Foo Fighters 25 Years Later, Still Roaring

Dave Grohl has done so much throughout his career — drummed for Nirvana, arguably the biggest band of its generation; led Foo Fighters, one of the most successful acts of the last three decades; sold out Wembley Stadium, twice; played on the White House lawn; interviewed the sitting president of the United States; broke his leg during a show and finished the show with the broken leg; entered the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, with another induction likely on the way; recorded with both living Beatles; appeared on “The Muppets,” also twice — that when you ask him what’s left, he takes a moment.

“That’s one of those things that I think of every morning when I wake up,” Grohl, 52, said during a recent interview, his long, brown hair streaked with gray and tucked behind his ears. “What have we not done? What could we do today?”

Without missing a beat, he recalled a moment years ago when he was “really hot” to play the Super Bowl. A pure thought experiment for most artists, but not him: “Well, let’s call the Super Bowl” was the next step, he recounted with a smile.

The talks, though there were a few of them, petered out. But could you blame him for thinking it could happen — that one could simply wish to play the Super Bowl, and a couple of phone calls later, play for 100 million viewers? Over the last 25 years, Foo Fighters have steadily grown from a one-man solo project into a bona fide rock institution. “It’s almost like we’re farmers, and the field just keeps growing,” Grohl said of the band’s stacking accomplishments. “Then we harvest it, and then it grows some more, and then we harvest it and it grows some more.”

Though their music has spanned the spectrum of what was once considered “alternative,” the Foos have become comfortably associated with a style of adrenalizing, heavy-footed hard rock, doled out in concerts that commonly stretch past the two-hour mark. While that sound has enabled the band to build a lucrative business — their worldwide tour behind the 2017 album “Concrete and Gold” grossed $114 million, per the industry trade Pollstar — rock hasn’t led the record business in more than a decade. The band hasn’t charted a Top 40 single since 2007.

Yet Foo Fighters occupy a rare space as a band with mainstream appeal, led by an undeniably famous star who does not yet feel like an elder statesman. Blessed with relentless energy and a robust contacts list, they’re called upon whenever rock music with joy and gravitas is required, whether it’s David Letterman’s final late-night show, an all-star Prince tribute at the Grammys, a benefit for musicians financially affected by coronavirus, the Kennedy Center Honors or a Democratic presidential fund-raiser. No matter where Foo Fighters show up, they always make sense.

This is partly a result of consistency — by sticking around, without courting controversy, and releasing numerous hit songs with staying power, Foo Fighters have become recognizable to multiple generations. Nirvana remains an important band for successive iterations of young people, and Grohl will always be a member. But whereas the rock stars of yesteryear loomed as unapproachable icons, Grohl feels like a relatable Everyman, someone you could actually have a beer with. And as the years have worn on, and more of his peers have died or receded from the spotlight, he has kept going, a survivor of his old band, his era, and trend after trend after trend. None of which seems to have lessened his indefatigable positivity, all of which he channels into summoning that rock ’n’ roll communal catharsis, whenever required.

Their new album, “Medicine at Midnight,” out Friday, is a subtle but distinct pivot. Without shedding their traditional distorted guitars and expansive howling, the Foos have consciously incorporated dance and funk rhythms into their new songs, influenced by artists like David Bowie and the Rolling Stones who did the same.

The irony of dropping their dance record when live music remains indefinitely postponed wasn’t lost on anyone, including Grohl, who remains the band’s driving creative force. He wasn’t shy about his ambition when we talked, but that friendly demeanor belies the monomaniacal focus required to be so productive. Hard work is not a very stereotypically rocking trait, and yet the Foos have averaged a new album every three years since the beginning, and rarely go dormant for more than a few months at a time. “He doesn’t flutter with his ideas,” said the keyboardist Rami Jaffee, who started playing with the band in 2005 and joined as a full-time member in 2017. “It’s just full-speed ahead.”

The drummer Taylor Hawkins was more direct. “I want to be the biggest band in the world,” he said. “There’s no [expletive] question, and so does Dave. I think he always did.”

Without a tour to embark on, the Foos spun up a promotional blitz across the internet. Grohl, along with the “Medicine at Midnight” producer Greg Kurstin, put out a series of Hannukah-themed covers of Jewish musicians like Drake and the Beastie Boys; he engaged in a viral drum battle with the 10-year-old British musician Nandi Bushell; he started an Instagram account where he tells long, funny stories from his life; the band has dipped into livestreamed performances; they got together in the same room for “Times Like Those,” where they provided running commentary for a photographic slide show culled from the band’s 25 years together. There are also plans to release a documentary about touring in vans, and one member let slip something about a separate movie project.

GROHL’S LONG JOURNEY through the music industry began in the mid-80s, when he dropped out of high school to drum for the Washington, D.C., hard-core band Scream. After it disbanded, he was invited to audition for the open drummer slot in Nirvana, then an up-and-coming Seattle-based band. Not long after, Nirvana recorded and released “Nevermind,” an industry-topping smash that tilted the axis of mainstream taste toward angsty rock.

Butch Vig, who produced the 1991 “Nevermind,” recalled Kurt Cobain hyping up Grohl as “the world’s greatest drummer,” and being blown away by the force of his playing in the studio. “But the thing that struck me was he had this unbelievable energy to him — he brought so much life and power to the band, but also some levity,” Vig said. “As the band evolved, and became this massive success, I could see a lot of the weight of the world being internalized in Kurt, and Dave continued to bring a sense of humor and joy to what Nirvana was doing.”

After Cobain’s 1994 suicide, Grohl was offered several other drumming jobs, including a full-time role with Tom Petty, but decided to pursue his own solo project: Foo Fighters, its name cribbed from a World War II phrase for U.F.O.s. He ended up playing every instrument on what would become the group’s 1995 debut album and recruited the ex-Nirvana guitarist Pat Smear, as well as the bassist Nate Mendel and the drummer William Goldsmith of the proto-emo group Sunny Day Real Estate to form a touring band.

