…I definitely wish I could skip today…I’m knackered & if it was saturday it’d be a whole lot easier…but it ain’t…&…well…you works with what you got

Of all the distortions and paranoia that Tucker Carlson promoted on his since-canceled Fox News program, one looms large: a conspiracy theory that an Arizona man working as a covert government agent incited the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol to sabotage and discredit former President Donald J. Trump and his political movement.
[…]
Federal prosecutors have not charged Mr. Epps with a crime, focusing instead on the more than 1,000 other demonstrators who acted violently or were trespassing in the Capitol. The Justice Department’s sprawling investigation into the attack remains open, however, and Mr. Epps could still be indicted.

Yet for more than 18 months, Mr. Carlson insisted that the lack of charges against Mr. Epps could mean only one thing: that he was being protected because he was a secret government agent. There was “no rational explanation,” Mr. Carlson told his audience, why this “mysterious figure” who “helped stage-manage the insurrection” had not been charged.
[…]
Now lawyers representing Mr. Epps and his wife are proceeding with plans to sue Fox News for defamation. “We informed Fox in March that if they did not issue a formal on-air apology that we would pursue all available avenues to protect the Eppses’ rights,” said Michael Teter, a lawyer for Mr. Epps who sent the network a cease-and-desist letter asking for an on-air apology and a retraction. After Mr. Teter did not hear from Fox about his request, he began to prepare the suit. “That remains our intent.”

[…] But he continues to push the false notion that the Jan. 6 attack was staged by anti-Trump elements inside the government. On a podcast last week, Mr. Carlson claimed that the riot “was not an insurrection” and that the crowd that day was “filled with federal agents.”

First Amendment experts say Mr. Epps has a viable case for defamation — one reminiscent of the lawsuit the network recently settled with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million, a case centered on numerous examples of false statements made on Fox News programs over an extended period.
[…]
By design, defamation law tilts heavily in the news media’s favor, making it difficult to be found liable for defaming public figures — who are often targets of media reporting — unless there is proof that the defendants either knew what they said was false or acted with a reckless disregard for the truth. Mr. Epps would be able to argue that Mr. Carlson repeatedly uttered statements about him from October 2021 to March 2023 that were baseless, or easily explained or contradicted by the facts reported in numerous news reports.
[…]
“No case is easy,” [Rodney Smolla, the president of Vermont Law School and a defamation expert who consulted for Dominion during its case against Fox News] added, “but this one is certainly, in my view, viable.”
[…]
What Mr. Epps whispered to that man on the day of the attack has been answered three separate times: in an interview the F.B.I. conducted with the man Mr. Epps had talked to, Ryan Samsel; in Mr. Epps’s own interview with the authorities; and in a podcast interview with a co-defendant in Mr. Samsel’s case. All three said Mr. Epps had urged Mr. Samsel to calm down.
[…]
Mr. Carlson, in his legal defense, could point to inconsistencies in Mr. Samsel’s account. He could also note that Mr. Epps sent a text to a family member, well after the riot ended, saying he helped “orchestrate” the movements of people toward the Capitol.
[…]
“The question I would raise if I were Tucker Carlson’s lawyer,” said David A. Logan, a former dean of Roger Williams School of Law, “is should Epps be able to claim defamation when the people who think less well of him are criminals?”

“Courts have struggled with this exact question,” he added, pointing to hypotheticals like a man who sues over false allegations that he is gay or an anti-abortion activist who claims she was wrongly accused of having an abortion.

Mr. Carlson could also rely on the ambiguous and indirect language he sometimes used in describing Mr. Epps. For instance, he said at various points that he couldn’t be sure if Mr. Epps was really a double agent, acknowledging, “We don’t know anything about him.”

An indictment of Mr. Epps could also complicate his defamation case, by making any claim of reputational damage more difficult. “The centerpiece of a libel case is an alleged harm to reputation, so it for sure can become trickier to prove that you experienced a damages-incurring loss if your reputation is already poor because of true information,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a professor at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law. “But the questions are often complex.”

The Case That Could Be Fox’s Next Dominion [NYT]

…&…it doesn’t always help when what you want to talk about is stuff that makes sense…but what you’ve got is…people

Economists have an imaginary person they call a “representative agent,” who is about as realistic as the Easter bunny or the Abominable Snowman. The representative agent is supposed to stand in for all of us in a model of how the economy works: 335 million Americans, for example, boiled down to one. As originally conceived, the representative agent is fully rational and unemotional, forward-looking and with perfect information about all the relevant facts. Just like nobody you know.

For as long as economists have plugged representative agents into their models, which is more than 50 years, other economists — including some of the biggest names in the profession — have pointed out their lack of realism.

