Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 1016

Why El Niño has never been more turbulent

A strong El Niño is building in the Pacific Ocean and is predicted to bring giant storms and rainfall that—combined with the effects of climate change—could have repercussions worldwide. “We’re predicting that this El Niño could be among the strongest in the historical record dating back to 1950,” Mike Halpert, deputy director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center, told SFGate. As waters in the Pacific Ocean heat up, climatologists are predicting a peak of El Niño conditions by late fall, early winter, according to the updated forecast released Thursday by the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Based on the increased rates of oceanic warming, forecasters announced that there is a 90 percent chance that El Niño will strike during winter, and an 85 percent chance it will continue through spring 2016. This will likely lead to "above-normal hurricane seasons" in both the central and eastern Pacific hurricane basins. Although climatologists cannot predict all the affects that a monster-sized El Niño forecast will have on climate change, the reverse—the influence of climate change on El Niño—is a growing debate, CNN reports. Some research, published in Nature Climate Change in 2014, suggests that climate change could impact the number of likely El Niños are likely to increase. It also suggests that "super" El Niños are twice as likely to occur. Though the United Nations does not think that climate change could impact upcoming El Niños, that does not mean that the effects won't be more severe. A likely by-product of global warming is also more extreme precipitation events and warmer temperatures that could contain more water vapor in the atmosphere and make El Niño flooding increasingly devastating. In effect, the upcoming El Niño could also ease the arid conditions of California's landscape, and subsequently curb some of the drought's negative impacts on agriculture. A SOLUTION TO CALIFORNIA'S DROUGHT? The solution to California's four-year drought could come as rainy relief known as El Niño. Scientists say that recent extreme weather in Texas and Oklahoma shows the state might see a wet, cold climate in fall and winter. "It will be the 'great wet hope' and it will deliver a wet winter," said Bill Patzert, a climatologist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratories told ABC7 in July. El Niño is the unusual warming of the Pacific Ocean near the equator that brings large amounts of rain, and in 1997 and 1998, was responsible for torrential downpours, destructive flooding, and mudslides throughout Southern California. An El Niño year could make a big impact on ending California's drought. "That's good news for California," Mike Halpert, deputy director for NOAA's climate prediction center in College Park, Maryland, tells San Jose Mercury News. "There are obviously no guarantees, but above-normal rainfall is becoming more likely." People affected by the drought understand that it is not just about rising food prices, uglier lawns, shorter showers, and dirtier cars. Californians were issued strict water mandates in April, limiting their use of the natural resource. The restrictions so far have been successful, with nearly 29 percent of the state reducing its water use, but dry spells are predicted to become more common in the coming years. Not everyone is as optimistic that El Niño will help the drought, SCPR reports. “We would need something on order with the wettest year on record to balance the four year deficit,” Kevin Werner, who directs NOAA’s western regional climate services told SCPR. Historically, strong El Niños have been linked to rainy weather in California and throughout South America—and droughts in Australia and Asia. Peru declared an El Niño emergency recently and warned that flooding could begin this summer, as Citigroup and the United Nations warned about potential price increases in wheat and other food staples. These would result in decreased harvests in Australia and other countries. More from Attn: California is throwing 'shade balls' at its drought problem 6 ways climate change will drastically change your everyday life  This one comic perfectly shuts down deniers of global warming  A strong El Niño is building in the Pacific Ocean and is predicted to bring giant storms and rainfall that—combined with the effects of climate change—could have repercussions worldwide. “We’re predicting that this El Niño could be among the strongest in the historical record dating back to 1950,” Mike Halpert, deputy director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center, told SFGate. As waters in the Pacific Ocean heat up, climatologists are predicting a peak of El Niño conditions by late fall, early winter, according to the updated forecast released Thursday by the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Based on the increased rates of oceanic warming, forecasters announced that there is a 90 percent chance that El Niño will strike during winter, and an 85 percent chance it will continue through spring 2016. This will likely lead to "above-normal hurricane seasons" in both the central and eastern Pacific hurricane basins. Although climatologists cannot predict all the affects that a monster-sized El Niño forecast will have on climate change, the reverse—the influence of climate change on El Niño—is a growing debate, CNN reports. Some research, published in Nature Climate Change in 2014, suggests that climate change could impact the number of likely El Niños are likely to increase. It also suggests that "super" El Niños are twice as likely to occur. Though the United Nations does not think that climate change could impact upcoming El Niños, that does not mean that the effects won't be more severe. A likely by-product of global warming is also more extreme precipitation events and warmer temperatures that could contain more water vapor in the atmosphere and make El Niño flooding increasingly devastating. In effect, the upcoming El Niño could also ease the arid conditions of California's landscape, and subsequently curb some of the drought's negative impacts on agriculture. A SOLUTION TO CALIFORNIA'S DROUGHT? The solution to California's four-year drought could come as rainy relief known as El Niño. Scientists say that recent extreme weather in Texas and Oklahoma shows the state might see a wet, cold climate in fall and winter. "It will be the 'great wet hope' and it will deliver a wet winter," said Bill Patzert, a climatologist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratories told ABC7 in July. El Niño is the unusual warming of the Pacific Ocean near the equator that brings large amounts of rain, and in 1997 and 1998, was responsible for torrential downpours, destructive flooding, and mudslides throughout Southern California. An El Niño year could make a big impact on ending California's drought. "That's good news for California," Mike Halpert, deputy director for NOAA's climate prediction center in College Park, Maryland, tells San Jose Mercury News. "There are obviously no guarantees, but above-normal rainfall is becoming more likely." People affected by the drought understand that it is not just about rising food prices, uglier lawns, shorter showers, and dirtier cars. Californians were issued strict water mandates in April, limiting their use of the natural resource. The restrictions so far have been successful, with nearly 29 percent of the state reducing its water use, but dry spells are predicted to become more common in the coming years. Not everyone is as optimistic that El Niño will help the drought, SCPR reports. “We would need something on order with the wettest year on record to balance the four year deficit,” Kevin Werner, who directs NOAA’s western regional climate services told SCPR. Historically, strong El Niños have been linked to rainy weather in California and throughout South America—and droughts in Australia and Asia. Peru declared an El Niño emergency recently and warned that flooding could begin this summer, as Citigroup and the United Nations warned about potential price increases in wheat and other food staples. These would result in decreased harvests in Australia and other countries. More from Attn: California is throwing 'shade balls' at its drought problem 6 ways climate change will drastically change your everyday life  This one comic perfectly shuts down deniers of global warming 

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We have autism all wrong: The radical new approach we need to understand and treat it