From the beginning, the specter of Nirvana hung over Grohl’s new endeavor. Fans at early Foo shows would clamor to hear “Marigold,” a Grohl-sung Nirvana B-side, and speculate freely about any potential reference to Cobain’s death in his lyrics. But Grohl found a way to take it in stride, which was no easy thing. “We carried that on our backs from the first rehearsal,” he said. “The last thing you want in any situation is, upon first meeting someone, have them ask you a question about the most painful time in your entire life.”

by Jeremy Gordon, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Magdalena Wosinska for The New York Times

Is Keanu Reeves Sandra Bullock's Son?

Is Keanu Reeves Sandra Bullock’s Son? (Snopes)

Image: Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images

[ed. The #1 trending topic on Snopes' myth-busting website. (I grieve for humanity) However this quote by Carl Sagan did check out:]

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

A Chance to Redeem Journalism

What the next editor of the Washington Post (or the New York Times) should tell reporters.

The newly announced resignation of Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron, the abrupt stepping-down of Los Angeles Times executive editor Norman Pearlstine in December, and the highly anticipated departure of New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet (one hopes imminently) combine to create an epic moment of reckoning for these highly influential news organizations.

A new generation of leaders is coming! And they have a lot of urgent repair work ahead of them. That includes abandoning the failed, anachronistic notions of objectivity under which they have operated for so long, recognizing and rejecting establishment whiteness, and finding dramatically more effective ways to create an informed electorate.

Nowhere are those challenges more critical than when it comes to reporting about politics and government. So as my way of helping out, I've written a speech for the next boss to give to their political staffs. It goes like this:

Hi!

It's so nice to be here. I'm looking forward to working with all of you amazing reporters and editors. You've all shown you're capable of incredible work, and I respect you enormously.

But at the same time, my arrival here is an inflection point.

It's impossible to look out on the current state of political discourse in this country and think that we are succeeding in our core mission of creating an informed electorate.

It's impossible to look out at the looming and in some cases existential challenges facing our republic and our globe — among them the pandemic, climate change, income inequality, racial injustice, the rise of disinformation and ethnic nationalism — and think that it's OK for us to just keep doing what we've been doing.

So let me tell you a bit about what we need to do differently.

First of all, we're going to rebrand you. Effective today, you are no longer political reporters (and editors); you are government reporters (and editors). That's an important distinction, because it frees you to cover what is happening in Washington in the context of whether it is serving the people well, rather than which party is winning.

Historically, we have allowed our political journalism to be framed by the two parties. That has always created huge distortions, but never like it does today. Two-party framing limits us to covering what the leaders of those two sides consider in their interests. And because it is appropriately not our job to take sides in partisan politics, we have felt an obligation to treat them both more or less equally.

Both parties are corrupted by money, which has badly perverted the debate for a long time. But one party, you have certainly noticed, has over the last decade or two descended into a froth of racism, grievance and reality-denial. Asking you to triangulate between today's Democrats and today's Republicans is effectively asking you to lobotomize yourself. I'm against that.

Defining our job as "not taking sides between the two parties" has also empowered bad-faith critics to accuse us of bias when we are simply calling out the truth. We will not take sides with one political party or the other, ever. But we will proudly, enthusiastically, take the side of wide-ranging, fact-based debate.

While we shouldn't pretend we know the answers, we should just stop pretending we don't know what the problems are. Indeed, your main job now is to publicly identify those problems, consider diverse views respectfully, ask hard questions of people on every side, demand evidence, explore intent and write up what you've learned. Who is proposing intelligent solutions? Who is blocking them? And why?

And rather than obsess on bipartisanship, we should recognize that the solutions we need — and, indeed, the American common ground — sometimes lie outside the current Democratic-Republican axis, rather than at its middle, which opens up a world of interesting political-journalism avenues.

Political journalism as we have practiced it also too often emphasizes strategy over substance. It focuses on minor, incremental changes rather than the distance from the desirable or necessary goal. It obfuscates rather than clarifies the actual problems and the potential solutions.

Who's winning today's messaging wars is a story that may get you a lot of tweets, but in the greater scheme of things it means nothing. It adds no value. It's a distraction from what matters to the public. It also distracts you from more important work.

Tiresomely chronicling who's up and who's down actually ends up normalizing the status quo. I ask you to consider taking as a baseline the view that there is urgent need for dramatic, powerful action from Washington, not just when it comes to the pandemic and the economic collapse, but regarding climate change and pollution, racial inequities, the broken immigration system, affordable health care, collapsing infrastructure, toxic monopolies and more.

Then you get to help set the national agenda, based on what your reporting leads you to conclude that the people want, need and deserve.

by Dan Froomkin, Salon |  Read more:

Image: Eric Baradat/AFP via Getty Images
[ed. Another call for more professionalism, which we definitely need. But how did good journalism become so rare that it needs this kind of reminding (over and over)? Shouldn't this be like, basic? As long as media business models rely on clicks for revenue it'll always be a race to the bottom, and good journalism, even in the idealized version imagined above, has to compete with a diverse (and expanding) media landscape, across multiple platforms. We'll see.]

Bryan Schutmaat, Tonopah, Nevada, from the series Grays the Mountain Sends, 2011
via: American Geography

[ed. See also: An Era of Emergencies is Upon Us and We Cannot Look Away (LitHub).]

via:

Cancer Precisely Diagnosed Using a Urine Test and AI

Prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers among men. Patients are determined to have prostate cancer primarily based on PSA, a cancer factor in blood. However, as diagnostic accuracy is as low as 30%, a considerable number of patients undergo additional invasive biopsy and thus suffer from resultant side effects, such as bleeding and pain.

The Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) announced that the collaborative research team led by Dr. Kwan Hyi Lee from the Biomaterials Research Center and Professor In Gab Jeong from Asan Medical Center developed a technique for diagnosing prostate cancer from urine within only 20 minutes with almost 100% accuracy. The research team developed this technique by introducing a smart AI analysis method to an electrical-signal-based ultrasensitive biosensor.

As a noninvasive method, a diagnostic test using urine is convenient for patients and does not need invasive biopsy, thereby diagnosing cancer without side effects. However, as the concentration of cancer factors is low in urine, urine-based biosensors are only used for classifying risk groups rather than for precise diagnosis thus far.

Dr. Lee's team at the KIST has been working toward developing a technique for diagnosing disease from urine with an electrical-signal-based ultrasensitive biosensor. An approach using a single cancer factor associated with a cancer diagnosis was limited in increasing the diagnostic accuracy to over 90%. However, to overcome this limitation, the team simultaneously used different kinds of cancer factors instead of using only one to enhance the diagnostic accuracy innovatively.

The team developed an ultrasensitive semiconductor sensor system capable of simultaneously measuring trace amounts of four selected cancer factors in urine for diagnosing prostate cancer. They trained AI by using the correlation between the four cancer factors, which were obtained from the developed sensor. The trained AI algorithm was then used to identify those with prostate cancer by analyzing complex patterns of the detected signals. The diagnosis of prostate cancer by utilizing the AI analysis successfully detected 76 urinary samples with almost 100 percent accuracy.

"For patients who need surgery and/or treatments, cancer will be diagnosed with high accuracy by using urine to minimize unnecessary biopsy and treatments, which can dramatically reduce medical costs and medical staff's fatigue," Professor Jeong at Asan Medical Center said. "This research developed a smart biosensor that can rapidly diagnose prostate cancer with almost 100 percent accuracy only through a urine test, and it can be further used in the precise diagnoses of other cancers via a urine test," Dr. Lee at the KIST said.

by National Research Council of Science & Technology, Phys.org | Read more:
Image: Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST)

[ed. Not sure what an electrical-signal-based ultrasensitive biosensor is. We'll see how it performs in more widespread trials.]

Defund the Global Policeman

Since Memorial Day, when cops in Minneapolis murdered George Floyd, thousands of protesters across the United States have demanded that their elected officials “defund the police.” It is difficult to imagine Donald Trump affirming, rather than mocking, this call. Yet in 2018 the President made a surprise Christmas visit to troops stationed at Ayn al Asad Air Base, in Iraq’s Anbar Province, and declared that the United States would cease to be the “policeman of the world.”

Trump was not the first President to make such a declaration. All three of his predecessors made similar claims about reining in the global policeman, a term that usually refers to the US propensity to deploy its naval armadas, spy satellites, infantry battalions, and supersonic jets to regulate distant disputes. Trump further claimed, during his visit to the air base, that other countries were “going to have to start paying for it,” meaning for US protection. If Trump didn’t want to entirely defund the global policeman, he at least wanted others to foot the bill. But this wish betrayed a misunderstanding of the way that the United States projects force overseas. The US global policeman functions in four primary ways. Three are relatively well known: first and most obvious, there are direct military operations launched from the approximately eight hundred US bases around the world, such as Trump’s drone strike on the Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani; second, there are joint operations and advisory missions, which President Obama expanded dramatically in Africa and the Middle East; and third, there are arms exports, highlighted by the Trump-Ukraine scandal. The fourth and perhaps least-discussed method is “security assistance,” which the US offers to dozens of countries, and which consists of training and technical upgrades for other nations’ military and police forces.

It is through security assistance that the United States puts the police in global policeman — a project that the country uses to manipulate others into achieving its own geopolitical goals. Far cheaper and less flashy than typical US military missions, security assistance’s primary domains of action are nonmilitary: terrorism and narcotics trafficking. In addressing these threats, the United States sends the militaries of the countries it aids on missions that look much more like law enforcement than combat. Increasingly trained in biometrics and forensics and reliant on predictive algorithms, soldiers are assigned to control borders, stop smuggling, eradicate drug crops, and prevent terror attacks.

If US security assistance is turning soldiers around the globe into cops, it is also sending US police experts around the globe to work with uniformed police in dozens of countries. The global policeman relies on local policemen. In addition to the troops Clinton, Bush II, and Obama placed on the ground and the air strikes they ordered, each committed to deploying police experts to other countries. Such commitments are diffuse and open-ended. As a result, the global policeman seems to run autonomously. No single agency controls the numerous programs that compose the colossus. Each day the global policeman assembles itself anew through the work of hundreds of global policemen (and policewomen): current and former US police officers who train, equip, and advise other countries’ police. Cops have become frontline US diplomats. Policing today is a triumph of globalization.

As many hope for a post-Trump future, reenvisioning US foreign policy seems possible, even if Senator Bernie Sanders — the Democratic candidate who was most critical of the way the United States acts as global policeman — is no longer in the running for the White House. Figuring out how to disassemble the global policeman, a common goal among many on the left, will require understanding what it is, how it evolved, and why it remains so intractable. Yet most existing critiques of the global policeman by liberal or centrist Democrats focus on its disorganization, hoping that US foreign policy can be rationalized to better align means and ends, accepting rather than transforming or rejecting the imperative of US primacy. This technocratic critique of the messy bureaucracy of security assistance amounts only to an attempt to apply a finer chisel, not a hammer, to the policing colossus.

