Homeland Security Tried to Manufacture Fake Terrorists

Section 1. Purpose. The first duty of government is to ensure domestic tranquility and defend the life, property, and rights of its citizens. Over the last 5 weeks, there has been a sustained assault on the life and property of civilians, law enforcement officers, government property, and revered American monuments such as the Lincoln Memorial. Many of the rioters, arsonists, and left-wing extremists who have carried out and supported these acts have explicitly identified themselves with ideologies—such as Marxism—that call for the destruction of the United States system of government. Anarchists and left-wing extremists have sought to advance a fringe ideology that paints the United States of America as fundamentally unjust and have sought to impose that ideology on Americans through violence and mob intimidation. They have led riots in the streets, burned police vehicles, killed and assaulted government officers as well as business owners defending their property, and even seized an area within one city where law and order gave way to anarchy. During the unrest, innocent citizens also have been harmed and killed.  (...)

... Christian figures are now in the crosshairs, too. Recently, an influential activist for one movement that has been prominent in setting the agenda for demonstrations in recent weeks declared that many existing religious depictions of Jesus and the Holy Family should be purged from our places of worship.

Individuals and organizations have the right to peacefully advocate for either the removal or the construction of any monument. But no individual or group has the right to damage, deface, or remove any monument by use of force.

In the midst of these attacks, many State and local governments appear to have lost the ability to distinguish between the lawful exercise of rights to free speech and assembly and unvarnished vandalism. They have surrendered to mob rule, imperiling community safety, allowing for the wholesale violation of our laws, and privileging the violent impulses of the mob over the rights of law-abiding citizens. Worse, they apparently have lost the will or the desire to stand up to the radical fringe and defend the fundamental truth that America is good, her people are virtuous, and that justice prevails in this country to a far greater extent than anywhere else in the world. Some particularly misguided public officials even appear to have accepted the idea that violence can be virtuous and have prevented their police from enforcing the law and protecting public monuments, memorials, and statues from the mob's ropes and graffiti. Executive Order 13933

Homeland Security Admits It Tried to Manufacture Fake Terrorists for Trump

Image: AP

[ed. Executive Orders matter (especially for the people caught up in them). Also, what has 'Homeland Security' done for you or me lately, or ever actually?]

Kazuo Ishiguro: On Being Human

[ed. The conversation at 31:50 - 39:50 seems especially interesting (to me, anyway) when good novels, songs and songwriting are compared to viruses in their ability to lodge somewhere in our brains, forming a soundtrack to our lives and providing insights at different times when we need them.] 

George Booth
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CDC Issues New Opioid Prescribing Guidance

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued new guidance for clinicians on how and when to prescribe opioids for pain. Released Thursday, this revamps the agency's 2016 recommendations which some doctors and patients have criticized for promoting a culture of austerity around opioids.

CDC officials say that doctors, insurers, pharmacies and regulators sometimes misapplied the older guidelines, causing some patients significant harm, including "untreated and undertreated pain, serious withdrawal symptoms, worsening pain outcomes, psychological distress, overdose, and [suicide]," according to the updated guidance.

The 100-page document and its topline recommendation serve as a roadmap for prescribers who are navigating the thorny issue of treating pain, including advice on handling pain relief after surgery and managing chronic pain conditions, which are estimated to affect as many as one in every five people in the U.S.

The 2016 guidelines proved immensely influential in shaping policy — fueling a push by insurers, state medical boards, politicians and federal law enforcement to curb prescribing of opioids.

The fallout, doctors and researchers say, is hard to overstate: a crisis of untreated pain. Many patients with severe chronic pain saw their longstanding prescriptions rapidly reduced or cut off altogether, sometimes with dire consequences, like suicide or overdose as they turned to the tainted supply of illicit drugs.

Federal agencies had tried to course correct, making it clear that the older voluntary guidelines were not intended to become strict policies or laws. But doctors and patient advocates also held out hope that the CDC's updated guidelines would undo some of the unintended consequences of the earlier guidance.

This was clearly on the mind of CDC health officials when they announced the new clinical guidelines on Thursday. (...)

The change in outlook is evident all over the new guidelines, says Dr. Samer Narouze, the president of the American Society of Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine.

"You can tell the culture around the 2016 guidelines was just to cut down opioids, that opioids are bad," he says. "It's the opposite here, you can sense they are more caring more about patients living in pain. It's directed more towards relieving their pain and their suffering."

