[ed. Fun with Science.]
Monday, November 14, 2022
One of the Biggest Problems in Biology Has Finally Been Solved
AlphaFold AI program predicted the 3-D structure of every known protein
There’s an age-old adage in biology: structure determines function. In order to understand the function of the myriad proteins that perform vital jobs in a healthy body—or malfunction in a diseased one—scientists have to first determine these proteins’ molecular structure. But this is no easy feat: protein molecules consist of long, twisty chains of up to thousands of amino acids, chemical compounds that can interact with one another in many ways to take on an enormous number of possible three-dimensional shapes. Figuring out a single protein’s structure, or solving the “protein-folding problem,” can take years of finicky experiments.
But earlier this year an artificial intelligence program called AlphaFold, developed by the Google-owned company DeepMind, predicted the 3-D structures of almost every known protein—about 200 million in all. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and senior staff research scientist John Jumper were jointly awarded this year’s $3-million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for the achievement, which opens the door for applications that range from expanding our understanding of basic molecular biology to accelerating drug development.
DeepMind developed AlphaFold soon after its AlphaGo AI made headlines in 2016 by beating world Go champion Lee Sedol at the game. But the goal was always to develop AI that could tackle important problems in science, Hassabis says. DeepMind has made the structures of proteins from nearly every species for which amino acid sequences exist freely available in a public database.
Scientific American spoke with Hassabis about developing AlphaFold, some of its most exciting potential applications and the ethical considerations of highly sophisticated AI.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
Why did you decide to create AlphaFold, and how did you get to the point where it can now fold practically every known protein?
We pretty much started the project roughly the day after we came back from the AlphaGo match in Seoul, where we beat Lee Sedol, the world [Go] champion. I was talking to Dave Silver, the project lead on AlphaGo, and we were discussing “What’s the next big project that DeepMind should do?” I was feeling like it was time to tackle something really hard in science because we had just solved more or less the pinnacle of games AI. I wanted to finally apply the AI to real-world domains. That’s always been the mission of DeepMind: to develop general-purpose algorithms that could be applied really generally across many, many problems. We started off with games because it was really efficient to develop things and test things out in games for various reasons. But ultimately, that was never the end goal. The end goal was [to develop] things like AlphaFold.
It’s been a mammoth project—about five or six years’ worth of work before CASP14 [Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction, a protein-folding competition]. We had an earlier version at the CASP13 competition, and that was AlphaFold 1. That was state of the art, you know, a good deal better than anyone had done before and I think one of the first times that machine learning had been used as the core component of a system to try and crack this problem. That gave us the confidence to push it even further. We had to reengineer things for AlphaFold 2 and put a whole bunch of new ideas in there and also bring onto the team some more specialists—biologists and chemists and biophysicists who worked in protein folding—and combine them with our engineering and machine-learning team.
I’ve been working on and thinking about general AI for my whole career, even back at university. I tend to note down scientific problems I think one day could be amenable to the types of algorithms we build, and protein folding was right up there for me always, since the 1990s. I’ve had many, many biologist friends who used to go on about this to me all the time.
Were you surprised that AlphaFold was so successful?
Yeah, it was surprising, actually. I think it’s definitely been the hardest thing we’ve done, and I would also say the most complex system we’ve ever built. The Nature paper that describes all the methods, with the supplementary information and technical details, is 60 pages long. There are 32 different component algorithms, and each of them is needed. It’s a pretty complicated architecture, and it needed a lot of innovation. That’s why it took so long.
But earlier this year an artificial intelligence program called AlphaFold, developed by the Google-owned company DeepMind, predicted the 3-D structures of almost every known protein—about 200 million in all. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and senior staff research scientist John Jumper were jointly awarded this year’s $3-million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for the achievement, which opens the door for applications that range from expanding our understanding of basic molecular biology to accelerating drug development.
Scientific American spoke with Hassabis about developing AlphaFold, some of its most exciting potential applications and the ethical considerations of highly sophisticated AI.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
Why did you decide to create AlphaFold, and how did you get to the point where it can now fold practically every known protein?
We pretty much started the project roughly the day after we came back from the AlphaGo match in Seoul, where we beat Lee Sedol, the world [Go] champion. I was talking to Dave Silver, the project lead on AlphaGo, and we were discussing “What’s the next big project that DeepMind should do?” I was feeling like it was time to tackle something really hard in science because we had just solved more or less the pinnacle of games AI. I wanted to finally apply the AI to real-world domains. That’s always been the mission of DeepMind: to develop general-purpose algorithms that could be applied really generally across many, many problems. We started off with games because it was really efficient to develop things and test things out in games for various reasons. But ultimately, that was never the end goal. The end goal was [to develop] things like AlphaFold.
It’s been a mammoth project—about five or six years’ worth of work before CASP14 [Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction, a protein-folding competition]. We had an earlier version at the CASP13 competition, and that was AlphaFold 1. That was state of the art, you know, a good deal better than anyone had done before and I think one of the first times that machine learning had been used as the core component of a system to try and crack this problem. That gave us the confidence to push it even further. We had to reengineer things for AlphaFold 2 and put a whole bunch of new ideas in there and also bring onto the team some more specialists—biologists and chemists and biophysicists who worked in protein folding—and combine them with our engineering and machine-learning team.
I’ve been working on and thinking about general AI for my whole career, even back at university. I tend to note down scientific problems I think one day could be amenable to the types of algorithms we build, and protein folding was right up there for me always, since the 1990s. I’ve had many, many biologist friends who used to go on about this to me all the time.
Were you surprised that AlphaFold was so successful?
Yeah, it was surprising, actually. I think it’s definitely been the hardest thing we’ve done, and I would also say the most complex system we’ve ever built. The Nature paper that describes all the methods, with the supplementary information and technical details, is 60 pages long. There are 32 different component algorithms, and each of them is needed. It’s a pretty complicated architecture, and it needed a lot of innovation. That’s why it took so long.
by Tanya Lewis, Scientific American | Read more:
Image: Tobias Hase/dpa/Alamy Live News[ed. From the referenced Nature paper:]
"Proteins are essential to life, and understanding their structure can facilitate a mechanistic understanding of their function. Through an enormous experimental effort, the structures of around 100,000 unique proteins have been determined, but this represents a small fraction of the billions of known protein sequences. Structural coverage is bottlenecked by the months to years of painstaking effort required to determine a single protein structure. Accurate computational approaches are needed to address this gap and to enable large-scale structural bioinformatics. Predicting the three-dimensional structure that a protein will adopt based solely on its amino acid sequence—the structure prediction component of the ‘protein folding problem’—has been an important open research problem for more than 50 years. Despite recent progress, existing methods fall far short of atomic accuracy, especially when no homologous structure is available. Here we provide the first computational method that can regularly predict protein structures with atomic accuracy even in cases in which no similar structure is known."
"Proteins are essential to life, and understanding their structure can facilitate a mechanistic understanding of their function. Through an enormous experimental effort, the structures of around 100,000 unique proteins have been determined, but this represents a small fraction of the billions of known protein sequences. Structural coverage is bottlenecked by the months to years of painstaking effort required to determine a single protein structure. Accurate computational approaches are needed to address this gap and to enable large-scale structural bioinformatics. Predicting the three-dimensional structure that a protein will adopt based solely on its amino acid sequence—the structure prediction component of the ‘protein folding problem’—has been an important open research problem for more than 50 years. Despite recent progress, existing methods fall far short of atomic accuracy, especially when no homologous structure is available. Here we provide the first computational method that can regularly predict protein structures with atomic accuracy even in cases in which no similar structure is known."
Foo Fighters & Guests
[ed. Pretty good for a couple of old guys. Dave does a credible Robert Plant cover.]
Michael Moore on the Midterms 'Blue Tsunami'
In the lead up to last week’s midterm elections in America, the punditocracy of commentators, pollsters and political-types were almost united: a “red wave” of Republican gains was on the cards.
But one dissenting voice stood out: that of leftist filmmaker Michael Moore. Against all the commonplace predictions, he had forecast Democrats would do well. He called it a “blue tsunami”.
