nautil.us | A more optimistic view would expect us to learn the cultural habits
of being part of a collective intelligence—better able to share, listen,
or take turns. It would hope too that we can learn the wisdom to cope
with opposites—to understand suspicion as necessary for truth, fear for
hope, and surveillance for freedom.
It’s
tempting to link possible future evolutions of collective intelligence
to what we already know of evolution. John Maynard Smith and Eörs
Szathmary offered one of the best summaries of these processes when they
described the eight main transitions in the evolution of complexity in
life. These were the shift from chromosomes to multicellular organisms,
prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells, plants to animals, and simple to sexual
reproduction. Every transition involved a new form of cooperation and
interdependence (so that things that before the transition could
replicate independently, afterward could only replicate as “part of a
larger whole”), and new kinds of communication, ways of both storing and
transmitting information.
It’s entirely plausible that future
evolutions of intelligence will have comparable properties—with new
forms of cooperation and interdependence along with new ways of handling
communication that bring with them deeper understanding of both the
outer as well as inner world. The idea of an evolution of consciousness
is both obvious and daunting. It is obvious that consciousness does
evolve and can in the future. But social science fears speculation, and
much that has been written on this theme is either abstract or empty. We
see in films and novels visions of machines with dramatically enhanced
capacities to calculate, observe, and respond. They may be benign or
malign (they’re more interesting when they are evil), but we can grasp
their implications when we see them scanning emotions on faces, shooting
down swarms of attacking missiles, or manipulating complex networks to
direct people.
NewYorker | Still, the force works selectively. “I, of all people, am aware that
there is some irony in the fact that I am leaving while a man who has
bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval
Office and a man who has repeatedly preyed on young girls campaigns for
the Senate with the full support of his party,” said Franken, referring
to Donald Trump and the Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore. Trump and Moore are immune because the blunt irresistible force works only on the other half of the country.
That half is cleaning its ranks in the face of—and in clear reaction
to—genuine moral depravity on the other side. The Trump era is one of
deep and open immorality in politics. Moore is merely one example.
Consider Greg Gianforte, the Montana Republican who won his
congressional race earlier this year after not only being captured on
tape shoving a newspaper reporter but then also lying to police about it. Consider the tax bill,
which is stitched together from shameless greed and boldface lies.
Consider the series of racist travel bans.
Consider the withdrawal from a series of international agreements aimed
at bettering the future of humanity, from migration to climate change to
cultural preservation. These are men who proclaim their allegiance to
the Christian faith while acting in openly hateful, duplicitous, and
plainly murderous ways. In response to this unbearable spectacle, the
roughly half of Americans who are actually deeply invested in thinking
of themselves as good people are trying to claim a moral high ground.
The urge to do so by policing sex is not surprising. As Susan Sontag
pointed out more than half a century ago, Christianity has “concentrated
on sexual behavior as the root of virtue” and, consequently, “everything
pertaining to sex has been a ‘special case’ in our culture.”
NYTimes | “I of all people am aware that there is some irony in the fact that I am leaving while a man who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval Office and a man who has repeatedly preyed on young girls campaigns for the Senate with the full support of his party.”
This irony reveals the limits of the #MeToo movement. This week, Time magazine named those who’ve spoken out against sexual harassment — collectively called “The Silence Breakers” — as its Person of the Year. “When multiple harassment claims bring down a charmer like former ‘Today’ show host Matt Lauer, women who thought they had no recourse see a new, wide-open door,” the cover article says. In truth, however, this new door is open for only some people — those whose harassers are either personally or professionally susceptible to shame.
Since October, when the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein was outed as a serial sexual predator and shunned by the social worlds he once ruled, an astonishing number of powerful and famous men have been fired and disgraced. It sometimes feels as if we’re in the midst of a cultural revolution where the toll of sexual harassment on women’s lives and ambitions will finally be reckoned with.
But the revolution is smaller than it first appears. So far, it has been mostly confined to liberal-leaning sectors like entertainment, the media, academia, Silicon Valley and the Democratic Party. It hasn’t rocked the Republicans, corporate America or Wall Street — with some exceptions — because these realms are less responsive to feminist pressure.
CNBC | Finally, it's important to remember that the actions that constituted
serious misconduct several years ago are not the same as they are now.
The resignations of Sen. Al Franken and Rep. Trent Franks on Thursday
seem to be much more the result of something closer to a new
zero-tolerance policy on harassment and lower-level assault.
That doesn't excuse
Franken, Franks, Ford or anyone else recently ensnared in this wave of
scandals. And there's a lot to be said for holding our elected leaders
to a much higher standard on this issue. But it's also fair to say that
Wall Street may have only purged itself from the most egregious examples
of bad behavior toward women based on standards from the 1990s or even
the early 2000s.
That's the assessment financial journalist Susan Antilla,
author of the groundbreaking book, "Tales From the Boom-Boom Room: The
Landmark Legal Battles that Exposed Wall Street's Shocking Culture of
Sexual Harassment." Antilla has recently spoken out
about how she believes Wall Street has made strides to battle
harassment over the past two decades, but adds that bias still very much
exists.
In a world where sitting
senators and congressmen can be forced out in a matter of days over
unproven allegations, that means Wall Street is still very vulnerable.
This is something everyone from the lawyers fighting for Goldman Sachs
in federal court to the H.R. departments at every other big firm need to
realize.
Getting back to Ford, it's important to note he isn't going quietly.
"I have never forcibly grabbed any woman or man in my life," Ford said
in a statement released Thursday. In an even more telling comment, a
lawyer for Ford said that, "Morgan Stanley has still not told Harold
directly of his termination, and unlike every other circumstance I've
been in, the company has refused to provide me with a reason. This all
demonstrates how this was a matter of convenience during a
hyper-sensitive time and not based on real facts."
Those comments stand as
very strong proof that rules are already starting to change on Wall
Street. If the standards for Ford are extended industry wide, expect a
dozen or so managing partners and higher-level executives to be ousted
in the coming year.
