Video: tchiks guitars and furniture (via YouTube)
Wednesday, September 2, 2020
Building a Guitar Out of a Shelf During Lockdown
Video: tchiks guitars and furniture (via YouTube)
America's Economy is Cooked
We are in an extraordinary moment, but not an entirely unprecedented one. Since the earliest days, societies have had to cope with disasters that wiped out the ability of everyday people to service their debts and thus threatened to destroy their societies.
If you've read U Missouri econ prof Michael Hudson's writings on the subject, you know that for millennia, rulers in these circumstances simply wiped out the debts, declaring a "jubilee" that allowed people to rebuild after disasters rather than being trapped in debt spirals.
In a new essay on Naked Capitalism called "How an 'Act of God' Pandemic Is Destroying the West: The US Is Saving the Financial Sector, Not the Economy," Hudson reveals the abyss on whose brink we are balanced, and what we must do to pull back from it.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/09/michael-hudson-how-an-act-of-god-pandemic-is-destroying-the-west-the-u-s-is-saving-the-financial-sector-not-the-economy.html
Hudson's oft-repeated golden rule is "Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid." That is to say: making it harder to declare bankruptcy, or binding debtors over to arbitration or wage-garnishing won't actually get them to pay debts they cannot afford.
This is a very sharp observation in the US context. The 2008 crisis was "solved" by bailing out finance, not people – and so the finance sector was able to lend to consumers to buy things again, while consumer debt mounted to spectacular levels.
Between mounting costs for housing, education, transport and health – a place to sleep, a path to employment, a way to get to work, the physical capacity to do your job – being alive has meant increasing your debt burden.
And now the US real economy – the wage-generating (and thus debt-servicing) economy – has ground to a halt. The finance economy continues to boom, largely on the (obviously false) premise that debts will continue to be repaid.
It's worth contrasting the US approach – the $1200/person bailout, the $6T finance bailout – with other countries that are less beholden to their finance sectors.
Canada and many EU governments simply assumed the payrolls of firms, relieving them of their major expense and providing ready cash to consumers that the can use to purchase from those retailers that remain.
And in China, where most of the finance sector is state owned – where banks are public utilities – debts were suspended: "debts, rents, taxes and other carrying charges of living and doing business cannot resume until economic normalcy is able to resume."
Contrast with the US, with ever-more-desperate measures to deny the iron law that "debts that can't be paid won't be paid."
Regulators have unshackled new forms of predatory lending (aka "fintech") with APRs in the hundreds or thousands of percent:
https://theintercept.com/2020/08/30/fintech-debt-personal-loans-economic-crisis/
And at the other end of that pipeline is a massive debt-collection bubble, as fintech subprime darlings like Oportun unleash a tsunami of debt lawsuits (more than 30/day!) against people with no means to pay:
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-loan-company-that-sued-thousands-of-low-income-latinos-during-the-pandemic
Desperate, broke people are willing to work for ever-lower wages, which puts downward pressure on everyone's wages.
Hudson: "Rising debt overhead serves the business and financial sector by lowering wages while extracting more interest, financial fees, rent and insurance."
America's longest period of expansion – the post-war boom – kicked off with the lowest levels of debt in living memory (wartime wages boomed, while wartime shortages left consumers with nothing to buy). Every recovery since has increased the economy's debt-to-asset ratio.
Eventually there comes a reckoning. Debts that can't be paid won't be paid. Business as usual has been to "let creditors foreclose and draw all the income and wealth over subsistence needs into their own hands."
But that's no longer possible. We've hit bottom.
US consumer debts can only be paid by "shrinking production and consumption, leaving them as strapped as Greece has been since 2015."
Something has to give: "either the population’s broad economic interests, or the vested interests insisting that labor, industry and the government must bear the cost of arrears that have built up during the economic shutdown."
The decision to to force businesses to pay rent during the shutdown led mass bankruptcies: a business that closed for months while accruing a rent buildup cannot recover – even a year of normal takings will leave it with no profits, every penny diverted to the landlord.
19% of hotel mortgages are in arrears, 10% of retailers – commercial real-estate mortgages stand at $2.4T. 40% of retail tenants are not currently paying rent – building up more indebtedness that can't be paid (debts that can't be paid won't be paid).
And while the US government can conjure money into existence by typing numbers into a spreadsheet at the central bank, states and cities (now starved of sales/property tax) cannot, and many are also bound by "balanced budget" rules.
Neither the GOP nor the Dems are willing to confront this. McConnell has advised states to meet bond obligations by raiding their pensions. Dems have abandoned efforts to provide relief to working people.
It's a very different story in China: "China can recover financially and fiscally from the virus disruption because most debts ultimately are owned to the government-based banking system. Money can be created to finance the material economy, labor and industry, construction and agriculture. When a company is unable to pay its bills and rent, the government doesn't stand by and let it be closed down and sold at a distressed price to a vulture investor."
For thousands of years, governments have understood that crises can only be weathered through debt forgiveness. The Anglo-American madness that insists that debts that can't be paid will someday be paid has hit bottom.
If you've read U Missouri econ prof Michael Hudson's writings on the subject, you know that for millennia, rulers in these circumstances simply wiped out the debts, declaring a "jubilee" that allowed people to rebuild after disasters rather than being trapped in debt spirals.
In a new essay on Naked Capitalism called "How an 'Act of God' Pandemic Is Destroying the West: The US Is Saving the Financial Sector, Not the Economy," Hudson reveals the abyss on whose brink we are balanced, and what we must do to pull back from it.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/09/michael-hudson-how-an-act-of-god-pandemic-is-destroying-the-west-the-u-s-is-saving-the-financial-sector-not-the-economy.html
Hudson's oft-repeated golden rule is "Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid." That is to say: making it harder to declare bankruptcy, or binding debtors over to arbitration or wage-garnishing won't actually get them to pay debts they cannot afford.
This is a very sharp observation in the US context. The 2008 crisis was "solved" by bailing out finance, not people – and so the finance sector was able to lend to consumers to buy things again, while consumer debt mounted to spectacular levels.Between mounting costs for housing, education, transport and health – a place to sleep, a path to employment, a way to get to work, the physical capacity to do your job – being alive has meant increasing your debt burden.
And now the US real economy – the wage-generating (and thus debt-servicing) economy – has ground to a halt. The finance economy continues to boom, largely on the (obviously false) premise that debts will continue to be repaid.
It's worth contrasting the US approach – the $1200/person bailout, the $6T finance bailout – with other countries that are less beholden to their finance sectors.
Canada and many EU governments simply assumed the payrolls of firms, relieving them of their major expense and providing ready cash to consumers that the can use to purchase from those retailers that remain.
And in China, where most of the finance sector is state owned – where banks are public utilities – debts were suspended: "debts, rents, taxes and other carrying charges of living and doing business cannot resume until economic normalcy is able to resume."
Contrast with the US, with ever-more-desperate measures to deny the iron law that "debts that can't be paid won't be paid."
Regulators have unshackled new forms of predatory lending (aka "fintech") with APRs in the hundreds or thousands of percent:
https://theintercept.com/2020/08/30/fintech-debt-personal-loans-economic-crisis/
And at the other end of that pipeline is a massive debt-collection bubble, as fintech subprime darlings like Oportun unleash a tsunami of debt lawsuits (more than 30/day!) against people with no means to pay:
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-loan-company-that-sued-thousands-of-low-income-latinos-during-the-pandemic
Desperate, broke people are willing to work for ever-lower wages, which puts downward pressure on everyone's wages.
Hudson: "Rising debt overhead serves the business and financial sector by lowering wages while extracting more interest, financial fees, rent and insurance."
America's longest period of expansion – the post-war boom – kicked off with the lowest levels of debt in living memory (wartime wages boomed, while wartime shortages left consumers with nothing to buy). Every recovery since has increased the economy's debt-to-asset ratio.
Eventually there comes a reckoning. Debts that can't be paid won't be paid. Business as usual has been to "let creditors foreclose and draw all the income and wealth over subsistence needs into their own hands."
