Mitch McConnell’s Impeachment Canard

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While prominent voices like those of David Frum of The Atlantic , Jim Geraghty of National Review and Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal have all called for a swift second impeachment of President Trump for instigating the mob that sacked the U. S. Capitol building in their attempt to stop the Constitutionally mandated counting of the electoral vote, this process appears to have been slowed down by Mitch McConnell’s January 8 memo stating that the Senate cannot begin to act on any impeachment articles from the House until January 19th at the soonest, one day before Joe Biden’s inauguration.

McConnell is misleading and pulling a combination of what he did to Merrick Garland by using parliamentary procedure to not act with Bill Barr’s traducing of his friend Robert Mueller by misrepresenting the actual case before him.

McConnell has a reputation as a master of Senate parliamentary procedure, and has used this reputation to hoodwink the public and his fellow Senators. There are in fact multiple ways to begin Senate impeachment hearings before January 19th.

The Senate is currently adjourned for three day increments and holding pro forma sessions in between.  According to Mitch McConnell’s memo,

“It would require the consent of all 100 senators to conduct any business of any kind during the scheduled pro forma sessions prior to January 19, and therefore the consent of all 100 senators to begin acting on any articles of impeachment during those sessions.”

According to a report Mitch McConnell had drawn up by the Congressional Research Service in 2012 about pro forma sessions, however, the correct language is not the consent of all 100 senators but rather unanimous consent, which is a very different thing that pretends to be the same thing. In fact the House just tried to pass a resolution by unanimous consent earlier today to request that Vice President Mike Pence invoke the 25th Amendment, and it basically means that unless anyone voices an objection we’ll all just pretend that all members agreed. (Someone did object, by the way, and the vote will be tabled for tomorrow.)

The CRS also, in this report, identifies two pro forma sessions of the Senate in which legislative business occurred through unanimous consent, on December 23, 2011 and August 5, 2011.

The report also states that there two ways to conduct business during a pro forma session and not just the one that McConnell claims in his recent memo:

“While, as noted above, the Senate has customarily agreed not to conduct business during pro forma sessions, no rule or constitutional provision imposes this restriction. Should the Senate choose to conduct legislative or executive business at a pro forma session, it could, providing it could assemble the necessary quorum or gain the consent of all Senators to act.”

So what are pro forma sessions and why is a) unanimous consent different from the b) consent of 100 senators. Also, why does McConnell think he can get away with conflating these two things?

Pro forma sessions are effectively sessions that last under five minutes in the Senate during which nothing is accomplished but which must be held in order to be in compliance with Article 1, Section 5, Clause 4 of the Constitution.

Neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other Place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting.

By holding a pro forma only meeting every three or so Congressional business days, either chamber can take an extended adjournment, allowing members the time to visit constituents, raise money, and so on, without technically violating the Constitution or requiring the consent of the other chamber.

In 2012, President Obama challenged the status of the pro forma session when it was being used by Mitch McConnell to block the President’s recess appointments. His administration claimed that these were not real sessions and that therefore the Congress was effectively in recess.

The Supreme Court disagreed in their decision in National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning, stating that pro forma sessions are not just for show because 1) the Senate says they aren’t and also because 2) legislative action can occur  by unanimous consent because a quorum, required for unanimous consent, is presumed, even if it doesn’t exist actually.

Confusing, isn’t it? I’ll quote extensively from this analysis from the Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog, which elucidates the matter further:

The interesting point is that (b) is rests on a fiction:  there actually is no Senate quorum during a pro forma session.  As Mitch McConnell’s brief in the Supreme Court explains, “The Senate, in other words, has provided that a quorum is presumed until proven otherwise.”  And it is a fiction the Court definitively accepts:  “[W]hen the Journal of the Senate indicates that a quorum was present, under a valid Senate rule, . . . we will not consider an argument that a quorum was not, in fact, present.”

Yet that critical presumption that a quorum exists is easily burst:  any member of the Senate can suggest the absence of a quorum.  “During any pro forma session, the Senate could have conducted business simply by passing a unanimous consent agreement. . . .  Senate rules presume that quorum is present unless a present Senator questions it.”  As Noel Canning’s brief in the Supreme Court explains, “whenever the Senate lacks quorum . . . , a single Senator can prevent the Senate from conducting business by making a quorum call.”

It’s turtles all the way down. To recapitulate:

  1. A pro forma session counts as a real session, for Constitutional purposes, if legislative action can occur during this session.
  2. Legislative action can occur during a pro forma session through unanimous consent.
  3. Unanimous consent requires a quorum comprised of a simple majority of all senators (51).
  4. Even if a quorum is not actually present, the rules of the Senate maintain the fiction that one is unless a senator calls for a quorum count.

