The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy

The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class's venality

Naomi Wolf Guardian UK

Occupy Wall Street protester Brandon Watts lies injured on the ground after clashes with police over the eviction of OWS from Zuccotti Park. Photograph: Allison Joyce/Getty Images

US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women – targeted seemingly for their gender – screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.

But just when Americans thought we had the picture – was this crazy police and mayoral overkill, on a municipal level, in many different cities? – the picture darkened. The National Union of Journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a Freedom of Information Act request to investigate possible federal involvement with law enforcement practices that appeared to target journalists. The New York Times reported that "New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers" covering protests. Reporters were asked by NYPD to raise their hands to prove they had credentials: when many dutifully did so, they were taken, upon threat of arrest, away from the story they were covering, and penned far from the site in which the news was unfolding. Other reporters wearing press passes were arrested and roughed up by cops, after being – falsely – informed by police that "It is illegal to take pictures on the sidewalk."

In New York, a state supreme court justice and a New York City council member were beaten up; in Berkeley, California, one of our greatest national poets, Robert Hass, was beaten with batons. The picture darkened still further when Wonkette and Washingtonsblog.com reported that the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on "how to suppress" Occupy protests.

To Europeans, the enormity of this breach may not be obvious at first. Our system of government prohibits the creation of a federalised police force, and forbids federal or militarised involvement in municipal peacekeeping.

I noticed that rightwing pundits and politicians on the TV shows on which I was appearing were all on-message against OWS. Journalist Chris Hayes reported on a leaked memo that revealed lobbyists vying for an $850,000 contract to smear Occupy. Message coordination of this kind is impossible without a full-court press at the top. This was clearly not simply a case of a freaked-out mayors', city-by-city municipal overreaction against mess in the parks and cranky campers. As the puzzle pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against OWS at the highest national levels.

Why this massive mobilisation against these not-yet-fully-articulated, unarmed, inchoate people? After all, protesters against the war in Iraq, Tea Party rallies and others have all proceeded without this coordinated crackdown. Is it really the camping? As I write, two hundred young people, with sleeping bags, suitcases and even folding chairs, are still camping out all night and day outside of NBC on public sidewalks – under the benevolent eye of an NYPD cop – awaiting Saturday Night Live tickets, so surely the camping is not the issue. I was still deeply puzzled as to why OWS, this hapless, hopeful band, would call out a violent federal response.

That is, until I found out what it was that OWS actually wanted.

The mainstream media was declaring continually "OWS has no message". Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online "What is it you want?" answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening.

The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process. No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.

No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.

When I saw this list – and especially the last agenda item – the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.

For the terrible insight to take away from news that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated a violent crackdown is that the DHS does not freelance. The DHS cannot say, on its own initiative, "we are going after these scruffy hippies". Rather, DHS is answerable up a chain of command: first, to New York Representative Peter King, head of the House homeland security subcommittee, who naturally is influenced by his fellow congressmen and women's wishes and interests. And the DHS answers directly, above King, to the president (who was conveniently in Australia at the time).

In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens.

But wait: why on earth would Congress advise violent militarised reactions against its own peaceful constituents? The answer is straightforward: in recent years, members of Congress have started entering the system as members of the middle class (or upper middle class) – but they are leaving DC privy to vast personal wealth, as we see from the "scandal" of presidential contender Newt Gingrich's having been paid $1.8m for a few hours' "consulting" to special interests. The inflated fees to lawmakers who turn lobbyists are common knowledge, but the notion that congressmen and women are legislating their own companies' profitsis less widely known – and if the books were to be opened, they would surely reveal corruption on a Wall Street spectrum. Indeed, we do already know that congresspeople are massively profiting from trading on non-public information they have on companies about which they are legislating – a form of insider trading that sent Martha Stewart to jail.

Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the DHS and police informers are aware, before Occupy itself is, what its emerging agenda is going to look like. If legislating away lobbyists' privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process, reforming the banks so they can't suck money out of fake derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system that allowed members of Congress to profit personally – and immensely – from their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organised Occupy movement … well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance.

So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organised suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.

Sadly, Americans this week have come one step closer to being true brothers and sisters of the protesters in Tahrir Square. Like them, our own national leaders, who likely see their own personal wealth under threat from transparency and reform, are now making war upon us.

'Free Will Debate: Who’s in Charge?' by Michael Gazzaniga (review)

Casey Schwartz DAILY BEAST

It’s a question that never goes away: do we have it or not? In a new book, Michael Gazzaniga reveals how neuroscience has shattered the debate—and it’s impact on how we make decisions and even criminal justice.

It’s an old debate. It’s a conversation spanning millennia. It won’t go away.

Free will—do we have it or not?

The consensus tilts this way, then that.

But today, in the hot field of neuroscience, the trendy view, Michael Gazzaniga writes, is the “bleak view.” Everything we do, think, feel, say, or fail to do is determined by our neural circuitry. The brain reigns supreme, tugging the mind along in its wake.

“The underlying contention,” Gazzaniga writes, “is that free will is just happy talk.”

In his new book Who’s in Charge?, Gazzaniga advances a counter argument.

Yet to do this, he proceeds along a surprising route. He devotes the first half of his book to laying out the massive collection of neuroscientific evidence showing that we have absolutely no idea what’s going on in our own brains—let alone control it.

And no one is better positioned than Gazzaniga to speak to this point. He is a veteran neuroscientist best known for his work with split-brain patients—people in whom the structure connecting the left and right hemisphere of the brain has been severed. Typically, this is a surgical procedure performed on people with severe epilepsy. It’s a last-resort technique to cut the corpus callosum, the bridge that joins up the two halves of the brain, in order to prevent seizure activity from spreading between them.

