Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 1012
August 18, 2015
Republicans’ vile anti-gay crusade: RNC endorses legislation to protect discrimination
Conservatives have suffered a rough summer and aren't copping with their losses well. After watching same-sex couples granted the right to wed nationwide and seeing state-level anti-gay discrimination plots face intense scrutiny, the Republican National Committee is continuing its anti-LGBT fight by endorsing federal legislation codifying the right to discriminate against LGBT Americans into law, reports ThinkProgress. The so-called First Amendment Defense Act is Republicans' response to nationwide marriage equality and what they describe as an attempt to protect people who find same-sex unions contrary to their faith by preventing any federal response to religious businesses, non-profits and institutions that discriminate against same-sex couples. The bill would allow universities with religious affiliations which receive federal funding to deny employment to workers with same-sex spouses. Cosponsor Sen. Mike Lee of Utah displayed particularly twisted logic when he claimed that the legislation is meant to prohibit "a particularly nasty form of discrimination which involves discrimination by the government against an individual or a group thereof on the basis of religious belief." RNC Chair of the Conservative Steering Committee Ellen Barrosse similarly defended this attempt to legalize discrimination by pointing to the free market and a specious argument that religious organizations would be forced to act not in accordance with their religious teachings. “Does Catholic Charities have to place children with gay couples, or will they have to shut down?” Barrosse asked during an interview with the Heritage Foundation's Daily Signal. “This is a free market, there are other agencies that will place children with them.” A similar argument was put forth by Sen. Lee: "we're not, moreover, in a society in which people who are either gay or lesbian who are married to a member of the same sex, for example, are subject to widespread discrimination. There is no shortage in the United States of colleges and universities and other employers of all types, of all sorts, who are willing to hire." But Republicans' push for this anti-gay discrimination is disingenuous at best. As the ACLU notes, there is no sign that the IRS has any plans to try to revoke the tax-exempt status of religious schools that oppose same-sex marriage and aside from the 1983 decision to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University for its prohibition of interracial marriage, the IRS has made no move to revoke the tax-exempt status of religious schools that have policies against interfaith marriages or remarriage after divorce. The RNC's extreme position in opposition to marriage equality and in support of legalized discrimination places the Party out of step with its presidential frontrunner, yet again. Donald Trump told NBC's Chuck Todd that unlike his party, he was "willing to go with what the courts are saying" and supported employee non-discrimination ordinances in light of the Supreme Court ruling overturning same-sex marriage bans, explaining his opposition to employers being allowed to fire employees due to sexual orientation: "I don’t think [someone's sexuality] should be a reason, no."
Jessica Alba thinks Gwyneth Paltrow comparisons are sexist: “What I think is unfair is to lump actresses together”
In a recent interview with Allure, Jessica Alba — whose eco-friendly start-up Honest is worth a cool $1.7-billion — says she is tired of being compared to fellow actress-entrepreneurs like Gwyneth Paltrow, Reese Witherspoon and Blake Lively. “What I think is unfair is to lump actresses together,” Alba explains. "People aren't lumping Justin Timberlake and Ashton Kutcher together. They do other businesses. I think it’s expected that when you get success in one area, you’re supposed to evolve and try to do something else—especially in business, and especially if you’re a man.” Back in June, Goop founder Paltrow had a similar response to a Time reporter who asked about other lifestyle brands started by actresses, saying “I wonder if George Clooney would be asked about Puff Daddy’s ancillary liquor line” and remarking that she is “fascinated how the media in particular are so confounded by entrepreneurial women doing something outside of their box.” “Jessica [Alba], especially, who’s a friend of mine—our businesses could not be more different,” Paltrow said at the time. “There’s not a lifestyle piece to her business. The fundamentals of our sites are very different. Reese launched—our businesses have similarities, but hers has retail. People are grasping at straws to tie us together and I get it, because it makes a good story, but I’m slightly offended by this sort of generalization that happens with myself and Jessica and Reese and Blake. Yes, there are similarities. But there aren’t stories in TIME written saying, 'Wow, look at Arnold Schwarzenegger, who did x, y, and z!'" Read the rest of the profile over at Allure.In a recent interview with Allure, Jessica Alba — whose eco-friendly start-up Honest is worth a cool $1.7-billion — says she is tired of being compared to fellow actress-entrepreneurs like Gwyneth Paltrow, Reese Witherspoon and Blake Lively. “What I think is unfair is to lump actresses together,” Alba explains. "People aren't lumping Justin Timberlake and Ashton Kutcher together. They do other businesses. I think it’s expected that when you get success in one area, you’re supposed to evolve and try to do something else—especially in business, and especially if you’re a man.” Back in June, Goop founder Paltrow had a similar response to a Time reporter who asked about other lifestyle brands started by actresses, saying “I wonder if George Clooney would be asked about Puff Daddy’s ancillary liquor line” and remarking that she is “fascinated how the media in particular are so confounded by entrepreneurial women doing something outside of their box.” “Jessica [Alba], especially, who’s a friend of mine—our businesses could not be more different,” Paltrow said at the time. “There’s not a lifestyle piece to her business. The fundamentals of our sites are very different. Reese launched—our businesses have similarities, but hers has retail. People are grasping at straws to tie us together and I get it, because it makes a good story, but I’m slightly offended by this sort of generalization that happens with myself and Jessica and Reese and Blake. Yes, there are similarities. But there aren’t stories in TIME written saying, 'Wow, look at Arnold Schwarzenegger, who did x, y, and z!'" Read the rest of the profile over at Allure.In a recent interview with Allure, Jessica Alba — whose eco-friendly start-up Honest is worth a cool $1.7-billion — says she is tired of being compared to fellow actress-entrepreneurs like Gwyneth Paltrow, Reese Witherspoon and Blake Lively. “What I think is unfair is to lump actresses together,” Alba explains. "People aren't lumping Justin Timberlake and Ashton Kutcher together. They do other businesses. I think it’s expected that when you get success in one area, you’re supposed to evolve and try to do something else—especially in business, and especially if you’re a man.” Back in June, Goop founder Paltrow had a similar response to a Time reporter who asked about other lifestyle brands started by actresses, saying “I wonder if George Clooney would be asked about Puff Daddy’s ancillary liquor line” and remarking that she is “fascinated how the media in particular are so confounded by entrepreneurial women doing something outside of their box.” “Jessica [Alba], especially, who’s a friend of mine—our businesses could not be more different,” Paltrow said at the time. “There’s not a lifestyle piece to her business. The fundamentals of our sites are very different. Reese launched—our businesses have similarities, but hers has retail. People are grasping at straws to tie us together and I get it, because it makes a good story, but I’m slightly offended by this sort of generalization that happens with myself and Jessica and Reese and Blake. Yes, there are similarities. But there aren’t stories in TIME written saying, 'Wow, look at Arnold Schwarzenegger, who did x, y, and z!'" Read the rest of the profile over at Allure.
Data is not always “liberating”: The New York Times was right to focus on Amazon’s damage to real people instead
The massive story on Amazon’s relentless and high-achieving office culture, which ran in Sunday’s New York Times, was bound to be controversial: It aired uncomfortable truths about a corporation that’s done its best to keep its inner workings secret and that knows its way around nondisclosure agreements. The story was also bound to be deflected in a follow-up by members of Amazon leadership team, who deny that the workplace is a heartless dystopia where people cry at their desks, are forced to work on holidays and find themselves marginalized when they have personal or family problems. And a front-page, 5,000-word article with more than 100 sources that stirs up all this noise, is bound to draw some criticism from the Times’ public editor. Given the paper’s power and its missteps during the Jayson Blair and Judith Miller eras, I appreciate having someone inside take a close, ethically informed look at the big stories. But I'm thrown by the conclusion to the assessment by Times’ public editor Margaret Sullivan, who leads in by summarizing the story’s impact.