Once the dust settles
from those firings and resignations, Wall Street will have to join
Congress, Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Main Street in a major
re-evaluation of its workplace rules. Anyone who thinks we're even
halfway through this process is fooling themselves.
CNN | What did Franks do, you ask? Let's let Franks tell you himself. Here's an excerpt from his statement announcing his resignation:
"Due
to my familiarity and experience with the process of surrogacy, I
clearly became insensitive as to how the discussion of such an intensely
personal topic might affect others.
"I
have recently learned that the Ethics Committee is reviewing an inquiry
regarding my discussion of surrogacy with two previous female
subordinates, making each feel uncomfortable. I deeply regret that my
discussion of this option and process in the workplace caused distress."
Um, what?
So, here's how the Franks statement -- in meticulous detail -- casts how this whole thing came about:
1.
He and his wife had problems conceiving and carrying a baby to term.
(Franks notes in the statement his wife had three miscarriages.)
2. Eventually they found a woman to be a surrogate. That woman gave birth to twins.
3.
He and his wife wanted more children. So did their kids. ("We
continued to have a desire to have at least one additional sibling, for
which our children had made repeated requests," writes Franks.)
4. He discussed the possibility of surrogacy with two women who worked for him.
theintercept | The Trump transition team — in the form of key Trump advisers Kushner
and Flynn — reached out to the Russian government in order to undermine
the U.S. government because the Israeli government asked them to.
Where’s the outrage? How is the sheer “scope and audacity” of the
Trump-Netanyahu backchannels — to quote one U.S. official who spoke to
me on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak
publicly on this issue — not a bigger story? For a start, as University
of Chicago law professors Daniel Hemel and Eric Posner argued in a New York Times op-ed on Monday, the much-mocked Logan Act
of 1799 remains “a serious criminal statute that bars citizens from
undermining the foreign policy actions of the sitting president.” These
two legal scholars point out that “if Mr. Flynn violated the Logan Act,
then so did the ‘very senior’ official who directed his actions. If that
official is Mr. Kushner, then Mr. Kushner could go to jail.”
Then there is the issue of Middle East policy itself. It wasn’t
outsourced to the Israelis by Trump and Co. only during the transition
or only over settlements. The outsourcing has continued in office.
Tomorrow, Trump is expected to announce
that the United States will recognize Jerusalem as the capital of
Israel — another key Israeli demand that every single previous
president, Republican and Democrat, has resisted. The decision on
Jerusalem is so contentious that it both undermines any chance of reviving the peace process and threatens to cost lives — not just those of Israelis and Palestinians, but of Americans too.
thesoundingline | The logical next question that sprung to mind was: “how has the
average age of members of Congress changed since its inception?”
The cynic might suspect that, in addition to being increasingly
disliked and out of touch, Congress may be getting increasingly old. It
should come as little surprise that that is exactly the case. The two
charts below show the average age of serving members of the House of
Representatives and the Senate every year since 1789 (the few members
whose birth dates are unknown were excluded). Both charts show the
unmistakable trend toward an older and older Congress. Remarkably, the
average age in the House of Representatives has surged from around 52 in
1995 to its all-time high of nearly 60 today and the average age in the
Senate is even higher at nearly 65.
It would be baseless to say that seniority, and the experience that
it brings, should be viewed negatively across the board as there have
been great leaders much older than 65. Yet, when taken within the
context of Congress’s dismal approval rating, the overwhelming feeling
of Americans that the country is headed in the wrong direction, and the
fact that members of Congress are serving for longer and longer, the
aging of Congress does not seem emblematic of a healthy institution. To
the contrary, it seems symptomatic of an insular and out of step group
that is failing to create a relevant vision for America.
In nearly all ways: technological, social, and economical, we are
living in a rapidly changing world. It seems that perhaps the only thing
that isn’t changing is the people’s representation in Congress.
thesoundingline | Perhaps most principle on the list of grievances against Congress is
the sentiment that they simply don’t get anything done. Any bill, no
matter how routine, is hijacked by an increasingly insular, partisan,
and corrupt political class. Bills are so full of divergent add-ons,
riders, and pet projects that they become so long that it is often
physically impossible for any single person to read them before the vote
is held. If one could read them, it would be impossible to reconcile
the opposing elements of the bill to permit anything resembling a
principled vote. It has often been said that it is the fate of republics
to devolve into oligarchies as power is consolidated by a few corrupt
families who hold it for too long.
This begs the following question whose answer may explain the
increasingly insular, partisan, and unproductive nature of Congress. Are
members of Congress trending to serving longer terms?
To answer that question, we have compiled a database of every member
of Congress every year since 1789. Using this database it is possible to
determine, for every year, the number of years each member of Congress
had previously served.
Having accounted for the careers of over 13,000 Congress men and
women, over a period of 227 years, we are able to chart the average
years served, or ‘tenure’, of the House of Representatives and the
Senate every year from 1789 until today.
As you might suspect, and as the charts below testify, there has been
an unmistakable trend towards Representatives and Senators serving more
and more terms. Until the start of the 20th century, the
average years served in the House was typically less than four years,
equivalent to about two terms. After that, the average tenure started to
rise dramatically, hitting a high of 12 years or six terms in 2008. The
Senate follows a similar trend going from four to five years (a single
term is six years) for the first 100 plus years of American history to a
high of about 15 years (nearly three terms) in 2008.
DailyMail |Location-based apps like Tinder have transformed the dating world.
But how will technology help us find Mr or Mrs Right 25 years from now?
According to a new report, the future of romance could lie in virtual reality, wearable technology and DNA matching.
These
technologies are set to take the pain out of dating by saving single
people time and effort, while giving them better matches, according to
the research.
Students from Imperial College London were commissioned by relationship website eHarmony.co.uk to produce a report on what online dating and relationships could look like by 2040.
They put together a report based on analysis of how people's lifestyle habits have evolved over the past 100 years.
