Why Obama Fears for Our Democracy

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/why-obama-fears-for-our-democracy/617087/

America as an experiment is genuinely important to the world not because of the accidents of history that made us the most powerful nation on Earth, but because America is the first real experiment in building a large, multiethnic, multicultural democracy. And we don’t know yet if that can hold. There haven’t been enough of them around for long enough to say for certain that it’s going to work.  

[...]

It’s interesting. You’re in high school and you see all the cliques and bullying and unfairness and superficiality, and you think, Once I’m grown up I won’t have to deal with that anymore. And then you get to the state legislature and you see all the nonsense and stupidity and pettiness. And then you get to Congress and then you get to the G20, and at each level you have this expectation that things are going to be more refined, more sophisticated, more thoughtful, rigorous, selfless, and it turns out it’s all still like high school. Human dynamics are surprisingly constant. They take different forms. It turns out that the same strengths people have—flaws and foibles that people have—run across cultures and are part of politics. This should be empowering for people. My ideal reader is some 25-year-old kid who is starting to be curious about the world and wants to do something that has some meaning. I want them to read this and say, “Okay, this is not all rocket science; this is something I could contribute to and make a difference in.”

‘No One Is Listening to Us’

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/11/third-surge-breaking-healthcare-workers/617091/

 The entire state of Iowa is now out of staffed beds, Eli Perencevich, an infectious-disease doctor at the University of Iowa, told me. Worse is coming. Iowa is accumulating more than 3,600 confirmed cases every day; relative to its population, that’s more than twice the rate Arizona experienced during its summer peak, “when their system was near collapse,” Perencevich said. With only lax policies in place, those cases will continue to rise. Hospitalizations lag behind cases by about two weeks; by Thanksgiving, today’s soaring cases will be overwhelming hospitals that already cannot cope. “The wave hasn’t even crashed down on us yet,” Perencevich said. “It keeps rising and rising, and we’re all running on fear. The health-care system in Iowa is going to collapse, no question.”

In the imminent future, patients will start to die because there simply aren’t enough people to care for them. Doctors and nurses will burn out. The most precious resource the U.S. health-care system has in the struggle against COVID-19 isn’t some miracle drug. It’s the expertise of its health-care workers—and they are exhausted.

Sex-Abuse Claims Against Boy Scouts Now Surpass 81,000

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/15/us/boy-scouts-abuse-claims-bankruptcy.html

 More than 81,000 people have come forward with sex-abuse claims against the Boy Scouts of America, describing a decades-long accumulation of assaults at the hands of scout leaders across the nation who had been trusted as role models.

The claims, which lawyers said far eclipsed the number of abuse accusations filed in Catholic Church cases, continued to mount ahead of a Monday deadline established in bankruptcy court in Delaware, where the Boy Scouts had sought refuge this year in a bid to survive.

Paul Mones, a lawyer who has been working on Boy Scouts cases for nearly two decades, said the prevalence of abuse detailed in the filings was breathtaking and might reflect only a fraction of victims.

“I knew there were a lot of cases,” Mr. Mones said. “I never contemplated it would be a number close to this.”

Before You Go

https://www.petermercurio.com/before-you-go/

Fail. Make plenty of glorious mistakes. Learn from them and don’t harp on what could’ve been or might be. Failed attempts will make you more resilient, and resiliency is something you will need in abundance. You can only obtain resiliency from your experiences. So have them. Put yourself out there and experience all that life has to offer. Yes, you can certainly observe from the sidelines and learn from other people’s mistakes, as your Papa has often done, but you won’t necessarily get the same kind of deep-rooted resilience. True resilience is absent of callousness.

In addition to resilience, it is important to be elastic, disciplined, and discreet. Allow us to call it living in the REDD zone:

Resilience: when you get knocked down, get back up and keep moving forward

Elasticity: be flexible enough to bend but not break

Discipline: stay focused on the task at hand and steadfast in protecting your values and ethics

Discretion: make responsible choices, be trustworthy, don’t spread gossip, fake news, or conspiracy theories

Super-spreading wedding party demonstrates COVID-19 risk posed by holiday gatherings

https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-11-12/covid-19-spread-at-thanksgiving-holiday-gatherings-could-be-like-maine-wedding

If you want to know why public health officials are so nervous about how much worse the COVID-19 pandemic will get as the holiday season unfolds, consider what happened after a single, smallish wedding reception that took place this summer in rural Maine.

Only 55 people attended the Aug. 7 reception at the Big Moose Inn in Millinocket. But one of those guests arrived with a coronavirus infection. Over the next 38 days, the virus spread to 176 other people. Seven of them died.

None of the victims who lost their lives had attended the party.

3D Map of COVID Cases by Population, March through November

 https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/jrkoze/3d_map_of_covid_cases_by_population_march_through/

Clyburn on slogans

 http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/2011/08/sotu.01.html

CLYBURN: Well, Jake, you may remember, months ago, I came out very publicly and very forcibly against sloganeering.

I happen to also be -- you know, John Lewis and I were co -- were founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. John and I sat on the House floor and talked about that defund the police slogan, and both of us concluded that it had the possibilities of doing to the Black Lives Matter movement and current movements across the country what "Burn, baby, burn" did to us back in 1960.

We lost that movement over that slogan. And a lot of people don't realize it, but John Lewis walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in February 1965. A year later, we got the Voting Rights Act out of that, six months later. And it wasn't a year after that that John Lewis was ousted as chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And so we saw the same thing happening here.

