Saturday, July 13, 2024

Web of Resistance

Next week brings the shameful spectacle of one of our major political parties coronating a would-be king.

Many millions of us had hoped it would never come to this; that the multiple civil and criminal cases against Trump would have prevented him from winning the Republican nomination.

But the legal system was no match for the machinations of a man with unlimited funds intent on delaying justice so that ultimately it would be denied.

Consequently, he will be on the ballot and polls indicate that if the election were held today, he would have a good chance of winning.

One option for the millions of us who think that would be a disaster for our democracy is to get depressed and withdraw from the fray.

But that would be a mistake. As long as we have an intact Bill of Rights, each of us has to speak out against the rise of a dictator who would abolish everything that makes our system of self-governance special.

Any small step — talking to neighbors and friends, donating to candidates with integrity, registering new voters, exposing Trump’s lies, organizing protests, letter-writing campaigns, anything — matters.

Supporting non-profits that work to enact positive changes in human rights, the environment, women’s rights, LBGTQ+ rights, diversity, education, healthcare, housing and other causes has never been more important.

Together, those of us on the ethical, humane, progressive side of history outnumber those who cluster in the sour eddies of hate, resentment and authoritarianism.

Together, we must weave a web of resistance to stop Trump and save our country.

HEADLINES:

 

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Friday, July 12, 2024

Last Hurrah

One thing Thursday night’s press conference did not settle is whether Biden will continue to be the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. 

That remains uncertain.

He didn’t have a disastrous night like during the recent debate, but deep reservations persist about whether he’s up to the job.

Biden indicated he’s aware of those doubts, but insists he’s still the best candidate to beat Trump in November.

That will remain an open question until and unless he steps aside.

The tension among Democrats watching the presser was palpable, as many feared he would lose his train of thought or misspeak badly. Except for referring to his running mate as Vice-President Trump and the head of the joint chiefs as his Commander-in-Chief, he didn’t make too many embarrassing gaffes.

And he stayed on topic pretty consistently although his answers meandered a bit and went on too long in some cases. But he demonstrated that he has a firm grasp on key foreign policy issues and was able to express in great depth and nuance opinions on topics that a person with cognitive impairment would not be able to do.

Nevertheless, Democrats are so nervous that I doubt Biden will be able to continue to resist the growing pressures from within his own party to step aside for much longer. 

I give him another week or maybe two.

The Democratic convention is in roughly a month. By then, I expect a new presumptive nominee to face Trump in November. A potential ticket gaining support within the party is Kamala Harris and Gretchen Whitmer.

An all-woman ticket might be the best scenario for defeating Trump, given his and the GOP’s vulnerability on abortion and women’s rights.

HEADLINES:

  • Biden’s High-Stakes Moment: NATO News Conference (NYT)

  • Democrats fear Biden drama may squander goldilocks economy (WP)

  • What is Project 2025? What to know about the conservative blueprint for a second Trump administration (CBS)

  • Prominent members of the Christian nationalist movement have maneuvered their way into Donald Trump’s inner circle — and their influence is remarkably clear in the draft Republican Party platform unveiled this week. [HuffPost]

  • Trump leads 2024 race in new poll as some Biden aides reportedly discuss how to convince him to end campaign (Guardian)

  • Biden confronts crucial day in his campaign, as his team says no Democrat would do better (AP)

  • Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) said it “wouldn’t hurt” for Biden to take a cognitive test, although she continues to back the president's White House bid. [HuffPost]

  • Residents of Gaza City are trapped in houses and bodies lie uncollected in the streets under an intense new Israeli assault, even as Washington pushed for a peace deal at talks in Egypt and Qatar. (Reuters)

  • Hundreds of thousands of Texans could be without power a week after Beryl (WP)

  • NPR gets $5.5 million grant to strengthen local journalism as news deserts spread (NPR)

  • The United States will start deploying longer range missiles in Germany in 2026, the two countries announced in Washington. The decision will send Germany the most potent US weapons to be based on the European continent since the Cold War. (Reuters)

  • Google says Gemini AI is making its robots smarter (Verge)

  • MIT researchers introduce generative AI for databases (MIT)

  • The sperm whale 'phonetic alphabet' revealed by AI (BBC)

  • A.I. Helped to Find a Vast Source of the Copper That A.I. Needs to Thrive (NYT)

  • Biden Forgets Nation’s Name (The Onion)

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Thursday, July 11, 2024

The Strange Case of J.T. LeRoy

When we launched a new city magazine for San Francisco called 7x7 in 2001, we gathered a wide variety of talented writers to help carry out our mission, which among other things was to differentiate ourselves from the traditional genre as much as possible.

