Comey, chaos … crisis? Trump enters new territory after most explosive week yet - Guardian

Comey, chaos … crisis? Trump enters new territory after most explosive week yet

Ill met by moonlight, a dozen reporters and cameramen peered into the darkness. Where was Sean Spicer? The press secretary had given a TV interview at 9pm then disappeared behind an awning, apparently conferring with colleagues. Journalists waited on the drive. The White House glowed behind them. “This is so weird,” one said. “It’s like hunting a dog and then killing it.”

A couple of minutes later Spicer emerged on a path running along a fence and hedgerow. He was caught in a blinding light and asked the cameramen to turn it off. “Relax, enjoy the night, have a glass of wine,” he said jocularly. Spicer then spent 12 minutes trying to explain why Donald Trump had taken the most explosive decision of his young presidency: axing the director of the FBI.

But the rationale that Spicer presented – that Trump had been acting on the recommendation of the attorney general and his deputy – was shredded by the president himself two days later. He had already decided that James Comey must go regardless of the recommendation, Trump said, because he was a “grandstander” and “showboat”.

The man who sealed his fame by telling reality TV show contestants “You’re fired!” had now done it to America’s top law enforcement official, creating a public relations catastrophe. Comey was only the second FBI director to be dismissed. Not since Richard Nixon had a US president fired the person leading an investigation bearing on himself.

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That investigation is examining Russian interference in last year’s election with potential Trump campaign collusion. The removal of Comey prompted accusations of a cover-up, warnings of a constitutional crisis, and comparisons with the Watergate scandal that brought Nixon down. The president fuelled the fire by suggesting he had “tapes” of his conversations with the FBI director.

Even for Trump, the inveterate rule-breaker, it was outrageous new territory. It prompted anew the question: just how much is the Republican party able and willing to tolerate? “With an approval rating of 35%, he’s a liability in the 2018 elections, not an asset,” said Rick Tyler, the former communications director for Senator Ted Cruz, a rival of Trump in the party primaries. “At some point they’re going to have to tell the president: shape up or ship out.”

Less than a week earlier, Trump had welcomed dozens of Republican House members to the Rose Garden at the White House to celebrate the passage of a healthcare bill. It seemed to be a moment of respite, of getting on track, of making peace with the party. “Hey, I’m president!” Trump said. “Can you believe it?”

There was no hint of what was to come. Contrary to Spicer’s explanation, Trump had decided Comey’s fate long ago. He was, according to multiple US media reports, angered by the FBI’s director’s dogged pursuit of the Russia investigation, ease in the media limelight (FBI directors are supposed to keep a low profile), insouciance when it came to White House leaks and failure to back the president’s allegation of wiretapping against Barack Obama.

Sean Spicer in the darkness on Tuesday night.

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Sean Spicer in the darkness on Tuesday night. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP

Last weekend, it seems, Trump decided to pull the trigger. The Washington Post reported: “At his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, Trump groused over Comey’s latest congressional testimony, which he thought was ‘strange,’ and grew impatient with what he viewed as his sanctimony, according to White House officials. Comey, Trump figured, was using the Russia probe to become a martyr.”

When he returned to the Oval Office on Monday, Trump summoned attorney general Jeff Sessions and his deputy Rod Rosenstein and told them to make the case against Comey in writing. With Sessions having recused himself from the Russia investigation over his contacts with the Russian ambassador, it was left to Rosenstein to do the heavy lifting in a memo that cited the FBI director’s mishandling of last year’s Hillary Clinton email investigation.

On Tuesday afternoon, Trump called senior members of both parties to inform them of his decision. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate, told him: “You are making a big mistake.” But the president went ahead anyway. There have been many political earthquakes since Trump was sworn in on 20 January but this hit a new spike on the Richter scale.

The crude method of dismissal also caused disquiet. Shortly before Spicer’s manoeuvres in the dark on Tuesday night, the FBI director had been addressing staff in Los Angeles when news of his termination flashed up on TV screens. At first he laughed, thinking it was a prank, the New York Times reported, but then his staff intervened, he stopped speaking and, in a side office, learned it was no joke.

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When the Guardian asked Spicer why the dismissal had not been done in person or by phone, as is customary in most walks of life, he said only that a message had been sent by hand to FBI headquarters and electronically. Some commentators felt the rushed nature of the deed and basic lack of courtesy spoke volumes.

A political novice governing by gut instinct, Trump appeared to have made arguably his biggest misjudgment yet. He seemed to think that Comey’s unpopularity on both sides of the aisle (Clinton has blamed him for her loss) would make it a win-win for him; instead it was a spectacular lose-lose. He told Justice with Judge Jeanine on Fox News: “I guess I was a little bit surprised, because all of the Democrats, I mean, they hated Jim Comey. They didn’t like him. They wanted him fired or whatever. And then all of a sudden, they come out with these glowing reports. Look, it’s politics.”

Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, said: “It’s stunning they didn’t think it would be this controversial. It’s an example of his ignorance of American political history and the norms and traditions of the system.”

What he failed to consider was the Russia question. Reports emerged that Comey had been accelerating the investigation and seeking more resources as he became increasingly concerned about evidence of collusion. Democratic senator Dick Durbin of Illinois said: “I think the Comey operation was breathing down the neck of the Trump campaign and their operatives, and this was an effort to slow down the investigation.”

Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, told HBO: “If there was no ‘there there’, James Comey would still have a job.”

On Tuesday night, Democrat after Democrat lined up to use the word Nixonian and draw parallels with the so-called Saturday Night Massacre when, in 1973, Nixon sought to fire Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor leading the Watergate investigation, triggering resignations and then Cox’s dismissal. Many demanded the appointment of a special prosecutor to look into Russiagate.

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Republican elders were also dismayed. Bill Brock, a former labour secretary under President Ronald Reagan, said: “It was either way too late or way too early. The FBI as an organisation is sacrosanct in this country: non-political, non-partisan, with brilliant people working for it, and I hate to see it being dragged into this mess.”

The following morning, Trump lived up to his reputation for spectacle beyond the likes of Scandal or Veep. Of all the days, he hosted Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and ambassador to the US Sergei Kislyak. American media did not have access to the meeting but photos taken by a Russian state news media photographer were posted online. A White House official was quoted by CNN: “They tricked us. That’s the problem with the Russians – they lie.”

And then, when US media did gain access to the Oval Office, they found not Lavrov but a surprise visitor: 93-year-old Henry Kissinger, who was secretary of state under Nixon. It was either coincidence, or evidence of a particularly dark sense of humour.

The White House stuck to its line until Thursday: that Trump had fired Comey based on Rosenstein’s recommendation and because he had lost the confidence of FBI colleagues (many FBI members disputed this). But then the president gave an interview to NBC News that blew this out of the water. “Regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire Comey,” he said.

Startlingly, Trump also revealed that Russia was a factor in his thinking. “When I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said: ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won.’”

James Comey, the FBI director, had been addressing staff in Los Angeles when news of his termination flashed up on TV screens. He thought it was a prank.

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James Comey, the FBI director, had been addressing staff in Los Angeles when news of his termination flashed up on TV screens. He thought it was a prank. Photograph: Cliff Owen/AP

And, Trump told NBC News, he had asked Comey – over dinner and in two phone calls – whether he was personally under investigation, and was told not. During the dinner, according to an associate quoted by the New York Times and Associated Press, Trump asked for Comey’s loyalty, implying a possible obstruction of justice. Trump has denied this.

As the story dominated the news cycle of what was supposed to be a quiet week, Trump reached for Twitter. He posted on Friday morning: “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” The White House refused to deny that Trump had made secret recordings.

The Democratic response to the week’s events was predictable; that of the Republicans less so. Trump was, after all, an outsider who staged a hostile takeover of the party in last year’s election. His relationship with Republicans on Capitol Hill remains fractious. It could have been a moment to emulate Howard Baker, a Republican senator from Tennessee who, during the Watergate investigation, took a stand and asked: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”

Indeed, in the first few hours, some critical voices emerged. Richard Burr, the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, said the timing and reasoning did not make sense. Senator John McCain called for a select committee to investigate and told security experts: “This scandal is going to go on. This is a centipede. I guarantee you there will be more shoes to drop.” Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona tweeted that he has spent several hours trying to find an acceptable rationale for the timing of Comey’s firing and could not do it.

But the centre held, at least for now. House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, who have already swallowed numerous indignities for the sake of their legislative agenda, batted away calls for a special prosecutor and accused the Democrats of double standards.

Cabinet veteran Brock, 86, agrees. “I don’t think there’s any comparable situation with what President Nixon did,” he said. “The Democrats are clearly overstating the case. They said James Comey has lost all credibility. That is the height of hypocrisy and I find it totally repugnant. Let’s agree how we can move this process forward without playing the political card. I would welcome it if the president called for a special prosecutor.”

Conservative author Sykes described the Republican reaction as “a mixed bag”. He said: “It is significant the number of Republicans who are willing to distance themselves from the decision. There are some signs of cracks in the support.

“I’m personally disappointed in Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan and I also think they’re making a mistake. This is going to be a distraction from the agenda and makes all their legislative programmes harder to get through. This has been the pattern: they’ve been willing to roll over because they think they’ll get their programme through but the price tag keeps going up. If it begins to dawn on them there’ll be a high cost next year [in the mid-term elections], that could change the calculation.”

The Comey firing led to renewed soul-searching in the conservative movement, which has ostensibly embraced Trump despite his uncertain values. Sykes added: “From the moment he was nominated, he posed an existential threat to conservatism. There was a time when conservatives would have been horrified at having a president who has so much contempt for the norms and traditions of government, or the separation of powers, or the rule of law. The fact they’re rolling over on this is defining test of conservatism.”

