Tuesday, July 18, 2023

DO YOU KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS?

“DO YOU KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS? — This week, Republican leaders — in Washington running the House and in Iowa running for president — were again caught off guard by the strain of right-wing populism animating the grassroots.

“In Congress, the formerly sacrosanct Pentagon bill became the target of culture-war amendments on abortion, diversity, and gender that could scuttle its passage. House Speaker KEVIN McCARTHY was forced to accept the far-right rebellion against the Defense budget bill and push it through without the usual widespread bipartisan support.

“Yesterday in Des Moines, the major Republican presidential candidates (minus DONALD TRUMP) attended the Family Leadership Summit, which chose TUCKER CARLSON to act as the event’s host and moderator. Normally, these cattle calls feature a friendly questioner who allows the candidates time to deliver their stump lines and outline some differences with their rivals. That was not Carlson’s approach. Instead, the former Fox News host interrogated the Republicans for being insufficiently Carlsonesque on the war in Ukraine, immigration, Jan. 6, Covid vaccines and transgender rights.

“The candidates who fared best either wholly embraced the Carlson view of the world (VIVEK RAMASWAMY), dodged and weaved enough to skate by (RON DeSANTIS), or got an easier grilling (TIM SCOTT and NIKKI HALEY). The candidates who left stage humiliated by Carlson were the ones who stuck to their beliefs despite probing and sometimes mocking questioning, including MIKE PENCE (Ukraine; Jan. 6) and ASA HUTCHINSON (health care for transgender people; Covid vaccines).

“The House Republicans’ attack on the NDAA and the Carlson attack on several GOP presidential candidates are animated by a strain of populism in the GOP that separates leaders into two camps: those who ‘know what time it is’ and those who don’t. That’s the catchphrase on the right that has become increasingly important to the most disruptive wing of the party.

“As KEVIN ROBERTS, the president of the Heritage Foundation, a key institution of this new ideological strain, told RCP’s Philip Wegmann this week, Carlson understands ‘fissures in the economic consensus, fissures in foreign policy, and most important to me, as some conservatives like to say, «what time it is.»’

“Wegmann added: ‘That aphorism refers to an emerging sense of urgency and appetite for sweeping action, not dragging and dull academic debates, among more populist-minded conservatives. From his primetime slot, Carlson pioneered much of that effort.’

“There are two things that characterize the what-time-it-is Right.

— The first is about tactics. The premise of the movement is that the struggle against left-wing cultural power is existential, and extreme tactics that would shock an older generation of conservatives need to be the norm. In fact, if a leader is not shocking in his conduct and proposals, he or she probably doesn’t know what time it is. So, yes, threatening the NDAA — which elicited howls of protest from elites — is embraced.

— The second key feature of this us-against-them mentality is that any policy consensus is, by definition, suspicious and an ideal target of attack. When you realize this, what looks at first like a hodgepodge of different ideas seems more unified. Covid health policy, disgust about Jan. 6, the Pentagon budget, immigration, support for Ukraine, promoting racial diversity, trans rights — these are all issues that enjoy a measure of elite bipartisan consensus. But for the Tucker Carlson wing, Republicans who embrace these things don’t know what time it is.

“The WSJ digs into aspects of this debate this morning with a big feature: ‘The 2024 Election Is a Fight Over America’s Way of Life: GOP voters see a country corrupted by liberal ideals.’ Aaron Zitner and Simon J. Levien write:

«The animating force in the Republican presidential primary, many voters and policy leaders say, is a feeling that American society — the government, the media, Hollywood, academia and big business — has been corrupted by liberal ideas about race, gender and other social matters. Democrats, in turn, feel that conservatives have used their political power in red states and in building a Supreme Court majority to undermine abortion rights and threaten decades of work to broaden equal rights for minority groups.

«That has turned the next race for the White House into an existential election, with voters on both sides fearing not just a loss of political influence but also the destruction of their way of life.»’”

— Político Playbook Blog, 7/15/2023. Capitalization in original.

ROBERT REICH: The larger meaning of the Hollywood strike The struggle of capital and labor in the 21st century

The larger meaning of the Hollywood strike

The struggle of capital and labor in the 21st century

ROBERT REICH

JUL 18

Friends,

It’s tempting to view the strike underway by Hollywood writers and TV and film actors against the studios as a war between wealthy Hollywood elites.

