阅读练习贴

Apolloemma

Making choice everyday, then I found I am more and more reluctant to do any choice.
Where Nokia Went Wrong
  





Nokia’s agreement on Tuesday to sell its handset business to Microsoft for $7.2 billion is something of a minor business coup for Nokia, since a year from now that business might well turn out to have been worth nothing. It also demonstrates just how far and fast Nokia has fallen in recent years. Not that long ago, it was the world’s dominant and pace-setting mobile-phone maker. Today, it has just three per cent of the global smartphone market, and its market cap is a fifth of what it was in 2007—even after rising more than thirty per cent on Tuesday.
What happened to Nokia is no secret: Apple and Android crushed it. But the reasons for that failure are a bit more mysterious. Historically, after all, Nokia had been a surprisingly adaptive company, moving in and out of many different businesses—paper, electricity, rubber galoshes. Recently, it successfully reinvented itself again. For years, the company had been a conglomerate, with a number of disparate businesses operating under the Nokia umbrella; in the early nineteen-nineties, anticipating the rise of cell phones, executives got rid of everything but the telecom business. Even more strikingly, Nokia was hardly a technological laggard—on the contrary, it came up with its first smartphone back in 1996, and built a prototype of a touch-screen, Internet-enabled phone at the end of the nineties. It also spent enormous amounts of money on research and development. What it was unable to do, though, was translate all that R. & D. spending into products that people actually wanted to buy.
One way to explain this is to point out that Nokia was an engineering company that needed more marketing savvy. But this isn’t quite right; in the early aughts, Nokia was acclaimed for its marketing, and was seen as the company that had best figured out how to turn mobile phones into fashion accessories. It’s more accurate to say that Nokia was, at its heart, a hardware company rather than a software company—that is, its engineers were expert at building physical devices, but not the programs that make those devices work. In the end, the company profoundly underestimated the importance of software, including the apps that run on smartphones, to the experience of using a phone. Nokia’s development process was long dominated by hardware engineers; software experts were marginalized. (Executives at Apple, in stark contrast, saw hardware and software as equally important parts of a whole; they encouraged employees to work in multidisciplinary teams to design products.)
It wasn’t just that Nokia failed to recognize the increasing importance of software, though. It also underestimated how important the transition to smartphones would be. And this was, in retrospect, a classic case of a company being enthralled (and, in a way, imprisoned) by its past success. Nokia was, after all, earning more than fifty per cent of all the profits in the mobile-phone industry in 2007, and most of those profits were not coming from smartphones. Diverting a lot of resources into a high-end, low-volume business (which is what the touch-screen smartphone business was in 2007) would have looked risky. In that sense, Nokia’s failure resulted at least in part from an institutional reluctance to transition into a new era.
And there was another mistake. Nokia overestimated the strength of its brand, and believed that even if it was late to the smartphone game it would be able to catch up quickly. Long after the iPhone’s release, in fact, Nokia continued to insist that its superior hardware designs would win over users. Even today, there are people who claim that if Nokia had stuck with its own operating systems, instead of embracing the Windows Phone in 2011, it could have succeeded. But even though the Windows Phone has been a flop, the truth is that, by 2010, Nokia had already introduced too many disappointing phones, and its operating system had already proven too buggy, clunky, and unintuitive to win consumers over. In 2008, Nokia was said to have one of the most valuable brands in the world. But it failed to recognize that brands today aren’t as resilient as they once were. The high-tech era has taught people to expect constant innovation; when companies fall behind, consumers are quick to punish them. Late and inadequate: for Nokia, it was a deadly combination.

===
Not very difficult for reading
Two failure for Nokia: just focusing on harrware; not participating in the industry transition of Smartphone. The big chanllenger for Nokia is Iphone and Android.
The class for me to learn is that: key point for a techonological company is not its brand, but its invotation.
By the way, the author seem not want to say that the failure of Nokia is that they spent too much energy and time on RD and lack marketing savvy.

Apolloemma

The Baby in the WellThe case against empathy.
                              by Paul Bloom                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

• 
  
  

                                                                                                         

Empathy is deaf to facts and figures; it’s engaged by the “identifiable victim effect.” Illustration by Harry Campbell.               

In 2008, Karina Encarnacion, an eight year-old girl from Missouri, wrote to President-elect Barack Obama with some advice about what kind of dog he should get for his daughters. She also suggested that he enforce recycling and ban unnecessary wars. Obama wrote to thank her, and offered some advice of his own: “If you don’t already know what it means, I want you to look up the word ‘empathy’ in the dictionary. I believe we don’t have enough empathy in our world today, and it is up to your generation to change that.”

This wasn’t the first time Obama had spoken up for empathy. Two years earlier, in a commencement address at Xavier University, he discussed the importance of being able “to see the world through the eyes of those who are different from us—the child who’s hungry, the steelworker who’s been laid off, the family who lost the entire life they built together when the storm came to town.” He went on, “When you think like this—when you choose to broaden your ambit of concern and empathize with the plight of others, whether they are close friends or distant strangers—it becomes harder not to act, harder not to help.”
The word “empathy”—a rendering of the German Einfühlung, “feeling into”—is only a century old, but people have been interested for a long time in the moral implications of feeling our way into the lives of others. In “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” (1759), Adam Smith observed that sensory experience alone could not spur us toward sympathetic engagement with others: “Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers.” For Smith, what made us moral beings was the imaginative capacity to “place ourselves in his situation . . . and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.”
In this sense, empathy is an instinctive mirroring of others’ experience—James Bond gets his testicles mashed in “Casino Royale,” and male moviegoers grimace and cross their legs. Smith talks of how “persons of delicate fibres” who notice a beggar’s sores and ulcers “are apt to feel an itching or uneasy sensation in the correspondent part of their own bodies.” There is now widespread support, in the social sciences, for what the psychologist C. Daniel Batson calls “the empathy-altruism hypothesis.” Batson has found that simply instructing his subjects to take another’s perspective made them more caring and more likely to help.
Empathy research is thriving these days, as cognitive neuroscience undergoes what some call an “affective revolution.” There is increasing focus on the emotions, especially those involved in moral thought and action. We’ve learned, for instance, that some of the same neural systems that are active when we are in pain become engaged when we observe the suffering of others. Other researchers are exploring how empathy emerges in chimpanzee and other primates, how it flowers in young children, and the sort of circumstances that trigger it.

This interest isn’t just theoretical. If we can figure out how empathy works, we might be able to produce more of it. Some individuals staunch their empathy through the deliberate endorsement of political or religious ideologies that promote cruelty toward their adversaries, while others are deficient because of bad genes, abusive parenting, brutal experience, or the usual unhappy goulash of all of the above. At an extreme lie the one per cent or so of people who are clinically described as psychopaths. A standard checklist for the condition includes “callousness; lack of empathy”; many other distinguishing psychopathic traits, like lack of guilt and pathological lying, surely stem from this fundamental deficit. Some blame the empathy-deficient for much of the suffering in the world. In “The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty” (Basic), Simon Baron-Cohen goes so far as to equate evil with “empathy erosion.”
In a thoughtful new book on bullying, “Sticks and Stones” (Random House), Emily Bazelon writes, “The scariest aspect of bullying is the utter lack of empathy”—a diagnosis that she applies not only to the bullies but also to those who do nothing to help the victims. Few of those involved in bullying, she cautions, will turn into full-blown psychopaths. Rather, the empathy gap is situational: bullies have come to see their victims as worthless; they have chosen to shut down their empathetic responses. But most will outgrow—and perhaps regret—their terrible behavior. “The key is to remember that almost everyone has the capacity for empathy and decency—and to tend that seed as best as we possibly can,” she maintains.
Two other recent books, “The Empathic Civilization” (Penguin), by Jeremy Rifkin, and “Humanity on a Tightrope” (Rowman & Littlefield), by Paul R. Ehrlich and Robert E. Ornstein, make the powerful argument that empathy has been the main driver of human progress, and that we need more of it if our species is to survive. Ehrlich and Ornstein want us “to emotionally join a global family.” Rifkin calls for us to make the leap to “global empathic consciousness.” He sees this as the last best hope for saving the world from environmental destruction, and concludes with the plaintive question “Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avoid planetary collapse?” These are sophisticated books, which provide extensive and accessible reviews of the scholarly literature on empathy. And, as befits the spirit of the times, they enthusiastically champion an increase in empathy as a cure for humanity’s ills.
This enthusiasm may be misplaced, however. Empathy has some unfortunate features—it is parochial, narrow-minded, and innumerate. We’re often at our best when we’re smart enough not to rely on it.

In 1949, Kathy Fiscus, a three-year-old girl, fell into a well in San Marino, California, and the entire nation was captivated by concern. Four decades later, America was transfixed by the plight of Jessica McClure—Baby Jessica—the eighteen-month-old who fell into a narrow well in Texas, in October, 1987, triggering a fifty-eight-hour rescue operation. “Everybody in America became godmothers and godfathers of Jessica while this was going on,” President Reagan remarked.

The immense power of empathy has been demonstrated again and again. It is why Americans were rivetted by the fate of Natalee Holloway, the teen-ager who went missing in Aruba, in 2005. It’s why, in the wake of widely reported tragedies and disasters—the tsunami of 2004, Hurricane Katrina the year after, or Sandy last year—people gave time, money, and even blood. It’s why, last December, when twenty children were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut, there was a widespread sense of grief, and an intense desire to help. Last month, of course, saw a similar outpouring of support for the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing.
Why do people respond to these misfortunes and not to others? The psychologist Paul Slovic points out that, when Holloway disappeared, the story of her plight took up far more television time than the concurrent genocide in Darfur. Each day, more than ten times the number of people who died in Hurricane Katrina die because of preventable diseases, and more than thirteen times as many perish from malnutrition.
There is, of course, the attention-getting power of new events. Just as we can come to ignore the hum of traffic, we become oblivious of problems that seem unrelenting, like the starvation of children in Africa—or homicide in the United States. In the past three decades, there were some sixty mass shootings, causing about five hundred deaths; that is, about one-tenth of one per cent of the homicides in America. But mass murders get splashed onto television screens, newspaper headlines, and the Web; the biggest ones settle into our collective memory—Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Sandy Hook. The 99.9 per cent of other homicides are, unless the victim is someone you’ve heard of, mere background noise.
The key to engaging empathy is what has been called “the identifiable victim effect.” As the economist Thomas Schelling, writing forty-five years ago, mordantly observed, “Let a six-year-old girl with brown hair need thousands of dollars for an operation that will prolong her life until Christmas, and the post office will be swamped with nickels and dimes to save her. But let it be reported that without a sales tax the hospital facilities of Massachusetts will deteriorate and cause a barely perceptible increase in preventable deaths—not many will drop a tear or reach for their checkbooks.”
You can see the effect in the lab. The psychologists Tehila Kogut and Ilana Ritov asked some subjects how much money they would give to help develop a drug that would save the life of one child, and asked others how much they would give to save eight children. The answers were about the same. But when Kogut and Ritov told a third group a child’s name and age, and showed her picture, the donations shot up—now there were far more to the one than to the eight.
The number of victims hardly matters—there is little psychological difference between hearing about the suffering of five thousand and that of five hundred thousand. Imagine reading that two thousand people just died in an earthquake in a remote country, and then discovering that the actual number of deaths was twenty thousand. Do you now feel ten times worse? To the extent that we can recognize the numbers as significant, it’s because of reason, not empathy.
In the broader context of humanitarianism, as critics like Linda Polman have pointed out, the empathetic reflex can lead us astray. When the perpetrators of violence profit from aid—as in the “taxes” that warlords often demand from international relief agencies—they are actually given an incentive to commit further atrocities. It is similar to the practice of some parents in India who mutilate their children at birth in order to make them more effective beggars. The children’s debilities tug at our hearts, but a more dispassionate analysis of the situation is necessary if we are going to do anything meaningful to prevent them.

