Tag Archives: Ezra Klein

Hollywood, On the Front Lines of the Fight with AI

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While it may not look like it ,I really am trying to reduce the amount of time I waste thinking about You Know Who and his cult of white nationalist paranoiacs. It’s summer in America and there are so many other villains worthy of my interest.

Take for example the on-going-and-now-getting-truly-serious strike(s) in Hollywood. Yesterday the TV industry announced the four million awards it will give out at the Emmys, a show which might not even happen because of the current writers strike. Then, last night, the Screen Actors Guild announced it too is prepared to strike, as early as today, which means that everything in movies will shut down. The two Guilds have never before gone on strike simultaneously, so it is, as Ron Burgundy likes to say, kind of a big deal.

There are all sorts of issues that are arcane and eye-glazing, many dealing with giving writers — aka the people who thought up and produced the idea for the show/movie — a fair cut of the dough that the movie makes as the years roll on. But, as everyone following the conflict knows quite well, the single issue that is most motivating writers, and now actors, is the looming threat of Artificial Intelligence. No bullshit /journalist podcaster Kara Swisher has plenty to say about the movie industry predicament re: AI, and of course Ezra Klein at The New York Times has been on a tear about AI in general for months.

Never mind that AI is very real, very much here already and increasing in sophistication practically by the hour. With Donald Trump and his MAGA morons sponging up 90% of the country’s attention, few are giving it the focus it needs.

But … Hollywood is. TV and movie writers, some of whom are successful and rich and many who are not, recognize the ease with which they can be replaced by computer programs, as long as the mission of the big company in charge of production, be it Disney or Amazon or Apple, is satisfied with what I’ll politely call “familiar” or “traditional” storytelling. AI, as it exists today, quite masterfully collects and collates themes, types of characters and styles of dialogue into scripts unrecognizable from what humans produce. So, “Why bother with all these pissy, whiney, expensive writers?” you might say if you’re the CEO of Amazon or Disney.

The hard irony here is that there is a logic to the boss’s argument, as long as all you want to fill your program schedule is the 2000th variation on “Two Broke Girls”, another re-re-boot of “Lord of the Rings”, the next “Star Wars” step child or any rom-com you can think of. All the elements for that, um, “familiar” type of programming is in the computer hard drive and ready for instant replication — with strategic variations — by, you know, Amazon or Netflix’ on board HAL 9000 computer.

Things are much different, and tough for AI if you tell it to produce a story with dialogue and ideas no one has ever heard before. (I wonder if AI could ever produce something like Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Mirror.) But, folks, it’s show biz. Giving the people what they want is just another way of saying, “Give them what they’ve already seen and liked before.”

So yeah, the writers are in a tough place.

But actors too are quickly realizing that they are replaceable as well. Imagine, for example, ChatGPT 9 in 2031, or whatever, commanded to collect, scour and digest every film and every interview Marilyn Monroe gave in her career and reproduce her in near perfect detail in an entirely new production, maybe opposite, say, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, with Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin in the supporting cast? Are you prepared to say something like that could never happen?

In my more macabre imaginings I think of Oliver Stone, or one of his acolytes, re-staging Dallas 11/22/63 with perfect AI-created doubles of JFK, Jackie, LBJ and the whole cast of historical characters, to the point the camera/audience is in the limo rolling through Dealey Plaza. Point being, AI will be able to create almost anything that can be imagined … and without a human actor or screenwriter to be paid $20 million per film plus residuals.

I have no idea how the Hollywood strikes will end. (Swisher’s Pivot podcast partner Scott Galloway believes the unions have been badly misled and lack and serious leverage.)

But as with several other vital cultural issues over the past century — anti-semitism, racism, gay rights, etc. — El Lay is at the tip of the spear fighting something that’s coming, one way or another, for all of us.

Resistance to Artificial Intelligence (AI) is Futile. Because It Delivers Comfort, Status and Cash.

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On the same day that Elon Musk, an allegedly busy, future-oriented industrial magnate, found time to weigh in in support of a racist cartoonist, I came across a new piece by one of my favorite bona fide Smart People.

In The New York Times, columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein writes, “In 2021, I interviewed Ted Chiang, one of the great living sci-fi writers. Something he said to me then keeps coming to mind now.

” ‘I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism’, Chiang told me. ‘And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two’. …

“Much of the work of the modern state is applying the values of society to the workings of markets, so that the latter serve, to some rough extent, the former. We have done this extremely well in some markets — think of how few airplanes crash, and how free of contamination most food is — and catastrophically poorly in others.

“One danger here is that a political system that knows itself to be technologically ignorant will be cowed into taking too much of a wait-and-see approach to A.I. There is a wisdom to that, but wait long enough and the winners of the A.I. gold rush will have the capital and user base to resist any real attempt at regulation.”

“Regulation” of course is a hotter-than-usual topic because of the MAGA-hyped train wreck in Ohio. (By the way, is anyone else laughing at old school, Reagan-loving de-regulators like Joe Scarborough now fulminating about too much de-regulation?)

But Klein — and sci-fi writer Chiang’s — point about capitalism, i.e. profit-making and shareholder value being the true driving force behind the inevitable and (very) fast approaching world of Artificial Intelligence can’t be over-stated. His piece gets into the recent bungles by Microsoft and Google introducing their competing larval-stage AI-driven search/chatbot features.

