Lily Salter's Blog, page 174

The Koch Brothers are plotting a right-wing takeover of America’s judicial system

(Credit: AP)

Between Donald Trump’s historic unpopularity and an unprecedented number of resignations��in the House and Senate, this year’s midterm elections could prove to be a blue wave for Democrats, even with much of the congressional map gerrymandered against them. If so, the Koch brothers appear to have missed the memo.

According to CBS, the right-wing billionaires are “all in” for 2018, planning to spend as much as $400 million on political candidates across the country. But it’s not just Congress they hope to reshape in their own image. The Washington Post reports the oil magnates have their sights set on the next Supreme Court vacancy, and that their political advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity, is “expanding its portfolio into the judicial branch.”

“In 2017, the network���s activists worked phones and knocked on doors, urging voters to push their senators to confirm Neil M. Gorsuch to fill the Supreme Court seat vacated by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia,” writes the Post’s Michelle Ye Hee Lee. “The new effort will build on the 2017 work, led by Concerned Veterans for America, which network officials viewed as an indication of how much energy activists will bring to the new judicial campaign.”

As part of their latest push, the Kochs announced Sunday that they have hired Sarah Field as vice president of judicial strategy. Field previously worked for the Federalist Society, an ultra-conservative pressure group that has helped Trump stack the courts with any number of far-right ideologues, including Gorsuch.

The Kochs’ active involvement in the nomination process speaks to their burgeoning alliance with the Trump administration. While the avowed libertarians refused to endorse Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, they have found common cause with the president on a host of policy matters, ranging from a trillion-dollar tax cut for multinational corporations and the rich, to massive deregulation and the ongoing dismantling of the Environment Protection Agency. As a separate report from Ye Hee Lee and James Hohmann of the Post reveals, they already have a major ally in Marc Short, a former political strategist for the Kochs who now serves as White House liaison to Capitol Hill.

“On areas of disagreement where they were once outspoken�������such as supporting free trade, advocating more open borders and opposing deficit spending ��� network officials now tread carefully to downplay divisions and avoid antagonizing Trump,” Ye Hee Lee and Hohmann observe.

Over the weekend, more than 500 megadonors, each of whom contributes more than $100,000 annually to the Koch network, gathered at a resort in Palm Springs for a biannual seminar to assess, among other things, the first year of the Trump’s presidency. When Americans for Prosperity’s Tim Phillips mentioned the former reality show host’s numerous federal district and circuit court appointments ��� the most in modern American history ��� the crowd erupted in applause.

���Securing Justice Neil Gorsuch onto the Supreme Court bench was a major victory for freedom, but the fight to realign our courts around the rule of law is far from over,��� the newly appointed Field said in a statement. ���This year we will mobilize our activists as needed, particularly when members of the Senate choose to needlessly obstruct the confirmation process. When the next vacancy opens on the Supreme Court, we will be ready.”

Border Patrol won���t tell us how they send people back. So we sued

(Credit: Shutterstock)

Late last year, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security for failing to respond to our request for public information. Earlier this month, we amended the complaint after we received an incomplete response from the agency, which repeatedly has failed to fulfill its obligations under the law.

Here���s how it started: Last summer, we ran a story about a surprising immigration case. While one part of the federal government wanted to give migrant kids a green card, another one wanted to deport them.

What explains the internal conflict? An often under-the-radar policy called expedited removal, which allows immigrants caught at U.S. bordersto be immediately deported without the chance to make their case in front of a judge. I found some cases in which U.S. citizens had been wrongfully deported.

At the same time, expedited removal was getting renewed attention because President Donald Trump had issued an executive order soon after he assumed office that called for expanding the use of the policy beyond borders, to the entire United States.

It seemed like a good time and place to do some digging on the topic. As part of the reporting I was doing on the case of the migrant kids, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which is a division of the Department of Homeland Security. I asked for documents that would help me understand the policies and procedures that Border Patrol agents use when deporting someone through expedited removal.

My underlying reason for this request was simple. Expedited removal gives agents extraordinary powers over migrants��� lives. I wanted to understand how agents decide to put someone into expedited removal, what kind of discretion they have and how they are instructed by the government to go about using this quickfire deportation policy.

I then moved on to producing an article and a radio segment with my colleague Andrew Becker about the potential expansion of expedited removal. We hoped that we would begin to receive materials from the government before we completed that reporting in late October.

We never did. So we filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security on Dec. 19.

The day after the lawsuit was filed, I finally received a response from Customs and Border Protection. The agency said it had located 166 pages of relevant materials but was withholding 121 of them entirely. Of the nine pages the agency released, every one of them was redacted in some way. The agency also said several pages already were public and gave us two web links. Both of those links were broken.

So earlier this month, we filed an amended legal complaint. The latest version argues that Customs and Border Protection not only failed to respond in a timely manner to my FOIA request, but also that its search was insufficient.

We know, for instance, that Customs and Border Protection didn���t turn over all relevant documents because we have learned that additional materials were disclosed to other news or legal groups.

So our battle for public information continues. We���ll keep you updated on our progress as we fight to get ahold of documents that will help us answer a straightforward question: What does the government tell a Border Patrol agent about who to send home and who to let in to the country?

How lotto scammers defraud elderly Americans and fuel gang wars in Jamaica

(Credit: AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Normally, January and February are high season for the Jamaican beach city of Montego Bay. But this year, an upsurge in shootings and other violent crime has lead many sunseekers to steer clear.

On Jan. 18, Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness declared a state of emergency in Montego Bay and surrounding St. James Parish. Hotels, restaurants, schools and government went on lockdown, with residents and tourists warned to ���remain in their resorts��� as police and military flooded the streets.

Since then, some 150 people have been arrested, two AK-47s and numerous other high-powered weapons seized and over 80 rounds of ammunition recovered. The 14-day state of emergency was recently extended until May 2.

Jamaican defense force chief Maj. Gen. Rocky Meade says law enforcement���s mission now is to restore peace in Montego Bay by disrupting gangs, particularly ���those that are responsible for murders, lotto scamming, trafficking of arms and guns, and extortion.���

It may sound strange to lump in lottery scams with weapons dealing and homicide. But in Montego Bay, these crimes do fall in the same category.

I���m a Jamaican violence researcher who���s been monitoring lotto scamming ��� a lethal and growing financial fraud scheme in my home country �����since as far back as 2013.

The craft of scamming

In this illegal scheme, Jamaicans pose as lotto officials to convince vulnerable foreigners that they���ve won a big payout. To retrieve their winnings, the caller says, all they have to do is pay a modest ���processing fee.���

According to my 2013 study, most perpetrators are young ��� aged 14 to 25 ��� and work as telemarketers, remittance services cashiers, hotel employees, taxi drivers, police officers, bank tellers and airline staffers. These professions give them access to the personal information of potential victims.

Largely, I���ve found the fraudsters tend to target Americans, especially the elderly, gamblers, tourists and people who run online businesses. In 2010, Jamaican lotto scammers defrauded US$30 million from scores of victims in the state of Minnesota.

Criminals locate their victims using the contact details on so-called ���lead lists��� gleaned from hotels and call centers. Services like Google Voice and Vonage allow them to mask their location so that their calls appear to come from an American phone number. They may also try to hide their Jamaican accent, though victims often say it���s clear they���re not American.

Fraudulent callers assure the victims of a large lottery prize, but then inform them that a processing fee is needed to access those funds. Using Western Union, MoneyGram or a Green Dot prepaid card, they manipulate their victims into sending them anywhere from $750 to $2,500 in a week.

Scammers may also menace victims who are reluctant to pay. Using Google Earth, they describe the victim���s home and say they���re waiting ���out front,��� threatening them with bodily harm.

Over time, Jamaica���s lotto scammers have accrued huge fortunes, earning up to $100,000 a week. This criminal enterprise thrives in the Montego Bay area, the heart of the Jamaican tourism industry. There, it is estimated that thousands of illicit entrepreneurs have gotten rich doing lotto scams since 2007.

New gang wars

Montego Bay also has a long-standing history of gang disputes in poor neighborhoods. So lotto scammers, who generally come from those same violent areas, often use their dirty money to secure protection. They pay criminal organizations to defend their homes and families and bribe police.

