Eclectic Spacewalk — 07/23/17
Here is a sampling of the best content I consumed this past week. Enjoy scratching your brain’s curiosity itch!
Book(s) I am reading — “Intuition Pumps and other tools for thinking & Candide”
Audiobook — “Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion”
Podcast — Future Thinkers REJOICE!, Radio Lab, The Art of Charm, This American Life, Farnam Street Blog
Aric Dromi WHAT UP?! Talk to me!
Top 5 articles/essays: Algorithms & Lies, Silicon Valley will NOT save us, Cities are NOT affordable, Phillip Morris is killing people again, & How the E.U literally starves Africa.
“The recent proliferation in big data models has gone largely unnoticed by the average person, but it’s safe to say that most important moments where people interact with large bureaucratic systems now involve an algorithm in the form of a scoring system. Getting into college, getting a job, being assessed as a worker, getting a credit card or insurance, voting, and even policing are in many cases done algorithmically. Moreover, the technology introduced into these systematic decisions is largely opaque, even to their creators, and has so far largely escaped meaningful regulation, even when it fails. That makes the question of which of these algorithms are working on our behalf even more important and urgent…
Even more to the point, though, is the question of how involved the investigation of algorithms would have to be. The current nature of algorithms is secret, proprietary code, protected as the “secret sauce” of corporations. They’re so secret that most online scoring systems aren’t even apparent to the people targeted by them. That means those people also don’t know the score they’ve been given, nor can they complain about or contest those scores. Most important, they typically won’t know if something unfair has happened to them…
One of the biggest obstacles to this is that Google, Facebook, or for that matter Amazon, don’t allow testing of multiple personas — or online profiles — by outside researchers. Since those companies offer tailored and personalised service, the only way to see what that service looks like would be to take on the profile of multiple people, but that is not allowed. Think about that in the context of the VW testing: it would be like saying research teams could not have control of a car to test its emissions. We need to demand more access and ongoing monitoring, especially once we catch them in illegal acts. For that matter, entire industries, such as algorithms for insurance and hiring, should be subject to these monitors, not just individual culprits.
It’s time to gird ourselves for a fight. It will eventually be a technological arms race, but it starts, now, as a political fight. We need to demand evidence that algorithms with the potential to harm us be shown to be acting fairly, legally, and consistently. When we find problems, we need to enforce our laws with sufficiently hefty fines that companies don’t find it profitable to cheat in the first place. This is the time to start demanding that the machines work for us, and not the other way around.”
“The increasing power of Silicon Valley tech billionaires means the increasing influence of a political philosophy that would be catastrophic for ordinary people, giving them less and less control over their workplaces, schools, and government, while funneling wealth upward to further enrich a tiny minority of people at the top. But, like the Juicero, proposals that would only serve to bilk people of their money for nothing in return will come disguised beneath a thick layer of vacuous, dishonest hype…
The answer lies in the concept’s malleability; there are many kinds of “UBI,” and the socialist UBI and the Silicon Valley UBI are not one and the same. One of them is an attempt to create a world of equality and prosperity for all. The other is an attempt to offer bare subsistence as a replacement for government programs, while leaving a fundamentally unequal economic and power structure fully in place.”
“In many of the world’s urban centers, homes are becoming prohibitively expensive for people with moderate incomes. As a city’s real-estate prices rise, some inhabitants may feel compelled to leave. Of course, if that inhabitant already owned a house there that they can sell, they may regard the price increase as a windfall that they can claim by departing. If not, however, they may be forced out with no compensation…
As such people depart, an expensive city gradually becomes an enclave of high-income households, and begins to take on their values. With people of various income levels increasingly divided by geography, income inequality can worsen and the risk of social polarization — and even serious conflict — can grow….
In some cases, a city may be on its way to becoming a “great city,” and market forces should be allowed to drive out lower-income people who can’t participate fully in this greatness to make way for those who can. But, more often, a city with a high housing-price-to-income ratio is less a “great city” than a supply-constrained one lacking in empathy, humanitarian impulse, and, increasingly, diversity. And that creates fertile ground for dangerous animosities.”
