Chris Hedges's Blog, page 360

White House Denounces Rep. Steve King’s Racist Remarks

WASHINGTON — Comments by Republican Rep. Steve King about white supremacy are “abhorrent,” the White House said Wednesday as bipartisan condemnation of King continued.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders praised a move by House Republicans to strip the nine-term Iowa lawmaker of his committee assignments.

King told The New York Times last week that, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?”

The comments were widely denounced as racist.

The House on Tuesday approved a Democratic measure rebuking King, and a member of the House Republican leadership suggested King should leave Congress.

When President Donald Trump was asked on Monday about King’s remarks, he said: “I haven’t been following it.” But Sanders said Wednesday that King’s comments were “abhorrent,” and said GOP leaders took action when one of their members said “outrageous and inappropriate things.”

House Democratic leaders, meanwhile, blocked an effort to censure King, referring a proposal by Illinois Rep. Bobby Rush to the House Ethics Committee for further review.

Censure is the most serious sanction for a House member short of expulsion, and it has been imposed only six times in the past 100 years.

Rush, the sole House member to oppose the earlier measure rebuking King, pressed for a vote Wednesday to censure King, saying the House should take a stronger stand against what he called “Steve King’s violent, vitriolic and rabid racism.”

After the House clerk read Rush’s resolution detailing a string of inflammatory comments by King over the years, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland moved to refer the matter to the Ethics Committee. Lawmakers approved the motion on a voice vote, postponing action on the censure measure indefinitely.

“I think we have spoken, and we have spoken on both sides of the aisle, that this is unacceptable rhetoric and behavior,” Hoyer said.

House Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C., who sponsored the disapproval motion, said censure should be reserved for statements made on the House floor. He and other Democratic leaders also said censuring King could open Democrats to Republican attacks.

Iran Newspapers, Minister Criticize U.S. Arrest of Newscaster

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Iran kept up its criticism Thursday of the FBI’s apparent arrest of an American anchorwoman from Iran’s state-run English-language TV channel, with its foreign minister saying “she’s done nothing but journalism.”

The hard-line Vatan-e Emrooz paper criticized the detention of Press TV’s Marzieh Hashemi as “Saudi-style behavior with a critical journalist.” That’s a reference to the Oct. 2 assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.

Meanwhile, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told Press TV that “we have a right to continue to look after her interests” as Hashemi, born Melanie Franklin in New Orleans, also holds Iranian citizenship.

Iranian law, however, does not recognize dual nationalities, an issue that comes up in its arrest of those with Western ties.

“She is a famous journalist, she’s done nothing but journalism,” Zarif told the broadcaster from a visit to Iraq. “The arrest of Ms. Hashemi is a very clear affront to freedom of expression, a political abuse of an innocent individual and I believe the United States should release her immediately without further delay.”

Hashemi was detained Sunday in St. Louis, where she had filmed a Black Lives Matter documentary after visiting relatives in the New Orleans area. She was then taken to Washington by the FBI on a material witness warrant, according to her elder son, Hossein Hashemi.

The FBI said in an email that it had no comment.

“We still have no idea what’s going on,” said Hashemi, a research fellow at the University of Colorado who was interviewed by phone from Washington. He also said he and his siblings had been subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury.

The incident comes as Iran faces increasing criticism of its own arrests of dual citizens and other people with Western ties. Those cases have previously been used as bargaining chips in negotiations with world powers.

Federal law allows judges to order witnesses to be arrested and detained if the government can prove their testimony has extraordinary value for a criminal case and that they would be a flight risk and unlikely to respond to a subpoena. The statute generally requires those witnesses to be promptly released once they are deposed.

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Associated Press writer Janet McConnaughey in New Orleans contributed to this report.

Government Mistakenly Wanted to Deport U.S. Veteran, Says ACLU

DETROIT — A Marine veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder was held for three days for possible deportation before federal authorities learned that he was a U.S. citizen born in Michigan, lawyers said Wednesday.

Jilmar Ramos-Gomez, 27, lives in the Grand Rapids area. He was released on Dec. 17 from a detention center in Calhoun County after personal records were provided to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan.

“Why did they think he was a noncitizen? Did they get him confused with someone else? Who knows,” ACLU attorney Miriam Aukerman said. “This is an individual who’s incredibly vulnerable with a mental illness.”

ICE released a statement Wednesday evening saying Ramos-Gomez told its officers he was “a foreign national illegally present in the U.S,” and the agency took him into custody on Dec. 14. ICE said it released him three days later after receiving documentation suggesting he was a U.S. citizen.

Ramos-Gomez was in the Kent County jail after being accused of trespassing and damaging a fire alarm at a Grand Rapids hospital on Nov. 21. The ACLU said he pleaded guilty and was supposed to be released on Dec. 14 while awaiting a sentence.

But ICE contacted the jail and requested that Ramos-Gomez be held for pickup. Kent County Undersheriff Chuck DeWitt said ICE, like other law enforcement agencies, has access to fingerprint records.

“Once he was released from our custody, he was under the domain of ICE. Where they take him is their process,” DeWitt said. “Our procedures were followed.”

DeWitt said he didn’t know whether Ramos-Gomez protested when immigration officers picked him up.

Ramos-Gomez was driven 70 miles (113 kilometers) to a detention center in Battle Creek. He was released after three days, after lawyer Richard Kessler contacted ICE on behalf of the man’s family.

Aukerman said Ramos-Gomez’ treatment was “appalling.”

Ramos-Gomez is receiving mental-health care and wasn’t available for an interview Wednesday. He was a lance corporal in the Marines and received awards for service in Afghanistan. The ACLU said his PTSD had a role in the disturbance at the hospital.

Sheriff Michelle LaJoye-Young defended her department, saying officers don’t have authority to verify why ICE wants to detain someone. Nonetheless, she called it a “very unfortunate situation” for Ramos-Gomez.

“We believe this case underscores the need for immigration policy reform,” the sheriff said.

 

Why Is the AP Carrying Water for William Barr?

A president facing a major scandal, just as the highest-profile trial is about to begin, pardons the indicted or convicted officials around him to effectively stop the investigation that’s closing in on his own illegal conduct.

Trump soon? We’ll see. But this actually describes what President George H.W. Bush did in 1992.

The Iran/Contra scandal revealed, among other things, that the Reagan/Bush White House had secretly sold missiles to Iran in exchange for hostages held in Lebanon, using the proceeds to fund right-wing forces fighting the leftist Nicaraguan government in violation of US law.

On Christmas Eve 1992, just as the indicted former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger was about to face trial, Bush pardoned him and five others, including former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams and and former National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane. The New York Times (12/25/92) reported this as “Bush Pardons 6 in Iran Affair, Averting a Weinberger Trial; Prosecutor Assails ‘Cover-Up.’”

The attorney general for Bush who approved the pardons, William Barr, is now being nominated for the same position by Trump. Is this background relevant? Though current news columns are rife with speculation that Trump might likewise protect himself by pardoning his indicted or convicted associates, the dominant US news wire service doesn’t seem to think so.

