in the state of Florida if it wins several ongoing campaigns. Besides SPC, another hotbed of organizing is Santa Fe College in Gainesville, which acts as a major feeder school for the University of Florida. Josh Braley, a soft-spoken Presbyterian minister with a Ph.D in religion, has been an adjunct at Santa Fe for 15 years. He saw it as “a good way to get your foot in the door,” before the full-time job offer; as usual, the full-time job never materialized.

When he was still actively searching, Braley was told that there were about 80 qualified applicants for every single full-time professorship. In a decade and a half, he can recall getting a single raise. He now makes $2,000 per semester per class. “Of all the people that I went to graduate school with [at Vanderbilt], I think I know only one who ended up with a tenured, full-time teaching position,” he says. In the spring of 2018, an SEIU organizer showed up in his classroom and asked him to sign a union card; he was skeptical, and put them off. A few weeks later, another organizer showed up at his house. He figured that if they were that persistent, there must be some support behind it. Now, he’s helping organize his coworkers himself.

When he was hired at Santa Fe 15 years ago, an administrator told him that a lot of adjuncts were just people who loved to teach, and who didn’t do it for the paycheck, and who were supported by their spouses; just last year, he read an interview with the college president in which he said the same thing. Yet Braley has never, in his 15 years, met an adjunct who fit that description. “What this tells me is that they don’t actually believe this, but they’re saying it because it’s a convenient fiction,” he says. “Or, what’s even more alarming is if they think this is true. They’re so out of touch.”

by Hamilton Nolan, Splinter |  Read more:

Image: Hamilton Nolan
[ed. See also: If I Made $4 a Word, This Article Would Be Worth $10,000 (Longreads).]

Electric Planet: Wired Bacteria Form Nature’s Power Grid

At three o’clock in the afternoon on September 4, 1882, the electrical age began. The Edison Illuminating Company switched on its Pearl Street power plant, and a network of copper wires came alive, delivering current to a few dozen buildings in the surrounding neighborhood.

One of those buildings housed this newspaper. As night fell, reporters at The New York Times gloried in the steady illumination thrown off by Thomas Edison’s electric lamps. “The light was soft, mellow, and grateful to the eye, and it seemed almost like writing by daylight,” they reported in an article the following day.

But nature invented the electrical grid first, it turns out. Even in 1882, thousands of miles of wires were already installed in the ground in the New York region — in meadows, in salt marshes, in muddy river bottoms. They were built by microbes, which used them to shuttle electricity.

Electroactive bacteria were unknown to science until a couple of decades ago. But now that scientists know what to look for, they’re finding this natural electricity across much of the world, even on the ocean floor. It alters entire ecosystems, and may help control the chemistry of the Earth.

“Not to sound too crazy, but we have an electric planet,” said John Stolz, a microbiologist at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.

In the mid-1980s, Dr. Stolz was helping to study a baffling microbe fished out of the Potomac River by his colleague Derek Lovley. The microbe, Geobacter metallireducens, had a bizarre metabolism. “It took me six months to figure out how to grow it in the lab,” said Dr. Lovley, now a microbiologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Like us, Geobacter feed on carbon compounds. As our cells break down these compounds to generate energy, they strip off free electrons and transfer them to oxygen atoms, producing water molecules. Geobacter couldn’t use oxygen, however, because it lived at the bottom of the Potomac, where the element was in short supply.

Instead, Geobacter transfers its electrons to iron oxide, or rust, Dr. Lovley and his colleagues discovered. The process helps turn rust into another iron compound, called magnetite.

The finding left the scientists with a puzzle. We humans draw oxygen into our cells to utilize it, but Geobacter does not import rust. So the microbe must somehow get the electrons out of its cell body and attach them to rust particles. How?

The researchers struggled for years to find the answer. Dr. Stolz eventually turned to other microbes to study. But Dr. Lovley soldiered on. Over the years, he and his colleagues have come across Geobacter in many places far beyond the Potomac. They’ve even encountered the bacteria in oil drilled from deep underground. “It’s basically found everywhere,” Dr. Lovley said.

In the early 2000s, Dr. Lovley’s team discovered that Geobacter could sense rust in its neighborhood. The microbe responded by sprouting hairlike growths.

Maybe each of those growths, known as a pilus, was actually a wire that latched onto the rust, Dr. Lovley thought. Electrons could flow from the bacterium down the wire to the receptive rust. “It seemed like a wild idea at the time,” Dr. Lovley said.

