A House of Dynamite Conversation

At one point in Kathryn Bigelow’s new film, A House of Dynamite, Captain Olivia Walker (played by Rebecca Ferguson) is overseeing the White House Situation Room as a single nuclear-armed missile streaks toward the American heartland. Amid tense efforts to intercept the missile, Walker finds a toy dinosaur belonging to her young son in her pocket. In that moment, the heartbreak and terror of the less-than-20-minute countdown to impact all but overwhelm Walker—and I suspect many who have watched the film in theaters. Suddenly, the stakes are clear: All the young children, all their parents, all the animals on the planet face extinction. Not as a vague possibility or a theoretical concept debated in policy white papers, not as something that might happen sometime, but as unavoidable reality that is actually happening. Right now.

In the pantheon of movies about nuclear catastrophe, the emotional power of A House of Dynamite is rivalled, to my way of thinking, only by Fail Safe, in which Henry Fonda, as an American president, must drop the bomb on New York City to atone for a mistaken US attack on Moscow and stave off all-out nuclear war. The equally relentless scenario for A House of Dynamite is superficially simple: A lone intercontinental ballistic missile is identified over the western Pacific, heading for somewhere in mid-America. Its launch was not seen by satellite sensors, so it’s unclear what country might have initiated the attack. An effort to shoot down the missile fails, despite the best efforts of an array of earnest military and civilian officials, and it becomes clear that—barring a technological malfunction of the missile’s warhead—Chicago will be obliterated. The United States’ response to the attack could well initiate worldwide nuclear war.

The emotional effectiveness of Bigelow’s film stems partly from its tripartite structure—the story is told three times, from three different points of view, each telling adding to and magnifying the others—partly from solid acting performances by a relatively large ensemble of actors, and not inconsequentially from details like the dinosaur. The film is in one sense a thriller, full of rising tension driven by a terrifying deadline. In a larger sense, it is a tragedy for each of the dedicated public servants trying to stave off the end of the world, and in that sense, it’s a tragedy for all of us to contemplate seriously.

I spoke with Bigelow and Noah Oppenheim, who wrote the screenplay for the film, last week, ahead of its debut on Netflix tomorrow. It opened widely in US theaters earlier in the month, which is why I’ve made no attempt to avoid spoilers in the following interview, which has been edited and condensed for readability. If you don’t already know that A House of Dynamite ends ambiguously, without explicitly showing whether Chicago and the world are or are not destroyed, you do now. (...)

Mecklin

I found the movie very effective, but I was curious about the decision not to have a depiction of nuclear effects on screen. There weren’t bombs blowing up. The movie had what some people say is an ambiguous ending. You don’t really know what followed. Why no explosions?

Bigelow

I felt like the fact that the bomb didn’t go off was an opportunity to start a conversation. With an explosion at the end, it would have been kind of all wrapped up neat, and you could point your finger [and say] “it’s bad that happened.” But it would sort of absolve us, the human race, of responsibility. And in fact, no, we are responsible for having created these weapons, and in a perfect world, getting rid of them.

Mecklin

So, do you have a different answer to that, Noah?

Noah Oppenheim

No, I don’t. I think that is the answer. I think if I were to add anything, it would only be that I do think audiences are numb to depictions of widespread destruction at this point. I mean, we’ve come off of years of comic book movies in which major cities have been reduced to rubble as if it were nothing. I think we just chose to take a different approach to trying to capture what this danger is.

Bigelow

And to stimulate a conversation. With an ambiguous ending, you walk out of the theater thinking, “Well, wait a minute.” It sort of could be interpreted, the film, as a call to action.

Mecklin

Within the expert community, the missile defense part of the movie is being discussed. It isn’t a surprise to them, or me, that missile defense is less than perfect. Some of them worry that this depiction in the movie will impel people to say, “Oh, we need better missile defense. We should build Golden Dome, right?” What do you feel about that? Kathryn first.

Bigelow

I think that’s kind of a misnomer. I think, in fact, if anything, we realize we’re not protected, we’re not safe. There is no magic situation that’s going to save the day. I’m sure you know a lot more about this, and Noah knows a lot more than I do, but from my cursory reading, you could spend $300 billion on a missile defense system, and it’s still not infallible. That is not, in my opinion, a smart course of action.

Mecklin

Noah, obviously you have talked to experts and read a lot about, in general, the nuclear threat, but also missile defense. How did you know to come up with, whatever, 61 percent [effectiveness of US missile interceptors]?

Oppenheim

That came directly from one of the tests that had been done on our current ground-based intercept system. Listen, as long as there are nuclear weapons in the world, it would obviously be better if we had more effective defense systems. But I think that the myth of a perfect missile defense system has given a lot of people false comfort over the years. In many ways, it appears to be an easier solution to chase. Right? How can we possibly eliminate the nuclear problem? So instead, maybe we can build an impenetrable shield that we can all retreat under.

But I think that there’s no such thing as an impenetrable shield at the end of the day, or at least not one that we’ve been able to build thus far. And from all of my conversations with people who work in missile defense—and again, I think we all are aligned and hoping that those systems could be improved—but I think that those folks are the first to acknowledge that it is a really hard physics problem at the end of the day that we may never be able to solve perfectly.

And so we do need to start looking at the other piece of this, which is the size of the nuclear stockpile. And how can we reduce the number of weapons that exist in the world, and how can we reduce the likelihood that they’re ever used?

Mecklin

Before I go on to other things, I wanted to give you the opportunity to name check any particular experts you consulted who helped you with thinking about or writing the movie.

Oppenheim

It’s a long list. I don’t know Kathryn—do you want to talk about Dan Karbler, who worked in missile defense for STRATCOM?

Bigelow

Go for it.

Oppenheim

So, we had a three-star general who came up in the missile defense field and actually has two kids whom he talks about, who also now work in missile defense, as well. We spoke to people who’ve worked in senior roles at the Pentagon, at the CIA, at the White House. We had STRATCOM officers on set almost every day that we were shooting those sequences. And then we relied upon the incredible body of work that folks who work in the nuclear field have been amassing for years. I mean, we talk a lot about the fact that the nuclear threat has fallen out of focus for a long time for the general public. But there is this incredible community of policy experts and journalists who’ve never stopped thinking about it, worrying about it, analyzing it.

And so whether it’s somebody like [the late Princeton researcher and former missileer] Bruce Blair or a journalist like Garrett Graff, who has written about continuity of government protocol, or Fred Kaplan and his book The Bomb—there’s a terrific library of resources that people can turn to.

Mecklin

I have found in my job that nuclear types—nuclear experts, journalists—are very picky. And I’m just curious: Generally with this kind of thing, trying to be a very technically accurate movie, inevitably you get people saying: “Oh, you got this little thing wrong. You got that little thing wrong.” Have you had anything like that that you’d want to talk about?

Bigelow

Actually, on the contrary, just yesterday in The Atlantic, Tom Nichols wrote a piece on the movie, and he said, you would think there might be some discrepancies, you would think there might be some inaccurate details, but according to him, and he’s very steeped in this space, it’s relatively accurate through and through. And it raises the need for a conversation about the fact that there are all these weapons in the world. (...)

Mecklin

I’m going to ask sort of a craft question. The narrative of the movie is telling essentially the same story three times from different points of view. And I’d just like to hear both of you talk about why and the challenges of doing that. Because the second, third time through—hey, maybe people get bored and walk out of the movie.

Bigelow

They don’t seem to.

I was interested in doing this story in real time, but of course, it takes 18, 19, minutes for that missile to impact, which would not be long enough for a feature film. But also, it’s not the same story, because you’re looking at it from different perspectives. You’re looking at it from the missile defense men at Ft. Greely. Then you’re looking at it from the White House Situation Room, where they need to get the information up to the president as quickly and as comprehensively as possible. And then you’re looking at it through STRATCOM, which is the home of the nuclear umbrella. And then, of course, finally, the Secretary of Defense and the president. So each time you’re looking at it through a different set of parameters.

