Remembering Jim Lehrer

This is FRESH AIR. Jim Lehrer, the respected journalist and a nightly fixture on PBS for more than three decades, died Thursday at his home in Washington. He was 85. Lehrer is best-known for co-anchoring "The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour" from 1983 to '95 with co-host Robert MacNeil and then, when McNeil retired, "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" until his retirement in 2011.

Lehrer grew up in Texas and was a newspaper journalist before getting into broadcasting. He was also a prolific writer. He published more than 20 novels and three memoirs and wrote four plays. Known for a calm, unflappable style and a commitment to fairness, Lehrer moderated presidential debates in every election from 1988 through 2012. He won numerous Emmys, a George Foster Peabody Award and a National Humanities Medal.

Jim Lehrer spoke to Terry Gross in 1988, five years after he'd suffered a heart attack and had double bypass surgery. (...)

TERRY GROSS: You have been the subject of many interviews since your heart attack, really, in 1983 and then since the writing of your plays and your new novel. Have you learned a lot about interviewing from being an interviewee yourself?

JIM LEHRER: I have, I think. I - MacNeil says, I think correctly, that I am a terrible interviewee because I give very long answers. In fact, as he said, you know, Lehrer, if you were ever on our program, we'd never invite you back because your answers are very - you asked me a question when we started. You know, I went on for five minutes, I think. I mean, that's a problem I have, and I understand. I sympathize, and I'm sure you must, too. I mean, I have great sympathy for the people I'm interviewing because I ask a question of somebody - now, keep in mind 99% of the interviews I do are live. I ask somebody a question, and then I'm immediately jumping, ready for the next question or ready to go on with it, you know?

I mean, I would much rather interview than be interviewed. I have learned a lot just out of sympathy for the people as a result of being the subject of the interview. There's no question about it. I now understand how difficult it is.

GROSS: Well, do you tell the people who are appearing on your program to give you short answers (laughter), and how do you stop them if the answers...

LEHRER: No.

GROSS: ...Are long?

LEHRER: What I tell the folks to do is to give their best answer. If it's short, that's fine. If it's long, that's fine. I can always interrupt them. I interrupt people for a living. That's what I tell them. It's very important that the person not have to be - not have to confine themselves to your rules. For instance, if - let's say somebody is like me, gives long answers like I'm giving you right now, as a matter of fact. And - but, I mean, that's your problem, see? That's not my problem.

GROSS: (Laughter).

LEHRER: I mean, if I'm going...

GROSS: Hey; thanks a lot.

LEHRER: Yeah, right. I mean, I've come - if you asked me the story of my life and if it takes two hours to tell you the story of my life, I think it takes two hours. And it's your job as the professional to cut it down a little bit. And I think that also, you get better answers that way. If I say to somebody who sits down who's already nervous - now, that's not true of people that are used to television. But if somebody comes in there very nervous - live show going all over the country, their mother's watching and everybody's there - and I say to them, all right; keep your answer short and blah blah blah, all it does is add to their anxiety. And I want people to be relaxed. I want them to forget that there are all these lights and cameras around and have eye contact. Our studios are set up, both in Washington and New York - are set up...

GROSS: This answer's too long. No, I'm kidding.

LEHRER: No, I know (laughter). I know it is.

GROSS: Just thought I'd try that out, see what happened (laughter).

LEHRER: See, it doesn't work with me. That's - it feels right. But we set our people - our guests are very close to us, and there's direct eyeball-to-eyeball contact. So that - so you try to confine the situation so the person is comfortable, and all they have to do is look at you. They're not - they don't have to look around. There's not a place to - you know, to be distracted. It's to make people comfortable.

GROSS: You've had to interview many politicians over the years, and I think that is always so difficult because politicians give you answers, but they're not necessarily answers to the questions you've asked. I don't mean you in particular.

LEHRER: Oh, I know.

GROSS: But in general, what are some of the techniques you've come up with for actually getting an answer to the question that you want answered because you're just not necessarily going to get it?

LEHRER: Terry, there's only one technique that works, and that's to have enough time to ask the question a second time and then a third time and maybe a fourth time. And then, if Billy Bob Senator isn't going to answer it, you at least have a stab. That's his option. If he didn't want to - you know, I mean, there's no law that says he has to answer all the questions that Jimmy Charles Lehrer asks him on television, but I have the time. We have the time on our program.

Senator, what is your position on selling grain to the Soviet Union? Well, you know, Jim, that reminds me of when I was a little boy growing up in Oklahoma. And then he tells you a story. And you ask, yeah, but Senator - you give him the time, you know? He does that, and you say, yes, but what's your position on selling grain? Well, you - first of all, you got to understand what grain is. Grains are these little - he still hasn't answered. So then you say, yes, but Senator, again - you know? And then finally, you have to decide. And you're sitting there in a live situation. Do I ask this sucker this question again, or do I go on? You have to - at some point, you have to have real confidence in your audience that they realize, hey; this jerk isn't going to answer this question, or, this wonderful man isn't going to answer this question, or whatever the situation is. Then you go on with it.

I do not believe in beating up on guests. I don't - we don't invite people on our program to abuse them. And so the other way to do it if you don't have the time is you say, you didn't answer my question, you know? Hey, hey, blah, blah, blah, you know? We don't do it that way. And it's because - it's not because we object to it. That's somebody else's job to object to it. That's just not our style. We're not comfortable doing that. And we have the luxury of time.

GROSS: You know, you strike me as one of the few news anchors on television - I mean, you and MacNeil, really - who do more than just read the news while the newscast is on. Does the emphasis that American news viewers put on news anchors on commercial news seem a little absurd to you?