But he and his team found several clues suggesting that the pilus is indeed a living wire. In one experiment, when Geobacter was prevented from making pili, the bacteria couldn’t turn rust to magnetite. In another, Dr. Lovley and his colleagues plucked pili from the bacteria and touched them with an electrified probe. The current swiftly shot down the length of the hairs.

Subsequent research revealed that Geobacter can deploy its wires in different ways to make a living. Not only can it plug directly into rust, it can also plug into other species of microbes.

The partners of Geobacter welcome the incoming flow of electrons. They use the current to power their own chemical reactions, which convert carbon dioxide into methane.

Discoveries like these raised the possibility that other bacteria might be dabbling in electricity. And in recent years, microbiologists have discovered a number of species that do.

“When people are able to dig down at the molecular level, we’re finding major differences in strategy,” said Jeff Gralnick of the University of Minnesota. “Microbes have solved this issue in several different ways.”

In the early 2000s, a Danish microbiologist named Lars Peter Nielsen discovered a very different way to build a microbial wire. He dug up some mud from the Bay of Aarhus and brought it to his lab. Putting probes in the mud, he observed the chemical reactions carried out by its microbes.

“It developed in a very weird direction,” Dr. Nielsen recalled.

At the base of the mud, Dr. Nielsen observed a buildup of a foul-smelling gas called hydrogen sulfide. That alone was not surprising — microbes in oxygen-free depths can produce huge amounts of hydrogen sulfide. Normally, the gas rises the surface, where oxygen-breathing bacteria can break most of it down.

But the hydrogen sulfide in the Aarhus mud never made it to the surface. About an inch below the top of the mud, it disappeared; something was destroying it along the way.

After weeks of perplexity, Dr. Nielsen woke up one night with an idea. If the bacteria at the bottom of the mud broke hydrogen sulfide without oxygen, they would build up extra electrons. This reaction could only take place if they could get rid of the electrons. Maybe they were delivering them to bacteria at the surface.

“I imagined it could be electric wires, and I could explain all of this,” he said.

So Dr. Nielsen and his colleagues looked for wires, and they found them. But the wires in the Aarhus mud were unlike anything previously discovered.

Each wire runs vertically up through the mud, measuring up to two inches in length. And each one is made up of thousands of cellsstacked on top of each other like a tower of coins. The cells build a protein sleeve around themselves that conducts electricity.

As the bacteria at the bottom break down hydrogen sulfide, they release electrons, which flow upward along the “cable bacteria” to the surface. There, other bacteria — the same kind as on the bottom, but employing a different metabolic reaction — use the electrons to combine oxygen and hydrogen and make water.

Cable bacteria are not unique to Aarhus, it turns out. Dr. Nielsen and other researchers have found them — at least six species so far — in many places around the world, including tidal pools, mud flats, fjords, salt marshes, mangroves and sea grass beds.

And cable bacteria grow to astonishing densities. One square inch of sediment may contain as much as eight miles of cables. Dr. Nielsen eventually learned to spot cable bacteria with the naked eye. Their wires look like spider silk reflecting the sun.

Electroactive microbes are so abundant, in fact, that researchers now suspect that they have a profound impact on the planet. The bioelectric currents may convert minerals from one form to another, for instance, fostering the growth of a diversity of other species. Some researchers have speculated that electroactive microbes may help regulate the chemistry of both the oceans and the atmosphere.

“To me, it’s a strong reminder of how ready we are to ignore things we cannot imagine,” Dr. Nielsen said.

by Carl Zimmer, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Gordon Studer
[ed. See also: The Mycelium Revolution Is Upon Us (Scientific American).]

Krist Dimo
via:

Helen Frankenthaler, Broome Street at Night, 1987
via:

David Byrne and Audience

The Beautiful and the Crapified

Last week’s announcement of the departure of Apple chief design officer Jony Ive marks the end of an era: the last connection to the Apple of Steve Jobs.

Now, no one would deny that Ive created beautiful objects.

As iFixit notes:

The iPod, the iPhone, the MacBook Air, the physical Apple Store, even the iconic packaging of Apple products—these products changed how we view and use their categories, or created new categories, and will be with us a long time.

But the title of that iFixit post, Jony Ive’s Fragmented Legacy: Unreliable, Unrepairable, Beautiful Gadgets, makes clear that those beautiful products carried with them considerable costs- above and beyond their high prices. They’re unreliable, and difficult to repair.

