Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 104

Pride may come before a fall — but only metaphorically

Getty/Marjan_Apostolovic

Way back in 1999, when we, by definition, partied as per Prince's instructions, I wrote about a study concerning the advantages to humanity if we could get smaller. Not down to the five inches in height depicted in the 2017 movie Downsizing but enough to be noticeable. We would need less food, decrease our waste production and maybe even live longer. Another advantage, according to that old study: “When a 20% taller person trips, he or she hits the ground with 210% more kinetic energy than a shorter person.”

I then noted that the calculation was the first I'd seen “for exactly how much harder they fall the bigger they come.” But why did that taller person trip in the first place? According to another well-worn adage, “pride goeth before a fall.” So was the stumblebum done in by self-regard?

Finally, we can address that question — at least among older British people — thanks to a new study entitled “Does Pride Really Come Before a Fall? Longitudinal Analysis of Older English Adults.” The work appears in the famously flip Christmas issue of the BMJ, which always features merry research. (It downsized its name from the British Medical Journal in 1988, thereby passing on the costs of ink to other publications that need to explain what the BMJ is.)

The researchers looked at data for people at least 60 years old from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA). At one point in this long-term investigation, subjects were asked, “During the past 30 days, to what degree did you feel proud?” The choices were: “not at all,” “a little,” “moderately,” “quite a bit” and “very much.” The BMJ researchers collapsed those responses to low (for the first two), high (for the last two) and moderate (for “moderately,” which is a good thing). ELSA participants had also been asked if they'd fallen down recently.

Data sets in hand, the game was afoot. The researchers crunched the numbers and found convincing evidence that pride doth not appear to goeth before a fall at all. “Unsurprisingly,” they wrote, “this is the first study to investigate temporal associations between pride and subsequent reported falls in a large sample of English older adults. Contrary to the proverb, our findings suggest that pride may actually be protective against falls rather than being a contributing factor.”

In fact, after controlling for confounding factors, the team found that “the odds of having had a reported fall ... was 19% lower for people with high levels of pride compared with those who had low levels.”

Clearly, these rigorous scientific findings raise a vital question. As the researchers themselves ask, “Do these findings undermine the validity of biblical wisdom in its application to contemporary health outcomes?” But, they point out, “the keen biblical scholar will have noted that ‘pride comes before a fall’ is, in fact, an inaccurate paraphrase of Proverbs chapter 16 verse 18, which reads ‘pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall,’” and that “the saying ‘pride comes before a fall’ more likely refers to metaphorical moral or ethical falls, not literal ones.”

Rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's, how then to explain a significant decrease in fall risk with feeling proud? The authors of the BMJ paper give it a go: “In the case of pride, higher levels are likely to be reflective of, or a driver of, higher levels of general subjective wellbeing, which has been shown to have close associations with physical health. Physical manifestations of pride may also make people with high levels of pride less likely to fall — for example, having a more upright and confident posture, walking with the head raised high giving better sight of oncoming obstacles, and walking with a purposeful gait.”

Of course, these results apply only to older English people. Here in the U.S., we have the fascinating case of the now 71-year-old orange-hued man who tweeted on December 3, 2015, “I have instructed my long-time doctor to issue, within two weeks, a full medical report — it will show perfection.” Look out below.

A new age of gunboat diplomacy — and a new area of conflict

AP Photo/Bullit Marquez

Amid the intense coverage of Russian cyber-maneuvering and North Korean missile threats, another kind of great-power rivalry has been playing out quietly in the Indian and Pacific oceans. The U.S. and Chinese navies have been repositioning warships and establishing naval bases as if they were so many pawns on a geopolitical chessboard. To some it might seem curious, even quaint, that gunboats and naval bastions, once emblematic of the Victorian age, remain even remotely relevant in our own era of cyber-threats and space warfare.

Yet if you examine, even briefly, the central role that naval power has played and still plays in the fate of empires, the deadly serious nature of this new naval competition makes more sense. Indeed, if war were to break out among the major powers today, don’t discount the possibility that it might come from a naval clash over Chinese bases in the South China Sea rather than a missile strike against North Korea or a Russian cyber attack.

The Age of Empire

For the past 500 years, from the 50 fortified Portuguese ports that dotted the world in the sixteenth century to the 800 U.S. military bases that dominate much of it today, empires have used such enclaves as Archimedean levers to move the globe. Viewed historically, naval bastions were invaluable when it came to the aspirations of any would-be hegemonic power, yet also surprisingly vulnerable to capture in times of conflict.

Throughout the twentieth century and the first years of this one, military bases in the South China Sea in particular have been flashpoints for geopolitical change. The U.S. victory at Manila Bay in 1898, the fall of the British bastion of Singapore to the Japanese in 1942, America’s withdrawal from Subic Bay in the Philippines in 1992, and China’s construction of airstrips and missile launchers in the Spratly Islands since 2014 — all have been iconic markers for both geopolitical dominion and imperial transition.

Indeed, in his 1890 study of naval history, that famed advocate of seapower Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, arguably America’s only original strategic thinker, stated that “the maintenance of suitable naval stations…, when combined with decided preponderance at sea, makes a scattered and extensive empire, like that of England, secure.” In marked contrast to the British Navy’s 300 ships and 30 bases circling the globe, he worried that U.S. warships with “no foreign establishments, either colonial or military... will be like land birds, unable to fly far from their own shores. To provide resting-places for them... would be one of the first duties of a government proposing to itself the development of the power of the nation at sea.”

So important did Captain Mahan consider naval bases for America’s defense that he argued “it should be an inviolable resolution of our national policy that no European state should henceforth acquire a coaling position within three thousand miles of San Francisco” — a span that reached the Hawaiian Islands, which Washington would soon seize. In a series of influential dictums, he also argued that a large fleet and overseas bases were essential to both the exercise of global power and national defense.

Although Mahan was read as gospel by everyone from American President Teddy Roosevelt to German Kaiser Wilhelm II, his observations do not explain the persistent geopolitical significance of such naval bases. Especially in periods between wars, these bastions seem to allow empires to project their power in crucial ways.

Historian Paul Kennedy has suggested that Britain’s “naval mastery” in the nineteenth century made it “extremely difficult for other lesser states to undertake maritime operations or trade without at least its tacit consent.” But modern bases do even more. Naval bastions and the warships they serve can weave a web of dominion across an open sea, transforming an unbounded ocean into de facto territorial waters. Even in an age of cyberwarfare, they remain essential to geopolitical gambits of almost any sort, as the United States has shown repeatedly during its tumultuous century as a Pacific power.

America as a Pacific Power

As the U.S. began its ascent to global power by expanding its navy in the 1890s, Captain Mahan, then head of the Naval War College, argued that Washington had to build a battle fleet and capture island bastions, particularly in the Pacific, that could control the surrounding sea-lanes. Influenced in part by his doctrine, Admiral George Dewey’s squadron sank the Spanish fleet and seized the key harbor of Manila Bay in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War of 1898.