So what would happen if a senator entered the senate chamber and requested a quorum count? Presumably something like this:

  1. It would be discovered that there is not a quorum.
  2. Without a quorum, no business can be done.
  3. If no business can be done, the the Senate is in violation of the Constitution Article 1, Section 5, Clause 4.
  4. The Senate must call on the Sergeant-at-arms to wrangle up 51 senators, so there is a quorum, so legislative action can occur in compliance with the Supreme Court’s decision in National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning.

Supposing there are 48 Democratic senators and at least 3 Republican senators willing to be in the Capitol Building to receive and act on Impeachment Articles from the House, this can happen as early as tomorrow. The next opportunity will be on January 15th at the next pro forma session of the United States Senate.

And thus Mitch McConnell’s attempt to obstruct congress can be toppled, by the numbers. Turtles all the way down.

Philosophical Classics for Nerds

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It is 60 days after the day I thought the U.S. presidential election would have been settled … and yet. Intellectually, I recognize the outrageousness of the situation, based on the Constitution, based on my high school civics lessons, and based on my memories of the 2000 presidential election between Bush and Gore when everyone felt that any wrong move or overreach back then would have threatened the stability of the republic and the rule of law.

At the same time I have become inured to the cray-cray and as I listen today to recordings of President Trump’s corrupt, self-serving call to Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger, I find that my intellectual recognition that norms are being broken (the norm that we trust the democratic system, the norm that we should all abide by the rules as they are written , the norm that we should assiduously avoid tampering with ‘the process’ in any way) is not accompanied by the familiar gut uneasiness that signals to humans that norms have been disturbed. That thing that makes up “common sense”, a unanimity between thought and feeling, is missing for me due to four and more years of gaslighting.

gaslight

When common sense breaks down in this way, there are generally two possible causes. Either you have gone crazy or everyone else has. Like Ingrid Bergman in that George Cukor film, our first instinct is to look for a Joseph Cotton to reassure us that we are right and Charles Boyer is wrong. What always causes me dread about that movie, though, is the notion that things wouldn’t have gone so well had Ingrid Bergman not been gorgeous and drawn Cotton’s gaze and concern.

In another film from a parallel universe, Cotton might have ignored Bergman, and she would have withdrawn from the world, into herself, and pursued a hobby she had full control over, like crochet, or woodworking, or cosplaying. Many do.

Over the past two decades, nerdiness has shifted from being a character flaw into a virtue, from something tacitly acknowledged into a lifestyle to be pursued. The key characteristic of “nerdiness” is the willingness to allow a passion to bloom into an obsession to the point of wanting to know every trivial and quadrivial  aspect of a subject. True nerdiness is achieved when we take a matter just that bit too far, when friendships are broken over opinions concerning the Star Wars prequels, or when marriages are split over the classification of a print font.

The loss of the sensus communis  can also mark the point where mere thought becomes philosophical. The hallmark of philosophical reflection is that moment when the familiar suddenly becomes unfamiliar and then demands our gaze with new fascination, like Ingrid Bergman suddenly drawing Joseph Cotton’s attention. For Heidegger this was the uncanniness of the world. For Husserl it was the epoche in which we bring into question the givenness of the world. And for Plato it is the desire for one’s lover, which one transfers to beauty in general, and finally to Truth itself.

http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436105

Philosophers as a rule take things too far. They say forbidden things. They draw unexpected conclusions. They examine all the nooks and crannies of thought, exhaustively, to reach the conclusions they reach, often to the boredom of their audience. They were nerds before we knew what nerds were.

Even in the world of philosophy, however, there are books and ideas that used to be considered too important to overlook but too nerdy to be made central to the discipline. Instead, they have existed on the margins of philosophy waiting for a moment when the Zeitgeist was ready to receive them.

Here are five works of speculative philosophy whose time, I believe has come.

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Simulacra and Simulations by Jean Baudrillard – This book describes virtual reality, a bit like William Gibson did with Neuromancer, before it was really a thing. The Wachowskis cite it as an inspiration for The Matrix and even put phrases from this work in one of Morpheus’s monologues. It is blessedly a short work that captures the essence of our virtual world today from a distance of almost half a century (it was written in 1983). No one should be working in tech today without understanding what Baudrillard meant by “the desert of the real.”

transporter

Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit – Parfit took apart the notion of identity using thought experiments drawn from science fiction. One of his most striking arguments, introduced in Part Three of his work, in a section called Simple Teletransportation and the Branch-Line Case, Parfit posits a machine that allows speed-of-light travel by scanning a person into data, sending that data to another planet, and then reconstituting that data as matter to recreate the original person. Of course, we have to destroy the original copy during this process of teletransportation. Parfit toys with our intuitions of what it means to be a person in order to arrive at philosophical gold. If the reader is troubled by this scenario of murder and cloning cum teleportation, Parfit is able to point out that this is what we go through in our lives. How much of the matter we were born with is still a part of our physical bodies? Little to none?