Steve McAlister / The Image Bank-Getty Images

In his new book, Gazzaniga gives us an abridged account of the research he’s done on these patients. What’s fascinating about them is that, in many respects, they remain perfectly normal, their intellect, memory, and language abilities intact.

But Gazzaniga’s first great breakthrough was in discovering the places where this left/right disconnect is wildly apparent.

In one of the very first experiments of his career, Gazzaniga tested a split-brain patient named WJ. First he held up a picture of a spoon in such a way that it was only registered by the left half of WJ’s brain—the half that specializes in language. When asked if he had seen anything, WJ responded normally, “a spoon.” But when the same picture was held up so that only WJ’s right brain registered its presence, WJ reported that he hadn’t seen anything at all.

This was the crucial moment that led Gazzaniga deep into the depths of split-brain patient research. What he found was that, once severed, each half of the brain has no idea what’s going on in the other. WJ’s vision wasn’t impaired since the reason he made no mention of a spoon when it was displayed only to his right brain was that his left brain, with its language centers, had no idea it was there.

Years of this kind of research led Gazzaniga to be able to characterize the differences between the left brain and the right brain. The right, he says, “lives a literal life.” It doesn’t extrapolate, it doesn’t narrate, it doesn’t generalize. It registers in an exact, concrete fashion what’s going on around it.

The left hemisphere plays a different role. It’s our resident storyteller. “The left hemisphere was the intellectual,” Gazzaniga discovered. It is our brain’s “interpreter.”

It’s the left brain that spins a narrative out of all the disconnected bits of information swimming up into our conscious view. The funny thing, however, is that the stories the left brain produces are largely if not entirely wrong.

“The reality is, listening to people’s explanations of their actions is interesting—and in the case of politicians, entertaining—but often a waste of time,” he writes.

The reason for this is that the left brain works with whatever becomes conscious, but consciousness is the ultimate slow poke. It lags behind. It’s walking while the non-conscious brain is sprinting to the finish line, processing what’s happening around us, making a decision about how to respond, even beginning to execute that response. Our conscious awareness is the last to find out.

So what “the interpreter” narrates is necessarily after the fact. Whatever we find ourselves doing, our interpreter will cobble together some reasonable explanation, but it is always a retrospective account.

Besides his own research, Gazzaniga touches upon a huge swath of brain science backing up the basic point that we have no idea what’s going on, but we need to tell ourselves otherwise.

This is the illusion that humans daily entertain: we are the masters of our domain, aware of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.

In fact, the illusion that we’ve got a unified operation inside our heads, running the show, is so thorough-going that “even the most strident determinists and fatalists at the personal psychological level do not actually believe they are pawns in the brain’s chess game.”

So it’s not that Gazzaniga denies the unseen forces that influence all of our actions and moods and impulses. Instead, he challenges the concept of free will as we know it.

“In traditional philosophy, free will is the belief that human behavior is an expression of personal choice that is not determined by physical forces, fate or God,” he reminds us.

In this view, implicitly, it’s possible to subtract away these external factors—"physical forces, fate and God"—and be left with an essential self, a free-wheeling agent.

But, Gazzaniga argues, neuroscience has dispelled the myth of such a self, of such a “you.” The brain, composed of all kinds of decentralized circuits that work in tandem, has no central command center.

“There is no ghost in the machine, no secret stuff that is YOU.”

“Prior to the startling advances of neuroscience, explanations of mechanisms were unknown. Today they are. Today we know we are evolved entities that work like a Swiss clock.”

It’s no longer useful to ponder the question of free will as such because neuroscience has changed the very meaning of the question. Accordingly, the mind develops ideas and beliefs that then influence the brain, which in turn influences the mind. It’s a constant back and forth. It’s dynamic.

The question of free will isn’t just for academics to debate. The implications extend well beyond the campus. One conspicuous example is how neuroscience is already creeping into courtrooms.

“The issue isn’t whether we are ‘free,’” he writes. “The issue is that there is no scientific reason not to hold people accountable and responsible.”

Should a criminal be held responsible for his crime when a brain scan can demonstrate some abnormality in his neural circuitry? Some lesion or tumor or chemical imbalance?

“My brain made me do it” threatens to become an increasingly valid defense.

But to Gazzaniga, this isn’t the right framework in which to consider the problem. “The issue isn’t whether we are ‘free,’” he writes. “The issue is that there is no scientific reason not to hold people accountable and responsible.”

A person’s brain, whether healthy or subpar, isn’t the end of the line. Throughout the book runs a version of this refrain: “the mind, which is somehow generated by the physical properties of the brain, constrains the brain.”

The mind—in ways we don’t yet understand—emerges from the brain, but it can’t be reduced to the brain. It’s not merely some subservient by-product. You can’t predict the mind from the raw ingredients of the brain. The mind is more than the sum of its parts.

Gazzaniga is calling for a new “vocabulary”—one that doesn’t yet exist—that captures the dynamism between the brain and the mind, between the individual and the group, between the group and the environment. All of these relationships are two-way streets; none a matter of simple, linear cause and effect.

Free will is no longer a meaningful concept.

Gazzaniga concludes his book with a call to arms.

“Understanding how to develop a vocabulary for these layered interactions, for me,” he writes, “constitutes the scientific problem of the century.”

