medialens | The idea that journalism should offer a neutral 'spectrum' of views
was unceremoniously dumped during the US presidential election. Hillary
Clinton was endorsed
by the 500 largest US newspapers and magazines; Trump by 20 of the
smallest, with the most significant of these – something called the Las
Vegas Review-Journal - reaching some 100,000 readers.
As with Jeremy Corbyn, from the moment Trump became a genuine
contender, he was drenched in vitriol by virtually the entire US-UK
corporate press. The smear campaign was epitomised by the baseless, Ian Fleming-like suggestion that Trump was in cahoots with the establishment's other great bĂȘte noire, Putin – a propaganda-perfect marriage of Evil and Pure Evil.
Ironically, Trump may well turn out to be the final nail in the
coffin of the manifestly stalled human attempt to become civilised. As
leading climate scientist Michael Mann has noted, Trump's stance on climate stability may mean 'game over' for it and us.
But elite media did not oppose Trump because of his climate
views – no question was raised on the issue during the presidential
debates and, as Noam Chomsky observes (below), the issue was of no
interest to journalists. On the other hand, Edward Herman comments,
a declared lack of enthusiasm for foreign conflict, notably with
Russia, 'may help explain the intensity of media hostility to Trump'.
Inevitably, our drawing attention to the awesome level of media bias
drew accusations that Media Lens was an unlikely 'apologist' for Trump's
far-right declarations promoting racism, misogyny and climate denial.
When we asked Guardian commentator Hadley Freeman why, in comparing
Trump and Clinton, she mentioned Clinton's email server scandal but not
her war crimes, she interpreted this as an endorsement of Trump:
The roots of the Clinton-Trump fiasco lie in decades of 'liberal' media refusal to challenge the increasing venality, violence and suicidal climate indifference at the supposedly rational end of the political spectrum. Virtually the entire 'liberal' journalistic community saw great hope in Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, while treating genuinely honest and compassionate political commentators like Chomsky, Edward Herman, John Pilger, Howard Zinn, Harold Pinter, Chris Hedges, Jonathan Cook and many others as quixotic freaks who may be mentioned in passing, published once in a supermoon, but otherwise ignored.
As Slavoj Zizek observed: 'The real catastrophe is the status quo.' When liberal journalism slams the door on reasoned arguments and authentic compassion, other doors swing wide for the likes of Trump.
The default corporate media excuse for ignoring 'our' crimes is that elected politicians have been chosen to serve by the people, and it is the task of journalism to support, not subvert, democracy. But of course democracy is profoundly subverted by a lack of honest media scrutiny. Structural media distortion is so extreme that, despite bombing seven countries, Barack Obama continues to be depicted and perceived as an almost saintly figure.
Hillary Clinton was indisputably the preferred establishment candidate, backed by virtually the entire US-UK corporate press.
'Mainstream' media did not merely support Clinton, they declared propaganda war on Trump. As we have seen in this brief sample, even BBC journalists thought nothing of ridiculing Trump's 'narcissistic personality disorder' – unthinkable language from a BBC reporter describing an Obama, a Cameron, or indeed a Clinton.
The intensity of establishment support for Clinton meant that journalistic performance was filtered by host media and self-censorship. As the former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger told us in an interview:
'[T]he whole thing works by a kind of osmosis. If you ask anybody who works in newspapers, they will quite rightly say, "Rupert Murdoch," or whoever, "never tells me what to write", which is beside the point: they don't have to be told what to write. It's understood.'
The moment the vote was cast, pressures filtering out criticisms of Clinton and less hysterical coverage of Trump were lifted. The result is a semblance of balance that allows stunningly extreme 'mainstream' media to enhance their ill-deserved reputation for 'fairness' and 'impartiality'.
thedailybell |This Bloomberg article is focused not on the top people in this conspiracy but on the “little people” who do the bidding of higher ups and have learned how to survive in an internationalist environment and profit from it.
But in our view, these are probably NOT the people that Trump’s voters really voted against. Many of Trump’s voters, like Trump himself, understand that the problems go far beyond academics, bureaucrats and corrupt tycoons.
In fact, this Bloomberg article is a perfect example of a kind of elite propaganda. It is trying to convince us that we need to “listen” to the anger of Trump voters and then, we are instructed, the intelligentsia needs to react.