One of those writers was a mysterious and reclusive character called J.T. LeRoy, who penned short essays for us about his supposed adventures in the city.

His backstory was intriguing -- a gay homeless abused kid from West Virginia who ran away to San Francisco, where he became a male prostitute who met various celebrities, closeted or out, in his line of work.

His novels included one, "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things," that had received critical acclaim nationally, and a number of well-known authors vouched for him.

His essays for 7x7 captured that certain oddity that has always struck me about this city — how many people here seem to be trying to reinvent themselves, with varying degrees of success.

If there were a Harry-Potter-type fantasy land with witches and wizards and strange creatures at the bars, surely it would include some of the haunts of San Francisco that J.T. described.

In my role as editor of the new magazine, one of my many tasks was to talk through the first draft of each essay with J.T. He asked that we do this by phone; I was busy so that was fine by me.

Part of his allure, I discovered, was that he almost never showed himself in public, sort of like Thomas Pynchon.

Instead, we would have long rambling conversations on the phone -- his voice was high-pitched with an Appalachian accent -- and those conversations were delightful. He took criticism well and would make any revisions I requested rapidly.

We had an understanding that we would eventually meet up in person as part of my due diligence but that never seemed to happen.

Eventually a woman he identified as his sister-in-law, Savannah Knoop, started showing up around town as his stand-in. He told me he chose her because he felt too crippled by social anxiety to come out in public himself.

By this point, I’d suspected that J.T. might be toying with me, but we had bigger problems at 7x7 than finding out his true identity. After the 9/11 terror attacks, San Francisco’s economy had crashed. The tourist trade basically evaporated overnight. Local businesses wanted to advertise in our magazine but couldn’t pay for the ads until the economy rebounded.

In turn, the magazine had to defer paying me, so I was working for free. After a year of this, I left for a visiting professorship at Stanford. With that, I also left the unsolved mystery of J.T.’s true identity behind.

It was several years later when the bombshell came. J.T. LeRoy was actually a writer named Laura Albert, and she had gotten some of the details of her supposed backstory by illegally taping phone calls to a suicide hotline for troubled kids. She was by then in France and had finally come clean in an interview with the Paris Review. 

Through mutual friends, she got word to me that she felt very bad that she had deceived me during our time at 7x7.

I never could bring myself to actually resent what she did, however, even though I was embarrassed about the scandalous nature of it and my failure to ferret out her true identity.

In the end, however, I rationalized that J.T. LeRoy’s little essays for 7x7 were a valuable refection of one of San Francisco’s enduring realities, and that is that there are quite a few characters out here trying to create new identities for themselves, much like in the mid-1800s’ Barbary Coast.

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Wednesday, July 10, 2024

Election on TikTok Time

Conventional wisdom has it that if Joe Biden is going to drop out of the race, he better do it soon if Democrats are to have a chance in November. 

But the sped-up, always-on social-media news churn of 2024 is unlike any election season we’ve ever witnessed, so the usual assumptions may no longer apply.

One of the reasons analysts assume Biden needs to act fast is that traditional political campaigns take a long time to get under way and generate the momentum needed to win elections. So, according to that reasoning, a replacement for Biden would need a lengthy on-ramp to be competitive.

But this is an age of almost instant communication on multiple platforms, capable of spurring large swaths of public opinion to turn on a dime, or maybe a bitcoin. This election cycle, one random social media meme might carry more weight than an august New York Times editorial board statement, for better or for worse.

Given this odd reality, it isn’t hard to imagine the sudden emergence of a new candidate — say Kamala Harris — igniting a surge in the polls that could swing the electoral outcome even if that doesn’t start happening until September, long after the Democratic convention ends.

Those who hate and fear a return of Trump have to at least hope such an alternative scenario is possible because Biden shows no sign of leaving the race — yet. But he definitely shows signs that his age is taking its toll.

HEADLINES:

  • Joe Biden’s determination to stay in race divides congressional Democrats (Financial Times)

  • Pelosi Suggests That Biden Should Reconsider Decision to Stay in the Race (NYT)

  • Before Biden can save Ukraine, he must use the NATO summit to save himself (CNN)

  • A revived NATO marks 75 years, but political uncertainty clouds its future (WP)

  • Supreme Court immunity decision collides with Trump’s NY conviction   (The Hill)

  • Trump and the Republican National Committee released a schedule for their convention next week that waxes nostalgic for his years in office. These years included violent crime spiking, thousands of Americans dying from COVID and an attempted coup. [HuffPost]

  • Is college worth it? Poll finds only 36% of Americans have confidence in higher education (AP)