Rich, protected and powerful, many lotto fraudsters eventually use their illegal earnings to purchase weapons and manpower, forming criminal gangs of their own and fighting for control over turf in Montego Bay.

As a result, the multimillion-dollar illicit economy is now fueling gang wars, corruption and homicides across western Jamaica. Montego Bay���s crime rate has spiked year upon year and murders have steadily climbed: from 203 in 2015 to 269 in 2016 and 335 in 2017. Montego Bay���s homicide rate is now 50 times that of New York City.

The rising violence in St. James Parish comes amid a national crime wave. In the first 20 days of 2018, say national police, Jamaica saw 100 homicides �����an average of five killings per day.

Last year���s murder toll of 1,616 homicides was up 19 percent over 2016, when Jamaica already had the 10th highest homicide rate in the world.

Globalization: great for crime

Lotto scamming is, in many ways, just a 21st-century rendition of the criminal violence that has plagued Jamaica for decades.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Jamaican political parties first fueled bloodshed by paying and arming criminal groups to help them win at the polls. In the 1980s and 1990s, those same gangs took up drug trafficking and the weapons trade, taking advantage of Jamaica���s strategic maritime location between South America and the U.S.

Now, since 2006, lottery scamming has become their lucrative new revenue source. Estimates suggest that the fraud���s immense profits were behind approximately 50 percent of the 335 murders that occurred in western Jamaica in 2017.

Ultimately, lotto scamming ��� similar to transnational gangs like MS-13 and the $500 billion global drug market ��� is a byproduct of globalization. In shrinking the world, globalization has allowed goods, services, ideas, money and contraband to move easily across porous borders.

It���s unlikely Jamaica���s state of emergency can stop that.

Damion Blake, Assistant Professor of Politics and Policy Studies, Elon University

In Trump���s first year, anti-abortion forces make strides despite setbacks

Abortion Rights Protest (Credit: Getty/Saul Loeb)

As a candidate, President Donald Trump promised abortion opponents four specific actions to ���advance the rights of unborn children and their mothers.���

One year into his presidency, three of those items remain undone. Nevertheless, abortion opponents have made significant progress changing the direction of federal and state policies on the issue.

Indeed, on Friday, as anti-abortion protesters gathered in Washington for the 45th annual March for Life, the Trump administration announced two new policies. One is a letter to states aimed at making it easier for them to exclude Planned Parenthood facilities from their Medicaid programs; the other is a proposed regulation to allow health care providers to refuse to perform services that conflict with their ���religious or moral beliefs.���

���In my administration, we will always defend the very first right in the Declaration of Independence, and that is the right to life,��� Trump said in a video address from the Rose Garden to the marchers.

Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion group the Susan B. Anthony List, led the Trump campaign���s Pro-Life Coalition. The then-candidate said he was committed to ���nominating pro-life justices to the U.S. Supreme Court,��� which happened with the nomination and confirmation of Justice Neil Gorsuch in April.

But despite many attempts, Congress did not pass a federal ban on abortions occurring after 20 weeks, did not cut off Planned Parenthood���s federal funding and did not write into permanent law the ���Hyde Amendment,��� which bans most federal abortion funding but needs annual renewal.

Still, there was progress on scaling back abortion and, in some cases, access to contraception at the federal level.

The administration made myriad changes. It reinstituted and expanded the ���Mexico City Policy,��� which forbids funding of international aid programs that ���perform or promote��� abortion. It issued rules aimed at allowing religious-affiliated and other employers to not offer contraceptive services if they have a ���religious belief��� or ���moral conviction��� against them, although federal courts have blocked the new rules from being implemented. And just last week it created a new ���conscience and religious freedom��� division in the Department of Health and Human Services��� Office of Civil Rights. That new division is designed to enforce both existing laws protecting the rights of conscience for medical personnel as well as the new regulations.

Most important, according to many in the anti-abortion movement, the president nominated and the Senate confirmed a dozen and a half federal district court and appeals court judges who are considered likely to rule in their favor.

Abortion rights supporters concede that while the priorities on their opponents��� wish list were not accomplished, plenty still happened.

���This administration is the worst we���ve ever seen for women and families,��� said Kaylie Hanson Long of NARAL Pro-Choice America in a statement. ���Its attacks on reproductive freedom are relentless, under the radar, and aren���t supported by the majority of Americans who believe abortion should remain legal.���

Dannenfelser said one of the biggest changes is the number of anti-abortion advocates now working in the Department of Health and Human Services in key roles. ���I can say there is more unity in this administration than there has been in any presidency on this,��� she said.

Abortion opponents know their biggest obstacle is the U.S. Senate, where they don���t have the 60 votes required for most legislation. ���Without making advances in the Senate, it���s going to be really tough,��� said Dannenfelser.

Meanwhile, outside Washington, states continued their efforts to restrict access to abortion and family planning. States have passed 401 separate measures since Republicans took over most state legislatures in 2011, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights research and advocacy group.

During 2017, 19 states enacted 63 separate restrictions, said Elizabeth Nash, who tracks state legislation for Guttmacher. Among the notable laws was one in Ohio to outlaw abortions of fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome. Arkansas and Texas passed laws to ban ���dilation and evacuation��� abortions, a procedure that uses suction and medical instruments to remove the fetus and is the most common procedure for abortion after the first trimester of pregnancy. Both bans have been blocked by federal courts.

Some of the new restrictions came from states that have not been active on the issue in recent years. A Wyoming law requiring ultrasounds to be offered to pregnant women seeking an abortion was that state���s first in 30 years, Nash said.

But 2017 was also notable for states seeking to widen or ensure access to abortion and other reproductive services. For example, Delaware passed a law enshrining abortion rights, while Oregon and New York require private health plans to cover abortion without patients��� cost sharing. Legislators in California, which has a long history of protecting abortion rights, have been pushing a bill that would require public universities to provide abortion pills to female students who are less than 10 weeks pregnant. The bill stalled last year, but it is being picked up again this year.

As a result, said Nash, ���we are really living in a bifurcated country. The states that are progressive are looking to protect access��� to abortion and contraception. ���The states that are conservative are looking to restrict it.���

In other words, a nation that looks a lot like it did 45 years ago, when the Supreme Court legalized abortion nationwide in Roe v Wade.

California Healthline Reporter Ana B. Ibarra in Sacramento, Calif., contributed to this article.

KHN���s coverage of women���s health care issues is supported in part by The David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

Kaiser Health News is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

An empire of graveyards: America’s military might laid bare

Donald Trump speaks at a briefing with senior military leaders in the Cabinet Room of the White House (Credit: Getty/Andrew Harrer)

Recently, a memory of my son as a small boy came back to me. He was, in those days, terrified of clowns. Something about their strange, mask-like, painted faces unnerved him utterly, chilled him to the bone. To the rest of us, they were comic, but to him ��� or so I came to imagine anyway ��� they were emanations from hell.

Those circus memories of long ago seem relevant to me today because, in November 2016, the American electorate, or a near majority of them anyway, chose to send in the clowns.�� They voted willingly, knowingly, for the man with that strange orange thing on his head, the result����� we now know,��thanks to��his daughter ��� of voluntary ���scalp reduction surgery.����� They voted for the man with the eerily red face, an unearthly shade seldom seen since the perfection of Technicolor.�� They voted for the overweight man who reputedly ate little but Big Macs (for fear of being��poisoned), while swinging one-handed from a political trapeze with fingers of a particularly��contestable size.�� They voted for the man who never came across a superlative he couldn���t apply to himself.�� Of his first presidential moment, he��claimed�����the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe���; he declared himself ���the��greatest jobs��president that God ever created���; he swore to reporters that he was ���the��least racist��person you have ever interviewed���; he offered his version of modesty by��insisting��that, ���with the exception of the late, great Abraham Lincoln, I can be more presidential than any president that���s ever held this office���; and when his mental state was challenged, he responded that his ���two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart,�����adding, ���I think that [I] would qualify as not smart, but genius… and a very stable genius at that!���

Of course, none of this is news to you, not if you have a screen in your life (or more likely your hand) ��� the very definition of twenty-first-century modernity.�� In fact, by the time this piece comes out, you���ll undoubtedly have a new set of examples to cite.�� After all, these days that essentially is the news: him and any outrageous thing he wants to say and not much else, which means that he��is��indisputably the greatest, possibly in the history of the universe, when it comes to yanking just about anybody���s chain.