Washington | Imagine a bottle of laundry detergent that can sense when you’re
running low on soap — and automatically connect to the internet to place
an order for more.
University of Washington researchers are the first to make this a reality by 3-D printing plastic objects and sensors that can collect useful data and communicate with other WiFi-connected devices entirely on their own.
With CAD models
that the team is making available to the public, 3-D printing
enthusiasts will be able to create objects out of commercially available
plastics that can wirelessly communicate with other smart devices. That
could include a battery-free slider that controls music volume, a
button that automatically orders more cornflakes from Amazon or a water
sensor that sends an alarm to your phone when it detects a leak.
“Our goal was to create something that just comes out of your 3-D
printer at home and can send useful information to other devices,” said
co-lead author and UW electrical engineering doctoral student Vikram Iyer.
“But the big challenge is how do you communicate wirelessly with WiFi
using only plastic? That’s something that no one has been able to do
before.”
MIT | MIT engineers have devised a 3-D printing technique that uses a new kind of ink made from genetically programmed living cells.
The cells are engineered to light up in response to a variety of
stimuli. When mixed with a slurry of hydrogel and nutrients, the cells
can be printed, layer by layer, to form three-dimensional, interactive
structures and devices.
The team has then demonstrated its technique by printing a “living
tattoo” — a thin, transparent patch patterned with live bacteria cells
in the shape of a tree. Each branch of the tree is lined with cells
sensitive to a different chemical or molecular compound. When the patch
is adhered to skin that has been exposed to the same compounds,
corresponding regions of the tree light up in response.
The researchers, led by Xuanhe Zhao, the Noyce Career Development
Professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Timothy Lu,
associate professor of biological engineering and of electrical
engineering and computer science, say that their technique can be used
to fabricate “active” materials for wearable sensors and interactive
displays. Such materials can be patterned with live cells engineered to
sense environmental chemicals and pollutants as well as changes in pH
and temperature.
What’s more, the team developed a model to predict the interactions
between cells within a given 3-D-printed structure, under a variety of
conditions. The team says researchers can use the model as a guide in
designing responsive living materials.
Zhao, Lu, and their colleagues have published their results today in the journal Advanced Materials.
The paper’s co-authors are graduate students Xinyue Liu, Hyunwoo Yuk,
Shaoting Lin, German Alberto Parada, Tzu-Chieh Tang, Eléonore Tham, and
postdoc Cesar de la Fuente-Nunez.
See, I thought global private "security" would be part of Rex Tillerson's portfolio, but evidently Exxon is compromised on multiple fronts and multiple levels:
theintercept | Prince told a top fundraiser that Maguire was working on part of his
Afghanistan plan, characterizing it as the first part of a multi-pronged
program. The fundraiser added that Prince never directly asked him for
money. But sources close to the project say Maguire did seek private
funding for Amyntor’s efforts until a CIA contract materialized.
“They’ve been going around asking for a bridge loan to float their
operations until the CIA says yes,” said a person who has been briefed
on the fundraising efforts.
Beginning last spring and into the summer, Maguire and a group of
Amyntor representatives began asking Trump donors to support their
intelligence efforts in Afghanistan, the initial piece of what they
hoped would be a broader program. Some Trump fundraisers were asked to
provide introductions to companies and wealthy clients who would then
hire Amyntor for economic intelligence contracts. Maguire explained that
some of the profit from those business deals would fund their foreign
intelligence collection. Others were asked to give money outright.
“[Maguire] said there were people inside the CIA who joined in the
previous eight years [under Obama] and inside the government, and they
were failing to give the president the intelligence he needed,” said a
person who was pitched by Maguire and other Amyntor personnel. To
support his claim, Maguire told at least two people that National
Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, in coordination with a top official at
the National Security Agency, authorized surveillance of Steven Bannon
and Trump family members, including Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.
Adding to these unsubstantiated claims, Maguire told the potential
donors he also had evidence McMaster used a burner phone to send
information gathered through the surveillance to a facility in Cyprus
owned by George Soros.
Amyntor employees took potential donors to a suite in the Trump Hotel
in Washington, which they claimed was set up to conduct “secure
communications.” Some White House staff and Trump campaign supporters
came to refer to the suite as “the tinfoil room,” according to one
person who visited the suite. This account was confirmed by another
source to whom the room was described. “John [Maguire] was certain that
the deep state was going to kick the president out of office within a
year,” said a person who discussed it with Maguire. “These guys said
they were protecting the president.”
Maguire and others at Amyntor have boasted that they have already sent intelligence reports to Pompeo.
Counterpunch | With the Senate and House all but assured to pass the $4.5 trillion
in tax cuts for businesses, investors, and the wealthiest 1% households
by the end of this week, phases two and three of the Trump-Republican
fiscal strategy have begun quickly to take shape.
Phase two is to maneuver the inept Democrats in Congress into passing
a temporary budget deficit-debt extension in order to allow the tax
cuts to be implemented quickly. That’s already a ‘done deal’.
Phase three is the drumbeat growing to attack social security,
medicare, food stamps, medicaid, and other ‘safety net’ laws, in order
to pay for the deficit created by cutting taxes on the rich. A whole new
set of lies are resurrected and being peddled by the media and
pro-business pundits and politicians.
Counterpunch | Pay no attention to the ongoing palace intrigue. Mueller’s
investigation will at most act as a speed bump of sorts. Don’t mistake
symptoms for the disease. Should the President or one of his minions be
dismissed they will almost certainly be replaced by another donor class
proxy. There’s no shortage of political mercenaries (in either party)
willing to ply us with carefully crafted distortion.
Despite internecine squabbles the majority of lawmakers in congress can all agree on more military spending, more surveillance, more
money for corporate executives… and less for everyone else. And so a
parade of talking heads trot out the usual pleasant fiction about
trickle-down economics. And it is fiction. Corporate leaders have openly
conceded they have no intention
of creating jobs or raising wages with money attained through tax cuts.
