Lily Salter's Blog, page 977
October 19, 2015
Forget the war on drugs: Alcohol ruins more lives than all other drugs combined
While our current political conversations often involve concerned discussions about marijuana’s imagined dangers or potential benefits (recall that the most recent Republican and Democratic debates both dedicated time to the question of pot legalization), our most problematic relationship actually seems to be with alcohol. America, it seems, has a drinking problem—and studies indicate it is only getting worse. There are real reasons, in addition to the pressing issue of mass incarceration and the failure of the drug war, for us to start thinking seriously about the cost of our increasing reliance on alcohol when we consider the ravages of drug use. Particularly since the toll of alcohol, though often left out of that conversation, actually outpaces those of every other legal and illicit drug combined.
Drinking is on the rise in the U.S. Precipitously. A study released this year from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation finds that heavy drinking among Americans rose 17.2 percent between 2005 and 2012. Not only are Americans drinking more, but in an increasing number of cases, they’re consuming those drinks in rapid succession. The same study found that binge drinking increased 8.9 percent nationally during the same time frame. In 2012, 8.2 percent of Americans were heavy drinkers, meaning they had one drink per day on average over the course of a month. An additional 18.3 percent of Americans that year fit the description of binge drinkers, defined by the CDC as men who have five or more drinks and women who have four or more drinks in a single drinking session. It's women, by the way, who have largely driven these increases. In the years between 2005 and 2012, binge drinking increased just 4.9 percent among men, but jumped 17.5 percent among women. The reason for such a significant rise is likely due to changing social mores, according to Tom Greenfield, scientific director at the Alcohol Research Group, who spoke with Kaiser Health News. Men still drink more than women do, but women have narrowed the gap in recent years. Binge drinking, always a favorite sport on college campuses, has also become more prevalent. A 2013 study from the Center for Addiction Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital found that women in college binge-drink more often than male students. "It's not that the percentage of young people is increasing alcohol use," George Koob, the director of the National Institute on Alcohol, told NBC News. "It's that bingeing is more intense." Even with so many Americans drinking more, the actual proportion of Americans drinking is the same as it’s long been. Per the HME study, “56 percent of people in the U.S. consumed...alcohol in 2005 [through] 2012.” Ali Mokdad, the lead researcher on the HME study, told USA Today, “The percentage of people who drink is not changing much, but among drinkers, we are seeing more heavy drinking and more binge drinking. We're going in the wrong direction." In big picture terms, the wealthiest and most educated people are most likely to drink. A Gallup poll released earlier this year confirmed that more affluent Americans drank more often than their poorer peers. “Whereas eight in 10 adults in these socio-economic status groups say they drink, only about half of lower-income Americans and those with a high school diploma or less say they drink.” (There was a racial component as well: 69 percent of non-Hispanic whites say they drink alcohol, compared with just 52 percent of nonwhites.) The reasons for the class discrepancy are likely varied; Gallup theorizes that greater means leads to more frequent involvement in activities that involve drinking, such as going on vacation, dining out and socializing with coworkers. It also seems likely that the culture of overwork in professional environments contributes to heavier drinking. As office hours grow longer and the average workweek increases, so too does the need to blow off steam. Not to mention that drinking is ingrained in many office social cultures. As Tom Greenfield points out, “The influx of young, wealthy professionals in San Jose, Oakland and San Francisco—many in hard-working, hard-partying tech jobs—may have helped spur the Bay Area’s significant increase in binge-drinking rates.” Big jumps in drinking rates in Silicon Valley (Santa Clara county saw a 28 percent increase in drinking between 2002 and 2012, the largest increase in California) further support this idea. In a 2009 New York Times piece, Arthur C. Brooks suggests that goal-driven, ambitious people drink because success often feels hollow. Brooks writes that scaling the ranks “may initially relieve stress as people rise into the middle class, [but] it seems to introduce a whole new set of stressful problems for those who keep climbing.” Brooks rhetorically poses, and then answers, the question of coping mechanisms:“Here’s one that many people try: Drink a lot. Research from 2010 found that people with high incomes reported consuming more alcohol than people of more modest means. Specifically, 81 percent of respondents making over $75,000 per year drink alcohol, versus 66 percent of those making $30,000 to $49,000 and 46 percent earning under $20,000.”
It seems important to recognize that while more affluent people drink on average, the consequences of drinking are often less severe than they are for poorer Americans. Researchers suggest this is partly because, despite drinking similar amounts, poorer people tend to drink to excess more often than wealthier people, who spread their consumption over more time. One study, cited by Psychology Today, found that upper-middle-class drinkers generally had 2-3.5 alcoholic beverages each day. “Conversely, people close to the bottom of the income ladder mostly divide into two extremes. Either they do not drink at all, or they drink to excess.”
"Educated, affluent [people] enjoy a glass of wine every night," Ali Mokdad told USA Today. "They can afford it, and they are cautious about their health." But Diane Hietpas, of the Menominee Tribal Clinic in Keshena, Wisconsin, seemed to offer the most insightful take on the issue. "[P]eople don't understand that this is a symptom of a much larger problem of poverty and trauma," Hietpas told the paper. "Our people are hurting." Following years of recession, war and social upheaval, it seems likely that her statement has applications across socioeconomic groups.The price of drinking is astronomical in every way. A recent report from the Centers for Disease Control finds that binge drinking among Americans costs the country nearly $250 billion annually in lost productivity in the workplace, alcohol-related crimes and treatment for the health issues that result from excessive alcohol consumption. While the wages of Americans’ boozing have always been pretty high, the study notes that costs have notably increased in recent years. In 2006, the price of binge drinking for the nation was $223.5 billion, the equivalent of $1.90 per drink. By 2010, the figure rose to $249 billion, or $2.05 a drink. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the lion’s share of those costs, 77 percent, were related to binge drinking.
Of far greater concern should be the ways in which alcohol destroys lives. The CDC estimates that alcohol was linked to 88,000 annual deaths in America between 2006-2010, while the agency found that 38,329 people died of drug overdoses in 2010. According to the Foundation for a Drug-Free World, alcohol is the cause of death for more American teenagers than all other drugs combined, and is “a factor in the three leading causes of death among 15- to 24-year-olds: accidents, homicides and suicides.” The New York Times reports that, on average, six Americans die of alcohol poisoning each day. Three quarters of those who died were 35 to 64 years old. And 30 percent of Americans report that they’ve had enough struggles with alcohol at some point in their lives that it could be considered a problem. Drinking is, in many ways, America’s pastime. But unlike other culturally shared activities, it often carries a hefty cost. None of this is intended to diminish the impact of a number of other social ills that desperately need to be addressed. Yet it does seem clear that misplaced fearmongering about, say, medical marijuana should be less of a legislative item than how we drink and why we drink, and how we can drink less.
Peggy Noonan outdoes herself, sneers that Obama’s presidency means “Anyone can run for president now”
Peggy Noonan cannot believe they are letting the riffraff have a say in how this country is governed. Her latest op-ed, published in the Wall Street Journal, is a series of would-be observations that only hang together on the common thread that is her barely stifled outrage that we will let just anyone vote these days. You'd think this country was a democracy, it's gotten so out of control! After a little preliminary longing for Joe Biden to get into the race to nudge that crass woman Hillary Clinton out of the lead, Noonan really digs into her hell-in-a-handbasket theme. "The 2016 primary is a rush to the left," she frets. "We are now not embarrassed to argue America should be more like Denmark, we are proudly socialist or severely progressive, and by the way Republicans are the enemy." Oh no, not Denmark, a country no doubt full of unembarrassed vulgarians. They probably wear white shoes after Labor Day, you know. Noonan doesn't know, but she can probably guess. If Sanders likes them, they must be an uncouth country full of bike-riding hippies. But what really puffs Noonan full of indignation is this ridiculous business of Democrats acting like Republicans are the opposition. "Asked which enemy she was proudest to have made, Mrs. Clinton mentioned the NRA, the Iranians, some others and 'probably the Republicans.' She was smiling, but if any GOP hopeful declared 'the Democrats' to be on his enemies list he would be roundly condemned as polarizing," Noonan huffs. Well, no one can deny that Noonan is a master class in self-delusion, that's for sure. It takes a lot to get to the idea the Republicans are the polite, cooperative party and that the Democrats are the conflict-stoking partisans. It's not the Democrats who have made attempted government shutdowns in service of partisan temper tantrums a multi-annual event. "If Hillary feels free to speak of the Republicans as enemies it’s because she knows there is a portion of the base that is angry, polarized and ready to respond to an aggressive tone," Noonan whines. Oh dear, they probably don't wipe their feet before they come in the house, do they? This feigned alarm at people responding to passion in politics isn't fooling anyone, of course. This is Concern Trolling 101, an attempt to shame Democrats, especially Clinton and Sanders, from speaking frankly because she knows in her heart that this kind of progressive talk is actually reaching people. Anyone who genuinely cares about politeness in politics wouldn't give a hoot about the Democratic debate, which was a model of how to disagree without getting ugly or personal about it. Noonan does have some words for a Republican---Donald Trump, of course. Not because he's racist or rude to women, naturally. Self-appointed manners scold Noonan can't be bothered to worry about someone calling Mexicans rapists or making period jokes to put women in their place. No, just as with her outrage over Clinton's light joke about Republicans, Noonan is solely focused on tutting at people who she feels say indelicate things about Republican politicians, something Trump most certainly does. But Noonan wants to believe that Trump's vulgar bleating isn't really speaking to Republican voters, who she longs to see as too genteel for such things. "Talking to Trump supporters this week I’m getting a sense of stalling or slight deflation," she writes hopefully. Sure, it's not showing up in poll numbers but she can "hear a certain wavering." Keep clapping, Peggy! Donald Trump, with his baseball caps and ugly combover, does do serious damage to Noonan's long-standing fantasy reducing American politics to mannered Republicans vs. loutish Democrats. Resolving this cognitive dissonance requires finding some way to reclassify Trump as a Democrat, so she can retreat back into her world where all Republicans know which fork to use when and only Democrats say the F-word in mixed company. Getting there requires a leap of logic that is impressive even compared to Noonan's addled history: "There are many reasons we’re at this moment, but the essential political one is this: Mr. Obama lowered the bar." Don't worry, Noonan has a cover story about why it's not racist to sniff about how putting a black man in the White House is just ruining the neighborhood, something about how Obama "was a literal unknown, an obscure former state legislator who hadn’t completed his single term as U.S. senator". Of course, Donald Trump was anything but a "literal unknown." He's been in the public eye for decades now, making headlines back when Obama was still just a college student. So no, they don't have that in common. But that's okay, Peggy. We all know that was just a feint to cover up your real argument, which is bemoaning that "Anyone can run for president now" that Obama has the White House. The text may be something something "state legislator" but the subtext is screamingly clear here. Isn't that what this country is supposed to be, a place where any kid can, if they have moxie and intelligence, grow up to be President? The irony is that Trump himself is on the same page as Noonan, full of outrage that someone like Obama actually made it to the White House. Trump downplays it now, but one of the big reasons he started getting so politically aggressive was that he refuses to believe that Obama is eligible to hold office. Trump has been a long-time advocate of birtherism, a conspiracy theory that allows racists to sneer at the idea of a black president by hiding behind "questions" about Obama's birth certificate. Trump is running not because anyone can run for President, but because he opposes that kind of democratic idealism with every fiber of his being. Maybe Noonan should reconsider her opposition to Trump. It seems that they have a lot more in common than she would like to admit. 