In “Barr as Attorney General: Old Job, Very Different Washington” (1/14/19), Associated Press reporter Eric Tucker made no mention whatsoever of the Iran/Contra pardons. Rather than seriously examine the trajectory of presidential power and accountability, Tucker framed the story, as the headline indicates, as a stark contrast between the  gentlemanly Bush and the “twice-divorced” Trump:

Serving Trump, who faces intensifying investigations from the department Barr would lead, is unlikely to compare with his tenure under President George H.W. Bush.

The false implication is that Bush did not himself face intensifying investigations from Lawrence Walsh, who operated out of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Counsel.  The misleading comparison is compounded by Tucker describing Trump as “breaking with the practice of shielding law enforcement from political influence” and ousting Attorney General Jeff Sessions for “not protecting him in the Russia investigation”—as if Barr didn’t have direct experience in the first Bush administration with imposing political influence on law enforcement to protect a president from investigation.

Instead, Tucker cites Barr’s supporters calling him “driven by his commitment to the department” and “very much a law-and-order guy.” (The praise for the new head of the department Tucker regularly covers marks his article as a “beat-sweetener,” a long and unfortunate tradition of journalists’ making their jobs easier by sucking up to sources.)

This deceptive piece was apparently picked up by literally thousands of media outlets. A search of “unlikely to compare with his tenure under President George H.W. Bush” produces over 2,400 results.

As Consortium News founder Robert Parry, who broke much of the Iran-Contra story for AP, would later write in a review of Walsh’s book Firewall: Inside the Iran/Contra Cover-Up:

The Republican independent counsel [Lawrence Walsh] infuriated the GOP when he submitted a second indictment of Weinberger on the Friday before the 1992 elections. The indictment contained documents revealing that President Bush had been lying for years with his claim that he was “out of the loop” on the Iran/Contra decisions. The ensuing furor dominated the last several days of the campaign and sealed Bush’s defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton.

Walsh had discovered, too, that Bush had withheld his own notes about the Iran/Contra Affair, a discovery that elevated the President to a possible criminal subject of the investigation. But Bush had one more weapon in his arsenal. On Christmas Eve 1992, Bush destroyed the Iran/Contra probe once and for all by pardoning Weinberger and five other convicted or indicted defendants.

Parry, who died a year ago, left AP after many of his stories on Iran/Contra were squashed (Consortium News, 1/28/18).

After I criticized AP on Twitter for the omission, a later piece by Tucker, co-written with Michael Balsamo, noted perfunctorily in the 16th graph: “As attorney general in 1992, he endorsed Bush’s pardons of Reagan administration officials in the Iran/Contra scandal.” (A search on “as attorney general in 1992, he endorsed Bush’s pardons of Reagan administration officials in the Iran/Contra scandal” produced a mere 202 results.)

While much of the media obsesses over every bit of “Russiagate,” some breathlessly anticipating the next revelation will surely bring down the Trump presidency, it’s remarkable how little interest there is in the trajectory of presidential power.

Rather, much of the establishment media has gone to great lengths to rehabilitate officials from both Bush administrations, including the elder Bush himself when he died last month. (One exception to the generally hagiographic coverage of his death was Arun Gupta’s “Let’s Talk About George H.W. Bush’s Role in the Iran/Contra Scandal”— in The Intercept, 12/7/18.) Indeed, Trump naming Barr just after George H.W. Bush’s funeral could be seen as a jiu-jitsu move: How could anyone object to his nominating the AG of the just-sainted Poppy Bush? It’s as though Trump were saying, “If you all like him so much, I’ll have what he had.” See the Institute for Public Accuracy news release, “Barr as AG? Bush and Trump Dovetail.”

AP’s actions also fit into the institution-protecting mode of what Parry derided as the “conventional wisdom”—which in its current formulation depicts Trump’s authoritarian tendencies as aberrations from the norms of US politics, rather than a continuation of the worst tendencies of his predecessors.

Air Traffic Controllers Union Fears Catastrophe During Shutdown

With the record-long government shutdown over President Donald Trump’s demand for border wall funding now in its fourth week, an official representing the National Air Traffic Controllers Association appeared on CNN on Wednesday to issue an alarming warning: Flying is “absolutely” less safe now than it was before the shutdown began.

“Each day that this shutdown continues, the situation gets worse and worse,” Trish Gilbert, executive vice president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, told CNN in an interview. “There are several complicated, complex layers in our system to ensure that it maintains the critical safety components that we all rely on when we fly. What we don’t want to see is a catastrophic event occur, and for us to come to you and say we told you that controllers are working longer hours, and now they don’t have their support staff.”

“They’re going to work unpaid, so they’re not sleeping at night,” Gilbert said of air traffic controllers. “They’re looking for other jobs; maybe they’re driving Uber before or after their shift. This is unacceptable.”

Asked if people should be concerned about flight safety as the shutdown continues with no end in sight, Gilbert answered in the affirmative, declaring: “I would say it is less safe today than it was a month ago, absolutely.”

“We do not have the professionals on the job. We are working with bare-bones crews. We have controllers there doing what they do very, very well, but how long can you expect them to do it without all of the systems behind them to keep the system safe and the planes in the air?” Gilbert continued. “This is a horrible game of chicken that we’re in the middle of, and we need to get out of it, and we need to get out of it today.”

Watch Gilbert’s full CNN appearance:

Flying “is less safe today than it was a month ago,” Executive VP of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, Trish Gilbert, tells @PoppyHarlowCNN.

“Right now you’re putting an incredible strain on the system,” she warns as the shutdown continues https://t.co/JUWP3WBp3G pic.twitter.com/BTMC7LUKU7

— CNN Newsroom (@CNNnewsroom) January 16, 2019

Gilbert’s “scary” warning about the safety of flying during the prolonged government shutdown comes just a day after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that it is bringing thousands of furloughed inspectors, engineers, and other employees back to work “to perform duties to ensure continuous operational safety of the entire national airspace.”

These workers, like hundreds of thousands of other government employees, will not be paid until the shutdown comes to an end.

Doug Lowe, president of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists’ Florida chapter, echoed Gilbert’s concerns in an interview last week, arguing that the longer the government remains shut down, “the more dangerous the aviation system becomes.”

“We’re gambling with aviation safety right now,” Lowe added. “A week from now, I would tell you, ‘Yes, I would not get on an aircraft.'”

Let’s Expose Congress Members for the Warhawks They Are

As the nation continued to reel from President Donald Trump’s shock decision last month to remove all U.S. troops from Syria, news came Wednesday that an unknown number of U.S. soldiers were among at least 15 killed in a bombing in northern Syria. Amid such continued violence, one would think the president’s withdrawal would have ever more urgency. And yet, just about everyone in Washington has attacked his decision to pull out.