With a single, ill-considered and poorly executed act, Trump stunned Washington, sowed discontent at the FBI and inadvertently gave fresh impetus to two congressional investigations into Russia’s election meddling. It was a sobering reminder to Republicans about who they must wake up next to every day. They must live with the savaging of norms, the outlandish tweets, the profound unpredictability.

Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said: “Their destiny is something they embraced when they nominated him because Donald Trump is not a conservative.”

In a simple message to Republicans, he added: “You clearly made an assessment his brand of politics, or whatever you want to call it, was worth the risk, and now you have to account for it.”

Voters are unleashing their anger at Republicans on issues such as healthcare at town hall events. A Quinnipiac University poll, conducted before Comey was fired, found Trump’s favorability rating at an all-time low of 35%. And by a record 54%-38% margin, voters said they would prefer the Democrats rather than Republicans to control the House.

Paradoxically, the healthcare bill that was cause for euphoria in the Rose Garden could, through its effects in stripping health insurance from millions of people, cost the party more votes than the Comey saga. Trump may then find himself running out of friends fast. Principles are one thing; popularity another.

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What U.S. Military Need to Know About Their New Retirement Plan - TIME

What U.S. Military Need to Know About Their New Retirement Plan Posted: 10 May 2017 10:20 AM PDT The military’s introduction of its new Blended Retirement System leaves nearly all current service members in a quandary. Those with between one and 12 years of service must choose between the old and new retirement plans—and there is nothing easy about the calculation. Why one to 12 years? Because on Jan. 1, 2018, all military personnel whose length of service is in that time bubble are eligible for either the old or the new programs. Both have pros and cons. Service members will have one year to make an irrevocable choice. About 88% of active-duty military—or 1.15 million service members—fall into this category. By contrast, anyone who joined before 2006 is automatically grandfathered into the old system, a generous traditional pension with inflation adjustments. Anyone joining in 2018 or beyond will be enrolled in the new blended system, which features a scaled-back pension but adds up to a 5% match for personal contributions to the government’s massive 401(k)-like Thrift Savings Plan (TSP). The military just rolled out a calculator that service members can use to compare their options, which is labeled as the beta version of the Blended Retirement System Comparison Calculator. Some unofficial calculators are also available, including one from USAA, a financial services company that serves military families. To choose wisely, those in the bubble years will need to take a hard look at their expected tenure in the military and their career earnings, as well as their ability to save and their stomach for taking a more active role in managing their own money. “There are a lot of ifs,” says Kathleen Brinkler, relationship manager with AAFMAA Wealth Management, a financial advisor for military personnel. “The new plan works if you contribute enough to get the full match, if you invest prudently, if you don’t take money out early, if you have enough time for your money to grow.” In general, if you plan to stay in the military for a total of at least 20 years—and thus become eligible for the legacy pension—the old plan will be your best choice. This becomes clearer the closer you currently are to 12 years of service. Why? With fewer than 10 years left before becoming eligible for the legacy pension you probably will not have enough time to make up the difference by saving in the TSP. Besides, under the old plan you can still save in the TSP. You just won’t get the match. Someone with just a year or two of service has a much tougher calculus. Many additional years of matching contributions and compound growth in the TSP can close the gap—and then some. But going with the blended program requires savings discipline and more hands-on attention. Meanwhile, at any length of service, if you suspect you may not stay at least 20 years, the new system is the obvious choice. It guarantees you will leave with some savings. These are not absolute answers. Power savers—those able to save 15% or more of pay—might do better in the new plan in many cases. And keep in mind that military personnel are subject to involuntary layoffs, like everyone else. The Army announced a forced troop reduction of 8% just two years ago. If you choose the old pension plan and get downsized, you lose. To understand the options, start with the legacy pension. A typical officer retiring after 20 years leaves with annual guaranteed income of about $53,000, which is indexed for inflation. Based on a 40-year retirement, that pension has a present value of about $1.4 million, according to AAFMAA calculations. Under the new blended system, the scaled back pension would provide $42,000 of annual income, which has a present value of about $1.1 million. So in rough terms anyone in the bubble years would need to save about $300,000 by retirement after 20 years for switching to the new system to make sense. That’s a tall order if you have only eight to 10 years to save. Ross Cutler, an AAFMAA advisor, figures an officer would have to save a Herculean 26% of pay for eight years for the new system to make sense. That assumes a fairly conservative 6% average annual return. If he or she achieved average annual returns of 8%, which is reasonable, that officer still would have to save 24% of pay. The percentages are similar for enlisted members who earn much less. Service members in the bubble years but with a longer time horizon–say, those who only recently joined–have a much clearer path to the new blended system. They would need to save only 6% of pay and achieve 6% average annual returns for the choice to make sense, AAFMAA figures. If they earned 8% on their money, they would need to save just 5% of pay. Cutler says most service members are low-risk investors. And matching funds under the new system go into a fund that yields about 1%. So soldiers would need to understand the value of more aggressive investing, and be willing to switch the money to more appropriate long-term accounts. “Most retire from the service and have second careers,” Cutler says. “If they don’t touch the TSP they can extend the time horizon out to age 62, and it’s easier to make the case for more aggressive investing with equities.” In general, anyone opting into the new blended retirement system should save at least 5% of pay—and not touch it. That way they get the full 5% match. The new system is designed around new service members saving 5% and retiring after 20 years with roughly the same total retirement benefit as under the old system. But new soldiers and even those in the bubble years could do much better if they power save. That isn’t easy on military pay. But saving 15% of officer’s pay instead of just 5% could add another $131,400 in 10 years. Over 20 years, it could add another $415,000 at historical rates of return. That’s enough to make the new plan a better choice.

