Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 146

Should the president have sole authority to launch a nuclear attack?

(Credit: Getty/Win McNamee)

More than a million people in Hawaii thought it was time to say their final alohas. A state cellphone alert announced that nuclear missiles were heading their way. “Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii,” the January 6 text read. “Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.”

Fortunately, it was a false alarm. It turned out that a Hawaii Emergency Management Agency employee had pushed the wrong button during an early morning shift-change safety drill. At a press conference later that day, Hawaii Gov. David Ige promised that no single person would be able to send such a warning again. The next day, the agency announced it now would require that two people issue an alert.

Good idea. But an even better idea would be to take the same approach to the U.S. nuclear button, the one President Trump insists is bigger than North Korea’s.

In a paper published Wednesday in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, two experts from the Union of Concerned Scientists and a University of Maryland national security specialist recommend that U.S. policy require at least two other officials sign off on such a critical decision.

“There’s no reason to maintain our current, unnecessarily dangerous policy,” said paper co-author Lisbeth Gronlund, co-director of the UCS Global Security Program. “There are viable alternatives that would allow other officials to take part in any decision to use nuclear weapons, whether it’s first use or a response to a nuclear attack.”

Not even a ‘stable genius’ is reassuring enough

Putting aside the fact that the nuclear button is actually a briefcase that for some reason is called a football, the U.S. president has the sole authority to order the launch of a nuclear weapon, for any reason and at any time. That’s terrifying, regardless of who is sitting in the Oval Office. No one person, not even our current, self-described “stable genius,” should have the license to start a nuclear war. As former Defense Secretary William Perry has said, “Certainly a decision that momentous for all of civilization should have the kind of checks and balances on executive powers called for by our Constitution.”

President Trump’s ignorance about nuclear weapons and his chest-thumping threats to incinerate North Korea have prompted some members of Congress to take action. Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., introduced a bill last January that would prohibit the president from ordering a first nuclear use without Congress declaring war, and last fall the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing on the sole authority question for the first time in four decades.

But don’t bet on Congress to pass legislation on the matter any time soon. The Markey-Lieu bill does not have the requisite bipartisan support, and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who had previously warned that Trump’s bellicose rhetoric could put the country “on the path to World War III,” told reporters after the November 14 hearing that he did “not see a legislative solution today.” Something could happen “over the course of the next several months,” he added, “but I don’t see it today.”

Whose the next in line?

A few days after Corker’s hearing, Columbia University professors Richard K. Betts and Matthew Waxman published a proposal to constrain the president’s sole authority. They suggest a protocol requiring the secretary of defense and the attorney general to certify the validity and legality of a presidential first-use order. The certification requirement would not apply if the United States were attacked, however, because Betts and Waxman presume it would delay a response.

Gronlund and her co-authors, UCS Global Security Program co-director David Wright and University of Maryland School of Public Policy professor Steve Fetter, agree that at least two other officials should be involved, but recommend the vice president and the speaker of the House of Representatives, the next two officials in the presidential chain of succession.

Tapping officials from the presidential succession list has three main advantages, Gronlund et al. explain. First, they have political legitimacy. Both are already designated by law to become commander-in-chief and assume authority to order a nuclear attack. Second, they would provide democratic input. Both were elected, and one—the speaker—can act on behalf of Congress. Finally, unlike the defense secretary or the attorney general, they are both independent. The president cannot fire either of them for refusing to follow an order.

Given that the Federal Emergency Management Agency continually tracks the location of the top officials in the line of presidential succession, Gronlund et al. point out, it would be relatively easy to include the vice president and House speaker in the decisionmaking process and make it possible for them to sign off on a first use order and a retaliatory nuclear launch.

“If the U.S. government is confident that the current system would allow a quick and smooth transfer of launch authority if the commander-in-chief were killed or incapacitated,” they write, “it should also be confident that this system would allow a small number of additional officials to affirm a launch decision by the president.”

End hair-trigger and declare no first use

Gronlund and her co-authors recommend two other changes in U.S. nuclear policy that they say would make the world safer. First, they call on the United States to take its land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) off high alert and eliminate the option of launching them in response to an attack warning.

The policy of keeping U.S. land-based missiles on a hair trigger dates to the Cold War era, when both U.S. and Soviet military strategists feared a surprise first-strike nuclear attack on cities and industrial sites as well as on their land-based nuclear missiles and bombers. To ensure that they maintained the capability of responding, both countries kept their land-based nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert so they could be launched within minutes to avoid being destroyed on the ground.

Today, even if all U.S. ICBMs were destroyed in their silos, most US nuclear weapons are deployed on submarines, which are virtually undetectable. They are designed to be able to survive a first strike and launch a retaliatory attack.