They’re simply going to take it and pass it on to their shareholders.
This is what happens when business interests call the shots. Society ends up in a place where three oligarchs own as much as the bottom half of society and allegations of Russian “interference” somehow overshadow the reality of a billion dollar presidential race which is funded heavily by concentrated sources of private power.
Counterpunch | By associating success (e.g. physical, emotional, financial, etc.)
with evolutionary value, this ideology ignores historical structures of
power and inequality and distorts the public’s understanding of their
true conditions.
When people come to believe individuals’ conditions are determined
solely by their genetics, or by how hard they fight to survive,
impoverished people are seen as lacking the abilities or motivation to
reach a privileged place in society, while privileged people are seen as
having the abilities which brought them their success.
The origin and history of this phrase, which understandably misleads
people, explains why there is this deep-seeded psychological inclination
to equate “fittest” to the best.
The phrase is often and incorrectly attributed to the father of
evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, and though Darwin did use this
language later in his life, the phrase was actually coined by Herbert
Spencer — an English philosopher, sociologist, and social Darwinism’s
most enthusiastic proponent.
Spencer believed that Darwin’s biologic theory of evolution could be
applied to society, arguing that social transformation was a progressive
process leading to more perfect human beings and social formations. He
claimed that if people should struggle or die because of their
conditions, it was because they were not biologically fit enough to
achieve a better position in life.
“The whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world
of them, and make room for better … If they are sufficiently complete
to live, they do live, and it is well they should live. If they are not
sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die”
[10]. He used this system of thought to theorize about the evolutionary
benefits of warfare and to justify a laissez faire approach to the
economy as well.
Prominent American philosophers, theologians, scientists, and
politicians espoused and popularized Spencer’s ideas. Andrew Carnegie,
who at the time was the richest man in America, and Edward Youmans, the
founder of the magazine Popular Science, were among his
American admirers. “Successful business entrepreneurs apparently
accepted almost by instinct the Darwinian terminology which seemed to
portray the conditions of their existence.” [6]
Countless instances of social Darwinist messaging can still be
observed in our media. Publications like The Economist (where Spencer
was once an editor), The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, provide examples of this.
theintercept |The White House press secretary did not directly dispute the revelation
that Blackwater founder Erik Prince and former Iran-Contra figure
Oliver North pitched a plan to develop a private spy network to members
of the Trump administration.
The plan, detailed in a story broken by The Intercept
on Monday, is to develop a private intelligence network to counter
perceived “deep state” enemies within the ranks of government. Prince
denied the report, and North did not respond to The Intercept’s request
for comment.
“I’m not aware of any plans for something of that definition or anything similar to that at this time,” said White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, in response to a question from CBS News’s Major Garrett about the story.
Garrett followed up to ask if President Donald Trump “would be
opposed” to an outside spy network operating on his behalf. Sanders said
she was unaware.
Garrett asked to Sanders to confirm whether any administration official had been briefed on such a network.
“I’m not going to answer some random hypothetical. Did some random
person off the street come in and say something? I don’t know,” Sanders said.
And finally, Garrett asked if it was an idea Trump would consider.
“Again, I haven’t asked him, but its not something that’s currently in the works,” Sanders replied.
A White House official later told
New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman that the proposal was indeed
pitched to the Trump administration, but that there is no sign the
president himself was briefed.
medium | Lately I’ve
been getting a lot more accusations of being a Kremlin agent and
questions about my motives and agendas in response to my writings and
far fewer actual arguments against the content of my writing, as well as
demands that I stop arguing with this Russiagate thing and move on to
writing about other matters. I’ll tell you what: I’ll stop writing about
the Russiagate lies when they stop happening, how’s that sound? If
you foam-brained pussyhat-wearing cultists are going to keep using lies
to inadvertently manufacture support for America’s new cold war
escalations, the least I can do is try to throw a monkey wrench in it.
If
Russiagate was legit, the people responsible for selling it to us
wouldn’t have to come up with new lies about it constantly. There are many very real dangers of the Trump administration that we can focus on without fanning the flames of world-threatening tensions
between two nuclear superpowers based on lies, and the longer we spend
fighting over this crap the more of those dangers manifest unnoticed.
Russiagaters are the very worst kind of conspiracy theorist, and as long
as they’re imperiling my world with their complicity in the
manipulations of the US power establishment I’m going to keep fighting
them. Get used to it.
unz |Reading
the mainstream media headlines relating to the flipping of former
National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to provide evidence relating to
the allegations about Russian interference in America’s last
presidential election requires the suspension of one’s cognitive
processes. Ignoring completely what had actually occurred, the “Russian
story” with its subset of “getting Trump” was on display all through the
weekend, both in the print and on the live media.
Flynn’s
guilty plea is laconic, merely admitting that he had lied to the
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) about what was said during two
telephone conversations with then Russian Ambassador to the United
States Sergey Kislyak, but there is considerable back story that emerged
after the plea became public.
The
two phone calls in question include absolutely nothing about possible
collusion with Russia to change the outcome of the U.S. election, which
allegedly was the raison d’etre behind the creation of Robert Mueller’s
Special Counsel office in the first place. Both took place more than a
month after the election and both were initiated by the Americans
involved. I am increasingly convinced that Mueller ain’t got nuthin’ but
this process will grind out interminably and the press will be hot on
the trail until there is nowhere else to go.
Based
on the information revealed regarding the two conversations, and,
unlike the highly nuance-sensitive editors working for the mainstream
media, this is the headline that I would have written for a featured
article based on what I consider to be important: “Israel Colluded with Incoming Trump Team to Subvert U.S. Foreign Policy,” with a possible subheading “FBI Entraps National Security Adviser.”
consortiumnews | So, where are independent-minded Western journalists to turn if their
stories critical of the U.S. government and corporations are suppressed?
The imperative is to get these stories out – and Russian media has
provided an opening for some. This has presented a new problem for the
plutocracy. The suppression of critical news in their corporate-owned
media is no longer working if it’s seeping out in Russian media (and
through some dissident Western news sites on the Internet).