So, I spoke about against the sloganeering. And I feel very strongly we can't pick up these things just because it makes a good headline. It sometimes destroys headway.

We need to work on what makes headway, rather than what makes headlines.

The belief that people who suffer will receive future virtuous rewards

https://www.behaviorist.biz/oh-behave-a-blog/suffering-just-world

A study published in the British journal of Social Psychology proposes that people expect suffering to result in a greater likelihood of attaining future rewards. This research was carried out by Dr. How Hwee Ong, Dr. Rob M. A. Nelissen and Dr. Ilja van Beest from the Department of Social Psychology at Tilburg University. 

There are two primary theories for why people believe that suffering in the present will lead to fortuitous rewards in the future. The first is known as the “just-world maintenance” explanation. This explanation states that individuals often believe that they’re living in a world where people get what they deserve. 

Thus, people who suffer unnecessarily will be compensated for the pain they’ve endured. In doing so, this will restore balance to a supposed just-world.

The alternative theory is known as the “virtuous suffering” explanation. This suggests that experiencing suffering can improve one’s moral character. 

I violated a code of conduct

https://www.fast.ai/2020/10/28/code-of-conduct/

 Summary: NumFOCUS found I violated their Code of Conduct (CoC) at JupyterCon because my talk was not “kind”, because I said Joel Grus was “wrong” regarding his opinion that Jupyter Notebook is not a good software development environment. Joel (who I greatly respect, and consider an asset to the data science community) was not involved in NumFOCUS’s action, was not told about it, and did not support it. NumFOCUS did not follow their own enforcement procedure and violated their own CoC, left me hanging for over a week not even knowing what I was accused of, and did not give me an opportunity to provide input before concluding their investigation. I repeatedly told their committee that my emotional resilience was low at the moment due to medical issues, which they laughed about and ignored, as I tried (unsuccessfully) to hold back tears. The process has left me shattered, and I won’t be able to accept any speaking requests for the foreseeable future. I support the thoughtful enforcement of Code of Conducts to address sexist, racist, and harassing behavior, but that is not what happened in this case.

How 30 Lines of Code Blew Up a 27-Ton Generator

https://www.wired.com/story/how-30-lines-of-code-blew-up-27-ton-generator/

 EARLIER THIS WEEK, the US Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against a group of hackers known as Sandworm. The document charged six hackers working for Russia's GRU military intelligence agency with computer crimes related to half a decade of cyberattacks across the globe, from sabotaging the 2018 Winter Olympics in Korea to unleashing the most destructive malware in history in Ukraine. Among those acts of cyberwar was an unprecedented attack on Ukraine's power grid in 2016, one that appeared designed to not merely cause a blackout, but to inflict physical damage on electric equipment. And when one cybersecurity researcher named Mike Assante dug into the details of that attack, he recognized a grid-hacking idea invented not by Russian hackers, but by the United State government, and tested a decade earlier.

The following excerpt from the book SANDWORM: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers, published in paperback this week, tells the story of that early, seminal grid-hacking experiment. The demonstration was led by Assante, the late, legendary industrial control systems security pioneer. It would come to be known as the Aurora Generator Test. Today, it still serves as a powerful warning of the potential physical-world effects of cyberattacks—and an eery premonition of Sandworm's attacks to come.

Study: Breitbart-led right-wing media ecosystem altered broader media agenda

https://www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-study.php

 Rebuilding a basis on which Americans can form a shared belief about what is going on is a precondition of democracy, and the most important task confronting the press going forward. Our data strongly suggest that most Americans, including those who access news through social networks, continue to pay attention to traditional media, following professional journalistic practices, and cross-reference what they read on partisan sites with what they read on mass media sites.

To accomplish this, traditional media needs to reorient, not by developing better viral content and clickbait to compete in the social media environment, but by recognizing that it is operating in a propaganda and disinformation-rich environment. This, not Macedonian teenagers or Facebook, is the real challenge of the coming years. Rising to this challenge could usher in a new golden age for the Fourth Estate.

Lots of Overnight Tragedies, No Overnight Miracles

https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/lots-of-overnight-tragedies-no-overnight-miracles/

 Pearl Harbor and September 11th are probably the two biggest news events of the last 100 years. Both lasted less than two hours, start to finish.

It took less than 30 days for most people to go from having never heard of Covid-19 to it upending their life.

It took less than 15 months for Lehman Brothers – a 158-year-old company – to go from an all-time high to bankrupt. Same with Enron, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Nokia, Bernie Madoff, Muammar Gaddafi, Notre Dame, and the Soviet Union. Things that thrived for decades can be ruined in minutes. There is no equivalent in the other direction.

There’s a good reason why.

Growth always fights against competition that slows its rise. New ideas fight for attention, business models fight incumbents, constructing a building fights gravity. There’s always a headwind. But everyone gets out of the way of decline. Insiders might try to stop it, but it doesn’t attract masses of outsiders who rush in to push back in the other direction like progress does.

The irony is that growth and progress is way more powerful than setback. But setback will always get more attention because of how fast it occurs. So slow progress amid a drumbeat of bad news is the normal state of affairs. It’s not an easy thing to get used to, but it’ll always be with us.