The reflexive hatred for Trump that dominates the national conversation is bad for the U.S., especially when it comes to foreign policy. This is not to say that the president isn’t a flawed figure; after all, I’ve spent the better part of two years critiquing most of his policies. Still, when the man demonstrates prudent judgment—as in his recent calls to pull U.S. troops out of Syria and Afghanistan—he should be applauded. But that’s unlikely to happen in a divided America, as long as an interventionist, bipartisan consensus runs the show in Washington.

Some call it the deep state, others the swamp—but the terminology hardly matters at this point.  This forever-war crowd of congressional members, media pundits, arms industry CEOs and semiretired generals holds the reins on foreign policy in ways that are counter to the war-exhaustion instincts of both Trump and the American public. And it has to stop.

That’ll be no easy task, of course, as the military-industrial-congressional complex has gathered ever more power in the generations since President Dwight D. Eisenhower—a Republican—coined the term. Still, there’s one way, in the near term, to expose Beltway bellicosity on foreign affairs: Force Congress to publicly debate and vote on each of America’s ongoing wars. Let’s start with Syria, since it’s there that President Trump has a rare opportunity to shift the onus of responsibility for the bloody conflagration onto U.S. representatives. And that’s the last thing cowardly congressional members want.

Legislators in Washington—imitating the media pundits they increasingly resemble—prefer only to yell, scream and tweet about every foreign policy move this president makes. Some of Trump’s actions have undoubtedly been unacceptable, but whenever he goes with his “instincts” and recommends troop withdrawals and less war in the Middle East, he’s immediately castigated by politicians from both sides of the aisle. Ranging from New Jersey Democrats like Bob Menendez to stalwart Southern Republican hawks such as Lindsey Graham, they’re all essentially selling the same snake oil: perpetual war.

Not that these members of Congress do anything about it—they’re all talk. In that sense, they’re no more useful than the mainstream media pundits peddling the same militarist agenda. The Senate traditionally has a powerful role in overseas policy, but these days, all the Foreign Relations Committee chairs and co-chairs do is give interviews in the Capitol Rotunda.  “Conservative” constitutionalists must recall that it’s Congress that’s supposed to declare wars, whereas the president only executes the chosen policy. So instead of squawking about Trump’s “isolationism” and “irresponsibility” in Mideast affairs, these empty suits should head back into their deliberative chambers and craft some alternative policy for a change.

None of this is new. The executive branch has increased its size, scope and power in foreign policy since at least World War II. Nevertheless, it’s not too late to rectify part of this unconstitutional state of affairs. After all, on Syria and Afghanistan, Trump has the strategic high ground, in that the wars are aimless failures, and the support of a majority of Americans who are sick of endless war and ready to bring the troops home. In a sense, that’s exactly what Trump ran on: ending “stupid” wars.

But the militarist elites don’t care what the people—especially Trump’s supporters—want. As far as they’re concerned, they alone know what’s good for America. Or so they’d have us believe. In reality, whether they’re election-obsessed legislators or ratings-obsessed media moguls, these interventionists all serve the same corporate masters. They play politics even when lives—both of U.S. troops and countless civilians—are at stake. That goes for pugnacious Republicans of the Lindsey Graham mold, as well as hypocritical media celebrities like Rachel Maddow and her Democratic fan club. On the ostensible left, we’re even seeing an entire generation of born-again hawks rise in opposition to any and all de-escalation, even if those same liberal politicians and pundits would likely celebrate the same decision were it made by President Barack Obama.

With this in mind, Trump should send future Syria and Afghanistan policy to Congress, forcing its members to debate and publicly vote for either more or less war. Congress, with the exception of the recent Yemen War resolution, hasn’t done so since October 2002. At the very least, constituents would finally know where their representatives stand on our many wars and could hold representatives accountable should they choose to follow strategic inertia and prolong these unpopular conflicts.

The health of American democracy depends on adhering to the Constitution and its representative institutions. Legislators—not unelected presidential advisers, media pundits and retired generals—should decide on matters of war and peace. That’s why Americans shouldn’t canonize men like former Secretary of Defense Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis. This darling of the mainstream left and right was neither martyr nor missionary.

At every turn, it appears, he and his allegedly self-described Committee to Save America, subverted Trump’s popular intention to end decades-long wars. That wasn’t his job—or John Kelly’s or H. R. McMaster’s—so in some ways, resigning was the most appropriate decision for Mattis. Note that the secretary of defense chose to finally fall on his sword not over U.S. support for starving 85,000 Yemeni children, but in response to a modest de-escalation from an aimless military intervention in Syria. A curious ethical decision to say the least.

Mattis wasn’t the only one on the president’s team to disapprove of the withdrawal. Just take national security adviser John Bolton, who at every turn seems to backtrack or soften the blow of the president’s policies. Bolton works harder than anyone in Washington to continue—or even radically expand—U.S. military involvement in the Middle East. Though his actions would seem to run counter to Trump’s recent anti-interventionist announcements, Bolton remains a fixture in a very confusing White House.

This is yet another reason the life-and-death decisions of war and peace must be decided in public—not in the West Wing or corporate boardrooms, but rather on the floors of the Senate and the House of Representatives. If the bipartisan crowd of congressional members who’ve been so critical of Trump’s proposed Mideast withdrawals sincerely believe that more war is the answer, let them cast their vote accordingly.

Even if ultimately the citizenry proves apathetic and fails to hold its representatives accountable, a public war debate and vote would be refreshing. It’s the least that my fellow soldiers—and our many nameless victims–deserve.

Did ‘The Sopranos’ Anticipate the Rise of Trump?

In “The Sopranos’ ” controversial and relentlessly scrutinized final episode “Made in America,” Tony’s misfit son AJ makes a reluctant announcement: he’s going to fight in Afghanistan because he believes the Army will improve his career prospects. “My ultimate goal is to qualify for helicopter pilot training,” he tells an incredulous Tony. “Afterwards go to work for Trump or somebody. Be their personal pilot.” (AJ ultimately accepts a position at “Little” Carmine Lupertazzi’s production company, which is developing a movie about a private detective who gets sucked into the internet.)

Twelve years later, the U.S. is still fighting in Afghanistan and Donald Trump has improbably ascended to the White House, his family’s criminal undertakings offering their own source of fascination for the American public. To borrow a phrase from “Sopranos” character Bobby Baccalieri, maybe Quasimodo predicted all this. Either way, the series has proved remarkably prescient in its assessment of America as a culture and a society.

“I think the thematic heart of the show—corruption, consumption and waste—are subjects that are on people’s minds to a far greater degree now than they were in the late ’90s,” New York Magazine’s Matt Zoller Seitz tells Truthdig. “And I hate to be so blunt, but we have a kind of gangster president.”

In their new book, “The Sopranos Sessions,” Seitz and co-author Alan Sepinwall offer a critical reexamination of the HBO drama—one that explores how the series revolutionized serial television, aesthetically and thematically. “The show’s mercurial unpredictability was electrifying,” they write in their introduction. “Pre-Sopranos, TV was widely dismissed as a medium for programs that didn’t ask the viewer to think about anything except what was coming on next, and that preferred lovable characters who didn’t change and had no inner life. The ideal network series was filler between commercials.”