American intellectuals may violently disagree with the average Trump voter on most things. They may have access to facts that prove that voters wrong. But there’s no way they — we — can go on dismissing and ridiculing these people without dooming themselves to irrelevance and provoking further backlash.
This is in fact the fondest hope, no doubt, of those tasked with defending the REAL culprits from exposure and attack. Such individuals are the ones running the world’s largest corporations and leading the most powerful nation states.
And these individuals may be found in higher places still, plotting the propaganda that the rest of us imbibe. Also managing central bank strategies and even plotting our gradual progress toward a new world war.
The Bloomberg article ends by suggesting that a lot of the irritation of Trump voters is aimed at political correctness and that the US needs “an open conversation about what ails it, not … one that tiptoes around speech taboos about racism, misogyny and sexual discrimination.”
Once more – hooey. Our guess is that like Donald Trump himself, many of his voters – perhaps tens of millions are quite aware that the world’s problems extend far beyond political correctness and “intellectuals.”
vox | So how do we have a better conversation around these
issues, one that can actually reduce people’s racial prejudices and
anxieties?
The first thing to understand is how white Americans,
especially in rural areas, hear accusations of racism. While terms like
“racist,” “white privilege,” and “implicit bias” intend to point out
systemic biases in America, for white Americans they’re often seen as
coded slurs. These terms don’t signal to them that they’re doing
something wrong, but that their supposedly racist attitudes (which they
would deny having at all) are a justification for lawmakers and other
elites to ignore their problems.
Imagine, for example, a white man who lost a factory job
due to globalization and saw his sister die from a drug overdose due to the opioid painkiller and heroin epidemic
— situations that aren’t uncommon today. He tries to complain about his
circumstances. But his concerns are downplayed by a politician or
racial justice activist, who instead points out that at least he’s doing
better than black and brown folks if you look at broad socioeconomic
measures.
Maybe he does have some level of white privilege. But
that doesn’t take away from the serious problems he sees in his world
today.
This is how many white Americans, particularly in
working-class and rural areas, view the world today. So when they hear
politicians and journalists call them racist or remind them about their
privilege, they feel like elites are trying to distract from the serious
problems in their lives and grant advantages to other groups of people.
When Hillary Clinton called half of Trump voters “deplorable,” she made this message explicit.
“Telling
people they’re racist, sexist, and xenophobic is going to get you
exactly nowhere,” said Alana Conner, executive director of Stanford
University’s Social Psychological Answers to Real-World Questions
Center. “It’s such a threatening message. One of the things we know from
social psychology is when people feel threatened, they can’t change,
they can’t listen.”
WaPo | I will never again use the term “political correctness.” Whatever rhetorical value the term may have once had is far more than offset by what has been unleashed in the name of resistance to it since the presidential election.
I have made no secret over the years ofmy convictionthat the sensitivities of individuals or members of various group should not be permitted to chill free speech on college campuses. I have the scars to show for speaking out againstoverdoing the idea of microaggression, the regulation of Halloween costumes and the prosecution of students for taking part in sombrero parties – all of which have struck me as “political correctness” run amok.
But the events of the last week are giving me pause about that term and its usage and the complex issues underlying it. It’s not that I now think speech codes are wise or that we should stamp out microaggressions wherever they are perceived. Rather,my reactionis to the way President-elect Donald Trump has been heard during the campaign and the terrifying events his election has set off.
The fight for academic freedom and for ideological diversity on college campuses should and will go on. But given what opposition to “political correctness” has licensed, it time to retire the term.
freep | Speaking at President Gerald Ford's alma mater, The Rev. Jesse
Jackson called for President Obama to issue a blanket pardon to Hillary
Clinton before he leaves office, just like Ford did for Richard Nixon.
Stopping
short of saying Clinton did anything wrong, Jackson told a large crowd
of University of Michigan students, faculty and administrators gathered
at daylong celebration of his career that Obama should
short-circuit President-elect Donald Trump's promised attempt to
prosecute Hillary Clinton for use of a private e-mail server.
"It
would be a monumental moral mistake to pursue the indictment of Hillary
Clinton," Jackson said. He said issuing the pardon could help heal the
nation, like Ford's pardon of Nixon did.
"President Ford said we don't need him for trophy. We need to move
on. President Nixon wasn't convicted of a crime. He didn't apply for a
pardon. (Ford) did it because he thought it would be best for the
country.