 

©2011 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC

Penn State and Pride

Amy Davidson The New Yorker

How does Jerry Sandusky plan to defend himself against the forty criminal charges that he raped or otherwise sexually abused eight children? There were eight children identified in the indictment, that is—as the Times reported, since Sandusky’s arrest, ten more alleged victims have reached out to investigators, and the grand jury’s findings are scattered through with hints of other boys. The grand jury designated the first ones Victim 1, Victim 2, and on through Victim 8. Sandusky’s lawyer, Joe Amendola, in an interview with Bob Costas, had another way of labelling them: “those so-called eight kids.” (Costas also spoke to Sandusky; more on that below.) Which part is he trying to question with that “so-called”—the number, their place in the story, their status as children? All of them, maybe. When Costas asked Amendola what, “in broad terms,” the defense would be, he said

we anticipate we’re going to have at least several of those kids come forward and say this never happened. This is me. This is the allegation. It never occurred. In fact, one of the toughest allegations—the McQueary violations—what McQueary said he saw, we have information that that child says that never happened. Now grown up… now the person’s in his twenties.

There are several problems here—rational, legal, human. First, the grand jury’s findings were based, in part, on the word of “several of those kids”. This case first unraveled not because an adult saw something--although a disturbing number did--but because one of the children, Victim 1, spoke up. Five others gave testimony, too.

Two of the children are only known, in effect, by accounts of the crimes. Victim 2, the subject of what Amendola calls “the McQueary violations,” is the child, about ten years old, whom Mike McQueary told the grand jury he saw Sandusky raping in 2002. Costas asked how the defense could produce him, when “we were told that that alleged victim could not be identified”—Penn State officials, in one of many lapses, did not even try to find out the name of the boy. “We think we have,” Amendola said. It must have been a complicated task, logically as much as logistically, to find a man who could say that, while it appeared he was being raped when he stood naked in a shower as a child with a man fifty years older, it was in fact some sort of optical illusion. (In another interview, with “Today,” Amendola said that Sandusky was already talking to Victim 2 about what investigators might ask back in 2002. He also suggested that alleged victims might be after money.) Victim 8, name also unknown, is a boy whom a janitor said he saw Sandusky performing oral sex on in 2000: how did the defense even know which “so-called” child this refers to?

(McQueary has been e-mailing acquaintances to say that he did more than the grand-jury report reflects, and Tuesday night told CBS that these events had left him “shaken…like a snow globe.”)

The grand jury findings describe the way Sandusky inveigled boys, whom he'd found through a charity for children who needed help, with presents and promises, football games and coaching, money and clothes, and then, gradually, made sexual demands a part of the routine. The grand jury noted that Sandusky called one of the victims dozens of times after he said he tried to break away. (The boy hid in the closet when the calls came.) Sandusky also allegedly had no hesitation about enlisting other adults—parents, school administrators—in bringing the children back into his orbit when they tried to distance himself. There was an ugly assertion of ownership there. One hears its echo in the phrase, “we’re going to have at least several of those kids.”

The prosecution may not need to worry so much: when Sandusky spoke to Costas, he said that he was “innocent,” but then gave a glimpse not of his exculpation but of what happened to those children:

Costas: Innocent? Completely innocent and falsely accused in every aspect?

Sandsuky: Well, I could say that, you know, I have done some of those things. I have horsed around with kids. I have showered after workouts. I have, I have hugged them and I have touched their legs, without intent of sexual contact, but, um, so if you look at it that way, uh, there are things that, that, um, wouldn’t, uh, you know—would be accurate.

“Would be accurate”: Amendola has a client who thinks that showering with and groping small children constitutes innocence. (Costas has rightly been praised for the interview; there was also a long pause and stumbling answer when he asked Sandusky if he was sexually attracted to children.) So, as a lawyer, he may not have much to go on. But his so-called defense is a reminder of some larger, awful truths: reporting this sort of crime is in no way easy, and exposes a person to insinuations, as well as pain; and children who have been abused can be set on difficult paths. Nor does the abuser necessarily disappear into the night. When one child became a teenager, Sandusky allegedly bribed him with, or offered the oblivion of, marijuana. Does he now see that as leverage against that witness, rather than a further crime?

That is one of many reasons why the failure of adults who were in a position to, at the very least, strongly suspect what was going on, and get children help or counseling, is hard to get over. Jack Raykovitz, the head of the Second Mile, has now resigned; by his own admission, he heard, nine years ago, that someone had seen Sandusky doing something with a child that made that person uncomfortable. (By other accounts, he heard much more.) He apparently didn’t act, even though he was the leader—the so-called leader—of a charity devoted to helping vulnerable children have better futures.

David Brooks, in a column in the Times today called “Let’s All Feel Superior”—is that actually the title he picked, or was it an agenda item left over from an editorial meeting?—says that he finds such criticisms tiresome: “the vanity is the outraged reaction of a zillion commentators over the past week.” His logic isn’t so much better than Amendola’s, but it comes down to saying that since ordinary people let the Holocaust happen we shouldn’t be so mean to everyone at Penn State. One would think, of course, that we learned a few things from the Holocaust, among them that there is no vanity as insidious as the condescension directed toward those who express outrage when the weak are hurt, and no gesture as violent as a shrug can be. (Brooks’s solution is a return to a “Puritan” sense of sin, which, oddly enough, is also pretty much his formula for addressing inequality in America.)

Brooks talks about the “bystander effect.” It is fair to ask why people who just happened to be passing by fail to insert themselves these scenes. At Penn State, though, there were too many officials who were not “bystanders” at all; they worked with Sandusky and helped enable his access to children—stood by him. They inhabited the same circle of self-congratulation. The pride that was the problem at Penn State was not that of pointing fingers. It was of keeping quiet about people whose names one knew, and not learning the names of children whose stories were disruptive. But there are no so-called children here, or anywhere; only real ones, who deserve better.

