May 20, 2018 in 3,551 words

Where ‘America First’ Once Led

_{^{A new exhibit reveals America’s isolationist attitudes and policies during the Holocaust—and speaks to where the country still stands today}}

_{Pictured above: People line up to enter the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.}

According to the authoritative Freedom House rankings, we have seen over a decade of deterioration in free institutions. Outright massacre is the order of the day in countries from Burma to the Levant, and tyrants no less cunning than Mussolini or Franco subvert the rule of law, freedom of the press, and freedom of speech from Warsaw to Ankara, and from Beijing to Moscow. As was the case 80 years ago, many in the United States would rather step back from a world that seems turbulent but not their problem. Their president wants tariffs and walls, while polls show that for many Americans, democracy, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press are not values to be defended to the death. Against this backdrop, a new exhibit at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum—“Americans and the Holocaust”—seems to speak to where America stands today, even though it has been years in the making and thus was not designed as a political commentary on the United States of 2018.

Speaking about the Holocaust Museum (where my wife works as a curator), Elie Wiesel said that it is “a question mark, not an answer.” That is particularly true here. But even so, the exhibit establishes some important facts. In an ingenious display that was crowdsourced from around the country, visitors from anywhere in the United States can discover what their hometown newspapers were saying during the rise of Hitler. The answer is: a lot. Discrimination against, and then persecution of, Germany’s Jews was widely covered. Kristallnacht, the officially sanctioned pogrom of November 9–10, 1938, received particular attention, and was roundly condemned across the country. The sympathy with the Jews of Germany and later Europe was impressive, and is documented by contemporary Gallup polls.

But were Americans willing to take in refugees, even children? The answer is no: By a three-to-one margin, including on the eve of the war and indeed after it, Americans did not want such immigrants. Grimmer yet: Did America admit at least those refugees provided for in the skimpy quotas allowed under law in the years leading up to 1941 and American entry? The answer again is no: not by a large margin. In 1936, for example, barely a quarter of the visas that could have been issued to refugees from Germany—most of them Jews—were in fact issued. Although in 1939 and 1940 the quotas were filled, in the early 1930s the percentage of visas granted was even smaller than in 1936.

The exhibit brings home both the feel of these attitudes and policies and the human price paid for them. A wall of letters, bureaucratic forms, visa applications, telegrams, and affidavits gives visitors the feeling of being caught in a bewildering blizzard of paper. A computerized light table lets visitors track the escapades of those attempting to escape Hitler’s clutches. Naturally enough, I chose to follow the career of a professor who trekked across Europe. He had just about made it through the State Department’s procedural rules, European passport and visa requirements, logistical obstacles … and, at the last step, vanished into the hell of Majdanek.

There is much else as well, including Dr. Seuss’s anti-Nazi cartoons, and, inevitably, Donald Duck going to war. But the exhibit returns repeatedly to the attitudes of leaders and opinion makers. …

Face It, You Just Don’t Care About the News Anymore

_{So what does that mean for democracy?}

Late one evening in March, I was sat in the JFK Forum at Harvard’s Kennedy School, surrounded by dozens of journalists and academics. We were watching Nina Martin and Renee Montagne, from NPR and ProPublica, collect their Goldsmith investigative reporting award for “Lost Mothers,” a harrowing and important piece of work exploring the shocking number of American women who die in childbirth every year.

As they were being given a standing ovation, I finally formulated the question I’ve been struggling with lately: With this kind of brilliant and high-quality journalism being pursued around the world every day, why is it that the news industry is steadily shrinking?

I’m a research fellow exploring alternative futures of journalism in the age of social media at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics, and Public Policy. Inspired by the work of the late media scholar James W. Carey — who looked at the media within the dynamics of culture, rather than the mechanics of economy or politics — I want to understand what is happening to journalism underneath all the noise and preoccupation with Donald Trump, his election, and his day-to-day dramas.

Let’s make a distinction here between journalism and news. Journalism, as media scholar Michael Schudson defines it, is “information and commentary on contemporary affairs, normally presented as true and sincere, to a dispersed and usually anonymous audiences so as to publicly include that audience in a discourse taken to be publicly important.”

News, on the other hand, is a standardized nonfiction literary form and only one of the many kinds of a journalistic output. News in this form was invented more than 200 years ago in response to very specific social and cultural conditions and was ignited by a new technology called the telegraph.