"Hillary Clinton has not been tried, but there are those
who want to drag her for the next three years. It will not stop until
they find a reason to put her in jail. That would be a travesty."
In
1974, Ford, a University of Michigan alumnus, issued a full and
complete pardon of Nixon for any crimes he may have committed. He said
the pardon was in the best interests of the nation.
Jackson's
comments came at the end of a long day in Ann Arbor, which included him
dropping in on an anti-Trump rally held by students on campus.
unz | In her Wednesday morning post mortem speech, Hillary made a bizarre
request for young people (especially young women) to become politically
active as Democrats after her own model. What made this so strange is
that the Democratic National Committee has done everything it can to
discourage millennials from running. There are few young candidates –
except for corporate and Wall Street Republicans running as Blue Dog
Democrats. The left has not been welcome in the party for a decade –
unless it confines itself only to rhetoric and demagogy, not actual
content. For Hillary’s DNC coterie the problem with millennials is that
they are not shills for Wall Street. The treatment of Bernie Sanders is
exemplary. The DNC threw down the gauntlet.
Instead of a love fest within the Democratic Party’s ranks, the blame
game is burning. The Democrats raised a reported $182 million dollars
running up to the election. But when Russ Feingold in Wisconsin and
other candidates in Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania asked for help.
Hillary monopolized it all for TV ads, leaving these candidates in the
lurch. The election seemed to be all about her, about personality and
identity politics, not about the economic issues paramount in most
voters’ minds.
Six months ago the polls showed her the $1 billion spent on data
polling, TV ads and immense staff of sycophants to have been a vast
exercise in GIGO. From May to June the Democratic National Committee
(DNC) saw polls showing Bernie Sanders beating Trump, but Hillary
losing. Did the Democratic leadership really prefer to lose with Hillary
than win behind him and his social democratic reformers.
Hillary doesn’t learn. Over the weekend she claimed that her analysis
showed that FBI director Comey’s reports “rais[ing] doubts that were
groundless, baseless,” stopped her momentum. This was on a par with the New York Times
analysis that had showed her with an 84 percent probability of winning
last Tuesday. She still hasn’t admitted that here analysis was
inaccurate.
What is the Democratic Party’s former constituency of labor and
progressive reformers to do? Are they to stand by and let the party be
captured in Hillary’s wake by Robert Rubin’s Goldman Sachs-Citigroup
gang that backed her and Obama?
If the party is to be recaptured, now is the moment to move. The 2016
election sounded the death knell for identity politics. Its aim was to
persuade voters not to think of their identity in economic terms,
but to think of themselves as women or as racial and ethnic groups
first and foremost, not as having common economic interests. This
strategy to distract voters from economic policies has obviously failed.
lewrockwell |“Mary’s Mosaic” is several things at once: an insightful and sensitive biography of both Mary Meyer and her one-time husband, CIA propaganda specialist Cord Meyer; a murder mystery; a trial drama; an expose of secret knowledge and cover-ups inside the Washington D.C. Beltway during the 1950s and 1960s; and of course, a love story about the late-developing relationship between President John F. Kennedy and Mary Pinchot Meyer, whom he had first met at an Ivy League prep school dance when she was only 15 years old. Their paths had crossed briefly once again in the Spring of 1945, at the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco. (Mary, her new husband Cord Meyer, and John F. Kennedy all attended the conference as journalists reporting on the events there, at the birth of the United Nations.)
Peter Janney’s own father, a World War II Naval aviator and a recipient of the Navy Cross, was also a CIA man, and Peter grew up amidst the CIA culture in Washington. Mary Meyer’s son Michael was his best childhood friend. He knew Mary Meyer as his best friend’s mother. He was therefore perfectly placed to write this book, for his own family had frequent social contacts with Cord and Mary Meyer, James Angleton, Richard Helms, Tracy Barnes, Desmond FitzGerald, and William Colby. Janney’s knowledge of the CIA Cold War culture in our nation’s capital in the 1950s and 1960s is very well-informed, on a personal level.