A new focus on individualized care

Opioid prescribing started to decline in 2012 and that trend continued after the 2016 guidelines were released. There's widespread agreement that opioids should be used cautiously because of the risks associated with addiction and overdose. But today, the majority of overdose deaths are not due to prescription opioids, but rather fentanyl and other illicit drugs. (...)

While the voluntary guidelines are a welcome step, their impact depends largely on how state and federal agencies and other authorities respond to them, says Leo Beletsky, professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University and director of the Health in Justice Action Lab there.

"CDC needs to be a lot more proactive than just putting out this update and trying to walk back some of the misinterpretation of the previous version," he says. The agency needs to work with other federal agencies, he says, including Health and Human Services and the Drug Enforcement Administration, as well as law enforcement to implement these guidelines. (...)

"Most people that I know – and I know a lot of people living with chronic pain – have already been taken off their medication. Doctors are incredibly fearful of prescribing at all." From Steinberg's perspective, the new CDC guidelines remain overly restrictive and won't make much difference to the patients who have already been harmed.

Specific dose and duration limits are out

The most consequential changes in the new guidance come in the form of 12 bullet points that lay out general principles related to prescribing.

Unlike the 2016 version, those takeaways no longer include specific limits on the dose and duration of an opioid prescription that a patient can take, although deeper in the document it does warn against prescribing above a certain threshold. The new recommendations also explicitly caution physicians against rapidly tapering or discontinuing the prescriptions of patients who are already taking opioids — unless there are indications of a life-threatening issue.

Unravelling rigid opioid prescribing policies

It's uncertain if the new guidance will translate into substantive changes for patients who are struggling to have their pain treated.

Many patients currently can't find treatment, in the aftermath of the 2016 guidelines, says Barreveld, because doctors are wary of prescribing at all. (...)

The previous guidelines led to restrictions on prescribing being codified as policy or law. It's not clear those rules will be re-written in light of the new guidelines even though they state they're "not intended to be implemented as absolute limits for policy or practice."

"That is a good idea, and it will have absolutely no effect unless three major agencies take action immediately," says Kertesz. "The DEA, the National Committee for Quality Assurance, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, all three agencies use the dose thresholds from the 2016 guideline as the basis for payment quality metrics and legal investigation."

by Will Stone and Pien Huang, NPR |  Read more:

Image: Jose M. Osorio/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

[ed. About time, but too little too late. As a former opioid patient, the hysterics and political grandstanding to do something about the "opioid crisis" have been frustrating to watch and heartbreaking for the thousands if not millions of patients who've been indiscriminately thrown to the curb. Everybody - politicians, hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, federal agencies, media, everybody - should be ashamed of their complicity in inflicting more pain and suffering on chronic pain patients and making the situation worse.]

George Booth, New Yorker Cartoonist of Sublime Zaniness, Dies at 96

George Booth: George Booth, New Yorker Cartoonist of Sublime Zaniness, Dies at 96

George Booth, the New Yorker cartoonist who created a world of oddballs sharing life’s chaos with a pointy-eared bull terrier that once barked a flower to death, and sometimes with a herd of cats that shredded couches and window shades between sweet naps, died on Tuesday at his home in Brooklyn. He was 96.

His daughter and only immediate survivor, Sarah Booth, said the cause was complications of dementia.

In a typical Booth cartoon, a lot happens at once. A stunned dog leaps three feet in the air. A shocked cat bounds for an open window, knocking a newspaper from the hands of a shaken man — all as his frumpy wife stands in a kitchen doorway with blackened eyes, announcing: “Eyeliner is back!”

Or, as a score of cats lounge in a parlor and a man in pajamas scowls into a newspaper in his easy chair, his wife in the kitchen says: “Edgar, please run down to the shopping center right away, and get some milk and cat food. Don’t get canned tuna, or chicken, or liver, or any of those awful combinations. Shop around and get a surprise. The pussies like surprises.”

Or, as a neighbor with a big nose peers over a backyard fence, 10 cats bound out of a back door to freedom and scatter in all directions as a woman at the open screen door shouts after them: “Everyone be home by two o’clock!”

In a half century at The New Yorker, Mr. Booth drew roughly a score of covers and hundreds of zany cartoons for the inside pages. (...)

