Memory in a Time of Quarantine

Our memories make us who we are, subconsciously driving our behaviors and dictating how we view the world. One of the most interesting things about memory is its imperfection. Rather than serving as a precise record of past events, our memories are more like concocted reflections, filtered and distilled from pure reality into a personal brew that is formulated by our own unique physiologies and emotional backgrounds. The wholly unique universe we each create—separate from but still tethered to the actual universe—is the product of electrical signals zapping through the lump of fatty flesh inside our skulls. Biology gives birth to something that exists outside the boundaries of biology.

The neural machinery involved in the formation, storage, and retrieval of memories is coming to light in labs across the world, but science has not yet solved this particular puzzle. In this issue, you’ll read about talented researchers who use modern tools such as optogenetics and genome editing to probe the biology underlying memory. In lab animals, these scientists can force the recall of memories at the flick of a molecular switch, implant false memories, and erode a real memory to the point of vanishing. Through these studies and others, perhaps science will one day robustly characterize memory’s biological nuts and bolts. But will we ever truly understand, and perhaps directly manipulate, the personal reality created by each individual’s brain?

What scares me most at this juncture in world history is how the COVID-19 pandemic will live in the memories of those affected by it. The patchiness of the current global predicament will dictate our individual familiarity with the ravages of SARS-CoV-2. Some will remain largely unscathed by illness, many will feel the economic pinch of societal lockdowns, many will also lose friends or loved ones to the virus, others will succumb to it themselves. No one will emerge unchanged.

Memories living within the survivors will mirror the array of individual experiences. For many, traumatic memories of the pandemic—whether that be illness from the virus or any of the hardships that come along with social isolation and the global economic downturn—will become uninvited guests, intruding on the daily business of living. On the opposite end of the spectrum, with any luck, many young people living through this reality will recall this period of their lives with a hazy bemusement. “Remember when we were kids, and we got to stay home from school with Mom and Dad for months on end?” Again, the mountain of memories that will accrue in this complicated time will not faithfully record the events now unfurling. Rather, they will form smudged reproductions of the difficulties we are all grappling with. Those memories, and the behaviors they drive, will linger, perhaps for generations.

The scientific enterprise is currently front and center. Millions around the world are counting on researchers and clinicians to pull us from the darkness of this pandemic, as dozens of drugs and vaccines make their way through development and organizations around the globe work to distribute accurate tests that can track the spread of the disease. And this is only the first battle. In the months and years to come, those of us who survive this episode will again call on healthcare providers and scientists to rescue us from the mental and physical aftereffects of the pandemic. For the foreseeable future, the world will need science and medicine more than ever before in recent history. And we will need humanity in equal measure.

by Bob Grant, The Scientist |  Read more:

Image: Andrzej Krause

Michael Ramirez
via: Ramireztoons

Labor of Love

If the coronavirus has taught us anything, it’s that people will watch any old dating show under quarantine, no matter how staggeringly dumb it is. So with that in mind, Fox’s Labor of Love will probably end up as the biggest hit of the summer.

Because, and I really can’t stress this enough, Labor of Love is stupid. It is arguably the most knuckleheaded show I have seen in half a decade. You could take this show and bury it in the desert, and people would still be able to locate it from the stench of its utter, logic-defying stupidity. Watching Labor of Love is like pulling your brain out of your ear with a corkscrew and booting it into a lake. Let me try to explain.

In textbook dating show fashion, Kristy is a 41-year-old divorcee who must choose between 15 different hunks. Together they will, in the words of host Kristin Davis, “skip the dating and go straight to baby-making”. Because, that’s right, Labor of Love is a dating show where the prize is a real life flesh-and-blood baby. The entire show exists to help one woman choose a candidate to impregnate her. It’s a mating show, not a dating show. Love, as we’re told, is optional.

Clearly, we were already headed this way. Dating shows cannot simply be dating shows any more. We’ve had Love is Blind, where couples propose to people they haven’t even seen. We’ve had Married at First Sight, where people get married the instant they meet. Of course there was eventually going to be a show about women being impregnated by men they barely know. (...)

It doesn’t help that the potential fathers all feel like dopey offcuts from other reality shows. They all uniformly, regardless of age or background or race, look like slabs of battered ham. They’re all a bit too dumb, their emotional problems a bit too overt. They say things like “I appreciate the interactions we had” instead of actual human words. They look, obviously, like the sort of people who’d sign up for a reality show about getting a woman pregnant.

The format is awful, especially the part where the woman eliminates potential fathers on an iPad app. The house they all live in is awful, not least because one of the rooms is an infantilised man cave called “The Father Hood”. The tasks are all awful, ranging from the annoying (“look after some children at a party”) to the insulting (“get your sperm analysed”) to the apparently randomly generated (“spraypaint negative adjectives on to a car and then beat the car to death with a hammer”). Labor of Love is so terrible that it doesn’t even feel like a television series. It feels like a document designed to be presented to God as an argument for the total eradication of the human race.

by Stuart Heritage, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Fox

[ed. Hard to believe the concept of "entertainment" has sunk this low.]

Georges Braque, The Aquarium
via:

via:

When All You Have is a Hammer, Everything Starts Looking Like a Dance

Everyone is hoping for a definitive solution to coronavirus. A vaccine, or a good antiviral, or a test + trace regimen so well-coordinated that it stops the virus in its tracks.

Suppose that after X years, we realize there is no definitive solution. We are faced with the choice of continuing restrictions forever, or lifting the restrictions, letting lots of people die, and getting herd immunity the hard way. What then?

If we lift the restrictions, the same number of people will die as if we had never instituted any restrictions at all, and also we will have wasted X years. We will have gone X years with millions of people poor and unemployed, millions of others locked in their houses and unable to have fun – and it won’t have saved a single life.

If there’s a 50% chance of a definitive solution in one year, is it worth staying locked down until then? What about a 25% chance in five years? 10% chance in ten years? If there is never a definitive solution, are we willing to stay locked down forever?