And you certainly don���t need me to go on about that strange skill of his, since every time he says or tweets anything over the top or grotesque beyond belief, the media���s all over it 24/7. No one, for instance, could doubt that never in our history has the word ���shithole��� (or, in some cases, ���s–hole���) or even ���shithouse��� been used more frequently than in the wake of the president���s recent wielding of it (or them or��one or the other) for unnamed African countries and Haiti in a White House meeting on immigration. That meeting proved an��ambush��and a half, only spiraling further out of control when, in its wake, the president denied ever using the word ���shithole��� and was��backed��by Republican attendees evidently so desperate to curry favor that they pretended they hadn���t heard the word, which, by now, just about everyone on Earth has heard or seen in English or some��translation��thereof.

Since he rode down that Trump Tower escalator into our political lives in June 2015, this sort of thing and more or less nothing else has largely been ���the news.����� It goes without saying ��� which won���t stop me from saying it����� that not since Nebuchadnezzar���s words were first scratched onto a cuneiform tablet has more focus been put on the passing words, gestures, and expressions of a single human being. And that’s the truest news about the news of this era.�� It���s been consumed by a single news hog.�� Which means that Donald Trump has already won, no matter what happens, since he continues to be treated as if he were the only three-ring circus in town, as if he were in himself that classic big-top Volkswagen��filled to the brim��with clowns.

The Imperial Presidency Exposed

Who could deny that much of the attention he���s received has been based on the absurdity, exaggeration, unsettling clownishness of it all, right down to the��zany crew��of subsidiary clowns who have helped keep him pumped up and cable newsed in the Oval Office?

In early October 2016, I��suggested��that a certain segment of voters in the white heartland, feeling their backs against the economic wall and the nation in decline ��� Donald Trump being our first true��declinist candidate��(hence that ���again��� in��MAGA) ��� was prepared to send a ���suicide bomber��� into the White House.�� And I suggested as well that they were willing to do so even if the ceiling collapsed on them.�� (Had I thought of it at the time, I would have added that much of the mainstream media also had its back to the wall with its status and finances in decline, staffs shrinking, and fears rising that it might be eaten alive by social media.�� As a result, some of its��key players��were similarly inclined to escort that suicide bomber Washington-wards, no matter what fell or whom it hit.)

In retrospect, that has, I think, proven an accurate assessment, but like all authors I reserve the right to change my imagery in midstream, which brings me back to my son���s childhood fear of clowns.�� At least for me, that now catches the most essential aspect of the age of Trump: its clownishness.�� And despite the fact that The Donald is often treated by his opponents as a laughing matter, an absurdity, a jokester (and a joke) in the Oval Office, I don���t mean��those��clowns, the ones that leave you rolling in the aisles.�� I mean my son���s clowns, the death���s-head ones whose absurd versions of the gestures of everyday life leave you chilled to the bone, genuinely afraid.

Donald Trump fits that image exactly because ��� though you wouldn���t know it from the usual coverage of him ��� he isn���t at all unique (except in the details, except in the exaggeration of it all).�� What makes him so clownish, in the sense I���m describing, is that he offers a chillingly exaggerated, wildly��fiery-and-furious��version of the very imperial American presidency we���ve come to know over these last seven decades: the one that has long ridden herd on a nuclear apocalypse; that killed millions on its journey to nowhere in Southeast Asia in the previous century; that hasn���t been able to stop itself from overseeing more than a quarter-century of war-making ��� two wars, to be exact����� in Afghanistan of all places; that, in its pursuit of its never-ending ���war��� on terror, has made war on so much else as well, turning significant parts of the planet into zones of��increasing chaos,��failed states,��fleeing populations, and wholesale destruction; the one whose ���precision��� military ��� the battle against ISIS in Iraq and Syria has been��termed��the�����most precise campaign in history����������has helped transform cities from��Ramadi��and��Fallujah��to��Mosul��and��Raqqa��into landscapes that, in their indiscriminate wreckage, look like Stalingrad after the battle in World War II (and that now is threatening to develop a ���precision��� version of nuclear war as well); and that has, in this century, overseen the creation of ���Saudi America��� on a planet in which it was already easy enough to grasp that fossil fuels were doing the kinds of damage to the human environment that nothing short of a giant asteroid or��nuclear war��might otherwise do.

From his��America First policies��to his��reported desire��to see (and make use of) terrorist attacks on this country, the man who has declared climate change a��Chinese hoax,��threatenedto loose ���fire and fury like the world has never seen,��� described other countries in language once considered unpresidential by presidents who nonetheless��treated��the very same countries like ���shitholes,��� and given ���his��� generals a remarkably free hand to ���win��� the war on terror is but an eerily clownish version of all that has gone before.�� He has, in a sense, ripped away the fa��ade of dignity from the imperial presidency and let us glimpse just what is truly imperial (and imperious) about it.�� He continues to show us in new ways quite an old reality: how terrifying a force for destruction, possibly even on a planetary level, U.S. power can be.

And just in case you don���t think that Volkswagen of Trump���s (or maybe I mean that private plane with the��golden bathroom fixtures) is filled with other clowns whose acts should similarly chill you to the bone, let���s skip Scott Pruitt as he��secretlydismantles the Environmental Protection Agency and so many protections for our health, the Energy Department���s Rick Perry as he��embraces��the CEOs of Big Energy, that��future oil-spill��king, the Interior Department���s Ryan Zinke, and the rest of the domestic wrecking crew, and turn instead to ���his��� generals ��� the ones from America���s losing wars ��� that President Trump has made ascendant in Washington.

And even then, let���s skip their urge to create smaller,��more ���usable�����nuclear weapons (a process started in the Obama years), or��hike��the nuclear budget, or redefine ever more situations, including��cyber attacks��on the U.S., as potential nuclear ones; and let���s skip as well their eagerness, from��Nigerto��Yemen,��Libya��to��Somalia, to expand and heighten the war on terror in an exaggerated version of exactly what we���ve been living through these past 16 years. Let���s concentrate instead on just one place, the ur-location for that war, the country about which those��in the Pentagon��are no longer speaking of war at all but of ���generational struggle���: Afghanistan.

The Graveyard of Empires

Think of it: 28 years after the Soviet army limped out of that infamous ���graveyard of empires��� at the end of a decade-long struggle in which the U.S. had backed the most extreme groups of Islamic fundamentalists (including a rich young Saudi by the name of Osama bin Laden), 16 years after the U.S. returned to invade and ���liberate��� Afghanistan, they���re still at it. In December, with Donald Trump��lifting��various constraints on U.S. military commanders there, the generals were, for instance, sending in the planes.�� That month there were more U.S. air strikes ��� 455 in a winter period of minimal fighting ��� than not just the previous December (65) but December 2012 (about 200) when 100,000 U.S. troops were still in-country.�� The phrase of this moment among U.S. military officers in Afghanistan,��according to��Max Bearak of the��Washington Post: ���We���re at a turning point.����� Another: ���The gloves are off.����� (Admittedly, no U.S. commander has as yet reported��seeing�����the light at the end of the tunnel,��� but don���t rule it out.)

In the meantime, drones of both the armed and unarmed surveillance variety are being��reassigned��to Afghanistan in rising numbers (as well as more helicopters, ground vehicles, and artillery). With the recent announcement that 1,000 more personnel will soon head for that country, U.S. troop strength continues to grow, bringing the numbers of American advisers, trainers, and Special Operations forces there up to perhaps 15,000 or more (as opposed to the��11,000��or so when Donald Trump entered the Oval Office).

In addition, the military has��plans��to double the size of Afghanistan���s own special ops forces and triple the size of its air force, while the head of U.S. Central Command, General Joseph Votel, is��calling for��far more aggressive actions by those American-advised Afghan security forces in the upcoming spring fighting season.�� (To put this in perspective, a 2008 U.S. military��plan��to spend billions of dollars ensuring that the Afghan air force was fully staffed, supplied, trained, and ���self-sufficient��� by 2015 ended seven years later with it in a ���woeful state��� of disrepair and near ruin.)�� Meanwhile, as part of this ramp-up of operations, the Navy is planning to��hire��drone-maker General Atomics to fly that company’s surveillance drones in Afghanistan in what���s being termed ���a ���surge��� of intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance capabilities.���

If all of this sounds faintly familiar to you, I���m not surprised. In fact, if you���ve already stopped paying attention ��� as most Americans on the nonexistent ���home front��� seem to have done when it comes to most of America���s wars of this era ��� I just want you to know that I completely understand.�� Sixteen repetitive years later, with the Taliban again in control of something close to��half��of Afghanistan, your response couldn���t be more all-American.�� Surges, turning points, more aggressive actions, you���ve heard it all before����� and when it comes to Afghanistan, the odds are that you���ll hear it all again.