The book also includes new interviews with creator David Chase, each of which provides fresh insight into the writers’ and show-runners’ creative process. Since their publication, these interviews have caused a stir of their own, fueling further speculation about the fate of Tony Soprano. I won’t dissect Chase’s admission here, but the fact that audiences and the media alike continue to hang on his every word is a testament not just to the brilliance of the show’s final scene but the enduring power of “The Sopranos” itself.

Over the phone, I spoke with Seitz about the show’s politics, America’s reverence for anti-heroes and its fundamental discomfort with ambiguity. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Jacob Sugarman: This year marks the 20th anniversary of “The Sopranos,” which serves as a hook of sorts for your book. Why do you think the show continues to resonate decades after it first premiered?

Matt Zoller Seitz: Well, there are number of reasons. One of them is that television as we know it now comes from “The Sopranos,” for better of worse—[specifically] the tradition of the anti-hero, or anti-heroes, being at the center of the story rather than a more moralistic hero that audiences can approve of. That’s a major change. Other shows had attempted that, but “The Sopranos” actually pulled it off, and it deserves the credit. Or the blame.

[More significantly], I think the thematic heart of the show—corruption, consumption and waste—are subjects that are on people’s minds to a far greater degree now than they were in the late ’90s. Tony Soprano is a waste-management consultant, but he’s essentially in the business of hauling and dumping garbage. That’s where his veneer of legitimacy comes from. He’s also a character who disposes of people, figuratively and literally, when they are no longer of any use to him; for whom morality is entirely situational; and who is gluttonous in every way. Food, drink, women, drugs, cars, houses, you name it. He’s a corrupter who introduces an element of decay to the people around him. And I hate to be so blunt, but we have a kind of gangster president.

JS: Please, be blunt!

MZS: I mean, that’s what he is. In fact, when I first heard Donald Trump announcing his presidency—the way he was talking and the way he was acting like a tough guy, implying that he could have people beaten up, or legally crushed, and making it clear that if you were loyal to him he loved you—he sounded like one of the two-bit gangsters Tony would end up killing before the end of the season, simply because he was too loud and too stupid to be allowed to live. You know?

JS: Do you think it’s fair to say that the show anticipated the rise of Trumpism? Rewatching the pilot episode for the umpteenth time, I was struck by how much Tony’s opening monologue seemed to echo the kinds of grievances that were so pervasive in the run-up to the 2016 election.

MZS: When Tony says, “Lately, I’ve been thinking that I came in at the end, that the best was over,” he was specifically addressing the end of the millennium, which had triggered widespread concern that our computer systems were going to fail us, that lights were going to go out, dams would burst, planes were going to fall from the sky. None of that happened, of course. But Tony was also speaking to the end of the American Century. It might not have happened right away, but the seeds had likely been planted as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed. Then 9/11 happened three years after “The Sopranos” debuted, and they had to take the twin towers out of the rearview mirror in the opening credits.

I think it’s inarguable that things have become worse for America, at least in terms of our international prestige, and we brought it on ourselves. Of course, it’s debatable whether a country built on genocide and slavery ever deserved such an exalted position in the first place. When people say they love you, what they really mean is they fear you. And that’s not a situation that’s unique to America. Before us, England played the part of Tony Soprano, and China took its turn, and France. A lot of different countries have had that role. But we have given up even the pretense of being a moral authority. I think the bloom is off the rose now in a way that it maybe wasn’t even in the ’50s and ’60s, when we were building up to Vietnam. Honestly, I’m stunned that we didn’t have somebody like Trump in charge of the country sooner. I look at that guy, and I feel like I’m seeing what we actually are and never wanted to admit. And I think, as a country, we need to spend some quality time with Dr. Melfi and take a good, hard look at ourselves.

JS: I thought it was really interesting that “The Sopranos Sessions” is publishing at a time when “Vice” is in theaters right now. Obviously it’s a different medium, with a different subject, but it seems like we’re trying to grapple with the damage of that administration. I think of “The Sopranos” as the ur work of the Bush presidency.

MZS: I would have to disagree with you slightly. Remember, David Chase is a baby boomer, and his sensibilities as a young man were shaped by counterculture works like “Catch-22,” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” And in cinema, stuff like “The Graduate,” “Easy Rider,” and “Blow-Up,” which is a major influence on the ending of the show.

Just in terms of calendar, Bill was in office when “The Sopranos” debuted. Clinton was a scumbag, and I don’t think we’ve really started to come to terms with the fact that he’s probably a rapist. At the very least, he used his power in a way that sexually dominated and intimidated women. There was a natural charm to him that women responded to in a consensual manner, but then there were also times when he threw his weight around like a gangster, and he lied about it. Peter Bogdanovich is quoted in one of the articles from the book as saying that he thought that the show spoke to the moral murkiness of that period.

JS: All fair points, and I would never try to absolve Bill Clinton of any kind of moral murkiness. But I guess I’d counter that the bulk of the series is set in post-9/11 America. You’re repeatedly reminded that the towers have come down, and the country has radically changed course.

MZS: Once Bush got into office, I think “The Sopranos” spoke directly to his presidency too, especially in the way that the mob guys expediently started blaming everything on Middle Easterners. They saw it as a way to escape the heat of the FBI.

JS: To return to your earlier point about the show revolutionizing serial television as we know it: Do you think “The Sopranos,” and the wave of anti-heroes it inspired, might have helped prime the country to embrace a sociopath as president?

MZS: Well, I think you can make a case for pop culture acclimating people to a Trump-like figure, but I probably wouldn’t pin it on “The Sopranos.” I think that show is basically on the side of the angels when it comes to making us feel conflicting emotions about a character like Tony and the gangsters he ran with, as well as the wives and girlfriends who were complicit in the evil of these men. There were a few moments when [the writers] kind of lost their grip and seemed to be getting off on the brutality of the characters, but it happened a lot less often than you would think. If anything, I think “The Sopranos” offered a counterweight, because the framework of it was morality and moral relativity.

But the movie characters I grew up with in the ’80s and ’90s seem really sinister in retrospect. Who were the male box office stars of that era? They were people like Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, Michael Douglas, Robin Williams and Bruce Willis. And what do they all have in common? Like Mel Gibson in the “Lethal Weapon” series, they’re “mavericks.” In “Top Gun,” Tom Cruise’s character is even named Maverick. All of these guys are personable, good-looking and hyper masculine. They walk with a swagger. They’re wittier than everybody else, and they’re more confident than everybody else. They enter a room and just take over, and they don’t give a damn about rules or regulations. They may get reprimanded, they may have to give up their badge for a period of time, but they’re [invariably] rewarded with a slow clap at the end. And there’s always a sputtering authority figure who complains that they don’t have any respect for protocol, and traditions, and all of that business.

There’s nothing more American than someone who refuses to follow the rules. I actually did a piece for The Star Ledger in 2003, and a lot of readers didn’t appreciate it because it was a pretty Republican circulation area at the time. But it essentially made this point. I don’t think we would have been as willing to accept somebody like George W. Bush if pop culture hadn’t been telling us for over 20 years that this is the guy that we all really want. Trump is more like a Michael Douglas character from an ’80s movie, honestly. He actually auditioned to be in “Wall Street”—did you know that?