But that's no longer possible. We've hit bottom.
US consumer debts can only be paid by "shrinking production and consumption, leaving them as strapped as Greece has been since 2015."
Something has to give: "either the population’s broad economic interests, or the vested interests insisting that labor, industry and the government must bear the cost of arrears that have built up during the economic shutdown."
The decision to to force businesses to pay rent during the shutdown led mass bankruptcies: a business that closed for months while accruing a rent buildup cannot recover – even a year of normal takings will leave it with no profits, every penny diverted to the landlord.
19% of hotel mortgages are in arrears, 10% of retailers – commercial real-estate mortgages stand at $2.4T. 40% of retail tenants are not currently paying rent – building up more indebtedness that can't be paid (debts that can't be paid won't be paid).
And while the US government can conjure money into existence by typing numbers into a spreadsheet at the central bank, states and cities (now starved of sales/property tax) cannot, and many are also bound by "balanced budget" rules.
Neither the GOP nor the Dems are willing to confront this. McConnell has advised states to meet bond obligations by raiding their pensions. Dems have abandoned efforts to provide relief to working people.
It's a very different story in China: "China can recover financially and fiscally from the virus disruption because most debts ultimately are owned to the government-based banking system. Money can be created to finance the material economy, labor and industry, construction and agriculture. When a company is unable to pay its bills and rent, the government doesn't stand by and let it be closed down and sold at a distressed price to a vulture investor."
For thousands of years, governments have understood that crises can only be weathered through debt forgiveness. The Anglo-American madness that insists that debts that can't be paid will someday be paid has hit bottom.
by Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic | Read more:
Image: Margaret Bourke-White, Louisville Kentucky 1937 (via Wikikpedia)
‘Nobody Likes Snitching’: How Rules Against Parties Are Dividing Campuses
It looked to be a typical college party: a small group of students crammed in a kitchenette, cheering on as a shirtless guy arm-wrestled a laughing young woman. No one wore masks.
The scene was posted on Snapchat by one of the partygoers, a first-year student at Cornell University, along with a selfie with a mocking caption: “The people who slide up saying ‘you’re not social distancing’ are the ones that wouldn’t have been invited anyway.”
The response was swift and severe. Within days, an online petition was created demanding that the student’s admission to Cornell be revoked, and in the week since, the petition has collected more than 3,500 signatures.
“Cornell University is attempting to take the biggest feat of allowing all students back on campus. This cannot be done without immense safety precautions taken and the compliance of every student,” a group calling itself the Concerned Student Coalition wrote in the petition. “We need to hold these students accountable for their actions.” (...)
The situation at Cornell underscores a deeper tension on campuses all over the country as about 1,100 colleges embark on the huge experiment of reopening in a pandemic. Students, returning to school after months of isolation, are not only being asked to fully reimagine what their college social lives look like, but also to assume active roles as the front line against an outbreak at their schools by policing campus safety.
“Nobody likes snitching — it’s not comfortable,” said Melissa Montejo, a sophomore at Cornell who signed the petition. “I really am not one to go around and tell people what to do, but for me, this was troubling. Three months of being careful and not engaging in problematic behavior is worth saving a life.” (...)
In recent weeks, the coronavirus outbreak has spread swiftly on college campuses. The New York Times has tracked thousands of cases that were linked to returning students. Several schools, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Notre Dame and the State University of New York College at Oneonta, suspended in-person classes after more than 100 students at each campus tested positive, often following large parties.
As a result, growing numbers of college officials are realizing that there are limits to what they can monitor on their own — and are calling on students to help. (...)
by Troy Closson, NY Times | Read more:
Image:Heather Ainsworth for The New York Times
The scene was posted on Snapchat by one of the partygoers, a first-year student at Cornell University, along with a selfie with a mocking caption: “The people who slide up saying ‘you’re not social distancing’ are the ones that wouldn’t have been invited anyway.”
The response was swift and severe. Within days, an online petition was created demanding that the student’s admission to Cornell be revoked, and in the week since, the petition has collected more than 3,500 signatures.
“Cornell University is attempting to take the biggest feat of allowing all students back on campus. This cannot be done without immense safety precautions taken and the compliance of every student,” a group calling itself the Concerned Student Coalition wrote in the petition. “We need to hold these students accountable for their actions.” (...)
The situation at Cornell underscores a deeper tension on campuses all over the country as about 1,100 colleges embark on the huge experiment of reopening in a pandemic. Students, returning to school after months of isolation, are not only being asked to fully reimagine what their college social lives look like, but also to assume active roles as the front line against an outbreak at their schools by policing campus safety.“Nobody likes snitching — it’s not comfortable,” said Melissa Montejo, a sophomore at Cornell who signed the petition. “I really am not one to go around and tell people what to do, but for me, this was troubling. Three months of being careful and not engaging in problematic behavior is worth saving a life.” (...)
In recent weeks, the coronavirus outbreak has spread swiftly on college campuses. The New York Times has tracked thousands of cases that were linked to returning students. Several schools, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Notre Dame and the State University of New York College at Oneonta, suspended in-person classes after more than 100 students at each campus tested positive, often following large parties.
As a result, growing numbers of college officials are realizing that there are limits to what they can monitor on their own — and are calling on students to help. (...)
In states with high virus counts, many administrators said they worried that college parties could accelerate an all-but-inevitable rise of clusters on their campuses. But in the New York metropolitan area, which has largely continued to stem its own outbreak, the concerns carry a different weight.
Some epidemiologists said they feared that college parties and large social gatherings could lead to a resurgence of the virus in places like the New York region that have kept case counts low.
“The biggest concern is that you are going to have newly infected people leave these parties and disperse back into their communities,” said Dr. Stephen Thomas, an infectious disease specialist at SUNY Upstate Medical University. “It’s that they’re going to be sources for continuing to spread the virus and it’s going to reverse the work that has already been done.”
Many students say they have more self-interested reasons to report their peers. On TikTok and other social media platforms, videos have gone viral in which students say “snitching” on their classmates would be an easy choice because of how much it costs to attend their colleges.
But for others like Cambria Kelley, a first-year graduate student at New York University, the issue is more personal. Ms. Kelley, who is from California, said several members of her family contracted the illness over the last few months, including her grandmother who died in July.
N.Y.U. has asked students to “politely urge” their classmates to wear masks and socially distance and to report those who violate that advice to school officials. And despite the friendships she may form with her classmates, Ms. Kelley said she will still feel an obligation to do so, keeping her family in mind.
“If it was bad enough, I wouldn’t hesitate to report them,” Ms. Kelley said. “I’m not going to be having my life put at risk because people decided to be selfish. These rules are for the good of everyone here.”
Some students, however, said deciding whether to report classmates involves a different calculation.
Some epidemiologists said they feared that college parties and large social gatherings could lead to a resurgence of the virus in places like the New York region that have kept case counts low.
“The biggest concern is that you are going to have newly infected people leave these parties and disperse back into their communities,” said Dr. Stephen Thomas, an infectious disease specialist at SUNY Upstate Medical University. “It’s that they’re going to be sources for continuing to spread the virus and it’s going to reverse the work that has already been done.”
Many students say they have more self-interested reasons to report their peers. On TikTok and other social media platforms, videos have gone viral in which students say “snitching” on their classmates would be an easy choice because of how much it costs to attend their colleges.
But for others like Cambria Kelley, a first-year graduate student at New York University, the issue is more personal. Ms. Kelley, who is from California, said several members of her family contracted the illness over the last few months, including her grandmother who died in July.
N.Y.U. has asked students to “politely urge” their classmates to wear masks and socially distance and to report those who violate that advice to school officials. And despite the friendships she may form with her classmates, Ms. Kelley said she will still feel an obligation to do so, keeping her family in mind.
“If it was bad enough, I wouldn’t hesitate to report them,” Ms. Kelley said. “I’m not going to be having my life put at risk because people decided to be selfish. These rules are for the good of everyone here.”