A “politics of empathy” doesn’t provide much clarity in the public sphere, either. Typically, political disputes involve a disagreement over whom we should empathize with. Liberals argue for gun control, for example, by focussing on the victims of gun violence; conservatives point to the unarmed victims of crime, defenseless against the savagery of others. Liberals in favor of tightening federally enforced safety regulations invoke the employee struggling with work-related injuries; their conservative counterparts talk about the small businessman bankrupted by onerous requirements. So don’t suppose that if your ideological opponents could only ramp up their empathy they would think just like you.

On many issues, empathy can pull us in the wrong direction. The outrage that comes from adopting the perspective of a victim can drive an appetite for retribution. (Think of those statutes named for dead children: Megan’s Law, Jessica’s Law, Caylee’s Law.) But the appetite for retribution is typically indifferent to long-term consequences. In one study, conducted by Jonathan Baron and Ilana Ritov, people were asked how best to punish a company for producing a vaccine that caused the death of a child. Some were told that a higher fine would make the company work harder to manufacture a safer product; others were told that a higher fine would discourage the company from making the vaccine, and since there were no acceptable alternatives on the market the punishment would lead to more deaths. Most people didn’t care; they wanted the company fined heavily, whatever the consequence.
This dynamic regularly plays out in the realm of criminal justice. In 1987, Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who had been released on furlough from the Northeastern Correctional Center, in Massachusetts, raped a woman after beating and tying up her fiancé. The furlough program came to be seen as a humiliating mistake on the part of Governor Michael Dukakis, and was used against him by his opponents during his run for President, the following year. Yet the program may have reduced the likelihood of such incidents. In fact, a 1987 report found that the recidivism rate in Massachusetts dropped in the eleven years after the program was introduced, and that convicts who were furloughed before being released were less likely to go on to commit a crime than those who were not. The trouble is that you can’t point to individuals who weren’t raped, assaulted, or killed as a result of the program, just as you can’t point to a specific person whose life was spared because of vaccination.
There’s a larger pattern here. Sensible policies often have benefits that are merely statistical but victims who have names and stories. Consider global warming—what Rifkin calls the “escalating entropy bill that now threatens catastrophic climate change and our very existence.” As it happens, the limits of empathy are especially stark here. Opponents of restrictions on CO2 emissions are flush with identifiable victims—all those who will be harmed by increased costs, by business closures. The millions of people who at some unspecified future date will suffer the consequences of our current inaction are, by contrast, pale statistical abstractions.
The government’s failure to enact prudent long-term policies is often attributed to the incentive system of democratic politics (which favors short-term fixes), and to the powerful influence of money. But the politics of empathy is also to blame. Too often, our concern for specific individuals today means neglecting crises that will harm countless people in the future.

Moral judgment entails more than putting oneself in another’s shoes. As the philosopher Jesse Prinz points out, some acts that we easily recognize as wrong, such as shoplifting or tax evasion, have no identifiable victim. And plenty of good deeds—disciplining a child for dangerous behavior, enforcing a fair and impartial procedure for determining who should get an organ transplant, despite the suffering of those low on the list—require us to put our empathy to one side. Eight deaths are worse than one, even if you know the name of the one; humanitarian aid can, if poorly targeted, be counterproductive; the threat posed by climate change warrants the sacrifices entailed by efforts to ameliorate it. “The decline of violence may owe something to an expansion of empathy,” the psychologist Steven Pinker has written, “but it also owes much to harder-boiled faculties like prudence, reason, fairness, self-control, norms and taboos, and conceptions of human rights.” A reasoned, even counter-empathetic analysis of moral obligation and likely consequences is a better guide to planning for the future than the gut wrench of empathy.

Rifkin and others have argued, plausibly, that moral progress involves expanding our concern from the family and the tribe to humanity as a whole. Yet it is impossible to empathize with seven billion strangers, or to feel toward someone you’ve never met the degree of concern you feel for a child, a friend, or a lover. Our best hope for the future is not to get people to think of all humanity as family—that’s impossible. It lies, instead, in an appreciation of the fact that, even if we don’t empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love.
That’s not a call for a world without empathy. A race of psychopaths might well be smart enough to invent the principles of solidarity and fairness. (Research suggests that criminal psychopaths are adept at making moral judgments.) The problem with those who are devoid of empathy is that, although they may recognize what’s right, they have no motivation to act upon it. Some spark of fellow-feeling is needed to convert intelligence into action.
But a spark may be all that’s needed. Putting aside the extremes of psychopathy, there is no evidence to suggest that the less empathetic are morally worse than the rest of us. Simon Baron-Cohen observes that some people with autism and Asperger’s syndrome, though typically empathy-deficient, are highly moral, owing to a strong desire to follow rules and insure that they are applied fairly.
Where empathy really does matter is in our personal relationships. Nobody wants to live like Thomas Gradgrind—Charles Dickens’s caricature utilitarian, who treats all interactions, including those with his children, in explicitly economic terms. Empathy is what makes us human; it’s what makes us both subjects and objects of moral concern. Empathy betrays us only when we take it as a moral guide.

Newtown, in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, was inundated with so much charity that it became a burden. More than eight hundred volunteers were recruited to deal with the gifts that were sent to the city—all of which kept arriving despite earnest pleas from Newtown officials that charity be directed elsewhere. A vast warehouse was crammed with plush toys the townspeople had no use for; millions of dollars rolled in to this relatively affluent community. We felt their pain; we wanted to help. Meanwhile—just to begin a very long list—almost twenty million American children go to bed hungry each night, and the federal food-stamp program is facing budget cuts of almost twenty per cent. Many of the same kindly strangers who paid for Baby Jessica’s medical needs support cuts to state Medicaid programs—cuts that will affect millions. Perhaps fifty million Americans will be stricken next year by food-borne illness, yet budget reductions mean that the F.D.A. will be conducting two thousand fewer safety inspections. Even more invisibly, next year the average American will release about twenty metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and many in Congress seek to loosen restrictions on greenhouse gases even further.

Such are the paradoxes of empathy. The power of this faculty has something to do with its ability to bring our moral concern into a laser pointer of focussed attention. If a planet of billions is to survive, however, we’ll need to take into consideration the welfare of people not yet harmed—and, even more, of people not yet born. They have no names, faces, or stories to grip our conscience or stir our fellow-feeling. Their prospects call, rather, for deliberation and calculation. Our hearts will always go out to the baby in the well; it’s a measure of our humanity. But empathy will have to yield to reason if humanity is to have a future. ♦

Apolloemma

Sanity on Pot and Stop-and-Frisk
Posted by Jeffrey Toobin
  





Two of the big legal stories of the past few weeks seem, on the surface, to have almost nothing to do with one another. Attorney General Eric Holder gave a tentative acquiescence to the marijuana-legalization programs in the states of Colorado and Washington. A federal judge declared that the stop-and-frisk practices of the New York Police Department violated the Constitution.  
In truth, the two decisions are closely related and suggest a welcome injection of sanity into contemporary American law enforcement.
Holder acted in response to the legal uncertainty created by two voter initiatives on marijuana, which made pot legal under state law but left its possession and distribution illegal under federal law. Holder came up with a reasonable compromise, which amounted to putting Washington and Colorado on a kind of probation. Holder said, in effect, that as long as the states kept pot away from kids, policed drugged driving, and kept the distribution away from narcotics cartels, the feds would leave the states alone.
Holder’s decision, and the reaction to it, suggests the changing political reality around marijuana. Even many tough-on-crime conservatives have come to recognize the futility (and vast expense) of the drug war. Putting people in prison for possession, or even for distribution, of marijuana seems increasingly like a form of cruel madness. Holder is the most politically controversial member of President Obama’s Cabinet, the frequent target of Republican attacks in Congress, and yet his decision on pot was met with silence. (Mostly.) If the Washington and Colorado experiments proceed successfully, it’s a certainty that other states will follow. And Holder’s decision suggests, too, that the federal government will continue to back away from bringing marijuana cases.
This is where the stop-and-frisk connection comes in. Judge Shira Scheindlin’s exhaustive opinion concluded that the N.Y.P.D. had engaged in an unconstitutional dragnet that subjected far too many innocent people to scrutiny.  (During the stop-and-frisk trial, in May, I profiled Judge Scheindlin in the magazine.) The stops were designed principally to locate weapons, but in more than ninety-eight per cent of the 2.3 million frisks, no weapon was found. Of the larger number of 4.4 million stops, only six per cent resulted in an arrest, and six per cent resulted in a summons. (Not all stops led to frisks, thus the difference in the numbers.) The remaining stops resulted in no further law-enforcement action at all.
Most importantly, the judge found that the police targeted minorities with its stop-and-frisk tactics. In fifty-two per cent of the 4.4 million stops, the person stopped was black, in thirty-one percent the person was Hispanic, and in ten per cent the person was white. (In 2010, New York City’s resident population was roughly twenty-three per cent black, twenty-nine per cent Hispanic, and thirty-three per cent white.) In all, Judge Scheindlin concluded, “these results show that blacks are likely targeted for stops based on a lesser degree of objectively founded suspicion than whites.”
Scheindlin herself drew the connection between stop-and-frisk and marijuana arrests. As she noted, “the most common arrest after a stop is for marijuana possession.” And this is where the two stories intersect, or rather collide.
To put the matter simply, blacks are at far greater risk of arrest for marijuana than whites are. This means that a black teen-ager in Brownsville, for example, is a great deal more likely than a white teen-ager in Park Slope to embark on adulthood with the added disadvantage of a drug record, even if their experiences with marijuana are exactly the same. Black folks who smoke on the street risk arrest; white yuppies who relax with a joint after work do not. Indeed, a recent federal study showed that blacks were nearly four times as likely as whites to be arrested on charges of marijuana possession in 2010, even though the two groups use the drug at similar rates. This study is essentially the Scheindlin decision on a national scale. It showed that the rate of marijuana arrests had actually increased since Obama became President.
But Holder’s decision suggests (though it does not guarantee) that marijuana arrests will be heading downward. To the extent that they do, that will be a step forward for racial equality. Ending discriminatory enforcement—which is what happened in New York and around the country—is a positive step for everyone.
The drug war is sometimes portrayed as irrational, but it is, in fact, irrational in a selective way—one targeted at blacks and other minorities. The decisions by Holder and Scheindlin point the war, and the country, back in a direction where law enforcement will spend more time chasing the right people for the right reasons.
Photograph by Justin Sullivan/Getty.

Stop-and-Frisk Campaign: About the IssueThe NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practices raise serious concerns over racial profiling, illegal stops and privacy rights. The Department’s own reports on its stop-and-frisk activity confirm what many people in communities of color across the city have long known: The police are stopping hundreds of thousands of law abiding New Yorkers every year, and the vast majority are black and Latino.
An analysis by the NYCLU revealed that innocent New Yorkers have been subjected to police stops and street interrogations more than 4 million times since 2002, and that black and Latino communities continue to be the overwhelming target of these tactics. Nearly nine out of 10 stopped-and-frisked New Yorkers have been completely innocent, according to the NYPD’s own reports.