And don���t for a moment think that this doesn���t add up to another version of sending in the clowns.

If you don���t believe that retired General James Mattis, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, and retired General James Kelly, aka the secretary of defense, the national security adviser, and the White House chief of staff, respectively, are clowns, if you���re still convinced that they���re the ���adults��� in the Trumpian playroom, check out Afghanistan and think again.�� But don���t blame them either.�� What else can a clown do, once those giant floppy shoes are on their feet, their faces are painted, and the bulbous red nose is in place, but act the part?�� So many years later, they simply can���t imagine another way to think about the world of American war.�� They only know what they know.�� Give them a horn and they���ll honk it; give them Hamlet���s ���to be or not to be��� soliloquy and they���ll still honk that horn.

For the last decade and a half, through invasions and occupations, surges and counterinsurgency operations, bombing runs and drone strikes, commando raids and training missions, they and their colleagues in the U.S. high command have helped spread terror movements across��significant parts of the planet, while playing a major role in creating a series of failing or failed states across the Greater Middle East and Africa.�� They���ve helped uproot whole populations and transform major cities into spectacles of ruin.�� Think of this as their twenty-first-century destiny.�� They���ve proven to be key actors in what has become an American��empire of chaos��or perhaps simply an��empire��of��graveyards.

They can���t help themselves.�� Forgive them, Father, for they are clowns led by the greatest clownster-in-chief in the history of this country.�� Yes, he makes even them uncomfortable because no one can pull the curtains back from the reality of the imperial presidency in quite the way he can.�� No one can showcase our grim American world, tweet by outrageous tweet, in quite his fashion.

And yes, it can all look ludicrous as hell, but don���t laugh.�� Don���t even think about it.�� Not now, not when we���re all at the circus watching those emanations from hell perform. Instead, be chilled ��� chilled to the bone.�� Absurd as every pratfall may be, it���s distinctly a vision from hell, an all-American vision for the ages.

 

Why don���t STEM majors vote as much as others?

(Credit: AP Photo/John Minchillo)

There���s no shortage of talk about the need to get more students to go into STEM majors. But a growing body of research, including our own at the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education at Tufts University, indicates there might also be a need to get more STEM majors to go to the polls.

An analysis that we conducted shows that college students studying STEM disciplines ��� that is, science, technology, engineering and mathematics ��� were among the least likely to vote. The analysis was based on enrollment and voting records of nearly 2 million undergraduate students at four-year colleges. Voting is only one measure of civic engagement, but it is an important one, as evidenced in what���s at stake for the November 2018 midterm elections. U.S. higher education���s purpose has long been viewed as not only vocational training but preparation for citizenry. This includes voting and participation in government and policymaking. Voting also provides a tangible way to measure students��� belief that people and systems are interconnected and that they can play a part in shaping their communities. These are key goals that higher education tries to foster.

STEM students appear less interested in other forms of political and civic engagement, too. One study found that students who took more science and engineering courses were less likely to participate in politics by donating money to a campaign or attending a political meeting. Another found that engineering majors were less committed to social activism than their non-STEM peers. Initiatives have sprung up to remedy this through science curricula, teaching and new approaches to research.

It may well be the case that STEM education needs a ���civic engagement makeover.��� However, our study of undergraduate college student voting points to other reasons ��� perhaps in addition to the educational experience ��� that explain students��� low interest in civic affairs. As researchers who examine the impact of attending college on students, we believe that a combination of academic experiences and student characteristics shapes student civic behavior, including voting. For our study, we tried to focus on figuring out how much student characteristics, such as gender and age, account for voter turnout differences by major.

Unraveling the relationship between voting and undergraduate major is a tricky task. It may be that faculty in some academic fields of study tend to do a better job than others with embedding a civic perspective and emphasizing the importance of political participation, and this contributes to higher turnout among students in these majors. Or students��� voting behavior may be explained more by who they are when they arrive at college and less by their course of study.

Students who are already civic-minded may be drawn to civic-oriented majors such as education or political science. And women�������known to vote at higher rates ��� may be drawn to particular fields such as education or health professions, perhaps due to cultural norms pushing them toward fields considered appropriate for women.

Which majors vote the most?

Using data from the National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement, we found that ��� at least at the undergraduate level ��� education majors vote at the highest rate, followed by health professions, humanities, social sciences, STEM and business majors.

We also know that among the group of 2 million students we analyzed, STEM students tend to be younger and male while students in the health professions tend to be older and female. In our sample, 82 percent of health professions majors are women, and 60 percent of STEM students are men. The average ages of STEM and health professions majors are 22 and 25, respectively. Age and gender are correlated with voting, so what would college students��� voting rates be if we removed these factors from the equation?

Once we account for age and gender, education majors were still most likely to vote and business majors were still the least likely to vote. Social science and humanities students��� predicted voting rates remain largely unchanged from their actual turnout rates. But for STEM students, the predicted probability of voting after accounting for age and gender goes up 2 percentage points. For students in the health professions, the prediction goes down by over 3 percentage points.

What does this all mean? For one, it confirms the important role of student characteristics in explaining voting behavior, at least in part. In other words, one reason why voting rates in STEM fields are lower than other disciplines is because STEM majors include more men and younger students who are less likely to vote. It also means that when we talk about differences in civic and political engagement by college major, it is important to consider who is enrolled in those majors.

The role of race and ethnicity

In addition to age and gender, race and ethnicity help explain who votes within certain fields of study. Although STEM majors overall had lower turnout than humanities students by nearly 4 percentage points, the picture looks different for Asian women voters. Asian women in STEM majors actually voted at a higher rate than Asian women in humanities, 38.2 percent versus 33.0 percent. Business majors��� turnout was lower than social science majors by about 4 percentage points, but not when it came to black women. Black women business majors voted at a higher rate than black women social science majors, 54.6 percent versus 52.8 percent.

What���s the takeaway? Even though there are notable overall voting trends by major, it is important to look at factors beyond just the majors to understand the reasons why. Other factors, such as student age, gender, race and ethnicity can reveal surprises and provide a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between a student���s major and voting. This research can make the work that educators are already doing to improve civic health and the common good more precise and informed.

Inger Bergom, Senior Researcher, Institute for Democracy and Higher Education at Tisch College of Civic Life, Tufts University and Hyun Kyoung Ro, Assistant Professor, Bowling Green State University

The hate report: First he threatened a mosque, then CNN

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Add CNN to the long list of organizations, from mosques to synagogues and churches, currently being threatened by unhinged Americans.

The news network reportedly was called and threatened 22 times by a Michigan man, Brandon Griesemer, who said, among other things: ���I���m coming to gun you all down.��� Griesemer also is accused of using racial slurs against African Americans and making disparaging comments about Jews in his calls, and a former classmate told The Washington Post that Griesemer identified with Adolf Hitler and suggested ���the Holocaust was exaggerated.���

Griesemer also recently made derogatory comments to a Michigan mosque over the phone, according to court documents filed by the FBI.

CNN long has been a whipping boy for President Donald Trump, who has called the network ���fake news.��� Griesemer allegedly used the term in several of his calls.

Despite the numerous violent threats to CNN, Griesemer swiftly was released on $10,000 bail and, as commentator Shaun King noted in The Intercept, he was ���out of jail in time for dinner.���

As we examined in this story last year, violent threats by white men often aren���t taken as seriously as threats from people claiming to be Islamist extremists.

We got in touch with a man who identified himself as Griesemer���s brother, Justin. He messaged on Facebook: ���My brother is a normal, stable individual. This should not get blown out of proportion.���

In a follow-up phone call, he wouldn���t answer most questions, but he denied his brother had any extreme or far-right views.