But does the article, with complete fairness, nail down the reality of life as an Amazon employee? No serious questions (to my knowledge) have arisen about the hard facts. That’s to The Times’s credit. But that may partly be because the article was driven less by irrefutable proof than by generalization and anecdote. For such a damning result, presented with so much drama, that doesn’t seem like quite enough.Now, we’re talking about a story with more than 100 sources, that got one woman to talk about the professional fallout of having a stillborn child, that collected all kinds of detail a very powerful corporation did not want the reporters to have. So while I don’t doubt that the story could have benefited from more reporting or research – what story couldn’t? – to put it at the door of "data" is a bit weird. Or maybe not so weird. "Data" is one of those words that’s become trendy to the point of fetishism in the digital age, along with “innovation,” “disruption,” “brand” and "industry." What’s also striking is the role that data and its all-powerful status plays in the culture of Amazon itself. This comes from the Times story, by Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld:
To prod employees, Amazon has a powerful lever: more data than any retail operation in history. Its perpetual flow of real-time, ultradetailed metrics allows the company to measure nearly everything its customers do: what they put in their shopping carts, but do not buy; when readers reach the “abandon point” in a Kindle book; and what they will stream based on previous purchases. It can also tell when engineers are not building pages that load quickly enough, or when a vendor manager does not have enough gardening gloves in stock. “Data creates a lot of clarity around decision-making,” said Sean Boyle, who runs the finance division of Amazon Web Services and was permitted by the company to speak. “Data is incredibly liberating.”And when the Times asked Amazon for information on turnover – one of the key issues of the piece is that the workplace is so hostile that people leave, the paper got this: “Turnover is consistent with others in the technology industry, they said, but declined to disclose any data” Okay, so at Amazon, they worship data, and they have more of it than anyone else. But when asked to provide some to deflect a charge, they decide it doesn’t really matter. Data can tell us a lot, and a very fruitful field within journalism concentrates on it. But data doesn’t entirely illuminate human lives. Stories about the details — the anecdotes — of human lives do that. Our best ways of understanding the human condition -- literature and the arts -- have very little to do with data. (This has not kept people from trying to apply it.) A worship of data – and a disregard for individual experience -- is part of the reason your kid spends all of his or her time getting ready for tests: Instead of actually teaching, or getting to know each child's mind, educators are under enormous pressure to come up with more, uh, data. One of the main reasons that people in the Internet age worship data, by the way, is the work of Malcolm Gladwell: His New Yorker articles and bestselling books revel in the glory of Big Data, often making social science research lively and accessible. This makes it interesting that Gladwell, just a few weeks ago, gave a speech in which he talked about the deficiencies of … data.
“More data increases our confidence, not our accuracy,” he said at mobile marketing analytics provider Tune’s Postback 2015 event in Seattle. “I want to puncture marketers’ confidence and show you where data can’t help us.” “Data can tell us about the immediate environment of people’s attitudes, but not much about the environment in which they were formed,” he said.Data, after all, is a tool —it’s up to informed human beings, who understand context, to make sense of it. “The reason your profession is a profession and not a job,” Gladwell said, “is that your role is to find the truth in the data.” Whatever the blind spots of the New York Times story, its writers did just that.The massive story on Amazon’s relentless and high-achieving office culture, which ran in Sunday’s New York Times, was bound to be controversial: It aired uncomfortable truths about a corporation that’s done its best to keep its inner workings secret and that knows its way around nondisclosure agreements. The story was also bound to be deflected in a follow-up by members of Amazon leadership team, who deny that the workplace is a heartless dystopia where people cry at their desks, are forced to work on holidays and find themselves marginalized when they have personal or family problems. And a front-page, 5,000-word article with more than 100 sources that stirs up all this noise, is bound to draw some criticism from the Times’ public editor. Given the paper’s power and its missteps during the Jayson Blair and Judith Miller eras, I appreciate having someone inside take a close, ethically informed look at the big stories. But I'm thrown by the conclusion to the assessment by Times’ public editor Margaret Sullivan, who leads in by summarizing the story’s impact.
But does the article, with complete fairness, nail down the reality of life as an Amazon employee? No serious questions (to my knowledge) have arisen about the hard facts. That’s to The Times’s credit. But that may partly be because the article was driven less by irrefutable proof than by generalization and anecdote. For such a damning result, presented with so much drama, that doesn’t seem like quite enough.Now, we’re talking about a story with more than 100 sources, that got one woman to talk about the professional fallout of having a stillborn child, that collected all kinds of detail a very powerful corporation did not want the reporters to have. So while I don’t doubt that the story could have benefited from more reporting or research – what story couldn’t? – to put it at the door of "data" is a bit weird. Or maybe not so weird. "Data" is one of those words that’s become trendy to the point of fetishism in the digital age, along with “innovation,” “disruption,” “brand” and "industry." What’s also striking is the role that data and its all-powerful status plays in the culture of Amazon itself. This comes from the Times story, by Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld:
To prod employees, Amazon has a powerful lever: more data than any retail operation in history. Its perpetual flow of real-time, ultradetailed metrics allows the company to measure nearly everything its customers do: what they put in their shopping carts, but do not buy; when readers reach the “abandon point” in a Kindle book; and what they will stream based on previous purchases. It can also tell when engineers are not building pages that load quickly enough, or when a vendor manager does not have enough gardening gloves in stock. “Data creates a lot of clarity around decision-making,” said Sean Boyle, who runs the finance division of Amazon Web Services and was permitted by the company to speak. “Data is incredibly liberating.”And when the Times asked Amazon for information on turnover – one of the key issues of the piece is that the workplace is so hostile that people leave, the paper got this: “Turnover is consistent with others in the technology industry, they said, but declined to disclose any data” Okay, so at Amazon, they worship data, and they have more of it than anyone else. But when asked to provide some to deflect a charge, they decide it doesn’t really matter. Data can tell us a lot, and a very fruitful field within journalism concentrates on it. But data doesn’t entirely illuminate human lives. Stories about the details — the anecdotes — of human lives do that. Our best ways of understanding the human condition -- literature and the arts -- have very little to do with data. (This has not kept people from trying to apply it.) A worship of data – and a disregard for individual experience -- is part of the reason your kid spends all of his or her time getting ready for tests: Instead of actually teaching, or getting to know each child's mind, educators are under enormous pressure to come up with more, uh, data. One of the main reasons that people in the Internet age worship data, by the way, is the work of Malcolm Gladwell: His New Yorker articles and bestselling books revel in the glory of Big Data, often making social science research lively and accessible. This makes it interesting that Gladwell, just a few weeks ago, gave a speech in which he talked about the deficiencies of … data.
“More data increases our confidence, not our accuracy,” he said at mobile marketing analytics provider Tune’s Postback 2015 event in Seattle. “I want to puncture marketers’ confidence and show you where data can’t help us.” “Data can tell us about the immediate environment of people’s attitudes, but not much about the environment in which they were formed,” he said.Data, after all, is a tool —it’s up to informed human beings, who understand context, to make sense of it. “The reason your profession is a profession and not a job,” Gladwell said, “is that your role is to find the truth in the data.” Whatever the blind spots of the New York Times story, its writers did just that.The massive story on Amazon’s relentless and high-achieving office culture, which ran in Sunday’s New York Times, was bound to be controversial: It aired uncomfortable truths about a corporation that’s done its best to keep its inner workings secret and that knows its way around nondisclosure agreements. The story was also bound to be deflected in a follow-up by members of Amazon leadership team, who deny that the workplace is a heartless dystopia where people cry at their desks, are forced to work on holidays and find themselves marginalized when they have personal or family problems. And a front-page, 5,000-word article with more than 100 sources that stirs up all this noise, is bound to draw some criticism from the Times’ public editor. Given the paper’s power and its missteps during the Jayson Blair and Judith Miller eras, I appreciate having someone inside take a close, ethically informed look at the big stories. But I'm thrown by the conclusion to the assessment by Times’ public editor Margaret Sullivan, who leads in by summarizing the story’s impact.