JS: I did not, but that’s perfect.

MZS: He was going to play himself. When I was writing a book about Oliver Stone, he told me that Trump was a terrible actor, that he was impossible to direct, and that he wouldn’t take direction at all.

JS: Of course he wouldn’t.

MZS: Keep in mind, this is Oliver Stone, who is not exactly Mr. Sensitivity.

JS: Since your book was published, we’ve learned that [creator] David Chase is working on a prequel film to “The Sopranos” called “The Many Saints of Newark,” set during the Newark riots of 1967. Obviously details are pretty sparse, but do you see a project like that as Chase attempting to reckon with our political moment?

MZS: They certainly weren’t shy about referencing recent politics on the show. So yeah, who knows?

JS: I ask because the series makes explicit reference to future New Jersey state Senator Anthony Imperiale, a racist rabble-rouser and proto-Trump, if ever there was one.

MZS: That’s interesting. I hadn’t even thought about that. But you know, I guess it’s possible. I remember seeing a profile of him on “60 Minutes” when I was a kid. And my stepfather, who was born and raised in Queens, and was a big reactionary right-wing guy, loved Imperiale. His very existence seemed to excite him. It’s interesting to think that he could be in the movie.

JS: I know you have to run, but I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you about the show’s final scene. It’s funny, because your book has its own little Holsten’s diner moment. David Chase appears to make a Freudian slip and acknowledge that Tony gets whacked, but then he quickly retreats, leaving the reader wondering exactly what just happened.

MZS: Right.

JS: I’m not going to ask you if you believe Tony is killed, because that feels like a boring question at this point, but why do you think we’re still so desperate to know what happens, 12 years after the show has wrapped?

MZS: Well, I should start by telling you that, if you tell me that the point of that scene is that Tony died, I’m not going to argue with you. I think you can certainly read it that way. But what I object to is the idea that there’s only one acceptable answer to what happened at the end of “The Sopranos,” and that it’s not open to interpretation, because that’s just absurd. I think if you keep insisting Tony died, and you won’t accept any other discussion, then you weren’t really paying attention to the show. And I would say you don’t really love the show for what it actually was.

“The Sopranos” was very rigorous in insisting that we don’t get the answers to certain questions, and it denied us closure every chance it got. This started in a big way in the second episode of season 3 when [Tony’s mother] Livia dies. There’s a scene where AJ and Meadow are talking about Robert Frost, and AJ is very frustrated because he [can’t understand] one of his poems. He just wants the answer, and Meadow keeps giving him intellectual prompts that are intended to stimulate independent thought, and lead him to his own conclusions. As he told us in the book, that was Chase’s way of acknowledging his own frustration with some of the viewers of the show. It annoyed him that people were so literal-minded in the way they dealt with certain aspects of the series. And this allowed him to mock them a bit.

In the next scene, AJ thinks he hears the floorboards creaking outside his bedroom. He goes into the hallway and says, “Grandma?” Was his grandmother there? Is there another world on “The Sopranos,” beyond the one we can sense? Maybe and maybe not. The show never settles the matter.

This is going to make me sound like a jerk, but I’m just going to say it: I feel like it is our duty as people who know what art is, and accept certain properties of art as being non-negotiable, to stand up and fight against this treatment of the final four minutes of the series as a puzzle. I think that this desire to solve the last scene like an eighth-grade algebra question is part of a larger war on art that has always been [intrinsic to] the American experience of culture. People don’t want art to be art. They want it to be entertainment, they want it to be digestible and they want to come up with the answer so they can get on with the rest of their lives. To be free of it. And you’re never going to be free of “The Sopranos.”

The Only Way to Stop Israel From Screwing Over Palestinians

The some 12 million Palestinians in the world—the majority of them made refugees by the Israelis—lack a nation-state. A good half of them, in addition to having no Palestinian state, do not even have citizenship in a host state. That is, the 5 million Palestinians under Israeli hegemony in the West Bank and Gaza are not citizens, and are completely stateless, as are Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and some European countries. Some have fairly useless laissez-passer, but these flimsy documents are so feared by border agents in most countries, who fear their bearers will never depart once admitted, that they won’t recognize them. Palestinian refugees in Lebanon told me that they are essentially in prison, unable to leave Lebanon, unable to return home to Palestine, unable to own property or get most kinds of work.

The Palestine Authority created by the Oslo peace process in the 1990s has been gutted, and has no real control of the land, water or territory of Palestine. It is more like the police forces in the Bantustans set up by white South Africans to avoid having to continue to recognize the citizenship of black South Africans.

I argue that it is because Palestinians are stateless that they can continually be screwed over by the Israelis, who are slowly but surely stealing their land and water and planting colonies in their cities, such as Hebron, in preparation for eventually expelling them to Jordan and making many of them refugees all over again. Most—but not all—Israelis deny that this is their goal, but they are fooling themselves. It is the only possible outcome of their policies and therefore must be considered their goal.

The stateless have no standing in international institutions and fall through the cracks of international law. Israelis understand this, because the fascists in the 1930s took citizenship away from European Jews. The Zionist or Jewish-nationalist response was to create Israel to ensure that Jews did not remain stateless. It was their temporary statelessness under Hitler that facilitated the Holocaust, since stateless people have no tribunal in which to adjudicate their rights.

The Israeli hard-liners are, in essence, adopting precisely the same policy toward the Palestinians as the fascists did toward the Jews and gypsies and gays in the 1930s, though, of course, they have not taken the horrific genocidal steps taken by Hitler in the 1940s. But the 1930s were no picnic for German minorities, and the danger to stateless Palestinians is that something horrible could yet be done to them with relative impunity for the Israeli leadership, for whom the United States will run interference no matter what.

All this is why it is a good thing that Palestine is applying to be a full member of the United Nations, having submitted the paperwork Tuesday night.

The only thing that might at least slow the politicide of the hard-right government of Israel against Palestine is for the latter to gain recognition as a state and have access to international tribunals that would inevitably halt Israeli colonization of Palestinian land.

Palestine a few years ago succeeded in moving from being a nonmember observer entity to a nonmember observer state, a status it shares with the Vatican. It only needed a majority in the U.N. General Assembly to make this change.

The new status allows Palestine to be a member of many U.N. committees, with Israel having failed to block this development, and it has even been allowed to join Interpol.

Palestine cannot become a full U.N. member without the agreement of the U.N. Security Council, on which the United States will wield its veto and ensure that the Palestinians remain stateless. In fact, the U.S. has done whatever it could to stop Palestine even from being a U.N. observer state and from joining U.N. committees. U.S. diplomacy, aimed at crushing the Palestinians on behalf of Israel, has failed so far with the rest of the U.N.

In fact, Palestine has just become the leader of the Group of 77, countries of the “global south” [another term for developing countries] at the U.N.