Today, nearly every one of those cultural conditions has changed. So, if the context of what we called “news” for nearly two centuries has radically altered, is news still functioning as it should? What is its role supposed to be, and what purpose is it fulfilling? Is news still relevant at all? …

The Opioid Crisis Is Not Just An American Epidemic

_{Nigeria is facing catastrophic levels of opioid addiction — and no one seems to know how to stop it.}

Bolu and his parents sat frozen in the car. Sweat was pouring down Bolu’s back, and he knew it wasn’t just the effects of suddenly coming off the tramadol and the codeine and the booze and the Rohypnol, and all the other drugs, all at once. He was on edge at the thought of entering the building looming in front of them.

Bolu’s last hope of getting clean after three years of dealing with addiction lay inside — a government-run rehab center in the central Nigerian state of Jos that was also home to drug runners and violent gang members, and terrifyingly alien to his comfortable middle-class upbringing. Run by the NDLEA, Nigeria’s equivalent to the Drug Enforcement Agency, it was part rehab and part correctional facility, somewhere between a halfway house and a last-ditch hope.

If Bolu walked in, the building’s peeling yellow walls would be his home — and jail — for the next four months while he embarked on a cold-turkey detox program to treat his addiction to tramadol, a legal but highly addictive painkiller.

In his father’s eyes, Bolu read the same thought that was racing through his own mind: Do I really have to go in there? The thought made him even more nervous, even sweatier. …

‘Hearts without God’: Santa Fe shooting leaves reformers facing a religious wall

_{Ten died on Friday but in a conservative Christian town, a Parkland-style surge for tighter gun laws seems unlikely.}

_{People gather to pray outside Santa Fe high school.}

Amid the grief after the Parkland high school massacre, a powerful student activist movement emerged with stunning swiftness. It laid the foundation for nationwide demonstrations and a sustained push for gun law reform.

But in the wake of the fatal shooting of eight students and two teachers at a Texas high school on Friday, it seems doubtful that this highly conservative, deeply religious small town will generate similarly strident calls.

In a place of 13,000 residents and more than a dozen churches, the focus has been on prayers and siting the shooting in the context of a biblical battle between good and evil, rather than framing it as an avoidable consequence of policy failures in a country with a unique gun culture.

“Possibility, maybe. I’m not sure,” said David Sustaita, an 18-year-old student at Santa Fe high school, when asked if a Parkland-style youth movement could emerge. He suggested relatively uncontroversial measures that do not rile gun rights advocates. “I’d like to see action. Metal detectors, better security, more cops,” he said. “Like airport security.”

According to authorities, a 17-year-old student hid a shotgun and a revolver in a trench coat then opened fire in an art class at the school, about 35 miles south-east of Houston. …

4 Gun Nut Arguments That Debunk Themselves

“Gun nut” is a loaded term that I’m going to use anyway, because it refers to members of a very specific group: Those who base their entire worldview around the idea that the presence of at least one gun can improve literally any situation. In the name of gaining a completely unbiased understanding of their position, I wanted to take four of the terrible, already debunked pro-gun arguments they use and see if they actually believe them when there aren’t any libtards around to own.

In order to do this, I found some products created by gun nuts for gun nuts — things they never would have expected to fall into the hands of someone with critical thinking or research skills. I should try to establish a little bit of rhetorical authority here by stating that I grew up shooting guns, still shoot them, and really don’t care if you have one. To be more clear, I was raised by “Russians and aliens are coming” gun nuts, not “bring our machine guns into Applebee’s” gun nuts. And if you’re desperate to poke holes in my expertise so you can dismiss everything I say, I am certain AR-15 stands for “Action Rifle 15stopher.”

4. “Only A Good Guy With A Gun Stops A Bad Guy With A Gun!”

Using a gun to kill an attacker is the American dream, like inventing the next F.emale B.ody I.nspector hat or breaking your leg near an improperly displayed “wet floor” sign. But how likely is it? Even in this great country where there are as many firearms as people, a Harvard University analysis found that guns are only used for defense in 0.9 percent of contact crimes. And here’s the statistic everyone is going to hate: Getting a gun drawn on your attacker only reduces your chances of being injured by 2.4 percent. If you wore a T-shirt that said “Don’t shoot me, Randy Bruckner (Aquarius)! I’m you from an alternate timeline!” every day, it would have the exact same odds of protecting you. And I’m not even done crunching all the numbers.