It is now much more likely that the United States would launch a retaliatory nuclear strike in response to an erroneous or misinterpreted nuclear-attack warning than an actual incident, the chance of which is extremely remote. Indeed, the possibility of an accidental nuclear launch is frighteningly real. A number of technical glitches and human errors in both Russia and the United States over the past few decades have nearly triggered one.

Finally, Gronlund et al. urge the United States to embrace a no-first-use policy. The sole purpose of U.S. nuclear weapons, they write, should be “to deter and, if necessary, respond to the use of nuclear weapons against the United States or its allies.”

A leaked draft of the soon-to-be-released Nuclear Posture Review, however, indicates that the administration plans to permit the use of nuclear weapons under a wider range of circumstances, including “non-nuclear strategic attacks,” which presumably would include cyber attacks. To push back on this ill-advised idea, Gronlund and her co-authors urge Congress to pass the aforementioned Markey-Lieu bill requiring Congress to declare war and authorize the use of nuclear weapons as well as a bill introduced by Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., last November that simply states: “It is the policy of the United States to not use nuclear weapons first.”

Deported twice, a man struggles to help his family survive

(Credit: AP Photo/Frank Franklin II)

For more than a decade, I documented one man’s deportation, the impact on his family and his eventual return to the U.S.

I did this as part of my work studying the migration of indigenous Mayan refugees from Guatemala to Mexico and the U.S. My telling of the story of this man, who I’ll call Alex to protect his identity, is forthcoming in the journal Representations. I believe it can help shed light on the human consequences of deportations and family separations — and the enormous risks deportees are willing to take, irrespective of walls, fences, and the danger of reuniting with their families.

Here is Alex’s story.

An immigration raid

Alex was born in a refugee settlement in Chiapas, Mexico. His family is one of more than 200,000 Guatemalans who fled a protracted war, supported by the U.S. and its allies, that largely targeted the indigenous people in Guatemala. In Mexico, barriers to legal status barred refugees from formal employment. To improve his family’s situation, he decided to enter the U.S. through a human smuggler, often referred to as a “coyote,” in 2000. He worked at a meatpacking plant and sent money to support his parents in Mexico.

Two years later, Alex fell in love with his wife, who we’ll refer to as Grace, a Guatemalan national. Grace arrived in the U.S. in 1999, also with the help of a coyote, to join her parents who enrolled her in elementary school. Grace too was smitten, and in 2002 she decided to forgo her high school senior year to be with Alex. One year later, Grace gave birth to their first child.

In December of 2006, Alex was deported, without a hearing — a violation of international human rights law — in one of the largest immigration raids in U.S. history. He was separated from his wife and 3-year-old child. Family separation due to deportation is common. It is also a violation of the American Convention on Human Rights. Article 17 of the Convention, signed by the U.S. in 1969, states: “The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the state.” The statement of this principle underscores how deportation violates one of the fundamental rights protected by the Convention —the rights of the family.

Back in Mexico, Alex faced a lack of job opportunities, compounded by racial discrimination toward indigenous peoples. Meanwhile, Grace, faced economic instability in the U.S. without Alex’s income. Even so, she advised Alex to stay in Mexico, due to her fear of more raids and concern over increased criminalization to punish unauthorized migration. In addition, under enforcement priorities initiated under George W. Bush, unlawful entry and re-entry would initiate a new era in the criminalization of migration that involved the creation of new classes of “felonies” that apply only to noncitizens.

Six months later, Alex’s wife and their son joined him in Chiapas, Mexico — becoming what are often referred to as “de facto” deportees. Studies have identified how deportees face stigma and discrimination upon return. National origins, language abilities and presumptions of why one was deported can become significant factors in the reintegration to home countries or the countries of spouses or parents. For example, Grace is a Guatemalan national and could not seek legal employment in Mexico.

Despite their reunification, Alex’s family continued to face significant hardships in Mexico. Alex’s friend, a coyote, informed him that he could make a livable wage working as a coyote and stay close to his family. Alex decided to explore this alternative.

Clandestine migration

Alex’s participation in a human smuggling network came with enormous risks. One day, for example, armed bandits surrounded a group of migrants he was leading across the U.S.-Mexico border and confiscated their belongings. Alex ran into the desert bush and escaped to the U.S. side of the border.

After a night in the desert without food or water, Alex returned to Mexico. He later learned that the bandits had taken the migrants hostage, but that they were released after relatives in the U.S. paid an undisclosed ransom. Alex returned home and informed his wife and parents of the incident. All insisted that he no longer continue to work as a coyote.