The most widespread political uprising in the United States in decades, spurred by Floyd’s killing, provides guidance for a different approach. Calls to defund the police reject incrementalism in changing how police operate because they repudiate police primacy on city streets. These calls often issue from an abolitionist framework that would divest from coercive state violence and invest in new institutions to promote human flourishing within a new social covenant based on racial and social justice. The problem with US foreign policy — represented in the figure of the global policeman — is that it is like a fully resourced police department in a time of dwindling fears of crime: robustly equipped with sophisticated tools to answer any exigency with force, even as the strategic and political value of using such lethal force recedes. Just as the uprisings urged cities to find ways to resolve conflicts without bullets or batons, they also show it is time for the country to relinquish its status as global policeman. Whether at home or abroad, doing so will require forfeiting a reliance on cops as the universal solvent for social problems. (...)

The Globalization of US policing both extends outward and reverberates inward. Today’s global policeman may be the world’s largest organism with no brain or nervous system. The operations of this acephalous being exceed enumeration, in part because reporting requirements are thin and often ignored. But it has several identifiable tentacles.

by Stuart Schrader, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: Yarisal & Kublitz, Another Peel Another Deal. 2014

[ed. See also: Demilitarizing Our Democracy (Tom Dispatch). Excerpt:]

This month’s insurrection at the Capitol revealed the dismal failure of the Capitol Police and the Department of Defense to use their expertise and resources to thwart a clear and present danger to our democracy. As the government reform group Public Citizen tweeted, “If you’re spending $740,000,000,000 annually on ‘defense’ but fascists dressed for the renaissance fair can still storm the Capitol as they please, maybe it’s time to rethink national security?”

At a time of acute concern about the health of our democracy, any such rethinking must, among other things, focus on strengthening the authority of civilians and civilian institutions over the military in an American world where almost the only subject the two parties in Congress can agree on is putting up ever more money for the Pentagon. This means so many in our political system need to wean themselves from the counterproductive habit of reflexively seeking out military or retired military voices to validate them on issues ranging from public health to border security that should be quite outside the military’s purview.

It’s certainly one of the stranger phenomena of our era: after 20 years of endless war in which trillions of dollars were spent and hundreds of thousands died on all sides without the U.S. military achieving anything approaching victory, the Pentagon continues to be funded at staggering levels, while funding to deal with the greatest threats to our safety and “national security” — from the pandemic to climate change to white supremacy — proves woefully inadequate. In good times and bad, the U.S. military and the “industrial complex” that surrounds it, which President Dwight D. Eisenhower first warned us about in 1961, continue to maintain a central role in Washington, even though they’re remarkably irrelevant to the biggest challenges facing our democracy.

Fanny Hagdahl Sörebo
via:

Never Forget

The Horrors: A Catalog of Trump's Worst Cruelites, Collusions, Corruptions, and Crimes.

The Complete Listing: Atrocities 1-1,056

Early in President Trump’s term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the head-spinning number of misdeeds coming from his administration. We called this list a collection of Trump’s cruelties, collusions, and crimes, and it felt urgent then to track them, to ensure these horrors — happening almost daily — would not be forgotten. This election year, amid a harrowing global health, civil rights, humanitarian, and economic crisis, we know it’s never been more critical to note these horrors, to remember them, and to do all in our power to reverse them.
- - -
Various writers have compiled this list during the course of the Trump administration. Their work has been guided by invaluable journalistic resources, including WTFJHT, NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other sources, to whom we are grateful.

ATROCITY KEY

– Sexual Misconduct, Harassment, & Bullying
– White Supremacy, Racism, Homophobia, Transphobia, & Xenophobia
– Public Statements / Tweets
– Collusion with Russia & Obstruction of Justice
– Trump Staff & Administration
– Trump Family Business Dealings
– Policy
– Environment
- - -
JUMP TO JANUARY 2021
JUMP TO 2020
JUMP TO 2019
JUMP TO 2018
JUMP TO 2017
- - -
by John McMurtrie, Ben Parker, Stephanie Steinbrecher Kelsey Ronan, Amy Sumerton, Rachel Villa, and Sopie DuRose, McSweeny's |  Read more:

[ed. To download a PDF of this entire list, click here.]

[ed. It's like being held hostage for the last four years.]

Tawaraya Sotatsu, Four Seasons Flowers and Flowers Senzai Wakamaki
via:

Julian Lage, Scott Colley & Kenny Wollesen

 

[ed. Insane.]

Filibuster: Weapon of Mass Obstruction

It’s obvious that McConnell’s commitment to the filibuster is instrumental. The filibuster on executive branch nominations of appointees and federal judges was sacred — he condemned the Democrats’ use of the “nuclear option” to get rid of it in 2013 — until President Trump needed Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court and then it was bye-bye to the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees that McConnell’s predecessor as Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, had left intact. If the reconciliation process didn’t exist, and Republicans needed 60 votes for upper-income tax cuts, there’s almost no doubt McConnell would have killed the legislative filibuster in 2017, for the sake of his party’s signature priority.

I’m not actually that interested in McConnell’s hypocrisy. I’m interested in his history. To make his case for the indispensable importance of the legislative filibuster, McConnell has essentially rewritten the history of the Senate. He has to create a new narrative to serve his current interests.

The truth is that the filibuster was an accident; an extra-constitutional innovation that lay dormant for a generation after its unintentional creation during the Jefferson administration. For most of the Senate’s history after the Civil War, filibusters were rare, deployed as the Southern weapon of choice against civil rights legislation, and an occasional tool of partisan obstruction.

Far from necessary, the filibuster is extraneous. Everything it is said to encourage — debate, deliberation, consensus building — is already accomplished by the structure of the chamber itself, insofar as it happens at all.

In the form it takes today, the filibuster doesn’t make the Senate work the way the framers intended. Instead, it makes the Senate a nearly insurmountable obstacle to most legislative business. And that, in turn, has made Congress inert and dysfunctional to the point of disrupting the constitutional balance of power. Legislation that deserves a debate never reaches the floor; coalitions that could form never get off the ground.

In quoting Madison, McConnell frames the filibuster as part of our constitutional inheritance. It is not. The filibuster isn’t in the Constitution. The Senate, like the House of Representatives, was meant to run on majority rule.