Some students, however, said deciding whether to report classmates involves a different calculation.
by Troy Closson, NY Times | Read more:
Image:Heather Ainsworth for The New York Times
Don’t Try to Out-China China
America, Don’t Try to Out-China China (NYT)
Image: Ng Han Guan/Associated Press
[ed. More détente, less confrontation. How diplomacy usually works.]
[ed. More détente, less confrontation. How diplomacy usually works.]
Tuesday, September 1, 2020
Monday, August 31, 2020
Thin Blue Line: Militias and the Police
The Thin Blue Line Between Violent, Pro-Trump Militias and Police (The Intercept)
Image: John Rudoff/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Hawaii Politics: One Legislator's Personal Journey
Transcript:
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And as we said, with the Republican Convention in the spotlight this week, we now turn to a former member of the party who simply had had enough. Beth Fukumoto served in the Hawaii House of Representatives for three terms. But the party forced her resignation after she publicly denounced President Trump’s policies and his rhetoric. She is now openly acknowledging what she calls her political failings and is now a Democrat. Here she is talking with our Michel Martin about the racism she endured and what led to her resignation.
MICHEL MARTIN: Thanks, Christiane. Beth Fukumoto, thank you so much for talking with us.
FMR. STATE REP. BETH FUKUMOTO (D-HI): Of course. Thank you.
MARTIN: You served three terms in the Hawaii House of Representatives. You rose to minority leader. You were one of the youngest people ever in a leadership position like that. So, you were clearly on the rise there before all the events took place that we’re now going to talk about. But I was just wondering if you wouldn’t mind taking us back to why you were attracted to the Republican Party to begin with.
FUKUMOTO: Sure. well, I think, for context, I was — it was 2008 when I was graduating from my master’s program, and went back to Hawaii because of the recession, and found a job working in the legislature. And I found a job working with the Republicans in the legislature. And I think what I saw — my state had been Democratically controlled since 1954. And so most of the policies that were in place were all Democratic policies, or at least they have had the ability to implement their policies since 1954. And I felt like, as somebody who was watching my community really suffer from the recession, and just economically, nobody was being able to build wealth, people were having trouble having a place to live, it — our cost of living was just skyrocketing. And I didn’t feel like the legislation was taking that seriously enough. And as somebody that was newly out of graduate school, and didn’t have much of a political background, the natural conclusion for me was that it must be that those principles didn’t work. So perhaps we should try Republican principles, and specifically things like being more careful with money, being cautious with government spending, not overtaxing people. All of that really appealed to me at the time, from the world view that I had.
MARTIN: Well, in fact, you were one of the standard-bearers, as I recall.
FUKUMOTO: Yes.
MARTIN: I mean, that was this initiative that was announced by the then chairman of the Republican National Committee, a multimillion-dollar initiative to kind of recruit, train and support diverse candidates across the country, particularly at the state and local level, as I recall. And weren’t you one of the people who were selected to kind of roll that out?
FUKUMOTO: Yes, I think one of the first events that I did — it was, I think, the first event I did at the RNC was this announcement that we were going to be putting money into state level races, specifically to get women and other candidates, specifically people of color to have backing, so that they could run for office, so they can achieve — we could achieve a better balance and more diversity amongst even our candidates.
MARTIN: So, what happened for you. When did you start to feel disaffected? When did you start to feel, well, maybe this isn’t what I thought it was?
FUKUMOTO: There were multiple things going on, right? You definitely — I knew that a lot of — at least some portion of the party was only doing this because they wanted to be able to win. And I thought that, as long as that coincided with what I actually wanted, which was more diversity on our tickets, then it was fine. We could work together. We could move forward. I think what — that was something I thought was going to be OK with me and, over time, realized that it wasn’t going to be. Part of it was that I was in this position where I should have been able to set policy. I should have been able to set the vision. And I was to a certain extent in Hawaii. But what I noticed fairly quickly, especially as Donald Trump and — I guess as Donald Trump started to pick up speed, what I realized very quickly is, I was only valued in the party, and my diverse face, if you will, was only valuable as long as that’s all it was. And if I had different opinions, if I wanted to voice something else, then quickly people didn’t want me on the stage anymore.
MARTIN: Well, give an example of that. How did that become clear to you?
FUKUMOTO: So, I think the example would be when I started talking about Donald — specifically, Donald Trump in December of 2015 was the first interview that I did, saying that I thought that the comments that he made about Japanese-American internment were appalling and didn’t have any place in the Republican Party. That, to me, should have been a perfectly good message, given that we were trying to make this new party. That’s what we said we were trying to do. So, when I realized that — first of all, when Donald Trump started talking about the Muslim registry, I started to get very concerned, started to talk to other Republicans who were much less concerned, and many of them said, this is not something that’s ever going to happen, he’s just using it as rhetoric, and brushed it off. And then when I tried to talk to RNC and say, this is impacting the message we’re putting out, it’s the exact opposite of all the things you told me to say, let me talk about it, they basically said, we don’t want to talk about this, because it’s not in the news cycle. And so, for me, I started speaking out then, and then quickly, within a few months, there was a complaint against me. A few months later, I said the same things again at the state convention, and was booed for 15 minutes. But I just really thought we needed to talk about this, because it was so different than what we said we were doing, that we needed to at least acknowledge what had gone wrong.
MARTIN: You were actually removed from your leadership position.
FUKUMOTO: That’s right.
The Social Fabric of the U.S. Is Fraying Severely, if Not Unravelling
The year 2020 has been one of the most tumultuous in modern American history. To find events remotely as destabilizing and transformative, one has to go back to the 2008 financial crisis and the 9/11 and anthrax attacks of 2001, though those systemic shocks, profound as they were, were isolated (one a national security crisis, the other a financial crisis) and thus more limited in scope than the multicrisis instability now shaping U.S. politics and culture.
Since the end of World War II, the only close competitor to the current moment is the multipronged unrest of the 1960s and early 1970s: serial assassinations of political leaders, mass civil rights and anti-war protests, sustained riots, fury over a heinous war in Indochina, and the resignation of a corruption-plagued president.
But those events unfolded and built upon one another over the course of a decade. By crucial contrast, the current confluence of crises, each of historic significance in their own right — a global pandemic, an economic and social shutdown, mass unemployment, an enduring protest movement provoking increasing levels of violence and volatility, and a presidential election centrally focused on one of the most divisive political figures the U.S. has known who happens to be the incumbent president — are happening simultaneously, having exploded one on top of the other in a matter of a few months.
Lurking beneath the headlines justifiably devoted to these major stories of 2020 are very troubling data that reflect intensifying pathologies in the U.S. population — not moral or allegorical sicknesses but mental, emotional, psychological and scientifically proven sickness. Many people fortunate enough to have survived this pandemic with their physical health intact know anecdotally — from observing others and themselves — that these political and social crises have spawned emotional difficulties and psychological challenges.
But the data are nonetheless stunning, in terms of both the depth of the social and mental health crises they demonstrate and the pervasiveness of them. Perhaps the most illustrative study was one released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this month, based on an extensive mental health survey of Americans in late June.
One question posed by researchers was whether someone has “seriously considered suicide in the past 30 days”— not fleetingly considered it as a momentary fantasy nor thought about it ever in their lifetime, but seriously considered suicide at least once in the past 30 days. The results are staggering.
For Americans between 18-24 years old, 25.5 percent — just over 1 out of every 4 young Americans — said they had. For the much larger group of Americans ages 25-44, the percentage was somewhat lower but still extremely alarming: 16 percent. A total of 18.6 percent of Hispanic Americans and 15 percent of African Americans said they had seriously considered suicide in the past month. The two groups with the largest percentage who said yes: Americans with less than a high school degree and unpaid caregivers, both of whom have 30 percent — or almost 1 out of every 3 — who answered in the affirmative. A full 10 percent of the U.S. population generally had seriously contemplated suicide in the month of June.