Ironically. both Jobs and Ive were inspired by Dieter Rams – whom iFixit calls “the legendary industrial designer renowned for functional and simple consumer products.” And unlike Apple. Rams believed that good design didn’t have to come at the expense of either durability or the environment:

Rams loves durable products that are environmentally friendly. That’s one of his 10 principles for good design: “Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment.” But Ive has never publicly discussed the dissonance between his inspiration and Apple’s disposable, glued-together products. For years, Apple has openly combated green standards that would make products easier to repair and recycle, stating that they need “complete design flexibility” no matter the impact on the environment.

Complete Design Flexibility Spells Environmental Disaster

In fact, that complete design flexibility – at least as practiced by Ive – has resulted in crapified products that are an environmental disaster. Their lack of durability means they must be repaired to be functional, and the lack of repairability means many of these products end up being tossed prematurely – no doubt not a bug, but a feature. As Vice recounts:

But history will not be kind to Ive, to Apple, or to their design choices. While the company popularized the smartphone and minimalistic, sleek, gadget design, it also did things like create brand new screws designed to keep consumers from repairing their iPhones. 

Under Ive, Apple began gluing down batteries inside laptops and smartphones (rather than screwing them down) to shave off a fraction of a millimeter at the expense of repairability and sustainability. 

It redesigned MacBook Pro keyboards with mechanisms that are, again, a fraction of a millimeter thinner, but that are easily defeated by dust and crumbs (the computer I am typing on right now—which is six months old—has a busted spacebar and ‘r’ key). These keyboards are not easily repairable, even by Apple, and many MacBook Pros have to be completely replaced due to a single key breaking. The iPhone 6 Plus had a design flaw that led to its touch screen spontaneously breaking—it then told consumers there was no problem for months before ultimately creating a repair program. Meanwhile, Apple’s own internal tests showed those flaws. He designed AirPods, which feature an unreplaceable battery that must be physically destroyed in order to open.

Vice also notes that in addition to Apple’s products becoming “less modular, less consumer friendly, less upgradable, less repairable, and, at times, less functional than earlier models”, Apple’s design decisions have not been confined to Apple. Instead, “Ive’s influence is obvious in products released by Samsung, HTC, Huawei, and others, which have similarly traded modularity for sleekness.”

Right to Repair

As I’ve written before, Apple is leading opponent of giving consumers a right to repair. Nonetheless, there’s been some global progress on this issue (see Global Gains on Right to Repair). And we’ve also seen a widening of support in the US for such a right. The issue has arisen in the current presidential campaign, with Elizabeth Warren throwing down the gauntlet by endorsing a right to repair for farm tractors. The New York Times has also taken up the cause more generally (see Right to Repair Initiatives Gain Support in US). More than twenty states are considering enacting right to repair statutes.

This stirring of support has led Apple to increase its lobbying efforts, deploying increasingly specious arguments – such as these recently offered to California legislators: consumers will hurt themselves if provided a right to repair, and such a change would empower hackers (see Apple to California Legislators: Consumers Will Hurt Themselves if Provided a Right to Repair). Rather than seeing these arguments derided and rejected, the lobbying succeeded, leading in April to cancellation of a hearing on then-pending California legislation, which now cannot move forward until 2020 at the earliest. Other state initiatives remain pending.

by Jerri-Lynn Scofield, Naked Capitalism | Read more:
Image: uncredited via

Seattle Pride Parade

Seattle Pride Parade today. Here are some reposted pictures from 2015 when a quarter million people showed up.

photos: markk (click below for more pics after the jump)

A History of the Bible by John Barton

Tiptoeing through a minefield.

A quiz question, which is also a trick question: how many references to the doctrine of the Trinity are there in the Bible? The answer: two, at a pinch. One of them was probably inserted into the text of the Gospel of John by a zealous scribe well after the gospel was written. This is known as “the Johannine comma” (where comma means “clause” or “phrase”). The other (in Matthew) was also probably a later addition by a pious scribe.

As John Barton shows in this massive and fascinating book, the Bible really did have a history. It grew and developed. As its disparate books were gradually integrated into the theological structures of the church, scribes would engage in what is called “the orthodox corruption of scripture”. So once the notion that God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit were all equal persons of the Trinity was established it became natural to seek confirmation of that doctrine in the Bible.

The Epistles of St Paul were probably written not long after the death of Christ, in the AD40s or 50s. St Paul appears to have been an “adoptionist” who held that Jesus was adopted as Son of God at the resurrection rather than a believer in the Trinity.