Janney compellingly relates how the D.C. metropolitan police and the U.S. Justice Department attempted to railroad an innocent black man, Ray Crump, for the mysterious murder of Mary Meyer in October of 1964, just three weeks after the Warren Report was issued. Due to the heroic efforts of African American female attorney Dovey Roundtree, Janney explains how against all odds, Crump was acquitted. Peter Janney reveals the likely motive for her murder—she was about to publicly oppose the sham conclusions of the Warren Report as a fraud. Furthermore, she had kept a private diary which presumably recorded details of her relationship with President Kennedy (and perhaps even of affairs of state). In October of 1964, she was literally “the woman who knew too much.” This book reveals the numerous lies and falsehoods told about her diary (and its disposition) by Ben Bradlee,James JesusAngleton, and others, in a way not adequately covered byprevious articles and books. The media in this country, misled by the CIA and by former acquaintances of Meyer’s who had much to hide, has consistently distorted the true story of what likely happened to her diary, and Peter Janney lays all of this out in a way that anyone can understand.
nakedcapitalism | Even though this assessment of the Trump win and the implications for
American politics going forward is long, it’s also meaty and very much
worth your attention. Mark Blyth was virtually the only person to call a
Trump victory from the get-go (a colleague who spends a lot of time
outside the Acela corridor is another member of that club) but also
correctly gamed out how the stock market would react.
Everything Blyth says is incisive, colorful, and on the mark. By
contrast, it’s frustrating listening to Schiller because she is invested
heavily in Dem orthodoxy, and not even in the plausible parts: the
Hillary scandals were manufactured by Republicans, Sanders would have
lost if he were the Democratic candidate, Clinton was a victim of being
a woman with a long political career (hello?). Similarly, towards the
end, Blyth says, “There is no left left. It’s already had its lunch
eaten,” and explains why, and then Schiller begs to differ by trying to
depict the Democrats as still a real force and capable of being
“renovated”. Help me. But she does have some random insightful remarks.
In other words, you can run the video and tune your attention in and
out, although you may then want to go back and listen to just the Mark
Blyth remarks a second time. There’s a lot of solid material here.
bloomberg | If they were anywhere else in Beijing, the five young women in cowboy
hats and matching red, white, and blue costumes would look wildly out
of place.
But here at the city’s biggest international property
fair -- a frenetic gathering of brokers, developers and other real
estate professionals all jockeying for the attention of Chinese buyers
-- the quintet of wannabe Texans fits right in. As they promote Houston
townhouses (“Yours for as little as $350,000!”), a Portugal contingent
touts its Golden Visa program and the Australian delegation lures
passersby with stuffed kangaroos.
Welcome to ground zero for the
world’s largest cross-border residential property boom. Motivated by a
weakening yuan, surging domestic housing costs and the desire to secure
offshore footholds, Chinese citizens are snapping up overseas homes at
an accelerating pace. They’re also venturing further afield than ever
before, spreading beyond the likes of Sydney and Vancouver to
lower-priced markets including Houston, Thailand’s Pattaya Beach and
Malaysia’s Johor Bahru.
The
buying spree has defied Chinese government efforts to restrict capital
outflows and shows little sign of slowing after an estimated $15 billion
of overseas real estate purchases in the first half. For cities in the
cross-hairs, the challenge is to balance the economic benefits of
Chinese demand against the risk that rising home prices spur a public
backlash.
“The Chinese have managed to accumulate very large
amounts of wealth, and the opportunities to deploy that capital in their
own market are somewhat restricted,” said Richard Barkham, the
London-based chief global economist at CBRE Group Inc., the world’s
largest commercial property brokerage. “China has more than a billion
people. Personally, I think we have just seen a trickle.”
bnarchives |Most explanations of stock market booms and
busts are based on contrasting the underlying ‘fundamental’ logic of the
economy with the exogenous, non-economic factors that presumably distort it.
Our paper offers a radically different model, examining the stock market not
from the mechanical viewpoint of a distorted economy, but from the dialectical
perspective of capitalized power. The model demonstrates that (1) the valuation
of equities represents capitalized power; (2) capitalized power is
dialectically intertwined with systemic fear; and (3) systemic fear and
capitalized power are mediated through strategic sabotage. This triangular
model, we posit, can offer a basis for examining the asymptotes, or limits, of
capitalized power and the ways in which these asymptotes relate to the
historical and ongoing transformation of the capitalist mode of power.
internationalman | Mister Trump has, however, stated that he will diminish direct taxation. The highest earners would pay 33 percent and the corporate tax rate would drop to 15 percent. Yet, he offers no explanation as to how he will make up for the shortfall. Nor does he explain how he will deal with the mushrooming national debt.
