Disinformation is a Bell That Can’t Be Unrung

Although the winner of the 2020 presidential contest is still unknown, one thing is clear: disinformation is becoming an endemic feature of U.S. politics.

Why it matters: Every nation is an "imagined community," political scientist Benedict Anderson said, bonded together by shared understandings, values and historical narratives. Disinformation cleaves those commonalities, making a country more dysfunctional, more divided and altogether weaker.

What's happening: In 2016, a defining story was how a foreign government, after correctly identifying long-running fractures in American society, perpetrated a covert action campaign using cyber espionage and other forms of malign online activity to heighten those political tensions. It worked spectacularly.

• This year, foreign campaigns have been quieter, seemingly limited to instances like crude pre-election shenanigans from Iran and Russia. Instead, the story of this election entails powerful U.S. actors, including the sitting president and some of his closest confidants, unleashing a torrent of domestic disinformation.

The state of play: President Trump and his allies spent the period before and after the election ramping up the sharing of false claims and misleading media.

• Overnight following the election, Trump tweeted, "We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!"
• There is no evidence — none — of attempted large-scale election fraud. This is just the latest version of Trump’s claim that "the only way we're going to lose this election is if the election is rigged," one that he continued to gesture at in further tweets Wednesday morning.
• Trump’s former acting director of National Intelligence posted a tweet Monday with photos of Joe Biden wearing a face mask outdoors and going maskless on an airplane, suggesting he only follows coronavirus safety protocols for show. In fact, the airplane photo was taken pre-pandemic, in 2019. The misleading tweet was shared more than 27,000 times.
• A senior adviser to the president falsely claimed that only ballots counted on Election Day itself should be considered valid — and that if the president appears ahead on election night, he is the rightful winner.

Between the lines: It matters that these messages have come from the White House and figures like a former top intelligence official. This brand of disinformation is far more pernicious than anything Russia's FSB or GRU could have dreamed up, because people in positions of authority and those in their orbit enjoy built-in credibility within American institutions and society.

• Foreign actors will likely soon move to amplify and seize on these American-made narratives. Already, U.S. officials worry that Russia and Iran are likely waiting until the immediate post-election period to execute their more fully realized online disinformation campaigns.
• Officials believe those will focus on discrediting the election results, no matter the winner.

The big picture: The last four years have seen a dramatic acceleration and escalation of the U.S.'s digital Balkanization, with many Americans living in entirely parallel information environments that share fewer and fewer first principles and basic truths. In the era of COVID-19, this has had tragic and deadly consequences.

by Zach Dorfman, Axios | Read more:
Image: Eniola Odetunde/Axios

This Nail-Biter Election Is Not A Repudiation Of Trump

Progressives hoping that the nation would be cleansed of President Trump and the GOP that enabled him in a mandate election Tuesday evening woke up to disappointment Wednesday morning.

Sure, Joe Biden is set to reap the largest popular vote total ever in U.S. electoral history. And of course, he’s likely taken Arizona and is seriously contesting Georgia, two states long considered part of the Republican firewall.

But after four years, Trumpism has not been repudiated.

Many progressives harbored high hopes that a landslide election in Biden’s favor, inaugurating a new Democratic Senate majority with him, would wash the past four years away — that the 230,000 COVID-19 deaths, Trump’s family separation policy, his administration’s obvious corruption, and his cozying up to white nationalists would seem like the death rattle of a spent and diseased political force in American politics.

“There’s a spiritual sickness that has still not been cleansed from the veins of American democracy,” said Rev. William Barber II, a North Carolina pastor and progressive political activist, on Sunday.

But if anything, the results have ratified Trumpism as an electoral force that will remain in our politics for years to come.

Ben Rhodes, a top Obama adviser, tweeted Wednesday morning that the problem with the election is that “this many Americans took a hard look at Trump and determined, ‘yeah, I want four more years of that.”

It’s an emotional loss for those who wanted to believe that President Trump was a simple aberration from American history, or that some invisible guard of Republicans were always waiting in the wings to come and help sweep him away in the name of democratic norms.

And even for others, who recognized that Trump’s worst impulses, intentionally or not, tap into deep currents in American history and our current politics, the results fail to suggest that those troubling trends of racial hatred and plutocracy have been put at bay.

by Josh Kovensky, TPM | Read more:

Seattle City Council Mulls Law That Could Dismiss Many Misdemeanor Crimes

Seattle - The Seattle City Council is considering new legislation that would create a legal loophole that would make substance addiction, mental illness or poverty a valid legal defense for nearly all misdemeanor crimes committed in the city.

The council's consideration of the plan has occurred with virtually no public discussion about the proposal, which has been included in the municipal budgeting process. The council has not, so far, conducted a standalone meeting to discuss the idea.

Scott Lindsay, the former public safety advisor for the city, said Seattle would be in a class of its own if it ultimately enacted the ordinance.

"I'm not aware of any legislation like this anywhere in the United States (or) even globally," he said Monday. "All cities have criminal codes to protect their citizens from criminal acts. This would essentially create a legal loophole that swallows all those codes and creates a green light for crime."

The legislation was proposed by Seattle City Councilwoman Lisa Herbold last Wednesday.

The proposal would allow for the dismissal of crimes of poverty and it would do so by revising the definition of duress as a defense against prosecution.

Seattle police currently make about 12,000 arrests every year that are not DUI offenses or related to domestic violence. In 2019, charges were filed for just over 5,400 misdemeanor cases, not including DUI charges or domestic abuse allegations.

If approved, the ordinance would excuse and dismiss -- essentially legalizing -- almost all misdemeanor crimes committed in Seattle by offenders who could show either:

• Symptoms of addiction without being required to provide a medical diagnosis;
• Symptoms of a mental disorder; or
• Poverty and the crime was committed to meet an "immediate and basic need." For example, if a defendant argued they stole merchandise to sell for cash in order to purchase food, clothes or was trying to scrape together enough money for rent. The accused could not be convicted.