Assuming you live an average American lifespan and have average luck, you have a 0.3 percent chance of being the victim of violent crime before you die. That means carrying a gun has a 0.0000648 percent of protecting you from something! Over the course of your life! Those odds are, sadly, lower than the chances of you or someone in your family making a mistake with the gun or having a suicidal urge, but those are factors you can sort of control, so let’s ignore them. The point is, carrying a gun to protect yourself is like carrying around a giant strawberry in case someone ever asks, “What’s a scarecrow’s favorite fruit?” You look like a total asshole for the teeny, tiniest chance of one day doing something horrific.

But enough about reality. What the shit does reality know about protecting yourself from imaginary gunmen? Pick up your gun and let’s take a look at a self-defense instructional DVD from the ARMED RESPONSE Video Training Series, called Tactics And Techniques For Defensive Shooting.

_{“Mister? I’m not being kidnapped. It’s simply that my adopted parents are ethnic. No no, it’s alright. This happens all the time.”}

Showing statistics to gun owners always works, and I just solved our national crisis. You’re welcome. However, there are a few who can’t be convinced — those who treat guns like religion. Owning a firearm is the one self-evident truth in their lives, and all of reality is built out from there. …

Duolingo’s crowdsourced language-learning model is letting some weird things slip through the cracks

_{FREE WORDS}

_{Old school.}

Duolingo has pulled off a remarkable feat. The startup, valued at $700 million, has built one of the world’s most popular language learning apps while only hiring a handful of translators. Each day, the startup serves up millions of sentences, almost all of them created by its 300 or so volunteers.

The seven-year-old company achieved this trick by repeating what its co-founder, Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Luis von Ahn, has accomplished twice before: turning the online crowd into the basis of the business model. In 2003, he launched “ESP Game,” crowdsourced image labeling to improve visual search, which Google licensed and rechristened Google Image Labeler in 2006. Three years later, Google was back again to buy von Ahn’s bot-detecting creation CAPTCHA, deploying it as reCAPTCHA, with humans deciphering text to help digitize books.

With Duolingo, von Ahn has refined the model to tackle one of the most sophisticated tasks on the web: accurate, nuanced translations of foreign languages. While algorithms have offered rough approximations for years (see Google Translate), humans are still needed to achieve translations precise enough for avid language learners. Crowdsourcing has proven to be the key. Without volunteers, Duolingo says its mission to make “language learning free and accessible for everyone in the world” would likely be impossible.

Today, Duolingo serves up courses via its app as well as through browsers in 31 languages to 200 million users (25 million are active monthly users). After its latest fundraising round last summer, the company’s venture war chest topped $108 million with investors such as Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, Union Square Ventures, NEA, and Drive Capital, as well as Ashton Kutcher and Tim Ferriss. …

To Build Truly Intelligent Machines, Teach Them Cause and Effect

_{Judea Pearl, a pioneering figure in artificial intelligence, argues that AI has been stuck in a decades-long rut. His prescription for progress? Teach machines to understand the question why.}

Artificial intelligence owes a lot of its smarts to Judea Pearl. In the 1980s he led efforts that allowed machines to reason probabilistically. Now he’s one of the field’s sharpest critics. In his latest book, “The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect,” he argues that artificial intelligence has been handicapped by an incomplete understanding of what intelligence really is.

Three decades ago, a prime challenge in artificial intelligence research was to program machines to associate a potential cause to a set of observable conditions. Pearl figured out how to do that using a scheme called Bayesian networks. Bayesian networks made it practical for machines to say that, given a patient who returned from Africa with a fever and body aches, the most likely explanation was malaria. In 2011 Pearl won the Turing Award, computer science’s highest honor, in large part for this work.

But as Pearl sees it, the field of AI got mired in probabilistic associations. These days, headlines tout the latest breakthroughs in machine learning and neural networks. We read about computers that can master ancient games and drive cars. Pearl is underwhelmed. As he sees it, the state of the art in artificial intelligence today is merely a souped-up version of what machines could already do a generation ago: find hidden regularities in a large set of data. “All the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just curve fitting,” he said recently.