LEHRER: It seems incredibly absurd to me. I don't understand it. I do - I simply do not understand the value that is placed on the ability of somebody to look into a television camera and read a teleprompter. Now, that's called a short answer.

by Terry Gross, NPR |  Read more:

Image: via

Are You Local?

When it comes to thinking about being local in Hawaii, most might not immediately think back to a notorious murder case of nearly a century ago.

Yet, the Massie case of 1931-1932, in which a young Native Hawaiian was tragically killed by a group of whites associated with the Navy, is precisely the historic event that scholars at the University of Hawaii say is central to appreciating the concept of local identity.

“The Massie Case has since become a kind of origins story of the development of local identity in Hawaii among working-class people of color,” John P. Rosa writes in his 2014 book, “Local Story: The Massie Kahahawai Case and the Culture of History.”

In his view and that of other scholars, it represented the first time the term “local” was used in Hawaii with any significance.

And while definitions of local identity have evolved, at its core local identity is as much about dividing people as it is about uniting them, and about who has power and influence and who does not.

It’s common to hear people define local as where someone went to high school, taking your slippers off before entering someone’s home, preferring your peanuts boiled or speaking pidgin English.

But, while these habits are not without comfort and significance, they are in a sense only surface-level connections that may prevent the people of Hawaii from recognizing what really brings us together, and what may be in the way of bridging differences to address the many troubles in our society.

What defines local identity, says Jonathan Okamura, an ethnic studies professor at UH Manoa, is a shared appreciation of the land, the peoples and the cultures of the islands.

But now that shared identity could be imperiled by the same powers that held sway in the 1930s: a local and national government inattentive to their concerns, abetted by economic forces controlled by others.

Hawaii was already becoming too reliant on outside economic forces, especially tourism, Okamura warned 25 years ago, disrupting the value of a shared identity.

The color of one’s skin may not serve as the best way to identify who is and is not local.

“Local identity, while not organized into a viable social movement, will continue in its significance for Hawaii’s people if only because of their further marginalization through the ongoing internationalization of the economy and over-dependence on tourism,” he wrote. (...)

Today, the troubles that are dividing us are made all the more difficult by economic dependency on tourism, the large military presence in the islands, and foreign investment and ownership that Okamura writes about.

Local identity and any disconnect that comes with it is also being shaped by increased immigration from the mainland and the broader Asia-Pacific region to Hawaii even as the local-born population is moving elsewhere.

Rosa says that local identity doesn’t necessarily divide us as long as we continue to discuss what it means to be local.

“Sometimes things get a little emotional when we think about identity and ‘who I am,’ but when we think of what place and shared values might be, that is one way to think about it,” he said in an interview. “It is people committed to this place in particular ways.” (...)

What Is Local?

It is easy to think of local identity as being based on race and ethnicity.

Indeed, in the Massie case Grace Fortescue singled out Joseph Kahahawai as the “darkest” of the five men. And the words malihini haole are frequently and sometimes pejoratively used to describe whites who move here from the mainland.

The working-class origins of local identity were informed by the labor needs of the plantations that brought large numbers of migrants from China, Portugal, Japan, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Korea to Hawaii in the mid-to-late 19th century and into the early 20th. Many stayed, and it is their descendants that “made up the core of locals” since the 1930s, says Rosa in a 2018 book, “Beyond Ethnicity: New Politics of Race in Hawai’i.”

Meanwhile, a white oligarchy remained in power in the islands for decades following the Massie case.

But demographics gave way to substantial change through several transformative periods since that time: martial law during World War II, the return of Japanese-American veterans to the islands, the so-called 1954 revolution that saw the territorial Legislature wrestled away from mostly white Republicans by racially diverse Democrats, the tourism and development boom that begins in the 1950s and 1960s, the Hawaiian Renaissance of the 1970s, the Japanese investment of the 1980s and the economic slowdown of the 1990s.

Hawaii is now in the midst of another transformative period, one whose dimensions are still being drawn but one that continues to reflect the dynamics of previous generations. It is also driven by something that did not exist until recently: the online world and social media.

All through it, local identity has continued.

“Over the years, local identity gained greater importance through the social movements to unionize plantation workers by the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union in 1946 and to gain legislative control by the Democratic Party in 1954,” Okamura writes.

Today, those who might identify as local are no longer just members of the working class. There are whites whose roots go back multiple generations. And the color of one’s skin may not serve as the best way to identify who is and is not local.

Changing Demographics

There is also a new category of people besides Native Hawaiian, haole and local — one that Rosa calls “other.”

Their arrivals began in small numbers in the 19th century but have grown significantly, more recently from places such as Latin America — including Mexicans and Brazilians — Southeast Asia (Vietnamese) Micronesia (Marshallese and Chuukese) and other parts of the Pacific (Samoans).

Are these groups considered locals?

It depends, in part on whether they acquire local knowledge, language and customs, whether they have respect for the indigenous population, the degree of their intermarriage rates, and on whether these groups are still primarily connected to their former homes or are nurturing ties to their new ones.

There is no litmus test for being local. But newer arrivals to Hawaii who integrate into local society rather than resist it — who seek to transplant themselves in a new environment with the same trappings of their old one — may sometimes find it easier to get along. (...)

‘Where You ‘Wen Grad?’

The topic of what it means to be local in Hawaii has been written about extensively in local media, including Civil Beat.

One of the most popular occasions was from the Honolulu Advertiser in 1996, which published readers’ answers to the question, “You Know You’re A Local If …”

The newspaper was flooded with countless letters, postcards, emails and faxes. It ended up publishing the “ones that made us laugh the hardest” while running more in a new column that would debut later that year.