The solution has been to brand the content of the Russian television
network, RT, as “propaganda” since it presents facts and viewpoints that
most Americans have been kept from hearing. But just because these
views – many coming from Americans and other Westerners – are not what
you commonly hear on the U.S. mainstream media doesn’t make them
“propaganda” that must be stigmatized and silenced.
As a Russian-government-financed English-language news channel, RT
also gives a Russian perspective on the news, the way CNN and The New York Times give
an American perspective and the BBC a British one. American mainstream
journalists, from my experience, arrogantly deny suppressing news and
believe they present a universal perspective, rather than a narrow
American view of the world.
The viewpoints of Iranians, Palestinians, Russians, North Koreans and
others are never fully reported in the Western media although the
supposed mission of journalism is to help citizens understand a
frighteningly complex world from multiple points of view. It’s
impossible to do so without those voices included. Routinely or
systematically shutting them out also dehumanizes people in those
countries, making it easier to gain popular support to go to war against
them.
Russia is scapegoated by charging that RT or Sputnik are
sowing divisions in the U.S. by focusing on issues like homelessness,
racism, or out-of-control militarized police forces, as if these
divisive issues didn’t already exist. The U.S. mainstream media also
seems to forget that the U.S. government has engaged in at least 70
years of interference in other countries’ elections, foreign invasions,
coups, planting stories in foreign media and cyber-warfare.
Now, these American transgressions are projected onto Moscow. There’s
also a measure of self-reverence in this for “successful” people with a
stake in an establishment that underpins the elite, demonstrating how
wonderfully democratic they are compared to those ogres in Russia.
The overriding point about the “Russian propaganda” complaint is that
when America’s democratic institutions, including the press and the
electoral process, are crumbling under the weight of corruption that the
American elites have created or maintained, someone else needs to be
blamed. Russia is both an old and a new scapegoat.
The Jan. 6 intelligence assessment on alleged Russian election
meddling is a good example of how this works. A third of its content is
an attack on RT for “undermining American democracy” by reporting on
Occupy Wall Street, the protest over the Dakota pipeline and, of all
things, holding a “third party candidate debates.”
According to the Jan. 6 assessment, RT’s offenses include reporting
that “the US two-party system does not represent the views of at least
one-third of the population and is a ‘sham.’” RT also “highlights
criticism of alleged US shortcomings in democracy and civil
liberties.” In other words, reporting on newsworthy events and allowing
third-party candidates to express their opinions undermine democracy.
The report also says all this amounts to “a Kremlin-directed campaign
to undermine faith in the US Government and fuel political protest,”
but it should be noted those protests by dissatisfied Americans are
against privileges of the wealthy and the well-connected, a status quo
that the intelligence agencies routinely protect.
There are also deeper reasons why Russia is being targeted. The
Russia-gate story fits neatly into a geopolitical strategy that long
predates the 2016 election. Since Wall Street and the U.S. government
lost the dominant position in Russia that existed under the pliable
President Boris Yeltsin, the strategy has been to put pressure on
getting rid of Putin to restore a U.S. friendly leader in Moscow. There
is substance to Russia’s concerns about American designs for “regime change” in the Kremlin.
Moscow sees an aggressive America expanding NATO and putting 30,000
NATO troops on its borders; trying to overthrow a secular ally in Syria
with terrorists who threaten Russia itself; backing a coup in Ukraine as
a possible prelude to moves against Russia; and using American NGOs to
foment unrest inside Russia before they were forced to register as
foreign agents. Russia wants Americans to see this perspective.
theatlantic | Little distinguishes democracy in
America more sharply from Europe than the primacy—and permissiveness—of
our commitment to free speech. Yet ongoing controversies at American
universities suggest that free speech is becoming a partisan issue.
While conservative students defend the importance of inviting
controversial speakers to campus and giving offense, many
self-identified liberals are engaged in increasingly disruptive, even
violent, efforts to shut them down. Free speech for some, they argue,
serves only to silence and exclude others. Denying hateful or
historically “privileged” voices a platform is thus necessary to make equality effective, so that the marginalized and vulnerable can finally speak up—and be heard.
The
reason that appeals to the First Amendment cannot decide these campus
controversies is because there is a more fundamental conflict between
two, very different concepts of free speech at stake. The conflict
between what the ancient Greeks called isegoria, on the one hand, and parrhesia,
on the other, is as old as democracy itself. Today, both terms are
often translated as “freedom of speech,” but their meanings were and are
importantly distinct. In ancient Athens, isegoria described the equal right of citizens to participate in public debate in the democratic assembly; parrhesia, the license to say what one pleased, how and when one pleased, and to whom.
When it comes to private universities, businesses, or
social media, the would-be censors are our fellow-citizens, not the
state. Private entities like Facebook or Twitter, not to mention Yale or
Middlebury, have broad rights to regulate and exclude the speech of
their members. Likewise, online mobs are made up of outraged individuals
exercising their own right to speak freely. To invoke the First
Amendment in such cases is not a knock-down argument, it’s a non sequitur.
John Stuart Mill argued
that the chief threat to free speech in democracies was not the state,
but the “social tyranny” of one’s fellow citizens. And yet today, the
civil libertarians who style themselves as Mill’s inheritors have for
the most part failed to refute, or even address, the arguments about
free speech and equality that their opponents are making.
The
two ancient concepts of free speech came to shape our modern liberal
democratic notions in fascinating and forgotten ways. But more
importantly, understanding that there is not one, but two concepts
of freedom of speech, and that these are often in tension if not
outright conflict, helps explain the frustrating shape of contemporary
debates, both in the U.S. and in Europe—and why it so often feels as
though we are talking past each other when it comes to the things that
matter most.
