Wading through myriad verbalized nouns such as foreground, as well as a bounty of illogical comparative sentences, became worthwhile when I stumbled on some intriguing thoughts about Internet privacy in Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression. She starts by recounting the stories of a number of young women who worked in the quaintly-named adult entertainment industry to generate income for various virtuous goals, the most exalted being to pay tuition at Duke. Year later, these women lose their jobs when those films surface on the Internet.

This sort of situation exposes my conservative side: I don’t think a degree from Duke is worth becoming a porn actor, or that youth excuses such a genuinely bad decision. Many of those who lost their jobs were teachers. As a former teacher, I feel certain that once your naked self has been viewed online, you’ll never truly control that class again, not to mention their parents. This applies of course to similarly-compromised men.

Any person can avoid this phenomenon by not taking or permitting naked pictures of yourself.

The next story was of a woman who lost her job when her ex-husband outed photos of them having sex together, private photos they had made consensually. Ah, revenge porn. Naturally, the man was not fired. That is another case of bad judgment, but in this case the bad judgment of trusting your spouse, who later turned into the worst kind of jerk, which is pretty hard to predict.

I feel more conflicted about this person, though the no-nude-pictures rule would have worked in this case, possibly exposing the jerk tendency earlier.

Finally there is the case of the lesbian porn book On Our Backs, a collection of photos from the women’s erotic magazine of the same name, itself a spoof-rebuke of the feminist publication Off Our Backs. In Algorithms of Oppression this is  portrayed as a limited-run book distributed within a small sub-population of a harried minority years before the Internet. Librarians tasked with digitizing previously published books were hesitant to scan this one, since it would morph from hard-to-find printed versions to images instantaneously available worldwide, something the women involved could not have predicted.*

What a shock it would be to find Episodes from my Past popping up on the Internet decades later, uncurated by me! So glad I’m not famous. Should we be able to control our online exposure? More generally, are all the things we have ever done salient parts of who we are now, or can we truly change?

Again we see the US falling on the full exposure side, including continuing to publish felons who have served their time, and erasing the accomplishments of men guilty of a single unwanted touch even on the back of a disinterested woman, while Europe seems more likely to believe in redemption, and has adjudicated some rights for individuals over their online appearances.

The whole country is the opposite of the wild, wild West.  No Fresh Starts. Just Baggage.

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* Though the book was published in 1996, five years after the WWW went public, it was based on photographs taken up to twelve years previously.

One of the books recommended on the Science Friday 2018 Summer Reading show is Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble. It was described as demonstrating how deep learning algorithms contribute to disparate life outcomes for people based on race or neighborhood. I was pleased to find it available in our library immediately, and sorry to discover that it is nearly a polemic: long on accusations, short on evidence.

Google is the villain of the piece. Intentions do not matter, only results, and as the dominant browser, Google gets blamed for some very sketchy search results, screenshots supplied. One example is the search for “black on white crime”: in the book the first four hits are from newnation, infowars, violenceagainstwhites, and whitedude, all white supremacy sites. I just did the exact same search, and my first four hits are from splcenter, theroot, nypost, and fbi.gov.

Maybe Google has fixed this since the book came out? Or maybe I have SafeSearch turned on.

I remember the Internet before SafeSearch, that is, during the previous century. My oldest son, who was born one year before the WWW went public, was pretty young, I want to say pre-reading, and asked to check out Star Wars online. He at least didn’t read well enough to skim search hits, which was good, since the first twenty or so were of the “Star Wars Babes” ilk.

This book was published in 2018, and SafeSearch is not super easy to disable. That the author wasn’t using it reinforces my skepticism about the book’s objectivity.

On The Other Hand, like all humans, I am a sucker for a powerful anecdote, and she has a searing one. Dylann Root, the shooter at the AME church in Charleston in 2015, claimed to have been made “racially aware” by reading the results of the Internet search “black on White crime”, his capitalization.* He read “pages upon pages” about “brutal black on White murders” in the US. He “researched deeper” and found “the same things were happening in England and France, and in all the other Western European countries.” His research alerted him to “the Jewish problem” as well.

I imagine he isn’t the only hate-crime perp who was inspired by the Internet. I know we love free speech, but should hate speech really be free? Europeans don’t think so. Dangerous ideas can take hold quickly, ideas that lead not only to murder but to policies based on wild rumor, policies that undercut democracy and equality, and even the natural world.