Mecklin

And was that a difficult thing for you, Noah, in terms of writing it? There’s got to be the narrative thing that keeps people watching, right?

Oppenheim

First, as Kathryn mentioned, trying to give the audience a visceral understanding of how short a period of time something like this would unfold in was really important. But during that incredibly short period of time, the number of moving parts within the government and within our military are vast, and so I actually looked at it as an opportunity, right? Because there’s so much going on in various agencies—at Greeley, at STRATCOM, at the Pentagon, the situation in the Situation Room—and so you have the chance to kind of layer the audience’s understanding with each retelling. Because the first time you experience it, I think it’s just overwhelming, just making sense of it all. And then the second and third time, you’re able to appreciate additional nuance and deepen your understanding of the challenge that our policymakers and military officers would face. And I think the weight of that just accumulates over the course of the film, when you realize what we would be confronting if this were to happen.

by John Mecklin, with Kathryn Bigelow and Noah Oppenheim, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists |  Read more:

Image: Eros Hoagland/Netflix © 2025.

[ed. See also: How to understand the ending of ‘A House of Dynamite’; and, for a realistic scenario of what a nuclear strike might look like: The “House of Dynamite” sequel you didn’t know you needed (BotAS):]

***

If we pick up where A House of Dynamite ends, the story becomes one of devastation and cascading crises. Decades of modeling and simulations based on the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki help us understand the immediate and longer-term effects of a nuclear explosion. But in today’s deeply interconnected world, the effects of a nuclear attack would be far more complex and difficult to predict.

Let us assume that the missile carried a several-hundred-kiloton (kt) nuclear warhead—many times more powerful than the 15-kt bomb the United States used to destroy Hiroshima—and detonated directly above Chicago’s Loop, the dense commercial and financial core of the nation’s third-largest city.

What would ensue in the seconds, minutes, days, and months that follow, and how far would the effects ripple across the region, nation, and beyond?

The first seconds and minutes: detonation

At 9:51 a.m., without warning, the sky flashes white above Chicago. A fireball hotter than the surface of the sun engulfs the Loop, releasing a powerful pulse of heat, light, and x-rays. In less than a heartbeat, everyone within half a square mile—from commuters to children, doctors, and tourists—is vaporized instantly. Every building simply vanishes.

A shockwave expands outward faster than the speed of sound, flattening everything within roughly one mile of ground zero, including the Riverwalk, the Bean, Union Station, most of Chicago’s financial district, and the Jardine Water Purification Plant—which supplies drinking water to more than five million people. People are killed by debris and collapsing buildings. The city’s power, transport, communications, and water systems fail simultaneously. Major hospitals responsible for the city’s emergency and intensive care are destroyed.

Two miles from the epicenter, residential and commercial buildings in the West Loop, South Loop, and River North neighborhoods are heavily damaged or leveled. Debris blocks the streets and fires spread as gas lines rupture and wood and paper burn.

Anybody outside or near windows in at least a four-mile radius suffers third-degree burns from thermal radiation within milliseconds of the detonation. Those “lucky” enough to survive the initial blast absorb a dose of radiation about 800 times higher than the average annual exposure for Americans, causing severe radiation sickness that will likely be fatal within days or weeks.

The blast may have produced a localized electromagnetic pulse, frying electronics and communication technologies in the vicinity of the explosion. If not already physically destroyed, Chicago’s electric grid, telecom networks, and computer systems are knocked offline, complicating response efforts.

In less than 10 minutes, 350,000 people are dead and more than 200,000 are injured. Much of Chicago is destroyed and beyond recognition.

The first hours and days: fallout

Then, there is fallout. The intense heat vaporizes microscopic particles, including dust, soil, concrete, ash, debris, and radioactive materials, and lifts them into the atmosphere, forming the infamous mushroom cloud. As the wind carries these particles, they fall back to the earth, contaminating people, animals, water, and soil.

The direction and speed of the wind over Chicago can vary, making fallout inherently unpredictable. Assuming the region’s prevailing westerly winds push the cloud eastward, fallout descends on Lake Michigan—the largest public drinking water source in the state, serving approximately 6.6 million residents.

At average wind speeds, radiation that travels roughly 40 to 50 miles of the plume is immediately lethal to anyone outdoors. More than a hundred miles downwind, the intensity of exposure inflicts severe radiation sickness. Contamination from longer-lived isotopes would reach even further, poisoning Michigan’s robust agriculture and dairy industry and contaminating milk, meat, and grains.

Back in the city, the destruction of critical infrastructure triggers a chain of systemic failures, paralyzing emergency response. Tens of thousands of survivors suffer from deep burns, requiring urgent care. With only twenty Level I-burn centers in the state and scores of medical personnel among the injured or killed, this capacity amounts to a drop in an ocean of suffering. The city’s health system, among the most advanced in the world, has effectively collapsed. Suburban hospitals are quickly inundated, forced to focus on those most likely to live.

Unsolicited Advice to the Sierra Club

After the 2020 George Floyd murder, the Sierra Club called for defunding police and reparations for slavery. It touched off an internal battle that tore the organization apart, leading to the ouster of two consecutive executive directors, employee layoffs, office closings, loss of members, and financial freefall. It also invited some unsolicited advice — from me.

My column, during the worst of the club’s turmoil, strongly advised its leaders to “stay in your lane.” “Stick to what you are known for, and good at, and you will remain effective and relevant,” I advised. You may be shocked to learn that they did not heed that advice. Perhaps they considered it unfriendly?

Psychology Today just published suggested responses to shut down unsolicited advice. Say something like, “That’s useful, but I prefer to handle it this way,” or “I appreciate your input, but already have a plan.” I didn’t even get such platitudes for suggesting the Sierra Club stick to environmental issues.

Instead, the group doubled down on woke social activism, its director, Michael Brune, trashing the reputation of Sierra Club founder and conservation hero John Muir. Brune claimed the club had played a “substantial role in perpetuating white supremacy.” It was an outrageous assertion, motivated by political correctness and based on the obscure fact that a young Muir had written some unflattering views after his travels among native American tribes. I hate judging people of the past by today’s standards. Muir was a product of the 19th century, who thought like most 19th century Americans. He said some things modern leaders would not say. But he played no role whatsoever in perpetuating any notion of white supremacy, much less a “substantial role.” He was not a Klansman, was never governor of Arkansas, managed no bus system in Montgomery, nor sanitation department in Memphis. He was a Wisconsin-bred northern Republican, an advocate of voting rights, an early progressive, a friend and ally of Theodore Roosevelt.

Brune’s attempt to demonize and “cancel” John Muir from Sierra Club history, and other “social justice” campaigns ultimately cost him his job and led to two years of infighting. The board then hired Ben Jealous, a former head of the NAACP and president of People for the American Way, the extremist lefty group founded by Norman Lear. The board put political correctness above its historic mission, and it didn’t work. Jealous was ultimately fired, too, but the direction has not changed. When the club was rich and influential beyond Muir’s wildest dreams, its leaders continually reached beyond environment issues into other left-wing causes, including labor unions, race relations, LGBT rights, Palestine v. Israel, and illegal immigration. Its “equity language guide,” suggested the word “Americans” was offensive.

The effect on its membership, funding, and influence can readily be seen in this week’s headlines: “Sierra Club Went Woke and Now is Going Broke;” “Sierra Club Embraced Social Justice and Then Tore Itself Apart;” “Sierra Club Faces Uncertainty;” and “Sierra Club Deviated from Environmental Mission to Embrace Far-Left Projects. It Ripped Itself to Shreds.”

It still calls itself the “largest and most influential grass roots environmental organization in the country.” But in fact, it has lost 60% of the four million members and supporters it claimed just five years ago. Its new director, Loren Blackford, faces a $40 million budget shortfall, and employees remain up in arms about a mission that has morphed beyond anything familiar.

