Friday, March 29, 2024

Secrets

 The work of investigative reporters, as we all know, involves uncovering secrets. Throughout our careers, we develop techniques for digging up facts that certain other people would prefer to keep hidden.

The Watergate scandal is a well-known example. Woodward and Bernstein worked long and hard to lift the veil of secrecy surrounding Nixon and his team’s actions in an investigation that ultimately resulted in the only presidential resignation in history.

In the process of uncovering other people’s secrets, reporters have to become skilled at keeping our own — such as the identities of confidential sources, or how we obtained classified documents, to cite two examples.

But this cloak-and-dagger stuff can come at a price. A few friends with whom I’ve long collaborated on investigative projects have recently mentioned the toll all this secrecy takes on us over time.

It’s corrosive. There are, for example, the little secrets in our personal lives that we keep even from ourselves, which often are the type that promote self-awareness and self-knowledge.

While rarely earth-shattering in nature, these secrets can be aspects of ourselves that are the sort one typically deals with in therapy or counseling. Issues that we should try to address in an effort to become better people who can live more fulfilling lives.

I’m not sure if this makes sense to anyone else, but I’ve developed the philosophy that closely-held personal secrets can develop into a pathology unless one feels safe enough to disclose them to a trusted friend — who, in turn, can hold them close for us in return.

Every secret-keeper, in other words, needs a confidant.

This seems to me necessary for our sanity. And if this is true for journalists, I can only imagine it is even more so for those holding onto the bigger, more consequential secrets, such as the national security variety. 

HEADLINES:

  • The true face of immigration (CNN)

  • U.S. Census revamped to better count Middle Eastern and Latino groups (Axios)

  • Explaining the Francis Scott Key Bridge’s Shocking Collapse (WSJ)

  • Richard Grenell acts as Trump’s ‘envoy,’ backing far right forces around the globe (WP)

  • Judge hears Trump’s First Amendment challenge to Georgia charges (The Hill)

  • The Christian reaction to Trump’s Bible endorsement goes deeper than you think (CNN)

  • RFK Jr.'s vice presidential pick calls IVF ‘one of the biggest lies being told about women’s health’ (Politico)

  • Robert F Kennedy Jr speaks to a sick America (Telegraph)

  • Ex-Giuliani Associate Shares Video “Republicans Don’t Want You to See” (TNR)

  • Putin says NATO won’t be attacked but F-16s will (CNBC)

  • U.S. Support for Israel’s War Has Become Indefensible (Atlantic)

  • Netanyahu doesn’t deserve to address Congress again (The Hill)

  • Israel Deploys Expansive Facial Recognition Program in Gaza (NYT)

  • Ireland said it would intervene in South Africa's genocide case against Israel, in the strongest signal to date of Dublin's concern about Israeli operations in Gazasince Oct. 7. (Reuters)

  • ‘Everybody has a breaking point’: how the climate crisis affects our brains (Guardian)

  • The city of Sacramento passed a resolution that would protect the trans community's rights, safeguarding them from anti-trans legislation such as the growing push around the country to ban gender-affirming care. It follows Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D-Calif.) signing of a law in 2022 that established California as a sanctuary state for trans youth. [HuffPost]

  • George Washington family secrets revealed by DNA from unmarked 19th century graves (CNN)

  • Why are women being sidelined in the AI race? (Fast Company)

  • AI boom broadens out across Wall Street (Financial Times)

  • Robotic face makes eye contact, uses AI to anticipate and replicate a person's smile before it occurs (TechXplore)

  • Teaching Machines To Be Human, And Humans To Live With Machines (Forbes)

  • Women’s faces were stolen for AI ads pushing Putin and erectile dysfunction pills (WP)

  • Beware AI euphoria (Financial Times)

  • TurboTax Threatens To Tell IRS Customer Cheated On Taxes Unless They Upgrade To Deluxe Version (The Onion)

Thursday, March 28, 2024

One Last Time

(This essay is from three years ago, in March 2021.)

