Friday, April 26, 2024

What's On Trial

We all can agree that Donald Trump has a way of breaking things. But now that he has promised to break our form of government — a constitutional democracy — if he is elected president this November, the stakes to prevent that from happening are higher than ever.

All of that makes Trump’s claim of absolute immunity for his actions on Jan. 6th, 2021, now before the Supreme Court, one of the most momentous legal cases in our country’s history. This is one of two federal cases against Trump brought by special prosecutor Jack Smith.

And it’s moving at a glacial pace.

While we wait for the court to rule on immunity, Trump continues to appear daily at the site of another trial, concerning his election interference in 20 16. That is occurring in New York state court.

Meanwhile, other 2020 election interference cases are proceeding in Arizona, Michigan. Nevada and Georgia. All of these raise disturbing questions about Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of an election he clearly lost to Joe Biden.

The administration of justice moves slowly and never before have we faced an attempt by a former president to overturn our democracy. It will take time but let’s hope justice in these various venues will ultimately prevail.

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Thursday, April 25, 2024

The We Generation

One experience common for Baby Boomers when we were kids is that we were subjected to air raid drills at school, where we were taught to dive under our desks and shield our heads — as if that would save us in a nuclear attack.

All serious looks at Bob Dylan’s writing, including Martin Scorsese’s “No Direction Home” recognizes this as a decisive influence in the poet’s formative years. He uses footage from those drills to drive the point home and Dylan confirms it in interviews.

Even though we were kids, we knew it was absurd at the time, yet the adults piled it on with more stuff like Disney’s “Our Friend the Atom,” a blatant attempt at pro-nuclear-power propaganda in 1957. What a pathetic joke that one was.

Almost as soon as he arrived in Greenwich Village and started singing in nightclubs, Dylan was mixing his recurrent nightmares about World War III into his songs.

These were the early days of the anti-war movement, which — though focused on the Vietnam War — always reflected elements of anti-nuke sentiment as well.

As youngsters, we intuited but were never actually told by our government how close we had repeatedly come to nuclear war until the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. But based on declassified documents, my own youngest son, who just happens to be named Dylan, wrote in a paper while he was earning his Master’s Degree in History that President Eisenhower threatened to drop the bomb on China on more than one occasion in the fifties.

Meanwhile, in Bob D’s main song on the topic the key generational line is “I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.” We all felt like outsiders in a world where the rulers seemed willing to indulge in mutually assured destruction — all that was left for us to do was to comfort each other.

Of course we all had nightmares of ending up, dazed and alone, wandering in a post dystopia. Our solutions — drugs, casual sex, rock ‘n roll, escapism all, or activism, protest music, community organizing, crusading journalism — all blended together as options.

It was somehow assumed that one had to be either a hippie and tune out or a radical and tune in, so of course many of us decided we would instead be both at the same time — hippie-radicals.

That’s when things became dicey and our generation started to spin out violent strike forces like the Weather Underground. Few of us actually supported violence but most of us harbored violent resentment and anger at those Dylan branded as the “Masters of War.”

We also struck out against racial injustice, misogyny, homophobia — hate of all kinds, by advocating love for each other. Other poets besides Dylan spun out their solutions: “Love is All You Need,” etc.

And when it came to love, Dylan seemed somewhat cynical but always ambivalent, with his haunting “Love is Just a Four-Letter Word,” that his once-lover Joan Baez turned into a classic, or the ever-so-tender “Just Like a Woman.”

The truth? Relationships between Baby Boomers have always been complicated. It’s almost as if we can’t be apart but we can’t be together — we tended to have more relationships over our lifespans than previous generations, but our breakups drove divorce rates to record levels as well.

One label older people tagged us with was the“Me Generation.” 

I prefer the “We Generation.” 

I ain't lookin' to compete with you
Beat or cheat or mistreat you
Simplify you, classify you
Deny, defy or crucify you
All I really want to do
Is, baby, be friends with you

We ran in a flock. And we’re still hoping to end up in each another’s dreams.

(This one first appeared in 2022.)

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Wednesday, April 24, 2024

The Conspirators

It’s likely that the election interference (aka the “hush money”) case against Donald Trump currently underway in New York State court will be the only one of the cases against him concluded before the 2024 election.