That proved to be true in his home state of Michigan, where Democrats won governor, house and senate for the first time in 40 years, often by large margins. It’s been more of a blue wall across the rest of the country, where Republican gains mostly failed to materialize, with the exception of Florida. But even so, the strong Democrat performance has stunned people on both sides of the US political divide, delighting the left and sparking hand-wringing on the right.
With the Democrats retaining power in the Senate, and a chance that even the House could remain in their control, suddenly Moore is looking like a prognosticator par excellence.
“I never doubted it – there was no way the Republicans were going to have some kind of landslide,” Moore said in an interview.
But, he added: “I don’t have any special powers, I’m not related to Nostradamus or Cassandra, but I was stunned once again that nobody was willing to stick their neck out. I was just trying to say that common sense, and data – and if you’re not living in a bubble – should bring you to the same conclusion that there are more of us than them.”
“We’ve won seven of the last eight elections in the popular vote, we’ve got more registered, we have a new crop of young people every year, plus the fact that 70% of eligible voters are either women, people of color, or 18 to 25 year olds, or a combination of the three,” he said. “That’s the Democratic party’s base”.
In the last of his increasingly popular mass emails, Mike’s Midterm Tsunami Truth #41, published on Wednesday, he wrote a devastating critique of the conventional wisdom of a US electorate focused on economic woes, fearful of crime and resigned to the loss of abortion rights, while non-plussed by the election-denying Republicans.
“We were lied to for months by the pundits and pollsters and the media. Voters had not ‘moved on’ from the Supreme Court’s decision to debase and humiliate women by taking federal control over their reproductive organs. Crime was not at the forefront of the voters ‘simple’ minds. Neither was the price of milk. It was their democracy that they came to fight for yesterday,” he penned. (...)
He wants a more positive message from the left, based less on scaring people and more on inspiring them. Already a self-defeating post-Trump narrative is taking shape, Moore believes, and it revolves mostly around Florida governor Ron DeSantis. “Oh, DeSantis is going to win because he’s like Trump but he’s smarter oooh, oooh”.
DeSantis does represent the kind of forceful, base-pleasing call-to-arms that Democrats fear. “He is clever to rent private jets and fly refugees up to Martha’s Vineyard,” Moore says. “Do you know the sort of orgasmic feeling that happens inside a right-winger when they see him doing something wonderful and crazy like that, slamming it right in the liberals face.”
The left can learn a lesson from that playbook: get creative, though not cruel. He points out that wasn’t until 10pm the night before the vote that Democrats finally put up a campaign ad featuring LeBron James, the most popular basketball player in America, asking voters in Georgia to vote against Herschel Walker in Georgia.
“Why didn’t they do that months ago? They wait until the last night to put up one of great African American sports stars?” (...)
Moore says two out of three emails he got after starting his email newsletter were from readers who signaled that they’d depressed themselves into thinking the mid-terms were a lost cause. Their reasoning followed, again, the narrative line of Biden’s low approval rating, inflation, the economy, crime and so on. They ignored the still burning rage of the loss of women’s reproductive rights.
“I said, what’s inflation or past elections got to do with anything? We don’t live in that time anymore. There are now going to be more women doctors than men, more women lawyers than men. Don’t you have a clue that there is something going on? You can’t take human rights away from an entire gender and not have that blow up in your face”.
But one dissenting voice stood out: that of leftist filmmaker Michael Moore. Against all the commonplace predictions, he had forecast Democrats would do well. He called it a “blue tsunami”.
That proved to be true in his home state of Michigan, where Democrats won governor, house and senate for the first time in 40 years, often by large margins. It’s been more of a blue wall across the rest of the country, where Republican gains mostly failed to materialize, with the exception of Florida. But even so, the strong Democrat performance has stunned people on both sides of the US political divide, delighting the left and sparking hand-wringing on the right.
“I never doubted it – there was no way the Republicans were going to have some kind of landslide,” Moore said in an interview.
But, he added: “I don’t have any special powers, I’m not related to Nostradamus or Cassandra, but I was stunned once again that nobody was willing to stick their neck out. I was just trying to say that common sense, and data – and if you’re not living in a bubble – should bring you to the same conclusion that there are more of us than them.”
“We’ve won seven of the last eight elections in the popular vote, we’ve got more registered, we have a new crop of young people every year, plus the fact that 70% of eligible voters are either women, people of color, or 18 to 25 year olds, or a combination of the three,” he said. “That’s the Democratic party’s base”.
In the last of his increasingly popular mass emails, Mike’s Midterm Tsunami Truth #41, published on Wednesday, he wrote a devastating critique of the conventional wisdom of a US electorate focused on economic woes, fearful of crime and resigned to the loss of abortion rights, while non-plussed by the election-denying Republicans.
“We were lied to for months by the pundits and pollsters and the media. Voters had not ‘moved on’ from the Supreme Court’s decision to debase and humiliate women by taking federal control over their reproductive organs. Crime was not at the forefront of the voters ‘simple’ minds. Neither was the price of milk. It was their democracy that they came to fight for yesterday,” he penned. (...)
He wants a more positive message from the left, based less on scaring people and more on inspiring them. Already a self-defeating post-Trump narrative is taking shape, Moore believes, and it revolves mostly around Florida governor Ron DeSantis. “Oh, DeSantis is going to win because he’s like Trump but he’s smarter oooh, oooh”.
DeSantis does represent the kind of forceful, base-pleasing call-to-arms that Democrats fear. “He is clever to rent private jets and fly refugees up to Martha’s Vineyard,” Moore says. “Do you know the sort of orgasmic feeling that happens inside a right-winger when they see him doing something wonderful and crazy like that, slamming it right in the liberals face.”
The left can learn a lesson from that playbook: get creative, though not cruel. He points out that wasn’t until 10pm the night before the vote that Democrats finally put up a campaign ad featuring LeBron James, the most popular basketball player in America, asking voters in Georgia to vote against Herschel Walker in Georgia.
“Why didn’t they do that months ago? They wait until the last night to put up one of great African American sports stars?” (...)
Moore says two out of three emails he got after starting his email newsletter were from readers who signaled that they’d depressed themselves into thinking the mid-terms were a lost cause. Their reasoning followed, again, the narrative line of Biden’s low approval rating, inflation, the economy, crime and so on. They ignored the still burning rage of the loss of women’s reproductive rights.
“I said, what’s inflation or past elections got to do with anything? We don’t live in that time anymore. There are now going to be more women doctors than men, more women lawyers than men. Don’t you have a clue that there is something going on? You can’t take human rights away from an entire gender and not have that blow up in your face”.
by Edward Helmore, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Anthony Harvey/PA
Friday, November 11, 2022
A Radically Different Model of American Education
Since 2021, the stagnation surrounding American higher education has given way to the first inklings of dynamism with the efforts of the University of Austin (UATX) team to found and accredit a new liberal arts college “dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth.” Like any start-up, UATX has faced detractors, dismissing the university as a pipe-dream, political pet project, or both. Nevertheless, those who question the feasibility of UAustin are sorely misinformed. A Political Economy Project talk on Monday, September 26 by the university’s Chief Academic Officer, Jacob Howland, made clear that UATX has already begun disrupting the American academy.
From its promotional materials and online presence, it is clear that the University of Austin tries to market itself as something altogether different from its competitors. After all, in a country with more than 5,000 institutions of higher education, it is imperative for a school to separate itself from the pack. Nevertheless, Howland clarified that the difference UATX attempts to offer its potential students is a fundamental one. The University of Austin does not seek to reform America’s traditional model of a university but rather upend it.
The changes Howland listed in his talk, entitled “Revitalizing American Higher Education: The Promise of the University of Austin,” are radical.
In place of large, on-campus administrative bureaucracies, UATX plans to make administration remote, outsourcing positions abroad. Not only will this arrangement save university funds, Howland noted, but it would also pay foreign workers livable, US-level wages. Further, the school will forgo—along with competitive varsity sports—what he called “club-med amenities”: climbing gyms, student recreation centers with ball pits and golf simulators, napping stations, private pools, and the like. UAustin has even rethought the principle of reserving classroom space for each academic department—at UATX, departments will have control over their budgets and bid for classrooms in a market. The money saved by this and other initiatives, Howland said, will go towards instruction.
