Saturday, February 25, 2023

The Liar

My usual practice is to avoid high-profile crime stories lest they ruin my day. They remind me too much of the Patty Hearst/SLA saga that both jump-started my journalism career and disrupted my work on what I considered a much more significant project, the Circle of Poison many years ago.

But against my better intentions, these last few days I found myself watching the Alec Murdaugh trial, as the defendant took the stand to deny that he murdered his wife and son.

Murdaugh admitted he is a serial liar, an opioid addict, a swindler who stole millions from family and friends and even that he lied about what he did at the murder scene. In the process he answered some questions with way too much information, when a simple “no” would have sufficed

An innocent person would have just said no.

My suspicion is he is guilty of the crimes, but I’m not sure he’s going to be convicted. After all, O.J. Simpson got off, and Murdaugh may as well. All he needs is to create a little bit of “reasonable doubt” in the mind of at least one juror. And he may have done that by testifying.

When an investigator of any type — a private eye, FBI agent, insurance adjuster, homicide detective, investigative reporter — watches someone like Murdaugh answer questions, what we notice is his body language, his facial expressions, his tendency to volunteer additional information beyond what is required.

We are looking to see whether he’s exhibiting the signs of a liar.

I have little doubt Murdaugh is lying about the murders. 

One of his explanations is he lied because he is an addict and that’s one of the things addicts do — weave a web of deception as part of covering up their habit. One question, therefore, is whether the jurors will acquit him on the basis of the lies of an addict or convict him on the basis of the lies of a murderer.

Or neither or both.

LINKS:

  • Alex Murdaugh duels with prosecutor on second day of cross-examination in trial over 2021 killings of his wife and son (CNN)

  • Alex Murdaugh Admits Lying and Stealing, but Denies Murders (NYT)

  • Disgraced former lawyer Alex Murdaugh testified Thursday that he never fatally shot his wife and son but that he did lie to investigators about not being at the dog kennels where the two were killed, a decision that he blamed on drug addiction and paranoia. [HuffPost]

  • Alex Murdaugh admits to lying, testifies he didn’t kill his wife and son (WP)

  • Grief and defiance in Kyiv on first anniversary of war in Ukraine (Guardian)

  • Zelenskyy responds to China's proposals for Russia's war in Ukraine (CBS)

  • Protests in Russia denounce Ukraine invasion; antiwar rallies held worldwide (WP)

  • Ukrainians paid tribute to their fallen loved ones and vowed to fight on to victory, while Russia said its forces were making gains in battles in the east as its invasion entered a second year with no end in sight. (Reuters)

  • The real reason for China's charm offensive over Ukraine and Russia (BBC)

  • The War in Ukraine Is the End of a World (Atlantic)

  • ‘It’s Complicated’: How Biden and Zelensky Forged a Wartime Partnership (NYT)

  • Economist Says AI Is a Doomed Bubble (Futurism)

  • ChatGPT and ethical decision making: It’s not what can be done, but what should (Venture Beat)

  • GPT-4 Is Coming – What We Know So Far (Forbes)

  • Trump accused of ‘shell game with classified documents’ after box moved around (Independent)

  • The historic attempt to undo a presidential election on Jan. 6, 2021, and former President Donald Trump's role in it isn't a topic of discussion for a 2024 GOP field fearful of antagonizing the conspiracy-fueled wing of the party. Likely entrants into the race, and candidate former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley, are playing it safe with veiled digs about Trump’s age, while others are avoiding mentioning him at all. [HuffPost]

  • ‘It’s a major blow’: Dominion has uncovered ‘smoking gun’ evidence in case against Fox News, legal experts say (CNN)

  • A Google worker says some staffers found out which colleagues had been laid off when their emails bounced back (Business Insider)

  • College students across Florida walked off campus in response to DeSantis’ recent policies targeting LGBTQ students and people of color. The Republican governor is "manipulating Florida’s education system," protesters said. [HuffPost]