Counterpunch | Now, there is something else being obscured in all this hashtag
outrage. And that is the criminality and coercion of all labor under
capitalism. Remember, too, that there is silence thus far from the most
vulnerable women working in the West; au pairs, maids, factory workers
and the like. Many of whom are immigrants or from immigrant families.
Also, the most acute violence directed at the working class can be found
in the near servitude of citrus pickers and migrant workers in states
like Florida, California and Texas. There is very little media attention given to this.
And one could also examine the actual rape conditions of American
prisons and county correctional facilities (see below). The clear rape
by proxy of young people intentionally put into cells with sexual
predators. This is the disciplining of the underclass via sexual
violence.
The 1% (or ruling class) are there to distract the populace from the
growing economic chasm between themselves and the rest of us. And this
is done by providing cheap satisfactions. The system grants the illusion
of reform but simply repackages the same. White male power will now
adjust to present itself as caring and sensitive to causing offense. Or
will there be genuine structural and substantive change? The odds are
against change if it challenges the ruling class. I also have noticed a
new sort of white male subject position that insists on being thee most
feminist man in any discussion, and publicly self lacerates as evidence
of his personal evolution. The confessional element in public discourse
today looms over all of this.
And today, in an age of electronic media and mass marketing of
everything, including lingerie for five year olds (see Victoria’s
Secret) this eruption of anger and outrage at the behavior of privileged
white men, feels oddly linked to that shadow guilt and resentment of
the white ruling class. The white patriarchy needs to abuse the help.
And if the slave is now too much of a threat, then women will suffice.
And, this is Capitalism after all, where everything is for sale. And
much of the language of this anger at white patriachy takes on the
quality of self help books and the therapy culture that favors
empowerment over organizing. It also manufactures a kind of theatre of
grief, in which the word “feelings” is used quite a bit. This is anger
predicated upon an identity consensus. And the massive hashtag response
speaks to a shared world view. There is a progressive aspect to it all,
and that is clear. I think, anyway. The boorish and abusive and
humiliating — a key word — behavior of men like Harvey Weinstein, and
their default belief that they can do what they want, with women, with
anyone under them, is being exposed.
NYTimes | The fliers appeared suddenly on a crisp morning in early November. They were scattered among golden leaves on the grounds of Spelman and Morehouse, the side-by-side women’s and men’s colleges that are two of the country’s most celebrated historically black schools.
“Morehouse Protects Rapists,” some of them read. “Spelman Protects Rapists.”
Some of the documents accused prominent athletes and fraternity members by name. Though workers quickly made the fliers disappear, students were already passing photos from cellphone to cellphone. Before long, the names were on Twitter.
And the next morning, students at Morehouse woke up to another unnerving sight: graffiti marring the chapel, a spiritual gathering place dedicated to a revered alumnus, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Scrawled in red spray paint, the message read: “Practice What You Preach Morehouse + End Rape Culture.”
In a letter to the campus on Oct. 29, the provost, Michael Quick, announced he was convening a series of forums and task forces. “There is no place on our campuses, or in our society, for abuse of power,” it said.
And in Atlanta, the issue is gripping two campuses, and exposed a deep fissure between schools closely linked by history and geography.
Neither Spelman nor Morehouse would disclose how many complaints it has received, and in interviews, Spelman students and professors said they did not believe sexual assault was any more common there than elsewhere.
But most said they believed the colleges had not been taking the issue seriously enough. Now their pent-up frustration has burst into the open during a national moment of reckoning.
“I don’t believe our students would be doing what they’re doing if things like this hadn’t been happening nationally,” said Beverly Guy-Sheftall, a women’s studies professor who was one of more than 70 Spelman professors who signed an open letter supporting students who said they had been assaulted.
In a three-minute speech on Nov. 9, the day the graffiti was found on the King chapel, Harold Martin Jr., the interim president of Morehouse, said there was “clearly a belief that there is a population that does not feel heard.”
progressivekc | UMKC administration once again failed to take concrete action against
sexual assault at the last town hall. They talked about meetings, and
committees and procedures – but when have those accomplished anything?
Their mouths made the same motions they did during last semester’s
sexual assaults, while their actions are still absent.
In face of such incompetence, PYO has taken a stand! We pasted fliers
with the names and faces of two known rapists on campus, in order to
warn the student body, while letting rapists know that they are not
welcome here. During the flyering, we were pleased to discover that
other rebellious youth had decorated the Bloch School of Business.
This is only the beginning – more actions will come. The end goal
of this campaign is to build a revolutionary counter-culture on campus
that will empower the student body to annihilate rape culture ourselves!
Such a goal is a high order, and will require dedicated, protracted
struggle. If you wish to keep in touch with our future efforts, like our
Facebook, and/or keep watching this website.
Counterpunch | When a system enters into the final stage of its deterioration –
whether that is an institutional system, a state, an empire, or the
human body – all the important information flows that support coherent
communication breakdown. In this final stage, if this situation is not
corrected the system will collapse and die.
It has become obvious to nearly everyone that we have reached this
stage on the planet and in our democratic institutions. We see how the
absolute dysfunction of the global information
architecture — represented in the intersection of mainstream media
outlets, social technology platforms and giant digital aggregators — is
generating widespread apathy, despair, insanity and madness at a scale
that is terrifying.
And we are right to be terrified, because this situation is
paralyzing us from taking the action required to solve global and local
challenges. While liberals fight conservatives and conservatives fight
liberals we lose precious time.
While progressives fight government, the corporations and the
super-rich we drown in despair. While philanthropists, fueled by their
own certainty and wealth, fight for justice or equality or for some poor
hamlet in Africa we become apathetic and distracted from the real
source of the problem. And while the president fights everyone and
everyone fights the president, the collective goes mad.
In the background, however, the game of hoarding resources and not
redistributing them accelerates; absorbing the sum total of our
collective actions and commitments into a singular unacceptable future.
There is only one way to avoid this fate; uncover the source of the
disease and cure it by mobilizing solutions.