  • 2.2 million still without power in sweltering heat as Texas begins cleaning up in Hurricane Beryl's wake (Fox)

  • Russian court orders arrest of opposition leader Navalny’s widow (AP)

  • Gulf Toads Send Out Mating Calls During Beryl — Experts say that the rain, cooler temperatures and barometric pressure drops caused by Beryl stimulated toads in Texas to mate. (NYT)

  • He makes giant trolls out of trash, hides them in woods for people to find (WP)

  • Target will stop accepting personal checks next week. Are the days of the payment method numbered? (AP)

  • Alibaba bets on gen AI tools for overseas merchants, executive says (Reuters)

  • Tool preventing AI mimicry cracked; artists wonder what’s next (Ars Technica)

  • Microsoft Won’t Follow OpenAI in Blocking China’s Access to AI Models (PYMNTS)

  • Lonely Elementary Schooler Already Crushing Library’s Summer Reading Program (The Onion)

 

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Tuesday, July 09, 2024

Shedding Bias in the Search for Truth, Jurors and Journalists are Essential in Democracy

What is expected of a journalist?

Maybe this analogy will help. It’s very much like what we ask of jurors.

When the members of a jury are selected, they are asked whether they can be fair in coming to a judgement — whether they can put aside any biases or pre-existing opinions about the people and issues involved in that trial in order to come to a dispassionate, balanced decision based not on beliefs or prejudices but on the facts as established in sworn testimony.

They are also reminded of this pledge by the judge when they receive instructions just before they begin their deliberations.

The analogy is not perfect but what we demand of jurors is similar to what we demand of journalists when we send them out to gather the facts for stories.

Editors and news directors recognize that reporters are just like anyone else in that they have their own beliefs, opinions, biases, blind spots and flaws. That’s only human.

But what a good journalist, like a good juror, has to also possess is an all-consuming commitment to get it right.

That this is hard to do is obvious, especially when the truths we discover contradict our core beliefs, prejudices or assumptions. But, as I’ve said many times to young journalists, you can’t discover the truth as you wish it to be, you have to report the truth as you discover it to be. 

The integrity of our legal system depends on jurors who can follow strict jury instructions in a search for the truth. The integrity of our media institutions depend on journalists who can maintain a similar discipline in their search for truth.

These roles matter — a lot. In fact, the future of our democracy depends on them.

HEADLINES:

  • What happened in France’s shock election, and what comes next? (CNN)

  • Biden scrambles to head off defections on Capitol Hill as lawmakers return (WP)

  • Dr. Sanjay Gupta: It’s time for President Biden to undergo detailed cognitive and neurological testing and share his results (CNN)

  • Poll finds Biden damaged by debate; with Harris and Clinton best positioned to win (Politico)

  • Death toll rises as Beryl pummels Texas with tornadoes, 90 mph gusts, leaving over 2.7 million without power (Fox)

  • Boeing to plead guilty to fraud over 737 Max crashes (Axios)

  • Wildlife Protections Take a Back Seat to SpaceX’s Ambitions (NYT)

  • Supreme Court immunity ruling raises questions about military orders  (The Hill)

  • Watching Biden, many see the heartbreaking indignities of aging (WP)

  • Russia's heaviest bombardment of Kyiv in 4 months hits a children's hospital (AP)

  • Top U.S. officials arrive in Cairo for talks on Gaza hostage-ceasefire deal (Axios)

  • Washington Post Tasks Managing Editor With Building ‘Third Newsroom’ (Daily Beast)

  • How Good Is ChatGPT at Coding, Really? (IEEE)

  • New York Times Co. fights OpenAI’s request for reporters’ source materials in copyright dispute (GeekWire)

  • Store Name Requires All Words Be Pronounced Wrong For Pun To Work (The Onion)

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Monday, July 08, 2024

Monday Links

HEADLINES:

  • French vote gives leftists most seats over far right, but leaves hung parliament and deadlock (AP)

  • France's far-right firewall holds, but with signs of cracks (NBC)

  • Biden’s Support Among Key House Democrats Erodes as He Campaigns in Pennsylvania (NYT)

  • Aides face scrutiny of whether they shielded Biden from showing signs of aging (WP)

  • Death Valley sets a new daily record with a searing 128 degrees as West Coast heat wave drags on (CNN)

  • Hurricane Beryl Slams Texas Coast Flooding Homes (Weather.com)

  • A key part of America’s economy has shifted into reverse (CNN)

  • Win for Trump, surprise on abortion: Takeaways from historic Supreme Court term (USA Today)

  • Fight Over Seabed Agency Leadership Turns Nasty (NYT)

  • Talks for a cease-fire in Gaza appear set to resume as the war reaches 9 months (NPR)

  • Robot 'commits suicide' in South Korea due to excessive workload (CNBC)

  • What are AI agents? (Technology Review)

  • Companies harness AI power for mental health support (60 Minutes)

  • OpenAI-Powered Humanoid Robot Fills Spot At BMW Assembly Plant (Forbes)

  • Area Man Accepts Burden Of Being Only Person On Earth Who Understands How World Actually Works (The Onion)

 

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Sunday, July 07, 2024

Please Yourself

I once started an idea for a screenplay with the narrator speaking a line I was very proud of at the time; "There are two kinds of regret. Regret for things that you did. And regret for things you didn't do."