Also: if a lockdown lasts a long time, what’s the average R0 during that phase? One possibility is that it’s less than 1, in which case the virus will “die out” locally (although it probably won’t go extinct smallpox-style – too much opportunity for other countries to reinfect us). Another possibility is that it’s more than 1, in which case lockdown isn’t working and we get continued exponential growth ending in lots of deaths and eventual herd immunity.

Is there a possibility where R0 is exactly 1? Seems unlikely – one is a pretty specific number. On the other hand, it’s been weirdly close to one in the US, and worldwide, for the past month or two. You could imagine an unfortunate control system, where every time the case count goes down, people stop worrying and go out and have fun, and every time the case count goes up, people freak out and stay indoors, and overall the new case count always hovers at the same rate. I’ve never heard of this happening, but this is a novel situation.

If that were true, right now we’re on track to gain herd immunity in 30 years. This would be another worst-of-all-worlds scenario where we have all the negatives of a long lockdown, but everyone gets infected anyway.

Sing, O Muse, Of Arbit-Rage

There’s a morbid joke about the news, which goes something like:

10,000 Africans in a famine =
1,000 Chinese in an earthquake =
100 Europeans in a plane crash =
10 Americans in a terrorist attack =
1 pretty white girl getting kidnapped

(if you want to go a different direction, you can add “= 0.1 black people murdered by cops”)

Coronavirus has killed about 100,000 Americans so far. How bad is that compared to other things?

Well, on the one hand, it’s about 15% as many Americans as die from heart attacks each year. If 15% more people died from heart attacks in the US next year, that would suck, but most people wouldn’t care that much. If some scientist has a plan to make heart attacks 15% less deadly, then sure, fund the scientist, but you probably wouldn’t want to shut down the entire US economy to fund them. It would just be a marginally good thing.

On the other hand, it’s also about the same number of Americans who died in the Vietnam War plus the Korean War plus 9/11 plus every school shooting ever. How much effort would you exert to prevent the Vietnam War plus the Korean War plus 9/11 plus every school shooting ever? Probably quite a lot!

Maybe part of this is that heart attack victims are generally (though not always!) older than 9/11 victims, so the cost in DALYs is lower. But the bigger problem is that there’s no arbitrage in the market for lives. Some normal good, like Toyota Camrys, sells for about the same price everywhere. There might be minor variations based on how far you go from a Toyota factory or something, but overall you wouldn’t expect the same Camry to sell for ten times as much in one city as another. Someone would arbitrage – buy the Toyotas in the cheap city and sell them in the expensive one! But the same reasoning fails when it applies to lives. Life has no single value denominated in dollars, attention, or outrage. So when we search for metaphors to tell us how bad 100,000 deaths from coronavirus are, our conclusion depends entirely on what metaphor we use. “It’s like 15% of heart attacks” sounds not-so-bad, and “it starts with the Vietnam War and gets worse from there” sounds awful, even though they’re the same number. There’s no way to fix this without somehow making all our intuitions collide against each other and equalize, which sounds really hard.

Suppose you reopened the economy tomorrow. You tried as hard as you could to put profits above people, squeezed every extra dollar out of the world regardless of human cost. And then you put a 1% tax on all that economic activity, and donated it to effective charity. Would that save more people than a strict lockdown? If a lockdown costs $5 trillion, then the 1% tax would make $50 billion. That’s about how much the Gates Foundation has spent, and they’ve saved about ten million lives. Ten million is higher than anyone expects US coronavirus deaths to be, so as far as I can tell this is a good deal.

On the other hand, the US spent about $5 trillion on the Iraq and Afghan wars. Even optimistically assuming this helped prevent some terrorism, it’s a no-brainer to say we should have accepted the cost in terrorist attacks and spent it on stricter COVID lockdowns instead.

Is spending resources on the coronavirus lockdown a good idea? A good idea compared to what? Compared to using resources efficiently, goodness no, not at all. Compared to putting the resources in a giant pile and setting them on fire, yes, definitely. Compared to usual practice? Usual practice basically involves alternating betwen the two previous options inconsistently; the answer depends on how long we spend in each category. At this point, we are too incompetent for questions about our preferences to even make sense.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

Pebble

A proposed mine in Alaska will endanger brown bears – and much more (The Guardian)

Image: Acacia Johnson

No, We’re Not All in This Together

Quarantine fatigue is bringing an end to our lockdown, whether we’re ready or not.

All 50 states now are reopening, no matter what’s going on with the virus. This anxiousness to get back to regular life and work, which you can feel bursting on the suddenly crowded streets of Seattle, may have been baked into the timeline centuries ago, when the word “quarantine” was coined by the Italians.

It’s a mashup of “quaranta giorni,” or “forty days.” Wednesday marks Day 58 we’ve been cooped up since the March 23 shutdown order. No wonder we got restless.

The good news is that, in King County, which had the first confirmed death in the nation in February, the virus has been driven down to near-suppression levels. On Sunday, the county reported just 31 new cases of the virus. That’s the lowest daily case figure since March 7, back when there was also far less testing being done.

Keeping the virus down now as we reopen would require testing, tracing and isolating the new cases. It’s a level of control and follow-through that probably isn’t in our DNA. But 31 cases is getting low enough that isolating the virus becomes at least theoretically possible.

The flip side can be seen only 140 miles away, in Yakima. It’s a real-time rebuke to the coronavirus cliché that “we’re all in this together.”

Yakima County, one-ninth the size of King, had 82 new cases Sunday. Two days prior, it reported 122 new cases. It now has a case rate of more than 1,000 per 100,000 residents, the highest of any county on the West Coast and three times the rate of King.

In the last few days, nearly half of all the new cases reported in the state were in Yakima.

The Yakima outbreak was clustered at first in nursing homes, like here, but is now running through agriculture and fruit-packing plants. The health officer there said the spread there versus relative containment elsewhere is because two-thirds of the jobs in Yakima are considered both “essential” (such as the food industry) and hands-on (can’t be done remotely).

“We’re a little bit of a model of what it looks like when you have a lot of the population going off to the workplace,” Dr. Teresa Everson told The Seattle Times. “We never got to low mobility.”