The first thing I noticed about Jesse was the fear and anxiety in his eyes. I was visiting a small New England school district when I heard about an eight-year-old boy who had recently transferred from a nearby district. There he had earned a dubious distinction: administrators called Jesse the worst behavior problem they had ever encountered. It wasn’t difficult to understand why, given his challenges. Jesse, a sturdy boy with straight brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses, struggled with severe social anxiety, extreme sensitivity to touch, and difficulty processing language. He also had a seizure disorder that was detected when he was a toddler, about the time he lost the ability to speak. He communicated with little more than guttural sounds and grunts, pushing away people and objects or physically leading people to what he wanted. Since it was so difficult for Jesse to make his needs known, he often seemed aggravated and miserable. He sometimes took out his frustration and anxiety on himself, pounding his fists against his thighs and his forehead, covering his body with bruises. When teachers tried to direct him from one activity to the next, he often reacted with flailing limbs or by pushing them away with his arms or legs. Reports from the previous school described kicking, scratching, and biting episodes escalating into fits so severe that almost daily, three or four adults had to pin the boy down to subdue him, then isolate him in a “time-out” room. The staff had interpreted all of this as willful, uncooperative behavior. But Jesse’s mother knew better. She understood that his actions were his way of communicating—a direct reflection of his confusion, agitation, and fear. When she explained to the administrators that her son struggled with sensory challenges that made him unusually sensitive to loud noises and being touched, they had been dismissive. Clearly, they insisted, the boy was displaying noncompliant behavior. In their eyes, Jesse was strong-willed, stubborn, and defiant, and their response was to try to break him—to treat him as a trainer would treat a horse. What did these educators offer to help Jesse learn to communicate? Practically nothing. The district’s policy was to focus first on controlling a child’s behavior, and, only after achieving success, to address the area of communication. They had it all wrong. I had heard so many awful things about Jesse that I was intrigued to come face-to-face with him. When I finally did, I didn’t observe any of what I had heard described—not the defiance, not the aggression, not the willful disobedience. What I saw was a boy who was understandably frightened, anxious, and constantly on guard. And I saw something else: Jesse’s extreme vigilance and anxiety were manifestations of the inevitable damage that occurs when people— however well meaning—completely misunderstand the behavior of individuals with autism. How does this happen? The short answer is that caregivers neglect to ask “Why?” They don’t listen carefully or observe closely. Instead of seeking to understand the child’s perspective and experience, they simply try to manage the behavior. Unfortunately this behavioral-assessment approach—that is, using a checklist of deficits—has become the standard way of determining whether a person has autism. We say a child has autism if he displays a combination of traits and behaviors that are deemed to be problematic: difficulty in communicating, trouble developing relationships, and a restricted repertoire of interests and behaviors, including repetitive speech—known as echolalia—and actions, such as rocking, arm flapping, and spinning. Professionals observe these “autistic behaviors” and then assess the people who display them by using a sort of circular reasoning: Why does Rachel flap her hands? Because she has autism. Why has she been diagnosed with autism? Because she flaps. Following this approach means defining a child as the sum of his deficits. How best to help such a child? By managing those behaviors or attempting to get rid of them: to halt the rocking, to squelch the echoing speech, to reduce the flapping. And what denotes success? The more we can make a child look and act “normal,” the better. This way of understanding and supporting people with autism is sorely lacking. It treats the person as a problem to be solved rather than an individual to be understood. It fails to show respect for the individual and ignores that person’s perspective and experience. It neglects the importance of listening, paying close attention to what the person is trying to tell us, whether through speech or patterns of behavior. On top of that, in my experience it doesn’t work—and often makes things worse. What’s more helpful is to dig deeper: to ask what is motivating these behaviors, what is underlying these patterns. It’s more appropriate, and more effective, to ask “Why?” Why is she rocking? Why does he line up his toy cars that way, and why only when he arrives home from school? Why does he stare at his hands fluttering in front of his eyes, and always during English class and recess? Why does she repeat certain phrases when she is upset? The Challenge of Dysregulation Usually the answer is that the person is experiencing some degree of emotional dysregulation. When we are well regulated emotionally, we are most available for learning and engaging with others. We all strive to be alert, focused, and prepared to participate in activities in our daily lives. Our neurological systems help by filtering out excessive stimulation, telling us when we’re hungry or tired or when to protect ourselves from danger. People with autism, primarily due to underlying neurology (the way the brain’s wiring works), are unusually vulnerable to everyday emotional and physiological challenges. So they experience more feelings of discomfort, anxiety, and confusion than others. They also have more difficulty learning how to cope with these feelings and challenges. To be clear: Difficulty staying well regulated emotionally and physiologically should be a core, defining feature of autism. Unfortunately professionals have long overlooked this, focusing on the resulting behaviors instead of the underlying causes. If you know a person with autism, consider what makes this person less able to stay well regulated: problems in communicating, environments that are chaotic, people who are confusing because they talk or move too quickly, unexpected change, excessive worry about things that are uncertain. Then there are associated challenges, such as sensory sensitivities to touch and sound, motor and movement disturbances, sleep deprivation, allergies, and gastrointestinal issues. Of course people with autism aren’t alone in experiencing these challenges. We all feel dysregulated from time to time. Speaking in front of a large audience, you might feel sweat collecting on your brow, your hands might quiver, your heart might race. Wearing a scratchy wool sweater might be so irritating that you can’t focus. When your normal morning routine—coffee, newspaper, shower— is thrown off by an unexpected intrusion, you might feel out of sorts for the rest of the morning. When these factors accumulate—you miss sleep, you’re under a deadline, you skip lunch, and then your computer crashes—it’s easy to beme extremely agitated. We all have these challenges, but people with autism are unusually ill equipped to deal with them because of their neurology. That makes them far more vulnerable than others—that is, their threshold can be much lower—and they have fewer innate coping strategies. In many cases, they also have sensory-processing differences: they are either highly sensitive or undersensitive to sound, light, touch, and other sensations and therefore less able to manage. In addition many people with autism are innately unaware of how others might interpret their actions when they are dysregulated. Feeling emotionally dysregulated affects different people in different ways. Often the reactions are immediate and impulsive. A child’s behavior may shift suddenly, with no apparent cause. When a child is exposed to a loud noise, for instance, he might drop to the floor. I often see children refuse to enter a gym class or the school cafeteria. Their teachers might mistakenly believe that this is willful disobedience, a planned attempt to escape an activity the child doesn’t enjoy. The reason is typically much deeper than that: the child can’t bear the volume or quality of the noise or the chaos of the setting. When I worked in a preschool autism program based in a hospital, the children ate lunch in the classroom on trays brought up from the hospital cafeteria. Once a teacher and I led the four- and five-year-olds to the cafeteria’s kitchen so they could see how the trays were cleaned. At exactly the moment we arrived, the industrial-size dishwasher spewed forth steam and suddenly emitted a high-frequency SSSHHHH! Instantly all the children dropped their trays, some covered their ears and screamed, and they ran for the exit. It was as if a monster had suddenly appeared, inches from their faces. That’s dysregulation, sudden and visible. Sometimes the cause of dysregulation is less obvious. While visiting a preschool where I consulted, I was walking outdoors with Dylan, a four-year-old with autism, when suddenly and without warning, he dropped to the ground and refused to proceed. I gently picked him up and helped him along, but soon he dropped again. As I helped him again, we heard a dog barking. He immediately panicked and tried to run away from the sound. It dawned on me that Dylan, with his hypersensitive hearing, had heard the dog all along, but its bark had been so distant that it hadn’t registered with me. What might have appeared as uncooperative, random, or defiant behavior was in fact a very understandable expression of fear. That too is dysregulation. Many children with autism flap their arms, either as an expression of their level of excitement or to calm themselves. When Conner felt joyful, and sometimes when he was anxious about a transition between activities, he did what his parents called his “happy dance.” He stood on his toes and stepped forward, then back, while flicking his fingers in front of his eyes. An earlier therapist had advised Conner’s parents to respond with a firm “Hands down!” And if he didn’t comply: “Sit down, sit on hands!” (To their credit, his parents ignored the suggestion, instead helping Conner to label his feelings or easing transitions by telling him what to expect.) It’s easy to dismiss flapping or rocking or dancing as just so much “autistic behavior.” But parents raising children with autism, and the professionals who work with them, need to take an extra step. Like detectives, we need to examine and consider all available clues and work to discern what is underlying or triggering a particular reaction. What is making the child dysregulated? Is it internal or external? Is it visible? Is it in the sensory realm? Is it pain, or physical discomfort, or a traumatic memory? In most cases the child can’t explain the behavior in words, so it’s up to those close to him to sort through the clues. Coping Strategies and Regulating Behaviors Here is the important irony: Most of the behaviors commonly labeled “autistic behaviors” aren’t actually deficits at all. They’re strategies the person uses to feel better regulated emotionally. In other words, in many cases they’re strengths. When a child with extreme sensory sensitivities enters a noisy room and cups his hands over his ears and rocks his body, this pattern of behavior is simultaneously a sign of dysregulation and a coping strategy. You could call it “autistic behavior.” Or you could ask “Why is he doing that?” The answer is twofold: the child is revealing that something is amiss and that he has developed a response to shut out what is causing him anxiety. Whether or not we realize it, all humans employ these rituals and habits to help us regulate ourselves—soothe ourselves, calm our minds and bodies, and help us cope. Perhaps, like many people, you find public speaking unnerving. To calm yourself, you might take a series of deep breaths or pace back and forth while you speak. That’s not exactly the way humans typically breathe or behave in public, but an observer would not judge this as deviant behavior. The person would understand that it’s your way to cope with the stress of the situation and to soothe your nerves so that you can do your best. When I return home from a day of work, I immediately check the mailbox, then sort the mail, placing bills in one pile, magazines in another, and tossing what I don’t need in the recycling bin. It would take a significant distraction for me to skip that small but important ritual; then I would feel out of sorts on some level until I took care of it. It’s a calming routine; it’s how I come home. When my wife has had a bad day or feels worried, she organizes and cleans. If I come home and find our home more immaculate than usual, I know that something is bothering her. Religious services include layers of comforting rituals—chanting and praying, symbolic gestures and body movements—to enable people to let go of the worries and trivialities of everyday life and enter a higher spiritual realm. For people with autism, comforting rituals and coping mechanisms come in all varieties: moving in particular ways, speaking in various patterns, carrying familiar items, lining up objects to create predictable and unchanging surroundings. Even proximity to certain people can serve as a regulating strategy. Excerpted from "Uniquely Human: A Different Way of Seeing Autism" by Barry M. Prizant PhD with Tom Fields-Meyer. Published by Simon and Schuster. Copyright 2015 by Childhood Communication Services Inc. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.The first thing I noticed about Jesse was the fear and anxiety in his eyes. I was visiting a small New England school district when I heard about an eight-year-old boy who had recently transferred from a nearby district. There he had earned a dubious distinction: administrators called Jesse the worst behavior problem they had ever encountered. It wasn’t difficult to understand why, given his challenges. Jesse, a sturdy boy with straight brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses, struggled with severe social anxiety, extreme sensitivity to touch, and difficulty processing language. He also had a seizure disorder that was detected when he was a toddler, about the time he lost the ability to speak. He communicated with little more than guttural sounds and grunts, pushing away people and objects or physically leading people to what he wanted. Since it was so difficult for Jesse to make his needs known, he often seemed aggravated and miserable. He sometimes took out his frustration and anxiety on himself, pounding his fists against his thighs and his forehead, covering his body with bruises. When teachers tried to direct him from one activity to the next, he often reacted with flailing limbs or by pushing them away with his arms or legs. Reports from the previous school described kicking, scratching, and biting episodes escalating into fits so severe that almost daily, three or four adults had to pin the boy down to subdue him, then isolate him in a “time-out” room. The staff had interpreted all of this as willful, uncooperative behavior. But Jesse’s mother knew better. She understood that his actions were his way of communicating—a direct reflection of his confusion, agitation, and fear. When she explained to the administrators that her son struggled with sensory challenges that made him unusually sensitive to loud noises and being touched, they had been dismissive. Clearly, they insisted, the boy was displaying noncompliant behavior. In their eyes, Jesse was strong-willed, stubborn, and defiant, and their response was to try to break him—to treat him as a trainer would treat a horse. What did these educators offer to help Jesse learn to communicate? Practically nothing. The district’s policy was to focus first on controlling a child’s behavior, and, only after achieving success, to address the area of communication. They had it all wrong. I had heard so many awful things about Jesse that I was intrigued to come face-to-face with him. When I finally did, I didn’t observe any of what I had heard described—not the defiance, not the aggression, not the willful disobedience. What I saw was a boy who was understandably frightened, anxious, and constantly on guard. And I saw something else: Jesse’s extreme vigilance and anxiety were manifestations of the inevitable damage that occurs when people— however well meaning—completely misunderstand the behavior of individuals with autism. How does this happen? The short answer is that caregivers neglect to ask “Why?” They don’t listen carefully or observe closely. Instead of seeking to understand the child’s perspective and experience, they simply try to manage the behavior. Unfortunately this behavioral-assessment approach—that is, using a checklist of deficits—has become the standard way of determining whether a person has autism. We say a child has autism if he displays a combination of traits and behaviors that are deemed to be problematic: difficulty in communicating, trouble developing relationships, and a restricted repertoire of interests and behaviors, including repetitive speech—known as echolalia—and actions, such as rocking, arm flapping, and spinning. Professionals observe these “autistic behaviors” and then assess the people who display them by using a sort of circular reasoning: Why does Rachel flap her hands? Because she has autism. Why has she been diagnosed with autism? Because she flaps. Following this approach means defining a child as the sum of his deficits. How best to help such a child? By managing those behaviors or attempting to get rid of them: to halt the rocking, to squelch the echoing speech, to reduce the flapping. And what denotes success? The more we can make a child look and act “normal,” the better. This way of understanding and supporting people with autism is sorely lacking. It treats the person as a problem to be solved rather than an individual to be understood. It fails to show respect for the individual and ignores that person’s perspective and experience. It neglects the importance of listening, paying close attention to what the person is trying to tell us, whether through speech or patterns of behavior. On top of that, in my experience it doesn’t work—and often makes things worse. What’s more helpful is to dig deeper: to ask what is motivating these behaviors, what is underlying these patterns. It’s more appropriate, and more effective, to ask “Why?” Why is she rocking? Why does he line up his toy cars that way, and why only when he arrives home from school? Why does he stare at his hands fluttering in front of his eyes, and always during English class and recess? Why does she repeat certain phrases when she is upset? The Challenge of Dysregulation Usually the answer is that the person is experiencing some degree of emotional dysregulation. When we are well regulated emotionally, we are most available for learning and engaging with others. We all strive to be alert, focused, and prepared to participate in activities in our daily lives. Our neurological systems help by filtering out excessive stimulation, telling us when we’re hungry or tired or when to protect ourselves from danger. People with autism, primarily due to underlying neurology (the way the brain’s wiring works), are unusually vulnerable to everyday emotional and physiological challenges. So they experience more feelings of discomfort, anxiety, and confusion than others. They also have more difficulty learning how to cope with these feelings and challenges. To be clear: Difficulty staying well regulated emotionally and physiologically should be a core, defining feature of autism. Unfortunately professionals have long overlooked this, focusing on the resulting behaviors instead of the underlying causes. If you know a person with autism, consider what makes this person less able to stay well regulated: problems in communicating, environments that are chaotic, people who are confusing because they talk or move too quickly, unexpected change, excessive worry about things that are uncertain. Then there are associated challenges, such as sensory sensitivities to touch and sound, motor and movement disturbances, sleep deprivation, allergies, and gastrointestinal issues. Of course people with autism aren’t alone in experiencing these challenges. We all feel dysregulated from time to time. Speaking in front of a large audience, you might feel sweat collecting on your brow, your hands might quiver, your heart might race. Wearing a scratchy wool sweater might be so irritating that you can’t focus. When your normal morning routine—coffee, newspaper, shower— is thrown off by an unexpected intrusion, you might feel out of sorts for the rest of the morning. When these factors accumulate—you miss sleep, you’re under a deadline, you skip lunch, and then your computer crashes—it’s easy to beme extremely agitated. We all have these challenges, but people with autism are unusually ill equipped to deal with them because of their neurology. That makes them far more vulnerable than others—that is, their threshold can be much lower—and they have fewer innate coping strategies. In many cases, they also have sensory-processing differences: they are either highly sensitive or undersensitive to sound, light, touch, and other sensations and therefore less able to manage. In addition many people with autism are innately unaware of how others might interpret their actions when they are dysregulated. Feeling emotionally dysregulated affects different people in different ways. Often the reactions are immediate and impulsive. A child’s behavior may shift suddenly, with no apparent cause. When a child is exposed to a loud noise, for instance, he might drop to the floor. I often see children refuse to enter a gym class or the school cafeteria. Their teachers might mistakenly believe that this is willful disobedience, a planned attempt to escape an activity the child doesn’t enjoy. The reason is typically much deeper than that: the child can’t bear the volume or quality of the noise or the chaos of the setting. When I worked in a preschool autism program based in a hospital, the children ate lunch in the classroom on trays brought up from the hospital cafeteria. Once a teacher and I led the four- and five-year-olds to the cafeteria’s kitchen so they could see how the trays were cleaned. At exactly the moment we arrived, the industrial-size dishwasher spewed forth steam and suddenly emitted a high-frequency SSSHHHH! Instantly all the children dropped their trays, some covered their ears and screamed, and they ran for the exit. It was as if a monster had suddenly appeared, inches from their faces. That’s dysregulation, sudden and visible. Sometimes the cause of dysregulation is less obvious. While visiting a preschool where I consulted, I was walking outdoors with Dylan, a four-year-old with autism, when suddenly and without warning, he dropped to the ground and refused to proceed. I gently picked him up and helped him along, but soon he dropped again. As I helped him again, we heard a dog barking. He immediately panicked and tried to run away from the sound. It dawned on me that Dylan, with his hypersensitive hearing, had heard the dog all along, but its bark had been so distant that it hadn’t registered with me. What might have appeared as uncooperative, random, or defiant behavior was in fact a very understandable expression of fear. That too is dysregulation. Many children with autism flap their arms, either as an expression of their level of excitement or to calm themselves. When Conner felt joyful, and sometimes when he was anxious about a transition between activities, he did what his parents called his “happy dance.” He stood on his toes and stepped forward, then back, while flicking his fingers in front of his eyes. An earlier therapist had advised Conner’s parents to respond with a firm “Hands down!” And if he didn’t comply: “Sit down, sit on hands!” (To their credit, his parents ignored the suggestion, instead helping Conner to label his feelings or easing transitions by telling him what to expect.) It’s easy to dismiss flapping or rocking or dancing as just so much “autistic behavior.” But parents raising children with autism, and the professionals who work with them, need to take an extra step. Like detectives, we need to examine and consider all available clues and work to discern what is underlying or triggering a particular reaction. What is making the child dysregulated? Is it internal or external? Is it visible? Is it in the sensory realm? Is it pain, or physical discomfort, or a traumatic memory? In most cases the child can’t explain the behavior in words, so it’s up to those close to him to sort through the clues. Coping Strategies and Regulating Behaviors Here is the important irony: Most of the behaviors commonly labeled “autistic behaviors” aren’t actually deficits at all. They’re strategies the person uses to feel better regulated emotionally. In other words, in many cases they’re strengths. When a child with extreme sensory sensitivities enters a noisy room and cups his hands over his ears and rocks his body, this pattern of behavior is simultaneously a sign of dysregulation and a coping strategy. You could call it “autistic behavior.” Or you could ask “Why is he doing that?” The answer is twofold: the child is revealing that something is amiss and that he has developed a response to shut out what is causing him anxiety. Whether or not we realize it, all humans employ these rituals and habits to help us regulate ourselves—soothe ourselves, calm our minds and bodies, and help us cope. Perhaps, like many people, you find public speaking unnerving. To calm yourself, you might take a series of deep breaths or pace back and forth while you speak. That’s not exactly the way humans typically breathe or behave in public, but an observer would not judge this as deviant behavior. The person would understand that it’s your way to cope with the stress of the situation and to soothe your nerves so that you can do your best. When I return home from a day of work, I immediately check the mailbox, then sort the mail, placing bills in one pile, magazines in another, and tossing what I don’t need in the recycling bin. It would take a significant distraction for me to skip that small but important ritual; then I would feel out of sorts on some level until I took care of it. It’s a calming routine; it’s how I come home. When my wife has had a bad day or feels worried, she organizes and cleans. If I come home and find our home more immaculate than usual, I know that something is bothering her. Religious services include layers of comforting rituals—chanting and praying, symbolic gestures and body movements—to enable people to let go of the worries and trivialities of everyday life and enter a higher spiritual realm. For people with autism, comforting rituals and coping mechanisms come in all varieties: moving in particular ways, speaking in various patterns, carrying familiar items, lining up objects to create predictable and unchanging surroundings. Even proximity to certain people can serve as a regulating strategy. Excerpted from "Uniquely Human: A Different Way of Seeing Autism" by Barry M. Prizant PhD with Tom Fields-Meyer. Published by Simon and Schuster. Copyright 2015 by Childhood Communication Services Inc. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