Peggy Noonan cannot believe they are letting the riffraff have a say in how this country is governed. Her latest op-ed, published in the Wall Street Journal, is a series of would-be observations that only hang together on the common thread that is her barely stifled outrage that we will let just anyone vote these days. You'd think this country was a democracy, it's gotten so out of control! After a little preliminary longing for Joe Biden to get into the race to nudge that crass woman Hillary Clinton out of the lead, Noonan really digs into her hell-in-a-handbasket theme. "The 2016 primary is a rush to the left," she frets. "We are now not embarrassed to argue America should be more like Denmark, we are proudly socialist or severely progressive, and by the way Republicans are the enemy." Oh no, not Denmark, a country no doubt full of unembarrassed vulgarians. They probably wear white shoes after Labor Day, you know. Noonan doesn't know, but she can probably guess. If Sanders likes them, they must be an uncouth country full of bike-riding hippies. But what really puffs Noonan full of indignation is this ridiculous business of Democrats acting like Republicans are the opposition. "Asked which enemy she was proudest to have made, Mrs. Clinton mentioned the NRA, the Iranians, some others and 'probably the Republicans.' She was smiling, but if any GOP hopeful declared 'the Democrats' to be on his enemies list he would be roundly condemned as polarizing," Noonan huffs. Well, no one can deny that Noonan is a master class in self-delusion, that's for sure. It takes a lot to get to the idea the Republicans are the polite, cooperative party and that the Democrats are the conflict-stoking partisans. It's not the Democrats who have made attempted government shutdowns in service of partisan temper tantrums a multi-annual event. "If Hillary feels free to speak of the Republicans as enemies it’s because she knows there is a portion of the base that is angry, polarized and ready to respond to an aggressive tone," Noonan whines. Oh dear, they probably don't wipe their feet before they come in the house, do they? This feigned alarm at people responding to passion in politics isn't fooling anyone, of course. This is Concern Trolling 101, an attempt to shame Democrats, especially Clinton and Sanders, from speaking frankly because she knows in her heart that this kind of progressive talk is actually reaching people. Anyone who genuinely cares about politeness in politics wouldn't give a hoot about the Democratic debate, which was a model of how to disagree without getting ugly or personal about it. Noonan does have some words for a Republican---Donald Trump, of course. Not because he's racist or rude to women, naturally. Self-appointed manners scold Noonan can't be bothered to worry about someone calling Mexicans rapists or making period jokes to put women in their place. No, just as with her outrage over Clinton's light joke about Republicans, Noonan is solely focused on tutting at people who she feels say indelicate things about Republican politicians, something Trump most certainly does. But Noonan wants to believe that Trump's vulgar bleating isn't really speaking to Republican voters, who she longs to see as too genteel for such things. "Talking to Trump supporters this week I’m getting a sense of stalling or slight deflation," she writes hopefully. Sure, it's not showing up in poll numbers but she can "hear a certain wavering." Keep clapping, Peggy! Donald Trump, with his baseball caps and ugly combover, does do serious damage to Noonan's long-standing fantasy reducing American politics to mannered Republicans vs. loutish Democrats. Resolving this cognitive dissonance requires finding some way to reclassify Trump as a Democrat, so she can retreat back into her world where all Republicans know which fork to use when and only Democrats say the F-word in mixed company. Getting there requires a leap of logic that is impressive even compared to Noonan's addled history: "There are many reasons we’re at this moment, but the essential political one is this: Mr. Obama lowered the bar." Don't worry, Noonan has a cover story about why it's not racist to sniff about how putting a black man in the White House is just ruining the neighborhood, something about how Obama "was a literal unknown, an obscure former state legislator who hadn’t completed his single term as U.S. senator". Of course, Donald Trump was anything but a "literal unknown." He's been in the public eye for decades now, making headlines back when Obama was still just a college student. So no, they don't have that in common. But that's okay, Peggy. We all know that was just a feint to cover up your real argument, which is bemoaning that "Anyone can run for president now" that Obama has the White House. The text may be something something "state legislator" but the subtext is screamingly clear here. Isn't that what this country is supposed to be, a place where any kid can, if they have moxie and intelligence, grow up to be President? The irony is that Trump himself is on the same page as Noonan, full of outrage that someone like Obama actually made it to the White House. Trump downplays it now, but one of the big reasons he started getting so politically aggressive was that he refuses to believe that Obama is eligible to hold office. Trump has been a long-time advocate of birtherism, a conspiracy theory that allows racists to sneer at the idea of a black president by hiding behind "questions" about Obama's birth certificate. Trump is running not because anyone can run for President, but because he opposes that kind of democratic idealism with every fiber of his being. Maybe Noonan should reconsider her opposition to Trump. It seems that they have a lot more in common than she would like to admit.
Peggy Noonan cannot believe they are letting the riffraff have a say in how this country is governed. Her latest op-ed, published in the Wall Street Journal, is a series of would-be observations that only hang together on the common thread that is her barely stifled outrage that we will let just anyone vote these days. You'd think this country was a democracy, it's gotten so out of control! After a little preliminary longing for Joe Biden to get into the race to nudge that crass woman Hillary Clinton out of the lead, Noonan really digs into her hell-in-a-handbasket theme. "The 2016 primary is a rush to the left," she frets. "We are now not embarrassed to argue America should be more like Denmark, we are proudly socialist or severely progressive, and by the way Republicans are the enemy." Oh no, not Denmark, a country no doubt full of unembarrassed vulgarians. They probably wear white shoes after Labor Day, you know. Noonan doesn't know, but she can probably guess. If Sanders likes them, they must be an uncouth country full of bike-riding hippies. But what really puffs Noonan full of indignation is this ridiculous business of Democrats acting like Republicans are the opposition. "Asked which enemy she was proudest to have made, Mrs. Clinton mentioned the NRA, the Iranians, some others and 'probably the Republicans.' She was smiling, but if any GOP hopeful declared 'the Democrats' to be on his enemies list he would be roundly condemned as polarizing," Noonan huffs. Well, no one can deny that Noonan is a master class in self-delusion, that's for sure. It takes a lot to get to the idea the Republicans are the polite, cooperative party and that the Democrats are the conflict-stoking partisans. It's not the Democrats who have made attempted government shutdowns in service of partisan temper tantrums a multi-annual event. "If Hillary feels free to speak of the Republicans as enemies it’s because she knows there is a portion of the base that is angry, polarized and ready to respond to an aggressive tone," Noonan whines. Oh dear, they probably don't wipe their feet before they come in the house, do they? This feigned alarm at people responding to passion in politics isn't fooling anyone, of course. This is Concern Trolling 101, an attempt to shame Democrats, especially Clinton and Sanders, from speaking frankly because she knows in her heart that this kind of progressive talk is actually reaching people. Anyone who genuinely cares about politeness in politics wouldn't give a hoot about the Democratic debate, which was a model of how to disagree without getting ugly or personal about it. Noonan does have some words for a Republican---Donald Trump, of course. Not because he's racist or rude to women, naturally. Self-appointed manners scold Noonan can't be bothered to worry about someone calling Mexicans rapists or making period jokes to put women in their place. No, just as with her outrage over Clinton's light joke about Republicans, Noonan is solely focused on tutting at people who she feels say indelicate things about Republican politicians, something Trump most certainly does. But Noonan wants to believe that Trump's vulgar bleating isn't really speaking to Republican voters, who she longs to see as too genteel for such things. "Talking to Trump supporters this week I’m getting a sense of stalling or slight deflation," she writes hopefully. Sure, it's not showing up in poll numbers but she can "hear a certain wavering." Keep clapping, Peggy! Donald Trump, with his baseball caps and ugly combover, does do serious damage to Noonan's long-standing fantasy reducing American politics to mannered Republicans vs. loutish Democrats. Resolving this cognitive dissonance requires finding some way to reclassify Trump as a Democrat, so she can retreat back into her world where all Republicans know which fork to use when and only Democrats say the F-word in mixed company. Getting there requires a leap of logic that is impressive even compared to Noonan's addled history: "There are many reasons we’re at this moment, but the essential political one is this: Mr. Obama lowered the bar." Don't worry, Noonan has a cover story about why it's not racist to sniff about how putting a black man in the White House is just ruining the neighborhood, something about how Obama "was a literal unknown, an obscure former state legislator who hadn’t completed his single term as U.S. senator". Of course, Donald Trump was anything but a "literal unknown." He's been in the public eye for decades now, making headlines back when Obama was still just a college student. So no, they don't have that in common. But that's okay, Peggy. We all know that was just a feint to cover up your real argument, which is bemoaning that "Anyone can run for president now" that Obama has the White House. The text may be something something "state legislator" but the subtext is screamingly clear here. Isn't that what this country is supposed to be, a place where any kid can, if they have moxie and intelligence, grow up to be President? The irony is that Trump himself is on the same page as Noonan, full of outrage that someone like Obama actually made it to the White House. Trump downplays it now, but one of the big reasons he started getting so politically aggressive was that he refuses to believe that Obama is eligible to hold office. Trump has been a long-time advocate of birtherism, a conspiracy theory that allows racists to sneer at the idea of a black president by hiding behind "questions" about Obama's birth certificate. Trump is running not because anyone can run for President, but because he opposes that kind of democratic idealism with every fiber of his being. Maybe Noonan should reconsider her opposition to Trump. It seems that they have a lot more in common than she would like to admit.
Racists threaten to boycott “Star Wars VII” because it promotes “white genocide,” apparently
Today in Stuff That Will Make You Hang Your Head In Despair, a bunch of white supremacists are tweeting under the hashtag #BoycottStarWarsVII. Why? Apparently J.J. Abrams' new “Star Wars” installment is a little too multicultural for their liking (black actor John Boyega plays Finn, a stormtrooper, one of the presumed leads). Enjoy your daily dose of hate speech below: https://twitter.com/2partyhoax/status... https://twitter.com/genophilia/status... https://twitter.com/officialCritDis/s... https://twitter.com/genophilia/status... https://twitter.com/teen_load/status/... https://twitter.com/Negromancer_616/s... Thankfully, the hashtag seems to have been mostly co-opted by reasonable people at this point (other reasonable people out there, feel free to chime in!): https://twitter.com/thelindsayellis/s... https://twitter.com/SimonInDJungle/st... https://twitter.com/BrokenGamezHD/sta... https://twitter.com/TheJackman50/stat... https://twitter.com/Bro_Pair/status/6... https://twitter.com/ellotheth/status/...