The Palestinians know that the U.S. will block them, but they feel that they will gain some sympathy around the world for having made the attempt. (They could well get a majority on the U.N. Security Council, which would be a moral victory). Some countries are thinking seriously about upgrading their Palestinian diplomatic missions to full embassies, which would be a way of recognizing a Palestinian state.

That the Palestinian leadership is going ahead with the application, moreover, shows the depths of its despair over any peace process and the profundity of its disappointment in the Trump administration and the government of Binyamin Netanyahu. Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, half of which Palestinians claim for their capital, and his slashing of aid to Palestinians and their refugees, have left the Palestinian leadership feeling as though it has nothing left to lose by defying Trump and Netanyahu.

Just as abolitionists engaged in many fruitless actions before the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation achieved for them their goals, so Palestinians will try out many policies and legislative approaches in an attempt to forestall being massively expropriated and displaced. It may be that, down the line, they too will be released from their estate of semi-slavery.

Angela Merkel Says There’s Still Time for Brexit Negotiations

LONDON — The Latest on Brexit (all times local):11:35 a.m.

Finnish Prime Minister Juha Sipila is urging all British citizens living the Nordic country to immediately register at Finland’s immigration service to make sure they receive a living permit in case of no-deal Brexit.

Sipila told Finnish news agency STT Wednesday that the temporary permit will be issued so that the 5,000 Britons currently living in the country of 5.5 million can continue their stay if Britain exits the European Union without a deal.

He said the likelihood of a no-deal Brexit has increased as a result of the British parliament’s decision to reject Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal Tuesday.

The Finnish government’s social benefits office Kela said there may be major changes to what social benefits British citizens in Finland may be entitled to in case of a Brexit without an agreement, but did not provide details.

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11:10 a.m.

French wine and spirits makers are warning that Britain crashing out of the European Union without a deal could hurt trade.

A day after British Prime Minister Theresa May suffered an overwhelming defeat over her Brexit deal, the federation of French wine and spirits exporters said Tuesday that “the specter of a ‘no deal’ could have serious consequences for the economy and the citizens of both parties.”

According to the federation, called FEVS, Britain is France’s second-biggest destination for exports of spirits and wine and France imports a large quantity of British spirits.

FEVS President Antoine Leccia said: “This vote is prejudicial to the historical and fruitful commercial relationship between our countries.”

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11 a.m.

A top official at the French presidency said Europeans would make no concessions on Brexit that would damage the European Union’s core principles, including the integrity of the single market.

The French official said that any request by Britain to seek an extension to the Brexit timetable would need to come with a new plan and a strategy from the British government.

The official was speaking anonymously in line with the French presidency’s customary practice.

He added that “nobody believes” the European Union would now be “weak and febrile.” ”And I don’t think Theresa May believes it”, he added.

The French parliament votes on Wednesday afternoon to adopt preparatory measures to get the country ready in case of no deal.

– By Sylvie Corbet

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10:50 a.m.

Russia’s foreign minister says Moscow isn’t taking any sides in the controversy over Britain’s exit from the European Union.

Sergey Lavrov was speaking Wednesday at a news conference a day after the British parliament overwhelmingly rejected British Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal.

He rejected allegations that Russia was gloating in the turmoil, saying that Russia is interested in seeing a “united, strong and, most importantly, independent European Union.”

Lavrov reaffirmed that Russia would stand ready to develop ties with Britain and the EU irrespective of the outcome of talks on British departure from the EU.

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10:10 a.m.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel says there’s still time for negotiations between the European Union and Britain over its departure from the bloc.

Merkel says that she regretted the decision by British lawmakers to oppose the agreement negotiated by British Prime Minister Theresa May and the EU.

Merkel told reporters in Berlin that “we will of course do everything to find an orderly solution, but we are also prepared if there is no orderly solution.”

Merkel said “we still have time to negotiate, but we are now waiting to see what the British prime minister proposes.”

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9:45 a.m.

Bank of England Governor Mark Carney says financial markets appear to have taken a fairly benign view of the big defeat of Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal and seem to believe Brexit may be delayed.

Addressing lawmakers on the Treasury Select Committee, Carney said Wednesday that the market reaction since Tuesday evening’s vote indicates that investors think the “prospect of no deal may have diminished.”

Carney made clear that wasn’t necessarily his view and that he wouldn’t put too much stock on short-term movements in financial markets. But he also said the move higher in the pound could be an indication that investors think the date when Britain leaves the European Union will be extended.

He said the market interpretation of May’s 230-vote defeat reflects “some expectation the process of resolution would be extended.”

At present the country is due to leave on March 29 but the government could ask the EU to extend that date.

On Wednesday, the pound was up 0.2 percent at $1.2888.

___

9:35 a.m.

Germany’s foreign minister says “the time for little games is now over” on Brexit because the clock is ticking to avert a hard rupture between the U.K. and the European Union.

Heiko Maas suggested British lawmakers who voted against the deal negotiated by Prime Minister Theresa May should recognize the importance of the issue, adding that “we need a solution, and we need it quickly.”

Maas told Deutschlandfunk radio that British lawmakers in London so far had only shown “what they don’t want, and that’s not enough.”

He dismissed the notion that May might get a substantially better deal if she goes back to Brussels, saying “if there was anything else one could have offered Britain it would have had to have been done in the last weeks.”

Maas wouldn’t rule out extending the March 29 deadline for Brexit, but noted that “this won’t really be easy, because we have the European elections in May.”

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9:15 a.m.

U.K. financial markets have taken the overwhelming defeat of Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal in stride.

The pound was up 0.1 percent at $1.2869 in early morning trading, while the FTSE 100 index of leading British shares was down 0.1 percent at 6,888.

Though uncertainty surrounding Britain’s exit from the European Union remains elevated, many in the markets think May’s defeat by lawmakers Tuesday evening makes it less likely the country will crash out of the bloc on March 29 with no deal.

James Smith, an economist at ING, says the “calm market response” suggests investors think at the very least that the government will end up having to seek an extension to the Brexit timetable.

Traders will remain focused on developments in Parliament later, where lawmakers will vote on whether they have confidence in the government.

___

9:10 a.m.

The head of an influential German business lobby group says the U.K. Parliament’s vote against the Brexit deal with the European Union shows “hysteria has won.”

Joachim Lang, chief executive of the Federation of German Industries, says that lawmakers’ rejection of the deal is “dramatic” and “the chance to find a way out of this chaos has been passed up for now.”

The group, known by its German acronym BDI, warned that Britain is getting closer to a disorderly departure from the EU and “the responsibility for avoiding this lies solely with the government and opposition in London.”

The BDI said trade in goods and services between Germany and Britain amounts to about 175 billion euros ($200 billion) a year.

It said “any uncertainty would endanger tens of thousands of companies and hundreds of thousands of jobs in Germany and especially in the United Kingdom.”

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9 a.m.

Britain’s envoy to Germany says the European Union might help avert a “no-deal” Brexit if it’s prepared to shift its position on the terms of future border controls with Ireland.