This status quo, Howland’s speech made clear, is antithetical to the values and mission of UATX. Far from trying to emulate its explicitly conservative counterparts in Hillsdale College and Liberty University, UATX seeks to be a “trans-political” space, where all ideological sides can be considered. Howland stated this principle succinctly: “Intellectual pluralism in place of sclerosis.” To make this a reality, the young institution will offer academics graduated term contracts with deliverables. The trade-up for no tenure, Howland said, would be the promise of low course loads and hard-to-find competitive salaries. Academic freedom in this tenure-less paradigm would be guaranteed by an external and independent committee that would adjudicate conflicts between faculty and the administration. (...)
In place of a major, UATX will offer juniors and seniors the opportunity to study in one of the university’s “Centers of Inquiry.” Described on the university website as “a combination of interdisciplinary research institutes, think tanks, and start-up incubators,” the centers will serve as homes for the creative, scholarly, or entrepreneurial culminating projects undertaken by each upperclassman. Announced centers include one for “Politics, Economics, and Applied History” and another for “Mathematics, Technology, and Engineering.” The point of the projects, Howland emphasized, is for students to connect with people and employ resources outside the university. Accomplishment is to be far less important than process.
by Lintaro P. Donovan, Dartmouth Review | Read more:
Image: The University of Austin’s logo. Courtesy of the University.
[ed. Yeah, good luck with that. See also: Have the Founders of the University of Austin Been in a Classroom Lately? (TNR).]
From its promotional materials and online presence, it is clear that the University of Austin tries to market itself as something altogether different from its competitors. After all, in a country with more than 5,000 institutions of higher education, it is imperative for a school to separate itself from the pack. Nevertheless, Howland clarified that the difference UATX attempts to offer its potential students is a fundamental one. The University of Austin does not seek to reform America’s traditional model of a university but rather upend it.
The changes Howland listed in his talk, entitled “Revitalizing American Higher Education: The Promise of the University of Austin,” are radical.
UAustin has even rethought the principle of reserving classroom space for each academic department—at UATX, departments will have control over their budgets and bid for classrooms in a market. The money saved by this and other initiatives, Howland said, will go towards instruction.Indeed, financial health seems to be a major focus of the entire UATX project, along with teaching quality. In Howland’s view, financial instability is a root cause of the decay in higher education. A lack of funds leads administrations to chase income over quality leading to the replacement of good professors with adjuncts. “Financially unstable universities inevitably erode academically,” Howland said. And yet, UATX’s vision includes no room for tenure. After all, the professor explained, 80% of large universities have or are considering Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) requirements (read: affirmative action) for the coveted academic appointment. Such a system has led to increasing (leftist) ideological conformity amongst college faculties, with out-and-proud conservatives unlikely to receive tenure or even be hired at most institutions.
This status quo, Howland’s speech made clear, is antithetical to the values and mission of UATX. Far from trying to emulate its explicitly conservative counterparts in Hillsdale College and Liberty University, UATX seeks to be a “trans-political” space, where all ideological sides can be considered. Howland stated this principle succinctly: “Intellectual pluralism in place of sclerosis.” To make this a reality, the young institution will offer academics graduated term contracts with deliverables. The trade-up for no tenure, Howland said, would be the promise of low course loads and hard-to-find competitive salaries. Academic freedom in this tenure-less paradigm would be guaranteed by an external and independent committee that would adjudicate conflicts between faculty and the administration. (...)
In place of a major, UATX will offer juniors and seniors the opportunity to study in one of the university’s “Centers of Inquiry.” Described on the university website as “a combination of interdisciplinary research institutes, think tanks, and start-up incubators,” the centers will serve as homes for the creative, scholarly, or entrepreneurial culminating projects undertaken by each upperclassman. Announced centers include one for “Politics, Economics, and Applied History” and another for “Mathematics, Technology, and Engineering.” The point of the projects, Howland emphasized, is for students to connect with people and employ resources outside the university. Accomplishment is to be far less important than process.
by Lintaro P. Donovan, Dartmouth Review | Read more:
Image: The University of Austin’s logo. Courtesy of the University.
[ed. Yeah, good luck with that. See also: Have the Founders of the University of Austin Been in a Classroom Lately? (TNR).]
Twitter Poisoning
I encountered Donald Trump a few times in the pre-social media era, and he struck me as someone who was in on his own joke. He no longer does. Elon Musk used to be a serious person more concerned with engineering and building businesses than with petty name-calling. He didn’t seem like the kind of person to amplify a preposterous, sordid story about Paul Pelosi. Kanye West was once a thoughtful artist. Now known as Ye, he radiates antisemitism on top of his earlier slavery denialism.
I have observed a change, or really a narrowing, in the public behavior of people who use Twitter or other social media a lot. (“Other social media” sometimes coming into play after ejection from Twitter.) When I compare Mr. Musk, Mr. Trump and Ye, I see a convergence of personalities that were once distinct. The garish celebrity playboy, the obsessive engineer and the young artist, as different from one another as they could be, have all veered not in the direction of becoming grumpy old men, but into being bratty little boys in a schoolyard. Maybe we should look at what social media has done to these men.
I’m not claiming that Twitter is the sole influence, of course. Traditional demons summoned by great wealth have not vanished. I have no access to what goes on in the brains of other people. What I’m talking about is plain public behavior. The personalities of a great many famous and powerful people have changed in a similar way — a way we could do without.
I believe “Twitter poisoning” is a real thing. It is a side effect that appears when people are acting under an algorithmic system that is designed to engage them to the max. It’s a symptom of being part of a behavior-modification scheme.
The same could be said about any number of other figures, including on the left. Examples are found in the excesses of cancel culture and joyless orthodoxies in fandom, in vain attention competitions and senseless online bullying.
My purpose is not to ridicule anyone, though it might be impossible to be perceived in any other way, given the near-monopoly status that ridicule has taken on in the era of social media. The human brain did not evolve to handle modern chemicals or modern media technology and is vulnerable to addiction. That is true for me and for us all.
Behavioral changes occur as a side effect of something called operant conditioning, which is the underlying mechanism of social media addiction. This is the core mechanism analogous to the role alcohol plays in alcoholism. (...)
What do I think are the symptoms of Twitter poisoning? There is a childish insecurity, where before there was pride. Instead of being above it all, like traditional strongmen throughout history, the modern social media-poisoned alpha male whines and frets. This works because his followers are similarly poisoned and can relate so well.
To be clear, whiners are much better than Stalins. And yet there have been plenty of more mature and gracious leaders who are better than either, even if we can no longer agree about who they were, because of our intense tribalism, which is amplified by the prevalence of social media addiction.
I’ll suggest a hypothesis about the childishness that comes to the surface in social media addicts. When we were children, we all had to negotiate our way through the jungle of human power relationships at the playground. When we feel those old humiliations, anxieties and sadisms again as adults — over and over, because the algorithm has settled on that pattern as a powerful way to engage us — habit formation restimulates old patterns that had been dormant. We become children again, not in a positive, imaginative sense, but in a pathetic way.
I have observed a change, or really a narrowing, in the public behavior of people who use Twitter or other social media a lot. (“Other social media” sometimes coming into play after ejection from Twitter.) When I compare Mr. Musk, Mr. Trump and Ye, I see a convergence of personalities that were once distinct. The garish celebrity playboy, the obsessive engineer and the young artist, as different from one another as they could be, have all veered not in the direction of becoming grumpy old men, but into being bratty little boys in a schoolyard. Maybe we should look at what social media has done to these men.
I believe “Twitter poisoning” is a real thing. It is a side effect that appears when people are acting under an algorithmic system that is designed to engage them to the max. It’s a symptom of being part of a behavior-modification scheme.
The same could be said about any number of other figures, including on the left. Examples are found in the excesses of cancel culture and joyless orthodoxies in fandom, in vain attention competitions and senseless online bullying.
My purpose is not to ridicule anyone, though it might be impossible to be perceived in any other way, given the near-monopoly status that ridicule has taken on in the era of social media. The human brain did not evolve to handle modern chemicals or modern media technology and is vulnerable to addiction. That is true for me and for us all.
Behavioral changes occur as a side effect of something called operant conditioning, which is the underlying mechanism of social media addiction. This is the core mechanism analogous to the role alcohol plays in alcoholism. (...)