But that’s not at all the case. In fact, what’s happening now in Hollywood is a microcosm of what’s happening across America in the emerging digital economy — which is rapidly replacing the production of things with the production of digitized ideas.

The workers in this emerging economy are some of the worst paid and worst treated anywhere, while the top owners and managers are among the fattest cats outside Wall Street.

The biggest fights between capital and labor in the 21st century may look different from the struggles of the 20th century — which centered on whether, for example, full-time workers got better hourly pay and benefits, time-and-a-half for overtime, and reasonable working conditions — but they are in many ways the same, if not worse.

They don’t involve physical property. They are over digitized creative output. More specifically, how much of the value of what’s created goes to those who do the creating versus to those who manage those creations?

The entertainment corporations say they’re suffering because people are going to the movies less and cutting their TV cables to watch streaming videos.

But follow the money: Your entertainment dollars are actually going to the biggest corporations in America. These giants have gained huge bargaining power because they own the ways content is distributed and are mining consumer data to give them even more power and higher profits.

Consider: Stock gains this year have been concentrated among five giant digital firms: Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta. Their combined market capitalization is now over $8 trillion, a figure that exceeds the GDP of every country but the United States and China. They are cash rich. All but Amazon have a combined $200 billion net cash-to-debt balance.

As these giant corporations take over streaming video, video games, and media platforms, their top executives, largest contractors, and biggest investors are raking it in.

Netflix’s Reed Hastings got a 2022 compensation package worth $51.1 million, up 25 percent from the year before. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO got $39 million. Comcast’s CEO, $32 million. Paramount’s CEO, $32 million. Disney’s CEO, $24 million.

Amazon’s Bezos and Meta’s Zuckerberg are raking in more than all these executives combined.

Meanwhile, the people who create the content are getting shafted. They have less and less bargaining power.

I’m talking about writers, designers, artists, musicians, software designers and developers, photographers, graphics specialists, coders, sound engineers, animators, singers, songwriters, architects, showrunners, journalists, and everyone who stores or delivers these creations.

And it’s just beginning. Artificial intelligence — right now, mostly via Google, Meta, and OpenAI — is busy scraping up every morsel of digital content on the internet. If you’re not Big Tech, your intellectual property is disappearing.

Over the last decade, the pay of TV writers has fallen by 23 percent. The typical actor has also been on a downward escalator (last year, averaging $26,276). So have the pay, benefits, and job security of most other content creators.

In other words, what’s happening in Hollywood is also happening in a huge and growing portion of the U.S. economy.

This gap between the declining rewards going to digital creators and the soaring rewards going to the executives of the giant corporations that manage digital creations has become a chasm, and it’s becoming ever larger.

***

The biggest variable in all this is the law — in particular, what limits it places on digital monopolies, and whether it facilitates or limits the power of creators.

In both these respects, the Biden administration has been terrific. It has been more aggressive against monopolists and in favor of unions than any administration since that of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

But much of the law is still in the 20th century, and the federal courts have tended to be on the side of the corporate giants.

Just look at the union busting Amazon has been able to get away with. Or how easily Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have been lifting copyrighted material from the internet.

Meanwhile, the courts are reluctant to use antitrust to inhibit the giants. Last week a federal judge rejected the FTC’s attempt to stop Microsoft’s $70 billion acquisition of the video game maker Activision Blizzard, saying the agency failed to prove the deal would reduce competition and harm consumers. This followed the FTC’s loss in February, when a judge rejected its attempt to block Meta from buying the virtual reality startup Within.

As Hollywood’s content creators go on strike, and as the FTC goes after Microsoft and Meta, bear in mind this huge and growing imbalance of power. If unchecked, it will soon comprise much of the American economy.

MALE CIRCUMCISION: Circumcision Permanently Alters the Brain The surgery subjected the infant to significant trauma

Circumcision Permanently Alters the Brain

The surgery subjected the infant to significant trauma

Two of my physics professors at Queen’s University (Dr. Stewart & Dr. McKee) were the original developers of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) for medical applications. They and a number of other Queen’s physicists also worked on improving the accuracy of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) for observing metabolic activity within the human body.