Sixty-four percent of the infected people are Hispanic or Latino. Some of the Latino neighborhoods have case rates up to 2,300 per 100,000 — five times the U.S. average, and nine times the state rate.

Due to all this, the farmworkers, many of them seasonal migrants, made a reasonable request that they not be clustered together into big bunk-bed farm dormitories at night. But the state decided to allow the bunking of workers in groups of 15 (even as the rest of us technically have been advised not to gather in a group of any size, even while outside).

The state’s rule “not only defies science, they defy basic human rights,” said the Latino Civic Alliance of Yakima.

Despite that, on Monday the workers were being told by some to quit complaining and man up to the virus.

“Return to work,” read a sign, in Spanish, on a car roaming past lines of protesting migrant workers, as reported by the Yakima Herald-Republic. “Your fear is the virus that is attacking our civil rights. Free yourself!”

Yeah, you there, the poorest, most marginalized people in the state. You be the tip of the spear.

by Danny Westneat, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Amanda Ray/Yakima Herald-Republic

The Sickness in Our Food Supply

“Only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett observed, “do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” For our society, the Covid-19 pandemic represents an ebb tide of historic proportions, one that is laying bare vulnerabilities and inequities that in normal times have gone undiscovered. Nowhere is this more evident than in the American food system. A series of shocks has exposed weak links in our food chain that threaten to leave grocery shelves as patchy and unpredictable as those in the former Soviet bloc. The very system that made possible the bounty of the American supermarket—its vaunted efficiency and ability to “pile it high and sell it cheap”—suddenly seems questionable, if not misguided. But the problems the novel coronavirus has revealed are not limited to the way we produce and distribute food. They also show up on our plates, since the diet on offer at the end of the industrial food chain is linked to precisely the types of chronic disease that render us more vulnerable to Covid-19.

The juxtaposition of images in the news of farmers destroying crops and dumping milk with empty supermarket shelves or hungry Americans lining up for hours at food banks tells a story of economic efficiency gone mad. Today the US actually has two separate food chains, each supplying roughly half of the market. The retail food chain links one set of farmers to grocery stores, and a second chain links a different set of farmers to institutional purchasers of food, such as restaurants, schools, and corporate offices. With the shutting down of much of the economy, as Americans stay home, this second food chain has essentially collapsed. But because of the way the industry has developed over the past several decades, it’s virtually impossible to reroute food normally sold in bulk to institutions to the retail outlets now clamoring for it. There’s still plenty of food coming from American farms, but no easy way to get it where it’s needed.

How did we end up here? The story begins early in the Reagan administration, when the Justice Department rewrote the rules of antitrust enforcement: if a proposed merger promised to lead to greater marketplace “efficiency”—the watchword—and wouldn’t harm the consumer, i.e., didn’t raise prices, it would be approved. (It’s worth noting that the word “consumer” appears nowhere in the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, passed in 1890. The law sought to protect producers—including farmers—and our politics from undue concentrations of corporate power.) The new policy, which subsequent administrations have left in place, propelled a wave of mergers and acquisitions in the food industry. As the industry has grown steadily more concentrated since the 1980s, it has also grown much more specialized, with a tiny number of large corporations dominating each link in the supply chain. One chicken farmer interviewed recently in Washington Monthly, who sells millions of eggs into the liquified egg market, destined for omelets in school cafeterias, lacks the grading equipment and packaging (not to mention the contacts or contracts) to sell his eggs in the retail marketplace. That chicken farmer had no choice but to euthanize thousands of hens at a time when eggs are in short supply in many supermarkets.

On April 26, John Tyson, the chairman of Tyson Foods, the second-largest meatpacker in America, took out ads in The New York Times and other newspapers to declare that the food chain was “breaking,” raising the specter of imminent meat shortages as outbreaks of Covid-19 hit the industry. Slaughterhouses have become hot zones for contagion, with thousands of workers now out sick and dozens of them dying. This should come as no surprise: social distancing is virtually impossible in a modern meat plant, making it an ideal environment for a virus to spread. In recent years, meatpackers have successfully lobbied regulators to increase line speeds, with the result that workers must stand shoulder to shoulder cutting and deboning animals so quickly that they can’t pause long enough to cover a cough, much less go to the bathroom, without carcasses passing them by. Some chicken plant workers, given no regular bathroom breaks, now wear diapers.5 A worker can ask for a break, but the plants are so loud he or she can’t be heard without speaking directly into the ear of a supervisor. Until recently slaughterhouse workers had little or no access to personal protective equipment; many of them were also encouraged to keep working even after exposure to the virus. Add to this the fact that many meat-plant workers are immigrants who live in crowded conditions with little or no access to health care, and you have a population at dangerously high risk of infection.

When the number of Covid-19 cases in America’s slaughterhouses exploded in late April—12,608 confirmed, with forty-nine deaths as of May 11—public health officials and governors began ordering plants to close. It was this threat to the industry’s profitability that led to Tyson’s declaration, which President Trump would have been right to see as a shakedown: the president’s political difficulties could only be compounded by a shortage of meat. In order to reopen their production lines, Tyson and his fellow packers wanted the federal government to step in and preempt local public health authorities; they also needed liability protection, in case workers or their unions sued them for failing to observe health and safety regulations.

Within days of Tyson’s ad, President Trump obliged the meatpackers by invoking the Defense Production Act. After having declined to use it to boost the production of badly needed coronavirus test kits, he now declared meat a “scarce and critical material essential to the national defense.” The executive order took the decision to reopen or close meat plants out of local hands, forced employees back to work without any mandatory safety precautions, and offered their employers some protection from liability for their negligence. On May 8, Tyson reopened a meatpacking plant in Waterloo, Iowa, where more than a thousand workers had tested positive.

The president and America’s meat eaters, not to mention its meat-plant workers, would never have found themselves in this predicament if not for the concentration of the meat industry, which has given us a supply chain so brittle that the closure of a single plant can cause havoc at every step, from farm to supermarket. Four companies now process more than 80 percent of beef cattle in America; another four companies process 57 percent of the hogs. A single Smithfield processing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, processes 5 percent of the pork Americans eat. When an outbreak of Covid-19 forced the state’s governor to shut that plant down in April, the farmers who raise pigs committed to it were stranded.