We are about to break down for you the source of this disease of
information that is accelerating us to ecological and institutional
collapse because once you see it, you will be free to act and build
something else.
theatlantic | Agony is the natural state of the news industry. Newspaper sales per capita peaked
before color television was a thing, and magazines have been in decline
since the Clinton administration. When it comes to the finances of the
Fourth Estate, bad news is, generally speaking, the news.
But
2017 has been a uniquely miserable year in the media business, in which
venerable publications and fledging sites, divided by audience age and
editorial style, have been united in misery. At Vanity Fair, the editorial budget faces a 30 percent cut. At TheNew York Times, advertising revenue is down $20 million annually after nine months. Oath, the offspring of Yahoo and AOL’s union, is shedding more than 500 positions
as it strains to fit inside of its Verizon conglomerate. Meanwhile,
almost every digital publisher seems to be struggling, selling, or
soliciting, whether it’s the media company IAC exploring offers to
offload The Daily Beast, Fusion Media Group offering a minority stake in The Onion
and former Gawker Media sites, or Mashable selling for a fifth of its
former valuation. So many media companies in 2017 have reoriented their
budgets around the production of videos that the so-called “pivot to
video” has became an industry joke. Today, the pivot seems less like a
business strategy and more like end-of-life estate planning.
Even the crown princes of digital upstarts, Vice and BuzzFeed,
are projected to miss their revenue targets by 20 percent each, which
amounts to a combined shortfall of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Finally, this week, Time Inc., the storied publisher of magazines and
websites, including People, Sports Illustrated, and Time, announced it had reached an agreement to be sold to the Meredith Corporation, whose focus on lifestyle is inspiring rumors that it may yet offload or even shut down Time, Fortune, and Money.
What
on Earth is going on? There are at least three major trends
contributing to this dismal media moment. They all point to the same
solution, and it’s something everyone in journalism should know by now:
News publishers have to get better at making money outside of
advertising.
NationalReview | Earlier today The Federalist published a piece by a philosophy
professor and self-proclaimed “superhero against the dark forces of
political correctness” that purports to present the case for Roy Moore.
Unlike many of Moore’s defenders, he’s trying to persuade Alabamians to
vote for Moore even if the claims against him are “mostly true.”
It’s an embarrassing effort. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t waste my time
responding to something so silly, but the author, Tully Borland, claims
to be rebutting one of my pieces about Moore, and he’s making actual
arguments I’m hearing from real life friends. So, today I’m making an
exception.
Borland’s piece rests — as most defenses of Moore do — on minimizing
Moore’s sins, maximizing his importance, and making incredibly stupid
analogies. Indeed, the efforts to minimize Moore’s actions almost reach
“Joseph married a teenager” levels of insanity.
WaPo | Pity poor Alabama voters. On Dec. 12, they must choose between a radical
pro-abortion Democrat and an alleged sex predator who has been accused
of pursuing and molesting teenage girls.
There is no good choice in that equation, and Alabamians should not
have to make it. In an earlier era, Roy Moore either would have done the
honorable thing out of his own sense of shame or would have been forced
to step down by state party leaders. Instead, he is staying in the race
— with the full complicity of Alabama Republican leaders who have
defended Moore and attacked his victims.
In refusing to step
down, Moore is executing a playbook written two decades ago by the 42nd
President, Bill Clinton. During the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Clinton
figured out that if you have no shame and ignore calls to resign, you
can survive any scandal. All you have to do is lie repeatedly (“there is
nothing going on between us”) and show no remorse when you are caught
doing so. When more women come forward with more allegations, deny them,
too, and create just enough doubt that your supporters will feel
justified sticking with you. Blame your opponents for conducting a
political witch hunt to run you out of office. If the evidence becomes
overwhelming, then admit “a critical lapse in judgment” but declare it is time “to move on” because “we have important work to do.”
For Clinton, it worked like a charm. He forced his supporters to
choose between power and principle — knowing full well that power would
win out. The feminist movement — the very people who should have been
championing Clinton’s victims — instead sided with him. Gloria Steinem
beclowned herself in a notorious 1998 New York Times op-ed where she attacked Clinton’s accusers, made excuses for his deceit and made light of his crimes. All 45 Senate Democrats voted to acquit Clinton in his impeachment trial.
Today,
with the cavalcade of revelations of sexual transgressions by
politicians and celebrities, some Democrats are expressing belated
regret that their party rallied around Clinton. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand
(D-N.Y.), who occupies Senate seat that Hillary Clinton once held, now says that Bill Clinton should have resigned.
Isn’t that convenient? Now that the Clinton political machine is
finally defunct, liberals come forward to condemn him? How courageous.
So..., having meditated for quite a long time on degeneracy this year, I was more primed and ready to explode on the #MeToo trope than little Rocket Man's spanking new MIRV. Not that I sincerely give a rat's nasty little flea-ridden patootty about the foolishness and phuckery of peasants - or even middle and upper class strivers peasants with a couple of nickels to rub together for that matter - I don't.
Above the gossipy fray, I don't care about the underlying gender/power disparities, or, virtue-signalling intersectional alliance with the oppressed either. It's simply not part of my psychic constitution to care
about the high-minded retelling of what amount to high-school style antics. The nekkid goings-on of chronologically grown-folk whose
psychological development can best be described as de-evolutionary arrested, is of little interest to me.
Simple critter that I am, at the reptile-brain level of engagement, it all comes down to my very weakly resisted inclination to wallow in schadenfreude. I am a glutton for the vicarious enjoyment of watching other despicable apes get ripped to
shreds on the plains of the popular-cultural serengeti by various and sundry wildly enflamed letgo beasts. I've been needing to go to confession six times a day for the past couple of months because of the obsessive and compulsive nature of my abiding and overarching enjoyment of this spectacle.
On the meta-level, i.e., philosophically above the sticky fray, what I care most deeply about is individual sovereignty and the
associated requisite science and methodology of asymmetrical violation
of the established order. If you haven't figured this out about me yet, if you haven't identified my "chief-feature" as it were, let me spell it out for you. I have a profound, all-consuming, and irrational problem with authoriteh.