What do I think are the symptoms of Twitter poisoning? There is a childish insecurity, where before there was pride. Instead of being above it all, like traditional strongmen throughout history, the modern social media-poisoned alpha male whines and frets. This works because his followers are similarly poisoned and can relate so well.
To be clear, whiners are much better than Stalins. And yet there have been plenty of more mature and gracious leaders who are better than either, even if we can no longer agree about who they were, because of our intense tribalism, which is amplified by the prevalence of social media addiction.
I’ll suggest a hypothesis about the childishness that comes to the surface in social media addicts. When we were children, we all had to negotiate our way through the jungle of human power relationships at the playground. When we feel those old humiliations, anxieties and sadisms again as adults — over and over, because the algorithm has settled on that pattern as a powerful way to engage us — habit formation restimulates old patterns that had been dormant. We become children again, not in a positive, imaginative sense, but in a pathetic way.
By Jaron Lanier, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Sargam Gupta
Thursday, November 10, 2022
Tiny Beasts
Global warming was fucking up the squirrels. It was of course fucking everything up — the new and improved Boston Seaport would be underwater in twenty years, and the mosquitos were leaving particularly nasty welts. But special attention was on the squirrels. Higher-than-usual temperatures were fermenting the berries they ate off the trees and getting them so drunk they lost their sense of balance. They dented the roofs of cars on Rte. 9 as they plummeted from the branches, and the Boston Common was littered with their chubby, lethargic bodies. I am telling you this, A, because you would have loved them. You would have called them your messy bitch children and left them bottle caps of Gatorade for their tiny hangovers and sat down to draw them, sketching each individual tuft of fur: brown then silver then gold then chestnut until one could believe that these were actually the most majestic creatures that had ever lived. You hated Boston. But I like to think you would have come to visit this particular summer because I was there and because of the novelty of squirrels getting even drunker than we could on the contents of the dozens of stolen nips bulging from our overall pockets. I am going to tell you about the summer of the drunk squirrels because I wish you could have been there. I miss you and want you to explain what it means that I am now in my Saturn return.
As you might expect, I was not in a good place this summer. You had been gone for two years. I was in my second year as an editorial assistant at a small nonprofit publishing house. I thought it would be a dream job — editing books, or at least assisting in editing books about social justice issues I cared about was, on paper, exactly what I wanted to be doing with my life. But in practice I spent most of my time slouched in the recliner set up in the nursing room playing Candy Crush until each subsequent panic attack about cover mechs with unmarked typos or mis-stapled proposal packets subsided. I knew that eventually I would either quit or be fired and it was only a matter of how stubborn I was, or how long it took them to realize that any time I was asked to secure permissions for the images that were to accompany a Y.A. history book about indigenous genocide, I would simply lie and say the image could not be traced. The idea of sending another email to an artist begging them to let us use their labor for free ~bEcAuSe wE’rE jUsT a nOnPrOfiT~ made me want to die. I was allegedly making contingency plans to leave. I was applying to things at a manic rate: graduate school to be a high school teacher or administrator, a Fulbright in India to learn Urdu for the CIA, used bookstores, hemp farms in New Hampshire.
I started therapy because I hated my job as much as it hated me, but kept going with the hope that one day I would be brave enough to tell Susan, the nice, heavyset middle-aged woman who took notes on her Google Chromebook and drank an entire Dunkin’ XL iced coffee over the course of our lunch hour sessions, that the night after you were killed by a drunk driver while you crossed the highway that bisected campus to get more cigarettes, our friend Martin raped me at the memorial service held by our college. At times I got close. I spent the first 50 to 54 minutes of my appointment railing against the capitalist system where my survival depended on me continuing to destroy my mental health by working at a company that was enjoying what the board members called, with less awareness of the irony than they thought they had, a “Trump bump” in sales for books about the emoluments clause and why immigrants are actually good. In the last 45 seconds I would maybe say something like “and I’m probably so mad about this because of how grief and sex and loss and agency and death are now inextricably intertwined in my psyche. See you next week!” as I headed out the door and back to my desk for a long afternoon of forging invoices and making less than $15 an hour.
You know that I am terrible at picking out people to sleep with; I do not read red flags any better than I read the dimensions of things I buy online. That’s why I wind up with puny, ten-inch-tall cat scratching posts that looked bigger on Instagram and men who think that being described as “sensitive” by one fifth-grade teacher excused them from developing a single additional cell of emotional intelligence. I would have loved to tell you about how this particular man, a postdoc at MIT ten years my senior, tried to test my nurturing instincts by coming to my shitty shared attic apartment with a beta fish in the same bag as the three limes, condoms (ribbed for no one’s pleasure), and one-percent milk.
He did not provide water purification tablets or food or a bowl or the pretty marbles for the bottom of the bowl or any warning, but somehow the fish was now my problem. It seemed my ability to figure it out or develop an attachment to this twitchy aquatic handkerchief would decide for him whether I was worth the effort or the cost of a second towel for when I spent the night at his place. The next morning I accidentally dumped the fish down the garbage disposal when, while trying to pack a hurried lunch, I grabbed the first tupperware I saw. You would have shrieked, A, at how I looked this man dead in the face when I flipped the switch. (...)
But again I digress. The morning most important to this story was a Sunday morning and I was, as always, late to my second job working as a babysitter at an Episcopalian church in Beacon Hill. I had woken too early with too much energy after downing a bottle of rosé the night before. I suddenly had big ambitions. I dug the single pair of workout shorts I owned from the back of my pajama drawer. I drank water straight from the tap and ate a fistful of granola. I intended to get off the train three stops early and run the rest of the way to the church before breezing in, pressed green juice in hand, with a few minutes to spare for stretching before the first kids were dropped off for an enriching morning of the same three alphabet puzzles and two books about Noah’s ark and absolutely no lessons about Jesus. (...)
This particular morning I kept to the edges of the park. There were too many other runners, so many that it looked like everyone but me knew they were being chased. Maybe if I had taken my usual tear through the dead center of the garden, swinging my legs over the fenced-off rose plots like a giant to shave seconds off my tardiness, I would not have found myself in the landing zone for this squirrel at the moment he tumbled from one of the gnarled oaks that grew along the fence.
What I did not expect is that a squirrel would have such heft. Perhaps I should have assumed — aside from this newfound drinking problem, the squirrels of the Public Garden and the Common had been putting on weight. Despite signage from the Boston Parks Department pleading with us to not feed the wildlife, tourists could not seem to resist giving them the remnants of $27 Faneuil Hall lobster rolls. The squirrels ambled about with the butts of soft hotdog buns drenched in butter and hand sweat wedged into their cheeks.
This squirrel hit my shoulder like a well-meaning dad clapping me on the shoulder before realizing that despite my short hair and boyish figure, I was not, in fact, one of his nephews or sons or a player on one of their junior league soccer teams. It was solid and full and sent me off balance enough that I had to take a knee. On the ground next to me was the squirrel, who for purposes of clarity and what you would have called a garishly white impulse to give everything a name, I will call Bruce.
“I’ve been hit!” I sent not-boyfriend a photo of Bruce, sprawled into a belly flop. Because not-boyfriend is an earth sign and therefore a psychological terrorist, I saw the message go from delivered to read where it remained like an unreturned high five. I waited forty-five seconds, two minutes, without the immediate-gratification ellipses. There were no squirrel emojis to follow up with, so I sat on the ground with Bruce. I guessed he was young, although I am far from an expert on the aging patterns of North American city fauna. He seemed impossibly relaxed, and were it not for the breath twitching around his tiny black nostrils, I would have assumed he had died on impact. With the hand that was not clenching my phone as though to choke a response out of it, I stroked the fur between his ears. It was spongy, like new grass or duckling feathers. Squirrels did not typically present opportunities for us to notice their feral beauty. This squirrel, you would have said, went to private school — his overbite wasn’t even that noticeable. I think I was with you when I learned that something like 80 percent of the trees we enjoy today are the result of squirrels burying acorns and then forgetting where they’d left them. Despite or because of their chaotic natures, we now have parks and forests and 200-year-old oaks, and we get to live on an earth with oxygen and shade even though we kill off trees at twice the rate we plant them. But now, here Bruce was, relieved of this immense responsibility, at absolute ease.