  • The Taliban ended college for women. Here's how Afghan women are defying the ban (NPR)

  • Scientists Discovered How to Speed Up Time. Seriously. (Popular Mechanics)

  • Europe is experiencing a winter drought: here's what you should know (EuroNews)

  • Japanese Americans won redress, fight for Black reparations (AP)

  • War-Weary Americans Not Sure How Much Longer They Can Occasionally Glance At Headlines About Ukraine (The Onion)

 

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Friday, February 24, 2023

Hot Links

LINKS:

  • More than 900,000 power outages reported in cross-country winter storms, with more snow, icing and blizzard conditions ahead (CNN)

  • Jobless Claims Edged Lower Last Week (WSJ)

  • A global divide on the Ukraine war is deepening (WP)

  • One year into Ukraine war, China says sending weapons will not bring peace (Reuters)

  • Why Can’t Russia Figure Out How to Win? (New York)

  • In Russia-Ukraine war, more disastrous path could lie ahead (AP)

  • Russia’s economy is hurting despite Putin’s bluster (CNN)

  • Trump lawyers call Georgia special grand jury proceedings ‘clown-like’ after forewoman’s remarks (The Hill)

  • Trump’s grip on the Republican base is slipping — even among his fans (WP)

  • Democrats condemn McCarthy for handing Capitol attack footage to Tucker Carlson (Guardian)

  • ‘All-out revolution’: Proud Boy describes group’s desperation as Jan. 6 approached (Politico)

  • Nineteen years ago, then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom sanctioned same-sex marriages and was heavily criticized for it. But in the end, Newsom was right: same-sex marriage won, eventually becoming legal in all 50 states. This pattern repeats throughout American history. Cultural shifts expand individual freedoms, conservatives vigorously and even violently oppose such changes, but their opposition ultimately fails. [HuffPost]

  • Donald Trump Jr. Gets Scathing Reminder Of His Father's 'Mental Competency' (HuffPost)

  • Schiff, Porter in tight race to replace Sen. Feinstein, poll shows; others trail far behind (LAT)

  • Report says donors ‘turning away’ from Taliban-ruled Afghanistan (Al Jazeera)

  • Gaza rockets, Israeli strikes follow deadly West Bank raid (AP)

  • It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube (Economist)

  • Chinese apps remove ChatGPT as global AI race heats up (CNN)

  • JPMorgan Restricts Employees From Using ChatGPT (WSJ)

  • The balloon drama was a drill. Here’s how the US and China can prepare for a real crisis. (Atlantic Council)

  • Justice Dept. Struggles to Carry Out Early Release Program for Abused Inmates (NYT)

  • Among journalists, shock at Dylan Lyons’ murder is coupled with a strong sense of ‘what if?’ (Poynter)

  • NPR to cut about 100 workers in one of its largest layoffs ever (WP)

  • Revealed: scale of ‘forever chemical’ pollution across UK and Europe (Guardian)

  • How octopus DNA suggests that Antarctica will melt again (Big Think)

  • The mysterious items washing up on beaches (BBC)

  • Nation In State Of Emergency After Entire Population Goes Missing (The Onion)

 

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Thursday, February 23, 2023

Riders in the Storm

On a slow news day, frigid swirling winds from the Arctic stripped the blossoms from the plum trees and knocked the power out in these parts as a reminder of the chaotic weather sweeping through much of the rest of the country. But the skies are mostly blue here on the coast where it almost never snows.

I took four girls, two of them 9 and two of them 11, two of them granddaughters and two of them friends, to the local iHop, where they brightened the place for a couple of hours. Kids these ages have abundant energy and they seem to break into smiles every minute or two. They ordered French toast and crepes with strawberries and bananas on top, an egg and hash browns, orange juice and hot chocolate.

I ordered a pot of coffee.