"A midlife crisis is a transition of identity and self-confidence that can occur in middle-aged individuals, typically 45 to 65 years old."-- Google

---

Many years ago, 34 to be precise, I was driving alone in my car along a familiar route listening to my favorite country music station on the radio, when a new song came on that stopped me in my tracks.

I pulled off the road to listen. It was a mournful but uplifting song from Cajun country with a soaring accordion, drum beat and lovely melody. The singer's deeply resonant voice told the story of a man down on the bayou, smoking a cigarette alone on a humid summer's night, drinking beer, imagining his lover's voice trying to shake him out of a bad mood. 

I loved it at first listen.

Though I heard it a few more times over the next weeks and months, it soon faded from airplay and I didn't hear it again for 33 years.

Last year, as I settled uneasily into my retirement/lockdown routine of sorting through the daily news, writing an essay, publishing it on Facebook, I also started spending hours each day listening to music and interviews with songwriters on YouTube.

Some of this was pure entertainment (I'm retired so why not?) but some of it was research. Soon I began to append song lyrics to the end of each essay. 

I began marveling at how vast YouTube's library has become; like its parent, Google, it just keeps expanding and deepening all the time. Both databases seem to grow at exponential rates.

One night last year I decided to search for that song I'd heard years ago. All I remembered was the phrase "C'mon Joe," so maybe that was the song's name. 

After several nights of searching -- Bingo! -- I found a performance of the song, called "Come On Joe," at an early SXSW by the late Chris Gaffney. It was satisfying but it wasn't the version I remembered. 

So from time to time over the past year I kept searching until two nights ago when YouTube finally turned up the version I remembered. It's by a Louisiana country singer and accordionist named Jo-El Sonnier -- his name suddenly came back to me the minute I saw it.

That version brought back all those old memories with a clarity only music can do, at least for me.

I'd been in the middle of an extended depression in the period when I fixated on that song. My sense was that literally everything about my life was going to have to change. I didn't know why; there was no obvious precipitating cause. It just was a restless feeling that welled up from somewhere deep inside and it could not be suppressed.

Though I tried.

It turns out that "Come On Joe" was Sonnier's only single to ever crack the country charts, getting as high as #17, so that's why I heard it back in the day. As I've played and replayed the song these past few days, Sonnier's voice from the backwoods not only takes me back to that period but brings me back from it as well, giving me comfort along the way.

Sonnier might find me a strange fan. I don't smoke cigarettes or drink beer on the back porch, and I'm certainly not from the backwoods of Louisiana, but Sonnier sings to me as clearly as any angel closer to home might do.

That is the power of art. And this post is sort of about the power of YouTube. Like Facebook, it has its positive aspects. 

***

Epilogue: This past January 13th, just after finishing a show in Llano, Texas, Jo-El Sonnier suffered a heart attack and died. He was 77.

HEADLINES:

  • Insurers brace for multi-billion dollar losses after Baltimore ship tragedy (Reuters)

  • Baltimore port shutdown a major disruption (CNBC)

  • Arizona becomes ground zero for 2024 election misinformation fears (The Hill)

  • President Joe Biden’s son Hunter will ask a US judge to dismiss the criminal case accusing him of evading $1.4 million in taxes, arguing that prosecutors bowed to political pressure from Republican lawmakers investigating his father. (Reuters)

  • Former Sen. Joe Lieberman has died (CNN)

  • Largest cocaine shipment of the year seized in Colombian Caribbean after high-speed boat chase (CBS)

  • Trump mocks ex-RNC chair Ronna McDaniel for being fired by NBC (Guardian)

  • No One Is Above the Law, Except, Apparently, Donald Trump (NYT)

  • Donald Trump Selling Bibles Sparks Fury From Christians—'Blasphemous Grift' (Newsweek)

  • Church Attendance Has Declined in Most U.S. Religious Groups (Gallup)

