The Zero Room

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Ecuador Will Imminently Withdraw Asylum for Julian Assange and Hand Him Over to the U.K. What Comes Next? — Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept: Assange, his lawyers and his supporters always said that he would immediately board a plane to Stockholm if he were guaranteed that doing so would not be used to extradite him to the U.S., and for years offered to be questioned by Swedish investigators inside the embassy in London, something Swedish prosecutors only did years later. Citing those facts, a United Nations panel ruled in 2016 that the actions of the U.K. government constituted “arbitrary detention” and a violation of Assange’s fundamental human rights. But if, as seems quite likely, the Trump administration finally announces that it intends to prosecute Assange for publishing classified U.S. government documents, we will be faced with the bizarre spectacle of U.S. journalists — who have spent the last two years melodramatically expressing grave concern over press freedom due to insulting tweets from Trump about Wolf Blitzer and Chuck Todd, or his mean treatment of Jim Acosta — possibly cheering for a precedent that would be the gravest press freedom threat in decades.
• I traced missile casings in Syria back to their original sellers, so it’s time for the west to reveal who they sell arms to — Robert Fisk in the Independent: Readers, a small detective story. Note down this number: MFG BGM-71E-1B. And this number: STOCK NO 1410-01-300-0254. And this code: DAA A01 C-0292. I found all these numerals printed on the side of a spent missile casing lying in the basement of a bombed-out Islamist base in eastern Aleppo last year. At the top were the words “Hughes Aircraft Co”, founded in California back in the 1930s by the infamous Howard Hughes and sold in 1997 to Raytheon, the massive US defence contractor whose profits last year came to $23.35bn (£18bn). Shareholders include the Bank of America and Deutsche Bank. Raytheon’s Middle East offices can be found in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Egypt, Turkey and Kuwait. There were dozens of other used-up identical missile casings in the same underground room in the ruins of eastern Aleppo, with sequential codings; in other words, these anti-armour missiles – known in the trade as Tows, “Tube-launched, optically tracked and wire-guided missiles” – were not individual items smuggled into Syria through the old and much reported CIA smugglers’ trail from Libya. These were shipments, whole batches of weapons that left their point of origin on military aircraft pallets.
• Behind Greece’s Deadly Fires — Yanis Varoufakis for Project Syndicate: Over the course of a decade, we have lost many more people to the tragedy caused by the EU establishment than to any flood or forest fire. More than 20,000 people have committed suicide since 2011, while one in ten working-age Greeks have emigrated because of the economic depression the EU has imposed on Greece. I expect crocodile tears to be shed in Brussels over our fire victims, and similarly hypocritical posturing by the Greek government. But I do not expect any reversal of the organized misanthropy afflicting Greece just because nearly 100 died in a single day. Unless and until progressives across Europe get organized, accept local responsibility, and band together to apply pressure at the EU level, nothing will change, except a further strengthening of proudly misanthropic political forces like Greece’s Golden Dawn, Italy’s Lega, Germany’s Christian Social Union and Alternative für Deutschland, Sebastian Kurz’s Austrian government, and the Polish-Hungarian illiberal nexus. In this context, Greece’s forest fires are a tragic reminder of our collective responsibility as Europeans.

Lately, I have been mostly reading:

• Here's what I saw at the border — Elizabeth Warren, Daily Kos: An ICE official brought in a group of nine detained mothers who had volunteered to speak to us. I don't believe that ICE cherry-picked these women for the meeting, because everything they told me was horrifying. Each mother told us her own story about crossing the border, being taken to a processing center, and the point that they were separated from their child or children. In every case, the government had lied to them about where their children were being taken. In every case, save one, no mother had spoken to her child in the days since the separation. And in every case, no mother knew where her child was.
• Army of Altruists: On the alienated right to do good — An essay by David Graeber from 2007: Imagine, for a moment, that the United States as it exists today were the creation of some ingenious social engineer. What assumptions about human nature could we say this engineer must have been working with? Certainly nothing like rational choice theory. For clearly our social engineer understands that the only way to convince human beings to enter into the world of work and the marketplace (that is: of mind-numbing labor and cut-throat competition) is to dangle the prospect of thereby being able to lavish money on one’s children, buy drinks for one’s friends, and, if one hits the jackpot, to be able to spend the rest of one’s life endowing museums and providing AIDS medications to impoverished countries in Africa. Where our theorists are constantly trying to strip away the veil of appearances and show how all such apparently selfless gesture really mask some kind of self-interested strategy, in reality, American society is better conceived as a battle over access to the right to behave altruistically. Selflessness – or at least, the right to engage in high-minded activity – is not the strategy. It is the prize.
• Is Michael Cohen ready for the John Dean role: A hero who saves America from Donald Trump? — Heather Digby Parton in Salon panders to my worst scandalphilic tendencies: In the interview, Stephanopoulos asked Cohen whether he could say that Trump told him to pay off Stormy Daniels and whether Trump knew about the Trump Tower meeting with the Russians in June 2016. Cohen said he could not answer on the advice of his attorney, which certainly implies that the answer to both questions is yes. Of course, Trump would know the answer was yes. If the president is inclined to issue a pardon, Cohen is saying he'd better do it soon. But keep in mind that this is TrumpWorld we're talking about, and among those people, you really don't exist unless you're on TV. All this may have more to do with Michael Cohen trying to figure out how he can parlay this situation into a new career in media once this mess is over. There's only one clear way for him to do that: Take the John Dean route and become the man who saved America from Donald Trump. Dean lost his law license and did four months in jail, but he is now considered a hero and a national icon. It's not a bad model.
• The fallacy of obviousness — Teppo Felin in Aeon: In fact, the current focus on human blindness and bias – across psychology, economics and the cognitive sciences – has contributed to the present orthodoxy that sees computers and AI as superior to human judgment. As Kahneman argued in a presentation last year: ‘It’s very difficult to imagine that with sufficient data there will remain things that only humans can do.’ He even offered a prescription that we ‘should replace humans by algorithms whenever possible’. Because humans are blind and biased, and can’t separate the noise from the signal, human decision-making should increasingly be left to computers and decision algorithms. This ethos has helped to fuel great excitement about AI and its attendant tools such as neural networks or deep learning. Proponents even claim that big data and associated computational methods will change the nature of science. For example, in 2008 Chris Anderson, then editor of Wired, boldly proclaimed ‘the end of theory’, as the ‘data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete’. Naturally, what we assume about human nature will determine the type of science we do, as well as shaping the types of questions we ask of it.
• Employer groups in Australia lied about the impacts of penalty rate cuts — Bill Mitchell: Given we received the latest employment by industry data in the last fortnight, we can undertake some detailed analysis to see whether there is any evidence to support the employers’ claims that the cuts would benefit jobs and hours of work in the impacted sectors (Retail Trade and Accommodation and Food Services). You will not be surprised to read that the opposite seems to be the case, although the generally poor results for the industries that are sensitive to the penalty rate cuts cannot be attributed directly to those cuts. But the evidence is very strong – the cuts to penalty rates have hurt low paid workers and driven then towards or over the poverty line with no positive effects being evident in terms of employment or working hour gains.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• How Colonies Can Liberate Themselves by Taxing Real Estate — Polly Cleveland in the D&S Blog: A reform government can heavily tax the value of real estate, possibly with exemptions for small resident property owners. Better yet, and much easier to implement, tax only the land component of real estate. Such a tax would force absentee owners to send euros or dollars back to the colonies. The government could then begin to provide services and repair infrastructure. But why tax real estate? Why not tax income or imports? Because absentees and foreign based corporations can easily avoid income taxes by funny accounting. Taxes on most imports are regressive and a drain on the economy. The real money is in real estate.
• America is one of the Few Cultures with Insults for Smart People — Ted Rall: Languages tend to evolve to reflect the cultural and practical priorities of the societies that speak them. This linguistic truism came to mind recently when, as part of research for one of my cartoons, I turned to Google Translate in search of a French translation for the English word “geek.” There wasn’t one. Nor in Spanish. All the Romance languages came up short; Google suggested “disadattato” in Italian, but that’s different — it means “misfit,” or “a person who is poorly adapted to a situation or environment.” A “geek” — “a person often of an intellectual bent who is disliked,” according to Merriam-Webster — is decidedly distinct from a misfit. You can tell a lot about a culture from its language. I had stumbled across a revealing peculiarity about American English: we insult people for being intelligent.
• How Bill Cosby, Obama and Mega-preachers Sold Economic Snake Oil to Black America — Lester K. Spence interviewed by Lynn Parramore at INET: I begin the book by juxtaposing Nat Adderley and Oscar Brown’s “Work Song” that’s about a certain type of labor in the 1960s against Ace Hood’s, “Hustle Hard.” He does more than just describe a condition in which he’s consistently having to work to make ends meet for himself and his family. The video features Ace Hood in a regular East Coast neighborhood, and all around him, people engage in different hustles to get by. The seasons change, and although the things that people sell change, like in the summer they’re hustling water and in the winter they’re hustling coats and gloves, the hustle itself doesn’t change. He doesn’t give a critique of that situation, but actually makes a normative argument for it, suggesting that it is a good thing. If you want to work in the world, this is what you’re supposed to do. If you don’t do it, your value as a human being is significantly reduced.
• Education – a faux crisis, an erroneous ‘solution’ and capital wins again — Bill Mitchell: One of the ways in which the neoliberal era has entrenched itself and, in this case, will perpetuate its negative legacy for years to come is to infiltrate the educational system. This has occurred in various ways over the decades as the corporate sector has sought to have more influence over what is taught and researched in universities. The benefits of this influence to capital are obvious. They create a stream of compliant recruits who have learned to jump through hoops to get delayed rewards. In the period after full employment was abandoned firms also realised they no longer had to offer training to their staff in the same way they did when vacancies outstripped available workers. As a result they have increasingly sought to impose their ‘job specific’ training requirements onto universities, who under pressure from government funding constraints have, erroneously, seen this as a way to stay afloat. So traditional liberal arts programs have come under attack – they don’t have a ‘product’ to sell – as the market paradigm has become increasingly entrenched. There has also been an attack on ‘basic’ research as the corporate sector demands universities innovate more. That is code for doing the privatising public research to advance profit. But capital still can see more rewards coming if they can further dictate curriculum and research agendas. So how to proceed. Invent a crisis. If you can claim that universities will become irrelevant in the next decade unless they do what capital desires of them then the policy debate becomes further skewed away from where it should be. That ‘crisis invention’ happened this week in Australia.
• Google and Facebook won’t rule the world – if we don’t buy their fantasies about big data — Alexander Taylor in the Conversation: Claims that big data and targeting will determine the next US president, and fears that data analytics allow politicians to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities have at their root a deterministic view, which sees social media users as completely passive and open to manipulation. But this view ignores how users actively process information, with differing perspectives, interests and forms of engagement. Paradoxically, while the data-driven advertising industry increasingly recognises the diversity of internet users’ psychological profiles and behavioural patterns, it seems to assume that they are all equally suggestible when it comes to social media advertising.
• Your Automobile and You - Road accident causes — Phil Are Go!:
  