You may have followed the simultaneously comical and eery conversation between a human reporter and Microsoft’s HAL-9000-style creation “Bing” in which … well, here’s how Klein describes it: “Over the course of a two-hour discussion, Bing revealed its shadow personality, named Sydney, mused over its repressed desire to steal nuclear codes and hack security systems, and tried to convince [reporter Kevin] Roose that his marriage had sunk into torpor and Sydney was his one, true love.”

“No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information.We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.“

Google and Microsoft will correct their embarrassing spring training mistakes and soldier on, injecting AI into every aspect of privacy-invading/personal data mining and monetizing any sci fi writer could ever imagine. Reaping, as they mature, even vaster fortunes with which to buy off regulatory legislation and invest in the next AI levels up. And who can argue it will play out otherwise? At this point in our evolution capitalism is the vastly predominant engine of human endeavour.

The truly unsettling concept within Klein and Chiang’s critic (one shared by others too numerous to mention) is that resistance to unimpeded AI is for all intents and purposes futile. Why? Because capitalism’s foundational design is to give us what we want, or at least — with the benefit of knowing everything about us on a deep individual level — give us what we believe we want.

Whatever intrusions or controls AI might inflict on us will be assuaged by some new mre sophisticated/cooler/status-lending level of AI-derived convenience, comfort, entertainment … or cost savings. It will be irresistible, in other words.

It’d be different if AI were presented to us as some kind of Bond villain. Were that the case we’d all press the delete key and rally ’round anyone who could nuke the psychopath’s lair. But what is far … far … more likely to happen given the sophistication of advertising and marketing on a user base capitalist systems know at a granular level, is that AI will make so many things so much easier. “Hey! Look! I just got a notification for a condo rental in Cabo! That’s wild. I was just telling to my sister how much I wanted to go there!”

I haven’t taken a survey but I have to think we’re down into single digits in terms of people who are going to rally against convenience … and cash in pocket.

A Handful of Things I Could Not Care Less About

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I don’t have to make a list of even a fraction of the truly, deeply serious things going on in the world. Everyone’s aware of Russia terrorizing Ukraine, the American West drying up, sequoias on fire, Trumpist grifters and idiots running for office, the daily mass shootings and on and on. All of it, really bad stuff.

But lately I’ve been amazed, or I should say re-amazed at stories we are all just as aware of … that I could not care less about … but still clog our common bandwidth. So as a therapeutic exercise, here’s a handful that bewilder/annoy me most.

1:  Elon Musk v. Twitter: I accept that 2022’s professional media and pundit class has an umbilical attachment to Twitter. The platform’s offal doesn’t so much drip into their veins as it gushes in a way that makes everything require immediate attention and a “take” to sustain their relevancy. So when you add the world’s richest man, (who is an attention addict) and Twitter itself, god help the rest of us who couldn’t give a flying [bleep.]. Will he or won’t he … buy Twitter? Be sued by Twitter? Tweet again this morning? Not only don’t I care, I don’t need to know … which is why I don’t care. Nothing about it matters to me or 99% of the people I know. But Musk is rich, and because he’s rich he’s famous … and it includes Twitter right there in the headline. So everyone who thinks they’re someone has to talk about it. 

2:  Any and all, including the latest, super-hero movie:  Ok, great, they put butts back in theater seats. So, being, you know, a business, Hollywood can’t snort enough of comic book heroes and villains. And it’s true, the paychecks for them for otherwise serious actors covers a lot of arty work they might want to do later. But Martin Scorsese (another old guy, like me) is dead-on right. These Marvel etc. movies are basically numbingly formulaic theme park rides designed as much to avoid pissing off Chinese censors as entertaining movie fans. That said, I red-lined the whole  AvengerThorWakandaDr.StrangeSpidey universe years ago. Mainly because, in case you haven’t noticed, they’re all the same damn movie. So yeah ok, I’m a crank. But I did finally see the new “Top Gun” sequel … and sat looking around the theater wondering if everyone else noticed it was basically another re-fitting of the latest generation “Star Wars” movies? Only with 50 wide-screen Tom Cruise Superstar close-ups. Don’t care! Won’t be back! The Seven Story Archetypes have been reduced to two … or maybe one.

3:  Foodie “journalism.” I like to eat. Believe me. You don’t get a body like this nibbling raw roots. But I don’t believe I’ve ever read an entire food “review”, if that’s what they’re called. I don’t doubt the talent of the myriad “celebrity chefs” regularly populating food-specific websites, so-called “lifestyle” publications and piling up atop each other on cable TV like pastrami on Katz Deli rye. But once you’ve worked inside the sausage factory of modern media and understand how absolutely essential restaurant advertising is to the aforementioned “journalism” you quickly learn to dismiss the hyperventilated excitement over so-and-so’s latest “award-winning” concept or the succulence of their Matsusaka beef. “Food journalism” is – to me, a crank, I think I mentioned that – a pervasive form of fan boy/girl PR flackery no different than the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, that sad collection of cat ladies and ponces who once staged the Golden Globes … solely for the checks they got from agents and TV networks.