That gives it an urgency it might otherwise not have.

The other three criminal cases facing the ex-President are all delayed due to legal maneuvers by Trump’s lawyers, so much so that they probably will not go to trial until after this fall’s election, if at all. Should Trump win the presidency, two of the three remaining cases will be dismissed by his choice of attorney general.

The one remaining case, in Georgia state court, has been dogged by controversy that seems to be delaying it endlessly.

That makes it incredibly important that the prosecutors in New York get their case right.

Hearings will resume on Thursday in the trial expected to last six weeks or longer. Any verdict will ultimately hinge on the jury buying the prosecutors’ case that Trump and his associates falsified business records in order to cover up his affair with porn star Stormy Daniels in furtherance of a conspiracy to prevent news of the scandal from losing Trump the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton.

That’s a mouthful.

And now the hope that the former president will ever be held accountable for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election hangs on the outcome.

As does our democracy.

HEADLINES:

  • Protests at Columbia and other schools escalate (CNN)

  • Pro-Palestinian Protests Force Colleges to Rethink Graduation Plans (WSJ)

  • U.S. hawks and Israel want Qatar to oust Hamas militants' political office. But rare interviews conducted by HuffPost's Akbar Shahid Ahmed with Hamas leaders suggest the move could fail to pressure them, undercutting the assumption that forcing a relocation would make the group more amenable to U.S. and Israeli demands. [HuffPost]

  • US Senate votes overwhelmingly to advance Ukraine, Israel aid legislation (Reuters)

  • The bubble has burst: On the road to a lost Chinese economic decade (The Hill)

  • Nestlé adds more sugar to baby food sold in poorer countries, a report said. Products sold in lower-income countries have up to 7.3 grams of added sugar per serving, while the same food sold in Europe often has none. (WP)

  • US vs. Russia: Why the Biden strategy in Africa may be failing (Politico)

  • Supreme Court Seems Poised to Allow Local Laws That Penalize Homelessness (NYT)

  • Email isn’t just annoying to Gen Z workers—it’s stressing them out (CNBC)

  • A long, hot U.S. summer is looming, forecasters say (Axios)

  • KQED offers buyout packages with layoffs potentially coming to cut costs (SFGate)

  • Why is so much of the internet’s infrastructure run by volunteers? (Economist)

  • It’s the End of the Web as We Know It (Atlantic)

  • How United Airlines uses AI to make flying the friendly skies a bit easier (TechCrunch)

  • A National Security Insider Does the Math on the Dangers of AI (Wired)

  • "Top secret" is no longer the key to good intel in an AI world: report (Axios)

  • Nation’s Therapists Refuse To See You Anymore Because You Scare Them (The Onion)

 

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Tuesday, April 23, 2024

AI: Threat to Writers?

 A sprawling article in The New Republic questions whether the coming of artificial intelligence (AI) spells the end for human writers. (TNR) 

“If a computer can write like a person, what does that say about the nature of our own creativity?” asks Samanth Subramanian.

The answer is, after a long winding trail of considerations, that nobody can yet say for sure, at least according to this author. But he seems to come out on the side of the human writer surviving in the end, and with that I agree.

The key word in this equation is “human.” In our society, human writers do much more than simply write. They invent and provoke and stimulate and define. They give voice to voiceless as well as to the unspeakable. They create the public narratives that help define both our social and private lives.

In fiction and nonfiction alike, they express the inner longings of the human spirit, which machines may emulate but cannot replicate.

Like artists of all kinds, writers’ work can be copied — we call it plagiarism — but as creators they cannot be replaced. AI may take away many of the jobs writers have; if so that will be a tragedy. But the writers will remain.

Writing is so much more than turning a phrase, word-smithing or even telling a story. Fundamentally, it’s about forging authentic human connections one at a time.

That will always be superior to the artificial connections enacted by machines.

And only a human being can tell the difference.