Power Broker Savors a Victory in San Francisco

By ERIK ECKHOLM NY TIMES

SAN FRANCISCO — Perhaps no one took more pleasure in the city’s first election of a Chinese-American mayor than Rose Pak.

Ms. Pak, 63, might at first glance be mistaken for one of the grandmothers who play cards on Chinatown benches. She has never held office and is listed only as a consultant to the Chinese Chamber of Commerce.

From her office at the chamber she also operates, political experts say, as one of San Francisco’s power brokers, a crucial bridge between an increasingly assertive Chinese community, now one-fourth of the city’s population, and the wider political and business establishment.

Since she became a community organizer in 1980, Ms. Pak has been a savvy networker, mobilizing Chinese votes and donations for a succession of mayors in return for city financing of social programs and building projects in Chinatown. Now she has, by all accounts, played a prime role in achieving her generation’s dream, electing one of their own to the city’s highest office.

“I’m ecstatic,” she said after Edwin M. Lee’s victory was declared this week. “After decades of struggling, we finally elected a Chinese-American.”

Critics call her an unregistered lobbyist who trades her influence for donations to groups she controls and is too friendly with wealthy developers. Others say she is an unusually effective broker of interests of the sort that makes any large city run.

“Rose Pak fits into the historical narrative of Chinatown,” said David C. Latterman, associate director of the graduate program in public affairs at the University of San Francisco. “She came in as a community activist and did what it takes to get her folks a bigger seat at the political table. Like her or not, you can’t criticize her success.”

Whether out of respect or fear, Ms. Pak is regarded by many here with awe. She is a powerful woman in an ethnic subculture dominated almost totally by men.

She is often loud and profane in a subculture that values quiet modesty, and is even known to shout obscenities at enemies from the reviewing stand at the Chinese New Year parade (which, like the Miss Chinatown U.S.A. pageant, is run by the chamber she dominates).

She is “tenacious as a pit bull,” said an ethnic Chinese lawyer who, like most Chinese interviewed, spoke about Ms. Pak only on the condition of anonymity. She combines a fiery temper with a wicked sense of humor about her political exploits.

“I’m not shy about what the community needs, and I’ll shout at the top of my lungs if necessary,” is how she described herself, in an interview laced with profanities.

Ms. Pak was born in China, where her father was a businessman. He died in the civil war, and her mother fled with the children to Hong Kong in 1952. At 17, she won a scholarship to a women’s college in San Francisco and went on to earn a master’s degree in 1972 from the Columbia School of Journalism in New York.

She returned to the Bay Area to work as a reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle. But she resigned after eight years to lead a campaign to save the treasured Chinese Hospital, which faced being closed without costly renovations. As a board member today, she is in charge of fund-raising for a new $160 million facility.

Fluent in English and Cantonese, with a shrewd understanding of the political ways on both sides of the divide, she became something of a gatekeeper for Chinatown, literally translating for city leaders who came to seek donations or discuss projects.

Battling the reluctance of immigrant Chinese to get involved in politics, she and other educated baby boomers organized Chinatown and demanded more city money. Nonprofit groups like the Chinatown Community Development Center, which provides low-income housing, became important institutions in Chinatown alongside the traditional family associations. The nonprofit groups also, it happens, provide legions of volunteers for favored political causes — most recently, the election of Mr. Lee.

Ms. Pak, who has never married, offered support to a succession of mayors and became especially close to Willie Brown, who stepped down in 2004 and who calls her Miss Rose.

“I realized that to empower our community we needed to get involved in the political process,” she said. “Why would anyone pay attention to you otherwise?”

Rather than seeking office herself, she felt she could accomplish more (and, critics note, expand her influence) by helping up-and-coming Chinese-Americans get appointments in city agencies and, increasingly, win elections.

Ms. Pak was instrumental in securing the appointment of Mr. Lee, then the city administrator and a longtime friend, as interim mayor in January, gaining votes from wavering supervisors after he firmly promised not to run in November. But months later, Ms. Pak and her allies raised money for an independent “Run, Ed, Run” campaign and gathered 60,000 signatures. Mr. Lee reversed himself and won handily.

Aaron Peskin, chairman of the city’s Democratic Party, said he worked cooperatively with Ms. Pak for part of his tenure as president of the Board of Supervisors from 2005 to 2009. But he is now a vocal critic.

“It was very seductive,” Mr. Peskin said of being courted by Ms. Pak, recalling how she gave presents, remembered the names of family members and invited him and his wife, along with other officials and business leaders, on one of her many delegations to meet senior leaders in China. “What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was being lobbied.”

In Hong Kong, on the last night of the China trip, he and Ms. Pak were joined by one of San Francisco’s largest contractors, he said, who had flown that day to have dinner with him (then the top city legislator) and Ms. Pak.

Jim Stearns, a Democratic political consultant who managed the mayoral campaign of a Lee rival this fall, said, “She is definitely a power player in this city, and it goes well beyond social services for poor Chinese.”

“It’s well known that if you have a controversial development project, you get Rose Pak on your side,” Mr. Stearns said, and make payments to the Chamber of Commerce or certain nonprofit groups, if not directly to Ms. Pak.

Such talk has been personally hurtful, Ms. Pak said, asserting that she only promotes public projects that will benefit the Chinese community.

Except for some modest payments in a period of personal hardship about a decade ago, she has not accepted corporate consulting fees, Ms. Pak said. She mainly lives on “a few thousand a month” from the chamber, she said. Even her critics say that she seems to be motivated more by power than wealth.