Remember, the framers had direct experience with supermajority government. Under the Articles of Confederation, each state had equal representation and it took a two-thirds vote of the states for Congress to exercise its enumerated powers. Without the consent of nine states (out of 13), Congress could not enter treaties, appropriate funds or borrow money. And the bar to amendment, unanimity, was even higher. The articles were such a disaster that, rather than try to amend them, a group of influential elites decided to scrap them altogether.

For a taste of this frustration, read Alexander Hamilton in Federalist no. 22, which contains a fierce condemnation of supermajority rule as it was under the articles:

The necessity of unanimity in public bodies, or of something approaching toward it, has been founded upon a supposition that it would contribute to security. But its real operation is to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent, or corrupt junto, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.

Hamilton is especially angry with the effect of the supermajority requirement on governance.

In those emergencies of a nation, in which the goodness or badness, the weakness or strength of its government, is of the greatest importance, there is commonly a necessity for action. The public business must, in some way or other, go forward. If a pertinacious minority can control the opinion of a majority, respecting the best mode of conducting it, the majority, in order that something may be done, must conform to the views of the minority; and thus the sense of the smaller number will overrule that of the greater, and give a tone to the national proceedings. Hence, tedious delays; continual negotiation and intrigue; contemptible compromises of the public good.

Delegates to the constitutional convention considered and rejected supermajority requirements for navigation acts (concerning ships and shipping), regulation of interstate commerce and the raising of armies. Majorities would have the final say everywhere except for treaties, amendments and conviction in an impeachment trial.

To make the Senate slow-moving and deliberative, the framers would not raise barriers to action so much as they would insulate the body from short-term democratic accountability. That meant indirect election by state legislatures, staggered terms of six years and a small membership of two senators per state. And at ratification, that is where the Senate stood: a self-consciously aristocratic body meant to check the House of Representatives and oversee the executive branch, confirming its appointments and ratifying its foreign agreements. (...)

The filibuster as we understand it developed in the 20th century. In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson called on Senate Democrats to reform the filibuster as a war measure after Republicans successfully filibustered a bill to arm merchant ships. Democrats obliged and created a “cloture” rule to end debate with a two-thirds vote of the chamber. In 1975, the Senate reduced that threshold from two-thirds to three-fifths, or 60 votes in a 100-member body.

Throughout this time, filibusters were uncommon. It was perfectly possible for the Senate to debate, deliberate and come to consensus without the supermajority requirement McConnell and the Republican caucus have imposed on virtually all legislation since 2009.

The point of comparison for the Senate as McConnell has shaped it is the middle of the 20th century, when a conservative coalition of Republicans and Dixiecrats made the chamber a graveyard of liberal legislation and social reform. Consensus didn’t matter. Power did. And it wasn’t until liberals wrested power from this coalition — in the House as well as the Senate — that they could take the initiative and begin work on an otherwise popular agenda.

There is no question the Senate is supposed to be slow, even sluggish. But it’s not supposed to be an endless bottleneck. The framers wanted stability in government, not stagnation. What we have now, with the filibuster intact, is a Senate that can barely move.

by Jamelle Bouie, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Erin Schaff/The New York Times

The Coup We Are Not Talking About

Two decades ago, the American government left democracy’s front door open to California’s fledgling internet companies, a cozy fire lit in welcome. In the years that followed, a surveillance society flourished in those rooms, a social vision born in the distinct but reciprocal needs of public intelligence agencies and private internet companies, both spellbound by a dream of total information awareness. Twenty years later, the fire has jumped the screen, and on Jan. 6, it threatened to burn down democracy’s house.

I have spent exactly 42 years studying the rise of the digital as an economic force driving our transformation into an information civilization. Over the last two decades, I’ve observed the consequences of this surprising political-economic fraternity as those young companies morphed into surveillance empires powered by global architectures of behavioral monitoring, analysis, targeting and prediction that I have called surveillance capitalism. On the strength of their surveillance capabilities and for the sake of their surveillance profits, the new empires engineered a fundamentally anti-democratic epistemic coup marked by unprecedented concentrations of knowledge about us and the unaccountable power that accrues to such knowledge.

In an information civilization, societies are defined by questions of knowledge — how it is distributed, the authority that governs its distribution and the power that protects that authority. Who knows? Who decides who knows? Who decides who decides who knows? Surveillance capitalists now hold the answers to each question, though we never elected them to govern. This is the essence of the epistemic coup. They claim the authority to decide who knows by asserting ownership rights over our personal information and defend that authority with the power to control critical information systems and infrastructures.

The horrific depths of Donald Trump’s attempted political coup ride the wave of this shadow coup, prosecuted over the last two decades by the antisocial media we once welcomed as agents of liberation. On Inauguration Day, President Biden said that “democracy has prevailed” and promised to restore the value of truth to its rightful place in democratic society. Nevertheless, democracy and truth remain under the highest level of threat until we defeat surveillance capitalism’s other coup.

The epistemic coup proceeds in four stages.

The first is the appropriation of epistemic rights, which lays the foundation for all that follows. Surveillance capitalism originates in the discovery that companies can stake a claim to people’s lives as free raw material for the extraction of behavioral data, which they then declare their private property.

The second stage is marked by a sharp rise in epistemic inequality, defined as the difference between what I can know and what can be known about me. The third stage, which we are living through now, introduces epistemic chaos caused by the profit-driven algorithmic amplification, dissemination and microtargeting of corrupt information, much of it produced by coordinated schemes of disinformation. Its effects are felt in the real world, where they splinter shared reality, poison social discourse, paralyze democratic politics and sometimes instigate violence and death.