NBA player describes humiliating racial profiling experience: “One of the the most degrading and racially prejudiced things I’ve ever experienced in life”
A little more than a month after New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton was forced to apologize to James Blake for his officers' mistaken takedown of the former tennis professional for minding his own business on a crowded New York city sidewalk, another African-American sports star is claiming he was recently racially profiled by police officers. Milwaukee Bucks forward John Henson says employees at Schwanke Kasten Jewelers in Whitefish Bay locked their front door when they saw Henson approach the store and then ran to the back to call police officers when Henson rang the door bell. “They locked the door and told me to go away,” 6-foot, 11-inch baller wrote in an Instagram post Monday calling out the jeweler that's been around since 1899. "After I rang the doorbell twice everyone went to the back ... This was followed by two police cars pulling up and parking across the street and watching me for 5 minutes," Henson explained in his lengthy post. After being questioned by police officers about his parked Chevrolet, the cops informed the jewelry store employees that Hanson was simply looking to buy a watch and they unlocked their doors to carry on with business as usual. “This was one of the the most degrading and racially prejudice things I've ever experienced in life and wouldn’t wish this on anyone,” Henson wrote, clearly incensed by the incident. The owner of Schwanke-Kasten Jewelry, Tom Dixon told the local paper that the Whitefish Bay Police Department had informed local business owners to be on alert, and defended the employees' actions as in response to the police department's warning. Still, it seems as though Hanson isn't buying the jeweler's excuse to profile potential customers: “You have no right to profile someone because of their race and nationality and this incident needs to be brought to light and I urge anyone who ever is thinking of shopping here reads this and doesn’t bring any business to this discriminatory place":
A little more than a month after New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton was forced to apologize to James Blake for his officers' mistaken takedown of the former tennis professional for minding his own business on a crowded New York city sidewalk, another African-American sports star is claiming he was recently racially profiled by police officers. Milwaukee Bucks forward John Henson says employees at Schwanke Kasten Jewelers in Whitefish Bay locked their front door when they saw Henson approach the store and then ran to the back to call police officers when Henson rang the door bell. “They locked the door and told me to go away,” 6-foot, 11-inch baller wrote in an Instagram post Monday calling out the jeweler that's been around since 1899. "After I rang the doorbell twice everyone went to the back ... This was followed by two police cars pulling up and parking across the street and watching me for 5 minutes," Henson explained in his lengthy post. After being questioned by police officers about his parked Chevrolet, the cops informed the jewelry store employees that Hanson was simply looking to buy a watch and they unlocked their doors to carry on with business as usual. “This was one of the the most degrading and racially prejudice things I've ever experienced in life and wouldn’t wish this on anyone,” Henson wrote, clearly incensed by the incident. The owner of Schwanke-Kasten Jewelry, Tom Dixon told the local paper that the Whitefish Bay Police Department had informed local business owners to be on alert, and defended the employees' actions as in response to the police department's warning. Still, it seems as though Hanson isn't buying the jeweler's excuse to profile potential customers: “You have no right to profile someone because of their race and nationality and this incident needs to be brought to light and I urge anyone who ever is thinking of shopping here reads this and doesn’t bring any business to this discriminatory place":A photo posted by @johnhenson31 on Oct 19, 2015 at 11:56am PDT
A little more than a month after New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton was forced to apologize to James Blake for his officers' mistaken takedown of the former tennis professional for minding his own business on a crowded New York city sidewalk, another African-American sports star is claiming he was recently racially profiled by police officers. Milwaukee Bucks forward John Henson says employees at Schwanke Kasten Jewelers in Whitefish Bay locked their front door when they saw Henson approach the store and then ran to the back to call police officers when Henson rang the door bell. “They locked the door and told me to go away,” 6-foot, 11-inch baller wrote in an Instagram post Monday calling out the jeweler that's been around since 1899. "After I rang the doorbell twice everyone went to the back ... This was followed by two police cars pulling up and parking across the street and watching me for 5 minutes," Henson explained in his lengthy post. After being questioned by police officers about his parked Chevrolet, the cops informed the jewelry store employees that Hanson was simply looking to buy a watch and they unlocked their doors to carry on with business as usual. “This was one of the the most degrading and racially prejudice things I've ever experienced in life and wouldn’t wish this on anyone,” Henson wrote, clearly incensed by the incident. The owner of Schwanke-Kasten Jewelry, Tom Dixon told the local paper that the Whitefish Bay Police Department had informed local business owners to be on alert, and defended the employees' actions as in response to the police department's warning. Still, it seems as though Hanson isn't buying the jeweler's excuse to profile potential customers: “You have no right to profile someone because of their race and nationality and this incident needs to be brought to light and I urge anyone who ever is thinking of shopping here reads this and doesn’t bring any business to this discriminatory place":A photo posted by @johnhenson31 on Oct 19, 2015 at 11:56am PDT
A photo posted by @johnhenson31 on Oct 19, 2015 at 11:56am PDT
Why so defensive, Amazon?: Firing back at the New York Times two months later is desperate damage control
Given all the negative press Amazon has received over the years – from its workers toiling in overheated warehouses to documentation of the way the online retailer put bookstores out of business to revolt from authors during the Hatchette dispute – you might think by now that this enormous, monopoly-like company would just roll with the punches. But a two month-old New York Times story about the cutthroat and relentless culture among the corporations white-collar workforce just swam back into sight. Amazon has apparently gotten so big that it can devote significant resources to fact-checking a story that took two New York Times reporters six months each to report. And it’s rich enough it’s able to enlist a former White House chief spokesman to try to debunk the article. This morning, former Time journalist and Obama spokesman Jay Carney – recently enlisted at Amazon as senior vice president for Worldwide Corporate Affairs -- offered this rebuttal, arguing that the piece was irresponsibly reported and sensationalist. Here’s how he leads off his response, in Medium, titled “What the New York Times Didn’t Tell You”:
“Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.” If you read the recent New York Times article about Amazon’s culture, you remember that quote. Attributed to Bo Olson, the image of countless employees crying at their desks set the tone for a front-page story that other media outlets described as “scathing,” “blistering,” “brutal” and “harsh.” Olson’s words were so key to the narrative the Times wished to construct that they splashed them in large type just below the headline.According to Carney, though, Olson resigned after being caught falsifying records. “Why weren’t readers given that information?” Here’s the response by New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet:
And Baquet adds, “His one quote in the story was consistent with those of other current and former employees. Several other people in other divisions also described people crying publicly in very similar terms.” Similarly, Carney charges reported Jodi Kantor with misleading the company, reprinting a friendly email in which she promised a balanced and responsible story. The fact is, the story was critical of workplace culture, but it was hardly a hit piece. Here’s the first long quote in the story:Olson described conflict and turmoil in his group and a revolving series of bosses, and acknowledged that he didn’t last there. He disputes Amazon’s account of his departure, though. He told us today that his division was overwhelmed and had difficulty meeting its marketing commitments to publishers; he said he and others in the division could not keep up. But he said he was never confronted with allegations of personally fraudulent conduct or falsifying records, nor did he admit to that.
If there were criminal charges against him, or some formal accusation of wrongdoing, we would certainly consider that. If we had known his status was contested, we would have said so.
“This is a company that strives to do really big, innovative, groundbreaking things, and those things aren’t easy,” said Susan Harker, Amazon’s top recruiter. “When you’re shooting for the moon, the nature of the work is really challenging. For some people it doesn’t work.” That’s hardly an example of yellow journalism, especially when reporters speak to more than 100 current and former employees on their way to an assessment.The New York Times, of course, is hardly beyond reproach. But any journalist who’s tried to report a piece a big institution doesn’t want to happen – especially one as fond of nondisclosure agreements and corporate control as Amazon – knows the huge number of people too frightened to speak to the press. For every piece of the story the Times – which errs on the side of caution with reported stories – found, there are likely half a dozen people scared to say something equally damning. “Virtually every person quoted in the story stated a view that multiple other workers had also told us,” Baquet (who I worked with for a few years at the Los Angeles Times) wrote in his rebuttal. “(Some other workers were not quoted because of nondisclosure agreements, fear of retribution or because their current employers were doing business with Amazon.)” For those of us who weren’t part of the reporting of this massive story – that is, those of us who are neither Kantor, co-writer David Streitfeld, or the numerous sources they interviewed – the details of who said what are hard to know for sure. But in the more than two months since the original story ran, most of the credible discussion of Amazon workplace culture hasn't gone the online retailer’s way. One of those – also on Medium – comes from a woman who has since left the company, complaining about being poorly treated during maternity leave by a corporation that continues to have trouble with women. It syncs up with a lot of what was in Kantor and Streitfeld's story. There’s always the chance that the paper made small errors of judgment in this gargantuan project – it’s hard to know. But when a heavily reported story is taken as credible and the rebuttal takes nine weeks and a heavily paid PR department to turn it out, it makes you wonder if the original story's biggest flaw is that it may be too close for comfort.Given all the negative press Amazon has received over the years – from its workers toiling in overheated warehouses to documentation of the way the online retailer put bookstores out of business to revolt from authors during the Hatchette dispute – you might think by now that this enormous, monopoly-like company would just roll with the punches. But a two month-old New York Times story about the cutthroat and relentless culture among the corporations white-collar workforce just swam back into sight. Amazon has apparently gotten so big that it can devote significant resources to fact-checking a story that took two New York Times reporters six months each to report. And it’s rich enough it’s able to enlist a former White House chief spokesman to try to debunk the article. This morning, former Time journalist and Obama spokesman Jay Carney – recently enlisted at Amazon as senior vice president for Worldwide Corporate Affairs -- offered this rebuttal, arguing that the piece was irresponsibly reported and sensationalist. Here’s how he leads off his response, in Medium, titled “What the New York Times Didn’t Tell You”:
“Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.” If you read the recent New York Times article about Amazon’s culture, you remember that quote. Attributed to Bo Olson, the image of countless employees crying at their desks set the tone for a front-page story that other media outlets described as “scathing,” “blistering,” “brutal” and “harsh.” Olson’s words were so key to the narrative the Times wished to construct that they splashed them in large type just below the headline.According to Carney, though, Olson resigned after being caught falsifying records. “Why weren’t readers given that information?” Here’s the response by New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet:
And Baquet adds, “His one quote in the story was consistent with those of other current and former employees. Several other people in other divisions also described people crying publicly in very similar terms.” Similarly, Carney charges reported Jodi Kantor with misleading the company, reprinting a friendly email in which she promised a balanced and responsible story. The fact is, the story was critical of workplace culture, but it was hardly a hit piece. Here’s the first long quote in the story:Olson described conflict and turmoil in his group and a revolving series of bosses, and acknowledged that he didn’t last there. He disputes Amazon’s account of his departure, though. He told us today that his division was overwhelmed and had difficulty meeting its marketing commitments to publishers; he said he and others in the division could not keep up. But he said he was never confronted with allegations of personally fraudulent conduct or falsifying records, nor did he admit to that.
If there were criminal charges against him, or some formal accusation of wrongdoing, we would certainly consider that. If we had known his status was contested, we would have said so.
“This is a company that strives to do really big, innovative, groundbreaking things, and those things aren’t easy,” said Susan Harker, Amazon’s top recruiter. “When you’re shooting for the moon, the nature of the work is really challenging. For some people it doesn’t work.” That’s hardly an example of yellow journalism, especially when reporters speak to more than 100 current and former employees on their way to an assessment.The New York Times, of course, is hardly beyond reproach. But any journalist who’s tried to report a piece a big institution doesn’t want to happen – especially one as fond of nondisclosure agreements and corporate control as Amazon – knows the huge number of people too frightened to speak to the press. For every piece of the story the Times – which errs on the side of caution with reported stories – found, there are likely half a dozen people scared to say something equally damning. “Virtually every person quoted in the story stated a view that multiple other workers had also told us,” Baquet (who I worked with for a few years at the Los Angeles Times) wrote in his rebuttal. “(Some other workers were not quoted because of nondisclosure agreements, fear of retribution or because their current employers were doing business with Amazon.)” For those of us who weren’t part of the reporting of this massive story – that is, those of us who are neither Kantor, co-writer David Streitfeld, or the numerous sources they interviewed – the details of who said what are hard to know for sure. But in the more than two months since the original story ran, most of the credible discussion of Amazon workplace culture hasn't gone the online retailer’s way. One of those – also on Medium – comes from a woman who has since left the company, complaining about being poorly treated during maternity leave by a corporation that continues to have trouble with women. It syncs up with a lot of what was in Kantor and Streitfeld's story. There’s always the chance that the paper made small errors of judgment in this gargantuan project – it’s hard to know. But when a heavily reported story is taken as credible and the rebuttal takes nine weeks and a heavily paid PR department to turn it out, it makes you wonder if the original story's biggest flaw is that it may be too close for comfort.Given all the negative press Amazon has received over the years – from its workers toiling in overheated warehouses to documentation of the way the online retailer put bookstores out of business to revolt from authors during the Hatchette dispute – you might think by now that this enormous, monopoly-like company would just roll with the punches. But a two month-old New York Times story about the cutthroat and relentless culture among the corporations white-collar workforce just swam back into sight. Amazon has apparently gotten so big that it can devote significant resources to fact-checking a story that took two New York Times reporters six months each to report. And it’s rich enough it’s able to enlist a former White House chief spokesman to try to debunk the article. This morning, former Time journalist and Obama spokesman Jay Carney – recently enlisted at Amazon as senior vice president for Worldwide Corporate Affairs -- offered this rebuttal, arguing that the piece was irresponsibly reported and sensationalist. Here’s how he leads off his response, in Medium, titled “What the New York Times Didn’t Tell You”:
“Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.” If you read the recent New York Times article about Amazon’s culture, you remember that quote. Attributed to Bo Olson, the image of countless employees crying at their desks set the tone for a front-page story that other media outlets described as “scathing,” “blistering,” “brutal” and “harsh.” Olson’s words were so key to the narrative the Times wished to construct that they splashed them in large type just below the headline.According to Carney, though, Olson resigned after being caught falsifying records. “Why weren’t readers given that information?” Here’s the response by New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet:
And Baquet adds, “His one quote in the story was consistent with those of other current and former employees. Several other people in other divisions also described people crying publicly in very similar terms.” Similarly, Carney charges reported Jodi Kantor with misleading the company, reprinting a friendly email in which she promised a balanced and responsible story. The fact is, the story was critical of workplace culture, but it was hardly a hit piece. Here’s the first long quote in the story:Olson described conflict and turmoil in his group and a revolving series of bosses, and acknowledged that he didn’t last there. He disputes Amazon’s account of his departure, though. He told us today that his division was overwhelmed and had difficulty meeting its marketing commitments to publishers; he said he and others in the division could not keep up. But he said he was never confronted with allegations of personally fraudulent conduct or falsifying records, nor did he admit to that.