HEADLINES:

  • The seismic political fallout from Trump’s criminal trial is only beginning (MSNBC)

  • Will a Mountain of Evidence Be Enough to Convict Trump? (NYT)

  • Biden’s polls improve as Kennedy and third-party factor shifts (WP)

  • Why so many American leaders are advancing a new kind of nihilism (Atlantic)

  • Israeli military intelligence chief quits over 7 October attack (Guardian)

  • How the Israel-Gaza Protests Could Hurt the Democratic Party (NYT)

  • The Supreme Court this week will debate whether states have the power to outlaw lifesaving abortions in hospital emergency rooms. “This case could radically alter how emergency medicine is practiced in this country and make pregnant people second-class citizens in America’s emergency rooms,” the deputy director of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project said. [HuffPost

  • Europe is warming up faster than any other continent, and the heat is deadly (NPR)

  • Trillions of cicadas are about emerge in the Midwest and the South. Two different broods of these extremely loud bugs are set to crawl out of the ground together for the first time since 1803. (WP)

  • More than 70% of the global workforce is exposed to risks linked to climate change that cause hundreds of thousands of deaths each year, the International Labour Organization said. (Reuters)

  • Ignoring experts, China’s sudden zero-COVID exit cost lives (AP)

  • The pandemic cost 7 million lives, but talks to prevent a repeat stall (WP)

  • The Most Embarrassing Blunders From Elon Musk’s Attempt at AI-Generated News (Gizmodo)

  • Cecil Williams, longtime champion of the poor, co-founder of Glide church, dies at 94 (SFC)

  • AI and the End of the Human Writer (TNR)

  • AI Detects Mysterious Detail Hidden in Famous Raphael Masterpiece (ScienceAlert)

  • The future of AI gadgets is just phones (Verge)

  • AI Will Eventually Fade From View, By Design (Forbes)

  • ‘Seek Funding’ Step Added To Scientific Method (The Onion)

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Monday, April 22, 2024

Day One

Today the first criminal trial of a former president in U.S. history gets underway, with opening arguments and a 12-person jury of his peers in attendance in a New York City courtroom.

Polls have indicated that Trump’s base will stick with him regardless of the outcome of this trial, which is usually called a “hush money” scandal but is really about election interference.

That’s because the reason Trump paid porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016 to stay quiet about their affair was he was afraid it would damage his chances in that year’s election.

Trump beat Hillary Clinton that time around.

But regardless of how the right-wing base feels about the philandering Trump, there is another demographic he has to be mindful of — suburban women, especially in the six or seven swing states that will decide the 2024 election.

As the salacious details emerge during this trial about Trump’s affair with Daniels soon after his wife Melania gave birth to their son, Barron, the former president’s standing with suburban voters, already tenuous, may erode.

That is one of the potential political implications of this trial.

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Sunday, April 21, 2024

Like a Leader

There are plenty of things to not like about House Speaker Mike Johnson, including that he’s an election denier, but unlike many Republicans currently in Congress, he seems capable of doing the right thing for the country.

Saturday’s bipartisan votes in the House to pass foreign aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan came roughly two months after they should have, but at least they came.

And that’s because Johnson defied the radical fringe of his caucus to muscle the votes through — with substantial Democratic support. By doing so, he risked losing his job. in the same way his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, lost his.

The crazies are still threatening to oust him, but for now, Johnson holds the gavel.

It’s important to recognize when political figures demonstrate a measure of leadership, regardless of party. As I said, there still is plenty to not like about Johnson, but his actions on Saturday were in the best interest of the country.

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Saturday, April 20, 2024

He Sang Our Lives

 Rewatching “No Direction Home,” Martin Scorsese’s epic 2005 documentary about Bob Dylan’s early career, requires stamina but it’s worth it. Not only does it contain dozens and dozens of tracks from his concerts in the early sixties, it contains the most extensive interviews he has ever given as well.

If you love Dylan’s music, which I do, the live footage of his performances is priceless. But whether you like it or not, the way he talks about his life and career bring us as close to an understanding of what we as a generation tried to do collectively as we are ever likely to get.

The unanswerable question is how and why this skinny, scruffy, raspy-voiced poet from Hibbing, Minnesota, emerged at exactly the right place, Greenwich Village and right time, 1961, to issue his series of clarion calls for an entire generation.