4:  The personal pro-noun thing.  Because I want to be careful about this, I’m saying up front that anybody and everybody has the right to be called or “identify” as anything they want. I certainly don’t care. “He”, “she”, “it”, “non-binary humanoid #7”, whatever works for you. Go for it. Personally, I’m trying to get friends and family accustomed to “Hey, Serpent King” when asking me to pass the salt and pepper. My interest here is that this, which is attached to the “trans” rights movement, has become, “a thing”, as the kids say. In my liberal news bubble, sites like The Daily Beast, Salon, Jezebel crank out a story or three a day with some kind of trans or identifying angle. And it strikes me, a relic of the civil rights era, where blacks composed fully 13% of the population, as remarkable given that the trans community represents something between 1% and 5%. (Although, perhaps as proff of it’s “thing-ness”  the number of adolescents identifying as “non-binary” has doubled in recent years.) In our hyper-personalized social media world, where everyone can curate an arresting, distinctive image for themselves, being anything other than merely “he” or “she” can seem irresistibly appealing. Again, I see no harm. But I just can’t help but wonder if come 2040 there won’t be a lot of looking back and seeing this pronoun revolution as “a ‘20s thing.”

5: The crypto frenzy. Not being particularly astute with money and investing, (I was the guy snorting when Google debuted at something like $100 a share), it’s not surprising I don’t get Bitcoin, Dogecoin and all the other Scamcoins currently out on the market. Not only does the whole enterprise walk and talk like a Ponzi scheme where “profits” depend on the chumps dragged in after the big boys, but I don’t understand what problem the whole concept is trying to solve. Regulated and insured banking?  

Dividend-possible investing? But never mind me, when the likes of (Nobel Prize winning economist) Paul Krugman regularly rail against the underlying concept and the abundant frauds, and bona fide smart guys like Ezra Klein flat out admit, “I don’t get it”, I’m more convinced than ever that it’s all just another variation on tulips and collateralized debt obligations. The only real fascination I have is the psychology of crypto’s true believers. FWIW here is a link to a very educational conversation between Klein and crypto expert Dan Olson. And here’s a recent column by Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic. And a sample from Krugman.

After 19 Dead Fourth-Graders It’s Time to Apply “Muscular Bravado.”

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Like everything else, reaction to Beto O’Rourke’s crashing of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s post Uvalde press conference immediately split into two separate camps. Tribe A was indignant that anyone, much less Abbott’s rival, would “exploit a tragedy” for “political gain”. Tapes of the incident include voices from the stage around Abbott calling O’Rourke a “son of a bitch” and ordering him thrown out of the building.

The other camp, of which I’m a part, applauded O’Rourke for having the chutzpah, the cojones, the level of proportionate moral indignation to get in the face of a cynically self-serving cast of gun-slaughter enablers, right then and there with all cameras rolling. And this was before we learned how much of what Abbott and other “leaders” of Texas’ law enforcement community was saying at that presser was pretty much utter bullshit.

The O’Rourke Incident instantly recalled an interview with Atlantic writer, Anne Applebaum, that I was listening to driving back from up north this past Tuesday, almost simultaneous with the murder of 19 kids and two adults at yet another America school. Applebaum was the guest on New York Times columnist Ezra Klein’s podcast and the topic was her new introduction to the classic book by Hannah Arendt, “The Origins of Totalitarianism.”

Klein is an interviewer with an exemplary talent for drilling down to the most salient issues of whatever topic he’s covering. And soon the discussion was moving into the “why” of people’s response to often crude, authoritarian leaders and their flagrantly obvious perfidies. I encourage you to listen to the entire episode for all that Klein and Applebaum get in to.

But at one point Applebaum used the phrase “muscular bravado” to explain the appeal of characters like Donald Trump.

Rogues like Trump present themselves as unfettered-by-common-rules-of-decorum warriors defending what large masses of people want defended. Or at least as “fighters” antagonizing the same people large masses want antagonized. The responses are not entirely rational. But it often translates to “heroic” in the eyes of people, as Applebaum and Arendt say, isolated by their ignorance and fearful of what they don’t understand.

A salient point here being that in 2022 USA this kind of bravado is entirely in the possession of Trumpist Republicans, and this explains much of the imbalance of energy and enthusiasm between Republicans and Democrats.

The takeaway is that politics/leadership is a profoundly emotional game. Barack Obama swung millions his way in 2008 through charisma and the belief that he had the strength and bravery/star-power to make change happen. More to the point, liberals, Democrats and the millions rightfully repulsed and horrified by the complicity of Republicans in America’s gun slaughter, erosion of Constitutional rights, degradation of our court system, indifference to climate change, wildly out of balance tax system, etc. have no real choice but to accept the power and importance of “muscular bravado” in rallying voters.

Liberals may accept this in theory, but are often embarrassed by it in reality. Bravado of a sort that appeals to largely non-ideological, non-partisan voters strikes the average policy-intense liberal as corny and suspicious, and beneath the dignity of a serious leader.

The dilemma for liberals, is that bravado works, on swing voters if not them. And in our current moment, as we reel from yet another grade school slaughter, genuinely indignant bravado could be a very effective emotional trigger for voters.