The Griesemer case comes a week after the Anti-Defamation League released a study showing that white supremacists and other right-wing extremists are responsible for the significant majority of extremism-related killings in the United States.

Right-wing extremists committed 71 percent of the 387 extremist-related killings in the last decade, according to the report. By contrast, Islamic extremists committed 26 percent. The Anti-Defamation League also pointed out that the number of slayings by white supremacists in America more than doubled from 2016 to 2017, rising to 18 total deaths.

The study quotes the league���s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt:

We saw two car-ramming attacks in the U.S. last year ��� one from an Islamic terrorist and another from a white supremacist in Charlottesville ��� and the number of deaths attributed to white supremacists increased substantially. The bottom line is we cannot ignore one form of extremism over another. We must tackle them all.

Last week, a 20-year-old California man was charged with the murder of a 19-year-old student, Blaze Bernstein, who was Jewish and gay. Police are investigating whether Bernstein���s heritage or sexual identity were factors in his killing.

The suspect in the case, Samuel Woodward, has a history of sharing troubling content online, including sharing a photo of the infamous curb stomp scene from ���American History X.���

Town manager who urged racial segregation gets the boot

A town manager in rural Maine has been fired after it was revealed that he had founded an organization ���emphasizing the positive aspects of our European heritage��� and had claimed America would be ���better off if people of different races ���voluntarily separate.��� ���

The organization also called Islam barbaric and the ���scourge of Western civilization,��� according to local media.

Lawmaker wants to keep guns away from people convicted of hate crimes

When Kentucky lawmaker Attica Scott started talking to her constituents about her new bill to prohibit people convicted of hate crimes from legally acquiring firearms, she kept hearing the same thing.

���They had no idea that we didn���t already have a law like this in place,��� she said.

People convicted of felony hate crimes (or any felony, for that matter) are prohibited from owning guns under federal law, but those convicted of misdemeanor hate crimes are able to slip under the bar.

According to FBI statistics, law enforcement agencies in Kentucky reported 241 hate crimes over the course of 2016. Scott noted that in the same week she introduced her bill, African American students at Western Kentucky University were targeted with feces spread on their apartment door and a note with racial slurs that also included Trump���s slogan, ���Make America Great Again.���

A small but growing collection of states have enacted similar rules to restrict hate criminals��� access to guns. California Gov. Jerry Brown, for example, signed one such bill last September.

���I know of Kentucky���s racist and hate-filled past and present,��� said Scott, the first black woman elected to that state���s Legislature in nearly two decades. ���That���s why this was a bill that made sense to me to file.���

The chemical industry doesn’t want you to be afraid of Teflon pans. You should be.

(Credit: Shutterstock/YARUNIV Studio)

Nonstick pans are an icon of the postwar ���Better Living Through Chemistry��� epoch of technological enamorment; fittingly, almost every home in America likely has at least one of them. Teflon pans have��existed since the 1960s; Cook���s Illustrated notes��that today 70 percent of all cookware sold in the United States��is nonstick. And while Teflon���s powers of food repulsion are a source of wonderment, the chemical engineers behind them were unable to endow them with the equally magical property of indestructibility. Hence my house, and your house, and probably every house I���ve ever set foot in, has at least one aging, slightly warped nonstick pan, often with small bits of black plasticine crud chipping off the surface.

I encourage you to take a break from this article and report to your kitchen. Find the aforementioned aging teflon pan in your cupboard, and then run your fingernail down the flaked parts on its surface. Some black stuff came off, didn���t it?

Normally, we don���t intentionally flake our pans with our fingernails. But if something as soft as keratin can cause teflon chipping, presumably the black flakes come off naturally while we���re cooking with them �����and especially when we cook with them using non-recommended utensils (like metal, which you’re not supposed to use on nonsticks). Manufacturers impel us not to use metal on our teflon pans, nor to heat them beyond “medium,” but these instructions are not well-disseminated.

In any case, the��ubiquity of Teflon means that the average American is��exposed to Teflon-cooked food routinely at home, or in meals��prepared at restaurants. That means all of us are consuming or put in contact with Teflon all the time. Indeed, Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), the carcinogenic chemical involved in Teflon production until a few years ago, is so prevalent that it is present in nearly every American���s bloodstream in measurable quantities,��according to the New York Department of Health.

More concerning, the companies involved in manufacturing Teflon, both 3M and DuPont, have a track record of covering up or lying about the effects of said chemicals used in the manufacturing process. It took a court order in 2000 to get DuPont to release their studies about PFOA. What lawyers discovered in decades of PFOA files was documented in horrific detail a New York Times Magazine feature from 2016:

…The documents [revealed] that 3M and DuPont had been conducting secret medical studies on PFOA for more than four decades. In 1961, DuPont researchers found that the chemical could increase the size of the liver in rats and rabbits. A year later, they replicated these results in studies with dogs. PFOA���s peculiar chemical structure made it uncannily resistant to degradation. It also bound to plasma proteins in the blood, circulating through each organ in the body. In the 1970s, DuPont discovered that there were high concentrations of PFOA in the blood of factory workers at Washington Works. They did not tell the E.P.A. at the time. In 1981, 3M ��� which continued to serve as the supplier of PFOA to DuPont and other corporations ��� found that ingestion of the substance caused birth defects in rats. After 3M shared this information, DuPont tested the children of pregnant employees in their Teflon division. Of seven births, two had eye defects. DuPont did not make this information public.

���DuPont, 3M and other PFC manufacturers had ample indications decades ago that PFOA and other perfluorochemicals contaminate the blood of the general U.S. population,��� writes the Environmental Working Group, an environmental nonprofit. ���How and why they ignored the warning signs is one of the more disturbing chapters in the unfolding tragedy of PFC pollution.��� DuPont noticed birth defects in its female employees��� children back in the 1980s, a fact that they were not forthcoming about; later in 2001, 3M scientists did a study of 598 American children that found that 96 percent had PFOA in their blood.

There are a��slew��of��chemical acronyms��here, so let���s review: The chemicals involved in nonstick pans are known as PFAs, shorthand for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances. There are��many��different subclasses of these chemicals, but they all start with ���PF���; the Centers for Disease Control factsheet includes details on perfluorosulfonates (PFOs) and perfluorocarboxylic acids like PFOA and PFNA. The specific molecule chains are less important than what these molecules do ��� which is, namely, reduce friction. In creating surfaces with relatively little friction (thanks to the fluoride atoms), PFAs have tremendous industrial application beyond cooking an omelet; famously, they were used��in the uranium refining process in the United States to manufacture A-bombs.��PFAs don���t occur naturally, either: unlike some contaminants that existed on Earth long before humans (e.g., lead and mercury), there were no polyfluoroalkyl substances on Earth prior to industrial civilization. It is a testament to global capitalism that virtually everyone in the developed world now has these contaminants coursing through their��veins.

In the past two years, manufacturers have phased out the most lingering perfluorinated compounds from nonsticks ��� those are the PFOAs, which have a four-year half life to leave the bloodstream. In their stead, other shorter-chain perfluorinated chemicals have merely replaced them. However, there is no evidence these are safe; merely, the fact that they are less-tested means manufacturers can claim ignorance and keep selling their same products with slightly different chemicals.

���Thyroid affects, cancer concerns��� this is definitely a chemical that should be phased out,��� Dr. Tracey Woodruff, the director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California, San Francisco, told Salon. Woodruff explained that PFOAs are being ���replaced with newer perfluorinated chemicals, shorter-chain ones��� the industry says they���re okay, but there aren���t many studies on them yet. Some of these shorter ones may also be problematic.���

Woodruff described the way the chemical industries toy with these chemicals as akin to an unsanctioned, “Silent Spring”-esque experiment on humans. ���We���re in another grand experiment with toxic chemicals, finding out which are bad,��� she said. ���They phase one out and then replace it with something not thoroughly tested. It���s a sad, never-ending loop the government should get in and break, but this administration will probably make it worse.���

Indeed, it has already: The New York Times reported in October 2017 that Nancy Beck, a Trump appointee in the Environmental Protection Agency, had revised the rules regarding PFOA to make it more difficult to track the health consequences of PFOA contamination ��� in effect, making it harder to regulate. Beck previously worked at the American Chemistry Council, effectively a lobbying group for the chemical industry. In other words, if you were looking to the federal government to help protect you, you���re looking in the wrong place.