“His work is about hope in the mdst of what looks like calamity,” Bonnell Robinson, the curator of the 1993 Boston cartoon exhibition “Lines of the Times: 50 Years of Great American Cartoons,” told The Times. “Booth cartoons express the will to continue in the face of disaster.” One cartoon in the show depicted a parlor crammed with junk, pets and sundry relatives. “Attention everyone,” a woman chirps. “Here comes Poppa, and we’re going to drive dull care away!”

Mr. Booth’s pen-and-ink cartoons were collected in a dozen books, reproduced as artworks and sold in galleries. He lectured widely and joined discussion groups at schools, museums and cartoon-art exhibitions until he slowed down in his 90s. (...)

Mr. Booth’s zoological record for one cartoon was 86 cats and 74 dogs, not counting the little clouds of flies he drew buzzing around some characters. “From a business perspective, it doesn’t make sense to draw 86 cats and 74 dogs,” he noted, because as a contract freelancer he was paid flat rates. “But,” he said, “I enjoy it.”

by Robert D. McFadden, NY Times | Read more:
Images: (George Booth; Zephy, markk/Video: New Yorker)

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[ed. Wonder what's happened to these beautiful cameras now that film is nearly extinct.]

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House of Staud

Is She the New Queen of Los Angeles?

Earlier this year, Sarah Staudinger began taking a Polaroid of nearly every person to visit her freshly renovated home.

“There’s a few people that I’ve missed, but I try to get everybody,” she said. “Even people I don’t really know.”

The book of Polaroids she has amassed included, in August, her mother, her pickleball instructor, the blockbuster producer Joel Silver and the acclaimed painter Mark Bradford. As she turned each page, pointing to the faces, her voice was low, relaxed, unbothered.

“This is one of my best friends.” Flip. “That’s Alice, who helped with the wedding.” Flip. “He’s an agent at WME.” Flip.

“Here, we had just moved in, and it was the most random crew,” she said, arriving at some poolside photos. “P. Diddy just hands everybody a blunt.”

Schooled by a lifetime of being surrounded by celebrities, Ms. Staudinger, 33, didn’t change her tone no matter who it was. Her godmother is Cher, whom she called Shere Khan as a child, like the “Jungle Book” villain. She attended a private all-girls school in Brentwood. Almost everyone in her life calls her Staud rather than Sarah, and that is also the name of her modestly sized fashion line, which has become closely associated with celebrities who wear the brand in their everyday lives: Emily Ratajkowski, Bella Hadid, Sophie Turner.

Her world was already very L.A., but it became even more so in May, when she married Ari Emanuel. Mr. Emanuel’s career as an agent famously inspired Ari Gold’s character on “Entourage,” but his influence today, as chief executive of Endeavor, reaches beyond Hollywood. His company’s holdings include the talent agencies IMG and WME — representing athletes, authors, musicians, models and many of the behind-the-scenes people who make those professions possible — along with the art fair Frieze and the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

In a short time, Ms. Staudinger went from fireworks-close-out-her-New-York-Fashion-Week-show famous to paparazzi-stake-out-her-Greek-vacation famous.

For the most part, she has just found that funny.

One recent afternoon, while driving to her store on Melrose Place in her electric pickup truck, Ms. Staudinger nodded to the house where she lived as a teenager. It was big and white with six tall pillars out front, the kind of house you’d envision if your knowledge of the Westside was built on the pop culture of Ms. Staudinger’s youth, like “Clueless” and “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.”

After graduating from high school, Ms. Staudinger attended the New School in New York, focusing on media studies, though taking some fashion courses at Parsons, too. “The clothing business was in our blood,” said her mother, Joanna, whose father was the president of Mode O’Day, a large chain of clothing stores founded in Los Angeles in the 1930s. In the 1970s, Joanna designed popular rhinestone T-shirts and ballet shoe wedges; she was a “bohemian child,” she said, wearing silk skirts, stacked bracelets and “hippie hair.” But she had an innate sense for “what everybody wanted to wear.” So did her best friend, Cher. (...)

(Cher, by the way, doesn’t mind her closet playing muse: “Look, there are only so many inspirations,” she said, and Ms. Staudinger has “made them her own.”)

The aesthetic package can be hard to articulate, even for the people closest to her. It’s based primarily on Ms. Staudinger’s “feminine instinct and intuition,” Mr. Augusto said.