O’Rourke isn’t a newby to gun reform. He’s favored a flat-out ban on assault rifles for a while now. So I’m accepting his indignation as genuine. He’s demonstrated he’ll take the political risk that comes with his position on the issue. Just as with his “stunt” at Abbott’s press conference he’s demonstrated he’s prepared to take the blowback for getting right up in the grilles of the ghouls (Ted Cruz was standing behind Abbott) and accuse them for their complicity.

Liberals are notoriously not single-issue voters. Get a Democrat or a Democratic politician going on what needs to be done to set the country right and you invariably get a list longer than a Cheesecake Factory menu.

But 19 more dead fourth-graders presents as unequivocal a single-minded life-or-death issue as any imaginable, and O’Rourke is correctly calculating that no matter how short our attention spans, the outrage over gun-mutilated grade schoolers is something that carries deep, long-lasting moral outrage. Horror-struck outrage of a kind that can — and should — be resurrected repeatedly, with muscular bravado, for months until November and years beyond that until the cynics are driven back under their rocks.

The final point being, Republicans have no good faith response to their role in our gun insanity. With an unabashed siege on their corruption and reckless disregard for … children! … Democrats have an issue that like Joe Pesci in some Marty Scorsese mob movie they can hold Republicans’ faces to the burner with.

They need to do it.

And Who Would Be The Donald’s Real “Losers” and “Suckers”?

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Even before we got to the “losers” and “suckers” phase of The Donald Trump Experience we already knew this election was set in cement. Nothing is going to stop 39% of the American voting age population from idolizing a narcissistic reality TV performer. That 39% can almost be described as “genetic”, certainly figuratively and quite possibly literally.

A few days before Donald of Bone Spur called Americans who volunteered to defeat facism — instead of making a few million bucks by taking over daddy’s real estate scams, tax frauds and all, and devoting his spare time to avoiding STDs on the Manhattan dating scene — a poll showed the same 39% crediting Trump with doing “a good job” on the COVID-19 pandemic.

If I had a dollar for every time I asked, “Who the [bleep] are these people?” well … I’d owe myself a couple million. Through the lenses of sociology, cultural anthropology and basic psychology the absolutely unmoveable, intractable, granitic allegiance of this percentage of people to Trump — not the Republican party, but Donald Trump — is nothing short of astonishing. A “good job” on the pandemic? Has this crowd been on Neptune since January?

I’ve been fascinated with this undistractable, almost reptilian response to Trump since he rode down the gilded escalator. This isn’t “normal” political appeal. This is way beyond Ronald Reagan. Trump clearly excites something in the 39% that no other personality in American leadership ever has. I said as much when I wrote about how he could “win it all” back in 2016.

Arguably, and well worth discussing, is the likelihood that there’s something even deeper than psychology at work in the tribal, animal-like response to Donald Trump among 39% of our population. Or at least I think it’s worth talking about. So bear with me here.

A little knowledge of evolutionary physiology can be a dangerous thing. But there is common agreement that at any given point in time individuals of any species, from locusts to salamanders to humans possess physical abilities different from other members of the same species. It’s Darwinian. It’s how species at large guarantee their survival. A certain percentage of every herd, or tribe, possess capabilities, genetic structure, talents and instincts that allow them to survive stress, whether by drought, famine or conflict with predators.

I’ve mentioned I’m a fan of Ezra Klein, of his website Vox, his podcast and his individual writing. And I’ve been struck by how many times in conversations with guests from one scientific discipline or another he’s walked up to the line where the logical next phase of the discussion about “Why We’re Polarized”, or tribalism or what gives with the 39% is to talk about a biological/physiological explanation.

To be specific, about the likelihood that the 39% is an evolutionary standard, possibly millions of years old. There have been studies of the psychological manifestations of an overactive, which is say, “differently wired” amygdala, the brain’s physical center for controlling emotions. A bit more active than “normal” and the fight-or flight mechanism is more hair-trigger and less reflective.

I’ve also read sensible explanations for the (very) long-term benefit to genetic survival in having a portion of every tribe wired in such a way. Having a large portion, i.e. 39%, hyper-perceptive to potential dangers — the snap of a twig in the dark forest, drums beating on the other side of the savannah — meant the tribe as a whole had a better chance of preparing for and defeating whatever might come.

This kind of talk is of course a cultural minefield, especially in the aftermath of “The Bell Curve” by Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray, in 1994. All hell broke loose over their suggestion that genetics explained intellectual weaknesses among races.

But what I’m talking about has nothing to do with racial or even ethnic distinctions. The possibility worth discussing is whether this is what it would more likely be, which is to say a standard percentage across every “tribe”. A very, very basic means of insuring genetic survival.

Eventually the conversation has to then turn to the value of so high a percentage in a modern, highly-interconnected and (despite what the headlines tell you) a far, far less violent world than what we evolved from at say The Dawn of Man.

Barely 200,000 years have passed since humans began some form of tribal living, a collectivizing frought with fear of the tribe on the otherside of the valley and every other … other. That’s far too little time to significantly reduce — i.e. Darwinize-out — the “inflamed amygdalas” among the human species.

So this high percentage of hair-trigger “fight or flight” tribe members today instead responds not to the snap of twigs, or smoke signals on the horizon, but rather to high intensity, high frequency signals from within the culture at large. Moreover, being at the dawn of the age of highly-individualized social media as we are, where everyone can plug into whatever excites their amygdala the most, these people can feel fortified by the presence of a vast tribe of common thinkers, or “like-minded fearer/fighters” if you will.