What this tells us is that, despite the euphoria that is presently being felt by Mister Trump’s supporters, the fundamentals that plague the US economy remain present and not only is it impossible for him to reverse the pre-existent slide toward economic collapse, it’s not really even a part of the agenda.
Under Mister Trump, the US will still see inflation for the US dollar and larger deficits.
At the same time, we’re approaching a wave of corporate debt default for the record books. The huge volume of junk bonds that were issued in recent years will begin to come to maturity in 2017. 2018 will be more severe and 2019 worse still. Highly leveraged companies will go belly-up.
National debt, corporate debt and personal debt are peaking and there will be nowhere to turn for a meaningful bailout. Although there will be quantitative easing and confiscation of private wealth in the coming years, no president, either liberal or conservative, can stop the debt bulldozer that’s now rumbling down the street.
None of this is to say that there may not be significant benefits to a Trump presidency. He’s likely to take a less collectivist approach, will diminish taxation and most importantly, will be less likely to take the US into another world war. This fact alone is reason to be grateful for his ascendancy.
But, regardless of who won the American presidential election, market collapses, debt defaults and an eventual currency collapse were baked in the cake. It’s safe to say that, should they occur in the next four years, as would seem likely, they would be blamed on the president, as they would happen on his watch.
This being the case, in addition to the fact that conservative thinkers are aging and being replaced by collectivists, it’s very likely that the US is looking at its last Republican president. For those who oppose collectivism, the future may look a bit more promising after the recent election, but the outcome will be essentially the same. On the road trip into the future, the scenery may be a bit more palatable than it would have been had Mrs. Clinton been elected, but the fundamental outcome will be the same.
oftwominds |Combine identity politics with political correctness, and the New Nobility/Oligarchy
can laugh their way to the bank while their pawn-serfs fight over how many politically
correct angels can dance on the head of a pin.
I have long held that our economy is, stripped of propaganda, nothing but an
updated version of feudalism, i.e. neofeudal: a vast class of precarious
laborers (i.e. precariats--precarious proletariats) who own little to no
wealth-producing capital ruled by a New Nobility/Oligarchy that owns the vast
majority of wealth-producing capital and control of the political system.
In the Marxist analysis, there are only three classes: those who must sell their
labor to earn a livelihood, those who earn their livelihood from owning wealth-generating capital, and
the dispossessed/ marginalized who are dependent on the state (bread and circuses)
or who scrape out a living on the margins of the lawful economy.
In this view, there is no meaningful class difference between the well-paid liberal
technocrat with the $1 million (mortgaged) house on the Left/Right Coast
and the rural conservative "deplorable" wage earner. Both must sell their labor and
neither earns a livelihood from wealth-generating capital.
If we extend this analysis, we find that the entire self-described "middle class"
is in fact nothing but the better paid slice of the working class, i.e. the class
who must sell their labor to pay their rent/mortgage, buy food, etc.
Both are precarious, but not equally so. The well-paid technocrat believes his skills
will protect him from unemployment, and he is equally confident that the "wealth"
in his mortgaged house and stocks/bonds 401K retirement account is secure and
permanent.
He feels superior to the "deplorable" wage earner, but this superiority is contingent
on 1) asset bubbles never popping (ahem, which they always do, eventually;
2) software that's eating the world will not eat his job or the premium
he is currently being paid, and 3) the skills he currently has won't become over-supplied
as the global work force expands into the sectors that require high levels of education.
So what inhibits the awareness of shared class membership and interests? Two
dynamics come to mind: the liberal/conservative ideological divide, and
the politically correct speech acts that differentiate the two.
The urban liberal technocrat feels morally superior to the "deplorable" wage earner
because he 1) considers himself a "winner" and the "deplorable" a loser and 2) he
has mastered the politically correct speech acts that signify his superior
"progressive" status.
NYTimes | Mr. Bannon is in some ways a perplexing figure: a far-right ideologue who made his millions investing in “Seinfeld”; a former Goldman Sachs banker who has reportedly called himself a “Leninist” with a goal “to destroy the state” and “bring everything crashing down.” He has also called progressive women “a bunch of dykes” and, in a 2014 email to one of his editors, wrote
of the Republican leadership, “Let the grassroots turn on the hate
because that’s the ONLY thing that will make them do their duty.”
A
few conservatives have spoken out against Mr. Bannon. Ben Shapiro, a
former Breitbart News editor who resigned in protest last spring, said Mr. Bannon was a “vindictive, nasty figure.” Glenn Beck called him a “nightmare” and a “terrifying man.”