The gospels (which show knowledge of the fall of the Jerusalem Temple in AD70) were written at least two decades after Paul’s epistles. And the Gospel of John was possibly written as late as the second century. It presents a Jesus who talks a great deal about his own status as God’s son. This more likely reflects the beliefs of a later era than that of Jesus himself, and John’s gospel may indeed be a biography of Christ written to suit the interests and beliefs of John’s own particular branch of Christianity. The episode of the woman taken in adultery – “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” – which appears only in this gospel, is not found in the earliest manuscripts, and is likely to be an even later addition.

Does this mean that Barton’s history of the Bible provides an armoury of arguments for religious sceptics? Well, the sceptical will certainly find material here to deploy. But Barton – who is an Anglican with Lutheran leanings – believes that it’s perfectly possible to see the Bible as a book with its own history and also to regard it as a repository of religious truths.

He views the New Testament as a collection of records written by different people, probably for different religious communities, at different times. The gospels were preserved not in scrolls but in codices – bound volumes with separate leaves – and were “not fixed Scripture but simply the reminiscences of the Apostles”. That explains why they can be internally inconsistent, but also how they can be thought of as texts that give a range of different angles on the life of Christ, even if they don’t all relate (in that common phrase) the gospel truth.

Barton opposes Dan Brown-style conspiracy theorists who think that some time in the fourth century a powerful church suppressed a range of heterodox scriptures and created the New Testament as we now know it. He argues convincingly that by the second century there was a loose canon of holy books that were broadly similar to those included in the Bible today.

Although Barton is a Christian he’s also an excellent guide to the composition of what is usually called the “Old Testament” – though, as he reminds us, that name implies that the Hebrew Bible (as he prefers to call it) is no more than a precursor to the New Testament. Early Christian thinkers saw it this way. They regarded the life of Christ as the great truth towards which the Hebrew prophets and scriptures pointed, and which superseded the old faith and its laws. They read the Hebrew Bible as a story of disobedience and falling: Adam and Eve fell, and then Christ reversed the effects of that fall. That could go along with hostility to Jewish beliefs, and even antisemitism. For the majority of Jews, however, the Hebrew Bible was “not at all about fall and redemption, but about how to live a faithful life in the ups and downs of the ongoing history of the people of Israel”.

The Hebrew Bible itself developed over a long period, probably from about the eighth to the second century BC. Barton suggests that the Book of Proverbs may well have been produced by something like Israel’s civil service. Job and Ecclesiastes are much later works, possibly written by individuals. The Psalter, a mixture of liturgy, national history and individual experience, which Barton describes as “a mess”, probably came together in about 300BC, although individual psalms may be much older than this.

The historical method of analysing layers of composition in the Bible even casts a faint shadow over the Ten Commandments. They are delivered on tablets of stone to an early itinerant nation. But since they include the commandment “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house ... nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass”, they imply “a settled agrarian community”.

If the tablets of stone of the decalogue seem to crumble at the edges when the Bible is subjected to historical analysis, then Barton’s readers might wonder how religious faith can coexist with a Bible that is regarded as an internally contradictory text with a long history and diverse cultural origins.

Sceptics, indeed, might find in his magisterial overview of the history of the Bible clear evidence that orthodox religions are grounded in the beliefs of communities rather than in a single authoritative text that records the word of God.

Believers, on the other hand, might follow him in taking a flexible view of the Bible as a collection of texts that preserve reminiscences of the life of Jesus and about God and how to worship him. Barton says this history is “the story of the interplay between religion and the book – neither mapping exactly onto the other”. Problems arise when interpreters try to impose orthodox religious beliefs on its text: “The extreme diversity of the material in the Bible is not to be reduced by extracting essential principles, but embraced as a celebration of variety.”

That might sound like wishy-washy Anglicanism. But there is a lot of argumentative muscle in Barton’s book. He aims to “dispel the image of the Bible as a sacred monolith between two black leather covers”. So he has little time for fundamentalists and Biblical literalists who believe that its every word is sacred.

by Colin Burrow, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: The Garden of Eden With the Fall of Man (1615) by Jan Brueghel and Rubens. Photograph: Alamy
[ed. See also: GOD: A Biography - A Flawed Character (NY Times) and The Problem of Evil (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).]

Gone But Not Forgotten

Dealing With Hospital Closure, Pioneer Kansas Town Asks: What Comes Next?

A slight drizzle had begun in the gray December sky outside Community Christian Church as Reta Baker, president of the local hospital, stepped through the doors to join a weekly morning coffee organized by Fort Scott’s chamber of commerce.