A Colorado-based volunteer reported being criticized for lobbying for more protection for wolves. She says a Sierra Club staffer asked, “What do wolves have to do with equity, justice, and inclusion?” The correct response would have been, “What do equity, justice, and inclusion have to do with the environment, which I thought was our mission?”

Former Board Chairman Aaron Mair was censured for asking “Do we want to still be the Sierra Club?” It’s the right question. Digital marketing pioneer Gary Vaynerchuk says, “I’m pretty good at sticking to what I know... I talk about what I know because I’m petrified of being wrong.” It’s not even that the Sierra Club was necessarily wrong on social issues — reasonable people may debate that. It’s that these are not the issues the club is known for, and more to the point, not the reason people join, donate, and support it.

by Greg Walcher, The Daily Sentinel | Read more:
Image: Sierra Club/uncredited via

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The Future of Search

Type​ a few words into Google and hit ‘return’. Almost instantaneously, a list of links will appear. To find them, you may have to scroll past a bit of clutter – ads and, these days, an ‘AI Overview’ – but even if your query is obscure, and mine often are, it’s nevertheless quite likely that one of the links on your screen will take you to what you’re looking for. That’s striking, given that there are probably more than a billion sites on the web, and more than fifty times as many webpages.

On the foundation of that everyday miracle, a company currently worth around $3 trillion was built, yet today the future of Google is far from certain. It was founded in September 1998, at which point the world wide web, to which it became an indispensable guide, was less than ten years old. Google was by no means the first web search engine, but its older competitors had been weakened by ‘spamming’, much of it by the owners of the web’s already prevalent porn sites. Just as Google was to do, these early search engines deployed ‘web crawlers’ to find websites, ingest their contents and assemble an electronic index of them. They then used that index to find sites whose contents seemed the best match to the words in the user’s query. A spammer such as the owner of a porn site could plaster their site with words which, while irrelevant to the site’s content, were likely to appear in web searches. Often hidden from the users’ sight – encoded, for example, in the same colour as the background – those words would still be ingested by web crawlers. By the late 1990s, it was possible, even usual, to enter an entirely innocent search query – ‘skiing’, ‘beach holidays’, ‘best colleges’ – and be served up a bunch of links to porn.

In the mid to late 1990s, Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were PhD students at Stanford University’s Computer Science Department. One of the problems Page was working on was how to increase the chances that the first entries someone would see in the comments section on a website would be useful, even authoritative. What was needed, as Page told Steven Levy, a tech journalist and historian of Google, was a ‘rating system’. In thinking about how websites could be rated, Page was struck by the analogy between the links to a website that the owners of other websites create and the citations that an authoritative scientific paper receives. The greater the number of links, the higher the probability that the site was well regarded, especially if the links were from sites that were themselves of high quality.

Using thousands of human beings to rate millions of websites wasn’t necessary, Page and Brin realised. ‘It’s all recursive,’ as Levy reports Page saying in 2001. ‘How good you are is determined by who links to you,’ and how good they are is determined by who links to them. ‘It’s all a big circle. But mathematics is great. You can solve this.’ Their algorithm, PageRank, did not entirely stop porn sites and other spammers infiltrating the results of unrelated searches – one of Google’s engineers, Matt Cutts, used to organise a ‘Look for Porn Day’ before each new version of its web index was launched – but it did help Google to improve substantially on earlier search engines.

Page’s undramatic word ‘recursive’ hid a giant material challenge. You can’t find the incoming links to a website just by examining the website itself. You have to go instead to the sites that link to it. But since you don’t know in advance which they are, you will have to crawl large expanses of the web to find them. The logic of what Page and Brin were setting out to do involved them in a hugely ambitious project: to ingest and index effectively every website in existence. That, in essence, is what Google still does. (...)

A quite​ different, and potentially more serious, threat to Google is a development that it did a great deal to foster: the emergence of large language models (LLMs) and the chatbots based on them, most prominently ChatGPT, developed by the start-up OpenAI. Google’s researchers have worked for more than twenty years on what a computer scientist would call ‘natural language processing’ – Google Translate, for example, dates from 2006 – and Google was one of the pioneers in applying neural networks to the task. These are computational structures (now often gigantic) that were originally thought to be loosely analogous to the brain’s array of neurons. They are not programmed in detail by their human developers: they learn from examples – these days, in many cases, billions of examples.

The efficiency with which a neural network learns is strongly affected by its structure or ‘architecture’. A pervasive issue in natural language processing, for example, is what linguists call ‘coreference resolution’. Take the sentence: ‘The animal didn’t cross the street because it was too tired.’ The ‘it’ could refer to the animal or to the street. Humans are called on to resolve such ambiguities all the time, and if the process takes conscious thought, it’s often a sign that what you’re reading is badly written. Coreference resolution is, however, a much harder problem for a computer system, even a sophisticated neural network.

In August 2017, a machine-learning researcher called Jakob Uszkoreit uploaded to Google’s research blog a post about a new architecture for neural networks that he and his colleagues called the Transformer. Neural networks were by then already powering Google Translate, but still made mistakes – in coreference resolution, for example, which can become embarrassingly evident when English is translated into a gendered language such as French. Uszkoreit’s example was the sentence I have just quoted. ‘L’animal’ is masculine and ‘la rue’ feminine, so the correct translation should end ‘il était trop fatigué,’ but Google Translate was still rendering it as ‘elle était trop fatiguée,’ presumably because in the sentence’s word order ‘street’ is closer than ‘animal’ to the word ‘it’.

The Transformer, Uszkoreit reported, was much less likely to make this sort of mistake, because it ‘directly models relationships between all words in a sentence, regardless of their respective position’. Before this, the general view had been that complex tasks such as coreference resolution require a network architecture with a complicated structure. The Transformer was structurally simpler, ‘dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely’, as Uszkoreit and seven current or former Google colleagues put it in a paper from 2017. Because of its simplicity, the Transformer was ‘more parallelisable’ than earlier architectures. Using it made it easier to divide language processing into computational subtasks that could run simultaneously, rather than one after the other.

Just as Dean and Ghemawat had done, the authors of the Transformer paper made it publicly available, at Neural Information Processing Systems, AI’s leading annual meeting, in 2017. One of those who read it was the computer scientist Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI, who says that ‘as soon as the paper came out, literally the next day, it was clear to me, to us, that transformers address the limitations’ of the more complex neural-network architecture OpenAI had been using for language processing. The Transformer, in other words, should scale. As Karen Hao reports in Empire of AI, Sutskever started ‘evangelising’ for it within OpenAI, but met with some scepticism: ‘It felt like a wack idea,’ one of his OpenAI colleagues told Hao.† Crucially, however, another colleague, Alec Radford, ‘began hacking away on his laptop, often late into the night, to scale Transformers just a little and observe what happened’.

Sutskever was right: the Transformer architecture did scale. It made genuinely large, indeed giant, language models feasible. Its parallelisability meant that it could readily be implemented on graphics chips, originally designed primarily for rendering images in computer games, a task that has to be done very fast but is also highly parallelisable. (Nvidia, the leading designer of graphics chips, provides much of the material foundation of LLMs, making it the world’s most valuable company, currently worth around 30 per cent more than Alphabet.) If you have enough suitable chips, you can do a huge amount of what’s called ‘pre-training’ of a Transformer model ‘generatively’, without direct human input. This involves feeding the model huge bodies of text, usually scraped from the internet, getting the model to generate what it thinks will be the next word in each piece of text, then the word after that and so on, and having it continuously and automatically adjust its billions of parameters to improve its predictions. Only once you have done enough pre-training do you start fine-tuning the model to perform more specific tasks.

It was OpenAI, not Google, that made the most decisive use of the Transformer. Its debt is right there in the name: OpenAI’s evolving LLMs are all called GPT, or Generative Pre-trained Transformer. GPT-1 and GPT-2 weren’t hugely impressive; the breakthrough came in 2020 with the much larger GPT-3. It didn’t yet take the form of a chatbot that laypeople could use – ChatGPT was released only in November 2022 – but developers in firms other than OpenAI were given access to GPT-3 from June 2020, and found that it went well beyond previous systems in its capacity to produce large quantities of text (and computer code) that was hard to distinguish from something that a well-informed human being might write.