The Philip Morris Files
Inside the campaign to subvert the world’s anti-smoking treaty
www.reuters.com
“The world’s largest publicly traded tobacco company is deploying its vast resources against international efforts to reduce smoking. Internal documents uncovered by Reuters reveal details of the secret operation…
The tobacco giant is pushing Marlboros in colorful ads at kiosks and handing out free smokes at parties frequented by young adults — tactics that break India’s anti-smoking laws, government officials say. Internal documents uncovered by Reuters illuminate the strategy.”
“There are at least three ways in which EU policies affect Africa’s ability to address its agricultural and food challenges: tariff escalation; technological innovation and food export preferences…
The impact of such charges goes well beyond lost export opportunities. They suppress technological innovation and industrial development among African countries. The practice denies the continent the ability to acquire, adopt and diffuse technologies used in food processing. It explains to some extent the low level of investment in Africa’s food processing enterprises.”
Neoliberalism! Oh wait, that isn’t a good thing…
“The third meaning of “neoliberalism,” most often used in academic circles, encompasses market supremacy — or the extension of markets or market-like logic to more and more spheres of life. This, in turn, has a significant influence on our subjectivity: how we view ourselves, our society, and our roles in it. One insight here is that markets don’t occur naturally but are instead constructed through law and practices, and those practices can be extended into realms well beyond traditional markets.
Another insight is that market exchanges can create an ethos that ends up shaping more and more human behavior; we can increasingly view ourselves as little more than human capital maximizing our market values…
We can leave it to the historians to piece together why and how Democrats made the decision to shift course in the 1980s, emphasizing means testing, privatization of key government services, education as a cure-all, and a trusting attitude toward large business. But they did, and we have to figure out what comes next. We need a full break with what happened before, both because the times are different and because the recent solutions — whatever word you use to describe them — aren’t cutting it anymore.”
“To understand Chait’s interpretation of the term, we must first define it. What the fuck is neoliberalism? Simply put, neoliberalism is an economic and political doctrine that characterizes deference to the free market and an inclination towards privatization, deregulation, and uninhibited free trade. Famous neoliberals (who don’t call themselves neoliberals) include the Clintons and basically any centrist or conservative politicians from the latter quarter of last century. Neoliberalism, in the Clintonian sense, is a paean to capitalism that masquerades as a defender of social democracy…
All of the hallmark facets of neoliberalism — competition, free markets, deregulation, unchecked inequality — also, of course, characterize the policies of the Republican Party. But despite the Democrats’ relative move to the left on social issues (so long as they don’t throw reproductive rights under the bus anytime soon) the party’s fundamental economic ideology is that too much government intervention in the economy, too much regulation, and too heavy of an expansion of the safety net are all bad things. If Chait is right about one thing, it’s that the Democrats “have never been a left-wing, labor-dominated socialist party.” And what’s more confusing is that all of these words — centrist, neoliberal, corporatist — all mean a similar thing and describe a particular type of politician. There’s a better, all-encompassing description of politicians from both parties: capitalist.”
“Leontief’s call for humility some 40 years ago stands as a reminder that the same religions that can speak up for human freedom and dignity when in opposition, can become obsessed with their rightness and the need to purge others of their wickedness once they attain power. When the church retains its distance from power, and a modest expectation about what it can achieve, it can stir our minds to envision new possibilities and even new worlds. Once economists apply this kind of sceptical scientific method to a human realm in which ultimate reality may never be fully discernible, they will probably find themselves retreating from dogmatism in their claims.
Paradoxically, therefore, as economics becomes more truly scientific, it will become less of a science. Acknowledging these limitations will free it to serve us once more.”
“Myth 1: Free market-driven development is the best mechanism to build vibrant economies, using the private sector to encourage growth and more opportunities for all, including the poor.
Myth 2: Countries should sustain their development through foreign direct investment.
Myth 3: Large-scale urbanization is necessary and an inevitable step for developing countries seeking to modernize through industrialization, manufacturing and sustained productivity growth.