"If you don't feel very protected right now, this would wipe out almost all remaining protections that we have," Lindsay said.

The offenses that would be covered by the Seattle ordinance would include just about any crime below the level of a felony while excluding charges of driving under the influence or domestic violence.

"This would absolutely open the floodgates for crime in Seattle, even worse than what we often currently struggle with," Lindsay said. "It's basically a blank check for anybody committing theft, assault, harassment (and) trespass to continue without disruption from our criminal justice system."

by Eric Johnson, KOMO News |  Read more:

Image: KOMO News

[ed. This Council is just plain nuts. See also: A criminal defense for poverty, behavioral health? Seattle officials to weigh controversial proposal (Seattle Times).]

A Guide to Watching the Election Without Losing Your Mind

A Guide to Watching the Election Without Losing Your Mind (Rolling Stone)

[ed. Unless Trump wins, then kiss your mind goodbye.]
Image: Joe Rodriguez. Images in illustration:Maksym Yemelyanov/Adobe Stock (TVs); Luis Santana/Tampa Bay Times/AP Images(Biden); Bruce Kluckhohn(Trump)

Does Knowing God Just Take Practice?

I was nine or ten when my parents left their stolid Anglican church for one that was undergoing what was known as “charismatic renewal.” This was the mid-nineteen-seventies, in the northern English city of Durham, but the energies were all American. The young congregants—our church was popular with local university students—played guitars, gave testimonials, raised their hands in rhapsody, and “danced with the spirit” in the aisles. Sometimes, though not often, people spoke in tongues, a diabolical glossolalia that I found deeply fascinating. There was a church band—twelve-string guitars, tambourines, trumpet, and flute. We sang American hymns, songs I vaguely thought of as “Californian.” I grew to dread one of the most popular, “I Am the Bread of Life,” which had a chorus with the words “And I will raise him up.” As the chorus soared, earnest hands were raised heavenward—including the hands of my parents, who were always moved by this song to forgo their customary physical reticence. I would glance sideways at them and then quickly look away, as if I’d witnessed the throes of some primal scene.

The extremity of emotion that pulsed through the congregation every Sunday alarmed me. I came to think of that church as the place where grownups weep. Charismatic or evangelical churches are theatres of spiritual catharsis. You come to such places and lay your burdens before the Lord, open your soul to the Holy Spirit, and “let all the sadness and evil out” (as my mother once put it). This crisis of transformation was often physically arduous. People shuddered and their eyes filled with tears, while others who had already been through such experiences held their hands or prayed over them. “Free prayer” was encouraged; worshippers might blurt out their hopes, secrets, prophecies. The natural order of things was inverted: adults, spasming in emotion, appeared to need the calm intervention of the dry-eyed child. This was where perfectly ordinary English people seemed to lead a kind of double life, an existence that, in its strange abandon and abnormality, appeared almost criminally intense.

What was unsettling to the child, in other words, was probably what was so exciting to the adult convert: the drama of transferred authority. The believing adult, pulled toward the commanding Christ, felt the divine power of God’s call, and the divinely inspired power of the pastors and the elders who voiced that call: You must change your life. But the unbelieving or skeptical child, with no great desire to change his life, felt abandoned by those who should have been in charge, and wondered furtively at the authority of that divine command. Who was this God, this Jesus, this Holy Spirit? If he didn’t exist, then Sunday morning was a mass sickness, nothing more than the contagion of hallucination. That prospect seemed quite troubling. But the alternative scenario didn’t seem any better. Evangelical practice presumes a highly interventionist Jesus, a surveillance God who not only numbers the hairs on your head but cares about your job interview, whom you go out with, the house you want to buy. When my mother told the pastor that I had done well in a recent school exam, he gave me a hug and offered a hearty “Praise the Lord!” I thought that this God probably didn’t exist, but, if he did exist, he had all the scrutinizing powers of a meddlesome headmaster, always alert for the smallest failures and successes.

I know how unbalanced this is. I’m sure I should have seen all the human goodness and decency—there was plenty of that around, too. I bring it up as a way of explaining my somewhat unbalanced interest in the work of the Stanford anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann, who has been studying American evangelical worship for at least twenty years. In 2012, Luhrmann published “When God Talks Back,” an account of her experiences in charismatic churches in Chicago and the San Francisco area. These were part of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, a network of congregations founded in California in the nineteen-seventies. Curious about everything, open-eyed, endlessly patient, Luhrmann embedded herself like a military correspondent. Over several years, she interviewed more than fifty congregants, worshipped and prayed with them, joined Bible-study groups, and reported, with scrupulous neutrality, on their daily spiritual practice.

Her new book, “How God Becomes Real” (Princeton), represents a distillation of that deep work on American Evangelicalism, and expands her acute discussion of spiritual practice across other forms of religious devotion that she has studied or encountered over the years—charismatic Christian worship in Ghana and India, Santería (“a blend of Yoruba spirit possession and Catholicism that emerged among West African slaves in the Caribbean”), and British witchcraft (Luhrmann’s first book, “Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England,” from 1989, was the product of field work among apparently ordinary Londoners who practiced magic and witchcraft).

This comparative framework suits Luhrmann, precisely because she is not interested in the questions that so gripped me when I was young: what or who is God, and how can we know if this God exists? Luhrmann passes over questions of belief in search of questions of practice—the technologies of prayer. She wants to know how worshippers open themselves up to their experiences of God; how they communicate with gods and spirits and in turn hear those gods and spirits reply to them, and she is interested in the kind of therapeutic transformation that such prayerful conversation has on the worshipper. She calls this activity “real-making,” and adds that her new book is not a believer’s or an atheist’s, but an anthropologist’s work. “Rather than presuming that people worship because they believe, we ask instead whether people believe because they worship,” she writes. Thus “the puzzle of religion,” as she defines it, “is not the problem of false belief but the question of how gods and spirits become and remain real to people and what this real-making does for humans.” Whether these questions—of belief and of practice—can be separated quite as staunchly as she wishes is the “puzzle” that surely haunts her own work.