Britain’s ambassador in Berlin, Sebastian Wood, says that the current “backstop ” solution is opposed both by U.K. lawmakers who want the country to leave the EU, and those who don’t.

In an interview with German public broadcaster ARD, Wood noted that Britain wouldn’t have the right to get out of the backstop unilaterally “and many have noticed this.”

He said “this might be the most important question in the coming days and weeks, and the EU can perhaps be a little helpful in that area.”

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8:50 a.m.

British Prime Minister Theresa May faces a no-confidence vote a day after Parliament rejected her Brexit deal by an historic margin.

May is battling to save her job after staking her political reputation on a last-ditch effort to win support for the divorce agreement she negotiated with the European Union. Though defeat was widely expected, the scale of the rout — 432-202 — was devastating for May’s leadership.

Immediately after the vote, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn tabled a no-confidence motion, saying it will give Parliament a chance to give its verdict “on the sheer incompetence of this government.”

Still, most analysts predict May will survive because her Conservative Party and the Democratic Unionist Party, which supports it, are expected to vote against the motion.

___

8:15 a.m.

European Union Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier says the bloc is stepping up preparations for a chaotic no-deal departure of Britain from the bloc after the rejection of the draft withdrawal deal in London left the EU “fearing more than ever that there is a risk” of a cliff-edge departure.

Barnier regretted Westminster’s massive rejection of the deal he negotiated with the government of British Prime Minister Theresa May and said that any future deal would still have to include approving the withdrawal agreement.

He said Wednesday that “whatever happens, ratification of the withdrawal agreement is necessary. It is a precondition.”

He said that a linked political declaration offered “possible options” for further talks.

Learning How to Say Goodbye to Our Broken Planet

I’m standing atop Rush Hill on Alaska’s remote St. Paul Island. While only 665 feet high, it provides a 360-degree view of this tundra-covered, 13-mile-long, seven-mile-wide part of the Pribilof Islands. While the hood of my rain jacket flaps in the cold wind, I gaze in wonder at the silvery waters of the Bering Sea. The ever-present wind whips the surface into a chaos of whitecaps, scudding mist, and foam.

The ancient cinder cone I’m perched on reminds me that St. Paul, was, oh so long ago, one of the last places woolly mammoths could be found in North America. I’m here doing research for my book The End of Ice. And that, in turn, brings me back to the new reality in these far northern waters: as cold as they still are, human-caused climate disruption is warming them enough to threaten a possible collapse of the food web that sustains this island’s Unangan, its Aleut inhabitants, also known as “the people of the seal.” Given how deeply their culture is tied to a subsistence lifestyle coupled with the new reality that the numbers of fur seals, seabirds, and other marine life they hunt or fish are dwindling, how could this crisis not be affecting them?

During breeding season, three-quarters of the northern fur seal population can be found on the Pribilof Islands. They dive to depths of 600 feet searching for small fish and squid. (Dahr Jamail)

While on St. Paul, I spoke with many tribal elders who told me stories about fewer fish and sea birds, harsher storms and warming temperatures, but what struck me most deeply were their accounts of plummeting fur seal populations. Seal mothers, they said, had to swim so much farther to find food for their pups that the babies were starving to death before they could make it back.

And the plight of those dramatically declining fur seals could well become the plight of the Unangan themselves, which in the decades to come, as climate turbulence increases, could very well become the plight of all of us.

Just before flying to St. Paul, I met with Bruce Wright in Anchorage, Alaska. He’s a senior scientist with the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association, has worked for the National Marine Fisheries Service, and was a section chief for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for 11 years. “We’re not going to stop this train wreck,” he assures me grimly. “We are not even trying to slow down the production of CO2 [carbon dioxide], and there is already enough CO2 in the atmosphere.”

While describing the warming, ever more acidic waters around Alaska and the harm being caused to the marine food web, he recalled a moment approximately 250 million years ago when the oceans underwent similar changes and the planet experienced mass extinction events “driven by ocean acidity. The Permian mass extinction where 90% of the species were wiped out, that is what we are looking at now.”

I wrap up the interview with a heavy heart, place my laptop in my satchel, put on my jacket, and shake his hand. Knowing I’m about to fly to St. Paul, Wright has one final thing to tell me as he walks me out: “The Pribilofs were the last place mammoths survived because there weren’t any people out there to hunt them. We’ve never experienced this, where we are headed. Maybe the islands will become a refuge for a population of humans.”

The Loss Upon Us

For at least two decades, I’ve found my solace in the mountains. I lived in Alaska from 1996 to 2006 and more than a year of my life has been spent climbing on the glaciers of Denali and other peaks in the Alaska Range. Yet that was a bittersweet time for me as the dramatic impacts of climate change were quickly becoming apparent, including quickly receding glaciers and warmer winter temperatures.

After years of war and then climate-change reporting, I regularly withdrew to the mountains to catch my breath. As I filled my lungs with alpine air, my heart would settle down and I could feel myself root back into the Earth.

The Gulkana Glacier in the Alaska Range, like most glaciers globally, is losing mass rapidly. Some experts predict that every alpine glacier in the world will be gone by 2100. (Dahr Jamail)

Later, my book research would take me back onto Denali’s fast-shrinking glaciers and also to Glacier National Park in Montana. There I met Dr. Dan Fagre, a U.S. Geological Survey research ecologist and director of the Climate Change in Mountain Ecosystems Project. “This is an explosion,” he assured me, “a nuclear explosion of geologic change. This… exceeds the ability for normal adaptation. We’ve shoved it into overdrive and taken our hands off the wheel.” Despite its name, the park he studies is essentially guaranteed not to have any active glaciers by 2030, only 11 years from now.

My research also took me to the University of Miami, Coral Gables, where I met the chair of the Department of Geological Science, Harold Wanless, an expert in sea-level rise.

I asked him what he would say to people who think we still have time to mitigate the impacts of runaway climate change. “We can’t undo this,” he replied. “How are you going to cool down the ocean? We’re already there.”

As if to underscore the point, Wanless told me that, in the past, carbon dioxide had varied from roughly 180 to 280 parts per million (ppm) in the atmospher eas the Earth shifted from glacial to interglacial periods. Linked to this 100-ppm fluctuation was about a 100-foot change in sea level. “Every 100-ppm CO2 increase in the atmosphere gives us 100 feet of sea level rise,” he told me. “This happened when we went in and out of the Ice Age.”

As I knew, since the industrial revolution began, atmospheric CO2 has already increased from 280 to 410 ppm. “That’s 130 ppm in just the last 200 years,” I pointed out to him. “That’s 130 feet of sea level rise that’s already baked into Earth’s climate system.”

He looked at me and nodded grimly. I couldn’t help thinking of that as a nod goodbye to coastal cities from Miami to Shanghai.