In 1905, however, Japan’s stunning victory over the Russian Baltic Fleet in the Tsushima Strait (between southern Japan and Korea) suddenly revealed the vulnerability of the slender string of bases the U.S. then possessed, stretching from Panama to the Philippines. Under the pressure of the imperial Japanese navy, Washington soon abandoned its plans for a major naval presence in the Western Pacific. Within a year, President Theodore Roosevelt had removed the last Navy battleship from the region and later authorized the construction of a new Pacific bastion not in distant Manila Bay but at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, insisting that “the Philippines form our heel of Achilles.” When the Versailles settlement at the end of World War I awarded Micronesia in the Western Pacific to Japan, the dispatch of any fleet from Pearl Harbor to Manila Bay became problematic in time of war and rendered the Philippines essentially indefensible.

It was partly for this reason, in mid-1941, that Secretary of War Henry Stimson decided that the B-17 bomber, aptly named the “Flying Fortress,” would be the wonder weapon capable of countering the Japanese navy’s control of the Western Pacific and sent 35 of these new aircraft to Manila. Stimson’s strategy was, however, a flight of imperial fantasy that condemned most of those planes to destruction by Japanese fighters in the first days of World War II in the Pacific and doomed General Douglas MacArthur’s army in the Philippines to a humiliating defeat at Bataan.

As bomber ranges tripled during that global conflict, however, the War Department decided in 1943 that the country’s postwar defense required retaining forward bases in the Philippines. These ambitions were fully realized in 1947 when the newly independent republic signed the Military Bases Agreement granting the U.S. a 99-year lease on 23 military installations, including the Seventh Fleet’s future homeport at Subic Bay and the massive Clark Air Base near Manila.

Simultaneously, during its postwar occupation of Japan, the U.S. acquired more than a hundred military facilities that stretched from Misawa Air Base in the north of that country to Sasebo Naval Base in the south. With its strategic location, the island of Okinawa had 32 active U.S. installations covering about 20% of its entire area.

As the Cold War came to Asia in 1951, Washington concluded mutual defense pacts with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia that made the Pacific littoral the eastern anchor for its strategic dominion over Eurasia. By 1955, the early enclaves in Japan and the Philippines had been integrated into a global network of 450 overseas bases aimed largely at containing the Sino-Soviet bloc behind an Iron Curtain that bisected the vast Eurasian continent.

After surveying the rise and fall of Eurasian empires for the past 600 years, Oxford historian John Darwin concluded that Washington had achieved its “colossal Imperium... on an unprecedented scale” by becoming the first power to control the strategic axial points “at both ends of Eurasia”  — in the west through the NATO alliance and in the east via those four mutual security pacts. During the later decades of the Cold War, moreover, the U.S. Navy completed its encirclement of the continent, taking over the old British base at Bahrain in 1971 and later building a multibillion-dollar base at the epicenter of the Indian Ocean on the island of Diego Garcia for its air and naval patrols.

Among these many bases ringing Eurasia, those along the Pacific littoral were of particular strategic import before, during, and after the Cold War. As the geopolitical fulcrum between the defense of one continent (North America) and control of another (Asia), the Pacific littoral has remained a constant focus in Washington’s century-long effort to extend and maintain its global power.

In the aftermath of the Cold War, as Washington elites reveled in their role as leaders of the world’s sole superpower, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, a master of Eurasia’s unforgiving geopolitics, warnedthat the U.S. could preserve its global power only as long as the eastern end of that vast Eurasian landmass did not unify itself in a way that might lead to “the expulsion of America from its offshore bases.” Otherwise, he asserted with some prescience, “a potential rival to America might at some point arise.”

In fact, the weakening of those “offshore bases” had already begun in 1991, the very year the Soviet Union imploded, when the Philippines refused to extend the U.S. lease on the Seventh Fleet’s bastion at Subic Bay. As Navy tugs towed Subic’s floating dry docks home to Pearl Harbor, the Philippines assumed full responsibility for its own defense without actually putting any more of its funds into air or naval power. Consequently, during a raging typhoon in 1994, China was able to suddenly occupy some shoals in the nearby Spratly Islands that went by the name of Mischief Reef — and that would turn out to be just its first step in a bid to control the South China Sea. Without the ability to launch its own air and navy patrols, in 1998 the Philippine military, in an attempt to reassert its claim to the area, grounded a rusting U.S.-surplus ship on nearby Ayungin Shoal as a “base” for a squad of barefoot soldiers who were forced to fish for their rations.

In the meantime, the U.S. Navy suffered its own decline with a 40% reduction in surface warships and attack submarines from 1990 to 1996. Over the next two decades, the Navy’s Pacific posture weakened further as the focus of naval deployments shifted to wars in the Middle East, the service’s overall size shrank by an additional 20% (to just 271 ships), and crews strained under the pressure of ever-extending deployments — leaving the Seventh Fleet ill-prepared to meet China’s unexpected challenge.

China’s Naval Gambit

After years of seeming compliance with Washington’s rules for good global citizenship, China’s recent actions in Central Asia and the continent’s surrounding seas have revealed a two-phase strategy that would, if successful, undercut the perpetuation of American global power. First, China is spending a trillion dollars to fund a vast transcontinental grid of new railroads, highways, and oil and natural gas pipelines that could harness Eurasia’s vast resources as an economic engine to drive its ascent to world power.

In a parallel move, China is building a blue-water navy and creating its first overseas bases in the Arabian and South China seas. As Beijing stated in a 2015 white paper, “The traditional mentality that land outweighs the sea must be abandoned... It is necessary for China to develop a modern maritime military force structure commensurate with its national security.” Though the force it contemplates will hardly compete with the U.S. Navy’s global presence, China seems determined to dominate a significant arc of waters around Asia, from the horn of Africa, across the Indian Ocean, all the way to Korea.

Beijing’s bid for overseas bases began quietly in 2011 when it started investing almost $250 million in the transformation of a sleepy fishing village at Gwadar, Pakistan, on the shores of the Arabian Sea, into a modern commercial port only 370 miles from the mouth of the Persian Gulf. Four years later, President Xi Jinping committed another $46 billion to the buildingof a China-Pakistan Economic Corridor of roads, railways, and pipelines stretching for 2,000 miles from western China to the now-modernized port at Gwadar. It still avoided any admission that military aims might be involved so as not to alarm New Delhi or Washington. In 2016, however, Pakistan’s Navy announced that it was indeed opening a naval base at Gwadar (soon strengthened with two warships donated by China) and added that Beijing was welcome to base its own ships there as well.

That same year, China began building a major military facility at Djibouti on the Horn of Africa and, in August 2017, opened its first official overseas base there, giving its navy access to the oil-rich Arabian Sea. Simultaneously, Sri Lanka, located at a midpoint in the Indian Ocean, settled a billion-dollar debt to China by ceding it a strategic port at Hambantota, creating a future potential for dual military use there, too — in effect, the Gwadar stealth strategy revisited.

As controversial as these enclaves might be (at least from an American point of view), they paled before China’s attempts to claim an entire ocean. Starting in April 2014, Beijing escalated its bid for exclusive territorial control over the South China Sea by expanding Longpo Naval Base on its own Hainan Island into a homeport for its four nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines. Without any announcement, the Chinese also began dredging seven artificial atolls in the disputed Spratly Islands to create military airfields and future anchorages. In just four years, Beijing’s armada of dredges had sucked up countless tons of sand from the ocean floor, slowly transforming those minimalist reefs and atolls into active military bases. Today, China’s army operates a jet runway protected by HQ-9 anti-aircraft missile batteries on Woody Island, a radar base on Cuareton Reef, and has mobile missile launchers near runways ready for jet fighters at three more of these “islands.”