I wanted what Bruce had, so I took Bruce. He was supple and loose and barely stirred when I picked him up; his head tipped backwards, arms thrown back as though opening himself up to the universe or to embrace the early morning sun or simply because he had torn his tiny rotator cuffs and there was no way for them to remain in their sockets. He was too girthy for the fanny pack where I kept my keys and wallet so like most other Sundays, I found myself snarfing down my idiot confection breakfast as I power walked toward the church, not only because I didn’t want to saunter in late holding evidence of my disregard for timeliness and how much I truly needed their $17/hr, but because the wax paper now served as Bruce’s sleeping bag.
I started therapy because I hated my job as much as it hated me, but kept going with the hope that one day I would be brave enough to tell Susan, the nice, heavyset middle-aged woman who took notes on her Google Chromebook and drank an entire Dunkin’ XL iced coffee over the course of our lunch hour sessions, that the night after you were killed by a drunk driver while you crossed the highway that bisected campus to get more cigarettes, our friend Martin raped me at the memorial service held by our college. At times I got close. I spent the first 50 to 54 minutes of my appointment railing against the capitalist system where my survival depended on me continuing to destroy my mental health by working at a company that was enjoying what the board members called, with less awareness of the irony than they thought they had, a “Trump bump” in sales for books about the emoluments clause and why immigrants are actually good. In the last 45 seconds I would maybe say something like “and I’m probably so mad about this because of how grief and sex and loss and agency and death are now inextricably intertwined in my psyche. See you next week!” as I headed out the door and back to my desk for a long afternoon of forging invoices and making less than $15 an hour.
You know that I am terrible at picking out people to sleep with; I do not read red flags any better than I read the dimensions of things I buy online. That’s why I wind up with puny, ten-inch-tall cat scratching posts that looked bigger on Instagram and men who think that being described as “sensitive” by one fifth-grade teacher excused them from developing a single additional cell of emotional intelligence. I would have loved to tell you about how this particular man, a postdoc at MIT ten years my senior, tried to test my nurturing instincts by coming to my shitty shared attic apartment with a beta fish in the same bag as the three limes, condoms (ribbed for no one’s pleasure), and one-percent milk.
He did not provide water purification tablets or food or a bowl or the pretty marbles for the bottom of the bowl or any warning, but somehow the fish was now my problem. It seemed my ability to figure it out or develop an attachment to this twitchy aquatic handkerchief would decide for him whether I was worth the effort or the cost of a second towel for when I spent the night at his place. The next morning I accidentally dumped the fish down the garbage disposal when, while trying to pack a hurried lunch, I grabbed the first tupperware I saw. You would have shrieked, A, at how I looked this man dead in the face when I flipped the switch. (...)
But again I digress. The morning most important to this story was a Sunday morning and I was, as always, late to my second job working as a babysitter at an Episcopalian church in Beacon Hill. I had woken too early with too much energy after downing a bottle of rosé the night before. I suddenly had big ambitions. I dug the single pair of workout shorts I owned from the back of my pajama drawer. I drank water straight from the tap and ate a fistful of granola. I intended to get off the train three stops early and run the rest of the way to the church before breezing in, pressed green juice in hand, with a few minutes to spare for stretching before the first kids were dropped off for an enriching morning of the same three alphabet puzzles and two books about Noah’s ark and absolutely no lessons about Jesus. (...)
This particular morning I kept to the edges of the park. There were too many other runners, so many that it looked like everyone but me knew they were being chased. Maybe if I had taken my usual tear through the dead center of the garden, swinging my legs over the fenced-off rose plots like a giant to shave seconds off my tardiness, I would not have found myself in the landing zone for this squirrel at the moment he tumbled from one of the gnarled oaks that grew along the fence.
What I did not expect is that a squirrel would have such heft. Perhaps I should have assumed — aside from this newfound drinking problem, the squirrels of the Public Garden and the Common had been putting on weight. Despite signage from the Boston Parks Department pleading with us to not feed the wildlife, tourists could not seem to resist giving them the remnants of $27 Faneuil Hall lobster rolls. The squirrels ambled about with the butts of soft hotdog buns drenched in butter and hand sweat wedged into their cheeks.
This squirrel hit my shoulder like a well-meaning dad clapping me on the shoulder before realizing that despite my short hair and boyish figure, I was not, in fact, one of his nephews or sons or a player on one of their junior league soccer teams. It was solid and full and sent me off balance enough that I had to take a knee. On the ground next to me was the squirrel, who for purposes of clarity and what you would have called a garishly white impulse to give everything a name, I will call Bruce.
“I’ve been hit!” I sent not-boyfriend a photo of Bruce, sprawled into a belly flop. Because not-boyfriend is an earth sign and therefore a psychological terrorist, I saw the message go from delivered to read where it remained like an unreturned high five. I waited forty-five seconds, two minutes, without the immediate-gratification ellipses. There were no squirrel emojis to follow up with, so I sat on the ground with Bruce. I guessed he was young, although I am far from an expert on the aging patterns of North American city fauna. He seemed impossibly relaxed, and were it not for the breath twitching around his tiny black nostrils, I would have assumed he had died on impact. With the hand that was not clenching my phone as though to choke a response out of it, I stroked the fur between his ears. It was spongy, like new grass or duckling feathers. Squirrels did not typically present opportunities for us to notice their feral beauty. This squirrel, you would have said, went to private school — his overbite wasn’t even that noticeable. I think I was with you when I learned that something like 80 percent of the trees we enjoy today are the result of squirrels burying acorns and then forgetting where they’d left them. Despite or because of their chaotic natures, we now have parks and forests and 200-year-old oaks, and we get to live on an earth with oxygen and shade even though we kill off trees at twice the rate we plant them. But now, here Bruce was, relieved of this immense responsibility, at absolute ease.
I wanted what Bruce had, so I took Bruce. He was supple and loose and barely stirred when I picked him up; his head tipped backwards, arms thrown back as though opening himself up to the universe or to embrace the early morning sun or simply because he had torn his tiny rotator cuffs and there was no way for them to remain in their sockets. He was too girthy for the fanny pack where I kept my keys and wallet so like most other Sundays, I found myself snarfing down my idiot confection breakfast as I power walked toward the church, not only because I didn’t want to saunter in late holding evidence of my disregard for timeliness and how much I truly needed their $17/hr, but because the wax paper now served as Bruce’s sleeping bag.
by Ayla Zuraw-Friedland, The Drift | Read more:
Image: Brooke Bourgeois
Wednesday, November 9, 2022
The Other Opioid Crisis: False Narratives Are Hurting Patients
The number of accidental drug overdose fatalities crossed 100,000 in 2021, an increase of almost 15% over the previous year, which itself was an increase of 30% over the year before. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in its press release, called these deaths “opioid overdoses.” This framing of drug overdose fatalities as an “opioid crisis” is both misleading and counterproductive. The term “opioid” evokes prescription medications in popular imagination and ramps up fear of medications that have been used for centuries. The overdose death numbers, however, mostly reflect street drugs, ranging from heroin to illicit fentanyl analogs; 85% of 2019 deaths were from these drugs, and the increase in 2020 can be attributed almost entirely to them.
The conflation of all opioids has resulted in an unwarranted focus on prescription opioids and medical use as the root cause of the “problem” of accidental drug overdoses, even though overdose deaths from prescription opioids are a small and decreasing fraction of the total. The result is policies that fail to address the problem they were intended to solve—illicit drug use and accidental drug overdoses. Further, these policies have harmed medically fragile patients with chronic, high-impact, intractable pain who need prescription opioid medication to maintain quality of life and basic function levels.
Why did a narrative that is at odds with science become dominant, despite the harm it causes to people with substance use disorder and to medically fragile patients? The answer lies in the complex incentives that face policymakers, law enforcement and families of overdose victims, particularly as illicit drugs have edged into upper-income suburbs. The result of the “opioid crisis” narrative has been disastrous for the most vulnerable and powerless: Americans struggling with complex medical conditions and constant pain.