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The cheapest (and most expensive) cities in America to buy weed

The western US has marijuana legalization in four states—Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington—as well as legal medical marijuana in a number more, including California, with the most wide-open medical marijuana system of all. The east, not so much. The nation's capital has personal legalization, otherwise, outside of a handful of tightly regulated medical marijuana states, that's about it. A comparison of marijuana prices courtesy of PriceofWeed.com and the Washington Post's Wonk Blog makes evident the pot prohibition premium East Coast pot smokers are paying in comparison with their West Coast brethren. The premium is essentially a "risk tax" imposed on consumers when providers in a market increase their prices to account for the possibility of being arrested for their efforts. There are a couple of exceptions to the general rule, which we will discuss below. In the meantime, here are pot prices per ounce reported in big cities out west: Seattle, $212 Denver, $233 San Francisco, $272 Los Angeles, $284 And on the East Coast and the Midwest: Miami, $250 Chicago, $300 New York, $345 Washington, DC, $350 While there is some variation among cities, the average price in the western cities is $250 an ounce, while the average price for eastern and midwestern cities is $311. That's a $61-an-ounce prohibition premium for consumers east of the Mississippi, adding roughly 25% to the price of an ounce out west. The two anomalies that immediately jump out are Miami, where prices are surprisingly low, and Washington, DC, where prices are surprisingly high, given that it legalized small-time pot possession and cultivation last year. DC has semi-legalized, but doesn't yet allow retail marijuana commerce, unlike the legal marijuana states, or even California, with its wide-open medical marijuana system. That could partially explain high prices there. Another explanatory factor is that, while DC allows personal grows, it is an entirely urban jurisdiction, with no open spaces for large-scale cultivation. DC is not Humboldt County, and it likely has to import most of the weed it consumes. And it's importing it from places where it is either cultivated illegally or transported illegally from places where it is legal to grow. Similarly Chicago, which has significantly lower prices than the northeastern cities, may be benefitting from relative proximity to legal pot-growing states. It's 700 miles closer to Colorado and the West Coast. When the risk of transporting pot is lessened because the route is shorter, the risk tax goes down. As for Miami, the low prices there are a bit of a mystery. The state has a reputation as an indoor pot cultivation powerhouse, in part because South Florida's muggy climate means home air-conditioning systems run 365 days a year, making it more difficult for police to find and investigate grows based on high electricity bills. But it also has relatively harsh marijuana cultivation laws. It is a historic smuggling center for Latin American drugs, but the data here are for high-grade US weed, not mid-grade Mexican, Colombian or Jamaican, so that doesn't really explain it, either. The Miami anomaly aside, the lesson is clear, and it ain't rocket science: In addition to all the other costs imposed by marijuana prohibition, it hits pot smokers right in the wallet. As a society, we may not want to make marijuana too cheap from fear that people will be inclined to use it to excess. That's where things like excise or luxury taxes come into play, as they have in the western legal states. They create a price floor. If there's a $100 excise tax on an ounce of pot, it doesn't matter how cheaply you can produce it, it's still going to cost $100—plus production costs and profits. The western states aren't taxing it that steeply, but they are effectively creating a floor on pot prices. Still, the taxed weed out west is cheaper than the untaxed weed back east. Nobody likes paying taxes, but a pot tax is still significantly less expensive for consumers than a pot prohibition premium, and the revenues go for the general good, not into the pocket of Billy the Black Market Bud Man.

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Scott Walker can’t be serious: He’s about to expose his own con on healthcare

Wisconsin governor and vanilla pudding made flesh Scott Walker is going through a bit of a slump in his campaign for the White House. After a debate performance that had all the pop and energy of a funeral, Walker’s poll numbers took a dive, both nationally and in Iowa. Then he alienated fiscal conservatives and Tea Party types by signing off on a new taxpayer-funded stadium for the Milwaukee Bucks. Walker needs something new and exciting to drag him out of this rut, so this week he’s going to try to recapture the affections of his party by taking direct aim at the one thing conservatives and Republicans hate most: Obamacare. On Friday, National Review published an op-ed by Walker in which he ran through all the boilerplate Republican criticisms of the Affordable Care Act and also promised that he’ll reveal his Obamacare replacement plan this week. The grand unveiling is apparently going to happen Tuesday at a speech in Minnesota. We don’t have the details yet, but going by what Walker wrote in his op-ed, it sure seems like he’ll be pitching some variety of the Republican healthcare unicorn: a plan that covers more people than Obamacare, costs less than Obamacare, has no mandates and regulates no one. In the op-ed, Walker writes that his health plan will not do many of the things that Obamcare does: he rails against “too much government interference” and “mandates that harm workers, businesses, and the economy.” He complains that Obamacare “taxed and regulated innovation out of the health-care industry" and inveighs against “out-of-control premium increases” (using Heritage Foundation data for a handful of states). “In recent years,” he writes, “hundreds of thousands of workers may have seen their hours cut thanks to Obamacare’s destructive incentives.” May have! That’s a slippery bit of weasel-wording – Walker can’t demonstrate that this happened (because it hasn’t) so he just puts it out there as a frightening possibility. The thing to understand about Obamacare is that it engages with the reality that reforming the healthcare system requires a series of trade-offs. Americans above a certain income threshold are now mandated to purchase insurance, but to help meet this mandate they are provided subsidies. Insurers must abide by certain regulations – they are no longer allowed to deny coverage to the sick – but the individual mandate helps cover those costs by impelling healthy people to purchase plans. Walker doesn’t seem interested in this reality. Instead he’s talking about eliminating mandates and eliminating regulations while boosting coverage and “lower[ing] the burden on taxpayers.” Basically, he’s promising all good things and nothing bad. He endorses coverage for preexisting conditions but rejects Obamacare’s approach of simply requiring insurers to cover them. I’m anxious to see what alternative he has in mind, though I suspect it’s the go-to Republican fallback of federally subsidized high-risk pools in each state (an idea that tends to meet resistance from conservatives when they hear how well-funded those pools have to be in order to work). This desire to produce healthcare legislation that meets every item on the conservative wish list is an all-too-common feature of Republican policymaking – or rather, lack of policymaking, given that the party has conspicuously failed to craft a piece of legislation that satisfies all these competing needs. So what can we expect from Walker on Tuesday? I tend to take a cynical view of these things, so my guess is that he’ll serve up yet another rearrangement of what is now the familiar smattering of Republican health policy ideas: selling insurance across state lines, tort reform, health savings accounts, and, yes, high-risk pools. We can also expect Walker to propose some ill-considered “reforms” to Medicaid. He adheres to the mistaken assumption that people are on Medicaid because they either can’t find a job or refuse to work, and he supports block-granting the program, which would drastically slash Medicaid’s overall budget. But whatever Walker ends up proposing, at least he’ll have a plan. Ask the other Republican candidates what they intend to do after they repeal Obamacare, and chances are excellent you’ll hear a variation of “something.” Donald Trump has an idea for “something terrific.” Jeb Bush envisions “something that doesn’t suppress wages and kill jobs.” Walker is at least threatening to get specific, and even if he stays true to his terminally dull nature and blurps up a bland mish-mash of Republican health policy proposals, he’ll nonetheless be ahead of the pack.

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When oysters tore liberals apart: Inside the war between sustainable farmers & wilderness advocates