Myth 4: The best way to understand productivity so as to grow economies is to measure it as how quickly and how cheaply we can produce something.
Myth 5: We can fight climate change through the free market and technological innovation instead of actual hard limits on carbon emissions and consumption.
The effects of these neoliberal myths have already caused a great deal of harm, but it would catastrophic if they are embraced by the world’s largest economies ― all of which, with the exception of the United States, are in the developing world. If this happens, the world will continue to see an escalation of social unrest and will face a bleak future as it continues to pursue a resource-intense economic model. It’s time for these myths to die, and for the developing world to create bold new ideas that better fit its circumstances.”
DATA IN OUR DYSTOPIC WORLD!
“Another week, another record-breaking AI research study released by Google — this time with results that are a reminder of a crucial business dynamic of the current AI boom. The ecosystem of tech companies that consumers and the economy increasingly depend on is traditionally said to be kept innovative and un-monopolistic by disruption, the process whereby smaller companies upend larger ones. But when competition in tech depends on machine learning systems powered by huge stockpiles of data, slaying a tech giant may be harder than ever…
Data hoarding is already well established as a defensive strategy among AI-centric companies. Google, Microsoft and others have open-sourced lots of software, and even hardware designs, but are less free with the kind data that makes such tools useful. Tech companies do release data: Last year, Google released a vast dataset drawn from more than 7 million YouTube videos, and Salesforce opened up one drawn from Wikipedia to help algorithms work with language. But Luke de Oliveira, a partner at AI development lab Manifold and a visiting researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, says that (as you might expect) such releases don’t usually offer much of value to potential competitors. “These are never datasets that are truly crucial for the continued market position of a product,” he says.”
“Now I don’t want to be all grim … Wait, no fuck that, there is no place for upsides in this piece of text. I’m not leaving you with a happy ending.
Glass’ introduction to the work space is the first step into a world far scarier than the one portrayed by the automation of jobs. It’s the world of automation of productivity, in which algorithms determine that we can type quicker, walk faster, lift more, and think less.”
“Amazon is considering handing transcripts of everything Alexa hears over to third-party developers, according to sources close to the matter cited in a report from The Information…
That’s not particularly reassuring. It’s common for data-gorging companies to point to a lack of identity details and equate that lack to a privacy shield. But in these days of Big Data, the claim has been proved to be flawed. After all, as we’ve noted in the past, data points that are individually innocuous can be enormously powerful and revealing when aggregated. That is, in fact, the essence of Big Data.”
SCIENCE of the SMALLEST to the BIGGEST!
“Today, the Micius team announced the results of its first experiments. The team created the first satellite-to-ground quantum network, in the process smashing the record for the longest distance over which entanglement has been measured. And they’ve used this quantum network to teleport the first object from the ground to orbit.
Teleportation has become a standard operation in quantum optics labs around the world. The technique relies on the strange phenomenon of entanglement. This occurs when two quantum objects, such as photons, form at the same instant and point in space and so share the same existence. In technical terms, they are described by the same wave function.”
“Physicists have reported some of the strongest evidence yet that that the quantum world does not obey local realism by demonstrating new evidence for the existence of quantum entanglement. By performing an essentially loophole-free Bell test, they have shown that two atoms separated by a distance of a quarter of a mile share correlations that should be impossible under the hypothesis of local realism, and are most likely explained by quantum entanglement…
The probability that the observed correlations can be explained by local realism due to some unknown “hidden variables” rather than entanglement is less than one in a billion, the physicists write in their paper published in Physical Review Letters. By accounting for all of their accumulated data, taken over the course of seven months, that probability drops even further, down to about one in ten quadrillion (the number 1 followed by 16 zeros). This means that the quantum world violates either locality (that distant objects cannot influence each other in less than a certain amount of time) or realism (that objects exist whether or not someone measures them), or possibly both.”
“Indian astronomers have discovered a huge new supercluster of galaxies 4 billion light-years away in the constellation of Pisces. The object, known as the Saraswati supercluster, stretches for 600 million light-years across and has a mass of 20 million billion Suns, or about 20,000 Milky Ways.