In a remotely healthy society, one that provides basic emotional needs to its population, suicide and serious suicidal ideation are rare events. It is anathema to the most basic human instinct: the will to live. A society in which such a vast swath of the population is seriously considering it as an option is one which is anything but healthy, one which is plainly failing to provide its citizens the basic necessities for a fulfilling life.
Since the end of World War II, the only close competitor to the current moment is the multipronged unrest of the 1960s and early 1970s: serial assassinations of political leaders, mass civil rights and anti-war protests, sustained riots, fury over a heinous war in Indochina, and the resignation of a corruption-plagued president.
But those events unfolded and built upon one another over the course of a decade. By crucial contrast, the current confluence of crises, each of historic significance in their own right — a global pandemic, an economic and social shutdown, mass unemployment, an enduring protest movement provoking increasing levels of violence and volatility, and a presidential election centrally focused on one of the most divisive political figures the U.S. has known who happens to be the incumbent president — are happening simultaneously, having exploded one on top of the other in a matter of a few months.
Lurking beneath the headlines justifiably devoted to these major stories of 2020 are very troubling data that reflect intensifying pathologies in the U.S. population — not moral or allegorical sicknesses but mental, emotional, psychological and scientifically proven sickness. Many people fortunate enough to have survived this pandemic with their physical health intact know anecdotally — from observing others and themselves — that these political and social crises have spawned emotional difficulties and psychological challenges.
But the data are nonetheless stunning, in terms of both the depth of the social and mental health crises they demonstrate and the pervasiveness of them. Perhaps the most illustrative study was one released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this month, based on an extensive mental health survey of Americans in late June.
One question posed by researchers was whether someone has “seriously considered suicide in the past 30 days”— not fleetingly considered it as a momentary fantasy nor thought about it ever in their lifetime, but seriously considered suicide at least once in the past 30 days. The results are staggering.
For Americans between 18-24 years old, 25.5 percent — just over 1 out of every 4 young Americans — said they had. For the much larger group of Americans ages 25-44, the percentage was somewhat lower but still extremely alarming: 16 percent. A total of 18.6 percent of Hispanic Americans and 15 percent of African Americans said they had seriously considered suicide in the past month. The two groups with the largest percentage who said yes: Americans with less than a high school degree and unpaid caregivers, both of whom have 30 percent — or almost 1 out of every 3 — who answered in the affirmative. A full 10 percent of the U.S. population generally had seriously contemplated suicide in the month of June.In a remotely healthy society, one that provides basic emotional needs to its population, suicide and serious suicidal ideation are rare events. It is anathema to the most basic human instinct: the will to live. A society in which such a vast swath of the population is seriously considering it as an option is one which is anything but healthy, one which is plainly failing to provide its citizens the basic necessities for a fulfilling life.
The alarming CDC data extends far beyond serious suicidal desires. It also found that “40.9% of respondents reported at least one adverse mental or behavioral health condition, including symptoms of anxiety disorder or depressive disorder (30.9%), symptoms of a trauma- and stressor-related disorder (TSRD) related to the pandemic (26.3%), and having started or increased substance use to cope with stress or emotions related to COVID-19 (13.3%).” For the youngest part of the adult population, ages 18-24, significantly more than half (62.9 percent) reported suffering from depressive or anxiety disorders.
That mental health would suffer materially in the middle of a pandemic — one that requires isolation from community and work, quarantines, economic shutdowns, and fear of illness and death — is not surprising. In April, as the realities of isolation and quarantine were becoming more apparent in the U.S., we devoted a SYSTEM UPDATE episode to a discussion with the mental health experts Andrew Solomon and Johann Hari, both of whom described how “the traumas of this pandemic — the unraveling of our way of life for however long that lasts, the compulsory viewing of all other humans as threats, and especially sustained isolation and social distancing” — will exacerbate virtually every social pathology, including ones of mental health.
But what makes these trends all the more disturbing is that they long predated the arrival of the coronavirus crisis, to say nothing of the economic catastrophe left in its wake and the social unrest from this year’s protest movement. Indeed, since at least the financial crisis of 2008, when first the Bush administration and then the Obama administration acted to protect the interests of the tycoons who caused it while allowing everyone else to wallow in debt and foreclosures, the indicia of collective mental health in the U.S. have been blinking red.
That mental health would suffer materially in the middle of a pandemic — one that requires isolation from community and work, quarantines, economic shutdowns, and fear of illness and death — is not surprising. In April, as the realities of isolation and quarantine were becoming more apparent in the U.S., we devoted a SYSTEM UPDATE episode to a discussion with the mental health experts Andrew Solomon and Johann Hari, both of whom described how “the traumas of this pandemic — the unraveling of our way of life for however long that lasts, the compulsory viewing of all other humans as threats, and especially sustained isolation and social distancing” — will exacerbate virtually every social pathology, including ones of mental health.
But what makes these trends all the more disturbing is that they long predated the arrival of the coronavirus crisis, to say nothing of the economic catastrophe left in its wake and the social unrest from this year’s protest movement. Indeed, since at least the financial crisis of 2008, when first the Bush administration and then the Obama administration acted to protect the interests of the tycoons who caused it while allowing everyone else to wallow in debt and foreclosures, the indicia of collective mental health in the U.S. have been blinking red.
by Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: CDC
[ed. Certainly blinking red for me.]
[ed. Certainly blinking red for me.]
Sunday, August 30, 2020
Steven Mnuchin Tried to Save the Economy. Not Even His Family Is Happy.
One spring day, not long after President Trump signed the largest economic stimulus package in American history in March, a group of his top aides and cabinet officers gathered in the Oval Office.
The $2.2 trillion government rescue — which delivered cash to individuals, small businesses and giant companies — was a crucial victory for Mr. Trump, who was facing withering attacks for his failures to respond to the fast-spreading coronavirus.
It also was a much-needed win for the program’s chief architect, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. He didn’t have a lot of fans. The president ran hot and cold on him. Conservatives distrusted him as a Republican in Name Only. Liberals demonized him as a plutocrat. Even members of Mr. Mnuchin’s immediate family distanced themselves; his liberal father said he was appalled by his son’s politics.
When the pandemic hit, the task of saving the economy was an opportunity for Mr. Mnuchin to transform himself from an unremarkable Treasury secretary into a national hero.
Mr. Mnuchin, a former banker and film financier, sought advice from his former Goldman Sachs colleagues, a cable-TV host, a Hollywood superagent, a disgraced Wall Street tycoon and Newt Gingrich. Unburdened by his own ideology and with a detail-disoriented boss, Mr. Mnuchin worked with Democrats to devise and pass the landmark stimulus bill.
Afterward, Mr. Trump hailed Mr. Mnuchin as a “great” Treasury secretary and “fantastic guy.”
The acclaim didn’t last. Republicans argued that Mr. Mnuchin had been outfoxed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the embodiment of free-spending liberals and, in Mr. Trump’s words, “a sick woman” with “mental problems.”
The conservative critique began to resonate with the president.
Thanks to the stimulus package, the economy had stabilized, but it was still on life support. Millions continued to lose their jobs. More help was needed. Was Mr. Mnuchin’s initial bipartisan success a fluke, or would he be able to save the American economy again?
The omens were bad. That spring day in the Oval Office, the president was venting about the stimulus package.
“I never should have signed it,” Mr. Trump bellowed, according to someone who was there. He pointed at his Treasury secretary. “You’re to blame.” (...)
Mr. Mnuchin is the rare cabinet secretary who does not seem to have strong political beliefs. “I don’t know if Steve is a Republican or Democrat,” said Larry Kudlow, the White House economic adviser. “I do know he’s smart and a hard worker.”
Mr. Trump has told people that he suspects that, deep down, Mr. Mnuchin is a Democrat. (Mr. Mnuchin has said he has always been a registered Republican. Still, he donated to Kamala Harris’s Senate campaign in 2016.) (...)