But does the article, with complete fairness, nail down the reality of life as an Amazon employee? No serious questions (to my knowledge) have arisen about the hard facts. That’s to The Times’s credit. But that may partly be because the article was driven less by irrefutable proof than by generalization and anecdote. For such a damning result, presented with so much drama, that doesn’t seem like quite enough.Now, we’re talking about a story with more than 100 sources, that got one woman to talk about the professional fallout of having a stillborn child, that collected all kinds of detail a very powerful corporation did not want the reporters to have. So while I don’t doubt that the story could have benefited from more reporting or research – what story couldn’t? – to put it at the door of "data" is a bit weird. Or maybe not so weird. "Data" is one of those words that’s become trendy to the point of fetishism in the digital age, along with “innovation,” “disruption,” “brand” and "industry." What’s also striking is the role that data and its all-powerful status plays in the culture of Amazon itself. This comes from the Times story, by Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld:
To prod employees, Amazon has a powerful lever: more data than any retail operation in history. Its perpetual flow of real-time, ultradetailed metrics allows the company to measure nearly everything its customers do: what they put in their shopping carts, but do not buy; when readers reach the “abandon point” in a Kindle book; and what they will stream based on previous purchases. It can also tell when engineers are not building pages that load quickly enough, or when a vendor manager does not have enough gardening gloves in stock. “Data creates a lot of clarity around decision-making,” said Sean Boyle, who runs the finance division of Amazon Web Services and was permitted by the company to speak. “Data is incredibly liberating.”And when the Times asked Amazon for information on turnover – one of the key issues of the piece is that the workplace is so hostile that people leave, the paper got this: “Turnover is consistent with others in the technology industry, they said, but declined to disclose any data” Okay, so at Amazon, they worship data, and they have more of it than anyone else. But when asked to provide some to deflect a charge, they decide it doesn’t really matter. Data can tell us a lot, and a very fruitful field within journalism concentrates on it. But data doesn’t entirely illuminate human lives. Stories about the details — the anecdotes — of human lives do that. Our best ways of understanding the human condition -- literature and the arts -- have very little to do with data. (This has not kept people from trying to apply it.) A worship of data – and a disregard for individual experience -- is part of the reason your kid spends all of his or her time getting ready for tests: Instead of actually teaching, or getting to know each child's mind, educators are under enormous pressure to come up with more, uh, data. One of the main reasons that people in the Internet age worship data, by the way, is the work of Malcolm Gladwell: His New Yorker articles and bestselling books revel in the glory of Big Data, often making social science research lively and accessible. This makes it interesting that Gladwell, just a few weeks ago, gave a speech in which he talked about the deficiencies of … data.
“More data increases our confidence, not our accuracy,” he said at mobile marketing analytics provider Tune’s Postback 2015 event in Seattle. “I want to puncture marketers’ confidence and show you where data can’t help us.” “Data can tell us about the immediate environment of people’s attitudes, but not much about the environment in which they were formed,” he said.Data, after all, is a tool —it’s up to informed human beings, who understand context, to make sense of it. “The reason your profession is a profession and not a job,” Gladwell said, “is that your role is to find the truth in the data.” Whatever the blind spots of the New York Times story, its writers did just that.
Watch the secret “Friends” scene that was hastily deleted after September 11
The last thing anyone wanted to laugh about in the wake of the tragic events of Sept. 11 were airport security jokes. Specifically, those that mentioned "hijackings" in passing. That's why, anticipating the backlash of a joke like this one, the creative team on NBC's "Friends" ultimately decided to scrap a scene from the 2001 episode “The One Where Rachel Tells Ross.” In it, Monica and Chandler are attempting to make it through security on their way to their honeymoon, when Chandler -- being Chandler -- spots a sign banning all jokes about bombs and views this as some sort of challenge. "I take my bombs very seriously," Chandler says as a TSA agent rushes over to the scene to escort him out. The interrogation just gets worse and worse, as the couple refuses to stop dropping the "b-word." The deleted scene, originally uploaded back i 2007, is having its moment of virality this week. Here's the clip below: [h/t US Weekly]The last thing anyone wanted to laugh about in the wake of the tragic events of Sept. 11 were airport security jokes. Specifically, those that mentioned "hijackings" in passing. That's why, anticipating the backlash of a joke like this one, the creative team on NBC's "Friends" ultimately decided to scrap a scene from the 2001 episode “The One Where Rachel Tells Ross.” In it, Monica and Chandler are attempting to make it through security on their way to their honeymoon, when Chandler -- being Chandler -- spots a sign banning all jokes about bombs and views this as some sort of challenge. "I take my bombs very seriously," Chandler says as a TSA agent rushes over to the scene to escort him out. The interrogation just gets worse and worse, as the couple refuses to stop dropping the "b-word." The deleted scene, originally uploaded back i 2007, is having its moment of virality this week. Here's the clip below: [h/t US Weekly]
This video demonstrates how rats can swim up your toilet bowl and will turn you into a life-long squatter
Once, while walking down the streets of Manhattan, I saw -- I swear to God -- a bunch of rats that were the size of small dogs. My friend Nicole was there, and she can confirm it happened:
(She's laughing because she moved away from New York last month, and no longer has to deal with this shit, and is obviously feeling very smug about it.) My only consolation, at the time, was knowing that at least those rats can't swim their way through the sewers and into my toilet bowl. Then I saw this video from National Geographic, and I learned just how wrong I was. It cannot be unlearned, which I am incredibly sorry about. I am also sorry to admit that the only thing I can think to do during this very trying time is to share this knowledge with everyone. Together, perhaps we can begin to heal:
(She's laughing because she moved away from New York last month, and no longer has to deal with this shit, and is obviously feeling very smug about it.) My only consolation, at the time, was knowing that at least those rats can't swim their way through the sewers and into my toilet bowl. Then I saw this video from National Geographic, and I learned just how wrong I was. It cannot be unlearned, which I am incredibly sorry about. I am also sorry to admit that the only thing I can think to do during this very trying time is to share this knowledge with everyone. Together, perhaps we can begin to heal:
Women, practice saying “vagina” out loud: Your life could depend on it
Women: Your body parts are not dirty words. Your health and well-being are not shameful topics. And if you think that being reticent about talking about reproductive health is a problem that belongs to an older generation, think again. As a Monday feature in the Independent finds, it's actually younger women who are avoiding straight talk with their doctors — and the consequences can be serious. An alarming recently released study by the UK organization Ovarian Cancer Action found that "Women aged 18 to 24 are four times less likely than those aged 55 - 64 to go to a doctor with a sexual-health issue." FOUR TIMES. The statistics get worse — 57 percent of the younger women say they'd Google instead of seeking medical help and 48 percent admit they are "afraid of being intimately examined." A full 44 percent say they're they're "embarrassed to talk about sexual health issues," and a third say would be embarrassed just to say the word "vagina" to a health professional. Only 11 percent of women 55 to 64 struggle over the same word. Professor Christina Fotopoulou, gynecological oncologist at Queen Charlotte’s & Chelsea Hospital in London, says that this level of reluctance can be dangerous. "Ovarian cancer is more common in older women but it also occurs in young women. It is crucial these women report these symptoms early to their doctors so they are given the right treatment," she says. "We as doctors should encourage women to talk to us and help them overcome their fears. It is our job and could save lives." Why is it that in a culture that certainly seems unburdened with embarrassment about sexuality, it's younger women who are so reluctant to even say the word "vagina"? Why is it that even as "menstrual activism" is on the rise, reproductive health itself is still taboo? Perhaps because with youth comes the expectation that everything in that region is supposed to be perfect. I remember when I was in a cancer support group, a friend who was only 24 once remarked, "You don't know what it's like to be the only sick one among your peers." Once you hit the post-menopausal years, there's much less investment in having an A+ reproductive system. The possibility of a loss of fertility is no longer relevant, and therefore no longer a stigma to face. And the implied failure that disease so often brings is somehow less of an issue when you're likelier to be among others going through the same or similar challenges. Last week, a younger friend dropped the bombshell announcement that she was going in for major surgery and would be needing help over the coming weeks. She needed a hysterectomy. This information was communicated to a variety of people, men and women, without shame or equivocation. I admired her, not just for stating clearly that she was in need of support, but for not trying to be cagey or delicate about what she was experiencing. I admired her for the example she's setting for her kids. And what I want for all women, of all