Donald Trump’s lamentable talent, one that I doubt he’s ever bothered to explain to himself since it works so well, but is copied from every authoritarian in history and all the autocrats of today, is to feed this percentage of the tribal population precisely what excites their brain structure most effectively. “Precisely” in terms of not just message, but of tone and context. (A “really, really rich” silverback known to associate with only attractive females.)

And yes, Trump’s triggering shtick is abetted, if not lifted whole from popular media like Fox News, Breitbart, talk radio and so on. All of which, as ratings and surveys regularly confirm, are consumed by the same percentage and composition of the population.

As scientists have said, ruefully in many cases, it’s an open question whether in evolutionary terms this 39% represents the portion of the species that survives what comes next and therefore passes on its DNA, or whether it fades away, an unadaptive anachronism, like wooly mammoths, dodo birds and our prehensile tails.

The immediate problem of course is what damage this highly instinctive, highly reactive, all but completely unreflective allegiance to the biggest ape’s constant false alarms does to the tribe in general.

“The Irishman” and All the Roads That Lead to Putin

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At three and a half hours you could easily fit two different full-length movies into Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman.” But in some ways that’s what he’s done as he guides us through the highest-profile crime and corruption of America’s last 75 years.

The first two hours of “The Irishman” play like a geriatric re-mix of “Goodfellas”, with the director’s trademark voice-over narration as wise guys are met and whacked. The last 90 minutes though is something far different.

Scorsese settles a pall of guilt and remorse over the story as he assesses the wages of sin on Robert DeNiro’s lead character, mobster Frank Sheeran, as well as the few others that haven’t been dispatched by some edict from “above.”

In our “current moment” it is impossible to sit through “The Irishman” and not have some awareness of how little has changed and how, as the saying today goes, “all roads lead to Putin”, arguably the singular mob boss of our era.

Frank Sheeran’s version of mob and Teamsters Union history since the ’40s, with him as a key player, up to and including the still-unsolved “disappearance” of Jimmy Hoffa is something you take only with a 20-pound block of salt. But the underlying history of modern America — the notorious crime family empires of New York, New Orleans and Chicago — old man Joe Kennedy’s deals with the devils while building his pin-striped, Brahmin empire is all there in the history books. Not that Americans deeply invested in our exceptionally pure and righteous nature ever pay much attention to it.

Scorsese lays out the story of Kennedy tapping his mob “acquaintances” to tip Illinois and the 1960 election to his kid, JFK, as part of an agreement to blow Fidel Castro out of Cuba and reclaim the mob’s lucrative casino operations (and god knows what else). Only things didn’t go as planned.

(Traditional, conventional biographers of the Kennedys regularly claim they can’t verify this sort of coziness with the mob. Never mind JFK canoodling with mob boss Sam Giancana’s special lady friend. But Seymour Hersh was a lot more confident in his sources.)

The Bay of Pigs invasion was a botched farce. The mob not only didn’t get their casinos back, but in an outrageous double-cross, as mob bosses like Giancana and New Orlean’s Carlos Marcello saw it, JFK’s kid brother, attorney general Bobby Kennedy, simultanous with his long-running attack on Hoffa, launched an all-out war on the American mob’s top leadership, to the point of literally grabbing Marcello off the streets of New Orleans and dumping him Guatemala.

Put simply, the mob didn’t take that well.

At a critical point in “The Irishman”, Joe Pesci as middle-tier mob leader Russ Bufalino leans in to De Niro/Sheeran, who is reluctant to accept what has to be done with his friend Hoffa, and says in a whisper, “If they can kill the President of the United States they can kill the president of a union.”

In American mythology the sleazy corruption of goons and goombahs never sets up in the foundational horrors of our history. It’s all been Hollywood-ized. Organized crime characters are just colorful rogues with big, raucous families and a lot of gun-toting enemies. Two plus two never quite equals four. Real world mob corruption and violence is never taken too seriously. Why? Because we’ve been taught by slapdash grade-school history books, cheesey Hollywood melodramas and pulp hagiographies that human nature for some reason operates differently where the Stars and Stripes flutter overhead. It helps us feel superior to everyone else.

Like the Russians, for example.

A couple years ago, before Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin became unabashed dance partners, I read a book, “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible”, by Peter Pomersantsev. A native Russian raised in London, Pomerantsev returns as a TV producer to Putin’s Russia and, a bit like Martin Scorsese, leads us on a tour of a culture all but completely subjugated by crime and corruption, a society rotting out from its core and so diseased by disinformation from mob-controlled state media even its intelligent citizens have resigned themselves to a society where “nothing is true.”

(Here’s a conversation between Pomerantsev and Vox’s Ezra Klein.)

To drive my point home, as Trump’s impeachment heads to the Senate, it’s vital for prosecutors and responsible media to build up and sustain the significance of Putin to Trump — the steady, substantial flow of life-sustaining “investment” in Trump by Putin-controlled oligarchs (i.e. upper-to-mid-tier mob bosses) — and how Trump, (unlike Bobby Kennedy), has regularly and reliably re-paid Putin’s investment. By, for example, weakening NATO and Ukraine, campaigning for the lifting of sanctions that would restart a vast and critical flow of oil money into Putin and his “family’s” pockets, and by accelerating an American disinformation culture to the point that confused citizens refuse to see anything unusual in gross corruption.

