George Packer's Blog, page 129

The Violent Costs of the Global Palm-Oil Boom

Just after nine o’clock on a Tuesday morning in June, an environmental activist named Bill Kayong was shot and killed while sitting in his pickup truck, waiting for a traffic light to change in the Malaysian city of Miri, on the island of Borneo. Kayong had been working with a group of villagers who were trying to reclaim land that the local government had transferred to a Malaysian palm-oil company. A few days after the murder, the police identified Stephen Lee Chee Kiang, a director and major shareholder of the company, Tung Huat Niah Plantation, as a suspect in the crime, but Kiang flew to Australia before he could be questioned by authorities. (Three other individuals were eventually charged in the case.) Around the world, environmental and human-rights activists added Kayong’s death to the tally of violent incidents connected to the production of palm oil, which has quietly become one of the most indispensable substances on Earth.

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Postscript: John Glenn, 1921-2016

“What is the reason for this?” John Glenn radioed from the threshold of outer space. “Do you have a reason?” The date was February 20, 1962, and the forty-year-old Glenn—then circling Earth at more than seventeen thousand miles per hour in Friendship 7, a capsule about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle—was responding to a set of rather unhappy instructions from ground control. In the next four and a half minutes, as Glenn reëntered the planet’s atmosphere, he was to perform a series of potentially life-threatening manual overrides. It appeared that Glenn’s heat shield had loosened, and the overrides were intended to secure it, so that he would not be incinerated. But ground control first wanted to insure that he understood the instructions, promising to “give you the reasons for this action when you are in view.” Glenn made the adjustments, and, during the topsy-turvy final stretch of his descent (he later reported that he felt like “a falling leaf”), he piloted the craft himself. This was a notable achievement even for a former Marine colonel who had flown a hundred and forty-nine missions in two wars, and who could maneuver himself “alongside you and tap a wing tip gently against yours,” according to a former squadron mate.

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The Political Bargain Behind Trump’s Cabinet of Lamentables

Of all the images transmitted from the lobby of Trump Tower over the past few weeks, perhaps the most poignant were the ones of a white-haired Al Gore emerging from the elevators after a face-to-face with the building’s owner, on Monday. “I found it an extremely interesting meeting, and to be continued,” Gore told the ever-present cameras. “I’m just going to leave it at that.” Some people interpreted the fact that Donald Trump had met with Gore, the former Democratic Vice-President and veteran climate-change campaigner, as a sign that he might be rethinking the retrogressive views about environmental policy he expressed during the campaign. This line of thinking appeared to get another boost on Wednesday, when Leonardo DiCaprio, who earlier this year released a documentary about the impact of global warming called “Before the Flood,” also traipsed into Trump Tower.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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How Much of the Obama Doctrine Will Survive Trump?

Breitbart Treats Kellogg to Its Smash-Mouth Style

When the Kellogg Company said last week that ads for its brands would no longer appear on Breitbart, the perpetually outraged far-right publisher found a new deplorable enemy. In a typically incendiary post, Breitbart characterized the company’s decision as part of a “war by leftist companies” against its readers. Since then, the site has published multiple posts criticizing the cereal company—“SHOCK: Amnesty International Blasts Kellogg’s for Using Child Labor-Produced Ingredients,” “Kellogg Foundation Gave Big to Soros Organization, Tides Foundation,” and so on. More to the point, it has called for “a movement against Kellogg’s bigotry” and a #dumpkelloggs boycott of Special K, Pop-Tarts, Pringles, and everything else the company makes. “We are fearless advocates for traditional American values,” Breitbart’s editor-in-chief declared. “Perhaps most important among them is freedom of speech.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Japan’s Pivot from Obama to Trump

On Monday, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced that he would visit Pearl Harbor with President Obama later this month, which will make him the first sitting Japanese leader to travel to the Navy base since Shigeru Yoshida went, in 1951, ten years after it was attacked by Japan’s Imperial Army. Abe called the visit “an opportunity for reconciliation between the U.S. and Japan” and a chance to “reconfirm” the security alliance between the two countries.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Rediscovering Obama’s Irish Roots
The Political Bargain Behind Trump’s Cabinet of Lamentables
Trump, the Man in the Crowd

Trump, the Man in the Crowd

What is President-elect Donald Trump looking for when he talks to crowds these days? On Wednesday morning, at a fund-raiser at Cipriani on Forty-second Street, he was collecting money for his inauguration, and telling jokes about all the Republican establishment donors who were, at last, eagerly gathering around, writing checks to make the swearing-in flashy. (Cipriani’s Wall Street branch was the site of the fund-raiser where Hillary Clinton, inopportunely, referred to a “basket of deplorables”; something in the setting does not seem to summon up populism.) There will be more such gatherings; the inauguration has already raised more than fifty million dollars. But, the day before, the President-elect had also tried to restage a part of the rapidly receding past: the classic Trump rally, raising the question of what, under President Trump, it might look like to run a permanent campaign.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Why Scientists Are Scared of Trump: A Pocket Guide
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How Much of the Obama Doctrine Will Survive Trump?

On Tuesday, President Obama delivered what was billed as his last big foreign-policy address before his term ends. Speaking at MacDill Air Force Base, in Tampa, the headquarters of Central Command and Special Operations Command, Obama called for the United States to adhere to the law and to abstain from using torture, imposing religious tests, stigmatizing Muslims, and other illiberal acts that Donald Trump has, at times, advocated. “These terrorists can never directly destroy our way of life, but we can do it for them if we lose track of who we are and the values that this nation was founded upon,” Obama declared.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Why Scientists Are Scared of Trump: A Pocket Guide
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Why Scientists Are Scared of Trump: A Pocket Guide

Next week, the American Geophysical Union will hold its annual conference in San Francisco. The A.G.U. meeting is one of the world’s première scientific gatherings—last fall, some twenty-four thousand experts in fields ranging from astronomy to volcanology attended. This year, in addition to the usual papers and journals, a new publication will be available to participants. It’s called “Handling Political Harassment and Legal Intimidation: A Pocket Guide for Scientists.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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A Federal Judge Has a Message for Naturalized Citizens (and Trump)
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Scott Pruitt, Trump’s Industry Pick for the E.P.A.

Garvin Isaacs, the president of the Oklahoma Bar Association, isn’t one for understatement, but he topped himself in his reaction to Why Scientists Are Scared of Trump: A Pocket Guide
A Federal Judge Has a Message for Naturalized Citizens (and Trump)
What Taiwan’s Leader Sees in Donald Trump

A Federal Judge Has a Message for Naturalized Citizens (and Trump)

Three times a year, Judge Sarah Evans Barker, a federal district judge for the Southern District of Indiana, oversees the swearing in of new citizens. Barker, like most judges, relishes these proceedings, since they’re ordinarily such festive occasions. “You feel the pressure to rise to the level of excitement,” she told me. By choice, Judge Barker handles the naturalization ceremony that falls around the Fourth of July. It’s an elaborate affair, held on the lawn of President Benjamin Harrison’s home, under a tent. There’s live music, and Barker hands out boxes of sparklers to the new Americans. This year, she was also scheduled to conduct the ceremony held nine days after the election, and she worried that what joy people felt would be tempered by fear. “I was concerned about what to say to people who had been buffeted about by the harsh rhetoric,” she told me, “and I wanted to do what I could to soothe their concerns.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Why Scientists Are Scared of Trump: A Pocket Guide
Scott Pruitt, Trump’s Industry Pick for the E.P.A.
What Taiwan’s Leader Sees in Donald Trump