ages, is to acknowledge that our bodies are imperfect systems and to not trust Dr. Google as a substitute for authentic if difficult conversations. "Illnesses such as ovarian cancer – which kills a woman every two hours in the UK – are much easier to treat if they are diagnosed early," says Katherine Taylor, acting chief executive of Ovarian Cancer Action. "Saying 'vagina' won’t kill you, but avoiding saying it could."Women: Your body parts are not dirty words. Your health and well-being are not shameful topics. And if you think that being reticent about talking about reproductive health is a problem that belongs to an older generation, think again. As a Monday feature in the Independent finds, it's actually younger women who are avoiding straight talk with their doctors — and the consequences can be serious. An alarming recently released study by the UK organization Ovarian Cancer Action found that "Women aged 18 to 24 are four times less likely than those aged 55 - 64 to go to a doctor with a sexual-health issue." FOUR TIMES. The statistics get worse — 57 percent of the younger women say they'd Google instead of seeking medical help and 48 percent admit they are "afraid of being intimately examined." A full 44 percent say they're they're "embarrassed to talk about sexual health issues," and a third say would be embarrassed just to say the word "vagina" to a health professional. Only 11 percent of women 55 to 64 struggle over the same word. Professor Christina Fotopoulou, gynecological oncologist at Queen Charlotte’s & Chelsea Hospital in London, says that this level of reluctance can be dangerous. "Ovarian cancer is more common in older women but it also occurs in young women. It is crucial these women report these symptoms early to their doctors so they are given the right treatment," she says. "We as doctors should encourage women to talk to us and help them overcome their fears. It is our job and could save lives." Why is it that in a culture that certainly seems unburdened with embarrassment about sexuality, it's younger women who are so reluctant to even say the word "vagina"? Why is it that even as "menstrual activism" is on the rise, reproductive health itself is still taboo? Perhaps because with youth comes the expectation that everything in that region is supposed to be perfect. I remember when I was in a cancer support group, a friend who was only 24 once remarked, "You don't know what it's like to be the only sick one among your peers." Once you hit the post-menopausal years, there's much less investment in having an A+ reproductive system. The possibility of a loss of fertility is no longer relevant, and therefore no longer a stigma to face. And the implied failure that disease so often brings is somehow less of an issue when you're likelier to be among others going through the same or similar challenges. Last week, a younger friend dropped the bombshell announcement that she was going in for major surgery and would be needing help over the coming weeks. She needed a hysterectomy. This information was communicated to a variety of people, men and women, without shame or equivocation. I admired her, not just for stating clearly that she was in need of support, but for not trying to be cagey or delicate about what she was experiencing. I admired her for the example she's setting for her kids. And what I want for all women, of all ages, is to acknowledge that our bodies are imperfect systems and to not trust Dr. Google as a substitute for authentic if difficult conversations. "Illnesses such as ovarian cancer – which kills a woman every two hours in the UK – are much easier to treat if they are diagnosed early," says Katherine Taylor, acting chief executive of Ovarian Cancer Action. "Saying 'vagina' won’t kill you, but avoiding saying it could."Women: Your body parts are not dirty words. Your health and well-being are not shameful topics. And if you think that being reticent about talking about reproductive health is a problem that belongs to an older generation, think again. As a Monday feature in the Independent finds, it's actually younger women who are avoiding straight talk with their doctors — and the consequences can be serious. An alarming recently released study by the UK organization Ovarian Cancer Action found that "Women aged 18 to 24 are four times less likely than those aged 55 - 64 to go to a doctor with a sexual-health issue." FOUR TIMES. The statistics get worse — 57 percent of the younger women say they'd Google instead of seeking medical help and 48 percent admit they are "afraid of being intimately examined." A full 44 percent say they're they're "embarrassed to talk about sexual health issues," and a third say would be embarrassed just to say the word "vagina" to a health professional. Only 11 percent of women 55 to 64 struggle over the same word. Professor Christina Fotopoulou, gynecological oncologist at Queen Charlotte’s & Chelsea Hospital in London, says that this level of reluctance can be dangerous. "Ovarian cancer is more common in older women but it also occurs in young women. It is crucial these women report these symptoms early to their doctors so they are given the right treatment," she says. "We as doctors should encourage women to talk to us and help them overcome their fears. It is our job and could save lives." Why is it that in a culture that certainly seems unburdened with embarrassment about sexuality, it's younger women who are so reluctant to even say the word "vagina"? Why is it that even as "menstrual activism" is on the rise, reproductive health itself is still taboo? Perhaps because with youth comes the expectation that everything in that region is supposed to be perfect. I remember when I was in a cancer support group, a friend who was only 24 once remarked, "You don't know what it's like to be the only sick one among your peers." Once you hit the post-menopausal years, there's much less investment in having an A+ reproductive system. The possibility of a loss of fertility is no longer relevant, and therefore no longer a stigma to face. And the implied failure that disease so often brings is somehow less of an issue when you're likelier to be among others going through the same or similar challenges. Last week, a younger friend dropped the bombshell announcement that she was going in for major surgery and would be needing help over the coming weeks. She needed a hysterectomy. This information was communicated to a variety of people, men and women, without shame or equivocation. I admired her, not just for stating clearly that she was in need of support, but for not trying to be cagey or delicate about what she was experiencing. I admired her for the example she's setting for her kids. And what I want for all women, of all ages, is to acknowledge that our bodies are imperfect systems and to not trust Dr. Google as a substitute for authentic if difficult conversations. "Illnesses such as ovarian cancer – which kills a woman every two hours in the UK – are much easier to treat if they are diagnosed early," says Katherine Taylor, acting chief executive of Ovarian Cancer Action. "Saying 'vagina' won’t kill you, but avoiding saying it could."Women: Your body parts are not dirty words. Your health and well-being are not shameful topics. And if you think that being reticent about talking about reproductive health is a problem that belongs to an older generation, think again. As a Monday feature in the Independent finds, it's actually younger women who are avoiding straight talk with their doctors — and the consequences can be serious. An alarming recently released study by the UK organization Ovarian Cancer Action found that "Women aged 18 to 24 are four times less likely than those aged 55 - 64 to go to a doctor with a sexual-health issue." FOUR TIMES. The statistics get worse — 57 percent of the younger women say they'd Google instead of seeking medical help and 48 percent admit they are "afraid of being intimately examined." A full 44 percent say they're they're "embarrassed to talk about sexual health issues," and a third say would be embarrassed just to say the word "vagina" to a health professional. Only 11 percent of women 55 to 64 struggle over the same word. Professor Christina Fotopoulou, gynecological oncologist at Queen Charlotte’s & Chelsea Hospital in London, says that this level of reluctance can be dangerous. "Ovarian cancer is more common in older women but it also occurs in young women. It is crucial these women report these symptoms early to their doctors so they are given the right treatment," she says. "We as doctors should encourage women to talk to us and help them overcome their fears. It is our job and could save lives." Why is it that in a culture that certainly seems unburdened with embarrassment about sexuality, it's younger women who are so reluctant to even say the word "vagina"? Why is it that even as "menstrual activism" is on the rise, reproductive health itself is still taboo? Perhaps because with youth comes the expectation that everything in that region is supposed to be perfect. I remember when I was in a cancer support group, a friend who was only 24 once remarked, "You don't know what it's like to be the only sick one among your peers." Once you hit the post-menopausal years, there's much less investment in having an A+ reproductive system. The possibility of a loss of fertility is no longer relevant, and therefore no longer a stigma to face. And the implied failure that disease so often brings is somehow less of an issue when you're likelier to be among others going through the same or similar challenges. Last week, a younger friend dropped the bombshell announcement that she was going in for major surgery and would be needing help over the coming weeks. She needed a hysterectomy. This information was communicated to a variety of people, men and women, without shame or equivocation. I admired her, not just for stating clearly that she was in need of support, but for not trying to be cagey or delicate about what she was experiencing. I admired her for the example she's setting for her kids. And what I want for all women, of all ages, is to acknowledge that our bodies are imperfect systems and to not trust Dr. Google as a substitute for authentic if difficult conversations. "Illnesses such as ovarian cancer – which kills a woman every two hours in the UK – are much easier to treat if they are diagnosed early," says Katherine Taylor, acting chief executive of Ovarian Cancer Action. "Saying 'vagina' won’t kill you, but avoiding saying it could."