Most of the other customers in the place were like me — i.e., old. Older people don’t smile very often and when they do, it often resembles a grimace rather than the real deal. But they do smile at kids and that’s a fact.

So I figured I was doing the whole place a favor by bringing my four lively little companions in for a visit.

Aging is relentless. Many of the working parts on an old person get creaky, you get pains where you didn’t even know something that vulnerable existed. An old man at the restaurant was curious why the girls weren’t at school. “President’s Week” I replied, although come to think, it may actually be “Ski Week.” To tell the truth, I’m not sure when or why this turned into a week’s vacation but the kids are glad it did.

They’d been up late the night before at their sleepover, and two of them wore pajama pants to the restaurant. They all huddled over a phone and giggled as they experimented with an app that created photos of them with wild hair and mustaches. Ours was by far the liveliest table in the joint. The old folks ate their meals, mostly in silence, occasionally looking up and over at the action.

When they did, they smiled. The real deal.

Afterward, as I drove us all back up the hill, I noticed blossoms blowing in the wind. A large cloud moved in from the north, casting a shadow like an alien spaceship. I shivered. Yes, it was a slow news day.

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Wednesday, February 22, 2023

Free Speech on Trial

"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." (47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1))

So, good old Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is finally up for review by the Supreme Court. I don’t know how the court will rule, but the immunity enjoyed by Internet giants Google, Facebook, Twitter and others could be coming to an end, which obviously would be a game-changer of immense proportions.

This news propelled me to look back at previous essays I’ve published on the matter. Here is one from December 2020:

“First Amendment Alert”

There's a headline in Monday's Post that reads "Trump Leaves Press Freedom in Tatters." That is true as far as it goes, but the problem is far deeper and more multi-faceted than the negative impacts of Trump's time in power.

Yes, he labeled reporters "enemies of the people" and led chants at his rallies of "lock them up" while pointing at the press corps in attendance. That was terrifying and disgusting.

But what was more damaging was that he championed conspiracy theories that represent the polar opposite of what journalists strive to provide, which of course is fact-based information.

Or in Trump's parlance, that would be "fake news."

Beyond all that, even careful observers may have missed Trump's latest attempt to damage freedom of speech by undermining Section 230 of the Community Decency Act (1996), which is the legal underpinning that as a practical matter allows free speech to exist on the Internet.

It essentially allows companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook to avoid liability for the material posted by users, and is the bedrock of how they have been able to grow into massively profitable companies.

Angry at Twitter for labeling some of his tweets as unverified allegations, Trump threatened to veto a critical defense bill unless Section 230 was repealed. Luckily, strong bipartisan support for the bill and for 230 rendered his threat harmless, because any veto would have been overridden by Congress.

But as much as it pains me to say this, Trump had a valid point when he contested Twitter's right to edit the content of his tweets.

Think about it: Do we wish for a giant social media company to be the arbiter of what is true and what isn't? Do we want them to regulate free speech and, by extension, a free press? And Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, whether we like it or not, constitute the new public square, especially during the pandemic.

A reasonable case can be made that Twitter and Facebook have violated their Section 230 protection by intervening in Trump's rants and cautioning readers against his opinions. These corporations seem to be acting like editors and doing what we do all the time in journalism. And we are not protected by Section 230; rather we are subject to libel and slander laws.

I imagine that once these issues get litigated, we will be confronted once again by the agreed-upon limits to free speech, and by extension freedom of the press, which is the "don't yell fire in a crowded theater" argument. 

This phrase originated in an opinion written by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in Schenck v. United States in 1919, which held that the defendant's speech in opposition to the draft during World War I was not protected free speech under the First Amendment. The case was later partially overturned by Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, which limited the scope of banned speech to that which would be likely to incite imminent lawless action (i.e. a riot). [Wikipedia]

An additional limit imposed in various degrees by democratic societies concerns hate speech, including Nazi propaganda. Here again, we face the philosophical quandary that when it comes to speech, how free is free?