A large body of research documents how the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border has led to a militarization and reorganization of drug trafficking organizations. Drug cartels can interfere with smuggling networks, making migrants even more vulnerable to assault or being forced to transport drugs. Scholar Laura Ortiz argues that the increased participation of imposter coyotes, who recruit migrants only to extort them, has helped reinforce dominant perceptions of smuggling as intertwined with criminal syndicates. Despite this dominant perception, scholar Simón Pedro Izcara Palacios argues that human smuggling and drug trafficking are operated by different groups. Drug cartels are not directly involved with human smuggling, but instead extort fees from human smugglers. Indeed, Alex identified how cartels pressured smugglers to pay a user’s fee for crossing the Sonora-Arizona border. Failure to pay can result in violence.

The risk of violence in coyote work, along with an absence of viable job opportunities in Chiapas, prompted Alex and his wife, now with four children, to make arrangements to join other family in the U.S. in 2015. Although Grace’s father is a U.S. permanent resident, he could not sponsor them through what politicians refer to as “chain migration” because he failed to meet annual income criteria – no less than 125 percent of the federal poverty level. Without legal options, Alex paid US$3,500 to a fellow coyote to take his wife and children over the border. This coyote successfully led them to a location on the Sonora-Arizona border where U.S. immigration officials at the time captured and later released migrants.

Grace and her children turned themselves in to U.S. Border Patrol. Because of new legal protections for families and children in the U.S., Grace and her children were released following one night in detention. The U.S. government filed removal proceedings; and to provide an opportunity to appear before an immigration judge to adjudicate her case, Grace and her children received deportation relief.

To help finance his family’s crossing, Alex decided to make a final clandestine crossing with eight migrants in the Sonora–Arizona corridor. Hours after beginning their journey, heavily armed men captured and held them hostage in a secluded building. A ransom was requested from U.S. kin of every migrant. Despite Grace’s offer to pay the ransom for his release, his captors refused. Instead, Alex remained captive for several weeks and was physically tortured.

Eventually, he escaped his captors, but was stuck in the desert again. Without food or water, he turned himself in to U.S. Border Patrol agents who documented the physical wounds he sustained from his prolonged torture and placed him in detention.

Few options

Alex’s previous unauthorized entry prompted what’s called a “reinstatement of removal,” a provision under the 1996 immigration reform that re-established the order of removal from 2006. At the request of his family, I located and covered the cost of an attorney. Because Alex expressed a well-founded fear of persecution or torture upon return to Mexico, his attorney advised him to apply for either a “withholding of removal,” or protection under the Convention Against Torture. Unlike asylum, neither of these remedies offer a path to permanent resident status.

Additionally, the application would have required that Alex remain in detention — potentially six months to a year — during the adjudication of his case. Scholars have noted how prolonged detention can exacerbate post-traumatic stress and other harms that asylum seekers and their families may have suffered in their own countries. Others have identified how prolonged detention compromises due process protections that violate international human rights law and coerce migrants into surrendering to deportation. Several have identified how deportations can be tantamount to a death sentence.

His family feared that he too may be killed following deportation and begged him to permit the attorney to adjudicate his case. Alex weighed his options and declined legal counsel. Following the end of his sentence and deportation, he returned to Chiapas. Within a month he made arrangements with another coyote and paid $7,000 to cross via the Chihuahua-Texas border. Like most who attempt re-entry following an apprehension, he succeeded, and is now reunited with his wife and children in the U.S.

Family reunification

Alex says he never wanted to be a coyote. His story provides an opportunity to understand the complex motivations that fuel unauthorized re-entry of deportee parents with family in the U.S. A 2009 Department of Homeland Security report states that 21 percent of re-entries are those without a U.S.-born child, while more than one-third of re-entries are parents of U.S. citizen children. Scholars have also shown how deportees like Alex, who are separated from families in the U.S., are more likely to migrate again than those without family ties.

As the nation considers reforming immigration policy, it is important to remember that deterrence strategies are ineffective in reducing the intention to migrate, particularly among those with family in the U.S. Walls or even detention cells are no match for those with direct experience with crime and violence who have credible fear claims and those separated from their families in the U.S.

In 2017, two years after Alex’s family’s reunification in the U.S., Grace appeared in court for her immigration hearing. The immigration judge filed an order of removal. Like other returnees and recent unauthorized arrivals, both now face the threat of deportation. Until international protocols on the protection of migrants and their families are upheld, the U.S. will continue producing unauthorized persons or families who are at risk of deportation for years to come.