Here are just a few excerpts from the initial article in the Advertiser that August, broken into categories for food, fashion, philosophy, habits, awareness and the like:

• “Your only suit is a bathing suit.”
• “You have at least five Hawaiian bracelets.”
• “You know ‘The Duke’ is not John Wayne.”
• “You measure the water for the rice by the knuckle of your index finger.”
• “You let other cars ahead of you on the freeway and you give shaka to anyone who lets you in.”
• “Your first question is, ‘Where you ’wen grad?’ And you don’t mean college.”

The entries and ideas kept on coming.

In a May 2002 column, the Advertiser’s Lee Cataluna revisited the topic. She wrote, “Every couple of months, a new one will show up in your e-mail inbox, one of those ‘You know you’re local if …’ lists.”

But Cataluna also observed that, “The only problem with those lists is they’re made for people who have no doubt that they’re local.” They are for “entertainment purposes only, eliciting happy nods of recognition rather than gasps of self-revelation.”

What Cataluna wanted to talk about was people who did not grow up in Hawaii but who had spent “some serious time and effort to understand and adopt the culture.”

She asked, “When do they know they’ve turned the corner to local-ness? How can they tell when they’ve passed major milestones?”

Such a list, she said, would include these characteristics:

• “You know you’re turning local when you no longer think eating rice for breakfast is strange.”
• “You know you’re turning local when, even though you hate seafood, you love poke cuz’ that’s different.”
• “You know you’re turning local when you say the word ‘pau’ so often that you forget what it means in English. Pau is pau.”

Cataluna concluded with what she called “the big one”: “You know you’re local when you get irked by people who act too ‘Mainland.’” (...)

But there is also much to celebrate and even honor in localisms.

“Our cultural expression is manifest through the adoption of others’ customs as our own,” said Davianna Pōmaikaʻi McGregor, an ethnic studies professor and the department’s director for the Center for Oral History, in an interview. “It is identified with Hawaiians — mixed plates, that sort of thing — and if you lose that you begin to erode at those cultures that cohere us and connect us.

“And the fact that people are coming together to celebrate life events, bringing food and sharing — on Molokai, people go and clean yards when someone passes away — if we stop doing those things, we are going to lose that connection. So it is important.”

by Chad Blair, Honolulu Civil Beat |  Read more:

Image: Cory Lum
[ed. See also: Can A White Person Ever Be ‘Local’ In Hawaii? (HCB).]

Why Netflix’s Fantastic New Docuseries Cheer Is So Addictive

Fifty-three seconds into the first episode of Netflix’s docuseries Cheer, teenaged Morgan talks about pain. Fifty-four seconds into Cheer, she’s thrown into the air, twisting and flipping like a fish on a line. She comes careening back down into three sets of arms one second later, and she lands with a thunderclap of brutality, muscle smacking against muscle.

“Are you okay, Morgan?” someone asks. My untrained eye can’t pick up what’s wrong — just that something is wrong. And though Morgan walks off the rough landing, her body, gingerly stiff and wobbling unevenly, is what I think it looks like to silently scream.

After watching Cheer’s first 55 seconds, I knew I was going to spend the next six hours of my life breathing, consuming, Googling, and social media-stalking everything about the show. I knew then that it was my favorite new show of this very young year.

Cheer focuses on a competitive sport that fuses turgid, erotic tribalism with the body-breaking violence of muscular humans flinging tinier, lighter humans into the air and then catching them — callused hands atop thickly taped wrists, clawing into triceps and ankles. To that mixture, the show adds the us-against-the-world mentality of Charles Xavier’s X-Men and the small-town glamour of Friday Night Lights.

This is competitive junior college cheerleading at the dynastic Navarro College. This is Cheer. And this show is ballistically addictive.

Cheer takes place in the mecca of junior college competitive cheerleading, a place called Navarro College, Navarro for short. It’s in a town 60 miles south of Dallas called Corsicana, and absolutely nothing competes with the Navarro cheerleaders. They are the biggest and only thing in town, having won 14 National Cheerleaders Association National Championships and five “grand national” wins, which basically means they got the highest score at the national championships regardless of division and designation.

But while the Navarro Bulldogs dominate on the mat, they’re still underdogs.

Director Greg Whiteley (of Netflix’s college football docuseries Last Chance U) doesn’t shy away from showing the grim reality of many of these cheerleaders’ futures. Not many have options beyond cheering at this National Championship-caliber school, many stating that the team is the only thing that’s keeping them from getting into trouble or making bad decisions. The one kid who has seemingly solid post-cheer prospects, an Instagram “cheerlebrity” with nearly a million followers, is blatantly being used by her parents as a cash cow.

Even then, the escape Navarro cheer offers these young women and men is temporary, as cheerleading is something that ends after college. Professional cheerleading is more like dancing, and those gigs aren’t usually fairly paid. This makes the years spent at Navarro so important for the kids there, especially the ones who would otherwise be at risk and out of school.

In the crosshairs of Cheer’s urgency, desperation, and drama are the National Championships in Daytona Beach, Florida. Specifically, the national championship performance, the two minutes and 15 seconds that’s relegated to an intricate and difficult routine where anything, even moves drilled into muscle memory by thousands of repetitions, could go wrong. And it’s coach Monica Aldama’s job to create a team that won’t break in those 135 seconds, as she’s done 14 times in her life.

by Alex Abad-Santos, Vox | Read more:
Image: Netflix
[ed. Highly recommended (I'm in love with Monica). See also: How Cheer’s Superstar Coach Monica Gets It Done (The Cut).]