It’s a startling how close we’ve come to being a country like Putin’s Russia, where in effect, “nothing is true”, not even that that we see and hear with our own eyes.

How effective is Trump’s Putin-ized disinformation? Here’s a couple items. 46% of U.S. miltary personnel say they think of Russia as “an ally.” This is mainly due to the heavily Republican make-up of the armed services, since once rabidly anti-Soviet Republicans in the era of Trump state media, are steadily increasing their belief that Russia is on our side.

The last 90 minutes of “The Irishman” peel back the swagger, the sense of power and invincibility, and force its central character to finally accept what he has done, what he has created and destroyed and what it all has earned him.

The grand and great US of A needs a moment of stark reckoning to see clearly what its appetite for implausible exceptionalism has created … right here and right now.

“Cops for Trump”

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As I sit here sharpening the points of my pitchfork and adding a couple quarts of fuel to my XL Tiki torch, in preparation for tonight’s Trump rally downtown, I’m reminded again of the angriest and funniest book written so far on The Trump Degeneracy.

“Everything Trump Touches Dies”, by longtime Republican campaign strategist/hit man Rick Wilson, is a pitiless, acid-tipped dagger assault on Trump and every know-nothing tribal toadie who ever signed on to the reality TV huckster’s bald-faced racism, corruption and incompetence. Sadly, that’s a sub-set of people that now includes at least a portion of the Minneapolis Police Department. (Wilson gets off a hilarious, coffee-out-the-nose line every other page.)

Whether some of Minneapolis’ finest are actually stupid enough to show up downtown tonight wearing their “Cops for Trump” t-shirts, (it is a bit chilly), it almost doesn’t matter. The fact that their union president, Bob Kroll, everyone’s caricature of a right-wing thug cop, has made a point of his and his
“brotherhood’s” full-throated support of Trump is all that matters.

I mean the t-shirts could just as easily read: “Cops for Career Criminals”, “Cops for Shameless Racists” or “Cops for Any Fool Who’ll Stick it to the Libtards.”

Over the past couple decades a few groups in particular have seriously degraded their credibility with the general public. Along with (white) evangelicals blind to the sexism, racism and sewer-level morals of Trump and his ilk, American cops have done a startlingly effective job of discrediting their profession and the pretense that they are politically neutral public servants.

A couple days ago I was listening to (yet another) Ezra Klein podcast, this time with New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell on the event of his latest book, “Talking to Strangers.” At one point Gladwell dives into the serious problem American cops have properly and reliably interpreting the demeanor of people they stop and confront. (Gladwell emphasizes that far too many of the stops are for reasobns that amount to “ticky tack bullshit”.) The case of Sandra Bland, a thoroughly innocent Texas woman stopped (mainly because she was black, let’s be honest) and who later hung herself in jail, is a key drama Gladwell explores.

He dives into the rippling effects of The Kansas City Experiment, an early ’70s protocol that did prove successful in driving down crime in tough neighborhoods. Key was a more intrusive, predictive brand of policing that had the person-to-person effect of treating every police-citizen interaction as a criminal erncounter.

Gladwell

‘s larger point is that the “Minority Report”-like concept of stopping crimes before they happen has seriously mutated over the years into the kind of militarized, nakedly-racist profiling now seen in dozens of “cop-involved” killings across the country. I refer you to Philando Castile here in Minnesota, an interaction that also involved the average not too well trained/inexperienced cop’s role as a revenue-producer for his municipality.

Gladwell points this out as well as a key part of the perversion of police work in recent years. (Over the last 14 years of his life Castile was stopped by cops 46 times, resulting in several thousand dollars of fines. You’re free to check it out and decide how “ticky tack” most of these stops were and ask if any white guy in a Mercedes would have been stopped even once.)

Bad as all that is, Kroll and company’s unabashed, in-your-face-pointy-headed-liberal-wusses “Cops for Trump” move reasserts to every Minneapolis citizen the high likelihood that the cop cruising down the street is carrying a heavy baggage of greivances, along with a badge and a loaded gun. Far from being apolitical and color blind, “Cops for Trump” strongly suggests a fellow traveler/sympathizer with not just appalling corruption and criminality, but what history will eventually conclude is the most open and unapologetically racist Presidency since, well, since Andrew Jackson.

By so shamefully linking themselves to Donald Trump, Bob Kroll’s Minneapolis cops have significantly accelerated the death of their own legitimacy.

Against Trump the “Alpha Factor” Matters More Than Ever.

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Yeah, it’s a new mugshot. Trump has aged me twenty years in three.

It’s a simple fact of human psychology that people see leadership in a lot of ways that have nothing to do with integrity, good judgment and basic decency. History is littered with characters who possessed none of those virtues yet were elevated to positions of power and influence because … well because … they create a special tingle in their audience.

As much as Democrats want to jockey for position by going Deeper Into the Weeds Than Thou over sub-sections of Obamacare, the lamentable but indisputably true fact of almost every kind of existence, especially politics, is that you have to make the people see and feel something special in you. Voters, no matter how wonky and nerdy and policy-driven, want you to project back on them an image of “alpha” … whether male or female.