“It is clear that the ‘representative’ agent deserves a decent burial,” Alan Kirman, then of European University Institute in Florence, Italy, wrote in The Journal of Economic Perspectives in 1992.

…we come to bury caesar…not to praise him…but…brutus isn’t exactly the poster boy most of us might pick, either

“The central problems of finance — bankruptcy, debt and asymmetric information — simply cannot arise in a representative agent model,” Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia wrote in The Oxford Review of Economic Policy in 2018.

…perfection is unattainable & all…so it makes sense there’d be a problem with the best we can manage…but…if you know what you’re working with is causing issues…you learn from mistakes…how to make new & different ones

But something better is emerging now. It’s called HANK, for Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian. In a HANK model of the United States, there isn’t one representative agent. There are millions of agents, each with her or his own characteristics: rich or poor, borrower or lender and so on. That heterogeneity makes it easy to see the distributional effects of, say, an increase in government spending.

New Keynesianism, the NK part of the acronym, is the workhorse theory of modern economics. It assumes that people are basically rational and markets are basically efficient but leaves room for imperfections, such as “sticky” prices that don’t change immediately in response to shifts in supply or demand. Being closely tied to New Keynesianism gives HANK a good chance of broad acceptance in the profession.
[…]
“I’m actually a bit surprised that there hasn’t been more media coverage of this,” [Matthew Rognlie, an assistant professor at Northwestern] emailed me. “I suppose that in academia we always get over-excited about the latest developments, but I do think this one may prove to be quite consequential.”
[…]
Trying to deal with the so-called Lucas critique led economists to try to build macroeconomic models on so-called micro-foundations: how individuals behave in the microeconomic world of spending, saving, working and leisure. For tractability, the economists averaged out all people into a single, farsighted individual, our famous representative agent. The die was cast.

Heterogeneous agent models penetrated gradually. They were first used when economists wanted to look at the distributional effects of, say, a tax cut or an interest-rate increase. They started to be used tentatively in the 1990s for macroeconomic estimation. Early practitioners included Per Krusell of Stockholm University, S. Rao Aiyagari of the University of Rochester and Ayse Imrohoroglu, now at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business.
[…]
The acronym was coined by Moll himself along with two co-authors, Greg Kaplan and Giovanni Violante, in a 2018 paper in The American Economic Review, “Monetary Policy According to HANK.”

The newer theories line up better with actual economic outcomes than earlier ones did, Moll said. They’re also better connected to behavioral economics, which recognizes that people are impatient and use failure-prone rules of thumb to make decisions.

…best guesses…even by smart people…about approximations of reality…provide answers…which are definitely in line with the approximate part…but…may transition awkwardly where they meet reality

The bottom line is that fiscal policy is far more effective in generating growth in a HANK model than in a representative agent model. HANK models predicted the potency of the pandemic stimulus, which ended up contributing to today’s high inflation, Rognlie said. On the flip side, he said, a HANK model also correctly predicted that high energy prices would weaken Germany’s economy by suppressing consumers’ non-energy spending.

Rognlie has a new paper with Adrien Auclert and Ludwig Straub that uses a HANK model to show that no matter where excess savings start out in an economy, they eventually “trickle up” to the balance sheets of rich people.

HANK also gives more accurate results for monetary policy. In a pure representative agent model, debt isn’t really a thing: Some people borrow, others lend, but it ends up a wash. HANK shows that an interest-rate increase benefits lenders while hurting borrowers. And since borrowers are living more hand-to-mouth, they decrease their spending by more than lenders raise it.

…it’s…a young man’s game?

Two changes made HANK possible, Moll said. One is greater computing power. The other is academic training. “To really understand the models and program them up you probably need to have a Ph.D. from the last 20 years,” he said.

The ‘Representative Agent’ Is Always Rational. The Rest of Us Are Not. [NYT]

…speaking of the representative man-child & his toys…as a lover of irony there is something undeniable about the part where you can once again click through on a tweet without signing up

This is Whitekanda, an area was created by a race war, white fear, the prospect of an all-Black state, stealing land from indigenous people & one of the greatest real estate scams of all time.

It is also the least racist place in America

A thread https://t.co/ojDr6y4Vd8

— Michael Harriot (@michaelharriot) July 9, 2023

…but the current invocation of the pique eviscerating the loudest voice on the platform has it that…so as to…I dunno…say something clever about threads…

The mania over Threads, explained [WaPo]

…you don’t get the threads…not unless you do as you’re told…or…somebody does it for you

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1678167573332934656.html

…them’s the breaks

A decade ago, Twitter rose to prominence by casting itself as a “global town square,” a space where anyone could reach millions of people overnight. The platform was pivotal in facilitating large social movements, such as the Arab Spring protests in the Middle East and the Black Lives Matter protests over police violence. In a recent email to staff, Twitter’s new chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, repeated this characterization, calling the site “a global town square for communication.”