The Tidy but Inaccurate Narrative
The dominant narrative runs something like this: Doctors overprescribed opioids from the late 1990s through approximately 2012, resulting in addiction to prescription painkillers. When prescriptions ran out, these patients turned to street drugs. This overprescribing was responsible for an increase in substance use disorder rates and overdose fatalities. The appropriate policy response was, therefore, to tighten restrictions on opioid prescribing. Very plausible, very straightforward—and almost entirely contradicted by the facts. (...)
Most overdose fatalities are caused by illicit fentanyl analogs; they were responsible for more than 70,000 of 107,000 such deaths in 2021. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is available by prescription, but these “fentalogues” are not prescription opioids—they are never a part of the medical/pharmaceutical distribution system. They are street drugs, distributed through illicit channels. It makes no sense for the government to monitor physicians, patients, pharmacies and prescription records; it is akin to searching for keys lost in an alley under the streetlight, not because the keys are likely to be under the light but simply because it’s easier to search there.
The conflation of all opioids has resulted in an unwarranted focus on prescription opioids and medical use as the root cause of the “problem” of accidental drug overdoses, even though overdose deaths from prescription opioids are a small and decreasing fraction of the total. The result is policies that fail to address the problem they were intended to solve—illicit drug use and accidental drug overdoses. Further, these policies have harmed medically fragile patients with chronic, high-impact, intractable pain who need prescription opioid medication to maintain quality of life and basic function levels.
The Tidy but Inaccurate Narrative
The dominant narrative runs something like this: Doctors overprescribed opioids from the late 1990s through approximately 2012, resulting in addiction to prescription painkillers. When prescriptions ran out, these patients turned to street drugs. This overprescribing was responsible for an increase in substance use disorder rates and overdose fatalities. The appropriate policy response was, therefore, to tighten restrictions on opioid prescribing. Very plausible, very straightforward—and almost entirely contradicted by the facts. (...)
Most overdose fatalities are caused by illicit fentanyl analogs; they were responsible for more than 70,000 of 107,000 such deaths in 2021. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is available by prescription, but these “fentalogues” are not prescription opioids—they are never a part of the medical/pharmaceutical distribution system. They are street drugs, distributed through illicit channels. It makes no sense for the government to monitor physicians, patients, pharmacies and prescription records; it is akin to searching for keys lost in an alley under the streetlight, not because the keys are likely to be under the light but simply because it’s easier to search there.
by Nita Ghei, Discourse | Read more:
Image: Catherine McQueen/Getty Images
[ed. See also: Part 2: The Other Opioid Crisis: A Failure of Care; and, Part 3: How the Criminal Justice System Imperils Patients and Physicians (Discourse):]
[ed. See also: Part 2: The Other Opioid Crisis: A Failure of Care; and, Part 3: How the Criminal Justice System Imperils Patients and Physicians (Discourse):]
The DEA continues this hunt for “drug-dealing doctors” even today, despite the fact that there is very little diversion of drugs from medical channels and almost none from patients. On the contrary, patients across the board are having their pain relief options limited, including patients with cancer where opioids are the first-line treatment.
The opioid problem today is a lack of access and even temporary shortages of some pain relievers. But in the 1990s, the DEA actually contributed to the rise of pill mills and the flow of prescription pain relievers to illicit markets. In what is probably a unique feature of the U.S., the DEA, a law enforcement agency, determines the quantities of the various Schedule II opioids—prescription medications—that manufacturers can produce in a year. The DEA increased the quota of oxycodone by about 3,900% between 1993 and 2015; the quota for fentanyl increased by 2,500%. While some increase was necessary as pain was significantly undertreated in the 1990s, opening the floodgates to this degree was a questionable call at best. The 1990s saw the rise of the pill mills and the first wave of the crisis, as a significant share of the new opioid production was diverted to nonmedical use.
The rates of substance use disorder have remained largely stable over the past several decades. The drug du jour has changed, though, with changes in the legal landscape. Sharp cutbacks in prescribing began in 2012, starting with the Veterans Administration, where prescriptions fell by two-thirds in eight years. The DEA started cutting opioid quotas in 2015. As the supply of prescription opioids in the illicit markets shrank, first heroin, then illicit fentanyl analogs filled the gap. The number of prescriptions fell rapidly between 2012 and 2022, but the number of fatal accidental overdoses rose almost as fast.
Today, opioid prescriptions are about 60% lower than their all-time peak in 2012. Fatal accidental overdoses, however, are at an all-time high, exceeding 100,000 last year. About 85% of these fatalities were caused by a combination of substances, including alcohol and illicit fentanyl analogs—substances that were never part of the medical materials supply chain. The DEA nonetheless continues to persist with its narrative of overprescribing doctors.
The opioid problem today is a lack of access and even temporary shortages of some pain relievers. But in the 1990s, the DEA actually contributed to the rise of pill mills and the flow of prescription pain relievers to illicit markets. In what is probably a unique feature of the U.S., the DEA, a law enforcement agency, determines the quantities of the various Schedule II opioids—prescription medications—that manufacturers can produce in a year. The DEA increased the quota of oxycodone by about 3,900% between 1993 and 2015; the quota for fentanyl increased by 2,500%. While some increase was necessary as pain was significantly undertreated in the 1990s, opening the floodgates to this degree was a questionable call at best. The 1990s saw the rise of the pill mills and the first wave of the crisis, as a significant share of the new opioid production was diverted to nonmedical use.
The rates of substance use disorder have remained largely stable over the past several decades. The drug du jour has changed, though, with changes in the legal landscape. Sharp cutbacks in prescribing began in 2012, starting with the Veterans Administration, where prescriptions fell by two-thirds in eight years. The DEA started cutting opioid quotas in 2015. As the supply of prescription opioids in the illicit markets shrank, first heroin, then illicit fentanyl analogs filled the gap. The number of prescriptions fell rapidly between 2012 and 2022, but the number of fatal accidental overdoses rose almost as fast.
Today, opioid prescriptions are about 60% lower than their all-time peak in 2012. Fatal accidental overdoses, however, are at an all-time high, exceeding 100,000 last year. About 85% of these fatalities were caused by a combination of substances, including alcohol and illicit fentanyl analogs—substances that were never part of the medical materials supply chain. The DEA nonetheless continues to persist with its narrative of overprescribing doctors.
Tuesday, November 8, 2022
The Politicians Who Destroyed Our Democracy Want Us to Vote for Them To Save It
The bipartisan project of dismantling our democracy, which took place over the last few decades on behalf of corporations and the rich, has left only the outward shell of democracy. The courts, legislative bodies, the executive branch and the media, including public broadcasting, are captive to corporate power. There is no institution left that can be considered authentically democratic. The corporate coup d’état is over. They won. We lost.
The wreckage of this neoliberal project is appalling: endless and futile wars to enrich a military-industrial-complex that bleeds the U.S. Treasury of half of all discretionary spending; deindustrialization that has turned U.S. cities into decayed ruins; the slashing and privatization of social programs, including education, utility services and health care – which saw over one million Americans account for one-fifth of global deaths from Covid, although we are 4 percent of the world’s population; draconian forms of social control embodied in militarized police, functioning as lethal armies of occupation in poor urban areas; the largest prison system in the world; a virtual tax boycott by the richest individuals and corporations; money-saturated elections that perpetuate our system of legalized bribery; and the most intrusive state surveillance of the citizenry in our history.
In “The United States of Amnesia,” to quote Gore Vidal, the corporate press and the ruling class create fictional feel-good personas for candidates, treat all political campaigns as if it is a day at the races and gloss over the fact that on every major issue, from trade deals to war, there is very little difference between Democrats and Republicans. The Democratic Party and Joe Biden are not the lesser evil, but rather, as Glen Ford pointed out, “the more effective evil.” (...)
[ed. Long list of Biden transgressions]
The wreckage of this neoliberal project is appalling: endless and futile wars to enrich a military-industrial-complex that bleeds the U.S. Treasury of half of all discretionary spending; deindustrialization that has turned U.S. cities into decayed ruins; the slashing and privatization of social programs, including education, utility services and health care – which saw over one million Americans account for one-fifth of global deaths from Covid, although we are 4 percent of the world’s population; draconian forms of social control embodied in militarized police, functioning as lethal armies of occupation in poor urban areas; the largest prison system in the world; a virtual tax boycott by the richest individuals and corporations; money-saturated elections that perpetuate our system of legalized bribery; and the most intrusive state surveillance of the citizenry in our history.