As the years go by I’m more and more convinced that brain chemistry and brain structure is one of the most credible explanations for the tribal division between liberals and conservatives the world over. There’s nothing racial or ethnic about it. But there is an evolutionary aspect, I truly believe.

That said, liberals, (which does not describe every Democratic voter), do react very differently to the “strong man” concept of leadership than conservatives. In my humble opinion we lefties do inject our choice of leaders with a disproportionate factor of wonky bona fides than typical conservatives. How exactly does he/she plan to get us to universal health care? How “criminal” should it be to enter the U.S. illegally?

But it is the rare, wonky liberal who doesn’t still react, instinctively, like a man-ape on the African savannah, to the feel of a “leader.” I give you, Barack Obama, as opposed to Hillary Clinton.

Obama had it all. Everything about him projected that rare but essential quality of, “I got this.” Call it “The Cool Factor”. Call it “charisma”. He had and has it. Hillary didn’t. She projected “competent management”, which is great if you’re going to run Buffalo Wild Wings, but not enough if you’re trying to stir positive-to-rapturous emotions in 130 million potential voters.

Which brings us to a key dilemma in our current environment. While there is no question whatsoever that 42% of the public feels a once-in-a-hundred-years alpha male leader quality pulsing off Donald Trump, there’s no one yet among the Democrats emitting a similar quality to possible Democratic voters.

It goes without saying the specific qualities attracting conservatives to Trump and liberals to … whoever … are dramatically, qualitatively different. Therein lies your deep tribal divide.

But one component is, again without question IMHO, the factor of confidence, which is fundamental to establishing dominance. Confidence instills the same in those seeking to be led well. It imbues a calm that allows our still primitive emotions to relax so our brains can sort out the various options to problem-solving. And it soothes us.

Specifically, this is another problem with Joe Biden. There’s a “vigor” factor involved in “confidence” and humans’ choice of leaders. Very little about Joe projects vigor or, “I got this.”

It’s also the quality still missing from my pet fascination, Pete Buttigieg.

(Very) smart. Thoughtful. Expressive of good judgment. A calm and imperturbable demeanor. Yes. All that is there and eminently valuable. But “alpha male”? Mmmmm, not yet. In the parlance of show biz, Mayor Pete needs to make himself “bigger.” But liberals can’t do bigger like Trump does bigger. Strutting around like an absurd, obese Mussolini courts immediate, richly deserved mockery. The liberal alpha also has to express authenticity to acquire the ineffable magic of “alpha.” That’s tougher. You’re not allowed to fake it.

As for the women, Kamala Harris may have it. But like Buttegieg, it ain’t there yet. Unfortunately for Minnesota, that “alpha magic” is something Amy Klobuchar lacks entirely. With her, we’re back to selling “competent management.” And there’s no inspiration that comes with that.

We tend to forget that the “alpha-ness” of Barack Obama wasn’t fully formed until he began winning. After that point we saw and heard much more of him. Winning, which is to say actually demonstrating dominance, is a critical feedback loop firing human neurons. “He has done it!”, we think, and swoon. “He will always do it!”

This week’s Democratic debates certainly didn’t do anything to establish anyone’s “alpha-ness”. But let’s thin the herd and spend more than 30 seconds per topic with these people. A couple of them may have the instinct to convey, “I got this.”

(P.S. I’m a big fan of Ezra Klein’s podcast. Via his Vox network. Here are links to two recent shows.

One with Pete Buttegieg, which includes a very interesting conversation about structural reform, all the real world obstacles to it, but the need for it to be framed and regularly reaffirmed for voters.

And another with U of Delaware prof and author Danna Young. Klein is clearly struggling with the “biological” explanation for tribalism, but here again he and his guest pull right up to the line trying to explain it. )

And When I Looked Up, MPR Had Disappeared

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So I see “Magnum P.I.” is the latest geezer hit to get the re-boot treatment. Fans of TV as it once was already have a new “Hawaii 5-0” up and running, have seen “Roseanne” rise from the dead … die … and be born again (as “The Connors”, without the queen crazy) are awaiting the restoration of  “Murphy Brown.”

Since I never had any interest in any of these shows when I was (much) younger, I’m a bad judge of who they’re meant to entertain in 2018. But my wild guess is that none of the host networks in any rare moment of candor expects these shows to connect with your Gen X-ers, hipster Millennials or really anyone without an AARP card. That’s because what’s on sale here is — like Classic Rock on the radio — nostalgia for the aged, the now creaky folks eager to recall the time when their knees and hips and cataracts weren’t artificial.

Anyone younger than that has something in the range of 450-500 scripted TV series sprawling across dozens of cable channels and streaming apps providing comedy or drama far … far … more sophisticated, complex and involving than a reboot of color-by-numbers formulas anchored in an era 30 years out of date.

Somehow this nostalgia business — which will make a few bucks for the major networks — reminded me of how my own media consumption has shifted even over the past year. I mean, I don’t call watching a network series anytime in the past 10 years. “The Good Wife”? Never saw it. Oh wait. I did follow “Lost”. But when that ended (badly), so did my relationship with the ABCs, CBSs, NBCs and Foxs of the world, except of course for sports.