GPT-3’s success intensified the enthusiasm for LLMs that had already been growing at other tech firms, but it also caused unease. Timnit Gebru, co-founder of Black in AI and co-head of Google’s Ethical AI team, along with Emily Bender, a computational linguist at the University of Washington, and five co-authors, some of whom had to remain anonymous, wrote what has become the most famous critique of LLMs. They argued that LLMs don’t really understand language. Instead, they wrote, an LLM is a ‘stochastic parrot ... haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning’. What’s more, Bender, Gebru and colleagues noted, training such a model consumes huge quantities of electricity, and the giant datasets used in the training often ‘encode hegemonic views that are harmful to marginalised populations’. (They quoted the computer scientists Abeba Birhane and Vinay Uday Prabhu: ‘Feeding AI systems on the world’s beauty, ugliness and cruelty but expecting it to reflect only the beauty is a fantasy’.)

by Donald MacKenzie, London Review of Books | Read more:

Image: via

[ed. How search works, how it could change. Well worth a full read.]

via: YouTube

Emergency Room Notebook, 1977

You never hear sirens in the emergency room — the drivers turn them off on Webster Street. I see the red backup lights of ACE or United Ambulance out of the corner of my eye. Usually we are expecting them, alerted by the MED NET radio, just like on TV. “City One: This is ACE, Code Two. Forty-two-year-old male, head injury, BP 190 over 110. Conscious. ETA three minutes.” “City One … 76542 Clear.”

If it is Code Three, where life is in critical danger, the doctor and nurses wait outside, chatting in anticipation. Inside, in room 6, the trauma room, is the Code Blue team. EKG, X-ray technicians, respiratory therapists, cardiac nurses. In most Code Blues, though, the EMT drivers or firemen are too busy to call in. Piedmont Fire Department never does, and they have the worst. Rich massive coronaries, matronly phenobarbital suicides, children in swimming pools. (...)

I like my job in Emergency. Blood, bones, tendons seem like affirmations to me. I am awed by the human body, by its endurance. Thank God — because it’ll be hours before X-ray or Demerol. Maybe I’m morbid. I am fascinated by two fingers in a baggie, a glittering switchblade all the way out of a lean pimp’s back. I like the fact that, in Emergency, everything is reparable, or not.

Code Blues. Well, everybody loves Code Blues. That’s when somebody dies — their heart stops beating, they stop breathing — but the Emergency team can, and often does, bring them back to life. Even if the patient is a tired eighty-year-old you can’t help but get caught up in the drama of resuscitation, if only for a while. Many lives, young fruitful ones, are saved.

The pace and excitement of ten or fifteen people, performers … it’s like opening night at the theater. The patients, if they are conscious, take part too, if just by looking interested in all the goings-on. They never look afraid.

If the family is with the patient it is my job to get information from them, to keep them informed about what’s going on. Reassure them, mostly.

While the staff members think in terms of good or bad codes — how well everyone did what they were supposed to do, whether the patient responded or not — I think in terms of good or bad deaths.

Bad deaths are ones with the manager of a hotel as next of kin, or the cleaning woman who found the stroke victim two weeks later, dying of dehydration. Really bad deaths are when there are several children and in-laws I have called in from somewhere inconvenient and none of them seem to know each other or the dying parent at all. There is nothing to say. They keep talking about making arrangements, about having to make arrangements, about who will make arrangements.

Gypsies are good deaths. I think so … the nurses don’t and security guards don’t. There are always dozens of them, demanding to be with the dying person, to kiss them and hug them, unplugging and screwing up the TVs and monitors and assorted apparatus. The best thing about Gypsy deaths is they never make their kids keep quiet. The adults wail and cry and sob but all the children continue to run around, playing and laughing, without being told they should be sad or respectful.

Good deaths seem to be coincidentally good Codes — the patient responds miraculously to all this life-giving treatment and then just quietly passes away. (...)

I saw blind Mr. Adderly on the 51 bus the other night. His wife, Diane Adderly, came in DOA a few months ago. He had found her body at the foot of the stairs, with his cane.

Ratshit Nurse McCoy kept telling him to stop crying.

“It simply won’t help the situation, Mr. Adderly.”

“Nothing will help. It’s all I can do. Let me alone.”

When he heard McCoy had left, to make arrangements, he told me that he had never cried before. It scared him, because of his eyes.

I put her wedding band on his little finger. Over a thousand dollars in grimy cash had been in her bra, and I put it in his wallet. I told him that the denominations were fifties, twenties, and hundreds and he would need to find somebody to sort it all out.

When I saw him later on a bus he must have remembered my walk or smell. I didn’t see him at all — just climbed on the bus and slumped into the nearest seat. He even got up from the front seat near the driver to sit by me.

“Hello, Lucia,” he said.

He was very funny, describing his new, messy roommate at the Hilltop House for the Blind. I couldn’t imagine how he could know his roommate was messy, but then I could and told him my Marx Brothers idea of two blind roommates — shaving cream on the spaghetti, slipping on spilled stuffaroni, etc. We laughed and were silent, holding hands … from Pleasant Valley to Alcatraz Avenue. He cried, softly. My tears were for my own loneliness, my own blindness.

The first night I worked in Emergency, an ACE ambulance brought in a Jane Doe. Staff was short that night so the ambulance drivers and I undressed her, pulled the shredded panty hose off of varicose veins, toenails curling like parrots’. We unstuck her papers, not from her gray flesh-colored bra but from her clammy breasts. A picture of a young man in a marine uniform: George 1944. Three wet coupons for Purina cat chow and a blurred red, white, and blue Medicare card. Her name was Jane. Jane Daugherty. We tried the phone book. No Jane, no George.

If their purses haven’t already been stolen old women never seem to have anything in them but bottom dentures, a 51 bus schedule, and an address book with no last names.

The drivers and I worked together with pieces of information, calling the California Hotel for Annie, underlined, the Five-Spot cleaners. Sometimes we just have to wait until a relative calls, looking for them. Emergency phones ring all day long. “Have you seen a — ?” Old people. I get mixed up about old people. It seems a shame to do a total hip replacement or a coronary bypass on some ninety-five-year-old who whispers, “Please let me go.”

It doesn’t seem old people should fall down so much, take so many baths. But maybe it’s important for them to walk alone, stand on their own two feet. Sometimes it seems they fall on purpose, like the woman who ate all those Ex-Lax — to get away from the nursing home.

There is a great deal of flirty banter among the nurses and the ambulance crews. “So long — seizure later.” It used to shock me, all the jokes while they’re in the middle of a tracheotomy or shaving a patient for monitors. An eighty-year-old woman, fractured pelvis, sobbing, “Hold my hand! Please hold my hand!” Ambulance drivers rattling on about the Oakland Stompers.

“Hold her bloody hand, man!” He looked at me like I was crazy. I don’t hold many hands anymore and I joke a lot, too, if not around patients. There is a great deal of tension and pressure. It’s draining — being involved in life-and-death situations all the time.

Even more draining, and the real cause of tension and cynicism, is that so many of the patients we get in Emergency are not only not emergencies, there is nothing the matter with them at all. It gets so you yearn for a good cut-and-dried stabbing or a gunshot wound. All day long, all night long, people come in because they don’t have much appetite, have irregular BMs, stiff necks, red or green urine (which invariably means they had beets or spinach for lunch).

Can you hear all those sirens in the background, in the middle of the night? More than one of them is going to pick up some old guy who ran out of Gallo port.