“When people ask why have I succeeded in this job, one, I understand why the president is the president. I was there — I saw why he won,” Mr. Mnuchin said in a mid-August interview in a Treasury Department conference room overlooking the White House.
He insisted that he didn’t take the criticism personally. After all, Mr. Mnuchin said, he is simply acting on behalf of Mr. Trump. “Anything that’s significant or material I check with the president.”
by James B. Stewart and Alan Rappeport, NY Times | Read more:
The $2.2 trillion government rescue — which delivered cash to individuals, small businesses and giant companies — was a crucial victory for Mr. Trump, who was facing withering attacks for his failures to respond to the fast-spreading coronavirus.
It also was a much-needed win for the program’s chief architect, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. He didn’t have a lot of fans. The president ran hot and cold on him. Conservatives distrusted him as a Republican in Name Only. Liberals demonized him as a plutocrat. Even members of Mr. Mnuchin’s immediate family distanced themselves; his liberal father said he was appalled by his son’s politics.
When the pandemic hit, the task of saving the economy was an opportunity for Mr. Mnuchin to transform himself from an unremarkable Treasury secretary into a national hero.Mr. Mnuchin, a former banker and film financier, sought advice from his former Goldman Sachs colleagues, a cable-TV host, a Hollywood superagent, a disgraced Wall Street tycoon and Newt Gingrich. Unburdened by his own ideology and with a detail-disoriented boss, Mr. Mnuchin worked with Democrats to devise and pass the landmark stimulus bill.
Afterward, Mr. Trump hailed Mr. Mnuchin as a “great” Treasury secretary and “fantastic guy.”
The acclaim didn’t last. Republicans argued that Mr. Mnuchin had been outfoxed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the embodiment of free-spending liberals and, in Mr. Trump’s words, “a sick woman” with “mental problems.”
The conservative critique began to resonate with the president.
Thanks to the stimulus package, the economy had stabilized, but it was still on life support. Millions continued to lose their jobs. More help was needed. Was Mr. Mnuchin’s initial bipartisan success a fluke, or would he be able to save the American economy again?
The omens were bad. That spring day in the Oval Office, the president was venting about the stimulus package.
“I never should have signed it,” Mr. Trump bellowed, according to someone who was there. He pointed at his Treasury secretary. “You’re to blame.” (...)
Mr. Mnuchin is the rare cabinet secretary who does not seem to have strong political beliefs. “I don’t know if Steve is a Republican or Democrat,” said Larry Kudlow, the White House economic adviser. “I do know he’s smart and a hard worker.”
Mr. Trump has told people that he suspects that, deep down, Mr. Mnuchin is a Democrat. (Mr. Mnuchin has said he has always been a registered Republican. Still, he donated to Kamala Harris’s Senate campaign in 2016.) (...)
“When people ask why have I succeeded in this job, one, I understand why the president is the president. I was there — I saw why he won,” Mr. Mnuchin said in a mid-August interview in a Treasury Department conference room overlooking the White House.
He insisted that he didn’t take the criticism personally. After all, Mr. Mnuchin said, he is simply acting on behalf of Mr. Trump. “Anything that’s significant or material I check with the president.”
by James B. Stewart and Alan Rappeport, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Erik Tanner for The New York Times
[ed. Tales from the Swamp.]
[ed. Tales from the Swamp.]
Saturday, August 29, 2020
Eagle Creek with Gibson & Son Road Building
[ed. My golfing partner made this video and supervises the crews. Pretty awesome, especially if you have little kids that enjoy heavy equipment (like my grandson).]
The Racial Anxiety Lurking Behind Reaction Videos
For decades, the drum break in Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight” has been making listeners reach for their adjectives. The barrage of tom-tom hits, which comes almost four minutes into Collins’s 1981 single, has elicited rock-critic clichés from “bone-crunching” to “iconic.” Complex magazine called it “notoriously brilliant”; the website The Quietus unholstered its hyphens, describing a“Phil-falling-down-the-stairs-with-his-kit explosion.” In 2009, Ozzy Osbourne declared the drum fill “the best ever.”
Then there is the judgment of Tim and Fred Williams, 22-year-old twins from Gary, Ind. The Williamses are YouTube stars who post so-called reaction videos, documenting their responses to hearing well-known songs for the first time. The clip that appeared on July 27, “FIRST TIME HEARING Phil Collins — In the Air Tonight REACTION,” shows them seated at a computer, absorbing the song’s ominous sound. When the big drum eruption finally arrives, their eyes widen, and they rock backward in surprise. “That was cold!” Fred cries. “Yeah,” Tim says. “That was cold.”
“Cold” is indeed the mot juste. “In the Air Tonight” has a chilly glamour. It is the definitive 1980s noir anthem, evoking the spiritual froideur [ed. coolness or reserve between people] we associate with such period artifacts as white linen suits, pink neon light and lines of cocaine on a DeLorean’s hood. It climbed the Billboard charts in 1981, but its place in pop culture was cemented by its later use onscreen — in a racy nocturnal scene in the 1983 film “Risky Business” and in a sequence in the pilot episode of “Miami Vice.” It has hung around ever since, passing through cycles of ironic and earnest appreciation on its way to a place in pop’s golden jukebox.
But the Williams brothers’ reaction has pushed it back to center stage: After the video went viral on Aug. 7, “In the Air Tonight” rose to No.2 on the iTunes charts. It is a familiar modern-day music business story, where a couple of guys in a bedroom can accomplish a job once designated to battalions of marketers. It is also a reminder that the reaction video — staring at a screen to watch people stare at a screen — is a weird, definitively American art form that stretches back at least to the 1990s heyday of “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” But the viral popularity of this display of intergenerational sympathy — Black 20-somethings professing love for a white boomer’s pop-rock chestnut — may also tell us something else about the ambient tensions and neuroses that are, you might say, in the air, adrift in the ether of 2020. (...)
Clearly, the Williams brothers understand this dynamic. They begin each video with the tagline “Back with another banger,” announcing a foregone conclusion: The song will be received with wild enthusiasm. Even if we take them at their word that they’ve never heard these songs, even if we accept their raves as genuine, we may still note that exaggerating their guilelessness and throwing a little extra sauce on their wowed responses is good business, part and parcel of the reaction-video gig. A popular YouTube channel can be a lucrative thing; the Williamses sell merchandise and know how to build a brand. Flattering the tastes of your target audience — catering to its insecurities — is Marketing 101.
Then there is the judgment of Tim and Fred Williams, 22-year-old twins from Gary, Ind. The Williamses are YouTube stars who post so-called reaction videos, documenting their responses to hearing well-known songs for the first time. The clip that appeared on July 27, “FIRST TIME HEARING Phil Collins — In the Air Tonight REACTION,” shows them seated at a computer, absorbing the song’s ominous sound. When the big drum eruption finally arrives, their eyes widen, and they rock backward in surprise. “That was cold!” Fred cries. “Yeah,” Tim says. “That was cold.”
“Cold” is indeed the mot juste. “In the Air Tonight” has a chilly glamour. It is the definitive 1980s noir anthem, evoking the spiritual froideur [ed. coolness or reserve between people] we associate with such period artifacts as white linen suits, pink neon light and lines of cocaine on a DeLorean’s hood. It climbed the Billboard charts in 1981, but its place in pop culture was cemented by its later use onscreen — in a racy nocturnal scene in the 1983 film “Risky Business” and in a sequence in the pilot episode of “Miami Vice.” It has hung around ever since, passing through cycles of ironic and earnest appreciation on its way to a place in pop’s golden jukebox.
But the Williams brothers’ reaction has pushed it back to center stage: After the video went viral on Aug. 7, “In the Air Tonight” rose to No.2 on the iTunes charts. It is a familiar modern-day music business story, where a couple of guys in a bedroom can accomplish a job once designated to battalions of marketers. It is also a reminder that the reaction video — staring at a screen to watch people stare at a screen — is a weird, definitively American art form that stretches back at least to the 1990s heyday of “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” But the viral popularity of this display of intergenerational sympathy — Black 20-somethings professing love for a white boomer’s pop-rock chestnut — may also tell us something else about the ambient tensions and neuroses that are, you might say, in the air, adrift in the ether of 2020. (...)