Readers without firsthand experience of evangelical communities were probably surprised by some of the day-to-day details in “When God Talks Back.” Luhrmann describes, at the Vineyard churches, a relationship with God of casual and remarkably friendly intimacy. She prepares us by cautioning that her evangelical subjects approach God in a way that, to traditional believers, might seem “vulgar, overemotional, or even psychotic.” Among her interviewees, Elaine prays for guidance about whether to take a roommate or move to a new apartment. Kate gets angry with God and “yells at him when things go wrong—when she organizes a trip for the church and the bus company is flaky or it rains.” Stacy prays for a good haircut, and Hannah asks God about whom to date, and sometimes feels he is pranking her in little ways: “I’ll trip and fall, and I’ll be like, Thanks, God.” Rachel asks for help with how to dress: “Like, God, what should I wear? . . . I think God cares about really, really little things in my life.” Other women speak of setting an evening aside for a “date night” with the Lord (men speak of “quiet time” with God, Luhrmann reports). They are perhaps encouraged in this thinking by their pastor, who suggests that his congregants should “set out a second cup of coffee for God in the morning—to pour God an actual cup of steaming coffee, to place it on an actual table, and to sit down at that table . . . to talk to God about the things on our minds.”

by James Wood, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Grace J. Kim

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AOC's Next Four Years

Her Republican colleagues had, up until then, been civil. But one day in late July, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol while Representative Ted Yoho lost his shit. The Florida Republican, incensed by the New York congresswoman’s recent comments linking crime and poverty, jabbed his finger in her face, calling her “crazy” and “disgusting.” She froze. The situation felt dangerous, with Yoho towering over Ocasio-Cortez, who calls herself “five-five on a good day.” Congressman Roger Williams, a Texas Republican, bumbled next to him like a wind puppet at a used-car dealership. She told Yoho he was being rude and went into the Capitol to vote. As Yoho descended the steps, he called her a “fucking bitch.” A reporter nearby witnessed the exchange, and soon the whole world had heard the epithet.

This part hasn’t been reported: The next day Ocasio-Cortez approached Yoho and told him, “You do that to me again, I won’t be so nice next time.” She felt his actions had violated a boundary, stepping “into the zone of harassment, discrimination.” His mocking response, straight out of Veep: “Oh, boo-hoo.” Publicly, Yoho doubled down, issuing a non-apology on the House floor, citing his wife and daughters as character witnesses.

Ocasio-Cortez flashed back to one of her first jobs out of school, when a male colleague whom she’d edged out for a promotion called her a bitch in front of the staff. She had been too stunned to reply, and no one came to her defense. She wouldn’t let it happen again.

Forty-eight hours later, Ocasio-Cortez delivered one of the most eloquent dunks in political history, a “thank u, next” for the C-SPAN set, taking on not just Yoho but the patriarchy itself. She took care to enter “fucking bitch” into the Congressional Record. “I want to thank him for showing the world that you can be a powerful man and accost women,” she told the House. “It happens every day in this country.” And the line that spawned headlines, T-shirts, hashtags, and memes: “I am someone’s daughter too.”

The 2020 horse race may be between two white, male septuagenarians, but it is a millennial Puerto Rican Democratic Socialist who produced a seminal political moment. Her Yoho rebuke inspired a fresh wave of awe for the youngest U.S. congresswoman in history and cemented her status as eopolitical icon—not just good on Twitter (where she schooled her congressional colleagues in a tutorial) and Instagram Live (where she gave an impromptu address on the dark night of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death), but a skilled orator with the power to move even her most cynical congressional colleagues. “They were like, ‘I didn’t know you’re that eloquent,’ ” Ocasio-Cortez says with a wry smile. “ ‘I’m so pleased and surprised by your restraint.’ ”

Ocasio-Cortez does not name Speaker Nancy Pelosi and, in a separate conversation, rejects reports of a clash, calling it media-manufactured misogyny. “Two powerful women coming from different perspectives,” she shrugs, “and there has to be a catfight.” Still, “House leadership is, sometimes, a little wary of me speaking on the floor. Not that I’m not allowed to, but it’s a little more dicey,” says Ocasio-Cortez. “I think a lot of people, including my Democratic colleagues, believe the Fox News version of me.”

Most of Ocasio-Cortez’s family and close friends call her Sandy. A few, like Representative Ayanna Pressley, go with “Alex.” But becoming AOC—and @AOC—has simultaneously vaulted her into a pantheon of triple-initialed legends and, alternately, given a handy tagline to the right’s worst nightmare. Her beatific face is commodified on twee Etsy greeting cards (“I AOC It’s Your Birthday”) and stamped alongside those of RBG and Frida Kahlo on “feminist prayer candles” and “Latina icon stickers.” Conservative attack ads depict her as socialist villainess. One especially disturbing spot shows a photo of her face on fire before cutting to a pile of skulls.

“It’s very dehumanizing in both ways, strangely, both the negative and the positive,” the congresswoman tells me one afternoon from behind the desk of her Bronx campaign office. “It’s not an accident that, every cycle, the boogeyman of the Democrats is a woman,” says Ocasio-Cortez. “A couple of cycles ago, it was Pelosi. Then it was Hillary, and now it’s me.” (...)