In July 2017, I traveled to Camp 41 in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, part of a project founded four decades ago by Thomas Lovejoy, known to many as the “godfather of biodiversity.” While visiting him, I also met Vitek Jirinec, an ornithologist from the Czech Republic who had held 11 different wildlife positions from Alaska to Jamaica. In the process, he became all too well acquainted with the signs of biological collapse among the birds he was studying. He’d watched as some Amazon populations like that of the black-tailed leaftosser declined by 95%; he’d observed how mosquitoes in Hawaii were killing off native bird populations; he’d explored how saltwater intrusion into Alaska’s permafrost was changing bird habitats there.

Orinthologist Vitek Jirinec at Camp 41. Some bird species in the Amazon have already declined by 95% since the 1980s. (Dahr Jamail)

His tone turned somber as we discussed his research and a note of anger slowly crept into his voice. “The problem of animal and plant populations left marooned within various fragments [of their habitat] under circumstances that are untenable for the long term has begun showing up all over the land surface of the planet. The familiar questions recur: How many mountain gorillas inhabit the forested slopes of the Virunga volcanoes, along the shared borders of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, and Rwanda? How many tigers live in the Sariska Tiger Reserve of northwestern India? How many are left? How long can they survive?”

As he continued, the anger in his voice became palpable, especially when he began discussing how “island biogeography” had come to the mainland and what was happening to animal populations marooned by human development on fragments of land in places like the Amazon. “How many grizzly bears occupy the North Cascades ecosystem, a discrete patch of mountain forest along the northern border of the state of Washington? Not enough. How many European brown bears are there in Italy’s Abruzzo National Park? Not enough. How many Florida panthers in Big Cypress Swamp? Not enough. How many Asiatic lions in the Forest of Gir? Not enough… The world is broken in pieces now.”

“A Terrifying 12 Years”

In October 2018, 15 months after Jirinec’s words brought me to tears in the Amazon, the world’s leading climate scientists authored a report for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warning us that we have just a dozen years left to limit the catastrophic impacts of climate change. The gist of it is this: we’ve already warmed the planet one degree Celsius. If we fail to limit that warming process to 1.5 degrees, even a half-degree more than that will significantly worsen extreme heat, flooding, widespread droughts, and sea level increases, among other grim phenomena. The report has become a key talking point of political progressives in the U.S., who, like journalist and activist Naomi Klein, are now speaking of “a terrifying 12 years” left in which to cut fossil fuel emissions.

There is, however, a problem with even this approach. It assumes that the scientific conclusions in the IPCC report are completely sound. It’s well known, however, that there’s been a political element built into the IPCC’s scientific process, based on the urge to get as many countries as possible on board the Paris climate agreement and other attempts to rein in climate change. To do that, such reports tend to use the lowest common denominator in their projections, which makes their science overly conservative (that is, overly optimistic).

In addition, new data suggest that the possibility of political will coalescing across the planet to shift the global economy completely off fossil fuels in the reasonably near future is essentially a fantasy. And that’s even if we could remove enough of the hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 already in our overburdened atmosphere to make a difference (not to speak of the heat similarly already lodged in the oceans).

“It’s extraordinarily challenging to get to the 1.5 degree Celsius target and we are nowhere near on track to doing that,” Drew Shindell, a Duke University climate scientist and a co-author of the IPCC report, told the Guardian just weeks before it was released. “While it’s technically possible, it’s extremely improbable, absent a real sea change in the way we evaluate risk. We are nowhere near that.”

In fact, even best-case scenarios show us heading for at least a three-degree warming and, realistically speaking, we are undoubtedly on track for far worse than that by 2100, if not much sooner. Perhaps that’s why Shindell was so pessimistic.

For example, a study published in Nature magazine, also released in October, showed that over the last quarter-century, the oceans have absorbed 60% more heat annually than estimated in the 2014 IPCC report. The study underscored that the globe’s oceans have, in fact, already absorbed 93% of all the heat humans have added to the atmosphere, that the climate system’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases is far higher than thought and that planetary warming is far more advanced than had previously been grasped.

To give you an idea of how much heat the oceans have absorbed: if that heat had instead gone into the atmosphere, the global temperature would be 97 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than it is today. For those who think that there are still 12 years left to change things, the question posed by Wanless seems painfully apt: How do we remove all the heat that’s already been absorbed by the oceans?

Two weeks after that Nature article came out, a study in Scientific Reports warned that the extinction of animal and plant species thanks to climate change could lead to a “domino effect” that might, in the end, annihilate life on the planet. It suggested that organisms will die out at increasingly rapid rates because they depend on other species that are also on their way out. It’s a process the study calls “co-extinction.” According to its authors, a five to six degree Celsius rise in average global temperatures might be enough to annihilate most of Earth’s living creatures.

To put this in perspective: just a two degree rise will leave dozens of the world’s coastal mega-cities flooded, thanks primarily to melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, as well as the thermal expansion of the oceans as they warm. There will be 32 times as many heat waves in India and nearly half a billion more people will suffer water scarcity. At three degrees, southern Europe will be in permanent drought and the area burned annually by wildfires in the U.S. will sextuple. These impacts, it’s worth noting, may already be baked into the system, even if every country that signed the Paris climate accord were to fully honor its commitments, which most of them are not currently doing.

At four degrees, global grain yields could drop by half, most likely resulting in annual worldwide food crises (along with far more war, general conflict, and migration than at present).

The International Energy Agency has already shown that maintaining our current fossil-fueled economic system would virtually guarantee a six-degree rise in the Earth’s temperature before 2050. To add insult to injury, a 2017 analysis from oil giants BP and Shell indicated that they expected the planet to be five degrees warmer by mid-century.

In late 2013, I wrote a piece for TomDispatch titled “Are We Falling Off the Climate Precipice?” Even then, it was already clear enough that we were indeed heading off that cliff. More than five years later, a sober reading of the latest climate change science indicates that we are now genuinely in free fall.

The question is no longer whether or not we are going to fail, but how are we going to comport ourselves in the era of failure?

Listening While Saying Goodbye

It’s been estimated that between 150 and 200 plant, insect, bird, and mammal species are already going extinct every day. In other words, during the two and a half years I worked on my book 136,800 species may have gone extinct.

We have a finite amount of time left to coexist with significant parts of the biosphere, including glaciers, coral, and thousands of species of plants, animals, and insects. We’re going to have to learn how to say goodbye to them, part of which should involve doing everything we humanly can to save whatever is left, even knowing that the odds are stacked against us.

For me, my goodbyes will involve spending as much time as I can on the glaciers in Washington State’s Olympic National Park and North Cascades National Park near where I live, or far more modestly taking in the trees around my home on a daily basis. It’s unclear, after all, how much longer such forest areas are likely to remain fully intact. I often visit a small natural altar I’ve created amid a circle of cedar trees growing around a decomposing mother tree. In this magical spot, I grieve and express my gratitude for the life that is still here. I also go to listen.

Where do you go to listen? And what are you hearing?

For me, these days, it all begins and ends with doing my best to listen to the Earth, with trying my hardest to understand how best to serve, how to devote myself to doing everything possible for the planet, no matter the increasingly bleak prognosis for this time in human history.

Perhaps if we listen deeply enough and regularly enough, we ourselves will become the song this planet needs to hear.