========
The decisions by holder and S piont the war, and the country, back in the direction where law enforcement will spend more time chasing the right people for the right reasons.

Apolloemma

After reading some articles in Newyorker, I think I was lost in the hot political issues. There are some things happened in this world and I can not know all of them, especially I think i can not confront the cruel things such as murders happened in Syria. Maybe, I think it is time to read some books to tell me how to understand or bear these tragedies, or one framwork to help me to understand them. So, I decide I will not read Newyorker and instreadly I plan to read some books and make some notes of them here.

1. Bentham's main idea is simply stated and intuitively appealing: the hightest principle of morally is to maximize happiness, the overall balance of pleasure over pain.
2. Bentham's argument from the principle that we should maximize utility takes the form of a bold assertion: there are no possible grounds for rejecting it. Every Moral argument, he claims, must implicitly draw on the idea of maximizing happiness. People may say they believe in certain absolute categorical duties or rights. But they would have no possible basis for defending these duties or rights unless they believed that repecting them would maximize human happiness, at least in the long run.
3.One was the Panopticon, a prison with a central inspection tower that would eable the supervisor to observe the inmates without their seeing him. He suggested that the Panopticon be run by a private contractor(ideally himself), who would manage the prison in exchange for the profits to be made from the labor of the convicts, who would work 16 hours perday. Although Bentham's plan was untilmately rejected, it was arguably ahead of time. Recent years have seen a revival, in the United States and Britain, of the idea of outsourcing prisons to private companies.
我的天，这事要是在中国提起的话，这些深信市场的人一定举双手双脚赞成的。而且会说市场是资源配置最有效的方式。市场在他们眼里成了能治百病的灵丹妙药了。

Apolloemma

Damn it! When you decide to stop one thing and begain to do another thing, this thing will always tell you that you are more worth to do this thing. Just stop of one day, Newyorker update its new version. Does it oppose me and destroy my plan intentionally?

A Bully Does His Research

Posted by Jesse Eisenberg

  

Well, well, well, if it isn’t Little Tommy. Gimme your lunch money, dweeb! Hand it over! What? Are you scared to give me your money? Are you worried about your family’s financial situation now that your parents are separated? Well, boo-hoo-hoo! You probably think it’s your fault, don’t you? And even though Mommy told you that it had nothing to do with you, that you didn’t make Daddy fall in love with his hygienist and run away to that ashram in Oregon, it still feels unsettling. You lie awake telling yourself, “If I had just loved them more, if I had just gotten better grades or was nicer to Grandma when she was in the hospital after her stroke, they would still be together.” And now you have to give me the money your mother gives you because she can’t pack a bag lunch since her insomnia and recent dependence on Ambien makes her too groggy in the morning. Well, cry me a river!
Well, well, well, if it isn’t Mr. Sellowitz, the science teacher, catching me in the act of stealing Little Tommy’s lunch money. Well, Smell-owitz, smell this: I’m not Claude Monet! Yeah, that’s right. I know you’re threatened by me, but unconsciously associating me with Monet’s not gonna help. Yeah, I know you wanted to go to RISD since you were my age, but you couldn’t get in, and now you’re stuck teaching sixth-grade science. Well, boo-hoo-hoo! You probably thought you were the future of impressionistic painting, doing your high-school thesis on a postmodern take on Monet’s “Water Lilies,” with real lilies mounted in a 3-D diorama inside a tank of water. Well, guess what? It wasn’t good enough for RISD, and it’s certainly not good enough for your stepfather, Aaron Segura, the beloved art critic who called the lilies diorama “hackneyed and juvenile.” Sorry, teach!
Well, well, well, if it isn’t Principal O’Malley, here to suspend me for stealing Little Tommy’s lunch money and talking back to Mr. Sellowitz. I bet it feels good punishing me, right, O’Malley? Lording your little power over an adolescent bully? Makes you feel big and strong, doesn’t it? Especially since I have such a nice head of hair and you started experiencing rapid male pattern baldness when you were only sixteen years old. Well, boo-hoo-hoo! You tried everything, didn’t you? First the natural remedies because you were too embarrassed to tell your doctor that you were going bald and couldn’t afford a prescription for anything that would actually work. So you tried eating sardines and massaging your scalp with mayonnaise every day for a year in the faint hope that it would help. And then, by the time you could afford Propecia, it was too late because your hair had already receded and Propecia has little success of actually re-growing hairs from dead follicles, especially in the temple-lobe region, where you were most severely affected. Suck it!
Well, well, well, if it isn’t my father, here to pick me up from school after I was suspended for stealing Little Tommy’s lunch money, talking back to Mr. Sellowitz, and showing Principal O’Malley that his need for power is rooted in unresolved trauma relating to his early male pattern baldness. Thanks for the ride home, Pops! Is it nice to pick me up in the middle of the day, or does it highlight the fact that Mom’s the one with the real job? Does it re-confirm, in some unconscious or even conscious way, that you’ve lost all sense of pride and masculinity? Did it initially seem interesting to have Mom keep her job at the law firm while you stayed home to raise us kids? Did you brag to your friends that you were proud to be “eschewing gender norms”? Well, boo-hoo-hoo! I bet you felt a burning desire to go out into the world and get even the most menial job just to feel like a person again once you realized the novel you thought you’d write with your new free time wasn’t ever going to materialize and you’d be stuck walking around the house in dirty sweatpants, looking at the clock, and pathetically waiting for the woman you used to love to bring home the bacon. Psych!
Well, well, well, if it isn’t the town bully, grounded in his bedroom, looking in the mirror and questioning his behavior after stealing Little Tommy’s lunch money, talking back to Mr. Sellowitz, revealing Principal O’Malley’s inner demons, and emasculating his father. So, has it really come to this? A clichéd moment of self-reflection from the hardened aggressor? Well, boo-hoo-hoo! You probably think that endlessly harassing people with your well-detailed and overly analytical personal affronts will make you feel better? You probably think you can keep everyone at a safe emotional distance if you attack them with your incisive and discerning perceptions? You probably think that if no one can get close to you, and if you remain hardened against the world, you’ll never get hurt? That if no one likes you, you could remain in that safe little bubble? Bite me!

====
读不懂。

Apolloemma

The President and the Pipeline
The campaign to make the Keystone XL The test of Obama’s resolve on climate change.
by Ryan Lizza

                                                                                                         

After meeting with Obama, one activist felt challenged to make the case “why this pipeline is not in our country’s best interest.” Illustration by Paul Rogers.

                           
On the day of his second Inauguration, in January, Barack Obama delivered an address of unabashed liberal ambition and promise. As recently as early April, before the realities of the world and the House of Representatives made themselves painfully evident, the President retained the confidence of a leader on the brink of enormous achievements. It seemed possible, even probable, that he would win modest gun-control legislation, an immigration-reform law, and the elusive grand bargain with Republicans to resolve the serial crises over the federal budget. And he seemed determined to take on even the most complicated and ominous problem of all: climate change. The President, who had a mixed environmental record after his first term, vowed that he would commit his Administration to combatting global warming, saying that “failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.”


The President flew to San Francisco on April 3rd for a series of fund-raisers. He stopped in first at a cocktail reception hosted by Tom Steyer, a fifty-six-year-old billionaire, former hedge-fund manager, and major donor to the Democratic Party. Steyer lives in the city’s Sea Cliff neighborhood, in a house overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. As the President’s motorcade headed to the party, several hundred activists were assembling along the route to his second event—a dinner hosted by Ann and Gordon Getty, in Pacific Heights, on a street known as Billionaires’ Row. The protesters held banners that represented various causes, but most of them held professionally printed two-toned blue signs that said, “STOP THE KEYSTONE XL PIPELINE.” The “o” in “Keystone” replicated the Obama campaign logo.
The environmental movement was testing Obama. Would he stand by his own Inaugural Address? During the past two years, environmentalists have coalesced around opposition to the seventeen-hundred-mile Keystone pipeline, which would carry oil from northern Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf of Mexico. Because the project crosses an international border, it requires the approval of the State Department and the President; a decision is expected in the coming months. Supporters of Keystone consider it essential to reducing the United States’ reliance on oil from the Middle East and unstable countries like Venezuela; its critics view it as Obama’s best chance to make a clear stand against one of the dirtiest fossil fuels contributing to climate change. “What do we want from our Pre-si-dent?” the protesters yelled. “No pipeline for the one per cent!” One marcher led the crowd in a call and response: “When I say ‘pipeline,’ you say ‘kill’! Pipeline! Kill!”
At the reception in Sea Cliff, Steyer, an ardent environmentalist, was no less relentless with his guest from Washington, pressing Obama on the issue of the pipeline. In 2004, Steyer raised significant funds for John Kerry, and in 2008 for Hillary Clinton. In 2010 and 2012, he wrote large checks for statewide ballot initiatives in California that addressed environmental concerns. Last fall, he announced that he was stepping down as head of his investment firm, Farallon Capital Management, to devote himself full time to politics, especially to the issue of climate change. He has spent generously to boost pro-green candidates in the Massachusetts Senate race and the Virginia governor’s race. This month, he is appearing in a series of ninety-second, self-financed television ads in which he argues against Keystone. In October, he is launching a major bipartisan initiative on climate change with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson.

Steyer, hoping for greater political influence, also has flirted with the idea of buying the Los Angeles Times, and is considering running for office in California. His brother Jim is a law professor and the founder and C.E.O. of Common Sense Media, which rates movies, books, apps, and video games to help parents find age-appropriate material for their kids. Jim Steyer told me that a friend had asked him if he and Tom were aspiring to be the Koch brothers of the left. “Yeah, I like that!” Jim replied. Tom dismissed the analogy. “I completely disagree, because what they’re doing is standing up for ideas that they profit from,” he said of the Kochs. “We think we’re representing the vast bulk of citizens of the United States. We’re not representing our pockets.” Bill McKibben, the environmental writer and advocate, who has met extensively with Steyer to discuss the strategy against Keystone, said, “After years of watching rich people manipulate and wreck our political system for selfish personal interests, it’s great to watch a rich person use his money and his talents in the public interest.”
Steyer is, at first glance, an unlikely leader of the environmental movement. He is rangy and square-jawed, and he has exquisite establishmentarian credentials, to say nothing of a vast pile of money. He honed his raffish sense of humor at Phillips Exeter Academy, and went on to get degrees from Yale and Stanford business school. Before starting his own fund, he worked at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. According to a Forbes estimate, Steyer’s net worth is $1.4 billion, although one of his aides says, “The general assumption is it’s a lot more than that.”
Steyer’s goal, at his fund-raiser for Obama, was not so much to berate the President, he said, as to “do the old F.D.R. thing,” showing Obama that the green movement was growing, and that supporting its goals was good politics. President Roosevelt is said to have once told labor leaders who were asking him to support major reforms, “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.” The story may be apocryphal, but Obama sometimes recounts it as a way of explaining to liberals that they need to build popular movements for their policies. When California Representative Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in the House, asked Steyer to hold the fund-raiser, to help Democrats running for Congress in 2014, he agreed, with one proviso: he would tell potential guests that they could lobby the President about the folly of approving Keystone.
Steyer’s pitch to the donors was simple: “This is the best deal I’m ever going to give you. You should want to give this money, period, even if you never got anything. You can go and speak to the highest people in the Democratic congressional leadership. And we’re throwing in the President of the United States as a gimme. So you should be begging me to come.” To insure that the event left an impression on Obama, Steyer invited fifteen top donors to join him for an intimate conversation with the President before the reception for a hundred. Jim Steyer said, “Tom really hammered Obama on the pipeline.”
Obama listened politely to Steyer, his wife, Kat Taylor, and their guests, then told them that climate change was one of many big issues he intended to address before he left office. “He was extremely impressive in terms of understanding the issue,” Steyer told me. “But he was saying, ‘I need to put this in the context of a whole program that I’m trying to get to. This isn’t the only thing I care about.’ ” Taylor said, “We didn’t get the answers we wanted.” At the larger reception, Obama joked about how the Republican Party’s miserable showing with Latinos in the 2012 election had been “clarifying” and said that passing immigration reform was a real possibility in the next few months.
On the issue of climate change, he was far more pessimistic. He reminded his audience that many Americans don’t share the views or the culture of Steyer’s guests. “The politics of this are tough,” he said. “Because if you haven’t seen a raise in a decade; if your house is still twenty-five thousand, thirty thousand dollars under water; if you’re just happy that you’ve still got that factory job that is powered by cheap energy; if every time you go to fill up your old car because you can’t afford to buy a new one, and you certainly can’t afford to buy a Prius, you’re spending forty bucks that you don’t have, which means that you may not be able to save for retirement.” He added, “You may be concerned about the temperature of the planet, but it’s probably not rising to your No. 1 concern.” To some in the room, it seemed that the President was speaking for himself. He never mentioned Keystone. “The clear takeaway for Tom was that the President issued us a challenge,” one of Steyer’s political aides said. “Go out there and make the public-policy case as to why this pipeline is not in our country’s best interest.”