But Twitter no longer serves this function. Thanks to a string of disastrous missteps over the past year by new owner Elon Musk — punctuated by the decision last week to cap the number of posts users can view — Twitter is hemorrhaging users and relevance. While Meta’s new Threads app is making an impressive debut, most social media experts say TikTok reigns as the new global town square and has held that role for quite a while.

…hubris is a bitch…& emergent properties are a tricksy bunch to work with

“Twitter is definitely not anyone’s public square. Not anymore,” said Chris Messina, who on Thursday posted the hashtag #DeadTwitter on Threads. Twitter is “Elon Musk’s private playground where he’s about to charge everyone … for entry and access #DeadTwitter.”

…& it doesn’t help when you don’t get a choice about being served a lot of irritating yammering as the price of admission

Musk also flooded the “for you” timeline with his own tweets, driving away users who came to the service to follow friends and interests outside of the platform’s billionaire owner.

Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilderness. [WaPo]

Twitter’s biggest struggle is that it’s an arcane follow-based social network, meaning users must manually seek out other users to follow to receive content, and if a user has no followers, it’s very hard to be heard. Contrast that with an app like TikTok, which delivers content through a highly sophisticated algorithmic feed. This means that even a user with zero followers on TikTok can reach millions with their first video.

TikTok also allows users to consume a breathtaking amount of information jammed into each short video. “People on TikTok are absorbing so much more content than on Twitter,” said Daniel, the high school senior. “TikTok is really good at hitting you with multiple things you’re interested in.”

…some people, anyway…but…I don’t watch a ton of tik tok videos…& part of why is that to be honest my brain isn’t wired that way…I can eyeball no end of interesting stuff…but…absorb…not so much…it’s something about the pacing…I can plow through pages like nobody’s business…& feel like I gain traction with the contents well enough that at the end I have a grasp of something I could take out for a spin…but…I’d have to watch the equivalent A/V presentation enough times to be sick of it before I could replicate that effect in full…others…need something they can reach out & touch…& more of us are out of touch than not if you ask the younger generations

“Twitter is the place where us boomers talk about what the kids are up to on TikTok,” said Neeraj K. Agrawal, 34, director of communications at Coin Center, a cryptocurrency policy think tank, and a heavy Twitter user. “That role as a filter for the strangest and best of the internet has moved [from Twitter] over to TikTok. The mainstream audience and the rest of the world is getting that information from TikTok now.”
[…]
“You’ve got a whole new generation of news influencers who are being invited to the White House,” she said. “Biden certainly isn’t inviting Twitter influencers to the White House. I think it lends a degree of credibility to TikTok.”
[…]
Goodman says Musk’s chaotic changes have made Twitter unusable. “Since the Elon Musk takeover, I see all these terrible people in my feed,” he said. “The worst replies are now prioritized to the top.”

Meme accounts are also fleeing Twitter. The owner and administrator of @RightWingCope, a Twitter account that documents right-wing internet ephemera, who asked to remain anonymous to protect his identity, said, “The quality of discussions [on Twitter] has gotten worse, mainly because Twitter blue accounts are pinned to the top and spam is much worse on the site.”
[…]
As part of its role as the internet’s “global town square,” Twitter also served up pop culture and comedy. But the boom in hate speech and harassment since Musk took over has permanently altered the tone of Twitter, many users say. “Twitter does not have that sense of community and playfulness,” said Alex Falcone, a comedian in Los Angeles.

A series of disastrous missteps over the past year has robbed Twitter of its relevance [WaPo]

…arguably…what with the limited & self-selecting nature of the crowd in our modest little internet abode…these aren’t things anyone would need to delve too deeply into…emergence is most often a product of larger scale…but…with enough iterations even the simplest systems can get too complicated to be a science & not an art…it’s why people fond of talking about this stuff make such a big deal out of the game go…but they tend to deal in large scale modelling of multiple variable relationships…&…well…if the devil’s in the detail…that box is blackest around the weighting

Tesla owners are using steering-wheel weights to drive hands-free [WaPo]

…the perfect is the enemy of the good

Social media injunction unravels plans to protect 2024 elections [WaPo]

…or at any rate good enough for now

NATO’s annual summit could define a decade of Western security [WaPo]

…but if the enemy of my enemy is my friend

Declaring war on Mexican cartels is popular. That doesn’t mean it’s smart. [WaPo]

…which one of those is better friends with the wisdom of crowds?