If there were criminal charges against him, or some formal accusation of wrongdoing, we would certainly consider that. If we had known his status was contested, we would have said so.
“This is a company that strives to do really big, innovative, groundbreaking things, and those things aren’t easy,” said Susan Harker, Amazon’s top recruiter. “When you’re shooting for the moon, the nature of the work is really challenging. For some people it doesn’t work.” That’s hardly an example of yellow journalism, especially when reporters speak to more than 100 current and former employees on their way to an assessment.The New York Times, of course, is hardly beyond reproach. But any journalist who’s tried to report a piece a big institution doesn’t want to happen – especially one as fond of nondisclosure agreements and corporate control as Amazon – knows the huge number of people too frightened to speak to the press. For every piece of the story the Times – which errs on the side of caution with reported stories – found, there are likely half a dozen people scared to say something equally damning. “Virtually every person quoted in the story stated a view that multiple other workers had also told us,” Baquet (who I worked with for a few years at the Los Angeles Times) wrote in his rebuttal. “(Some other workers were not quoted because of nondisclosure agreements, fear of retribution or because their current employers were doing business with Amazon.)” For those of us who weren’t part of the reporting of this massive story – that is, those of us who are neither Kantor, co-writer David Streitfeld, or the numerous sources they interviewed – the details of who said what are hard to know for sure. But in the more than two months since the original story ran, most of the credible discussion of Amazon workplace culture hasn't gone the online retailer’s way. One of those – also on Medium – comes from a woman who has since left the company, complaining about being poorly treated during maternity leave by a corporation that continues to have trouble with women. It syncs up with a lot of what was in Kantor and Streitfeld's story. There’s always the chance that the paper made small errors of judgment in this gargantuan project – it’s hard to know. But when a heavily reported story is taken as credible and the rebuttal takes nine weeks and a heavily paid PR department to turn it out, it makes you wonder if the original story's biggest flaw is that it may be too close for comfort.
Iraq war bombshell: Leaked memo shows Tony Blair committed to Bush’s war a full year before the invasion
The most risky aspect of Republicans' dogged push to mire Hillary Clinton in scandal over her use of personal email while at the State Department is that the quest would eventually reveal information that may not be flattering to Republicans or past administrations. That seems to be the case with the latest batch of released Clinton emails that reportedly included a memo from Colin Powell to then-president George W. Bush confirming that former British prime minister Tony Blair would support the U.S. invasion of a Iraq a full year before the British parliament voted to join the operation. The Daily Mail recently obtained a newly leaked memo from Powell to Bush from Clinton's treasure trove of previously private emails, written a full week ahead of the two leaders' 2002 meeting at Bush's Crawford, Texas ranch, laying to rest any doubt that there was a concerted global effort to push for the invasion of Iraq following the attacks of 9/11. "Blair will be with us should military operations be necessary," Powell confidently wrote to Bush in March 2002, adding that Blair was even willing to “present to you the strategic, tactical and public affairs lines that he believes will strengthen global support for our common cause." Powell suggested that Blair could uniquely "make a credible public case on current Iraqi threats to international peace." On April 5, 2002, Blair traveled to Bush's ranch for a two day summit on Iraq. “This is a matter for considering all the options. We’re not proposing military action at this point in time,” Blair told the public at the time. But the former British ambassador to the US would later go on to testify that the agreement to invade Iraq was already set in stone by that point. “The two men were alone in the ranch, so I’m not entirely clear to this day what degree of convergence was signed in blood, if you like, at the Crawford ranch,” Christopher Meyer told the Chilcot Inquiry in 2009, Britain’s public inquiry into the Iraq war. “This story is nothing new. The memo is consistent with what Mr. Blair was saying publicly at the time and with Mr. Blair’s evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry,” a spokesperson for Blair said in response to the leaked memo, downplaying the significance of the revelation. But as the BBC notes, Blair "told the Chilcot Inquiry into the war in 2010 he had been 'open' about what he had told Bush in private, that 'we are going to be with you in confronting and dealing with this threat.'" Now, as the two biggest names in the Republican race for the White House bicker about George W. Bush's role in the 9/11 attacks and right-wing voices clamor for more Clinton emails to be released, the Republicans find themselves in a mess of their own making.The most risky aspect of Republicans' dogged push to mire Hillary Clinton in scandal over her use of personal email while at the State Department is that the quest would eventually reveal information that may not be flattering to Republicans or past administrations. That seems to be the case with the latest batch of released Clinton emails that reportedly included a memo from Colin Powell to then-president George W. Bush confirming that former British prime minister Tony Blair would support the U.S. invasion of a Iraq a full year before the British parliament voted to join the operation. The Daily Mail recently obtained a newly leaked memo from Powell to Bush from Clinton's treasure trove of previously private emails, written a full week ahead of the two leaders' 2002 meeting at Bush's Crawford, Texas ranch, laying to rest any doubt that there was a concerted global effort to push for the invasion of Iraq following the attacks of 9/11. "Blair will be with us should military operations be necessary," Powell confidently wrote to Bush in March 2002, adding that Blair was even willing to “present to you the strategic, tactical and public affairs lines that he believes will strengthen global support for our common cause." Powell suggested that Blair could uniquely "make a credible public case on current Iraqi threats to international peace." On April 5, 2002, Blair traveled to Bush's ranch for a two day summit on Iraq. “This is a matter for considering all the options. We’re not proposing military action at this point in time,” Blair told the public at the time. But the former British ambassador to the US would later go on to testify that the agreement to invade Iraq was already set in stone by that point. “The two men were alone in the ranch, so I’m not entirely clear to this day what degree of convergence was signed in blood, if you like, at the Crawford ranch,” Christopher Meyer told the Chilcot Inquiry in 2009, Britain’s public inquiry into the Iraq war. “This story is nothing new. The memo is consistent with what Mr. Blair was saying publicly at the time and with Mr. Blair’s evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry,” a spokesperson for Blair said in response to the leaked memo, downplaying the significance of the revelation. But as the BBC notes, Blair "told the Chilcot Inquiry into the war in 2010 he had been 'open' about what he had told Bush in private, that 'we are going to be with you in confronting and dealing with this threat.'" Now, as the two biggest names in the Republican race for the White House bicker about George W. Bush's role in the 9/11 attacks and right-wing voices clamor for more Clinton emails to be released, the Republicans find themselves in a mess of their own making.
October 18, 2015
Babies ruined my orgasm: How trying to have kids sucked all the pleasure out of sex
Rob and Helen came to my clinic 18 months after throwing away Helen’s contraceptive pills. They were awkward with embarrassment as they took their seats. ‘We’ve been trying for a baby for ages,’ Rob began, then hesitated, but Helen finished the sentence: ‘We’re starting to think there’s something wrong.’ He was a chef: tall and slightly overweight, with silvering hair and anxious eyes. She was an assistant at a nursery: slim with bobbed red hair and doll-like, porcelain-white cheeks. ‘I don’t know if we need IVF?’ asked Helen, spinning her wedding ring with the fingers of her right hand, ‘but at thirty-seven I’m told we should hurry up.’ I asked about family history. Helen was one of three children, didn’t know of any problems that ran in her family, and both her brother and her sister already had children of their own. Rob was also one of three: though his brother had a daughter, she’d been conceived with the help of IVF. On average, couples who have regular unprotected sex have about a 20 per cent chance of conceiving within a month, 70 per cent chance of conceiving within six months, and 85 per cent chance of conceiving within a year. It’s for that reason that doctors prefer to wait at least a year before initiating infertility tests. The first tests to be carried out are the most straightforward: for Rob, two semen samples sent in at least a month apart after a few days’ abstinence, and for Helen, blood tests at two separate points in her menstrual cycle to assess whether she was ovulating regularly. The semen samples are trickiest to arrange; they have to be delivered to the lab, which is only open at certain hours, within an hour of ejaculation. ‘What ... these?’ said Rob when I handed him the specimen tubes. ‘They don’t give you much ... to aim for.’ How he went about obtaining the samples we left undiscussed. Helen laughed, dissolving the tension in the room at last. ‘What are you trying to say about your equipment?’ she said, elbowing him. Helen needed a blood test on the third or fourth day after her next period began, followed by another one seven days before the following period was due. The first test gives an idea of whether the two hormones that coordinate ovulation – ‘luteinizing hormone’ and ‘follicle-stimulating hormone’ – stand in the right ratios to one another and to levels of estrogen. The second test gives an idea of whether the ovary is creating enough progesterone – the hormone that prepares the womb for pregnancy – to suggest she had ovulated. Helen drew her diary from her bag, where all her periods for the past year had been plotted out on a grid. ‘This is my menstrual map,’ she said grimly; ‘a map of disappointment.’ We picked out the days she’d need blood tests, and fixed the appointments. When I met her next she came alone. After taking the blood samples she rolled down her sleeve and paused. ‘You know the worst of it?’ she said. ‘It’s what it’s done to our sex life ... I mean, it’s difficult to feel romantic, or desirable, when all you’re thinking about is ovulation and conception.’ ‘Some people don’t conceive until they get their appointment through for the fertility clinic,’ I said, ‘that’s when they stop worrying about it. Don’t make it a trial, or something to get stressed about.’ ‘That’s just it,’ she said. ‘Before, I hardly ever had an orgasm with sex. Now, I never do. Do you think that’s a problem?’ * The nerve that coordinates orgasm, called ‘pudendal’, has an almost identical course in men and women. Its name comes from the Latin, pudere, to be ashamed, as if we’re still cowering in the Garden of Eden, trembling behind fig leaves. The pudenda might be comic, absurd or even embarrassing, but never shameful: without our parents’ pudendal nerves, after all, few of us would be here. People can be reluctant or embarrassed to discuss aspects of conception, sex and sexuality, but as a doctor it’s unavoidable; you can’t work with human bodies for long without having to talk about them. Whether folded in foreskin, or desensitized by circumcision, the pudendal nerve in men branches through the skin of the glans penis, and in women through the clitoris. Those nerves coalesce into bundles that run down the back of each corpus cavernosum – the ‘cavernous bodies’ present in both sexes, which stiffen through being engorged with blood, but which were once thought to be inflated by the pneuma, or spirit, of sexual desire. The nerve on each side then drops down into the penile or clitoral root and loops under the arch of the symphysis pubis of the pelvic bone – an angled Gothic arch in the male, and a rounder Roman arch in the female (with its smoother accommodations for a baby’s head, and its more dissipated scatter of nerves). It then tunnels deeper into the layers of muscle and sinew that support and give continence to the bladder, taking in out-branches that supply sensitivity to the skin between the thighs. It’s here that it slips under the prostate gland and seminal vesicles in men, which store and bathe the sperm that have migrated up from the testis, and the cervix and womb in women. Then it continues towards the spine, emerging into the pelvis between powerful muscles that cantilever the weight of the body into the legs. The sacrum is a triangular bone at the base of the spine, perforated by holes like a priest’s censer. It is so called because it was once believed to be sacred: a reservoir of human essence – medieval Europeans thought that at resurrection their bodies would be reconstituted first from the sacrum, and that energies discharged from the sacrum were essential in the creation of new life. After twisting themselves through the tangle of the sacral plexus, pudendal nerve fibers slip through the sacrum’s perforations, and plug into the spinal cord. Marcus Aurelius spoke of orgasms as the simple product of a timed duration of friction. Aristotle thought that the heat necessary for conception was generated by sex just as a fire can be ignited by rubbing two sticks. But of course the propagation of sexual tension is less predictable than those theories suggest; less a process of ignition than the interplay between storm clouds and an ionizing earth – the lightning flash of a two-way traffic between the mind and bodily physiology. In Western countries where surveys have been attempted it’s been reported that only a third of women regularly experience orgasm during intercourse, the reasons for this being both social and physical. The effect of drugs can play a part: antidepressants like Prozac and Seroxat, some of the most commonly prescribed drugs in the Western world, can so dampen the action of those nerve endings that orgasm becomes difficult to achieve for both men and women. Heroin can do the same, and, most famously, so can alcohol. A mirroring tension builds between the nerves within the glans or clitoris and the answering plexus in the pelvis until some final, pivotal change provokes the climax. What the French called la petite mort can be seen on brain scans not as a darkening to oblivion, but as a ‘lighting up’ in the emotional core (cingulate gyrus), reward centers (nucleus accumbens), and hormonal regions (hypothalamus) of the brain. It’s those hormonal regions that in some animals actually provoke ovulation as a response to sex, just as Galen imagined, but in humans that’s not the case. During orgasm, pulses of nerve stimulation ripple back out from the spinal cord to the prostate gland and seminal vesicles in men, and the cervix and vagina in women. In men they trigger the prostate, vas deferens and urethra to squeeze sperm and seminal fluid towards the penis in a series of clenching spasms, while coordinated reflexes shut the entrance to the