In and Out

[ed. Talk about getting robbed.]

The Myth of the “Millennial-Friendly City”

If there is one thing that is true about Millennials, it is that we are mystifying, and therefore constantly being asked to explain ourselves. This is the premise, I think, behind Angela Lashbrook’s recent viral article for OneZero titled “Millennials Love Zillow Because They’ll Never Own a Home.” The piece rightly points out that often, our wish to escape our terrible lives leads to us fantasizing about buying nice houses in cities where we do not, and, due to the circumstances of our personal lives and/or careers, probably could not, live. In fact, there is an entire genre of internet content — some of it reputable, some of it laughably not so — that seemingly exists to either supplement these fantasies of skipping town or to actively encourage them.

The most recent example of this phenomenon came from the commercial real estate listings start-up, which last week proclaimed that it had objectively determined the most Millennial-friendly cities in the country. Judging by things like population trends, affordability, average commute times, and the number of young people in a city whose jobs offer health insurance, Commercial Cafe determined that the metro areas surrounding places like Denver, Austin, Seattle, and Portland were, definitively, friendly to Millennials. Of course, I already knew these cities were Millennial-friendly through another methodology: being friends with people who aren’t boring as hell, since if you’re friends with any kind of young, cool or cool enough person, you’ll invariably hear one of them talking about how they’re thinking about moving to that city, if they haven’t already.

Still, this is not the only study that claims to have figured out what makes a city Millennial-friendly, a concept I find fascinating because of how arbitrary it seems. Politico believes that Millennials choose which city to live in based on the number of other young people, especially those with college degrees or who have recently relocated there, as well as the average GDP and the possibility of taking an “alternative commute” to work. Business Insider has its own rankings, based on population changes, increases in median wages, and decreases in unemployment rate. The Penny Hoarder developed a formula for Millennial-friendliness which factored in “Millennial happiness” and ended up placing St. Louis, MO and Grand Rapids, MI at one and two, respectively. This is just random enough for me to believe that these places might secretly be tight.

But these lists, including Penny Hoarder’s (whose counterintuitive conclusions I honestly do appreciate), fail to grasp what makes a city a genuinely compelling place to live. Cities like New York, Berlin, and Austin are not “cool” because of their public transportation or how many jobs there are there; instead, they were all direct beneficiaries of a cycle in which artists, punks, and general counterculture types ended up moving there when they were still cheap, treating these underpopulated cities as places where they could live affordably and in close quarters with likeminded people, together producing the sort of radical art and culture that end up being cool enough to get vacuumed into the city’s self-conception, after which a bunch of yuppies move in and fuck it all up. (I don’t have specific numbers to back this up, but my landlord once told me if I ever wanted to buy an investment property, I should buy something in a town where an anarchist bookstore just opened up.)

This isn’t a great cycle, especially since the arrival of the artists and punks is the first sign that the local population — in these neighborhoods, that most often means people of color and immigrants — is only a decade or two away from being priced out. Think of it as Lenin’s theory of the two-stage revolution, except in reverse, and instead of communism, it’s a path for gentrifying a city until it sucks ass.

Since 2016, I’ve lived in the Raleigh-Durham municipal area, which is frequently pegged as one of the most Millennial-friendly locales in the nation. Durham in particular has seen its star rise dramatically, to the point that all the artists and punks barely had a chance to set up shop before everybody else started moving in. Case in point: About a year ago, I was sitting in the backyard of a local bar when I ended up talking to a bro wearing a Patagonia sweater and Sperry boat shoes who told me that he and his roommates from architecture school had all moved down to the area after graduation because a friend had told them that, “the job market was poppin’.” (In case I have not been clear enough: this person was white and very fratty.)

Ever since then, I have noticed an influx of “that type” of person — preppy out-of-towners who flock to an area during a boom period and, through sheer force of numbers, end up changing its character in increasingly generic ways. Previously fun bars where adult people can simply relax while drinking an adult beverage either get overrun or run out of the neighborhood, with “experiential” bars that Millennials allegedly enjoy (read: bars where you can throw axes, play arcade games, or do mini-golf) popping up in their place. Music venues start booking different acts who appeal to this growing market of kinda-generic Millennials, letting local scenes languish in the background.

When people treat the place they live as a giant AirBnB they can check out of after a few years working as a “creative lead” at a mid-sized start-up before moving elsewhere, they become less attuned to local issues, specifically the problems faced by those outside their specific, transplant-y milieu. In other words, there are two types of people: those for whom such lists apply, and those who are negatively affected by those for whom such lists apply.

by Drew Millard, The Conversation |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Why Some Kids Wear Shorts All Winter

Lindsey Miller first took note of the boys who refused to wear long pants when she was in grade school. At her elementary school in Maryland, a few particular boys made a habit of wearing shorts to school all winter, even though January temperatures in the mid-Atlantic state routinely drop below freezing. And it was always boys, she told me, never female students—“Girls made fun of them, but other guys cheered them on,” she recalled. One kid she knew in third grade, whose name has escaped her memory in the decade-plus since, “wore basically the same pair of shorts all year,” Miller, now 20, remembered.

The “one kid who wears shorts to school all year”: In regions that get cold and snowy in the winter, he’s a figure that’s equal parts familiar and bewildering to kids and teachers alike, and his clothing choices present an annual hassle for his parents. On Twitter, where Lindsey Miller once joked about the middle-school winter-shorts boy, he is in fact the butt of a number of observational jokes, many of them from classmates and beleaguered moms and dads: “There’s really this dude wearing shorts at school… IN THE WINTER.” “Have kids so you can argue with tiny, opinionated people about why they can’t wear shorts in winter and then coats when it’s 80 degrees.” Educators at a middle school and high school in Minnesota confirmed to me that they can count on having two or three of him every year, arriving at school after braving the morning windchill with bare calves. (In the interest of transparency, both were former teachers of mine, who I’m sure were perplexed to hear from me for the first time in more than a decade only to be asked about this.)