Tony Green, on dismissing, denying, contracting and spreading the coronavirus

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/10/10/coronavirus-denier-sick-spreader/

The party was my idea. That’s what I can’t get over. Well, I mean, it wasn’t even a party — more like a get-together. There were just six of us, okay? My parents, my partner, and my partner’s parents. We’d been locked down for months at that point in Texas, and the governor had just come out and said small gatherings were probably okay. We’re a close family, and we hadn’t been together in forever. It was finally summer. I thought the worst was behind us. I was like: “Hell, let’s get on with our lives. What are we so afraid of?”

Some people in my family didn’t necessarily share all of my views, but I pushed it. I’ve always been out front with my opinions. I’m gay and I’m conservative, so either way I’m used to going against the grain. I stopped trusting the media for my information when it went hard against Trump in 2016. I got rid of my cable. It’s all opinion anyway, so I’d rather come up with my own. I find a little bit of truth here and a little there, and I pile it together to see what it makes. I have about 4,000 people in my personal network, and not one of them had gotten sick. Not one. You start to hear jokes about, you know, a skydiver jumps out of a plane without a parachute and dies of covid-19. You start to think: “Something’s really fishy here.” You start dismissing and denying. 

Why Does the U.S. Have Three Electrical Grids?

https://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/energy/renewables/why-does-the-us-have-three-electrical-grids

What about the financial benefits of tying together these three interconnects? Are they substantial? And are they enough to pay for the work that would be needed to unify them into a supergrid?

Peter Fairley The financial benefits are substantial and they would pay for themselves. And there’s really two reasons for that. One is as old as our systems, and that is, if you interconnect your power grids, then all of the generators in the amalgamated system can, in theory, they can all serve that total load. And what that means is they’re all competing against each other. And power plants that are inefficient are more likely to be driven out of the market or to operate less frequently. And so that the whole system becomes more efficient, more cost-effective, and prices tend to go down. You see that kind of savings when you look at interconnecting the big grids in North America. Consumers benefit—not necessarily all the power generators, right? There you get more winners and losers. And so that’s the old part of transmission economics.

What’s new is the increasing reliance on renewable energy and particularly variable renewable energy supplies like wind and solar. Their production tends to be more kind of bunchy, where you have days when there’s no wind and you have days when you’ve got so much wind that the local system can barely handle it. So there are a number of reasons why renewable energy really benefits economically when it’s in a larger system. You just get better utilization of the same installations.

The Mystery of the Immaculate Concussion

https://www.gq.com/story/cia-investigation-and-russian-microwave-attacks

Polymeropoulos countered by warning the Russians to stop meddling in American elections. The Russians denied they would ever do such a thing. It was the way most Russian officials behave in such meetings at all levels of government—a lecture about American racism, theatrical incredulity and hurt feelings that the Americans would think the Russians had meddled in American politics. Still, Polymeropoulos was stunned by how unabashedly combative his Russian counterparts were. He had spent his career in a region where people were exceedingly polite, rolling out banquets and plying him with tea, even as he knew they were plotting to kill him. He knew the Russians didn’t like him, but “I would have expected them to be a little more polite,” Polymeropoulos told me.

The Prophet of the Revolt

 https://pullrequest.substack.com/p/the-prophet-of-the-revolt

In fact, the public, which swims comfortably in the digital sea, knows far more than elites trapped in obsolete structures.  The public knows when the elites fail to deliver their promised “solutions,” when they tell falsehoods or misspeak, when they are caught in sexual escapades, and when they indulge in astonishing levels of smugness and hypocrisy.  The public is disenchanted in the elites and their institutions, much in the way science disenchanted the world of fairies and goblins.  The natural reaction is cynicism.  The elites aren’t seen as fallible humans doing their best but as corrupt and arrogant jerks.  The public, I said, is mired in negation.

The pandemic crisis has been a striking illustration of all this.  Information about the virus moved at the speed of light, but the institutions that were supposed to protect public health moved ponderously and were always playing catch-up, while the experts contradicted each other and sometimes themselves.  In the US, the CDC kept changing its mind about surgical masks.  The FDA seemed to think its mission was to throw out regulatory obstacles to treatment and cure.  Given that lives were at stake, these were not trivial confusions.

Elites like Fauci might become more credible if they admitted that they, too, are dwellers in Plato’s cave, like everyone else, even people with multiple PhDs who are awarded long titles by federal agencies.  We are all trying to make sense of the flitting shadows.  A little humility would go a long way.

As Local News Dies, a Pay-for-Play Network Rises in Its Place

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/18/technology/timpone-local-news-metric-media.html

 A site called New York Business Daily ran the article, saying the creditor was squeezing the finances of a struggling Manhattan hotel.

What the article didn’t mention: Mr. Bennett owned the hotel and dictated the article.

His spokeswoman said in a statement that Mr. Bennett “has no relationship with the websites.” She added that he had spoken to numerous news outlets “to obtain economic aid for the hotel industry.”

After The Times presented evidence that he directly ordered articles, lawyers representing Mr. Timpone sent The Times a cease and desist letter, demanding that it not publish the information.

On COVID

What's the most profoundly beautiful piece of music you have ever listened to?

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/im3brz/whats_the_most_profoundly_beautiful_piece_of/

So many good pieces here

George on Georgia – So, apparently, I’m a racist

 

https://decaturish.com/2020/10/george-on-georgia-so-apparently-im-a-racist/
But laying the weight of this moral question on Pine Lake is a cop out that excuses the wider community of its own moral failings around racial justice and policing, because the racial composition of DeKalb County’s recorder’s court cases are more or less identical to Pine Lake’s court and no one seems ready to hold the county’s 70-percent majority Black voters accountable for that, either.