For the coup de gras, one can apply the lessons of teletransportation to address our pointless fear of death. What is death, after all, but a journey through the teleporter without a known terminus?

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The Conscious Mind by  David J Chalmers – Just as the 4th century BCE saw a flourishing of philosophy and science in Greece, or the 16th century saw an explosion of literary invention in England, in the 1990’s Australia become the home of the most innovative works on the Philosophy of Mind in the world. Out of that period of wild genius David J Chalmers came out against the general trend driven by Daniel Dennett and Paul Churchland that denied the reality of consciousness. Chalmers, on the other hand, made the case through exacting arguments that consciousness is not only real, but is a fundamental property of the universe, alongside spatiality and temporality.

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Hegel and the Metaphysics of Absolute Negativity by Brady Bowman – Since Dale Carnegie’s important work reforming the habits of white collar labor, positive thinking has been the ethos of professional life. The Marxian threat of alienated labor is eliminated by refusing to acknowledge the possibility of alienation in the corporate managerial class. Just as movie Galadriel tells us that “history became legend, legend became myth”, the power of positive thinking became a tenet of faith, then a method of prosperous Biblical exegesis, and finally a secret.

Do you ever get tired of mindless positivism? What if the underlying engine of the universe turns out not to be positive thinking but absolute negativity? And what if this can be proven through Hegel’s advanced dialectical logic? How much would you pay for a secret like that?

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The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose – Penrose was a brilliant mathematical physicist who unleashed his learned background to the problem of human consciousness. Do physics and quantum physics in particular confirm or reject our theories about the human soul? I’ve always loved this book because Penrose comes up with a solution to human consciousness in a  somewhat unphilosophical way – which made many philosophers nervous. The crux of his argument for the place of mind in a quantum universe is the size horizon of some features of the human brain. Ultimately, I think, Penrose provides a way to reconcile Kantian metaphysics with modern cutting edge physics and biology in a way that works – or that at least is consistent and the ground for the possibility of Kantianism.

Dark_Side_of_the_Moon

Honorable mention: Darkside by Tom Stoppard – if you have been watching The Good Place then you should be familiar with The Trolley Problem, a thought experiment used to tease our ethical intuitions and commitments. What could make The Trolley Problem even better? What if it is incorporated into  a radio play by one of our greatest living English dramatists, performed to the tracks of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, and acted out by Bill Nighy (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), Rufus Sewell (Dark City) and Iwan Rheon (Game of Thrones).

One Day Till Election Day

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The most important thing about making a Moscow Mule is getting the cup right. It needs to be copper, which does good things with the lime juice. Don’t use a silver cup, which is used a a container for the Mint Julep. To make a Moscow Mule my way, pour ice into a copper cup. Over the ice add:

  • 2 oz not too expensive vodka
  • 4 oz Moscow Mule mix
  • enough sparkling water to fill your copper cup to the rim

Garnish with a lime slice and mint sprig.

A few years ago I found myself with Dennis Vroegop at a LinkedIn Learning party in Redmond, Washington. It was there that we began negotiations on what eventually became our App Development for HoloLens video course. It was November 3rd, 2016  during the week of the Microsoft MVP summit and the free bar had an excellent mixologist who was able to make me a Rusty Nail as well as a Moscow Mule. I was thrilled.

As the night wore on, we went from party to party with a great sense of freedom and the feeling that we were on top of the world and that we were on the cusp of great things. Another friend, Tamas Deme, ended up at a dour affair for the local Republican Party where depressed representatives waited patiently for bad news.

But that isn’t how things turned out. As we moved from party to party, people started getting panicked phone calls from spouses at home and their faces turned from bemusement to chagrin. At one point we ran into Tim Huckaby, a legend in the Microsoft RD world, who told us Trump was winning the election. We thought he was joking.

Finally my wife called me in tears barely able to contain herself. The country had elected (another) rapist and she couldn’t understand how. I couldn’t get my head around it and ended up walking around Redmond for the next few hours.

Instead of the best year, 2016 became the start of a set of strange, difficult to understand events. Everything feels like it has slowly been dissipating ever since. Friendships have become strained. Relationships have frayed. The extended, non-nuclear family is maintained by avoiding each other. I constantly have to tell my children that this isn’t how things used to be and politicians as well as people in general traditionally are afraid of being caught in lies. But I can tell from their tone that they doubt me. After all, isn’t my generation partly responsible for what has happened?