bladder so that semen can go only one way – out. In women, those same ripples trigger convulsions in tiny glands around the urethra and anterior wall of the vagina – Skene’s glands – which push out a sort of female seminal fluid similar to the prostatic fluid expelled by men. The outlets of Skene’s glands vary between women: on climax they may push a watery fluid out into the urethra as occurs in men, or directly into openings within the vagina – explaining why some women feel as if they ‘ejaculate’ on orgasm, while others do not. An Italian sexologist, Dr Emmanuele Jannini of L’Aquila University, believes that the area around the urethra on the anterior vaginal wall is a separate erogenous zone in some women, distinct from the clitoris. Like Ernst Gräfenberg, the New York sexologist whose initial ‘G’ gave the name to the ‘G-spot’, Jannini thinks that there are women who experience orgasms deeper in the vagina than others, as an accident of their pudendal nerve anatomy. The vagina in health is acidic, something that helps keep it free of infection. Unfortunately, sperm prefer a neutral environment – neither acid nor alkaline – similar to that prevailing within the womb. The secretions from Skene’s glands and the prostate gland are alkaline, which suggests that they helpfully neutralize the acid environment of the vagina at the moment when sperm are released into it. The secretions from Bartholin’s glands, which lie at the posterior entrance to the vagina and become active much earlier in intercourse, are also alkaline and so do the same thing. William Taylor wrote over two centuries ago, ‘so the poetic orgasm, when excited, glows but for a time’: in men, up to ten seconds; for women, orgasm can last double that. The pattern of female orgasm is different from that of the male: broader and slower to rise as well as fall away. There are several theories, none entirely convincing, which suggest how female orgasm might help in conception. One theory is that the longer duration of the female orgasm in women could give the cervix more time to pull in male seminal fluid, which may increase the likelihood of pregnancy, and could help sperm survive by neutralizing the natural acidity of the vagina. But there are others: by encouraging more sex; by secreting the hormone oxytocin from the brain (which may cause the womb to draw in fluid); even that female orgasms help in sexual selection – identifying men who are more likely to prioritize their women’s happiness as highly as their own. * A few weeks later I met Helen and Rob again. Rob’s semen analysis was normal: I ran through the parameters examined by the laboratory, translating the arid terminology of ‘motility’, ‘morphology’, ‘concentration’ and ‘consistency’. Helen’s hormone tests too had come back as I’d hoped: the LH and FSH were in appropriate proportion to one another, the estrogen as low as it should be early in the cycle. The progesterone level in her blood a week before her period was due suggested that she’d ovulated normally – there was no obvious reason they weren’t conceiving. ‘So the results are all very reassuring,’ I told them. ‘Rob, your tests are normal, and Helen, your ovaries are ovulating at the time in the month we’d expect them to.’ ‘So what could be wrong?’ she asked. ‘Sometimes the tubes inside aren’t letting the sperm past for some reason, sometimes the immune system prevents the sperm and the egg coming together, often there’s nothing wrong at all.’ ‘So what now?’ ‘Now I write to the fertility clinic at the hospital, and you two try not to worry about it too much.’ Excerpted from "Adventures in Human Being: A Grand Tour from the Cranium to the Calcaneum" by Gavin Francis. Published by Basic Books, a division of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright 2015 by Gavin Francis. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
I flipped my “psycho switch”: The surprising rage and fury I felt in the cage with mixed martial arts champions
Tuesday and Thursday evenings were dedicated to sparring. Heavier fighters started at six thirty and went for an hour; lighter weights came in at seven thirty. The moods in the gym were unpredictable on these nights, though you got a sense of how it was going to go down as soon as you entered. Some evenings, it was relaxed, just a bunch of guys getting together to hone their skills. On others, there was an underlying current that raised the hairs on your arms as soon as you walked in the door. The sessions always followed the same format. They started with shadowboxing, moved to kickboxing, then to takedowns, on to clinch work, and finally to the ground. Within this structure, fighters tested out different strikes, shots, submission holds. As at any workplace, there were jealousies, friendships, allegiances, hurt feelings, and rivalries, which presented a list of variables for coaches to ponder when pairing up fighters: Who was coming off a good fight? Who was coming off a bad fight? Who was injured but not admitting it? Who was in a bad mental space? Who wanted more attention? Who had something to prove? The gym had an implicit hierarchy. Ricardo Liborio and cofounder Conan Silveira were on top of the pyramid. The coaches under them each commanded a level of respect. And there was a pecking order among the fighters that was determined by their standings in the sport and was sorted in part during sparring sessions. Uncontrolled aggression against teammates was discouraged, but sometimes it was worth it for a fighter to show a little more belligerence than usual, to knock someone down, just to send a message he wasn’t going to be pushed around. And even though coaches tried to keep an eye on things, it was in practice impossible for a few trainers to totally police more than twenty pairs of fighters facing off simultaneously. At seven thirty, the larger fighters cleared off the mats, replaced by the more numerous crew of fighters who competed between 135 and 170 pounds. As they warmed up, Conan Silveira huddled with Mike Brown, writing down matchups on a clipboard. There were more than thirty fighters on the mats. Brown called out the pairs. Silveira grasped a stopwatch in his right hand, held close to his chest. “Let’s go!” Silveira yelled, his voice booming through the room. Feet slid over the mats. Breaths exhaled short and sharp. Fists pounded flesh. Plastic shin protectors cracked as they connected with legs. Don’t let them fool ya! Or even try to school ya! Bob Marley exhorted from the gym’s loudspeakers. Kami Barzini paced the mats, hands clasped behind his back. Jorge Masvidal, a lightweight Cuban-American UFC fighter from Miami, jabbed his opponent, who countered with a kick at Masvidal’s left thigh. Masvidal caught the leg with his left hand and then kicked his opponent’s other leg out from under him, dumping him on his ass. The kid struggled to his feet, tears welling in his eyes. A few feet away, Sirwan Kakai squared off with Charles Rosa, another of the gym’s top prospects. Barzini motioned for me to come over. Kakai and Rosa stood in range and unleashed on each other. Kakai, usually self-contained, was gripped by rage. “He’s got blood in his eyes,” Barzini said. Kakai threw a left into Rosa’s gut. The young fighter crumpled to his knees, grabbing his side. Liver shots were known to be the most excruciating of blows, sending bolts of pain racing through the body. As Rosa gasped for breath, Kakai stormed back and forth across the mats like a bull in a pen, his face contorted with fury. “That’s enough,” Barzini hissed. “Control!” ... Shortly after I arrived at American Top Team, I got the itch to train. It was unavoidable when my days were taken up with watching other people exercise. Also, I realized that the closest I could get to understanding what I was seeing was to at least try it myself, even if that only meant learning to hit a punching bag. I began lessons with Rich Attonito, a UFC fighter who supported himself as a personal trainer. In the afternoons between practices, Attonito pulled on his mitts and guided me across the mats, showing me how to jab, hook, throw a straight right, thwack a thigh with a leg kick. I loved it. At the start, I lashed out like I was trying to smash through a wall. Attonito, a loquacious guy from New Jersey, was amused. He imitated me, scrunching up an angry face and striking out like Frankenstein on a rampage. He called it “Going Medieval.” It wasn’t about hitting or kicking as hard as possible, he told me, but learning mechanics, the twist of the wrist just as the punch lands, the rotation of the shin when you kick, coiling and uncoiling your body to deliver force. Anger was fine, he said—it was fuel—but it needed to be subordinated to technique. When you fought, you needed to be loose and adaptable, not constricted with rage. After a few months of observing my progress, Kami Barzini suggested that I spar with him. “It will take your writing to a deeper level,” he said. Actual fighting had not been in my plans. Though Barzini promised he would go easy, I was terrified. After more than a week of avoiding the subject, I relented. We set it up for a Friday after morning practice. It was a time when the gym was usually quiet, and there were only a few fighters around as we pulled on our boxing gloves and got ready to step into the cage. Conan Silveira was still there. He was a massive Brazilian who had made his name cage fighting in the Wild West days of the 1990s. When he saw what we were up to, he rushed over looking as if he’d just smelled something rotten. “Do you have life insurance?” he asked me. I gave a nervous laugh. “This is not funny,” he said. With that, I climbed into the cage with Barzini. The fighters locked the door behind us, sliding a pin between two pieces of metal. We started. Barzini stood in front of me, waiting. I threw a jab that he blocked and then countered by tapping me on the head. We repeated this several times. When hitting mitts with Attonito, I had felt like a superstar—I threw a punch and he brought the mitt forward an inch or two to meet it, resulting in a pleasing Thwack! of leather on leather. It’s much harder to hit someone who is trying to evade your punches. My heart began to race, my breaths coming shallow and quick. Within a minute, I was gasping for air and struggling to hold my hands up. Barzini ducked, grabbed my leg, lifted, and then dumped me on the canvas, which reverberated as our combined four hundred pounds of weight bounced off it. As I flailed, Barzini put me on my back and got full mount, one leg on each side of my hips. He postured up and tapped me in the head with light punches as I tried to cover up. It was incredibly unpleasant. I wasn’t physically hurt, but the feeling of being “mounted” was humiliating. It became clear how much MMA is a game of primal dominance. Barzini let me up and we sparred a little more. He continued to block my ineffectual punches until the end, when he dropped his hands and I landed a jab into his face. The fighters, who had been greatly entertained by the spectacle, unlocked the cage. I sat on a bench, soaked in sweat. My heart beat faster than I thought was possible. I later realized I’d experienced my first adrenaline dump: It had flooded my system as soon as we started sparring, but had just as soon ebbed and left me exhausted. Conan Silveira sat next to me. “He was going about fifteen percent,” he said. “That’s fifteen, not fifty.” I didn’t care. I had not been killed or injured. The emotions that had swept my body stunned me—from excitement to exhaustion to humiliation to the exhilaration of landing a punch. It motivated me to get better. A few months later, Barzini and I went again. My primary goal was to make it longer than thirty seconds before becoming exhausted. In fact, I managed to keep up my energy for several minutes, circling away from Barzini, occasionally stopping to throw a jab, and then moving away again. I tried to pace my breathing, making sure to breathe in and out. After a while, though, I slowed down. Barzini had been tracking me without expending any effort. Now he came forward and backed me to the cage. A few fighters watched and shouted advice. I felt something inside me twist and detonate. My fear turned to an annihilating, thrumming black rage. A rush of hatred flooded me. I swung, catching Barzini with a hook that thudded flush to the side of his head. The fighters erupted in cheers. A smile flashed on Barzini’s face, which angered me further. I punched in fury, throwing as hard and fast as I could, until I collapsed. Barzini patted me on the back. “You finally threw some real punches,” he said. We are known to have separate fear and rage circuits in our brains. When the fear circuit is activated—if, for example, you are approached on the street by someone who wants to harm you—your brain will initiate a series of processes meant to preserve your life: Adrenaline flows, your heart beats faster, your breathing quickens, your muscles receive more blood. Your body will be primed to run as fast as it possibly can. I felt this during my first sparring session with Barzini, and it had led to a crash. More extreme fear activates the rage circuit, which is what happened to me in our second session. When Barzini backed me against the cage, there was no escape. I had to fight, and my body responded by providing the reaction needed to fuel my outburst. It had also unleashed a reserve of buried emotion. It had to do with my dad’s death, but also years of things that had never been expressed between us and now never would be. On top of that was the legal jousting with my aunt and uncle. Added to a stew of free-floating testosterone and generalized rage, it had led to an explosion. Barzini called it “the Psycho Switch.” Every fighter has it, he said, something they tap into when they need it. His came from what he’d seen growing up in Iran. Everyone had their own thing. It was something that no one at the gym told me about until I had experienced it myself. Fighters were understandably leery of being portrayed as bros with anger management issues, especially because they knew that’s what many casual observers assumed they were—and there was a small minority of people within mixed martial arts who lived up to the stereotype. The vast majority of fighters, however, were the opposite when away from the cage—they were often, in fact, laid back and friendly. But fighting wasn’t a sport for content, happy people. To hit another human being or to be hit yourself, when not in a life-threatening situation, does not come easily. Fighters need an inner spark, something to push them to the physical and mental extremes they sometimes have to go to in order to win. Such emotions unleashed out in the world would be dangerous. Within the space of the cage, however, it is ritualized and relatively safe. The professional fighter has to be able to tap into these emotions and physiological reactions but also control them, to use them as the glue that connects all his skills. To give in entirely to either fear or rage is a sure way to lose a fight: If your opponent can weather the storm until you exhaust yourself, then you will be easily finished. Every fighter has had an experience of “breaking,” the point at which it just became too much. A broken fighter, exhausted from the effort and ebbing of adrenaline, will give up just to get out of the cage. Fighters spend years training to master those reactions. Inside the cage, they put that training into practice and transform. I had the idea, now, what that transformation felt like. I understood why fighters often embraced at the end of fights: They were thankful to have been able to express that part of themselves. Excerpted from "Beast" by Doug Merlino. © Doug Merlino © 2015. Published by Bloomsbury USA, reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.