  • Justices were skeptical of abortion pills arguments. Anti-abortion groups have backup plans. (Politico)

  • Domestic Political Pressures Widen Divide Between Biden and Netanyahu (NYT)

  • Benjamin Netanyahu Is Israel’s Worst Prime Minister Ever (Atlantic)

  • Israel is fighting a battle at home over drafting the ultra-Orthodox (AP)

  • Birds, bees and even plants might act weird during the solar eclipse (WP)

  • Inside the Creation of the World’s Most Powerful Open Source AI Model (Wired)

  • New robot called Figure 01 can speak and move like a human (Jerusalem Post)

  • The Fight for AI Talent: Pay Million-Dollar Packages and Buy Whole Teams (WSJ)

  • Report: You Were Supposed To Be Looking Something Up Right Now (The Onion)

***

"Come on Joe"

Well, it's a long, hot night
And the stars are shining kinda extra bright
Sitting on the back porch glidin'
Whetting my appetite

Well, I'm a six-pack high
And start missing the light of my baby's eyes
Wasn't it beautiful, the kind of a soul they said would never die

Well, it's muggy in the shack
And the backwoods are black
'Cause the clouds hid the moon away
The light from my cigarette flickers in the dark
The only way she knows I'm here
Then suddenly the sounds of the fiddles and accordions
Sweetly begin to play and I can almost hear her sweet voice say

Come on Joe, just count to ten
Pull yourself together again
And come on Joe, you gotta get hold of this mood you're in
Come on Joe, you gotta be strong
You're still young and life goes on to carry on
'Til we're together again

Hey, I know she's right
But it's hard to fight when you're hurtin' so
I tried to walk out of that door before but I just can't go
With the tears and the laughter in every rafter in every room
Wasn't it beautiful
Wasn't it the kind of happiness and glow

Come on Joe, just count to ten
Pull yourself together again
And come on Joe, you gotta get hold of this mood you're in
Come on Joe, you gotta be strong
You're still young and life goes on to carry on
'Til we're together again

Come on Joe
Hey, come on Joe
To carry on 'til we're together again

-- Written by Tony Romeo, Sung by Jo-El Sonnier 

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Newsless Days and Nights

Unforeseen circumstances recently compelled me into a situation where I had no Internet access for six days and seven nights. Just writing that sentence reminds me of one of my favorite romantic comedies, “Six Days, Seven Nights,” with Harrison Ford and the late Anne Heche.

In the film, in case you’ve not seen it, an unlikely romance develops between two people forced to spend time alone together on a remote island after their small plane crashes in a thunderstorm.

My youngest daughter and I used to watch it on our Friday night movie nights while her brothers watched their preferred violent action movies in the other room.

But back to the present tense. There was no romance during my recent ordeal, but there was a great deal of open, empty time — silence, if you will.

It gave me some thinking space.

For years, I’ve filled my waking hours with the task of gathering, sorting and interpreting the news. If my dreams are any indication, I’ve spent most of my sleeping hours doing that too.

And to what end?

I know that a few of those who subscribe to this newsletter, or follow me on Facebook and other social media platforms appreciate that work, but that others care about and respond more to personal stories and memories, whether based in the news or not.

The first thing that struck me when I returned to the connected world and turned on CNN, was how little had changed while I was away. Yes, the headlines were different, some new voices had emerged, some old voices had disappeared, but fundamentally, nothing had changed.

The world was still ablaze with meaningless conflicts, unthinkable risks and angry debates. It still seemed to be sliding toward destruction. But it also was still filled with unspeakable beauty, endless hope, great acts of kindness and the sweetest of loves. 

It may take me a while to sort this all out but I trust you get my drift.

HEADLINES:

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

Don't Blame the Program

(Dear readers: I am back after a brief break.)

In 1987, Forethought, a prophetically named software company in Silicon Valley, developed the visual presentation program PowerPoint for the Macintosh Operation System. Within a few months the new program was purchased by Microsoft as its first major acquisition.