One afternoon in early August, I met Steyer for lunch at a Greek restaurant in San Francisco’s financial district. Steyer’s voice turned grave when he talked about his embrace of climate change as a political issue.

“In every generation, there’s an overwhelming issue that people may not recognize at the time, but that becomes the issue that is the measure of what you did,” he said. “In World War Two, if you look back, everybody was measured by what they said in the thirties and what they did in the forties. Charles Lindbergh was the biggest hero in the United States of America, and he went wrong on the biggest issue of the day, and that was the end of him. Look back to where people came out on civil rights in the fifties and sixties: maybe you were right about economic policy then, but, if you blew it on the big issue, then that’s the measure.” Climate change, Steyer insisted, “is the issue we’ll get measured by as a country and a generation. If we blow this, it will be because we were very focussed on the short term, on our pocketbooks, and we had no broader sense of what we were trying to do and what we were trying to pass on.”
According to Steyer, the opposition to Keystone emerged from the President’s failed efforts to tackle climate change early in his Administration. Obama had some limited successes. In 2009, in one of his first acts in office, he ordered the Department of Transportation to implement higher fuel-efficiency standards for cars; in 2012, the rules were finalized, and they are his single most significant climate-change policy.
The Environmental Protection Agency, led by Lisa Jackson, a chemical engineer, also issued a stringent rule on mercury emissions, forcing some coal plants, one of the largest sources of carbon emissions, to close down or switch to natural gas, which releases about half the carbon content of coal when burned. But Obama comes from Illinois, a coal state, and often has campaigned as a friend of the coal industry. As President, he didn’t confront the fossil-fuel industry in the way that many environmentalists and some advisers had hoped. “He’s been oil- and gas-friendly,” John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff and an adviser to the Obama White House, said.
In December, 2009, Obama left an international climate summit in Copenhagen without a binding agreement to deal with global emissions or even a deadline to reach one. In April, 2010, after BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, spilling some two hundred million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, a debate ensued within the Administration. The E.P.A and other agencies wanted to use the event to vilify BP and drive an environmental agenda that would take on the fossil-fuel industry. They found little support at the White House, where Obama’s senior staff believed that such an approach was either wrong on the merits or politically dangerous.
“We were told to stand down,” a former senior Administration official who argued for taking a more confrontational approach said. During the cleanup, the Administration focussed on working constructively with BP while pursuing an ambitious climate bill that would have effectively put a price on carbon emissions, the starting point for moving away from fossil fuels. The bill passed the House in 2009, but the following summer, with Democrats from coal states opposing it and the White House unable to find enough votes to overcome a filibuster, it died in the Senate. In November, Republicans won back the House of Representatives, eliminating the prospects for any climate-change initiative. The incoming class of Tea Partiers included a number of climate-change deniers, and Obama abandoned serious work on the issue.
“I think that in the first term he was hiding his light under a bushel,” Steyer said. “Barack did a good job on the regulatory side, but he made the decision that it was going to be somewhere between extremely unlikely and impossible to get a big energy bill. He obviously didn’t make it his top priority.”
Opposing Keystone is just one item in Steyer’s new portfolio of political interests. After lunch, we headed to his offices at Next Generation, part of his growing network of energy and climate organizations, which include a political arm, a policy think tank, three clean-energy investment funds, and two research centers that he has financed at Stanford University. Steyer’s top policy adviser on climate is Kate Gordon, who previously worked at the Center for American Progress, an influential liberal think tank in Washington. After the summer of 2010, she said, the environmental movement, which had been unusually united in support of Obama’s climate bill, fractured. “Everything crashed and burned, and immediately all those groups retreated to their corners,” Gordon said. As Obama grappled with the Republican ascendancy in Congress, he dropped from his agenda any mention of climate change. Podesta, who is now an adviser to Steyer, said that Keystone filled the policy vacuum left by the President’s silence: “People were beginning to doubt the President’s commitment.” Keystone “became the test of the question: Are we going to do anything long term about climate change?, as he had promised in the 2008 election.”
Gordon told me that until recently she thought that Obama was likely to approve the pipeline and that it was not wise for the movement to stress the issue. “I thought that it would be putting all of our eggs in one basket,” she said. “And, to continue with the egg metaphor, if we lost it would be a major loss and we’d have a lot of egg on our face.” She did see the benefits of the campaign, however: “The goal is as much about organizing young people around a thing. But you have to have a thing. You can’t organize people around a tipping point on climate change.”

Canada has the third-largest reserve of oil in the world, behind Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, and the United States imports more oil from Canada than any other country does. Ninety-nine per cent of the oil that Canadians export—roughly 2.7 million barrels a day—comes here to be refined into petroleum products, which are sold domestically and abroad. The overwhelming majority of Canada’s reserves are in the form of bitumen, a viscous oil, attached to a mixture of sand, water, and clay, that is found under pristine boreal forests across fifty-four thousand square miles in northern Alberta.

It’s the most controversial oil deposit in the world. Oil sand has the texture of soft asphalt; twenty per cent of it lies close to the surface, and the area is effectively strip-mined. The bitumen-rich sand is removed, mixed with water into a slurry, and spun in centrifuges until the oil is separated, leaving behind vast black tailings ponds that are hazardous to wildlife. The mining operations sprawl ruinously for miles. The remaining eighty per cent of the oil sands lie hundreds of feet down beneath a layer of hard rock. Steam is injected deep belowground until the oil naturally separates and is drawn out. The extra energy required to extract the oil from the sand makes it a more carbon-intensive fossil fuel—averaging seventeen per cent more, according to the State Department—than conventional oil. Even the name of the oil fields of Alberta is contested. Most industry and government sources use the term “oil sands”; environmentalists and other opponents prefer “tar sands.”
The oil sands also are the only major reserve of crude in the world that is completely landlocked. Canadian oil companies, with tacit support from the U.S., have long sought to connect the facilities in Alberta to the Gulf Coast, the site of several large refineries, such as that of the oil company Valero, in Port Arthur, Texas, which are designed to handle heavy crude oil. The industry argues that although rail and other pipeline projects hold some potential, the Keystone pipeline is the simplest, most cost-effective, and most direct way to get Canadian oil to market.
Keystone is actually the name for a system of pipelines. An existing line runs east from Alberta and then cuts south through the Dakotas and Nebraska, where it divides in two. One leg turns east and terminates at refineries in Illinois. The other leg runs south to Cushing, Oklahoma, a crucial oil-market hub. Much of the oil that the U.S. imports from Canada already passes through these pipelines. But the major controversy is over the Keystone XL, a proposed “bullet” pipeline connecting Alberta to Nebraska and a new southern leg that runs from Cushing to the Gulf. The southern project didn’t require Presidential approval and is nearing completion, despite some local efforts to stop it. Keystone XL would increase Canada’s oil exports to the U.S. by as much as eight hundred and thirty thousand barrels a day, and, environmentalists argue, it would increase the speed at which the oil sands are exploited.
“The pipeline would completely change the rate at which the oil comes out of the ground,” Steyer said. “It would enable a much faster development, three times as fast. This is the size of Florida. . . . This is going to go on for decades. It’s not like we’re enabling a Shell station to be open after midnight.”
Anti-Keystone activists believe that, if they can prevent Canadian crude from reaching Texas, they can dramatically slow the development of the oil sands. The industry concedes the point. In February, a pro-oil Canadian think tank issued a report called “Pipe or Perish: Saving an Oil Industry at Risk.” It noted that without Keystone XL the amount of oil produced in northern Alberta, which is projected to double by 2030, will soon outpace the industry’s ability to export it: “If this happens, investment and expansion will grind to a halt.”

The construction of Keystone XL seemed like a foregone conclusion until the spring of 2011, when the climate scientist James Hansen posted an article online. The title of his post, which was really a short note to other climate researchers and activists, was “Silence Is Deadly.” The message was alarming: “The U.S. Department of State seems likely to approve a huge pipeline to carry tar sands oil (about 830,000 barrels per day) to Texas refineries unless sufficient objections are raised.” Hansen argued that catastrophic climate change could be averted if coal was phased out in the next few decades, even if known deposits of conventional oil continued to be exploited. But, as the easily accessible deposits of oil have diminished, industry has focussed increasingly on unconventional deposits, like the oil sands.

“Phase-out of emissions from coal is itself an enormous challenge,” Hansen wrote. “However, if the tar sands are thrown into the mix, it is essentially game over.” If the carbon locked underground in Alberta is exploited, he insisted, there is no chance of preventing runaway global warming.
One of Hansen’s readers was Bill McKibben, a former staff writer at The New Yorker, who first started writing about climate change in the nineteen-eighties; he now runs an advocacy group called 350.org. (The name is a nod to Hansen’s calculation that once the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide exceeds three hundred and fifty parts per million, climate change could become uncontainable.) Like many climate-change activists, McKibben, after Obama’s legislative failure, was struggling to bring focus to the movement. He became seized by the pipeline issue. “This is like a Rube Goldberg machine producing global warming and other environmental catastrophes,” he told me. “You couldn’t figure out a grosser way to wreck the planet than what they’re doing. If we’re going to do anything about global warming, it’s the poster child for the kind of stuff that’s going to have to stay in the ground.”
In June, 2011, McKibben and several fellow-activists, including Hansen, the poet Wendell Berry, and the actor Danny Glover, circulated a letter urging people to join a protest against the pipeline, to take place in Washington that August. Over two weeks, McKibben and twelve hundred and fifty-two others were arrested in a civil-disobedience demonstration outside the White House gates. (Most were arrested for “failure to obey a lawful order,” after police asked them to move.) McKibben spent three days in a D.C. jail. He helped to persuade ten large environmental groups, ranging from Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace to the Environmental Defense Fund and the League of Conservation Voters, to write a joint letter to Obama opposing Keystone and supporting the demonstration. Later, the Sierra Club, which has always kept its distance from environmental radicalism, made an exception to its hundred-and-twenty-year-old tradition of using only “lawful means” to protect the environment, in order to allow its leadership to take part in future actions. McKibben had successfully made Keystone the most prominent environmental cause in America.
That fall, McKibben and some of his colleagues sat down at a computer in his office at Middlebury College, and examined Google Earth images of downtown Washington. For the next action, he wanted to build a human chain around the White House. The route was about a mile and a half long; he figured that he would need three thousand people. The movement was growing, especially on college campuses. In November, some fifteen thousand people showed up for the demonstration, which they called a “solidarity hug.” Many carried signs that quoted Obama’s statements from the 2008 campaign on climate change and his commitment to reduce the country’s dependence on fossil fuels. “We want him to live up to what he said he was going to do,” McKibben said.
The anti-Keystone movement had seemed like a fringe cause. Now it was generating front-page headlines. Four days after the human-chain stunt, the Administration announced that the State Department would need another year to study the pipeline. In July of 2012, McKibben wrote an article for Rolling Stone called “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.” The piece explained the difficulties of tackling climate change if unconventional oil resources such as the Canadian oil sands were exploited. Tom Steyer admired the article so much that he called McKibben, whom he didn’t know, to congratulate him.