While fighter planes and submarines are pawns in China’s opening gambit in the contest for the South China Sea, Beijing hopes one day to at least check (if not checkmate) Washington with a growing armada of aircraft carriers, the modern dreadnaughts in this latter-day game of empires. After acquiring an unfinished Soviet Kuznetsov-class carrier from Ukraine in 1998, the naval dockyard at Dalian retrofitted the rusting hulk and launched it in 2012 as the Liaoning, China’s first aircraft carrier. That hull was already 30 years old, an age that would normally have assured such a warship a place in some scrap metal yard. Though not combat capable, it was a platform for training China’s first generation of naval aviators in landing speeding jets on heaving decks in high seas. In marked contrast to the 15 years needed to retrofit this first ship, the Dalian yards took just five years to construct, from the keel up, a much-improved second carrier capable of full combat operations.

The narrow hulls and ski-jump prows that limit these first two carriers to just 24 “Flying Shark” fighter planes won’t hold for the country’s third carrier, now being built from indigenous designs in Shanghai. When launched next year, it will be able to carry on-board fuel reserves that will give it a longer cruising range and a complement of 40 aircraft, as well as electromagnetic systems for faster launches. Thanks to an accelerating tempo of training, technology, and construction, by 2030 China should have enough aircraft carriers to ensure that the South China Sea will become what the Pentagon has termed a “Chinese lake.”

Such carriers are the vanguard of a sustained naval expansion that, by 2017, had already given China a modern navy of 320 ships, backed by land-based missiles, jet fighters, and a global system of surveillance satellites. Its current anti-ship ballistic missiles have a range of 2,500 miles and so could strike U.S. Navy vessels anywhere in the Western Pacific. Beijing has also made strides in mastering the volatile technology for hypersonic missiles with speeds of up to 5,000 miles per hour, making them impossible to stop. By building two new submarines every year, China has already assembled a fleet of 57, both diesel- and nuclear-powered, and is projected to reach 80 soon. Each of its four nuclear submarines carries 12 ballistic missiles that could reach anywhere in the western United States. In addition, Beijing has launcheddozens of amphibious ships and coastal corvettes, giving it naval dominance in its own waters.

Within just five years, according to the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, China “will complete its transition” from the coastal force of the 1990s to a modern navy capable of “sustained blue water operations” and “multiple missions around the world,” including full-spectrum warfare. In other words, China is forging a future capacity to control its “home” waters from the East China Sea to the South China Sea. In the process, it will become the first power in 70 years to challenge the U.S. Navy’s dominion over the Pacific basin.

The American Response

After taking office in 2009, President Barack Obama came to the conclusion that China’s rise represented a serious threat and so he developed a geopolitical strategy to counter it. First, he promoted the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation commercial pact that would direct 40% of world trade toward the United States. Then, in March 2014, after announcing a military “pivot to Asia” in an address to the Australian parliament, he deployed a full battalion of Marines to a base at the city of Darwin on the Timor Sea. A month later, the U.S. ambassador to the Philippines signed an enhanced defense cooperation agreement with that country allowing U.S. forces to be stationed at five of its bases.

Combining existing installations in Japan with access to naval bases in Subic Bay, Darwin, and Singapore, Obama rebuilt America’s chain of military enclaves along the Asian littoral. To make full use of these installations, the Pentagon began planning to “forward base 60% of [its] naval assets in the Pacific by 2020” and launched its first regular “freedom of navigation” patrols in the South China Sea as a challenge to the Chinese navy, even sending in full carrier strike groups.

President Trump, however, cancelled the Trans-Pacific Partnership right after his inauguration and, with the endless war on terror in the Greater Middle East grinding on, the shift of naval forces to the Pacific slowed. More broadly, Trump’s unilateral, America-first foreign policy has damaged relations with the four allies that underpin its line of defense in the Pacific: Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia. Moreover, in his obsessive courtship of Beijing’s help in the Korean crisis, the president even suspended, for five months, those naval patrols into the South China Sea.

The administration’s new $700 billion defense budget will fund 46 new ships for the Navy by 2023 (for a total of 326), but the White House seems incapable, as reflected in its recent National Security Strategy, of grasping the geostrategic importance of Eurasia or devising an effective scheme for the deployment of its expanding military to check China’s rise. After declaring Obama’s “pivot to Asia” officially dead, the Trump administration has instead offered its own “free and open Indo-Pacific” founded on an unworkable alliance of four supposedly kindred democracies — Australia, India, Japan, and the United States.

While Trump stumbles from one foreign policy crisis to the next, his admirals, mindful of Mahan’s strategic dictums, are acutely aware of the geopolitical requisites of American imperial power and have been vocal about their determination to preserve it. Indeed, China’s naval expansion, along with advances in Russia’s submarine fleet, have led the Navy to a fundamental strategic shift from limited operations against regional powers like Iran to full-spectrum readiness for “a return to great power competition.” After a sweeping strategic review of his forces in 2017, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson reported that China’s “growing and modernized fleet” was “shrinking” the traditional American advantage in the Pacific. “The competition is on,” he warned, “and pace dominates. In an exponential competition, the winner takes all. We must shake off any vestiges of comfort or complacency.”

In a parallel review of the Navy’s surface force, its commander, Vice Admiral Thomas Rowden, proclaimed “a new age of seapower” with a return to “great power dynamics” from “near-peer competitors.” Any potential naval attack, he added, must be met with a “distributed lethality” capable of “inflicting damage of such magnitude that it compels an adversary to cease hostilities.” Summoning the ghost of Captain Mahan, the admiral warned: “From Europe to Asia, history is replete with nations that rose to global power only to cede it back through lack of seapower.”

Great Power Rivalry in the Twenty-First Century

As such rhetoric indicates, there is already a rising tempo of naval competition in the South China Sea. Just last month, after a protracted hiatus in freedom-of-navigation patrols, the Trump administration sent the supercarrier USS Carl Vinson, with its full complement of 5,000 sailors and 90 aircraft, steaming across the South China Sea for a symbolic visit to Vietnam, which has its own long-running dispute with China over oil rights in those waters.

Just three weeks later, satellite imagery captured an extraordinary “display of maritime might” as a flotilla of some 40 Chinese warships, including the carrier Liaoning, steamed through that same sea in a formation that stretched for miles. Combined with the maneuvers it staged in those waters with the Cambodian and Russian navies in 2016, China, like empires past, is clearly planning to use its gunboats and future naval bases to weave a web of de facto imperial control across the waters of Asia.

Naysayers who dismiss China’s challenge might remind us that its navy only operates in two of the metaphoric “seven seas,” a pale imitation of the U.S. Navy’s robust global posture. Yet China’s rising presence in the Indian and Pacific oceans has far-reaching geostrategic implications for our world order. In a cascading series of consequences, China’s future dominance over significant parts of those oceans will compromise the U.S. position on the Pacific littoral, shatter its control over that axial end of Eurasia, and open that vast continental expanse, home to 70% of the world’s population and resources, to China’s dominion. Just as Brzezinski once warned,Washington’s failure to control Eurasia could well mean the end of its global hegemony and the rise of a new world empire based in Beijing.