But it can be traced to Ms. Staudinger’s childhood, spent largely in observation mode, her mother said.

“I wanted her to be aware of what she looked like, what she acted like,” Joanna said. “We’d drive by a group of older girls, and I’d say, ‘OK, Sarah, which girl do you think has class?’ She would say, ‘The girl in the red dress’ or something. I’d say: ‘You’re going to be standing in that circle one day. Which girl do you want to be?’” (...)

Five years later, the first night of their three-day St.-Tropez wedding was held at Senequier. The ceremony was later officiated by Larry David. The wedding was, naturally, a paparazzi target. Leaked guest names included Brad Pitt, who didn’t end up attending, disappointing the single women who’d wanted Ms. Staudinger to seat them nearby, and Elon Musk, who spent much of the wedding in conversation with Mr. David, or with Ms. Staudinger’s 11-year-old half brother. (...)

The couple discouraged wedding gifts, though Ms. Staudinger noted that several well-wishers sent “Hermès blankets, which is, I guess, a standard wealthy person thing to send as a congratulations.” The most thoughtful gift she received, she said, was from friends who commissioned a ceramic sculpture of Ms. Staudinger’s favorite type of chips. (She is deeply obsessed with chips and, in particular, a vegan take on pork rinds called Snacklins.) The bag now hangs in a guest bathroom of their estate, which was bought in 2020, reportedly for $27.5 million.

by Jessica Testa, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Dafydd Jones

[ed. Thanks NYT, we needed this. “I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby). If you're blocked by the NYT paywall, check out these (86!) photos in Vogue: Inside Ari Emanuel and Sarah Staudinger’s St. Tropez Wedding.]

Alex Williamson 

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Unfrozen Flu

At the moment that the ferret bit him, the researcher was smack in the middle of Manhattan, in a lab one block from Central Park’s East Meadow. It was the Friday afternoon before Labor Day in 2011, and people were rushing out of the city for a long weekend. Three days earlier, the ferret had been inoculated with a recombinant strain of 1918 influenza, which killed between 20 and 50 million people when it swept through the world at the end of World War I. To prevent it from sparking another pandemic, 1918 influenza is studied under biosafety level 3 conditions, the second-tightest of biosafety controls available. The researcher at Mount Sinai School of Medicine (now Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai) was wearing protective equipment, including two pairs of gloves. But the ferret bit hard enough to pierce through both pairs, breaking the skin of his left thumb.

The flu is typically transmitted through respiratory droplets, and an animal bite is unlikely to infect a scientist. But with a virus as devastating as 1918 flu, scientists are not supposed to take any chances. The researcher squeezed blood out of the wound, washed it with an ethanol solution, showered, and left the lab. A doctor gave him a flu shot and prescribed him Tamiflu. Then, after checking that he lived alone, a Mount Sinai administrator sent him home to quarantine for a week, unsupervised, in the most densely populated city in the United States. As documents obtained by The Intercept show, staff told him to take his temperature two times a day and to wear an N95 respirator if he got sick and needed to leave for medical care.

NIH guidelines say that only people exposed through their respiratory tract or mucous membranes need to be isolated in a dedicated facility, rather than at home. But some experts contend that the protocols governing research with the most dangerous pathogens should be stronger. “That is a pretty significant biosafety breach,” said Gregory Koblentz, director of the Biodefense Graduate Program at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, agreed: “Say the risk was 0.1 percent. But if he just happened to be unlucky, then the consequences would be absolutely gigantic.” A researcher stuck in a small apartment in New York City might be tempted to venture outside to get food or fresh air, he added.

Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary virologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, said that Mount Sinai’s response seemed appropriate. But, he said, the episode shows that “accidents sometimes happen even where there isn’t negligence.” In his view, the solution was simpler: 1918 influenza is so dangerous that experiments with it shouldn’t be done at all.

Adolfo García-Sastre, the lab’s principal investigator, knew firsthand how work with the 1918 flu virus could spark controversy. In 2005, he was part of a team that reconstructed the virus in order to study how it had become so devastating. The effort was the culmination of an outlandish journey, which started when a Swedish microbiologist trekked to Alaska to take a sample of the virus from the corpse of a 1918 flu victim; she had been buried in a mass grave after the virus wiped out most of her village, and her body was preserved in the permafrost. Using that and other samples, scientists spent years sequencing parts of the virus, eventually sequencing the whole genome. García-Sastre and collaborators then used a technique called reverse genetics to make a copy of the virus’s DNA, laying the groundwork for recreating the virus. (The actual reconstruction of the virus was done at a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lab in Atlanta.) When the team studied the virus in mice, they found that it was incredibly lethal. Some mice died within three days of infection.