An Oligarch in USA ? Trump allegedly demanded loyalty from Comey - New York Times

By SUSAN CHIRA

MAY 12, 2017

For scholars of democracy who have kept anxious watch over the tumultuous first months of this presidency, this week’s firing of James Comey set off a new round of alarm bells.

As President Trump attacked judges, intelligence agencies, the press, even the Congressional Budget Office — all potential independent constraints on presidential power — they constantly adjusted their scorecards, trying to sift the alarming from the merely noisy. But firing the official who heads an investigation into possible collusion between a presidential campaign and a foreign power crossed a line, they agreed.

“My alarm-o-meter definitely jumped,” said Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. “I’d say I went from a 4 to a 7 out of 10.”

Few argue that the United States is in imminent danger of becoming an autocracy, a term much chewed over by pundits these days, including some conservative ones like David Frum, President George W. Bush’s former speechwriter. But in conversations over the past few months, scholars’ moods and assessments have soared and plummeted.

Fear when Mr. Trump castigated a judge in personal terms. Relief when the administration heeded a court’s temporary stay of the first executive order closing the border to those from seven Muslim-majority countries. Alarm over denunciations of the press. Admiration for a robust American tradition of protest.

“Whenever I run into somebody, they ask me, ‘How worried should I be?’ ” said Yascha Mounk, a lecturer on government at Harvard who has warnedof declining commitment to democratic institutions in several countries.

There is a lively debate in the profession over the answer to that question.

Mr. Mounk’s own concerns have skyrocketed. “It’s the first time he’s done something, rather than said something, that is straight out of the playbook of would-be authoritarians,” he said this week. Other political scientists argue that the Trump administration has shown itself too chaotic and incompetent to harm democratic institutions.

Bright Line Watch, a survey of more than 1,500 political scientists on the state of democracy in America, has so far not recorded an existential threat.

But Susan Stokes, a professor of political science at Yale who is one of the survey’s organizers, said that she and her colleagues decided after Mr. Comey’s firing to add a new question to the latest survey: “Law enforcement investigations of public officials or their associates are free from political influence.” She added dryly, “It will be interesting to see how our colleagues respond.”

Mr. Drutman is particularly concerned by the way congressional leaders immediately backed Mr. Trump.

“That suggests that partisan loyalty is still far more powerful than checks and balances,” he said.

Ms. Stokes worries about Mr. Trump’s temperament. “Political scientists assume that politicians are ambitious and mainly motivated by a desire to win and retain office,” she said. “It’s not an uplifting image of our leaders but at least it makes them predictable, their actions explicable. An ever-improvising president, one who is utterly undisciplined, even to the point of undermining his own positions — that really does worry me.”

Many of the political scientists speak in unusually emotional terms about wrestling with their personal political beliefs (in this case, liberal) and their professional assessments.

“I lived through Reagan and Bush, and I know how it feels to settle in for a long term of policies you don’t like,” Ms. Stokes said. “But this doesn’t feel like you’re settling into anything. You’re on a bus and the axle broke and you’re careening toward you don’t know what.”

Mr. Mounk decided to leave Germany for what may seem like a peculiar reason: As a Jew, he was treated with such suffocating deference that he felt he would never feel normal there. He attended college in Britain and then watched with dismay from the United States as the country voted to leave the European Union.

“2016 has not been an easy year for me,” he told me back in February. “The places I lived turned out to be not quite the beacons of multiethnic democracy I took them to be. It’s personally confounding because this is the America I love, where attitudes are in many ways more tolerant than in Europe.”

Some of the scholars who have issued the most passionate warnings are those who come from countries where democracy has imploded in spectacular fashion.

N. Turkuler Isiksel, an assistant professor of political science at Columbia, watched as a leader she at one point saw as a potential check on Turkey’s powerful military went on to gut other political institutions, jail enemies and cripple independent journalism. Mr. Mounk grew up as a Jew in Germany keenly aware that political safeguards could disappear.