I’m an expat U.S. scientist — and I’m returning to Trump’s America to stand up for science

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Editor’s note: With the second March for Science scheduled for April 14, The Conversation is publishing articles in which scientists share their perspectives, including this one, on the role of scientists in society.

Donald Trump’s presidency has not been good for science or scientists. Since Trump took office 15 months ago, his administration has proposed to terminate many federally funded research programs and slash funding for others. Trump’s appointees are working to roll back environmental regulations and conservation policies.

The president and some of his Cabinet members have challenged the broad consensus among scientists that human activities are dramatically changing Earth’s climate. And across all policy areas, Trump has shown clear disdain for expertise and facts.

I am a marine conservation scientist studying human impacts on coral reefs and other ocean ecosystems. Given what’s happening in Washington, D.C., the recent move by a handful of prominent U.S. climate scientists who have accepted French President Emmanuel Macron’s “Make Our Planet Great Again” offer of millions of euros to relocate to France for the rest of Trump’s presidency makes perfect sense.

Their choices make a bold and important statement — one that I strongly support. But I’m going the other way.

I’m an American expat in Australia, where I moved in 1999 as a Fulbright scholar to study how human activities were harming the Great Barrier Reef. Except for four years doing my Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara, I’ve lived here ever since. During that time, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Australian Research Council and the World Wildlife Fund have funded the majority of my research and salary.

But now, after many years abroad, my husband (also a marine biologist) and I are moving back to the United States with our three children. Although this choice may seem counterintuitive in a political climate that is overtly hostile to science and solving environmental problems, I believe that science and scientists are needed in the United States now more than ever before.

Corals — and scientists — under pressure

There’s a practical motive for our shift to the University of Hawaii. Finding two faculty jobs in the same place is rare enough that the universal conundrum of dual-career academic couples like us has its own name: “the two-body problem.”

Practical factors can, however, make it seem professionally unwise for scientists to move to the United States now. Federal research funding, upon which many academic researchers depend, will likely suffer major blows under the Trump administration.

For example, although the National Science Foundation fares relatively well under President Trump’s proposed science budget for fiscal 2019, its funding for research platform construction and scientific instrumentation acquisition would decrease by more than 50 percent if Congress supports the administration’s request. The Environmental Protection Agency’s funding would drop to its lowest level since the early 1990s, and its climate change research funding would be eliminated. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s budget would be slashed by 20 percent. NOAA’s climate change grants and the Sea Grant College Program, which supports thousands of researchers studying coastal, ocean and Great Lakes topics, would be terminated.

These potential cuts loom at a time when the world’s coral reefs are in crisis. Stresses on reefs include rising ocean temperatures and acidification due to climate change; fishing, which is cutting key parts out of marine food webs; and pollution from coastal development and agriculture.

Key Trump administration proposals are likely to worsen these problems. Shrinking marine national monuments will critically undermine the protection that they offer coral reef ecosystems from the damaging effects of fishing. Expanding offshore drilling to virtually all U.S. waters and loosening safety regulations will increase the risk of oil spills. On a global level, pulling out of the Paris climate accord will make it harder to limit warming, which will reduce coral reefs’ chances of surviving in altered oceans.

Speaking out, with data

Despite these challenges, as a scientist who wants to leave the planet in better shape than what we have today, I feel almost obligated to return to the United States. In the current political climate, people with evidence-based decision-making skills are needed more than ever. Scientists outside of government can and should seize opportunities to comment on government actions and provide fact-based counterviews where appropriate.

The notion of “change from within” inspires me into action. At the University of Hawaii, I want to do more than publish peer-reviewed papers that will be read by other scientists but not likely by the public nor policymakers. Engaging with mainstream and social media, giving public talks to nonscience audiences, and getting involved in public policy dialogue are just a few ways to help “put science on the table” and solve problems.

Many renowned scientists have spent large parts of their careers speaking out about important societal and environmental issues. One great communicator, the late Stanford University biologist Stephen Schneider, worked tirelessly to help the public and policymakers understand climate disruption and humans’ role in it, and contributed to four climate science assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Another role model, Oregon State University marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco also became a vocal conservationist who founded organizations to train other researchers to speak out on issues of public importance. She ultimately became the head of NOAA and a scientific adviser to President Barack Obama.

Hawaii is hardly the focus of my concerns — it’s among the most environmentally progressive states. But even there, fishing, pollution and climate change threaten coral reef ecosystems, particularly near the human-populated main Hawaiian Islands. Many scientists both within and beyond Hawaii are helping to guide wise decision-making on these issues.

It is challenging but also exciting to be a scientist in this unique time and place. I’m eager to engage with whoever will listen in Washington, Hawaii and elsewhere to do what I believe is every modern-day scientist’s responsibility: informing actions that will help make the world a better place.

Elizabeth Madin, Assistant Professor, University of Hawaii (starting May 2018); Postdoctoral Researcher in Marine Ecology (current), Macquarie University

Don’t let Trump betray veterans

Getty/Win McNamee

Whenever Donald Trump fires a member of his administration, the least likely reason is incompetence, corruption, abuse of authority or wasteful extravagance. If those were causes for dismissal in the Trump administration, nearly his entire cabinet would have been replaced by now. That tweet signaling the removal of Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin — an Obama administration holdover widely regarded as one of the few able appointees in the cabinet — wasn't provoked by any such offense.

The real trouble with Shulkin, as he informed the country on his way out, was his determination to stand up against a scheme fronted by the billionaire Koch brothers to privatize the VA health system, a $200 billion public enterprise that currently serves the needs of nine million veterans. Even worse, Shulkin achieved enough success in providing and improving care to win the approval of 70 percent of the nation's former service members.

If you ask veterans whether the VA should be privatized, the answer is overwhelmingly no. And if you survey the nation's many veterans' organizations, the response is unanimously negative as well, with the single exception of an outfit called "Concerned Veterans of America" — which is financed by the Koch brothers' political network.

Unfortunately for those who have served the country in uniform, the Koch network has contrived to place political operatives from "Concerned Veterans" in key positions at the VA. It was those operatives, dedicated to the Koch agenda, who helped to undermine and eventually remove Shulkin.

As for Trump, is anybody still surprised that his campaign pledge to provide the very best medical services for veterans was a fraud? By replacing Shulkin with Dr. Ronny Jackson, his personal physician, who lacks any experience or qualifications to run the VA, the president proved just how little he cares about this vital government program. In effect, he sacrificed veterans to the whims of the Koch brothers.

Known as the country's biggest financiers of right-wing officials, organizations and think tanks, Charles and David Koch relentlessly promote their ideological and commercial interests (which generally coincide). They're especially notorious for sponsoring politicians who will allow their continued destruction of the planet in pursuit of oil and coal profits. This is an understandable if despicable approach to politics.

But why are the Kochs so determined to dismantle the VA, one of the most popular and effective federal programs in history? Perhaps they have a secret plan to profit from privatizing veterans' health care. Or perhaps their urge to destroy the VA is precisely because it has worked well. They openly hate government, which stands in the way of complete corporate domination of democratic society, and that may be reason enough. Whatever their motives, privatization poses a severe threat to veterans and ought to be opposed by every patriotic American.