Two Days Till The Election

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The Sidecar is a somewhat neglected concoction, being a brandy-based cocktail that doesn’t fit into the common categories of brown, clear and beach drinks. The most important thing is to wet the tip of your martini glass with water before dipping it in sugar and chilling it in the freezer. To make a sidecar, shake:

  • 2 oz brandy
  • 2 oz triple sec or other orange liqueur
  • 1 1/2 oz fresh squeezed lemon juice

The base of a cocktail (brandy, whiskey, gin, vodka, rum or tequila) is a bit like a Kuhnian paradigm that casts an interpretive shadow over whatever else you add to it. If you add lime juice and simple syrup to rum you get a Daiquiri. When you add lime juice and simple syrup to gin, you end up with a Gimlet. Garnishes also provide a gravitational pull of their own. Dry vermouth, gin and olives gives you a martini. Dry vermouth, gin and cocktail onions makes a Gibson. Replace gin with vodka and you end up with either a vodka Martini or a vodka Gibson (emphasizing that vodka, being a clear alcohol like gin, is a mere variation rather than a species change). Gin, sweet vermouth and bitters gives you a Martinez, a drink that the Martini is apparently descended from. Bourbon, sweet vermouth and bitters is a Manhattan. Replace the Manhattan’s vermouth with simple syrup and you get an Old-Fashioned. Add mint leaves to this and you have a Mint Julep.

Herodotus tells us that the Persians always deliberated over important issues once drunk and once sober, to ensure they captured all the aspects of the matter with clarity but also with an open mind so that, matatis mutandis, good outcomes were achieved. The surprise is always in how different moods can affect our judgment which we otherwise assume is firm and built on unmoving principles. It is why decisions should never be made in haste or in a moment of high passion. And if we do this anyways, there is much to be said for a process that allows review, so that mistakes made in the moment can be fixed.

But due process, like brandy cocktails, is not currently in vogue, and it is difficult to tell if this is a result of changing perspectives on what justice entails – or if this is merely a momentary passion.

Three Days Out From Election Day


The White Russian is famously the drink of The Dude. It is a three ingredient cocktail composed of equal parts vodka, Kahlua and heavy white_russiancream. No garnish. I prefer it in an Oculus Rift novelty glass, but any old-fashioned glass will do.

My wife’s grand-parents and great-grandparents were White Russians. In the 1918 revolution her family retreated and retreated with the Tsarist forces through the Ukraine. Her great-great-grandfather and a cousin iconically died when their regiment was surrounded by the Reds in the snow. The Reds did not take prisoners. To be fair, the Whites didn’t either. And both took advantage of the war to act out pogroms on Jews, whom neither side trusted.

One of her great grand-fathers was sent to the Gulag for a 5 year term for blowing up a bridge. If the bridge actually existed, family opinion holds that his sentence would have been much more severe. Later, after walking home following the end of his 5 years in Siberia, he took advantage of the war to gather his family and escape from the Ukraine to Germany. German fliers had promised them a great life if they migrated west. Instead, the Germans placed them in a labor camp, where they stayed through the extent of the war. Once the guards had left the camp, they made their way to  allied forces and eventually were granted passage to New York City, where they lived for several years before settling in the suburbs around Washington, D.C.

Their take-away from all this was that the Nazis were bad but the Soviets were worse.

I recently discovered that my mother is voting for Trump. I was a bit surprised, but not completely. My mother is Vietnamese and there are complicated factors involved which come down to: 1) a specific distrust of the Chinese, who in the past and currently are attempting to create a sphere of influence in that part of the world, especially as the Trump administration has withdrawn from foreign engagement; 2) anti-communism that grows out of a long history of communist atrocities in Vietnam as well as the trauma of being expelled from one’s own country and being forced to leave both family and ancestral graves behind; 3) Trump has been successful in portraying himself as being tough on China, despite general indifference to the plight of the Uyghurs or of the independence movement in Hong Kong.

The horror of communism is the basic belief in the plasticity of human nature and the belief that with proper education, reinforced with force if necessary,  anybody can be made to believe anything. Combine this with an absolute belief in the righteousness of one’s cause as well as a cadre of cynical operators willing to carry out this political agenda, and you end up with the sort of destruction of norms and truth illustrated in the writings of George Orwell and  Alexander Solzhenitsyn, films like The Death of Stalin, and the growing testimony about the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

But as strongly as I abhor the anti-humanism and anti-enlightenment baggage of communist movements (or maybe because of it) it is clear that a general sympathy for the working person, a desire to help those in need and an recognition of the need to address the consequences of global warming are not the essence of communism. The essence of communism is a disregard for truth and a belief that anyone can be made to believe anything and that norms are a weakness. These are not the traits of a Biden presidential candidacy.

Drinking down my White Russian, I coo privately over the prospect of Biden presidential victory and begin to confuse the two.

Sam Elliott tells us in The Big Lebowski that The Dude was the right man at the right time (which is also a perfect description of Joe Biden). The Dude has many faults. Among his virtues, though, is a degree of appreciation for what he expects from the world and a respect for norms. He is surrounded by somewhat extreme friends, but he also gives them space and grants them their personal dignity and recognizes their humanity. For all his 60’s radical rhetoric, he is ultimately a man of bourgeois tastes pursuing enlightenment ideals about interior decoration with a clear sense of human dignity and of what crosses the line of human dignity.

