While the Lights Were Off

Going without Facebook for a few hours on Monday certainly was an eye-opener, not to mention the down time for its subsidiaries WhatsApp and Instagram.

Without focusing on the alleged cause of the disruption, it certainly was a reminder of just how large a role virtual reality plays in our daily lives.

In my case, I had been ready to post my daily news lineup and essay (Letter From Helmand.11) early in the morning but couldn't do so until late afternoon.

When you compare the Facebook blackout with the energy blackouts we've had in some years, it might suggest a case for considering the massive social network a public utility.

As such it would be subject to government regulation, whereas currently it is largely free from official oversight under Section 230 of 47 US Code, which provides it immunity for hosting third-party content.

To state that in plain English, I am a third-party content provider and Facebook is not liable for what I say here.

As to whether Facebook *should* be regulated, I'm conflicted. It is so large and influential, you could argue it effectively is a monopoly. On the other hand, I'm a proponent for unfettered free speech and a free press.

People can come down on either side of that issue; when it comes up I'd prefer to revert to the traditional role of reporting the story and leave the commentators to do their thing.

In any event, it was nice to see the old homepage come back up and reconnect us all!

***

THE HEADLINES:

* Gone in Minutes, Out for Hours: Outage Shakes Facebook -- When apps used by billions of people worldwide blinked out, lives were disrupted, businesses were cut off from customers — and some Facebook employees were locked out of their offices. (NYT)

* Facebook’s Temporary Absence Shows Its Far-Reaching Presence (WSJ)

* AstraZeneca has requested emergency use authorization from U.S. regulators for its new treatment to prevent COVID-19 for people who respond poorly to vaccines because of a weakened immune system.  (Reuters)

* Biden says he cannot promise U.S. will not breach debt-ceiling limit (WP)

* Cleanup crews and environmental authorities are racing to contain the devastation linked to a large oil spill off the Southern California coastline. There are questions over why Amplify Energy didn't detect the leak and respond more quickly in the first few critical hours. [HuffPost]

* Did ship’s anchor cause California oil spill? Maybe (AP)

* The California oil spill could endanger birds and sea life for years, experts say (NPR)

* The effectiveness of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in preventing infection dropped to 47% from 88% six months after the second dose, according to data published that U.S. health agencies considered when deciding on the need for booster shots. (Reuters)

* Energy Prices Spike as Producers Worry Over Pandemic and Climate -- Even as more costly fuel poses political risks for President Biden, oil companies and OPEC are not eager to produce more because they worry prices will drop. (NYT)

* Climate Change Is Melting Russia’s Permafrost—and Challenging Its Oil Economy (WSJ)

* A new report shows just how much climate change is killing the world's coral reefs -- Rising ocean temperatures killed 14% of the world's coral reefs, a new analysis finds. But it's not without hope: Experts say many can recover if immediate action is taken to curb future warming. (NPR)

* Rogue Americans stashed assets offshore, eluding victims and impeding investigators (WP)

* VIDEO: Global Trade Recovery Is ‘Strong but Unequal,’ W.T.O.(Reuters)

* The Biden administration reversed a ban on abortion referrals by family planning clinics, lifting a Trump-era restriction as political and legal battles over abortion grow sharper from Texas to the U.S. Supreme Court. The new regulation will restore the federal family planning program to the way it ran under the Obama administration, when clinics were able to refer women seeking abortions to a provider. [AP]

* "More than 100 young artists, teachers and their relatives affiliated with the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, a celebrated school that became a target of the Taliban in part for its efforts to promote the education of girls, fled the country on Sunday, the school’s leaders said." (NYT)

* Rights group: Taliban unlawfully killed 13 ethnic Hazaras (AP)

* Taliban to resume issuing passports to Afghan citizens (CNN)

* Top Vatican cardinal says Biden should not be denied Communion (WP)

* The Texas State Board of Pardons and Paroles voted to recommend George Floyd get a full posthumous pardon for a 2004 drug conviction. (Reuters)

* More than 95 percent of California’s coastal kelp are gone, devoured by a population explosion of purple sea urchins. (Cal Today)

* Former President Donald Trump now has a Dec. 23 deadline to undergo questioning in former “Apprentice” contestant Summer Zervos' defamation lawsuit over what he said in denying her sexual assault allegations, a court said. [AP]

* Japanese-born American Syukuro Manabe, German Klaus Hasselmann and Italian Giorgio Parisi won the 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics for work that helps understand complex physical systems such as Earth's changing climate. (Reuters)

 * 40-Year-Old Not Active Enough To Realize Body Falling Apart (The Onion)

Letter From Helmand.11 "Forever Homeless"

[NOTE: This is the latest in a series of letters from a friend inside Afghanistan who shall remain anonymous. He describes conditions on the ground since the Taliban took power in late August.]