He was and is by far our most authentic voice. He wrote and sang like a man possessed of some supernatural ability to channel the emerging spirit of the largest generation of humans to ever crowd our way onto the planet. 

Meanwhile, just like many of the rest of us, Dylan has lived out his personal life and his career as a series of acts, changing and adapting to a world that’s never seemed quite as stable as the one our parents envisioned for us. Through multiple marriages and relationships, he’s somehow raised six kids, while stubbornly staying as far out of the limelight as his superstardom has allowed.

To this day, Dylan’s greatest songs give me chills and make the hair stand up on the back of my neck. His music, more than any other, helps me remember who I am. 

Somehow he became us — or we became him — I’m not sure which. Or maybe it’s both. 

He doesn’t know either — his modesty is not false. Like he said, he was just a song and dance man. He didn’t try to be a leader or the face of a generation. But he became that anyway and the world is a better place because of it.

Bob Dylan will turn 83 in a couple of weeks.

(Republishing this two yeas after I wrote it.)

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Friday, April 19, 2024

Ceteris Paribus

 For one semester at the University of Michigan I was an Econ major, but I got hung up on the Latin phrase meaning "all other things being equal," which kept showing up in every economic model we studied.

When I (somewhat rebelliously) wrote a paper arguing that in real life all other things never stay equal, my professor was not amused and gave me a D. That was the end of my potential career as an economist.

I understood, of course, the concept of modeling and the need to control for random factors that could affect the outcome, since I’d also been a math major for a minute. But similar concerns about reality’s messiness compared to math’s formulaic purity derailed my academic trajectory in that subject as well. Quod Erat Demonstrandum if you will.

In the end, I found that I was better suited to working with words, so it was journalism for me, which of course is completely obsessed with the real world and all of its messiness. But the two subjects that came up over and over again in my journalism career were economics and math.

I often wished that I’d paid better attention in those classes as the stories I covered often had elements that put my memory to the test. 

Accordingly, years later when I was teaching journalism at U-C, Berkeley, Stanford and SF State, I found myself advising students to take classes in math and economics because they would probably need them in their future careers.

Mindful of my own academic record, I also told my students if they just couldn’t stand the way all those “other things” never seemed to add up the way they were supposed to, maybe being a journalist was indeed the right job for them.

Finis.

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Thursday, April 18, 2024

The World is Flat

 (From my archive. This is an excerpt from an essay I published in 2010.)

Each big change that sweeps through your life, especially of the losing kind (losing a job, a relationship, a house) creates a grieving period but also opens up new possibilities for your future.

This is obvious, of course, and I am not a self-help guru, so I won't condescend to anyone by offering cliches about how to deal with such situations.

But I will note that, in my case, when someone takes something away from me (typically a job), after I'm sad and perhaps mad for a bit, I reach the stage where I feel that a burden has been lifted.

Upon reflection, somebody paid me to do something, told me what to do and how to do it, indicated displeasure but rarely pleasure -- you know the routine — and now all that is gone from my life.

In American business culture, it seems, kindness is a lost art. The idea is to be direct.

The world is changing for middle-class Americans. Our position of relative privilege in the world is flattening out as we increasingly integrate our economy with the emerging global system. It’s called globalization.

There are some who would use our power, including our military power, to resist this adjustment in relative privilege. They believe we have a God-given right to being "number one" and other people should not be allowed to catch up unless they do so at no cost to us.

It doesn't work that way. The world as we know it is a finite place. There are only so many resources. They have to go around, according to some sort of system of equity, or monstrous disparities will persist between the rich and the poor.

There are those who defend such disparities and would fight to the death (or send others to their death) in order to defend them.

Not me. I recognize that my relative wealth is directly related to a larger world of poverty, illness, and shortened expectations. I am grateful to be an American, but I’d like to think we could be better global citizens.

But the political discourse over these matters has become so poisoned that I have trouble enduring it. Let’s hope the situation improves soon.

P.S. It didn’t.