Clearly, the Williams brothers understand this dynamic. They begin each video with the tagline “Back with another banger,” announcing a foregone conclusion: The song will be received with wild enthusiasm. Even if we take them at their word that they’ve never heard these songs, even if we accept their raves as genuine, we may still note that exaggerating their guilelessness and throwing a little extra sauce on their wowed responses is good business, part and parcel of the reaction-video gig. A popular YouTube channel can be a lucrative thing; the Williamses sell merchandise and know how to build a brand. Flattering the tastes of your target audience — catering to its insecurities — is Marketing 101.
by Jody Rosen, NY Times | Read more:
Image: YouTube
[ed. Reaction videos? Must be some subset or evolution of unboxing videos. See also: The Addictive Joy of Watching Someone Listen to Phil Collins (New Yorker)]
[ed. Reaction videos? Must be some subset or evolution of unboxing videos. See also: The Addictive Joy of Watching Someone Listen to Phil Collins (New Yorker)]
Friday, August 28, 2020
Rotisserie Chicken
Emma Feigenbaum remembers when she first dropped a rotisserie chicken into her basket in the supermarket. She was about twelve, on vacation with her family on Long Island. At home, she enjoyed home-cooked meals almost every night, and prepared foods were not something that her family typically bought. Then she turned a corner and arrived at the warm, glowing display of rust-colored birds.
“It was revelatory,” Feigenbaum recalls. “I remember thinking to myself, It’s a whole roast chicken, I don’t have to roast a chicken.”
Her practical purchase was further justified upon a taste test; Feigenbaum was blown away by its flavor, the sticky skin and crispy wing tips. Even if the breast meat was a little dry (it’s always a little dry), nowadays she finds the slightly chewy breast meat of a supermarket rotisserie chicken appealingly nostalgic. Since then, rotisserie chicken has stuck around as occasional stand-in for home-cooked dinners, and it’s had an immense presence in her work—Feigenbaum is a food stylist and chef, and she has previously served as a food editor for Martha Stewart Living. She says that when styling any recipe that involves shredded chicken meat, it’s a no-brainer. “It looks the same as if I’m spending $16 for a Bell & Evans [raw chicken],” she says. “It’s not a better or worse product than what you roast at home, just a more convenient one.”
Roasting a whole chicken at home is a rite of passage for nearly everybody who has turned on an oven, and for avid home cooks, perfecting one can border on a spiritual quest. There are numerous gurus of the craft, as well as buzzworthy home hacks, from spatchcocking to brining to using a hair dryer to ensure a crisp skin and juicy meat. Roasted chicken is the entrée that many food critics regard as a “litmus test” for a restaurant’s worth—and it is essentially beloved all around the globe. Yet going out of one’s way to roast a chicken at home seems futile when there is a hot, glistening, extremely delicious roasted bird a few aisles away, priced as low as a bag of chips. And an entire generation has been raised with them around.
In the United States, rotisserie chickens are available for an ever-deeper—even artificial—bargain compared to the price of a whole, uncooked chicken at the same store. While a home-roasted chicken represents an idealized American dinner, the rise of the ubiquitous takeout rotisserie chicken is an extreme microcosm of the commodification and exploitation of that vision.
At Costco, the wholesale supermarket chain founded in 1983 with 785 locations in the United States, rotisserie chickens have been widely reported to be a “loss leader” at $4.99 each; they’re sold for less than they cost, but they are there to lure you into the store, so you can buy other goods (at a profit to the company) while you’re shopping. (Representatives at Costco declined to comment for this article.) At many other supermarkets selling cut-rate rotisserie birds, the same strategy has been in place for decades. A spokesperson for Kroger, a supermarket chain with nearly 3,000 stateside locations, says that their rotisserie chicken program began in the 1980s: “Hot rotisserie chickens are a prepared food mainstay for many households,” she added.
Even restaurant chefs have a soft spot for the supermarket entrée. King Phojanakong, chef-owner of Kuma Inn on New York City’s Lower East Side, remembers that rotisserie chicken was an imperative whenever his family shopped at Costco growing up. Now, he goes with his kids.
“I cook a pot of rice, there’s salad, and that’s dinner,” he says. “The next day, we make a fried rice, and everybody loves it.” (...)
In 2020, the United States is expected to eat an estimated 1 billion rotisserie chickens, according to the National Chicken Council. And yet many of them won’t turn a profit for their retailers—at least not directly. The fact that they double as marketing for so many businesses may help explain why they’re so ubiquitous today. But the economy of roasting many birds at once on mechanically rotating spits—and the sensory appeal of that process—is not to be underestimated.
“It was revelatory,” Feigenbaum recalls. “I remember thinking to myself, It’s a whole roast chicken, I don’t have to roast a chicken.”
Her practical purchase was further justified upon a taste test; Feigenbaum was blown away by its flavor, the sticky skin and crispy wing tips. Even if the breast meat was a little dry (it’s always a little dry), nowadays she finds the slightly chewy breast meat of a supermarket rotisserie chicken appealingly nostalgic. Since then, rotisserie chicken has stuck around as occasional stand-in for home-cooked dinners, and it’s had an immense presence in her work—Feigenbaum is a food stylist and chef, and she has previously served as a food editor for Martha Stewart Living. She says that when styling any recipe that involves shredded chicken meat, it’s a no-brainer. “It looks the same as if I’m spending $16 for a Bell & Evans [raw chicken],” she says. “It’s not a better or worse product than what you roast at home, just a more convenient one.”
Roasting a whole chicken at home is a rite of passage for nearly everybody who has turned on an oven, and for avid home cooks, perfecting one can border on a spiritual quest. There are numerous gurus of the craft, as well as buzzworthy home hacks, from spatchcocking to brining to using a hair dryer to ensure a crisp skin and juicy meat. Roasted chicken is the entrée that many food critics regard as a “litmus test” for a restaurant’s worth—and it is essentially beloved all around the globe. Yet going out of one’s way to roast a chicken at home seems futile when there is a hot, glistening, extremely delicious roasted bird a few aisles away, priced as low as a bag of chips. And an entire generation has been raised with them around.In the United States, rotisserie chickens are available for an ever-deeper—even artificial—bargain compared to the price of a whole, uncooked chicken at the same store. While a home-roasted chicken represents an idealized American dinner, the rise of the ubiquitous takeout rotisserie chicken is an extreme microcosm of the commodification and exploitation of that vision.
At Costco, the wholesale supermarket chain founded in 1983 with 785 locations in the United States, rotisserie chickens have been widely reported to be a “loss leader” at $4.99 each; they’re sold for less than they cost, but they are there to lure you into the store, so you can buy other goods (at a profit to the company) while you’re shopping. (Representatives at Costco declined to comment for this article.) At many other supermarkets selling cut-rate rotisserie birds, the same strategy has been in place for decades. A spokesperson for Kroger, a supermarket chain with nearly 3,000 stateside locations, says that their rotisserie chicken program began in the 1980s: “Hot rotisserie chickens are a prepared food mainstay for many households,” she added.
Even restaurant chefs have a soft spot for the supermarket entrée. King Phojanakong, chef-owner of Kuma Inn on New York City’s Lower East Side, remembers that rotisserie chicken was an imperative whenever his family shopped at Costco growing up. Now, he goes with his kids.
“I cook a pot of rice, there’s salad, and that’s dinner,” he says. “The next day, we make a fried rice, and everybody loves it.” (...)
