Politico: The thriller that predicted the Russia scandal

The People’s House centers around a Russian scheme to flip an election and put Republicans in power by depressing votes in the Midwest. Pipeline politics play an unexpectedly outsize role. Sexual harassment and systematic coverups in Congress abound. But it’s no unimaginative rehash. Pepper released the book in the summer of 2016, just as the presidential contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton was heating up — and before Russia’s real-life campaign to influence the election had been revealed. In fact, the heart of the story had been written for three years when Russian government sent hackers to infiltrate the Democratic National Committee and sent their trolls to influence the election on social media. The Putin-like oligarch Pepper portrays as pulling the strings of U.S. politics had been fleshed out for two. [...]

As he waited for edits on the first book, early in 2016, Pepper got started on a sequel, The Wingman. He finished the bulk of the manuscript by January 2017, as Trump was getting sworn in. Now, one year into Trump’s tenure, his second offering in the otherwise dull world of political thrillers — which comes out on Monday — is an equally complex tale of kompromat influencing a presidential election, even more sexual misconduct, and an Erik Prince-like military contractor with close ties to the administration, this time told through the lens of a rollicking Democratic presidential primary. He wrote it before the now-infamous Steele dossier became public knowledge (and before, Pepper says, he learned about it) — and months before revelations about the Blackwater founder’s close ties to the Trump team and its Russian entanglements. If the first parallels were eerie, these ones were, Pepper admits, maybe even spooky. [...]

The key to writing a successful political thriller is to come up with a scenario that’s far-fetched enough to stretch the reader’s imagination, but not so insane as to be wholly unbelievable. Two years ago, a successful Russian plot to throw an American election by manipulating the Midwest would almost certainly fall into the latter category. So might the idea of systematic blackmail of a presidential candidate.

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Haaretz: Why We've Suppressed the Queer History of the Holocaust

While we may believe that this homophobia was a natural outgrowth of 1930s society, the opposite was the case. Redlich was from the Czechoslovakian town of Olomouc. Similarly to Weimar Germany, Czechoslovakia had a vocal movement calling for the decriminalization of homosexuality, there was a gay subculture, with bars, journals, novels, and activists.

Scholars like Insa Eschebach have pointed out that homophobia among those who were themselves victims of the Holocaust was a specific product of the concentration camp society. Reading survivors’ testimonies, the historian comes across often hair-curlingly vicious statements about prisoners who engaged in same sex conduct.

This homophobia was not a byproduct of the Nazis’ prejudice; the prisoners viewed same sex desire as a personification of all that was wrong in the violent world of the camps. [...]

The Holocaust produced a prisoner society that was deeply gendered, homophobic, hierarchical, and violent. We need to recognize that even  a collective of those who themselves had been excluded and victimized still excluded those they defined as "other."

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Nautilus Magazine: Waiting For the Robot Rembrandt

One reason to be optimistic is that humans are not the only creatures capable of creation without utility. For example, given drawing materials, chimpanzees have been observed to produce drawings for the sheer pleasure of it. In fact, the Okinawa exhibition includes drawings by five chimpanzees and a bonobo owned by Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a professor at Kyoto University—and all are classified into Category (4), “Machine Art / Machine Aesthetics,” to remind us of what is possible. If the animals had produced drawings in return for bananas, we would not have included them in that category, because their art would not been created for its own sake.

For AI to get to where chimpanzees are, two steps are needed. First, AI must be able to generate its own goals. The goals of today’s AI are designed by human programmers, who write so-called evaluation functions to calculate how well or poorly an algorithm is doing at any given time. The first piece of machine-made art that qualifies for category 4 will need to be able to write its own evaluation functions. [...]

When AI starts making fine art, will we recognize it? We can teach AI our own art history as a way of encouraging output that we will recognize and enjoy. On the other hand, untrained AI will be more likely to produce something starkly original and even unrecognizable, after the manner of so-called Outsider Art or Art Brut. While we cannot divine the internal aesthetic sense of the autistic artist Moriya Kishaba, one of our category-2 exhibitors, many people find his tilings of tiny Chinese characters strangely beautiful. The future of AI art is analogous to a world full of artists like Moriya before they were discovered.

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CGP Grey: This Video Will Make You Angry (Mar 10, 2015)

The Irish Times: Fintan O’Toole: Is Brexit the maddest thing England has ever done? Not quite

Edward was not mad. He knew the claim wasn’t real. He made it because he was in dispute with the actual French monarchy about the feudal status of his own vast holdings in the southwest of the country, the duchy of Aquitaine. He needed the support of the Flemings, but they were also feudal subjects of the French monarchy. They couldn’t support him unless he declared that he was in fact king of France. So he did.