I note in passing that if you draw a circle four miles wide around the center of Pine Lake, you have roughly 4 percent of DeKalb County’s territory, 25 percent of its murders and 15 percent of its aggravated assaults. Someone emptied four full magazines of a handgun on Sunday night within earshot of my house. We regularly do the “was that fireworks” discussion as we debate calling the cops or not.

Pine Lake homeowners pay a millage rate of 21.53 — the highest municipal tax rate in Georgia — to maintain a police department that answers to the city. 

Still, I suppose a long-winded, statistically-laden defense for how Pine Lake operates relative to other police departments and court systems is both inadequate and beside the point. There is a big, structural problem in America — Black people are discriminated against in jobs and housing and, yes, the policing system and even the most optimized and ideal process in Pine Lake changes none of that.

The Jailed Activist Left a Letter Behind. The Message: Keep Fighting

 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/world/asia/vietnam-pham-doan-trang-arrest.html

She left the country in 2013, but she was not happy in exile.

“It’s really hard to watch from outside what happens in Vietnam,” she said at the time. “It makes me feel helpless.”

She returned to Vietnam in 2015, and lived in hiding since 2017.

Ms. Pham’s arrest may also have been prompted by a report she co-wrote last month challenging the official account of a deadly police raid near Hanoi.

In Vietnam, all land is owned by the state, and officials have the power to seize prime parcels and give them to their cronies or foreign companies, a practice that fuels corruption. Such land grabs are a sensitive issue, and some critical activists have been imprisoned.

The dispute in Dong Tam village began when officials transferred 145 acres to the country’s largest telecommunications company, the government-owned Viettel Corp., but residents refused to give up their land. During a confrontation in 2017, villagers held 19 police and security officials captive for a week.

Georgy_K_Zhukov on Holocaust Denial

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/hp5zw0/askhistorians_has_a_policy_of_zero_tolerance_for/fxo7ey0/

I wish we had a dozen genocide scholars waiting on standby who could jump on every instance and provide fantastic, thorough rebuttals and nip even the slightest hint of denialism in the bud the moment it shows up.

But we can't, and there is a very real danger in denialist stuff being left up unrebutted. That, in the end, is what deniers hope for. They know they can't win a fair debate. Their talking points have been rebutted innumerable times, and there have been little additions to them in decades anyways. They essentially rely on deceptive presentation that might sound plausible to someone who doesn't know the topic, but would crumble with even a light prodding by an expert. They aren't trying to win a debate, they are trying to win by exhaustion. They are counting that the people who can handle those questions don't have the time or energy to do it every time, or to keep replying as long as the denier is willing to keep posting, if a chain starts up.

Excess Deaths by Cause

https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2020/10/06/excess-deaths-by-cause/

 So in these data (remember, the numbers are updated regularly, we’re looking at March 1 to September 1 only, and this is a rough-and-ready calculation), we have 1,641,133 All-Cause deaths in comparison to a baseline 2015-2019 average of 1,359,816. In this period the raw excess is 281,317 deaths. COVID-19 was listed as a cause of 179,303 of these, leaving a deficit—a remaining excess—of 102,014. Overall excess mortality from March 1st to September 1st is 17.1% above the baseline, with COVID-19 accounting for 10.9 of those percentage points, with a 6.22 percentage point excess distributed across other causes.

Tyler Childers Pushes Back On Southern Values And Our 'Long, Violent History'

https://www.npr.org/sections/we-insist-a-timeline-of-protest-music-in-2020/2020/09/18/914469882/tyler-childers-pushes-back-on-southern-values-and-our-long-violent-history

The song "Long Violent History" plays out the internal argument that led Childers to make this explicit and remarkable stand in solidarity. It's a lament grounded in bluegrass fiddle and that fundamental African import, the banjo. Presenting himself as a confused "white boy from Hickman" who once understood how the protests might feel like unnecessary trouble, Childers artfully bends perspective at the ballad's center, realizing that for all the times he'd belligerently questioned authority, he'd never felt like he might lose his life. Echoing a long line of labor and other protest songs, Childers asks how many "boys could they haul off this mountain" until their parents, their loved ones, would get out Papaw's pistol and fight back. "Would that be the start of a long, violent history?" he asks. The tune ends with a sonic invocation of the long, violent history of American white supremacy: a few lines of "My Old Kentucky Home," a minstrel ballad written by Stephen Foster, complete with racist depictions of enslaved people.

Childers has taken a chance with this song – in the video, he explains that the eight instrumental songs that precede it on his new album were well-considered as stage-setters for this final, controversial act.  

Olympian Wyomia Tyus sprinted to gold and spoke out in Mexico City. America forgot her.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/09/22/wyomia-tyus-olympic-sprinter-gold-medals/

A sharecropper’s daughter, Tyus grew up on a dairy farm in rural Georgia during the Jim Crow era. She overcame family tragedy as a teenager and went on to win four Olympic medals, including the two 100-meter golds. She also set or equaled the 100-meter world record four times.

And yet, more than 50 years later, Tyus’s place as the first back-to-back 100 champion in Olympic history is often overlooked. [...]

One of Tyus’s proudest moments was returning to Griffin in 1999 for the opening of Wyomia Tyus Olympic Park — 164 acres featuring soccer and baseball fields, a lake for fishing, picnic areas and nature trails. More than 30 years after she had made Olympic history, her hometown was finally recognizing her.