Microsoft soon expanded the program to work with Windows systems as well as Macs, and then bundled it into the Microsoft Office suite that would essentially take over the world of business software. Since the late 1990s, PowerPoint's market share of the presentation market has consistently been estimated at about 95 percent.

I'm sure many people love it, and apologies to them, but from the first I have absolutely hated PowerPoint presentations, finding them at best confusing and often downright unintelligible. What must make sense to many other people makes no sense at all to me.

The logic that lies behind PowerPoint presentations reflects the code that the brains of most people in business easily comprehend. It must play for them like music, though perhaps that would be the genre of modern jazz that sounds like a traffic jam.

My distaste for the software peaked while working in middle management at one leading technology company where the entire communication culture -- the entire corporate purpose -- seemed to hinge on PowerPoint presentations . The large unit I managed worked for weeks on a presentation explaining what exactly it was that we were supposed to be doing and why.

Once my team determined it was ready, we forwarded our presentation to upper management, where it was discussed at length before being sent back to us for revisions. We would then produce a new round of PowerPoints with adjustments here and adjustments there before sending the revised deck back upstairs.

This went on for many months. The ultimate goal, apparently, was for our PowerPoint to be presented to the board of directors, a body composed entirely of men who lived far from where our company was headquartered and who reigned like distant gods over the entire enterprise.

Gradually, it occurred to me we were caught in our own Groundhog Day, because we were never going to get board approval for our presentation. And in our case there would be no happy ending. I realized the reason nobody could ever agree on the PowerPoint presentation was that we actually had no clear idea why our company even existed.

We were spending millions of dollars going nowhere.

The enterprise been two separate tech companies before being mushed together by some of the leading venture capitalists, who’d made off like thieves. Those of us who worked there, though generously compensated, quite simply would never be able to create a viable presentation of the un-presentable.

Inevitably the company spiraled into bankruptcy, which then became front-page news in the Wall Street Journal.

POSTSCRIPT: Years after the company I described above went bankrupt and disappeared from the NYSE, I visited Japan only to discover that a Japanese subsidiary of the firm was still very much in operation. They used the same logo we had popularized before our demise and probably were still searching for their identity.

Maybe they never got our final PowerPoint. The one that said "Sayōnara." 

Monday, March 25, 2024

Monday, March 18, 2024

Tolerance

 One of the disquieting awkwardnesses of the later stages of life is the realization that there now are many important concepts and institutions that are younger than you are.

For example, you might say that people my age are older than human rights.

That somewhat shocking assertion is based in the fact that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights wasn’t issued by the UN until late 1948, after we early Baby Boomers had already toddled onto the scene.

It is a tragic reality of human history that it took until the end of World War II for the world to get around to taking such an elemental step toward equality and justice.

Then again, women only got the right to vote in the U.S. a century ago, and racial segregation persisted into the 1960s. Sexism and racial discrimination remain embedded structurally in our society to this day.

The achievement of full human rights anywhere on the planet remains elusive and aspirational, which is why the work of advocacy organizations devoted to exposing human rights abuses is so important.

Lately I’ve become newly curious about origin of our fundamental concepts of human rights. Historians have long traced it back to 539 BC, when Cyrus the Great conquered the city of Babylon, freed the slaves, and declared that people should have a choice in their religion.

This inspired many of the reforms in Greece, Rome and India — ancient societies that advanced the rights and freedoms of people beyond what previously had been known.

It was many centuries later before seminal advances like the U.S. Declaration of Independence in 1776.

That occurred just over the equivalent of three of my lifetimes ago. We still have a long way to go as a species, but there is some small comfort that over the past 75 years, we’ve made some progress inside the U.S. on civil rights, women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights (if not along the entire spectrum of gender and sexuality), disability rights, and discriminatory practices like ageism, bullying, religious extremism and many other forms of hate.

But those advances are under new assault in our time, including in the U.S..