Once pigs reach slaughter weight, there’s not much else you can do with them. You can’t afford to keep feeding them; even if you could, the production lines are designed to accommodate pigs up to a certain size and weight, and no larger. Meanwhile, you’ve got baby pigs entering the process, steadily getting fatter. Much the same is true for the hybrid industrial chickens, which, if allowed to live beyond their allotted six or seven weeks, are susceptible to broken bones and heart problems and quickly become too large to hang on the disassembly line. This is why the meat-plant closures forced American farmers to euthanize millions of animals, at a time when food banks were overwhelmed by demand.

Under normal circumstances, the modern hog or chicken is a marvel of brutal efficiency, bred to produce protein at warp speed when given the right food and pharmaceuticals. So are the factories in which they are killed and cut into parts. These innovations have made meat, which for most of human history has been a luxury, a cheap commodity available to just about all Americans; we now eat, on average, more than nine ounces of meat per person per day, many of us at every meal. Covid-19 has brutally exposed the risks that accompany such a system. There will always be a tradeoff between efficiency and resilience (not to mention ethics); the food industry opted for the former, and we are now paying the price.

Imagine how different the story would be if there were still tens of thousands of chicken and pig farmers bringing their animals to hundreds of regional slaughterhouses. An outbreak at any one of them would barely disturb the system; it certainly wouldn’t be front-page news. Meat would probably be more expensive, but the redundancy would render the system more resilient, making breakdowns in the national supply chain unlikely. Successive administrations allowed the industry to consolidate because the efficiencies promised to make meat cheaper for the consumer, which it did. It also gave us an industry so powerful it can enlist the president of the United States in its efforts to bring local health authorities to heel and force reluctant and frightened workers back onto the line.

by Michael Pollan, NYRB | Read more:
Image: Ellie Foreman-Peck

Amber Mark

Louis, Louis

Over at The Cut, New York magazine’s ode to the stylish and sexy set, there are stories of couples considering open relationships and pro tips on “How to Whiten Your Teeth at Home” (and your skin, your apartment, yourself. . .). But the other day, I found a somewhat startling headline there. The famed fashion brand Louis Vuitton, fervently adored by those who like to showcase their status on various airport concourses, had manufactured and donated 2,500 face masks to workers at New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The masks given to the MTA, where nearly a hundred workers have lost their lives during the pandemic, another article pointedly clarified, are plain, not adorned with the company’s valuable logo.

I imagined this odious scene in my head. How had the masks been sent over to the MTA? Was there a ceremony, featuring a small gaggle of exhausted workers, an over-eager Vuitton public-relations manager, some MTA boss awoken from his work-at-home slumber? Or were they just mailed over in a large box with Louis Vuitton as the return address? I wondered why the masks were not adorned with the brand name—surely the expert artisans of repurposed Vuitton factories could put a little logo on them? I imagined the rehearsed response that would fall from the nude matte lips of a working-from-the-Hamptons publicity doyenne: “Well, the pandemic is so tragic,” she’d intone nasally, “we didn’t want people to think that we are using it as a publicity thing, or to push a secondary market for masks.”

Except that Louis Vuitton is using this moment (as are Chanel and Armani and Kate Spade and Ralph Lauren, for that matter) to do just that; they flash with a flourish the company’s caring heart. The logo on the masks would make them valuable beyond their functionality, maybe even make them (gasp) fashionable, and we all know that fashion of that high-end, snobby sort does not belong on the faces of poor MTA workers. Sharing some small bit of its billions in profits is kindly and socially responsible; giving away its logo to working stiffs is cheapening its brand.

The Vuitton caper represents the conundrum that luxury fashion brands face in this time of tragedy. Chanel, which has also allegedly repurposed its factories to make masks and protective gowns, survived World War II with a tarnished reputation. Its survival was ensured largely because Coco Chanel, the company’s namesake, became an eager agent for the Nazis. Even as she peddled her suits and gowns during the War, Chanel cozied up to a top officer in German military intelligence, happily moving into the Ritz Hotel and passing information she gleaned from her uppity and ever style-conscious French friends on to the Germans.

Louis Vuitton’s mask-donation publicity stunt is not equal to colluding with the Nazis, but it is a hypocritical effort to create the pretense of a “company conscience” where none exists. Bernard Arnault, a lover of diamonds who heads up LVMH (the company that owns Louis Vuitton) is the richest man in France. His company is valued at $166 billion; he recently gobbled up Tiffany for $16 billion. But Arnault, the mask stunt tries to say, also has a heart of gold, a desire to tend to the needs of the MTA. This caring story is the one Vuitton wants to tell.

The truth happens to be different. Vuitton’s bid for good publicity underscores just how hard it is going to be for luxury fashion brands to contort themselves into the tight moral constraints that are likely to dominate consumption in the post-Covid-19 world. Gone are the days when impossibly thin New York women could put on a Chanel suit that cost a small mountain of credit card debt and lay rightful claim to the snobbery that came with it. Similarly lost will be admiration for the branded tchotchkes that heiresses and style mavens flashed with some deliberation every chance they got.

There is research to show just how terrified the fashion industry is of all this—and of one other more important and crucial consequence of the pandemic. A report published by McKinsey & Company mentions something called “a quarantine of consumption,” where consumers already driven away from luxury brands and toward those that promise sustainability and fair labor practices will now turn away altogether and for always. Boasting about a $6,000 pair of Louboutins may have brought awe and envy to the suburban mother in the “before” times. In the after-times it just reveals a craven let-them-eat-cake sort of callousness.

Trend forecasters agree. “The virus, I think, can be seen as a representation of our conscience . . . it brings to light what is so terribly wrong with society and every day that becomes more clear,” said Li Edelkoort. “It teaches us to slow down and change our ways.” This change of ways bodes ill for all the discretionary spending that brand-boasting Americans and more crucially the jet-setting Chinese have promoted in the post-2008 recovery. With “discretionary” spending drawn into the realm of ethical consumption, a fashion brand must now signal not only style but virtue.