A fellow political scientist labeled Ms. Isiksel hysterical in a Twitter tirade after she wrote an article warning Americans that what she’d seen in her native Turkey could happen here.

Even as they acknowledge that neither Turkey nor Germany has the same long tradition of stable democracy as the United States, both she and Mr. Mounk say Americans have a complacency born of a fortunate history.

Mr. Mounk speaks of a “muscle memory” of how abruptly the political winds can shift that his family and many Europeans possess but most Americans lack.

As bedtime reading, Ms. Iskisel turned to the 1935 Sinclair Lewis novel “It Can’t Happen Here,” which envisions the election of an American populist who imposes totalitarian rule. Her sense of urgency is heightened because she is a Muslim immigrant married to an American and waiting for her green card to become permanent.

“I don’t trust the American sense of how much trouble they are really in,” she said. “I think overconfidence can be a danger here. I don’t know who has the accurate sense — people with the experience or people who haven’t experienced it before and may not realize they’re in a pot of water that is gradually heating up.”

As an example, she argued that Mr. Trump’s address to Congress in February, praised by many commentators as appropriately presidential, would have been denounced a year ago for Islamophobia and race-baiting, but that his previous speeches had been so incendiary that the bar for what was unacceptable had shifted. And she rejects the arguments of incompetence, saying, “You don’t have to be competent when you have the awesome powers of the U.S. president.”

While average citizens can shield themselves from the emotional whipsaw of the news, political scientists who track the health of democracies find their work drawing them inexorably into the headlines.

“It’s very easy to go down the rabbit hole and lose the big picture,” Mr. Drutman said in March. He had to install an app blocking him from the web for hours at a time so that he could tear his attention away from the latest headlines to focus on writing about American political polarization.

The scholars agree on what to watch for next: Who will be nominated as head of the F.B.I. and what will Republicans do?

“Does Trump nominate a professional or does he nominate a crony?” Mr. Mounk said. “His ability to undermine independent institutions is in the hands of the Republicans.”

Mr. Drutman said that if Republicans continue to reflexively back Mr. Trump, he would raise his “alarm-o-meter” to 8.

For now, the democratic temperature-takers are resigning themselves to a life of perpetual checkups as this extraordinary presidency unfolds. “It’s like that family member who’s the doctor,” Ms. Stokes said. “You go to a family dinner and they want you to look at the pain in their elbow.”

Susan Chira (@susanchira) is a senior correspondent and editor on gender issues for The New York Times.

NYT

Microsoft’s Windows Chief On the Surface, Virtual Reality and More - TIME Business

Microsoft’s Windows Chief On the Surface, Virtual Reality and More

Posted: 09 May 2017 11:53 AM PDT

Windows may dominate the worldwide desktop market, but Microsoft is working to adapt the operating system for all kinds of devices, from giant displays like the Surface Studio to mixed reality headsets like the HoloLens.
The Redmond, Wash. company is expected to unveil more details about the future of Windows this week at its annual Build conference. The event comes after Microsoft recently debuted new products including Windows 10 S and the Surface Laptop . Harman Kardon also just revealed its new Invoke smart speaker, which is powered by Microsoft’s Cortana virtual assistant.

Terry Myerson, Microsoft’s executive vice president of the Windows and devices group, sat down with TIME to discuss the future of Windows, Microsoft’s hardware efforts, virtual reality, and more. Below is a transcript of our conversation edited for length and clarity.
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TIME: Over the past several months there’s been a bigger focus on how students and creative professionals can use Windows and Surface devices. Why?
Terry Myerson: It’s become more than just a focus. If you go back in time to three years ago when Satya [Nadella] first became CEO, there was this vision of ubiquitous computing. Everything around us was going to become smart and connected, whether it was coffee pots, the lights, your phone, everything. And there was this question of: What was Windows’ role? Where are we going to go?
There was this defining moment when someone on the team sent me this TED Talk about great companies. It talked about how great companies know what they do and how they do it, but great companies also know why they do what they do.
I think prior to us thinking about our purpose this way, we might have had an event where we talked about a new version of Windows that had certain features and a new laptop that had certain specs. But you step back and you say, “why would the world want these things? What is the impact we could have, and where could we have the biggest impact?” It’s not just the event, you have to start early and start with that purpose and what you’re doing. It’s very authentic. This authentic concept about, why Windows, why Surface, where we want to go in this world where everything is going to be smart.
When the first Surface was announced in 2012, it started as a tablet that could replace your laptop, and now here we are with a Surface laptop. Can you talk about the strategy that went into that decision?
At the core of the Windows ecosystem today, laptops are the category where we have the most impact on the world. We participate in so many categories, from mixed reality to large screens to phones to laptops . . . and laptops are the biggest category. In laptops we saw an opportunity to really try and set a new bar.
At the core of it is Windows 10 S, the ability to design a device specifically for this new platform. That’s what allows us to have the 14.5 hours of battery life. That’s what allows us to have the better performance. Our partners are going to look at the customer reception to it and decide should they, should they not, it’s their business. But our goals are to grow the Windows ecosystem.
This isn’t the first time Microsoft has launched more than one version of Windows. Windows RT, the “lighter” version of Windows 8 that debuted in 2012, wasn’t heavily embraced by partners, caused confusion among customers, and was eventually phased out. Why will Windows 10 S be different, and what have you learned?
There are things that are distinctly different. RT ran on ARM underpowered processors. This is going to run on every class of hardware. There are some low-spec devices it will run on, but it will also run on the Surface Laptop, which is a beautiful premium device.
If you buy a Windows 10 S device, you can switch to Windows Pro. That’s a big difference versus, you just buy it and you get what you get. So now you have a performance system, you have a way to say “Okay, I don’t want these constraints, I want to go out into the open world.” There are a lot more apps in the Windows Store now than there was. This version of Windows is more popular than Windows 8
Those are all learnings we might not have had if we couldn’t reflect on the past. But that’s what we do, we’re always trying to learn. When you go back in time and look at what they were trying to achieve, it was in some ways similar. If I had to pick a fourth thing, it’s really focusing on, at least initially, these students in the classroom. RT was launched as more of a consumer product.
You talked before about how many new types of devices will become “smart” and capable of connecting to one another. How do you see Cortana playing a bigger role as this transition occurs?
Everything around us will be smart and connected. And you’re just going to expect a certain level of intelligence when you’re dealing with all of your things, that they’re all going to work together in all the right ways. I think with each of these assistants, there’s opportunity to be the glue that provides the orchestration across all of the devices in our lives. All these scenarios where there are all these apps and devices in our lives. We don’t really want to interact with any one of them, we want to interact to achieve a goal, a purpose. And I do think having one of these personal assistants understand how to interact with apps and devices, that’s the vision we want to achieve.
How will voice be a bigger part of the way we interact with apps on Windows and Surface in the future?
Amazon struck a chord with voice with Echo. It’s great work. We’ve supported voice in our devices for a long time. But how often do you talk to your laptop? These phones have had voice support, and sometimes people use it, but not like they do with Echo. And so I do think we’re developing all of these input technologies at a core platform capability. But getting the device form factor right, where there’s something innately human about interacting with it, is critical.
Of all the devices we have, where people are using voice the most is Xbox. People are home, they put their headsets on, and they’re talking to each other. The ‘Hey Cortana’ scenario shows up on Xbox a lot. But the Surface scenario, voice is there and we’re developing it, but I don’t think we’ve nailed the right scenario yet.
One of the most interesting announcements from last year’s Surface Studio event was the Surface Dial. As we move into augmented and virtual reality, how is Microsoft thinking about new forms of interaction?
When we started out with this mixed reality journey, we had gaze, gesture, and voice. We started out with this vision that the world would be your display. We always knew there was going to be this spectrum of virtual reality where your displays are opaque, and augmented reality where the display is translucent. And this spectrum, we called it mixed reality.
But our first big bet was with Hololens, which was augmented reality. And gaze, gesture, and voice were the three things we bet on: where you are looking, what you are pointing at, and what you are saying.
Having a display that is translucent sometimes, opaque sometimes, and you can wear it all the time, you know [Facebook CEO Mark] Zuckerberg has talked about that, we’ve talked about that. I think that’s a frontier that we all can see in the future. I picture us having this giant Jenga set in front of us. Now we actually have the technology to reach out and push that Jenga bar and have all the right physics so that it falls down correctly. But you don’t feel it. You don’t feel the friction. That’s the scenario I think about all the time.
Will mixed reality ever be mainstream? For those who aren’t using it for gaming or commercial use cases, will it ever be the new home computer?
I think it will revolutionize gaming and entertainment, I think it will revolutionize so many things that are done away from desks. I don’t think it’s going to replace the work you do at your desk, but when people are away from their desk, when their hands are free.
I remember looking out from my office a couple of weeks ago and someone was spray-painting the street to say “there’s a pipe down here.” And I remember thinking that’s so lame; they should be able to see a virtual map of where the pipe is. If we can get that presence right, I think it’s just going to revolutionize our lives, allow us to connect when we’re apart.

Age of post truths - Guardian

Matthew d'Ancona

Friday 12 May 2017 17.00 AEST

Last modified on Friday 12 May 2017 17.46 AEST

A word on definition: “post truth” is emphatically not the same as lies, spin and falsehood. What is new is not mendacity but the public’s response to it – the growing primacy of emotional resonance over fact and evidence, the replacement of verification with social media algorithms that tell us what we want to hear. Truth is losing its value as society’s reserve currency, and legitimate scepticism is yielding place to pernicious relativism.

Here, as a primer, are 10 classic examples of post truth, past and present.

1. ‘Alternative facts’

On the morning after Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, Sean Spicer, the new White House press secretary, called a special press conference and insisted belligerently that “this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe”. The crowd in photographs of Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration looked larger, he claimed, because of new white floor coverings laid on the National Mall that had the effect of “highlighting areas where people were not standing, while in years past, the grass eliminated this As angry as Spicer and his boss might be, their position was hilariously unsustainable. It fell to Kellyanne Conway, senior aide to the president, to find some way of squaring the epistemological circle, of reconciling bogus claim with photographic evidence. On NBC’s Meet the Press the next day, Conway told Chuck Todd that there was a perfectly reasonable explanation: “Don’t be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. You’re saying it’s a falsehood [...] Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that.”

2. ‘£350m for the NHS’

The promise that the weekly cost of EU membership – allegedly, £350m – would be ploughed into the NHS was front and centre in the Vote Leave campaign. For a start, the figure did not take account of the rebate received by Britain: its net contribution per week to the EU was closer to £250m. Having pointed out the error, the UK Statistics Authority declared itself “disappointed to note that there continue to be suggestions that the UK contributes £350m to the EU each week, and that this full amount could be spent elsewhere”.

Four days after the referendum, Chris Grayling, the then leader of the House of Commons, downgraded the promise to “an aspiration”. Iain Duncan Smith, another prominent Brexiter, also distanced himself from the hitherto unambiguous claim: “I never said that during the course of the election [sic].” Dominic Cummings, the campaign’s director, has admitted: “Would we have won without £350m/NHS? All our research and the close result strongly suggests no.” But the speed with which the pledge was dumped indicates that it was never likely to be honoured. To borrow a distinction often made by Trump’s supporters, it was evidently a mistake to take the Leave campaign literally rather than seriously.

3. ‘Pizzagate’

Hillary Clinton … subject of ‘ludicrous’ claims. Photograph: Mary Altaffer/AP

Conspiracy theories thrive in the new age of post truth – often with dangerous consequences. In December, a phony report alleging that Hillary Clinton was at the heart of a paedophile conspiracy persuaded 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch from Salisbury, North Carolina, to “self-investigate” the ludicrous claims by firing shots from an assault rifle in a Washington DC pizza parlour. The restaurant, Comet Ping Pong, had been falsely associated with the story, itself comprehensively debunked before Welch’s attack. Death threats were received by the owner and staff, unwitting victims of the so-called Pizzagate allegations. It is worth noting that Michael Flynn, briefly Trump’s national security adviser, had tweeted that the stories connecting Clinton with “Sex crimes w/Children” were a “MUST READ”. As tempting as it is to dismiss fake news as the staple diet of the fringe, it has enthusiastic consumers at the very apex of power.

4. ‘Holohoax’ horrors

The most vile manifestation of post truth has been the reinvigoration of Holocaust denial, especially online. Google searches on the subject are rewarded by headlines such as “Holocaust Against Jews is a Total Lie – Proof”; “Is the Holocaust a Hoax?”; “Was there really a Holocaust?”; “THE HOLOCAUST AND THE FOUR MILLION VARIANT”; “How the ‘Holocaust’ was faked”; and “Jewish Scholar Refutes The Holocaust”. There could scarcely be a more brutal reminder that algorithms, in their current form, are indifferent to veracity.

5. ‘Reality is not external’

John Hurt as Winston Smith in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Photograph: RONALD GRANT

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is the Ur-text for all those confronted by post truth, and it is heartening that the dystopian classic rose to the top of Amazon’s charts days after Conway urged Americans to embrace “alternative facts”. In his interrogation of Winston Smith, the Inner Party oligarch, O’Brien, warns that “reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else ….Whatever the Party holds to be truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.”

Winston still objects that the party has no mastery over gravity, climate, disease or death: “O’Brien silenced him by a movement of his hand. ‘We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull … There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation – anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to … You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.”

6. ‘The University of Google’

Increasingly, scientific evidence is proving no match for emotionalism and the charisma of celebrity. In 2007, the model and television personality Jenny McCarthy, whose son Evan is autistic, appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s show to take a stand on vaccination. Against the full might of the scientific establishment, she pitted her “mommy instinct”. Challenged to produce her own evidence, she said: “My science is named Evan, and he’s at home. That’s my science.” In the course of the controversy, doctors had often complained that the web had digitally turbo-charged false science. McCarthy turned this allegation on its head. “The University of Google is where I got my degree from,” she declared.

The guru of the anti-vaccination movement Andrew Wakefield – though discredited and stripped of his medical licence – has grasped that, in the strange alchemy of our times, academic infamy can be the basis for a celebrity of sorts: a means of relaunching his campaign and career. In April 2016, his movie, Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe – withdrawn from the Tribeca film festival – was shown in Manhattan for the first time amid much hoopla and controversy.