The author suggests that Google could refuse Adwords income from such sites, blocking them at least from being able to pay for a higher position in the results queue. Google is a corporation, the sort of entity which wouldn’t be expected to demonstrate moral judgment, yet which seems more principled that the US government today.

Where else can we turn?

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* I got the search results listed above whether I used white or White.

America, and perhaps all of civilization, has been in thrall to money for as long as it has existed. Using money to make a moral decision is obviously a specious construct, though thinking so makes me an elite. And that, Donald, is one of the reasons you aren’t an elite, despite your having nicer boats.

Am I making up my  own definition of elitism? Wikipedia defines it as a power thing, exclusively composed of decision makers to-the-manor-born. I use it to refer to people who make time for, and are interested in, reading, contemplation, and discussion. People excited by ideas. My favorite people.

Shuddering from the images of the US using its considerable weight to body block efforts by the World Health Organization to promote breast feeding and reduce sugar consumption, I decided to double down instead of detox by reminding myself that greedy assholes have been around for a while.

I found a couple of examples in Big Chicken by Maryn McKenna, which is reminding me that the idyllic 50s and 60s were really pretty toxic. Thomas Jukes, father of antibiotic use to fatten livestock, who died in 1999 at the age of 93, fulminated to the end over ridiculous attempts to limit profit-making by farmers for such flummery as antibiotic-resistant pathogens and humane treatment of food animals. Then there’s Rep. Jamie Whitten of Mississippi, who spent the last 17 of his 54 years in Congress renewing a rider he inserted in an appropriations bill, a rider requiring his personal blessing before funding antibiotic bans. He was able to block such bans until he retired in 1995.

He was also a Democrat, for those of you who think they have a monopoly on the white hats.

Both of these guys were motivated, of course, by funding, and were funded by organizations whose big money-making products undermine public health, as both the men and the companies well knew.

My most precious trading card in the Greedy Jerk collection is one I acquired years ago:  General Motors inventor Thomas Midgley, Jr. This gem came up with his first big idea, adding tetraethyl lead (TEL) to gasoline to reduce engine knocking, in 1921. Two years later he took a leave of absence due to lead poisoning. He returned as vice president of a spinoff manufacturing the additive. The first two plants were plagued by ten deaths as well as several cases of lead poisoning, demoralizing the staff. A third plant with a revised process experienced cases of lead poisoning, hallucinations, and insanity, followed by five deaths. Nonetheless, Midgley appeared at a press conference in 1924 pouring TEL over his hands and inhaling it to demonstrate its inoffensiveness, after which he took another leave due to lead poisoning.

Midgley lost that position in 1925, but was not fired. He moved to GM’s Frigidaire division, where he invented Freon. Both TEL and Freon were widely used worldwide for decades, and Midgley won awards from various industry groups and science societies as well as two honorary degrees. He was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences the year he died.

Midgley died from polio, indirectly. After contracting it in 1940, he invented a rope-and-pulley system to lift him from his bed. In 1944, it strangled him to death.

J. R. McNeill posited that Midgley had “more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth’s history.”

Does it make me feel better that bad actors have always valued money over lives? Maybe. Whatever values and wilderness we have now survived them, at least. Conversely, the density of egregious actors seems to be growing exponentially.

We experienced the splendiferous July Fourth fireworks show in San Jose for the second time yesterday. New fireworks included fat, shimmering snakes that coil into tight spirals then spin in place; swarms of tiny firefly sparks that hover, buzzing; long stems of light reaching up from the ground, sometimes ending as spikes, sometimes unfolding petals; and huge chrysanthemum fireworks from which the lit ray-ends shoot off in random directions, like an alien space fleet. There were also shimmering golden waterfalls, roiling sky-lakes, crackles, whistles, and booms, circles, Saturns, and smileys.

I am almost soothed watching the many fireworks that explode or unfold into organic shapes, alien space fleets notwithstanding.

Speaking of space fleets, the armed services anthems were among the mostly martial musical accompaniment. Between that and the “rocket’s red glare, the bomb bursting in air”, I have always associated fireworks displays with ordnance, but Wikipedia says they were invented in China in the 9th century for entertainment and celebration.

That works for us, but lots of people, together with their pets, despise fireworks, especially here in Santa Cruz.*  Yesterday in the US there were plenty of firework-related injuries and some deaths, even at official events. Everyone who watches fireworks is in some small way taking a risk.

Life is a risky business.

Which America are we celebrating anyway? For me, always the one whose laws echo international law, welcoming asylum seekers from the world over, and whose citizens take to the street to protest official thugs tearing or sneaking tiny children from their at-most-misdemeanor-committing parents. Definitely not the Amerika that rewards bold people who save their families from violence and death threats by risking all in a dangerous journey by putting these best and brightest into internment camps for families, after denying them a chance at legal asylum.

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* Even in San Jose, the crowd was only in the thousands, though there were tens of thousands in San Francisco, and of course hundreds of thousands in Boston, where we acquired our fireworks addiction.

All the Italicized bits are web-quotes, some edited for length, of random things that struck me while browsing today, several involving Ulysses.

The timing of Justice Kennedy’s retirement explained:

Justice Anthony Kennedy announced that he would be retiring, and it was reported that, as an executive at Deutsche Bank, Justice Kennedy’s son Justin Kennedy had presided over $1 billion in loans to President Trump, who has publicly referred to Justin as a “special guy.”

One reason for America’s health crisis:

Taco Bell was named the best Mexican restaurant of 2018 in the [annual] Harris Poll.

Local Iowa example of fact-free America: 

June Gloom is a catchphrase on the Central Coast. Often there is fog, though almost never rain. It can also be cool, by which I mean low 60s instead of high 60s.

This year, we had the Gloom, if you want to call it that, mostly in May, so when our niece visited for a week mid-June, she had pretty nice weather. Most of our visitors have been from New England, and some are disappointed to find that Central Coast does not have Baywatch weather. Ever. Being from southeast Texas, our niece was happy to have a break from the heat, and even found the Silicon Valley weather–insufferable 80s to us–pleasantly lacking in humidity.

Here she is at Rio Del Mar. It’s a long way from the bayou.

San Francisco has all-summer Gloom, since the fog just sits on that city most of the season. The day our niece visited, the Golden Gate bridge was relatively visible; often you can’t even see the towers, and occasionally you have to say to people, There’s a 70-story-tall bridge right over there, believe it or not.

She had a good time anyway.

I was surprised to find that Google allows employees’ families to tour the Googleplex. Google comes from googol, which is 10 to the 100 power, more than the number of atoms in the universe. The Googleplex is an lovely campus, though not quite as mind-blowing as the googolplex, which is 10 to the googol power. It was fun to see where our son works, works out, eats, shops, gets his hair cut, and socializes during the workweek.

Most summer days, instead of Gloom, we have the most amazing Blue Skies I have ever seen. Here’s a shot from our back yard. The picture doesn’t do the depth of the blue justice. It looks like every atom in the universe is glowing blue.

After taking power in 1933, the Nazis quickly moved to remove internal opposition to the Nazi regime in Germany. The legal system became one of many tools for this aim and the Nazis gradually supplanted the normal justice system with political courts with wide-ranging powers. —Wikipedia

The supreme court has never been the brightest bulb among the separated powers, having voted to uphold racism and inequality almost as often as it has done the opposite. I pretty much gave up on them in 2010, when they cut the last shredded piece of leather minimally leashing the Koch and friends Dogs of Hell* with the decision in Citizens United v. FEC.

Recently the court has jumped the shark, though. In the decision that found gerrymandered districts were not racist, the (racist) justices who prevailed chastised the plaintiffs for assuming that the districts were drawn up with the purpose of denying voting rights by race, rather than assuming they were drawn up with all the best intentions, then…oh, wow! Who knew the votes of people of color wouldn’t count?

But that’s fake news! The years-long, brilliantly executed plan by the Dark Money forces to take over state houses and gerrymander districts in favor of republicans after the 2010 census has been  documented dozens of times, including in book length by Jane Mayer, one of the most careful evidence-gatherer/presenters in the land. It would have made as much sense to ask the plaintiffs to assume that Clinton won the presidency in 2016.

Then the court upheld the Muslim travel ban, saying the intent of the president as expressed in tweets is inadmissible–where else does he express intent?–and making a big point of saying this decision is not racist, not like the decision about Japanese-American internment, which definitely was. They were real clear on that point. Crystal.

I always believe those people who state, repeatedly, I am not a racist. All those people who never need to say that are probably really racist.

Most egregious, though, was a tweet from Mitch McConnell, a picture of him shaking hands with his boy Neil Gorsuch, titled “Team Mitch.” Are supreme court justices on teams? Apparently. This tweet is a blatant celebration, by both Gorsuch and McConnell, that the right wingers on the court are now free to decide cases without considering jurisprudence, precedent, or even common sense. They voted for the team, and they won, Yea! The year Mitch spent obstructing Merrick Garland was totally worth it.

That last sentence is not sarcasm, it’s terrifying. They wanted, and they got, a party-controlled court.

The 2018 midyear election is coming, assuming the US is still a democracy by then. Clearly lots of elections have already been decided, since it’s impossible to overcome the odds in these gerrymandered districts. If the red wave that Trump is predicting strands most of the reasoning folk at sea, I think I would like to move before they come for us. Listening, husband? There must be a sane corner left on Earth. New Zealand?

The normally-capitalized institutions rendered in lower case herein are ones I no longer respect. I’m too much of a grammar nerd to not capitalize people’s names though, even the names of Despicable Hes and Shes.

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* Is that a Marvel thing now? I thought it had an idiomatic meaning that predated Marvel movies, but maybe my own memory has been usurped by the zeitgeist, which might cast some doubt on the entire blog entry, mightn’t it?

Warning: Politically Incorrect Blog approaching.

I’ve now heard both Michelle Wolf and Trevor Noah characterize Bill Clinton as the “poster child” for the MeToo movement. No, I don’t get all my news from comedians.

The exemplar for the MeToo movement is Harvey Weinstein. He specifically used his position of power to rape and assault some women, and to compel others to perform or view sex acts in exchange for career opportunities. He also documentably derailed careers of women who rebuffed him.

Documentably: a should-be word.

Bill Clinton did not cover himself with glory when he repeatedly allowed Monica Lewinsky to pleasure him, but he was a libidinous creature assailed, as are most celebrities, by people wanting to conjugate with him, and he often did not Just Say No. Adultery is not a crime, and not admitting to adultery in front of your wife is practically an intelligence test. Bill Clinton should be judged by his legacy of increasing income inequality, enabling mass incarceration, and decimating the economy of Mexico.

Certainly if BC weren’t powerful, it wouldn’t have happened, but at the time most of us did not believe he forced or even initiated the situation. JFK might more reasonably be called-out, since in his day folks were less promiscuous, so he had front men arrange liaisons for him both on the road and in the White House pool. That seems more coercive.

Weinstein is still the best choice.

The MeToo movement is super important, long overdue, upliftingly empowering, and lacking nuance. Just as police should not shoot people for shoplifting Mentos, women should not destroy the careers of those who flirt, place a friendly hand on a shoulder, or ogle. Women can insist these activities stop, especially in the workplace, but these are not career-destroying activities.

Upliftingly: another should-be word.

Nor is it fair for women to blame men for the women’s misjudgments. (No ambiguous adjectives!) An NPR story about an aspiring woman writer who had a chance to meet a famous male writer she hoped would be a mentor was prefaced by a warning to those who might be offended. Over dinner he propositioned her and she agreed, so they went to his house. Once canoodling started, she changed her mind, he stopped immediately, and she left.

I’d rate that innocuous. Should it be a rule that the only permissible sex partner is one who is your peer in terms of power?

Put the Harvey Weinsteins in jail to rot. For the less-obvious cases, please remember how quickly an accusation becomes a life sentence.

I’m taking a break from the crisis to talk about animals, that is, non-human animals.

Animals are like us in a lot of ways. As part of a tour I give as a volunteer docent, I point out that grey whales have a dominant pectoral fin, either right or left, just as we have a dominant hand, and that baleen is made of keratin, as are human hair and nails.

In most ways, animals are different from us. Marine invertebrates, for example, seem to live much longer than we do, so much longer that we really don’t know how long. When folks ask how long seastars live, we say 80 years, but it’s a guess. They might live twice as long. Anemones seem to live for hundreds of years. How would short-lived creatures like us ever figure it out?

Most–all?–trees live for hundreds of years, or at least they did before people were around. As documented in Hidden Life of Trees, trees play the long game, planning pollination cycles and controlling predators with respect to years-long environmental factors. Trees living near humans Die Young.

But even I do not think trees are animals, so let’s undigress. A raccoon who climbed a 25-story building had has Andy Warhol moment recently. Although that’s higher than usual for raccoons, or so we think, they are very good climbers, and this one was certainly in no danger of falling. People projected their own climbing skills and fear of heights onto this animal, possibly because we can’t seem to consider any topic without “ME” front and center.

People ask how marine mammals can “hold their breath” during long dives. It’s a reasonable question, but the answer is, they don’t. Their various strategies include emptying their lungs (to avoid “the bends”); storing excess oxygen in their muscles and their thick, viscous (compared to ours) blood; lowering their heart rates, some to as low as 4 beats per minute; and switching to anaerobic respiration, yet without the negative effects we get, which modern science can’t yet explain.