Historically, the VA has provided both excellent care, as it did when the Clinton administration advanced its technological capacities, and less excellent care, as it did in the turbulent wake of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. And it is true that some veterans, who live far from VA facilities or confront long delays in obtaining ordinary medical services, could benefit from a system like Medicare that allows them to use nearby private doctors and hospitals. Yet over the decades, the VA has addressed the traumatic injuries, mental illness and substance abuse suffering inflicted by war with dedicated services that the private sector will never match. That is why the VA Commission on Care, a bipartisan panel of top health care experts, issued a report in June 2016 that firmly rejected the privatization option. That is also why privatization has met with tough skepticism among elected officials of both parties.

To disrupt or even destroy those essential services with an ill-conceived ideological notion of "reform" would be to harm millions of veterans irreparably. It is hard to imagine a worse betrayal of their sacrifice.

In 2018, AI will be listening and watching us more than ever: Is our privacy under threat?

Lolostock via Shutterstock/Salon

It seems strange in a world where Facebook users believe the social network listens to their private spoken conversations — and produces related adverts — that smart, learning and always-listening devices with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant are suddenly so popular.

At CES 2017, Alexa ruled the nascent smart speaker roost, as the personal assistant appeared on devices beyond those of Amazon's own Echo range. Google countered with the Google Assistant, and at CES 2018 we have seen both spread far and wide.

Finding Alexa or Google Assistant (or even both) inside a television or speaker is no longer a surprise. But as the smart home of the future finally becomes an attainable reality, artificial intelligence is appearing everywhere.

At CES it was in fridges and ovens, washing machines, dryers and even light switches. Yes, we are at a stage where even the most humble of household devices — the light switch — has been given a microphone, speakers, and a blue pulsating light to indicate when it is listening and thinking. Somehow, while our backs were turned, our light switches became intelligent.

The revelation of widespread surveillance efforts by the NSA and Britain's GCHQ are still a recent memory. Yet the giants of Silicon Valley are fitting microphones and cameras in every room of our house. The Amazon Echo Spot is designed as a bedside alarm clock — yet it has a small camera, an always-listening microphone and an always-on internet connection.

Days after it was revealed, a Google Home Mini was caught constantly listening in its owner's bathroom, uploading everything it heard to Google's server. This fault was quickly nipped in the bud by a PR team who sprang into action on a Friday night like a SWAT team. Disaster averted, but for how long?

'Very troubling'

Most consumers are unlikely aware that they've invited a piece of always-listening artificial intelligence into their home. But the cybersecurity community knows this facet full well. And it's going to take some convincing that the Amazon Echo devices, Google Home speakers and every other AI device has their security under control — and technological backdoors firmly shut.

"I find the idea of devices that are 'always listening' in our homes very troubling," says Cybersecurity expert and blogger Graham Cluley. "Fears would include that devices might be poorly secured and open to hacking, as well as the temptation for some firms to abuse the data that they are collecting. The Internet of Things generally is a bit of a nightmare, not least because many devices are being made on the cheap with little thought for security and privacy."

As consumer interest in AI grows — and the market appears more lucrative — companies without the budgets of Amazon and Google must still ensure consumers, then, that they don't cut corners to make a quick buck.

There were signs at CES this month that the industry is aware of this potential privacy nightmare. A smart home security camera produced by Angree, crowd-funded in 2015 and going on sale this coming March, turns away when you arrive home. What may seem like a gimmick, is actually a comfort measure: Guests would likely feel uncomfortable if they see your camera constantly looking at them. Averting its gaze when people are present provides that solution — as long as it doesn't look away when confronted by a burglar, of course.

Following a similar theme, the Lenovo Smart Display — which gives Google Assistant its first display — has a physical shutter over the webcam that guarantees privacy. It may not be seamless — and we can't imagine Apple ever offering such a thing for fear of upsetting Jony Ive — but in a world where laptop users are known to stick tape over their webcams, it's a smart move by Google and Lenovo to keep concerns of Google Assistant's prying eyes at bay.

Not great at keeping mum

"On the face of it, smart speakers sound like a great idea which add functionality [to the home]...[but] that's not to say they are all that great at keeping mum about what's said to them," says Lee Munson, a security researcher at Comparitech. "While Apple is renowned for creating an ecosystem in which privacy and security are sacrosanct, Amazon has already seen its Alexa system subpoenaed into a court of law to give evidence in a murder trial, and the jury is still out on Google's foray into the market."

Wary of how much personal information users tell assistants like Alexa, Munson believes consumers should be "wary, not to mention well-informed, before making a purchase," he says. And in a corporate setting Munson adds: "Such advice should count double given the frequency in which sensitive data will be spoken in range of a smart speakers, especially if it is located in a busy staff area or a meeting room."

To assume total privacy is a fallacy

Martin Quaife, senior consultant at Blackstone Consultancy, a private security specialist in London, has some simple advice for consumers looking to buy into the Alexa or Google Assistant ecosystem: Don't expect 100 percent privacy. Ever. "If not for the ability of Amazon Echo and Google Home to listen, these things would become nothing more than doorstops and paperweights," he says.

But there are ways to protect yourself and your data — and to give yourself a little extra piece of mind. Both Google Home and Amazon Echo products feature a physical mute switch, which turns off the always-listening microphone. And it's worth remembering that the mic is only listening for the "Alexa" or "Hey Google" wake-up call. The rest of the time it is not recording.

Once it starts recording, however, everything you say — and, indeed, everything said by others within earshot of the Echo or Home — is recorded and uploaded to the servers of Google or Amazon. These recordings can be played back, which might seem a little creepy. But thankfully they easily be deleted in the Alexa and Google smartphone apps at any time.

Ultimately, smart home gadgets are here to help simplify and streamline our lives, understanding voice commands instead of presses of buttons and taps of applications. The smarter they get, the more the creep factor presents itself, but keeping your home network secure and your devices up-to-date with the latest software are the best ways to help mitigate against your data being stolen, your privacy compromised and your smart home from being hacked.

So far, the continued interest in smart speakers from a generally wary public suggests manufacturers are striking a good balance between know-it-all convenience and know-too-much invasion of privacy. It is too early to say whether this balance will remain intact through 2018 and beyond.

Culture shapes how children view the natural world

AP Photo/Disney, Adam Chapman

How do young children understand the natural world? Most research into this question has focused on urban, white, middle-class American children living near large universities. Even when psychologists include kids from other communities, too often they use experimental procedures originally developed for urban children. Now researchers have developed a methodology for studying rural Native American kids' perspectives on nature and have compared their responses with those of their city-dwelling peers. The findings offer some rare cross-cultural insight into early childhood environmental education.

Sandra Waxman, a developmental psychologist at Northwestern University, and her colleagues have long collaborated with the Menominee, a Native American nation in Wisconsin. When the researchers presented plans for their study to tribe members who were trained research assistants, the assistants protested that the experiment — which involved watching children play with toy animals — was not culturally appropriate. It does not make sense to the Menominee to think of animals as divorced from their ecological contexts, Waxman says.

Instead one of the Menominee researchers constructed a diorama that included realistic trees, grass and rocks, as well as the original toy animals. The researchers watched as three groups of four-year-olds played with the diorama: rural Menominee, as well as Native Americans and other Americans living in Chicago and its suburbs.