Jason McDaniel, a political scientist at San Francisco State University, said in Ms. Pak’s defense: “People look to interest-group leaders like her to get things done. I get a whiff of resentment, this idea that Rose Pak is an inscrutable power broker behind the scenes.”

Ms. Pak’s raucous style, and her wry pleasure in the blood sport of politics, was evident in her description of a conflict with Mr. Peskin. As a supervisor he tried to block a parking garage she wanted in Chinatown, she said, but then “he had the nerve to come to the grand opening.”

“I grabbed the microphone and said, ‘Here comes the Taliban,’ ” she recalled with a chuckle.

“Aaron later claimed that I purposely had arranged for firecrackers to be set off underneath him, making a hole in his pants,” she said, laughing and offering no comment on his charge.

Tea Party Fatal Delusion

(The G.O.P. in the 2000s)

Andrew Sullivan The Daily Beast

Longtime readers will know I've long had a theoretical scenario for politics under this president - and the results from the elections yesterday seem to confirm it. To be frank, I was taken aback by the immediate and total obstructionism from the GOP in 2009. I thought it would be a little less crass. But I never thought they'd moderate after 2008. There was always a long-suppressed backlash against the Bush era of massive debt, reckless spending, and unwinnable land-wars. And there was also a cultural panic at a biracial president and the new America he represented. Both these prompted a spasm of ideological abstraction and purism, in which there were only two choices in political life: freedom or slavery. If you think I exaggerate, try reading Mark Levin's best-seller.

Suddenly, we found the right even more defined and dominated by talk radio, Fox News, and the far right blogosphere (yes, Mr Erickson, that would be you), and its resort to 1980s dogma as a cure-all for its woes. Hence the description of a centrist health insurance reform, based on many Republican ideas, to the right of the Clintons' and far to the right of Nixon's, as a form of enslavement. Hence the absurd notion that the stimulus had no impact, simply because it was too small to fill the hole in demand that the statisticians in 2009 did not accurately measure or predict.

Hence the attacks on collective bargaining for public sector workers, and the draconian anti-illegal-immigration initiatives from Arizona to Alabama. Hence the total denial of climate change and a desire to abolish the EPA. Hence a Supreme Court happy to find radical new interpretations of the Constitution, including the unlimited right of corporations to influence elections, and turning the Second Amendment into something more radical than anything previously contemplated. Hence the even more bizarre defenses of the banks who gambled with the country's core financial stability to make even more grotesque bonuses than they had been earning already. Hence too the total silence when it comes to anything that could not just repeal but "replace" Obamacare. The uninsured simply don't exist in the mind of the GOP.

The reasons for this pathological pattern are, to my mind, manifold. The first is that, quite simply, much smaller legislative parties tend to include fewer moderates (because they're the ones likeliest to lose in swing districts) and so the atmosphere skews far right or far left (my two main historical examples of this are British: Labour after Thatcher's first victory, the Tories after Blair's). This was intensified by the pre-2010 purge of any moderates and selection of an even more ideological freshman class in the House of Representatives. The second is the dominance in the GOP of what might be called the Media Industrial Complex. When there is so much money to be made from politics-as-entertainment, the dominant public figures on the right tend to be provocative, polarizing media stars. From Limbaugh to Levin to Hannity, the premium is on conflict and provocation for ratings. After a while, this is all you've got in the Republican psyche, and no moderating forces acting against it. In that atmosphere, you need talk-show hosts as president, not governors or legislators. Herman Cain is drawn precisely from that media industrial complex. Mitch Daniels and Jon Huntsman are excluded for the exact same reason.

And the recession's damage to an incumbent president's party merely put a misleading mid-term gust behind sails rigged for winds that were blowing in the 1970s, not the 2000s. The 2010 mid-terms were what might be called a "fatal success." Yes, there was a backlash among older, whiter voters against the 2008 tide. But to conclude from that that there was a widespread, general support for further moves to the furthest right in an economy where many are struggling to get by and where economic inequality is still soaring, was a huge over-reach. And so we see the staggering results of last night's votes.

The Ohio law against collective bargaining rights for public sector workers did not just go down. It went down in a landslide. Yes, the unions poured money into the battle and outspent opponents. But the scale of the victory is hard to gainsay. In a critical swing state, the GOP is in full retreat. In Arizona, the recall of the official who had pioneered the anti-illegal immigration measures is another remarkable event. Ditto even Mississippi's rejection of a ballot initiative that is a theocon's wet dream (if theocons are allowed such things), and takes the concept of personhood at conception to new, bizarre heights and exposes the stealth theocon campaign against contraception as well.

We've seen the polls showing a shift in Americans' views of inequality and their support of higher taxes for the wealthiest as part of a debt-reduction package. We've seen the accelerating moderation on marriage equality and marijuana. We've noticed the Tea Party's further alienation of minority voters, and now, with the Cain circus, possible intensification of the gender gap. We've noticed that increasing numbers of voters, including independents, regard the GOP as potentially sabotaging the economy purely in order to defeat Obama. Now we are seeing the effect of all this in actual elections. And the GOP primary campaign has also underlined just how marginal, ideological and inexperienced many of the presidential candidates are. A party that gives a motivational speaker ten times the support of a two-term governor of Utah, re-elected with 84 percent of the vote, with strong bipartisan credentials and an even stronger tax reform plan ... well, it's a party in free-fall that also doesn't understand that it is.

Look at PPP's polling in Ohio right now:

Obama continues to suffer from poor approval ratings in Ohio with only 41% of voters approving of him to 49% who disapprove. But voters don't seem to consider any of his opponents to be viable alternatives ... On our weekend poll, which got the final result of Issue 2 correct to within a point, Obama led all of his Republican opponents in the state by margins ranging from 9-17 points.

Obama led Mitt Romney 50-41 on our poll. He was up 11 points on Herman Cain at 50-39, 13 on Newt Gingrich at 51-38, 14 on Ron Paul at 50-36, 14 on Michele Bachmann at 51-37 and a whooping 17 points on Rick Perry at 53-36. It used to be Sarah Palin's numbers that we compared to Barry Goldwater, but Perry's deficit would represent the largest Republican defeat in Ohio since 1964.

For this party, Herman Cain is the perfect nominee (since Palin simply couldn't overcome her lies and pathologies). Because it is increasingly clear he is the master of complete denial of reality and has no actual experience in any public office.

Meep, meep.

November 7, 2011

It Started Digital Wheels Turning

By JOHN MARKOFF NY TIMES

Researchers in Britain are about to embark on a 10-year, multimillion-dollar project to build a computer — but their goal is neither dazzling analytical power nor lightning speed.

Indeed, if they succeed, their machine will have only a tiny fraction of the computing power of today’s microprocessors. It will rely not on software and silicon but on metal gears and a primitive version of the quaint old I.B.M. punch card.

What it may do, though, is answer a question that has tantalized historians for decades: Did an eccentric mathematician named Charles Babbage conceive of the first programmable computer in the 1830s, a hundred years before the idea was put forth in its modern form by Alan Turing?

The machine on the drawing boards at the Science Museum in London is the Babbage Analytical Engine, a room-size mechanical behemoth that its inventor envisioned but never built.

The project follows the successful effort by a group at the museum to replicate a far less complicated Babbage invention: the Difference Engine No. 2, a calculating machine composed of roughly 8,000 mechanical components assembled with a watchmaker’s precision. That project was completed in 1991.

The new effort — led by John Graham-Cumming, a programmer, and Doron Swade, a former curator at the museum — has already digitized Babbage’s surviving blueprints for the Analytical Engine. But the challenges of building it are daunting.

In the case of the Difference Engine, a complete set of plans existed. The Analytical Engine, by contrast, was a work in progress, as Babbage continually refined his thinking in a series of blueprints. Thus, the hope is to “crowd-source” the analysis of what should be built; plans will be posted online next year, and the public will be invited to offer suggestions.

“There is no single set of plans that design a single machine.” said Tim Robinson, a docent at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. “It was constantly in a state of flux.”

The project is significant in part because there has been a heated debate over whether — given time and resources — Babbage would have been able to build the machine he foresaw.

The idea was proposed last year by Mr. Graham-Cumming, who suggested a three-step project in which a decision would first be made on which blueprint to focus on, then a three-dimensional computer simulation would be created, and finally the machine would be built.

“I hope that future generations of scientists will stand before the completed Analytical Engine, think of Babbage and be inspired to work on their own 100-year leaps,” he wrote.

Babbage, who lived from 1791 to 1871, is rightfully known as the “father of computing.” But it would be left to a fellow scientist, Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, to fully appreciate that his inventions were more than just tools for automatically tabulating logarithms and trigonometric functions.

Lovelace — daughter of the poet Lord Byron — recognized that the Analytical Engine could be a more generalized media machine, capable of making music and manipulating symbols. And 113 years before John McCarthy coined the term “artificial intelligence,” she considered — and then rejected — the notion that computers might exhibit creativity or even thought.

While Babbage was driven by the desire to automate tabular data for military and related applications, Lovelace wrote a lengthy commentary on the design that would prove deeply influential when it was rediscovered in the middle of the 20th century.

Lovelace is known as the first programmer, because she designed a program for the unbuilt machine. The algorithm appears in a series of notes written by Lovelace after a friend of Babbage asked her to translate an Italian professor’s write-up of a lecture Babbage had given at the University of Turin.

The Lovelace notes are remarkable both for her algorithm for calculating the sequence known as Bernoulli numbers and for what would become known as the “Lovelace objection.” In passing, she commented that the Babbage computer would not originate anything, but rather could do only what it had been instructed. The implication was that machines would not be creative, and thus not intelligent.

The consensus of computer historians is that while Babbage was clearly the first to conceive of the flexible machine that foreshadowed the modern computer, his work was forgotten and was then conceptually recreated by Turing a century later.

In 1936, Turing wrote “On Computable Numbers,” in which he reformulated and advanced ideas first put forward by Kurt Gödel in 1931, positing the existence of what would be called “Turing machines” — an abstract computing device that was intended as an aid to exploring the limitations of what could be computed — and demonstrating that such devices could in principle perform any mathematical computation that was represented as an algorithm.

“The pioneers of electronic computing reinvented the fundamental principles largely in ignorance of the details of Babbage’s work,” said Dr. Swade, the former museum curator. “They knew of him, there was a continuity of influence, but his drawings were not the DNA of modern computing.”

He argues that Turing was a “bridging” figure between Babbage and Lovelace and the modern world of electronic computers.

A Turing biographer, Andrew Hodges, doubts that his subject had seen the Lovelace notes when he wrote “On Computable Numbers.”

“It’s most unlikely that Babbage/Lovelace had any influence on Turing in 1936,” Dr. Hodges, an Oxford mathematician, wrote in an e-mail. “Motivation, means, language, results were all completely different.”