How America can exploit China’s brain drain [WaPo]

…still…the sky hasn’t fallen on our heads

Apocalypse not now? AI’s benefits may yet outweigh its very real dangers [Guardian]

…but…talking about the weather isn’t as innocuous as it used to be

Science fiction has always dealt with worst-case scenarios when imagining our possible futures, and the climate has often formed the backdrop of the human struggles.

Some of the biggest names writing in the genre have tackled the climate crisis and its apocalyptic or dystopian consequences – Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Bruce Sterling’s Heavy Weather.
[…]
“My writing has always been drawn from my own worries and fears, so it was perhaps inevitable that I would choose to write about the climate emergency,” says Rachelle Atalla, a Glasgow-based Scottish-Egyptian author whose second novel, Thirsty Animals, came out this year.

“I have long been interested in water – all life [is] dependent upon it, yet we are also happy to exploit it as a commodity. Particularly in the UK, we behave with the assumption that there will always be an abundance of drinking water.”
[…]
Atalla says: “Writing Thirsty Animals was an opportunity to bring the realities of climate change and its displacement closer to home. I wanted to really interrogate human behaviour and ask: as our natural resources begin to dwindle, do we take a community-based approach in pursuit of active change? Or do we turn inwards and focus on our individualistic desire to survive?”

Climate change is becoming so prevalent in fiction that there have been attempts to label it – not entirely successfully – with its own sub-genre classification – cli-fi. But just as Atwood said of her MaddAddam trilogy, “It’s not climate change, it’s everything change”, so many of the current crop of science fiction authors feel you can’t actually write about the future without mentioning the threat to the planet.
[…]
“Climate breakdown is escalating so rapidly that events which 10 years ago might have seemed like the distant future are happening now. Everything is filtered through that lens – even when it’s not the main focus, climate anxiety is there in the periphery.”
[…]
“With the very real science and facts of climate change becoming ever more present and felt in our here and now, is it any wonder that more science fiction writers are using their stories to write cautionary tales of a future where humanity will be forced to adapt and change in order to survive?” says Julie Crisp, a literary agent working mainly with science fiction and fantasy.

Science fiction has always sounded a warning about human behaviour and its possible consequences, she adds. “It deals with a futuristic imagining based on the scientific, moral and social principles of the ‘now’ – and the author taking them a step further, into the ‘then’.

“Whether it’s the imaginings of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and a dystopian future cowed by mass surveillance and regimentation of its people or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, with its patriarchal and white supremacist control over women’s bodies – science fiction has shown readers what can happen should the worst actions of society follow an upward trajectory and become a dystopian style-future.”

She cites Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future and Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were as examples of authors using climate change “to paint a grim picture of where, should the inertia of humanity to change their destructive actions continue, it will lead to a future that none of us want”.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/09/climate-change-sci-fi-authors-global-crisis-atwood-mccarthy

…& nor are the prevailing conditions

Israeli protests reignite as PM pushes on with justice system overhaul [Guardian]

…& one man’s vital shield from brutal reality is another’s waste…while padding some other waistline entirely

UK ‘wastes billions’ on defence firms that give investors rich returns [Guardian]

…sometimes what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger

UK scientists could make poisonous grass pea a valuable food crop [Guardian]

…but it’s hard to feel that way about the proverbial thousand cuts

When we give children the [anxiety] label but no tools to challenge it, their worlds grow smaller. My life’s greatest moments involved facing my fears [Guardian]

…whatever we’re trying to do to stop the bleeding

‘Democracy is at risk’: inside the fight for supreme court reform [Guardian]

…& whatever we might be hemorrhaging

Chief justice John Roberts urged to testify on ethics scandals for ‘good of democracy’ [Guardian]

…I’m told it helps to apply pressure

Twitter faces legal challenge after failing to remove reported hate tweets [Guardian]

…but to be careful when cutting off the circulation lest you lose the limb you’re trying to save

Meet the DC thinktank giving big oil ‘the opportunity to say they’ve done something’ [Guardian]

…so…if we none of us get out of here alive…& one way or another…even if we do our best to learn from the mistakes of others how to make less of our own…something’s going to get its hooks into you…at least we can aim for a better class of those…some might say it’s a sea change…but when it comes to hook lines…that could be a category mistake

Nearly a decade before she died in 2021, at 69, the activist and poet bell hooks gave an extensive radio interview with the novelist Silas House. They discussed the themes of hooks’s expansive body of work, such as gender, race and the South, and hooks offered insights into her early life, her choices and her writing. This talk from 2012 is excerpted from “bell hooks: The Last Interview and Other Conversations” (Melville House) and has been edited for length and clarity.

…RIP to the lady of the lower case letters & higher learning…may she never be mistaken

…& I’ll try not to fuck up on the tunes?