The discovery, reported in the Astrophysical Journal, throws a spanner in the works of the current cosmological model. The supercluster is too big to be already in place 10 billion years after the Big Bang (which is when we are seeing it). It contains 43 clusters of galaxies, and according to the current model, shouldn’t have had time to accumulate to this size.”
Journalism & Fake News—
“The mainstream media evidently has two jobs. One is to legitimize the warlike inhumanity of the one percent. The other is to cut, gut, and field dress the progressive left and leave it for dead. The first is a dire task, taken up with grave and solicitous care, while the latter is a sport, where the slander and calumny flow freely, generally sans justification or evidence. Both tasks require immunity to hypocrisy, however, since to do either is to bathe in the fetid waters of duplicity. Given the glibness and piety with which these tasks are dispatched, this does not seem to be a problem for the Pharisees and scribes at the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, and beyond…
Finally, the decision to act comes. Even the noblest among us have a breaking point. This, of course, is a trope taken from tinseltown: we’ve all seen the well-bred burgher absorb slings and arrows from some lothario and romantic rival for a woman’s affection. Eventually, once the audience has been sufficiently enraged, the high-born cosmopolite can abide no more, and the corrupted casanova gets his comeuppance (usually a duel or fisticuffs). Recall Colin Firth finally having a go at Hugh Grant’s shifty rogue in Bridget Jones’ Diary. At the level of nations, the wayward country gets its just desserts in the form of hellfire missiles and artillery rounds, plus shahada-reciting throngs of jihadists routing towns and villages. As gays are tossed from buildings and villagers of the wrong faith beheaded, crusty imperialists like the hellbound Zbigniew Brzezinski observe from afar, impervious to the bloodshed so long as their strategic aims are achieved…
But all this begs the question, why would anyone believe what the mainstream media and its stable of government sources have to say in the first place? Have you thought lately about the avalanche of lies organizations like the CIA have fed you, unedited, straight through the mouth of the mainstream? They lied to you about Iraq. They lied to you about Syria. They lied to you about Russian activity in Ukraine. They lied to you about the downing of the Malaysian jet in Ukraine. Lying is the CIA’s modus operandi, and what’s worse, the national intelligence agencies don’t work for you, and your safety is not their priority. They work for the White House and the Pentagon, who serve the interests of our imperial plutocracy, which has long been laser-focused on exploiting weaker nations abroad under the cloak of humanitarianism and democracy promotion…
This seems like naiveté, the very thing that got Orgon in trouble in the first place. And this is the same kind of naiveté one sees among popular liberal progressives like Sanders and Corbyn. Despite being so unrepentantly vilified by the media, despite being scarred by such lupine savagery from their own parties, they continue to make feckless appeals to authority for lenience and grace. Please, our capitalist benefactors, have mercy on us. Consider single-payer. Fund the NHS. Be more judicious in your imperial wars. But like Orgon asking for clemency on Tartuffe’s behalf, in the faint hope that this inveterate hypocrite will reform himself, there is little hope that such base entreaties will affect the slightest feeling of solidarity or benevolence at the heart of a capitalist system that is, in essence, heartless.”

“Just 6 percent of Americans think Russia is the top issue, yet nightly newscasts devoted 75 percent of their airtime to the story. Meanwhile, Americans’ biggest concern, health care, only garnered 4 percent of the major networks’ total coverage.
The media have shown how drastically out of step they are with their own audience. If they want to earn back their hemorrhaging Nielsen numbers, perhaps they can spend time on something other than Russia Russia Russia.”