All three groups were more likely to enact realistic scenarios with the toy animals than imaginary scenarios. But both groups of Native American kids were more likely to imagine they were the animals rather than give the animals human attributes. And the rural Menominee were especially talkative during the experiment, contrary to previous research that characterized these children as less verbal than their non-Native American peers. The results were published last November in the Journal of Cognition and Development.

“The involvement of tribal communities in all aspects of the research — planning, design, execution, analysis and dissemination — has to be the minimum requirement of all research involving Native people,” says Iowa State University STEM scholars program director Corey Welch, who is a member of the Northern Cheyenne.

The fall of the “alt-right” came from anti-fascism

Getty/Chip Somodevilla

Richard Spencer, the infamous founder of the white nationalist "alt-right" movement, already knew his group of racists was making a public nosedive even before the recent catastrophe at Michigan State University.

"I think the movement is in a bad state right now, I'm not going to lie about it," Spencer said to his millennial sidekick Gregory Conte during a March 3 episode of his podcast. "We're going to have to figure out how to build institutions in the era of rapid — and rabid — de-platforming. Which is really hard."

Spencer has been the figurehead for the "alt-right" since its evolution from the backwoods of esoteric web blogs, within private conferences and then, finally, attaining public recognition as part of a national political conversation. No one could have seen the highs that 2015 and 2016 would bring to white supremacy, and they thought their boom in numbers and exposure would be a permanent incline. But even after Donald Trump's election, the anti-fascist movement has detonated like a bomb, with Spencer seeing one devastating hurdle after another. Conferences have been shut down, "alt-right" violence has been publicly exposed and opposition has been so explosive that he can't even buy a cup of coffee without a mob chasing him down the street.

Publicly, though, he has claimed he would never back down in the face of opposition and has pushed forward on a series of high-profile college appearances. On March 5, he was set for yet another, this time at Michigan State University, in a move that was so unpopular with the student body and administration that it took a lawsuit from a supporter of Spencer to get him into a university building. This had become the usual pattern over the last nine months for the "alt-right," following the disastrous "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Since then, the movement's public outreach has been punctuated by canceled venues, dropped web platforms and the exposing of deception.

At this point, it is safe to say the "alt-right" is in a period of extreme decline. The term "alt-right," short for "alternative right," started to be applied to the growing movement when Spencer developed a webzine in 2010 using the term to link up various strains of pseudo-intellectual far-right nationalist ideologies with which he was mingling. White nationalists of various stripes became the center of his movement, and over the next five years, they worked hard to create an intellectual foundation and narrative structure they could use to argue for open fascism: white identity meets human inequality.

By 2015, their rhetoric was picked up by the angry trollosphere, where it transformed into a world of memes, harassment and multimedia content — all while they struggled to move from the virtual world of message boards into street action. The high point of this rise was Trump's election, but since then, even their more relatively "moderate" counterparts have abandoned them and every project they launch has seemed to fail.

This is not an unusual story for white nationalism in the US. Strong personalities mixed with instability and inadequate know-how has created a series of catastrophic disasters for organizations focused on building a "white ethnostate," and we have watched groups, from the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) to the Aryan Nations, burn out in violent spectacles. The most common narrative that media outlets have picked up on is that it is the ineptitude of the racists themselves that has collapsed their movements, and reporters often stereotype them as poor and ignorant "rednecks" against actual demographic information about these movements. While the white nationalist ability for self-sabotage can be impressive, it misses the most critical factor in the story of every white supremacist loss: They failed because of effective anti-fascist organizing.

Stop Spencer

Back in 2016, Spencer had decided to launch himself onto state-school campuses in what he labeled the "Danger Zone Tour." The idea here was that government-owned institutions would be more likely to host him against the pressure of anti-fascists than private institutions. There is some merit to his logic. After both the 2010 and 2011 conferences for the "race realist" organization American Renaissance were canceled by pressure campaigns from the anti-fascist community organization, One People's Project, the "alt-right" settled into a long-term relationship with Montgomery Bell State Park just outside Nashville, Tennessee. Since then, they have not had to move, and even though they have annual protesters, the state-managed venue has not cowed to pressure. Spencer assumed the same would be true on campuses.

Michigan State is only the latest in a string of these, and even though a mass campaign from students at multiple campuses formed to stop him, the school administration caved to a lawsuit leveled against it and offered him a farm building on the outskirts of their Lansing campus during spring break.

The organizing for what was branded the "#StopSpencer" campaign began toward the end of 2017. The timing of the campaign — taking shape during the period in which Spencer could be granted his platform — allowed for the student body and surrounding communities to organically build a solid base of opposition. By the time Spencer's March 5, 2018, talk happened, there had already been escalations with student walkouts and informational actions.

The existence of the "alt-right" has given impetus to the idea of anti-fascist organizing, which goes back decades, even while remaining on the margins of the American left. Anti-fascist work, however, was given more urgency with the rise of Trumpism, and therefore grew as an organizational priority. When the "alt-right" peaks into a public presence — especially with a high-profile face like Spencer's — that impetus hits the periphery of those organizers like a lightning bolt, and all of a sudden, it moves from the confines of committed activists to a movement defined by huge swaths of the community. Spencer himself, as with the rest of the "alt-right's" All-Star bench, can be considered the catalyst and injection of adrenaline into an already-angry community.

The resistance against Spencer has not just emerged during the past 12 months. In years before the "alt-right" became a household name, Spencer was being brought to campuses by groups like the now-defunct Youth for Western Civilization. Anti-fascists often disrupted Spencer's talks against affirmative action, mirroring what we saw later in the high-profile actions against Milo Yiannopoulos. The "alt-right's" attempts to focus on college campuses because of access to affluent, young, professional-class men has also delivered them over to a student activist culture, and the fires outside the University of California, Berkeley and the clashes at the University of Washington, among many others, were the result. The insistence of people like Yiannopoulos and Spencer to force their way onto campuses only escalated things and prompted anti-fascist organizations to be ready to mobilize.

Spencer generally ignored the fact that his appearances were becoming demilitarized zones, with his December 2016 event at Texas A&M drawing hundreds in a spectacle comparable to a football game. He used, what he claimed as "success" there, to go on to Alabama's Auburn University on April 19, 2017, employing former Klan attorney Sam Dickson to sue his way into the college. The same strategy took him to the University of Florida, Gainesville, on October 19, where a massive coalition pushed back on him and his followers. At each location, organizations of students and community members were formed, battling the white nationalists showing up, rendering the events barely functional and creating permanent connections for ongoing organizing work.

This activity was only an extension of what was taking place anytime Spencer — or white supremacist groups like Identity Evropa or the Traditionalist Workers Party — were attempting to hold a public conference or rally. Police barricades, last-minute venue cancellations and public brawls overshadowed the "alt-right's" message, and as members were doxxed and fired from their jobs, it became harder and harder to make their movement attractive to recruits. In the wake of Charlottesville, they were forced off social media, web hosting, podcast platforms and just about every outreach tool available, leaving them only to the back alleys of the internet.

The situation over the course of Spencer's campus tour, which was intended to be a victory lap for the "alt-right," ended up a death spiral. Charlottesville was intended to be their high-water mark, where they brought out nearly 1,000 fully-committed white nationalists, but it now seems like a ghost they only wish they could hold onto.