In “The United States of Amnesia,” to quote Gore Vidal, the corporate press and the ruling class create fictional feel-good personas for candidates, treat all political campaigns as if it is a day at the races and gloss over the fact that on every major issue, from trade deals to war, there is very little difference between Democrats and Republicans. The Democratic Party and Joe Biden are not the lesser evil, but rather, as Glen Ford pointed out, “the more effective evil.” (...)
[ed. Long list of Biden transgressions]
The decisions of politicians like Biden have a staggering human cost, not only for the poor, workers and the shrinking middle class but for millions of people in the Middle East, millions of families ripped apart by mass incarceration, millions more forced into bankruptcy by our mercenary for-profit medical system where corporations are legally permitted to hold sick children hostage while their frantic parents bankrupt themselves to save them, millions who became addicted to opioids and hundreds of thousands who died from them, millions denied welfare assistance, and all of us barreling toward extinction because of a refusal to curb the greed and destructive power of the fossil fuel industry, which has raked in $2.8 billion a day in profit over the last 50 years.
Biden, morally vacuous and of limited intelligence, is responsible for more suffering and death at home and abroad than Donald Trump. But the victims in our Punch-and-Judy media shows are rendered invisible. And that is why the victims despise the whole superstructure and want to tear it down.
These establishment politicians and their appointed judges promulgated laws that permitted the top 1 percent to loot $54 trillion from the bottom 90 percent, from 1975 to 2022, at a rate of $2.5 trillion a year, according to a study by the RAND corporation. The fertile ground of our political, economic, cultural and social wreckage spawned an array of neo-fascists, con artists, racists, criminals, charlatans, conspiracy theorists, right-wing militias and demagogues that will soon take power (...)
Biden and other establishment politicians are not actually calling for democracy. They are calling for civility. They have no intention of extracting the knife thrust into our backs. They hope to paper over the rot and the pain with the decorum of the polite, measured talk they used to sell us the con of neoliberalism. The political correctness and inclusivity imposed by college-educated elites, unfortunately, has now become associated with the corporate assault, as if a woman CEO or a Black police officer is going to mitigate the exploitation and abuse. Minorities are always welcome, as they were in other species of colonialism, if they serve the dictates of the masters. This is how Barack Obama, whom Cornel West called “a Black mascot for Wall Street,” became President.
Biden, morally vacuous and of limited intelligence, is responsible for more suffering and death at home and abroad than Donald Trump. But the victims in our Punch-and-Judy media shows are rendered invisible. And that is why the victims despise the whole superstructure and want to tear it down.
Biden and other establishment politicians are not actually calling for democracy. They are calling for civility. They have no intention of extracting the knife thrust into our backs. They hope to paper over the rot and the pain with the decorum of the polite, measured talk they used to sell us the con of neoliberalism. The political correctness and inclusivity imposed by college-educated elites, unfortunately, has now become associated with the corporate assault, as if a woman CEO or a Black police officer is going to mitigate the exploitation and abuse. Minorities are always welcome, as they were in other species of colonialism, if they serve the dictates of the masters. This is how Barack Obama, whom Cornel West called “a Black mascot for Wall Street,” became President.
by Chris Hedges, SheerPost | Read more:
Image: The Body Politic – by Mr. Fish
[ed. Happy election day. I was never a fan of Biden (or anyone, except Elizabeth Warren) but the alternatives (ie., Trump-supporting Republicans) inhabit a completely different universe of awfulness.]
[ed. Happy election day. I was never a fan of Biden (or anyone, except Elizabeth Warren) but the alternatives (ie., Trump-supporting Republicans) inhabit a completely different universe of awfulness.]
Mastodon: Everything You Need to Know
Interest in the open source social media platform known as Mastodon has spiked again as users look for an alternative to Twitter, should Elon Musk’s takeover spell the end of that website as we know it.
If you’re fleeing the sinking ship of Twitter for the potential life raft of Mastodon – or wondering whether to – here’s what you need to know.
Welcome to the Fediverse
The first thing to get your head around is that Mastodon is what’s known as a “federated” network, a collection of thousands of social networks run on servers across the world that are linked by the common Mastodon technology, on a platform known as the “Fediverse”.
You sign up for a specific server, which is run by whoever set it up, usually volunteers doing it out of their own pocket or taking donations through Patreon. They’ll have their own rules and policies on, for example, who can join and how strictly the conversation will be moderated.
You can even start your own server if you want to set the rules yourself. Otherwise, there’s a list of servers which focus on specific locations or topics of interest. The servers on that list have all signed up to the “Mastodon covenant” which promises “active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia”.
Whichever Mastodon server(s) you sign up for, however, you can follow users on a different one with no problem.
Oh, and as this is a volunteer-run system, there are no paid-for ads in your feed. (...)
Posting is similar but different
For a start, you may have to get used to your posts being called “toots” rather than “tweets”.
On the plus side, you’ll have almost twice as many characters (500) to write a post, and additional features such as click spoiler warnings for text and images.
You will have more control over who can see your post, from being discoverable across the server, down to only those who you mention in the post – similar to a DM.
Hashtags work similar to Twitter for trending topics, and you can share someone else’s post with your followers by boosting it – which works the same as retweeting. But there’s no such thing as “quote tooting”.
If you’re fleeing the sinking ship of Twitter for the potential life raft of Mastodon – or wondering whether to – here’s what you need to know.
Welcome to the Fediverse
The first thing to get your head around is that Mastodon is what’s known as a “federated” network, a collection of thousands of social networks run on servers across the world that are linked by the common Mastodon technology, on a platform known as the “Fediverse”.
You can even start your own server if you want to set the rules yourself. Otherwise, there’s a list of servers which focus on specific locations or topics of interest. The servers on that list have all signed up to the “Mastodon covenant” which promises “active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia”.
Whichever Mastodon server(s) you sign up for, however, you can follow users on a different one with no problem.
Oh, and as this is a volunteer-run system, there are no paid-for ads in your feed. (...)
Posting is similar but different
For a start, you may have to get used to your posts being called “toots” rather than “tweets”.
On the plus side, you’ll have almost twice as many characters (500) to write a post, and additional features such as click spoiler warnings for text and images.
You will have more control over who can see your post, from being discoverable across the server, down to only those who you mention in the post – similar to a DM.
Hashtags work similar to Twitter for trending topics, and you can share someone else’s post with your followers by boosting it – which works the same as retweeting. But there’s no such thing as “quote tooting”.
[ed. "Tweets" were bad enough, but "toots"? Haha. Probably an accurate reflection of most opinions though.]
Monday, November 7, 2022
The Myth of Fed Independence
The Federal Reserve, far from the independent institution it often touts itself as, is under intense pressure at all times from massive commercial banks and other financial institutions advocating for favorable regulations, according to federal lobbying disclosures reviewed by The Intercept, as well as interviews with former Fed and other finance employees.
The Federal Reserve has come under scrutiny in recent months for its aggressive interest rate hikes designed to, as Chair Jerome Powell said, “get wages down and then get inflation down.” The Fed’s own research has warned that its aggressive policy mirrors a similar one that caused a “severe recession” under Paul Volcker in the 1980s, as The Intercept recently reported. Even the United Nations, which recently warned that the Fed’s rate hikes risk “inflicting worse damage than the financial crisis in 2008 and the COVID-19 shock in 2020.” Yet President Joe Biden, unlike Donald Trump, has declined to publicly criticize the Fed, saying after it began hiking rates earlier this year that he would “respect the Fed’s independence.”
Besides setting monetary policy, the Fed is also tasked with regulating commercial banks. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., opposed Powell’s nomination by both Trump in 2018 and Biden in 2021 due to what she considered his weak position on banking regulations. “Powell will roll back critical rules that help guard against another financial crisis — and that is simply a risk we cannot afford,” Warren said in a floor speech.