These are hard times and we need more Dude’s in the world. We also need more White Russians over here, bartender!

Four Days From Election Day

aviation

This is the Aviation cocktail. It is one of the earliest recorded cocktails of the 20th century. Just sourcing the ingredients can be a feat in itself.

  • 2 oz gin
  • 1/2 oz lemon juice
  • 1/4 oz maraschino liqueur
  • 1/4 oz creme de violette

Shake with ice and pour into a martini glass. Garnish with a lemon twist or a maraschino cherry. There is some controversy about the creme de violette. Some people leave it out altogether, on the theory that modern versions of the liqueur are inferior to that used in the original drink. Some throw it in with the rest of the ingredients in the shaker, which creates a very purple drink. I like to add it over a spoon after pouring the glass so it is in a separate layer, creating a morning dawn with clouds effect, which is how the drink originally got its name.

The disputes over the right way to make an Aviation follow a long term (or long form) mode of thought. This is unusual and increasingly rare. Typically we make short term decisions, and this has been blamed many of the follies we face today.

Stock market investment is meant to be a long term matter but many of the disasters that occur in the market seem to occur when people treat it as a short form (i.e. gambling) metier. There was a time, as with the characters in a Jane Austen novel, when a person’s worth was calculated based on a 5% return on investments. Mr. Darcy was worth 10,000 pounds a year, which meant he had an endowment of 200,000 pounds. 10,000 pounds a year put Mr. Darcy in the top 1% of British incomes at the time. His 10,000 pounds is equivalent to around £450,000 today, according to a quick unverified Google search I just did. His modern equivalent, I imagine, would consequently be Jared Kushner, not Colin Firth, which makes Ivanka Trump our Elizabeth Bennett!

Okay. Enough of that.  Short term thinking vs. long term thinking. That is the current topic.

I once had a manager to whom I expressed my concerns that the path we were on in building a software product simply wouldn’t work. There was no audience for it. I was concerned that my manager was hiding information from the CEO of the company and that this would lead to disaster down the road, including but not limited to everyone losing their jobs. My manager calmly told me with a smile that this was something I shouldn’t worry about and that if his strategy didn’t work, it was his job that would be forfeit, not mine.

I think he was sincere in saying this, to the extent any manager is capable of sincerity (I’ve known a few), but the problem was that this was short term thinking. In the short term, he was confident that what he was saying was true. Later, however, adverse circumstances led to a shortfall in income and I moved on to other employment while he continued doing internal pitches in order to get more money for his project. He of course forgot about any claims he had made previously.

There are several lessons that can be drawn from this. The first is never to trust  management. They are not on your side. Their job is to figure out how to get you to further their own goals.

The second is that something said can be true in the short term but not true in the long term. In the short term, people will say whatever gets them through to the end of the meeting they are in. This is what we also call a pragmatic attitude.

Statements concerning actions that are true over the long term are actually called “ethics”. When someone claims they will do something, and perhaps believe it, but after a few days or a few weeks, abandons that promise, then they are being unethical. If the keep to their word over the long term, they are being ethical. A characteristic of people who keep their word over the long term is that they are thoughtful about what they say and what they promise.

Even the beliefs we hold can be ethical or unethical in this way. I was once serving jury duty in a case that was pretty fun – about which I can’t really say anything. Most of the jury was inclined one way while two were inclined another. At the end of the deliberations, one of the hold outs was eventually ready to change his vote because he had a party he wanted to go to that night. So it was down to the fore-person. She made multiple arguments about how it was possible that the person on trial may not have done what he was accused of. And honestly her intentions were good. She was concerned about the three-strikes mandate that at the time would have given the defendant an excessive punishment, and many juries at the time were struggling with the notion of jury nullification in cases where they felt the criminal justice system itself was unfair. It occurred to me to ask her, out of curiosity, whether she believed what she was saying.

After which there was a long pause of at least a minute and maybe more. She then announced that she was changing her vote and we returned to the courtroom to announce our verdict.

“Is that true” is a powerful question, I discovered that day.

In life, we all say things that sound good at the moment. When I supported pitches to the client while working at a digital agency, this was what we did every day. We said things that sounded good. Strangely, we always believed what we were saying when we said it. Following the George Costanza rule, it isn’t a lie if you believe it.

But what we believe in the moment isn’t the same thing as an ‘ethical belief’. It can be blamed on social media, the lowering of public discourse, the long term effects of Trumpism, but it feels like people no longer believe or speak ethically anymore. There is no sense that the things we say should be true or that the promises we made should be kept. It’s all just words …

And words can destroy lives, markets, norms,  social bonds and potentially great nations. My hope for the Biden presidency is that we will finally have ethical beliefs, again.