In other words, the Boy Who Wears Shorts All Winter is a highly recognizable but largely inscrutable character, and when I asked parents, teachers, child psychologists, and a former B.W.W.S.A.W. himself to try to explain what exactly motivates such a plainly impractical clothing choice, they all offered different answers.

by Ashley Fetters, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Charles Rex Arbogast/AP Images

[ed. It's not just boys. I used to see schoolgirls in Alaska skittering across freezing, wind-whipped sidewalks and parking lots in shorts and mini-skirts. I figured they were braving short-term pain for later long-term gain inside a warm school building.] 

GoFish Cam

[ed. No doubt these will probably get much smaller. Not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand you're taking a relaxing, contemplative activity and turning it into a video game. On the other, it is kind of cool to see what's going on underwater and how close you might be to actually getting a strike. See also: Catch more fish with this underwater camera attachment (Boing Boing).]

Eliane Elias

[ed. Bravura performance.]

Who’s Afraid of the IRS? Not Facebook.

In March 2008, as Facebook was speeding toward 100 million users and emerging as the next big tech company, it announced an important hire. Sheryl Sandberg was leaving Google to become Facebook’s chief operating officer. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, then 23 years old, told The New York Times that Sandberg would take the young company “to the next level.”

Based on her time at Google, Sandberg soon decided that one area where Facebook was behind its peers was in its tax dodging. “My experience is that by not having a European center and running everything through the US, it is very costly in terms of taxes,” she wrote other executives in an April 2008 email, which hasn’t been previously reported. Facebook’s head of tax agreed, replying that the company needed to find “a low taxed jurisdiction to park profits.”

Later that year, Facebook named Dublin as its international headquarters, just as Google had done when Sandberg was there. And just like Google, Facebook concocted an intra-company deal to “park profits” in Ireland, where it would pay a tax rate near zero.

Like its Big Tech peers, Facebook wasn’t much afraid of the IRS. But, as it happened, the same year that Facebook started moving profits to Ireland, the IRS launched a team to crack down on deals like that. The effort started aggressively. As we recently reported, the IRS threw everything it had at Microsoft in the largest audit in the agency’s history.

But shortly after the IRS showed this new ambition, Republicans in Congress, after taking the House in 2010, began forcing cuts to the IRS’ budget. Over the years, as Facebook grew into one of the world’s largest companies, with 2 billion users, the IRS was shrinking. By the time the IRS finally took on Facebook over its Irish deal a few years later, the agency was in over its head.

ProPublica pieced together the story of the Facebook audit from court documents filed by the two sides in their yearslong battle. (Both the IRS and the company declined to comment.) The picture revealed by the documents provides a crucial window into the IRS’ struggles to check large corporations’ tax schemes.

At one point in the audit, the exam stalled for months because there was no money to hire an expert. Agents tried for five years to pick apart the deal’s complexities and were still scrambling when the statute of limitations expired in July 2016. Like a student forced, when the bell rings, to turn in a test with unanswered questions, the IRS sent Facebook the results of its incomplete audit. Based on the work it had done, the IRS thought Facebook had massively mispriced its Irish deal and should have paid billions more in taxes.

Today the fight continues before the U.S. Tax Court, and the conflict is about to reach a climax: A trial is scheduled for February, and the IRS is trying to convince a judge that it has a firm basis for its conclusions. For its part, Facebook has defended its actions in court filings, calling the IRS’ conclusions “arbitrary, capricious, or unreasonable.”

If the IRS prevails in court, it could cost Facebook up to $9 billion more in taxes, based on estimates in the company’s securities filings. It would be a notable defeat for a company that, when it comes to risky tax avoidance, has been more aggressive “than almost any other U.S. corporation,” said Matt Gardner, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. According to Facebook’s public filings, from 2010 through 2017 (when the U.S. corporate tax rate was 35%), the company paid a total of $3.9 billion in taxes on $50 billion of pre-tax income, a rate of about 8%.

by Paul Kiel, ProPublica |  Read more:

Image: Glenn Harvey

Chie Yoshii
via:

Clair Hartmann
via:

Ling Ma's "Severance" Captures the Bleak, Fatalistic Mood of 2018

[ed. And a world-wide pandemic.]

There is a scene early on in George Romero’s horror classic “Dawn of the Dead,” from 1978, in which a great tide of zombies converges on a once sacred American institution: the shopping mall. Romero had more or less invented the modern zombie a decade before, in “Night of the Living Dead,” set mostly at a farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania. At the mall, the creatures—stiff, as always, with frozen expressions—resemble the mannequins that surround them. When a still-living character asks, bewildered, “What are they doing? Why do they come here?” another answers, “Instinct, memory of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.” Romero’s satire, like the violence in his movies, could be blunt. When “Dawn” was remade, in 2004, the Times called the unimaginative update “a cautionary tale for those dying to shop.”