Just because most of us are appalled by certain statements do we really believe they should be banned?

This whole subject troubles me deeply. I've lived my entire adult life fighting one way or another for a free press and advocating for free speech for everybody. We've all seen how authoritarian regimes limit these freedoms as an essential tool for maintaining power.

Clearly, words are powerful, indeed the pen may be more powerful than the sword. But we have reached a point in history where we are compelled to revisit James Madison's fundamental admonition: "The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable."

In 2020’s America, we the people are deeply divided on that proposition.

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Tuesday, February 21, 2023

Line Cutters (Afghan 56)

 (This is the latest in a series of reports secretly filed by an Afghan friend of mine about life in his country under the Taliban. I am withholding his identity to protect his safety.)

Dear David:

As usual, I went to the bank at 6:30 a.m. to stand in line to get my salary. There were already more than 200 people lined up, and the line was getting longer by the minute. This time, however, there were some new people in the crowd.

Previously, the salaries of  teachers were remitted three days before Taliban soldiers' salaries. But this time, our livelihoods were remitted together. Therefore, the new people in line were the Taliban. 

Normally, these lines are orderly. The rule is that anyone when he arrives must stand at the end of the queue so each will enter the bank in turn. This is important because the bank sometimes runs out of money. 

Teachers and civil servants carefully follow the rules and even if they are very old, they stand at the end of the queue according to their turn. But the Taliban soldiers don’t understand the rules; they come from mountains and forests and are accustomed to getting their way by force.

So on this occasion, they simply went straight to the head of the line and tried to enter the bank. At the gate, the bank guards, who are also Taliban, did not allow them to enter.  There was a tense standoff but the Taliban soldiers eventually went to the end of the line.

During my wait in the line, which lasted many hours, several more groups of Taliban soldiers arrived and each proceeded to the front of the line. There, they argued vociferously with the bank guards. Some of them managed to enter the bank and others tried to stand at the front of the queue instead of their proper place at the end of the line. 

A man near me muttered, "The country has fallen into the hands of these kinds of people. When the Taliban themselves do not observe order, how can they be expected to rule a country?”

LINKS:

  •  The Taliban’s campaign against women continues. Don’t look away. (Edit Bd/WP)

  • U.S. Warnings to China on Arms Aid for Russia’s War Portend Global Rift (NYT)

  • Why China’s stand on Russia and Ukraine is raising concerns (AP)

  • China told the United States to keep out of its relationship with Russia, just as Beijing's top diplomat prepared for a visit to Moscow, and possibly a meeting with Vladimir Putin, to discuss ideas for peace in Ukraine. (Reuters)

  • Biden’s visit to Kyiv shrouded in secrecy (WP)

  • Biden in Kyiv to show solidarity as Ukraine war nears 1 year (AP)

  • New powerful earthquakes rock Turkey and Syria (Al Jazeera)

  • A nuclear reactor was melting down. Jimmy Carter came to the rescue. (WP)

  • Supreme Court for first time casts doubt on Section 230, the legal shield for Big Tech (LAT)

  • The return to the office could be the real reason for the slump in productivity. Here’s the data to prove it (Fortune)

  • DA drops gun enhancement charge against Alec Baldwin in 'Rust' shooting (ABC)

  • 7 things you didn’t know that ChatGPT can do (Tom’s Guide)

  • AI is starting to pick who gets laid off. With software that analyzes performance data. In a recent U.S. survey, 98% of human resources leaders said software and algorithms will help them make layoff decisions this year. (WP)

  • New methods will have to be invented to test students in era of ChatGPT (The Federal)

  • Charges Against Trump Lawyer ‘Very Likely,’ Colleagues Warn Donald (Rolling Stone)

  • California’s Budget Deficit Blows Up (WSJ)

  • World risks descending into a climate ‘doom loop’, warn thinktanks (Guardian)

  • Israel declares temporary pause on new West Bank settlements (BBC)

