Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.
— Jerry Pournelle, bornin 1933
5G Just Got Weird
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GIRLS IN STEMM: The International Astronomical Search Collaboration confirmed the two 14-year-olds’ discovery. (Incidentally, the asteroid is predicted to hit Earth in 1 million years.) |
Early in his presidency, Donald Trump insisted that he was the
best thing that could happen to The New York Times and other media outlets.
Since then, he has often repeated that when he is done being president —
whether that’s in January or four years from now — the media will miss him and
they will suffer without his presence.
Trump certainly creates plenty of news, but make no mistake, the
media will carry on regardless of who is president come next year. Journalism,
particularly local journalism, will continue its commitment to being a watchdog
for its audience. Despite what you might think, that really hasn’t changed with
Trump in the White House and it won’t change no matter who wins the election.
And The New York Times most certainly is not going anywhere.
But what about some of the national political outlets? What
about CNN and MSNBC and Fox News, especially their primetime punditry
programming?
Would a Joe Biden victory in November be bad for business?
In a story by Digiday’s Steven Perlberg,
former CNN president Jonathan Klein said. “What would go away is the bad guy in
the story. There’s no antagonist. So what are we tuning in for? Grandpa is a
nice guy. Everybody might be relieved to not watch as much cable news anymore
and go find a book to read, a garden to plant, or a socially-distanced walk to
take.”
I’m not sure that is true. For starters, Fox News will continue to
motor along. It’s already the most-watched cable news station with Trump in the
White House. Without Trump, it will have a target to criticize nightly in
Biden. Meantime, the other networks won’t be obsessing over Trump, but there
will still be news. Plus, there’s a chance that viewers currently suffering
Trump fatigue might be more engaged in the news again.
But there’s also a good possibility that if Biden does become
president, there won’t be nightly conversations about the president’s latest
tweet. There might not be a daily question of, “Did you see what the president
did today?”
One reporter who currently has a TV deal with one of the
networks told Perlberg, “There isn’t going to be an arms race for Joe Biden TV
analysts.”
But speaking of Trump fatigue, when Jeremy Barr, now with The
Washington Post, was still with The Hollywood Reporter last May, he wrote a story talking to some media about
what it would be like to cover a Trump second term.
A senior CNN producer told Barr, “I don’t know anybody who wants
to do another four years of this news cycle.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean the media is rooting against Trump
because of his politics.
The producer told Barr, “As journalists, I don’t think anybody
cares about what party the president of the United States is. What they care
about is being able to live their lives normally again. I think there’s mental
exhaustion around this presidency, and I don't know anybody who is enjoying
it.”
Could the same be said of the audience?
Either way, the news will carry on regardless of who lives in
the White House.
'Nero' trends after meme Trump retweeted of himself playing violin is likened to Nero fiddling as Rome burns
"Nero" trended on Twitter early Monday after a meme of President Trump playing the violin drew viral comparisons to the Roman emperor among his critics online.
On Sunday night, Trump promoted the meme, which was initially shared by White House social media director Dan Scavino, that depicted him calmly smiling as he played the violin. The meme was captioned: "My next piece is called nothing can stop what's coming."
Will Covid-19 tame China’s wildlife trade?