And so it happens that Louis Vuitton, never before concerned with anything New York’s MTA workers need or do, has to make masks for them. The hope is that websites like The Cut, which seems to have branding conundrums of its own in the post-Covid moment (like the blackly comic juxtaposition of Covid casualty numbers next to the thirteen best eye creams), will run articles on it along with Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and perhaps Vanity Fair. The handing out of masks, the repurposing of factories, all the luxe brands hope, will make fashion look good, where good (revolutionarily for fashion) means actually virtuous rather than simply beautiful. If there is any embarrassment to be felt about the multi-billion-dollar LVMH handing out a few thousand masks through Louis Vuitton, it has been ignored.

by Rafia Zakaria, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: The Baffler

Democrats Have Abandoned Civil Liberties

Emmet G. Sullivan, the judge in the case of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, is refusing to let William Barr’s Justice Department drop the charge. He’s even thinking of adding more, appointing a retired judge to ask “whether the Court should issue an Order to Show Cause why Mr. Flynn should not be held in criminal contempt for perjury.”

Pundits are cheering. A trio of former law enforcement and judicial officials saluted Sullivan in the Washington Post, chirping, “The Flynn case isn’t over until a judge says it’s over.” Yuppie icon Jeffrey Toobin of CNN and the New Yorker, one of the #Resistance crowd’s favored legal authorities, described Sullivan’s appointment of Judge John Gleeson as “brilliant.” MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner said Americans owe Sullivan a “debt of gratitude.”

One had to search far and wide to find a non-conservative legal analyst willing to say the obvious, i.e. that Sullivan’s decision was the kind of thing one would expect from a judge in Belarus. George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley was one of the few willing to say Sullivan’s move could “could create a threat of a judicial charge even when prosecutors agree with defendants.”

Sullivan’s reaction was amplified by a group letter calling for Barr’s resignation signed by 2000 former Justice Department officials (the melodramatic group email somberly reported as momentous news is one of many tired media tropes in the Trump era) and the preposterous “leak” of news that the dropped case made Barack Obama sad. The former president “privately” told “members of his administration” (who instantly told Yahoo! News) that there was no precedent for the dropping of perjury charges, and that the “rule of law” itself was at stake.

Whatever one’s opinion of Flynn, his relations with Turkey, his “Lock her up!” chants, his haircut, whatever, this case was never about much. There’s no longer pretense that prosecution would lead to the unspooling of a massive Trump-Russia conspiracy, as pundits once breathlessly expected. News that Flynn was cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller inspired many of the “Is this the beginning of the end for Trump?” stories that will someday fill whole chapters of Journalism Fucks Up 101 textbooks.

The acts at issue are calls Flynn made to Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak on December 29th, 2016 in which he told the Russians not to overreact to sanctions. That’s it. The investigation was about to be dropped, but someone got the idea of using electronic surveillance of the calls to leverage a case into existence.

In a secrets-laundering maneuver straight out of the Dick Cheney playbook, some bright person first illegally leaked classified details to David Ignatius at the Washington Post, then agents rushed to interview Flynn about the “news.”

“The record of his conversation with Ambassador Kislyak had become widely known in the press,” is how Deputy FBI chief Andrew McCabe put it, euphemistically. “We wanted to sit down with General Flynn and understand, kind of, what his thoughts on that conversation were.”

A Laurel-and-Hardy team of agents conducted the interview, then took three weeks to write and re-write multiple versions of the interview notes used as evidence (because why record it?). They were supervised by a counterintelligence chief who then memorialized on paper his uncertainty over whether the FBI was trying to “get him to lie” or “get him fired,” worrying that they’d be accused of “playing games.” After another leak to the Washington Post in early February, 2017, Flynn actually was fired, and later pleaded guilty to lying about sanctions in the Kislyak call, the transcript of which was of course never released to either the defense or the public.

Warrantless surveillance, multiple illegal leaks of classified information, a false statements charge constructed on the razor’s edge of Miranda, and the use of never-produced, secret counterintelligence evidence in a domestic criminal proceeding – this is the “rule of law” we’re being asked to cheer.

Russiagate cases were often two-level offenses: factually bogus or exaggerated, but also indicative of authoritarian practices. Democrats and Democrat-friendly pundits in the last four years have been consistently unable to register objections on either front.

Flynn’s case fit the pattern. We were told his plea was just the “tip of the iceberg” that would “take the trail of Russian collusion” to the “center of the plot,” i.e. Trump. It turned out he had no deeper story to tell. In fact, none of the people prosecutors tossed in jail to get at the Russian “plot” – some little more than bystanders – had anything to share. (...)

I can understand not caring about the plight of Michael Flynn, but cases like this have turned erstwhile liberals – people who just a decade ago were marching in the streets over the civil liberties implications of Cheney’s War on Terror apparatus – into defenders of the spy state. Politicians and pundits across the last four years have rolled their eyes at attorney-client privilege, the presumption of innocence, the right to face one’s accuser, the right to counsel and a host of other issues, regularly denouncing civil rights worries as red-herring excuses for Trumpism. (...)

Democrats clearly believe constituents will forgive them for abandoning constitutional principles, so long as the targets of official inquiry are figures like Flynn or Paul Manafort or Trump himself. In the process, they’ve raised a generation of followers whose contempt for civil liberties is now genuine-to-permanent. Blue-staters have gone from dismissing constitutional concerns as Trumpian ruse to sneering at them, in the manner of French aristocrats, as evidence of proletarian mental defect.

Nowhere has this been more evident than in the response to the Covid-19 crisis, where the almost mandatory take of pundits is that any protest of lockdown measures is troglodyte death wish. The aftereffects of years of Russiagate/Trump coverage are seen everywhere: press outlets reflexively associate complaints of government overreach with Trump, treason, and racism, and conversely radiate a creepily gleeful tone when describing aggressive emergency measures and the problems some “dumb” Americans have had accepting them.

by Matt Taibbi, Substack |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Have to agree. This is inside baseball. Does anyone really have a good recollection of all the twists and turns that turned out to be nothing-burgers in the Mueller investigation? Not me (and I try to keep up). But that hasn't kept the media from jumping from one outrage to another.] 