In her research at UC San Francisco, Woodruff analyzes studies on perfluorinated��chemicals and their health effects, particularly on pregnant women. ���We have done a systematic review of the literature on prenatal exposure to PFOA, and believe that it can adversely increase the risk of lower-birth-weight babies,��� she said. She explained that one of the most frightening things about PFOA is how it doesn���t degrade.

���Once the EPA started monitoring PFOA in drinking water, they it they found it everywhere. It doesn���t break down in the environment,��� she told Salon.

Woodruff, who says she cooks frequently at home, was able to convey her own research into practical advice about how to mitigate risk in one���s own kitchen.

���When you use a [nonstick] pan, you shouldn���t heat it without putting anything in it,��� Woodruff told Salon. ���That will emit fumes.��� Fumes are one way that perfluorinated��chemicals get into human bodies, but birds are particularly susceptible. ���There have been reports of people heating those Teflon pans without adequate ventilation, and the birds in their house dying,��� Woodruff said. ���When someone in the industry was asked about this, she said something like, ���people should know better than to cook in an enclosed kitchen.��� Like, blaming the canary for being in the coal mine?���

It is well-documented that perfluorinated��chemicals can��kill birds. In 2010, during a thunderstorm off the coast of the Dutch-occupied Caribbean island of Bonaire, lightning struck several oil tanks, resulting in huge fires. Firefighters fought the fires for many days using foam sprays that contained perfluorinated��chemicals, which served as foaming agents. Over a four-month span, the Bonaire population of Caribbean flamingos dropped from several thousand to zero. ���For multiple years flamingos were not or only incidentally seen,��� wrote scientists in an article in Marine Pollution Bulletin, an academic journal.

I asked Woodruff about my own in-home concerns, the visible chipping of black, plasticine material that one sees on old nonstick pans. Woodruff said her understanding was that the vapors were more dangerous than the chipped pieces. ���The research isn���t very definitive,��� she added. ���The bigger scraped bits ��� they might just pass through your body, as opposed to the vapors.��� Woodruff added that she ���was not sure that anyone had thoroughly investigated this question of scratched surfaces.���

Woodruff explained that if you must use nonstick pans, always have oil or��food in it. ���Definitely don���t heat the pan without something in it,��� she said.

Woodruff also mentioned that simple ways of avoiding perfluorinated chemicals were things that you should already be doing ��� like washing you hands before you eat, or forgoing higher trophic level foods for lower ones. ���A lot of these chemicals stick to dust, and that���s how we���re exposed to them ��� they migrate into dust, sticky surfaces,��� Woodruff said. She encouraged doing ���small things like washing your hands before you eat, eating fruits and vegetables �����things you should already be doing.��� Woodruff added that she herself uses cast-iron or stainless steel pans, and that a little oil on those surfaces can achieve the same effect as a nonstick pan anyway.

It is problematic that basic knowledge about the proper use of nonstick pans is not more widespread. Indeed, the dark history of perfluorinated chemicals leads to a more political question, and one that implicates the chemical companies manufacturing these kinds of things: Where is the��line between��corporate responsibility��and consumer responsibility? One cannot reasonably expect everyone using a nonstick pan ��� often which��the consumer may not have bought��themselves �����to know not to heat it over a certain temperature. Are the chemical companies culpable in this regard?

���The industry response is that consumers should just have better training,��� Woodruff said caustically. ���Studies have shown that training/labeling programs [are] not efficacious. If you don���t want people to get sick you shouldn���t have [perfluorinated chemicals] in homes in the first place.���

* * *

How to avoid exposure to perfluorinated chemicals in your kitchen:

Avoid using Teflon or other similar nonstick pans, if you can. Cast-irons, enamel cast-irons and stainless steel pans are harmless, and��function similarly to��nonstick pans if you add enough oil.��Titanium and titanium ceramic nonstick pans are different chemical formulations, generally free of perfluorinated compounds, though the titanium ceramic pans have not been well-studied.
If you must use��Teflon or similar nonstick pans, do not heat them on the stove without something in them, whether oil or food.
Do not heat them higher than the manufacturer-specified temperature, and do not put them in the oven.
Wash your hands and wipe down surfaces to avoid dust contamination, which PFOAs stick to.
Keep your kitchen well-ventilated when you use these pans. If you have pet birds, do not��keep their cages in the kitchen while you use these pans.

Why is the Bible so badly written?

(Credit: Stocksnapper via Shutterstock)

Millions of evangelicals and other Christian fundamentalists believe that the Bible was dictated by God to men who acted essentially as human transcriptionists. If that were the case, one would have to conclude that God is a terrible writer. Many passages in the Bible would get kicked back by any competent editor or writing professor, kicked back with a lot of red ink�������often more red than black.

Mixed messages, repetition, bad fact-checking, awkward constructions, inconsistent voice, weak character development, boring tangents, contradictions, passages where nobody can tell what the heck the writer meant to convey. This doesn���t sound like a book that was dictated by a deity.

A well-written book should be clear and concise, with all factual statements accurate and characters neither two-dimensional nor plagued with multiple personality disorder ��� unless they actually are. A book written by a god should be some of the best writing ever produced. It should beat Shakespeare on enduring relevance, Stephen Hawking on scientific accuracy, Pablo Neruda on poetry,��Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn��on ethical coherence, and Maya Angelou on sheer lucid beauty ��� just to name a few.

Why does the Bible so fail to meet this mark? One obvious answer, of course, is that neither the Bible nor any derivative work like the Quran or Book of Mormon was actually dictated by the Christian god or other celestial messengers. We humans may yearn for advice that is ���god-breathed,��� but in reality, our sacred texts were written by fallible human beings, who try as they might, fell short of perfection in the ways we all do.

But why is the Bible��so��badly written? Falling short of perfection is one thing, but the Bible has been the subject of literally thousands of follow-on books by people who were genuinely trying to figure out what it means. Despite best efforts, their conclusions don���t converge, which is one reason Christianity has fragmented into over 40,000 denominations and non-denominations.

Here are just a few of the reasons for this tangled web of disagreements and the generally terrible quality of much biblical writing (with some notable exceptions) by literary standards.

Too many cooks

Far from being a single unified whole, the Bible is actually a collection of texts or text fragments from many authors. We don���t know the number of writers precisely, and ��� despite the ancient traditions that assigned authorship to famous people such as Moses, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John �����we don���t know who most of them were. We do know that the men who inscribed the biblical texts had widely different language skills, cultural and technological surroundings, worldviews and supernatural beliefs, along with varying objectives.

Scholars estimate that the earliest of the Bible���s writers lived and wrote about 800 years before the Christian era, and the most recent lived and wrote around 100 CE. They ranged from tribal nomads to subjects of the Roman Empire. To make matters more complicated, some of them borrowed fragments of even earlier stories and songs that had been handed down via oral tradition from Sumerian cultures and religions. For example, flood myths that predate the Noah story can be found across Mesopotamia, with a boat-building hero named Gilgamesh or Ziusudra or Atrahasis.

Bible writers adapted earlier stories and laws to their own cultural and religious context, but they couldn���t always reconcile differences among handed-down texts, and often may not have known that alternative versions existed. Later, variants got bundled together. This is why the Bible contains��two different creation myths,��three sets of Ten Commandments, and��four contradictory versions of the Easter story.

Forgery and counter-forgery

Best-selling Bible scholar Bart Ehrman has written a whole book about��forgery in the New Testament, texts written under the names of famous men to make the writings more credible. This practice was so common among early Christians that nearly half of the books of the New Testament make false authorship claims, while others were assigned famous names after the fact. When books claiming to be written by one person were actually written by several, each seeking to elevate his own point of view, we shouldn���t be surprised if the writing styles clash or they espouse contradictory attitudes.

Histories, poetries, none-of-these

Christians may treat the Bible as a unified book of divine guidance, but in reality it is a mix of different genres: ancient myths, songs of worship, rule books, poetry, propaganda, gospels (yes, this was a common literary genre), coded political commentary, and mysticism, to name just a few. Translators and church leaders down through the centuries haven���t always known which of these they were reading. Modern comedians sometimes make a living by deliberately garbling genres ��� for example, by taking statements literally when they are meant figuratively ��� or distorting things someone else has written or said. Whether they realize it or not, biblical literalists in the pulpit sometimes make a living doing the same thing.