Despite the base level of ego required to run for any office, Ocasio-Cortez seems uncomfortable with the mania about her future. “I think it’s part of our cultural understanding of politics, where—if you think someone is great, you automatically think they should be president,” she says. “I joke. I’m like, ‘Is Congress not good enough?’ ”

Her aspirations are a matter of endless speculation: New York Senate, House leadership, a Cabinet post? “I don’t know if I’m really going to be staying in the House forever, or if I do stay in the House, what that would look like,” she says. “I don’t see myself really staying where I’m at for the rest of my life.” This is one of the few times AOC seems guarded and cautious about her words. “I don’t want to aspire to a quote-unquote higher position just for the sake of that title or just for the sake of having a different or higher position. I truly make an assessment to see if I can be more effective. And so, you know, I don’t know if I could necessarily be more effective in an administration, but, for me that’s always what the question comes down to.” She does not believe in political messiahs, nor does she see herself as a “hierarchical, power-based person.” At the beginning of her first term, her staff still called her Alex. It was only when journalists on the Hill started to follow suit that her team collectively decided to address her as Congresswoman. She blends into the crowd at Pelham Bay Park, even though she’s the only one in a suit. When a nearby gender-reveal party pops a blue confetti cannon, she throws her hands in the air and cheers. When I ask Pressley what the popular narratives miss, she cites humility. “She certainly did not set out to be an icon or even a historymaker. I think it was her destiny, but there is no calculation.”

As Ocasio-Cortez puts it, “I don’t want to be a savior, I want to be a mirror.”

by Michelle Ruiz, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Image: Tyler Mitchell
[ed. See also: The Most Important Thing About AOC Is That She Is Normal (Current Affairs).]

Grant Green

Idle Moments (Rudy Van Gelder Edition / Remastered 1999)

The Epigenetic Secrets Behind Dopamine, Drug Addiction and Depression

As I opened my copy of Science at home one night, an unfamiliar word in the title of a new study caught my eye: dopaminylation. The term refers to the brain chemical dopamine’s ability, in addition to transmitting signals across synapses, to enter a cell’s nucleus and control specific genes. As I read the paper, I realized that it completely upends our understanding of genetics and drug addiction. The intense craving for addictive drugs like alcohol and cocaine may be caused by dopamine controlling genes that alter the brain circuitry underlying addiction. Intriguingly, the results also suggest an answer to why drugs that treat major depression must typically be taken for weeks before they’re effective. I was shocked by the dramatic discovery, but to really understand it, I first had to unlearn some things.

“Half of what you learned in college is wrong,” my biology professor, David Lange, once said. “Problem is, we don’t know which half.” How right he was. I was taught to scoff at Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his theory that traits acquired through life experience could be passed on to the next generation. The silly traditional example is the mama giraffe stretching her neck to reach food high in trees, resulting in baby giraffes with extra-long necks. Then biologists discovered we really can inherit traits our parents acquired in life, without any change to the DNA sequence of our genes. It’s all thanks to a process called epigenetics — a form of gene expression that can be inherited but isn’t actually part of the genetic code. This is where it turns out that brain chemicals like dopamine play a role.

All genetic information is encoded in the DNA sequence of our genes, and traits are passed on in the random swapping of genes between egg and sperm that sparks a new life. Genetic information and instructions are coded in a sequence of four different molecules (nucleotides abbreviated A, T, G and C) on the long double-helix strand of DNA. The linear code is quite lengthy (about 6 feet long per human cell), so it’s stored neatly wound around protein bobbins, similar to how magnetic tape is wound around spools in cassette tapes.

Inherited genes are activated or inactivated to build a unique individual from a fertilized egg, but cells also constantly turn specific genes on and off throughout life to make the proteins cells need to function. When a gene is activated, special proteins latch onto DNA, read the sequence of letters there and make a disposable copy of that sequence in the form of messenger RNA. The messenger RNA then shuttles the genetic instructions to the cell’s ribosomes, which decipher the code and make the protein specified by the gene.

But none of that works without access to the DNA. By analogy, if the magnetic tape remains tightly wound, you can’t read the information on the cassette. Epigenetics works by unspooling the tape, or not, to control which genetic instructions are carried out. In epigenetic inheritance, the DNA code is not altered, but access to it is.

This is why cells in our body can be so different even though every cell has identical DNA. If the DNA is not unwound from its various spools — proteins called histones — the cell’s machinery can’t read the hidden code. So the genes that would make red blood corpuscles, for example, are shut off in cells that become neurons.

How do cells know which genes to read? The histone spool that a specific gene’s DNA winds around is marked with a specific chemical tag, like a molecular Post-it note. That marker directs other proteins to “roll the tape” and unwind the relevant DNA from that histone (or not to roll it, depending on the tag).

It’s a fascinating process we’re still learning more about, but we never expected that a seemingly unrelated brain chemical might also play a role. Neurotransmitters are specialized molecules that transmit signals between neurons. This chemical signaling between neurons is what enables us to think, learn, experience different moods and, when neurotransmitter signaling goes awry, suffer cognitive difficulties or mental illness.

Serotonin and dopamine are famous examples. Both are monoamines, a class of neurotransmitters involved in psychological illnesses such as depression, anxiety disorders and addiction. Serotonin helps regulate mood, and drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors are widely prescribed and effective for treating chronic depression. We think they work by increasing the level of serotonin in the brain, which boosts communication between neurons in the neural circuits controlling mood, motivation, anxiety and reward. That makes sense, sure, but it is curious that it usually takes a month or more before the drug relieves depression.

Dopamine, on the other hand, is the neurotransmitter at work in the brain’s reward circuits; it produces that “gimme-a-high-five!” spurt of euphoria that erupts when we hit a bingo. Nearly all addictive drugs, like cocaine and alcohol, increase dopamine levels, and the chemically induced dopamine reward leads to further drug cravings. A weakened reward circuitry could be a cause of depression, which would help explain why people with depression may self-medicate by taking illicit drugs that boost dopamine.

But (as I found out after reading that dopaminylation paper), research last year led by Ian Maze, a neuroscientist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, showed that serotonin has another function: It can act as one of those molecular Post-it notes. Specifically, it can bind to a type of histone known as H3, which controls the genes responsible for transforming human stem cells (the forerunner of all kinds of cells) into serotonin neurons. When serotonin binds to the histone, the DNA unwinds, turning on the genes that dictate the development of a stem cell into a serotonin neuron, while turning off other genes by keeping their DNA tightly wound. (So stem cells that never see serotonin turn into other types of cells, since the genetic program to transform them into neurons is not activated.)