“It means a lot more from my hometown to know that, as a Black person from Griffin, Georgia, they would do something like that,” Tyus said. “I never felt that they would.”

Tyus was inducted to the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame in 1985. She’s encouraged by the progress that has been made for women’s sports and athletes but believes there is still a long way to go.

On the economic impact of slavery

https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/izmsww/i_feel_sorry_for_americans_a_baffled_world/g6k2hje/

Calculating the value of an individual slave, each slave would be worth around $92,000 in today's dollars, PLUS the 20+ years of wages and room & board you would have had to pay a paid laborer.

Think about that. Each slave, worth nearly $100k as an asset, plus 20 years of free labor. Imagine the impact this had on the vast plantations of the South.

Imagine if you're a modern day business. You have ten slaves. On the books, you have $1 million in assets - collateral for bank loans at nearly 0% interest, as well as investment capital.

On top of that, you pay no wages. So, your competitors, who are out there paying 10 people $50k in salary plus benefits, have a nearly $1 million LIABILITY on their books.

A company with ten slaves is $2 million richer than the company without slaves literally just by existing, just on the books, and then get $500k in additional profits by not having to page any wages.

Extrapolate that across hundreds of years of pre-industrial economic growth. At a time when most other countries had either outlawed slavery, or were winding down their slave trade. 

Supreme Court Precedent Killed Breonna Taylor

https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/supreme-court-precedent-killed-breonna

 Breonna Taylor died in a hail of bullets while Louisville police served a no-knock warrant on her home. There were no drugs in her house. She was not even the target of the police investigation. No one has been arrested, and the fact that no officers are (yet) standing trial has been the source of ongoing public outrage. “Say her name” is the battle cry for those who seek justice for an innocent young woman, gunned down in her own house by the very police who swear to “protect and serve.” 

For the past several days I’ve been doing a deep dive into the facts and law of the case, and I’ve come to a singular and depressing conclusion: Supreme Court precedents killed Breonna Taylor. These court precedents have killed before. And while there is an outside chance that an individual officer may be held legally responsible for her death, the prime movers here are the forces the court has set into motion, and unless there are substantial legal reforms, those precedents will kill again.

Before we dive into the cases, let’s first look at the facts of this incident. In early afternoon on March 12, the Louisville Metro Police Department obtained a no-knock search warrant for Taylor’s home. The purpose of the warrant was to search for and seize drugs, drug paraphernalia, and any other objects (weapons, financial records) related to drug trafficking. 

But if you read the warrant carefully, you note something rather interesting. The vast majority of the evidence—involving drug trafficking by two individuals, Adrian Walker and Jamarcus Glover—doesn’t apply to Taylor or her apartment at all. 

The Virtue Signalers Won’t Change the World

 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/why-third-wave-anti-racism-dead-end/578764/

Social concern and activism must not cease, but proceed minus the religious aspect they have taken on. One can be fervently dedicated to improving the lot of black Americans without a purse-lipped, prosecutorial culture dedicated more to virtue signaling than to changing other people’s lives.

Progressives can battle a War on Drugs that creates a black market that tempts too many poor black men into lives of crime. They can fight for free access to long-acting, reversible contraceptives for poor women and phonics-based reading instruction for kids from bookless homes. They can stand against Republican attempts to discourage the black vote via a sham concern for all-but-nonexistent voter fraud. The struggle must, and will, continue.

But the black person essentially barred from the polls gains nothing from someone sagely attesting to their white privilege on Twitter and decrying that “no one wants to talk about race in this country” when America is nothing less than obsessed with race week in and week out. One may consider President Trump a repulsive, bigoted excrescence without morally equating anyone who didn’t prioritize his racism enough to deny him their vote in 2016 with those who cheered a lynching 100 years before.

All of the above hinges on feigning claims of injury, on magnifying indignation in a trip-wire fashion, and on fostering a Manichaean, us-versus-the-pigs perspective on humanity out of Lord of the Flies. Racial uplift in modern America does require dealing with matters more abstract than what a Douglass or a King faced. This is a challenge. Progressives shirk that challenge, however, in fashioning a new kind of activism based on performance and display. They should not do less; they should do better.

End the Poisonous Process of Picking Supreme Court Justices

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/22/opinion/ginsburg-supreme-court-confirmation.html

 Supreme Court justices often try to retire during the presidency of someone sympathetic to their jurisprudence. Of course, that doesn’t always work: Justice Scalia died after almost 30 years on the high court trying to wait out President Barack Obama, and Justice Ginsburg died after nearly 27 years trying to outlast President Trump.

Over all, though, strategic retirements give the justices too much power in picking their own successors, which can lead to a self-perpetuating oligarchy. The current system also creates the impression that the justices are more political actors than judges, which damages the rule of law. It may even change the way the justices view themselves.

No other major democracy in the world gives the justices on its highest court life tenure, and nor do 49 of the 50 states. The longest terms are more like the 12-year terms served by German Constitutional Court justices. Countries and states that do not have term limits have mandatory retirement ages; many jurisdictions have both.

The unpredictable American system of life tenure has led to four presidents picking six or more justices and four presidents selecting none, as happened with Jimmy Carter. This gives some presidents too much influence on the Supreme Court and others too little.