The most controversial oysters you probably never heard of were harvested in California's Drakes Estero from the 1930s up until December 2014, when after years of contentious litigation that eventually made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, the National Park Service prevailed in reclaiming the estuary as wilderness. Whether the government had the authority to shut down the Drakes Bay Oyster Company, whether an area could be open to certain forms of agriculture and still be called "wild," and what "wilderness" even means, anyway, are all questions explored in "The Oyster War," reporter Summer Brennan's account of the very public, often fraught battle, which grew to encompass environmentalists, local food activists, scientists, politicians, federal officials and West Marin County citizens. The lines were anything but clear-cut: the entire ruckus was, in Brennan's words, "a strange political dispute in that both sides seemed to be liberal Democrats -- liberal Democrats who supported organic sustainable farming on the one side, and liberal Democrats who supported wilderness on the other." Salon spoke with Brennan about how she came to be embroiled in the so-called oyster war, and about the work of sorting through historic accounts, legal documents, scientific reports, strongly held opinions and evidence of misdoings on both sides of the debate to arrive at her version of the story, and about the bigger questions that we, as a society, are still struggling to answer. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. How did you first encounter this story as a reporter? The main story about the oyster farm hadn't crossed my radar until early 2012, when I pitched a freelance article to my hometown newspaper, the Point Reyes Light. The editor suggested that maybe I'd like to be a full-time reporter, and that's when I found out about the conflict. It was the big story for the paper at the time, and had been and would be for a little while more. And the first story I was asked to write was a short news item that was related to that. So I plunged in right away. In the book you mention it was impossible to write even that first story without delving into this massive controversy. Oh yeah, it was just an 800-word, short thing, and actually I wasn't even out in California yet -- I was in the process of moving. One of the people I interviewed over the phone sent me hundreds of pages of documents and all kinds of things, and I was like, okay, this is a big story. But at the time, and for that first story, especially, I had to rely on the newspaper's editor to guide where she wanted the story to go. It wasn't really an investigation, it was just reporting on what was being said by the people involved. It was fascinating to see you step back and try to approach the story, for the book, from a somewhat neutral position -- or at least, giving fair say to both sides -- especially when people on both sides felt so passionately about it, and didn't seem likely to change their minds. How much of a challenge was that for you? It was hard, in some ways, and in some ways not. I think it's in my nature to be curious about multiple vantage points to an issue. Even in my own life, when I'm encountering adversaries of some kind, whether it's in work or personally, I do tend to think, "Okay, well what's the other side of this?" But I think the hardest part about it was being in the community, where it was common for people to be very vocal about supporting one side or the other. So to kind of withhold that allegiance, to be clear that I was going to at least attempt to talk to everybody, I think made some people nervous. I just kept having to check in with myself about it. And there was so much information, on either side, so it is kind of hard to sift through; it's easier to say, "I trust this and this person, and they think this about it, so I'm going to go with what they have to say" -- whether that person is someone you know who works for the park, or a writer that you like such as Michael Pollan, or your neighbor. Not to say that plenty of people didn't themselves investigate it, but I think there's something attractive about that. So I just kept trying to question my own beliefs about it, and even -- as I say in the book -- at the very end, I had moments of thinking, "Wait, am I getting this right? Is there some piece that I'm missing that is totally covering my view of things?" I tried to be transparent about that part, too. One of the things that really stood out to me was the role that science and scientific studies played in the debate over the oyster farm. Science never really had the final word: people would use research, they would distort it to promote their own agendas -- it reminds me of a lot of other environmental debates we're having, like fracking, or the Keystone pipeline. What did this tell you about the way we use science to these ends? Do you think we generally need to step back and take all findings like these with perhaps a few more grains of salt? It's such an interesting question, and obviously the use of scientific evidence is and has been immensely helpful and beneficial for putting in stronger protections for people, the environment, or what have you. But not all scientific studies are created equal, and there are a lot of things that are not necessarily strong. In this story, there was also a misunderstanding about the different types of scientific reports that get put out: there are reports that have primary research and new data that's being reported, and then there's a different kind, which is mostly what was used for this story, which were based on findings elsewhere that were being extrapolated to fit a different purpose. That's a common practice that happens all the time, and I think it was confusing for people. So then the question just becomes whether the other studies being referenced are actually representational or not; there was an issue with one of the scientific reports in the book where the readings that they used as a stand-in for the sounds made by oyster boats were more in line with the sounds made by a jet-ski. People were very upset about that. And so when people are talking about falsifying science, that's not really what it is. It's an evolving thing. Somewhere in the book I have the quote by Richard Feynman: "The scientist is never certain." Of course there are things that we know with pretty absolute certainty to be true because of scientific research, but there's a plasticity to a lot of these types of things, too. Getting into some of the issues that this case specifically touched upon, I was wondering if you could speak to this idea of wilderness, and what we count as being "wild." That idea is fascinating to me, and was one of the biggest reasons why I wanted to write this book, because it seemed so unclear, was this amorphous idea that had very different meanings to different people at different times, as well as different applications. In the book, there are at least two types of wilderness that can be referenced -- probably three. One is "legal wilderness": a legal designation of a wilderness area. And even in that, there's wiggle room for what it can mean. It doesn't allow roads or mechanized vehicles of any kind, but sometimes exceptions are made, such as for tourist services. Then there's what people think of as wilderness, and a lot of those attributes are not things that are part of the legal designation. I was having a conversation with someone, and they were talking about how a wilderness area needs to be remote, and should be a certain number of miles from a major metropolitan area, or from anything you might think of that could be called "civilization," and how it shouldn't haven't sound or light pollution of any kind. I've even heard people say they think there shouldn't be flight paths over it, which is hard to find nowadays, or there should be no sign of man at all. These are very extreme ideas of what wilderness means. Then there are people who are somewhere in between. The phrasing in the Wilderness Act is, "an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." So it's a flexible idea, and it's an idea that's in flux, especially as "the wilderness" comes to mean something very different: it used to be the rule, and now it's the exception. Our older ideas of wilderness were a bit outdated -- they didn't account for indigenous people's voices and contributions or really, even, existence within those landscapes, so I think that we do need a re-evaluation of what that means practically, for preservation. You went and got the Native American perspective on this question, which hadn't previously been covered much. What did that contribute to the conversation? When I spoke with the chairman of the Graton Rancheria Indians, he said nobody had contacted him about it. I did actually find a letter that the park had sent to his tribal committee, so I guess there at least were attempts to speak with them. But anyway, like what I was saying about ideas of wilderness, it was a really eye-opening moment for me to talk to him about his tribal roots and the role that those people had played in the area for thousands of years. He said, "This wasn't a wilderness, this is where we lived, this was our home. It's more of a garden." And he talked about how even if they weren't practicing agriculture, they were still... You write about how there's a false dichotomy between wild and cultivated landscapes -- does this play into that idea? Absolutely, and maybe there's more of a spectrum than we think. Of course the words are antonyms, so you do have to be careful there -- you can also go too far and say, "Oh, well, it can still be wild and we can have a farm there." And I think that cultivated land and wild land have things to learn from each other, in terms of how we manage both of them. Wild places still exist, but there aren't so many left on Earth that we haven't put our fingerprints on in some way. Especially in America, there aren't many places that don't require some degree of management, just because we have issues with invasive plants and animals. There's an aspect of cultivation that has found its way into our understanding and management of wilderness. And likewise, there's a lot to be learned about the way wild systems work and function and flourish that can be applied to agriculture. People are seeing the need to avoid monoculture and to cut down on pesticide loads, for example. Going beyond this very small community with strong stakes and opinions about the oyster war, what are you hoping other readers take away from the story, and seeing how it all played out? I would hope they'd be drawn into the story for the reasons I was. I came to care about the people that were involved, and I was swept up in their passion about whatever it was they were passionate about, be it their agriculture practice or saving the environment. I hope that it can provide a window into both of those worlds. And I think some of the more personalized stories may change perceptions: when you talk about a government scientist, for example, it's maybe easy to villainize them a little. But then when you meet them and spend time with them and hear about their work, it's a bit of a different experience.The most controversial oysters you probably never heard of were harvested in California's Drakes Estero from the 1930s up until December 2014, when after years of contentious litigation that eventually made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, the National Park Service prevailed in reclaiming the estuary as wilderness. Whether the government had the authority to shut down the Drakes Bay Oyster Company, whether an area could be open to certain forms of agriculture and still be called "wild," and what "wilderness" even means, anyway, are all questions explored in "The Oyster War," reporter Summer Brennan's account of the very public, often fraught battle, which grew to encompass environmentalists, local food activists, scientists, politicians, federal officials and West Marin County citizens. The lines were anything but clear-cut: the entire ruckus was, in Brennan's words, "a strange political dispute in that both sides seemed to be liberal Democrats -- liberal Democrats who supported organic sustainable farming on the one side, and liberal Democrats who supported wilderness on the other." Salon spoke with Brennan about how she came to be embroiled in the so-called oyster war, and about the work of sorting through historic accounts, legal documents, scientific reports, strongly held opinions and evidence of misdoings on both sides of the debate to arrive at her version of the story, and about the bigger questions that we, as a society, are still struggling to answer. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. How did you first encounter this story as a reporter? The main story about the oyster farm hadn't crossed my radar until early 2012, when I pitched a freelance article to my hometown newspaper, the Point Reyes Light. The editor suggested that maybe I'd like to be a full-time reporter, and that's when I found out about the conflict. It was the big story for the paper at the time, and had been and would be for a little while more. And the first story I was asked to write was a short news item that was related to that. So I plunged in right away. In the book you mention it was impossible to write even that first story without delving into this massive controversy. Oh yeah, it was just an 800-word, short thing, and actually I wasn't even out in California yet -- I was in the process of moving. One of the people I interviewed over the phone sent me hundreds of pages of documents and all kinds of things, and I was like, okay, this is a big story. But at the time, and for that first story, especially, I had to rely on the newspaper's editor to guide where she wanted the story to go. It wasn't really an investigation, it was just reporting on what was being said by the people involved. It was fascinating to see you step back and try to approach the story, for the book, from a somewhat neutral position -- or at least, giving fair say to both sides -- especially when people on both sides felt so passionately about it, and didn't seem likely to change their minds. How much of a challenge was that for you? It was hard, in some ways, and in some ways not. I think it's in my nature to be curious about multiple vantage points to an issue. Even in my own life, when I'm encountering adversaries of some kind, whether it's in work or personally, I do tend to think, "Okay, well what's the other side of this?" But I think the hardest part about it was being in the community, where it was common for people to be very vocal about supporting one side or the other. So to kind of withhold that allegiance, to be clear that I was going to at least attempt to talk to everybody, I think made some people nervous. I just kept having to check in with myself about it. And there was so much information, on either side, so it is kind of hard to sift through; it's easier to say, "I trust this and this person, and they think this about it, so I'm going to go with what they have to say" -- whether that person is someone you know who works for the park, or a writer that you like such as Michael Pollan, or your neighbor. Not to say that plenty of people didn't themselves investigate it, but I think there's something attractive about that. So I just kept trying to question my own beliefs about it, and even -- as I say in the book -- at the very end, I had moments of thinking, "Wait, am I getting this right? Is there some piece that I'm missing that is totally covering my view of things?" I tried to be transparent about that part, too. One of the things that really stood out to me was the role that science and scientific studies played in the debate over the oyster farm. Science never really had the final word: people would use research, they would distort it to promote their own agendas -- it reminds me of a lot of other environmental debates we're having, like fracking, or the Keystone pipeline. What did this tell you about the way we use science to these ends? Do you think we generally need to step back and take all findings like these with perhaps a few more grains of salt? It's such an interesting question, and obviously the use of scientific evidence is and has been immensely helpful and beneficial for putting in stronger protections for people, the environment, or what have you. But not all scientific studies are created equal, and there are a lot of things that are not necessarily strong. In this story, there was also a misunderstanding about the different types of scientific reports that get put out: there are reports that have primary research and new data that's being reported, and then there's a different kind, which is mostly what was used for this story, which were based on findings elsewhere that were being extrapolated to fit a different purpose. That's a common practice that happens all the time, and I think it was confusing for people. So then the question just becomes whether the other studies being referenced are actually representational or not; there was an issue with one of the scientific reports in the book where the readings that they used as a stand-in for the sounds made by oyster boats were more in line with the sounds made by a jet-ski. People were very upset about that. And so when people are talking about falsifying science, that's not really what it is. It's an evolving thing. Somewhere in the book I have the quote by Richard Feynman: "The scientist is never certain." Of course there are things that we know with pretty absolute certainty to be true because of scientific research, but there's a plasticity to a lot of these types of things, too. Getting into some of the issues that this case specifically touched upon, I was wondering if you could speak to this idea of wilderness, and what we count as being "wild." That idea is fascinating to me, and was one of the biggest reasons why I wanted to write this book, because it seemed so unclear, was this amorphous idea that had very different meanings to different people at different times, as well as different applications. In the book, there are at least two types of wilderness that can be referenced -- probably three. One is "legal wilderness": a legal designation of a wilderness area. And even in that, there's wiggle room for what it can mean. It doesn't allow roads or mechanized vehicles of any kind, but sometimes exceptions are made, such as for tourist services. Then there's what people think of as wilderness, and a lot of those attributes are not things that are part of the legal designation. I was having a conversation with someone, and they were talking about how a wilderness area needs to be remote, and should be a certain number of miles from a major metropolitan area, or from anything you might think of that could be called "civilization," and how it shouldn't haven't sound or light pollution of any kind. I've even heard people say they think there shouldn't be flight paths over it, which is hard to find nowadays, or there should be no sign of man at all. These are very extreme ideas of what wilderness means. Then there are people who are somewhere in between. The phrasing in the Wilderness Act is, "an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." So it's a flexible idea, and it's an idea that's in flux, especially as "the wilderness" comes to mean something very different: it used to be the rule, and now it's the exception. Our older ideas of wilderness were a bit outdated -- they didn't account for indigenous people's voices and contributions or really, even, existence within those landscapes, so I think that we do need a re-evaluation of what that means practically, for preservation. You went and got the Native American perspective on this question, which hadn't previously been covered much. What did that contribute to the conversation? When I spoke with the chairman of the Graton Rancheria Indians, he said nobody had contacted him about it. I did actually find a letter that the park had sent to his tribal committee, so I guess there at least were attempts to speak with them. But anyway, like what I was saying about ideas of wilderness, it was a really eye-opening moment for me to talk to him about his tribal roots and the role that those people had played in the area for thousands of years. He said, "This wasn't a wilderness, this is where we lived, this was our home. It's more of a garden." And he talked about how even if they weren't practicing agriculture, they were still... You write about how there's a false dichotomy between wild and cultivated landscapes -- does this play into that idea? Absolutely, and maybe there's more of a spectrum than we think. Of course the words are antonyms, so you do have to be careful there -- you can also go too far and say, "Oh, well, it can still be wild and we can have a farm there." And I think that cultivated land and wild land have things to learn from each other, in terms of how we manage both of them. Wild places still exist, but there aren't so many left on Earth that we haven't put our fingerprints on in some way. Especially in America, there aren't many places that don't require some degree of management, just because we have issues with invasive plants and animals. There's an aspect of cultivation that has found its way into our understanding and management of wilderness. And likewise, there's a lot to be learned about the way wild systems work and function and flourish that can be applied to agriculture. People are seeing the need to avoid monoculture and to cut down on pesticide loads, for example. Going beyond this very small community with strong stakes and opinions about the oyster war, what are you hoping other readers take away from the story, and seeing how it all played out? I would hope they'd be drawn into the story for the reasons I was. I came to care about the people that were involved, and I was swept up in their passion about whatever it was they were passionate about, be it their agriculture practice or saving the environment. I hope that it can provide a window into both of those worlds. And I think some of the more personalized stories may change perceptions: when you talk about a government scientist, for example, it's maybe easy to villainize them a little. But then when you meet them and spend time with them and hear about their work, it's a bit of a different experience.