Jeb’s humiliating weakness: Americans like him even less than Donald Trump
Donald Trump continues to dominate the Republican field and his rise comes not only at the cost of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker in Iowa (who's seen his early lead in the neighboring state evaporate) but also at the expense of former Florida governor Jeb Bush's favorability nationally. While Trump's rise in the poll this summer has been breathlessly covered by political and media reporters alike, much of the coverage has been tempered with warnings of caution from poll watchers who point to Trump's high unfavorability ratings and the high number of Republican voters who say they would not support Trump to argue that his standing as the GOP frontrunner may be short-lived. However, new polling suggests that Trump has not only managed to survive his summer of controversy but he's also somehow managed to increase his favorability rating, besting original GOP frontrunner Jeb Bush. A new CNN poll released today shows that Trump's favorability stands at 36 percent among all Americans while Bush's stands at a marginally lower 34 percent. Bush, who gave a rather weak-kneed performance at the first Republican primary debate, saw his unfavorability rating among all Americans jump 13 percent from late July to 56 percent from 43 percent. On Monday, the latest Morning Consult poll of Republican and Republican-leaning independent voters in Iowa showed that Bush and Trump were virtually tied in their favorable ratings, with 41 percent of registered voters viewing Trump favorably, compared with 40 percent viewing Bush favorably. The same poll showed Trump winning with 32 percent, far ahead of Bush, who came in second with 12 percent of the vote. And while "Bush’s donors aren’t sounding the alarm — yet," according to a new report in The Hill, "several Bush donors agreed that Bush had underperformed in the debate":
Polling strongly suggests that Bush’s standing has eroded since the Aug. 6 debate. In the last three major polls of Republican voters in Iowa taken before the debate, for instance, Bush twice placed third and was once tied for fourth. In the three major polls taken since then in the Hawkeye State, however, he has placed seventh in one, tied for seventh in another and fourth in a third. Nationally, the last three major polls before the debate had all shown him placing second, behind Trump. In the two polls released since that clash, he was fourth and tied for second. Most backers of Bush continue to believe it will all turn out alright. They believe that as the field is winnowed over time, the former Florida governor is far better-positioned to hoover up the voters of those who drop out than is Trump.Perhaps it's Trump's transformational summer run as the "Teflon Don" that has Bush's super-sized super PAC, Right To Rise, set to launch a $10 million post-Labor Day television advertising blitz in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.
The GOP plot to destroy “birthright citizenship”: Everything you need to know about Trump & Walker’s hideous plans
Back when he was considered by all the smart people to be the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, Governor Scott Walker made a huge gaffe when he told Glenn Beck that he was not only repudiating his previous tepid support for a path to citizenship for undocumented workers, but that he now believed even legal immigration should be curbed. Rumor had it that his comment was so upsetting to the Koch brothers that they were rethinking their impending endorsement. They subsequently announced another set of auditions with their billionaire friends for later in the summer. (Those auditions were held just this month, and featured Walker, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina. Walker didn't seem to be much of a factor in that meeting, and his poll numbers are going nowhere fast.) When Walker made his comments, many in the GOP were shocked and objected strenuously. Sen. Orrin Hatch called it "poppycock" and Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio said "we want legal immigration...it's enriched our country immeasurably. It’s who we are. It’s the fabric of our success.” That was in April of this year and what a difference four months makes. The new GOP frontrunner, Donald Trump, has made immigration the centerpiece of his campaign, and curbing legal immigration, a policy he endorses, is only one of several highly controversial policies he's proposed in his recently released "immigration plan." He is also for deportation of all undocumented workers and plans to repeal "birthright" citizenship, which would require a constitutional amendment. That's in addition to banning transfers of money to Mexico and raising fees on travel in order to blackmail the Mexican government into building a wall at the border. The legality of all these proposals is questionable, but that hasn't deterred Trump's many fans from applauding his initiative. Among those fans is Ann Coulter, who went so far as to declare it "the greatest political document since the Magna Carta." That's where we found ourselves yesterday, when Walker rushed to the microphone to reiterate his earlier endorsement of draconian immigration laws and ensure that everyone knew he had been there first. Walker is on board with the repeal of birthright citizenship as well, which is unsurprising since his immigration guru is the same senator who's been advising Trump -- the Chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Refugees, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions. Sessions has been flogging the repeal of birthright citizenship since at least 2010, when he was quoted saying:
"I'm not sure exactly what the drafters of the (14th) amendment had in mind, but I doubt it was that somebody could fly in from Brazil and have a child and fly back home with that child, and that child is forever an American citizen."Sessions is a former judge so he's been to law school and knows very well what the drafters of the 14th Amendment had in mind. It was adopted in the wake of the Civil War in order to ensure that people like Jeff Sessions and states like Alabama would not be able to deny citizenship, due process and equal protection under the law to former slaves and immigrants. Ever since then, people like Jeff Sessions and states like Alabama have been trying to find ways to circumvent the spirit and letter of the Amendment. Back in 1986, Ronald Reagan nominated Sessions to the federal bench, but he ran into a snag in the Senate when four DOJ lawyers testified that, as U.S. Attorney, Sessions had a bit of a problem with racism: He had told people that the NAACP and the ACLU were un-American, communist organizations, which had "forced civil rights down the throats of people." He also said that he wished he didn't have to prosecute civil rights cases at all. He became only the second nominee in 48 years whose nomination was killed by the Senate Judiciary Committee. However, he got the last laugh in 1996, when he won a seat in the Senate for himself, and eventually landed on that very same Judiciary Committee, with many of same senators who had thwarted his dream of a federal judgeship. Perhaps Sessions greatest revenge came last term, when he helped lead the crusade against President Obama's nominee to head the civil rights division of the DOJ, Debo Adegbile, arguing Adegbile couldn't be trusted because he once represented a client convicted of the 1981 murder of a police officer. In one of the most smug and sanctimonious comments in the history of the Senate, Sessions declared that his opposition was based upon the fact that the civil rights division "must protect the civil rights of all Americans" and not be used as a tool to further the political agenda of "special interest groups." Chutzpah doesn't begin to describe it. But all of that is fairly standard Southern-conservative behavior. Some people will never stop fighting the Civil War. Where Sessions is really making his impact on the future is on immigration policy. Last January, he put together a policy paper called "The Immigration Handbook for the New Republican Majority," which forms the basis for Trump and Walker's plans and will likely influence the rest of the candidates' platforms as well. This is his cri de guerre:
We need make no apology in rejecting an extreme policy of sustained mass immigration, which the public repudiates and which the best economic evidence tells us undermines wage growth and economic mobility. Here again, the dialect operates in reverse: the “hardliners” are those who refuse even the most modest immigration controls on the heels of four decades of large-scale immigration flows (both legal and illegal), and increased pressures on working families. Conservativism is by its nature at odds with the extreme, the untested, the ahistorical. The last large-scale flow of legal immigration (from approximately 1880–1920) was followed by a sustained slowdown that allowed wages to rise, assimilation to occur, and the middle class to emerge.What he doesn't mention is that the "slowdown" was largely due to three separate periods of large scale expulsion of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. President Warren Harding ran on a platform in 1920 that included deportations, and he was a good as his word, overseeing the round up and removal of tens of thousands of people. (The KKK became involved shortly thereafter and flew the anti-immigrant banner proudly for the next 50 years.) From 1929 to 1936, during the worst of the Great Depression, the government forcefully deported vast numbers of Mexicans and scared many more into leaving voluntarily. In 2005, the State of California passed an official "Apology Act" to those people forced to relocate to Mexico during this period, many of whom were Americans. In the mid 1950s, the Eisenhower administration famously enacted "Operation Wetback," which was yet another round-up and deportation program. This one was famous for snatching working people with no opportunity to tell family or collect their property, transporting them to distant destinations in Mexico -- simply dumping them there with no money or prospects. Sometimes they were left in the desert to die. So when Sessions talks about being opposed to the "ahistorical" nature of immigration reform, he's basically saying that these past actions were all good and he thinks we should do it again. His "handbook" offers political rhetoric and messaging which tells voters that their economic ills are caused by immigrants. It does not, however, offer any details about implementation of his plans, and neither does Trump's -- nor, in all likelihood, will Walker's forthcoming plan, either. They will all say "it's a matter of will," and shake their fists in self-righteous defense of the American worker being deprived of his and her fair chance to work as a strawberry picker or a restaurant dishwasher. They will claim that undocumented workers are living on easy street, collecting welfare and health care when they aren't "droppin' babies" (as Lindsay Graham colorfully put it) to secure American citizenship. No matter how distorted and dishonest these talking points are, a good number of Americans are always willing to believe them. Hopefully we have evolved beyond the point where we will allow the government to do anything like this again, however:
His father and oldest sister were farming sugar beets in the fields of Hamilton, Mont., and his mother was cooking tortillas when 6-year-old Ignacio Piña saw plainclothes authorities burst into his home. "They came in with guns and told us to get out," recalls Piña, 81, a retired railroad worker in Bakersfield, Calif., of the 1931 raid. "They didn't let us take anything," not even a trunk that held birth certificates proving that he and his five siblings were U.S.-born citizens. The family was thrown into a jail for 10 days before being sent by train to Mexico. Piña says he spent 16 years of "pure hell" there before acquiring papers of his Utah birth and returning to the USA.If Jeff Sessions has his way, that will never happen again, but not because he thinks it's wrong to deport immigrants. That would be perfectly fine. No, he would make sure those kids could never return to the U.S. because they wouldn't be allowed to be American citizens in the first place. When Trump unveiled his plan this week, Sessions was ecstatic. He said, "This is exactly the plan America needs. Not only would the plan outlined in this paper work, but more quickly than many realize." And he'll undoubtedly say the same thing when Scott Walker unveils his immigration plan too. Why wouldn't he? They're following the Sessions "Immigration Handbook" to the letter.