By 1950, however, Turing clearly had come in contact with Lovelace’s work: He responded to her objection to the notion of computers’ thinking in his paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Indeed, a small element of mystery surrounds the question of when Turing did actually come in contact with Babbage’s plans.

Dr. Hodges acknowledges that no clear point in time is evident, but notes that by 1945 the Analytical Engine had come to prominence.

“Anecdotally, it has been said that Babbage’s name came up in discussions at Bletchley Park after the success of the Colossus in 1944,” Dr. Hodges wrote, in a reference to the machines developed in England during World War II to break German codes.

Moreover, although Lovelace is now renowned as the first programmer, her more significant contribution was in being the first to comprehend the significance of programmable computers. Her notes, which were signed only with her initials because at the time women were not thought to be authors, gave the reader a clear sense of the broader potential of modern computing.

It was not until the 1970s that the idea of computers as “dynamic” media machines took hold in the work of computer scientists like Alan Kay.

The leaders of the new project argue that the first conceptual leap was Lovelace’s. “The real intellectual triumph of Lovelace is overlooked by most people,” Mr. Graham-Cumming said.

As she put it, “It would be a mistake to suppose that because its results are given in the notation of a more restricted science, its processes are therefore restricted to those of that science.”

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October 28, 2011

What Makes Spielberg Jump?

By MICHAEL CIEPLY NY TIMES

LOS ANGELES

“I didn’t get it?”

Steven Spielberg, film rebel, sputtered at the lens in mock fury and disbelief.

“I wasn’t nominated? I got beaten out by Fellini?” he howled, on learning that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had nominated “Jaws” for a best-picture Oscar, but had snubbed him as the movie’s director.

The year was 1976, and Mr. Spielberg — long haired, loose and tongue firmly in cheek — was hurling outrage at the makers of a sassy documentary about the year’s Oscar contest. “This is called commercial backlash,” the young Spielberg explained, in a final and perhaps not entirely feigned moment of exasperation. “Everybody loves a winner,” he said. “But nobody loves a winner!”

Mugging for the camera at the age of 30, he had found the fault line in his own colossal career. It would totter — and totters still — between loud, popular, popcorn movies, like this year’s “Real Steel” and “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” for which Mr. Spielberg was an executive producer, and his untiring push for recognition as an innovative director.

Now Steven Spielberg the contender will try again, as he twice enters the awards race, once with an ambitious 3-D, motion-capture animation film, “The Adventures of Tintin,” and again with a period drama, “War Horse,” based on the children’s book whose stage adaptation on Broadway won the Tony Award for best play in June.

Mr. Spielberg declined to be interviewed about those films. This month, his representatives said, he was busy in Richmond, Va., in the second week of production on “Lincoln,” a long-planned drama about leadership and turmoil in the last months of Abraham Lincoln, starring Daniel Day-Lewis. Likely to be released late next year, it looks like yet another bid to become the kind of winner everyone can love.

Still, the line between art and commerce can be a scary place. Time and again Mr. Spielberg has held the audience in the palm of his hand. Now 64, he is not simply the best-selling film director of all time; his domestic ticket sales, at about $3.8 billion, roughly match the combined sales of his next two rivals, Robert Zemeckis and James Cameron. If Hollywood had a Mount Rushmore, Mr. Spielberg would get two heads.

Yet Spielberg the Artist has often struggled, as if the box-office hits were a handicap to be overcome. Who could forget the Great Snub of 1986, in which “The Color Purple” got 11 Oscar nominations — though not for Mr. Spielberg’s directing — and won nothing? (That tied a dubious record set a decade earlier by “The Turning Point,” directed by Herbert Ross.)

In 1987 Mr. Spielberg won his first Oscar, an honorary Irving G. Thalberg award. After some ferocious campaigns, three more Academy Awards would follow, for “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan.” Those helped fill the mantel but have left him short of the recognition given Walt Disney, with his 26 statuettes, or even Billy Wilder, with 7, and Francis Ford Coppola, with 6.

Lately Mr. Spielberg has been working as if he intends to close the gap. By most measures he appears busier than at any time in his professional life. If “Lincoln” is released by DreamWorks and Walt Disney Studios in late 2012, he will have directed three major films in the span of a year. He has recently shared producer credits on another four movies, including “Super 8” and “Cowboys & Aliens,” while shouldering corporate responsibility for others, like “The Help” and “I Am Number Four,” which come from DreamWorks, a company he owns and manages in partnership with Stacey Snider.

The movies have come on top of television ventures that have included “Terra Nova,” the time-travel series he has produced in partnership with Peter Chernin for Fox, along with “Falling Skies” for TNT, “The River” for ABC and “Smash,” for NBC. It is a pace that startles even Kathleen Kennedy, a producer of “The Adventures of Tintin,” “War Horse” and “Lincoln,” who has worked with Mr. Spielberg for more than 30 years.

“He’s often choosing for emotional reasons,” Ms. Kennedy said of decisions that helped add Mr. Spielberg’s three directing assignments to an already large stack of productions. “I do think that plays a role in what he chooses to do.”

For those who wonder what drives him (money is no object: The Los Angeles Business Journal recently listed him as this city’s eighth richest person, with a net worth estimated at $3.2 billion), Mr. Spielberg has left clues. Perhaps the most telling was tucked away last year in the teacher’s guide to the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s exhibition of Norman Rockwell works from the collections of Mr. Spielberg and George Lucas.

In the guide Mr. Spielberg discusses the painting “Boy on High Dive,” in which a boy crouches on the end of a diving board, looking fretfully over the edge. “For me, that picture represents every motion picture just before I commit to directing it — just that one moment,” he says of a work that has long hung in his Amblin Entertainment office at Universal Studios.