In 2020, the United States is expected to eat an estimated 1 billion rotisserie chickens, according to the National Chicken Council. And yet many of them won’t turn a profit for their retailers—at least not directly. The fact that they double as marketing for so many businesses may help explain why they’re so ubiquitous today. But the economy of roasting many birds at once on mechanically rotating spits—and the sensory appeal of that process—is not to be underestimated.
by Cathy Erway, Taste | Read more:
Image: Photofusion/Universal Images Group via Getty Images via
The Brain Implants That Could Change Humanity
Jack Gallant never set out to create a mind-reading machine. His focus was more prosaic. A computational neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Gallant worked for years to improve our understanding of how brains encode information — what regions become active, for example, when a person sees a plane or an apple or a dog — and how that activity represents the object being viewed.
By the late 2000s, scientists could determine what kind of thing a person might be looking at from the way the brain lit up — a human face, say, or a cat. But Dr. Gallant and his colleagues went further. They figured out how to use machine learning to decipher not just the class of thing, but which exact image a subject was viewing. (Which photo of a cat, out of three options, for instance.)
One day, Dr. Gallant and his postdocs got to talking. In the same way that you can turn a speaker into a microphone by hooking it up backward, they wondered if they could reverse engineer the algorithm they’d developed so they could visualize, solely from brain activity, what a person was seeing.
The first phase of the project was to train the AI. For hours, Dr. Gallant and his colleagues showed volunteers in fMRI machines movie clips. By matching patterns of brain activation prompted by the moving images, the AI built a model of how the volunteers’ visual cortex, which parses information from the eyes, worked. Then came the next phase: translation. As they showed the volunteers movie clips, they asked the model what, given everything it now knew about their brains, it thought they might be looking at.
The experiment focused just on a subsection of the visual cortex. It didn’t capture what was happening elsewhere in the brain — how a person might feel about what she was seeing, for example, or what she might be fantasizing about as she watched. The endeavor was, in Dr. Gallant’s words, a primitive proof-of-concept.
And yet the results, published in 2011, are remarkable.
The reconstructed images move with a dreamlike fluidity. In their imperfection, they evoke expressionist art. (And a few reconstructed images seem downright wrong.) But where they succeed, they represent an astonishing achievement: A machine translating patterns of brain activity into a moving image understandable by other people — a machine that can read the brain.
Dr. Gallant was thrilled. Imagine the possibilities when better brain-reading technology became available? Imagine the people suffering from locked-in syndrome, Lou Gehrig’s disease, the people incapacitated by strokes, who could benefit from a machine that could help them interact with the world?
He was also scared because the experiment showed, in a concrete way, that humanity was at the dawn of a new era, one in which our thoughts could theoretically be snatched from our heads. What was going to happen, Dr. Gallant wondered, when you could read thoughts the thinker might not even be consciously aware of, when you could see people’s memories?
“That’s a real sobering thought that now you have to take seriously,” he told me recently. (...)
by Moises Velasquez-Manoff, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Derrick Schultz
By the late 2000s, scientists could determine what kind of thing a person might be looking at from the way the brain lit up — a human face, say, or a cat. But Dr. Gallant and his colleagues went further. They figured out how to use machine learning to decipher not just the class of thing, but which exact image a subject was viewing. (Which photo of a cat, out of three options, for instance.)
One day, Dr. Gallant and his postdocs got to talking. In the same way that you can turn a speaker into a microphone by hooking it up backward, they wondered if they could reverse engineer the algorithm they’d developed so they could visualize, solely from brain activity, what a person was seeing.
The first phase of the project was to train the AI. For hours, Dr. Gallant and his colleagues showed volunteers in fMRI machines movie clips. By matching patterns of brain activation prompted by the moving images, the AI built a model of how the volunteers’ visual cortex, which parses information from the eyes, worked. Then came the next phase: translation. As they showed the volunteers movie clips, they asked the model what, given everything it now knew about their brains, it thought they might be looking at.The experiment focused just on a subsection of the visual cortex. It didn’t capture what was happening elsewhere in the brain — how a person might feel about what she was seeing, for example, or what she might be fantasizing about as she watched. The endeavor was, in Dr. Gallant’s words, a primitive proof-of-concept.
And yet the results, published in 2011, are remarkable.
The reconstructed images move with a dreamlike fluidity. In their imperfection, they evoke expressionist art. (And a few reconstructed images seem downright wrong.) But where they succeed, they represent an astonishing achievement: A machine translating patterns of brain activity into a moving image understandable by other people — a machine that can read the brain.
Dr. Gallant was thrilled. Imagine the possibilities when better brain-reading technology became available? Imagine the people suffering from locked-in syndrome, Lou Gehrig’s disease, the people incapacitated by strokes, who could benefit from a machine that could help them interact with the world?
He was also scared because the experiment showed, in a concrete way, that humanity was at the dawn of a new era, one in which our thoughts could theoretically be snatched from our heads. What was going to happen, Dr. Gallant wondered, when you could read thoughts the thinker might not even be consciously aware of, when you could see people’s memories?
“That’s a real sobering thought that now you have to take seriously,” he told me recently. (...)
Dear Brain
Not many people will volunteer to be the first to undergo a novel kind of brain surgery, even if it holds the promise of restoring mobility to those who’ve been paralyzed. So when Robert Kirsch, the chairman of biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University put out such a call nearly 10 years ago, and one person both met the criteria and was willing, he knew he had a pioneer on his hands.
The man’s name was Bill Kochevar. He’d been paralyzed from the neck down in a biking accident years earlier. His motto, as he later explained it, was “somebody has to do the research.”
At that point, scientists had already invented gizmos that helped paralyzed patients leverage what mobility remained — lips, an eyelid — to control computers or move robotic arms. But Dr. Kirsch was after something different. He wanted to help Mr. Kochevar move his own limbs.
The first step was implanting two arrays of sensors over the part of the brain that would normally control Mr. Kochevar’s right arm. Electrodes that could receive signals from those arrays via a computer were implanted into his arm muscles. The implants, and the computer connected to them, would function as a kind of electronic spinal cord, bypassing his injury.
Once his arm muscles had been strengthened — achieved with a regimen of mild electrical stimulation while he slept — Mr. Kochevar, who at that point had been paralyzed for over a decade, was able to feed himself and drink water. He could even scratch his nose.
There are about two dozen people around the world who have lost the use of limbs from accidents or neurological disease, who’ve had sensors implanted on their brains. Many, Mr. Kochevar included, participated in a United States government-funded program called BrainGate. The sensor arrays used in this research, smaller than a button, allow patients to move robotic arms or cursors on a screen just by thinking. But as far as Dr. Kirsch knows, Mr. Kochevar, who died in 2017 for reasons unrelated to the research, was the first paralyzed person to regain use of his limbs by way of this technology.
This fall, Dr. Kirsch and his colleagues will begin version 2.0 of the experiment. This time, they’ll implant six smaller arrays — more sensors will improve the quality of the signal. And instead of implanting electrodes directly in the volunteers’ muscles, they’ll insert them upstream, circling the nerves that move the muscles. In theory, Dr. Kirsch says, that will enable movement of the entire arm and hand. (...)
Zap That Urge
Not all the applications of brain-reading require something as complex as understanding speech, however. In some cases, scientists simply want to blunt urges.
When Casey Halpern, a neurosurgeon at Stanford, was in college, he had a friend who drank too much. Another was overweight but couldn’t stop eating. “Impulse control is such a pervasive problem,” he told me.
As a budding scientist, he learned about methods of deep brain stimulation used to treat Parkinson’s disease. A mild electric current applied to a part of the brain involved in movement could lessen tremors caused by the disease. Could he apply that technology to the problem of inadequate self control? (...)
Dr. Halpern’s approach takes as fact something that he says many people have a hard time accepting: that the lack of impulse control that may underlie addictive behavior isn’t a choice, but results from a malfunction of the brain. “We have to accept that it’s a disease,” he says. “We often just judge people and assume it’s their own fault. That’s not what the current research is suggesting we should do.”
I must confess that of the numerous proposed applications of brain-machine interfacing I came across, Dr. Halpern’s was my favorite to extrapolate on. How many lives have been derailed by the inability to resist the temptation of that next pill or that next beer? What if Dr. Halpern’s solution was generalizable?