F.D.A. Halts Coronavirus Testing Program Backed by Bill Gates

An innovative coronavirus testing program in the Seattle area — promoted by the billionaire Bill Gates and local public health officials as a way of conducting wider surveillance on the invisible spread of the virus — has been ordered by the federal government to stop its work pending additional reviews.

The program involved sending home test kits to both healthy and sick people in the hope of conducting the kind of widespread monitoring that could help communities safely reopen from lockdowns. Researchers and public health authorities already had tested thousands of samples, finding dozens of previously undetected cases.

But the program, a partnership between research groups and the Seattle and King County public health department that had been operating under authorization from the state, was notified this week that it now needs approval directly from the federal government. Officials with the Food and Drug Administration told the partnership to cease its testing and reporting until the agency grants further approval.

“Please discontinue patient testing and return of diagnostic results to patients until proper authorization is obtained,” the F.D.A. wrote in a memo.

The delay is the latest evidence of how a splintered national effort to develop, distribute and ramp up testing has left federal regulators struggling to keep up. Amid concerns about the reliability of a burgeoning number of coronavirus antibody tests — which check whether someone may have previously had the virus — the F.D.A. responded last week by ordering companies to submit data proving the tests’ accuracy.

But the Seattle program does not test for antibodies and has wide backing, including from public health leaders, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Mr. Gates, whose foundation has been deeply involved in fighting the pandemic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also provided an in-person technical adviser to the project.

Dr. Eric Topol, the director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, who is not involved in the Seattle group, said it had “emerged as leading lights in this whole Covid-19 crisis.” He said it was “bizarre” that the F.D.A. would halt such a project. (...)

The program has roots in the Seattle Flu Study, which over the fall and winter had collected thousands of samples from people in Washington State who had symptoms of illness. As previously detailed in The New York Times, researchers there had struggled to get government approval to test those old samples for the coronavirus and report the results.

By the end of February, those researchers ended up doing some testing anyway, discovered the first case of community transmission in the region and provided key evidence that the virus had most likely been circulating for weeks.

Mr. Gates, the Microsoft co-founder who has committed much of his wealth to global public health issues, has backed the Seattle study. He said in a blog post Tuesday that the program could detect cases and help guide public health responses.

“Not only will it help improve our understanding of the outbreak in Seattle, it will also provide valuable information about the virus for other communities around the world,” Mr. Gates wrote.

An F.D.A. spokesperson said home collection kits raised additional concerns about safety and accuracy that required the agency’s review. The issue in the Seattle case appears to be that the test results are being used not only by researchers for surveillance of the virus in the community but that the results are also being returned to patients to inform them.

The two kinds of testing — surveillance and diagnostic — fall under different F.D.A. standards. In a pure surveillance study, the researchers may keep the results just for themselves. But coronavirus testing has largely revolved around getting results returned to doctors who can share the results with patients. (...)

Dr. Topol said it would not make sense to have people swab their noses and then not give them their test results.

“To withhold that information from people is downright absurd,” Dr. Topol said.

by Mike Baker, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Grant Hindsley for The New York Times
[ed. Bureaucracy at its's unfuckingbeliveable finest. The federal response to this crisis has been abysmal from the beginning, and is the gift that keeps on giving. See also: What is the FDA Doing Now??! (Marginal Revolution).]

Tomo Nakayama

The 50 Best Movies on Netflix Right Now

May 7, 2020

The sheer volume of films on Netflix — and the site’s less than ideal interface — can make finding a genuinely great movie there a difficult task. To help, we’ve plucked out the 50 best films currently streaming on the service in the United States, updated regularly as titles come and go. And as a bonus, we link to more great movies on Netflix within many of our writeups below. (Note: Streaming services sometimes remove titles or change starting dates without giving notice.)

Here are our lists of the best TV shows on Netflix, the best movies on Amazon Prime Video and the best of everything on Disney Plus.

by Jason Bailey, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: The Bling Ring/Netflix

[ed. Paywall tip: Cookie Remover, a Chrome extension, works well if you're occasionally blocked from seeing NY Times articles.]

Local Sleuths Track Down Source of Mysterious Radio Songs

For days, Seattle writer and attorney Nathan Barnes has been consumed by a strange mystery: Who is broadcasting the same 20-song playlist over and over via FM radio? There are no call signs, no ad breaks, no DJ or explanation... just the same odd 59-minute playlist, cycling 24 hours a day. What?

Because we are all stuck inside, observing doom, this is exactly the kind of bonkers mystery that Twitter needs. After posting about the strange broadcast, Nathan's followers leapt into action, digging into radio records, driving around town with car radios carefully tuned, and wandering through Cal Anderson park looking for answers.

"We have a five-year-old and we’re often on the classical station during the day, especially a few weeks ago when you’re trying to be wholesome and haven’t given up yet," Barnes said in an interview with The Stranger.

The mystery began when someone, him or his wife, accidentally bumped the dial from 98.1 over to 98.5, heard some pleasantly nostalgic classic rock, and left it there. A few hours later, they observed, "I swear I've heard this song before."

The playlist starts every time with Jim Croce singing Time in a Bottle. Then it's Signs by the Five Man Electrical Band. Then Killer Queen by Queen, Mr. Tambourine Man by The Byrds, Mercy Mercy Me by Marvin Gaye ... and so on. Good songs! But why play them together, Nathan wondered? He started writing down the tunes as they played, puzzling over them.

"I'm writing down the tracks like oh my gosh this must mean something," he recalls. "I was obsessing over it and eventually I had to get it out on Twitter."

A post on Tuesday immediately attracted attention, and amateur sleuths joined in. Some people analyzed the years in which the songs came out — no pattern. Others ran their initials through cypher keys — nothing.

Someone suggested looking for patterns in the time signatures. Someone else translated the years into binary. Another theory is that someone couldn't be near a loved one in the hospital, so they (somehow) broadcast the playlist of their favorite songs so they could feel close.

My guess was a community college radio project that someone forgot to turn off before the lockdown. My partner thought it was a service for retail stores to play over the speakers.