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Watch Donald Trump address immigration, abortion and what it means to be “conservative” in “Meet the Press” exclusive

Donald Trump doubled down in an NBC "Meet the Press" exclusive, which aired Sunday morning, telling host Chuck Todd that he would reverse President Obama's orders on immigration and call for the deportation of all undocumented immigrants. "We're going to keep the families together, but they have to go," he told Todd. Asked where the immigrants would "go" if they didn't have a home to return to, Trump reiterated "They have to go!" Adding, "We will work with them. They have to go. Chuck, we either have a country, or we don't have a country." Later, Trump was asked to define "conservatism." Here was his response:

"Well, for me, conservatism as it pertains to our country is fiscal.  We have to be strong and secure and get rid of our debt.  The military has to be powerful and not necessarily used but very powerful.  I am on the sort of a little bit social side of conservative when it comes-- I want people to be taken care of from a health care standpoint.  But to do that, we have to be strong.  I want to save Social Security without cuts.  I want a strong country.  And to me, conservative means a strong country with very little debt."

The conversation then pivoted to the issue of abortion, as Trump noted that he's "always hated the concept" and considered himself "pro-life." "Should it be legal?  Should some form of abortion be legal?" Todd asked him point-blank. Off-mic, Trump responded to Todd, telling him that he'd make some exceptions: "Rape, incest, if the mother is going to die.  And Ronald Reagan had those same exceptions.  And many Republicans have those same exceptions." Watch the full interview courtesy of NBC below: Donald Trump doubled down in an NBC "Meet the Press" exclusive, which aired Sunday morning, telling host Chuck Todd that he would reverse President Obama's orders on immigration and call for the deportation of all undocumented immigrants. "We're going to keep the families together, but they have to go," he told Todd. Asked where the immigrants would "go" if they didn't have a home to return to, Trump reiterated "They have to go!" Adding, "We will work with them. They have to go. Chuck, we either have a country, or we don't have a country." Later, Trump was asked to define "conservatism." Here was his response:

"Well, for me, conservatism as it pertains to our country is fiscal.  We have to be strong and secure and get rid of our debt.  The military has to be powerful and not necessarily used but very powerful.  I am on the sort of a little bit social side of conservative when it comes-- I want people to be taken care of from a health care standpoint.  But to do that, we have to be strong.  I want to save Social Security without cuts.  I want a strong country.  And to me, conservative means a strong country with very little debt."

The conversation then pivoted to the issue of abortion, as Trump noted that he's "always hated the concept" and considered himself "pro-life." "Should it be legal?  Should some form of abortion be legal?" Todd asked him point-blank. Off-mic, Trump responded to Todd, telling him that he'd make some exceptions: "Rape, incest, if the mother is going to die.  And Ronald Reagan had those same exceptions.  And many Republicans have those same exceptions." Watch the full interview courtesy of NBC below:

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“If we did not protest, no one would punish those men”: A brutal murder, a sham trial, and justice denied in Kabul

On March 19, 2015, 27-year-old female Islamic studies student Farkhunda argued with a mullah selling amulets in front of the Shah-Do Shamshera shrine in Kabul. As she questioned the ethics of selling “charms” for financial gain, the man reportedly accused her of burning the Quran. She immediately protested that she was a Muslim and had not burned the Quran. The growing mob of men either did not hear or did not care to acknowledge her defense. While a number of police officers failed to intervene, the mob beat her with sticks and stones. Within a short time, she was dropped from a roof, run over with a car and finally set on fire. When 22-year-old Zahra Ibrahimi, an artist and computer literacy teacher of girls in Kabul, heard about the murder, she knew she could not stay silent. She contacted her friends and on March 23 they painted their cheeks red to match the circulating photos and videos of Farkhunda’s bloody face. They made signs denouncing Farkhunda’s murder, and they joined hundreds to march from the shrine where Farkhunda was attacked to the banks of the river where she was burned. On March 24 Zahra joined thousands of men and women holding banners and shouting for justice in front of the Afghan Supreme Court in Kabul. The tragedy had transported her from the front of the classroom to the forefront of the national news as photographs of her barred teeth, painted cheeks and raised fist appeared in the Washington Post, the Huffington Post and news outlets around the world.  Zahra says of the incident: “We felt if we did not protest, then no one would punish those men.” A month earlier, in February of 2015, shortly after the United States announced an end to combat operations in Afghanistan, Zahra met us at the Serena Hotel in Kabul to talk about her job teaching in the computer literacy program at the Amena E Fedawi girls’ school in Kabul. The program, part of the Digital Citizen Fund started by Afghan social entrepreneur and Time 100 person of the year Roya Mahboob, seeks to expand digital literacy for women and girls throughout Afghanistan. Zahra brought her sister, Asima, the goalie of the women’s Afghan national soccer team. We sat in the luxurious but deserted hotel cafe, far from the dust clouds, smog and chaotic traffic of central Kabul. In response to our smiles, they looked at us with what can only be described as wariness and cautious optimism. They wanted us to see the women’s soccer team practice; they wanted us to visit the classroom where Zahra taught. They wanted the world to know they were fighting every day for the importance of girls' education and empowerment in Afghanistan. “I think I am too lucky because I have the best students in the world, and they really love me and I love them too. This century is the Computer Century,” Zahra said to us. “Knowledge is power.” Zahra, who had been always at the top of her class throughout her education, had never planned to become a teacher. Roya Mahboob, who calls Zahra “relentlessly creative and positive with her students,” inspired Zahra to consider a path of sharing what she had learned with other women and girls. “Education is not only important for Afghan women, it is important for all men and women, but for women it is more important,” Zahra said. “If a mother is educated, she can train her child and help her child ... Afghan society is made up of men and women. If all of them are educated, we can have the best society because two is more powerful than one.”  The computer is particularly important for women and girls, Zahra said, because in Afghan society women and girls are often not allowed to work outside the home. With computers and cellphones, women can learn and work from home or from one of numerous women’s centers established by UNICEF and other groups around Afghanistan. The next morning when we rose early and crossed Kabul to visit Zahra’s computer education class, the students stood up with their arms straight at their sides, their eyes wide and steady, and one by one they bolted out their answers. “I want to be a doctor,” one girl said; “I want to be a pilot”; “I want to be a computer scientist”; “I want to be a politician”; “I want the world to know that we do not want the Taliban to come back and close the schools.” Zahra, their teacher and translator, stood at the head of the classroom, and now for the first time she smiled. If Farkhunda’s savage murder reveals a virulent strain of misogyny in Afghan society, then the swift and passionate protests of women like Zahra testify to a growing counterforce that some attribute to the expansion of women’s education over the last decade. Under Taliban rule, women’s education had effectively ceased, but after the Taliban’s defeat by coalition forces in 2003, the Afghan government and the international community invested heavily in education. Though statistics in Afghanistan are notoriously difficult to verify, according to the World Bank, by 2012 more than 2.9 million girls had enrolled in school. Lauryn Oates, project director for Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan, who worked with UNICEF to gather statistics on women in Afghanistan and later wrote of her findings for the Guardian, echoes Zahra when she says, “The single greatest predictor for nearly every single indicator was the mother's education level.” Children of educated mothers are more likely to attend school, become literate, marry later and have better access to sanitation, food and water. They are more likely to demand a better life for themselves and their daughters. Amid the rhetoric over what constitutes original or authentic Afghan or Muslim culture and what the Taliban considers “foreign” or corrupting influence, many erroneously conclude that misogynist conservatism has dominated Afghan and Muslim culture from the beginning and that modern European and American influence single-handedly precipitated the recent expansion of women’s education. Many in the Taliban speak, as some conservative Christians do in America, of returning to the mythical origins of a restrictive theocracy where students only learn narrow interpretations of religious texts. Women like Zahra, who harbor no more love of foreign control than members of the Taliban, also crave a return.  Zahra’s view of history, which not surprisingly differs considerably from the Taliban’s, supports the narrative that recent changes in women’s education in Afghanistan result not so much from progress as a return to some of the great traditions in Islamic culture: “As Allah said, knowledge is necessary for both men and women. Allah paid attention to education, and I think through education we can have a good society because we can make good decisions.” According to Zahra, education is not only power, it provides access to a true understanding of Islam.   A brief examination of Islamic and Afghan history substantiates Zahra’s instincts. In 2004, Aisha Abdurrahman published "Muslim Women: a Biographical Dictionary," which profiles influential Islamic women from the first century AH to the 13th century AH. Profiles range from literary figures like Wallada bint al-Mustakfi (1001 to 1091), who wrote poetry, shunned the hijab and walked around Bagdad in a transparent tunic, to Islamic scholars like Fatima bint al-Mundhir (d.763 CE), to scientists like Al-ljliyah bint al-‘ljli al-Asturlabi (living in the mid-900s AD), and polymath scholars such as Sutayta al-Mahamali (d. 987), specialist in hadith, jurisprudence and mathematics. Many people now understand that while Europe languished in the superstitious Dark Ages, Islamic scholars equipped with paper from China studied spherical trigonometry and physics, using astrolabes to calculate the altitude of the stars, and made great achievements in medicine, literacy and many other fields. Islamic scholars of the Golden Age can be credited with, among other innovations, the invention of algebra. Between the ninth and 13th centuries, the libraries in Baghdad (Bait al-Hikma), Damascus (al-Zahiriyah), Timbuktu (Sankoré), Cordoba (Royal Mosque) and Cairo (Dar al-Hikmah) contained more books, manuscripts and literature than in the entire Greek world. As the evolution of power led to the extinguishing of scholarly pursuits in Islamic nations, Europe, building on the work of Islamic and Chinese scholars, flowered into the Renaissance. Passion for scholarship, science and the arts belong less to any one culture than to different historical periods of the world’s great civilizations. At any period, in America, Europe or in nations of the Muslim world, one can find the opposing forces of conservative control locked in struggle with forces of the human spirit that crave knowledge, expression and justice. The 19th and 20th centuries in Afghanistan witnessed an ongoing struggle between, on the one hand, those in support of education and women’s rights and on the other hand tribal elements seeking to consolidate power and limit women’s agency. Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, Emir of Afghanistan from 1880 to 1901, abolished the tribal custom of forcing a woman to marry her deceased husband’s brother, raised the age of marriage, gave women the right to divorce, and allowed women to inherit property. In the early 20th century, Amanullah Khan and his reformer wife, Soraya Tarzi, one of the most influential women in the Muslim world at the beginning of the 20th century, created modern schools for boys and girls, abolished the strict dress codes for women, and pushed for equal rights while increasing trade with Europe and Asia. At this time, women began to enter the workforce. Amanullah’s sister, Kobra, created the Organization for Women’s Protection. Eventually, conservative elements from tribal areas grew agitated with the reforms and in 1929 supported a bandit-turned-revolutionary named Habibullah Kalanani in a successful coup. Nine months later Mohammed Nadi Shah seized power and completed the process of abolishing Amanullah’s reforms.   Throughout the 20th century the conflict between conservative and reformist impulses continued: In 1959 women were allowed to unveil again, but as a result 60 people were killed during a revolt in Kandahar. In 1964 the constitution gave women the right to vote, and in 1965 the Democratic Organization of Women formed to work against illiteracy and forced marriages. In 1977 an Afghan woman activist named Meena Keshwar Kamal worked to establish RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. The ongoing struggle between restrictive impulses seeking to limit women’s freedom and impulses toward gender equity, rights and social freedom have always interwoven with outside elements from Europe, America, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, who have all sought influence in Afghanistan. It is certainly not the case, however, that reformist movements have always grown out of Europe and America. While trying to enforce reforms, including women’s rights, on tribal areas in the 1970s, the Russians often resorted to violence and terror while demonstrating a complete disregard for religious and tribal customs. During the same period, the United States began to provide military support for the Mujahedin, many of whom, after the defeat of the Russians, formed the Taliban forces who in the 1990s established extremely oppressive codes for women. The defeat of the Taliban at the hands of Coalition forces in 2001 led to the establishment of a democratic government, which continues to struggle with the Taliban for control of the nation and the role women will play in its future. By all measures, the last decade has been dangerous for women seeking a voice in Afghanistan. In 2009 the Taliban killed female activist Sitar Achakzai in Kandahar a month before she planned to leave Afghanistan for the sake of her own safety. In 2011 Hamida Marmaki, a renowned female Afghan law professor and human rights activist, was killed in a suicide attack. In 2012 outspoken student Malala Yousafzai was gunned down on her school bus. Also in 2012, gunmen killed activist Nadia Seddiqi. Recently Pakistani rights activist Sabeen Mahmud was gunned down in Karachi, and the list goes on. Many girls’ schools have been attacked and burned in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 2009, President Karzai signed into law by executive order the Elimination of Violence Against Women Act (EVAW), but the constitution requires that parliament approve the law, and so far it has failed to do so because of conservative politicians and their constituents in the tribal territories. Many women activists and reformers, like Roya and her sister Elaha Mahboob, who set up the Digital Citizen Fund where Zahra teaches, received night letters from the Taliban and finally left the country for their own safety. The murder and forced exile of many other female activists, teachers, scholars, entrepreneurs and professionals can only demoralize those women who remain to fight for their rights. Though the expansion of women’s education and education in general since 2003 has been a major achievement, 38 percent of children (most of them girls) still do not have access to education. According to UNESCO, of the 5,000 schools built or rehabilitated since 2003, 50 percent are unusable because they have deteriorated, been destroyed or, in some cases, constructed too far from communities. UNICEF, which places the literacy rate for women and girls at 22 percent, hopes that expansion of technology and connectivity throughout the region will grow literacy and seed economic development. In 2014 there were only 210,000 fixed Internet subscribers, but mobile services cover  90 percent of the country. Currently, 20 million Afghans (48 percent of them women) subscribe to mobile services (out of a population of about 30 million). More important, USAID estimates that eight out of 10 women have access to a mobile phone. Among those women who own a cellphone, 67 percent obtained them in the last several years, and 25 percent of them use their phones for commercial and social activity. These statistics have encouraged UNICEF Innovation Labs to develop various technologies that allow women to operate simple educational programs, perform banking transactions, and even work on their cellphones. Among those who can access the Internet through phones or computers, 74 percent use social media. One of the first things the girls learn in Zahra’s computer class is how to set up their own social media accounts so they can begin to communicate with the outside world and feel connected to a wider community. Technology and social media now serve criminals, governments, terrorists and protesters alike. Many witnesses to and participants in Farkhunda’s murder unintentionally ignited a backlash of protest by posting videos of the crime on social media. Hasmat Stanekzai, spokesman with the Kabul police, reportedly wrote on Facebook about Farkhunda: "This (person) thought, like several other unbelievers, that this kind of action and insult will get them U.S. or European citizenship. But before reaching their target, lost their life.” The comment not only caused an eruption on social media, it helped spur many women to protest on the streets. After the murder, the reaction, protest and national and international debate over what it meant and what the government should do in response largely took place in the digital sphere before it spilled onto the streets. Many women, especially in Kabul where the murder happened, saw videos of the crime and immediately expressed their outrage via cellphone and social media. They communicated with each other to organize protests. For current President Ashraf Ghani, the Farkhunda murder represented one of the first challenges to his pledge to push for women’s rights and social reform. The protests elicited an immediate reaction from the government. Hashmat Stanekzai of the Kabul police was fired for his outburst on social media, and Ashraf Ghani set up a commission to investigate the crime. At first Zahra and her friends had hope that Farkhunda’s killers and the police who stood by watching her murder would receive justice. It seemed to many that the verdict, in this case, would extend beyond those involved in the murder, even beyond the murder itself, to all those men across the nation who cheered Farkhunda’s death and sought to silence women. Though Ashraf Ghani would not directly involve himself in the case, the trial could not help but feel like a litmus test of his government’s stance on women’s rights and social justice. After three days of court hearings, four people were found guilty (including the amulet seller who claimed Farkhunda had burned the Quran), and sentenced to death, charges against 18 men were dropped for lack of evidence, and eight others were sentenced to 16 years in prison. Of 19 policemen charged with dereliction of duty because they did not act to save Farkhunda, eight were acquitted due to lack of evidence, and 11 were sentenced to one year in prison. Few people felt satisfied with the result, which, in a few short hours, seemed to both exonerate many of the guilty while condemning others without due process. Then in June the Appeals Court overturned the death sentences of all four men found guilty (giving three 20-year sentences and the other a one-year sentence), and released most of those convicted of Farkhunda's murder ahead of their appeals. When we asked Zahra why the police had failed to arrest some key assailants who were clearly identifiable from video footage of the attack, while they arrested others without any evidence that they had been involved, she said, “If you have money, you get away with everything. If not, you may be punished.” She and her fellow activists felt discouraged by the judicial outcome both for the sake of Farkhunda, a woman who, like themselves, sought a public voice, and for what the judgment might portend for their own lives. “Kabul is becoming more dangerous,” Zahra said. “After Farkhunda’s murder and seeing that the murderers were not punished, men in Kabul became fearless and bold. Now many women who work for social change are depressed because they do not feel secure. They are afraid to make plans for the future. When we go to our jobs or to school, men harass us wherever we go because of what we do and how we dress. They say, ‘Don’t dress and act that way. Otherwise, we will do to you what we did to Farkhunda.’ We only feel secure in our homes.” Zahra says it is still too soon to tell what will happen in the long run. “Sometimes my mother tells me not to go to my job and tells my sister not to go to school. I come home early at the end of the day and do not go places if I do not have to. I am afraid for my sister. She is on the national soccer team, and sometimes she comes home late. But I cannot stop my life. We will see what happens. If more of the men involved in the Farkhunda murder were punished, and if those who were convicted had more severe sentences, then we would feel safer because men would stop what they are doing.” The habit of summoning courage has laid the foundation of a stubborn if not optimistic determination among a growing number of women in Afghanistan. For those who protest in the face of grave injustices and who continue to work for reform on a daily basis, even when their efforts endanger their own lives, returning to life under the Taliban is no more possible than escaping to another country. In the “computer century,” as Zahra described it, personal and political agency is predicated on connectivity and access to digital literacy. With so few female teachers in the country in general, and even fewer who can teach digital literacy, women like Zahra (and the Digital Citizen Fund in which she teaches) have become indispensable to the future of the nation.   When we asked Zahra what she would like to be known for, she expressed doubt that she would be known at all. She has been inspired, though, by the many Afghan women who have fought for social justice in recent years. Some of them are dead, some have emigrated, some remain to continue their work. Those Zahra has admired most have been defenders of women’s rights, the true spirit of their religion and the inherent greatness of their nation. Perhaps what the world thinks of Zahra matters less than what the girls in her classroom, who sit upright with their fingers hovering over keyboards, see when they turn to their teacher. They see a woman leading the way.