Not many people will volunteer to be the first to undergo a novel kind of brain surgery, even if it holds the promise of restoring mobility to those who’ve been paralyzed. So when Robert Kirsch, the chairman of biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University put out such a call nearly 10 years ago, and one person both met the criteria and was willing, he knew he had a pioneer on his hands.
The man’s name was Bill Kochevar. He’d been paralyzed from the neck down in a biking accident years earlier. His motto, as he later explained it, was “somebody has to do the research.”
At that point, scientists had already invented gizmos that helped paralyzed patients leverage what mobility remained — lips, an eyelid — to control computers or move robotic arms. But Dr. Kirsch was after something different. He wanted to help Mr. Kochevar move his own limbs.
The first step was implanting two arrays of sensors over the part of the brain that would normally control Mr. Kochevar’s right arm. Electrodes that could receive signals from those arrays via a computer were implanted into his arm muscles. The implants, and the computer connected to them, would function as a kind of electronic spinal cord, bypassing his injury.
Once his arm muscles had been strengthened — achieved with a regimen of mild electrical stimulation while he slept — Mr. Kochevar, who at that point had been paralyzed for over a decade, was able to feed himself and drink water. He could even scratch his nose.
There are about two dozen people around the world who have lost the use of limbs from accidents or neurological disease, who’ve had sensors implanted on their brains. Many, Mr. Kochevar included, participated in a United States government-funded program called BrainGate. The sensor arrays used in this research, smaller than a button, allow patients to move robotic arms or cursors on a screen just by thinking. But as far as Dr. Kirsch knows, Mr. Kochevar, who died in 2017 for reasons unrelated to the research, was the first paralyzed person to regain use of his limbs by way of this technology.
This fall, Dr. Kirsch and his colleagues will begin version 2.0 of the experiment. This time, they’ll implant six smaller arrays — more sensors will improve the quality of the signal. And instead of implanting electrodes directly in the volunteers’ muscles, they’ll insert them upstream, circling the nerves that move the muscles. In theory, Dr. Kirsch says, that will enable movement of the entire arm and hand. (...)
Zap That Urge
Not all the applications of brain-reading require something as complex as understanding speech, however. In some cases, scientists simply want to blunt urges.
When Casey Halpern, a neurosurgeon at Stanford, was in college, he had a friend who drank too much. Another was overweight but couldn’t stop eating. “Impulse control is such a pervasive problem,” he told me.
As a budding scientist, he learned about methods of deep brain stimulation used to treat Parkinson’s disease. A mild electric current applied to a part of the brain involved in movement could lessen tremors caused by the disease. Could he apply that technology to the problem of inadequate self control? (...)
Dr. Halpern’s approach takes as fact something that he says many people have a hard time accepting: that the lack of impulse control that may underlie addictive behavior isn’t a choice, but results from a malfunction of the brain. “We have to accept that it’s a disease,” he says. “We often just judge people and assume it’s their own fault. That’s not what the current research is suggesting we should do.”
I must confess that of the numerous proposed applications of brain-machine interfacing I came across, Dr. Halpern’s was my favorite to extrapolate on. How many lives have been derailed by the inability to resist the temptation of that next pill or that next beer? What if Dr. Halpern’s solution was generalizable?
by Moises Velasquez-Manoff, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Derrick Schultz
Small-Time Scams are Dissolving America From the Inside
Few were surprised when the "We Build the Wall" crowdfunding effort, where rank and file conservatives shelled out to build a tiny section of the big, beautiful border wall, turned out to be a gigantic scam, according to a recent federal indictment. It was only slightly more surprising that Steve Bannon, President Trump's former chief strategist, was a central part of the grift. He was arrested by federal marshals last week, and faces charges of money laundering conspiracy and wire fraud conspiracy. Hilariously, it seems one of the alleged conspirators, Brian Kolfage, spent some of the ill-gotten proceeds on a boat called the "Warfighter."
But this scheme is one small wave in an ocean of fraud. Half of conservative politics now — particularly the infestation of conspiratorial insanity that is rapidly devouring the Republican Party — runs on this kind of small-bore grifting. Look behind the latest bug-eyed theories about Democrats being space lizard cannibals or coronavirus vaccines being a secret plot to brainwash citizens, and odds are you will find some kook hawking snake oil remedies to eagerly receptive rubes. It follows that a stringent crackdown on petty scams and quack medicine would go some distance towards cleansing American politics of madness. (...)
In this they are following a long tradition of other right-wing grifters. Alex Jones of InfoWars has long sold supplements with ridiculous lies about how they will make you stronger, healthier, and smarter (or cure COVID-19). BuzzFeed News sent some of them to a testing lab and found they were just vitamins and other ordinary supplements sold at a preposterous markup. As Alex Pareene and Rick Perlstein have written, this kind of thing has been a foundational part of conservative politics for decades.
By the same token, basically all of Trump's business empire — the fraudulent Trump University, the grift Trump Foundation, and various other Trump-branded trash — has been a similar type of scam after he squandered his father's inheritance (on which he dodged taxes in a likely illegal fashion) on real estate and casino failures. Of course as president he is constantly violating the Constitution by nickel-and-diming the government to use his own facilities.
It thus makes perfect sense that the very top of conservative politics, the Trump re-election campaign, has apparently been infested with fraud and self-dealing. Trump's previous campaign manager, Brad Parscale, recently departed the effort under suspicion that he had directed millions of dollars into his and his friends' pockets. As Josh Marshall writes at Talking Points Memo, "Criminality and fraud come like breathing to the president and seemingly everyone around him. Like recognizes like. Thieves and cons sense a fellow traveler." No wonder the campaign has crossed the billion dollar mark in its spending faster than any in history.
[ed. Tip of the iceberg. See also: Spotting $62 Million in Alleged P.P.P. Fraud Was the Easy Part (NYT).]
But this scheme is one small wave in an ocean of fraud. Half of conservative politics now — particularly the infestation of conspiratorial insanity that is rapidly devouring the Republican Party — runs on this kind of small-bore grifting. Look behind the latest bug-eyed theories about Democrats being space lizard cannibals or coronavirus vaccines being a secret plot to brainwash citizens, and odds are you will find some kook hawking snake oil remedies to eagerly receptive rubes. It follows that a stringent crackdown on petty scams and quack medicine would go some distance towards cleansing American politics of madness. (...)
In this they are following a long tradition of other right-wing grifters. Alex Jones of InfoWars has long sold supplements with ridiculous lies about how they will make you stronger, healthier, and smarter (or cure COVID-19). BuzzFeed News sent some of them to a testing lab and found they were just vitamins and other ordinary supplements sold at a preposterous markup. As Alex Pareene and Rick Perlstein have written, this kind of thing has been a foundational part of conservative politics for decades.By the same token, basically all of Trump's business empire — the fraudulent Trump University, the grift Trump Foundation, and various other Trump-branded trash — has been a similar type of scam after he squandered his father's inheritance (on which he dodged taxes in a likely illegal fashion) on real estate and casino failures. Of course as president he is constantly violating the Constitution by nickel-and-diming the government to use his own facilities.
It thus makes perfect sense that the very top of conservative politics, the Trump re-election campaign, has apparently been infested with fraud and self-dealing. Trump's previous campaign manager, Brad Parscale, recently departed the effort under suspicion that he had directed millions of dollars into his and his friends' pockets. As Josh Marshall writes at Talking Points Memo, "Criminality and fraud come like breathing to the president and seemingly everyone around him. Like recognizes like. Thieves and cons sense a fellow traveler." No wonder the campaign has crossed the billion dollar mark in its spending faster than any in history.
by Ryan Cooper, The Week | Read more:
Image: Illustrated | Getty Images, Alamy, iStock[ed. Tip of the iceberg. See also: Spotting $62 Million in Alleged P.P.P. Fraud Was the Easy Part (NYT).]
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