In the fourth stage, epistemic dominance is institutionalized, overriding democratic governance with computational governance by private surveillance capital. The machines know, and the systems decide, directed and sustained by the illegitimate authority and anti-democratic power of private surveillance capital. Each stage builds on the last. Epistemic chaos prepares the ground for epistemic dominance by weakening democratic society — all too plain in the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

We live in the digital century during the formative years of information civilization. Our time is comparable to the early era of industrialization, when owners had all the power, their property rights privileged above all other considerations. The intolerable truth of our current condition is that America and most other liberal democracies have, so far, ceded the ownership and operation of all things digital to the political economics of private surveillance capital, which now vies with democracy over the fundamental rights and principles that will define our social order in this century.

This past year of pandemic misery and Trumpist autocracy magnified the effects of the epistemic coup, revealing the murderous potential of antisocial media long before Jan. 6. Will the growing recognition of this other coup and its threats to democratic societies finally force us to reckon with the inconvenient truth that has loomed over the last two decades? We may have democracy, or we may have surveillance society, but we cannot have both. A democratic surveillance society is an existential and political impossibility. (...)

The Economics and Politics of Epistemic Chaos

To understand the economics of epistemic chaos, it’s important to know that surveillance capitalism’s operations have no formal interest in facts. All data is welcomed as equivalent, though not all of it is equal. Extraction operations proceed with the discipline of the Cyclops, voraciously consuming everything it can see and radically indifferent to meaning, facts and truth.

In a leaked memo, a Facebook executive, Andrew Bosworth, describes this willful disregard for truth and meaning: “We connect people. That can be good if they make it positive. Maybe someone finds love. … That can be bad if they make it negative. … Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack. … The ugly truth is … anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.”

In other words, asking a surveillance extractor to reject content is like asking a coal-mining operation to discard containers of coal because it’s too dirty. This is why content moderation is a last resort, a public-relations operation in the spirit of ExxonMobil’s social responsibility messaging. In Facebook’s case, data triage is undertaken either to minimize the risk of user withdrawal or to avoid political sanctions. Both aim to increase rather than diminish data flows. The extraction imperative combined with radical indifference to produce systems that ceaselessly escalate the scale of engagement but don’t care what engages you.

I’m homing in now on Facebook not because it’s the only perpetrator of epistemic chaos but because it’s the largest social media company and its consequences reach farthest.

The economics of surveillance capitalism begot the extractive Cyclops, turning Facebook into an advertising juggernaut and a killing field for truth. Then an amoral Mr. Trump became president, demanding the right to lie at scale. Destructive economics merged with political appeasement, and everything became infinitely worse.

by Shoshana Zuboff, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

[ed. Remember, paywall advice.]

Miley Cyrus

[ed. Don't judge. The girl can sing and really seems be coming into her own these days (probably teach a Master class in marketing in her spare time).]

The Pandemic Has Erased Entire Categories of Friendship

American culture does not have many words to describe different levels or types of friendship, but for our purposes, sociology does provide a useful concept: weak ties. The term was coined in 1973 by the Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter, and it comprises acquaintances, people you see infrequently, and near strangers with whom you share some familiarity. They’re the people on the periphery of your life—the guy who’s always at the gym at the same time as you, the barista who starts making your usual order while you’re still at the back of the line, the co-worker from another department with whom you make small talk on the elevator. They’re also people you might have never directly met, but you share something important in common—you go to the same concerts, or live in the same neighborhood and frequent the same local businesses. You might not consider all of your weak ties friends, at least in the common use of the word, but they’re often people with whom you’re friendly. Most people are familiar with the idea of an inner circle; Granovetter posited that we also have an outer circle, vital to our social health in its own ways.

During the past year, it’s often felt like the pandemic has come for all but the closest of my close ties. There are people on the outer periphery of my life for whom the concept of “keeping up” makes little sense, but there are also lots of friends and acquaintances—people I could theoretically hang out with outdoors or see on videochat, but with whom those tools just don’t feel right. In my life, this perception seems to be largely mutual—I am not turning down invites from these folks for Zoom catch-ups and walks in the park. Instead, our affection for each other is in a period of suspended animation, alongside indoor dining and international travel. Sometimes we respond to each other’s Instagram Stories.

None of the experts I spoke with had a good term for this kind of middle ground—the weaker points of Granovetter’s proposed inner circle and the strongest of the weak ties—except for the general one. “Friend is a very promiscuous word,” William Rawlins, a communications professor at Ohio University who studies friendship, told me. “Do we have a word for this array of friends that aren’t our close friends? I’m not sure we do, and I’m not sure we should.” (...)

Friends are sometimes delineated by the ways we met or the things we do together—work friends, old college buddies, beer-league-softball teammates—but they’re all friends, and Rawlins thinks that’s for the best. “Living well isn’t some cloistered retreat with just a few folks,” he told me. “The way worlds are created is by people sharing with and recognizing each other.” Many different kinds of relationships are important, he says, and man does not thrive on close friendships alone.

This realization, new to me, is also somewhat new in the general understanding of human behavior. Close relationships were long thought to be the essential component of humans’ social well-being, but Granovetter’s research led him to a conclusion that was at the time groundbreaking and is still, to many people, counterintuitive: Casual friends and acquaintances can be as important to well-being as family, romantic partners, and your closest friends. In his initial study, for example, he found that the majority of people who got new jobs through social connections did so through people on the periphery of their lives, not close relations.

Some of the most obvious consequences of our extended social pause could indeed play out in the professional realm. I started hearing these concerns months ago, while writing a story on how working from home affects people’s careers. According to the experts I spoke with, losing the incidental, repeated social interactions that physical workplaces foster can make it especially difficult for young people and new hires to establish themselves within the complex social hierarchy of a workplace. Losing them can make it harder to progress in work as a whole, access development opportunities, and be recognized for your contributions. (After all, no one can see you or what you’re doing.) These kinds of setbacks early in professional life can be especially devastating, because the losses tend to compound—fall behind right out of the gate, and you’re more likely to stay there.

