Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 700
August 3, 2016
As era of autonomous trucking arrives, Michigan researchers prove how easy it is to hack trucks
Freightliner unveils its Inspiration self-driving truck during an event at the Hoover Dam Tuesday, May 5, 2015, near Boulder City, Nev. (AP Photo/John Locher) (Credit: AP)
The future of trucking, Vox’s David Roberts argued in a solid piece published Wednesday, belongs not to truckers, but to autonomously piloted freight trucks. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are over 1.8 million active truckers in the workforce, and most of them would have their livelihoods threatened by the emergence of a robust autonomous trucking industry.
As Roberts noted, the advantages to switching to fleets of self-piloted long-haul trucks are many — the majority of the driving occurs on relatively straightforward, and stupefyingly dull, freeway and interstate systems. For navigating in urban environments, the size of such trucks is actually an advantage, as it allows them to play host to more cameras and sensors, creating what Roberts characterized as superior “situational awareness.”
However, as researchers at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute demonstrated, there is a catch to the autonomous dream — these vehicles will not be impervious to hackers. In a paper they will present at the Usenix Workshop on Offensive Technologies in Austin next week, the researchers will show that even the long-haul vehicles currently on the road, with their comparatively modest autonomous systems, are vulnerable to attack.
Although the researchers currently need physical access to a vehicle in order to hack into its J1939 networking system and gain control of the truck’s accelerator, brakes, and instrument panel, they are confident that it is only a matter of time before they will be able to gain access remotely as well — and not simply access to one truck, but to many. As the researchers wrote, “[i]t is reasonable to assume that with more time an adversary could create an even more sophisticated attack, one that could be implemented remotely.”
Moreover, “if you wanted to hijack someone’s car, you’d have to know the make and model and tailor the attack,” Leif Millar told Wired’s Andy Greenberg. “With trucks, it’s all open, so you can just craft one attack.”
Watch video of the researchers hacking a truck below.
August 2, 2016
Calling all “chicks with picks”: How I climbed my way out of fear, one icy step at a time
(Credit: Bernadette Murphy)
I step hesitantly across the catwalk, trying not to glance into the ice-coated gorge gaping beneath. My steps are wobbly, partly because of the mountaineering boots, but more due to terror. I’m offered a rope to secure to my climbing harness in case I’m worried about falling as we descend a narrow iron ladder deep into the yawning cavern.
Sweat drenches my woolen undershirt. The inch-long barbed crampons clamped to my boots make balancing on the ladder rungs precarious. I hold onto the railing with knotted fingers, trying to avoid glancing at the jagged rocks and ice below. Eventually, I clomp and grapple and clench my way deep into the canyon.
I’m in Southwest Colorado at the fabled Ouray Ice Park, taking a novice all-women’s ice climbing clinic run taught by a group called “Chicks with Picks.” As someone who’s terrified of heights, this may seem a foolhardy choice.
But it’s not. The truth is, I’m a “chick” all right, but more of the “chicken” variety. Heights, loud noises, crowds, traffic, and earthquakes make me woozy. I fret about aging, career impasses, my young adult children, global warming, my 401K, and the possibility of dementia. This list of what makes me clammy with terror is never-ending — and growing.
And that’s the problem I’m here, learning to climb ice, to address. For most of my life, fear has ruled me. What will happen if I lose my job? How will I manage as a single woman if my 25-year marriage ends? When I listen to the fear, it multiplies like germs in a petri dish, taking over everything until it eventually frightens me into a full-scale retreat from life. I have to fight back. So I try to cajole myself into taking contrary action.
This attitude goes against everything I thought I knew. We should avoid excess risk as we age, I was told. After all, in our 40s it takes longer to heal a knee damaged learning to snowboard than in our 20s. Pursuing a new educational direction in later life to change careers or for the simple joy of learning something we’re hungering to know squanders our time and resources. If we’re too ambitious with our investments in our 50s, we might not be able to recoup the loss before retirement. And those who leave long-term marriages in the hopes of living a more authentic experience are simply crazy. There’s too much to lose.
I believed these directives until a few years ago when I found myself at a crossroads. My last remaining parent was dying, my kids were leaving home, and that long-term marriage was coming to an end. When I looked in the mirror, I no longer saw the young woman I’d once been. Though she hadn’t been exactly fearless, she had been full of optimism and courage in the face of the unknown, qualities I had lost.
I wanted her back, but I didn’t know how.
Then, on a fluke, I took a motorcycle safety class as research for a book I was writing and surprised myself with the intensity of feeling that rose up from the deepest part of me. Sitting astride that brawny machine brought into question everything I thought I knew about who I was and the options I faced. I was shocked and then awed as I faced down my fear on an iron beast that outweighed me four to one. The parts of my soul that had shriveled up and almost disappeared slowly began to flower again. I became reacquainted with the young woman I’d once been and had nearly lost in my pursuit of a protected and predictable life.
Two months later, the day after my father died, I went to my local Harley dealer and bought a matte black motorcycle. And thus began my process of demolishing that “safe” life through a series of choices that made other people scratch their heads. I left the marriage, learned to rock climb and ski, rode my motorcycle across the country and back, moved to French Polynesia, took up SCUBA diving, and began to date — all in progressing middle age. I had a big, messy midlife crisis, visible to all around me and loud, too, thanks to the motorcycle pipes. I became the cautionary tale in the suburban neighborhood where I lived.
But I felt more alive than I had in years.
Friends are quick to caution you about all the ways risk can hurt you and steal what you’ve worked so hard to gain. But no one told me about the slow death that ensues if you don’t put your genuine, tender-at-the-bone self on the line. Like a frog in a pot of slowly heated water, my essence was being sapped away — and I was oblivious. My failure to take action, to embrace risk, was destroying the very parts of me that were the most precious.
Our society propagates a soul-crushing falsehood. We believe that risk is by definition something unwanted, to be eradicated whenever possible, especially in midlife when there’s less time to fix whatever we might mess up. But that’s the exact time we need it most, when all our demographic markers have been set in place – mother, wife, professor, homeowner — when we think we can no longer surprise ourselves, when we believe we know how the story ends.
Neuroscientists, researchers, and psychologists helped me see that risk, the very factor I’d long avoided, was the tonic that made me feel healthier emotionally. As a result of my risk taking, my libido sparked. I encouraged the phenomena of neuroplasticity and neurogenesis within my own brain, and my self-confidence skyrocketed. By deliberately engaging new situations — even as simple as taking a bicycle instead of my car to work, trying a new place to eat, or changing up my fitness regime — my happiness improves and I bolster my mental and physical health. It’s no surprise that women are less likely to engage risk than their male counterparts, yet we may benefit even more from taking a chance.
By training myself to take small risks and building on them daily, I am slowly turning my emotional state away from what scares me toward what makes me feel most alive. That’s not to say that fear retracts its claws and leaves me in peace. I still have to wrestle it, but in doing so, I rediscover my eagerness, perseverance, and even a little taste of audacity.
Standing now, at the bottom of this ice-choked chasm, I realize I haven’t even begun the ostensibly scary part of today’s plan: reaching high to swing my ice axes and kicking the front points of my crampons to climb the ice. But the fact that I’ve made it this far makes me ecstatic. I stared down this one fear on this one occasion. Whether I distinguish myself as a novice female climber today doesn’t matter. I took on an activity that once panicked me and now I feel euphoric. The next time I choose to climb down a ladder like this, it will be easier. The next time I encounter a catwalk overlooking a gorge, I’ll be one degree less scared than I was today. The next time life hands me difficulties that feel insurmountable, I’ll remind myself of how I once triumphed when asked to descend a frozen canyon.
And later today, after I survive the ice climbing challenge and the self-inflicted wound above my right eye from where I will bash myself with my ice pick, I’ll pull off my helmet and sunglasses. I’ll look into the mirror. And there I’ll find my true self, the self I thought I lost, looking a little rough with a stain of blood and bruising along her eyebrow. There she is, stronger than she thought she was, grinning back at me.
Why you should care about the Olympics, even if you don’t care about the Olympics
(Credit: AP/Charlie Riedel)
On Friday, the world will turn its gaze to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. Millions worldwide will share in the spectacle, the pageantry and the moments of athletic transcendence. It should be a great moment for Rio and Brazil, but one recent poll found that half of all Brazilians are opposed to hosting the Games. What gives?
The lead-up to the games has played out against a backdrop of domestic political and economic unrest in Brazil, angry protesters repeatedly attempting to extinguish the Olympic torch, and fears of half-empty stadiums amid anemic ticket sales.
“Rio has been the biggest challenge we have ever faced,” said one longtime member of the International Olympics Committee, an organization that awarded the 2022 Winter Games to Beijing, a city with no snow.
Before we proceed, it must be noted that pre-Games chaos is not a problem unique to Rio or Brazil — confusion, cost-overruns, and delays are endemic to the modern Olympics. Nonetheless, these are a few of the issues that will frame the Rio Games:
Economic crisis
Many of the struggles of the Rio Olympics can be attributed, in some measure, to Brazil’s ongoing recession, the country’s worst in decades. Brazil’s unemployment rate hit a 4-year high this year as GDP shrank for the fifth straight quarter.
In June, the financially strapped state government of Rio de Janeiro received $850 million in emergency federal funds after declaring a “state of public calamity” that it said threatened its ability to meet Olympic commitments.
When Rio landed its Olympic bid in 2009, Brazil’s booming economy led optimistic officials to envision the Games would as a catalyst for all manner of positive change. But the crash — and the cash suck of Olympic preparations — has rendered Rio’s government unable to fund basic services like public security and healthcare, leading cops and firefighters to set up camp at the international airport in protest, displaying banners reading “Welcome to Hell.”
Zika
The Brazilian outbreak of the mosquito-borne Zika virus, which is linked to birth defects, has been a persistent source of concern in the lead-up to the Olympic Games. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend that pregnant women not to go to the Olympics, and fears over the virus have prompted athletes to withdraw from the Games and led South Korea to outfit its team with “Zika-proof” uniforms.
Concerns that the Olympics could hasten the global spread of Zika have garnered significant media attention. In May, over 150 experts signed an open letter to the World Health Organization calling for the Olympics to be moved from Rio or postposed “in the name of public health.”
The good news: Fears that large numbers of visitors will become infected and rapidly spread the virus around the world as they return to their home countries appear to be largely overblown. Researchers at the Yale School of Public Health say that Zika risk posed by the Olympics is “negligible,” estimating that between three and 37 out of the 500,000 expected Olympic visitors would be expected to spread the virus to their home countries. What’s more, Olympics-related tourism represents a miniscule portion of the total overall travel volume to Zika-affected countries — less than 0.25 percent.
“The threat of Zika is a concern. It’s a public health crisis,” Joseph Lewnard, one of the authors of the Yale study, told CNBC. “It’s just that canceling the Olympics is not going to be what it takes to stop the problem here.”
The bad news: Whether or not the Olympics will worsen the global situation, the Zika problem will remain. Puerto Rico is now experiencing a Zika outbreak, and the virus has now spread mosquitoes in the continental United States, which are believed to have caused four infections in Florida.
Environmental issues
Rio’s Olympic bid claimed it would put on “green games for a blue planet,” but organizers have consistently failed to deliver on their environmental promises.
Organizers promised to plant 24 million trees to offset carbon emissions caused by the games. So far they’ve planted 5.5 million.
Rio’s Olympic bid said that the city’s air quality meets WHO standards. It did not, and does not.
Officials pledged to clean up the lagoons surrounding the Olympic park, but Rio’s waterways remain contaminated with raw human sewage. A study commissioned by the Associated Press found that, at concentrations measured last year, “swimmers and athletes who ingest just three teaspoons of water are almost certain to be infected with viruses that can cause stomach and respiratory illnesses and more rarely heart and brain inflammation.”
“Don’t put your head underwater,” Dr. Valerie Harwood, chair of the department of integrative biology at the University of South Florida, advised visitors. Five Olympic events will be held in Rio’s polluted waterways, including marathon swimming.
Olympic housing
The Australian team generated headlines in the weeks leading up to the Games after initially refusing to occupy its building in the Olympic village, deeming it “not safe or ready” and citing clogged toilets and exposed wires. The team eventually moved in, but then was forced to evacuate the building after a small fire broke out. During the evacuation, team members said property was stolen from their quarters, including special shirts designed to prevent the transmission of Zika.
But Australia’s complaints make up just a small part of the housing issues in Rio. The IOC warned organizers five years ago that Rio’s housing contracts incentivized private developers to engage in potentially dangerous corner-cutting to boost profits when units in the Olympic village are sold off as luxury apartments after the Games.
Journalists covering the Games will live in a media village built on the site of a mass grave of African slaves.
Construction of the Olympic Park required the eviction of some 600 residents from a favela on the site, some of whom were forcibly removed after refusing to leave their homes.
Terrorism
Jihadist attacks haven’t been a major threat for Brazil in the past, but heightened fears of possible attacks at the Olympics have led American officials to lend assistance in counterterrorism efforts.
ISIS has been actively recruiting Portuguese speakers online in the weeks preceding the Games, and Islamist outlets have called for lone wolf attacks in Rio.
Last month Brazilian authorities arrested 10 members of a Brazilian Islamist group suspected of planning attacks during the games.
The Salon author questionnaire: “The word ‘nice’ makes me break out in hives”
For August, I posed a series of questions — with, as always, a few verbal restrictions — to five authors with new books: Jennifer Close (“The Hopefuls”), Joe McGinniss Jr. (“Carousel Court”), Liz Moore (“The Unseen World”), Gina Ochsner (“The Hidden Letters of Velta B.”) and Lara Vapnyar (“Still Here”).
Without summarizing it in any way, what would you say your book is about?
OCHSNER: What’s it about? What ISN’T it about! Eel-fishing, falling in love, how to make Latvian style pierogi, the Bear-Slayer myth, a boy with enormous furry ears, a graveyard with restless bodies, outrageous nationalism, ethnic tension, a ghost girl who lives in the river and with whom one should never under any circumstances go swimming, how to send a curse through the mail.
MOORE: Early computers and how they thought, future computers and how they will think, father/daughter relationships, human language, child prodigies, family secrets.
CLOSE: It’s about the friendship between two couples, both newcomers to Washington, DC. It’s also about marriage, ambition, politics, and jealousy.
VAPNYAR: Love, marriage, divorce, death, immigrants, online dating, tech startups, digital media.
MCGINNISS: Marriage, money, sex, parenting, longing, greed, unmet expectations, desperation, cicadas, anger, home, addiction, sketchy neighbors, aspirations and cable news killers.
Without explaining why and without naming other authors or books, can you discuss the various influences on your book?
MOORE: Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA chatbot, growing up in the Boston area in the 1980s and ‘90s, having a scientist father and a linguist mother.
MCGINNISS: Too many of my friends whose weddings I attended have since divorced or separated. Those who haven’t have endured struggles as life pressures mount and inevitable tension rises between spouses. Having listened and counseled as best I could, (because I’m certainly no expert), a few friends through various rough marital patches, I learned firsthand what we all know: marriage is work. When money and professional issues arise, couples can and do certainly navigate such periods by coming together and facing the challenges together. Sometimes though, pressure exposes old wounds, finds the vulnerabilities in the relationship and hones in, testing the relationship in ways never imagined. Some pass the test. Many don’t.
VAPNYAR: Fixation on love, obsession with death, addiction to eating while watching TV shows.
CLOSE: West Wing, Obama, political charisma, Washington DC, being an outsider, and the culture of competition.
OCHSNER: Latvian mythology, Latvian songs (dainas), Eastern European cuisine (dishes involving hedgehogs in particular), Roma history and culture(s), Hungarian, Czech and Polish fiction, ghost stories.
Without using complete sentences, can you describe what was going on in your life as you wrote this book?
MCGINNISS: Heavy stuff, care taking, helplessness, premature goodbyes, deep sadness, grief, pure joy, fatherhood, moments, just moments, so many moments, wonder-induced head shaking and gratitude.
VAPNYAR: Bad divorce, kids’ troubles, desperate attempt to fix dire financial situation by inventing a “killer app,” mother’s illness and death, new love.
MOORE: Teaching, getting married, teaching some more, learning Philadelphia, fixing up an old house, spending a year at the American Academy in Rome.
OCHSNER: Five visits to Latvia, three visits to Romania and Moldova, one very chilly visit to Central Russia in winter. Four ill-behaved Siberian Huskies. Three teenagers. Two minor mental break-down (mine, not theirs). Two jobs. One husband.
CLOSE: Moving, adjusting to DC, husband at the White House, second book, teaching, writing.
What are some words you despise that have been used to describe your writing by readers and/or reviewers?
CLOSE: “Girl books” and “chick lit.” My problem with these terms isn’t that my audience is mostly women, it’s the negative and derogatory attitude that goes along with them, as if there’s something wrong with having women as readers. It’s the way people try to make you feel smaller, like you don’t matter as much by saying, “She writes girl books.”
VAPNYAR: That my immigrant characters complain too much. They have a roof over their head, they are not hungry. It’s ungrateful of them to be miserable.
MOORE: “Quirky” makes it into the cover of most of my books. It somehow feels too cute.
OCHSNER: The word “nice” makes me break out in hives. When someone tells me that they think my work is nice I want to take knitting needles and shove them in my ear canals. I have the same almost physical reaction to the word “interesting.” The word is vague enough to mean anything and nothing. Like nice, interesting means the reader had zero connection and zero emotional response to anything in the work.
MCGINNISS: Bleak. Dark. More than one reviewer used terminology around the idea of not knowing who to “root for.” Or “likeability.” Since when did reviewers/editors all become 11-year-olds when reacting to fiction. “Who should I root for?” Who did you root for in “Goodfellas?” In “The Sopranos?” In “Native Son?” “Revolutionary Road?” “Lolita?” “Affliction?” Some of the best stories I’ve ever read revolved around protagonists who did reprehensible things but were impossible to look away from, were so compelling for so many reasons — and that’s a testament to the author/creator.
If you could choose a career besides writing (irrespective of schooling requirements and/or talent) what would it be?
VAPNYAR: A spy. But I don’t want to kill people or steal secrets—that would be too stressful. I just want to quietly try out different identities.
CLOSE: Is it cheating to say that I’d want to work in book publicity? The publicity team at Knopf works really hard but they also make their job look fun. I think promoting a book that you love and getting it into the hands of people you know are going to love it just as much would be so satisfying.
OCHSNER: I’d like to be a volcanologist, ethnologist, photographer and painter.
MCGINNISS: Some sort of benevolent producer or agent handling projects involving book-to-film deals. Or film deals. Or book deals. Deals. Making deals for high quality stories whether books, stories, journalism or film.
MOORE: If you’d asked me this when I was ten I would have said professional soccer goalkeeper (“irrespective of talent” is key here). Now I think it would be great to host an hour-long radio interview program.
What craft elements do you think are your strong suit, and what would you like to be better at?
OCHSNER: I’m pretty good at fleshing out characters. I like to crawl inside their minds and imaginations and sort of loll about. Sticking to a clean narrative arc gives me some troubles. I’ve been told that I’m digressive and I’d have to agree. The odd anecdote that in no way relates to the “big idea” is just as illuminating and fascinating to me as anything else pertaining to the through-line.
VAPNYAR: Developing characters, humor, sex scenes. I struggle with my plots.
MCGINNISS: Tone, pacing, dialogue. I admire and envy those who can write subtle, moving stories filled with emotional tension. And humor. I’d love to be able to write funny.
CLOSE: I love writing dialogue and I think I have a good ear for it. Writing funny also comes naturally to me. Pacing and plot can be a struggle and I work hard to improve that. At some point in my writing process there’s post its and papers taped all over the wall in an attempt to map everything out.
MOORE: Narrative voice often comes naturally to me but dialogue does not.
How do you contend with the hubris of thinking anyone has or should have any interest in what you have to say about anything?
OCHSNER: I have a tremendously supportive family. But we’re also pranksters and jokers. Nobody gets through a family reunion unscathed. Birthday gatherings, for example, usually turn into impromptu roasts. At my last birthday the whole family gathered and after I’d blown out the candles on the cake, each person shared what they believed was the oddest quality about me or the most embarrassing thing they remember me doing. That will keep a girl humble! I should add that my school photos from 6th, 7th and 8th grade were also shared. If ever I think I’ve got something so important to say or share with the world that everyone else should sit up and take notice, I just remember who I really am: a pretty ordinary person who just happens to enjoy telling stories.
VAPNYAR: I said some things that were really important to me in this novel, and I just hope and pray that I find readers who would find them important as well.
CLOSE: I can honestly say that of all the things that I worry about with my writing and the publishing process (and there’s a lot), this one doesn’t bother me much. Being published has been a dream of mine for as long as I can remember and I’m just grateful and excited that people are able to read what I write.
MOORE: Denial, avoidance, refusal to discuss my books until they’re galleys even with my closest loved ones, keeping a writing routine, general petulance.
MCGINNISS: It’s just a book. Nobody reads anymore, right? The generation of the novel being an event or something that could reach people peaked in the ’80s and early ’90s, so we’ve been told. I reminded of that scene in “The Candidate” when the consultant played by Peter Boyle tells golden boy Senate candidate Bill McKay at the outset of his long-shot campaign, and I’m paraphrasing: “Say what you want” with a simple guarantee: “You lose.” I already won, because I’m doing what I love. Writing what I want to read and having it validated by people whose judgment I value (my wife, agent, and editor, and of course, Kirkus), is everything. But the fact that is even the huge buzz books that fetch seven-figure deals may still miss and those that do you can count on one hand. Show me a novelist with an ego and—wait, actually, don’t. I’d rather sort through the clean laundry basket trying to find matches for my son’s socks than spend time with writers with high opinions of themselves. (They’re usually the ones who read for at least 30 minutes or more at their readings or inform the audience which # city they are on their 17-city tour. Or Tweet about “touring” We’re not rock stars. Btw…I’ll be appearing in the following cities…)
The geography of inequality: Segregation is normalized but must be put to an end
A woman walks through a blighted neighborhood in Philadelphia. (Credit: AP/Matt Rourke)
On television, Philadelphia played a largely meaningless backdrop to the Democratic National Convention.
“My friends, we’ve come to Philadelphia — the birthplace of our nation—because what happened in this city 240 years ago still has something to teach us today,” said Hillary Clinton, accepting her nomination.
In reality, what’s happening in Philadelphia today offers much better grist for political insight. The city, as delegates discovered, boasts amazing restaurants, diverse, bustling parks and markets, charming rowhouse streets, and an urban downtown with the highest residential population of any save for Midtown Manhattan. But as a bumper crop of timely this is the real Philadelphia stories explained, it is also a city pockmarked with boarded-up houses and vacant lots, populated by families broken apart by gun violence and incarceration, and where public school buildings are silent not because it is summertime but rather thanks to the long-term fiscal destruction of the majority-black district.
The tale of two cities is a frequent and useful trope but fails to emphasize the fact that racial and economic segregation persist as organizing principles of American society. Segregation is the geographic expression of inequality, and locks it in place. Mass incarceration is, in turn, quite literally an extension of residential segregation: holding pens to discipline and control people, disproportionately black, expelled from the formal economy and evicted from their homes. The federal government has the power to do something about it but the candidates vying to run it don’t discuss it.
Cities are everywhere and nowhere this election, receiving little explicit attention while the issues under debate, from criminal justice to immigration, are profoundly urban. Cities are home to the nation’s largest and most controversial police forces, and the sentences meted out in urban courtrooms are the great entryways into America’s massive prison system. In protest, Black Lives Matter, like Occupy Wall Street before it, strategically leverages density and urban infrastructure toward insurgent political ends. Segregation defines the contours and functions of American crime, policing and punishment—and of American politics and economics as a whole.
Donald Trump is a New Yorker, and knows from (shady) firsthand experience that cities are the engines driving the nation’s economic growth. But culturally, cities play a different and sinister role, which Trump exploited to portray them as home to the scary un-American other—a source of physical, political and demographic danger. At the RNC, Trump warned against “terrorism in our cities,” complained that murders are up in cities, and decried so-called Sanctuary Cities. While Ted Cruz denounced “New York values,” Trump does something of a piece, coalescing the fears of a coming minority-majority America.
Neither Democrats, paying renewed attention to economic justice, nor Republicans, who one doesn’t expect to care much anyways, have an explicit program to confront urban problems. Segregation, underfunded schools and inadequate and expensive housing afflict cities whether they be decaying Cleveland or booming San Francisco. Last month, the major party conventions touted economic agendas, halfhearted criminal justice reform measures, foreign policies and a surfeit of personalities. There was little to address the problems of cities as such, and to deal with a seven-decade long urban crisis.
According to experts on a University of Pennsylvania Urban Studies panel I moderated before the DNC, the condition of poor urban neighborhoods is declining but receive as little attention as ever.
Rental prices are too high and wages are too low. The amount one must earn to afford a two-bedroom home rose from $16.31 in 2006 to $20.30 today, said Ira Goldstein, the president of policy solutions at Reinvestment Fund. Federal rental assistance is down $1.6 billion since 2010. Middle-class neighborhoods, especially those where people of color live in large numbers, have been hit by repeated crises, from predatory lending in the 1990s, subprime mortgages in the early and mid-2000s, to the foreclosure epidemic unleashed in 2008. Community Development Block Grants are down 72-percent from 1975 and 12-percent since 2009, meaning cities have less federal money than ever to respond to recurring crisis.
Politicians ignore poor people in American cities and many poor people return the favor by not voting—and in Baltimore, by rioting. Politicians like Clinton suggest that training police on implicit bias is a solution to what black people are protesting against in the streets. It is useful to recall an essay Bayard Rustin wrote in 1966, putting the anger in geographic, and political economic, context.
Rustin warned that “if every policeman in every black ghetto behaved like an angel and were trained in the most progressive of police academies, the conflict would still exist. This is so because the ghetto is a place where Negroes do not want to be and are fighting to get out of. When someone with a billy club and a gun tells you to behave yourself amid these terrible circumstances, he becomes a zoo keeper…He is brutalizing you by insisting that you tolerate what you cannot, and ought not, tolerate.”
The growing attention to economic inequality has not created the political will to confront segregation, which is what shapes and perpetuates it on the local level. Measures to attack suburbs’ use of exclusionary zoning to keep poor people of color out have gained traction under Obama but the Office of Urban Affairs he created has quietly all but disappeared. The national debate over education remains dominated not by strategies for creating equity but by debates over charters and standardized testing.
Increased and targeted funding for housing and education, aggressive legal fights against segregation, and unionized, high-wage public jobs would help. Another place to start, for Democrats who have made a call to overturn Citizens United a refrain, would be to add two 1970s Supreme Court decisions to the list.
The Court, as Michael J. Graetz and Linda Greenhouse discuss in their new book on the Burger Court, erected two major roadblocks to creating integrated and equally-good public schools, gutting Brown v. Board of Education before it could be truly implemented. In San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, the court ruled in 1973 that it was constitutional to fund schools through local property taxes even if poor districts got shortchanged. The following year, in Milliken v. Bradley, they ruled against extending school busing to the suburbs—rendering desegregation impossible in major metropolitan areas.
Four decades later, the results are dire: urban public schools, and a growing number of suburban ones, are segregated islands of racially concentrated poverty cut off from the wealth funding exclusive municipalities. Big picture policies to address inequality will disproportionately, and rightfully, deliver economic justice to poor people in cities. But inequality is not only about wages but also about space and segregation—and the prison archipelago constructed to contain the people who it cannot contain. To end inequality, what sociologist Douglas Massey aptly dubbed “American Apartheid” has got to go. It’s not in any party platform but remains the basis of this country’s worst and most persistent problems.
New York governor bans sex offenders from playing Pokémon Go
Pokémon Go (Credit: AP Photo/Daniel Ochoa de Olza)
On Monday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo directed the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision to order registered sex offenders under their care not to play Pokémon Go.
The directive — which does not carry the force of law — comes after state Senators Jeffery Klein and Diane Savino demonstrated that of the addresses of a randomly selected 100 sexual offenders in New York City, 73 percent of them were within a half-block of a Pokémon, Pokémon stop, or training gym.
In the press release accompanying the directive, Senator Savino wrote that “Pokémon Go entertains our children, but it forgets about the reality of this world: it can be dangerous. Sex offenders who download the game legally could pinpoint hot spots where children congregate, like Pokémon stops or gyms, and meet them in person.”
Senator Klein added that “[w]e know that pedophiles always seek new ways to lure victims and this new technology that entertains our kids, could also bring them close to dangerous individuals instead of Pokémon.”
Both identified the difficulty of relocating Pokémon stops and gyms in the current iteration of the game, due in large part to Niantic’s unwillingness or inability to respond to complaints in a timely fashion.
In his statement, Governor Cuomo noted that “[p]rotecting New York’s children is priority number one and, as technology evolves, we must ensure these advances don’t become new avenues for dangerous predators to prey on new victims. These actions will provide safeguards for the players of these augmented reality games and help take one more tool away from those seeking to do harm to our children.”
Khizr Khan: U.S. wars “have created a chaos” in Muslim-majority countries
Khizr Khan on MSNBC's "Hardball" on Monday, August 1
Khizr Khan, the Pakistani American father of a U.S. soldier who died in Iraq, has become something of a media celebrity in the past week.
At the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Khan and his wife Ghazala denounced Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump for his racist, anti-Muslim policies.
Trump responded by maliciously attacking the Khans, and a political scandal has ensued.
Many media outlets have amplified Khizr Khan’s patriotic sentiments. Significantly less attention, however, has been paid to Khan’s criticism of U.S. wars and his lamentation that “We have created a chaos” and a “quagmire” in Muslim-majority countries.
Khizr and Ghazala Khan spoke on MSNBC’s “Hardball” on Monday, Aug. 1. Fifteen minutes into the program, after Khan harshly condemned Islamist extremists for “hijacking” his religion, host Chris Matthews briefly asked Khan about U.S. wars in Muslim-majority countries.
“What do you think, or feel, when you see us attack Iraq, or go into Afghanistan after Osama bin Laden? Or we go attack, we bombed Libya. We’re bombing Syria now, all Islamic countries,” he said. “What do you feel, as an Islamic man?”
“As a Muslim American I feel that these policies are not in the interest of the United States of America,” Khan replied, with a look of distress.
“And we see the result of it,” he continued. “We are more vulnerable now. We have created a chaos.”
“Well you know, you’re speaking to the choir,” Matthews laughed.
Khan added, “I wish this country would have listened to Chris Matthews when he was talking, when he was preaching. We could have saved ourselves from this quagmire.”
“I didn’t think Iraq made any sense, and I think you agree,” the host responded.
Matthews then segued back to Donald Trump, to whom they devoted much more time.
In total, they only discussed U.S. foreign policy for 50 seconds in the 15-minute “Hardball” interview.
This brief excerpt, in which Khizr Khan criticizes militaristic U.S. foreign policy, is not included in the isolated clips for the episode on MSNBC’s website. One has to watch the full episode to see it.
Khan’s criticisms came on the same day that the U.S. launched a new bombing campaign in Libya. In fact, while Khan was stirring up patriotic sentiment on air, MSNBC’s breaking news lower third below him reported: “U.S. launches a new campaign of airstrikes.”
This new war comes just five years after the previous NATO war plunged the oil-rich North African nation into chaos, empowering extremist groups and allowing ISIS to consolidate its largest regime outside of Iraq and Syria.
The Obama administration dropped 23,144 bombs on six Muslim-majority countries in 2015. Libya is now the seventh country with ongoing U.S. air strikes.
As he noted, Chris Matthews was indeed critical in the lead-up to the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. He was also somewhat skeptical of the 2011 war in Libya and the Obama administration’s attempt in 2013 to launch a bombing campaign in Syria.
Yet Matthews’ record isn’t entirely consistent. In May 2003, when then-President George W. Bush declared “victory” in Iraq, Matthews commended “the president’s amazing display of leadership.”
“The president deserves everything he’s doing tonight in terms of his leadership,” Matthews exclaimed. “He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics.”
Moreover, in 2014, as the U.S. launched new wars against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, Matthews declared, “When it comes down to how we fight this, everybody seems to be for air attacks, airstrikes. Everybody is for drone attacks.”
Likewise, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who has also applauded Khan and used his story to attack Trump, is one of the most hawkish figures in U.S. politics.
Clinton voted and lobbied for the invasion of Iraq, helped lead the catastrophic 2011 war in Libya and pushed for a much more aggressive policy in Syria, contributing greatly to the “chaos” and “quagmire” Khan railed against.
Salon contacted the Clinton campaign with a request for comment, but did not immediately receive a response.
Warren Buffett places a billionaire’s bet: Donald Trump, release your tax returns and I’ll release mine
Warren Buffett criticized Donald Trump for his recent comments about a family whose son died fighting in Iraq, and challenged Trump to show his tax returns at a rally in Omaha, Nebraska, on Aug. 1, 2016. (Credit: Associated Press)
Shortly after clinching the Republican presidential nomination in May, Donald Trump announced that he planned to buck a decades-long bipartisan tradition of major party candidates releasing their tax returns.
“There’s nothing to learn from them,” the alleged billionaire said in an interview with the Associated Press. But only days earlier, Trump had repeated a promise he made throughout the GOP primary contests.
“I’ll do it as fast as the auditors finish,” Trump said of his tax returns during a May appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” insisting that they will “show I’m worth more than $10 billion by any stretch of the imagination.”
While Republicans have allowed Trump to renege on his pledge without much fanfare, there have been growing calls by Democrats for Trump to show his receipts.
On Monday, billionaire investor Warren Buffett made Donald Trump an offer “he can’t refuse.”
Trump can pick “any place, any time between now and election,” the so-called Oracle from Omaha said at a Hillary Clinton rally in his hometown, calling on the businessman turned GOP presidential nominee to discard his lame excuses and release his taxes returns.
“I will meet him in Omaha or Mar-a-Lago or, he can pick the place, anytime between now and election. I’ll bring my return, he’ll bring his return.”
“Now I’ve got news for him, I’m under audit too,” Buffett said, undermining Trump’s go-to excuse. “And believe me, nobody’s going to stop us from talking about what’s on those returns.”
“There are no rules against showing your tax returns.”
“You’re only afraid if you’ve got something to be afraid about,” Buffett told the crowd. “He’s not afraid because of the IRS. He’s afraid because of you.”
“You will learn a whole lot more about Donald Trump if he releases his income tax return”:
Trump’s religious hypocrisy: He signed an anti-porn pledge that could penalize his own wife’s photos
Donald Trump; Donna Rice Hughes (Credit: AP/David Furst/YouTube/Set Free Summit/Photo montage by Salon)
That Melania Trump posed for some racy nude photos a couple decades ago, which have been leeringly published by The New York Post, is not a story. Nudity isn’t wrong, sex isn’t wrong, photography isn’t wrong, and none of these things become wrong because you put them together.
What is a story, however, is that on the very same day that these softcore photos of Donald Trump’s wife were released, it was announced that Trump signed a pledge that he, as president, would prosecute people who do what his wife did, i.e. make erotic materials for public consumption. It’s another move on Trump’s part to align himself with the religious right, and in doing so, he’s proving yet again that both he and religious right leaders are opportunistic hypocrites.
The Enough Is Enough campaign, an anti-porn group, asked the presidential candidates to sign a pledge to “defend the innocence and dignity of America’s children by enforcing the existing federal laws and advancing public policies designed to 1) prevent the sexual exploitation of children online and 2) to make the Internet safer for all.”
Few, if any, would dispute the importance of fighting child pornography, but the pledge also demands enforcement of “federal obscenity laws,” which the group defines as “messages or pictures” that “are patently offensive descriptions or depictions of sexual or excretory organs or activities.”
They include “sexual nudity” and “dirty words” in this category. They also argue that “graphic sex acts” and “lewd exhibition of the genitals” should count as obscene materials that the federal government needs to scrub off the internet.
A careful reader will note that the photos of Melania Trump meet Enough Is Enough’s definition of obscenity.
Enough Is Enough is a small organization, basically a vehicle for Donna Rice-Hughes to wage war on the widespread availability of internet porn.
If her name sounds familiar, congrats, you remember the Gary Hart scandal.
Rice-Hughes, who then was just going by her maiden name, was suspected in 1987 of having an affair with the then-senator, suspicions which dashed his presidential aspirations. Shortly thereafter, she turned towards Christianity and got married. Now she heads up an anti-pornography organization.
Rice-Hughes did not return requests for comment, but she did speak to U.S. News and World Report about Trump, making it clear that yes, this is an attack on all porn on the internet.
“Bestiality and anal sex online, that’s the new normal,” Rice-Hughes told U.S. News. “This entire sex industry is tied together, so it’s like fighting the drug war … just completely ignoring the obscenity laws [but combating child porn] would be like saying, ‘We’ve got a war on drugs, but we’re only going to concentrate on meth and heroin.’ That’s not going to do a very good job.”
Lux Alptraum, a freelance writer and former editor of Fleshbot noted to me that while bestiality videos do exist, “I waded through the porn internet every day for years and have never seen a bestiality video.”
“Anal, on the other hand, is a totally different matter,” Alptraum wryly added, “but clearly Hughes and I have different opinions on the particular level of depravity that consensual anal intercourse represents.”
Esha Bandari, a staff attorney for the ACLU, explained that there’s a long history of passing obscenity laws “in the guise of protecting minors”, but that allow governments to prosecute adults making erotic materials for other adults.
Bandari pointed to a recent ACLU victory in Louisiana, where the court struck down a law that made it a crime to publish material on the internet that is “harmful to minors” without verifying their age. The law was so broadly worded, according to Bandari, that one could get in legal trouble for offering sex education to high school students or even selling “The Catcher in the Rye“.
The federal government has shifted away from trying to enforce broadly written obscenity statutes in recent years, Bandari argued, focusing instead on cases involving “actual harm” to minors, such as child pornography or trafficking. She felt this was a far better way for the government to balance its obligation to protect children with its obligation to protect the “artistic expression” of adults, which often includes erotic materials, as Melania Trump could be the first to tell you.
“I think that ignoring consensually created porn that’s by and for adults, while working to eliminate the sexual abuse of children, is absolutely a valid and effective strategy,” Alptraum agreed, “the same way that decriminalizing or legalizing the recreational use of drugs like marijuana is far more beneficial to society than clogging up the prison system with ‘criminals’ who’ve done nothing more than sell a small amount of weed.”
It is worth noting that the Hillary Clinton campaign politely declined to sign Enough Is Enough’s pledge.
“Trump signing an anti-pornography pledge is just his latest effort to shore up support from white evangelical voters, a hugely important part of the Republican base,” Peter Montgomery of the People for the American Way, said over email.
He noted the laundry list of ways Trump has pandered to the Christian right, from letting them write the GOP platform to picking Mike Pence as his running mate to promising “them the Supreme Court of their dreams”.
“I don’t know how many Religious Right leaders actually buy Trump’s transparently cynical religious appeals, but it doesn’t really matter,” Montgomery added. “They’re supporting him because he is promising to give them political power and a Supreme Court that will advance their agenda.”
Enough Is Enough’s conservative Christian agenda is not far from the surface. The website touts a paper Rice-Hughes published in the Christian Apologetics Journal in 2014, where she compares internet porn to addictive drugs and says that it “harms children, women, and men and fuels pornography addiction, the breakdown of marriage, and sex trafficking”.
“The pornography ‘fantasy’ has had real-life implications on our adult society and on our children,” argued Enough Is Enough communications director Cris Clapp Logan in an article on the website. “Sensible adults — doctors, lawyers, and pastors—have lost their families, professions and life to hard-core pornography use.”
No one denies that it’s easier than ever to look at porn. At the same time, however, the divorce rate is going down. Rape is also down, as is child sex abuse. If porn is so destructive, why are things getting better even as porn becomes more prevalent?
The Trump campaign’s response to the publication of Melania’s pictures has been dismissive. Jason Miller, the senior communications advisor, said the pictures are “nothing to be embarrassed about.” The campaign told the NY Post that “pictures like this are very fashionable and common”.
To groups like Enough Is Enough, however, the commonness and lack of shame regarding explicit nudity and sexy pictures is the problem, the very one that Trump swore he would help to stomp out.
Trump really should decide: Is this sort of thing no big deal, as his campaign told the NY Post? Or is it a threat to the very fabric of society, as he suggested when he signed the Enough Is Enough anti-porn pledge?
“You can get that baby out of here”: Donald Trump, upstaged by crying baby, orders it removed from rally
It’s safe to say the Democratic party just got its youngest member ever.
During a rally in Ashburn, Virginia, on Tuesday, Donald Trump actually kicked a baby out for committing the offense of crying in his presence.
“Don’t worry about that baby,” Trump said the first time the child interrupted his diatribe about the Chinese. “I love babies. I hear that baby crying, I like it.”
Trump called the baby, “young and healthy and beautiful, and that’s what we want” before returning to his thought.
When the baby later interrupted him a second time, however, Trump said, “Actually, I was only kidding. You can get the baby out of here.”
“I think she actually believed me when I said I love having a baby crying while I’m speaking,” he added, having received positive feedback from the audience. “People don’t understand. But that’s O.K.”
Watch below via TMZ:
