Month: October 2020

The fundamental idea behind GTO is that there’s a single best decision for every imaginable betting scenario—a decision that will maximize a player’s winnings over time. In any given hand, a player who perfectly executes game theory optimal may still lose; there’s only so much you can do if your opponent lucks into the nuts. But in the course of thousands of hours of poker, a player who adheres to GTO at every moment is virtually guaranteed to come out ahead.

At a press conference on Tuesday, the day the U.S. officially passed two hundred thousand deaths from the pandemic, Trump was asked why he had not said anything about the grim milestone. He listened to the reporter’s question, then turned away. “Uh, anybody else?” he asked. Because of all the horrors and lies that preceded it, and all that are sure to follow, the President’s callous disregard was not a major story but just another viral video in a news cycle full of them. Trump has succeeded in conditioning us to believe that the week’s news, while awful, is less so because the awfulness is so consistent. Awful is the new Trumpian normal, which is pretty amazing when you consider that the old Trump-era normal was already pretty bad. He has rendered us collectively incapable of outrage, just when we need it most. If we can’t be appalled at the President’s indifference toward two hundred thousand dead Americans, then there is nothing left that can horrify us. After all, the covid-19 death toll so far is the biggest mass-casualty event in American history aside from the Civil War, the Second World War, and the 1918 flu pandemic.

The other new slogan, which Trump has had less success in encouraging his fans to take up, is “we love you!” Trump claims that this chant began spontaneously at a rally a few days ago, but even his fans don’t seem to be buying that. “This chant is going on, like it’s crazy, and it’s ‘We love you, we love you, we love you,’ ” he said at a second Ohio rally on Monday. “And, you know what . . . I don’t want to say it. I’m just saying, they have not been able to find in the history of politics in this nation—even, we loved Ronald Reagan. But they have not been able to find where people broke out and said ‘We love you’ about—I guess I have to call myself a politician. . . . No, but think of it. How nice is that? I never heard it.”

In any case, the inner workings of Trump’s mind aren’t of much consequence. As the President, what matters are his words and actions. Right now, he is launching a dangerous attack on U.S. democracy. Even as he seeks to undermine the voting process and stack the Supreme Court before Election Day, he is stepping up voter-suppression efforts aimed at minority groups that tend to vote Democratic. And despite a couple of objections from individual Republican senators, his party, the Party of Lincoln, is overwhelmingly behind him. At a White House press conference on Wednesday evening, a reporter asked Trump if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power after the election. “We’re gonna have to see what happens,” he replied. This is how democracies decay and die.

The leaked chat logs appear to reveal that some members of the Patriot Coalition have taken part in multiple violent rallies throughout the summer, and that they claim to have operated a series of vigilante patrols and checkpoints during the Oregon wildfires. While the chats appear to show they work and fight alongside members of extremist groups like the Proud Boys, American Wolf and 1776 2.0, the Patriot Coalition seems to have no coherent ideology beyond a desire to violently confront leftists in the name of the police and President Trump. A user identified as Paige summed up the general feelings of the group in a post made ahead of a what turned out to be a bloody ‘Back the Blue’ rally on August 22nd  in Portland when she wrote: “I’m waiting for the presidential go to start open firing.”

In less than a day, Nhung’s Instagram account had ten thousand new followers—and many of them were attacking her. Things got so out of control that she changed her account setting to private. Although she was lying in a hospital bed, people kept claiming to see her bustling about the city. One user came across a photograph of a woman who looked like Nhung at the grand opening of a Uniqlo, and reposted the image on Instagram, announcing to her followers that Nhung was partying while sick. Another user posted a picture of a different look-alike walking along Ta Hien, Hanoi’s night-life strip, and suggested that Nhung was casually infecting passersby. Next came a rumor that Nhung had gone to visit her boyfriend in Vinhomes Times City, an upscale district.

As Election Day approaches, the President has escalated his level of incitement. With the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, last week, a battle with the Democrats in the Senate is almost inevitable. Trump has already moved from allegations of fraud to intimations of unlawfulness and violence. “Gotta be careful with those ballots,” he said on September 8th, in a speech in North Carolina. “Watch those ballots. I don’t like it.” He continued, “Be poll watchers when you go there. Watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do.” Trump has advised his supporters to vote twice—once by absentee and once at the polls, to make sure their votes count. (This would be a crime.) He has expressed sympathy for the anti-Black Lives Matter counter-protesters who fired paintballs at their adversaries in Portland, and has defended Kyle Rittenhouse, the pro-Trump vigilante who is accused of killing two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Trump also retweeted a prediction that political unrest “could lead to ‘rise of citizen militias around the country.’ ” In light of these provocations, it seems that anything short of a landslide for either Biden or Trump could lead to chaos. It’s unsurprising that, when the Transition Integrity Project, a group of a hundred bipartisan experts, ran a series of simulations, they concluded that “the potential for violent conflict is high, particularly since Trump encourages his supporters to take up arms.”

As the days passed, and the death count climbed, Kennedy was alarmed at the way the President was downplaying the crisis. “I knew from that room that he was saying things that just weren’t true,” he said. Trump told the public that the government was doing all it could, but the P.P.E. emergency was being managed by a handful of amateurs. “It was the number of people who show up to an after-school event, not to run the greatest crisis in a hundred years,” Kennedy said. “It was such a mismatch of personnel. It was one of the largest mobilization problems ever. It was so unbelievably colossal and gargantuan. The fact that they didn’t want to get any more people was so upsetting.”

Small or large, personal or industrial—retrieving anything from space is immensely difficult, and has been done on just a handful of occasions. The military tracks about twenty-six thousand artifacts orbiting Earth, but its catalogue recognizes only objects larger than ten centimetres; the total number is much greater. By one estimate, there are a hundred million bits of debris that are a millimetre in size, a hundred trillion as small as a micron. We live in a corona of trash.

The notion of reaching out to the Williams family or other massacre descendants during the development did not occur to him, Lindelof said, though the production team did consult with the Greenwood Cultural Center and used various primary-source documents. “It didn’t feel like it was appropriation. It felt like we were telling history,” he said. Entertainment conglomerates, such as Warner Media, HBO’s parent company, have used trademark and copyright laws to protect their intellectual property for decades. For large corporations and wealthy families, such legal maneuvers are easy. For average people, seeing their stories come to light is often assumed to be payment enough.

In 2008, Hawke married Ryan Shawhughes, a month before their first daughter, Clementine, was born. Shawhughes, who had worked briefly as a nanny for him and Thurman while she was a student at Columbia University, “turned his life around,” according to O’Brien. As well as managing Hawke’s finances, she has collaborated with him artistically, co-producing “First Reformed,” “Seymour,” a film version of his novel “The Hottest State,” and “Blaze,” a 2018 bio-pic about the country singer Blaze Foley, which was Hawke’s first major outing as a director. In 2011, Hawke called his mother to tell her that Shawhughes was pregnant with their second child, Indiana. As he remembers it, Leslie said, “Ethan, you’re gonna go broke. You have so many children. You’re crazy.” She hung up and then called right back. “I take that back,” she said. “The best thing that could happen to you and your children is you go broke. You need to keep your hunger alive. Have more children. Just don’t stop making good art.”

As to when do you go off the rails, the answer is when somebody says something that’s really funny. Suddenly you realize there is a comedy idea there that wasn’t there five seconds before, and it’s almost as good as an orgasm. David Sherlock, who was Graham’s boyfriend, would be downstairs, and we’d be upstairs, and suddenly he would hear an enormous amount of noise—shrieking and drumming of feet—and that was the moment when we both saw that there was a great comic possibility.

In the video, Troye recounts when Trump, a noted germaphobe, met with the coronavirus task force, early on in the crisis, and told its members that perhaps the pandemic was a good thing because he would no longer have to shake hands with all the “disgusting people” at his rallies and other public events. During our interview, I asked Troye if she could remember other particularly memorable times when Trump spoke privately to the group. She recalled how Trump refused several times to consider urgent business that the task force presented to him, deciding “to talk about himself and a preferred news network and how upset he was with them, instead of focussing on the agenda at hand.” Fox News coverage, in other words, preoccupied the President more than saving American lives. I asked Troye if that shocked her. “No,” she said. She remembered what she thought at the time: “This is exactly what you would expect.”

In 2013, for example, a Boeing engineer suggested installing a computer-based airspeed indicator to supplement the 737 max’s single external speed sensor, the faulty operation of which is suspected of triggering the mcas in the two deadly crashes: Lion Air Flight 610, on October 29, 2018, and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, on March 10, 2019. The engineer’s request “was rejected by Boeing management due to cost concerns and because adding synthetic airspeed could have jeopardized the 737 MAX program’s directive to avoid pilot simulator training requirements,” the report says. If Boeing had told airlines that their pilots would need extensive retraining to fly the new planes, including instruction on how to react to an activation of the mcas, the airlines might have been less eager to order them. Not only did Boeing neglect to inform the airlines about the new feature, but it removed any references to the mcas from the operations manual that pilots of the 737 max relied on.