Everyone was thrown into a tizzy when the station unexpectedly broadcast a government PSA about getting a flu shot, then went back to the playlist.

Folks began chiming in with their location so they could triangulate the source, and Nathan kept his ear to the dial when he had to run an errand in Eastlake.

"I had convinced myself this was some kind of pirate radio station, someone in SODO who was pumping this out, just based on my drive," Nathan says.

The enigma was a welcome break from ... you know, everything else.

"Of course we’re all sitting around the house, everyone’s job is up in the air, businesses are closing, there’s a lot of anxiety," he says. "Thousands of people are now putting some amount of minor mental effort to shoehorn meaning into twenty songs picked at random by some software."

Wait, what? Picked at random by some software? Yes, as it turns out, the mystery has been solved and it meant ...

by Matt Baume, The Stranger |  Read more:

Image: Joyce Marrero/Getty
[ed. Quarantine is making everyone crazy(er).]

Fred Willard (Sept., 1933 - May, 2020)

Fred Willard, Scene Stealer Extraordinaire, Dies At 86 (NPR). Also this tribute from Rolling Stone.]

[ed. Here's a clip from early in Fred's career when he starred with Martin Mull on Fernwood 2 Night, one of the funniest and most subversive comedy shows back in the late 70s. Also, check out the old commercials. Begins at 0:52]

America’s Chilling Experiment in Human Sacrifice

“There is no wealth but life.”
— John Ruskin, Unto This Last (1860)

A chilling experiment is underway in America, with plenty of unwilling human guinea pigs.

Many parts of the country are reopening for business against the warnings of medical experts, flying in the face of grim predictions of sharply rising body counts. Two-thirds of Americans fear that the restart is happening too quickly, and the President himself acknowledges that by easing restrictions, “there’ll be more death.” Yet he presses on, even as his own White House suffers a viral outbreak. (...)

Meanwhile Dan Patrick, lieutenant governor of Texas, offered his own assessment of the trade-off between capitalism and the lives of America’s senior citizens, explaining, “there are more important things than living.”

Since the days of Adam Smith, free market capitalists have held that human beings are rational actors who pursue economic gain for self-interested motives. But here is Patrick, a free marketer if there ever was one, talking about a gift-sacrifice economy model in which people – some people, at least – lay down their lives to keep the economic engines revved.

Patrick’s words reveal an unspoken truth about capitalism. For the system to work smoothly, there have always been requirements of human sacrifice — a certain portion of the population was expected to act not as self-serving homo economicus, but self-sacrificing homo communis, focused upon what benefits the collective at their own expense. If these people can’t social distance at the workplace, they are expected to show up anyway. If there isn’t enough safety equipment, they are declared essential workers who must put their lives and that of their families at risk for the greater good.

But for whom and for what is this sacrifice intended? How much dying will be figured into state budgets and gross domestic product (GDP)? When ranked by GDP, the U.S. is the wealthiest economy in the world, but is a country’s wealth something totally separate from, or even contrary to, the health and life the majority of its citizens?

Wealth v. “illth”

To help us navigate these questions, it is useful turn to someone who offered potent challenges to the economic calculus of his day: John Ruskin, the 19th-century art critic-turned-political economist. He was one of the most outspoken critics of capitalism and prevailing economic ideas of the Victorian era, and his work presciently points to shortcomings that have followed us into the present day.

Ruskin questions the premises on which free market capitalism is based, returning to first principles: what is wealth? What do we value? How should we understand the relationship between people, the economy, and the state?

In his view, economies are, above all, social systems whose true end is to benefit the people, and not, as the Texan politician would have it, the other way around. (...)

Ruskin defined wealth quite differently from many of his contemporaries, and ours. For him, wealth is anything that supports life and health, from the supplies in your storeroom to the song in your heart: “There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.” (Unto this Last).

By that definition, America is looking increasingly impoverished. And it is not a virus which is stealing our wealth away.

Playing on the root of the word “wealth” from the Old English word “weal,” signifying health, Ruskin proposed that while wealth was anything life-supporting that could be used and enjoyed, it had a dark counterpart that he called “illth” from the Old Norse word for bad – the things that make people ill, their lives stunted and despairing, their environment polluted. Wealth cannot be produced without illth, but great fortunes have been made by extracting the means of wealth without paying the cost of illth. To take a Ruskinian example, a factory that pollutes the water it uses, fouls the air and pays its workers below what a healthy life requires will be more profitable than a business that cleans up after itself and pays a living wage, but its illth becomes a form of national debt expressed in damage to the health of others and the environment. Think of something like a toxic Superfund site.

Economists have a term for Ruskin’s concept of illth, referring to it as “negative externalities,” even though they are not external to the capitalist economic system, but intrinsic to it. The most daunting problems of the current age, environmental disaster and inequality, are fueled by illth. (...)

Pandemics are exacerbated by illth. We can see it in communities of color where the coronavirus strikes down those whose resources and access to health care have been limited by discriminatory policies and high contact employment. We can see it in factory farms where broken supply chains have caused farmers to euthanize livestock and plow under crops while people across the country go hungry. Airlines got immediate stimulus aid in the U.S., but there has been no subsidy for the restaurant supply chain that could be diverted for distribution by food banks and favorably located restaurants thus sustaining at least some of our much-vaunted small businesses. No one has to fly, but everyone must eat.

We sense illth accumulating in the comments of Las Vegas mayor Carolyn Goodman, who, in her eagerness to get the casinos back in business, told an astonished Anderson Cooper on CNN that she would offer up the city’s workers as a “control group” in a reopening experiment. If they weren’t able to social distance, Goodman was unconcerned: “In my opinion, you have to go ahead,” she said. “Every day you get up, it’s a gamble.”

Ruskin saw the capitalists of his day as gamblers heedless of the costs they foisted onto ordinary people: “But they neither know who keeps the bank of the gambling-house, nor what other games may be played with the same cards, nor what other losses and gains, far away among the dark streets, are essentially, though invisibly, dependent upon theirs in lighted rooms.” (Unto This Last).

In other words, not only do capitalists gamble with other peoples’ lives; they are oblivious to the fact that there are other ways to arrange society, to deal the cards differently, more fairly. (...)