The most popular question for the wharf docents is, How do the sea lions get onto the planks under the wharf? The planks are a few feet above the water most of the time. When I’m off-duty, sometimes I answer questions if I hear them, but often I just listen. Sans authoritative input, most people conclude they wait for high tide. Often people say, That makes sense. But it doesn’t. Why would animals choose to live somewhere they can only access twice in 24 hours? Sea lions dive down a few feet then race up, arcing six or eight feet above the water, and landing, splat, on the crossbeams.

Back to trees. Thinking about how the coastal redwoods get nutrients from the fog, then return them to the sea in the form of leaf litter, I concluded, that seems like an ecosystem, or a piece of one. But then I wondered about the creatures and processes in the ocean that put the nutrients into the water, and the prevailing weather patterns that stir up the ocean surface, create the fog, and move it onto the shore. I know banana slugs are the main detritivores in the redwood forest; are they also part of this cycle? The ocean currents and the topology of the coast seem to play a role. There may be different sea creatures who break down the leaf litter. I know there are interactions among the different types of trees in the forest as well.

Where to draw the line? As a swarm of individuals, we want to reduce our observations to scale, a behavior, an understandable subset we can explain or diagram. It’s hard for us to perceive or even accept large systemic effects: Flying really is safer than driving! So maybe Earth is only one Ecosystem. Just as the human microbiome seems to explain most of the diseases plaguing mankind, all the holes we are ripping in Biome Earth could explain extinctions, weather extremes, and other planetwide disfunctions.

The topic didn’t turn out to be as light as I planned.

I can’t stop blogging about this seminal moment for our country.

Yesterday I heard isolated stories of reunification. One couple’s 14-month-old was taken and then returned 85 days later. He was filthy, and lice-ridden! Days later, he will not let his mother put him down, even to sleep.

Even so, HHS has no overarching plan to reunite kids already separated. Their cases will “proceed through the system.”

239 girls, the youngest 9 months old, arrived at a care facility in NYC, where they will be cared for during the day and spend the night with foster families. They arrived with lice, bedbugs, chicken pox, and other communicable diseases. Two other facilities in that city, Catholic Guardian Services and Lutheran Social Services, refused to reveal whether they are housing forcibly-removed children, but an 11-year-old staying at CGS had met younger children who had been separated from their parents.

Apparently the US has been paying for migrant shelters which transport, house, and maintain youths who cross the border alone for years, with over 30 facilities in Texas and 100 more in 13 other states. It’s a lucrative business. According to NYT, a single company, Southwest Key, won $955 million in contracts since 2015. Their CEO made $770,000 in 2015.

To be sure, these aren’t the temporary facilities with the lice and the cages. They are more dorm-style, with educational and recreational facilities, and movies.

Like white-collar crime prison.

In any case, they are filling up quickly, and they aren’t appropriate for “soft” Trump’s goal of detaining entire families. Besides new facilities, that plan depends on overturning the Flores decision, which prevents ICE from detaining children more than 20 days. It’s the reason for the existence of the billion-dollar industry of youth migrant shelters.

Unintended consequence?

Faced with an immigrant spike in 2014, Obama decided it was untenable to either separate children from their families or seek to extend child detainment, so his administration devised a plan involving close case management and ankle bracelets. Under this strategy, 95% of immigrants were showing up for their court dates, including ones who would be deported.

That’s the policy Trump replaced with Zero Tolerance and port-of-entry blocking in April. Then on May 20, Trump cancelled the funding that provides legal representation for unaccompanied minors, because with the influx it would cost too much. Remember, all the separated children are reclassified as Unaccompanied.

We don’t have a category for Ripped from Parent’s Arms or Virtual Orphan by Subterfuge.

There is so much more, but I should get to the positive stuff: Millions of dollars of pro-fairness donations–$15 million for RAICES alone–are pouring in from individual donors,* and at least one billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg, has contributed as well as condemned. Led by American, multiple airlines have refused to transport forcibly-separated kids. A law firm in Washington state will represent immigrant-agency employees who want no part of the new policy. A few workers have resigned, while others are sneaking audio and video to the press.

This is a fight for America’s heart.

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* Wanna donate? You can find lists of organizations online, or if it’s hard to choose, ActBlue has an aggregation: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/kidsattheborder.