The loss of these interactions can make the day-to-day realities of work more frustrating, too, and can fray previously pleasant relationships. In a recent study, Andrew Guydish, a doctoral candidate in psychology at UC Santa Cruz, looked at the effects of what he calls conversational reciprocity—how much each participant in a conversation talks while one is directing the other to complete a task. He found that in these situations—which often crop up between managers and employees at work—pairs of people tended to use unstructured time, if it were available, to balance the interaction. When that happened, both people reported feeling happier and more satisfied afterward.

Now Guydish worries that reciprocity has been largely lost. “Zoom calls usually have a very defined goal, and with that goal comes defined expectations in terms of who’s going to talk,” he told me. “Other people sit by, and they don’t get their opportunity to give their two cents. That kind of just leaves everybody with this overwhelming sense of almost isolation, in a way.”

This loss of reciprocity has extended to nondigital life. For example, friendly chats between customers and delivery guys, bartenders, or other service workers are rarer in a world of contactless delivery and curbside pickup. In normal times, those brief encounters tend to be good for tips and Yelp reviews, and they give otherwise rote interactions a more pleasant, human texture for both parties. Strip out the humanity, and there’s nothing but the transaction left.

The psychological effects of losing all but our closest ties can be profound. Peripheral connections tether us to the world at large; without them, people sink into the compounding sameness of closed networks. Regular interaction with people outside our inner circle “just makes us feel more like part of a community, or part of something bigger,” Gillian Sandstrom, a social psychologist at the University of Essex, told me. People on the peripheries of our lives introduce us to new ideas, new information, new opportunities, and other new people. If variety is the spice of life, these relationships are the conduit for it.

by Amanda Mull, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Valerie Chiang

Hawaii's Food System is Broken. Now is the Time to Fix It

Kalany Omengkar

Image: via:
Hawaii’s Food System Is Broken. Now Is The Time To Fix It (Honolulu Civil Beat)

Precedent and the Conservative Court

In the spring of 2019, the Supreme Court's new majority, which by then included two Trump appointees, overturned one of the Court's decades-old precedents. In Nevada v. Hall, decided in 1979, the Court had ruled one state could not claim sovereign immunity in another state's courts. The Court's 2019 majority, in an opinion authored by Justice Clarence Thomas, concluded that Hall had misread the historical record and that its rule had survived as an outlier.

For Justice Stephen Breyer, who was in the minority, this rationale was not enough. "[J]udges may be tempted to seize every opportunity to overrule cases they believe to have been wrongly decided," he wrote, "[b]ut the law can retain the necessary stability only if this Court resists that temptation." He ended on a foreboding note: "Today's decision can only cause one to wonder which cases the Court will overrule next." (...)

Indeed, by historical standards, the Roberts Court has been remarkably unwilling to overturn past decisions. The Warren and Burger Courts overturned an average of four Supreme Court precedents each term. Even when counting some of its more perplexing statements as overrulings — including declarations that "the court of history" had overruled the 1944 decision of Korematsu v. United States and that the 1896 ruling of Ward v. Race Horse had been "methodically repudiated" — the Roberts Court has overturned, on average, a little over one decision per term.

More recently, some signs have emerged of the Court's increasing readiness to overturn precedent. Since Justice Gorsuch joined the Court in 2017, the average is up to three overrulings per term. The appointment of Gorsuch, along with those of Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, have and will continue to shift the intellectual makeup of the Court.

The recent overrulings have provided an opportunity for the justices to reason about the nature and authority of judicial precedent. To the nation's great benefit, several justices in the conservative majority have forthrightly described the conditions under which they would vote to overrule precedent. By publicly elaborating criteria for overruling past decisions, these justices have provided a way for the governed to hold them accountable to a neutral set of principles. They also offer some valuable clues as to which way the Court's new majority may be headed and the internal divisions that may characterize it. More important still, their discussions illuminate the role and the limits of judicial authority in our constitutional system.

The Precedent Debates

The Court's deference to its own precedents under the doctrine of stare decisis serves many important functions. It pushes the justices to learn from past example. It allows justices who disagree strongly about fundamental interpretive questions to find points of agreement. While the originalist and the living constitutionalist may disagree about the Constitution, precedent allows each to recognize that, as a factual matter, the Court has decided a given constitutional question before and then permits them to agree to let it stand. Perhaps most important, precedent is good for public faith in the Court as a court of law. If changes in the makeup of the Court caused a sea change in the law, the Court would increasingly resemble a legislature, weakening the case for its independence from electoral politics.

It is an old joke, though, that stare decisis is Latin for "stand by things decided when it suits our purposes." Every justice believes some opinions must be overruled some of the time — the question is which ones those are. For this reason, Justice Breyer's contention that stare decisis is essential because it constrains judges from deciding cases based on the vagaries of preference may be exactly wrong. A judge who believes a past decision was erroneous as law the day it was decided but likes the decision as policy would find that stare decisis enables him to reach his preferred result and uphold the past decision. The norm of adherence to precedent may therefore expand, not constrain, judicial discretion. What is needed to constrain judicial caprice, then, is not the call of mere stare decisis, but rather a clear, cross-cutting test for when precedent constrains a judge — and, equally significant, when it does not.

by Jeremy Rozansky, National Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Telework's Tax Mess

As teleworkers flit from city to city, they're creating a huge tax mess.

Why it matters: Our tax laws aren't built for telecommuting, and this new way of working could have dire implications for city and state budgets.

• "There’s gonna be a shakeout of what economic activity looks like and where it’s going to get done, and that’s going to require cities to rethink what their tax base looks like," says Kim Rueben of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

The backdrop: By and large, Americans owe income taxes where they work, Rueben notes.

• Here's a good example: Professional baseball players owe tax money in the states where their away games take place. 