But most Republican officeholders have so far remained silent. Some have dismissed fears
about Mr. Bannon. Other Republicans have praised him, like Reince
Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, whom Mr.
Trump announced as his chief of staff on Sunday, and who said
Mr. Bannon could not be such a bad guy because he served in the Navy
and went to Harvard Business School. Some saw the pick of Mr. Priebus as
evidence that Mr. Trump would not be leaning so much on Mr. Bannon. But
don’t be fooled by Mr. Priebus’s elevated title; in the press release
announcing both hires, Mr. Bannon’s name appeared above Mr. Priebus’s. In a little more than two months Mr. Bannon, and his toxic ideology, will be sitting down the hall from the Oval Office.
theatlantic | Facebook, wherenearly halfof Americans get their news, has borne the brunt of the ire, both for creating echo-chambers of partisan news and for failing to promote high-quality information over false drivel. But online extremism researchers say America’s misinformation problem is bigger than Facebook. They are also pointing fingers at sites like 4chan, Twitter and Reddit, online free-for-alls that lackFacebook’s relatively strict stance on hate-speechand have allowed racist communities to flourish in recent years. These forums have grown angrier and more multitudinous since Trump announced his candidacy, and while it’s not yet clear how much they contributed to the triumph of Trump, they certainly lined up behind him.
“When we talk about online radicalization we always talk about Muslims. But the radicalization of white men online is at astronomical levels,” the journalist Siyanda Mohutsiwa, who said she has been following the so-called “alt-right” forums on Reddit for years,wrote in a Twitter threadearlier this week. “These online groups found young white men at their most vulnerable & convinced them liberals were colluding to destroy white Western manhood.”
Groups that oppose immigration and political correctness, such as neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and the “alt-right,” have bloomed online in recent years. (It’s worth noting that these groups consider themselves distinct, and most don’t use the term “racist;” at most, they prefer the term “racialist.”) Astudy publishedin September by George Washington University extremism researcher J.M. Berger found “major American white nationalist movements on Twitter added about 22,000 followers since 2012, an increase of about 600 percent.” Berger found that people who followed white nationalists on Twitter referenced Trump “more than almost any other topic.”
So what do we do now? By “we” I mean all those left,
center and even right who saw Donald Trump as the worst man ever to run
for president and assumed that a strong majority of our fellow citizens
would agree.
I’m not talking about rethinking political strategy. There will be a
time for that — God knows it’s clear that almost everyone on the
center-left, myself included, was clueless about what actually works in
persuading voters.
Tuesday’s fallout will last for decades, maybe generations.
I particularly worry about climate change. We were at a crucial
point, having just reached a global agreement on emissions and having a
clear policy path toward moving America to a much greater reliance on
renewable energy. Now it will probably fall apart, and the damage may
well be irreversible.
Vacation in the Head
Krugman went on to say “I myself spent a large part of the Day After
avoiding the news, doing personal things, basically taking a vacation in
my own head.”
After taking a vacation in the head, he came back with the wrong answer.
What is an open source insurgency? An open source insurgency is how a very large and very
diverse group of people empowered by modern technology and without any
formal organization, can defeat a very powerful opponent.
I first started writing about open source insurgencies during the war
in Iraq over a decade ago. During that war, over 100 insurgent groups
with different motivations for fighting (tribal interests, pro-Baathist,
pro-nationalist, pro-Saddam, and lots of jihadi flavors) used the
dynamics of open source warfare to fight a global superpower to a
standstill. We saw it again a few years later in the political world,
when during the Arab Spring an open source fueled protest toppled governments in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria.
Open source insurgencies and protests can arise spontaneously and
they are very hard to stop once they get going since they are impervious
to most forms of repressive counter-attack and political subversion.
For example, the open source movement propelling Trump forward made him
impervious to attacks on his character. It also eliminated any need
for "ground game" or standard political organization and obviated any
need for information disclosure and detailed policy papers.
Of course, that doesn't mean you can't defeat an open source insurgency. You can, but it requires a different approach.
medium | The
thing that has become the most clear to us this election year is that we
don’t agree on the fundamental truths we thought we did.
I
went to college in the part of Pennsylvania that definitely flipped the
state for Trump. A good number of my friends are still living there,
and have posted messages from what seems at this moment in history to be
a completely different country.