Five Days from Election Day

cocktail

This is the Man-O-War, named after the race horse. Lemon juice gives it a brilliant cheerful tone. To make it, shake over ice cubes:

  • 2 oz bourbon
  • 1 ounce orange liqueur (or triple sec)
  • 1/2 oz sweet vermouth
  • 1/2 oz fresh squeezed lemon juice

Garnish with a lemon twist and a brandied cherry (or a maraschino cherry).

Cocktails for the most part were invented as a way to dress up poor quality liquor during prohibition. The desire to have a more sober and then a more drunk public were the proximate causes for the 19th and 21st amendments. In between these two amendments, in apparently a period when the government went crazy with ratification craze, the 20th amendment got rid of the lame duck presidency.

Prohibition contributed to a rise in organized crime, dedicated to providing a class of drug users narcotics that they could no longer attain legally.

(Please excuse me for any spelling or grammar or usage mistakes. I’ve been drinking a Man-O-War, which is a fabulous drink. Support your local liquor store and buy some tasty liquor.)

The upside of the progressive increase in violence and a social example of the imposition of a Hobbesian world on top of modernity was the creation of the cocktail culture – meant to offset the bad taste of imported cheap alcohol. On the one had, the best cocktails can be made with the best alcohol. On the other hand, why ruin a perfectly good Japanese whiskey with fruit?

Anyhoo, we got a first wave of cocktail culture, meant to elevate bad tasting alcohol with additives, because of the 19th amendment. There was another wave post-pohibition with the Tiki-bar movement, promulgated by a post-war, Disney-like desire to recreate the world to specifications. And a third wave in the 70’s which was punk-like and weird and cool.

The great thing about cocktails is that they tell a story around the raw benefit of alcohol to make you feel temporarily euphoric. The narrative of the cocktail, depending on whether it works for you or not, is that it extends the euphoria beyond the immediate bio-chemical effect and creates a decadent romance around the rituals of the cocktail.

Which brings me back to the election. Alcohol is a necessity to get us through the next 5 days. Those traumatized by the election of 2016 are never going to feel confident about Biden’s clear electorial lead going into the 2020 election in 5 days.

In a temporary, drug induced level of empathy for Trump voters, I would add that those surprised and then forced to accept as pre-determined the election of the Republican victory in 2016 also will need a stiff drink to get over the false-consciousness they are currently experiencing. The bad high will soon be over and they will need to accommodate themselves to the fact that it was a horrible mistake they didn’t mean to sign on to. My good-faith advice, which you won’t take, is to write a publish a mea-culpa about why Trump was a mistake and a violation of your personal principles. Give Hosannas to Jesus Christ instead of Trump. Drink if you need to and hit publish on Medium about what a disaster this has all been. Because anything you say after the election will not matter. (And, mundis-mutandi, you can always delete afterwards if affairs go differently and claim you were hacked. But we all already know how the election is going.)

I’ve the lost the thread of this post other than fresh lemon juice dramatically improves any cocktail. Fresh juice is the secret principle of the 70’s rediscovery of 50’s Tiki cocktails. I will try to publish more secrets of fresh juice added to alcohol in the next few days.

The other thread, I think, is that the misery and violence that sprung from the 19th amendment had, as a positive result, the invention of the cocktail sub-genre. That’s all I’m saying, man.

How to Floss Your Youtube Algo

I once had a friend named Rick Barraza. He works at Microsoft and the last time I talked to him, about three years ago in Redmond, he was deleting all of his social media accounts. One of his chief concerns as a member of what was then the Responsibility in AI group (?) was with the use of AI by media content distributors to recommend new content based on your previous content preferences. A side-effect / primary goal (depending on your hermeneutical suspicion level) of these “recommendation engines” is to actually steer you toward more and more extreme content which increases your viewing time with the content you are being fed. Recommendation engines can actually modify your outlook based on the content it feeds you. This effect has been identified as a root cause of the increase in both left wing and right wing extremist outlooks over the past half decade.

Rick is now offline and lost to me but that last conversation continues to echo through the years. When I pull up Youtube I often find some  odd things showing up in my recommendation list. At a minimum, I don’t want these things to show up when my children come into the living room. So I came up with a playlist of random and neutral content that I can run through my Youtube account to normalize it and get rid of these outliers.

Then a week ago it occurred to me that I could use these regular algo flossings to also do a bit of mental flossing. To the extent that Youtube’s algorithms remotely alter my emotional rhythms and outlook and tastes, it occurred to me that I could piggyback on Youtube’s hack of my mind in order to hack myself. By carefully modifying the model that Youtube has created of me, I can perhaps perform the highest form of self-care.

I wanted to give you a taste of some of the pieces I am using to shift the model in case it helps you. I just run the full list through Youtube every few days and walk away. I’ve noticed that the content recommendations I now get out of Youtube are much more edifying. At a minimum, it is much less embarrassing for me, personally, when my children see it.