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“I knew I could never go home again”: The high cost of cooking (gumbo) on reality television

Before I begin, a simple fact: Louisiana cuisine is superior to every other American cuisine, and the competition isn't remotely close. Corollary to this fact is that anyone who promotes Louisiana cuisine beyond state lines is doing the rest of the country a favor, even if that person punctuates every sentences with "Bam!" -- he's only doing so, after all, because he knows that when he hits that dish with a finishing salt, whatever meal he's just prepared is better than any you ever will. So when Slate's Ashlie Stevens complained that "Next Food Network Star" finalist Jay Ducote belonged to Californian Guy Fieri's school of "shouting at slabs of meat," and that his presence in the competition is indicative of the network's "obsession with cranking out imitations" of Fieri, she only missed the point completely. Fieri's enthusiastic about everything -- every episode of "Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives" is an exercise in escalating superlatives, a veritable Cold War between the "best" and "greatest" things he can "hunch" into his mouth-hole. Ducote's enthusiasm is specific, grounded in the confidence that the tradition from which he comes will allow him to interrogate -- not shout at -- a tenderloin far better than any challengers. Which isn't to say he's professionally trained. Like another Louisiana State University graduate, Jesse Romero, who appeared on the Gordon Ramsay vehicle "MasterChef" this season, Ducote's Pembleton-deep knowledge of how to break a slab down and make it sing isn't the product of formal training, but of another tradition at which Louisiana outstrips the rest of the nation -- tailgating. It would be difficult to argue that the highly contingent nature of cooking outside in Louisiana during the wettest of its four rainy seasons necessarily gave the pair an advantage in their respective competitions since Romero was -- to the surprise of everyone, including himself -- eliminated very early in the "MasterChef" run by Gordon Ramsay, who accused him of behaving "like a petulant child."* *Romero didn't appear to be in the episode itself, nor in the previous ones. Reality shows are typically edited in the service of the production team's preferred narrative, such that someone eliminated in a later episode for petulance is shown behaving petulantly in previous ones. In Romero's case, the "MasterChef" editors did nothing of the sort. When I asked Romero if he was as surprised by both the fact of and explanation for his elimination, all he'd say was that the way he was portrayed on the show was "dead on accurate." Romero's early exit notwithstanding, it's clear that the tailgating experience provided Ducote with a distinct advantage over competitors who work in more traditional settings. Shooting days on "Next Food Network Star" often run twelve or thirteen hours long, and contain stretches of post-cooking, pre-judging downtime in which the contestants aren't allowed to interact. ("They want cameras on us for all our interactions, just in case," Ducote told me. "When you see us meet each other in the first episode, that's not staged. When you see us sizing each other up, and it looks like we're sizing each other up, that's because we're sizing each other up.") That kind of routine comes more naturally to a tailgater than fellow finalists like professional chef Dominick Tesoriero, who constantly interacts with his team during shifts, or former NFL cornerback and current food truck owner Eddie Jackson, who holds court with his customers all day. Cooking and waiting is the rhythm of tailgating, and few of the challenges Food Network producers could throw at the finalists could match those regularly posed by darkening Louisiana skies. Not that Ducote cooked flawlessly, mind you. He became what he called "a state embarrassment" after attempting to make a "quick gumbo," two words that should never a share sentence, much less be adjacent to each other in one. Not only did he make a cardinal error in Creole cuisine by creating a roux far thicker than any gumbo warrants, he had been tasked in this particular judge's challenge to use a "slimy" ingredient and chose okra -- which in addition to being slimy is also a natural thickening agent. As he prepared a single bowl for its glamour shot, the gumbo was already so thick that "I knew I could never go home again." He also knew that the rest of the gumbo would be sitting for hours while the judges evaluated his competitors' dishes, and that every passing minute increased the likelihood that he'd be offering their distinguished palates a concoction that would fall on the culinary spectrum somewhere between "a spicy congealed okra pudding" and "Cajun-infused baby food." When he returned to the lonely hotel room in which all the contestants spent their nights -- a room bereft of access to the outside world, as cell phones, televisions, and Internet access were forbidden -- all he could think about was that no matter how far "I advanced in this competition, or in this life either, there's no way I'm ever living down that gumbo. I could devote my life to gumbo, base my entire career on it, write cookbooks, go on tour, and people in New Orleans will shake their heads when they see me and say, 'How could you fuck up the gumbo?'" I first interviewed Ducote over two months ago, the week after his nationally televised gumbo disaster, so I didn't get a chance to ask him whether he's been approached and upbraided by disappointed strangers. We talked instead about the strange nature of Internet celebrity -- as proprietor of the popular website and radio show "Bite and Booze," he often arrives home to find promotional bottles of wine and whisky stacked high on his porch, and if you're reading this, you no doubt know my story -- and while I found him engaging almost to a fault, I admit that I've been secretly waiting for him to be eliminated so that I could write this article secure in the knowledge that he didn't win the competition. Not because I want to see him lose, but because a life spent rooting for the New York Mets has taught me that, the rare appearance of the miraculous notwithstanding, being invested in who wins and who loses a competition inevitably leads to disappointment. But as Ducote remained on the series episode after episode, I began to feel what every Mets fan fears most -- hope. Hope for Ducote personally, and for the state he seemed to represent more forcefully with each passing episode. Even the commercials sandwiching the final segments of the show seemed to be conspiring against his competitors. In the penultimate episode, as Jay, Dom, and Eddie each filmed a pilot episode for Food Network, the scenes of his dry-run were followed by an ad for a company that offered "free panties, because he puts you in the mood." His competitors? Cialis and Metamucil. As much as I know I should remain objective, part of me can't help but hope that Sunday night's finale will be Ducote's 1986.Before I begin, a simple fact: Louisiana cuisine is superior to every other American cuisine, and the competition isn't remotely close. Corollary to this fact is that anyone who promotes Louisiana cuisine beyond state lines is doing the rest of the country a favor, even if that person punctuates every sentences with "Bam!" -- he's only doing so, after all, because he knows that when he hits that dish with a finishing salt, whatever meal he's just prepared is better than any you ever will. So when Slate's Ashlie Stevens complained that "Next Food Network Star" finalist Jay Ducote belonged to Californian Guy Fieri's school of "shouting at slabs of meat," and that his presence in the competition is indicative of the network's "obsession with cranking out imitations" of Fieri, she only missed the point completely. Fieri's enthusiastic about everything -- every episode of "Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives" is an exercise in escalating superlatives, a veritable Cold War between the "best" and "greatest" things he can "hunch" into his mouth-hole. Ducote's enthusiasm is specific, grounded in the confidence that the tradition from which he comes will allow him to interrogate -- not shout at -- a tenderloin far better than any challengers. Which isn't to say he's professionally trained. Like another Louisiana State University graduate, Jesse Romero, who appeared on the Gordon Ramsay vehicle "MasterChef" this season, Ducote's Pembleton-deep knowledge of how to break a slab down and make it sing isn't the product of formal training, but of another tradition at which Louisiana outstrips the rest of the nation -- tailgating. It would be difficult to argue that the highly contingent nature of cooking outside in Louisiana during the wettest of its four rainy seasons necessarily gave the pair an advantage in their respective competitions since Romero was -- to the surprise of everyone, including himself -- eliminated very early in the "MasterChef" run by Gordon Ramsay, who accused him of behaving "like a petulant child."* *Romero didn't appear to be in the episode itself, nor in the previous ones. Reality shows are typically edited in the service of the production team's preferred narrative, such that someone eliminated in a later episode for petulance is shown behaving petulantly in previous ones. In Romero's case, the "MasterChef" editors did nothing of the sort. When I asked Romero if he was as surprised by both the fact of and explanation for his elimination, all he'd say was that the way he was portrayed on the show was "dead on accurate." Romero's early exit notwithstanding, it's clear that the tailgating experience provided Ducote with a distinct advantage over competitors who work in more traditional settings. Shooting days on "Next Food Network Star" often run twelve or thirteen hours long, and contain stretches of post-cooking, pre-judging downtime in which the contestants aren't allowed to interact. ("They want cameras on us for all our interactions, just in case," Ducote told me. "When you see us meet each other in the first episode, that's not staged. When you see us sizing each other up, and it looks like we're sizing each other up, that's because we're sizing each other up.") That kind of routine comes more naturally to a tailgater than fellow finalists like professional chef Dominick Tesoriero, who constantly interacts with his team during shifts, or former NFL cornerback and current food truck owner Eddie Jackson, who holds court with his customers all day. Cooking and waiting is the rhythm of tailgating, and few of the challenges Food Network producers could throw at the finalists could match those regularly posed by darkening Louisiana skies. Not that Ducote cooked flawlessly, mind you. He became what he called "a state embarrassment" after attempting to make a "quick gumbo," two words that should never a share sentence, much less be adjacent to each other in one. Not only did he make a cardinal error in Creole cuisine by creating a roux far thicker than any gumbo warrants, he had been tasked in this particular judge's challenge to use a "slimy" ingredient and chose okra -- which in addition to being slimy is also a natural thickening agent. As he prepared a single bowl for its glamour shot, the gumbo was already so thick that "I knew I could never go home again." He also knew that the rest of the gumbo would be sitting for hours while the judges evaluated his competitors' dishes, and that every passing minute increased the likelihood that he'd be offering their distinguished palates a concoction that would fall on the culinary spectrum somewhere between "a spicy congealed okra pudding" and "Cajun-infused baby food." When he returned to the lonely hotel room in which all the contestants spent their nights -- a room bereft of access to the outside world, as cell phones, televisions, and Internet access were forbidden -- all he could think about was that no matter how far "I advanced in this competition, or in this life either, there's no way I'm ever living down that gumbo. I could devote my life to gumbo, base my entire career on it, write cookbooks, go on tour, and people in New Orleans will shake their heads when they see me and say, 'How could you fuck up the gumbo?'" I first interviewed Ducote over two months ago, the week after his nationally televised gumbo disaster, so I didn't get a chance to ask him whether he's been approached and upbraided by disappointed strangers. We talked instead about the strange nature of Internet celebrity -- as proprietor of the popular website and radio show "Bite and Booze," he often arrives home to find promotional bottles of wine and whisky stacked high on his porch, and if you're reading this, you no doubt know my story -- and while I found him engaging almost to a fault, I admit that I've been secretly waiting for him to be eliminated so that I could write this article secure in the knowledge that he didn't win the competition. Not because I want to see him lose, but because a life spent rooting for the New York Mets has taught me that, the rare appearance of the miraculous notwithstanding, being invested in who wins and who loses a competition inevitably leads to disappointment. But as Ducote remained on the series episode after episode, I began to feel what every Mets fan fears most -- hope. Hope for Ducote personally, and for the state he seemed to represent more forcefully with each passing episode. Even the commercials sandwiching the final segments of the show seemed to be conspiring against his competitors. In the penultimate episode, as Jay, Dom, and Eddie each filmed a pilot episode for Food Network, the scenes of his dry-run were followed by an ad for a company that offered "free panties, because he puts you in the mood." His competitors? Cialis and Metamucil. As much as I know I should remain objective, part of me can't help but hope that Sunday night's finale will be Ducote's 1986.

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Charles Koch scolds the 1 percent: The plutocrat’s surprising moment of clarity