Over
the last several weeks I have watched dozens of my friends on Facebook
de-friend one another. I have seen plenty of self-righteous posts flow
across my news feed, along with deeply felt messages of fear, anger and
more recently — existential despair.
On the other side I see reflections of joy, levity, gratitude and optimism for the future. It could not be more stark.
The thing that both groups have in common is very apparent: A sense of profound confusion about how the other side cannot understand their perspective.
This seemed to be building on a trend in social media that hit full tilt in the lead up to the election: Political divisions between us are greater than they ever have been, and are still getting worse by the day.
I
don’t believe that the Media Elite, Donald Trump or the Alt Right are
to blame for the state of our politics. They peddle influence and ideas,
but they don’t change the actual makeup of our country. Elected
officials are still a fairly accurate representation of voters’ wishes.
I
also don’t believe this is inherently a reaction to the political
overreach of the status quo. This discontent is part of something felt
outside of our borders too. You do not have to look far to see this
rising tide of hyper-nationalism going international.
The reason is much more subversive, and something we really haven’t been able to address as humans until now. I believe that the way we consume information has literally changed the kind of people we are.
NYTimes | On
Aug. 19, 2015, shortly after midnight, the brothers Stephen and Scott
Leader assaulted Guillermo Rodriguez. Rodriguez had been sleeping near a
train station in Boston. The Leader brothers beat him with a metal
pipe, breaking his nose and bruising his ribs, and called him a
“wetback.” They urinated on him. “All these illegals need to be
deported,” they are said to have declared during the attack. The
brothers were fans of the candidate who would go on to win the
Republican party’s presidential nomination. Told of the incident at the
time, that candidate said: “People who are following me are very
passionate. They love this country, and they want this country to be
great again.”
That
was the moment when my mental alarm bells, already ringing, went amok.
There were many other astonishing events to come — the accounts of
sexual violence, the evidence of racism, the promise of torture, the
advocacy of war crimes — but the assault on Rodriguez, as well as the
largely tolerant response to it, was a marker. Some people were
outraged, but outrage soon became its own ineffectual reflex. Others
found a rich vein of humor in the parade of obscenities and cruelties.
Others simply took a view similar to that of the character Botard in
Ionesco’s play: “I don’t mean to be offensive. But I don’t believe a
word of it. No rhinoceros has ever been seen in this country!”
In
the early hours of Nov. 9, 2016, the winner of the presidential
election was declared. As the day unfolded, the extent to which a moral
rhinoceritis had taken hold was apparent. People magazine had a giddy
piece about the president-elect’s daughter and her family, a sequence of
photos that they headlined “way too cute.” In The New York Times, one
opinion piece suggested that the belligerent bigot’s supporters ought
not be shamed. Another asked whether this president-elect could be a
good president and found cause for optimism. Cable news anchors were
able to express their surprise at the outcome of the election, but not
in any way vocalize their fury. All around were the unmistakable signs
of normalization in progress. So many were falling into line without
being pushed. It was happening at tremendous speed, like a contagion.
And it was catching even those whose plan was, like Dudard’s in
“Rhinoceros,” to criticize “from the inside.”
Evil
settles into everyday life when people are unable or unwilling to
recognize it. It makes its home among us when we are keen to minimize it
or describe it as something else. This is not a process that began a
week or month or year ago. It did not begin with drone assassinations,
or with the war on Iraq. Evil has always been here. But now it has taken
on a totalitarian tone.
At
the end of “Rhinoceros,” Daisy finds the call of the herd irresistible.
Her skin goes green, she develops a horn, she’s gone. Berenger,
imperfect, all alone, is racked by doubts. He is determined to keep his
humanity, but looking in the mirror, he suddenly finds himself quite
strange. He feels like a monster for being so out of step with the
consensus. He is afraid of what this independence will cost him. But he
keeps his resolve, and refuses to accept the horrible new normalcy.
He’ll put up a fight, he says. “I’m not capitulating!”
qz | Donald Trump’s election victory is only a shock
if you have been looking at the world through simple equations.
Classical physics is rooted Newton’s three laws, where an action has an
equal reaction, objects at rest tend to stay there, and force equals
mass times acceleration. Newton describes the observable world in ways
that are logical. But long ago, scientists showed the underlying
physical world can’t be explained with algebra. To understand the
universe, classical physics had to incorporate quantum mechanics, which
describes a micro-world of uncertainty and ambiguity that is harder to
measure but defines our true reality. Likewise, as recent geopolitical
shocks have proven, outdated methods are no longer capable or sufficient
to explain global society’s complex and interconnected systems.