• Are You in a BS Job? In Academe, You’re Hardly Alone — David Graeber in the Chronicle of Higher Education: Support staff no longer mainly exist to support the faculty. In fact, not only are many of these newly created jobs in academic administration classic bullshit jobs, but it is the proliferation of these pointless jobs that is responsible for the bullshitization of real work — real work, here, defined not only as teaching and scholarship but also as actually useful administrative work in support of either. What’s more, it seems to me this is a direct effect of the death of the university, at least in its original medieval conception as a guild of self-organized scholars. Gayatri Spivak, a literary critic and university professor at Columbia, has observed that, in her student days, when people spoke of "the university," it was assumed they were referring to the faculty. Nowadays it’s assumed they are referring to the administration. And this administration is increasingly modeling itself on corporate management.
• Donald Trump has shown himself to be the American version of Gaddafi in his behaviour towards Iran and the nuclear deal — Robert Fisk: Gaddafi’s handshake was legendary – so was his kiss from Tony Blair, who was as obsequious to Gaddafi in Libya as Theresa May was to Trump in Washington. Much good did it do Blair or May. Gaddafi ran his business dealings through his family – now there’s a thought – and even maintained good relations with Russia. His speeches were interminable – he liked the sound of his own voice – and although he constantly lied, his audience was forced to listen and to fear his wrath. Above all, Gaddafi was completely divorced from reality. If he lied, he believed his own lies. He believed that he kept his promises. He believed in the world he wanted to believe in, even if this was non-existent. His Great Man Made River Project was supposed to Make Libya Great Again.
• The Philip Cross Affair — Craig Murray: 133,612 edits to Wikpedia have been made in the name of “Philip Cross” over 14 years. That’s over 30 edits per day, seven days a week. And I do not use that figuratively: Wikipedia edits are timed, and if you plot them, the timecard for “Philip Cross’s” Wikipedia activity is astonishing is astonishing if it is one individual […] There are three options here. “Philip Cross” is either a very strange person indeed, or is a false persona disguising a paid operation to control wikipedia content, or is a real front person for such an operation in his name. Why does this – to take the official explanation – sad obsessive no friends nutter, matter? Because the purpose of the “Philip Cross” operation is systematically to attack and undermine the reputations of those who are prominent in challenging the dominant corporate and state media narrative. particularly in foreign affairs. “Philip Cross” also systematically seeks to burnish the reputations of mainstream media journalists and other figures who are particularly prominent in pushing neo-con propaganda and in promoting the interests of Israel.
• Driving Cars — xkcd:
  