That finding inspired Maze’s team to wonder if dopamine might act in a similar way, regulating the genes involved in drug addiction and withdrawal. In the April Science paper that so surprised me, they showed that the same enzyme that attaches serotonin to H3 can also catalyze the attachment of dopamine to H3 — a process, I learned, called dopaminylation.

Together, these results represent a huge change in our understanding of these chemicals. By binding to the H3 histone, serotonin and dopamine can regulate transcription of DNA into RNA and, as a consequence, the synthesis of specific proteins from them. That turns these well-known characters in neuroscience into double agents, acting obviously as neurotransmitters, but also as clandestine masters of epigenetics. (...)

To put it plainly, the discovery that monoamine neurotransmitters control epigenetic regulation of genes is transformative for basic science and medicine. These experiments show that the tagging of H3 by dopamine does indeed underlie drug-seeking behavior, by regulating the neural circuits operating in addiction.

And, equally exciting, the implications likely go well beyond addiction, given the crucial role of dopamine and serotonin signaling in other neurological and psychological illnesses. Indeed, Maze told me that his team’s latest research (not yet published) has also found this type of epigenetic marking in the brain tissues of people with major depressive disorder. Perhaps this connection even explains why antidepressant drugs take so long to be effective: If the drugs work by activating this epigenetic process, rather than just supplying the brain’s missing serotonin, it can take days or even weeks before these genetic changes become apparent.

by R. Douglas Fields, Quanta | Read more:
Image: James O’Brien

Bruce Springsteen

There's No Art in This White House (spoken word)

[ed. See also: When Disaster Is an Invaluable Lesson (Hedgehog Review).]

Harold Ancart

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Karen O & Willie Nelson

[ed. Interesting arrangement. Willie is sounding a little frail these days.]

Amadeo de Souza Cardoso, The Leap of the Rabbit, 1911

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Hawai‘i Restaurant Card

Hawaii Restaurant Card Program (with FAQs)

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Anatomy Of An Outbreak: Once Unleashed, The Coronavirus Moved Swiftly On Lanai

No one knows exactly when the coronavirus arrived on Lanai. The first recorded cases on Oct. 20 were detected in a health care worker who had traveled to Oahu and three employees of the Four Seasons Resort Lanai at Manele Bay.

But those were just the first visible cracks in a growing public health crisis that has shattered this island’s distinction as the state’s lone coronavirus-free sanctuary.

In six days the infection count shot up from four to at least 79, stoking fears that this tiny isle of fewer than 3,000 close-knit residents could be on the verge of a coronavirus free fall. Health workers say they expect the positive case count to continue to climb as hundreds of results trickle in from a massive weekend testing drive.

The virus has infected numerous kupuna, including some with preexisting health conditions, which, along with their age, make them more vulnerable to the deadly disease. At least 15 students at Lanai High and Elementary School are also infected. Some of these students brought the virus home, spreading the contagion to family members. 

With one school, one gas station, two grocery stores and less than 30 miles of paved roads, health officials worry the island could prove to be the ultimate petri dish.

As health workers rush to uncover how deeply the virus has pervaded the Lanai population, many residents say what they fear as much as the virus is the unknown. How many people have been infected? Is it even safe to hunker down with other family members at home?

“We don’t have a plan for how we’re going to handle this,” lamented Butch Gima, a state social worker. “We’re in dire straits here and we’re still in reaction mode.”

On Monday Gov. David Ige approved a request from Maui Mayor Mike Victorino to send the island into a strict shutdown. Starting Tuesday Lanai residents and visitors will only be permitted to leave their homes or hotel rooms for essential purposes, such as grocery shopping or to see a doctor.

Over the weekend many residents started sheltering at home preemptively. Those with second homes on the mainland boarded airplanes and fled.

“We have a friend who flew in Wednesday thinking that he’s coming to the one place in the United States that doesn’t have COVID,” said Manele resident David Green. “Of course, he had very bad timing.”

Coronavirus Free Fall

The fact that the island was COVID-free for the first seven months of the pandemic led some residents to gradually relax their vigilance. People loosened their adherence to mask-wearing and physical distancing guidelines. Some residents resumed having baby showers, birthday parties and children’s sleepovers, according to a dozen residents and health care workers interviewed for this story. A Civil Beat reporter traveled to Lanai last week to document the public health crisis that was just beginning.

“We were locked down here for so long, it felt like prison,” said Neal Byumanglag, a 59-year-old construction worker, referring to longstanding travel restrictions that kept most Lanai residents confined for months on end to the island’s 140 square miles.

“It’s like putting a dog in a cage,” he said. “What do you think that dog’s going to do when you open the cage back up? It’s the same thing with people here.”

But it was more than island fever. Many Lanai residents depend on regular trips to Maui to access cheaper prices on food and supplies at Costco and other big box stores.

When travel restrictions eased in mid-October to allow Maui County residents to bypass the mandatory 14-day quarantine when traveling between Maui, Mokokai and Lanai, some Lanai residents resumed regular trips to Maui to shop or see family and friends.

The return of tourism to the island on Oct. 15 signaled another psychological shift toward normalcy. Hundreds of hotel workers returned to their jobs for the first time in months.

So when the virus finally seeped onto the island, it met a population that had largely let down its guard — and it exploded.

Worst Case Scenario

If cases continue to mount, a frightening set of challenges could be in store for the sickest patients.

The island’s only hospital is a three-bed emergency department with no critical care beds or specialists. The hospital has a ventilator, but no respiratory therapist trained to operate it. Patients who develop COVID-19 symptoms severe enough to need hospital care must be flown off the island.