On the outskirts of Bolao town, five minutes down an overgrown dirt track into the jungle of southern China’s Guangxi region, Hua Chaojiang breeds cobras by the hundred. An acrid smell and a chorus of angry hisses meet us when we step into the darkness of the three-storey red-brick building. Hua, who has been raising snakes for 20 years, is unfazed. He reaches into one of the pens, grabs a tail and casually lifts up a complaining — and venomous — elapid snake. The four-year-old cobra is about as thick as Hua’s muscled arm and nearly twice as long. Hua laughs when asked whether the poisonous snakes have ever bitten him. “Of course,” he replies, using a metal pole with a hook to keep its fangs away from his body. Despite their impressive size, Hua’s cobras are starving. Some are already dead. It is six months since the Chinese government banned the breeding and consumption of snakes and other land-based wildlife, as part of its response to the discovery of a novel coronavirus in the central city of Wuhan. Now that Covid-19 has turned from an epidemic to a pandemic, China’s prohibition looks like it could become permanent, leaving Hua with thousands of snakes and nowhere to put them. “If there is no market, what can I do with them?” he asks. To save money, Hua has cut down feeding from five times to once a week. Even so, his walk-in freezer is nearly empty of frozen cockerels. The hunger makes the cobras restless. “Snakes fight snakes. Snakes eat snakes,” he says. The snake trade has been lucrative for Hua. Before the ban, a snake would sell for about Rmb50 (more than $7) per kilogramme in markets in neighbouring Guangdong province. He has been growing his business steadily since the 1990s, when he first started keeping cobras in a small shed with half a dozen snake pens. Later he invested profits in a new building to keep the poisonous reptiles further from neighbours. He attended courses with snake-breeding experts and passed tests to become a qualified breeder. As he expanded he moved most of his stock into the jungle, although he still keeps a few pits of oriental rat snakes, which are not venomous, on his original farm.
Fake driver’s licenses flooding into US from China, other countries, US says.
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STEPHEN BARTOS: COVID-19 didn’t cause the breakdown of our parliamentary system — it just accelerated it.
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DUE PROCESS: The audit will occur after revelations that details relating to two people working in the office on secondment from state insurance agency icare ‘were not fully documented’.
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MOST SOPHISTICATED’ IN US HISTORY: Underground tunnel connecting Mexico and Arizona discovered. “The tunnel had not yet been finished and did not have an opening on the U.S. side. However, the tunnel was equipped with a ventilation system, water lines, electric wiring, reinforcement of its walls, and shoring.”
The Communist Party of China and the Idea of `Evil’ (Oxford Politics Review, April 24 2020)
Labelling an entity like the Communist Party `evil’ or bad might work polemically. But it ends up doing a massive disservice to the many Chinese still in China who are not members. Some are deeply opposed to their government. Some are supportive. Some are in between. … But the idea that they are silent, suppressed, and without agency is profoundly condescending. Continue reading
AI That Writes Prose And Poetry Is Getting Stronger (Uh-Oh)
“The more text to which an algorithm can be exposed, and the more complex you can make the algorithm, the better it performs. … The model that underpins [the AI software] GPT-3 boasts 175bn parameters, each of which can be individually tweaked — an order of magnitude larger than any of its predecessors. It was trained on the biggest set of text ever amassed, a mixture of books, Wikipedia and Common Crawl, a set of billions of pages of text scraped from every corner of the internet.” That means, alas, that GPT-3 has picked up some of the uglier material found in some of those corners. – The Economist
CLASS IN AMERICA: My Life Pouring Concrete. “This is how some men spend the majority of their lives. I say ‘men’ because, in my chosen subspecialty of concrete (whose ranks include those formally designated in the United States under the category of ‘cement masons, concrete finishers, and terrazzo workers’), the work force is 98.9 percent male.”
Plus: “In Orwell’s day, the privileged set had to get up close and personal to develop their disdain for the working class. These days, thanks to Twitter, they can do it without getting out of bed.”
US to de-list non-compliant Chinese firms by end of 2021
Steve Mnuchin and other officials seek changes to ensure that Chinese firms are held to the same accounting standards as US companies.
Does the US-led Five Eyes have wider sights on China? SCMP
US fails to build regional coalition against China Asia Times
‘Everything is gone.’ Flooding in China ruins farmers and risks rising food prices CNN
Scathing but insightful piece about “the Right,” by Julius Krein
Further results on cross-immunities. And coverage from the NYT. And another new paper
Scale of Lebanon blast (photo)
How much do the Chinese favor income inequality?
Bernard Bailyn obituary (NYT)