This reminds us, though, of one of the great problems of Brexit: saving face. People – and states – don’t act merely out of self-interest. There are times when they make claims they know to be daft. But they can’t find a way to back down.

The claim that the English monarch was king of France started out as a way of dealing with an immediate political problem, just as Brexit has its origins in David Cameron’s strategy for dealing with internal dissent in the Tory party. It, too, was thought of as a kind of deliberate overreach: Edward, like the less extreme of the Brexiters, thought he was making an exaggerated gesture that could be easily bargained away in later negotiations. [...]

It is astonishing how much pain people will suffer and inflict rather than admit they made a mistake. Brexit is not the Hundred Years War, but unless someone finds a way out it now, the consequences will be felt for a century.

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The Guardian: For how long can we treat the suffering of animals as an inconvenient truth?

Those alert to animal sentience already find themselves in difficult situations. Richard Dawkins, for example, has declared: “We have no general reason to think that non-human animals feel pain less acutely than we do.” This, Dawkins says, should change our cultural habits. Practices such as branding cattle, castration without anaesthetic and bullfighting, for instance, “should be treated as morally equivalent to doing the same thing to human beings”. [...]

There’s no escape via the “lower” animals, though. Plenty of research suggests that chickens are not unfeeling meat stores on two drumsticks. They suffer distress, even when they are not suffering themselves. Uncomfortable as it may be to learn this, chickens demonstrate empathy for one another. Studies of fish brains and behaviour suggest that intensive farming practices are almost certainly causing fish conscious distress. And then there are the cephalopods: the octopus, squid and cuttlefish. Their brains have the capacity to think, plan, reflect and learn and almost certainly feel, in the same way that humans do. Octopuses make this clear, showing intention and imagination when they carry shelters with them, build settlements, vary their hunting habits from day to day and escape from captivity when given the chance. Thanks to revelations such as these, while I still eat cows, sheep and pigs, I no longer eat octopus. It’s my own little cognitive dissonance; after all, I haven’t quite given up eating cuttlefish, even though I know about studies that show that they, like cats and dogs, dream when asleep. I have, unconsciously, drawn a line. [...]

Bioethicist David Mellor, who was influential in drafting New Zealand’s progressive animal welfare legislation, says our deepened scientific understanding of the animal experience means we should move away from giving the animals in our care mere “freedoms” from negative experience; we should, instead, be ensuring they enjoy lives that are “worth living”.  

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The Local: For first time ever, Paris counts its homeless

Charities estimate the homeless population of Paris to be about 3,000. Many are foreign, often from Eastern Europe. But there's no official data -- an issue that city hall, under pressure to tackle one of the capital's most visible problems, is now trying to fix.

After two blazing rows sparked by politicians' offhand remarks about homelessness, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo carried out the city's first-ever homeless census on Thursday night.

Some 2,000 volunteers and officials fanned out until 1am, counting the bodies huddled in doorways and surveying those awake about their housing and health problems. Rail workers counted those sheltering at metro stations. [...]

An estimate by statistics agency INSEE put France's national homeless count at 143,000 in 2012, but charities say this has likely rocketed due to a housing crunch and the migrant crisis.

Macron's centrist government opened 13,000 extra places in emergency winter shelters. But two ruling party members have landed themselves in hot water over homelessness in the space of just days.  Urban affairs minister Julien Denormandie prompted an uproar by asserting only 50 men were sleeping rough in the Paris region -- a stunning underestimate, according to charities. And days later, Paris lawmaker Sylvain Maillard, a member of Macron's party, added fuel to the fire by insisting that some stay on the streets, even in the snow, "by choice".  

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AJ+: The Myth Of The Absent Black Father

Research shows that in local news, national news and commentary across all U.S. media, black fathers were shown spending time with their kids almost half as often as white fathers. That's despite the fact that black fathers have outperformed other groups when it comes bathing, feeding and playing with their kids. So where does this stereotype come from? 

TED Talk: The dangerous evolution of HIV | Edsel Salvaña

Think we're winning the battle against HIV? Maybe not, as the next wave of drug-resistant viruses arrives. In an eye-opening talk, TED Fellow Edsel Salvana describes the aggressive HIV subtype AE that's currently plaguing his home of the Philippines -- and warns us about what might become a global epidemic.