Steyer grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. His father, from a Jewish family in Bedford-Stuyvesant, became a Wall Street lawyer, and his mother, an Episcopalian from Minnesota, was a journalist and a teacher. He and his older brothers, Jim and Hume, a lawyer in New York, attended Buckley, a boys’ school near their apartment. Tom often spent his summers outdoors. He worked on a cattle ranch in Nevada, picked fruit in Oregon, and travelled around Alaska as an adviser to the state, scouting projects that the government could fund with its oil revenues. After graduating from Yale, he worked for two years on Wall Street, and then Jim helped persuade him to move to California to attend business school at Stanford, where Jim went to law school. Tom, in his second year, met his future wife, Kat Taylor, also a Stanford law student. She runs a community bank and TomKat Ranch, a two-thousand-acre cattle ranch in Pescadero, an hour south of San Francisco, on the Pacific Coast.

In 1983, after finishing business school, Tom returned to New York and worked in the risk-arbitrage division of Goldman Sachs under Robert Rubin, Clinton’s future Treasury Secretary. Goldman had made money through the most difficult economic years of the nineteen-seventies. Steyer wanted to learn how to invest, but he was also interested in politics, and he was attracted to Rubin, partly because he was one of the few prominent Wall Street figures with ties to the Democratic Party. “I knew that I was going to be taught how to be a careful and successful person in investing by people who had done it in really, really, really hard times,” Steyer said.
Steyer was seen as a future leader at Goldman, but his relationship with the company ended abruptly when, less than three years into the job, he told Rubin that he was considering moving to California to manage his own investment fund. “They demand loyalty,” Steyer’s wife, Taylor, said. “He went to talk about leaving to possibly run some money in San Francisco, and Goldman basically said, ‘Fine, see ya.’ ” The move led to a temporary falling out between Steyer and Rubin. “I remember thinking we were losing a superstar, ” Rubin said.
In San Francisco, in February, 1986, Steyer started Farallon Capital Management, and he married Taylor a few months later. The new hedge fund applied the methodology he had learned at Goldman to a broader range of investment activities. He raised about ten million dollars to start the firm. When he left, he said, he was managing “about twenty B”—twenty billion dollars.
After securing his fortune, Steyer spent his forties turning to God and politics. “I am very religious,” he said. “I go to church every Sunday. I think about everything I’m doing now from a religious perspective. My midlife crisis was thinking about the purpose in living, and my reaction was to figure out that I believe in God.”
Steyer became a philanthropist and wrote occasional checks to Democratic politicians in California, but the Bush Presidency galvanized him. “In 2002, I was, like, ‘O.K., this guy’s a historic mistake,’ ” he said. “I can’t tell my grandchildren, ‘We really screwed it up, but I was making a lot of money so I didn’t have time to do anything about it.’ I thought, Win, lose, or draw, I have to put everything I can into defeating this guy because he’s going to be terrible for the United States if he gets reëlected. So I went to work for John Kerry.”
In 2007, Chris Lehane, a former Clinton and Gore operative nicknamed the “master of disaster” for his work at the White House responding to Whitewater and the Lewinsky affair, learned that Republicans in California were attempting to change the rules for allocating electoral votes in Presidential elections. Under the proposed plan, the Republican nominee for 2008 would have gained some twenty extra electoral votes. Lehane approached Steyer, who had become well known in Democratic donor circles, about funding a campaign to defeat the proposal. It was a battle of hedge-fund managers. Paul Singer, an investor close to Rudolph Giuliani, who was running for President, largely funded the Republican effort, and Steyer, spending nearly a million dollars, funded the counter-campaign. Steyer won.
Three years later, Steyer and Lehane teamed up again, to defeat a ballot proposition financed by two Texas oil companies that would have overturned a California law to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Unlike the 2007 effort, in which Steyer’s role was not well-known until afterward, Steyer co-chaired the 2010 campaign with George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was governor and also opposed the oil companies’ proposition, recruited him. The unlikely pair of Steyer and Shultz became the public faces of the effort. Shultz, who is now ninety-two, said of Steyer, “He likes to win—big.” Steyer spent five million dollars, and the proposition was defeated by a margin of sixty-two to thirty-eight.
Last year, Steyer funded a California proposition to close a tax loophole that benefitted out-of-state corporations. The money would be directed instead to education and environmental initiatives. Steyer spent more than thirty million dollars on the initiative, which passed by sixty-one per cent; it will add an extra billion dollars of revenue to the state budget every year for the foreseeable future. He considers it one of the best investments he ever made. “I would do that every year for the rest of my life if I could,” he said. At the end of the campaign, he established a political arm of Next Generation, which he is using to replicate the successful California strategy across the country.

Last summer, in his first phone call with McKibben, Steyer suggested that the two go hiking in the Adirondacks. By the time they descended Giant Mountain, Steyer was prepared to dedicate himself to Keystone full time.

“He understood the math of everything,” McKibben told me. “Not surprisingly, because I guess that’s what you do when you’re a hedge-fund guy, or whatever it is he does—you sit around figuring out the mathematical implications of things. He instantly understood why Keystone was important both in science terms and in political terms—that it would be the moment when the President would make or break his place in this particular history.”
That October, Steyer officially stepped down from running Farallon. He no longer has an ownership position in the company, but the firm still invests his money and he’s the equivalent of a limited partner. After being criticized by some Republicans for holding some investments in the fossil-fuel industry, including stock in Kinder Morgan, which has proposed extending a rival pipeline to Keystone, Steyer said that he would fully divest his portfolio of its “dirty energy” holdings within a year. After leaving Farallon, he convened a two-day “Big Think Climate Meeting” to plot his future in politics. He held the retreat at the TomKat Ranch. Two dozen top environmentalists attended, among them McKibben, Hal Harvey, and Tara McGuinness, who now works at the White House. Also present were Steyer’s closest political advisers, including Lehane and Podesta, and some friends from the venture-capital and high-tech worlds, among them some young executives from Twitter.
The news about climate change was particularly grim. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography had reported that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide was three hundred and ninety-one parts per million, well above the safe limit of three hundred and fifty. Obama was favored to win reëlection, but he had hardly mentioned climate change in the campaign. Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, avidly supported Keystone, promising to “build it myself,” if necessary. “We wanted to get as many people who know stuff but weren’t part of the existing climate-energy establishment to think about this problem,” Steyer said. Between sessions, which took place at a long table in the TomKat kitchen, some attendees played around outside on a mechanical bull.
There was no debate about the science and little debate about the policy prescriptions. The planet was warming and greenhouse-gas emissions had to be curbed. The problem was that the political system wasn’t responding fast enough. “If you’re driving a car at a hundred miles an hour toward a cliff,” Steyer said, “you can’t wait until the last inch and go, ‘You’re absolutely right, that is a cliff!’ ” Given the inevitable consequences to the environment, Lehane said, climate will become a top issue for voters. “The social-theory question Tom basically settled on was: How do we accelerate that process?” Lehane said.
The group broke into three camps. The participants from Silicon Valley were deeply influenced by how activists in the Arab Spring had used cell phones, text messages, and social media to organize. “They talked about liberation technology, and how that could be used and deployed around this movement and this issue, particularly given how strongly young people feel,” one of Steyer’s aides said. (Young voters overwhelmingly support climate-change policy.) Podesta, who was skeptical, described them as the “all we need is the killer app” camp.
McKibben represented the second faction, which Podesta described as a “human-rights kind of strategy.” McKibben talked about civil disobedience, of the sort that he and his followers engaged in, and about his latest effort, a campaign modelled on the anti-apartheid divestment movement. He believes that major institutions can be pressured to divest themselves of fossil fuels. He is at work enlisting what he says are huge numbers of young people—his organization has thousands of volunteers—including an extensive network on college campuses.
Podesta and Lehane argued that, to change policy, one had to change the politics. They cited immigration reform and gay marriage, issues on which national politics had changed quickly in the Democrats’ favor. “Right now, there’s no pain in being a weasel on climate change,” Podesta said. “What’s the safest political thing to do? Don’t piss off the fossil-fuel industry, because they’ll come after you if you do. And then the other group is ‘Say the right thing, but don’t do much.’ ” Republicans have been able to claim that the science is unclear and that there hasn’t been appreciable warming in the past ten years and not “pay any price for it.” Podesta and Lehane urged Steyer to spend his money on electoral politics, to force politicians to pay a price.

After Obama won reëlection, he began to talk again about global warming. “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations,” he said in his second Inaugural Address. In his State of the Union Message, he declared that if Congress didn’t send him a plan to reduce carbon emissions he would act on his own, through the E.P.A.’s regulatory process. Obama likely would have quietly approved the original pipeline-permit proposal, submitted by TransCanada, the company building Keystone, to the State Department in 2008. But in December, 2011, congressional Republicans inserted language in an economic package that demanded a decision within sixty days, and the State Department said that that wasn’t enough time to review the proposal. TransCanada submitted a new permit application in May, 2012, the one now under review. Activists have used the interim to lobby against the plan. “This thing was rolling toward approval,” Podesta said, arguing that the Republican effort to force Obama’s decision backfired. “All they did was put off the decision long enough so that you could mount a serious campaign against it.”

In February, a few days after Obama’s State of the Union address, McKibben helped organize a major rally on the Mall. Tens of thousands of people showed up. Steyer addressed the crowd, along with the country’s leading anti-Keystone activists. McKibben had asked Steyer to join him and Hansen and a few dozen others in tying themselves to the White House gates and getting arrested, but Jim, among others, talked him out of it. “Tom, that’s not who you are, that’s who Bill McKibben is,” he told him. “It’s important to have a voice like Bill McKibben, but that’s not your voice. Your voice is as this incredibly smart, thoughtful business guy who’s looking at the economic implications and going, ‘This is a disaster.’ ”
Steyer wanted to test Lehane’s theory that traditional campaign politics—the world of Super PACs and field organizations and TV ads—was the best way to spend his money. “Once politicians start to become aware that this issue can either help them or hurt them, you begin to change the conduct and behavior of those who are in elected office,” Lehane insisted. “Politicians very rarely lead, despite the fact that they talk about leadership in every speech. They typically follow.”
There aren’t usually many significant electoral races in the year after a Presidential election, but in December, with Hillary Clinton stepping down, President Obama nominated Massachusetts Senator John Kerry as Secretary of State. Kerry, a longtime advocate for addressing climate change and a co-author of the failed 2010 legislation, was now in charge of reviewing TransCanada’s application to build the pipeline extension, and the special election in Massachusetts to fill his Senate seat gave Steyer an ideal test case. Edward Markey, a longtime Massachusetts congressman and another co-author of climate legislation, opposed Keystone. His Democratic primary opponent, Representative Steve Lynch, supported it. Steyer’s group spent $1.8 million attacking Lynch and backing Markey. Lehane said they used the same “formula” that had been successful in California: an “enemy” oil company pursuing its own self-interest was hurting the state. Markey won, and went on to victory in the general election. Steyer began looking for his next opportunity.