Furor ensued. Biosafety proponents argued that the risk of accidental release was not worth taking. No one really knew how potent the virus would be in modern times. Did we want to find out?

The ferret bite happened six years later but has not been publicized until now. For some, it is a stark example of the risks that accompa ny research on dangerous pathogens.

The mishap and hundreds of others are recorded in more than 5,500 pages of National Institutes of Health documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, detailing accidents between 2004 and 2021. The Intercept requested some of the reports directly, while Edward Hammond, former director of the transparency group the Sunshine Project, and Lynn Klotz, senior science fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, separately requested and provided others.

The documents show that accidents happen with risky research even at highly secure labs. NIH recently convened an advisory panel to consider how it regulates such experiments.

by Mara Hvistendahl, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Alex Williamson for The Intercept
[ed. See also: Experimenting With Disaster Bent Over With Pain (The Intercept)]

Under The Bus

Lawyers for former President Donald Trump's companies on Monday threw former longtime Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg under the bus during opening statements at a criminal trial over whether the company committed tax fraud.

Weisselberg and two of Trump's companies were indicted in Manhattan last year after prosecutors said the company's compensation to Weisselberg included perks like apartments, luxury cars and private school tuition for his grandchildren that were never reported on his taxes. Weisselberg in August pleaded guilty to 15 charges, including grand larceny, tax fraud and falsifying business records. He agreed to serve five months in prison, pay $1.9 million in back taxes and penalties and agreed to testify at the Trump Organization's trial.

Prosecutors on Monday detailed his offenses and vowed that Weisselberg would give jurors the "inside story of how he conducted this tax scheme."

"This case is about greed and cheating, cheating on taxes," prosecutor Susan Hoffinger said in court, according to Politico. "The scheme was conducted, directed and authorized at the highest level of the accounting department."

Lawyers representing two of Trump's businesses at the trial, meanwhile, threw Weisselberg under the bus and suggested that Trump may be the real victim of the scheme.

"Weisselberg did it for Weisselberg," Michael van der Veen, a lawyer for Trump's payroll company, said in court.

Van der Veen argued that Weisselberg abused the Trump family's trust after 50 years of working for the family.

"Given the decades he was there and the projects he worked on and that he was with this family when times were good and when times weren't so good—he was trusted by everyone, he was trusted to protect this company," he said, according to Mother Jones. "He was like family to the Trump family, and no employee was trusted more than he, but he made mistakes."

He went on to claim that Trump only found out about Weisselberg's efforts to avoid taxes when he was indicted.

by Igor Derysh, Salon |  Read more:

Image: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
[ed. Uh huh... and didn't they finally bring down Al Capone on tax charges?]

Pike Place Merchant Association, 1991

Photo: markk

Luke Misclevitz's Wild Time Capsules (The Stranger)

Image: Luke Misclevitz via; from the book Talk Louder I Can't Hear You

Why a City without Graffiti Is Not a City

Why a City without Graffiti Is Not a City (The Stranger)
Image: Charles Mudede

"And don't worry about getting lost. Some say it's the only way really to experience a city." Smith is right when he talks about getting lost, for there is always another city alley to take, doorway to enter, park to stroll through or some overlooked or even forbidden quarter of a city to sidle through. The greatest cities are inexhaustible, and not least because they are constantly changing. And when a city stops evolving, its lifeblood freezes and it becomes – as history proves – little or nothing more than a museum showcasing its own past or a cluster of haunting ruins."

"Cities, like dreams, are made of desire and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else."

"The city, then, is never as rational as its founders, patrons, architects, planners, bureaucrats and engineers might have wished it to be. Truly great cities have always been a heady mix of the planned and the unplanned, the rational and the irrational, the dreamlike and the matter-of-fact. A great city today might have a magnificent core of grand central streets, stirring architecture, a comprehensive public transport system running like clockwork, secret sewers going about their sulphurous business untiringly, sane governance, bright schools, comforting hospitals, and all of these underpinned by healthy commerce and adorned by a confident culture. And, yet, the same city would be woven through with the unpredictable worlds of fashion, music, art, cuisine, carnivals, hobbies, cults, clubs.