Dear David:

 

Autumn has come, but I barely know it. From a lifetime of experience, I know the pattern. Just as flowers announce the coming of spring, in autumn the trees reveal the change as the leaves turn yellow. 

 

But this year, all I see is the timelessness of despair. The sullen faces of the vendors who can’t sell their wares. The sorrowful faces of the laborers who, lacking work, must go home day after day empty-handed. The woman wearing her burqa, sitting in the street begging for money. 

 

The only shift I can feel is that from warm weather to cold.

We are trapped here. No matter how much we scramble, we cannot escape from this morass. 

Sometimes despair penetrates me so deeply that it’s all I can do to drag my exhausted body through the motions of living. And sometimes a window as small as the eye of a needle offers the chance to dream, to imagine I can flee, sowing the seed of hope in my heart. 

In the darkest times I think that this misery is my fault, that I haven't tried hard enough in my life. I am always tired, and with no good choices. I always seem to make the wrong ones. But finally I realize that it is this time and this place that are to blame. That I am not alone in this hardship – I and my countrymen are all in the same sinking boat.

We cannot survive without begging. I hear, see and read that my countrymen beg for asylum from every country, but most often we are deported, humiliated. Still we clean the sweat of embarrassment from our forehead and put our hand back out to keep begging. We’ve learned this behavior from the so-called leaders of our half-stable government over the years. Our politicians have danced to the tune of every country’s anthem to collect more charity. 

As I write today, two quotes are on my mind. One is from the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz: “Home is not where you are born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease.” If this is true, I have been homeless all my life.

The other is from the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: “Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.” 

Thus I have lived all my life in exile. 

Because I was born in Afghanistan.

***

Normally, I choose to let my Afghan friend's words speak for him and do not add my own comments. But today's letter brings up a topic I often struggle with: Depression.

A common assumption among both therapists and patients is that the cause of depression is internal, personal. Perhaps it was something in the way we were raised, something from our childhood. Or maybe some sort of chemical imbalance in our brain.

But what if one of the major causes of depression are the conditions in which we too often find ourselves -- alone, disconnected, powerless, ill, poor, abandoned, hopeless?

I would recommend reading today's letter in that context. And then ask yourself, "Why wouldn't he be depressed?"

***

THE HEADLINES:

* Women in Kabul return to work, school and the streets, in defiance of the Taliban (CNN)

* Can Nuclear Fusion Put the Brakes on Climate Change? (New Yorker)

* In Alaska’s Covid Crisis, Doctors Must Decide Who Lives and Who Dies -- Amid the nation’s worst Covid-19 outbreak, patients are trapped in remote communities and doctors are prioritizing treatment based on who is most likely to survive. (NYT)

* VIDEO: Tens of Thousands of Gallons of Oil Leak Into Pacific Ocean (AP)

* Private financial records shared with The Washington Post and media partners in more than 100 countries expose vast reaches of the offshore system used to hide billions of dollars from tax collectors, creditors, criminal investigators and — in cases involving 14 world leaders — citizens around the world. (WP)

* Foreign money secretly floods U.S. tax havens. Some of it is tainted. -- A burgeoning trust industry in South Dakota and other U.S. states is sheltering the assets of international millionaires and billionaires — some linked to money laundering, corruption and worker exploitation — by promising levels of concealment that rival or surpass those offered in overseas tax havens. (WP)

* Taliban raid suspected IS hideout after bombing in capital (AP)

* Skateboards, Climate Change and Freedom: Germany’s Next-Generation Parliament -- A new generation of lawmakers is entering Germany’s Parliament. They felt ignored by the previous government, so they set out to change that by winning elections. (NYT)

* A whistleblower who worked on Facebook's civic misinformation team during the 2020 election said in an explosive "60 Minutes" interview that the platform fails to weed out "angry, hateful, polarizing content" because it drives engagement and makes money. [HuffPost] 

* Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen reveals herself as ‘whistleblower’ behind tens of thousands of leaked documents (WP)