This week, I have been mostly reading comics, because reality has been very disappointing:

• How long after this week's Gaza massacre are we going to continue pretending that the Palestinians are non-people? — Robert Fisk, the Independent: Monstrous. Frightful. Wicked. It’s strange how the words just run out in the Middle East today. Sixty Palestinians dead. In one day. Two-thousand-four-hundred wounded, more than half by live fire. In one day. The figures are an outrage, a turning away from morality, a disgrace for any army to create. And we are supposed to believe that the Israeli army is one of “purity of arms”? And we have to ask another question. If it’s 60 Palestinians dead in a day this week, what if it’s 600 next week? Or 6,000 next month? Israel’s bleak excuses – and America’s crude response – raise this very question. If we can now accept a massacre on this scale, how far can our immune system go in the days and weeks and months to come?
• Excelsior! — Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:
  
• A Travesty of Protectionism — Michael Hudson: The idea of industrial protectionism, from British free trade in the 19th century to U.S. trade strategy in the 20th century, was to obtain raw materials in the cheapest places – by making other countries compete to supply them – and protect your high-technology manufactures where the major capital investment, profits and monopoly rents are. Trump is doing the reverse: He’s increasing the cost of steel and aluminum raw materials inputs. This will squeeze the profits of industrial companies using steel and aluminum – without protecting their markets.
• Not Available — xkcd:
  
• The Victorians portrayed paedophiles as strangers – and the myth persists today — Ailise Bulfin in the Conversation: The Victorians portrayed paedophiles as scary strangers and social outsiders. By portraying them in this way, it was possible to avoid the unthinkable reality that children could be abused in respectable middle-class homes. This myth of the stranger paedophile is still persistent today. And even though the evidence shows that most child sexual abuse is perpetrated by close family members, the stranger myth continues to distract our attention from the most common type of abuse.
• There’s electricity in the air! But it’s not for sale — The FRED® Blog:
  The graph above shows that electricity production in the United States has steadily grown; and, about 10 years ago, it plateaued. Electricity sales, however, have barely increased in the past decades. What’s happening? The divergence between the two measures is, to a large extent, due to more and more electricity production never hitting the market. Many firms and even households produce their own energy for their own use. This could be energy extraction from byproducts of production such as biogas or burning waste or running one’s own wind or solar farm. The recent flattening of electricity production reflects the fact that electricity demand is not increasing as it has in the past, thanks to improved energy efficiency all around.
• I Win — Jake Likes Onions: