Monthly Archives: December 2016

For those not familiar with Hooked, in 2015 TechCrunch presented a summary:

So with Hooked, [founders Parag Chordia and Prerna Gupta are] commissioning short stories that take the form of text message conversations. Instead of turning pages, you tap the screen to bring on the next message. The app offers a limited number of free stories but charges a subscription fee (starting at $2.99 per week) for unlimited access.

Chordia suggested that this presents a couple of advantages over a standard book or e-book. For one thing, readers aren’t faced with “this block of text that just doesn’t have that natural feel on your phone that a casual game does.” It could also make it easier for readers to consume the story in small bites, say when they’re waiting in line or riding the subway.

At the same time, the stories are supposed to keep you, well, hooked. I read one of them, “Unknown,” and while I don’t think it was a great piece of literature, I have to admit that the mystery grabbed me — I kept hitting the “Next” button until I reached the end.

“Every line has to either advance the story or advance the relationships,” Chordia said. “Every message is a cliffhanger.”

Katherine Martinko wonders about Hooked:

For anyone accustomed to reading full-length books and not communicating constantly over text message, the format can seem very strange indeed. The plot development is limited to exchanges going back and forth between characters, sort of like a play, except the characters can never be in same place, otherwise they wouldn’t be texting. It does not allow for character development, complex imagery, or descriptive language. …

While I think it’s important to get teens interested in reading, I worry that spoon-feeding them over-simplified, thrilling fiction is not a good long-term solution to the problem. Books are a bit like food; it’s entirely possible to overindulge in ‘junk’ literature that immediately gratifies, but has little lasting value — whether it’s a complex story to mull over afterwards or important emotional lessons to take away from it. After all, much of fiction’s worth lies in character development and the empathetic bond created with readers over the course of a novel. To take that out of the equation entirely seems tragic.

Philosophizing about the social effects of such an app, however, does not change the data, which is every app developer’s primary focus. Gupta, clearly, is on to something pretty spectacular, when you consider that Hooked has recently become the top grossing book app for iOS in the United States and is now competing with Amazon’s Kindle and Audible apps to be the number one free book app in the U.S. Apple store, too. It’s impressive.

I think that context matters, and here the context of an SMS conversation provides information to the reader that may never actually need to be described: each character has a device capable of SMS, they are probably in a certain age range, certain things will never be known for certain – but inferred with a certain probability. I’m sure there’s more down this vein.

But another important aspect is that endemic to, in my view, all story-telling – it’s a teaching tool. Not in the overt sense, mind you, but in the very act of SMS, by learning the by-ways of an important communications tool of today. How can SMS be used to fool you? When someone uses this sentence structure, and later that happens, maybe this is something that can deployed in real life.

Just as in novels.

I haven’t seen Hooked in action, but it sounds interesting – and, for an author, like an intellectual challenge. Apparently, much like traditional publishing, there are gatekeepers – it doesn’t appear to be a free-for-all, and let the readers sort it all out. From Katherine:

There is a staff of 200 writers constantly pitching and creating content for Hooked. Stories are written in four or five segments, each about 1,000 words conveyed through texts. From Quartz:

“The kids can be absolutely brutal,” says Sean Dunne, one of about 200 writers who’s written for Hooked since it launched. His stories include “The Watcher,” whose first episode came out in early October and has 872,000 reads alone at time of writing. “For every story I publish there were 10 ideas shot down, that didn’t get approval.”

Today we were delighted and perplexed by Tampopo (1985), a Japanese movie playing in Minneapolis’ Lagoon Cinema. This is a movie about food, featuring a main storyline, detailing a widow who is failing as a ramen cook, and the men who come together to help her master the art of ramen service, from cooking to presentation to preparing her hole-in-the-wall eatery to host her guests. Interspersed is a far more whimsical story about a fellow who appears to be a gangster with a food fetish, and his main squeeze.

The main story is well done. The characters are well thought out, and, as an audience, we get the feeling that, outside the movie frame, they don’t sit around smoking cigs until they are called upon to appear again, but have lives they are also living, from the divorced trucker who used to box, to the ramen sensei on loan from a band of hobos-cum-gourmets. Coming together, their interaction initiate the audience into delight as the movie leisurely explores metaphorical blind alleys, such as the second scene, in which a trucker is reading a book on ramen appreciation; it’s brought to life for us, provoking laughter, then thoughtfulness.

Source: Flixist

In this ocean of the main plot are islands of perplexity. Perhaps inserted to highlight a point, although I often didn’t really see it, they primarily involve the gangster, his girl, and their use of food during sex, which was quite surprising, and a little alarming. But they are not the only sources of perplexity, as we also see a woman on her deathbed, her desperate husband begging her to live on, until he loses his temper and demands that she cook dinner for the family.

It may not be a lively kitchen workout, but she gets the job done before meeting her end.

The movie bounces from main story to side story to dead-end, back to the main story, never hurried, but with enough impulse and unexpected >FIST FIGHT!< turns to keep you guessing. And, in the end, a death scene was one of the most thematically loyal, obscure, and interesting I’ve ever seen at the cinema. I’ll never look at yam jammed intestines in quite the same way again.

Recommended, if you like offbeat movies.

Last night, while conversing with my Arts Editor, I used the word “excruciant” (don’t ask how, fortunately I’ve already forgotten). Of course, I thought I had made up a new word.

Sadly, no. At least the Romans had already thought of it, as this is Latin.

Verb

excruciant

1. third-person plural present active indicative of excruciō

[Wiktionary]

Not sure I like being associated with that particular brand of Roman.

Prosopagnosia:

Prosopagnosia /ˌprɑːsəpæɡˈnoʊʒə/^[1] (Greek: “prosopon” = “face”, “agnosia” = “not knowing”), also called face blindness,^[2] is a cognitive disorder of face perception where the ability to recognize familiar faces, including one’s own face (self-recognition), is impaired, while other aspects of visual processing (e.g., object discrimination) and intellectual functioning (e.g., decision making) remain intact. The term originally referred to a condition following acute brain damage (acquired prosopagnosia), but a congenital or developmental form of the disorder also exists, which may affect up to 2.5% of the population. [Wikipedia]

Encountered in the Letters column of NewScientist.

In a mini review of Jeremy Rifkin’s The Zero Marginal Cost Society in NewScientist (19 November 2016, paywall), Sally Adee summarizes Rifkin’s vision of the future:

Within 60 years, capitalism might have left the building completely. In its place will be a society in which all our basic needs are met. Rifkin calls his new economic vision “the commons”, but it goes beyond the economy – it will be the new “water” we swim in.

You will have a job, but it won’t be for money. The company you work for will be a non-profit. Your “wealth” will be measured in social capital: your reputation as a cooperative member of the species. So when you contribute to open-source code that makes a better widget, you’ll enjoy a “payment” in the form of an improved reputation. Apps that track your contribution to the commons – whether by your input at work, your frugal use of energy, or other measures of reputation – will let you cash in your karma points for luxuries, say, an antique chair that was conspicuously not built by a fabricator. Even in the commons, we’ll still be human.

Karma points, eh? And how will this differ from money? It doesn’t. Just another measurement of what I’ll call social contribution – so don’t get sidetracked by the terminology. The key is the nature of social contribution and what is valued. In the past it was contributing to the building of things, whether you’re laying the pavement of a bridge – or building the software that enabled the proper design of the bridge – or created the mathematics that enabled the proper design. In other words, working with reality, even at some remove, in order to further our survival.

From this limited mini review, it appears Rifkin wants to more directly control the definition of social contribution, transforming from the relatively unregulated riff on satisfying the wants and needs of society, individual and whole, to a more idealistic – or at least more manipulable – definition of good vs bad wants and needs. I suspect this’ll definitely be a more political definition of how to run society, as it’ll be disconnected from base reality (in other parts of the review, citations of automation and next generation 3D printers are used to suggest the cost of creating such things used for survival will become negligible), possibly resulting in potent arguments over who has contributed and who has not.

Could even lead to small wars. Especially with those 3D printers functioning as your weapons factories. Now I’m tempted to buy the book just to see if it’s as nihilistic as this little tidbit suggests it should be.

Concerning Cuba’s healthcare approach, a reader writes:

Efficiency is rarely a desirable goal in and of itself, especially in government or societal affairs. I would argue that Cuba is not “efficient” per se, but “effective”. They have continuity of care, which is well-known in the medical field as important. There’s a lot more that could be happening in Cuba with the neighborhood approach that could be teased out with more research, and thus made into concrete benefits. Imagine how healthy Cuba might be if they could increase their health care spending from 10% of ours to 15% of ours.

Meanwhile, I’m fearful I’m going to be priced out of the market before I manage to make eligibility for Medicare and/or that Medicare will cease to be as affordable and effective as it is today by that point, thanks to the new Congress and Administration we’ll be getting.

America doesn’t have the best health care in the world; we have perhaps the worst among OECD nations. (I think that’s the right acronym and group I want.)

I agree, efficiency is more of a bugaboo of minds entranced by monetary concerns, but an irritant to those of us seeking social harmony.

But, for reasons obscure, the reader’s phrasing triggers in my mind (no doubt everyone else is far ahead of me, but I mostly write this blog so I can hear myself think) the observation that humanity evolved in relatively small groups in which the contributions of everyone was valued; it’s programmed into us to contribute, and to expect our contributions to be valued.

We did not evolve in a large state (country) environment. The larger a state grows, the less we are likely to be recognized for simple contributions on a nation-wide scale. In this view, cities and other political sub-units of countries become important in that they permit the individual to contribute and be recognized for those contributions on that local level; to participate in governance; and other functions that would be, without those political units’ presence, fading away.

It’s not an important point, but I think it gives a little insight into an alternative importance to current social and physical structures; given the drive of many people to be dominant in their little puddle, as it were, this is one way to reduce the pressure on those individuals. Not that this always works – we all know bitter old men who try to dominate their neighborhood; when I moved into my current residence, one of my neighbors fit that definition to a ‘T’. I suspect many white supremacists fit the same definition – bitter and frustrated that they and their brand, with which they so closely identify, are not the dominant figure of the nation.

Another reader writes:

Russia underwrote much of Cuba’s medical efforts.

I’m not clear as to whether this refers to the Soviet Union’s well known links to Cuba, or if Russia continues to support Cuba’s medical efforts even today. I know quite a few economic links were severed when the Soviet Union collapsed, and Cuba lost a number of subsidies in the process. I’m not sure how that affected their medical field, though. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, or 25 years ago.

I was hasty in my last post. Lawfare’s Chris Mirasola has provided a crisp history of the uncomfortable China/Taiwan/American relationship, and then a quick analysis:

The President-elect’s personal financial interests further muddies the situation. According to the Shanghaiist, the Trump Organization was considering a deal to build luxury hotels in Taiwan as recently as this past September. It is unclear how far this deal has progressed, though a local mayor has said that the project is still speculative.

What will this all mean for Sino-American relations? As Bolton recognized, “Beijing’s leaders would be appalled by this approach.” He is likely correct. Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Geng Shuang, speaking before the phone conversation, condemnedproposed US-Taiwan military exchanges and “urge[d] the US to abide by the one China policy” and “avoid backsliding and damaging the larger interests of China-US relations.” President Xi Jinping has been particularly direct about Taiwan’s political status. After Tsai Ying-wen’s election President Xi reiterated Beijing’s strong opposition to Taiwan separatism, asserting that, “the more than 1.3 billion Chinese people and the whole country will not tolerate secessionist activities by any person, at any time and in any form.” Xi has also signaled that he may be more aggressive than past administrations in bringing Taiwan under Beijing’s control. He told former Taiwanese Vice President Vincent Siew, for example, that, “political disagreements that exist between the two sides must reach a final resolution . . . and these issues cannot be passed on from generation to generation.”

If this phone call is indeed a first step in a plan to bolster Taiwanese sovereignty, the President-elect may find himself confronting a particularly vociferous, and increasingly powerful, opponent in President Xi Jinping.

I fear the business world has not prepared Mr. Trump for his new position. Perhaps the neocons will cheer on direct action such as this (although it appears Bolton is taken aback), but the risks are comparable to a bull in a … sorry.

Still, such an analysis as my off-the-cuff makes variables into constants, always an intellectual error. In this case, the variable taken to be a constant is the Chinese leadership and their response profile. They are now faced with a baffling situation, an American President who may not even realize the affront he is giving. Given our military capabilities, do they respond with strength, or with subtlety? We would assume a Cold War with another President, but such a War would damage all parties, and the Chinese leader’s are fools if they think their position is assured. The Chinese are starting to taste a bit of sufficiency, even affluence – if that’s taken away by a world-wide recession in which the Chinese leadership is seen to have a role, revolt might be in the cards.

The Chinese, upon examination of the situation, may consider simply protesting his behavior as a matter of saving face, while privately agreeing to suck it up for four years, hoping more reasonable actors may take over the American government. This is how they may be a variable.

This all makes me wonder if the next Presidential election will be an international cyber struggle in which the Russians and the Chinese vie for control of the American voter. At the moment, it would appear the Chinese might prefer an experienced American politician of Clinton’s caliber, while the Russians prefer the chaos and incompetence of Trump.

Updating the President-elect’s scandal list, we have a couple more.

Reuters is reporting Trump has invited imminent dictator Duterte of the Philippines to visit:

Trump’s brief chat with the firebrand Philippine president follows a period of uncertainty about one of Washington’s most important Asian alliances, stoked by Duterte’s hostility toward President Barack Obama and repeated threats to sever decades-old defense ties.

The call lasted just over seven minutes, Duterte’s special adviser, Christopher Go, said in a text message to media, which gave few details.

Duterte congratulated the U.S. president-elect, the Trump team’s statement said, and the two men “noted the long history of friendship and cooperation between the two nations, and agreed that the two governments would continue to work together closely on matters of shared interest and concern.”

In five months in office, Duterte has upended Philippine foreign policy by berating the United States, making overtures toward historic rival China and pursuing a new alliance with Russia.

His diplomacy has created jitters among Asian countries wary about Beijing’s rising influence and Washington’s staying power as a regional counterbalance.

Perhaps “diplomacy” is a euphemism.

Second on the list is Trump’s direct contact with Taiwan, as reported by the New Civil Rights Movement:

Source: Washington Monthly

The U.S. Government severed official diplomatic relations with Taiwan in 1979, and technically no president, or president-elect, has spoken with their president since.

Why?

China.

Taiwan is considered by China to be a part of China, and China considers communication with the head of state of Taiwan to be a “highly provocative” act against the Chinese government, as one expert notes.

The Financial Times’ Demetri Sevastopulo and Geoff Dyer broke the news, reporting that Trump’s phone call “on Friday with Tsai Ying-wen, the president of Taiwan … risks opening up a major diplomatic dispute with China before he has even been inaugurated.”

The reporters note that “the call is likely to infuriate Beijing which regards the island as a renegade province.”

It’s often said the Chinese see symbolism everywhere. Let’s hope in Trump they see a drunken elephant, to be approached with caution and a tranquilizer gun. And absolutely no temper.

As frustrating as it may be to measure American entertainments audiences, just think about these folks, as mentioned in passing on 38 North by Yonho Kim:

Further cooperation between media organizations is critical for any informational radio content delivered to North Korea on storage devises to effectively compete with the video entertainment content now in high demand. North Koreans “are already content with watching South Korean dramas,” in the words of one defector I interviewed. Informational programs that limit themselves to dry facts would quickly lose the interest of their intended audience, a reality that necessitates the incorporation of fun and entertaining elements in the news.

Yep, all you can do is throw in some fun, some information, and toss it over the wall. A few years later, some defector might tell you about your success – or how your program fell like a bad cake.

That’s a tough job.

We’re in a world now where we’re going to need to make individual and collective decisions concerning computers. Originally, computers were used to do things that humans did not do well, such as tireless calculations, tedious bookkeeping, and similar miscellanea. But recently – say, the last 20 years – they’ve become an integral part of things that most humans can do quite well on their own.

Such as communications.

Don’t get me wrong, they can certainly enhance communications – but, like all tools, they’re value-neutral. That is, in the wrong hands, malicious or merely shallow-thinking, zealots or the painfully earnest, they can be tremendously damaging, multiplying the effects of, say, a racist note pinned to a cork board in a restaurant a million-fold. The Nazis achieved power through misinformation campaigns, as did many other groups.

Computers make that easy, and the technology nerds make it hard to detect.

But before making a decision, we need to investigate whether and how to authenticate our communications. For years before the election we knew Fox News was a source of misinformation, which was eventually verified by the work of conservative Bruce Bartlett. But since the recent election we’ve been informed that we were flooded with false news items, and that the Russians were also in the ring, unseen but hitting below the belt.

Now NewScientist (19 November 2016, paywall) is reporting on the other side of the teeter-totter, on the side that’s looking to authenticate the news – albeit a very small corner of it. Aviva Rutkin reports on the work of Digital Verification Corps (DVC) of Amnesty International:

Pictures of what look like mass graves. Videos of explosions in city centres. The internet is awash with potential evidence of human rights abuses in some of the world’s most pressing conflicts.

But it can be tough to sift the real evidence from the fakes, or to work out exactly what an image shows. This is the challenge facing the Digital Verification Corps.

Launched by Amnesty International in October, the corps is training students and researchers to authenticate online images so they can help human rights organisations gather robust evidence on modern-day crimes.

“The use of smartphones has basically proliferated, and so too has the amount of potential evidence. But the actual verification of that is critical,” says Andrea Lampros at the University of California, Berkeley’s Human Rights Center (HRC). “That’s what makes it valid and usable – and that requires a tremendous amount of people power. We can help sift through those vast amounts of material and make them really useful to human rights groups and, potentially, courts.”

How will they do it?

The first step in any investigation is a reverse image search. By searching with tools like image search engine TinEye, corps members can pinpoint when a photo was first posted online and quickly rule out obvious fakes, whether shared deliberately or by mistake.

Next the corps tries to confirm when and where the image was taken. Social media often strips out valuable metadata, and this information can also be modified. Where metadata is available, the team might use those details to quiz someone whose says the image is theirs. Does information about the type of camera used to take the photo, for example, match that person’s story?

Corps members are also trained to scour images for landmarks, like schools or mosques, which they can compare with satellite data.

This reminds me of another effort, bellingcat, subtitled by and for citizen investigative journalists. I have not kept up with them, but I do remember seeing articles on their investigations into pictures coming out of the Ukraine during the Russian invasion, and into the downing of Malaysia Flight 117. Today? This excellent post on bellingcat by Elliot Higgins addresses the same issue concerning the DVC:

The work of open source investigators frequently involves using content shared on social media. The reliability of those sources is something that is always under question, not only by the investigators themselves, but also by those who would try to discredit that type of content as being unreliable. …

The latest victims of their own efforts are the Syrian White Helmets, a rescue organisation whose members wear body cameras, and have emerged as one of the leading sources of evidence of air strikes against civilian infrastructure in the Syrian conflict.

Because of this, they have regularly been smeared by the Syrian and Russian governments, and decried as fakes and terrorists. Russian state TV outlet RT (formerly “Russia Today”), for example, ran an opinion piece on 26 October by writer Vanessa Beeley, who labeled them a “terrorist support group and Western propaganda tool”, while a separate report a week earlier questioned the White Helmets’ neutrality by claiming that they were funded by Western governments. As early as May, Kremlin wire Sputnik called the White Helmets a “controversial quasi-humanitarian organisation” which was “fabricating ‘evidence’ of Russia’s ‘disastrous’ involvement in Syria”. This Sputnik piece also quoted Beeley, as saying that the White Helmets “demonize the Assad government and encourage direct foreign intervention.”

So here’s the thing: are we all going to have to become experts at communications authentication? Is it safe to trust organizatioons such as bellingcat and DVC? How do you feel about that?

Or will the Internet as a social communications medium shrivel up and go away as people, realizing how they’re being misled, just walk away?

Where’s Walter Cronkite when you need him?

WaPo‘s Erik Wemple reports, in a disbelieving voice, on the comments of pro-Trump commentator Scottie Nell Hughes:

In an interview on “The Diane Rehm Show,” Donald Trump supporter and CNN political commentator Scottie Nell Hughes declared the end of facts. Or, in her own words: “There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore of facts.”

She explained that contention, too: “And so Mr. Trump’s tweet amongst a certain crowd, a large — a large part of the population, are truth. When he says that millions of people illegally voted, he has some — in his — amongst him and his supporters, and people believe they have facts to back that up. Those that do not like Mr. Trump, they say that those are lies, and there’s no facts to back it up. So … ” …

“One thing that has been interesting this entire campaign season to watch is that people that say facts are facts, they’re not really facts. Everybody has a way, it’s kind of like looking at ratings or looking at a glass of half-full water. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth or not true.”

From 1984 (1956)
“War is Peace“
Source: Cosmic Catacombs

It’s a bit of a jaw-dropper, unless Mz. Hughes wishes to argue that she’s merely suggesting Trump supporters don’t really care about facts, just what St. Donald is saying at this moment. But it doesn’t come out that way. I think there are consequences to ignoring facts, and the only real question is how long those consequences can be covered up. For example, Trump claims to have negotiated with Carrier to remain in Indiana, his first victory in the campaign to retain jobs in the United States. From The New York Times:

The long-promised call from Donald J. Trump to the heating and cooling giant Carrier came early one morning about a week after the election, when he unexpectedly won the industrial heartland.

The president-elect warned Gregory Hayes, the chief executive of Carrier’s parent, United Technologies, that he had to find a way to save a substantial share of the jobs it had vowed to move to Mexico, or he would face the wrath of the incoming administration.

On Thursday, as he toured the factory floor here to take credit for saving roughly half of the 2,000 jobs Indiana stood to lose, Mr. Trump sent a message to other businesses as well that he intended to follow through on his pledges to impose stiff tariffs on imports from companies that move production overseas and ship their products back to the United States.

“This is the way it’s going to be,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with The New York Times. “Corporate America is going to have to understand that we have to take care of our workers also.”

The libertarians, at least the honest ones, will commence worrying about how the government’s interference is going to distort the market. Between businesses running scared because they are no longer free to pursue efficiencies to higher taxes for the incentives – $7 million – that act as the carrot to keep Carrier in the state.

And they have a point. While Trump will achieve his immediate goal – for a while – by his direct carpet bombing approach, the unintended consequences will be subtle, but felt for a generation. Bernie gets at least part of it:

“He has signaled to every corporation in America that they can threaten to offshore jobs in exchange for business-friendly tax benefits and incentives,” Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont wrote in an op-ed on Thursday for The Washington Post.

The question will be whether the effects of Trump’s approach will be strong enough to upset his supporters or not¹.

And this feeds back to Mz. Hughes’ statements. I misdoubt they’re accurate; I think Trump’s supporters, unable to observe directly, and no longer willing to take the media’s word for much of anything, simply disbelieve because we’re really not built for issues the size of the United States. We have to take a lot of things “on faith”, even science. And when you’re wondering how to pay the mortgage, where all those lovely jobs went that didn’t require much beyond a high school education, and someone says the media is lying, everyone’s lying, well, it may look like we’re in a post-truth world.

But we’re not.

If & when the ceiling caves in on Trump, those billboards with Obama’s picture asking “Do you miss me yet?” might even be welcomed by the more moderate conservatives; hard-core Trumpists will shake their fists and proclaim that it’s all a conspiracy. But there won’t be many of them.

Will the Democrats have a strong candidate by then?

¹The other question is whether all the national and international businesses will collude to make those demands, thus exposing Trump for being a shallow thinker.

Looks like fun.

Meanwhile in Mexico

Chandra Bolzelko writes in Reuters concerning capital cases:

Removing self-representation as a possibility in capital cases could and should be corrected for with some type of minimum standards for capital defenders. Few defendants in death penalty trials can afford a lawyer. The lawyers that are appointed for them are often unprepared, unqualified and otherwise problematic. A 2000 analysis of 461 capital cases found that 25 percent of death penalty defendants in Texas were represented by attorneys with disciplinary histories. One-fifth of people who were executed in Washington state were assigned counsel that had been or was later disbarred. The qualified attorneys who should be appointed need to be adequately compensated, but they’re not.

This denigration of the right to effective assistance of counsel is what makes it easy to allow defendants like Dylann Roof to represent themselves. If appointed counsel won’t do much better, why not let people exercise their rights under Faretta and get themselves killed? Especially when the trial will add glorious sound bites and scenes of an allegedly racist killer getting to cross-examine his African-American victims.

In the name of individual liberties that we’ve already stopped protecting, we will watch Roof’s slow, elaborate, taxpayer-funded self-harm unfold. The trial of the Charleston church shooter places us at a crossroads of Constitution and conscience. If we overturn Faretta v. California and prevent defendants in capital cases from defending themselves while providing them with qualified and paid counsel, we won’t have to choose.

I don’t doubt Chandra is accurately alluding to capital cases as entertainment, as they are for some folks who don’t trouble themselves with questions of actual guilt, or for that matter just what went wrong with the alleged perpetrator’s upbringing – ignoring the possibility of Nature being guilty, of course. Having sat on a court case involving alleged violence and drugs, I do remember the gravity of deciding the future of a young man; I would not care, in the least, to sit on a capital case.

Which all reminds me that the funding for public defenders cut by Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty (R) doesn’t ever seem to have been restored. MPR has an updated report on Minnesota public defenders:

In Minnesota, the public defender system is the largest user of the state’s court system, representing about 150,000 cases per year.

According to the Legislative Auditor, the system operates with about 65 percent of the staff it should, thanks primarily to budget cuts under the Pawlenty administration.

A typical public defender here has 10 minutes to meet with a client for the first time “to evaluate the case, explain the client’s options and the consequences of a conviction or plea, to discuss a possible deal with the prosecuting attorney, and allow the client to make a decision on how to proceed,” according to the Minnesota Board of Public Defense.

I know a public-spirited gentleman & lawyer who aspires to be a public defender. He’s been aspiring for several years now. Between inadequate funding and outdated laws, I think the Legislature has some work to do once the MNsure mess is cleaned up. Perhaps completely decriminalizing marijuana would help. I wonder if there are statistics on how particular crimes end up being represented by the public defender office.

Oh, sorry, sorry. I’ll have to dig some more. Maybe someone could blow this up and put it on a billboard.

And put “miss me yet?” on it? Or would that be tacky?

Thanks to Steve Benen.

Concerned about changes to Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure? Susan Hennessey of LawFare suggests the changes are frivolous – but are leading to something much more important:

First, a refresher on the previous state of affairs. Previously, Rule 41 included territorial venue provisions authorizing magistrate judges to issue warrants only within their district, except in a set of narrowly defined circumstances. Because prior to obtaining a warrant, authorities did not know the physical location of a computer using Tor or other anonymization services, it was unclear whether law enforcement could obtain such a warrant from any federal judge under those rules.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) features Vincent Price as a revenge killer, out to wipe out the surgical team who failed his wife in her moment of need. As an ornament to his efforts, each death will symbolize in some way the nine plagues of Egypt, although the last is not obviously completed.

I was mystified as to how a brass unicorn catapulted through the body of one victim was related to a plague, but perhaps I’ve already forgotten.

Then again, this movie is about obscurity, from deaths to the identity of the Price’s assistant; unless the editing for TV was quite destructive, the audience is never permitted to know her identity or role; she’s listed as Vulnavia in the credits, but I do not believe that name, or any other, is mentioned in the movie.

Much else is attributed airily to expertise, such as the reproduction of Vincent’s voice, himself the victim of an accident on the same day his wife died. Just how does he do that? Whose ashes were buried in his grave? How was his wife’s body, dead these 4 years, so well preserved so that he might reside next to her for eternity?

But this movie has a queerly detached feel to it. I think this is due to the fact that no great effort was made to make sympathetic characters. The surgical team is, for the most part, little more than moving targets; the police almost laughably incompetent; and Price and his assistant principally mysterious. We see events, we’re presented logic and motivations, but it’s almost academic, a quaint puzzle to be solved by the desperate chief surgeon and the police, who are principally harassed by a commissioner more interested in publicity than effectuality.

For all this, there is certainly some competency: the deaths are effective, sometimes chilling; Vincent, limited as he is by the script, still evokes some mild sympathy and even horror, his domicile full of his inventions calculated to put a chill of concern into any visitor.

Still, in the end, I felt a little empty. It failed to emotionally involve me, so I was not excited.

Israel appears to be mirroring certain regrettable aspects of the American political system. Mazal Mualem illuminates two instances, perhaps inadvertently, in this article for AL Monitor. First, she touches on extremism:

… the term “terrorist arson,” or as last week’s events were sometimes termed, “the arson intifada,” has since entered Israel’s public and political lexicon. As expected, these terms only boosted the right-wing coalition’s agenda.

James Hamblin writes about the Cuban health system in The Atlantic:

Cuba has long had a nearly identical life expectancy to the United States, despite widespread poverty. …

As a poor country, Cuba can’t afford to equivocate and waste money on health care. Much advanced technology is unavailable. So the system is forced instead to keep people healthy. This pressure seems to have created efficiency.

It’s largely done, as the BBC has reported, through an innovative approach to primary care. Family doctors work in clinics and care for everyone in the surrounding neighborhood. At least once a year, the doctor knocks on your front door (or elsewhere, if you prefer) for a check-up. More than the standard American ritual of listening to your heart and lungs and asking if you’ve noticed any blood coming out of you abnormally, these check-ups involve extensive questions about jobs and social lives and environment—information that’s aided by being right there in a person’s home.

Then the doctors put patients into risk categories and determine how often they need to be seen in the future. Unlike the often fragmented U.S. system where people bounce around between specialists and hospitals, Cuba fosters a holistic approach centered around on a relationship with a primary-care physician. Taxpayer investment in education about smoking, eating, and exercising comes directly from these family doctors—who people trust, and who can tailor recommendations.

A rather different approach to the problem of competition between nations. It used to be that humanity spent a lot of time and lives invading other countries and taking them over. That was our “keeping up with the Jones'” analog – or perhaps it’s the other way around. Nowadays, though, rather than depending on God to show the superiority of the ideology of the Motherland, now we compete on statistics: life expectancy, GDP, percentage of adult population with a college degree, to name a few.

And it appears Cuba takes this all very seriously, with a result that that they are comparable to US results in healthcare while spending about 10% of Americans per capita per annum. It’s quite impressive, of course – but to an American, to think that you’ll have a primary care doc assigned to you based on your neighborhood will seem the height of anti-Americanism – where is our choice! we shout, even as diseases we would never choose assail us. Indeed, we often choose not to visit a doctor or dentist for years at a time, convinced that we’re healthy – we talk about it at McDonald’s while eating the fad of the month, after all.

So the USA tries to compete on healthcare using a system that is seriously broken compared to a rational system like Cuba’s. And, so long as we value choice over statistics, we never will win. At least not until someone comes up with the magic pill that solves everything at a dime per dose. (Anyone remember Carter’s Little Liver Pills?)

So we should work on being honest, instead. Rather than insisting we have the best health system in the world – it’s only the most expensive – choice should be emphasized, even fetishized. And then personal responsibility should be part of it, too. Not taking care of that diabetes? Hmmmmmm. You’ll look great in this commercial.

But don’t put any money down on winning that “best healthcare system in the world” bet. Our results will never prove it.

A point unhighlighted is that of knowledge. There is a an underappreciated facet of the fetish of capitalism, and it is that certain intangible resources are infinite: time & knowledge come to mind. When it comes to capitalism & healthcare, there’s an assumption that, of course, there’ll be time to sort out which hospital offers the cheapest service, and that you’ll have time to take advantage of that – which leads me to wonder if I want healthcare that competes on price? This is not a whimsical afterthought, as the latter might be an example of the problem of knowledge, in this case that the domain of knowledge best applied to the problem of selecting medical services; Mr. Weissman’s proclamation that forcing hospitals to publish price lists will fix the entire healthcare problem is, I fear, naive. Only fools select product solely on the basis of price unless the question of quality is not relevant to the product, but sometimes the domain to apply can be unclear.

The Cubans, for all that they appear to be using coercion, are achieving greater efficiency by putting the most knowledgeable in charge of the effort: the primary care physician, who best knows medicine in at least the neighborhood, sees the entire neighborhood on a regular basis, and apparently tries to be as proactive as possible. I fear that American citizens, made up of mostly amateurs and in charge of their own health, will never match the efficiency of Cuba.

WHICH leads to the pivotal question: efficiency or liberty? The latter is one of our most sacred words, but this scenario should be a teaching moment, that no particular concept will ever have universal applicability. As we watch the GOP disassemble the ACA, aka Obamacare, an institution which has already shown greater efficiency than our free markets (another sacred word) on, at least, the statistic (twitched didn’t you?) of percentage of the population insured, it’s worth keeping in mind that society is not a machine that will always run better if only it’s lubricated with the sacred oil, blessed by God or by the proper economists, who are often treated like gods – although why the Kansan GOP elite wants to worship a fellow named Laffer leaves me a trifle nonplussed; but I should be gentler, as they’ve already made their fellow Kansans pay the price for their foolishness.

Society, whether American or not, is not some perfect machine which merely needs a bit of the proper oil now and then, but rather a creaking pile of rivets and gears, mismatched and rusty, shiny but soft metal so easily bent, predicated on assumptions concerning the needs of society that have never been well thought out, thinking that the inhabitants are rational creatures with reasonable information about the world. Yet those creatures, poor and slack as they are, rarely reach those standards, and so we see domestic violence; deceit; medical needs unmet by private corporations; frightened people deprived of their guns; people frightened of neighbors with guns; patronization on the left, met by equal force of loathing and ignorance on the right, making for a soup with a hell of a punch; & etc.

If it all worked so well, we wouldn’t have prisons.

As engineers know, you can’t have all the bells and whistles. You can’t use a Ferrarri to tow broken-down tractors back to the repair shop. We can decide to have choice, but we should know the price: replicated effort, emergency room visits for preventable illnesses, lives lost due to incompatible records; poverty; etc.

Or you can enforce systems which save more lives, at the cost of losing choice, losing liberty; and that’s the up-front costs. Libertarians worry about development of new meds if prices are government controlled, and the fear is not unreasonable. But then, it’s not clear that the free market is doing particularly well even now. But lack of choice obviates the advantage of the privileged, to some extent, and what if you’re stuck with the incompetent? Choice puts pressure on such people, to improve or get out; without choice, I would wonder if the governmental mechanisms would be strong enough to force them out.

Give me liberty! Give me efficiency!

I doubt you get to have both.