* European politicians call for Facebook investigation after whistleblower revelation (Reuters)

* The Facebook Whistleblower, Frances Haugen, Says She Wants to Fix the Company, Not Harm It (WSJ)

* In Mexico, Nearly 100,000 People Are Missing -- Nearly 100,000 people have disappeared in Mexico. Their families now search for clues among the dead. (NYT)

* Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones lost another lawsuit — his third in a week — seeking damages for his lies that the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre was a hoax. A jury will decide later how much he'll have to pay. [HuffPost]

* In a Surge of Military Flights, China Tests and Warns Taiwan (NYT)

* Protecting indigenous people key to saving Amazon, say environmentalists (Reuters)

* Burned Out? Maybe You Should Care Less About Your Job (WSJ)

* Russia film crew set to blast off to make 1st movie in space (AP)

* Vietnamese Americans, Once Displaced Themselves, Mobilize to Help Afghans (NYT) 

* A landmark opioid trial puts spotlight on pharmacy chains CVS, Walmart and Walgreens (NPR)

* California may be the first state to try treatment that pays people not to use meth. (KQED)

* Swedish 'Mohammad' cartoonist Lars Vilks killed in car crash (Reuters)

* The Bay Area’s opioid crisis is only getting worse (SFC)

* The San Francisco Giants won their division title on the last day of the regular season with the best record in the major leagues (107-55) and the most wins their storied franchise history. (DW)

* In fantasy baseball, the Mud Lake Mafia for the first time in its 20-year history won the championship in the Champs of Summer League. (DW)

* Walls Of Congress Dissolve Into Endless Blue Void As Zuckerberg Informs Lawmakers There No Way To Escape Facebook (The Onion)

Psychology of the Hunter

For decades I worked with my fellow reporters chasing stories. We would study the patterns in the events we were following, trying to connected dots so we could beat other reporters to the story.

In the process, there may have been times that we, you might say, cut corners.

You'd could describe this as hyper-competitive behavior. There was an unspoken rule -- 'all is fair in love, war and journalism,' a twist on the idiom coined by the poet John Lyly.

In plainer words, a justification for cheating.

During the process of landing a big investigative story, we usually had identified a bad guy or a group of bad guys who were allegedly responsible for the situation we were trying to expose.

As part of that work, we would become interested in the bad guy's psychology, and on occasion we would consult with psychologists to better understand our target.

This was particularly important when we were tracking ongoing behavior, such as a series of crimes by a perpetrator not yet apprehended by the authorities.

So in those cases we were much like cops or intelligence agents, some of whom were often tracking the same targets as we were.

This is how journalists acquire some of their most valuable sources -- fellow investigators with similar objectives, which in all cases is catching the bad guy.

A problem that develops in this work when journalists get confused about whose agenda they are pursuing. As long as there is alignment, there is nothing wrong with a reporter and, say, a D.A. working to break the same case.

But their objectives are different -- the prosecutor is seeking to build a legal case, whereas the reporter is seeking to tell an accurate story.

While its may seem that those objectives are consistent with one another, the devil is in the details. There are all sorts of practical differences between what is legally provable in a court of law and what is the publishable "truth."

While all of this is happening in real time, any reasonably self-aware investigator starts turning inward and ask a few questions: "Why am I doing this work? Who am I to judge others? Which ends justify which means?"

There are many different possible answers to these questions. All I know for sure is that to continue with this kind of work over many decades, you need to have found the ones that work for you. 

Otherwise you will stop.

***

THE HEADLINES:

* The Lawyer Behind the Memo on How Trump Could Stay in Office -- John Eastman was a little-known but respected conservative lawyer. Then he became influential with Donald Trump — and counseled him on how to retain power after losing the election. (NYT)

* Democrats’ Tax Plans Worry High-Income Businesses (WSJ)

* Pelosi on verge of cementing legacy — or ending career on sour note -- Whether she retires next year or not, the next few weeks and months will serve as a major inflection point for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) legacy. (WP)

* VIDEO: Demonstrators March for Abortion Rights (AP, Storyful)

* ‘Everybody is frustrated,’ Biden says as his agenda stalls (AP)

* Military Bases Turn Into Small Cities as Afghans Wait Months for Homes in U.S. -- An estimated 53,000 evacuees from Kabul remain stranded on eight military bases across the country. Thousands more are waiting at U.S. bases abroad to come to the United States. (NYT)