Chart after chart. Anxiety reaction. Tension headaches. Hyperventilation. Intoxication. Depression. (These are the diagnoses — the patients’ complaints are cancer, heart attack, blood clots, suffocation.) Each of these patients costs hundreds of dollars including ambulance, X-ray, lab work, EKG. The ambulances get a Medi-Cal sticker, we get a Medi-Cal sticker, the doctor gets a Medi-Cal sticker, and the patient dozes off for a while until a taxi comes to take him home, paid for with a voucher. God, have I become as inhuman as Nurse McCoy? Fear, poverty, alcoholism, loneliness are terminal illnesses. Emergencies, in fact.

We do get critical trauma or cardiac patients, and they are treated and stabilized with awesome skill and efficiency in a matter of minutes and rushed to surgery or ICU, CCU.

Drunks and suicides take hours of time holding up needed rooms and nurses. Four or five people waiting at my desk to sign in. Ankle fractures, strep throat, whiplash, etc.

Maude, beery, bleary, is sprawled on a gurney, kneading my arm like a neurotic cat.

“You’re so kind … so charming … it’s this vertigo, dear.”

“What is your last name and your address? What happened to your Medi-Cal card?”

“Gone, everything is gone … I’m so miserable and so alone. Will they keep me here? There must be something the matter with my inner ear. My son Willie never calls. Of course, it’s Daly City and a toll call. Do you have children?”

“Sign here.”

I have found a minimum of information among the rest of the mess in her purse. She uses Zig-Zag papers to blot her lipstick. Big smeary kisses, billowing like popcorn all over her purse.

“What’s Willie’s last name and phone number?”

She begins to cry, reaching both arms for my neck.

“Don’t call him. He says I’m disgusting. You think I’m disgusting. Hold me!”

“I’ll see you later, Maude. Let go of my neck and sign this paper. Let go.”

Drunks are invariably alone. Suicides come in with at least one other person, usually many more. Which is probably the general idea. At least two Oakland police officers. I have finally understood why suicide is considered a crime.

Overdoses are the worst. Time again. Nurses usually too busy. They give them some medication but then the patient has to drink ten glasses of water. (These are not the stomach-pump critical overdoses.) I’m tempted to stick my finger down their throat. Hiccups and tears. “Here, one more cup.”

There are “good” suicides. “Good reasons” many times like terminal illness, pain. But I’m more impressed with good technique. Bullets through the brain, properly slashed wrists, decent barbiturates. Such people, even if they don’t succeed, seem to emanate a peace, a strength, which may have come from having made a thoughtful decision.

It’s the repeats that get to me — the forty penicillin capsules, the twenty Valium and a bottle of Dristan. Yes, I am aware that, statistically, people who threaten or attempt suicide eventually succeed. I am convinced that this is always an accident. John, usually home by five, had a flat tire and could not rescue his wife in time. I suspect a form of manslaughter sometimes, the husband or some other regular rescuer having at last finally tired of showing up just in the guilty nick of time.

“Where’s Marvin? Must be worried sick.”

“He’s phoning.”

I hate to tell her he’s in the cafeteria, has gotten to like their Reuben sandwiches.

Exam week at Cal. Many suicides, some succeeding, mostly Oriental. Dumbest suicide of the week was Otis.

Otis’s wife, Lou-Bertha, had left him for another man. Otis took two bottles of Sominex, but was wide awake. Peppy, even.

“Get Lou-Bertha before it’s too late!”

He kept hollering instructions to me from the trauma room. “My mother … Mary Brochard 849-0917 … Try the Adam and Eve Bar for Lou-Bertha.”

Lou-Bertha has just left the Adam and Eve for the Shalimar. It was busy for a long time, then an answer, and Stevie Wonder for a whole record of “Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing.”

“Run that by me one more time, honey … He OD’d on what?”

I told her.

“Shit. You go tell that toothless worthless nigger he better be taking a lot more of something a lot stronger if’n he expects to get me outta here.”

I went in to tell him … what? She was glad he was okay, maybe. But he was on the telephone in room 6. Had his pants on, still wore a polka-dot gown on top. He had located the half-pint of Royal Gate in his jacket pocket. Was just sort of lounging around, like an executive.

“Johnnie? Yeah. Otis here. I’m up here at City Emergency Room. You know, off Broadway. What’s happening? Fine, fine. That bitch Lou-Bertha messing ’round with Darryl … [Silence.] No shit.”

The charge nurse came in. “He still here? Get him out! We have four Codes coming in. Auto accident, all Code Three, ETA ten minutes.”

I try to sign as many patients as possible before the ambulances arrive. The people will just have to wait later, about half of them will leave, but meanwhile all are restless and angry.

Oh, hell … there were three here before this one but better just sign her in. It’s Marlene the Migraine, an Emergency habituée. She is so beautiful, young. She stops talking with two Laney College basketball players, one with an injured right knee, and stumbles to my desk to go into her act.

Her howls are like Ornette Coleman in early “Lonely Woman” days. Mostly what she does is first, bang her head against the wall near my desk, dump everything off my desk with a swoop.

Then she starts her cries. Whooping, anguished yelps, reminiscent of Mexican corridas, Texan love songs, “Aiee, Vi, Yi!”

“Ah-hah, San Antone!”

She has slumped to the floor and all I can see is an elegantly manicured hand, extending her Medi-Cal card above the desk.

“Can’t you see I’m dying? I’m going blind, for crissakes!”

“Come on, Marlene — how’d you get those false eyelashes on?”

“Nasty whore.”

“Marlene, sit up and sign in. Ambulances are coming, so you’ll have to wait. Sit up!”

She sits up, starts to light a Kool. “Don’t light that, sign here,” I say. She signs and Zeff comes to put her into a room.

“Well, well, if it isn’t our old angry pal, Marlene.”

“Don’t you humor me, you dumb nurse.”

The ambulances arrive, and for sure they are emergencies. Two die. For an hour all the nurses, doctors, on-call doctors, surgeons, everybody is tied up in room 6 with the two surviving young patients.

One of Marlene’s hands is struggling into a velvet coat sleeve, the other is applying magenta lipstick.

“Holy Christ — I can’t hang around this joint all night, right? Seeya, honey!”

“See ya, Marlene.”

by Lucia Berlin, Maxima-Library |  Read more:
Image: A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories
[ed. For Tessa and Gary. From Lucia Berlin's "A Manual For Cleaning Women: Selected Stories. Had an emergency room experience lately and kept thinking about this story.]

Have You Heard the Good News?

A quick look at some recent headlines shows that we have problems. The nation sharply and angrily divided along political lines. Rioters in the streets of Los Angeles. A destructive trade war. Debt and deficits at unsustainable levels.

Those are real and serious problems (and not close to an exhaustive list). But the tenor of the public debate—from elected officials to pundits, journalists to public intellectuals—implies that we are living in something approaching the apocalypse. To them, the game is rigged, the system is broken, everything is awful, and life was better decades ago.

That’s mostly bullshit.

Yes, we have real problems. But widen the aperture, and you’ll see that there has never been a better time to be alive than the present day.

If that doesn’t sound like what you’re reading in the newspaper, remember that the news business relies on outraging you.

How many viral social media posts essentially say “all is pretty, pretty good, so let’s just move along”? Of course, just saying “pretty, pretty good” quotes a man who thinks dinner with Hitler and dinner with Trump are six of one half, a sieg heil of another. That kind of poor reality testing is kind of the theme of this essay.

The incentives of the press fuel the narrative of despair and doom. So do the incentives facing politicians, who don’t get gigs by telling you: “Things are mostly okay, but hey, there are some things we really need to work on.”

All of this doomsaying feeds into the populist moment we are living in. And it comes from both sides.

Horseshoe theory is the idea that the far left and the far right converge toward each other, even if they’d both vigorously deny it. Populism, as practiced by both the left and right ends of the horseshoe, has never just been about telling people popular things, such as “ice cream is delicious.” Rather, it’s telling people: “Ice cream is delicious, and you aren’t getting your fair share of the ice cream because you are a helpless victim living in a rigged ice-cream system, and here are the people responsible that we will take to task for you, and by doing so restore your rightful ice cream.”