On Friday, Medeiros said he tried unsuccessfully to gain clearance to fly several coronavirus-infected kupuna with less acute symptoms to Maui or Oahu, where there is readily available hospital capacity to treat them should their conditions deteriorate.

“I was told they don’t do just-in-case scenarios,” Medeiros said. “So you want us to just wait until they need to be on a ventilator to ship them out?”

There are risks involved in transporting critically ill patients. But this has always been the case when someone on Lanai suffers a heart attack or loses blood in a car wreck.

The unique quandary posed by Lanai’s COVID-19 outbreak is a numbers problem. What happens if several Lanai residents who’ve contracted the virus fall ill and need critical care all at once? 

by Brittany Lyte, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Images: markk
[ed. My beloved island. Larry Ellision (of Oracle fame) owns 98% of the island, why can't he use a small portion of his $75 billion net worth to help out, at least with off-island transportation?]

Alejandro Prieto
via:

Matthew McConaughey's Guide to Life

The biggest question in the universe, writes Matthew McConaughey in his new autobiography (of sorts) is “WHOWHATWHEREWHENHOW?? – and that’s the truth. WHY? is even bigger.” With Greenlights, his love letter to livin, McConaughey attempts to answer these questions and others, such as why he never puts a “g” on the end of “living” – “because life’s a verb”.

Greenlights is not a memoir, though it tells true stories from his life in chronological order. Nor is it “an advice book”. It is “an approach book”, bringing together McConaughey’s insights from 35 years of writing journals, and more of collecting bumper stickers. These “philosophies can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted”. A few are shared here.

‘The value of denial depends on one’s level of commitment’

“Like a good southern boy should”, McConaughey begins with his mother. When McConaughey is eight years old, she enters him into the Little Mr Texas contest. He wins, and his mom hangs a framed picture of him holding his trophy on the kitchen wall. Every morning at breakfast, she gestures to it. “Look at you: winner, Little Mr Texas, 1977.”

Now 50, McConaughey is an Oscar-winning actor, a bankable star and still one of the most handsome men in Hollywood. He has been up and down, endured boom and bust, gone from livin on easy street to trailer parks. He has weathered hard winters of the soul, and long professional droughts. Through it all he’s always been Winner, Little Mr Texas, 1977.

Last year, McConaughey came across the same photo in a scrapbook. The trophy reads “runner-up”. When he confronted his mother, she said the winner was wealthy and won with his fancy suit. “We call that cheatin. No, you’re Little Mr Texas.” McConaughey calls this the lesson of “audacious existentialism”.

‘To lose the power of confrontation is to lose the power of unity’

This proclamation, on a bumper sticker reproduced in the book, captures the young McConaughey’s home life: full of love and also violence. (“I’ve always loved bumper stickers, so much so that I’ve stuck bumper to sticker and made them one word, bumpersticker.”)

McConaughey’s parents divorced twice and married thrice, to each other. His father broke his mother’s finger four times, “to get it out of his face”; he later died from a heart attack mid-intercourse, as he’d always said he would. “Yes,” writes McConaughey, “he called his shot all right.”

At dinner one Wednesday night, his father asks for more potatoes. His mother calls him fat. His father overturns the table. His mother breaks his nose with the phone receiver while calling 911. She pulls out a 12in knife. His father grabs a 14oz ketchup bottle. They circle each other, him slashing her with sauce, dodging her knife.

Their gazes meet, “Mom thumbing the ketchup from her wet eyes, Dad just standing there, letting the blood drip from his nose down his chest … They dropped to their knees, then to the bloody, ketchup-covered linoleum kitchen floor … and made love. A red light turned green. This is how my parents communicated.”

Don’t lose your truck

High school for McConaughey was summer time, all the time. He got straight As and dated the best-looking girl at his school and the other schools. He had a job, no curfew, and a golf handicap of four.

He had two years of acne, brought on by a cosmetic called Oil of Mink that his mother was selling door to door – but, blighted by whiteheads (“blistering geysers of pus”), he was still voted most handsome in his year. “Yeah, I was catching greenlights.”

McConaughey was the fun guy. Not for him, leaning against the wall at the party, smoking and looking cool. He engaged. He took the girls four-wheel driving in his truck, and flirted with them through a megaphone: “Look at the jeans Cathy Cook’s got on today, lookin gooooooood!” “Everyone laughed. Especially Cathy Cook.”

One day he trades in his truck for a sports car that he knew the chicks would dig even more. He gets to school early each day and just leeeaaans against it. “I was so cool. My red sports car was so cool.”

But after a few weeks, he notices a cloud has cast across his summer sky: “The chicks, they weren’t digging me like they used to.” They were out four-wheel driving with someone else. It hits him: “I lost the effort, the hustle, the mudding, and the megaphone. I lost the fun.” He gets his truck back. (...)

‘When you can, ask yourself if you want to’

McConaughey lands an agent and parts in Angels in America and Boys on the Side. He adopts a puppy – Ms Hud, a lab-chow mix who becomes his longtime companion – and rents a quaint guesthouse on the edge of a national park in Tucson, Arizona. The house comes with a maid, who cooks and cleans.

McConaughey can’t believe his fortunes. “She even presses my jeans!” he raves to a friend, holding up his Levi’s to show her the crisp, starched-white line. His friend smiles, then says something McConaughey would never forget: “That’s great, Matthew, if you want your jeans pressed.”

“I’d never had my jeans pressed before,” he writes. “I’d never had anyone to press my jeans before. I’d never thought to ask myself if I wanted my jeans pressed … Of course I wanted my jeans pressed. Or did I?

“No, actually. I didn’t.” (...)

‘Truth’s like a jalapeño. The closer to the root, the hotter it gets’

As Hollywood’s go-to romcom guy, McConaughey is at first unbothered by the fact he is a critical write-off. “I enjoyed making romantic comedies, and their pay checks rented the houses on the beaches I ran shirtless on.”

In July 2005 he meets his future wife, embraces family life, and becomes increasingly unsatisfied by his parts. He tells his agent: no more romcoms. And he waits.