Alberta is the Texas of Canada, a fact that Canada and the U.S. have appreciated for some time. In 2005, when Vice-President Dick Cheney visited, the U.S. Ambassador to Canada sent him a cable about his destination: “Considered the ‘most Americanized’ province in Canada, attributable in part to the oil and gas boom that drew U.S. firms to the province in the early 1900s, Alberta maintains a relatively pro-American, free market sentiment.” U.S. entrepreneurs spent decades trying to help Canada figure out how to profitably exploit the oil sands. “The old joke there was that Canadians sold life insurance and Americans drilled for oil,” David Manning, Alberta’s lobbyist in Washington, said. “My friends growing up were from Oklahoma and Texas. A lot of the expertise and a lot of the early investment came from the U.S.”

For many years, interest in the oil sands spiked only when crude prices rose enough to justify the high costs of extracting the petroleum from the sand. Mired in debt, Alberta lacked the ability to fully develop the resource. Its industry was saved by a prolonged spike, from 9/11 until the recent recession, when the price of oil jumped from twenty-five dollars a barrel to more than a hundred and thirty. Canada began advertising its vast oil resources to the world.
The Bush Administration saw Canadian oil as a cornerstone of its energy policy, and in 2005 Alberta opened an office in Washington to help solidify American backing. Revenues from oil erased Alberta’s debt. In 2006, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, an Alberta politician who started in the petroleum industry in Calgary in 1978, declared Canada an “emerging energy superpower.” Today, one-third of the Canadian economy is tied in some way to the oil sands.
The impact is most immediately visible in Calgary. The skyline is dotted with construction cranes and new glass towers built by oil and gas companies: the Bow, the newest and tallest building, built by the energy companies Encana and Cenovus; the Shell Centre; the Home Oil Tower; the sprawling Suncor Energy Centre, home to one of the largest operators in the oil sands; and the TransCanada Tower, which houses the pipeline company’s headquarters and the control room it uses to pump oil from Alberta to the U.S. through the existing Keystone pipeline.
Many of the energy executives, regulators, and politicians I spoke to in Calgary seemed baffled that their industry and province had become the face of global environmental ruin. Jim Ellis, who was a commander in Bosnia in 1994 and ran the Canadian military in Afghanistan in 2005, now directs the Alberta Energy Regulator, which oversees environmental compliance for the oil sands. In 2009, he was greeted as a pariah at the Copenhagen climate summit. “We had no idea,” he said. “We were just little Alberta. We wandered in and went, ‘Holy crow, what is going on here?’ We came back, and one of the ministers said, ‘You know what, I don’t think some people like Alberta and Albertans.’ We’ve never seen that before! We’re nice people!”
Industry officials point out that the amount of carbon emitted to extract the oil in Alberta has declined by about one per cent every year for the past two decades. They note that Hansen’s dire warning about Canada’s unconventional oil deposits was based on the assumption that every ounce of oil in the sands would be burned. (Only a small fraction of the total estimated reserves is recoverable, and doing so will take decades.) Alberta even instituted a carbon tax for its heaviest emitters, a policy that has never gained traction in the United States. The tax is only fifteen dollars per ton of carbon dioxide, but the money goes into a fund to pay for research to lower the amount of carbon used to extract the oil. To many critics, however, focussing so much attention on reducing the carbon footprint of oil-sands oil to the levels of, say, Saudi Arabian oil, which has a lower carbon profile, is like telling a morbidly obese patient to lose weight by eating Quarter Pounders instead of Big Macs.

Obama’s approach to Keystone is characteristically technocratic. In June, he delivered a major speech about climate change in which he declared that Keystone XL would be approved “only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.” The State Department has been studying the issue, and in March it released a draft environmental-impact statement. It concluded that building the pipeline would not “significantly impact the rate of extraction in the oil sands,” and noted that, without Keystone XL, oil from Alberta would be shipped to refineries on the Gulf by rail, which is more carbon intensive, or to foreign markets through new pipelines that Canadian companies are trying to build to their east and west coasts. There are regulatory hurdles and local opposition to those projects. But in a market analysis the State Department concluded that, one way or another, the Canadians would find a way to sell their oil.

Lisa Jackson, frustrated by Obama’s inaction on climate change, left the E.P.A. in February. In April, the agency, under attack by congressional Republicans who were delaying the confirmation of its next administrator, Gina McCarthy, scrambled the Keystone debate: it challenged the State Department’s analysis of the oil market, suggesting that Canada might find it difficult to ship its oil without Keystone. “We think it is important that it be as complete and accurate as possible,” the E.P.A. assessment noted, adding that the State Department’s report, “while informative, is not based on an updated energy-economic modeling effort.” The fate of Keystone now depends on the outcome of this bureaucratic fight. “If State sticks with its original analysis, Keystone will probably be approved,” a former State Department official said.
Kerri-Ann Jones, the Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, who is in charge of that analysis, told me that she is taking the E.P.A.’s critique seriously. “We’re looking at any new information regarding the market analysis, any changes we’re seeing,” she said.
The E.P.A.’s rebuke to the State Department has energized environmentalists and unsettled the Canadians. Gary Doer, the Canadian Ambassador to the U.S., is a former pre-mier of Manitoba who has a good record on climate-change policy—one of the reasons that the Harper government sent him to Washington in 2009. Doer is tanned, with a sweep of white hair. When I spoke with him last month, he said that he took umbrage at being lectured on climate change by the U.S. “We have regulations well in advance of the United States,” he said.
I mentioned that I had recently been in San Francisco with Tom Steyer. “California thermal oil, outside the San Francisco areas that you were in, has higher greenhouse-gas emissions than oil sands!” he said. “When we have California celebrities commenting on oil, it’s a little rich, in its full sense of the word. We have a different culture. You can’t own five homes and drive around in a corporate plane and then claim to be some Buddhist purist.” He added, “It is an interesting thing when you have people going to Copenhagen saying, ‘I’ve weaned myself completely off of all fossil fuels,’ which begs the question, How long is that kayak ride from Malibu to Copenhagen?”

On August 15th, Steyer was standing in shirttails and a pair of blue-and-white striped boxers on the deck of a pontoon boat as it navigated an inlet along the Texas-Louisiana border in the Gulf of Mexico. His boat crept toward the Mariposa, a hulking gray tanker in front of Motiva, a refinery owned jointly by Royal Dutch Shell and Saudi Refining. Jim Margolis, a political ad-maker best known for producing most of Obama’s Presidential-campaign commercials in 2008 and 2012, was pacing the deck, directing the captain. The Mariposa’s two forward anchors looked like torpedoes protruding from the bow. “If we get in any closer, Tom, and they figure out it’s you, I think they’ll probably drop an anchor on you,” Margolis said, as he handed Steyer some clothes.

Steyer had asked Margolis to help him produce a series of television ads making the case against Keystone. In August, Lehane had produced an ad that featured an actor, portraying the C.E.O. of TransCanada, hurtling down a pipeline as if it were a waterslide while he bragged about selling Keystone to the American public using an “old-fashioned lie.” Lehane wanted it to air in Washington during an appearance, on August 6th, by Obama on the “Tonight Show,” but the local NBC affiliate said that the commercial didn’t meet its standards. Lehane “was delighted when that happened,” Steyer said, noting that the decision only gave the ad more attention.
The ad was largely a stunt, but Margolis came up with a million-dollar campaign consisting of four ninety-second commercials that will appear sequentially over four weeks, starting on September 8th, during the Sunday-morning political chat shows. He and Steyer call it the Keystone Chronicles. Each week, Steyer will appear in a new location. After the Gulf, he’ll go to Arkansas, near the site of a recent spill of Canadian crude. Then he’ll appear at a clean-energy manufacturing plant to discuss jobs. The series will end with Steyer in New York, on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, with the Manhattan skyline behind him, speaking about Hurricane Sandy and the impact of climate change. “It gives it a more documentary feel, in the sense that each one is different and you have to watch each week to see what he’s doing next,” Margolis said.
Steyer put on a pair of khakis, changed into a blue shirt, and read his script aloud. “I’m Tom Steyer, I evaluate investments and help grow companies,” he said. “Being successful means learning the difference between a good investment and a bad deal. Today, we look at who profits when Keystone is built. Here’s a hint: it’s not America. We’re on the Gulf Coast at one of the largest refineries in the world, owned by Royal Dutch Shell and Saudi Refining. It’s where tar-sands oil piped from Canada will be refined and loaded on ships to be sold overseas to countries like China.” While Steyer studied his lines, Margolis and his crew watched the Mariposa, which seemed to be leaving port. Filming in the path of a moving vessel carrying some six hundred thousand barrels of oil seemed unwise.
Steyer’s boat motored through the inlet in search of another backdrop, and stopped at a refinery owned by Valero, the Texas company that happened to be his opponent during his California proposition fight in 2010. The Sanko Amity, a green-and-red tanker, was sitting idle in front of the refinery. Its ballast tank was largely empty, so the ship towered above the water. After anchoring and setting up the shot, Margolis’s partner, J. Toscano, looked into a monitor and was thrilled. “It’s so good, it’s going to seem like Green Screen,” he said.
A makeup artist touched up Steyer’s face, and he stood in front of the Valero tanker reading the script from a teleprompter, as Margolis shouted instructions. “Less angry, more factual,” he said. “More in sorrow than in anger.” After two dozen takes and some B-roll of Steyer floating past the refineries looking at pipelines, they were finished. The ad followed Steyer and Lehane’s California formula: foreign oil from Canada was being sold to foreign refiners in the Gulf and shipped to China, while the oil companies profited.
As political theatre, it was a pretty good ad. Steyer appeared honest and confident. But, as a lesson in global-oil economics, the ad lacked context. Back on shore, I met with Greg Gentry, Valero’s general manager in Port Arthur. As he explained the process of turning crude oil into gasoline, diesel, kerosene, and jet fuel, he pointed out of the window at a distillation tower with tubes running from it. Inside the tower, crude oil was heated at various temperatures and turned into vapor, which was then collected and condensed. The higher up the tower, the lower the temperature. Heating crude oil toward the bottom, at four hundred degrees, made kerosene. Farther up, at two hundred degrees, made gasoline. I noted that it wasn’t much different from distilling alcohol. “That’s exactly what it is,” Gentry said.
Most early American refineries were built to refine lighter crudes produced in the U.S. As America began importing more foreign oil, newer refineries were designed to process heavy crudes. The refineries best situated to buy oil-market crude were the ones on the Gulf Coast, Gentry said. “They’re sitting on the water, so they upgraded to run the world’s heavier crudes.”
Much of the gasoline, diesel, and other fuels produced at Valero is sent north by pipeline. “If you’re consuming product anywhere in the Northeast United States, the majority of that product is made on the Gulf Coast,” he said. The rest is sold in foreign markets, a fact that Steyer and other opponents of Keystone have seized upon to argue that Canadian oil would do little to achieve oil independence for America. But there’s a world market for refined products, and American refiners sell according to market demands, no matter what country they buy their crude oil from. Keystone wouldn’t change that basic fact of the international oil market.
Gentry favors approval of the Keystone XL. He said that he needs three hundred and forty-five thousand barrels of oil a day, and having a pipeline of crude that would terminate up the road would be ideal. He currently buys his foreign oil from Venezuela, Mexico, and Russia, and the reliability of a pipeline beats the costs and potential delays associated with tankers. “When the weather kicks up, or there’s a hurricane in the Gulf, ships get delayed four or five days,” he said. He laughed when I said that the Canadian Ambassador to the U.S. had told me that Keystone was being built at the request of Gulf refiners. “Is that right?” he said. Gentry’s main concern was in receiving a reliable supply at the best price. He also disagreed with the State Department’s claim that, without Keystone, Canada would simply ship its oil by rail. Bringing Canadian oil to the Gulf by rail is too expensive, he said: “They would have to drop the price of their crude.”