Quantum mechanics’ principles are actually quite
clear: Units are difficult to quantify, and they’re in perpetual motion;
invisible objects can occupy space; there are no causal certainties,
only correlations and probabilities; gravity matters more than location;
and meaning is derived relationally rather than from absolutes.
Relatively is the rule. Indeed, the principles of quantum mechanics are,
when explained in art, quite clear. Take this example:
Michael Frayn’s award-winning play Copenhagen
presents multiple versions of what might have transpired when German
physicist Werner Heisenberg paid a visit to his Danish mentor Niels Bohr
in late 1941. Against the backdrop of an intense arms race between the
US and Germany to develop atomic weapons that could determine the
outcome of World War II, the two Nobel laureates debated the scientific
aspects of nuclear fission and the psychology of nuclear deterrence,
seamlessly blending physics and geopolitics in their discourse.
Seventy years later, another Nobel Prize-winning
physicist, Leon Cooper of Brown University, began using Frayn’s play as a
medium to instruct his undergraduate students. He recruited an ensemble
of faculty, including the respected international-relations theorist
Thomas Biersteker and a European historian, to co-teach the course.
Uniquely, each class featured a live performance of scenes from the play
by members of the Trinity Repertory Company of Providence, Rhode
Island. Cooper issued a challenge to his students from the outset: “Can
you understand the play if you don’t understand the physics?”
Today, in the wake of the Trump win, there is no
more important question that we can ask about the emerging world order
than this: Can we understand geopolitics if we don’t understand its
physics?
theatlantic | The mere mention of “quantum consciousness” makes most physicists
cringe, as the phrase seems to evoke the vague, insipid musings of a New
Age guru. But if a new hypothesis proves to be correct, quantum effects
might indeed play some role in human cognition. Matthew Fisher, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, raised eyebrows late last year when he published a paper in Annals of Physics
proposing that the nuclear spins of phosphorus atoms could serve as
rudimentary “qubits” in the brain—which would essentially enable the
brain to function like a quantum computer.
As recently as 10 years ago, Fisher’s
hypothesis would have been dismissed by many as nonsense. Physicists
have been burned by this sort of thing before, most notably in 1989,
when Roger Penrose proposed that mysterious protein structures called
“microtubules” played a role in human consciousness by exploiting
quantum effects. Few researchers believe such a hypothesis plausible.
Patricia Churchland, a neurophilosopher at the University of California,
San Diego, memorably opined that one might as well invoke “pixie dust in the synapses” to explain human cognition.
Fisher’s
hypothesis faces the same daunting obstacle that has plagued
microtubules: a phenomenon called quantum decoherence. To build an
operating quantum computer, you need to connect qubits—quantum bits of
information—in a process called entanglement. But entangled qubits exist
in a fragile state. They must be carefully shielded from any noise in
the surrounding environment. Just one photon bumping into your qubit
would be enough to make the entire system “decohere,” destroying the
entanglement and wiping out the quantum properties of the system. It’s
challenging enough to do quantum processing in a carefully controlled
laboratory environment, never mind the warm, wet, complicated mess that
is human biology, where maintaining coherence for sufficiently long
periods of time is well nigh impossible.
Over
the past decade, however, growing evidence suggests that certain
biological systems might employ quantum mechanics. In photosynthesis,
for example, quantum effects help plants turn sunlight into fuel. Scientists have also proposed
that migratory birds have a “quantum compass” enabling them to exploit
Earth’s magnetic fields for navigation, or that the human sense of smell
could be rooted in quantum mechanics.
Fisher’s notion of quantum
processing in the brain broadly fits into this emerging field of quantum
biology. Call it quantum neuroscience. He has developed a complicated
hypothesis, incorporating nuclear and quantum physics, organic
chemistry, neuroscience and biology. While his ideas have met with
plenty of justifiable skepticism, some researchers are starting to pay
attention. “Those who read his paper (as I hope many will) are bound to
conclude: This old guy’s not so crazy,” wroteJohn Preskill,
a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, after Fisher
gave a talk there. “He may be on to something. At least he’s raising
some very interesting questions.”
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
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April Three
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
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He ...