Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 288

Tim and Eric reveal the meaning behind their quirky comedy

Only moments before I went on live on “Salon Talks” to interview comedians Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim — better known simply as Tim & Eric — I commented that, as a diehard Tim & Eric fan, I expected this to be a lot of fun. Eric quickly threw me a sideways mischievous grin and said, “Yeah.”

He wasn’t lying.

If Zach Galifianakis was an interview guest on “Between Two Ferns” instead of the host of the show, I suspect the experience would be very similar to what happened when I spoke with Tim & Eric. Most of the questions were treated not as opportunities for self-promotion, pontification or introspection, but instead as prompts for them to riff.

Like Galifianakis, their sense of humor, at least when participating in the interview format, is abrupt, random and silly. It obliterates the decorum that audiences expect from interviews: Staying on topic, being polite to the questioner, avoiding confrontation (particularly of the needless variety). The result is deliciously meta, less an interview in its own right than a running joke that takes the piss out of the interview format itself.

The best example from our conversation was when I asked them about the Freudian elements from a recent episode from their series “Tim & Eric’s Bedtime Stories.” Called “The Duke,” the episode tells the story of an unemployed man-child (Jorge Garcia) whose wife (Rhea Perlman) is seduced by a mysterious and suave character simply known as The Duke (Ray Wise).

Without spoiling anything, it is safe to say that individuals passingly familiar with Freud’s theories about parent-child relationships, infantilization, emasculation and politics will immediately see some heavily Freudian themes in that particular story.

It is also safe to say that anyone familiar with Tim & Eric’s approach to being interviewed knew that they were not going to answer my question about Freud seriously.

This isn’t to say that they were never serious. Near the end of our conversation — after Tim and Eric described being creatively inspired by a mystical German artifact, claimed to be funded by Antifa and detailed Tim’s ongoing project of stealing Eric’s passport — I asked Tim about how friendships and parent-child relationships have been a running theme throughout their oeuvre.

“A lot of our comedy, when you cut away the poop jokes, when you cut away the weirdos, when you cut away the style — almost all comedy, or any kind of storytelling, is always gonna be about relationships,” Heidecker mused. “Always.”

Tim & Eric’s brand of humor certainly isn’t for everyone, but as answers like this one reveal, that doesn’t mean it can’t be relevant to everyone. Indeed, if you have a taste for the darkly surreal and want to be viewed as a comedy aficionado, it’s something you can’t afford to miss.

Watch our full “Salon Talks” conversation on Facebook.

Tune into Salon’s live shows, “Salon Talks” and “Salon Stage,” daily at noon ET / 9 a.m. PT and 4 p.m. ET / 1 p.m. PT, streaming live on Salon and on Facebook.

“Take on the f**king demonstrators”: Nixon, Vietnam and the politics of polarization

(Credit: AP)

“I want them to break those windows up at the Capitol, I think,” said the president of the United States. Richard Nixon had been elected in 1968 on a law-and-order platform, and he was talking about demonstrators coming to protest him and the Vietnam War, but he privately welcomed the violence. It was more unpopular than the war, so Nixon could use it to his political advantage — for example, to tar peaceful antiwar protestors with the crimes of the violent. When his chief of staff read him a poll on the protests (28 percent in favor, 65 percent opposed), Nixon said, “Make a note there: Take on the fucking demonstrators.”

Nixon was a master of the dark art of orchestrating political tensions, resentments and animosities for maximum political gain. The divisions he sowed in America have never entirely healed. “The divisive country we live in today? It starts with Vietnam,” said filmmaker Ken Burns. In the ninth episode of “The Vietnam War,” titled “A Disrespectful Loyalty (May 1970–March 1973),” Burns and co-director Lynn Novick illuminate the damage done by a president who saw political advantage in sowing political division. The light shed on this dark part of American history could dispel some of its lingering effects. It might even make it more difficult for another president to play the same tricks on us.

Nixon’s most divisive act was to add four more years to a war he knew he could not win. Prolonging the war guaranteed that the divisions that had opened like wounds in the body politic during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson would just grow larger and more painful. The Nixon years became a time of increasing radicalization on the part of the antiwar movement — and on the part of the anti-antiwar movement. To cite one notorious example, a faction of the Students for a Democratic Society became the Weather Underground, its political activism curdling into political violence. The Weathermen set off bombs in America, hoping to set off a revolution as well. It didn’t work out as planned. Instead, the Weathermen became the perfect villains for a Republican president who wanted to smear the larger, peaceful antiwar movement as violent, radical and anti-American. To cite another notorious example of Nixon-era radicalization, New York construction workers physically attacked antiwar demonstrators in the Hard Hat Riot. Nixon responded by inviting the head of the construction workers union to the White House — and later making him secretary of labor. It helped lure traditionally Democratic voters into Nixon’s New American Majority. Nixon profited from the rise of violence on the left and right, even as it bred fear, distrust and even hatred in America.

If only Americans at that time had gotten the chance to hear the secretly recorded White House tapes that Burns and Novick include in “The Vietnam War.” The tapes would have united America — left, right and center — against Nixon. The tapes reveal the real reason Nixon prolonged the war — a cold, hard political calculation. Nixon assumed that he would lose his reelection bid if South Vietnam fell before Election Day 1972. To avoid being rejected at the polls as a president who lost a war, Nixon kept American troops fighting and dying in Vietnam through all four years of his first term. It was a policy that all patriotic, God-fearing, peace-loving, troops-honoring, war-hating Americans would have gladly joined in opposing, had they but known.

Nixon hid his true thinking. He told us he would end the war through “Vietnamization” or negotiation. He said “Vietnamization” would train and equip South Vietnam to defend itself, so American troops could come home. Before he even announced the “Vietnamization” program, he knew it would not work. On his first full day in office, January 21, 1969, Nixon asked his top advisers how soon South Vietnam would be able to defend itself without American troops. The answer was simple and clear: not for the foreseeable future. The South would depend on American troops for its survival even after it was fully trained and equipped. This was the unanimous view of the Pentagon, CIA, State Department, Joint Chiefs of Staff, American embassy in Saigon and the U.S. military commander in Vietnam. That didn’t stop Nixon from promising to “withdraw all of our forces from Vietnam on a schedule in accordance with our [Vietnamization] program, as the South Vietnamese become strong enough to defend their own freedom.” Nixon knew this wasn’t going to happen. On his own White House tapes, you can hear him say, “I look at the tide of history out there — South Vietnam probably can never even survive anyway.” Vietnamization gave Nixon a chance to stretch out American withdrawal for four years and to claim credit for reducing the number of American soldiers in Vietnam from more than 500,000 when he took office to less than 50,000 by Election Day 1972.

Nixon’s refusal to face the ugly facts (in public at least) enabled opponents and supporters of the war to avoid facing the ugliest aspects of their own positions. Liberals did not like to admit that leaving Vietnam would mean losing the war. Conservatives did not like to admit that staying in Vietnam would mean continued stalemate, not victory. Vietnamization gave all an excuse to avoid confronting unpleasant reality. The cost of that avoidance was not apparent at first.

As Nixon dragged out the war, more and more Americans told pollsters they wanted Congress to make the president bring the troops home by the end of 1971. Nixon considered the idea, but his national security adviser Henry Kissinger privately warned him that Saigon might fall before Election Day as a consequence. Publicly, Nixon framed the issue in terms of national honor and national security. He said, “The issue very simply is this: Shall we leave Vietnam in a way that — by our own actions — consciously turns the country over to the Communists? Or shall we leave in a way that gives the South Vietnamese a reasonable chance to survive as a free people? My plan will end American involvement in a way that would provide that chance. And the other plan would end it precipitately and give victory to the Communists.” Nixon made support for his plan sound strong, loyal and heroic, and opposition sound weak, defeatist and treacherous. His polarizing rhetoric led Democrats to ask if the Republican would ever end the war and conservatives to ask if liberals wanted the Communists to win. And so the divisions deepened, as Americans questioned one another’s sanity, morality and patriotism.

For Nixon, the real issue, very simply, was this: would South Vietnam fall before the 1972 presidential election, or after? When it could hurt Nixon’s chances at winning a second term, or when it would be too late for the voters to hold him accountable? By the spring of 1971, Nixon had settled on a range of possible exit dates that would allow him to both (1) avoid a pre-election South Vietnamese collapse and (2) claim that Vietnamization had succeeded. He thought he could meet both goals if he brought the last troops home any time from July of 1972 to January of 1973. Nixon preferred to do it before the election, when it could do him the most good politically. Kissinger preferred to do it after, when the threat of a pre-election collapse had passed completely.

“Our major goal is to get our ground forces the hell out of there long before the elections,” Nixon said.

“The only problem is to prevent the collapse in ’72,” Kissinger said.

“I know. I know!” Nixon said.

In the end, Nixon fooled liberals and conservatives alike — and used both for his political ends.

Liberals like the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee Sen. George S. McGovern, D-SD sincerely believed that Nixon was committed to preserving South Vietnam. McGovern framed the election as “a choice between four more years of war, or four years of peace.” He overestimated Nixon’s anti-Communism and underestimated his political opportunism. The Democrat was caught flat-footed two weeks before the election when the White House announced that it had reached a settlement with North Vietnam. The agreement called for complete withdrawal of American troops from South Vietnam in return for the release of American prisoners of war from the North — two goals McGovern shared. When South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu refused to sign the deal, McGovern concluded it was some kind of Nixonian trick to keep the war going. McGovern misread the situation completely.

The agreement was a “decent interval” deal. It would only keep South Vietnam going for another year or two before the North took over. It was a way of ensuring that Saigon didn’t collapse a few months after the last American troops left, thereby demonstrating that Vietnamization was a failure and that Nixon had sacrificed the lives of more than 20,000 American soldiers in vain. “We’ve got to find some formula that holds the thing together a year or two,” Kissinger said. “After a year, Mr. President, Vietnam will be a backwater. If we settle it, say, this October, by January ’74 no one will give a damn.” Nixon and Kissinger justified the “decent interval” exit strategy by telling themselves that it preserved American credibility. “If a year or two years from now North Vietnam gobbles up South Vietnam, we can have a viable foreign policy if it looks as if it’s the result of South Vietnamese incompetence.” In order to get the deal, Nixon and Kissinger secretly assured the Communists that America would not intervene again, as long as the North waited a year or two before taking over the South. Nixon was willing to forfeit America’s credibility with our Cold War adversaries to preserve his political credibility with American voters.

South Vietnam rejected the deal for the same reason North Vietnam accepted it — both realized that it would lead to Saigon’s fall, as I wrote in “Fatal Politics: The Nixon Tapes, the Vietnam War, and the Casualties of Reelection.” The deal would leave 150,000 North Vietnamese troops in South Vietnam — precisely the kind of threat that the South could not handle on its own, as Nixon’s military, diplomatic and intelligence advisers had warned him. Briefed on Nixon and Kissinger’s settlement terms, President Thieu had wept angry tears and said the deal meant suicide for the South. The Saigon government united in opposition. “These guys are scared. And they’re desperate. And they know what’s coming,” Kissinger said. “And Thieu says that, sure, this — these proposals keep him going, but somewhere down the road he’ll have no choice except to commit suicide. And he’s probably right.”

This was the same Kissinger who went before the White House cameras when North Vietnam accepted the deal and said, “We believe that peace is at hand.” The agreement was not the “peace with honor” that Nixon had promised. It was delayed defeat concealed by deceit.

But it sure worked politically. Nixon won reelection in a record-setting landslide with 60.7 percent of the popular vote and the electoral votes of 49 states. This looked like an enormous win for conservatives, but in retrospect the victory seems hollow. Conservatives thought they were supporting a strong leader who put American interests before his political interest, who stuck with an unpopular war despite great domestic opposition, and was vindicated when the enemy accepted his settlement demands. In reality, Nixon’s settlement demands set the stage for Communist victory as soon as a “decent interval” passed; he prolonged an unpopular war because he calculated that losing it would be even more unpopular, and he did this because he put his political interests above American interests and all other values. Prolonging the war brought with it a host of social ills: domestic division, civil disorder, reduced respect for the law, diminished morale and increased drug abuse in the armed forces. It cost the lives of more than 20,000 American soldiers and countless more Vietnamese, North and South. A true conservative could make a case for waging war to prevent a Communist victory in Vietnam, but not merely to prevent a Democratic victory in the United States. No one deserved to die for that, American or Vietnamese, Communist or anti-Communist. Nixon’s victory depended on dividing Americans and defiling the fundamental values that unite us as a people, conservative values as well as liberal ones.

To avoid taking responsibility for the consequences of his “decent interval” exit strategy, Nixon blamed the fall of Saigon on liberals in Congress. Specifically, he blamed Congress for providing less aid to the South than the president requested (true) and for prohibiting the use of American airpower in Indochina (true, though Congress did this only after Nixon said he would sign the prohibition into law). Long before Congress took either of these steps, however, Nixon’s own settlement terms doomed Saigon to fall, something that was understood at the time by Nixon and Kissinger, Moscow and Beijing, North and South Vietnam. Nevertheless, Nixon’s stabbed-in-the-back myth, the most divisive and destructive kind of historical delusion, lives on in works like Lewis Sorley’s highly influential book, “A Better War: The Unexpected Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam.” True believers in the myth should check out Sorley’s earlier, more balanced, book, “Thunderbolt: General Creighton Abrams and the Army of His Times.” In Thunderbolt, Sorley writes that Saigon “was asked to sign on to an agreement that would sanction the continuing presence in the South of hundreds of thousands of invading troops. Agonizing as it was, their ouster had proven too difficult to attain, no less so in Paris than on the battlefield. Thieu sensed — correctly — that a ceasefire in place foreshadowed the eventual downfall of an independent South Vietnam. Henry Kissinger maintained — perhaps also correctly — that he got the best agreement possible under the circumstances. In that gap between what was necessary and what was attainable lay the essential tragedy of the war in Vietnam.” This is a valuable unlearned lesson of the war. We lost because our most capable civilian and military leaders never figured out a way to win.

Some of our leaders, the worst of them, turned us against one another to conceal their own failures. We should never let them do that to us again.

Read more from the University of Virginia Press.

Paul Horner, the face of fake news, dies a lonely death

Paul Horner (Credit: YouTube/CNN)

Paul Horner, the 38-year-old “satire” writer was found dead last week after a short, comet-like career of producing fake news, some of which may have very well influenced President Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral victory. Local authorities — who discovered him in his bed — suspect a drug overdose as cause of death, surmising no foul play, CBS News reports.

He — or someone using his fake byline of “Jimmy Rustling” — was still publishing to abcnews.com.co as recently as September 15.

Horner was many things, but apologetic was not one of them. He famously told the Washington Post last year that Donald Trump was elected because of him and his widely shared and fabricated articles.

Throughout his work, he bolstered conservative conspiracy theories including the notion that anti-Trump protestors were paid to attend the candidate’s rallies and that Barack Obama was secretly a radical Muslim. Facebook was his platform of dissemination, but Horner’s articles were shared — and sometimes even used as primary sources — by Fox News, Donald Trump Jr., and Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.

Horner, and many others saw Trump’s rise as a change in America’s DNA, a total disregard for fact. “People are definitely dumber,” Horner told the Post in November, 2016. “My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time.” He said with observable enthusiam, “They never fact-check anything!”

Somewhat the trollish sociopath, and genuinely a political danger, Horner framed himself as an undercover operative of the alt-right, effectively, rewriting their lies on websites that looked like or even straight-up stole the images of reliable news sources. But when caught, Horner would shrug, call it “satire,” claim he was really exposing the dishonesty of the conservative right, and repeat, pulling in thousands in profit. All the while, the traditional media relabeled his toxicity as edginess, his work representative of a new media paradigm, one that social media helped to usher in.

But, as Salon’s Matthew Sheffield writes: “It’s important to realize, however, that the massive number of conspiracy-peddling, far-right websites that have proliferated in recent years belong to a long tradition of conservative fake news.” It wasn’t that Horner and his ilk were “rebels” or something new. Just like Trump’s attacks on mainstream media, that clique honed in on a deep-seated and long-settled distrust of news sources. They hadn’t birthed something not seen before.

Indeed, Kurt Andersen has authored an entire book documenting the fake-news era, which he argued was 500 years in the making. The truth is, the sort of mindset Horner represented was even older than that.

Whether you’re a Breitbart-like founder or, like Horner, a Breitbart-audience exploiter, there’s money to be made in the business of fake news. Horner himself told the Post he raked in about $10,000 a month producing the kind of “journalism” that right-wingers wanted to see and believe in regardless of actual facts (it’s the way Fox News has made billions).

Just like any death, especially one by a clearly troubled man battling addiction, it is a tragedy. But Horner’s life and work does not provide us a window into the transformation of modern media or make him pioneer in alternative journalism. No, there’s no great insight to be gained from the man who said openly in the same interview that he hated Trump and yet seemed proud of his role in the candidate’s victory.

Horner’s fake news career was about two things: attention and money. His journey just shows the sacrifices in humanity and decency some will make to get them.

Was Facebook fooled by the Russians?

Mark Zuckerberg (Credit: AP/Paul Sakuma)

Facebook’s political troubles do not appear to be anywhere near ending, despite mea culpas by founder Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg that the global social media giant now recognizes its platform was used by Russian troll accounts to influence the 2016 election and its automated advertising platform can be gamed to foment racist messaging.

The past two weeks’ media revelations about how, as one New York Times piece put it, Zuckerberg created a 21st-century Frankenstein, a behemoth he cannot control, read like a screenplay from the latest Netflix political thriller. Last weekend, the Washington Post reported that Facebook discovered a Russian-based operation “as it was getting underway” in June 2016, using its platform to spread anti-Democratic Party propaganda. Facebook alerted the FBI. After Facebook traced “a series of shadowy accounts” that were promoting the stolen emails and other Democratic campaign documents, it “once again contacted the FBI.”

But Facebook “did not find clear evidence of Russian disinformation or ad purchases by Russian-linked accounts,” the Post reported. “Nor did any U.S. law enforcement or intelligence officials visit the company to lay out what they knew.” Instead, it was preoccupied with a rash of highly propagandistic partisan pages, both left and right, that came out of nowhere in 2016, the Post reported. These websites stole content from real news sites and twisted it into incendiary claims, drawing readers and shares that exploited Facebook’s royalty-producing business model. “The company found that most of the groups behind the problematic pages had clear financial motives, which suggested that they weren’t working for a foreign government,” the Post said.

This messaging fog prompted Zuckerberg to say it was “crazy” for anyone to suggest that fake news on Facebook played a role in Trump’s electoral victory and the GOP triumph. The Post’s biggest scoop—after noting that Facebook was telling federal agencies during the election about Russian trolling activities, even if it misread them—was President Obama pulling Zuckerberg aside at an international conference, where “Obama made a personal appeal to Zuckerberg to take the threat of fake news and political disinformation seriously . . . [or] it would only get worse in the next presidential race.”

The Post’s account is a remarkable example of Washington-based reporting. Sources inside Facebook, law enforcement and intelligence agencies are saying that they held in their hands the dots that are only being connected today—much like the federal agents who were tracking some of the 9/11 hijackers before the terrorist attack. Facebook has since changed its tune, giving special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russia-Trump campaign collusion and congressional inquests 3,000 Facebook ads placed by one Russian front group. Zuckerberg also issued an online video last week, in which he said, “I don’t want anyone to use our tools to undermine democracy,” and pledged Facebook would now disclose the names of businesses that place political ads.

Meanwhile, after ProPublica this month reported it could use Facebook’s automated ad placement service to target people describing themselves as “Jew haters” or who used terms like “how to burn Jews,” Sandberg announced the colossus had badly erred, and would revamp its ad filtering and targeting system. “The fact that hateful terms were even offered as options was totally inappropriate and a fail on our part,” she said. “Hate has no place on Facebook, and as a Jew, as a mother and as a human being, I know the damage that can come from hate.”

But even as Zuckerberg makes public commitments about supporting American democracy, and Sandberg makes heartfelt declarations against enabling hate, top technology writers and editorial pages aren’t quite buying Facebook’s mea culpas. The most sympathetic pieces say there was no willful malice on Facebook’s part. They add that when Facebook asked the feds to help them figure out the Russia puzzle, they were met with silence from federal law enforcement agencies. That deer-in-the-headlights narrative has led to characterizing its trials as “Facebook’s Frankenstein moment.” As New York Times business writer Kevin Roose quoted a former Facebook advertising executive, “The reality is that if you’re at the help of a machine that has two billion screaming, whiny humans, it’s basically impossible to predict each and every nefarious use case . . . It’s a whack-a-mole problem.”

The Times editorial page was less forgiving, calling Zuckerberg and Sandberg’s awakening “belated,” noting that Facebook has opposed federal regulation of online political messaging, and that Zuckerberg’s remedy of disclosing names of businesses that place ads is easily evaded by campaign operatives. “Disclosing the name of Facebook business accounts placing political ads, for instance, will be of little value if purchasers can disguise their real identity — calling themselves, say, Americans for Motherhood and Apple Pie,” the Times said. “Further, even if Facebook succeeds in driving away foreign propaganda, the same material could pop up on Twitter or other social media sites.”

Actually, the Post reported that Facebook has recently deployed software that was able to “disable 30,000 fake accounts” in May’s French national election, and that software was successfully used last weekend in Germany’s national election. That disclosure by the Post, and other investigative reporting by the Times about how Facebook has worked with foreign governments to censor posts by critics and posted pro-regime propaganda, suggests Facebook is not quite the innocent bystander it professes to be.

The Times ran an extensive piece on how Facebook’s future lies with finding hundreds of millions of new users overseas, including in countries where governments want to control the media. Part of trying to access markets like China, where Facebook has been banned, include allowing Chinese state media outlets to buy pro-government ads targeting Facebook’s Hong Kong users. In other words, its ad sales business model has looked past political propaganda to cash in, which Russia adroitly exploited in 2016. Of course, there is a double-standard here. Russia was using Facebook to aim at U.S. elections, upsetting America’s political establishment; whereas when China and other nations used Facebook for political purposes, it’s apparently okay.

Last week Jim Rutenberg, the Times’ “Mediator” columnist, wrote there’s a veritable mountain of detail that still has not been made public by Facebook concerning 2016’s election. This goes far beyond releasing the 3,000 ads bought by a single Russian troll account it shared with Mueller and congressional committees. So far, we know the ads amplified “divisive social and political messages,” that the users who bought the ads were fabricated, and that some ads targeted specific states and voter segments. But what we don’t know, Rutenberg noted, is what those ads looked like, what they specifically said, whose accounts sent them, how many people saw and shared them, which states and counties were targeted, and what actions the ads urged people to take. The Daily Beast reported that at least one ad organized an anti-refugee rally in Idaho, and another report said Russian trolls promoted 17 Trump rallies in Florida.

On Monday afternoon, the Post reported it had spoken to congressional sources familiar with the contents of the 3,000 ads, who said they used references to groups like Black Lives Matter to incite different blocs of voters. “The Russian campaign — taking advantage of Facebook’s ability to simultaneously send contrary messages to different groups of users based on their political and demographic characteristics — also sought to sow discord among religious groups. Other ads highlighted support for Democrat Hillary Clinton among Muslim women,” the Post said.

For these reasons and others, Facebook’s political troubles do not appear to be ending soon. Predictably, some Democratic lawmakers are saying it’s time to require anyone who buys an online political ad to disclose it. But that notion, apart from going nowhere in a GOP-majority Congress, only scratches the surface of what’s going on. Campaign finance laws have proven to be utterly incapable of stopping so-called dark money in recent years, such as front groups created by the Koch brothers or state chambers of commerce. These laws can only regulate explicit political speech, such as ads telling people to vote for or against a certain candidate. How are they going to prevent innuendo-filled messaging, from fake messengers, on a deregulated internet?

Companies like Facebook, which track and parse the behavior of multi-millions of Americans online and sell ads based on those metrics, have embraced all the benefits of its business model. But they have avoided taking the lead to prevent nefarious uses of their platforms, until they’re shamed in public, such as ProPublica’s recent outing of Facebook’s automated ad platform that can be gamed by anti-Semites, or disclosures like the Post report that Obama tried to give Zuckerberg a wakeup call last November.

Internet “companies act as if they own our data. There’s no reason why that should be the case . . . That data is an x-ray of our soul,” Franklin Foer, author of the new book, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, told KQED-FM in San Francisco on Monday. But these companies aren’t regulated in the U.S. The firms own vast files on virtually anyone who is likely to vote, let alone shop. And their automated systems rolled out the red carpet to anyone seeking to target 2016’s voters, from the presidential campaigns to Russian trolls.

Your favorite companies may be political black boxes

(Credit: AP Photo/Danny Johnston, File)

You book a hotel on Expedia.com.

You buy a Garmin to navigate highways.

Finally, you stream Netflix movies to keep the kids occupied on the trip.

Just know you’re patronizing companies that volunteer virtually nothing about their political practices and spending, according to a new study on corporate political disclosure and accountability by the nonpartisan Center for Political Accountability and the Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Research at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

Other familiar names such as travel website TripAdvisor, satellite service provider Dish Network Corp. and energy drink-maker Monster Beverage Corp. rank among 58 companies within the S&P 500 that earned a score of zero on the study’s 70-point scale.

Scores are calculated based on 24 indicators that range from whether a company publicly discloses corporate contributions to political committees and organizations — including politically active nonprofit organizations that don’t themselves disclose their donors — to whether it posts a detailed report of its corporate political spending on its website. The study also awards points to companies that have established clear political spending and disclosure policies.

Other notable companies receiving low political transparency scores include toymaker Mattel Inc., discount stores Dollar General Corp. and Dollar Tree Inc., Michael Kors Holdings Ltd., Tyson Foods Inc.

Also among the basement dwellers: consumer credit reporting agency Equifax, which is facing congressional hearings after a massive breach of its data systems that compromised the security of about 143 million Americans’ personal information.

When asked about Tyson Food’s score of three points out of a possible 70, Caroline Ahn, a Tyson Foods spokeswoman, said the company complies with federal disclosure requirements.

“We report to the U.S. House and Senate any corporate expenditures paid to trade associations that are involved with advocacy efforts,” she said in an emailed statement.

But other companies, such as Microsoft Corp., eBay Inc., HP Inc. and PG&E Corp., fared much better with scores of at least 65 points out of a possible 70.

The number of these “trendsetter” companies, those that scored 63 points or more, increased by nine companies from the 41 companies that had the distinction in the 2016 report.

This year was also the first time in the Center for Public Accountability/Zicklin study’s seven-year history that a company received a perfect score. This distinction goes to Becton, Dickinson & Co., a global medical technology company.

The average score for all 499 companies in the study was about 30 points on its zero-to-70 scale. That’s a slight uptick from 2016.

Several companies significantly improved their scores from 2016 to 2017. Among them are chemical company LyondellBasell Industries NV, Host Hotels & Resorts, CenterPoint Energy Inc. and Ralph Lauren Corp. each boosted their score by dozens of points by voluntarily disclosing more spending or clarifying political spending practices.

Until recently, Host Hotels and Resorts didn’t have a staffer to focus on disclosure and corporate political spending, said Kevin Gallagher, the company’s vice president and assistant general counsel. Now the company does.

“We were just really happy to improve our disclosure, and I think we can do even better next year,” Gallagher said.

Food spice outfit McCormick & Company Inc., pharmacy chain Walgreen Boots Alliance Inc. and Costco Wholesale Corp. are well-known companies that also scored well, according to the study.

Bruce Freed, president of the Center for Political Accountability, said corporate disclosure has held even and he thinks it will continue to grow at a steady pace even in the shadow of a president who hasn’t released his tax returns.

“Political disclosure and contributions are now becoming a standard that companies are expected to follow,” he said. “Those companies that don’t disclose are going to be viewed as outliers.”

This year’s Center for Political Accountability/Zicklin study showed a slight dip — from 305 last year to 295 this year — in the number of companies that disclosed some or all their election-related spending, or banned such spending altogether. Freed said the year-to-year change in which companies are listed within the S&P 500 may have caused this decrease.

But the Center for Political Accountability/Zicklin study has also revealed a growing trend toward more managerial and board oversight of political spending and more disclosure or prohibition of political spending, said Freed, noting the study has measured the full S&P 500 for the past three years.

For instance, the numbers of senior managers overseeing political spending grew from 237 in 2015 to 292 this year.

The number of companies banning contributions to 501(c)(4) “social welfare” nonprofit organizations is now at 177, versus 83 in 2015.

The study also notes that more companies are voluntarily disclosing their election spending without being told to do so.

The Center for Competitive Politics is a longtime critic of the Center for Political Accountability/Zicklin transparency study. While Center for Competitive Politics senior policy analyst Luke Wachob hasn’t yet seen the newest study’s findings, he faulted past studies for “misrepresenting the issue of corporate disclosure and for using a ‘one-size-fits-all’ policy for the those of different entities that comprise ‘corporate America.’”

Wachob said his organization hopes the study’s “defects” have been addressed in its latest iteration.

Kelli Mleczko, a spokeswoman for Sempra Energy, said public policy engagement is important for all companies — but so is transparency. Sempra Energy earned a score of 68 points out of 70.

“While the CPA-Zicklin Index can be used as a benchmark for areas to focus on in terms of accountability, our principle motive is that we believe maintaining [transparency] and accountability is core to being a responsible company,” she said.

How World War III with China might be fought

(Credit: AP Photo/Charlie Riedel. File)

[This piece has been adapted and expanded from Alfred W. McCoy’s new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.]

For the past 50 years, American leaders have been supremely confident that they could suffer military setbacks in places like Cuba or Vietnam without having their system of global hegemony, backed by the world’s wealthiest economy and finest military, affected. The country was, after all, the planet’s “indispensible nation,” as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright proclaimed in 1998 (and other presidents and politicians have insisted ever since). The U.S. enjoyed a greater “disparity of power” over its would-be rivals than any empire ever, Yale historian Paul Kennedy announced in 2002. Certainly, it would remain “the sole superpower for decades to come,” Foreign Affairs magazine assured us just last year. During the 2016 campaign, candidate Donald Trump promised his supporters that “we’re gonna win with military . . . we are gonna win so much you may even get tired of winning.” In August, while announcing his decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, Trump reassured the nation: “In every generation, we have faced down evil, and we have always prevailed.” In this fast-changing world, only one thing was certain: when it really counted, the United States could never lose.

No longer.

The Trump White House may still be basking in the glow of America’s global supremacy but, just across the Potomac, the Pentagon has formed a more realistic view of its fading military superiority. In June, the Defense Department issued a major report titled on Risk Assessment in a Post-Primacy World, finding that the U.S. military “no longer enjoys an unassailable position versus state competitors,” and “it no longer can . . . automatically generate consistent and sustained local military superiority at range.” This sober assessment led the Pentagon’s top strategists to “the jarring realization that ‘we can lose.’” Increasingly, Pentagon planners find, the “self-image of a matchless global leader” provides a “flawed foun­dation for forward-looking defense strategy . . . under post-primacy conditions.” This Pentagon report also warned that, like Russia, China is “engaged in a deliberate program to demonstrate the limits of U.S. authority”; hence, Beijing’s bid for “Pacific primacy” and its “campaign to expand its control over the South China Sea.”

China’s Challenge

Indeed, military tensions between the two countries have been rising in the western Pacific since the summer of 2010. Just as Washington once used its wartime alliance with Great Britain to appropriate much of that fading empire’s global power after World War II, so Beijing began using profits from its export trade with the U.S. to fund a military challenge to its dominion over the waterways of Asia and the Pacific.

Some telltale numbers suggest the nature of the future great power competition between Washington and Beijing that could determine the course of the twenty-first century. In April 2015, for instance, the Department of Agriculture reported that the U.S. economy would grow by nearly 50% over the next 15 years, while China’s would expand by 300%, equaling or surpassing America’s around 2030.

Similarly, in the critical race for worldwide patents, American leadership in technological innovation is clearly on the wane. In 2008, the United States still held the number two spot behind Japan in patent applications with 232,000. China was, however, closing in fast at 195,000, thanks to a blistering 400% increase since 2000. By 2014, China actually took the lead in this critical category with 801,000 patents, nearly half the world’s total, compared to just 285,000 for the Americans.

With supercomputing now critical for everything from code breaking to consumer products, China’s Defense Ministry outpaced the Pentagon for the first time in 2010, launching the world’s fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A. For the next six years, Beijing produced the fastest machine and last year finally won in a way that couldn’t be more crucial: with a supercomputer that had microprocessor chips made in China. By then, it also had the most supercomputers with 167 compared to 165 for the United States and only 29 for Japan.

Over the longer term, the American education system, that critical source of future scientists and innovators, has been falling behind its competitors. In 2012, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development tested half a million 15-year-olds worldwide. Those in Shanghai came in first in math and science, while those in Massachusetts, “a strong-performing U.S. state,” placed 20th in science and 27th in math. By 2015, America’s standing had declined to 25th in science and 39th in math.

But why, you might ask, should anybody care about a bunch of 15-year-olds with backpacks, braces, and attitude? Because by 2030, they will be the mid-career scientists and engineers determining whose computers survive a cyber attack, whose satellites evade a missile strike, and whose economy has the next best thing.

Rival Superpower Strategies

With its growing resources, Beijing has been laying claim to an arc of islands and waters from Korea to Indonesia long dominated by the U.S. Navy. In August 2010, after Washington expressed a “national interest” in the South China Sea and conducted naval exercises there to reinforce the claim, Beijing’s Global Times responded angrily that “the U.S.-China wrestling match over the South China Sea issue has raised the stakes in deciding who the real future ruler of the planet will be.”

Four years later, Beijing escalated its territorial claims to these waters, building a nuclear submarine facility on Hainan Island and accelerating its dredging of seven artificial atolls for military bases in the Spratly Islands. When the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague ruled, in 2016, that these atolls gave China no territorial claim to the surrounding seas, Beijing’s Foreign Ministry dismissed the decision out of hand.

To meet China’s challenge on the high seas, the Pentagon began sending a succession of carrier groups on “freedom of navigation” cruises into the South China Sea. It also started shifting spare air and sea assets to a string of bases from Japan to Australia in a bid to strengthen its strategic position along the Asian littoral. Since the end of World War II, Washington has attempted to control the strategic Eurasian landmass from a network of NATO military bases in Europe and a chain of island bastions in the Pacific. Between the “axial ends” of this vast continent, Washington has, over the past 70 years, built successive layers of military power – air and naval bases during the Cold War and more recently a string of 60 drone bases stretching from Sicily to Guam.

Simultaneously, however, China has conducted what the Pentagon in 2010 called “a comprehensive transformation of its military” meant to prepare the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) “for extended-range power projection.” With the world’s “most active land-based ballistic and cruise missile program,” Beijing can target “its nuclear forces throughout . . . most of the world, including the continental United States.” Meanwhile, accurate missiles now provide the PLA with the ability “to attack ships, including aircraft carriers, in the western Pacific Ocean.” In emerging military domains, China has begun to contest U.S. dominion over cyberspace and space, with plans to dominate “the information spectrum in all dimensions of the modern battlespace.”

China’s army has by now developed a sophisticated cyberwarfare capacity through its Unit 61398 and allied contractors that “increasingly focus . . . on companies involved in the critical infrastructure of the United States – its electrical power grid, gas lines, and waterworks.” After identifying that unit as responsible for a series of intellectual property thefts, Washington took the unprecedented step, in 2013, of filing criminal charges against five active-duty Chinese cyber officers.

China has already made major technological advances that could prove decisive in any future war with Washington. Instead of competing across the board, Beijing, like many late adopters of technology, has strategically chosen key areas to pursue, particularly orbital satellites, which are a fulcrum for the effective weaponization of space. As early as 2012, China had already launched 14 satellites into “three kinds of orbits” with “more satellites in high orbits and . . . better anti-shielding capabilities than other systems.” Four years later, Beijing announced that it was on track to “cover the whole globe with a constellation of 35 satellites by 2020,” becoming second only to the United States when it comes to operational satellite systems.

Playing catch-up, China has recently achieved a bold breakthrough in secure communications. In August 2016, three years after the Pentagon abandoned its own attempt at full-scale satellite security, Beijing launched the world’s first quantum satellite that transmits photons, believed to be “invulnerable to hacking,” rather than relying on more easily compromised radio waves. According to one scientific report, this new technology will “create a super-secure communications network, potentially linking people anywhere.” China was reportedly planning to launch 20 of the satellites should the technology prove fully successful.

To check China, Washington has been building a new digital defense network of advanced cyberwarfare capabilities and air-space robotics. Between 2010 and 2012, the Pentagon extended drone operations into the exosphere, creating an arena for future warfare unlike anything that has gone before. As early as 2020, if all goes according to plan, the Pentagon will loft a triple-tier shield of unmanned drones reaching from the stratosphere to the exosphere, armed with agile missiles, linked by an expanded satellite system, and operated through robotic controls.

Weighing this balance of forces, the RAND Corporation recently released a study, War with China, predicting that by 2025 “China will likely have more, better, and longer-range ballistic missiles and cruise missiles; advanced air defenses; latest generation aircraft; quieter submarines; more and better sensors; and the digital communications, processing power, and C2 [cyber security] necessary to operate an integrated kill chain.”

In the event of all-out war, RAND suggested, the United States might suffer heavy losses to its carriers, submarines, missiles, and aircraft from Chinese strategic forces, while its computer systems and satellites would be degraded thanks to “improved Chinese cyberwar and ASAT [anti-satellite] capabilities.” Even though American forces would counterattack, their “growing vulnerability” means Washington’s victory would not be assured. In such a conflict, the think tank concluded, there might well be no “clear winner.”

Make no mistake about the weight of those words. For the first time, a top strategic think-tank, closely aligned with the U.S. military and long famous for its influential strategic analyses, was seriously contemplating a major war with China that the United States would not win.

World War III: Scenario 2030

The technology of space and cyberwarfare is so new, so untested, that even the most outlandish scenarios currently concocted by strategic planners may soon be superseded by a reality still hard to conceive. In a 2015 nuclear war exercise, the Air Force Wargaming Institute used sophisticated computer modeling to imagine “a 2030 scenario where the Air Force’s fleet of B-52s . . . upgraded with . . . improved standoff weapons” patrol the skies ready to strike. Simultaneously, “shiny new intercontinental ballistic missiles” stand by for launch. Then, in a bold tactical gambit, B-1 bombers with “full Integrated Battle Station (IBS) upgrade” slip through enemy defenses for a devastating nuclear strike.

That scenario was no doubt useful for Air Force planners, but said little about the actual future of U.S. global power. Similarly, the RAND War with China study only compared military capacities, without assessing the particular strategies either side might use to its advantage.

I might not have access to the Wargaming Institute’s computer modeling or RAND’s renowned analytical resources, but I can at least carry their work one step further by imagining a future conflict with an unfavorable outcome for the United States. As the globe’s still-dominant power, Washington must spread its defenses across all military domains, making its strength, paradoxically, a source of potential weakness. As the challenger, China has the asymmetric advantage of identifying and exploiting a few strategic flaws in Washington’s otherwise overwhelming military superiority.

For years, prominent Chinese defense intellectuals like Shen Dingli of Fudan University have rejected the idea of countering the U.S. with a big naval build-up and argued instead for “cyberattacks, space weapons, lasers, pulses, and other directed-energy beams.” Instead of rushing to launch aircraft carriers that “will be burned” by lasers fired from space, China should, Shen argued, develop advanced weapons “to make other command systems fail to work.” Although decades away from matching the full might of Washington’s global military, China could, through a combination of cyberwar, space warfare, and supercomputing, find ways to cripple U.S. military communications and thus blind its strategic forces. With that in mind, here’s one possible scenario for World War III:

It’s 11:59 p.m. on Thanksgiving Thursday in 2030. For months, tensions have been mounting between Chinese and U.S. Navy patrols in the South China Sea. Washington’s attempts to use diplomacy to restrain China have proven an embarrassing failure among long-time allies – with NATO crippled by years of diffident American support, Britain now a third-tier power, Japan functionally neutral, and other international leaders cool to Washington’s concerns after suffering its cyber-surveillance for so long. With the American economy diminished, Washington plays the last card in an increasingly weak hand, deploying six of its remaining eight carrier groups to the Western Pacific.

Instead of intimidating China’s leaders, the move makes them more bellicose. Flying from air bases in the Spratly Islands, their jet fighters soon begin buzzing U.S. Navy ships in the South China Sea, while Chinese frigates play chicken with two of the aircraft carriers on patrol, crossing ever closer to their bows.

Then tragedy strikes. At 4:00 a.m. on a foggy October night, the massive carrier USS Gerald Ford slices through aging Frigate-536 Xuchang, sinking the Chinese ship with its entire crew of 165.  Beijing demands an apology and reparations. When Washington refuses, China’s fury comes fast.

At the stroke of midnight on Black Friday, as cyber-shoppers storm the portals of Best Buy for deep discounts on the latest consumer electronics from Bangladesh, Navy personnel staffing the Space Surveillance Telescope at Exmouth, Western Australia, choke on their coffees as their panoramic screens of the southern sky suddenly blip to black. Thousands of miles away at the U.S. CyberCommand’s operations center in Texas, Air Force technicians detect malicious binaries that, though hacked anonymously into American weapons systems worldwide, show the distinctive digital fingerprints of China’s People’s Liberation Army.

In what historians will later call the “Battle of Binaries,” CyberCom’s supercomputers launch their killer counter-codes. While a few of China’s provincial servers do lose routine administrative data, Beijing’s quantum satellite system, equipped with super-secure photon transmission, proves impervious to hacking. Meanwhile, an armada of bigger, faster supercomputers slaved to Shanghai’s cyberwarfare Unit 61398 blasts back with impenetrable logarithms of unprecedented subtlety and sophistication, slipping into the U.S. satellite system through its antiquated microwave signals.

The first overt strike is one nobody at the Pentagon predicted. Flying at 60,000 feet above the South China Sea, several U.S. carrier-based MQ-25 Stingray drones, infected by Chinese “malware,” suddenly fire all the pods beneath their enormous delta wingspans, sending dozens of lethal missiles plunging harmlessly into the ocean, effectively disarming those formidable weapons.

Determined to fight fire with fire, the White House authorizes a retaliatory strike. Confident their satellite system is impenetrable, Air Force commanders in California transmit robotic codes to a flotilla of X-37B space drones, orbiting 250 miles above the Earth, to launch their Triple Terminator missiles at several of China’s communication satellites. There is zero response.

In near panic, the Navy orders its Zumwalt-class destroyers to fire their RIM-174 killer missiles at seven Chinese satellites in nearby geostationary orbits. The launch codes suddenly prove inoperative.

As Beijing’s viruses spread uncontrollably through the U.S. satellite architecture, the country’s second-rate supercomputers fail to crack the Chinese malware’s devilishly complex code. With stunning speed, GPS signals crucial to the navigation of American ships and aircraft worldwide are compromised.

Across the Pacific, Navy deck officers scramble for their sextants, struggling to recall long-ago navigation classes at Annapolis. Steering by sun and stars, carrier squadrons abandon their stations off the China coast and steam for the safety of Hawaii.

An angry American president orders a retaliatory strike on a secondary Chinese target, Longpo Naval Base on Hainan Island. Within minutes, the commander of Andersen Air Base on Guam launches a battery of super-secret X-51 “Waverider” hypersonic missiles that soar to 70,000 feet and then streak across the Pacific at 4,000 miles per hour – far faster than any Chinese fighter or air-to-air missile. Inside the White House situation room the silence is stifling as everyone counts down the 30 short minutes before the tactical nuclear warheads are to slam into Longpo’s hardened submarine pens, shutting down Chinese naval operations in the South China Sea. Midflight, the missiles suddenly nose-dive into the Pacific.

In a bunker buried deep beneath Tiananmen Square, President Xi Jinping’s handpicked successor, Li Keqiang, even more nationalistic than his mentor, is outraged that Washington would attempt a tactical nuclear strike on Chinese soil. When China’s State Council wavers at the thought of open war, the president quotes the ancient strategist Sun Tzu: “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.” Amid applause and laughter, the vote is unanimous. War it is!

Almost immediately, Beijing escalates from secret cyberattacks to overt acts. Dozens of China’s next-generation SC-19 missiles lift off for strikes on key American communications satellites, scoring a high ratio of kinetic kills on these hulking units. Suddenly, Washington loses secure communications with hundreds of military bases. U.S. fighter squadrons worldwide are grounded. Dozens of F-35 pilots already airborne are blinded as their helmet-mounted avionic displays go black, forcing them down to 10,000 feet for a clear view of the countryside. Without any electronic navigation, they must follow highways and landmarks back to base like bus drivers in the sky.

Midflight on regular patrols around the Eurasian landmass, two-dozen RQ-180 surveillance drones suddenly become unresponsive to satellite-transmitted commands. They fly aimlessly toward the horizon, crashing when their fuel is exhausted. With surprising speed, the United States loses control of what its Air Force has long called the “ultimate high ground.”

With intelligence flooding the Kremlin about crippled American capacity, Moscow, still a close Chinese ally, sends a dozen Severodvinsk-class nuclear submarines beyond the Arctic Circle bound for permanent, provocative patrols between New York and Newport News. Simultaneously, a half-dozen Grigorovich-class missile frigates from Russia’s Black Sea fleet, escorted by an undisclosed number of attack submarines, steam for the western Mediterranean to shadow the U.S. Sixth fleet.

Within a matter of hours, Washington’s strategic grip on the axial ends of Eurasia – the keystone to its global dominion for the past 85 years – is broken. In quick succession, the building blocks in the fragile architecture of U.S. global power start to fall.

Every weapon begets its own nemesis. Just as musketeers upended mounted knights, tanks smashed trench works, and dive bombers sank battleships, so China’s superior cybercapability had blinded America’s communication satellites that were the sinews of its once-formidable military apparatus, giving Beijing a stunning victory in this war of robotic militaries. Without a single combat casualty on either side, the superpower that had dominated the planet for nearly a century is defeated in World War III.

Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of the now-classic book The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, which probed the conjuncture of illicit narcotics and covert operations over 50 years, and the just-published In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power (Dispatch Books) from which this piece is adapted.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, as well as John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Hurricane Maria has crushed Puerto Rican farmers

The aftermath of Hurricane Maria, San Juan, Puerto Rico, September 20, 2017. (Credit: Getty/Hector Retamal)

The devastation from Hurricane Maria wiped out 80 percent of Puerto Rico’s agricultural production, according to Puerto Rico’s agriculture secretary, Carlos Flores Ortega. The New York Times visited farmer José A. Rivera after the winds flattened his plantain, yam, and pepper fields.

“There will be no food in Puerto Rico,” Rivera, told the Times. “There is no more agriculture in Puerto Rico. And there won’t be any for a year or longer.”

Food prices will surely rise on the island, although the loss of crops will not necessarily mean people will starve. Puerto Rico imports about 85 percent of its food. Even so, the storm damaged the infrastructure used to distribute imported food, like ports, roads, and stores.

On CNN, Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rosselló pleaded for aid from Congress. “We need to prevent a humanitarian crisis occurring in America,” he said. FEMA and the Coast Guard are working in the territory.

Flores, the agriculture secretary, appeared to be looking for a silver lining. This may be a chance to rebuild the island’s agriculture so that it is more efficient and sustainable, he told the Times.

As climate change accelerates, we can expect the rate of disasters like this to accelerate as well.

The case of the passionless plot: “Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders”

Miles Gaston Villanueva as Lyle Menendez and Gus Halper as Eric Menendez in "Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders" (Credit: NBC/Justin Lubin)

Classics are classics for a reason, and sometimes there’s no substituting for or improving upon them. “Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders” proves the accuracy of each side of this statement in ways obvious to people familiar with Dick Wolf’s franchise and the famous double-homicide it profiles.

Spooling out over eight episodes starting Tuesday at 10p.m. on NBC, the limited series enables Wolf to adapt the famous investigation and subsequent murder trial of Lyle and Erik Menendez to this tried and true brand. Everything you know about “Law and Order” shows up in its true crime cousin, from the cool and detached scripting to that signature “boom-gung-gung.”

A murder case is a murder case, after all — except, that is, when the case in question is somewhat analogous to another celebrity murder already dramatized to wide critical and industry acclaim. The Menendez brothers weren’t movie stars or famous football heroes, and their case pre-dated the O.J. Simpson murder trial. But they were spoiled rich kids who came to symbolize privilege and the runaway excess of the late 1980s, making them prime fodder for cable’s Court TV to sensationalize.

And there’s the rub, because the nature of Wolf’s approach thwarts sensationalism to emphasize the logistics of a case.

“Law & Order True Crime” takes us back to late 1989 and 1990, when Lyle (Miles Gaston Villanueva) and Erik (Gus Halper) Menendez murdered their parents José and Kitty (Carlos Gómez and Lolita Davidovich) and managed to remain free for months afterward owing a reflexive tendency in the police department to overlook the potential culpability of a person based on their wealth and social status.

Grisly as their actions were, the Menendez brothers reside in the memory as tabloid figures, tacky entitled creeps who embarked on a shopping spree days after they gunned down their mother and father at close range.  Such a detail speaks volumes about their icy lack of remorse and guile while also begging for a hint of pulp. There’s a reason this case has already inspired two TV movies, including one that aired this summer on Lifetime and starring Courtney Love (!) as Kitty.

But showrunner Rene Balcer, who previously drew inspiration from the Menendez murders to write a 1991 “Law & Order” episode, steers his writers to take the same dry approach here as he did sixteen years ago, walking us through the particulars of the tale with all the spark of a burned out docent on her last museum tour of the day.

An array usual style suspects place the action, including the requisite pastel polo shirts, boxy cars and an impressive wig game led by a stack of wild, hay-colored coils topping Edie Falco’s dome. Falco’s impression of defense attorney Leslie Abramson is as on point as you’d expect it to be, and she summons enough of Abramson’s vivid personality to enliven her scenes and draw the viewer’s focus. And you’ll appreciate that once you get past asking whether Falco is wearing that permed hairpiece or if it’s wearing her.

Aesthetics are probably the best aspect of “Law & Order True Crime” and the least of its stumbling blocks. Of broader concern is the paucity of splash and vitality in the first two episodes of the miniseries.  “Law & Order” adopts an intentionally low passion, “just-the-facts-ma’am” approach to its mysteries in an effort to make its ripped-from-the-headlines cases feel timeless. That method allowed Wolf’s police drama to last for 20 years.

(Its spinoff “Special Victims Unit,” in contrast, intentionally spotlights the personality of its detectives and has lasted almost as long as its progenitor. I’d even posit that it informs the modern approach to broadcast procedurals much more these days than the original.)

But “Law & Order” also neatly wraps up the majority of its investigations and trials within the space of one episode. Expanding “The Menendez Murders” over eight installments means placing personality to front and center, which it does when it explores the moneyed social circles of Beverly Hills. But save for Falco’s Abramson and Josh Charles’ portrayal of Erik’s therapist Dr. Jerome Oziel, the players aren’t given much room to make a significant impression within the two episodes provided for review.

In a subgenre defined by the comparatively bold “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story,” this simply doesn’t fly. Dynamic performances and writing that flirts with camp serve to augment that series’ narrative, though the series still found a way to lead with dialogues regarding the justice system’s socioeconomic bias.

Wolf and Balcer may very well step into that field in later episodes given the conspicuous parallels to the Simpson case and modern debates; the Menendez case also contains allegories about race and class, and there’s possible material to be explored in terms of relative difference in treatment the Menendez brothers may have received as scions of the nouveau riche, illustrating another level of favoritism enjoyed by establishment money.

Regardless of whether this happens, we’ll never know if “Law & Order True Crime” would have made a more positive impression “American Crime Story” hadn’t already set such a high bar. Heck, who knows if Wolf would have even thought to apply the “Law & Order” formula to any real crime without the success of the FX series — or Netflix’s “Making a Murderer” and HBO “The Jinx” besides?

Never mind such “what ifs,” because what matters is the situation as it stands: “Law & Order True Crime” moves through its paces with color-by-numbers economy, a strange observation to make about a homicide case that began with a series of shotgun blasts inside of an ostentatious mansion.

HBO “Vice Principals” star on shattering casting categories

“The industry has created these categories,” actor Kimberly Hébert Gregory told Salon’s Drew Lowther on “Salon Talks, speaking about casting in the TV industry. “I’m just hoping that as women, as women of color, and just women in general, we’re able to take ourselves out of the categories and say: ‘I’m not going to be the blonde lead, I’m going to be the strong woman.'”

Hébert Gregory currently stars in HBO’s “Vice Principals,” which will return later this year for its second and final season. She will also star in a new ABC drama titled “Kevin (Probably) Saves the World” alongside Jason Ritter, and premiering in October. Hébert Gregory’s TV appearances have been expansive—”Grey’s Anatomy,” “Shameless,” “The Big Bang Theory”— but as a black women in Hollywood, she knows intimately the challenges and limitations that race and gender often prescribe. But as she said on Salon Talks: “I want a seat at the table.”

“I want to be able to play the vixen,” Hébert Gregory says of opening up space in casting. “I want to be able to play soft, but I want people to know that the artistry is there.”

Certainly, Hébert Gregory sees Emmy wins from black actors like Sterling K. Brown and Donald Glover as “changing the conversation,” she said. “I’m a big humanist, so I really believe we all benefit from hearing from everyone. Once we can all get to that point, where there are more seats at the table, there are more women at the table, there are more people of color at the time, there are more LGBTQIA people, we’re better for that.”

As marginalization and discrimination are front and center in our political and cultural spheres, Hébert Gregory is hopeful that “we can reprogram our minds to be open about women, gender, transgender and race,” she said. “I think that’s something that we’re all working on as a country and so our industry will ultimately have to reflect that.”

Watch our full “Salon Talks” conversation on Facebook.

Tune into Salon’s live shows, “Salon Talks” and “Salon Stage,” daily at noon ET / 9 a.m. PT and 4 p.m. ET / 1 p.m. PT, streaming live on Salon and on Facebook.

Here’s the secret to winning people over — even if you’re very different

Have you ever addressed a group of young people and felt like a dinosaur? You make a reference to a house phone or a typewriter and the whole crowd looks up from their iPhones in utter confusion?

I have. Luckily, Jay Heinrichs, master rhetorician and author of “Thank You for Arguing,” sat down with me for a recent episode of “Salon Talks” to offer some pointers on connecting with different audiences.

Heinrichs has traveled the world as a presenter and persuasion guru. His books are used to teach the construction of successful arguments in classrooms across the country. He says the power in rhetoric belongs to the listener, so people who can understand an audience best also have it.

“The most important tool of all when you are talking to a group of people is decorum. Now you think of decorum as like how you hold your fork or something in a restaurant. But decorum comes from the Latin word that means ‘fitting in,'” explained Heinrichs, “So, it’s like survival of the fittest, socially. So for me, [I think] how do I fit in with a group that’s usually younger than me? Maybe of all kinds of different ideologies?”

“What I try to do is find out ahead of time is who that audience is going to be and I find out all I can about them,” he added.

Watch our full “Salon Talks” conversation on Facebook.

Tune into Salon’s live shows, “Salon Talks” and “Salon Stage,” daily at noon ET / 9 a.m. PT and 4 p.m. ET / 1 p.m. PT, streaming live on  Salon  and on  Facebook .