Our post-Snowden TV paranoia: “Homeland,” “Quantico” and privacy inside the surveillance state
When the aliens get around to watching American film and television, I imagine they will be somewhat confused. They’ll know the flag, probably — that sheet that was poked into the surface of the moon, as a welcome and a warning — but will be a bit confused by when and how we choose to wave it. For all that Hollywood is decidedly American — of, by and for the people — the industry’s creative stance on the American government has been antagonistic for years and years. The “Mission: Impossible” and “Jason Bourne” franchises are both about renegades escaping government entrapment; “The Wire” and “The Shield” express suspicion and disillusionment about corruption and dysfunction in public institutions. “The X-Files,” which will probably be of paramount interest to the aliens, is wholly about government conspiracy, as its leads both try to uncover and actively engage in a decades-long national cover-up. (The aliens will be similarly confused by Mulder and Scully’s relationship, but that’s a concern for another time.) In any number of spy thrillers, action movies and comic-book universes, America is Americans’ real enemy — the institution ordering the air strikes, the shadowy superstructure poisoning the water, the source of the terrifying weaponry. It’s writ large in classic films like 1989’s “Born On The Fourth Of July,” a searing indictment of the Vietnam War; it’s writ more subtly in films like 1975’s “Three Days Of The Condor,” where the lead character is enmeshed in a cynical, profiteering CIA conspiracy. But it’s not just Vietnam-era disiullsionment and Cold War paranoia; suspicion of government is a viewpoint that so saturates media, from highbrow to lowbrow, that it’s moved beyond “trend” and into “movement.” In the currently ongoing hit “Scandal,” assembled government leaders stole an election; in the similarly mainstream show “The West Wing,” even the beloved President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) orders an assassination. In the extended Marvel universe, the very organization tasked to protect the world from supernatural occurrences becomes an apparatus used for oppression; Captain America himself becomes a crusader against the government’s excesses. It’s even a theme in children’s programming: The titular alien of “ALF” is perpetually in hiding from the government’s Alien Task Force and criticizes the president for nuclear weaponry; and the just-ended “Dog With A Blog” featured a military conspiracy, as Stan (the dog) only knows how to communicate because of some worrying experimentation. In the current roster of television programming, paranoia about the far-reaching power of the government holds just as much power as ever. But the content has changed. Where previous nightmares included torture at the hands of the military, racial profiling and corrupt elections, many right now are about surveillance — some even name-checking whistleblower Edward Snowden. It’s an interesting paradigm shift, but clearly a topical one; the worst fears of films like “Enemy Of The State” (1998) were realized in real life. “The Wire,” which debuted in 2002, gets its title from wiretaps initiated by the police in order to entrap and prosecute incredibly well-organized drug dealers. Although the dealers were very sympathetic — and were just as important characters to the show as the police — the point of the show was to try to stop them, and most of the first season is about the team of police jumping through hoops to authorize even just one or two wiretaps. Given that we trace so much of prestige television’s lineage through “The Wire,” it’s bizarre to see how the same issue has mutated and evolved. “The Good Wife,” which is often one of the first shows to respond to a widely discussed issue in the news, did a whole arc on wiretapping in its critically acclaimed season five. Although creator Robert King isn’t a supporter of Snowden’s actions, the whistleblower is mentioned repeatedly in the season. Eventually, the characters call out the Department of Defense and the NSA — on CBS! — and go to the mat with their unwelcome observers. “Homeland” this season has a whole arc that hews closely to Snowden’s story — although instead of starring a Snowden stand-in, it features a Hollywood version of Laura Poitras, the journalist that filmed and released “CitizenFour.” (She is named, conveniently, Laura.) The catalyst for the narrative is that two amateur hackers accidentally stumble into possession of a cache of classified CIA documents; Laura (Sarah Sokolovic) is the journalist they coordinate with. Plenty of stories throughout history have grappled with watching and being watched, but in our current moment of post-Snowden global security, plotlines about the unwelcome intimacy of surveillance have taken on different resonance. ABC’s “Quantico,” which is so melodramatic about national security that it leaves all kinds of subtext in its wake, is exclusively about a terrorist attack that was executed by someone on the inside — another FBI agent. And though wiretapping is not specifically invoked, the driving force of drama is about all of the agents-in-training uncovering secrets about each other. Privacy of any kind is an illusion, because the rigors of Quantico eliminate any possible artifice. The investigation into the attack that provides the narrative spine of the show is the end point of all of this secret-finding; the last secret, the ultimate secret, the last shred of privacy. Our anxieties about the American government aren’t new; our anxieties about surveillance aren’t new either, if Jeremy Bentham has anything to say about it. But what is interesting about the thread of distrust in the government in these three shows is that each is spearheaded by a woman — Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) in “The Good Wife,” Alex Parrish (Priyanka Chopra) in “Quantico,” and both Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) and the journalist Laura in “Homeland.” It may just be that women are more likely to lead a television show than ever. But it also raises the question of a very different right to privacy — that difficult-to-define principle that is the pillar of Roe v. Wade. Abortion rights are not quite as splashy of a struggle as cyber terrorism, but the women in these shows are a reminder that there are many different iterations of the drama of surveillance.
How America is eternally “caught off guard” in the Middle East
1,500. That figure stunned me. I found it in the 12th paragraph of a front-page New York Times story about “senior commanders” at U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) playing fast and loose with intelligence reports to give their air war against ISIS an unjustified sheen of success: “CENTCOM’s mammoth intelligence operation, with some 1,500 civilian, military, and contract analysts, is housed at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, in a bay front building that has the look of a sterile government facility posing as a Spanish hacienda.” Think about that. CENTCOM, one of six U.S. military commands that divide the planet up like a pie, has at least 1,500 intelligence analysts (military, civilian, and private contractors) all to itself. Let me repeat that: 1,500 of them. CENTCOM is essentially the country’s war command, responsible for most of the Greater Middle East, that expanse of now-chaotic territory filled with strife-torn and failing states that runs from Pakistan’s border to Egypt. That’s no small task and about it there is much to be known. Still, that figure should act like a flash of lightning, illuminating for a second an otherwise dark and stormy landscape. And mind you, that’s just the analysts, not the full CENTCOM intelligence roster for which we have no figure at all. In other words, even if that 1,500 represents a full count of the command’s intelligence analysts, not just the ones at its Tampa headquarters but in the field at places like its enormous operation at al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, CENTCOM still has almost half as many of them as military personnel on the ground in Iraq (3,500 at latest count). Now, try to imagine what those 1,500 analysts are doing, even for a command deep in a “quagmire” in Syria and Iraq, as President Obama recently dubbed it (though he was admittedly speaking about the Russians), as well as what looks like a failing war, 14 years later, in Afghanistan, and another in Yemen led by the Saudis but backed by Washington. Even given all of that, what in the world could they possibly be “analyzing”? Who at CENTCOM, in the Defense Intelligence Agency, or elsewhere has the time to attend to the reports and data flows that must be generated by 1,500 analysts? Of course, in the gargantuan beast that is the American military and intelligence universe, streams of raw intelligence beyond compare are undoubtedly flooding into CENTCOM’s headquarters, possibly overwhelming even 1,500 analysts. There’s “human intelligence,” or HUMINT, from sources and agents on the ground; there’s imagery and satellite intelligence, or GEOINT, by the bushelful. Given the size and scope of American global surveillance activities, there must be untold tons of signals intelligence, or SIGINT; and with all those drones flying over battlefields and prospective battlefields across the Greater Middle East, there’s undoubtedly a river of full motion video, or FMV, flowing into CENTCOM headquarters and various command posts; and don’t forget the information being shared with the command by allied intelligence services, including those of the “five eyes“ nations, and various Middle Eastern countries; and of course, some of the command’s analysts must be handling humdrum, everyday open-source material, or OSINT, as well -- local radio and TV broadcasts, the press, the Internet, scholarly journals, and god knows what else. And while you’re thinking about all this, keep in mind that those 1,500 analysts feed into, and assumedly draw on, an intelligence system of a size surely unmatched even by the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. Think of it: the U.S. Intelligence Community has -- count ‘em -- 17 agencies and outfits, eating close to $70 billion annually, more than $500 billion between 2001 and 2013. And if that doesn’t stagger you, think about the500,000 private contractors hooked into the system in one way or another, the 1.4 million people (34% of them private contractors) with access to “top secret” information, and the 5.1 million -- larger than Norway’s population -- with access to “confidential and secret” information. Remember as well that, in these years, a global surveillance state of Orwellian proportions has been ramped up. It gathers billions of emails and cell phone calls from the backlands of the planet; has kept tabs on at least 35 leaders of other countries and the secretary general of the U.N. by hacking email accounts, tapping cell phones, and so on; keeps a careful eye and ear on its own citizens, including video gamers; and even, it seems, spies on Congress. (After all, whom can you trust?) In other words, if that 1,500 figure bowls you over, keep in mind that it just stands in for a far larger system that puts to shame, in size and yottabytes of information collected, the wildest dreams of past science fiction writers. In these years, a mammoth, even labyrinthine, bureaucratic “intelligence” structure has been constructed that is drowning in “information” -- and on its own, it seems, the military has been ramping up a smaller but similarly scaled set of intelligence structures. Surprised, Caught Off Guard, and Left Scrambling The question remains: If data almost beyond imagining flows into CENTCOM, what are those 1,500 analysts actually doing? How are they passing their time? What exactly do they produce and does it really qualify as “intelligence,” no less prove useful? Of course, we out here have limited access to the intelligence produced by CENTCOM, unless stories like the one about top commanders fudging assessments on the air war against the Islamic State break into the media. So you might assume that there’s no way of measuring the effectiveness of the command’s intelligence operations. But you would be wrong. It is, in fact, possible to produce a rough gauge of its effectiveness. Let’s call it the TomDispatch Surprise Measurement System, or TSMS. Think of it as a practical, news-based guide to the questions: What did they know and when did they know it? Let me offer a few examples chosen almost at random from recent events in CENTCOM’s domain. Take the seizure at the end of September by a few hundred Taliban fighters of the northern provincial Afghan capital of Kunduz, the first city the Taliban has controlled, however briefly, since it was ejected from that same town in 2002. In the process, the Taliban fighters reportedly scattered up to 7,000 members of the Afghan security forces that the U.S. has been training, funding, and arming for years. For anyone following news reports closely, the Taliban had for months been tightening its control over rural areas around Kunduz and testing the city’s defenses. Nonetheless, this May, based assumedly on the best intelligence analyses available from CENTCOM, the top U.S. commander in the country, Army General John Campbell, offered this predictive comment: “If you take a look very closely at some of the things in Kunduz and up in [neighboring] Badakhshan [Province], [the Taliban] will attack some very small checkpoints... They will go out and hit a little bit and then they kind of go to ground... so they’re not gaining territory for the most part.’” As late as August 13th, at a press briefing, an ABC News reporter asked Brigadier General Wilson Shoffner, the U.S. deputy chief of staff for communications in Afghanistan: “There has been a significant increase in Taliban activity in northern Afghanistan, particularly around Kunduz. What is behind that? Are the Afghan troops in that part of Afghanistan at risk of falling to the Taliban?” Shoffner responded, in part, this way: “So, again, I think there's been a lot of generalization when it comes to reports on the north. Kunduz is -- is not now, and has not been in danger of being overrun by the Taliban, and so -- with that, it's kind of a general perspective in the north, that's sort of how we see it.” That General Cambell at least remained of a similar mindset even as Kunduz fell is obvious enough since, as New York Times reporter Matthew Rosenberg reported, he was out of the country at the time. As Goldstein put it:
“Mostly, though, American and Afghan officials appeared to be genuinely surprised at the speedy fall of Kunduz, which took place when Gen. John F. Campbell, the commander of coalition forces, was in Germany for a defense conference... Though the Taliban have been making gains in the hinterlands around Kunduz for months, American military planners have for years insisted that Afghan forces were capable of holding onto the country’s major cities. “‘This wasn’t supposed to happen,’ said a senior American military officer who served in Afghanistan, speaking on the condition of anonymity. ‘The Afghans are fighting, so it’s not like we’re looking at them giving up or collapsing right now. They’re just not fighting very well.’”It’s generally agreed that the American high command was “caught off guard” by the capture of Kunduz and particularly shocked by the Afghan military’s inability to fight effectively. And who would have predicted such a thing of an American-trained army in the region, given that the American-backed, -trained, and -equipped Iraqi Army on the other side of the Greater Middle East had a similar experience in June 2014 in Mosul and other cities of northern Iraq when relatively small numbers of Islamic State militants routed its troops? At that time, U.S. military leaders and top administration officials right up to President Obama were, as the Wall Street Journal reported, “caught off guard by the swift collapse of Iraqi security forces” and the successes of the Islamic State in northern Iraq. Peter Baker and Eric Schmitt of the Times wrote in retrospect, “Intelligence agencies were caught off guard by the speed of the extremists’... advance across northern Iraq.” And don’t forget that, despite that CENTCOM intelligence machine, something similar happened in May 2015 when, as Washington Post columnist David Ignatius put it, U.S. officials and American intelligence were “blindsided again” by a very similar collapse of Iraqi forces in the city of Ramadi in al-Anbar Province. Or let’s take another example where those 1,500 analysts must have been hard at work: thefailed $500 million Pentagon program to train “moderate” Syrians into a force that could fight the Islamic State. In the Pentagon version of the elephant that gave birth to a mouse, that vast effort of vetting, training, and arming finally produced Division 30, a single 54-man unit of armed moderates, who were inserted into Syria near the forces of the al-Qaeda-aligned al-Nusra Front. That group promptly kidnapped two of its leaders and then attacked the unit. The result was a disaster as the U.S.-trained fighters fled or were killed. Soon thereafter, the American general overseeing the war against the Islamic State testified before Congress that only “four or five” armed combatants from the U.S. force remained in the field. Here again is how the New York Times reported the response to this incident:
“In Washington, several current and former senior administration officials acknowledged that the attack and the abductions by the Nusra Front took American officials by surprise and amounted to a significant intelligence failure. While American military trainers had gone to great lengths to protect the initial group of trainees from attacks by Islamic State or Syrian Army forces, they did not anticipate an assault from the Nusra Front. In fact, officials said on Friday, they expected the Nusra Front to welcome Division 30 as an ally in its fight against the Islamic State. “‘This wasn’t supposed to happen like this,’ said one former senior American official, who was working closely on Syria issues until recently, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential intelligence assessments.”Now, if accurate, this is wild stuff. After all, how anyone, commander or intelligence analyst, could imagine that the al-Nusra Front, classified as an enemy force in Washington and some of whose militants had been targeted by U.S. air power, would have welcomed U.S.-backed troops with open arms is the mystery of all mysteries. One small footnote to this: McClatchy News later reported that the al-Nusra Front had been poised to attack the unit because it had tipped off in advance by Turkish intelligence, something CENTCOM’s intelligence operatives evidently knew nothing about. In the wake of that little disaster and again, assumedly, with CENTCOM’s full stock of intelligence and analysis on hand, the military inserted the next unit of 74 trained moderates into Syria and was shocked (shocked!) when its members, chastened perhaps by the fate of Division 30, promptly handed over at least a quarter of their U.S.-supplied equipment, including trucks, ammunition, and rifles, to the al-Nusra Front in return for “safe passage.” Al-Nusra militants soon were posting photos of the weapons online and tweeting proudly about them. CENTCOM officials initially denied that any of this had happened (and were clearly in the dark about it) before reversing course and reluctantly admitting that it was so. (“‘If accurate, the report of NSF [New Syrian Forces] members providing equipment to al-Nusra Front is very concerning and a violation of Syria train-and-equip program guidelines,’ U.S. Central Command spokesman Colonel Patrick Ryder said.”) To turn to even more recent events in CENTCOM’s bailiwick, American officials were reportedly similarly stunned as September ended when Russia reached a surprise agreement with U.S. ally Iraq on an anti-ISIS intelligence-sharing arrangement that would also include Syria and Iran. Washington was once again “caught off guard” and, in the words of Michael Gordon of the Times, “left... scrambling,” even though its officials had known “that a group of Russian military officers were in Baghdad.” Similarly, the Russian build-up of weaponry, planes, and personnel in Syria initially "surprised" and -- yes -- caught the Obama administration “off guard.” Again, despite those 1,500 CENTCOM analysts and the rest of the vast U.S. intelligence community, American officials, according to every news report available, were "caught flat-footed" and, of course, "by surprise” (again, right up to the president) when the Russians began their full-scale bombing campaign in Syria against various al-Qaeda-allied outfits and CIA-backed opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. They were even caught off guard and taken aback by the way the Russians delivered the news that their bombing campaign was about to start: a three-star Russian general arrived at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad to offer an hour’s notice. (Congressional lawmakers are now considering “the extent to which the spy community overlooked or misjudged critical warning signs” about the Russian intervention in Syria.) The Fog Machine of American Intelligence You get the point. Whatever the efforts of that expansive corps of intelligence analysts (and the vast intelligence edifice behind it), when anything happens in the Greater Middle East, you can essentially assume that the official American reaction, military and political, will be “surprise” and that policymakers will be left “scrambling” in a quagmire of ignorance to rescue American policy from the unexpected. In other words, somehow, with what passes for the best, or at least most extensive and expensive intelligence operation on the planet, with all those satellites and drones and surveillance sweeps and sources, with crowds of analysts, hordes of private contractors, and tens of billions of dollars, with, in short, “intelligence” galore, American officials in the area of their wars are evidently going to continue to find themselves eternally caught “off guard.” The phrase “the fog of war” stands in for the inability of commanders to truly grasp what’s happening in the chaos that is any battlefield. Perhaps it’s time to introduce a companion phrase: the fog of intelligence. It hardly matters whether those 1,500 CENTCOM analysts (and all those at other commands or at the 17 major intelligence outfits) produce superlative “intelligence” that then descends into the fog of leadership, or whether any bureaucratic conglomeration of “analysts,” drowning in secret information and the protocols that go with it, is going to add up to a giant fog machine. It’s difficult enough, of course, to peer into the future, to imagine what’s coming, especially in distant, alien lands. Cobble that basic problem together with an overwhelming data stream and groupthink, then fit it all inside the constrained mindsets of Washington and the Pentagon, and you have a formula for producing the fog of intelligence and so for seldom being “on guard” when it comes to much of anything. My own suspicion: you could get rid of most of the 17 agencies and outfits in the U.S. Intelligence Community and dump just about all the secret and classified information that is the heart and soul of the national security state. Then you could let a small group of independently minded analysts and critics loose on open-source material, and you would be far more likely to get intelligent, actionable, inventive analyses of our global situation, our wars, and our beleaguered path into the future. The evidence, after all, is largely in. In these years, for what now must be approaching three-quarters of a trillion dollars, the national security state and the military seem to have created an un-intelligence system. Welcome to the fog of everything.1,500. That figure stunned me. I found it in the 12th paragraph of a front-page New York Times story about “senior commanders” at U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) playing fast and loose with intelligence reports to give their air war against ISIS an unjustified sheen of success: “CENTCOM’s mammoth intelligence operation, with some 1,500 civilian, military, and contract analysts, is housed at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, in a bay front building that has the look of a sterile government facility posing as a Spanish hacienda.” Think about that. CENTCOM, one of six U.S. military commands that divide the planet up like a pie, has at least 1,500 intelligence analysts (military, civilian, and private contractors) all to itself. Let me repeat that: 1,500 of them. CENTCOM is essentially the country’s war command, responsible for most of the Greater Middle East, that expanse of now-chaotic territory filled with strife-torn and failing states that runs from Pakistan’s border to Egypt. That’s no small task and about it there is much to be known. Still, that figure should act like a flash of lightning, illuminating for a second an otherwise dark and stormy landscape. And mind you, that’s just the analysts, not the full CENTCOM intelligence roster for which we have no figure at all. In other words, even if that 1,500 represents a full count of the command’s intelligence analysts, not just the ones at its Tampa headquarters but in the field at places like its enormous operation at al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, CENTCOM still has almost half as many of them as military personnel on the ground in Iraq (3,500 at latest count). Now, try to imagine what those 1,500 analysts are doing, even for a command deep in a “quagmire” in Syria and Iraq, as President Obama recently dubbed it (though he was admittedly speaking about the Russians), as well as what looks like a failing war, 14 years later, in Afghanistan, and another in Yemen led by the Saudis but backed by Washington. Even given all of that, what in the world could they possibly be “analyzing”? Who at CENTCOM, in the Defense Intelligence Agency, or elsewhere has the time to attend to the reports and data flows that must be generated by 1,500 analysts? Of course, in the gargantuan beast that is the American military and intelligence universe, streams of raw intelligence beyond compare are undoubtedly flooding into CENTCOM’s headquarters, possibly overwhelming even 1,500 analysts. There’s “human intelligence,” or HUMINT, from sources and agents on the ground; there’s imagery and satellite intelligence, or GEOINT, by the bushelful. Given the size and scope of American global surveillance activities, there must be untold tons of signals intelligence, or SIGINT; and with all those drones flying over battlefields and prospective battlefields across the Greater Middle East, there’s undoubtedly a river of full motion video, or FMV, flowing into CENTCOM headquarters and various command posts; and don’t forget the information being shared with the command by allied intelligence services, including those of the “five eyes“ nations, and various Middle Eastern countries; and of course, some of the command’s analysts must be handling humdrum, everyday open-source material, or OSINT, as well -- local radio and TV broadcasts, the press, the Internet, scholarly journals, and god knows what else. And while you’re thinking about all this, keep in mind that those 1,500 analysts feed into, and assumedly draw on, an intelligence system of a size surely unmatched even by the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. Think of it: the U.S. Intelligence Community has -- count ‘em -- 17 agencies and outfits, eating close to $70 billion annually, more than $500 billion between 2001 and 2013. And if that doesn’t stagger you, think about the500,000 private contractors hooked into the system in one way or another, the 1.4 million people (34% of them private contractors) with access to “top secret” information, and the 5.1 million -- larger than Norway’s population -- with access to “confidential and secret” information. Remember as well that, in these years, a global surveillance state of Orwellian proportions has been ramped up. It gathers billions of emails and cell phone calls from the backlands of the planet; has kept tabs on at least 35 leaders of other countries and the secretary general of the U.N. by hacking email accounts, tapping cell phones, and so on; keeps a careful eye and ear on its own citizens, including video gamers; and even, it seems, spies on Congress. (After all, whom can you trust?) In other words, if that 1,500 figure bowls you over, keep in mind that it just stands in for a far larger system that puts to shame, in size and yottabytes of information collected, the wildest dreams of past science fiction writers. In these years, a mammoth, even labyrinthine, bureaucratic “intelligence” structure has been constructed that is drowning in “information” -- and on its own, it seems, the military has been ramping up a smaller but similarly scaled set of intelligence structures. Surprised, Caught Off Guard, and Left Scrambling The question remains: If data almost beyond imagining flows into CENTCOM, what are those 1,500 analysts actually doing? How are they passing their time? What exactly do they produce and does it really qualify as “intelligence,” no less prove useful? Of course, we out here have limited access to the intelligence produced by CENTCOM, unless stories like the one about top commanders fudging assessments on the air war against the Islamic State break into the media. So you might assume that there’s no way of measuring the effectiveness of the command’s intelligence operations. But you would be wrong. It is, in fact, possible to produce a rough gauge of its effectiveness. Let’s call it the TomDispatch Surprise Measurement System, or TSMS. Think of it as a practical, news-based guide to the questions: What did they know and when did they know it? Let me offer a few examples chosen almost at random from recent events in CENTCOM’s domain. Take the seizure at the end of September by a few hundred Taliban fighters of the northern provincial Afghan capital of Kunduz, the first city the Taliban has controlled, however briefly, since it was ejected from that same town in 2002. In the process, the Taliban fighters reportedly scattered up to 7,000 members of the Afghan security forces that the U.S. has been training, funding, and arming for years. For anyone following news reports closely, the Taliban had for months been tightening its control over rural areas around Kunduz and testing the city’s defenses. Nonetheless, this May, based assumedly on the best intelligence analyses available from CENTCOM, the top U.S. commander in the country, Army General John Campbell, offered this predictive comment: “If you take a look very closely at some of the things in Kunduz and up in [neighboring] Badakhshan [Province], [the Taliban] will attack some very small checkpoints... They will go out and hit a little bit and then they kind of go to ground... so they’re not gaining territory for the most part.’” As late as August 13th, at a press briefing, an ABC News reporter asked Brigadier General Wilson Shoffner, the U.S. deputy chief of staff for communications in Afghanistan: “There has been a significant increase in Taliban activity in northern Afghanistan, particularly around Kunduz. What is behind that? Are the Afghan troops in that part of Afghanistan at risk of falling to the Taliban?” Shoffner responded, in part, this way: “So, again, I think there's been a lot of generalization when it comes to reports on the north. Kunduz is -- is not now, and has not been in danger of being overrun by the Taliban, and so -- with that, it's kind of a general perspective in the north, that's sort of how we see it.” That General Cambell at least remained of a similar mindset even as Kunduz fell is obvious enough since, as New York Times reporter Matthew Rosenberg reported, he was out of the country at the time. As Goldstein put it:
“Mostly, though, American and Afghan officials appeared to be genuinely surprised at the speedy fall of Kunduz, which took place when Gen. John F. Campbell, the commander of coalition forces, was in Germany for a defense conference... Though the Taliban have been making gains in the hinterlands around Kunduz for months, American military planners have for years insisted that Afghan forces were capable of holding onto the country’s major cities. “‘This wasn’t supposed to happen,’ said a senior American military officer who served in Afghanistan, speaking on the condition of anonymity. ‘The Afghans are fighting, so it’s not like we’re looking at them giving up or collapsing right now. They’re just not fighting very well.’”It’s generally agreed that the American high command was “caught off guard” by the capture of Kunduz and particularly shocked by the Afghan military’s inability to fight effectively. And who would have predicted such a thing of an American-trained army in the region, given that the American-backed, -trained, and -equipped Iraqi Army on the other side of the Greater Middle East had a similar experience in June 2014 in Mosul and other cities of northern Iraq when relatively small numbers of Islamic State militants routed its troops? At that time, U.S. military leaders and top administration officials right up to President Obama were, as the Wall Street Journal reported, “caught off guard by the swift collapse of Iraqi security forces” and the successes of the Islamic State in northern Iraq. Peter Baker and Eric Schmitt of the Times wrote in retrospect, “Intelligence agencies were caught off guard by the speed of the extremists’... advance across northern Iraq.” And don’t forget that, despite that CENTCOM intelligence machine, something similar happened in May 2015 when, as Washington Post columnist David Ignatius put it, U.S. officials and American intelligence were “blindsided again” by a very similar collapse of Iraqi forces in the city of Ramadi in al-Anbar Province. Or let’s take another example where those 1,500 analysts must have been hard at work: thefailed $500 million Pentagon program to train “moderate” Syrians into a force that could fight the Islamic State. In the Pentagon version of the elephant that gave birth to a mouse, that vast effort of vetting, training, and arming finally produced Division 30, a single 54-man unit of armed moderates, who were inserted into Syria near the forces of the al-Qaeda-aligned al-Nusra Front. That group promptly kidnapped two of its leaders and then attacked the unit. The result was a disaster as the U.S.-trained fighters fled or were killed. Soon thereafter, the American general overseeing the war against the Islamic State testified before Congress that only “four or five” armed combatants from the U.S. force remained in the field. Here again is how the New York Times reported the response to this incident:
“In Washington, several current and former senior administration officials acknowledged that the attack and the abductions by the Nusra Front took American officials by surprise and amounted to a significant intelligence failure. While American military trainers had gone to great lengths to protect the initial group of trainees from attacks by Islamic State or Syrian Army forces, they did not anticipate an assault from the Nusra Front. In fact, officials said on Friday, they expected the Nusra Front to welcome Division 30 as an ally in its fight against the Islamic State. “‘This wasn’t supposed to happen like this,’ said one former senior American official, who was working closely on Syria issues until recently, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential intelligence assessments.”Now, if accurate, this is wild stuff. After all, how anyone, commander or intelligence analyst, could imagine that the al-Nusra Front, classified as an enemy force in Washington and some of whose militants had been targeted by U.S. air power, would have welcomed U.S.-backed troops with open arms is the mystery of all mysteries. One small footnote to this: McClatchy News later reported that the al-Nusra Front had been poised to attack the unit because it had tipped off in advance by Turkish intelligence, something CENTCOM’s intelligence operatives evidently knew nothing about. In the wake of that little disaster and again, assumedly, with CENTCOM’s full stock of intelligence and analysis on hand, the military inserted the next unit of 74 trained moderates into Syria and was shocked (shocked!) when its members, chastened perhaps by the fate of Division 30, promptly handed over at least a quarter of their U.S.-supplied equipment, including trucks, ammunition, and rifles, to the al-Nusra Front in return for “safe passage.” Al-Nusra militants soon were posting photos of the weapons online and tweeting proudly about them. CENTCOM officials initially denied that any of this had happened (and were clearly in the dark about it) before reversing course and reluctantly admitting that it was so. (“‘If accurate, the report of NSF [New Syrian Forces] members providing equipment to al-Nusra Front is very concerning and a violation of Syria train-and-equip program guidelines,’ U.S. Central Command spokesman Colonel Patrick Ryder said.”) To turn to even more recent events in CENTCOM’s bailiwick, American officials were reportedly similarly stunned as September ended when Russia reached a surprise agreement with U.S. ally Iraq on an anti-ISIS intelligence-sharing arrangement that would also include Syria and Iran. Washington was once again “caught off guard” and, in the words of Michael Gordon of the Times, “left... scrambling,” even though its officials had known “that a group of Russian military officers were in Baghdad.” Similarly, the Russian build-up of weaponry, planes, and personnel in Syria initially "surprised" and -- yes -- caught the Obama administration “off guard.” Again, despite those 1,500 CENTCOM analysts and the rest of the vast U.S. intelligence community, American officials, according to every news report available, were "caught flat-footed" and, of course, "by surprise” (again, right up to the president) when the Russians began their full-scale bombing campaign in Syria against various al-Qaeda-allied outfits and CIA-backed opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. They were even caught off guard and taken aback by the way the Russians delivered the news that their bombing campaign was about to start: a three-star Russian general arrived at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad to offer an hour’s notice. (Congressional lawmakers are now considering “the extent to which the spy community overlooked or misjudged critical warning signs” about the Russian intervention in Syria.) The Fog Machine of American Intelligence You get the point. Whatever the efforts of that expansive corps of intelligence analysts (and the vast intelligence edifice behind it), when anything happens in the Greater Middle East, you can essentially assume that the official American reaction, military and political, will be “surprise” and that policymakers will be left “scrambling” in a quagmire of ignorance to rescue American policy from the unexpected. In other words, somehow, with what passes for the best, or at least most extensive and expensive intelligence operation on the planet, with all those satellites and drones and surveillance sweeps and sources, with crowds of analysts, hordes of private contractors, and tens of billions of dollars, with, in short, “intelligence” galore, American officials in the area of their wars are evidently going to continue to find themselves eternally caught “off guard.” The phrase “the fog of war” stands in for the inability of commanders to truly grasp what’s happening in the chaos that is any battlefield. Perhaps it’s time to introduce a companion phrase: the fog of intelligence. It hardly matters whether those 1,500 CENTCOM analysts (and all those at other commands or at the 17 major intelligence outfits) produce superlative “intelligence” that then descends into the fog of leadership, or whether any bureaucratic conglomeration of “analysts,” drowning in secret information and the protocols that go with it, is going to add up to a giant fog machine. It’s difficult enough, of course, to peer into the future, to imagine what’s coming, especially in distant, alien lands. Cobble that basic problem together with an overwhelming data stream and groupthink, then fit it all inside the constrained mindsets of Washington and the Pentagon, and you have a formula for producing the fog of intelligence and so for seldom being “on guard” when it comes to much of anything. My own suspicion: you could get rid of most of the 17 agencies and outfits in the U.S. Intelligence Community and dump just about all the secret and classified information that is the heart and soul of the national security state. Then you could let a small group of independently minded analysts and critics loose on open-source material, and you would be far more likely to get intelligent, actionable, inventive analyses of our global situation, our wars, and our beleaguered path into the future. The evidence, after all, is largely in. In these years, for what now must be approaching three-quarters of a trillion dollars, the national security state and the military seem to have created an un-intelligence system. Welcome to the fog of everything.