Young minister loses license over political endorsement

 https://www.baptiststandard.com/news/texas/young-minister-loses-license-over-political-endorsement/

Once Bumgardner learned Sprey decided to allow his ministry license to expire, he chose to make the issue a matter of public record.

“I love the members of the church and its pastor dearly. I am forever in their debt. I am deeply grieved that this issue could not be resolved,” he said.

“Unfortunately, my license is inextricably linked to my qualifications and credentials as a Christian minister. It affects my standing in the ministerial community. It also affects my ability to be hired by a local church.”

FOREIGN ACTORS AND CYBERCRIMINALS LIKELY TO SPREAD DISINFORMATION REGARDING 2020 ELECTION RESULTS

https://www.ic3.gov/media/2020/200922.aspx

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) are issuing this announcement to raise awareness of the potential threat posed by attempts to spread disinformation regarding the results of the 2020 elections. Foreign actors and cybercriminals could create new websites, change existing websites, and create or share corresponding social media content to spread false information in an attempt to discredit the electoral process and undermine confidence in U.S. democratic institutions.

State and local officials typically require several days to weeks to certify elections’ final results in order to ensure every legally cast vote is accurately counted. The increased use of mail-in ballots due to COVID-19 protocols could leave officials with incomplete results on election night. Foreign actors and cybercriminals could exploit the time required to certify and announce elections’ results by disseminating disinformation that includes reports of voter suppression, cyberattacks targeting election infrastructure, voter or ballot fraud, and other problems intended to convince the public of the elections’ illegitimacy.

The FBI and CISA urge the American public to critically evaluate the sources of the information they consume and to seek out reliable and verified information from trusted sources, such as state and local election officials. The public should also be aware that if foreign actors or cyber criminals were able to successfully change an election-related website, the underlying data and internal systems would remain uncompromised.

The Cheating Scandal That Ripped the Poker World Apart

https://www.wired.com/story/stones-poker-cheating-scandal/

Mike Postle was on an epic winning streak at a California casino. Veronica Brill thought he had to be playing dirty. Let the chips fall where they may.

 

Three links on nationalism

 https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/03/against-the-dead-consensus

Faced with voters’ resounding “No!” to these centrifugal forces, consensus conservatives have grown only more rigid in their certainties. They have elevated prudential judgments and policies into sacred dogmas. These dogmas—free trade on every front, free movement through every boundary, small government as an end in itself, technological advancement as a cure-all—foreclose debate about the nature and purpose of our common life.

Consensus conservatism long ago ceased to inquire into the first things. But we will not.

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/open-letter-against-new-nationalism

Again we watch as demagogues demonize vulnerable minorities as infesting vermin or invading forces who weaken the nation and must be removed. Again we watch as fellow Christians weigh whether to fuse their faith with nationalist and ethno-nationalist politics in order to strengthen their cultural footing. Again ethnic majorities confuse their political bloc with Christianity itself. In this chaotic time Christian leaders of all stripes must help the church discern the boundaries of legitimate political alliances. This is especially true in the face of a rising racism in America, where non-whites are the targets of abominable acts of violence like the mass shooting in El Paso.

To be clear, nationalism is not the same as patriotism. Nationalism forges political belonging out of religious, ethnic, and racial identities, loyalties intended to precede and supersede law. Patriotism, by contrast, is love of the laws and loyalty to them over leader or party. Such nationalism is not only politically dangerous but reflects profound theological errors that threaten the integrity of Christian faith. It damages the love of neighbor and betrays Christ.

https://americanmind.org/essays/the-global-community-is-a-fantasy/

We are having this debate because the terms of solidarity in America are in flux as they have not been in fifty years. Centrifugal forces of globalization, the digital technological revolution, de-Christianization, and the collapse of the working-class family have scattered old ways and old ideas. The most fundamental political questions of attachment and belonging need to be asked and answered anew. Not least among these questions is that concerning the attachments and consequent moral obligations of political community.

Unfortunately those associated with ANN offer no positive answer to these questions. They say little on the central matter of citizenship, and what they do say is discouraging and dismissive. While the history of nations and nationalism is certainly checkered with violence, so, too, has the nation been the foundation of modern political liberty and class solidarity. Its promise animated rebellions against tyrants and the establishment of democracy. It fueled the demise of Eastern empires and Western colonialism alike. The nation is the ground of equality that makes self-government meaningful and the welfare state possible.

Frank Meeink was a top neo-Nazi who inspired Edward Norton’s character in “American History X.” He now speaks out against it—and says members of his old neo-Nazi crew became cops.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/he-was-the-neo-nazi-who-inspired-american-history-x-his-nazi-pals-are-now-cops

Meeink, 45, recalls attending a big summit in the early ‘90s with David Duke and other white nationalist leaders.

“They were telling us to cover up our swastikas, grow our hair out, and become cops,” he says. “I know of at least three of the people at that meeting who became cops.”

The main reason Duke and the other white nationalist speakers were urging their hate-filled charges to join law enforcement did not have so much to do with “alerting skinhead crews of pending investigative action against them,” as the 2006 FBI assessment concluded, but to disenfranchise people of color—particularly Black people.

“The Fourth Amendment is violated all the time by the cops, and in these meetings they would say, ‘Yeah—and when we become cops we’ll get them felonies so they can’t vote.’ That constantly went around,” Meeink remembers, sighing deeply. “We need to get all these white nationalists out of the police force. There are so many racist cops. And I know a lot of cops.”  