Earlier this month, billionaire Charles Koch had a surprising message: In a speech to his fellow conservatives, he said politicians must end taxpayer-funded subsidies and preferential treatment for corporations. Why is this surprising? Because the demand came from an industrialist whose company and corporate subsidiaries have raked in tens of millions of dollars' worth of such subsidies. The Koch-organized conference at a luxury resort in Southern California reportedly attracted roughly 450 conservative donors who have committed to spending nearly $900 million on the 2016 presidential election. The event included appearances by Republican presidential candidates such as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. "Where I believe we need to start in reforming welfare is eliminating welfare for the wealthy," said Koch, who, along with his brother David, is among the biggest financiers of conservative political causes. "This means stopping the subsidies, mandates and preferences for business that enrich the haves at the expense of the have nots." Yet, in the last 15 years, Koch's firm Koch Industries and its subsidiaries have secured government subsidies worth more than $166 million, according to data compiled by the watchdog group Good Jobs First. The group says since 1990, Koch-owned properties have received 191 separate subsidies worth a total of $195 million. Koch Industries and its subsidiaries, which are a privately held, are involved in everything from oil refining to manufacturing to high finance. In 2012, Charles Koch issued a similar jeremiad against government-sponsored subsidies for corporations. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, he said, "We are on dangerous terrain when government picks winners and losers in the economy by subsidizing favored products and industries." In his essay, he specifically derided tax credits -- yet even after the op-ed, Koch-owned properties accepted more than $77 million worth of such taxpayer-funded preferences from governments, according to Good Jobs First. Among the biggest subsidies received by Koch-owned companies was a $62 million Louisiana property tax abatement for Georgia Pacific -- a paper and chemical conglomerate that was acquired by Koch Industries in 2005. Georgia Pacific also received a separate $11 million tax credit from Louisiana in 2014 to upgrade its facilities. Since 2007, Good Jobs First says Koch Industries itself has received more than $20 million in subsidies through an Oklahoma program designed to incentivize investment and job creation. Oklahoma's government website lists more than $28 million in such tax credits to the firm and its subsidiaries. Koch, it should be noted, is not like other top executives of major corporations. His company is not publicly traded -- it is privately held, with most of the company owned by him and his brother, David. That means the Kochs could reject subsidies and not have to justify the move to hordes of shareholders. Instead, though, they have accepted the government support, even as they fund conservative campaigns that deride the influence of government on the economy. Of course, Koch's speech certainly did identify a growing trend in America. As Big Business has used campaign cash to secure more control over politics, elected officials have been approving more and more taxpayer subsidies for corporations. Conservative opposition to those expenditures will no doubt be key to reining them in. However, it is difficult to believe that the head of a company that has benefited from so much taxpayer support is really going to use his political power to end the largesse. In other words: The message may be compelling, but the messenger is not particularly credible.Earlier this month, billionaire Charles Koch had a surprising message: In a speech to his fellow conservatives, he said politicians must end taxpayer-funded subsidies and preferential treatment for corporations. Why is this surprising? Because the demand came from an industrialist whose company and corporate subsidiaries have raked in tens of millions of dollars' worth of such subsidies. The Koch-organized conference at a luxury resort in Southern California reportedly attracted roughly 450 conservative donors who have committed to spending nearly $900 million on the 2016 presidential election. The event included appearances by Republican presidential candidates such as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. "Where I believe we need to start in reforming welfare is eliminating welfare for the wealthy," said Koch, who, along with his brother David, is among the biggest financiers of conservative political causes. "This means stopping the subsidies, mandates and preferences for business that enrich the haves at the expense of the have nots." Yet, in the last 15 years, Koch's firm Koch Industries and its subsidiaries have secured government subsidies worth more than $166 million, according to data compiled by the watchdog group Good Jobs First. The group says since 1990, Koch-owned properties have received 191 separate subsidies worth a total of $195 million. Koch Industries and its subsidiaries, which are a privately held, are involved in everything from oil refining to manufacturing to high finance. In 2012, Charles Koch issued a similar jeremiad against government-sponsored subsidies for corporations. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, he said, "We are on dangerous terrain when government picks winners and losers in the economy by subsidizing favored products and industries." In his essay, he specifically derided tax credits -- yet even after the op-ed, Koch-owned properties accepted more than $77 million worth of such taxpayer-funded preferences from governments, according to Good Jobs First. Among the biggest subsidies received by Koch-owned companies was a $62 million Louisiana property tax abatement for Georgia Pacific -- a paper and chemical conglomerate that was acquired by Koch Industries in 2005. Georgia Pacific also received a separate $11 million tax credit from Louisiana in 2014 to upgrade its facilities. Since 2007, Good Jobs First says Koch Industries itself has received more than $20 million in subsidies through an Oklahoma program designed to incentivize investment and job creation. Oklahoma's government website lists more than $28 million in such tax credits to the firm and its subsidiaries. Koch, it should be noted, is not like other top executives of major corporations. His company is not publicly traded -- it is privately held, with most of the company owned by him and his brother, David. That means the Kochs could reject subsidies and not have to justify the move to hordes of shareholders. Instead, though, they have accepted the government support, even as they fund conservative campaigns that deride the influence of government on the economy. Of course, Koch's speech certainly did identify a growing trend in America. As Big Business has used campaign cash to secure more control over politics, elected officials have been approving more and more taxpayer subsidies for corporations. Conservative opposition to those expenditures will no doubt be key to reining them in. However, it is difficult to believe that the head of a company that has benefited from so much taxpayer support is really going to use his political power to end the largesse. In other words: The message may be compelling, but the messenger is not particularly credible.Earlier this month, billionaire Charles Koch had a surprising message: In a speech to his fellow conservatives, he said politicians must end taxpayer-funded subsidies and preferential treatment for corporations. Why is this surprising? Because the demand came from an industrialist whose company and corporate subsidiaries have raked in tens of millions of dollars' worth of such subsidies. The Koch-organized conference at a luxury resort in Southern California reportedly attracted roughly 450 conservative donors who have committed to spending nearly $900 million on the 2016 presidential election. The event included appearances by Republican presidential candidates such as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. "Where I believe we need to start in reforming welfare is eliminating welfare for the wealthy," said Koch, who, along with his brother David, is among the biggest financiers of conservative political causes. "This means stopping the subsidies, mandates and preferences for business that enrich the haves at the expense of the have nots." Yet, in the last 15 years, Koch's firm Koch Industries and its subsidiaries have secured government subsidies worth more than $166 million, according to data compiled by the watchdog group Good Jobs First. The group says since 1990, Koch-owned properties have received 191 separate subsidies worth a total of $195 million. Koch Industries and its subsidiaries, which are a privately held, are involved in everything from oil refining to manufacturing to high finance. In 2012, Charles Koch issued a similar jeremiad against government-sponsored subsidies for corporations. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, he said, "We are on dangerous terrain when government picks winners and losers in the economy by subsidizing favored products and industries." In his essay, he specifically derided tax credits -- yet even after the op-ed, Koch-owned properties accepted more than $77 million worth of such taxpayer-funded preferences from governments, according to Good Jobs First. Among the biggest subsidies received by Koch-owned companies was a $62 million Louisiana property tax abatement for Georgia Pacific -- a paper and chemical conglomerate that was acquired by Koch Industries in 2005. Georgia Pacific also received a separate $11 million tax credit from Louisiana in 2014 to upgrade its facilities. Since 2007, Good Jobs First says Koch Industries itself has received more than $20 million in subsidies through an Oklahoma program designed to incentivize investment and job creation. Oklahoma's government website lists more than $28 million in such tax credits to the firm and its subsidiaries. Koch, it should be noted, is not like other top executives of major corporations. His company is not publicly traded -- it is privately held, with most of the company owned by him and his brother, David. That means the Kochs could reject subsidies and not have to justify the move to hordes of shareholders. Instead, though, they have accepted the government support, even as they fund conservative campaigns that deride the influence of government on the economy. Of course, Koch's speech certainly did identify a growing trend in America. As Big Business has used campaign cash to secure more control over politics, elected officials have been approving more and more taxpayer subsidies for corporations. Conservative opposition to those expenditures will no doubt be key to reining them in. However, it is difficult to believe that the head of a company that has benefited from so much taxpayer support is really going to use his political power to end the largesse. In other words: The message may be compelling, but the messenger is not particularly credible.Earlier this month, billionaire Charles Koch had a surprising message: In a speech to his fellow conservatives, he said politicians must end taxpayer-funded subsidies and preferential treatment for corporations. Why is this surprising? Because the demand came from an industrialist whose company and corporate subsidiaries have raked in tens of millions of dollars' worth of such subsidies. The Koch-organized conference at a luxury resort in Southern California reportedly attracted roughly 450 conservative donors who have committed to spending nearly $900 million on the 2016 presidential election. The event included appearances by Republican presidential candidates such as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. "Where I believe we need to start in reforming welfare is eliminating welfare for the wealthy," said Koch, who, along with his brother David, is among the biggest financiers of conservative political causes. "This means stopping the subsidies, mandates and preferences for business that enrich the haves at the expense of the have nots." Yet, in the last 15 years, Koch's firm Koch Industries and its subsidiaries have secured government subsidies worth more than $166 million, according to data compiled by the watchdog group Good Jobs First. The group says since 1990, Koch-owned properties have received 191 separate subsidies worth a total of $195 million. Koch Industries and its subsidiaries, which are a privately held, are involved in everything from oil refining to manufacturing to high finance. In 2012, Charles Koch issued a similar jeremiad against government-sponsored subsidies for corporations. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, he said, "We are on dangerous terrain when government picks winners and losers in the economy by subsidizing favored products and industries." In his essay, he specifically derided tax credits -- yet even after the op-ed, Koch-owned properties accepted more than $77 million worth of such taxpayer-funded preferences from governments, according to Good Jobs First. Among the biggest subsidies received by Koch-owned companies was a $62 million Louisiana property tax abatement for Georgia Pacific -- a paper and chemical conglomerate that was acquired by Koch Industries in 2005. Georgia Pacific also received a separate $11 million tax credit from Louisiana in 2014 to upgrade its facilities. Since 2007, Good Jobs First says Koch Industries itself has received more than $20 million in subsidies through an Oklahoma program designed to incentivize investment and job creation. Oklahoma's government website lists more than $28 million in such tax credits to the firm and its subsidiaries. Koch, it should be noted, is not like other top executives of major corporations. His company is not publicly traded -- it is privately held, with most of the company owned by him and his brother, David. That means the Kochs could reject subsidies and not have to justify the move to hordes of shareholders. Instead, though, they have accepted the government support, even as they fund conservative campaigns that deride the influence of government on the economy. Of course, Koch's speech certainly did identify a growing trend in America. As Big Business has used campaign cash to secure more control over politics, elected officials have been approving more and more taxpayer subsidies for corporations. Conservative opposition to those expenditures will no doubt be key to reining them in. However, it is difficult to believe that the head of a company that has benefited from so much taxpayer support is really going to use his political power to end the largesse. In other words: The message may be compelling, but the messenger is not particularly credible.