Probably another kind of regret is starting a screenplay but never finishing it.

***

When I first started publishing daily essays on Facebook at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, the most common feedback I received was that my “memories” resonated with people.

I'm always grateful for feedback of any kind, but memories were only one part of what I was trying to explore. In my view, if I just looked backward all the time I probably would never figure out where I was going.

My own past, like everyone else’s, was littered with successes, failures, losses, gains, pleasures and pains, darkness and light. Good and bad seemed roughly in balance, you could say. 

But as a writer, my main concern is not with the past but the future. And feedback is nice but it can be a mixed bag.

In this context, I’ve always loved Ricky Nelson's plaintive yet defiant ballad "Garden Party," where the '60s pop star recounted playing before a huge crowd while trying to make a comeback at Madison Square Garden in 1972.

That night, he thought the concert was a disaster because the crowd had booed him off the stage when he sang some new songs.

But it turned out later that at least some of them were booing the police who were trying to control the most restive members of the crowd. But Nelson didn't learn about that until he’d written and released his song.

It was his initial sense of the concert that the crowd couldn't handle the fact that he had changed his look and his sound; in other words, that he had evolved. He figured they were disoriented that he'd moved on from his status as a teen idol.

But he didn’t care.

The key line in the song is "If memories were all I sang, I'd rather drive a truck." 

That turned out to be his last hit, but it was a big one. He kept performing it at bars and clubs and a few concert halls until he died at age 45 in a plane crash on the way to a New Year's Eve concert. 

***

Maybe I should return to that old screenplay idea?

HEADLINES:

  • Biden’s defiant delusion (David Axelrod, CNN)

  • Biden interview fails to quell Democrat concerns over fitness (BBC)

  • Biden Aides Wrote Questions for Radio Hosts Who Interviewed Him (WSJ)

  • Biden Faces More Calls From Democrats to Quit the Race (NYT)

  • American allies fear Biden is finished and can’t beat Trump (Politico)

  • 8 policies that could be vulnerable to new legal challenges (WP)

  • Chevron doctrine ruling a ‘gut-punch’ for US health and environment – experts (Guardian)

  • Trump tries to distance himself from Project 2025 plan (WP)

  • A reformer wanting a nuclear deal with America wins Iran’s election (Economist)

  • 'Breakthrough' heightens hopes of Gaza ceasefire deal (BBC)

  • Beryl set to strengthen on approach to Texas due to hot ocean temperatures (AP)

  • Google's AI Push Puts Climate Goals in Jeopardy. It Could Do So Much Better (CNET)

  • Woman Shocked After Ancestry Report Finds Brother Owned Slaves (The Onion)

    LYRICS

“Garden Party” by Rick Nelson

I went to a garden party
To reminisce with my old friends
A chance to share old memories
And play our songs again

When I got to the garden party
They all knew my name
But no one recognized me
I didn't look the same

But it's all right now
I learned my lesson well
You see, you can't please everyone
So you got to please yourself

People came from miles around
Everyone was there
Yoko brought her walrus
There was magic in the air

And over in the corner
Much to my surprise
Mr. Hughes hid in Dylan's shoes
Wearing his disguise

But it's all right now
I learned my lesson well
You see, you can't please everyone
So you got to please yourself

I played them all the old songs
I thought that's why they came
No one heard the music
We didn't look the same

I said hello to "Mary Lou"
She belongs to me
When I sang a song about a honky-tonk
It was time to leave

But it's all right now
I learned my lesson well
You see, you can't please everyone
So you got to please yourself

Someone opened up a closet door
And out stepped Johnny B. Goode
Playing guitar like a ringing a bell
And lookin' like he should

If you gotta play at garden parties
I wish you a lotta luck
But if memories were all I sang
I'd rather drive a truck

But it's all right now
I learned my lesson well
You see, you can't please everyone
So you got to please yourself

And it's all right now, yeah
Learned my lesson well
You see, you can't please everyone

So you got to please yourself 

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