That was more or less the sales pitch of the populist of the moment: socialist Zohran Mamdani, who clinched the Democratic nomination in the New York City mayor’s race by arguing the city needed revolutionary change. And, with some names changed, it’s a huge part of the MAGA pitch, too.

Populism pits “the people” against “the elites.” It requires the finger-point and the class conflict. And it requires things to be very bad, or else there’s not much for the populist leader to fix.

It is also about zero-sum grievance. It’s about telling people they are getting the shaft and our side is the one to unshaft you, extracting vengeance for you along the way. It’s inherently anti-republican (small r), replacing constitutional, individual, and minority protections and rights with the will of the 51 percent (often fewer are needed) who you can convince about your “populist” revanchist policies that will undo all real or imagined past wrongs done to them.

Now, there is nothing wrong with a good grievance—that is, if the grievance is justified and the solution to the grievance reasonable. The left can justifiably point to Americans without health insurance. The right can justifiably point to a border that was consciously left open for many years. Examples abound.

But today, both the progressive left and the MAGA right seem to run on imaginary—or at best, horribly exaggerated—grievance. The uniting theme is that the average American has it terrible these days, and only their chosen end of the horseshoe can fix it. People will go to extremes only when they are convinced things are terrible—and there’s a cottage industry, again both press and politicians, working on selling that story.

The left blames rich people and corporations. (We have to redistribute your ice cream from them back to you.) The right blames free trade, immigrants —including legal ones, who came here just to take your ice cream—and, uh, also rich people and corporations. Actually, the populist, progressive left and the populist, MAGA right agree on a lot (straight from the horseshoe’s mouth). Both are hostile to big business, tech companies (with the exception of crypto for MAGA, at least for now), fiscal responsibility and entitlement reform, global supply chains, experts, free trade, taxing tipped income, non-organized labor, and free markets. At the extremes, they both scapegoat Jews, the far right often using placeholder words like globalist, the far left preferring words like Zionist, though increasingly just going to full-on Jew-blaming (stay classy, James).

Both ends of the horseshoe advocate intrusive, autocratic socialistic government, either de facto (the MAGA right who won’t use the word socialist but nonetheless push for more government control of the economy) or de jure (the progressive left, definitely including Mamdani, often will use the s-word, usually but not always prefaced with the adjective democratic)—such unchecked state power being the necessary tool to fix what is broken and even the score.

There has never been a better time and place to be alive than in the United States today.

The thing that unites them is their claim that the average American is living through a catastrophe that only they can fix. Despite the popularity of this view, it just isn’t true. But, sadly, telling people they’re being screwed by some remote “other” seems to be a winning strategy—at least for a while.

Put simply, it’s just the opposite. We are living in the best world ever for the most people ever. Lots of things are bad; lots of things can be made better. “Best world ever” does not mean “perfect world.” But if the progressive left tells you the 1950s were better, as labor unions were stronger and tax rates were over 90 percent, and the MAGA right tells you the 1950s were better, as labor unions were stronger and Harriet was still a tradwife to Ozzie, both are just wrong.

Our politics today would look a lot different and a lot better if we started from the undeniable reality of today’s extreme broad-based prosperity and human flourishing—and then tried to make it even broader and even better.

So let’s start with the facts:

There has never been a better time and place to be alive than in the United States today. We will focus on economics below, as that is our expertise, and easily the single biggest category of populist grievance.

by Clifford S. Asness and Michael R. Strain, Free Press |  Read more:

Image: Ernst Haas/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
[ed. Just a reminder, interesting and informed perspectives are always welcomed here whether we agree with them or not.]

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Everything That’s Wrong About Raccoons

Too many people want you to dismiss a raccoon’s deal of “Oh they’re mischievous cat-dogs with friendly washed hands and a jewel-thief face” when it’s really an ALL-HANDS NO-FEET TRASH-CAT WITH A DOG’S STOMACH AND A POSSUM’S HEART.

It can put itself up in trees but it waddles on the ground, I can’t be in trustment of a beast that clambers and waddles both; either be graceful and lithe all of times, or be clumsy and relatable on the ground. Seals can barely pull off “limber in the water, silly on a rock” and raccoons, you are not seals, you do not have their wise old laugh-faces, you just seem creepy and duplicitous.

Once when my dog died a passel of raccoons showed up in the backyard as if to say “Now that he’s gone, we own the night,” and they didn’t flinch when I yelled at them, and I found it disrespectful to 1) me personally and 2) the entire flow of the food chain. Don’t disrespect me if you can’t eat me, you false-night-dogs.

YOU SCRUBBLEMENT UP YOUR WITCH HANDS AND I DON’T TRUST IT, THAT IS A HUMAN ATTRIBUTE AND I WANT YOU TO LEAVE THAT TO US, STOP BEFORE-WASHING AND RUBBLE-SCRITCHING YOUR FUR-FINGERS, YOU MASHED-DOWN SMALLBEAR

They’re a dense badger lie

THEY CAN POINT THEIR FEET BACKWARDS TO CLIMB DOWN TREES, THEY CAN SWIM, THEY CAN SWEAT LIKE A YOU OR ME, A PERSON OR PANT LIKE A DOG TO COOL DOWN AS THEY CHOOSE, THEY IDLY AND INSOLENTLY SLIDE BETWEEN THE ANIMAL AND THE HUMAN WORLD AND IF THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU TAUGHT ME NOTHING ELSE IT’S THAT THAT IS FUCKED UPWARDLY

I don’t like the word “chittering” and that is the only sound a raccoon makes

MAYBE THEY ARE AN ASSEMBLAGE OF VERY CONDENSED SQUIRRELS THAT POWERED UP INTO A MEDIUM-SIZED BEASTIE AND THAT WOULD BE INAPPROPRIATE, IF SQUIRRELS HAD DEVELOPED POWER-RANGER-LIKE ABILITIES

I hate the way they wobble-squample across the street at night when you see a shadowy mass under a streetlight and then it turns out to be like seven fur-children

A raccoon is the child of a cat and a wizard and it walks in too many worlds for it to be allowed to stay in this one

STOP LOOKING AT ME, YOU RIVER-DABBLER

by Mallory Ortberg, Toast |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Still traveling so here's a repost of a perennial favorite. See also: So You've Decided to Drink More Water]

Hans Erni, Le Dessinateur or Kybernetes, Lithograph in 5 colours, 1956

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The Penny Dies at 232

The American penny died on Wednesday in Philadelphia. It was 232.

The cause was irrelevance and expensiveness, the Treasury Department said.

Nothing could be bought any more with a penny, not even penny candy. Moreover, the cost to mint the penny had risen to more than 3 cents, a financial absurdity that doomed the coin.

The final pennies were minted on Wednesday afternoon in Philadelphia. Top Treasury officials were on hand for its final journey. No last words were recorded

In its heyday, the penny had immense cultural impact. It was the going rate for thoughts. It was a symbol of frugality, saved and/or earned. It could sometimes be pretty and other times arrive from heaven. And how many ideas would never have come to light without a penny dropping?

When picked up, it was said to bring good luck for a 24-hour period, an assertion commonly made, but one that was never proven by any scientific double-blind studies.

On the darker side, a penny could undoubtedly be bad, especially when turning up. (...)

The American penny was born in 1793 in Philadelphia. Its parent was Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the Treasury, who was the chief author of the Coinage Act, which birthed the penny and its siblings.

The penny went through several reinventions. At birth, it depicted Lady Liberty. In 1909, Abraham Lincoln took over the front for the rest of its life.

The reverse of the coin was where it showed more variety, with a 15-link chain, a wreath, wheat stalks and the Lincoln Memorial all getting moments. In 2009, the variations increased, with a log cabin and other designs. Most recently it depicted a Union shield.