A shopping mall also features prominently in “Severance” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Ling Ma’s zombie apocalypse of a début, which was published in August, won the Kirkus Prize for fiction in October, and has begun to pop up, as the year nears its end, on various best-of-2018 lists. In “Severance,” the mall reads as a knowing gesture: Romero’s work, and the waves of subsequent entrants to the genre that he created, are, one gathers, part of the world that her characters inhabit. When the novel opens, a group is fleeing an epidemic that has decimated the global population; one man says that life has come to feel like a “zombie or vampire flick.” The group’s leader replies, “Let’s think about the zombie narrative. It’s not about a specific villain. One zombie can be easily killed, but a hundred zombies is another issue. Only amassed do they really pose a threat. This narrative, then, is not about any individual entity, per se, but about an abstract force: the force of the mob, of mob mentality. Perhaps it’s better known these days as the hive mind.”

This blowhard, a former I.T. guy named Bob, “who has played every iteration of Warcraft with near a religious fervor,” is not the hero of the book. No one is, really, but the protagonist is Candace Chen, a quiet, dispassionate twentysomething who, in the years leading up to the apocalypse, lives in Brooklyn and works in Manhattan, at a publishing company, where she oversees the manufacture of Bibles, mostly in China. (“Of any book,” Candace notes, “the Bible embodies the purest form of product packaging, the same content repackaged a million times over, in new combinations ad infinitum.”) “Severance” is set not in the near-future typical of dystopian fantasies but in a reimagined version of the recent past—specifically, autumn, 2011, around the time of the Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park. The epidemic that has befallen the globe is called Shen Fever—it is believed to have originated in Shenzhen, China, the world capital of electronics manufacturing—and it is contracted through the inhalation of “microscopic fungal spores.” Before it kills its victims, it sends them into a zombie-like cycle of repetition, endlessly performing familiar tasks unto death. Candace is one of the last survivors in New York: even as the city’s infrastructure starts to collapse, making it nearly impossible to get to the office, she stays, roaming the streets with a camera and uploading pictures to a blog that she created years before, called NY Ghost, in the hope that her images of the dying city will spur others to contribute nostalgic visions of the place they once called home. (...)

Ma’s prose is, for the most part, understated and restrained, somewhat in the manner of Kazuo Ishiguro, and particularly his classic “The Remains of the Day,” from 1989, which Ma has cited as an influence. As in that book—and in Ishiguro’s subsequent novel “Never Let Me Go,” published in 2005, about human clones who lead quiet lives until their organs are harvested—one has the sense that the protagonist’s disaffected personality is symptomatic of a deeply troubled system, the horrors of which she has been unable, or unwilling, to face. “At work, they knew me to be capable but fragile,” Candace says. “Quiet, clouded up with daydreams. Usually diligent, though sometimes inconsistent, moody. But also something else, something implacable: I was unsavvy in some fundamental, uncomfortable way.” (...)

Such reveries can be dangerous. Bob, the I.T. guy, leads the group of survivors west, to a mysterious place he calls the Facility, located somewhere near Chicago. On the way, a member of the group sneaks off to her childhood home, in Ohio, and contracts Shen Fever while trying on teen-age outfits still hanging in her old bedroom. Nostalgia, Candace realizes, may play a role in the onset of the fever. “The past is a black hole, cut into the present day like a wound, and if you come too close, you can get sucked in,” Bob says. “You have to keep moving.” This is precisely what the peripatetic Candace has always done, leaving China, Utah, New York. No wonder that she seems to be immune.

In this zombie novel, though, there is nothing particularly heroic about survival. On the way to the Facility, the group must navigate a world ravaged by disease; to stock up on supplies, they ransack homes, favoring those whose inhabitants are already dead. When the occupants are still in the throes of the fever, Bob drills his group to harvest usable supplies with maximum efficiency and, before leaving, to shoot the fevered residents in the head. He sees this as mercy killing, though Candace wonders at his real motivations. Still, she knows how to assimilate—how to survive by adopting new, discomfiting customs. When Bob inquires if she has adequately integrated herself into the group, she marvels at how he “asks the question in all seriousness, as if I had any choice.” It’s taken some adjustment, she answers finally. “I’ve been alone for a long time.” For all her particularity as a character, Candace comes to seem emblematic after all—adrift, without allegiances, embodying the atomization of late-capitalist humans in a society stripped to its bones.

The Facility, we discover when the group finally reaches it, is, inevitably, a mall. The remaining survivors pick abandoned stores—Aldo, Bath & Body Works, Journeys—to convert into personal living spaces. They eat out of vending machines and live in as much fear of each other as of the fever. When the fever does strike, it is not because anyone was dying to shop but because the mall, it turns out, was a part of someone’s past. The desire to return to cozier memories makes people vulnerable to the disease destroying the world.

by Jiayang Fan, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Sally Deng
[ed. See also: What People In China Are Saying About The Outbreak On Social Media (NPR).]

That Pro-Gun Rally in Virginia? It Wasn’t Exactly “Peaceful”

On Monday, the streets of Richmond, Virginia, were flooded with a spectacular arsenal of weaponry; some 22,000 people from all over the country had turned up to protest the gun control laws recently passed by the Virginia State Senate. Fearing a repeat of the deadly violence that had gripped the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, three years earlier, governor Ralph Northam declared a state of emergency and barred weapons from the Capitol grounds. Some 6,000 protesters grumblingly abided. But just outside the legions of police barricades, twice that number of people roamed the streets of Richmond bearing a bristling mass of rifles, from AR-15s to massive Barrett sniper rifles. Some wore skull masks; others waved Confederate flags. Members of hate groups like the League of the South and the American Guard, as well as the Proud Boys, mingled openly; some of the latter were wearing patches that said “RWDS”—an acronym for “Right-Wing Death Squad.” Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones gave a speech from a Terradyne battle tank. Adding to the bellicose mood, some attendees paraded with a massive guillotine as a prop, and others held up an effigy strung on a noose, emblazoned with the slogan, “Thus always to tyrants.”