This has not only been my career-limiting professional modus operandi, pared of all guise and dissimulation, it is truly my religion. It has been this way for me since about the age of eleven, when a phenomenal sunday school teacher encouraged me to question any and everything. This encouragement was permanently crystallized and violentized in my psyche at twelve when I first rebelled against peer authoriteh and beat the literal shit out of an arrogant neighborhood bully. (I would link to this buffoon, but I see he's still alive and never made it out of Wichita)
Anyway, as best I can gather, this current, energetic eruption of rule-breaking in polite society all started when the late Si Newhouse decided to go laughing to his grave by profoundly deviating from the established behavioral norms of the Trans-American Protectorate (now archived) - by publishing Ronan Farrow's expose on the disgusting degenerate rape-pig Harvey Weinstein. Publication of that story in The New Yorker amounted to detonation of a nuclear grenade of asymmetric, unintended consequences.
Said grenade has cracked an American cultural dam. Not only did it unleash the pent-up gender-flood from the oppressed and long-offended feminine-striver masses in entertainment/media/politics - it also unexpectedly unleashed the genuinely oppressed rage of the deplorables still rightfully and righteously angered over the cultural and moral pass given to serial rapist William Jefferson Clinton.
Now, which camp will keep the very hot fires of this cultural moment burning - remains to be seen. Whether the fires rise up to the Impyrian heights of the multi-billionaire TAP elites who are earnestly warring among themselves remains to be seen. That it's forced its way onto teevees all across America and is the hot potato that will determine the outcome of the Alabama senatorial special election - does not yet give us a clear indication of whether this moment will engulf, scorch, and shred all the really big killer-apeswho fundamentally have no game and need to get righteously burned. Meanwhile, I'll continue wallowing in schadenfreude and enjoying every single instance of yet another despicable ape getting shredded and scorched out'chere on these fields of dystopian sorrow....,
pagesix | A source familiar with the purchase said: “While everyone in New York
wants a doorman, Eric specifically said he didn’t want one. He doesn’t
want anyone to see him and his guests coming in and out. He insisted on
his own elevator.”
Schmidt has also spent millions getting the 6,250-square-foot duplex —
which has four bedrooms and a large entertainment area with a wet bar
opening onto a 3,300-square-foot terrace — soundproofed, claiming he
“doesn’t sleep well,” but also affording him complete privacy.
Other sources say that earlier this summer, the tech mogul was
embarking on a tour of the French Riviera and asked his aides to find
alluring female companions to “decorate his yacht.”
Schmidt, who’s worth $8.2 billion, bought the 195-foot Oasis for
about $72.3 million in 2009. The source said, “He had one of his aides
approach beautiful and intelligent women that Schmidt never met before,
saying, ‘Eric would like to invite you to his yacht,’ which was cruising
around the Riviera.”
He was spotted in St. Tropez earlier this month, and later sailed to
the Cap d’Antibes, and we’re told that some of the women approached by
his aides had agreed to join Schmidt onboard.
Wendy Schmidt, who lives in Nantucket, said in an interview last year
that they started living separate lives because she felt like “a piece
of luggage” following him around the world.
newyorker | We have witnessed a theatre of accountability insidiously refine itself,
quite quickly, in the past few months. Louis C.K.’s statement, for
example, following the exposé in the Times of his sexual harassment of
female comics, was not as passionate as, but was more coherent than,
Harvey Weinstein’s ramblings about Jay-Z and the gun lobby. The
opportunistic finesse of Kevin Spacey’s coming-out certainly tripped
some social alarms, but he nonetheless garnered some sympathy. Power
brokers like the Pixar animation baron John Lasseter have even scooped
long-labored-over articles by preëmpting them altogether. (Lasseter is
taking a six-month leave of absence.) No display was savvier than NBC’s
orchestration on Wednesday.
The “Today” show’s artful transposition of grief where there would
naturally be scrutiny continued into the 10 A.M.
slot, in which the
veteran host Kathie Lee Gifford spoke of how much she, too, loved Lauer
and how sad she was. It continued on this morning’s program, with
Guthrie and
Kotb again at the helm. Not since Bill Cosby—or Bill O’Reilly, depending
on one’s television diet—has the scourge of sexual assault so acutely
infiltrated the righteous perimeter of the American home. (President
Trump, also affiliated with NBC and accused of assaulting women, never
quite depended on a family-man image.) The influence of a
behind-the-scenes figure like Weinstein can feel diffuse, removed from
our everyday cultural consumption; Lauer was, and is, synonymous with
the family feel of “Today.” Part of this comes from the network’s
bloated investment in Lauer—he reportedly earns between twenty million
and twenty-five million dollars a year. (In 2014, a source told Page Six
that the
company chartered helicopter rides for Lauer from his Hamptons compound
to its Rockefeller Center studios at his request.) When, in 1996, Lauer
wrested
the anchor chair from Bryant Gumbel, gossip magazines swooned over his
geometric jaw and feathery hair; twenty years later, he was transforming
comfortably into a smug but wise paternal figure. His tenure at the
“Today” show was the longest in its history. Now instances of Lauer’s
public pettiness toward women seem like the exertions of a holistically
awful campaign. In 2012, he admonished the actress Anne Hathaway for
photographs that the paparazzi had taken of her exiting a car. “Seen a
lot of
you lately,” he said. And, famously, Lauer was an architect of
“Operation Bambi,” a plan that succeeded in getting his former co-anchor
Ann Curry fired from the show that same year. (“ ‘Chemistry,’ in
television history, generally means the man does not want to work with
the woman,” Curry said, according to Brian Stelter’s insider anatomy,
“Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV.”) On her
final show, Curry wept and Lauer pretended to soothe her. His interview
of Hillary Clinton last year was intrusive and aggressive when compared
with his handling of Trump. How a man thinks of women dictates how he
works with them.
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
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