Adam Neely’s music theory video about The Girl From Ipenema is extraordinary and profound. But that isn’t why it works well for flossing. The exploration of the gentrification of Brazilian music in a way that created cross pollination with American bebop and an unexpectedly deep and ambiguous musical chord structure creates a pleasant nexus of 50’s themes, mathematics, interesting graphics and lots of variations on the same song. This creates a latticework of connections to other affirming content that work together to drive out the less pleasant things that may inadvertently show up on your recommendation list.

Tony Zhou’s Every Frame a Painting is a series about film technique and appreciation. Tony is a video editor who came to this from creating content for The Criterion Channel (which by the way is a magnificent first year course on the building blocks of filmmaking if you watch them all). The long shot video, in particular, shifts your model toward other videos about the one shot, which is almost always received as a virtuoso film technique that is used in both artsy and popular movies. Playing it a few times in your playlist will surface still shots from movies that will tend to make your YouTube recommends much more visually appealing.

Emmanuel Levinas is one of the greatest unknown modern philosophers. He studied in the French / German existential tradition but is most famous for his ethics. He famously said that Ethics is first philosophy, which is a complete re-orientation from Heidegger’s ontology as first philosophy, Descartes’ epistemology as first philosophy or Aristotle’s metaphysics as first philosophy. His thinking about The Other has made its way into contemporary culture, although his understanding of The Other is much different from the way popular culture has received it. I used to use Slavoj Zizek, the neo-Trotskyite, as part of my flossing regimen but have found that ironic humor can be problematic when attempting to perform algorithmic hygiene and can introduce some mutations of the recommendation model that are not optimal. More on this in a future post.

Three minutes of Ben Hogan’s golf swing is a bit of a palate cleanser. It is a perfect combination of excellence and boredom, which is what we are after when creating a flossing playlist.

Anuja Kamat’s What is a Raag? besides being lovely and informative fixes the implicit tendency of algos to whitewash. Ben Hogan’s back swing is like white bread to sop up left over gravy. It sets up Anuja Kamat’s follow through which attracts links to high quality content outside of this safe zone. Just as having too much irony can be a problem in our playlist, and invites erratic content, a narrowness of horizons can similarly distort the recommendation model in undesirable ways.

Preparing banh xeo (Vietnamese crepe) is a subgenre cross between cooking instruction and ASMR. While almost any banh xeo video will probably work, this one is especially interesting for the amount of time spent on establishing credibility and authenticity.

At first I was worried that Khruangbin’s performance of Maria Tambien, August 10 and White Gloves for NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series would open my algo up to radical leftist politics, which while not necessarily bad in itself can lead to a self-perpetuating extremist slope in the model, but instead the moderating calmness of public broadcasting is what ultimately influences the algorithm the most. This neo-liberal tendency is actually perfect for algo and mental flossing.

Other content which would seem similar on the surface, such as TED talks and TEDx talks, anecdotally have those sliding side-effects toward cesspool media and should be avoided at all cost when cleaning up your video profile. If you must watch a TED talk, try to watch it in your browser’s “private” mode (though this isn’t guaranteed to always remove the deleterious influence on your recommendation model, so be careful).

The last item I want to share with you from my Youtube hygiene playlist is a talk about 5 dangerous ideas entitled Crafting Delight by Rick Barraza. The talk itself is nothing special and you should probably just leave it playing with the sound off while you go do something else. I believe (though I cannot prove it), however, that embedded in the video are subharmonic or subliminal signals recognizable to the Youtube algorithms that effectively reset them so they are less predatory and potentially even beneficial.

Again, I can make no empirical claims about whether the Crafting Delight video is actually an encoded vaccine for predatory recommendation engines. All I know is that it seems to work for me. I also cannot say whether there are or are not other algo vaccination videos on Youtube pretending to be recorded night club performances, travelogs, or even software programming instructional videos. I do get tips from time to time though about the beneficial mental and algorithmic side-effects of various media. What I suggest is that you try these out and if they work for you, then hit me up for the rest of the playlist.

If these videos have helped you to de-program, please let me know in the comments so I can weight them correctly for my future counter-algo algo training data sets.

Gleaning and Presenting

I’ve been back on the presenter circuit these past few weeks and it honestly feels really good. Presenting in the Age of The Vid is peculiar and requires a change up in skills. Voicing over a slide deck really doesn’t work anymore. Having your face in the corner of the Skype or Zoom helps. A bit of face presence and a lot of videos works the best because it provides something visually interesting to hold the audience’s attention while providing the realtime authenticity (and the potential for hockey-fight level disasters) that makes live theater worthwhile.

My colleague Charles De Andrade and I did two talks at the beginning of the month at MEP Force 2020, a conference of digital tech in the construction industry. We did a case study talk on how the use of 3D visualizations on the desktop as well as in Mixed Reality improves planning and reduces cost, especially in a situation where we increasingly need to be able to work remotely. The second talk went into the details of the challenges involved in getting very large buildings into very small visualization devices and how we work around these with lots of math.