This fall, five months after Obama’s visit to San Francisco, the politics of his second term have changed. His gun-control agenda is dead. His immigration bill—the legislative centerpiece of his second term—is languishing in the House, with little prospect for passage. Chances for a grand bargain with Republicans on the budget seem remote. The White House had hoped that Obama’s 2012 victory would jolt Republicans into a more coöperative mood, but Congress has thwarted his entire domestic agenda.

In recent months, Obama has been looking for ways to act without Congress. Climate change happens to be the one policy area that requires almost nothing from Capitol Hill in order for him to make a major difference. “In my State of the Union address, I urged Congress to come up with a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change, like the one that Republican and Democratic senators worked on together a few years ago,” he said in his June climate speech. “And I still want to see that happen. I’m willing to work with anyone to make that happen. But this is a challenge that does not pause for partisan gridlock. It demands our attention now. And this is my plan to meet it.” He directed the E.P.A. to issue new rules curbing emissions from coal-fired power plants. Electricity plants running on coal produce more than a quarter of U.S. carbon pollution. Depending on the stringency of the new E.P.A. rules, they could be even more consequential than his 2012 automobile regulations.
Accounts of Obama’s private views about his second-term climate agenda suggest that he sees the E.P.A. rules as his real legacy on the issue, and that he’s skeptical of the environmentalists’ claims about Keystone. “He thinks the greenhouse-gas numbers have been inflated by opponents,” Ambassador Doer said. Journalists who discussed the issue with Obama earlier this year in off-the-record sessions said that he told them the same thing. Some of Steyer’s allies on the climate issue also remain unconvinced that Keystone is the right battle. Rubin, who will be an adviser to the climate initiative being launched by Steyer, Paulson, and Bloomberg, says he doesn’t oppose the pipeline, and Shultz, another adviser to the new effort, favors approving Keystone. “This is oil that’s going to be produced whether or not there’s a Keystone pipeline,” Shultz said. “Get over it!”
But the deterioration of Obama’s legislative agenda and the growing strength of the movement against the pipeline have convinced some that the odds are now higher that Obama will deny the pipeline permit. “I think it’s a fifty-fifty proposition,” Podesta said.
For many activists, the opposition to Keystone isn’t really about the pipeline; they admit that no single project will tip the balance on climate change. Rather, they want Obama to use Keystone as a symbolic opportunity to move America away from fossil fuels. On the night Obama won the Iowa caucuses in 2008, he pledged to “free this nation from the tyranny of oil, once and for all.” In his second Inaugural Address, he said, “The path toward sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition, we must lead it.” Speaking of Obama’s coming decision on Keystone, the former senior Administration official pointed out, “Rarely do you get an opportunity to so easily define who you are and what you think the future of this country should look like from an energy perspective.”
In Keystone, Steyer has picked an issue that enables him to win regardless of Obama’s decision. Leading the fight against the pipeline will help him in a future political campaign in his home state. “He’s now won two major ballot campaigns in California, and has an incredibly strong relationship with both labor and environmentalists, in a state where it costs fifty million dollars to be a competitive candidate,” Lehane said. “In terms of California brand and California politics, he’s in a pretty sweet place.”
The stakes for Obama are higher. There are few opportunities to influence the politics of climate change and leave a legacy on the issue. If he intends to lead an effort to write an international treaty on climate change, as he has promised, taking a stand against the oil sands would provide moral authority in those negotiations, Steyer said: “If you want a leadership position, you have to make public, hard decisions, stick with them, and lead. Everyone’s watching this around the world. Everyone knows this is his big choice. You can’t whiff on the big choices and then turn around and say, ‘But, you know, we really are leading on this—except when it’s inconvenient to us.’ ”
Whether or not the pipeline was the correct battle to wage over climate change, it is now Obama’s. “Sometimes you don’t get to pick the perfect fight,” Steyer said. “Sometimes, someone punches you in the face and you’re in the fight.” ♦

Apolloemma

1. I state the core idea in two relatively simple propositions. One is that in situation that have thinking participants, the participants vew of the world is always particle and distorted. That is the principle of fallibility. The other is that these distorted views can influence the situation to which they related because false views lead to inapproapriate actins. That is the principle of refexivity. For instance, treating dug addicts as crinimals creates criminal behavior. It misconstures the problem and interferes with the proper threatement of addicts. As another example, declaring that government is bad trends to make for bad government.
2. Recognizing reflexivity has been sacrificed to the vain pursuit of certainty in human affairs, most notably in economics, and yet, uncertainty is the key feature of human affairs. Economic theory is built on the concept of equilibrium, and that concepts is in direct contradiction with the concept of reflexivity. The two concepts yield two entirely different interpretation of financial market.
3 The concept of fallibility is far controversial. It is generally recongnized that the complexity of the world in which we live exceeds our capacity to comprehen it. I have no great insights to offer. The main source of difficulties is that participants are part of the situation they have to deal with. Confronted by the reality of extreme complexity we are obliged to resort to various methords of simplification — generalizatin, dichotomies, metaphors, decision rules, moral precepts, to metion just a few. This mental constructs take on an existence of their own, further comlicating the situation.
4. The structure of the brain is another source of distortions. Recent advances in brain science have began on provide some indight into how the brain functions, and they have substantiated Hume's contention that reason is the salve of passion. The idea of disembedied or reason is a figment of our imagnization.

Apolloemma

How Evil Should a Video Game Allow You to Be? Posted by Simon Parkin






It was Vladimir Nabokov’s wife, Véra who rescued the manuscript of “Lolita” from a back-yard incinerator at Cornell University. Beset by doubt over the book’s subject matter, Nabokov hoped to burn the novel before it reached the public. Likewise, the American literary critic George Steiner had second thoughts on the publication of his 1981 novella, “The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.,” in which Adolf Hitler survives the Second World War and is given the opportunity to defend his crimes. Steiner had the book recalled and pulped.
The question of whether—or to what extent—literature should allow readers into the minds of terrorists, murderers, and abusers both fictional and historical is one that continues to trouble authors. But if video-game creators share such qualms it hasn’t stopped the production, in the course of the past forty years, of games that ask players to march in the boots of legions of despots and criminals, both petty and major. Long-time video-game players are guilty of innumerable virtual crimes, from minor indiscretions like jaywalking, in Atari’s Frogger, and smoking indoors, in Metal Gear Solid, to more serious outrages like driving under the influence, in Grand Theft Auto; gunning down an airport filled with civilians, in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II; and full-scale genocide in Sid Meier’s Civilization series.
A 2011 Supreme Court ruling recognized that video games, like other forms of art and entertainment, are protected by the First Amendment as a form of speech. “For better or worse,” Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the decision, “our society has long regarded many depictions of killing and maiming as suitable features of popular entertainment.” As such, Rockstar, the developer of Grand Theft Auto V, the latest entry in the long-running series, which was released today, could include a prolonged interactive depiction of torture without fear of censorship. Nevertheless, the “24”-esque scene, which requires players to rotate the game controller’s sticks in order to tug out the victim’s teeth with pliers, has inspired debate—not only over its artistic merit but also over whether such distressing interactions have any place in video games.
Video-game violence is, like all onscreen violence, an act of play. But the medium has a unique capacity to inveigle, and even implicate, its audience through its interactivity. When we watch a violent scene in a film or read a description of violence in a novel, no matter how graphic it is, we are merely spectators. In video games, whose stories are usually written in the second person singular—“you,” rather than “he” or “she” or “I”—we are active, if virtual, participants. Often the game’s story remains in stasis until we press the button to step off the sidewalk, light the cigarette, drunkenly turn the key in the ignition, or pull a yielding trigger. It is one thing to watch Gus Van Sant’s 2003 “Elephant,” a fictional film based on the 1999 Columbine High School massacre; it is quite another to inhabit the pixellated shoes of that atrocity’s perpetrators, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, as one does in the video game Super Columbine Massacre RPG.
The ability to assume a role, rather than simply witness actions, is part of the medium’s great (if woefully unexplored) potential, enabling us to inhabit the lives of people who don’t necessarily share our beliefs, values, or systems of behavior. In the award-winning 2008 game Braid, for example, the player becomes a suit-wearing stalker chasing down an ex-lover. In the 2013 independent game Papers, Please, you play as a zealous immigration inspector at a border checkpoint for a fictitious Eastern-bloc country, refusing entry to refugees. In the recent game Cart Life, you play as one of three downtrodden protagonists working a low-paying job in America. An enormously effective game that reflects the struggle of many people who live on the poverty line, it’s essentially a fictionalized documentary that illuminates the subject in a way that is possible only in a video game, compelling the player to experience the forces and choices that someone earning minimum wage struggles with. In this way, game designers, like novelists or filmmakers, can create truly transgressive works. A skillfully designed game might use this participatory perspective for artistic purpose—offering profound, affecting statements about the human condition. As in a film, this means that there’s the potential for a kind of onscreen violence that is not merely permissible but valuable. Unfortunately, it’s still a rarity: much scripted violence in games is psychopathically repetitive and presented without broader commentary or consequence. But the opportunity for a courageous designer is there.
In Grand Theft Auto V, the ambition is not only to tell a story but also to create a fully functioning social universe within a faithful depiction of a contemporary city. In addition to the core story, the player has the freedom to do whatever he or she wants, from taking part in a virtual triathlon to visiting a strip club to stealing cars. In this kind of video game, often described as an “open world” game, there is a difference between action that is required by the game in the course of the narrative and the action that is merely possible within the bounds the game; this further complicates the question of whether the capacity for some types of play should be removed.
It’s an issue all game makers face. They are, after all, small gods, constructing the rules and bounds of a reality. In previous Grand Theft Auto titles, for example, players were able to visit strip clubs, “kill” innocents and, in one notorious anecdote, pay for a prostitute and, after having sex with her, murder her to reclaim the money. In Grand Theft Auto IV, from 2008, which was game set in Liberty City, a fictional approximation of New York, players could hijack a plane and, if they so chose, fly it into a skyscraper. These particular actions are not stipulated by the game maker—they do not advance the player toward beating the game. But the world and its logic both facilitate them.
Last month, a user on a Grand Theft Auto V forum asked whether players would be able to rape women in the game. In the post, which was widely shared on social media, he wrote, “I want to have the opportunity to kidnap a woman, hostage her, put her in my basement and rape her everyday, listen to her crying, watching her tears.” This is alarming but, in a game that prides itself on player-led freedom and opportunity within virtual, victimless but violent worlds, is it unreasonable? If this freedom is necessary to maintain the artifice of the world, the designer surely has a responsibility to engineer the victim’s reactions in order to communicate something of the pain and damage inflicted.
Fictional characters, whether they appear in novels, films, or video games, are never fully independent entities. They are conjured by words on a page, directions in a screenplay, or lines of programming code, existing only in imagination or on a screen. A creator has no moral obligation to his or her fictional characters, and in that sense anything is theoretically permissible in a video game. But a game creator does have a moral obligation to the player, who, having been asked to make choices, can be uniquely degraded by the experience. The game creator’s responsibility to the player is to, in Kurt Vonnegut’s phrase, not waste his or her time. But it is also, when it comes to solemn screen violence, to add meaning to its inclusion.
Questions about video-game violence will gain urgency. The video-game medium curves toward realism or, as the novelist Nicholson Baker put it in the magazine, a “visual glory hallelujah.” As the fidelity of our virtual worlds moves ever closer to that of our own, the moral duty of game makers arguably intensifies in kind. The guns in combat games are now brand-name weapons, the conflicts in them are often based on real wars, and each hair on a virtual soldier’s head has been numbered by some wearied 3-D modeller. The go-to argument that video games are analogous to innocuous playground games of cops-and-robbers grows weaker as verisimilitude increases. The 1982 Atari 2600 game Custer’s Revenge, in which players controlled a stick-man representation of General Custer tasked with raping a naked Native American woman tied to a pole, attracted plausible criticism. How much more repellent might the work be if rendered by contemporary technologies with their ever-more-realistic graphics?
The rise of motion control (where physical gestures replace traditional button-control inputs in video games) will, for many, accentuate those concerns. Some games now no longer merely require your mind and thumbs but also your entire body. In a hypothetical motion-controlled video-game version of “Lolita,” it would be possible to inhabit the body, as well as the mind, of Humbert Humbert. A virtual sex crime might elicit a very different response if, instead of pressing a button to instigate it, you were required to mimic its pelvic thrusts and parries—even if, as in Nabokov’s work, it was included to illustrate or illuminate, not titillate. But one wonders how many spouses would snatch that sort of work from the incinerator.
Image courtesy Rockstar North.

