Uncategorized
- The president committed crimes.
- The president also committed impeachable offenses.
- Trump was not complicit in the Russian social-media conspiracy.
- Trump’s complicity in the Russian hacking operation and his campaign’s contacts with the Russians present a more complicated picture.
- The counterintelligence dimensions of the entire affair remain a mystery.
The Paradox of Progress and The Uncomfortable Truth
Mark Manson has a new book coming out May 14th called Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope. He gives us a sneak peak with two posts to his blog, The Paradox of Progress and The Uncomfortable Truth.
Both are long, but inventive and smart reads. I’m looking forward to getting the new book soon.
The Five Conclusions
Benjamin Wittes, editor in chief at Lawfare and writing for The Atlantic, outlines in simple terms his conclusions after reading the Mueller Report. They are damning. His five conclusions are:
He goes into a lot of detail under each of these points. If you aren’t going to read the Mueller Report, please take the time to read Wittes piece.
Ka-Blooey
It’s fun to imagine 50-year-old me time-traveling to visit 15-year-old me just to tell him I’d seen the latest Star Wars movie trailer and that I’d watched the latest episode of the most popular television show on the planet. It’s a Dungeons and Dragons-type show, and I enjoyed the latest superhero movie based on Marvel Comics. His tiny little head would explode.
It seems unfathomable to me that these genres are today the world’s biggest and most successful entertainment franchises.
When I was 13–15, there were amazing movies like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Clash of the Titans, E.T., Return of the Jedi, Blade Runner, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Dark Crystal, TRON, and Superman III (ok, that last one doesn’t count). However, not all of these were as universally accepted, praised, and mainstreamed as the same type of films today. Back then, superhero movies were barely made. Now we have 23 Marvel movies to unpack with ten years of story culminating in a three-hour tour de force. Star Wars was restarted, and the new films are more popular today than the original movies. Game of Thrones is what every kid playing D&D saw in his head as he was rolling 20-sided dice.
The generation that played with action figures, bought comics for 75 cents, and memorized the Monster Manual is making entertainment. I couldn’t be happier.
In any case, I’ll try to keep my head from going ka-blooey.
Declined
The University of Virginia’s NCAA championship-winning men’s basketball team has declined an invitation to visit the White House. I’m sure the decision was made on the advice of the team’s nutritionist worried cold fries and KFC would be served.
They also probably wanted nothing to do with the man who occupies the office who called the white supremacists who descended on their campus “very fine people.”
I wish more championship sports teams and individuals would do the same.
The Magical Productivity Commitment
Seth Godin has some thought on the snooze button.
The snooze button is a trap. It’s a trap because not only do you have to decide later, but you just expended time and energy to deciding to decide later.
Do it once, move on.
‘Decide once’ is a magical productivity commitment.
There is a certain class of decision that benefits from time. Decisions where more information is in fact useful.
But most of the time, we’re busy making decisions that should be made now or not at all. You end up with a ton of decision debt, a pile of unanswered, undecided, unexplored options. And you’re likely to simply walk away.
If you open an email, you’ve already made the commitment to respond and move on. Not to push it down the road.
In or out, yes or no, on to the next thing.
Decision debt is my life. I probably just need to stop hitting snooze.
A Starter Guide for Going iPad Pro Only
Ben Brooks, writing at his site The Brooks Review, has one of the better outlines to help you turn an iPad Pro into your everyday computer.
I’m so close to biting the bullet and doing this. Not quite there, but so, so close.
‘If You Want to Kill Someone, We Are the Right Guys’
Mara Hvistendahl, writing in Wired, has one of the most interesting stories I’ve read in a long time. Weaving in and around the dark web, bit coin and murder, this story would make a great movie.
Why I’m Leaving Marvel Universe’s New York
Sam Weiner, writing for McSweeney’s, made me laugh out loud with his take on why he’s moving from Marvel Universe’s New York. It makes sense to me.
The Rise of Skywalker Speculation
M. G. Siegler, over at his 500ish Words Medium site, spent a bit over 600 words to discuss a few personal theories on the next Star Wars movie, Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker. He’s got some great ideas, especially how Palpatine fits into all of this.
I agree the title is a bit bland. I prefer my title, The First Skywalker, as I have a theory the Jedi and Sith will be no more after this movie and “Skywalkers” will be the new name for Force users.