The painting is about fear, and so are Mr. Spielberg’s films this year — and, at some level, almost always.

As an Oscar contender “The Adventures of Tintin,” based on the Belgian artist Hergé’s classic series about the capers of a teenage reporter and his dog, faces a threshold question — still to be determined — as to whether the Academy will allow it to compete for an animation award, given that it uses computer techniques, rather than illustrations, to transform real actors.

But the core of the story, and Mr. Spielberg’s hope of moving the Academy’s voters, turns on his use of digital magic to communicate a stomach-churning sense of threat to a boy and his beast.

In that sense “Tintin” forms a matched set with “War Horse,” which is adapted from the 1982 book by Michael Morpurgo, about a boy, played in the movie by the newcomer Jeremy Irvine, who follows his horse into the carnage of World War I. The confluence, said Ms. Kennedy, who spoke by telephone from the set of “Lincoln,” is partly accidental. “Tintin,” she noted, is an elaborate production that actually began six years ago and involves an intricate collaboration with Peter Jackson, another of its producers, while “War Horse” was hurried into existence in the last year or so.

In a brief e-mail exchange Mr. Spielberg said he sees the two films as being completely different. “They are each other’s polar opposite,” he said, without elaborating.

And it is a canard, of course, that Mr. Spielberg, through his directing career, has been hung up on a child’s point of view. Having directed roughly 30 films (depending on how one counts odds and ends like the “Amblin’ ” short or his contribution to the “Twilight Zone — The Movie”), among his full-length features he has focused squarely on the young only in “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” “Hook” and “Empire of the Sun.” But this time around Mr. Spielberg seems more than casually intent on tapping the power of youth. Before diving into his current pair of pictures, he flirted with the possibility of directing “39 Clues” and “Chocky,” both about the young.

“War Horse” and “Tintin” each also have a connection with one of the best contemporary films about childhood hopes and fear, “Billy Elliot,” about a working-class boy who, improbably, becomes a ballet star. Beneath a digital gloss Jamie Bell, who played Billy, now portrays Tintin. “War Horse,” meanwhile, counts Lee Hall, who wrote both the movie and stage versions of “Billy Elliot” as one of its writers, along with Richard Curtis.

Again, Ms. Kennedy said, the convergence is accidental. Mr. Hall, she said, was working on a “War Horse” script before Mr. Spielberg became involved. As adapted for the screen, she added, “War Horse,” without the puppetry of the stage play, is “about the nobility of real horses.”

But a child’s panic, Mr. Spielberg has explained, is at the core of his art. “I was born a nervous wreck, and I think movies were one way of transferring my own private horrors to everyone else’s lives,” he told an interviewer for Rolling Stone magazine in 2007.

To observe him now, gray haired and accomplished — in January he will receive yet another lifetime achievement award, this one from the Producers Guild of America, to match the Thalberg, Cecil B. DeMille, Britannia and other industry prizes — is to see a filmmaker who has worked to flush that anxiety from his professional life while fighting to preserve and heighten it in pictures like “War Horse” and “Tintin.”

(Asked what he wished for the film industry at large, Mr. Spielberg in his e-mail said he would like to see as much passion devoted to storytelling and “the discovery of new voices” as has gone toward the quest for new technologies.)

To an unusual extent the mature Steven Spielberg is insulated from jolts by multiple layers of business protection. As of last year he has been represented by not one but two of Hollywood’s most powerful agencies. The Creative Artists Agency handles his film career, while the rival William Morris Endeavor Entertainment represents both Mr. Spielberg and DreamWorks in television.

His corporate life is split between DreamWorks and a personal production company, Amblin Entertainment. In a further complication he keeps a tight alliance with the Kennedy/Marshall Company, owned by Ms. Kennedy and her husband, Frank Marshall — more insulation.

The Indian financiers who support DreamWorks through their Reliance Entertainment group are certainly not out to cause anxiety. “It’s been a privilege to partner with Steven, and get to know him through our regular meetings over the past three years,” wrote Amitabh Jhunjhunwala, who represents Reliance on the DreamWorks board, in a reverential e-mail this month.

Mr. Spielberg’s exalted status this year let him do what no one else in Hollywood likely could have achieved: He cornered both Paramount Pictures, which is releasing “Tintin” in the United States on Dec. 21 (and earlier abroad, where it has split territories with Sony Pictures), and Walt Disney, which has “War Horse” on Dec. 25, into placing his pictures on prime holiday season dates within days of each other. The studios are hungry for his promotional support — or even a screening-ready print of “War Horse” — but Mr. Spielberg, for the moment, is absorbed with “Lincoln.”

Inside his creative cocoon he relies on a small corps of fellows including the editor Michael Kahn, the cinematographer Janusz Kaminski and the composer John Williams. All three have contributed to “The Adventures of Tintin,” “War Horse” and now “Lincoln.” Mr. Kaminski is the baby, at 52. Mr. Kahn, who is 75, has been Mr. Spielberg’s editor since “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” released in 1977. Mr. Williams, 79, dates at least to “The Sugarland Express” (1974), Mr. Spielberg’s first feature film.

“We’ve never had an argument or disagreement about anything in all those years,” Mr. Williams said. “He’s never once said to me, ‘I don’t like that.’ ”

Asked what keeps the partnership fresh, Mr. Williams pointed to the diversity of Mr. Spielberg’s work, and to new technical challenges, like that of scoring animation, which he has not previously done.

There is that. And the eternal panic of a boy who wants everyone to love his pictures — audience and Academy alike — and is still diving in.