No one was shot—a frankly extraordinary turn of events given the sheer amount of weaponry, the density of the crowd, and the weapons stuffed casually into backpacks or held loosely in the crooks of pale arms. This happy vicissitude of fate led right-wing groups to declare the event a triumph—in the words of fringe-right publications Gateway Pundit and InfoWars, a “peaceful protest.” Mainstream media, too, bought into this analysis: “Pro-gun rally by thousands in Virginia ends peacefully,” was the assessment of the Washington Post. Having made Northam the butt of their rhetorical ire during the rally, conservative groups further condemned his choice to declare a state of emergency in the state’s capital: “Gov. Northam fantasizes he saved Virginia from volatile situation,” crowed a headline at Breitbart.

All this confidence belied the fact that bloodshed—great and heavy and perhaps unprecedented on American soil—was narrowly averted. A federal motion for detention released Tuesday revealed that three members of neo-Nazi terror group The Base had planned to attend Monday’s rally in Virginia, kitted out with a home-built, functioning fully-automatic rifle capable of firing several rounds at a time; survival gear; and 1,500 rounds of ammunition. They had planned to open fire into the crowd.

According to the affidavit, one of the men had postulated that there were enough “radicalized” individuals slated to be in Richmond that “all you gotta do is start making things go wrong and Virginia can spiral out to fucking full blown civil war.” Their goal, one of the men stated in a video, was to “bring the collapse…If you want the white race to survive, you’re going to have to do your fucking part.” The three men were arrested four days before the Richmond rally—held at bay from fulfilling the fantasies they had described of “literally hunting people” in a heavily armed crowd, and setting into motion a chain of violent events that would extend far beyond Richmond.

But even with the Base threat—which was thoroughly ignored by right-wing media—neutralized, it seems myopic at best to describe the Monday event as “peaceful.” There was, it was true, an absence of immediate bloodshed; but what abounded, in that armed and insurrectionist sea of humanity, was the promise that bloodshed might happen at any time, should the will of the mob be thwarted. America’s exceptional tolerance towards armed white gunmen—its brooking of gun-toting militias around the country, and the po-faced seriousness with which the media takes claims of “freedom” when it comes to the right to own weapons of mass slaughter—is entirely restricted to this demographic. Famously, California enacted gun-control legislation prohibiting the open carrying of firearms after a demonstration of armed Black Panthers on the steps of the state house; this swift reactive prohibition was enacted by then-governor Ronald Reagan. The threat of white supremacist violence, despite resulting in multiple shooting massacres against black people, Jews, and Latinos in the last several years, has yet to pierce the national consciousness as the vast and threatening specter it is. Terrorists were intercepted on the way to this rally with the open goal of sparking civil war; the thousands of armed individuals roaming the streets of an American city openly proclaimed their intent not to obey laws they might disagree with. Yet their very whiteness rendered them invisible as a threat: in America, if you are white, you can wear a mask and carry a gun and hang a governor in effigy, and go home quietly at the end of the day, unmolested.

by Talia Lavin, GQ |  Read more:
Image: Molly Conger via

via:

Outrage Culture Is Ruining Foreign Policy

August and September 2018 were two significant months for the outrage culture that has afflicted the U.S. public square in recent years. In August, the California Democratic Party called for a boycott of In-N-Out Burger because of a $25,000 donation that company made to the state Republican Party. A few weeks later, some Americans burned their sneakers over a Nike television ad featuring the blackballed NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick.

Ever since, I have wondered how foreign diplomats posted in Washington try to capture the current moment in U.S. politics. Do they and the foreign ministers, prime ministers, presidents, kings, and queens they serve grasp the near-constant state of indignation that has gripped society, fueling polarization and even fear in recent years? It seemed absurd to me that a beloved burger joint became the object of political ire among Democrats and that people, the majority of whom seemed to be supporters of President Donald Trump, were burning their sneakers. I cannot even imagine what those diplomatic cables say.

These episodes were no doubt regarded as the oddities and excesses of the current moment in American politics and may have been a source of confusion and dismay for U.S. allies, but the Kaepernick story and the burger boycott (which failed) had no effect on foreign policy. Yet this may be changing. In recent months, outrage—and its cousin, virtue signaling—have made it harder and harder to have a conversation about U.S. foreign policy. At a time when the world and U.S. priorities in it are changing, this sad state of affairs is putting Americans at a disadvantage.

There are already countries in the Middle East that elites in the United States tend to view through their own ideological prisms. As I wrote last summer: Egypt, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia are “red” in the sense that Republicans tend to be—or are perceived to be—more supportive of these governments than Democrats. In turn, Iran, the 2015 nuclear deal, and Palestine are—or are perceived to be—“blue” given that Democrats tend to support engagement with the Iranians, back the nuclear agreement, and express sympathy with the Palestinians in greater numbers than Republicans. This state of affairs, I argued, was not a positive development. Looking back, I was a bit too Pollyannish for fear of giving offense—it is actually ludicrous, moronic, and dangerous.

In Washington these days there is no conversation or debate about foreign policy; there is only politics. The appreciation of a complex world in fine-grained shades of gray—the recognition of which once indicated an active and fertile mind—has given way to a binary world of absolutes. Folks choose teams and advocate for what is best for their side, not necessarily what is in the best interest of the United States. This seemed clear as the conversation— though it was more like people talking in their own echo chambers—about the U.S. killing of the Iranian general Qassem Suleimani unfolded. There was far greater interest among journalists, analysts, and activists in scoring points. That is how you get fury over a manufactured controversy in which Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a presidential candidate challenging Trump, allegedly changed her position on Suleimani’s demise. She did no such thing. I suppose that this type of nonsense is to be expected in a political campaign season, but it is precisely because the stakes in a confrontation with Iran are so high that the indignation and trolling were inappropriate.

There were a bevy of interesting analyses written over the last two weeks, but the overall quality of the discourse over the Suleimani hit was diminished by partisanship in which two basic facts seemed to get lost. First, Suleimani was the leader of the Quds Forces who had copious amounts of American, Syrian, and Iraqi blood on his hands, and he had devoted his violent life to doing the bidding of a regime built on a worldview that is hostile to the United States and American ideals. Second, killing Suleimani contained serious risks. Acknowledging the former should not qualify as support for the Trump administration, and recognizing the latter does not make one an apologist for Iran’s leaders. It should be ok to use the conjunction “but” or caveat a declaratory statement with a complicating factor. The world is maddeningly complicated (and interesting), and unless Americans can acknowledge that in their public discourse, they will have a foreign policy built on the defective assumptions of ideologues. (...)

There are a variety of compelling reasons to rethink the U.S.-Saudi relationship, but that is hard to do if one team believes that the Saudis are the root of all evil and the other is not willing to acknowledge there is a problem. It may very well be that smart individuals on both sides recognize the complexities and nuance of the Saudi issue but are constrained from publicly discussing them for fear of retribution and opprobrium from fellow team members. In other words, ideological purity tests. How did we get here? That is a rhetorical question. We all know how.

by Steven A. Cook, Foreign Policy |  Read more:

Image: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Pentagon Racks Up $35 Trillion in Accounting Changes in One Year

The Pentagon made $35 trillion in accounting adjustments last year alone -- a total that’s larger than the entire U.S. economy and underscores the Defense Department’s continuing difficulty in balancing its books.

The latest estimate is up from $30.7 trillion in 2018 and $29 trillion in 2017, the first year adjustments were tracked in a concerted way, according to Pentagon figures and a lawmaker who’s pursued the accounting morass.

The figure dwarfs the $738 billion of defense-related funding in the latest U.S. budget, a spending plan that includes the most expensive weapons systems in the world including the F-35 jet as well as new aircraft carriers, destroyers and submarines.

“Within that $30 trillion is a lot of double, triple, and quadruple counting of the same money as it got moved between accounts,” said Todd Harrison, a Pentagon budget expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The Defense Department acknowledged that it failed its first-ever audit in 2018 and then again last year, when it reviewed $2.7 trillion in assets and $2.6 trillion in liabilities. While auditors found no evidence of fraud in the review of finances that Congress required, they flagged a laundry list of problems, including accounting adjustments.

Although it gets scant public attention compared with airstrikes, troop deployments, sexual assault statistics or major weapons programs, the reliability of the Pentagon’s financial statement is an indication of how effectively the military manages its resources considering that it receives over half of discretionary domestic spending.

The military services make adjustments, some automatic and some manual, on a monthly and quarterly basis, and those actions are consolidated by the Pentagon’s primary finance and accounting service and submitted to the Treasury.

There were 546,433 adjustments in fiscal 2017 and 562,568 in 2018, according to figures provided by Representative Jackie Speier, who asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate. The watchdog agency will release a report on the subject Wednesday after reviewing more than 200,000 fourth-quarter 2018 adjustments totaling $15 trillion.

by Anthony Capaccio, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: via

[ed. Mind boggling, on 35 trillion levels.]

Google’s Latest User-Hostile Design Change Makes Ads and Search Results Look Identical

Did you notice a recent change to how Google search results are displayed on the desktop?

I noticed something last week — thinking there must be some kind of weird bug messing up the browser’s page rendering because suddenly everything looked similar: A homogenous sea of blue text links and favicons that, on such a large expanse of screen, come across as one block of background noise.

I found myself clicking on an ad link — rather than the organic search result I was looking for.

Here, for example, are the top two results for a Google search for flight search engine ‘Kayak’ — with just a tiny ‘Ad’ label to distinguish the click that will make Google money from the click that won’t…

Turns out this is Google’s latest dark pattern: The adtech giant has made organic results even more closely resemble the ads it serves against keyword searches, as writer Craig Mod was quick to highlight in a tweet this week.

Last week, in its own breezy tweet, Google sought to spin the shift as quite the opposite — saying the “new look” presents “site domain names and brand icons prominently, along with a bolded ‘Ad’ label for ads”: (...)

But Google’s explainer is almost a dark pattern in itself.

If you read the text quickly you’d likely come away with the impression that it has made organic search results easier to spot since it’s claiming components of these results now appear more “prominently” in results.

Yet, read it again, and Google is essentially admitting that a parallel emphasis is being placed — one which, when you actually look at the thing, has the effect of flattening the visual distinction between organic search results (which consumers are looking for) and ads (which Google monetizes).

Now a user of Google’s search engine has — essentially — only a favicon between them and an unintended ad click. Squint or you’ll click it.

This visual trickery may be fractionally less confusing in a small screen mobile environment — where Google debuted the change last year. But on a desktop screen these favicons are truly minuscule. And where to click to get actual information starts to feel like a total lottery.

A lottery that’s being stacked in Google’s favor because confused users are likely to end up clicking more ad links than they otherwise would, meaning it cashes in at the expense of web users’ time and energy.

by Natasha Lomas, TechCrunch |  Read more:
Images: Google and Twitter
[ed. I thought I'd screwed up my settings and fiddled around for a while trying to get the old Google back. No luck. Deception - not a good look.]

Bill Evans

via:

via: