Last night the TV media reports were uniformly misleading on the topic of the very close Doug Jones vs Roy Moore Senate race in Alabama. I feel that I have a good understanding of the practice and methods of journalism. Objective journalism is something I support. Though not balanced journalism. Balanced journalism is when we give Timon and Pumbaa equal time on explaining what stars are.

Timon: Fireflies that got stuck up in the big bluish-black thing.

Pumbaa: …balls of gas burning billions of miles away.

I think the problem may be the Timonization of our society. Americans are always looking on the bright side! Putting on a game face! Trying harder! Saying the cup is half full! Making up alternate facts! Cynics are mistrusted haters. Even though jobs with benefits are hard to find, college degrees less and less useful, poverty increasing, health care elusive, and politicians and corporations using big shovels to move money from the 99% to the 1%, the zeitgeist demands a chin-up mentality.

That may be why so many pundits last night were touting a victory for respect, a lesson for Republicans, an inclusive message for our country. Alabamians, it was said, rejected hate.

Wrong. Approximately 74% of white men and 58% of white women voted for Moore, as did 91% of Republicans, most of whom I imagine are white. So white Alabamians are strongly supportive of a candidate who thinks slavery was a great thing for our country, homosexuality should be illegal, and dating a teen when you are twenty years older is ok if her mom agrees. Not to mention assaulting her.

98% of Democrats and 96% of blacks, which I imagine is almost the same pool, voted for Jones, as did 51% of Independents. Many blacks in Alabama had lost their right to vote previously due to voter ID laws punishing people without both free time and access to cars on weekdays. During this very vote, some received texts with misleading info about voting locations, while others found their status changed to Inactive when they arrived at the polls. Still, with overwhelming numbers they managed to carry the day. Jones was savvy, campaigning with black leaders in black neighborhoods, unlike Jon Ossoff in Georgia last summer.

Blacks did the heavy lifting for Democrats in Virginia recently as well, despite similar institutional barricades. So why don’t Dems condemn racial inequality and fight voter ID laws? Timon might say they are circus clowns stuck in a really tiny car. I’ll let the reader decide what Pumbaa would say.

A growing number of refugees from Google and Facebook–including Sean Parker, Tristan Harris, Chamath Palihapitiya, Justin Rosenstein, Leah Pearlman, Loren Brichter, James Williams, and Roger McNamee–ranging in age from twentyish to sixtyish are coming out to mainstream media with this comment on social media: It’s a Bad Idea. They aren’t just explaining that clicking on Like, seeing that Red Alert new friend symbol, or reacting to an audible Notification gives you a jolt of dopamine, the chemical basis of behavioral addictions. They are claiming that the constant distraction of our devices has already eroded our ability to remember, reason, make decisions, and even control our own minds.

These well-heeled, highly educated insiders are by no means immune to the affliction. They employ various countermeasures, including turning off their phones for the night at 7 pm, programming their home Internets to shut down for a portion of each day, severely restricting access by their children, and hiring a social media assistant to maintain their accounts.

So much for that person’s ability to remember and reason.

Commanding our attention is the specific, scientifically-pursued goal of social media companies, a clearly stated and closely tracked mission. The target economy is the attention economy, an Internet shaped around the demands of advertisers. Google maintains an internal dashboard displaying how much of people’s attention it has commandeered for advertisers in real time. Smart phone owners today touch, swipe, or tap their phones an average of 2,617 times per day, each one delivering a valuable piece of monetizable information directly to marketeers.

Because it fundamentally changes the way we process the world, social media enabled by portable technology could lead to dystopia. Humanity’s experience with and perceptions of facts, news, groups, candidates, government, and human interactions are being fundamentally changed. Some fear the loss of democracy: what constitutes an informed decision today?

The Before in Life Before refers to the era without widely accessible social media–ie, most of human history. Few people under the age of twenty have direct experience of this, even those well outside of the First World. A UCSC college student who spent last summer in Central America told me she was astonished to encounter people living in flimsy shacks with outdoor plumbing and smart phones. She ascribed it to the human desire for interconnection.

I ascribe it to the human susceptibility to psychological manipulation by deep-pocketed corporations.

Facebook played a role in not only the election of Donald Trump, but also the genocide of the Rohingya. Rumors circulated on WhatsApp (owned by Google) led to seven people being lynched in India last May. Were these inadvertent results? The way online advertising is solicited and targeted, the device features designed to draw our attention, and the rapid spread of unvetted information are core aspects of the revenue model for social media companies.

All of them were working perfectly in those cases.

Lately I’ve been thinking about my nephew’s first semester in college and my son’s applications to grad school, and as it happens, also reading Kids These Days by Malcolm Harris. The book analyzes an entire system, in this case the education and labor system of the US between the 1970s and now. I enjoy analyzing the quantitative evidence behind big trends during my lifetime, some of which I suspected were happening.

Unfortunately, most of the news in this book so far is bad. No parent of a millennial will be surprised to learn that this generation of young people had to work much harder in school, compete more for admission to college, and pay more to attend college, only to graduate into a polarized, wage-flat job market designed to steer the results of their training and effort into shareholders’ pockets.

What did surprise me was the venality of the Obama-era student loan changes. Now that all student loans are processed by the government, there is no way to escape: Big Brother can garnishee your wages, social security and disability benefits, and tax returns, or place a lien on your property. These loans are a huge source of income to the government, so this is one Obama change that Republicans won’t be repealing. Even the forgiveness after twenty years of payments was a trap: in most cases, twenty years of payments will total much more than paying off the entire loan sooner.

I also did not realize that hedge fund manager salaries are not included in salary surveys because there is a law allowing them to report their salaries as investment earnings, at much lower tax rates. How sweet is that! Very poor people often work off the books, so the numbers showing growing salary inequality actually understate the case, with the highest and lowest earners not represented.

The world is so mean now. It has been getting meaner for years, but meanness seems to be strangling us at the moment.

Sadly, low wages and looming loans seem like trivial problems when faced with the case of Daniel Shaver. From what foul depths crawl the jurors who acquit the paramilitary police cowards who gun down unarmed citizens? Would it be justice if those jurors’ adult children were terrorized and murdered, their grandchildren deprived of a parent? Or is that, finally, too mean?

On Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me last weekend there was a piece about the squatting desk, a new idea to replace the now-bad-for-you standing desk, which replaced the as-bad-as-smoking chair. What? I missed the news day on which the standing desk lost favor.

So to the web. I found one study, but it was poorly designed, sorting people into mostly-standing or mostly-sitting based on their job types, not on interviews, then collecting data on their health. For example, all office workers would be classified as sitting, even those with a standing desk, and all carpenters would be classified as standing, even those who specialize in inlays. I think carpenter are seated while assembling inlays. In any case, this study found that standing and sitting are both bad. Float, people.

Then there were the skeptics who claimed, No one benefits from a standing desk because no one actually stands at one. I do. I stand for hours every day. I also know a person who stands to use the computer, which she does primarily, and sits to use the phone. So there are two of us. My husband used a standing desk for at least a year, ultimately deciding he did not like it, but while he had it, he stood. And someone at his office claimed it when he relocated and may be using it now. So, 2.5 to 3.5 confirmed cases.

Other people say standing isn’t exercise if you are still. Luckily, it’s impossible to be perfectly still while standing at a computer. I’m constantly shifting my weight. Certainly that incredibly accurate step-counter, Fitbit, gives me lots of points. Hey, it’s more exercise than driving the Mustang, which also puffs up my Fitbit score.

One complete idiot said that sitting is better than standing for preventing DVT. Actually, No. That is Dangerously Wrong info. Less than two months ago I personally heard a vascular surgeon exhort people to stand to avoid that exact condition. This is an example of how you can die from browsing the Internet.

So am I just like the folks who keep  browsing until they find the answer they already believed when they started? Or am I actually a good identifier of inaccurate information online? Note that I did not find any accurate information. Surprise?

For much of my young life I feared nuclear war. The Houston ISD was still practicing Duck and Cover when I entered school, and there was talk of bomb shelters, though I didn’t know anyone who had one. I didn’t mull it over a lot, but it was a pervasive undercurrent, as I realized when the fear was lifted. I felt more light-hearted somehow. The sun seemed friendlier. All those sci-fi books in which aliens pitied or despised humans, the species that destroyed its home and itself, were fiction, not prediction. We were smarter than that.

Or not. Though I hadn’t thought of nuclear holocaust for decades, I should have been keeping up, because the nuclear club has been growing. I was prompted to write today by an article discussing the likelihood of a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan. It would be brief, decimate both countries, and bring nuclear winter to the globe. I remember nuclear winter. Unlike the horrors of a nuclear strike, which I decided not to enumerate, nuclear winter was always easy to imagine. It’s cold and dusky. The air is sooty. The protective ozone layer is breached or even dissipated. It’s hard to grow food. The nuclear winter can last for years or decades, depending on the size of the strike.

Recent events in North Korea, and in the US in reaction to North Korea, are putting nuclear war back in the news now, with me in prime target country. Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were tiny, hand-crafted weapons that had to be delivered in person, yet they were horribly destructive. Nuclear weapons today are many times stronger, and fly to their destinations at supersonic speeds from land, sea, or air. Maybe there would be time to send a goodbye text.

I dreamed about nuclear winter last night. The living nightmare is Trump, one guy with impulse-control issues and a red button.

I heard an interview on NPR this morning with Abby Honold, a sexual assault victim seeking to get a bill passed that would fund training for officers interviewing trauma victims. She explained that since the accusations of sexual misconduct against Al Franken emerged, she is seeking a different sponsor for the bill. She had liked working with him, but under the circumstances she felt his sponsorship was inappropriate.

Rachel Martin, the interviewer, asked whether she thought Franken should resign. Honold said that while she understood why many might think so, she also felt strongly about respecting victims, and since Franken’s accuser, Leeann Tweeden, did not think he should resign, Honold was not prepared to contradict her. Martin pounced, positing that “the central question here” is “the trade-off that happens. … Republicans in Alabama will point to Roy Moore and say, yes, his transgressions are abhorrent, but we need him in the Senate to further our own legislative priorities. And while you personally, Abby, might find Senator Franken’s actions abhorrent, … you’re not willing to call him out and call on him to step down.”

Seriously? Honold said she doesn’t want Franken to sponsor her bill because the accusation was true, and she thinks the victim’s position should be supported. She added that there should be an investigation, which Franken has also requested.

Honold is a measured speaker, a thoughtful advocate, and the victim of a sadistic serial rapist. In other words, not a person with a politicized agenda. But the US media, even the mainstream media, seem to seek controversy these days.

More important, the reporter missed an opportunity to have a really interesting discussion: are some predators worse than others? I suspect one answer may have to do with power. If the predation includes any aspect of intimidation or control, certainly it is egregious. Without such, is it less so?

Most sexual-predator resignations in the news are happening due to the distaste factor, not because of criminal prosecutions. There’s a sort of shunning going on. It’s a shunning that would not have happened in the Mad Men era, even though some of the harassments did. Should time frame be a factor?

Many sex crimes have statutes of limitation, and every state is different. That seems like an issue, too.

We should be thinking about these issues, and trying to find some standards on which to proceed, before we are inundated with cases. It would be a shame if perpetrators were treated differently based on when their case was revealed rather than on the damage caused. We may also have to deal with false accusations, which could become very divisive and be just as reputation-destroying.

As far as interviewers go, my favorite is Robert Siegel. He asks innocuous-sounding questions of controversial subjects in a calm voice. Often, his subject will insert head into noose unwittingly. There’s no need to introduce conflict if you can entice someone to confess.

Suddenly every 2017 production seems informed by our current politics. Is it me, or is art blossoming in the age of Trump?

Today we saw the John Adams’ opera Girls of the Golden West, which is in its world premier run at SFO. This is very modern music, and mostly recitative, which aren’t my personal favorites. Yet it’s an unflinching tour de force. Based on original material, the opera examines race relations during the California Gold Rush. Several scenes transported me to Charlottesville: gangs of struggling, drunk white miners formed gangs that heckled, beat, raped, and lynched hispanic, Asian, and black strivers and bystanders. If you like modern opera, go see this powerful show that gives a voice to real people from the past.

Earlier this we saw the movie Get Out, which is hard to describe. It’s a horror movie, a spoof on horror movies, a comedy, a tragedy, and a trenchant commentary on US black-white race relations and power dynamics, while being entertaining and well-acted. The commentary part is implicit. This movie never preaches, not even close–that’s its superpower. The horror aspect gave me pause, but it turned out to be fairly mild, though apparently I missed a lot of the horror-spoof imagery since I’m not familiar with the tropes. What’s up with deer?

Recently we’ve been watching Seth MacFarlane’s The Orville, a new TV series that on the surface is a sendup of the original Star Trek. Not many episodes into the series, it started going current-culture-critique big time. There’s a planet on which everyone rates everyone else’s behavior all the time, in person and on videos posted by other people. Too many pans and one can end up a jobless pariah or even re-educated. In another episode, an all-male species performs sex-change operations on the !% of babies that are born female in the assumption that those would be outcasts, until they discover their most favorite native poet is a reclusive female, which causes an uproar. In both cases, the resolution is not entirely what one would expect. Basically, if you have a weakness for sci-fi and thought the Book of Mormon was funny you should try this, and if not, don’t.

I especially like these shows because they are all complex treatments that challenge  and expand one’s world view. They spark discussion, even between a long-married couple. Perhaps it’s wimpy, but I find them more palatable and hopeful than the non-fiction analyses surrounding us. Like the December, 2017 issue of The Atlantic, which is soooo depressing.

I admit, I’m a Jack Reacher fan. A fairly recent one, but I’m caught up. I just finished his latest, The Midnight Line, in which the opioid crisis plays a role. I realize these books are fictional. I also think they are well-researched, realistic fiction. The rest of this blog is a quote from that book. The character Noble is a DEA agent.

Noble cooked, and talked about heroin. It was both his paycheck and his passion. He knew its history. Once upon a time it was a legal ingredient. It was in all kinds of stuff, branded with famous names still known today. There was heroin cough syrup. There was heroin cough syrup for children. Stronger, not weaker. Doctors prescribed heroin for fussy babies and bronchitis and insomnia and nerves and hysteria and all kinds of other vapors. The patients loved it. Best health care ever. Millions got addicted. Corporations made a lot of money. Then folks got wise, and by the start of World War One, legal heroin was history. 

But the corporations never forgot. About the easy money. … The corporations took eighty years to get back in the heroin business. They came in the side door. By that time in history heroin itself had negative PR. … So they made a synthetic version. A chemical copy. Like an identical twin… Exactly the same, but now it had a long clean name. All bright and shiny. It could have been a toothpaste. They put it in neat white pills. What were they for? Getting high, baby. Whatever you want. Except they couldn’t put that on the pack. So they said they were for pain. Everyone has pain, right?

Not really. Not at first. Pain was not yet a thing. Institutes had to be funded, and scholarships endowed. Doctors had to be persuaded. Patients had to be empowered. Which all worked in the end. Pain became a thing. Self-reported and untestable, but suddenly a symptom as valid and meaningful as any other. As a result, America was flooded with hundreds of tons of heroin, in purse-size blister packs, backed with foil.

… [Noble] said, “Let me emphasize two very important things. First up, most of this stuff goes to the right people for the right reasons. No one could deny that. It does a lot of good. But equally, no one could deny enough has fallen out around the edges to also cause a lot of harm. Because second up, no one should ever underestimate the appeal of an opiate high.”

… He said, “These are regular folk I’m talking about. American as apple pie. They like the ball game on the radio, and country music. Not the Grateful Dead. They were seduced by the clean white pill. It made them feel real good. Maybe for the first time in their lives. These are plain people. But smart. They soon figured out ways it could make them feel even better. They got the time-release version, and broke it up, so they got the whole hit at once. Couple times a day. Maybe three. Then they discovered the patches. You stick them on your skin. Like when you’re quitting smoking. A long clean name on the pack, but it’s the same stuff your great-great-grandma lined up for. … By that point these folks are already hopeless addicts. But not in their own minds. It’s partly a pride thing. Addicts are other people, with a dirty needle in a toilet stall. What they have is a pharmaceutical product, made in a lab, by pretty girls in masks who hold test tubes up to the light…But in fact they’re running worse risks. … Fifty thousand people died last year. Regular folk. Four times as many as got killed in gun crimes.”