Oscar Gil-Garcia, Assistant Professor, Binghamton University, State University of New York

Frances McDormand’s Oscar win was for all women

Frances McDormand accepts the award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama for “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” during the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards (Credit: Getty/Paul Drinkwater)

When Frances McDormand won Best Actress at the 90th Academy Awards, she asked every women nominated, be it actress, cinematographer, director, to stand with her. “Look around, everybody . . . because we all have stories to tell and projects we need financed,” she said as she gazed out into the Oscars arena. It was a culminating and collaborative moment of an evening that celebrated women in Hollywood,  even if most of those awarded were still men.

The emotional moment, in Frances McDormand’s best-actress #Oscars acceptance speech. pic.twitter.com/gBORLyNztX

— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) March 5, 2018

McDormand won the Oscar for her starring role in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.” She previously won the coveted award back in 1996 for her performance in “Fargo.” McDormand seemed nervous when she began her speech. “If I fall over pick me up, because I’ve got some things to say,” she said, her voice gaining vigor.

This moment of female empowerment followed Ashley Judd, Salma Hayek and Annabella Sciorra, three women who accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment and assault. The trio spoke of #MeToo and women’s power, introducing a segment that spotlighted the vitality of diversity on and behind the big screen. Director Ava Duvernay asked in the montage, “What will we remembered for?” Host Jimmy Kimmel also began the show acknowledging the sexual misconduct reckoning in Hollywood and the work of women and Time’s Up.

But McDormand went beyond addressing #MeToo. She encouraged producers to back more women-led and created projects. And the Oscar-winning actress closed her speech with two words: “inclusion rider,” referring to a clause in an actor’s contract that mandates diversity in the film’s cast and crew in order to retain them. A brave and bold statement that was warmly received by especially, all of the women in the room.

 

Time warp: Rita Moreno wears same dress from 1962 Oscars

Rita Moreno presents the award for best foreign language film at the Oscars, March 4, 2018. (Credit: AP/Chris Pizzello)

Rita Moreno wants to do the time warp.

The “One Day at a Time” actress signaled her style has remained consistent throughout the years on Sunday night when she arrived on the Oscars red carpet in the same dress she wore to the event in 1962.

The legendary actress first donned the black and gold gown when she won the best supporting actress Oscar for her role in the musical film “West Side Story.”

Moreno, who was a presenter at the 90th Annual Academy Awards, told E!’s Ryan Seacrest that the skirt was made from a obi sash from the Philippines. Obi sashes are traditional material used to make Japanese kimonos. 

“I would think that it would tarnish,” Moreno said of the dress’ long life-span. “It’s been hanging in my closet.”

The 86-year-old actress is iconic — not only for fitting into a dress she wore 56 years ago —but she is just one of a dozen performers to have achieved EGOT status, having won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony.

Needless to say, Twitter was very enthusiastic about the ensemble’s comeback.

https://twitter.com/matwhi/status/970...

I can't fit into jeans from high school and Rita Moreno is wearing the same dress she wore to the #Oscars in 1962. #goddess pic.twitter.com/O969xhGCYf

— shauna (@goldengateblond) March 5, 2018

 

 

 

 

Blowback isn’t just about politics — it’s about climate too

(Credit: AP)

You want to see “blowback” in action? That’s easy enough. All you need is a vague sense of how Google Search works. Then type into it phrases like “warmest years,” “rising sea levels,” “melting ice,” “lengthening wildfire season,” or “future climate refugees,” and you’ll find yourself immersed in the grimmest of blowback universes.  It’s a world which should give that CIA term of tradecraft a meaning even the Agency never imagined for it.

But before I put you on this blowback planet of ours and introduce you to the blowback president presiding over it, I want to take a moment to remember Mr. Blowback himself.

And what a guy he was!  Here’s how he described himself in the last piece he wrote for TomDispatch just months before his death in November 2010: “My own role these past 20 years has been that of Cassandra, whom the gods gave the gift of foreseeing the future, but also cursed because no one believed her.”

He wasn’t being immodest.  He had, in many ways, seen the shape of things to come for what he never hesitated to call “the American empire,” including — in that 2010 piece — its decline.  As he wrote then, “Thirty-five years from now, America’s official century of being top dog (1945-2045) will have come to an end; its time may, in fact, be running out right now. We are likely to begin to look ever more like a giant version of England at the end of its imperial run, as we come face to face with, if not necessarily to terms with, our aging infrastructure, declining international clout, and sagging economy.”

You know how — if you’re of a certain age at least — there are those moments when you go back to the books that truly mattered to you, the ones that somehow prepared you, as best anyone can be prepared, for the years to come.  One I return to regularly is his.  I’m talking about “Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire.”