HEADLINES:

  • Senate dismisses two articles of impeachment against Homeland Security secretary, ends trial (AP)

  • A self-described "Christian nationalist" who served in Trump's administration said his former boss is "cloaking" his actual, "radical" beliefs on the campaign trail, adding that he would govern in a "more aggressive fashion" if he won a second term. [HuffPost]

  • Surreal scenes as jurors in New York trial tell Trump what they really think (Guardian)

  • Other states, like Arizona, could resurrect laws on abortion, LGBTQ+ issues and more that have been lying dormant for more than 100 years (The Conversation)

  • Finally, Mike Johnson Makes His Move to Shiv Marjorie Taylor Greene (New Republic)

  • Secret Russian foreign policy document urges action to weaken the U.S. (WP)

  • Reformers hoped to curtail US domestic spying; lawmakers are poised to expand it (Reuters)

  • NPR Editor Resigns After Publicly Criticizing Coverage, Calls New CEO ‘Divisive’ (WSJ)

  • The Real Story Behind NPR’s Current Problems (Slate)

  • Hundreds of cargo ships lost propulsion in U.S. waters in recent years (WP)

  • They Experimented on Themselves in Secret. What They Discovered Helped Win a War (Wired)

  • How did life on Earth begin? Cracks may have been the key. (WP)

  • Banks told to anticipate risks from using AI, machine learning (Reuters)

  • AI and robotics demystify the workings of a fly's wing (Nature)

  • Mother Still Searching For Preschool That Focuses Exclusively On Her Son (The Onion)

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Wednesday, April 17, 2024

Is NPR Too Liberal?

NPR’s decision to suspend senior editor Uri Berliner for five days after his online essay criticizing the network’s alleged liberal bias is not the first such controversy in the public broadcasting system’s history.

In 2010, for example, NPR cancelled commentator Juan Williams’s contract after comments about Muslims that he made during an appearance on the conservative Fox network. 

When people ask me as a former public media executive whether those who work there are mostly liberal, I always answer, “Of course!” The workforce at NPR and at member stations throughout the system tends to be well-educated — and well-educated people skew toward the liberal end of the political spectrum.

Beyond that, public broadcasting employees tend to be thoughtful people, interested in public policy, and supportive of social changes that hold the promise of making our democratic system more inclusive, diverse, and progressive.

Such tendencies can be easily mischaracterized as the kind of knee-jerk “wokeness” so decried by conservatives as a dangerous force in American culture. I’m not sure that such a danger actually exists, but if it does it comes nowhere close to rivaling the threat demonstrated by the Capitol rioters on Jan. 6th, 2021. 

Nevertheless, the critics’ point-of-view is worth taking seriously. 

Liberals, when they do achieve some measure of power, should always practice what they preach, and that definitely incudes tolerance for diverse points of view.

Which brings me back to the news hook for this column. I wasn't privy to the discussions leading up to Berliner’s suspension, but it certainly doesn’t make NPR look good. I read Berliner’s essay and found it to be a relatively mild critique of the network’s liberal bias through flawed coverage of three important stories. 

Whereas Berliner ascribes a liberal bias to the network’s failure to fully execute on those stories, and he may well be right, another view might be that these were routine journalistic failures, not political ones.

Either way, the leaders at NPR probably need to grow thicker skin when it comes to criticism from within their organization. Ideally they should welcome it, though I know that in real life that can be extremely hard to do.

Controversies over coverage happen not infrequently inside newsrooms, and I view them as healthy exercises. If I were running NPR, I’d probably hold out an olive branch to Berliner, with a gentle suggestion that the next time would he please try to keep the dialogue a little more inside the family circle.

Meanwhile, this very public controversy is already being seized upon by right-wingers to call for ending government support for public broadcasting, so let me be clear. NPR, whatever its flaws, is a national treasure. You can trust the journalism — it’s fair, balanced and relatively unbiased.

And at a time when our democracy is under serious assault, we need a healthy public media system now more than ever.

(I worked at NPR affiliate KQED in 1994-’5 and again from 2013-’19. Thanks to my friend and veteran journalist Bruce Koon for talking this issue through with me. He is of course not responsible for what I’ve written. That’s on me)

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Tuesday, April 16, 2024

Origin Stories: CIR

 In April 1977, Lowell Bergman and I were discussing how to form a new journalism organization in the wake of the demise of our informal muckraking unit inside Rolling Stone.