======
1. A 2011 Supreme Court ruling recognized that video games, like other forms of art an entertainment, are protected by the First Amendment as a form of speech. "For better or worse," Supreme Court Justice as wrote in the decision, "Our society has long regarded many depictions of killing and maiming as suitable features of popular entertainment."
2. It is an issue all game makers face. They are, after all, constructing the rules and bounds of a reality.

Apolloemma

Janet Yellen’s Harvard Speech : Man can't do Economics.

A reporter from our humor department has tried to find a talk on men and economics given in 2005 by Janet Yellen at Harvard Business School. But since there’s no sign of a transcript (or such a speech), here’s how our correspondent imagines it might have gone.
I’d like to thank Harvard for inviting me here today to speak about the issues of diversity that confront the world’s élite financial institutions. Now, there are many fields in which men are significantly overrepresented, but it is especially troubling in the case of economics for one reason: men are so bad at it.
Looking back at the many economic crises throughout history, the story is the same. For every failing bank, stock-market crash, or sovereign default, it is overwhelmingly men, old men, time and time again, making the mistakes that bring the world’s financial systems to the brink of complete collapse. There is nothing like the 50-50 split you would expect if men and women were equally inept at business decisions—not even 90-10. It’s as if men have an intrinsic aptitude for creating economic disaster. And, in fact, there are studies that support this unfortunate truth. I wish it wasn’t so, but these are the numbers—the facts—that we need to confront.
Is it fair for the system to keep these poor men trapped in the top cohort, setting them up for so much failure? No, no it is not. People tend to attribute things to pure achievement that are, in fact, not attributable to achievement. It is much easier for us to grab onto theories that put us in control of the patterns and circumstances of the world than to despair at the reality of our own individual insignificance in the face of centuries-old social structures. And so the human brain credits the promotions of these men to meritocracy when, really, it’s just pure dumb luck.
There may also be differences between little boys and little girls that bear on fiscal responsibility, and which aren’t just a product of socialization. While I would prefer to believe otherwise, my experience with my own son—who insisted on playing Monopoly highly leveraged and usually ended family game night by flipping the board over, screaming that the rules were stupid, and storming to his room—tells me something.
When there were next to no women in the business world, it was much easier to overlook the intrinsic male-ness of the failure to grasp the most rudimentary principles of economics which has led to the biggest financial crises of our time. I would like nothing more than to be proven wrong. I hope that one day a woman, for example, will make earth-shattering economic mistakes from a position as visible as the Federal chairmanship. Not that I think she would, but what do I know.
Photograph: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg/Getty.

=======
奶奶的实力表现出来了。虽然我也觉得奶奶做联储主席有些怪，但是这更多是受一直以来的意识所影响。
1. These is nothing like the 50-50 split you would expect if men and women were equally inept at business decisions-not even 90-10. It is as if men has an intrinsic aptitude for creating economic diseaster. And, if fact, there studies that support this unfortunate truth.
2. People tend to attribute things to pur achievement that are, in fact, not attributable to achievement. It is much easier for us to grab onto theories that put us in control of the patterns and circumstances of the world than to despair at the reality of our own individual insignificance in the face of centuries-old social structures.
3. I would like nothing more than to be proven wrong. I hope that one day one women, for example. will make earth-shattering economic mistakes from position as visible as the Federal Chairmanship. Not that I think she would, but what do I know. (不是我认为她应该能犯，而是我觉得她一定会犯)

Apolloemma

September 20, 2013
An Avoidable Tragedy: Aaron Alexis and Mental Illness
Posted by Andrew Solomon
  








A statement made by Cathleen Alexis, the mother of Aaron Alexis. Click to expand. Photograph by Seth Wenig/AP.


Aaron Alexis was very obviously disturbed for a considerable period prior to the shooting in the Washington Navy Yard on Monday, and no one did much about it. I’m concerned at how heavily the media seems to have focussed on the issue of his security clearance, with the suggestion that this is a failure of prevention because the place where Alexis went crazy was a Navy base. It would be equally tragic if he’d gone on a shooting spree in a post office, supermarket, or hospital. What’s shocking is not that he had a security clearance, but that someone with such intense problems could slip through the social fabric so readily.
Alexis clearly wanted to lead a good life. The time he spent in Buddhist practice seems to point to that, and so do the many fond recollections of him that have surfaced in Fort Worth. And that makes his case even sadder in some ways than those of Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook, James Holmes at Aurora, or Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech, none of whom seems to have made a very active attempt to forestall his derangement. The story coming out of D.C. is of a man at war with himself and with the world around him, and unfortunately that latter war carried the day.
His parents appear to have a moral center, as indicated by the words of his mother:

I don’t know why he did what he did, and I’ll never be able to ask him why. Aaron is now in a place where he can no longer do harm to anyone, and for that I am glad. To the families of the victims, I am so, so very sorry that this has happened. My heart is broken.

We often rush to blame parents in situations such as this one, but that is a grave mistake. Parents do not cause mental illness, and they are not responsible for the acts of their children. All one can wish of Cathleen Alexis is that she had seen the signs and pointed her son toward help. But children can hide a great deal from their parents, and Aaron Alexis had left home a long time ago. We must believe in his mother’s pain; she no more expected this than did the rest of us.

As we wonder how Aaron Alexis’s mental illness went untreated, we have to consider three problems: stigma, screening, and access to care.
Stigma haunts the whole field of mental health. Very few people with mental illnesses commit crimes, and it is misleading and unhelpful to suggest otherwise. It needlessly shames people with legitimate complaints and causes them to hide their mental-health status from those around them. People who seek treatment for mental illness are not, in general, the ones who go on killing sprees. It is untreated mental illness that is to blame. Our response to a tragedy such as this must not be to make people afraid to seek help, but to propel such people toward the help they need. And that requires reducing the stigma attached to seeking treatment, not exacerbating it, as always seems to happen in the wake of such tragedies.
Screening is virtually nonexistent. Alexis was clearly depressed, and he was also delusional. The story of his complaining that microwaves were being sent through the hotel ceiling to keep him awake is a story of someone with escalating psychosis. The story of his fight at the airport in Virginia, where he accused a woman he didn’t know of laughing at him, reflects acute symptomatic paranoia. The issue of his getting so angry that he fired bullets into the tires of the car of someone who had disrespected him is indicative of extremely labile mood states. And on and on. Not long ago, he went to a V.A. hospital with acute insomnia, which is sometimes a sign of underlying mental disorders, and yet no one screened him there for mental illness, not even for P.T.S.D., which should be a standard procedure at V.A. hospitals.
There is no question that most Americans with mental disorders are not receiving treatment, even though there are now very useful, if still somewhat primitive, treatments for most mental illnesses. Some people are picked up after they commit extreme, bizarre, or horrific acts—but aside from that, almost no one receives medical help who does not self-identify as having a mental-health complaint. Self-identification is the province of the privileged, of people with a sophisticated understanding of what mental health is and what can be done when it betrays us.
There are excellent screening tools available for those who may not self-identify. The Jed Foundation, set up by Phillip and Donna Satow after their son took his own life as a college sophomore, has instituted screening of college students for depression, and has turned up vast numbers of students at risk for suicide who would not otherwise have been identified. The Jed tools are now in use at fifteen hundred universities in the United States. If we can do this at schools under the aegis of a single family-run nonprofit, we can do it in many other contexts as well. But few people get screened. We therefore fail to pick up on the pain and confusion of people such as Alexis, we do not contain the violence of which some people with untreated mental illness are capable, and we likewise do not contain the epidemic of suicide in young Americans.
Even those who stand up to the stigma and who get identified in screening often struggle to get access to care. Parity legislation requires companies employing more than fifty people that offer coverage for mental health to provide the same level of coverage for mental-health interventions as for medical and surgical ones. Nonetheless, people with mental illnesses struggle to get treatment except when they have advanced psychosis. Psychiatry continues to be treated as some kind of luxury. Those whose insurance covers it might get medication—but without supportive therapy, they may not understand why they need to take the medication, or what to do if it doesn’t seem to work. Denying coverage is a lunatic policy. We should do all we can to make sure that people are screened; that their conditions are identified as early as possible; that they have access to safe, affordable care; and that they don’t sacrifice basic freedoms when they seek treatment.
Mother Jones (cited by Emily Bazelon in an excellent story in Slate) did an analysis of sixty-two mass shootings and reported this:

Nearly 80 percent of the perpetrators in these 62 cases obtained their weapons legally. Acute paranoia, delusions, and depression were rampant among them, with at least 36 of the killers committing suicide on or near the scene. (Seven others died in police shootouts they had little hope of surviving, regarded by some experts as “suicide by cop.”) And according to additional research we completed recently, at least 38 of them displayed signs of possible mental health problems prior to the killings.

We can castigate perpetrators and their families all we want; we can tighten security procedures; we can subject those among them who survive to extreme punishments. We need to address gun control, which would help to curtail the ability of such tortured souls to ruin the lives of others and themselves.
But until we develop a social model that includes finding and treating those who suffer from these complaints, we will be subjected to scenes like the one at the Navy Yard over and over again. Some shootings, like Columbine, are perpetrated by people of whom no one would ever have expected such violent acts. Those events, which appear random, will be difficult to contain. But many are perpetrated, as this one was, by people who are clearly disturbed. Some cases are hard to pick up. Alexis’s was not.