[Noble explains that the opioid distribution war has been won.] “… the black market is virtually dead, and the medical market is heavily scrutinized. Total success. Except the previous bonanza left us with millions of addicts. … When we bit down, the price of pills went up, because of supply and demand. What used to be ten bucks was suddenly fifty. It was a crisis. Suddenly regular cartel powder up from Mexico looked like an irresistible bargain. Remember, deep down it’s the same chemical. These folks are canny shoppers. None of them ever paid sticker for a car. And numbers don’t lie. Even when they factored in the cost to their dignity, with the dirty needles and the toilet stalls and all, hey, the powder was still a bargain. We swapped one problem for another.”

Friends visiting Tuesday night happened to mention that a krill bloom drew 64 blue whales to Monterey Bay last weekend, the most in 30 years. I checked online, found that sightings were ongoing, and booked a whale watch for the next day. Only the Sea Goddess had seats available.

We left around 12:30, setting off at a dead run westward as soon as we cleared the harbor.

The humpbacks were in full Cirque du Soleil mode, slapping pectoral fins, showing flukes, and breaching, unbelievably, more times than we could count. At one point, two humpbacks seemed to be having a breaching contest on a course roughly paralleling us to the right. They were far away, but one could clearly see the whale shape rise above the water then fall, creating a huge splash.

Captain Julie ignored all this activity with unflagging focus. Naturalist Stephanie kept apologizing for not investigating by saying, We have some place we went to take you. The elephant in the room–a poor metaphor in this case, since even humpback whales are much, much larger than elephants–was the Blue Whale. N.S. wasn’t going to promise that unless she could deliver.

Then we were there. Blues and humpbacks were feeding in the same area, the humpbacks continuing their distracting behavior. Blue whales are a light greyish blue, as compared to the dark grey of humpbacks. The blues are stately, backs gently arcing above the surface then disappearing slowly. The arc seems to go on and on. We saw several, sometimes two or three at a time, not at all far away. One even showed its fluke. They are big, much bigger than the boat.

In the first shot, you can see the relatively small dorsal fin toward the left, and it in the second it is toward the right, giving a bit of an idea of how long the back is. The third shot is pretty blurry; I’m trying to show the height of the spout. Amateurish and scale-free, these pictures aren’t that helpful. For the first few minutes of the encounter, I was rapt, and nearly didn’t take any.

Our two-hour tour lasted three-and-a-half hours, because we had to travel thirteen miles to find the blues. No one complained.

The current New Yorker contains a short piece by a woman who initiated medical intervention after experiencing a couple of short periods of unconsciousness. After months of tests and treatments, one doctor diagnosed dehydration.

This reminds me of the time my husband and I spent several hours and an ER copay discovering that our son’s alarming symptoms were due to hunger.

Our son was prevented from eating by his parents, who over the course of several hours took him on a long bike ride, then to someone’s house where food was promised but not delivered. This dehydrated adult, on the other hand, simply did not develop the habit of drinking water, or even water-based liquids, ever. After a few years that apparently can become a problem.

She claims not to have recognized the feeling of thirst. She had realized she was dry-mouthed and headachy, but neither knew nor attempted to discover why.

Once diagnosed, she theorized that since “the discerning person has accumulated so much culture that no room is left for natural instinct”, she was perhaps subliminally trying to belong to an elite subgroup–or supergroup.

Huh?

Maybe this attitude is common, but I can’t seem to find any mention of it. Of course, here near Silicon Valley, several overly-wealthy entrepreneurs are planning to upload their consciousnesses to the Internet and live forever, which pretty definitively dismisses nature.

Good luck with that.

Meanwhile, the author used an app for a while to remind her to drink at regular intervals, but has now returned to her dry, aristocratic ways.