“Epidemics are hard to cover. Navigating the gaps between the private, personal, and societal and managing to be relate-able while also true to science is a tough part of health reporting, generally. Doing those things in the middle of public panic — and its attendant misinformation — requires deftness. And performing them while also minding the social issues that accompany every epidemic means reporters have to dig deep, both into multiple disciplines and into ethics. With multiple competing narratives, politics, and the sheer scale of disease, it’s often easy to forget the individuals who suffer…
That’s not to say the country’s fully embraced the wisdom of public health, even for white patients. The war on drugs is still raging, reinvigorated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Criminalization of women who give birth while addicted still penalizes even white women. And that $45 billion in the Senate package also comes with massive cuts to Medicaid, which is the largest insurer at the front lines of the crisis. But responsible journalism like Catherine Saint Louis’s contributes to a sense that the tide is turning, and that perhaps the country will figure out a sensible drug policy. At least, for these victims.”
“The most popular form of fake news is not that which looks to influence political votes but that which makes money from advertising. Due to the nature of social media, which until recently favoured virality over truth, coupled with a ‘virtually untraceable’ ad tech value chain, teenagers in Macedonia found a way to “print money”, as Dr Laura Dornheim, head of public affairs at Adblock Plus puts it…
The key lies in better educating internet users in media literacy. Coles believes the rapid rise of fake news provides clear evidence that there is a need for more critical awareness online. In April, Facebook introduced an educational list on its platform that featured bullet points on how to spot fake news, but this was live for only a few days.
By any means, Facebook admits that its core value of “just connecting people” isn’t good enough anymore, but Walker is confident that technology has solved similar issues before, and can do so again.”
“1. I teach the elements of journalism, including requiring students to produce articles from start to finish. As a result, students learn to be skeptical about the veracity of a news or opinion piece that does not attribute quotes, cite or link to crucial information, tries to sell the reader a product, or fails to abide by the inverted pyramid structure. This year, my students also wrote opinion articles about several controversial issues that link history to current events, such as whether the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Andrew Jackson shared similar characteristics.
2. I model ways to use and browse social media. With the projector on, I show which stories I repost and comment on — mostly from award-winning, established news outlets. One senior noted: “I paid close attention to the types of articles that came up in your social media timelines. I quickly started to check out those same sources, which gave me a better sense of where I should get my news — certainly not the first news alert that happens to pop up.”
3. I am shifting my approaches after speaking with experts. For one, I’ve decided to abandon checklists that seek to ferret out fake news since connecting with Sam Wineburg, professor of education and history at Stanford University and lead author of the forthcoming study “The Challenge That’s Bigger Than Fake News: Teaching Students to Engage in Civic Online Reasoning.”
THE BRAIN
“You can call it “post-truth,” you can call it “fake news,” or you can, as Kellyanne Conway helpfully suggested on Meet the Press over the weekend, call it “alternative facts.” Or you can borrow Dan Rather’s phrasing from earlier this year: “A lie, is a lie, is a lie.” In a fantastic recent piece for Politico, psychology writer Maria Konnikova investigates 20 years’ worth of research on what happens when your brain is overloaded with a constant stream of untruths, and comes to a bleak forecast for the next four years. In short: Sorting fact from fiction can become so exhausting that, after a while, your brain simply stops trying.”
“In the 1980s, a psychologist named James Prochaska developed the Transtheoretical Model (TTM) based on research showing that people generally don’t “Just Do It,” as Nike (or a New Year’s resolution) might have it, but instead tend to move through a series of stages before modifying behaviors they want to change. The five stages look like this:
Stage 1: Pre-contemplation
Stage 2: Contemplation
Stage 3: Preparation
Stage 4: Action
Stage 5: Maintenance
So let’s say you want to make a change: exercise more, eat healthier, switch jobs, get out of a problematic relationship, apply to graduate school, stop drinking, or even try therapy for the first time. What keeps people from taking action? According to this model, change involves a series of subtle preparatory adjustments…
You can think and think about change, but ultimately you’ll have to start. Yes, change is hard. Yes, it involves taking responsibility for your life. Yes, it requires you to give up the familiar, which no matter how unpleasant can still feel comforting. And yes, change will put you face-to-face with loss. But what’s beautiful about this loss is that while you might have to give up the hope for a better past or a less painful present, the future is squarely in your court.”
“Drugs, pollution and poverty make it hard for lots of people to think clearly. It’s a personal tragedy and a drag on the economy…
When all these factors are added up, they represent a severe threat not just to Americans’ quality of life, but to the productivity of the U.S. workforce. Policy makers, economists and other intellectuals should start thinking more about how to beat back this multipronged assault on national clear-headedness.”
Voter Fraud? Nah…
“The Brennan Center’s seminal report “The Truth About Voter Fraud” conclusively demonstrated most allegations of fraud turn out to be baseless — and that of the few allegations remaining, most reveal election irregularities and other forms of election misconduct. And numerous other studies have reached the same conclusion.
Voter fraud is not acceptable in our elections, but we must find solutions that address actual problems instead of imposing policies that make it harder for millions of eligible Americans to participate in our democracy.”
“Academic studies repeatedly show that election fraud is exceedingly rare. “The data show Americans are more likely to be struck by lightning than commit election fraud,” says Rudy Mehrbani, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. And yet widespread fraud is received wisdom for some on the right.”
“The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School launched a new, bipartisan initiative today called the “Defending Digital Democracy” (DDD) Project. Co-led by the former campaign managers for Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney and experts from the national security and technology communities, including Facebook and Google, the project aims to identify and recommend strategies, tools, and technology to protect democratic processes and systems from cyber and information attacks. By creating a unique and bipartisan team comprised of top-notch political operatives and leaders in the cyber and national security world, DDD intends to offer concrete solutions to an urgent problem.
The Project has enlisted Marc Elias of Perkins Cole and Ben Ginsberg of Jones Day, two of the top respective Democratic and Republican election lawyers in the country, to advise the project, along with a bipartisan senior advisory group made up of leaders in technology, cyber security, and national security, including:
Heather Adkins, Director, Information Security and Privacy — Google;
Dmitri Alperovich, Co-Founder and CTO — CrowdStrike;
Stuart Holliday, President and CEO — Meridian International Center; former United States Ambassador for Special Political Affairs at the United Nations;
Nicco Mele, Director, Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy — Harvard Kennedy School;
Debora Plunkett, former Director — National Security Agency’s Information Assurance Directorate;
Suzanne E. Spaulding, former Under Secretary — National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD) at the Department of Homeland Security.
Alex Stamos, Chief Security Officer — Facebook.”
Two words to describe this: FUCKING GROSS. Big Business/Government bias is NOT going to help the situation!
Miscellaneous —
“These are among the examples cited in a sobering new report released by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services. The inspector general found that heavy painkiller use and abuse remains a serious problem in Medicare’s prescription drug program, known as Part D, which serves more than 43 million seniors and disabled people. Among the findings:
Of the one-third of Medicare beneficiaries in Part D (or roughly 14.4 million people) who filled at least one prescription for an opioid in 2016, some 3.6 million received the painkillers for at least six months.
Consistent with data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there were wide geographic differences in prescribing patterns. Alabama and Mississippi had the highest proportions of patients taking prescription painkillers — more than 45 percent each — while Hawaii and New York had the lowest — 22 percent or less.
More than half a million beneficiaries received high doses of opioids for at least three months, meaning they took the equivalent of 12 tablets a day of 10-milligram Vicodin. The figure does not include patients who have cancer or those who are in hospice care, for whom such doses may be appropriate.
Almost 70,000 beneficiaries received what the inspector general labeled as extreme amounts of the drugs — an average daily consumption for the year that was more than 2 1/2 times the level the CDC recommends avoiding. Such doses put patients at an increased risk of overdose death. Extreme prescribing could also indicate that a patient’s identity has been stolen, or that the patient is diverting medications for resale.
Some 22,000 beneficiaries seem to be doctor shopping — obtaining large amounts of the drugs prescribed by four or more doctors and filled at four or more pharmacies. All states except for Missouri operate Prescription Drug Monitoring Program databases that allow doctors to check whether their patients have received drugs from other doctors before writing their own prescriptions.