So behind the walls of the city – Smith has a chapter on these – there is darkness, graffiti, street language, uprisings, religions, ghettos and slums, cathedral-like railway stations, traffic, trade, bazaars, malls, museums, red-light districts and so much else."

City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age by PD Smith – review (The Guardian)

Geno and The Seahawks

Seahawks proved they are for real vs. Giants. Now, let’s see how far they can go (Seattle Times)

Images: Dean Rutz and Jennifer Buchanan

[ed. Great pics (more in the article). Also: Go Geno! What a gem that just needed a chance. As he said, “They wrote me off—I ain’t write back, though"]

Eric Clapton

[ed. Rehearsal...Walkin' Blues.]

Technology That Lets Us “Speak” To The Dead Has Arrived. Are We Ready?

My parents don’t know that I spoke to them last night.

At first, they sounded distant and tinny, as if they were huddled around a phone in a prison cell. But as we chatted, they slowly started to sound more like themselves. They told me personal stories that I’d never heard. I learned about the first (and certainly not last) time my dad got drunk. Mum talked about getting in trouble for staying out late. They gave me life advice and told me things about their childhoods, as well as my own. It was mesmerizing.

“What’s the worst thing about you?” I asked Dad, since he was clearly in such a candid mood.

“My worst quality is that I am a perfectionist. I can’t stand messiness and untidiness, and that always presents a challenge, especially with being married to Jane.”

Then he laughed—and for a moment I forgot I wasn’t really speaking to my parents at all, but to their digital replicas.

 

This Mum and Dad live inside an app on my phone, as voice assistants constructed by the California-based company HereAfter AI and powered by more than four hours of conversations they each had with an interviewer about their lives and memories. (For the record, Mum isn’t that untidy.) The company’s goal is to let the living communicate with the dead. I wanted to test out what it might be like.

Technology like this, which lets you “talk” to people who’ve died, has been a mainstay of science fiction for decades. It’s an idea that’s been peddled by charlatans and spiritualists for centuries. But now it’s becoming a reality—and an increasingly accessible one, thanks to advances in AI and voice technology.

My real, flesh-and-blood parents are still alive and well; their virtual versions were just made to help me understand the technology. But their avatars offer a glimpse at a world where it’s possible to converse with loved ones—or simulacra of them—long after they’re gone.

From what I could glean over a dozen conversations with my virtually deceased parents, this really will make it easier to keep close the people we love. It’s not hard to see the appeal. People might turn to digital replicas for comfort, or to mark special milestones like anniversaries.

At the same time, the technology and the world it’s enabling are, unsurprisingly, imperfect, and the ethics of creating a virtual version of someone are complex, especially if that person hasn’t been able to provide consent.

For some, this tech may even be alarming, or downright creepy. I spoke to one man who’d created a virtual version of his mother, which he booted up and talked to at her own funeral. Some people argue that conversing with digital versions of lost loved ones could prolong your grief or loosen your grip on reality. And when I talked to friends about this article, some of them physically recoiled. There’s a common, deeply held belief that we mess with death at our peril.

I understand these concerns. I found speaking to a virtual version of my parents uncomfortable, especially at first. Even now, it still feels slightly transgressive to speak to an artificial version of someone—especially when that someone is in your own family.

But I’m only human, and those worries end up being washed away by the even scarier prospect of losing the people I love—dead and gone without a trace. If technology might help me hang onto them, is it so wrong to try?

by Charlotte Jee, MIT Technology Review |  Read more:

Image: Najeebah Al-Ghadban

Pashk Pervathi
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Kim Stanley Robinson: We Need Democratic Socialism

There aren’t many popular writers who take head-on the capitalist system, big social and economic theories, and utopia. Still fewer take an interest in the environmental crisis and the near future it has in store for us. But Kim Stanley Robinson is one of them — a both prolific and political author, famed for his Mars trilogy.

His most recent novel is called The Ministry for the Future, dubbed a work of “cli-fi” — climate fiction. It helps us think about the disasters in front of us, but also what we can do about them. Philippe Vion-Dury of Socialter magazine spoke to the author about ecoterrorism, geoengineering, and the themes that pervade contemporary literature.