On March 4 and 5, 2018, there was a planned "alt-right" conference in Detroit. Anti-fascist organizers got wind of the location and the "alt-right" were banned from one venue after another, including private restaurants that wouldn't even serve them drinks. Under pressure, Spencer's attorney and host of the conference, Kyle Bristow, publicly distanced himself from the white nationalist movement. It just wasn't worth it anymore.

Spencer still had high hopes for his use of the campus, but since students were gone and the building provided to him was used primarily by farm animals, it wasn't looking good. Hundreds were brought out by the #StopSpencer campaign, which was coordinating in multiple locations to block audience members from entering the hall. The Traditionalist Workers Party, led by the now-disgraced leader Matthew Heimbach, was stopped by a flash mob of protesters, and Gregory Conte ended up as a ranting meme in a million YouTube clips before being arrested. In the end, only a handful showed up despite the 150 tickets he offered. About 20 actually made it in, less than the number of people arrested out front. Those who did show up had more in common with skinhead gangs like the Hammerskin Nation than the suit-and-tie crowd Spencer so desperately wants to recruit.

The bottom line is that coordinated anti-fascist action like this has made it incredibly difficult for the "alt-right" to organize. Major figures like Spencer have had their events turned into platforms for mass opposition, and his speeches shouted down. In 2016, he was able to host a sold out National Policy Institute conference at the famed Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, DC, but last year, the organization got booted from the unheated barn they were forced to rent. All of the tools they had — online outreach, public events and private meetings — have essentially been stolen from them, and an entire infrastructure of doxxing and protest action have made consequence inevitable. This is not how they build "the movement of the future."

In a YouTube video shortly after the Michigan State debacle, Spencer recapped this failure, admitting that anti-fascist organizers had won and they cannot have public appearances anymore.

"I don't think that it's a good idea for me to host an event that is wide open to the public," Spencer said, lamenting the pressure from anti-fascist groups. "Things are difficult. We felt that great feeling of winning for a long time. We are now in something that feels a lot more like a hard struggle."

Matt Parrott, longtime white nationalist and cofounder of the Traditionalist Workers Party, went on "Gab," an alternative to Twitter popular among white nationalists, to place blame for their failure solely on the opposition.

"The antifa has pretty much succeeded in achieving what the progressive left cannot, which is fully and finally de-platforming the hard right," Parrott said. "They demoralized and disabled the majority of the "alt-right," driving most of them off the streets and public square."

The major "alt-right" blog, The Right Stuff, has been organizing private meet-ups that are heavily vetted for their membership, a format they are now presenting as an alternative to "in real life" activism. Spencer agrees, basically giving up on open, public events that can reach the unconverted.

The story of Michigan, and the decline of the "alt-right," is the result of a coordinated campaign of thousands of anti-fascists who have radicalized in a period of insurgent white supremacy. The goal of anti-fascist organizing of all stripes is to dismantle the functioning of white nationalist organizations to make white nationalists unable to meet their goals, which range from recruitment to violence.

What anti-fascism means

Even still, the overall narrative in many media outlets has instead been one framed as anti-fascist violence, minimizing the entirety of anti-fascist community organizing to snapshots of street fights. The argument made here is that this type of anti-fascism, narrowly understood, is counterproductive to stopping fascist growth since it makes them appear as victims. The problem with this discourse is that it first misses the actual diversity of anti-fascist organizing, which has a massive spectrum and is predominantly made up of ordinary people doing traditional organizing work with neighbors and congregants, but also that it misunderstands what actually stops fascist growth.

It is not the vague mysticism of public opinion or the spin from op-eds. What stops white nationalists is activists stopping white nationalists: stopping their project from working, from expanding, from making a difference. In this way, the anti-fascist movement — made up of church groups, student clubs, anarchists and liberals — has prevented the "alt-right's" infrastructure from self-replicating by throwing a monkey wrench into their machine.

We have every reason to believe that the "alt-right" could recover from this and any other period of massive decline. The white nationalist movement has seen mass upheavals against it, destabilizing lawsuits from nonprofits like the Southern Poverty Law Center, and projects like the KKK rise to national prominence before dropping to pariah status. What the "alt-right" has done over the decades, and will continue to do, is manipulate edge issues that they can use to push conservatives into a more reactionary direction. What matters is how the left continues to build this movement now, so that any moment of resurgence is eliminated purely through the competent organizing work that shows community members the stake of the threat, inoculates them against nationalist lies and shows them how getting involved can change lives.

The only thing that will really seal the death certificate of the "alt-right" is an ever-growing presence of antifascism in all areas of social life, a movement whose vibrancy is overwhelming and has the ability to be intergenerational. While "alt-right" branding and strategies are new, their ideas are not, and they won't be the last — unless antifascism is not seen as just the hobby of a few.

Copyright, Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission.

James Comey: His belief Clinton would win election was “a factor” in email investigation

AP/Alex Brandon

James Comey’s interviews and book, “A Higher Loyalty,” have indeed been raising a lot of questions as of late. ABC News released a clip of the much-anticipated interview ABC special with George Stephanopoulos on Saturday—which will air tonight— in which Comey said his belief that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 presidential election was “a factor” in the email probe that ensued just days before the election.

"Wasn't the decision to reveal influenced by your assumption that Hillary Clinton was going to win, and your concern that, she wins, this comes out several weeks later and then that's taken by her opponents as a sign that she's an illegitimate president?," Stephanopoulos asked.

“I don’t remember consciously thinking about that, but it must have been because I was operating in a world where Hillary Clinton was going to beat Donald Trump, and so I’m sure that it was a factor,” Comey told Stephanopoulos. "I don’t remember spelling it out, but it had to have been, that she’s going to be elected president and if I hide this from the American people, she’ll be illegitimate the moment she’s elected, the moment this comes out.”

As ABC News notes, this comment is further explained in his book, which is the reason he’s currently on a media tour.

In the excerpt, via ABC, Comey writes:

"Like many others, I was surprised when Donald Trump was elected president. I had assumed from media polling that Hillary Clinton was going to win. I have asked myself many times since if I was influenced by that assumption. I don't know. Certainly not consciously, but I would be a fool to say it couldn't have had an impact on me."

Jennifer Palmieri, former White House Director of Communications and Director of Communications for the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign, responded to this comment on CNN on April 15.

Video: Here's @jmpalmieri's reaction to Comey saying that his belief Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election was "a factor" in the email probe... https://t.co/7kpFtYtjZh

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) April 15, 2018

 

“What amazes me about what he said, and what I understand he said in the book, is that he decided to send the letter to the hill because of a political consideration and that political consideration is that he put it upon himself to be worried whether or not the next president of the United States was going to be considered legitimate,” Palmieri said.

“The whole reason the FBI exists independent, inside of the Justice Department, is so decisions do not happen by taking political considerations into account,” she said. “That is the whole reason, and what he did was make a very, very fateful decision because he took political considerations into account and decided how it make look. That’s not his job. And it amazes me because his whole justification for any action was he was always trying to act within the bounds of how the FBI is supposed to operate and that is very clearly outside of the bounds of how the FBI is supposed to operate.”