In his new book, Pearl, now 81, elaborates a vision for how truly intelligent machines would think. The key, he argues, is to replace reasoning by association with causal reasoning. Instead of the mere ability to correlate fever and malaria, machines need the capacity to reason that malaria causes fever. Once this kind of causal framework is in place, it becomes possible for machines to ask counterfactual questions — to inquire how the causal relationships would change given some kind of intervention — which Pearl views as the cornerstone of scientific thought. Pearl also proposes a formal language in which to make this kind of thinking possible — a 21st-century version of the Bayesian framework that allowed machines to think probabilistically. …

From the moon’s far side, a radio receiver will listen for ancient clues to the universe’s origin

_{COSMIC EAVESDROPPING}

_{Beyond the moon.}

Neil Armstrong walked on the near side of our moon half a century ago. On Monday, China’s expected to embark on the first step of a mission to probe its far side, and even more ambitiously, search for glimpses of the universe’s origin.

China could launch the relay communication satellite Queqiao, or “bridge of magpies,” from its southwestern Sichuan province as soon as May 21, the start of a three-day launch window. Named for the birds in a Chinese folktale that help connect two parted lovers once a year, Queqiao will connect earth to the Chang’e-4 lander and rover that China plans to launch towards the end of this year. It’s an essential step for the lunar exploration mission because direct communication is impossible between the moon’s far side and the earth. If all goes as planned, China would become the world’s first nation to land on the far side of the moon by the end of the year.

Besides keeping the future lander in touch with earth, the Queqiao is also going to carry a new scientific instrument built by Chinese and Dutch scientists.

A radio antenna, which will be transported with Queqiao, will be stationed some 60,000 km behind the moon. Scientists are hoping that the radio antenna will reveal clues about the early universe, the time after the Big Bang when stars began to form from an ocean of hydrogen. …

Video Goodnesses
_{and not-so-goodnesses}

A small group of people in Johnston County NC are investigating their state’s role in the CIA’s torture and rendition program. Last fall, they had a series of public hearings on the subject and on May 7th they’re planning to meet with their commissioners in an effort to compel their county’s very conservative board of commissioners to issue a ban on the use of public resources for rendition or torture, and to publicly acknowledge what they found: that a CIA contractor called Aero operating out of the local county airport, handled some 80% of rendition flights between September 2001 and March 2004. VNT follows along.

THANKS to HBO and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.

Terry Crews recounts how his show “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” was rescued from cancellation and discusses his deeply personal contribution to the Me Too movement.

THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.

Jordan stands by Trump’s plans to implement an abstinence-based sex ed program in schools and reveals the very real prayer shield guarding the White House.

THANKS to Comedy Central and The Opposition with Jordan Klepper for making this program available on YouTube.

CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.

Me commentary on Prince Harry and Meghan’s royal wedding.

Some security camera footage of Max getting his shower. And than some drying time.

_{Seriously? Just take Max in the shower with you.}

FINALLY . . .

Venezuela’s unfolding crisis, as told by its version of The Onion

_{TOO REAL}

_{Hard to laugh about.}

Venezuela’s presidential election will take place on May 20, amid various crises. Inflation is by some measures 18,000%, meaning basic food items can cost a month’s salary. Cash is worth so little that people are making bags out of it. The incumbent president, Nicolás Maduro, is expected to rig the election.

The best way to understand the despair in Venezuela is not reading the state-run media, but El Chigüire Bipolar, a satirical news site that turns the country’s tragedies into dark, insightful comedy. The site’s name translates to “The Bipolar Capybara.” The capybara, of course, being the world’s largest rodent.

Much like The Onion in the United States, El Chigüire headlines often encapsulate a national sentiment that the news is some combination of absurd and wrong. It is hugely popular, with over 2 million Twitter followers. Quartz has translated several recent headlines, adding bits of the piece or additional context. Satire, it turns out, is a good gauge of how people are feeling.

Supermarket puts armed escorts on the shelves to protect products

The high price of some—if not all—products, combined with easy access on the shelves and a constant influx of people to supermarkets, has created the perfect setting for those who feel tempted to take something without paying.

Transportation stoppage will no longer be an excuse for missing work

There are those who prefer to view crisis as opportunity, and this is the case for William Muñoz (28), who took advantage of the transportation stoppage to start his own company carrying people on his back.

Unemployed Kellogg’s mascots find work in the animal lottery

Cash-strapped Venezuelans have often turned to “animalitos,” a lottery game where would-be winners place bets on various animals. El Chigüire writes:

Kellogg’s has added its name to the long list of international companies that have said adiós to Venezuela; nevertheless, Tony the Tiger, Tucan Sam, and other company mascots continue their daily lives, but are left with no other option than finding work in the lottery of animalitos.

…

_{Ed. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not?}