He gets offers of $5m, $8m, $14.5m for two months’ work. He turns them down. For nearly two years, he refuses to give the industry what it wants from him – and one day he is discovered again.

The offers come in droves, almost as many as after A Time to Kill in 1996 – from Linklater, Soderbergh, Scorsese. While shooting The Wolf of Wall Street McConaughey thumps his chest and hums to relax before each take. Leonardo DiCaprio suggests he do it in the scene.

by Elle Hunt, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Wolf of Wall Street/Alamy

So Trump Loses. What Happens Then?

Okay, I admit it, I’ve been worried -- and no surprise there. In this world from hell, it’s not hard to worry about untold numbers of things going wrong. Let me, however, lay out my own large-scale version of worry about this America of ours. What if Joe Biden does win? The world -- at least the world I know and read and watch and talk to -- has one giant anxiety then: that Donald Trump will declare the election a “fake,” refuse to leave office, send the lawyers into the courts, the troops or the dreaded feds into the streets, and call out all those armed Trumpsters for support. You more or less know the scenario(s) yourself, I’m sure, and whether the U.S. military then would or would not decide to literally remove the president from office, it would indeed be a nightmare.

Still, something else has long been on my mind: not what Donald Trump could try to stop from happening, but what he could actually do between November 3rd and January 20, 2021. This is, after all, the head of an administration that has tried to roll back nearly 100 environmental regulations, turning this country into a potential hell on earth. His people, now undoubtedly fearing defeat, are already moving fast to make sure that the U.S. will, in the worst sense imaginable, remain Donald Trump’s land until that hell freezes over.

My worry: what, in those months, could The Donald do to ensure that, when Joe Biden sits at that desk in the Oval Office for the first time, he finds himself waist deep in you-know-what (including potentially a future Great Depression) that he and his crew might never be able to shovel themselves out of? With that in mind, I asked TomDispatch regular Rajan Menon to consider just what shape we might find ourselves in economically in the Biden moment (if it ever arrives). So get your shovel ready and dig in. Tom

So Trump Loses. What Happens Then?

Donald Trump isn’t just inside the heads of his Trumpster base; he’s long been a consuming obsession among those yearning for his defeat in November. With barely more than a week to go before the election of our lifetime, those given to nail biting as a response to anxiety have by now gnawed ourselves down to the quick. And many have found other ways to manage (or mismanage) their apprehensions through compulsive rituals, which only ratchet up the angst of the moment, among them nonstop poll tracking, endless “what if” doomsday-scenario conversations with friends, and repeated refrigerator raids.

As one of those doomsday types, let me briefly suggest a few of the commonplace dystopian possibilities for November. Trump gets the majority of the votes cast in person on November 3rd. A Pew Research Center survey found that 60% of those supporting the president intend to vote that way on Election Day compared to 23% of Biden supporters; and a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll likewise revealed a sizable difference between Republicans and Democrats, though not as large. He does, however, lose handily after all mail-in and absentee ballots are counted. Once every ballot is finally tabulated, Biden prevails in the popular vote and ekes out a win in the Electoral College. The president, however, having convinced his faithful that voting by mail will result in industrial-scale fraud (unless he wins, of course), proclaims that he -- and “the American people” -- have been robbed by the establishment. On cue, outraged Trumpsters, some of them armed, take to the streets. Chaos, even violence, ensues. The president’s army of lawyers frenetically file court briefs contesting the election results and feverishly await a future Supreme Court decision, Mitch McConnell having helpfully rammed through Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to produce a 6-3 conservative majority (including three Trump-appointed Supremes) that will likely favor him in any disputed election case.

Or the vote tally shows that Trump didn’t prevail in pivotal states, but in state legislatures with Republican majorities, local GOP leaders appoint electors from their party anyway, defying the popular will without violating Article II, Section I, of the Constitution, which doesn’t flat-out prohibit such a stratagem. That was one possibility Barton Gellman explored in his bombshell Atlantic piece on the gambits Trump could use to snatch victory (of a sort) from the jaws of a Biden victory. Then there are the sundry wag-the-dog plots, including a desperate Trump trying to generate a pre-election rally-around-the-flag effect by starting a war with Iran -- precisely what, in 2011, he predicted Barack Obama would do to boost his chances for reelection.

And that, of course, is just part of a long list of nightmarish possibilities. Whatever your most dreaded outcome, dwelling on it doesn’t make for happiness or even ephemeral relief. Ultimately, it’s not under your control. Besides, no one knows what will happen, and some prominent pundits have dismissed such apocalyptic soothsaying with assurances that the system will work the way it’s supposed to and foil Trumpian malfeasance. Here’s hoping.

In the meantime, let’s summon what passes for optimism these days. Imagine that none of the alarmist denouements materializes. Biden wins the popular vote tally and the Electoral College. The GOP’s leaders discover that they do, in fact, have backbones (or at least the instinct for political survival), refusing to echo Trump’s rants about rigging. The president rages but then does go, unquietly, into the night.

Most of my friends on the left assume that a new dawn would then emerge. In some respects, it indeed will. Biden won’t be a serial liar. That’s no small matter. By the middle of this year, Trump had made false or misleading pronouncements of one sort or another more than 20,000 times since becoming president. Nor will we have a president who winks and nods at far-right groups or racist “militias,” nor one who blasts a governor -- instead of expressing shock and solidarity -- soon after the FBI foils a plot by right-wing extremists to kidnap her for taking steps to suppress the coronavirus. We won’t have a president who repeatedly intimates that he will remain in office even if he loses the election. We won’t have a president who can’t bring himself to appeal to Americans to display their patriotism through the simple act of donning masks to protect others (and themselves) from Covid-19. And we won’t have a president who lacks the compassion to express sorrow over the 225,000 Americans (and rising) who have been killed by that disease, or enough respect for science and professional expertise, to say nothing of humility, to refrain from declaring, as his own experts squirm, that warm weather will cause the virus to vanish miraculously or that injections of disinfectant will destroy it.