It Happened One Night . . . at MGM

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2003/04/mgm200304

When Patricia Douglas was raped by an MGM salesman at a 1937 studio party, the 20-year-old dancer filed charges, taking on Hollywood's most powerful institution. Today, as Douglas breaks a 65-year silence, the author exposes the perjury, bribes, and smear tactics used to destroy her.

 [...]

Back in the grand-jury room, Lester Roth called Clement Soth, the parking attendant who had discovered Douglas. Soth had originally said that he had seen David Ross flee the scene, but now he recanted that crucial detail. “The man was much thinner,” Soth said under oath. “Mr. Ross’s face is fat.” When I contacted Soth’s daughters, they confirmed that, in exchange for their father’s perjury, MGM offered him “any job he wanted.” Soth joined the studio “family” as a driver and remained there for the rest of his life.

How One Man Conned the Beltway

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/09/opinion/sunday/garrison-courtney-spies-contracts.html

The spy was recruiting for his secret task force. Scattered about the Beltway in grim brick and glass monoliths was a small army of gung-ho companies hoping to turn their patriotic ardor, technological inventiveness and commercial know-how into moneymaking national security contracts.

Starting in 2014 and continuing for over a year, the spy approached dozens of these companies with his recruitment pitch: the chance to join a covert government program, the knowledge of whose existence, he warned, could cost some lives, but it was also a group, he promised, that could save some lives, too. And in return for assisting the C.I.A. by providing him and his security operative — “The Twins,” people cleared for the op would call the pair — with salaries and commercial cover, the grateful agency would ensure that a trove of government contracts would come their way.

The spy called this top-secret enterprise Alpha214. It was approved, he claimed, by the president and by the director of national intelligence. Its clandestine activities were routinely discussed in surveillance-proof Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, SCIFs for short, with an all-star cast of intelligence officials.

A two-star general who commanded the 25th Air Force in worldwide intelligence and reconnaissance was briefed on the enterprise. It distributed to task force participants letters that appeared to be from the attorney general promising immunity and, on two occasions, $12 million payments. Its commercial backbone ultimately grew to include about a dozen tech companies.

There was, however, one big problem with the program: It was a gigantic construct of inventive multimillion-dollar crookery. 

Free to be Muslim and an American

https://www.ajc.com/news/opinion/free-muslim-and-american/r243jCUp87NVaT5mJPBNEI/

For me, this moment isn’t just a celebration, but an opportunity to continue to heal the false conflict between America and Islam that Osama bin Laden has tried to create. Born to an American Catholic mother and a Lebanese Muslim father, I have struggled to understand what it means to be an American Muslim. That day in 2001 changed not only the world and the U.S., but also challenged an entire population to define itself. Bin Laden not only created the plot that hijacked those four planes, but he also hijacked the message of an entire religion. No one has been as troubled these past 10 years as those moderate Muslims who have had to repeatedly hear this man try to speak for us. An Egyptian man once said it perfectly in a State Department focus group: “In the Middle East, if you don’t define yourselves, they [extremists] will.”

Each year on my birthday, now officially Patriot day, I have taken his words to heart, knowing that as an American, and as a Muslim, I must work constantly to define myself and my values. I’ve talked American politics and the Iraq war with a Tunisian cabdriver, and lead Bible-Quran comparative studies in Georgia. I am certainly not alone, and Tuesday, 40 women, all under the age of 40, all born in the United States, all Muslim, stood up to define themselves in a new book, “I Speak for Myself: American Women on Being Muslim.” Our book showcases the diversity within Islam, a generation of women working to connect worlds and spread compassion.

How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled

Laura Leebrick, a manager at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon, is standing on the end of its landfill watching an avalanche of plastic trash pour out of a semitrailer: containers, bags, packaging, strawberry containers, yogurt cups.

None of this plastic will be turned into new plastic things. All of it is buried.

"To me that felt like it was a betrayal of the public trust," she said. "I had been lying to people ... unwittingly."

Rogue, like most recycling companies, had been sending plastic trash to China, but when China shut its doors two years ago, Leebrick scoured the U.S. for buyers. She could find only someone who wanted white milk jugs. She sends the soda bottles to the state.

But when Leebrick tried to tell people the truth about burying all the other plastic, she says people didn't want to hear it.

How to Save Restaurants

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/10/opinion/restaurants-indoor-dining.html

When the pandemic hit America’s restaurants, it was as if an anvil dropped — on a bubble.

To run a restaurant, any kind of restaurant, is a constant struggle to keep that bubble aloft. Every day is a negotiation: of labor costs, food costs, rent, insurance, health inspections, and the art and craft of creating an experience special enough to keep people coming through the doors. When the pandemic lockdown forced hundreds of thousands of establishments to close, there was no backup plan. No one was prepared for the extent of the fallout.

The restaurant and fast food industry, the second-largest private employer in the United States, collapsed overnight. At least 5.5 million jobs evaporated by the end of April, and the number of people employed in food services is still 2.5 million fewer than in February. Technomic, a consulting firm for the food-service industry, estimates that 20 percent to 25 percent of independently owned restaurants will never reopen. And those restaurants uphold an ecosystem that extends to farms, fishmongers, florists, ceramists, wineries and more. The damage has been so severe that the James Beard Foundation announced in August that it would cancel its restaurant awards this year because of the pandemic and a need to re-examine structural bias.