  • We’re Living in an Age of Small Creatures — 340-pound penguins were once normal—and maybe they will be again someday. (Slate)

  • Inside the Hunt for U.F.O.s at the End of the World (NYT)

  • Sea level rise poses ‘unthinkable’ risks for the planet, Security Council hears (UN)

  • Jane Fonda says she isn't scared of dying, but she has regrets (CNN)

  • Abraham Lincoln’s love letters captivated America. They were a hoax. (WP)

  • Mature Cat Not Going To Waste Time Chasing Laser That Doesn’t Want Her (The Onion)

    LYRICS:

    “I Can’t Help It”

    by Hank Williams

    Today I passed you on the street
    And my heart fell at your feet
    I can't help it if I'm still in love with you

    Somebody else stood by your side
    And he looked so satisfied
    I can't help it if I'm still in love with you

    A picture from the past came slowly stealing
    As I brushed your arm and walked so close to you
    Then suddenly I got that old time feeling
    I can't help it if I'm still in love with you

    It's hard to know another's lips will kiss you
    And hold you just the way I used to do
    Oh, Heaven only knows how much I miss you
    I can't help it if I'm still in love with you

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Monday, February 20, 2023

President Day News

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Sunday, February 19, 2023

Voices: 130 Years Later

 Among my possessions are two things from my grandmother on my father’s side — her wedding ring and a 12-page typed manuscript about growing up in a hard-scrabble frontier family in Canada’s Huron County.

It was a difficult life. Born in the 1870s, she was the second youngest of eight kids. Her father mainly seems to have made money by selling things that he cleared from the land — logs and limestone — or that his wife and kids gathered like wild blueberries and raspberries. They did have a few crops, an apple orchard, pear trees that didn’t produce, and a handful of farm animals.

She says that it was a two-mile walk to school and that many times her hands and feet froze in winter. But that they were fine once she was able to thaw them out. Her father sounds like a pretty uneven character, unsuccessful and also abusive to the point that one by one all of the family members ran away, only to return for a while before disappearing once again.

When they left, they weren’t reachable even if they wanted to talk. There were no telephones yet. For my grandmother, after her own mother finally ran off, life became simply unbearable. She was expected to cook and clean the house for her father and older brothers and to stop going to school, which was her one true love.

Besides being able to see friends at school, she loved to read and write and make up stories.

When she was around 16 she finally ran away from home, taking her younger sister with her. They found another farm family where the situation was friendlier, and for the most part she finished her growing up and schooling there.

Eventually, as an older teen, she found happiness singing and dancing with other farm kids on Saturday nights until three or four in the morning, then grabbing an hour of sleep before rising to another day’s hard work.

I had read about all of this in her manuscript before but that was soon after she died in the late 1960s, when I didn’t really appreciate it at the time. But yesterday as I reread it for the first time in many years, a new detail jumped out at me. When she was only 14 or so, my grandmother apparently wrote a book!

It must have been short and definitely was fiction, even though at the time she says she had not yet read a work of fiction by someone else. She says her siblings loved her book and asked her to read it to them over and over. There is no indication what the story was about.

My grandmother was hardly what you’d call an intellectual. She didn’t come from a long line of literary greats, so far as we know, but she created stories of her own almost by instinct, I believe. It makes me wonder about the original of fiction much further back in human societies.

Anyway, so far as I can determine, this novel of hers from 130 years ago was not preserved. It would have been written with a pencil in some sort of school notebook, which was lost somewhere along the way.

All I have now is the knowledge that it once existed. Plus the additional fact that her youngest son, my father, also wrote an unpublished novel on his own, which I discovered among his possessions after he died.

At the very least, I know I’m not the first story-teller in the family.

I also have my grandmother’s wedding ring, a simple metallic thing distinguished by a heart, given to her by David Weir, my grandfather who died two decades before I came onto the scene.

Everything else I just have to imagine. 

(Read also: Finding Dad’s Novel.)

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