Let’s commit that over the next 75 years that progress on all of these human rights issues resumes and accelerates in every corner of the globe. Our common humanity requires that to happen. 

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Technology: Good or Bad?

 (This is from 2022.)

That is not really the right question.

My intent is to pull away from the pro- and anti-technology camps, and consider the larger picture.

I have personal history as well as friends and family both inside the digital technology industry and among those who blame that industry for our worst social problems here in the Bay Area — especially the high cost of housing.

Since the affection I feel for these people is not conditional on their political positions, I hope they will let me sit this dispute out.

If you think about it, casting blame for street crime, homelessness, high rents and home prices, traffic jams, drug addiction and pollution is a trap that our deeply divided society lures way too many citizens into.

We don’t like certain outcomes so somebody must be to blame — that’s the way our minds work. And it doesn’t help matters at all when politicians in both parties play the blame game ruthlessly, battling over each little inch of political turf as if they were engaged in hand-to-hand combat inside an actual war zone like Ukraine.

When it comes to my own background, I have mainly been a pro-technology voice for a quarter century. My long-term readers and friends know that among traditional journalists I was an early adapter and enthusiast at the dawn of web-based journalism in the 1990s.

I’ve written at great length and positively about my time with HotWired, Wired Digital and Salon, as well as many other digital startup ventures and initiatives. And I remain an advocate for strong web-based journalism to this day.

My last substantial job before retiring was to help build a credible web channel for northern California’s public media company KQED, to complement its legacy TV and radio services. Our team succeeded.

But most relevant to the debate over tech’s current influence in San Francisco were my years blogging for 7x7 and BNET about the emergence of Web 2.0. I recognized the significance of social media companies (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), and gig economy startups (Lyft, Airbnb, Uber, Getaround, Nextdoor, etc.) early and often.

I also enthusiastically encouraged the decision by those companies, as well as tech giants Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others to relocate from the peninsula to San Francisco, knowing that it would help transform what in the post-2008-recession years was a sleepy town into a booming metropolis.

That is indeed what has occurred. San Francisco’s population exploded and with that came the worsening of a cluster of social problems, which are now the focus of family arguments, negative political campaigns and absurd recall efforts.

Meanwhile, if you know anything about me, or traditional journalists in general for that matter, you know that instead of taking sides in disputes like this one, we often speak of “holding two opposing ideas” in our heads simultaneously. This comes from years of training and experience investigating complex subjects.

It also is because we have a stake in seeking the truth and not necessarily in being right.

Therefore, I neither blame technology (nor tech workers) for San Francisco’s social problems, nor exonerate them from the responsibility to participate in their adopted municipality’s efforts to address them.

These days, my many friends on the Bay Area left seem to want to blame tech companies and workers in a knee-jerk fashion for what is happening in the city (and many other places) but I fear this is imperfect thinking. The technology industry has improved our lives immeasurably in ways we all now take for granted. We have more powerful communications tools in our pockets today than human begins ever had during our long evolution and more wonders are on the way.

We have a legion of tech startups to thank for that.

Besides, our social problems have many complicated causes beyond anything the latest wave of migrants flocking into our 49-square-mile corner of earth can reasonably be held accountable for.

By the same token, simply by being residents, often with more resources than their neighbors, the tech workers who have streamed into the city bear responsibility to get involved and study the gnarly details of these social problems, and contribute new, constructive ideas to the search for solutions.

Staying back, staying aloof, blankly denouncing government institutions, praising free market solutions, retreating to Darwinian logic is not a healthy contribution. The Libertarian copout so common among techies is an example of incomplete thinking.

San Francisco’s historic commitment to human rights and progressive change is a wonderful thing and rare for a major city. Joining in those traditions of San Francisco is both an opportunity and a privilege — for everyone.

It would be a pity to live here and miss it. So to all of my beloved lefties and techies — listen up.

Please end the blame games. When it comes to the pro-and anti-tech camps, I’m not standing with either of you. The only camp worth joining is one we can all be in together.