And these, of course, won’t be minor victories. Still, Joe Biden’s arrival in the Oval Office won’t alter one mega-fact: Donald Trump will hand him a monstrous economic mess. Worse, in the almost three months between November 3rd and January 20th, rest assured that he will dedicate himself to making it even bigger.

The motivation? Sheer spite for having been put in the position -- we know that he will never accept any responsibility for his defeat -- of facing what, for him, may be more unbearable than death itself: losing. The gargantuan challenge of putting the economy back on the rails while also battling the pandemic would be hard enough for any new president without the lame-duck commander-in-chief and Senate Republicans sabotaging his efforts before he even begins. The long stretch between Election Day and Inauguration Day will provide Donald Trump ample time to take his revenge on a people who will have forsaken, in his opinion, the best president ever.

More on Trump’s vengeance, but first, let’s take stock of what awaits Biden should he win in November.

by Tom Engelhardt and Rajan Menon, TomDispatch | Read more:

[ed. Sorry. I try not to polute this blog with more politics than necessary, but it is that time.]

R.I.P., G.O.P.

Of all the things President Trump has destroyed, the Republican Party is among the most dismaying.

“Destroyed” is perhaps too simplistic, though. It would be more precise to say that Mr. Trump accelerated his party’s demise, exposing the rot that has been eating at its core for decades and leaving it a hollowed-out shell devoid of ideas, values or integrity, committed solely to preserving its own power even at the expense of democratic norms, institutions and ideals.

Tomato, tomahto. However you characterize it, the Republican Party’s dissolution under Mr. Trump is bad for American democracy.

A healthy political system needs robust, competing parties to give citizens a choice of ideological, governing and policy visions. More specifically, center-right parties have long been crucial to the health of modern liberal democracies, according to the Harvard political scientist Daniel Ziblatt’s study of the emergence of democracy in Western Europe. Among other benefits, a strong center right can co-opt more palatable aspects of the far right, isolating and draining energy from the more radical elements that threaten to destabilize the system.

Today’s G.O.P. does not come close to serving this function. It has instead allowed itself to be co-opted and radicalized by Trumpism. Its ideology has been reduced to a slurry of paranoia, white grievance and authoritarian populism. Its governing vision is reactionary, a cross between obstructionism and owning the libs. Its policy agenda, as defined by the party platform, is whatever President Trump wants — which might not be so pathetic if Mr. Trump’s interests went beyond “Build a wall!”

“There is no philosophical underpinning for the Republican Party anymore,” the veteran strategist Reed Galen recently lamented to this board. A co-founder of the Lincoln Project, a political action committee run by current and former Republicans dedicated to defeating Mr. Trump and his enablers, Mr. Galen characterized the party as a self-serving, power-hungry gang.

With his dark gospel, the president has enthralled the Republican base, rendering other party leaders too afraid to stand up to him. But to stand with Mr. Trump requires a constant betrayal of one’s own integrity and values. This goes beyond the usual policy flip-flops — what happened to fiscal hawks anyway? — and political hypocrisy, though there have been plenty of both. Witness the scramble to fill a Supreme Court seat just weeks before Election Day by many of the same Senate Republicans who denied President Barack Obama his high court pick in 2016, claiming it would be wrong to fill a vacancy eight months out from that election.

Mr. Trump demands that his interests be placed above those of the nation. His presidency has been an extended exercise in defining deviancy down — and dragging the rest of his party down with him.

Having long preached “character” and “family values,” Republicans have given a pass to Mr. Trump’s personal degeneracy. The affairs, the hush money, the multiple accusations of assault and harassment, the gross boasts of grabbing unsuspecting women — none of it matters. White evangelicals remain especially faithful adherents, in large part because Mr. Trump has appointed around 200 judges to the federal bench.

For all their talk about revering the Constitution, Republicans have stood by, slack-jawed, in the face of the president’s assault on checks and balances. Mr. Trump has spurned the concept of congressional oversight of his office. After losing a budget fight and shutting down the government in 2018-19, he declared a phony national emergency at the southern border so he could siphon money from the Pentagon for his border wall. He put a hold on nearly $400 million in Senate-approved aid to Ukraine — a move that played a central role in his impeachment.

So much for Republicans’ Obama-era nattering about “executive overreach.”

Despite fetishizing “law and order,” Republicans have shrugged as Mr. Trump has maligned and politicized federal law enforcement, occasionally lending a hand. Impeachment offered the most searing example. Parroting the White House line that the entire process was illegitimate, the president’s enablers made clear they had his back no matter what. As Pete Wehner, who served as a speechwriter to the three previous Republican presidents, observed in The Atlantic: “Republicans, from beginning to end, sought not to ensure that justice be done or truth be revealed. Instead, they sought to ensure that Trump not be removed from office under any circumstances, defending him at all costs.” (...)

As Republican lawmakers grow increasingly panicked that Mr. Trump will lose re-election — possibly damaging their fortunes as well — some are scrambling to salvage their reputations by pretending they haven’t spent the past four years letting him run amok. In an Oct. 14 call with constituents, Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska gave a blistering assessment of the president’s failures and “deficient” values, from his misogyny to his calamitous handling of the pandemic to “the way he kisses dictators’ butts.” Mr. Sasse was less clear about why, the occasional targeted criticism notwithstanding, he has enabled these deficiencies for so long.

Senator John Cornyn of Texas, locked in his own tight re-election race, recently told the local media that he, too, has disagreed with Mr. Trump on numerous issues, including deficit spending, trade policy and his raiding of the defense budget. Mr. Cornyn said he opted to keep his opposition private rather than get into a public tiff with Mr. Trump “because, as I’ve observed, those usually don’t end too well.”

Profiles in courage these are not.

by Editorial Board, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: The Shining, Barry Blitt