The intense lobbying the Fed is subjected to is targeted at these banking regulations. To take just one example, the Chamber of Commerce, the main business lobby in the U.S., reported lobbying on Powell’s nomination along with “Federal Reserve regulatory reform” — i.e., deregulation Powell was known to favor — as part of its $15.39 million lobbying activities in the first quarter of 2018. The Fed under Powell would go on to water down key elements of the Dodd-Frank banking regulations passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
Paid lobbyists make their case on behalf of massive financial corporations in the same fashion as K Street lobbyists hawking their wares to members of Congress. In 2022 alone, over 120 groups reported lobbying the Fed on issues ranging from credit card fees to cryptocurrency to sprawling monetary policy initiatives such as mortgage finance. Postings on the Federal Reserve website in the past year record meetings with Discover Financial, Student Loan Servicing Alliance, National Bankers Association, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs. (U.S. banks saw their profits rise 7.8 percent in the second quarter of 2022 because of the rate hikes, though profits were still down year over year.)
“The Fed has a history of caving to corporate special interests, and I’ve loudly warned about the dangers of financial deregulation under Chair Powell that risk Americans’ economic security,” Warren told The Intercept.
Like their congressional counterparts, many of the lobbyists seeking to influence the Federal Reserve spent time in government before joining their respective firms. The agencies that served as training grounds for Fed lobbyists include the departments of Defense and Energy, but also financial regulatory agencies like the Treasury Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Reserve itself.
Bill Nelson — executive vice president and chief economist of one of the largest bank lobby groups, the Bank Policy Institute, or BPI — served as deputy director of the Division of Monetary Affairs at the Federal Reserve where he attended Federal Open Markets Committee meetings and briefed the Board of Governors. He now lobbies the Federal Reserve on behalf of the same banks that the Fed is charged with regulating.
According to three former BPI employees, the organization regularly hosts unreported meetings where Fed officials are provided ample time to discuss policy with members of the lobbying organization.
“When you have Fed officials sitting next to JPMorgans and Wells Fargos at these BPI events, do you really think the interests of communities are being represented? They are a very lethal force. Look at mortgage rates today, do you really think those rates are a result of the pending recession? This is a machine working hand in hand to generate profit on their own balance sheets. Everyone is serving their own interests,” Marshall Bornemann, a former employee of the Financial Services Roundtable, which later merged with The Clearing House Association to become BPI, told The Intercept. Three former BPI employees who spoke to the Intercept on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisal confirmed that unreported conversations through informal channels abound between BPI members and Federal Reserve officials.
“These types of meetings between Fed members and BPI are totally in violation of the Fed’s own communication policy,” former Federal Reserve economist Claudia Sahm told The Intercept.
BPI acknowledged its lobbying activity. “Like other industries, the banking industry regularly engages with its regulators,” Sean Oblack, head of communications for BPI, told The Intercept in an email. “For its part, BPI employs subject matter experts on topics from sanctions enforcement to cybersecurity to money markets, and our economists, analysts and attorneys maintain an open dialogue with policymakers who care about developments in those areas.”
The conventional wisdom is that the Federal Reserve is an independent institution dispassionately pursuing its mandate to maximize employment and stabilize prices for the betterment of the country. But since its inception, big banks have tried to influence the Fed to their liking.
In the aftermath of Dodd-Frank — legislation passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crash to create greater oversight on banks — federal regulatory agencies like the Federal Reserve and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission began publicly listing their meetings with stakeholders in an effort to increase transparency and public trust in their oversight efforts. But even now, so little is publicly known about the kinds of outside pressure the Federal Reserve is subjected to that multiple experts contacted for this story were unaware that lobbying was even permitted.
Scandals involving insider trading and unreported meetings between Fed officials and major financial services groups are baked into the foundation of the Federal Reserve as a system created by and for bankers.
by Daniel Boguslaw, Ken Klippenstein, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Graeme Sloan/Sipa via AP Images
The Federal Reserve has come under scrutiny in recent months for its aggressive interest rate hikes designed to, as Chair Jerome Powell said, “get wages down and then get inflation down.” The Fed’s own research has warned that its aggressive policy mirrors a similar one that caused a “severe recession” under Paul Volcker in the 1980s, as The Intercept recently reported. Even the United Nations, which recently warned that the Fed’s rate hikes risk “inflicting worse damage than the financial crisis in 2008 and the COVID-19 shock in 2020.” Yet President Joe Biden, unlike Donald Trump, has declined to publicly criticize the Fed, saying after it began hiking rates earlier this year that he would “respect the Fed’s independence.”
Besides setting monetary policy, the Fed is also tasked with regulating commercial banks. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., opposed Powell’s nomination by both Trump in 2018 and Biden in 2021 due to what she considered his weak position on banking regulations. “Powell will roll back critical rules that help guard against another financial crisis — and that is simply a risk we cannot afford,” Warren said in a floor speech.
Paid lobbyists make their case on behalf of massive financial corporations in the same fashion as K Street lobbyists hawking their wares to members of Congress. In 2022 alone, over 120 groups reported lobbying the Fed on issues ranging from credit card fees to cryptocurrency to sprawling monetary policy initiatives such as mortgage finance. Postings on the Federal Reserve website in the past year record meetings with Discover Financial, Student Loan Servicing Alliance, National Bankers Association, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs. (U.S. banks saw their profits rise 7.8 percent in the second quarter of 2022 because of the rate hikes, though profits were still down year over year.)
“The Fed has a history of caving to corporate special interests, and I’ve loudly warned about the dangers of financial deregulation under Chair Powell that risk Americans’ economic security,” Warren told The Intercept.
Like their congressional counterparts, many of the lobbyists seeking to influence the Federal Reserve spent time in government before joining their respective firms. The agencies that served as training grounds for Fed lobbyists include the departments of Defense and Energy, but also financial regulatory agencies like the Treasury Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Reserve itself.
Bill Nelson — executive vice president and chief economist of one of the largest bank lobby groups, the Bank Policy Institute, or BPI — served as deputy director of the Division of Monetary Affairs at the Federal Reserve where he attended Federal Open Markets Committee meetings and briefed the Board of Governors. He now lobbies the Federal Reserve on behalf of the same banks that the Fed is charged with regulating.
According to three former BPI employees, the organization regularly hosts unreported meetings where Fed officials are provided ample time to discuss policy with members of the lobbying organization.
“When you have Fed officials sitting next to JPMorgans and Wells Fargos at these BPI events, do you really think the interests of communities are being represented? They are a very lethal force. Look at mortgage rates today, do you really think those rates are a result of the pending recession? This is a machine working hand in hand to generate profit on their own balance sheets. Everyone is serving their own interests,” Marshall Bornemann, a former employee of the Financial Services Roundtable, which later merged with The Clearing House Association to become BPI, told The Intercept. Three former BPI employees who spoke to the Intercept on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisal confirmed that unreported conversations through informal channels abound between BPI members and Federal Reserve officials.
“These types of meetings between Fed members and BPI are totally in violation of the Fed’s own communication policy,” former Federal Reserve economist Claudia Sahm told The Intercept.
BPI acknowledged its lobbying activity. “Like other industries, the banking industry regularly engages with its regulators,” Sean Oblack, head of communications for BPI, told The Intercept in an email. “For its part, BPI employs subject matter experts on topics from sanctions enforcement to cybersecurity to money markets, and our economists, analysts and attorneys maintain an open dialogue with policymakers who care about developments in those areas.”
The conventional wisdom is that the Federal Reserve is an independent institution dispassionately pursuing its mandate to maximize employment and stabilize prices for the betterment of the country. But since its inception, big banks have tried to influence the Fed to their liking.
In the aftermath of Dodd-Frank — legislation passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crash to create greater oversight on banks — federal regulatory agencies like the Federal Reserve and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission began publicly listing their meetings with stakeholders in an effort to increase transparency and public trust in their oversight efforts. But even now, so little is publicly known about the kinds of outside pressure the Federal Reserve is subjected to that multiple experts contacted for this story were unaware that lobbying was even permitted.
Scandals involving insider trading and unreported meetings between Fed officials and major financial services groups are baked into the foundation of the Federal Reserve as a system created by and for bankers.
by Daniel Boguslaw, Ken Klippenstein, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Graeme Sloan/Sipa via AP Images
Saturday, November 5, 2022
Yes Sir, May I Have Another?*
Image: Scott Olson/Getty Images
[ed. Articles I've never finished reading. (*Animal House)]
[ed. Articles I've never finished reading. (*Animal House)]
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