Remember, Donald Trump fired Comey in May 2017, claiming that he was dismissed over Comey’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails. However, it has been widely speculated that Comey's firing was likely due to Trump’s fury over the FBI’s investigation into allegations of Trump's collusion with Russian agents seeking to undermine democracy in the United States. Comey testified in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee in June 2017, an event that became a must-see TV event, with many people in liberal cities like Washington, D.C. taking the day off work to spectate. In his testimony, Comey alleged Trump tried to get Comey to take a loyalty oath, and also that Trump directed him to drop the FBI's case against Michael Flynn.

Comey’s interview tonight will likely be yet another popular event—one in which has seemingly left Trump shaking in his proverbial Twitter shoes (as his recent tweets suggest).

Slippery James Comey, a man who always ends up badly and out of whack (he is not smart!), will go down as the WORST FBI Director in history, by far!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 15, 2018

New NASA satellite may be best shot at finding Earth 2

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

This week will usher in the launch of a new research satellite whose mission has been described as the next phase in the search for Earth-like planets, and which could possibly even find hints of extraterrestrial life. That would be the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, commonly known as TESS, which is scheduled to depart from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Monday. The satellite will be launched on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, and will be tasked as the successor to the Kepler space observatory's mission to discover new insights on exoplanets, meaning planets that exist beyond our solar system.

“The goal of TESS is to produce the catalogue of really good targets that we will be observing for the next decade, or two decades, that people will be really studying in detail,” Stephen Rinehart, a TESS Project Scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), told Salon. “Kepler’s goal was to carry out a census, to study the demographics. Like the census, it’s about understanding the demographics of the population of planets.”

In March 2009, Kepler launched as a space observatory to discover Earth-size planets. The mission was initially expected to last until 2016, but in 2012 one of the spacecraft’s reaction wheels stopped turning. In 2013, a second wheel displayed a malfunction, thus causing a hindrance in the completion of the mission. Luckily, scientists and engineers figured out a way to reimagine Kepler's mission in light of its limited mobility; the second, modified phase of its mission was dubbed "K2."

As Rinehart explained, prior to Kepler, information about exoplanets was limited. Scientists didn’t know how rare, or common, planets were in the universe.

“When Kepler was first proposed, we hadn’t found any exoplanets yet,” Rinehart said. “When Kepler launched, we only had a few. It was Kepler that really was responsible for finding a majority of exoplanets.”

Today, according to NASA, Kepler has discovered 2,343 confirmed exoplanets — 30 of which are less than twice the size of Earth in the habitable zone, meaning they’re at a distance from their solar system’s star where water could possibly exist on a planet’s surface. The K2 phase discovered 309 additional confirmed planets. Now that scientists know there are a lot of planets out there, it’s time to understand them better — and see how unique we are in the universe.

The way in which TESS will do that is by looking at stars only within the nearest few-hundred light years. Rhinehart explained that Kepler pointed at one part of the sky for a long time, and looked at many stars that were thousands of light years away. Since TESS will be looking at stars that are closer, it will be able to gather more critical information to make  follow-up observations.

Rhinehart described the series of follow-up observations as a funnel. Starting with a "TOI" — meaning "TESS Object of Interest" — scientists will first determine if a planet candidate is a planet or not.

After determining if the suspected planet is indeed a planet, scientists will study its host star. Rhinehart explained that whether the planet is interesting or not depends a lot on its star.

“Once you have all that, now you can do a radial velocity measurement, and that involves making a really precise spectroscopic measurement on how fast the star is moving either toward you or away from you and how that changes over time,” Rhinehart explained.

Follow-up measurements with TESS are able to measure a planet's mass and size, and then calculate its density, which can hint at the nature of the world.

“So now I can start talking about, what are these planets made out of: gas like Jupiter, or is it a water world, or is it a rock like Earth, or is there something more exotic?” Rhinehart said.

If you're curious whether we’re alone in this universe, TESS's findings could be extraordinarily interesting. Rhinehart remains hesitant to guarantee that TESS will discover little green men.

“Understanding the origin of life and whether we are alone in the universe, and the possibility of habitability of these distant worlds is really exciting,” he said. “I think that it’s overstating it that TESS is going to do that. The goal of TESS is to find signs of habitability, to find signs that a planet might be habitable.”

Rhinehart reiterated that it’s possible that one of the planets TESS discovers will be habitable, but it might be a while before a confirmation is made, and that’s because it will take a lot of follow-up measurements.

Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is excited by the prospect of TESS.

“Looking at it from the big picture, it is one more step down the Yellow Brick Road,” he told Salon.

As scientists get a better understanding of the characteristics of the planets TESS observes, they will be looking for signs of habitability and life — including whether a planet's atmosphere contains oxygen or methane, two signs that may hint at life.

But TESS isn't an interstellar mission. If there is compelling evidence for life on Earth 2.0, a more thorough study would be challenging given the distances involved. Since TESS is studying planets that are light years away — and one light year is around 6 trillion miles — it is unlikely humans or our probes will have the capability to travel such distances in our lifetime.

“If you want to meet the aliens, even if they are only bacteria, you have to go there or bring them here,” Shostak said.

SNL: Robert De Niro & Ben Stiller play Mueller and Cohen in “Meet the Parents” parody

Forget about a fourth “Meet The Parents” movie, a parody in which Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller are poking fun at the chaos going on at the White House will do just fine. The former co stars reunited on this week’s Saturday Night Live, but instead of De Niro playing Jack Byrnes, and Stiller playing Greg Focker, De Niro took on the character of Robert Mueller, and Stiller was Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen.

The scene played out like this. Kate McKinnon who hilariously played Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and Beck Bennett who played Vice President Mike Pence, were chatting before a planned meeting with Stiller’s Cohen character, who—like in real life—had just had his office raided this week.

“I feel like I say this every week, but this week was bad,” McKinnon’s Sessions said.

“In a couple of months the president will be back to normal,” Bennett’s Pence replied.

“How’s that?” fake Sessions inquired.“Because it’ll be me.”

Then Stiller’s Cohen entered the room.

“That’s right, it’s Michael Cohen, attorney at law. And also sometimes not at law,” he announced. “Can you believe what they’re doing to poor Mr. Trump? It’s a disgrace! This whole raid was a complete violation of attorney-criminal privilege.”

“Look we got a real problem here, Jeff,”  Stiller’s Cohen said. “Do you know how much evidence I have in my office? I’m Donald Trump’s lawyer. I’ve got a whole hard drive that’s just labeled, ‘Yikes!’”

Fake Cohen went to another room where De Niro’s Mueller waited for him—with a polygraph test. The scene quickly turned into one mimicking the infamous lie detector test from “Meet The Parents.”

“Here put these on,” De Niro’s Mueller said. “Have you ever used a lie detector before? Just relax Mr. Cohen if you’re innocent you have nothing to worry about.”

De Niro's Mueller disclosed that his team uses “codenames” for Trump and his administration. Trump's former codename was "Putin's little b***h" but was recently changed to "Stormy's little b***h." Ivanka Trump is “girlfriend.” Cohen is "dead man walking."

During the fake polygraph test, Stiller’s Cohen said “You can milk anything with nipples.”

“Really? I have nipples, can you milk me Mr. Cohen?” De Niro's Mueller said. “Now we are going to catch all you little Fockers, you got that?”