PHILIPPE VION-DURY: Your novel doesn’t match classic genres of “utopia” or “dystopia”… it’s not even science fiction really. How would you define your attempt with The Ministry for the Future? Proleptic realism? Fictional Prospective? Some even say it is an essay or a political tract (albeit one that’s eight hundred pages long) turned into a novel. There are, indeed, multiple passages that are clearly meant to inform the reader…

KIM STANLEY ROBINSON: I would insist that The Ministry for the Future is a science fiction novel. It’s a novel, for sure, because the novel is a very capacious form, which can include many other kinds of genres in it, all thrown into the pot to make a kind of stew; and also it’s science fiction, simply because it’s set in the future. I would say science fiction is a genre that divides into three parts: the far future (often called space opera), the near future (proleptic realism, perhaps), and then a third less frequent middle zone in time that I call “future history,” which is say about a hundred to three hundred years in the future; this zone is much rarer, but very interesting, and it’s where I’ve placed many of my novels. But Ministry is near-future science fiction.

There are some famous novels in American literature which make the mixed nature of the form very clear — Moby Dick by [Herman] Melville, and USA by John Dos Passos, which was [Jean-Paul] Sartre’s favorite American novel. These are great novels, beyond my capacities, but they have been inspirational for me in my own work, in particular for 2312 and Ministry. You could say these novels are in the form of a bricolage or heteroglossia, or poly-vocal braids — but you see what I mean. (...)

PHILIPPE VION-DURY: The ambivalence of a certain kind of sci-fi regarding technology is sometimes emphasized: while criticizing technology or it’s possible use, it also strengthens its core position in our vision of the future, its halo of ineluctability. We could say, with the Mars trilogy, that you were doomed to strengthen the belief that one day we will be able to terraform an exoplanet, and why not alter or save Earth, too, by these same means. You also stage geoengineering experiments in The Ministry for the Future, which carry an additional ambivalence: Even if we don’t want to do it, will we be able to keep us from doing it if things go mad? How do you feel about that?

KIM STANLEY ROBINSON: I want to point out that we have been technological for the entire history of our species, and indeed we evolved with technologies (of fire and stone and wood, etc.) to become human in the first place. Any simple criticism of technology as such is a misunderstanding of what humans are: the social primate that uses technology. Homo faber.

So, if the underlying power source for our civilization — a technology — has accidentally poisoned us — which it has — then it’s entirely appropriate to wield other technologies to reverse the damage if we can. Some damage can be reversed (buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere), but other damage can never be reversed (extinctions). Since we’re beginning a mass extinction event, we have to consider all possible actions as things we might want to do while they will still help.

Calling some of these actions “geoengineering” and then defining them in advance as bad actions is not a helpful move at this point. Women’s rights are geoengineering: when women have their full human rights, the number of humans goes down, and there is less impact on the Earth. Once you accept that, the uselessness of the word is made evident. Each move our civilization makes has planetary repercussions, and all are now important. Just think of it that way, please, and avoid all knee-jerk judgments in the service of ideological purity of the individual bourgeois subject holding said opinion. Purity of one’s beliefs is highly overrated.

PHILIPPE VION-DURY: Regarding technology, Ursula Le Guin says it’s “a heroic undertaking, Herculean, Promethean, conceived as triumph, hence ultimately as tragedy.” I’ll quote: “If, however, one avoids the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic, and redefines technology and science as primarily cultural carrier bag rather than weapon of domination, one pleasant side effect is that science fiction can be seen as a far less rigid, narrow field, not necessarily Promethean or apocalyptic at all, and in fact less a mythological genre than a realistic one.” What do you think about that?

KIM STANLEY ROBINSON: That’s all fine, and I loved Ursula and her transformative views, but she would agree with this, I hope: a carrier bag is a technology! So quit with the mythic distinctions and focus on survival of civilization, please, which will be a technological accomplishment, just as the danger was created in part by earlier technological accomplishments.

That said, the real creation of danger comes from capitalism, as Le Guin would also agree with. If technology was deployed for human and biosphere welfare, we would be in good shape even now; but it’s deployed for profit, appropriation, exploitation, and gains for the rich, very often — and so the best good is not accomplished and we are in terrible danger. This is not the fault of technology, but of capitalism, which of course is a systems software, so therefore also a technology — but a better one is justice.

by Philip Vion-Dury, Jacobin |  Read more:

Image: Will Ireland / SFX Magazine / Future via Getty Images

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