Over the preceding two years at the magazine's headquarters at 625 Third Street in Soma, we'd pulled together a half dozen or so reporters to pursue investigative stories, which had resulted in some good stories and also a ton of trouble.

Along with a bunch of awards, we had proven an ability to attract death threats and huge libel suits, among other forms of attention. We had both been unceremoniously dumped by Jann Wenner just before Christmas 1976 when he announced he would be taking the magazine to the east coast.

Our idea was to form a non-profit to carry on that type of work and Lowell brought an ally into the mix -- Dan Noyes, who he'd met in the "Arizona Project." That was a group investigation into the murder of journalist Don Bolles, which in turn led to the creation of another non-profit group, Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE).

The three of us -- Bergman, Noyes and myself -- co-founded the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) later in 1977. A large group of advisers helped us launch the organization and we settled into an office in downtown Oakland.

But back in April, we had been still discussing what such an organization should be, what it should do, what its essential identity should be.

Today, 47 years later, CIR and IRE have long been staples of the journalism world and we are working individually on our memoirs. In that context, Lowell recently unearthed an old type-written letter he had sent to Dan that April. Dan and I had not yet met and Lowell wanted to introduce him to my thoughts on the subject.

    "I talked with Weir --as expected he is enthusiastic. Interestingly, David presented the following perspective: (the group should have) two major groups of activity: publications and community involvement."

This old letter is a prime example of why I spend so much energy beseeching people to preserve their journals, letters, notes and files whenever possible. Until Lowell sent a copy of it to me recently, I had absolutely no memory of having said those things.

But clearly I was envisioning not only a journalism organization but one that would attempt to root that work in the communities where we worked.

The Bay Area was our base. It was a region with deep contradictions -- idealism, activism and hope with violence, cynicism, and deeply entrenched reactionary media organizations, notably the old Hearst daily, the San Francisco Examiner.

We couldn't know it at the time, but that same newspaper would be transformed by a talented group of our peers, including the heir to the Hearst publishing empire, Will Hearst, into an excellent newspaper in its final decades.

We participated in that transformation. We also found our way into relationships with dozens of other media groups -- CBS News, NBC News, ABC News, 60 Minutes, 20/20, Mother Jones, New West, New York, NHK, BBC, etc., here and around the world.

There were many ups and downs in the early years, including press conferences denouncing us, and/or announcing libel suits and more death threats, but ultimately CIR survived and thrived. How that came to be is the story the three of us need to tell in our memoirs.

NOTE: Early in 2024, Mother Jones and CIR merged into a single organization.

HEADLINES:

  • Trump's historic hush money trial begins in New York (CNN)

  • ‘This Seems to Be a Major Strategic Error on the Part of Iran’ (Politico Mag)

  • Israel vows to retaliate against Iran for missile attacks (Axios)

  • Far Right’s Ties to Russia Sow Rising Alarm in Germany (NYT)

  • Ukraine appealed again to allies for "extraordinary and bold steps" to supply air defenses to help defend against waves of Russian air strikes that have targeted the energy system in recent weeks. (Reuters)

  • Ukraine’s attacks on Russian oil refineries deepen tensions with U.S. (WP)

  • Tesla lays off ‘more than 10 percent’ of its workforce, loses top executives (Verge)

  • 'Rust' movie armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed sentenced to 18 months (NBC)

  • The US Government Has a Microsoft Problem (Wired)

  • Half of the world's 75 poorest countries are experiencing a widening income gap with the wealthiest economies for the first time this century in a historical reversal of development, the World Bank said in a report. (Reuters)

  • From thousands to millions to billions to trillions to quadrillions and beyond: Do numbers ever end? (The Conversation)

  • Are Flying Cars Finally Here? (New Yorker)

  • Facebook blocked news in Canada last August to avoid paying fees to media companies and looks likely to do the same in Australia. The blocking of news links has led to profound and disturbing changes in the way Canadian Facebook users engage with information about politics, two unpublished studies shared with Reuters found. (Reuters)

  • A.I. Has a Measurement Problem (NYT)

  • Eric Trump Only Potential Juror Uninformed Enough To Serve At Father’s Trial (The Onion)

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