Drenched in often clumsy appeals to emotion, the film hinges on the story of the so-called “CDC whistleblower” – Dr William Thompson, a scientist at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Thompson, as the film relates, fed Brian Hooker, a biochemical engineer and father of an autistic son, with reams of data that Hooker – who had no training in epidemiology – subjected to his own personal analysis. He claimed that the CDC had known all along that there was a link between MMR and autism, especially among African American men, but had concealed this information. In fact, Hooker had committed elementary statistical errors, and his report was retracted by the journal that had published it. But Vaxxed simply repeats the allegations, presenting Hooker as the David who took on the Goliath of the health industry, and Wakefield as the oracular prophet vindicated.

7. ‘It’s a pageant’

Wag the Dog … ‘The power of politically manipulated technology to obliterate reality.’ Photograph: www.ronaldgrantarchive.com

The power of politically manipulated technology to obliterate reality was perfectly predicted in Wag the Dog, Barry Levinson’s movie satire of 1997, which describes the “pageant” of a fictional war invented to distract attention from a presidential sex scandal. The political fixer, Conrad Brean (Robert De Niro) approaches a Hollywood mogul, Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman), to “produce” the military “pageant” of an imaginary conflict with Albania:

Conrad: You watched the Gulf war – what do you see day after day? The one smart bomb falling down the chimney. The truth? I was in the building when we shot that shot – we shot in a studio, Falls Church, Virginia. One-tenth scale model of a building.

Stanley: Is that true?

Conrad: How the fuck do we know? You take my point?

Later in the story, Conrad is dismayed when the CIA conspires with the president’s electoral opponent to declare the nonexistent war at an end. But the producer is not so easily dissuaded:

Conrad: It’s over. I saw it on television.

Stanley: The war’s not over. No, the war isn’t over.

Conrad: I saw it on TV.

Stanley: No, this is what you hired me for. No, the war isn’t over until I say it’s over. This is my picture. This is not the CIA’s picture.

What the two men are arguing about is not reality, but a competition between two fictions. They are talking about post truth.

8. ‘I have a very good memory’

At a 2015 campaign rally in Birmingham, Alabama, Trump declared: “I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City … where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.” This was a complete falsehood. But Trump simply refused to acknowledge his mendacity. “I have a very good memory, I’ll tell you,” he said when challenged on NBC. “I saw it somewhere on television many years ago. And I never forgot it.”

9. Tucker’s Law

The Thick of It, starring Peter Capaldi, centre, as Malcolm Tucker … the essence of post truth. Photograph: BBC/Mike Hogan/BBC

In the very first episode of The Thick of It in 2005, Armando Iannucci and Jesse Armstrong captured the essence of post truth. Malcolm Tucker is explaining to the besieged minister, Hugh Abbot, how to turn the tanker of a potentially damaging story:

Hugh: What, erm ... What are we going do now?

Malcolm: You’re going to completely reverse your position.

Hugh: Look, no, hang on a second. Hang on, Malcolm. It’s not actually that, erm – that’s going to be quite hard, really.

Malcolm: Yes, well, the announcement that you didn’t make today – you did.

Hugh: No, no, I didn’t. And there were television cameras there while I was not doing it.

Malcolm: Fuck them.

Hugh: I’m not quite sure how … what level of reality I’m supposed to be operating on.

Malcolm: Look, this is what they run with. I tell them that you said it, they believe that you said it. They don’t really believe you said it – they know that you never said it.

Hugh: Right.

Malcolm: But it’s in their interests to say you said it – because if they don’t, they’re not going to get what you say tomorrow or the next day when I decide to tell them what it is you’re saying.

What Malcolm describes to Hugh is the pernicious contract that lies at the heart of post truth.

10. ‘Birthers’ and the backfire effect

The furore over Barack Obama’s place of birth was first whipped up by supporters of Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, and very publicly exploited by Trump as a pilot exercise for his eventual candidacy. Obama’s initial response to the claim that a person born outside the US was not qualified to run for the presidency was to post an image of his short-form birth certificate. In July 2009, the director of Hawaii’s department of health confirmed that the president’s full birth records were indeed on file. Finally, in April 2011, Obama published his long-form birth certificate on the White House website.

Case closed? Not a bit of it. Before the publication of this definitive evidence, 45% of US citizens admitted to doubts about Obama’s birthplace. After the full certificate was posted, this figure fell – but only to 33%. Then, in a startling rejection of the facts, the number began to climb again, reaching 41% in January 2012. According to Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College, presenting someone who believes in a conspiracy theory with evidence that it is unfounded can often reinforce his or her belief: the so-called “backfire effect”. Like an infection resisting anti-biotics, post truth can fend off even incontestable facts.

Post Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back by Matthew d’Ancona is published by Ebury (£6.99).