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Then this past weekend I did a talk at XReality organized by Dom Wu called Dreaming in Holograms about my work in spatial computing and my hobby ‘gleaning’ sci fi scenes and screen scrapes from movie and television.

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To glean, according to Webster’s, is to gather grain after the reapers have finished harvesting. Besides grain, you can also glean potatoes, grapes, vegetables, figs – pretty much anything that is left behind after the normal harvesting process. And I glean sci fi.

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So I spent 90 minutes discussing my gleaning hobby and how it relates to my profession – building Holographic applications.

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And of course how both of these have left me with a strange condition. I dream in holograms. My dreams are filled with semi-transparent buildings and semi-transparent people. This is true of my falling dreams as well as my swimming through air dreams. It’s even true of my being late to class and naked dreams. Oddly, though, all my nocturnal holograms are monochromatic, filled in with many shades of gray, and never in full color.

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I’ve heard of a man in Japan who dreams in fish – which I find difficult to imagine.

Multi-modal User Input for Spatial Computing

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One of the fights that I thought we had put behind us is over the question ‘which interface is better?’ For instance, this question the was frequently brought up in comparisons of the mouse to the keyboard, its putative precursor. The same disputes came along again with the rise of natural user interfaces (NUI) when people began to ask if touch would put the mouse out of business. Always the answer has been no. Instead, we use all of these input modes side-by-side.

As Bill Buxton famously said, every technology is the best at something and the worst at something else. We use the interface best adapted to the goal we have in mind. In the case of data entry, the keyboard has always been the best tool. For password entry, on the other hand, while we have many options, including face and speech recognition, it is remarkable how often we turn to the standard keyboard or keypad.

Yet I’ve found myself sucked into arguments about which is the best interaction model, the HoloLens v1’s simple gestures, the Magic Leap One’s magnetic 6DOF controller, or the HoloLens v2’s direct manipulation (albeit w/o haptics) with hand tracking.

Ideally we would use them all. A controller can’t be beat for precision control. Direct hand manipulation is intuitive and fun. To each of these I can add a blue tooth XBox controller for additional freedom. And the best replacement for a keyboard turns out to be a keyboard (this is known as the Qwerty’s universal constant).

It was over two years ago at the Magic Leap conference that James Powderly, a spatial computing UX guru, set us on the direction of figuring out ways to use multiple input modalities at the same time. Instead of thinking of the XOR scenario (this or that but not both) we started considering the AND scenario for inputs. We had a project at the time, VIM – an architectural visualization and data reporting tool for spatial computing –, to try it out with. Our main rule in doing this was that it couldn’t be forced. We wanted to find a natural way to do multi-modal that made sense and hopefully would also be intuitive.

We found a good opportunity as we attempted to refine the ability to move building models around on a table-top. This is a fairly universal UX issue in spatial computing, which made it even more fascinating to us. There are usually a combination of transformations that can be performed on a 3D object at the same time for ease of interaction: translation (moving from position x1 to position x2), scaling the size of the object, and rotating the object. A common solution is to make each of these a different interaction mode triggered by clicking on a virtual button or something.

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But we went a different way. As you move a model in space by pointing the Magic Leap controller in different directions like a laser pointer with the building hanging off the end, you can also push it away by pressing on the top of the touch pad or rotate it by spinning your thumb around the edge of the touch pad.

This works great for accomplishing many tasks at once. A side effect, though, is that while users rotated a 3D building with their thumbs, they also had a tendency to shake the controller wildly so that it seemed to get tossed around the room. It took an amazing amount of dexterity and practice to rotate the model while keeping it in one spot.

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To fix this, we added a hand gesture to hold the model in place while the user rotated it. We called this the “halt” gesture because it just required the user to put up their off hand with the palm facing out. (Luke Hamilton, our Head of Design, also called this the “stop in the name of love” gesture.)

But we were on a gesture inventing roll and didn’t want to stop. We started thinking about how the keyboard is more accurate and faster than a mouse in data  entry scenarios, while the mouse is much more accurate than a game controller or hand tracking for pointing and selecting.

We had a similar situation here where the rotation gesture on the Magic Leap controller was intended to make it easy to spin the model in a 360 degree circle, but consequently was not so good for very slight rotations (for instance the kind of rotation needed to correctly orient a life-size digital twin of a building).

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We got on the phone with Brian Schwab and Jay Juneau at Magic Leap and they suggested that we try to use the controller in a different way. Rather than simply using the thumb pad, we could instead rotate the controller on its Z-axis (a bit like a screwdriver) as an alternative rotational gesture. Which is what we did, making this a secondary rotation method for fine-tuning.

And of course we combined the “halt / stop in the name of love” gesture with this “screwdrive” gesture, too. Because we could but more importantly because it made sense and most importantly because it allows the user to accomplish her goals with the least amount of friction.