The Great Drought is upon us: Why California is America’s barren new normal
Long ago, I lived in a cheap flat in San Francisco and worked as the lone straight man in a gay construction company. Strangely enough, the drought now strangling California brings back memories of those days. It was the 1970s. Our company specialized in restoring the Victorian “gingerbread” to the facades of the city’s townhouses, and I got pretty good at installing cornices, gable brackets, and window hoods, working high above the street. What I remember most, though, is the way my co-workers delighted in scandalizing me on Monday mornings with accounts of their weekend exploits. We were all so innocent back then. We had no idea of the suffering that lay ahead or of the grievous epidemic already latent in the bodies of legions of gay men like my friends, an epidemic that would afflict so many outside the gay community but was especially terrible within it. It’s unlikely that many of those guys are alive today. HIV was already in the population, although AIDS had yet to be detected or named, and no one had heard of “safe sex,” let alone practiced it. When the epidemic broke out, it was nowhere worse than in trendsetting San Francisco. By then I had returned to New Mexico, having traded my hammer for a typewriter. When I announced my intention to leave California, the guys all said the same thing. “Don’t go back there,” they protested. “You’ll just have to go through all of this again!” All of this required no translation. It meant the particular newness of life in that state, which was always sure to spread eastward, as Californian styles, attitudes, problems, tastes, and fads had been spreading to the rest of the country almost since the days of the Gold Rush. Hippies, flower power, bikers, and cults. The movies we see and the music we listen to. The slang we pick up (I mean like, what a bummer, dude). Wine bars and fern bars, hot tubs and tanning booths, liposuction and boob jobs. The theft of rivers (Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown) and the theft of baseball teams (Brooklyn still mourns). Gay rights, car culture, and the Reagan Revolution. Scientology, mega-churches, Buddhist chic, and exercise videos. If they didn’t actually start in California, they got big and came to national attention there. Without the innovations of Silicon Valley, would you recognize your mobile phone or computer? Would you recognize yourself? It’s the same with climate change. California in the Great Drought is once again Exhibit A, a living diorama of how the future is going to look for a lot of us. And the present moment -- right now in 2015 -- reminds me of San Francisco as the AIDS epidemic broke out. Back then we had no idea how bad things were going to get, and that is likely to be true now, as well. As usual, California is giving us a preview of our world to come. The Arrival of the Bone-Dry New Normal On the U.S. Drought Monitor’s current map, a large purple bruise spreads across the core of California, covering almost half the state. Purple indicates “exceptional drought,” the direst category, the one that tops both “severe” and “extreme.” If you combine all three, 95% of the state is covered. In other words, California is hurting. Admittedly, conditions are better than at this time last year when 100% of the state was at least “severe.” Recent summer rains have somewhat dulled the edge of the drought, now in its fourth year. Full recovery, however, would require about a foot of rain statewide between now and January, a veritable deluge for places like Fresno, which in good times only get that much rain in a full year. To be clear, the current drought may not have been caused by climate change. After all, California has a long history of periodic fierce droughts that arise from entirely natural causes, some of them lasting a decade or more. Even so, at a minimum climate change remains a potent factor in the present disaster. The fundamental difference between California’s current desiccation and its historical antecedents is that present conditions are hotter thanks to climate change, and hotter means drier since evaporation increases with temperature. Moreover, the relationship between the two is non-linear: as temperature creeps up, evaporation gallops. Bottom line: the droughts of the future will be much more brutal -- and destructive -- than those of the past. California is already on average about 1.7° Fahrenheit hotter than a century ago, and its rate of warming is expected to triple in the century ahead. The evaporative response to this increase will powerfully amplify future droughts in unprecedented ways, no matter their causes. Throughout the state, draconian cutbacks in water use remain in force. Some agricultural districts are receiving 0% of the federally controlled irrigation water they received in past years, while state water deliveries are running at about 15% of normal. Meanwhile, a staggering 5,200 wildfires have burned in the state’s forests and chaparral country this year, although timely rains everywhere but in the northern parts of California and the rapid responses of a beefed-up army of firefighters limited the burning to less acreage than last year -- at least until recently. The blow-up of the Rocky Fire, north of San Francisco, in the early days of August -- it burned through 20,000 acres in just a few hours -- may change that mildly promising statistic. And the fire season still has months to go. So how is this a trendsetter, a harbinger for lands to the east? California’s drought is deep and long -- we don’t yet know how long -- and the very long-term forecast for an immense portion of western North America, stretching from California to Texas and north to South Dakota, is for a future of the same, only worse. Here is the unvarnished version of that future (on which an impressive number of climate models appear to agree) as expressed in a paperthat appeared in Science Advances last February: “The mean state of drought in the late 21st century over the Central Plains and Southwest will likely exceed even the most severe mega-drought periods of the Medieval era in both high and moderate emissions scenarios, representing an unprecedented fundamental shift with respect to the last millennium.” Let’s unpack that a little bit: principal author Benjamin Cook of NASA and his colleagues from Columbia and Cornell universities are saying that climate change will bring to the continent a “new normal” more brutally dry than even the multiple-decades-long droughts that caused the Native American societies of Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde to collapse. This, they add, is now expected to happen even if greenhouse gas emissions are significantly lowered in the decades to come. The impact of such droughts, they conclude, will exceed the bounds of anything known in the history of the continent or in its scientifically reconstructed pre-history. In other words, the California drought of recent years offers only a foretaste of what is to come. Incidentally, Cook, et al. are by no means outliers in the literature of climate prediction. Other important studies with similar forecasts support a steadily broadening consensus on the subject. And North American droughts will have to compete for attention with countless other climate change impacts, especially the hundreds of millions of refugees worldwide who will be put into motion by rising sea levels and other forces that will render their present homes unlivable. A User’s Guide to Climate Change If California points the way to dry times ahead, it also gives us an early glimpse of how a responsible society will try to live with and adjust to a warmer future. The state has imposed stringent new limits on water use and is actively enforcing them, and in general, individual consumers have responded positively to the new requirements, in some cases even exceeding mandated conservation goals. In a similar spirit, the state has augmented its wildland fire-fighting capacity to good effect, even as the fire danger has approached levels never before seen. Perhaps most impressively the state has adopted its own pioneering cap-and-trade program aimed at rolling back total greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels. Under cap-and-trade, carbon polluters have to obtain permits to continue their emissions, and only a finite number of such permits are made available. A coal-burning power plant or a refinery has to buy its permit from the state or from another company that already has one. This way, a ceiling is established for total greenhouse gases emitted by the most energy-intensive sectors of the economy. Although the jury may still be out on how well the program meets its goals, there is no debating its positive impact on the state treasury. In the fiscal year just begun, the auction of permits under California’s cap-and-trade program will net approximately $2.2 billion, a windfall that will be spent on mass transit, affordable housing, and a range of climate-adaptation programs. And by the way, the warnings of nay-sayers and climate deniers that cap-and-trade would prove a drag on the economy have, by the way, proved groundless. In a manner similar to the U.N.’s prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, California now publishes an assessment every three years of both its vulnerability to climate change and the steps it plans to take to mitigate or adapt to its effects. The report is a model of its kind and draws on copious California-specific scientific research, some of which is funded by the state. You might think California’s neighbors would follow suit, and eventually, as with most things Californian, they undoubtedly will. If President Obama’s just-announced “Clean Power Plan” withstands the expected court challenges, it will prove a powerful spur in that direction as it mandates state-by-state reductions in power plant carbon emissions that will, in the end, drive them 32% below 2005 levels. Many states will undoubtedly have to adopt cap-and-trade systems in order to comply. As they set about devising their own programs, where do you think they will look for a workable example? You guessed it: California. An “Island” Again, or Nearly So In the seventeenth century, Spanish cartographers thought California was an island separated from the rest of North America by the legendary Straits of Anian. In some ways, nothing has changed. In late July, while California Governor Jerry Brown was at the Vatican joining Pope Francis in calling for urgent global action to combat climate change, his opposite numbers across the putative straits continued to assume the posture of startled ostriches. Doug Ducey, the Republican governor of Arizona, admits