The penny was at first strictly a copper coin. In 1943, because of hunger for copper for the war effort, it changed for a year into zinc-coated steel. Starting in 1982, and until its death, the penny, so associated with its copper color, was in fact 97.5 percent zinc and merely 2.5 percent copper plating.

As the penny entered its long decline, it more and more frequently found itself casually tossed into a jar in someone’s home or ignominiously dropped in a “Take a Penny” tray at retailers. Calls grew for it to be euthanized, citing its obsolescence. In the end, President Trump signed its death warrant in February.

Even after death, the penny will not vanish for a while longer. There are some 250 billion pennies in circulation and they will be out there, gathering dust, or maybe, very, very rarely, being used to help pay for something. As the last pennies slowly disappear, businesses will have no choice but to round transactions to the nearest nickel when dealing with cash.

With the penny’s demise, coin enthusiasts’ worried eyes now turn toward its longtime associate, the nickel. Its purchasing power has also shrunk to nearly nothing, and it costs more than a dime to make.

by Victor Mather, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

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AI-Powered Nimbyism Could Grind Planning Systems to a Halt

The government’s plan to use artificial intelligence to accelerate planning for new homes may be about to hit an unexpected roadblock: AI-powered nimbyism.

A new service called Objector is offering “policy-backed objections in minutes” to people who are upset about planning applications near their homes.

It uses generative AI to scan planning applications and check for grounds for objection, ranking these as “high”, “medium” or “low” impact. It then automatically creates objection letters, AI-written speeches to deliver to the planning committees, and even AI-generated videos to “influence councillors”.

Kent residents Hannah and Paul George designed the system after estimating they spent hundreds of hours attempting to navigate the planning process when they opposed plans to convert a building near their home into a mosque.

For £45-a-time, they are offering the tool to people who, like them, could not afford a specialist lawyer to help navigate labyrinthine planning laws. They said it would help “everyone have a voice, to level the playing field and make the whole process fairer”. (...)

Hannah George, a co-founder of Objector, denied the platform was about automating nimbyism.

“It’s just about making the planning system fair,” she said. “At the moment, from our experience, it’s not. And with the government on this ‘build, baby, build’ mission, we see that only going one way.”

Objector has said while AI-created errors are a concern, it uses two different AI models and cross-checks the results in an effort to reduce the risk of “hallucinations” – a term used to describe when AIs make things up.

The current Objector system is designed to tackle small planning applications, for example, repurposing a local office building or a neighbour’s home extension. A capability to challenge much larger applications, such as a housing estate on greenbelt land, is in development, said George.

The Labour government has been promoting AI as one solution to clearing planning backlogs. It recently launched a tool called Extract, which aims to speed up planning processes and help the government carry out its mission to build 1.5m new homes.

But there may be an AI “arms race” developing, said John Myers, the director of the Yimby Alliance, a campaign calling for more homes to be built with the support of local communities.

“This will turbocharge objections to planning applications and will lead to people finding obscure reasons [for opposing developments] that they have not found before,” he said.

A new dynamic could emerge “where one side tries to deploy AI to accelerate the process, and the other side deploys AI to stop it,” he said. “I don’t see an end to that until we find a way to bring forward developments people want.” (...)

Paul Smith, the managing director of Strategic Land Group, a consultancy, this month reported on the rising use of AI by people to oppose planning applications.

“AI objections undermine the whole rationale for public consultation,” he wrote in Building magazine. “Local communities, we are told, know their areas best … So, we should ask them what they think.

“But if all local residents are doing is deciding they don’t like the scheme before uploading the application documents to a computer to find out why they don’t like it, is there really any point in asking them at all?”

by Aisha Down and Robert Booth, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Rui Vieira/PA

Ken Parker, Who Reinvented the Guitar, Dies at 73

Ken Parker, an iconoclastic guitar maker who upended entrenched luthier traditions by producing hyper-engineered, flyweight guitars seemingly designed for an art gallery, if not the 23rd century, died on Oct. 5 at his home in Gloucester, Mass. He was 73. (...)

In 1993, Mr. Parker founded Parker Guitars in Wilmington, Mass., with Larry Fishman, who oversaw the management of the company and the electronics of the guitars. Mr. Parker leveraged his extensive experience in woodworking and guitar repair, along with his maverick streak, to build groundbreaking guitars that went on to be displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

Which is not to say he thought of guitars as art objects. “I’m a toolmaker,” he was quoted as saying in a 2007 profile in The New Yorker. “I make tools for musicians.”

In Mr. Parker’s view, guitar innovation stalled after the debut in the 1950s of hallowed models like the Fender Stratocaster and the Gibson Les Paul — guitars that Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page and countless others used to amplify a generation. His goal was to bundle together all available advances in technology and materials and build a guitar for a new age.

“I didn’t feel like I had some secret broth that I could smear on a Strat,” Mr. Parker said in 2023 interview with the music site Reverb. “That’s like trying to improve on a smile,” he added. “I mean, what do you do? It’s already developed.”

His alternative was the Parker Fly, a head-turning guitar that relied heavily on composite materials and looked like a prop from “Flash Gordon.”

Priced at around $2,000, the Fly was never a big seller, but it did find admirers among an array of notable musicians including Joni Mitchell, Adrian Belew and Dave Navarro of Jane’s Addiction. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails once said he recorded about 80 percent of the guitar parts for the band’s platinum-selling 1999 album, “The Fragile,” on a Parker Fly.

In practical terms, the Fly lived up to its name, weighing about five pounds — roughly half of many Les Pauls. Mr. Parker accomplished this in part by shaving away all extraneous material and using lighter woods for the body, like poplar and spruce, instead of traditional hardwoods like ash or mahogany. He then reinforced the back and neck with an thin external skeleton of carbon, fiberglass and epoxy resin for strength.

The Fly also offered an array of tones. Its pickups (devices that translate string motion into an electronic form that gets passed on to an amplifier) could approximate the rich, muscular sound of classic Gibson humbuckers or the shimmer and quack of the single-coil Stratocaster pickups. Its piezo pickups could conjure the airy sounds of an acoustic.

The guitar featured a composite fingerboard with glued-on, wear-resistant stainless steel frets, locking tuners and a strikingly angular cutaway headstock that reduced weight and helped its overall balance. The Fly also had a distinctive flat-spring vibrato system to improve responsiveness over a standard tremolo bar.

And then there were its looks. Everyone seemed to have an opinion. In the Reverb interview, Mr. Parker recalled that Joni Mitchell once told him: “Looks like you found it on a beach. But then it also looks like it came from outer space.” Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones asked, “Nice guitar, but why does it have to look like a bleeding assault rifle?”

by Alex Williams, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Robert Martin

[ed. Great guitars, and Mr. Parker was a true innovator. They'll always have a prominent place in guitar design history. See also: History of the Parker Fly (Guitar.com).]

Always Watching - 24/7 Edition

When most people think about immigration enforcement, they picture border crossings and airport checkpoints. But the new front line may be your social media feed.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has published a request for information for private-sector contractors to launch a round-the-clock social media monitoring program. The request states that private contractors will be paid to comb through “Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, VK, Flickr, Myspace, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, Reddit, WhatsApp, YouTube, etc.,” turning public posts into enforcement leads that feed directly into ICE’s databases.

The request for information reads like something out of a cyber thriller: dozens of analysts working in shifts, strict deadlines measured in minutes, a tiered system of prioritizing high-risk individuals, and the latest software keeping constant watch.

I am a researcher who studies the intersection of data governance, digital technologies and the U.S. federal government. I believe that the ICE request for information also signals a concerning if logical next step in a longer trend, one that moves the U.S. border from the physical world into the digital.
A new structure of surveillance

ICE already searches social media using a service called SocialNet that monitors most major online platforms. The agency has also contracted with Zignal Labs for its AI-powered social media monitoring system.

The Customs and Border Protection agency also searches social media posts on the devices of some travelers at ports of entry, and the U.S. State Department reviews social media posts when foreigners seek visas to enter the United States.