More than 400 doctors, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants had questionable prescribing patterns for the beneficiaries most at risk (meaning those that took extreme doses of the drugs or showed signs of doctor shopping). One Missouri prescriber wrote an average of 31 opioid prescriptions each for 112 patients on Medicare. And four doctors in the same Texas practice ordered opioids for more than 56 beneficiaries who seemed to be doctor shopping. “The patterns of these 401 prescribers are far outside the norm and warrant further scrutiny,” the inspector general said.”
“Because of the UK’s dramatic shift from student grants to loans, a startling report from the Institute for Financial Studies predicts that 77.4% of university graduates in the UK’s class of 2017 will not repay their full student loan obligations. This is up from 41.5% just six years ago in 2011.
The shift came in the wake of austerity measures that phased out tuition assistance with no repayment requirement.”
“Read past the first paragraphs of our Declaration of Independence and it’s all about King George III and his abuses of power. Our Constitution encodes checks and balances and a separation of powers. Our economic system rests on antitrust law, which is designed to keep monopolies from crushing smaller competitors and accumulating too much power.
So if large numbers of Americans see Democrats as the party of entrenched elites who exert power over the little people, then Democrats have lost the messaging battle that ultimately determines who prevails and who doesn’t in our elections.”
“So what is this essay about? Simply put, I want to suggest that in a perfect world Section 30121 would distinguish between foreign governments involving themselves in U.S. elections and foreign nationals doing so. Unfortunately, we don’t live in that perfect world because of the Supreme Court.
What is the rationale for our law forbidding foreigners from meddling in our elections? As Prof. Hasen notes in the Slate piece linked above, unlike limitations on domestic campaign finance — which serve an anti-corruption purpose — the foreign contribution ban serves a different (or additional) purpose: It aims to preserve our democracy for, well, us — meaning Americans.
That explains why, during the 2010 State of the Union, Justice Alito mouthed “not true” when President Obama characterized the Citizens United decision as “open[ing] the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections.”
“Seven months later, Pence is still lying, only now the lies have become more dangerous. Today, Americans face a dual threat from Pence: first, in his capacity as vice president and as a key player in an administration rife with scandal and possibly treasonous activity; and second, as the potential inheritor of the tarnished presidency as talk of impeachment accelerates. Mike Pence spent months trying to hide the truth about Donald Trump. It is important that Americans do not make the same mistake with Pence.
Impeaching Trump, in other words, would not free the US from the dark specter of collusion and betrayal that has swept over it since Trump took power. Although Trump has lowered the bar for president immeasurably, Americans must not forget that behind Pence’s smooth smile is a calculating politician with a track record of oppressive policymaking and a knack for dishonesty. The answer to the question “Trump or Pence?” is always “neither.”
“On June 20, at a national summit on violent crime from which civil rights advocates were excluded, Sessions named urban crime as a motivating factor for Department of Justice new priorities. On Tuesday, Sessions explicitly cited the needs of minority communities as a justification for his policy changes. Sessions has claimed that the Obama Justice Department’s policies resulted in a surge of violent crime. However, there is no evidence that federal charging decisions had anything to do with crime rates, which rose slightly in 2015 but remain at historic lows.”
“Science fiction can help. Maybe you associate it with spaceships and aliens, but science fiction offers more than escapism. By presenting plausible alternative realities, science fiction stories empower us to confront not just what we think but also how we think and why we think it. They reveal how fragile the status quo is, and how malleable the future can be…
Science fiction isn’t useful because it’s predictive. It’s useful because it reframes our perspective on the world. Like international travel or meditation, it creates space for us to question our assumptions. Assumptions locked top 19th-century minds into believing that cities were doomed to drown in horse manure. Assumptions toppled Kodak despite the fact that its engineers built the first digital camera in 1975. Assumptions are a luxury true leaders can’t afford.
But assumptions are notoriously hard to beat back, and for a very good reason: They’re useful. They provide us with cognitive shortcuts for making sense of the world. They make us more efficient and productive. The problem is that they fail to update when that world changes, and they stand in our way when we could change the world.”
Short Films —
Lectures —
Documentary —