President Trump says that it is time to move on from the coronavirus and get on with economy. Ruskin would have recognized the deity worshipped by country’s leader, which he called the “Goddess of getting on.” Only Ruskin recognized that she tended to favor “not of everybody’s getting on – but only of somebody’s getting on,” — what he called a “vital, or rather deathful, distinction.” For capitalists, getting on post-Covid means executives working remotely while the rank and file return to the factory floor without adequate face masks, and large corporations, not public input, determines the blueprints for our lives. (...)

The Covid crisis has exposed contradictions in market and America First ideology. Without federal aid to state and local governments, essential personnel are being laid off even as we declare them heroes. Employer based insurance is failing, but few American politicians are willing to fully embrace single payer insurance. Meat plant workers are declared essential, but still subject to deportation, as if famed Revolutionary patriot Nathan Hale had said, “I only regret that you have but one life to give for my country.”

Ultimately, the most dangerous pestilence that threatens the country is not a packet of RNA called Covid-19 but an economic and political system that does not value true wealth, and promotes the life of the few while condemning the many to literal sickness unto death.

by Lynn Parramore and Jeffery L. Spear, INEC via Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Image: Unknown, The Triumph of Death (Trionfo della Morte)

via: here and here

Have the Record Number of Investors in the Stock Market Lost Their Minds?

This past weekend, I drove out to Bethpage State Park, the public golf mecca on Long Island that Robert Moses built during the Great Depression. The park, which has five courses, recently reopened with new safety rules: no carts, no clubhouse amenities, and payments processed in advance by phone. Among the three players I got teamed up with was a local retiree who had returned from Florida just in time for the lockdown. As we social-distanced our way around the Red course, I asked how he was filling his time. He said that he was watching television and trading in the stock market. That sounded dangerous, I ventured, but my playing partner dismissed my concerns. He had faith in the market, he said, and, in any case, he had set aside a fixed sum, to limit his exposure.

The stock market fell for three days in a row to start this week, and Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, said on Wednesday that there is a growing sense that “the recovery may come more slowly than we would like.” In a Zoom presentation to the Economic Club of New York, on Tuesday, Stanley Druckenmiller, a former hedge-fund manager who now invests his own money, said, “The risk-reward for equity”—that is, stocks—“is maybe as bad as I’ve seen it in my career.” And yet many small investors, like my golfing companion, do not seem fazed by warnings like these. Since the Dow plunged more than ten thousand points in February and March, individual traders have been buying and selling stocks at record rates. On Thursday, E-Trade, the discount brokerage, reported that its daily trading volume in April was more than three times as large as it was in April, 2019. Other discount brokers have reported similar figures. TD Ameritrade said that it did more than three million trades a day in April, compared with eight hundred and seventeen thousand a year earlier.

This trading frenzy is taking place in the context of a price war that has prompted firms such as E-Trade, TD Ameritrade, and Charles Schwab to eliminate commissions for stock purchases and sales, exchange-traded funds, and index options. Since the shutdowns began, many investors have taken advantage of this era of free trades, which began last fall, well before the coronavirus pandemic hit, to exploit what they seem to view as a good money-making opportunity. In March alone, TD Ameritrade added more than four hundred thousand accounts, CNBC’s Maggie Fitzgerald reported earlier this week. Charles Schwab added nearly three hundred thousand accounts.

In rational terms, getting rid of commissions shouldn’t have had a substantial impact. If you invest five thousand dollars in Apple or Tesla, the five or ten dollars you saved in fees won’t have much effect on the ultimate outcome. “How much trading would you have to do for it to make a difference?” Richard Thaler, an economist at the University of Chicago—who was awarded the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, for his contribution to behavioral economics—said to me on Thursday, when I called and asked him about the surge in online trading. On the other hand, Thaler added, “Free is always appealing. Everybody likes a free lunch, even though my colleagues don’t think they exist.” Having taken a friendly jab at the Chicago disciples of Milton Friedman, Thaler said that nobody really knows what is driving all the stock trading. “It could be that it’s just a lot of people have a lot of time on their hands,” he said. “One friend suggested to me it is replacing gambling. The casinos are closed and there are no sports to bet on.”

For some active traders, this theory does seem to apply. “I like betting on sports,” Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, told Business Insider. “Sports ended, and this was something that was still going that I could do during the day.” After the shutdowns began, Portnoy put three million dollars in an E-Trade account “to play around with.” He’s been busy sharing his exploits with his large Twitter following. (On Friday morning, he reported, “I’m up fifty grand.”) Of course, most investors don’t have the same resources as Portnoy, who made a fortune earlier this year when a big gambling company took a majority stake in his Web site. And many small investors aren’t day-trading. They are simply moving money into exchange-traded funds or blue-chip stocks, some of which are still pretty beaten up, while others, such as Apple and Alphabet, have already made up most of their losses.

The Yale economist Robert Shiller, who shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, for his studies of what drives stock prices, suggested to me that investors are responding to a widely shared narrative that says stock prices tend to rebound sharply after a big fall, and that you have to get in early to make the biggest gains. “I hear the term ‘ “V”-shaped’ a lot,” he said. Shiller’s book “Irrational Exuberance,” from 2000, came out just before the dot-com bubble burst, and “Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events,” from last year, explores what he describes as the power of “contagious popular stories that spread through word of mouth, the news media, and social media.” In standard economic theory, investors are supposed to carefully weigh things like the level of prices, interest rates, and expected profits before they invest. But Shiller told me that “a narrative is often more emotionally compelling and resonant than an argument about valuation or something else.”

After stocks dipped at the end of 2018, and again in the spring of last year, the market did rebound, and quickly reached new highs. This strengthened the “V”-shaped” narrative, Shiller said. So does the widespread belief that the Federal Reserve, through its massive asset purchases, has put a floor under the stock market. “The consensus seems to be, ‘Don’t worry, the Fed has your back,’ ” Druckenmiller said in his presentation. “There’s one problem with that: our analysis says it’s not true.”

by John Cassidy, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Jeenah Moon / Bloomberg / Getty