What would change isn’t only the scale of monitoring but its structure. Instead of government agents gathering evidence case by case, ICE is building a public-private surveillance loop that transforms everyday online activity into potential evidence.

Private contractors would be tasked with scraping publicly available data to collecting messages, including posts and other media and data. The contractors would be able to correlate those findings with data in commercial datasets from brokers such as LexisNexis Accurint and Thomson Reuters CLEAR along with government-owned databases. Analysts would be required to produce dossiers for ICE field offices within tight deadlines – sometimes just 30 minutes for a high-priority case.

Those files don’t exist in isolation. They feed directly into Palantir Technologies’ Investigative Case Management system, the digital backbone of modern immigration enforcement. There, this social media data would join a growing web of license plate scans, utility records, property data and biometrics, creating what is effectively a searchable portrait of a person’s life.

by Nicole M. Bennett, The Conversation |  Read more

Image: Westend61/Westend61 via Getty Images
[ed. Explain to me again why Edward Snowden continues to be banished to Russia, rather than hailed as a true American hero. What he revealed seems almost trivial these days. See also: Always Watching: How ICE’s Plan to Monitor Social Media 24/7 Threatens Privacy and Civic Participation (NC):]

What is SocialNet?

SocialNet is a surveillance tool developed by ShadowDragon, giving OSINT (Open-source intelligence) professionals and governments tools to search and collect publicly available information across more than 200 websites, social networks, and online services simultaneously.

According to recent reporting by 404 Media, the tool creates comprehensive profiles of individuals by aggregating their digital footprints across various platforms, enabling analysts to map connections, track activities, and visualize relationships between people of interest.

Which Platforms Are Being Monitored?

The list of monitored platforms is extensive and includes:

• Major social networks: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Bluesky
• Messaging platforms: WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord
• Content platforms: OnlyFans, JustForFans, TikTok
• Payment services: PayPal, Cash App, BuyMeACoffee
• Gaming platforms: Roblox, Chess.com
• Demographic-specific sites: Black Planet
• Special interest networks: FetLife, cigar review sites, hobby forums

The danger here is that when one person is flagged, their friends, relatives, fellow organizers or any of their acquaintances can also become subjects of scrutiny. Previous contracts for facial recognition tools and location trackinghave shown how easily these systems expand beyond their original scope. What starts as enforcement can turn into surveillance of entire communities.

Profiles in Cowardice

After forty days. Forty days of the longest government shutdown in American history. Forty days of Democrats saying this is the line—healthcare for twenty-two million Americans. Forty days of holding firm while Republicans bet Democrats would break first.

Chuck Schumer just taught Donald Trump that hostage-taking works.

Not because he had to. Because the framework he operates within cannot imagine doing what this moment requires: actually fighting power instead of managing accommodation to it.

Eight Democratic senators voted to end the shutdown last night. The deal they cut? A “guaranteed vote” next month on ACA subsidies that everyone—including Chuck Schumer—knows won’t pass. They traded their only leverage for a promise they know is worthless. They held the line for forty days, then surrendered for nothing.

The base is in open revolt. Gavin Newsom’s response was one word: “Pathetic.” JB Pritzker called it “an empty promise.” AOC reminded everyone that “working people want leaders whose word means something.” Chris Murphy admitted plainly: “There’s no way to sugarcoat what happened tonight.”

And Ro Khanna did what needed doing: he called for Schumer’s removal as Senate minority leader.

This isn’t just fury at a bad deal. This is recognition that the Democratic establishment is operating within a dead framework that keeps producing the same result: managed decline wrapped in sophisticated justifications.

Schumer’s calculation was pure technocratic management. The shutdown polls badly. Healthcare polls well. Get a vote scheduled, minimize political damage, trust that Republicans will take the blame when premiums skyrocket. Classic establishment thinking: read the focus groups, calculate the risk, optimize for damage control.

What he cannot see—what the framework literally prevents him from seeing—is that the fight itself mattered more than any deal. That people weren’t asking for better negotiating tactics. They were asking for proof that Democrats would hold the line on something. Anything. After Chicago. After ICE raids. After warrantless mass detentions. After watching Trump systematically dismantle constitutional constraints.

This was the test. Forty days to prove Democrats could fight power instead of accommodating it. And Schumer folded.

Symone Sanders got it immediately: “The hostage taking worked.” That’s the lesson Trump learned last night. That’s why Chris Murphy is right to fear Trump gets stronger, not weaker. When you teach authoritarians that threatening to hurt people produces Democratic capitulation, you haven’t minimized damage—you’ve guaranteed more hostage situations.

The establishment will produce sophisticated analysis explaining why this was actually strategic. They’ll point to the guaranteed vote, the federal worker protections, the political positioning for next month. They’ll treat this as a temporary setback in normal political competition.

But this isn’t normal political competition. This is one side attempting regime change while the other pretends it’s just another negotiation requiring careful positioning.

The base understands what Schumer cannot: you cannot manage your way out of authoritarian consolidation. You cannot focus-group your way to resistance. You cannot optimize yourself into fighting power when your entire framework is built on accommodating it.

The governors get it. Newsom fighting homeowner cartels in California. Pritzker calling out empty promises. They’re not waiting for Senate leadership to figure out what time it is. They’re building the alternative: liberal populism that actually fights concentrated power instead of explaining why fighting is unstrategic.

The progressive caucus gets it. AOC reminding everyone that people’s lives depend on Democrats keeping their word. Khanna calling for new leadership. James Talarico declaring “this moment demands fighters, not folders.”

Even establishment voices like Murphy understand something fundamental broke last night. When your own senator has to record a video saying “there’s no way to sugarcoat this” and “I’m angry—like you”—that’s not spin control. That’s recognition that the base has decided the framework is dead.

Forty days was long enough to prove Democrats could fight. Long enough to make Trump pay a political price for hostage-taking. Long enough to show working people that their leaders’ word means something.

Chuck Schumer surrendered all of that for a vote next month that won’t pass.

by Mike Brock, Notes From the Circus |  Read more:

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[ed. For a detailed explanation of SNAP and how we got here, see: November 9, and November, 10 2025 (Letters From an American - Heather Cox Richardson):]

Seven Democrats and one Independent voted with all but one Republican to advance a measure that funds the government through January 30 of next year. It includes funding for military construction and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, and operations for the legislative branch, or Congress. Tucked within that last appropriation is a measure that allows the eight Republican senators whose phone logs were seized during former special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to sue the government for up to $500,000 apiece. (...)

President Donald J. Trump did not want the shutdown to end this way. He was trying to use the pain he was inflicting on the American people to force Republican senators to end the filibuster and pass a series of measures that would essentially have made him a dictator. The Republican senators were clear they didn’t want to do that. And now, they haven’t. They chose a way out of the shutdown fight that did not support Trump’s ambitions. After nine months in which they appeared to do his bidding, that’s an interesting development.

Trump does not appear to be giving up his position on hurting the country easily. Late last night, three judges from the First Circuit refused to stop the lower court order saying that the administration must pay SNAP benefits in full, and today, the administration went back to the Supreme Court to ask it to freeze those payments.

Trump also posted an attack on air traffic controllers, saying to those who took time off during the shutdown “I am NOT HAPPY WITH YOU. You didn’t step up to help the U.S.A. against the FAKE DEMOCRAT ATTACK that was only meant to hurt our Country. You will have a negative mark, at least in my mind, against your record. If you want to leave service in the near future, please do not hesitate to do so, with NO payment or severance of any kind! You will be quickly replaced by true Patriots, who will do a better job….” In fact, the country has a shortage of air traffic controllers.

Most Expensive Coffee in the World

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[ed. Bat Poop Coffee? See also: World's most expensive coffee goes on sale in Dubai at $1,000 a cup. Selling for nearly $1,000 a cup, a cafe in Dubai is offering the world's most expensive coffee, brewed from Panamanian beans sold at a premium price. via.]