My own theory how Palpatine fits into the story ties into whatever the MacGuffin is in the movie. After seeing the trailer (and hearing the laugh), I’m convinced the quest the characters are going to be going on is finding some sort of Sith artifact that Palpatine merged his “Force essence” with at the time of his “shafting” my Darth Vader. I’m also convinced Matt Smith is playing a younger clone of Palpatine that finds the artifact before our heroes. Snoke might have been an earlier receptacle for Palpatine’s essence which would make both his backstory and death make more sense.
My theory that Rey is a clone of Luke Skywalker derived from his severed hand is still in play and I really hope I’m right.
My other narrative guess is Palpatine will jump to Kylo Ren for the final battle between him and Rey. Ren will essentially defeat Rey in an epic lightsaber battle, but at the moment Palpy-Ren tries to land the killing blow, Ben Solo reasserts himself and takes his own life to end the Palpatine threat once and for all.
Am I right? Well, we won’t know how wrong I am until December.
Appeasement
Andrew Sullivan continues to impart a careful study of where the United States of America currently finds itself in with Donald Trump as President. This week he calls the current climate “appeasement.”
We are appeasing an angry king. And the usual result of appeasement is that the angry king banks every concession and, empowered and emboldened by his success, gets more aggressive and more power hungry. Far from restraining him, appeasement gives him time to amass strength, until there’s no restraining him at all. By the time it’s absolutely clear that he is a tyrant, it’s too late. That’s the core narrative of every Shakespeare play that charts a historical bid for absolute power. And every one of those plays is a tragedy.
This week, in the face of Democratic appeasement and Republican complicity, Trump has upped the ante once again. He is lying about the devastating proof of obstruction of justice in the Mueller report, as is his attorney general, the person supposed to defend the rule of law. He is again attempting to intimidate a witness to his abuses of power, this time Don McGahn. He is refusing to let anyone in his administration testify before the Congress, in an unprecedented act of contempt for the legislative branch. He is constantly hinting in his tweets that the DOJ should investigate what he has deemed “spying” on his campaign in 2016; he’s tried multiple times to get the Justice Department to go after his political opponent, Hillary Clinton; and he has retweeted a list of those who should be targeted — including Obama and Clinton — for investigation. And now that he has a toady in the Justice Department, he may well get what he wants. (Can you believe we actually miss Jeff Sessions?) For good measure, his spokesman has said, revealingly, that the president is “not inclined” to release his tax returns at this moment, despite what appears to be a constitutional obligation. In the immortal words of Mel Brooks, it’s good to be the king!
I don’t think he’s off base here.
Twitter and the Problem of White Supremacists
Jason Koebler, writing at Motherboard, explains in no uncertain terms why Jack Dorsey and the rest of the Twitter higher-ups can’t ban Nazis and white supremacists on the platform.
They’d be banning Republicans too.
Twitter has a white supremacist problem, and it’s one the platform has had trouble addressing.
Apparently, if they auto-ban Twitter accounts that represent terrorists like ISIS or al Qaeda in the same way they would auto-ban Twitter accounts that represent white supremacist terrorists, the algorithm would sweep up some Republican politicians.
Boo. Hoo.
At a Twitter all-hands meeting on March 22, an employee asked a blunt question: Twitter has largely eradicated Islamic State propaganda off its platform. Why can’t it do the same for white supremacist content?
An executive responded by explaining that Twitter follows the law, and a technical employee who works on machine learning and artificial intelligence issues went up to the mic to add some context. (As Motherboard has previously reported, algorithms are the next great hope for platforms trying to moderate the posts of their hundreds of millions, or billions, of users.)
With every sort of content filter, there is a tradeoff, he explained. When a platform aggressively enforces against ISIS content, for instance, it can also flag innocent accounts as well, such as Arabic language broadcasters. Society, in general, accepts the benefit of banning ISIS for inconveniencing some others, he said.
In separate discussions verified by Motherboard, that employee said Twitter hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians.
The employee argued that, on a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material. Banning politicians wouldn’t be accepted by society as a trade-off for flagging all of the white supremacist propaganda, he argued.
Pretty sure society would be just fine with that trade-off. Other white supremacists would be upset, of course, but if you are a white supremacist and happen to be a politician, I think that would be telling.