Local power in the age of digital policing

https://triangulator.org/blog/local-power-digital-policing/

 The progressive possibility of digital enforcement isn’t to expand the coverage and efficiency of policing but rather to narrow the scope of what is enforced, and ensure the design of those enforcement systems prevents abuse. Instead of “policing difference” in the name of safety we should only deploy technology that enforces, and measures progress towards a more inclusive form of urbanism that is truly safer for all.

As Reich, Weismantel, and a generation of planners, engineers, and advocates have shown us, we know how to build safer streets and cities, and none of it requires policing or new forms of surveillance. At the same time we must recognize, as Reich documented in his work on justice for public benefits recipients, that policing is about more than uniforms and guns. Reform must begin with the laws themselves, and a recognition of the many ways we "police" streets. It also requires confronting the economically regressive roots of traffic enforcement based on fees and fines, and the resulting criminalization of poverty—immoral in and of itself, but also a tool deployed as a proxy for illegal forms of explicit racial discrimination. Many cities rely on these fines a critical source of revenue, and there's evidence of increased fiscal dependence on fines as cities face dramatic revenue shortfalls due to COVID.

After a military funeral following suicide

Here’s what the media must do to fend off an election-night disaster

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/heres-what-tv-news-must-do-to-fend-off-an-election-night-disaster/2020/09/04/c94cee50-ed1c-11ea-b4bc-3a2098fc73d4_story.html

This time, with the stakes of the election so high, news organizations need to get it right. They need to do two things, primarily, and do them extraordinarily well.

First, in every way possible, they must prepare the public for uncertainty, and start doing this now. Granted, the audience doesn’t really show up in force until election night itself, but news reports, pundit panels and special programming can help plow the ground for public understanding of the unpredictability — or even chaos — to come.

Second, on election night and in the days (weeks? months?) to follow, news organizations will need to do the near-impossible: reject their ingrained instincts to find a clear narrative — including the answer to the question “who won?” — and stay with the uncertainty, if that’s indeed what’s happening.

America’s coronavirus response failed because we didn’t understand the complexity of the problem.

 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/03/what-really-doomed-americas-coronavirus-response/608596/

In many complex systems, efficiency, redundancy, and resiliency pull in different directions: More efficient systems, which are cheaper, eliminate redundancies, which provide resilience but cost more. For example, commercial airplanes always have two or more engines and have a co-pilot, even though one pilot and one engine is sufficient to fly the plane safely. The redundancy adds to expenses, but increases safety and resiliency in case something happens to one pilot or engine. In fact, commercial aviation is so safe because redundancy is mandated by regulation and built into every level, but our commercial-flying experience is so miserable because airlines have made it as efficient as possible to save money. (If one plane doesn’t arrive on time, there is no backup waiting to fly instead, for example.)

Hong Kong mourns the end of its way of life as China cracks down on dissent

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/09/hong-kong-mourns-way-life-china-cracks-down-dissent/

 But what does it mean for a city to die? How do you mourn the loss of a place in which you are still living?

As the people of Hong Kong grapple with the loss of their home as they know it, I asked nine fellow locals where they feel most connected to the city and took their portraits there. I saw neighborhoods through the eyes of those who love them dearly; it was like being invited into people's hearts for a tour. Hong Kong is changing, but parts of it are immutable, safeguarded in the collective memory of those of us who call it home.

Francis Fukuyama: Restore honor in public service

 https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2020/08/30/francis-fukuyama-our-next-president-must-restore-the-idea-that-there-is-honor-in-public-service

The first and most important change lies less in the realm of policy than in the realm of culture. The United States has never trusted its public servants, but, since the 1980s, the denigration of bureaucrats, the Washington milieu and government in general has intensified. While this denigration is loudest on the right, the left has participated as well, raising deep suspicions about the motives of the military, the police, the CIA and other disfavored agencies. There is a general feeling that the government is incompetent and cannot be trusted to manage anything.

What is lost in this culture is the older view that public service is an honorable calling and that citizens do not simply have rights, but also responsibilities — a view perhaps most eloquently expressed by President John F. Kennedy in his 1961 inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” We will never entirely recover from the cynicism that has crept into our consciousness in the decades since World War II. But just as President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher were able to shift cultural attitudes away from public service, so too could future leaders move the needle back.

Dear Decaturish – From A CSD teacher regarding the impact of COVID-19 on critical thinking

https://decaturish.com/2020/09/dear-decaturish-from-a-csd-teacher-regarding-the-impact-of-covid-19-on-critical-thinking/

I spent my career building projects that brought my students together. Teaching this way, still and in isolation, is soul-sucking. As much as I try to get my students to interact virtually, I’m still there; the ever-present adult. So, they miss the camaraderie they would typically build with side conversations. Strangely, that’s what I keep coming back to in my mind. It’s what I miss the most, and it’s what I think they need the most.

It’s through those strange and wonderful side conversations that kids explore their world and build their flawed but functional understanding of how life works. It’s those side conversations that develop the world view that they then spend the rest of their formative years refining. They need the chance to ask each other questions they are afraid to ask adults, and they need the opportunity to work their way through questions they are unequipped to answer. Because, it’s in that playful struggle, through those leaps of the imagination, that children learn to think critically.

And adults just can’t play their game, not anymore, our minds are too chained by what we’ve decided is reality. But, that’s our reality, not theirs. They live in a better world, where anything is possible. The much-derided “child’s play” is more important than most people know, and it’s a game best played without supervision.