Lost in translation

The books of the Bible were originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, though not in the modern versions of these languages. (Think of trying to read Chaucer���s Old English.) When Roman Catholic Christianity ascended, church leaders embraced the Hebrew Bible and translated it into then-modern Latin, calling it the Old Testament. They also translated texts from early Jesus-worshipers and voted on which to include in their canon of scripture. These became the New Testament. Ironically, some New Testament writers themselves had already quoted bad translations of Old Testament scriptures. These multi-layered imperfect translations inspired key doctrines of the Christian faith, the most famous being the��Virgin Birth.

Most English versions of the Bible have been translated directly from the earliest available manuscripts, but translators have their own biases, some of which were shaped by those early Latin translations and some of which are shaped by more recent theological considerations or cultural trends. After American Protestants pivoted away from supporting abortion in the 1980s, some publishers actually��retranslated��a troublesome Bible verse that treated the death of a fetus differently from the death of a person. The meaning of the Bible passage changed.

But even when scholars scrupulously try to avoid biases, an enormous amount of information is simply lost in translation. One challenge is that the meanings of a story, or even a single word, depend on what preceded it in the culture at large or a specific conversation, or both.

Imagine that a teenage boy has asked his mom for a specific amount of money for a special night out, and Mom says, ���You can have $50.��� She is communicating something very different if the kid asked for $20 (Mom is saying��splurge a bit) versus if the kid had asked for $100 (Mom is saying��rein yourself in).

As the mom opens her wallet, the son scrolls through restaurant options on Yelp and exclaims, ���Sick!��� Mom blinks, then mentally translates into the slang of her own generation which, her son���s perceptions aside, doesn���t come close to translating across 2,000 years of history.

Inside baseball

A lot changes in 2,000 years. As we read the Bible through modern eyes, it helps to remember that we���re getting a glimpse, however imperfectly translated, of the urgent concerns of our Iron Age ancestors. Back then, writing anything was tremendously labor intensive, so we know that information that may seem irrelevant now (because it is) was of acute importance to the men who first carved those words into clay, or inked them on animal skins or papyrus.

Long lists of begats in the Gospels; greetings to this person and that in the Pauline epistles; instructions on how to sacrifice a dove in Leviticus or��purify a virgin war captive��in Numbers; “chosen people” genealogies; prohibitions against eating creatures that don���t exist; pages of threats against enemies of Israel; coded rants against the Roman Empire . . .

As a modern person reading the Bible, one can���t help but think about how the pages might have been better filled. Could none of this have been pared away? Couldn���t the writers have made room instead for a few short sentences that might have changed history:��Wash your hands after you poop.��Don���t have sex with someone who doesn���t want to.��Witchcraft isn���t real. Slavery is forbidden.��We are all God���s chosen people.

Answer: No, they couldn���t have fit these in, even without the��begats. Of course there was physical space on papyrus and parchment. But the minds of the writers were fully occupied with other concerns. In their world, who begat who mattered (!) while challenging prevailing Iron Age views of��illness��or��women and children��or��slaves��was simply inconceivable.

It���s not about you

The Gospel According to Matthew (not actually authored by Matthew) was written for an audience of Jews. The author was a recruiter for the ancient equivalent of Jews for Jesus. That is why, in the Matthew account, the Last Supper is timed as a Passover meal. By contrast, the Gospel According to John was written��to persuade pagan Roman prospects, so the author timed the events differently. This is just one of many explicit��contradictions��between the four Gospel accounts of Jesus���s death and resurrection.

The contradictions in the Gospel stories ��� and��many other parts of the Bible����� are not there because the writers were confused. Quite the opposite. Each writer knew his own goals and audience, and adapted hand-me-down stories or texts to fit, sometimes changing the meaning in the process. The folks who are confused are those who treat the book as if��they��were the audience, as if each verse was a timeless and perfect message sent to them by God.�� Their yearning for a set of clean answers to life���s messy questions has created a mess.

The pig collection

My friend Sandra had a collection of decorative pigs that started out small. As family and friends learned about it, the collection grew to the point that it began taking over the house. Birthdays, Christmas, vacations, thrift stores . . . when people saw a pig, they thought of Sandra. Some of the pigs were delightful; others, not so much. Finally, the move to a new house opened an opportunity to do some culling.

The texts of the Bible are a bit of a pig collection. Like Sandra���s pigs, they reflect a wide variety of styles, raw material and artistic vision. From creation stories to Easter stories to the book of Revelation, old collectibles got handed down and inspired new, and folks who gathered this type of material bundled them together into a single collection.

A good culling might do a lot to improve things. Imagine a version of the Bible containing only that which has enduring beauty or usefulness. Unfortunately, the collection in the Bible has been bound together for so long that Christian authorities (with a few��exceptions) don���t trust themselves to unbind it. Maybe the thought of deciding what goes and stays feels overwhelming or even��dangerous. Or maybe, deep down, Bible-believing evangelicals and other fundamentalists suspect that if they started culling, there wouldn���t be a whole lot left. So, they keep it all, in the process binding themselves to the worldview and very human imperfections of our Iron Age ancestors.

And��that���s��what makes the Good Book so very bad.

Spending a year on “Mars”

This June, 2015 photo provided by the University of Hawaii shows the domed structure that will house six researchers for eight months in an environment meant to simulate an expedition to Mars, on Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii. The group will enter the geodesic dome Thursday, Jan. 19, 2017, and spend eight months together in the 1,200 square foot research facility in a study called Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS). They will have no physical contact with any humans outside their group, experience a 20-minute delay in communications and are required to wear space suits whenever they leave the compound. (Sian Proctor/University of Hawaii via AP) (Credit: AP)

The wind sweeps quietly across the barren, dry landscape. There is not a shrub in sight, not a tree, not a single blade of grass that the wind might disturb. Only barren grayish-red rocks.

The wind never touched us as we peered out of our only window, which was more of a porthole than a real window. We did hear it though as it swept across our white dome perched on the slope of the volcano.

We lived and worked for an entire year halfway up Mauna Loa under conditions similar to those that explorers on Mars will encounter. We called the 1,200-square-foot space that we lived in our ���habitat,��� and whenever we left it we had to wear spacesuits. We each had our own tiny room outfitted with a bed, a small table, a stool and a chest of drawers.

Cut off from civilization, we were dependent on ourselves and on each other. We had to perform any work that needed doing and fix anything that broke. All we had was the material contained in the storage unit dubbed the ���sea can.��� The nearest supermarket was months away. We received news ���from Earth��� electronically �����with a 20-minute delay. That is about how long it takes for signals to travel the maximum distance of 240 million miles between the two planets.

To be honest, it took weeks for me to realize just what I had gotten into. By that time, I was an integral part of the fourth and longest study conducted by the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, HI-SEAS for short. The project was conducted by a team under Kim Binsted at the University of Hawaii and financed by NASA.

The purpose of the experiment was to understand the effects that a Mars mission would have on the human psyche, and to simulate and understand these effects on performance and mood. Make no mistake, sending humans to Mars is much more than just a technical challenge.

The��right��mix is��critical

No simulation can possibly recreate the dangers actually encountered on such a voyage. These are well-known, however, as a result of experience with the International Space Station (ISS), but it is important to understand that physical dangers pose only one of many risks inherent in space travel. Thus far, astronauts have rarely spent more than six months on the ISS. A manned Mars mission, on the other hand, would take about two and a half to three years; the flight alone would take about six months. This is why finding candidates who are able to form a cohesive team capable of working together at close quarters over time without getting on each others��� nerves and who are able to deal with extraordinary stress is a prerequisite for such a mission. One of the questions posed by the experiment was how to give support from Earth to a crew on Mars in resolving problems given the considerable time lag involved in communications.

The knowledge gained from this project will be useful to other groups working under what are called ICE conditions (isolated, confined, extreme). These include submarine crews and teams stationed in Antarctica. There have been more than a few incidents in which fights between crew members have scuttled or nearly wrecked an expedition. It has become something of a tradition for HI-SEAS crews to watch ���Mutiny on the Bounty��� together. A scientific mission to Mars might easily be doomed to failure if its members are unable to cooperate.