The real problem is the fact that there are enough GOP politicians who post on Twitter content that is difficult for an algorithm to distinguish from white supremacists. Basically, Twitter has a white supremacy problem, but really American politics has one too.
Collective Soul “Right as Rain”
I’m really digging this new song by Collective Soul. Sounds a lot like classic Collective Soul.
Unfortunately, all I hear is the “Jammin’ Me” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers riff. Is that good or bad?
A New Culture War in Sports
Will Leitch, in his weekly New York Magazine column, talks about how Sports now has its very own “Confederate Monuments” controversy. Apparently, singer Kate Smith’s rendition of “God Bless America” will no longer be played at Philadelphia Flyers games because recordings surfaced of her singing “racially insensitive songs” with titles like “That’s Why Darkies Were Born” and “Pickaninny Heaven.” Her statue outside the arena will also be removed.
Leitch outlines other statue controversies over the years and the list is long. From Joe Paterno to George Steinbrenner to O.J. Simpson, there are plenty of opportunities to grapple with sports icons with problematic pasts.
The entire foundation of American sports is built on the back on racism and sexism and loathsome behavior. If you wanted to watch gentlemen on Sunday, you’d go to church, but the sinners, they provide more entertainment bang for your buck. To see sports starting to reckon with the problematic nature of so many of their old symbols and icons is actually sort of encouraging, even if it’s so far rather empty and ineffectual.
The inconsistency of ejecting Kate Smith from sports and letting other icons like Steinbrenner stand isn’t a reason to reverse course and bring back Kate Smith. It’s a reason to go after Steinbrenner, and all the rest of them. Maybe that’s exactly what they’re most worried about.
I won’t be holding my breath.
In The Future 9
More from Nicholas Bate –
We’ll be very pleased to go back to work after the long holiday. As in the World of the Robot, we’ll be delighted to still be needed, wanted and loved.
How Mortal Kombat Set the Bar for 30 Years of Fighting Games
Don Nero, writing in Esquire, has a great story on Ed Boon, co-creator of Mortal Kombat. In the 90s, there weren’t many arcades of my high school days still around. However, I spent far too much time and money playing Mortal Kombat at the truck stop with my friend Grant. Grant was significantly better than me.
I had no idea Boon graduated from the University of Illinois.
An Ode to Adam Wainwright
Will Leitch, writing for mlb.com, compares St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Adam Wainwright to Billy Chapel, the main character in the book and movie For the Love of the Game. Wainwright has finessed and struggled to still be a Major Leaguer at age 37. This go-around will surely be his last.
The hope for Cardinals fans is Wainwright gets his own Billy Chapel moment in the sun. It doesn’t have to be a perfect game. It just has to be something fans will remember.
Baseball pitching is a young man’s game now. The veteran crafty pitcher who can make batters look like fools is a retiring breed. Of course, Wainwright can still make a batter look ridiculous, and his curveball can still freeze you in the box. However, it’s obviously harder and harder to find that reserve of magic.
Here’s hoping he still has some of the old Wainwright wizardry left.
The Gamble
Mima M, writing for Discussing Film, takes us on an incredible journey chronicling the creation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s a fun look at how Iron Man, an absolute second tier Marvel character, kicked it all off and no one knew if it was going to succeed.
And now here we are just days away from Avengers Endgame and likely the biggest super-hero movie ever so far.
Finite Energy
Curtis McHale has a good thought experiment.
If you had a finite amount of energy to use up and when it was gone you died, what would you not bother with? Would you worry about things you can’t change? Would you drop those clients that are stressing you out?
Would you be doing much of anything that you are doing now?
Likely no.
This idea is very much in my wife’s wheelhouse. She actually has a finite amount of energy to give, yet she “borrows spoons” from months in the future probably every day.
Bittersweet
Game of Thrones, the Marvel Cinematic Universe Phase 3, and the Skywalker Saga ending this year is a bittersweet end to this decade.
What If Everything Mueller Told Us Had Been New?
David A. Graham, writing in The Atlantic, posits and interesting theory. What if everything in the Mueller Report had been new?
… it isn’t hard to imagine that if Mueller’s revelations had all been fresh, they might have, as the saying goes, shaken the political world.
At the minimum, the Mueller Report validates all the reporting that’s been done in the last two years. Not much of it was “fake news.”