that the climate may indeed be changing but doubts that humans play a causal role in it. Susana Martinez of New Mexico, also a Republican, continues to insist that climate science is inconclusive, while former governor of Texas and current presidential candidate Rick Perry adamantly remains “not a scientist,” although he knew enough to inform us in his 2012 campaign screed Fed Upthat climate change science is “a contrived phony mess.” In general, when it comes to climate change, the leadership of statehouses across the country remains as troglodytic as the House of Representatives. Only in Hawaii, Oregon and Washington on the West Coast, Minnesota in the Midwest, and a handful of Northeastern states will governors even acknowledge the importance of acting to curb climate change as well as adapt to it. This year, the deniers may get a boost from an unlikely source. Warm surface waters seem to be brewing something special in the Pacific Ocean. Says one researcher, “The El Niño event currently ongoing in the eastern and central Pacific is strengthening. The only question is whether it will be just a significant event, or a huge one.” El Niño draws the winter Pacific storm track southward, bringing precipitation to southern California, Arizona, and points eastward. If the southern tier of states has a wet winter, the Republican rain-dancers will feel confirmed in their official doubt and denialism, much as a broken clock is right at least twice a day. Occasional El Niños, however, will not avert the long-term new normal for California and much of the West. As that state is showing, adaptation will soften some of the blows, and possibly, if we act soon enough and strongly enough, we may manage to cap the overall changes at some still livable level. The jury will be out on that for quite some time. Meanwhile, as in pre-AIDS San Francisco, we are all still in a state of at least semi-innocence. Maybe we can imagine in an intellectual way what it might be like to lose the forests across half of the continent, but can any of us conjure the feeling of how that would be? After many missteps and halting starts, the medical and public health establishments finally came to the assistance of the victims of AIDS. As difficult as that was, it was easy compared to the remedies climate change will demand. And for much of the damage there will be no remedy. Get ready.Long ago, I lived in a cheap flat in San Francisco and worked as the lone straight man in a gay construction company. Strangely enough, the drought now strangling California brings back memories of those days. It was the 1970s. Our company specialized in restoring the Victorian “gingerbread” to the facades of the city’s townhouses, and I got pretty good at installing cornices, gable brackets, and window hoods, working high above the street. What I remember most, though, is the way my co-workers delighted in scandalizing me on Monday mornings with accounts of their weekend exploits. We were all so innocent back then. We had no idea of the suffering that lay ahead or of the grievous epidemic already latent in the bodies of legions of gay men like my friends, an epidemic that would afflict so many outside the gay community but was especially terrible within it. It’s unlikely that many of those guys are alive today. HIV was already in the population, although AIDS had yet to be detected or named, and no one had heard of “safe sex,” let alone practiced it. When the epidemic broke out, it was nowhere worse than in trendsetting San Francisco. By then I had returned to New Mexico, having traded my hammer for a typewriter. When I announced my intention to leave California, the guys all said the same thing. “Don’t go back there,” they protested. “You’ll just have to go through all of this again!” All of this required no translation. It meant the particular newness of life in that state, which was always sure to spread eastward, as Californian styles, attitudes, problems, tastes, and fads had been spreading to the rest of the country almost since the days of the Gold Rush. Hippies, flower power, bikers, and cults. The movies we see and the music we listen to. The slang we pick up (I mean like, what a bummer, dude). Wine bars and fern bars, hot tubs and tanning booths, liposuction and boob jobs. The theft of rivers (Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown) and the theft of baseball teams (Brooklyn still mourns). Gay rights, car culture, and the Reagan Revolution. Scientology, mega-churches, Buddhist chic, and exercise videos. If they didn’t actually start in California, they got big and came to national attention there. Without the innovations of Silicon Valley, would you recognize your mobile phone or computer? Would you recognize yourself? It’s the same with climate change. California in the Great Drought is once again Exhibit A, a living diorama of how the future is going to look for a lot of us. And the present moment -- right now in 2015 -- reminds me of San Francisco as the AIDS epidemic broke out. Back then we had no idea how bad things were going to get, and that is likely to be true now, as well. As usual, California is giving us a preview of our world to come. The Arrival of the Bone-Dry New Normal On the U.S. Drought Monitor’s current map, a large purple bruise spreads across the core of California, covering almost half the state. Purple indicates “exceptional drought,” the direst category, the one that tops both “severe” and “extreme.” If you combine all three, 95% of the state is covered. In other words, California is hurting. Admittedly, conditions are better than at this time last year when 100% of the state was at least “severe.” Recent summer rains have somewhat dulled the edge of the drought, now in its fourth year. Full recovery, however, would require about a foot of rain statewide between now and January, a veritable deluge for places like Fresno, which in good times only get that much rain in a full year. To be clear, the current drought may not have been caused by climate change. After all, California has a long history of periodic fierce droughts that arise from entirely natural causes, some of them lasting a decade or more. Even so, at a minimum climate change remains a potent factor in the present disaster. The fundamental difference between California’s current desiccation and its historical antecedents is that present conditions are hotter thanks to climate change, and hotter means drier since evaporation increases with temperature. Moreover, the relationship between the two is non-linear: as temperature creeps up, evaporation gallops. Bottom line: the droughts of the future will be much more brutal -- and destructive -- than those of the past. California is already on average about 1.7° Fahrenheit hotter than a century ago, and its rate of warming is expected to triple in the century ahead. The evaporative response to this increase will powerfully amplify future droughts in unprecedented ways, no matter their causes. Throughout the state, draconian cutbacks in water use remain in force. Some agricultural districts are receiving 0% of the federally controlled irrigation water they received in past years, while state water deliveries are running at about 15% of normal. Meanwhile, a staggering 5,200 wildfires have burned in the state’s forests and chaparral country this year, although timely rains everywhere but in the northern parts of California and the rapid responses of a beefed-up army of firefighters limited the burning to less acreage than last year -- at least until recently. The blow-up of the Rocky Fire, north of San Francisco, in the early days of August -- it burned through 20,000 acres in just a few hours -- may change that mildly promising statistic. And the fire season still has months to go. So how is this a trendsetter, a harbinger for lands to the east? California’s drought is deep and long -- we don’t yet know how long -- and the very long-term forecast for an immense portion of western North America, stretching from California to Texas and north to South Dakota, is for a future of the same, only worse. Here is the unvarnished version of that future (on which an impressive number of climate models appear to agree) as expressed in a paperthat appeared in Science Advances last February: “The mean state of drought in the late 21st century over the Central Plains and Southwest will likely exceed even the most severe mega-drought periods of the Medieval era in both high and moderate emissions scenarios, representing an unprecedented fundamental shift with respect to the last millennium.” Let’s unpack that a little bit: principal author Benjamin Cook of NASA and his colleagues from Columbia and Cornell universities are saying that climate change will bring to the continent a “new normal” more brutally dry than even the multiple-decades-long droughts that caused the Native American societies of Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde to collapse. This, they add, is now expected to happen even if greenhouse gas emissions are significantly lowered in the decades to come. The impact of such droughts, they conclude, will exceed the bounds of anything known in the history of the continent or in its scientifically reconstructed pre-history. In other words, the California drought of recent years offers only a foretaste of what is to come. Incidentally, Cook, et al. are by no means outliers in the literature of climate prediction. Other important studies with similar forecasts support a steadily broadening consensus on the subject. And North American droughts will have to compete for attention with countless other climate change impacts, especially the hundreds of millions of refugees worldwide who will be put into motion by rising sea levels and other forces that will render their present homes unlivable. A User’s Guide to Climate Change If California points the way to dry times ahead, it also gives us an early glimpse of how a responsible society will try to live with and adjust to a warmer future. The state has imposed stringent new limits on water use and is actively enforcing them, and in general, individual consumers have responded positively to the new requirements, in some cases even exceeding mandated conservation goals. In a similar spirit, the state has augmented its wildland fire-fighting capacity to good effect, even as the fire danger has approached levels never before seen. Perhaps most impressively the state has adopted its own pioneering cap-and-trade program aimed at rolling back total greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels. Under cap-and-trade, carbon polluters have to obtain permits to continue their emissions, and only a finite number of such permits are made available. A coal-burning power