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These religious clowns should scare you: GOP candidates’ gullible, lunatic faith is a massive character flaw

One of the most serious problems with religious faith is that it can afflict an otherwise intelligent person and incite her to utter arrant inanities with the gravitas of an old-time, Walter-Cronkite-style television newscaster. This problem is doubly striking when that intelligent person is herself a newscaster (of sorts). And triply striking when that newscaster (of sorts) is Megyn Kelly, the Fox News star who looks sane amid a roster of crazies headed by the faith-addled duo of Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly. Kelly is purportedly a Roman Catholic, but judging by her racy photos, divorce, and remarriage outside the church, the Pope and his bull(s) don’t play much of a role in her life. All of which is good, in my view. Nonetheless, as the recent Fox News Republican presidential debates were coming to an end, Kelly decided to extract a (patently ridiculous) religion-related question from her channel’s Facebook feed and give it air time. Prefacing it by calling it “interesting,” she put the query to the politicians assembled on stage directly and in all seriousness: “Chase Norton on Facebook . . . wants to know this of the candidates: ‘I want to know if any of them have received a word from God on what they should do and take care of first.’” She paused. With just a hint of insouciance, and in one of the most understated segues I’ve ever witnessed, she then asked, “Senator Cruz, start from you. Any word from God?” Now let’s pause and consider the situation. Kelly is a political science graduate from a major Northeastern university, an attorney by trade with some 10 years of practice behind her, and a citizen of one the planet’s most developed countries. Speaking on satellite television (a technological wonder, whether we still recognize it or not, and no matter what we think of Fox News) in the twenty-first century, this sharp, degree-bearing professional American has just asked, with a straight face, a senator (who happens himself to be a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law) if he is receiving messages from a supernatural being. Yet no one in the audience broke into guffaws or even chuckled. And, of course, no one cried out with irate incredulity at the ludicrousness of the supposition implicit in the question (that an imaginary heavenly ogre could possibly be beaming instructions down to one of his earthling subjects). But since the supernatural being in question goes by the name of “God,” in the clown show that was the Republican debate, everyone – audience, MC, and the clowns themselves – simultaneously took leave of their senses and judged the matter at hand legit. In any event, the question gave Cruz the chance to display his bona fides as a faith-deranged poseur. He told us, to waves of applause, that he was “blessed to receive a word from God every day in receiving the scriptures and reading the scriptures. And God speaks through the Bible.” He reminded us that his truant, once-alcoholic father had found Jesus and returned to the family; that he supports the sickening array of Religious Freedom Restoration Acts now pullulating pestilentially across the land; and that he’s against Planned Parenthood. Nothing new or even interesting here. Referring to conservatives, he noted that “the scripture tells us, ‘you shall know them by their fruit.’" Well, we know Cruz’s fruit, and it is poison to the cause of Enlightenment. Kelly then turned to John Kasich, who, punctuating his speech with a strange mix of karate chops, head wobbles, and thumb-wags, brought up his family’s immigrant background and implied his election as Ohio’s governor was a miracle, but, oddly, did so without really implicating the Lord in it. He rambled on (godlessly) about the need for unity and respect, giving us reason to think – and this is a good thing – that he considered the issue of religion too divisive to dilate upon. He finally, though, did answer Kelly’s question: “In terms of the things that I’ve read in my lifetime, the Lord is not picking us. But because of how we respect human rights, because that we are a good force in the world, He wants America to be strong. He wants America to succeed.” This bland verbiage prefaced his closing non sequitur: “Nothing is more important to me than my family, my faith, and my friends.” Given that he is a biblical literalist and believes he is destined for heaven, and that why Kasich chose to pass up the chance to spout piety is a mystery.  However, he (grudgingly) recognized the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of same-sex marriage; quite possibly, he is content with leaving faith out of public affairs.  Just as the Constitution would have it. Wisconsin governor Scott Walker spoke next. He admitted to being an "imperfect man" and straightaway proved it by claiming to have been redeemed of his sins “only by the blood of Jesus Christ.” Walker’s father is a Baptist preacher, and he himself took to the pulpit as a teen, so such language should hardly surprise us. But before you dismiss it as boilerplate Jesus jabberwocky, consider that it does serve to highlight the bizarre conceit of the Christian cult: that the good Lord could think of no other way to give us a boost a couple of millennia ago except by orchestrating a cruel, ghastly act of human sacrifice involving His own kid. (Some dad.) If nothing else, ghoulish talk of this sort should prompt Fox News post-factum to rate the entire debate NOT SUITABLE FOR MINORS, or, at the very least, VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED. (And where are all those annoying trigger-warning zealots when you need them? Why don’t they campaign to have the Bible stamped with “TRIGGER WARNING: contains multiple accounts of genocide, warfare, murder, enslavement, sexual abuse of women and underage girls, and ritual human and animal sacrifice”?) In any case, Walker returned to reality, if only for a brief sojourn, and said the Lord hasn’t vouchsafed him a plan of action, and “hasn’t given me a list, a Ten Commandments, if you will, of things to act on the first day.” He closed saying he planned to live his “life in a way that would be a testimony to [God] and our faith.” On this latter point journalists may wish to ask Walker to be more specific. Since he had just mentioned a bloody, barbaric, public act of execution and its lasting salvific effect on him, we are well within our rights to demand what sort of form his “testimony” will take. He has two sons. Might he consider offering at least one of them as a participant in one of the Philippines’ horrific real-life reenactments of the crucifixion that occur on Good Friday? Perhaps he would like to take part himself? Will he, if elected president, opt to introduce crucifixion as an approved means of execution? According to the Bible, God visited genocide, warfare, exile, slavery, and rape on humanity, and has drawn up plans to destroy the vast majority of us. Which of these banes would a President Walker chose, as part of his personal faith journey, to impose on his fellow Americans? Or would he limit himself to making merely cosmetic changes, such as replacing the White House’s annual National Security Strategy with the Book of Revelation? Without responding to the Facebook user’s question about God’s to-do list, Senator Marco Rubio sputtered out permutations of bless (noun, verb, and adjective) in pitchman’s prattle too dull to merit space here, and spoke about the need for reform in the Veterans Administration (which Kelly had asked him to address, from the Lord’s perspective, of course). One might have concluded that he hardly believed in the supernatural at all, yet one would, of course, be erring grievously: he attends the extremist Christ Fellowship in Miami, a hotbed of exorcism, creationism and homophobia. Kelly last turned to Dr. Ben Carson. Perhaps the most disturbing example of how high intelligence and belief in balderdash myths can jointly inhabit a single mind, Carson, so faith-deranged that he denies evolution and has had himself baptized twice, dodged God entirely and offered a reasonable look into how a neurosurgeon sees the issue of race relations. We can only surmise he felt he had elsewhere spoken enough about God. He gained nothing with his audience by leaving the Lord out, but by doing so he at least offered rationalists a tiny respite from the evening’s madness. Presidential candidates have the constitutionally protected right to profess the religion of their choice and speak freely about it, just as atheists have the right – and, I would say, the obligation – to hold religion up to the ridicule and derision it so richly deserves. In that regard, nonbelieving journalists in particular should give openly devout candidates no passes on their faith. Religion directly influences public policy and politics itself, befouls the atmosphere of comity needed to hold reasoned discussions and arrive at consensus-based solutions, sows confusion about the origins of mankind and the cosmos, and may yet spark a nuclear war that could bring on a nuclear winter and end life as we know it. I could go on (and on), but the point is, we need to talk more about religion, and far more frankly, and now, before it’s too late. Discussing religion freely and critically will desacralize it, with the result that the public professions of faith of which our politicians are so enamored will eventually occasion only pity, disgust and cries of shame! or, at best, serve as fodder for comedians. Faith should, in fact, become a “character issue.”   The advances of science have rendered all vestigial belief in the supernatural more than just obsolete. They have shown it to indicate grave character flaws (among them, gullibility, a penchant for wish-thinking and an inability to process information), or, at the very least, an intellectual recklessness we should eschew, especially in men and women being vetted for public office. One who will believe outlandish propositions about reality on the basis of no evidence will believe anything, and is, simply put, not to be trusted. Come on, rationalist journos, be brave and do your job. Even if Megyn Kelly won’t do hers.

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