* Afghanistan on verge of socio-economic collapse, EU's top diplomat says (Reuters)

* Bomb at Kabul mosque kills 5 civilians, Taliban says (AP)

*Taliban government behaviour 'not encouraging', says EU foreign policy chief (Reuters)

* Kabul Faces Blackout as Taliban Don’t Pay Electricity Suppliers (WSJ)

*. The best pandemic advice comes from the very young and the very old (WP)

* Virus surge hits New England despite high vaccination rates (AP)

* In Arizona, Drought Ignites Tensions and Threatens Traditions Among the Hopi -- The tribe has survived for more than a thousand years in the arid mesas. The megadrought gripping the Southwest is testing that resilience. (NYT)

* A major oil spill off the California coast has caused dead birds, fish and oil to wash up on Huntington Beach, officials say (CNN)

* China tightens political control of internet giants (AP)

* Robots Take Over Italy’s Vineyards as Wineries Struggle With Worker Shortages (WSJ)

* An Erotica Pioneer Goes From Hero to Villain for Dozens of Authors -- In the constantly evolving romance landscape, Blushing Books has long occupied a specific niche: spanking erotica. Now some of its most successful writers just want their books back. (NYT)

* Geologists Unearth Fully Intact Rock (The Onion)

***

Every breath you take 
And every move you make 
Every bond you break 

Every step you take 

-- The Police

How Pandemics End

Today again the top story is that Merck has developed a possible treatment for Covid-19. The experimental drug, molnupiravir, apparently keeps the virus from replicating.

The pill, which is under FDA review, would be available for patients to take at home, keeping the disease under control and avoiding hospitalization.

It appears to work best when administered soon after a patient is diagnosed and may not be as effective as monoclonal antibodies, but those require a patient to be hospitalized and receive an intravenous transfusion.

So this is how the pandemic may end, similar to how another terrible pandemic, AIDS, was brought under control by similar antiviral drugs.

If so, the toll will still have been terrible -- over 5 million dead globally with 2,000 a day still dying here in the highly-vaccinated U.S.

***

For some reason I love the following story from Reuters: "Old Irish Goats Protect Dublin Hills From Wildfires." 

According to the piece, a "bearded, indigenous breed near extinction love to eat the highly flammable vegetation and the local council hopes grazing by a herd of 25 will leave the north Dublin suburb of Howth less prone to natural wildfires."

***

THE HEADLINES:

* The pill that could change the Covid fight (Politico)

* U.S. Coronavirus Death Toll Surpasses 700,000 Despite Wide Availability of Vaccines (NYT)

* Koch-backed group fuels opposition to school mask mandates, leaked letter shows (WP)

* Inflation Warning Signs Flash Red, Posing Challenge for Washington (NYT)

* Global COVID-19 deaths hit 5 million as Delta variant sweeps the world (Reuters)

* South Pole posts most severe cold season on record, a surprise in a warming world (WP)

* In Portugal, There Is Virtually No One Left to Vaccinate (NYT)

* Merck COVID-19 pill success slams Moderna shares, shakes up healthcare sector (Reuters)

* The Colorado River Is in Crisis. The Walton Family Is Pushing a Solution.-- The first-ever official shortage on the Colorado River has intensified a debate over how to provide water for 40 million people across the Southwest and irrigate fields of thirsty crops. No voice is more influential than that of the Walton family, billionaire heirs to the Walmart fortune. (WSJ)

* As coronavirus cases mount and vaccine mandates spread, holdouts plague police and fire departments (WP)

* California to Mandate Covid-19 Vaccines for All Students as Soon as Next Fall (NYT)

* Apple Doesn’t Make Videogames. But It’s the Hottest Player in Gaming.--CEO Tim Cook quietly turned the iPhone company into a superpower in the videogame business. Now he’s fighting rivals in a multiplayer universe. (WSJ)

* Alaska’s vanishing salmon push Yukon River tribes to brink (AP)

* Afghan girls stuck at home, waiting for Taliban plan to re-open schools (Reuters)

* Women’s March protesters rally across U.S. to protect Roe v. Wade (WP

* Millions of Indian kids have been out of school for 18 months. The break threatens decades of progress. (WP)

* The Rolling Stones release previously unheard 1979 song (Reuters)

* China Unable To Recruit Hackers Fast Enough To Keep Up With Vulnerabilities In U.S. Security Systems (The Onion)