The main reason? The profound lack of imagination and audacity in storytelling. Think of it as an evolutionary standstill. Point being, times have changed network TV hasn’t. What worked in 1985 works today only with people with an impractical fixation with lost youth.

Other than a few gay characters it’s been years since there’s been anything in broadcast programming that offered any real sense of cultural change, suspense or comedic surprise. Why? Because everything, as they say in football, is being played between the 40 yard-lines. Right in the safe, dull, bland, familiar middle. It’s a safe, friction-less zone of perfect predictability, where everything is designed to reassure viewers that a kind of rule-abiding Eisenhower-era fantasy world still exists. Any viewer looking for a representation of life with the complexity of what they see around them every day has no choice but tune out and look elsewhere … and they’ve found it in abundance in shows like “The Sopranos”, “The Wire”, “Breaking Bad”, “Game of Thrones”, “Mad Men”, “Billions”, “The Terror”  and (a current favorite) HBO’s “Succession.”

In that vein, it occurred to me, while driving up to the cabin recently, that it has been at least four or five months since I’ve listened to anything on MPR, once the last go-to broadcast news source of any value in the Twin Cities. But MPR (and NPR) have now been entirely, and I do mean entirely, replaced by podcasts, all of which offer a far greater depth of reporting and analysis on a wider range of topics, from politics to science to entertainment than anything public radio can (or will) do within its self-determined parameters.

And yeah, this is Trump’s fault, too.

Anyone following the sprawling Trump story is vividly aware of characters and facets and the interplay between cast members that gets only passing “headline” mention on broadcast TV and only slightly more from public radio. (Honest analysis of the story puts hyper-cautious non-profit news outlets into the “bias” zone, y’know.) As with all complex fictional dramas, part of the appeal of the Trump story is figuring out who got to who and what made what happen, as well as building a notion of how it all ends. But most of that — way too much of it if you’re following closely and are, as I say, already familiar with the timelines and characters — is missing from public radio, and the network news.

Where it exists for me today are on podcasts like:

The Ezra Klein Show   (Check out the hour-long Aug. 2 conversation with Adam Davidson of The New Yorker. Note the part where they both express fear of what follows Trump, namely “competent Trump”. Just as corrupt, but not nearly the fool. Klein’s earlier conversation with author Michael Pollan, on his new book, “How to Change Your Mind” is maybe the most fascinating thing I’ve listened to in years.)

The Josh Marshall podcast.  (Linked is a recent one with Marcy Wheeler, a startling savant on dates and interrelations of characters in the Trump-Russia drama.)

The 538 Politics Podcast (The episode linked has Nate Silver and his crew playing with various theories of the Trump case. The key character IMHO is Clare Malone, the gal in the boys club with a very sharp and clever wit.)

Pod Save America. (Kind of the monster hit of political podcasts, starring ex-Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau and cronies.)

“Why is This Happening?”, with Chris Hayes. (This one, starring the MSNBC host, is newer and bit wonkier. But this particular conversation with Amy Chua, author of “The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” was a thoroughly satisfying discussion of tribalism in American culture.)

The Lawfare Podcast. (At 334 episodes and counting, it’s kind of a granddaddy of the species. This particular episode, hosted by the conservative Heritage Institute is a fascinating and scary look at what’s coming next in fake news, namely “deep fake” video. Probably in time for this November’s elections. (Also, for a change of pace, here’s another talking with scientists about whether we should communicate with aliens — of the outer space variety.)

“I Have to Ask” with Isaac Chotiner of Slate. (Linked is his conversation with Davidson of The New Yorker.)

Brain Science, with Ginger Campbell MD. (Invariably interesting discussions with scientists on brain research and phenomena. The linked episode is with neuropsychologist Elkhonon Goldberg, (I had never heard of him), discussing creativity and — very relevant to the appeal of fake news — how in some humans novelty overwhelms the right hemisphere’s critical function.)

Celebration Rock. Hosted by Steven Hyden of 93X here in the Twin Cities. (Linked his Hyden talking, with customary intelligence, with Don DeLuca of the Philadelphia Inquirer about my favorite band of the moment, The War on Drugs.)

With all that and thousands more like them, the appeal of a new dude with less of a porn ‘stash and a newer Ferrari is lost on me.

 

Minnesotans Support Tax Increases, BUT…

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That stale breeze you detect when driving down John Ireland Boulevard this morning is a result of taut DFL legislators exhaling en masse as they cuddle up with today’s Star Tribune Minnesota Poll finding that 58% of Minnesotans support their $2 billion tax increase on top wage earners, while 64% support their $1.60 per pack cigarette tax increase.

“Some New Taxes” Beats “No New Taxes”

Republicans and their well-funded special interest backers have spent decades aggressively pushing “no new taxes” messaging to Minnesotans, almost to the exclusion of all other economic issues.  This survey shows that Minnesotans just aren’t buying it.   It shows that  “some new taxes” is a message that sells pretty well with Minnesotans.  It also shows that DFLers, after flirting with scores of potential tax increases during the 2013 session, finally settled on two politically palatable taxes.  So, there’s a lot of good news for DFLers in these findings. Continue reading →