• So if a New Hampshire resident is commuting to a Massachusetts-based company, that person will pay taxes to Massachusetts. 

• If the worker is only commuting four out of five days a week, they'll owe Massachusetts taxes on four-fifths of their income, says Rueben.

The pandemic upended that system. Now, that same New Hampshire resident is following stay-at-home orders and working from home every day. So does that worker owe Massachusetts any tax money?

It's a huge question that has reached the Supreme Court.

• New Hampshire, which doesn't have an income tax, is suing Massachusetts for asking telecommuters to pay income taxes on work completed outside of Massachusetts.

• But Massachusetts is saying that work would have been done within its state if not for the pandemic and is asking out-of-state commuters to pay taxes on the days they would have come to the office. (...)

The big picture: The pandemic has exposed our tax laws' inability to handle remote work at scale — which is sure to be a permanent side effect of this time period.

• Even if people choose not to work from home 100% of the time, many will cut down the number of days in the office. That means they may move out of expensive cities and spend less time at local businesses.

• So in addition to potential income tax revenue loss, cities may see diminished property and sales tax revenue, too, says Jed Kolko, chief economist at the jobs site Indeed.

by Erica Pandey, Axios | Read more:
Image: Annelise Capossela/Axios

The Face of the NYSE

Mirror, mirror: Who’s the most-photographed NYSE trader of them all? (Financial News)

Image: AFP

[ed. This guy. In nearly every photo of the NY Stock Exchange and across a wide range of financial articles, you can't escape him. It finally ocurred to me to do a Google search to see if I was hallucinating, and, out to curiosity, determine if he really is a trader and not just some character actor (he is a trader). But...]

The irony is that even as human traders have been de-emphasised at exchanges due to the rise of electronic trading, the need for photos of them remains stronger than ever. Every markets article on a website needs some kind of image. But these days there are only 375 trading-firm employees on the floor of the exchange, according to a spokeswoman for NYSE, which is part of Intercontinental Exchange. In the 1990s, such employees numbered in the thousands.

That lack of activity on the floor has led some news organizations to believe that all the action shots of traders are misleading. In 2014, Jeremy Olshan, editor in chief of MarketWatch, a Wall Street Journal sister website, banned photos of the NYSE floor for that reason. “The Big Board,” he explained then, “is now little more than a Big Tent for a phony media circus of photo-ops and cable-news talking heads.” The ban remains in effect today.

Gamestop and the Revenge of the Retail Trader

Gamestop shares are set to rally 70% this morning when trading starts, and AMC shares opened up 300%, extending a run that has perplexed market observers, irked hedge funds, and generally made crypto’s recent gains appear soft and weak.

Being a retail trader is mostly being a sucker, hoping to best the markets while lacking the infrastructure, access, and information that professionals enjoy. Hell, most professional fund managers that regular folks can invest in fail to beat the market. That’s one reason why index funds and other passive investments that merely track aggregate performance have grown so much in recent years; why pay more to have someone make you less money than simply making the same returns as the S&P 500?

Things have changed some in recent years. Robinhood blew up the trading fee economy, and now along with a host of similar companies — Public.com with its social focus, Freetrade in the UK, and so forth — has made retail investing far more accessible than it was before to more folks. And we’re all trapped inside. And a rude, jokey Reddit forum has gone from in-nerd joke to front-page news after its users started to push their weight around.

It’s an old saw that back in the dotcom boom traders would congregate in chat rooms to share tips, lie to each other, and try to pump their own equities higher. That all still happens. But what has changed is that the combination of mature social platforms and free trading has at once boosted access to the public markets while Reddit and other online congregation points have provided a simpler way for retail investors, the hoi polloi, to fuck around and make other people find out. (...)

This is what has happened with Gamestop, a company that until recently was unnotable, and stuck between a physical retail footprint, the pandemic, and its customers increasingly preferring digital game purchases. It was worth around $4 per share last summer. It started 2021 worth around $18. Now it’s $147.98 after rising 92.7% yesterday, and is up $69.02 this morning, or 46.6%.

How did that happen? No, the company did not get suddenly, radically stronger in short order. Instead, a coterie of Reddit users realized that Gamestop was shorted by more than 100%. That means that investors had bet more shares than existed in the company that it would lose value.

And mostly this would have been fine, a quirk of the market; other highly-shorted stocks can see a majority of their shares sold short, but to see a short-percentage of greater than 100% was eyebrow-raising.

Then came the wager: If big investors had bet more shares than Gamestop had in existence that it would lose value, what would happen if lots of individuals investors — retail interest, as they say — started buying the stock? That might drive its value up, forcing the hedge funds and other big capital pools to decide whether to hold onto their negative bet and take strong paper losses as Gamestop rallied, or cover their short, buying the stock at a higher price than they initially paid for it, losing money. Covering shorts would require buying the stock at high prices, perhaps boosting its value yet again.

It’s the wildest short-squeeze we can recall.

There’s always tension between short-sellers and investors who prefer to make positive wagers. Indeed, shorts are generally hated and the term perma-bear, slang for someone who is chronically worried about the price of assets to the point of distraction,1 is often levied at them.

But a boom in retail investing and social platforms allowing the congregation of disparate individual investors can do quite a lot, it turns out. So, users of the WallStreetBets sub-Reddit started buying Gamestop. And they kept doing so, pushing its price higher and higher.

The result was that big money got smacked in the shorts, literally. CNBC reports that short-sellers have lost more than $5 billion so far thanks to Gamestop’s rapid appreciation on the back of becoming an internet meme.

by Alex Wilhelm, Jonathan Shieber, TechCrunch | Read more:
Image: Eric BVD - Stock.Adobe.com

[ed. See also: GameStop Shares Surge Afresh as Short Sellers Start to Surrender (Yahoo); and (for more than you ever wanted to know): The GameStop Game Never Stops (Bloomberg).]