But how do you pick a team that remains cohesive over months and even years, while at the same time doing highly demanding research? It is obvious that the members of a Mars expedition have to be experts in their fields. Pilots are needed to navigate the shuttle or the rocket. The engineers and technicians must be able to maintain both the rocket and the habitat; they along with the physicians charged with caring for crew members must be absolutely competent. The researchers and scientists involved must know what they���re doing.

These were the considerations when our HI-SEAS-IV team was put together. Andrzej Stewart, a pilot and flight controller from the U.S., was our engineer; Sheyna Gifford, also from the United States, was our physician. Cyprien Verseux, our astrobiologist, was from France, and I served on the team as geophysicist and chief scientist. Rounding out our group were Tristan Bassingthwaighte, at the time working on a degree in architecture and specializing in next-generation space habitats, and Carmel Johnston, a soil scientist.

In an anonymous election, we selected Carmel to be our commander. In essence, in situations in which decisions had to be made quickly, she had the final say. In most cases, however, we made our decisions democratically. At 26, Carmel was the second-youngest team member; Sheyna, the oldest, was 37.

But professional qualifications tell only half the story. A team composed of the most brilliant scientists might be a disaster if they are all focused only on their own interests and can���t get along with their colleagues. In a setting in which a moment���s inattention can mean quick death, each individual is crucially dependent on his or her crewmates. This is why everyone has to be adaptable, empathetic, tolerant, and above all make the needs of the team the top priority �����even if that puts an individual at a personal disadvantage. That is the only way that the crew can pull itself together after working out serious differences and continue with its mission.

Conflicts, such as those that we experienced, are unavoidable on a Mars expedition. Sometimes we argued over empty coffee cups left lying around, sometimes over how far we should venture onto dangerous terrain when we were deployed outside. No matter how carefully team members are vetted, it is impossible to prevent differences of opinion. But what distinguishes a good team from a bad one is that it quickly recovers from arguments and maintains a high level of performance over time.

A trove��of��outdoor��experience

Each one of us brought to the project different personality traits, experiences, attitudes and work habits. Carmel, our commander, was a doer. Her motto might be summarized as, ���Don���t put off for tomorrow what you can do today.��� She was all business, solving problems and improvising as necessary. By her own admission, she would rather sleep outside in a sleeping bag under the stars than in a bed. As paradoxical as it may seem that she would voluntarily spend an entire year inside, her infinite trove of outdoors experience helped us immensely to endure life in our Mars habitat. We were cut off from civilization and forced to discover our internal resources and make do with the equipment we had brought along.

Her opposites, so to speak, were two team members who painstakingly analyzed each situation for potential weaknesses in our overall planning. They made every effort to ensure the safety of the crew �����ironically, the majority of mishaps happened to them. But three other team members were perhaps the most important in terms of dealing with conflicts that arose. Two of them were born conciliators who argued rationally and posed probing questions whenever there were disagreements. And then there was Tristan, whose quick wit ensured that even tense confrontations were resolved with laughter.

The topics that we discussed changed over the course of the year. But the cause of conflicts always remained the same: differing motivations. Some had volunteered for the experiment because they saw it as an opportunity for personal challenge and enrichment. Whenever the HI-SEAS researchers made additional requests, they readily complied without grumbling. If they had free time, they worked on personal projects.

On the other hand, others had joined because they hoped to improve their chances of becoming astronauts. There���s certainly nothing wrong with that. But it led two of the participants to try to get through the year with as little effort as possible. They resisted any work that had not been assigned to them from the beginning. In some cases, this led to arguments lasting hours about tasks that would have taken five minutes to complete.

It is doubtful that anyone seeking to travel to Mars would rather watch movies than explore the surface of the planet. But our experiences have shown that while astronauts on a real trip to Mars do not necessarily need similar character traits, they do have to be on the same wavelength when it comes to work.

Stress��test��for��our��nerves

Other factors frayed our nerves as well. For example, I found it hard not to be able to walk in a straight line for more than 36 feet or sleep with the window open. And I missed eating fresh raspberries. One thing that all six of us agreed on was that the endless stretch of volcanic rock made us miss the vibrant colors of living nature all the more. Even the city dwellers among us felt that way. Like the astronauts on the International Space Station or crews in a submarine, a Mars crew lives ���inside��� at all times �����whether within the dome or ���outside��� in a space suit.

Because of this, we never felt the sun or wind on our skin. Likewise, although we saw our surroundings through the visor of our headgear, the real world was somehow beyond reach. The external wall of our habitat, the spacesuit, every stone: everything felt the same �����mediated through the muffling bluntness of our gloves. Even if human beings land on Mars one day, we will unavoidably perceive it as outsiders.

Even in the habitat, after a few months everything felt the same. We knew every nook and cranny, every smell, every noise. A few of us had brought scented oils to give our noses a little olfactory vacation, but they didn���t help much. Paradoxically, measures like these that we thought might remind us of our previous lives ended up making us feel even more isolated. Among other things, we brought along a virtual reality program with which we could pretend to sit on a beach or walk through the woods or along city streets. These pastimes were a welcome change. But at the same time they reminded us that we were surrounded by desolate lava rock.

Our physical isolation from the Earth meant that we were isolated from its inhabitants as well. We couldn���t see them, smell them or touch them, but even worse was the fact that every word we transmitted or received was delayed by 20 minutes. No intimate or encouraging conversation can take place under those conditions. As a result, we tended to exchange only the most urgent messages. At the beginning, this arrangement functioned fairly well, but over time we lost our sense of connection to friends and family. And that loss was mutual. Although we ���Martians��� received selected news from home, we had only the barest inkling of what was really going on. At the same time, our families became increasingly unable to appreciate what we were going through. This process of disconnection is gradual and insidious. In my case it took almost nine months, toward the end of the much-feared third quarter, before I began to feel really alone and forgotten. By that time some of the crew members were dealing with emotional lows.

Most of us developed strategies to counter the isolation. In my opinion, those who played sports and worked hard each day were the most successful. It gave them a sense of inner satisfaction to dedicate themselves to a personal project and experience a sense of growth.

It is hardly a secret that workouts help to decrease stress. But on a trip to Mars it would serve a second function as well. Weightlessness and the effects of reduced gravity have a harmful effect on health, and so astronauts will have to engage in intensive exercise to retain bone and muscle mass.

We turned our forays outside the habitat into a hybrid of sports and work. For example, we experimented with extracting water from the extremely dry lava rocks, which are about as dry as those on Mars. We went ���outside��� in our spacesuits every two or three days. I think we can agree that walking on rocky, uneven terrain in a suit weighing up to 50 pounds at 8,200 feet qualifies as strenuous exercise. Toward the end of our mission our excursions lasted as long as six hours. We went on numerous research expeditions and explored about a hundred caves in the surroundings. After all, the point of flying to Mars is to unlock the planet���s secrets, not to stay in one���s little pod.

Exploration of this sort will be a major focus on Mars. For one thing, caves offer a certain degree of protection from cosmic radiation from which we on Earth are protected by our magnetic field and dense atmosphere. At the same time, they may harbor more moisture than the surface and even provide a refuge for living organisms. If such organisms ever existed on Mars, they would more likely have survived in caves.

The question of whether life exists or ever existed on the red planet is one of the key reasons for sending an expedition there. But even aside from that, human beings have always endured hardships in the service of understanding our own planet. Non-government initiatives such as Mars One or the ambitious plans for SpaceX show that many people are ready to take on the rigors of the dangerous journey. Presumably, liftoff is only a matter of time.

Studies such as HI-SEAS are designed to increase the chances that the first Mars crew will survive, and to create a setting in which its members can concentrate on seeking out signs of life rather than squandering their energies in conflicts and petty competition.

If it were possible for me to fly to Mars today, I wouldn���t hesitate �����provided that I got along well with the crew and knew that I would get back in one piece. My year-long experience gave me a good understanding of the negative aspects of life away from Earth, and I know that I have what it takes. While my time on our Hawaiian Mars did not transform me into a completely new person, I have become much calmer in the face of enormous psychological stress. It now takes a lot to make me lose my equilibrium. For the privilege of delving into the secrets of an alien planet I would gladly forgo fresh raspberries for a few years.