plant or a refinery has to buy its permit from the state or from another company that already has one. This way, a ceiling is established for total greenhouse gases emitted by the most energy-intensive sectors of the economy. Although the jury may still be out on how well the program meets its goals, there is no debating its positive impact on the state treasury. In the fiscal year just begun, the auction of permits under California’s cap-and-trade program will net approximately $2.2 billion, a windfall that will be spent on mass transit, affordable housing, and a range of climate-adaptation programs. And by the way, the warnings of nay-sayers and climate deniers that cap-and-trade would prove a drag on the economy have, by the way, proved groundless. In a manner similar to the U.N.’s prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, California now publishes an assessment every three years of both its vulnerability to climate change and the steps it plans to take to mitigate or adapt to its effects. The report is a model of its kind and draws on copious California-specific scientific research, some of which is funded by the state. You might think California’s neighbors would follow suit, and eventually, as with most things Californian, they undoubtedly will. If President Obama’s just-announced “Clean Power Plan” withstands the expected court challenges, it will prove a powerful spur in that direction as it mandates state-by-state reductions in power plant carbon emissions that will, in the end, drive them 32% below 2005 levels. Many states will undoubtedly have to adopt cap-and-trade systems in order to comply. As they set about devising their own programs, where do you think they will look for a workable example? You guessed it: California. An “Island” Again, or Nearly So In the seventeenth century, Spanish cartographers thought California was an island separated from the rest of North America by the legendary Straits of Anian. In some ways, nothing has changed. In late July, while California Governor Jerry Brown was at the Vatican joining Pope Francis in calling for urgent global action to combat climate change, his opposite numbers across the putative straits continued to assume the posture of startled ostriches. Doug Ducey, the Republican governor of Arizona, admits that the climate may indeed be changing but doubts that humans play a causal role in it. Susana Martinez of New Mexico, also a Republican, continues to insist that climate science is inconclusive, while former governor of Texas and current presidential candidate Rick Perry adamantly remains “not a scientist,” although he knew enough to inform us in his 2012 campaign screed Fed Upthat climate change science is “a contrived phony mess.” In general, when it comes to climate change, the leadership of statehouses across the country remains as troglodytic as the House of Representatives. Only in Hawaii, Oregon and Washington on the West Coast, Minnesota in the Midwest, and a handful of Northeastern states will governors even acknowledge the importance of acting to curb climate change as well as adapt to it. This year, the deniers may get a boost from an unlikely source. Warm surface waters seem to be brewing something special in the Pacific Ocean. Says one researcher, “The El Niño event currently ongoing in the eastern and central Pacific is strengthening. The only question is whether it will be just a significant event, or a huge one.” El Niño draws the winter Pacific storm track southward, bringing precipitation to southern California, Arizona, and points eastward. If the southern tier of states has a wet winter, the Republican rain-dancers will feel confirmed in their official doubt and denialism, much as a broken clock is right at least twice a day. Occasional El Niños, however, will not avert the long-term new normal for California and much of the West. As that state is showing, adaptation will soften some of the blows, and possibly, if we act soon enough and strongly enough, we may manage to cap the overall changes at some still livable level. The jury will be out on that for quite some time. Meanwhile, as in pre-AIDS San Francisco, we are all still in a state of at least semi-innocence. Maybe we can imagine in an intellectual way what it might be like to lose the forests across half of the continent, but can any of us conjure the feeling of how that would be? After many missteps and halting starts, the medical and public health establishments finally came to the assistance of the victims of AIDS. As difficult as that was, it was easy compared to the remedies climate change will demand. And for much of the damage there will be no remedy. Get ready.
The dark side of Donald Trump: How gridlock leads to dangerous populism & authoritarian zeal
Of the many ways Donald Trump has distinguished himself from his fellow Republican presidential candidates, his flamboyant xenophobia and protectionism have garnered the most attention. And that was still the case this past weekend, when the billionaire real estate mogul, reality television star and “cherisher” of women went on “Meet the Press” to tell host Chuck Todd that a President Trump would work hard to deport more than 11 million people. “We’re going to keep the families together,” Trump promised. But only so long as they understood that regardless of what the 14th Amendment might say, these American-born children of immigrations would “have to go,” too. As my colleague Joan Walsh has pointed out already, this is a prescription for turning the entire country into a charnel house for civil rights that would make today’s Arizona seem comparatively benign. If the policy were truly enforced with the kind of rigor that Trump promises and his supporters crave, the result would be “a massive police state,” as Walsh puts it. The number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents would increase three-fold under Trump; and anyone who still failed to understand President Trump’s message would be encouraged to look no further than the southern border, where a giant wall would stand and carry on the Berlin and West Bank tradition. The racial hue of Trump’s vision is obvious, and it’s understandable that commentators are inclined to see Trumpism through that lens. But there was another important Trump-related media development over the weekend. It was a stellar piece by the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel, who recently spent some time in Flint, Michigan, talking to some of “the Donald’s” biggest fans. And while nostalgia for an era when whiteness meant more than it does today was common, Weigel’s piece suggests that racial anxiety isn’t the main reason these folks are embracing Trump. What they like about him, it appears, is that he is a more convincing authoritarian. “I don’t think he’d go to Congress and ask,” one supporter said to Weigel about a hypothetical President Trump. “I think he’d just do it.” A dutiful student of high school civics knows that the framers of the Constitution took great pains to keep such a sentiment from governing the country. But for the voters Weigel spoke to, such a display of presidential “strength” (a favored word of Trump and his believers) is badly needed. “He lets people know what he’s going to do, not what to ask for,” a 51-year-old named Bob Parsons said of Trump, approvingly. He then compared the former host of “The Apprentice” to Ronald Reagan. Unsurprisingly, Trump’s fans say they appreciate their man’s disdain for “political correctness.” But although the phrase has been repeated so frequently by pro-Trump opponents of immigration that even (some) conservatives now recognize it as a dog whistle, when the people Weigel spoke with offer their explanation of what plagues the U.S., immigrants and foreigners are not the chief villains. They’re the main beneficiaries of whatever’s afflicting the people of Flint and elsewhere, no doubt. But they’re not ultimately responsible for the dynamic that’s hurting American workers. That role, according to Trump’s backers, goes to American corporations and politicians. What explains the American elite’s leaving the working class hanging by a thread? Corruption is part of it, but it’s not the primary reason. The simpler explanation, which Trump himself repeats in some form or another ad nauseam, is that these elites are just hopeless fools. “Our leaders are stupid,” Trump said earlier this month during a Fox News debate. “Our politicians are stupid and the Mexican government is much smarter.” During all sorts of trade negotiations, Trump has argued, “people in Washington … don’t know what they’re doing.” It’s less a grand conspiracy between corporations and Chinese/Mexican workers, in other words, than rank incompetence. If you understand the global economy and deindustrialization from that angle, Trump’s appeal makes more sense. It’s still totally wrong, mind you; but at least it hangs together, in its haphazard way. If the American middle class really is shrinking because those clowns in Washington couldn’t negotiate their way out of a paper bag; and if good-paying manufacturing jobs really are moving abroad because most politicians are too feckless and weak to stand up for (white) working Americans, lest they be called “politically incorrect,” then a guy with Trump’s experience, resources and proclivities is absolutely what’s needed. But as Weigel hints in his report, the story Trump fans are telling themselves is a fantasy. Whether globalization-as-deindustrialization was a historical, technological and economic necessity or the product of a series of clear and straightforward decisions is up for debate. But the idea that throughout the past 40 years, and under multiple presidential administrations, some of the most ambitious, hardworking and intelligent people in America were simply unable to keep negotiators from other countries from bamboozling them — that idea is not on the table. Because that idea is ridiculous. The real world is not so simple. For that matter, most unreal worlds aren’t, either. The authoritarian mind-set doesn’t have much patience for nuance or complication, however. It prefers to see the world as comprehensible, bordering on self-evident. And whenever it is confronted with a reality too opaque and intricate to be easily simplified, that’s when a kind of flattening mysticism — or “romance,” as Weigel calls it — steps in to abolish complexity and sand away rough edges. Channeled as it currently is in Trump’s direction, this free-floating rage at the status quo and this authoritarian desire for a great leader to enact justice through force of will is relatively harmless. What should worry the rest of us, though, is the prospect that Trump isn’t a one-off but rather a sign of things to come.