As a graduate student working in the Dept. of Epidemiology, I was approached by a group of nurses who were attempting to organize a protest against male infant circumcision in Kingston General Hospital. They said that their observations indicated that babies undergoing the procedure were subjected to significant and inhumane levels of pain that subsequently adversely affected their behaviors. They said that they needed some scientific support for their position. It was my idea to use fMRI and/or PET scanning to directly observe the effects of circumcision on the infant brain.

The operator of the MRI machine in the hospital was a friend of mine, and he agreed to allow us to use the machine for research after normal operational hours. We also found a nurse who was under intense pressure by her husband to have her newborn son circumcised, and she was willing to have her son to be the subject of the study. Her goal was to provide scientific information that would eventually be used to ban male infant circumcision. Since no permission of the ethics committee was required to perform any routine male infant circumcision, we did not feel it was necessary to seek any permission to carry out this study.

We tightly strapped an infant to a traditional plastic “circumstraint” using Velcro restraints. We also completely immobilized the infant’s head using standard surgical tape. The entire apparatus was then introduced into the MRI chamber. Since no metal objects could be used because of the high magnetic fields, the doctor who performed the surgery used a plastic bell with a sterilized obsidian bade to cut the foreskin. No anesthetic was used.

The baby was kept in the machine for several minutes to generate baseline data of the normal metabolic activity in the brain. This was used to compare to the data gathered during and after the surgery. Analysis of the MRI data indicated that the surgery subjected the infant to significant trauma. The greatest changes occurred in the limbic system concentrating in the amygdala and in the frontal and temporal lobes.

A neurologist who saw the results postulated that the data indicated that circumcision affected most intensely the portions of the victim’s brain associated with reasoning, perception and emotions. Follow up tests on the infant one day, one week and one month after the surgery indicated that the child’s brain never returned to its baseline configuration. In other words, the evidence generated by this research indicated that the brain of the circumcised infant was permanently changed by the surgery.

Our problems began when we attempted to publish our findings in the open medical literature. All of the participants in the research including myself were called before the hospital discipline committee and were severely reprimanded. We were told that while male circumcision was legal under all circumstances in Canada, any attempt to study the adverse effects of circumcision was strictly prohibited by the ethical regulations. Not only could we not publish the results of our research, but we also had to destroy all of our results. If we refused to comply, we were all threatened with immediate dismissal and legal action.

I would encourage anyone with access to fMRI and /or PET scanning machines to repeat our research as described above, confirm our results, and then publish the results in the open literature.

Paul D. Tinari, Ph.D.

Director

Pacific Institute for Advanced Study

FLORIDA: 355 Manatees Dead So Far This Year

The die-off of Florida manatees goes on.

Their marine habitat is choked with mass tonnage of red tide, starving these gentle sea creatures and pushing them to the brink.

Please help us save them with a donation to the Saving Life on Earth Fund.

So far this year, more than 350 manatees have perished.

With their habitat polluted and their food supply vanishing, more than 2,000 have now died over the past two years.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service prematurely reduced protection for them in 2017. The results have been disastrous.

Many of the deaths have occurred on the east coast of Florida, in the Indian River Lagoon.

But the largest number of manatee deaths this year have been near the Gulf of Mexico, after hurricanes last summer made landfall and deposited toxic pollution from fertilizers.

This nutrient pollution poisons habitat, contributing to harmful algal blooms and throwing marine ecosystems out of whack.

We petitioned the Service to give manatees back the protection they deserve, but the agency hasn't responded. So we're ready to fight it out in court to save these sea creatures, who desperately need our help.

The extreme mortality event claiming more than 20% of Florida's manatees is all the evidence we need that they're in crisis.

The Endangered Species Act saves almost all the species granted its full protection. It's exactly what manatees need to survive a toxic habitat and avoid extinction.

We won't let manatees disappear. We'll keep fighting for them till their future is secure.

Please give today to the Saving Life on Earth Fund.

For the wild,

Kierán Suckling
Executive Director
Center for Biological Diversity

P.S. Monthly supporters who give steady gifts of $10 or $20 sustain the Center's work for wildlife. Do your part by starting a monthly donation.

Donate now to support the Center's work.
Photo of manatees by NOAA

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