The town manager was there, along with the franchisee of the local McDonald’s, an insurance agency owner and the receptionist from the big auto sales lot. Baker, who grew up on a farm south of town, knew them all.

Still, she paused in the doorway with her chin up to take in the scene. Then, lowering her voice, she admitted: “Nobody talked to me after the announcement.”

Just a few months before, Baker — joining with the hospital’s owner, St. Louis-based Mercy — announced the 132-year-old hospital would close. Baker carefully orchestrated face-to-face meetings with doctors, nurses, city leaders and staff members in the final days of September and on Oct. 1. Afterward, she sent written notices to the staff and local newspaper.

For the 7,800 people of Fort Scott, about 90 miles south of Kansas City, the hospital’s closure was a loss they never imagined possible, sparking anger and fear.

“Babies are going to be dying,” said longtime resident Darlene Doherty, who was at the coffee. “This is a disaster.”

Bourbon County Sheriff Bill Martin stopped before leaving the gathering to say the closure has “a dark side.” And Dusty Drake, the lead minister at Community Christian Church, diplomatically said people have “lots of questions,” adding that members of his congregation will lose their jobs.

Yet, even as this town deals with the trauma of losing a beloved institution, deeper national questions underlie the struggle: Do small communities like this one need a traditional hospital at all? And, if not, what health care do they need?

Sisters of Mercy nuns first opened Fort Scott’s 10-bed frontier hospital in 1886— a time when traveling 30 miles to see a doctor was unfathomable and when most medical treatments were so primitive they could be dispensed almost anywhere.

Now, driving the four-lane highway north to Kansas City or crossing the state line to Joplin, Mo., is a day trip that includes shopping and a stop at your favorite restaurant. The bigger hospitals there offer the latest sophisticated treatments and equipment.

And when patients here get sick, many simply go elsewhere. An average of nine patients stayed in Mercy Hospital Fort Scott’s more than 40 beds each day from July 2017 through June 2018. And these numbers are not uncommon: Forty-five Kansas hospitals report an average daily census of fewer than two patients.

James Cosgrove, who directed a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office study about rural hospital closures, said the nation needs a better understanding of what the closures mean to the health of people in rural America, where the burden of disease — from diabetes to cancer — is often greater than in urban areas.

What happens when a 70-year-old grandfather falls on ice and must choose between staying home and driving to the closest emergency department, 30 miles away? Where does the sheriff’s deputy who picks up an injured suspect take his charge for medical clearance before going to jail? And how does a young mother whose toddler fell against the coffee table and now has a gaping head wound cope?

There is also the economic question of how the hospital closure will affect the town’s demographic makeup since, as is often the case in rural America, Fort Scott’s hospital is a primary source of well-paying jobs and attracts professionals to the community.

As Fort Scott deals with the trauma of losing a beloved institution, deeper national questions underlie the struggle: Do small, rural communities need a traditional hospital at all? And if not, how will they get the health care they need? (...)

Mercy Hospital Fort Scott joined a growing list of more than 100 rural hospitals that have closed nationwide since 2010, according to data from the University of North Carolina’s Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research. How the town copes is a window into what comes next.

‘We Were Naive’

Over time, Mercy became so much a part of the community that parents expected to see the hospital’s ambulance standing guard at the high school’s Friday night football games.

Mercy’s name was seemingly everywhere, actively promoting population health initiatives by working with the school district to lower children’s obesity rates as well as local employers on diabetes prevention and healthy eating programs — worthy but, often, not revenue generators for the hospital.

“You cannot take for granted that your hospital is as committed to your community as you are,” said Fort Scott City Manager Dave Martin. “We were naive.”

Indeed, in 2002 when Mercy decided to build the then-69-bed hospital, residents raised $1 million out of their own pockets for construction. Another million was given by residents to the hospital’s foundation for upgrading and replacing the hospital’s equipment.

“Nobody donated to Mercy just for it to be Mercy’s,” said Bill Brittain, a former city and county commissioner. The point was to have a hospital for Fort Scott.

by Sarah Jane Tribble, Kaiser Health News | Read more:
Image: Christopher Smith
[ed. And, in other Health News, see also: Hidden FDA Reports Detail Harm Caused By Scores Of Medical Devices (KHN).]

The bodies of Salvadoran migrant Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his daughter, Valeria, lie in the Rio Bravo. The grim reality of the migration crisis unfolding on America’s southern border has been captured in shocking photographs showing the lifeless bodies of a Salvadoran father and his daughter who drowned as they attempted to cross the Rio Bravo into Texas.

Julia Le Duc/AP
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