The man who wrote that was Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant and an eminent scholar of modern Asian history, who would in that work characterize himself in his former life as a “spear-carrier for empire.”

“Blowback” was published in 2000 to next to no notice.  After the attacks of September 11, 2001, however, it became a bestseller.  There was so much to learn from it, starting with the very definition of blowback, a word he brought out of the secret world for the rest of us to consider. “The term ‘blowback,’ which officials of the Central Intelligence Agency first invented for their own internal use,” he wrote, “refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people.  What the daily press reports as the malign acts of ‘terrorists’ or ‘drug lords’ or ‘rogue states’ or ‘illegal arms merchants’ often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations.”

And if “unintended consequences” isn’t a supremely appropriate title under which to write the misbegotten history of the years that followed 9/11 in the era of the self-proclaimed “sole superpower” or, as American politicians love to say, “the indispensable nation,” what is?  Of course, in the best blowback fashion, al-Qaeda’s attacks of that day hit this country like literal bolts from the blue — even the top officials of George W. Bush’s administration were stunned as they scurried for cover.  Of all Americans, they at least should have been better prepared, given the warning offered to the president only weeks earlier by that blowback center of operations, the CIA.  (“Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” was the title of the presidential daily brief of August 6, 2001.)

Osama bin Laden would prove to be the poster boy of blowback.  His organization, al-Qaeda, would be nurtured into existence by an all-American urge to give the Soviet Union its own Vietnam, what its leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, would later call its “bleeding wound,” and to do so in, of all places, Afghanistan.  In October 2001, 12 years after the Red Army limped out of that country in defeat and a decade after the Soviet Union imploded, in part thanks to that very wound, Washington would launch a “Global War on Terror.” It would be the Bush administration’s response to al-Qaeda’s supposedly inexplicable attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.  The Taliban’s Afghanistan would be its first target and so would begin America’s second Afghan War, a conflict now almost 17 years old with no end in sight.  Yet in our American world, remarkably few connections are ever made between the present war and that blowback moment against the Soviets nearly 40 years ago.  (Were he alive, Chalmers Johnson, who never ceased to make such connections, would have been grimly amused.)

Giving imperial overstretch new meaning

Talk about the endless ramifications of blowback.  It was bin Laden’s genius — for a mere $400,000 to $500,000 — to goad Washington into spending trillions of dollars across significant parts of the Islamic world fighting conflict after conflict, all of which only seemed to create yet more rubble, terror outfits, and refugees (who, in turn, have helped fuel yet more right-wing populist movements from Europe to Donald Trump’s America). Tell me it’s not a blowback world!

As it happened, bin Laden’s 2001 attacks brought official Washington not to its knees but to its deepest post-Cold War conviction: that the world was its oyster; that, for the first time in history, a single great power potentially had it all, a shot at everything, starting with Afghanistan, followed by Iraq, then much of the rest of the Middle East, and sooner or later the whole planet.  In a post-Soviet world in which America’s leaders felt the deepest sense of triumphalism, the 9/11 attacks seemed like the ultimate insult.  Who would dream of doing such a thing to the greatest power of all of time?

In an act of pure wizardry, bin Laden drew out of Bush, Cheney, and company their deepest geopolitical fantasies about the ability of that all-powerful country and, in particular, “the greatest force for freedom in the history of the world,” the U.S. military, to dominate any situation on Earth.  The early months of 2003, when they were preparing to invade Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, may have been their ultimate hubristic moment, in which imagining anything other than success of a historic sort, not just in that country but far beyond it, was inconceivable.

Until then, never — except in Hollywood movies when the bad guy rubbed his hands with glee and cackled that the world was his — had any power truly dreamed of taking it all, of ruling, or at least directing, the planet itself.  Even for a globalizing great power without rivals and wealthy almost beyond compare that would prove the ultimate in conceptual overstretch. Looking back, it’s easy enough to see that almost 17 years of ceaseless war and conflict across the Greater Middle East, Africa, and even parts of Asia, of massive destruction, of multiplying failed states, of burgeoning terror outfits, and of blowback of every sort, have given the old phrase, “biting off more than you can chew,” new geopolitical meaning.

Washington created what was, in effect, a never-ending blowback machine.  In those years, while the distant wars went on and on (and terrors of every imaginable sort grew in this country), the United States was transformed in a remarkable, if not yet fully graspable, fashion.  The national security state now reigns supreme in Washington; generals (or retired generals) are perched (however precariously) atop key parts of the civilian government; a right-wing populist, who rose to power in part on the fear of immigrants, refugees, and Islamic extremists, has his giant golden letters emblazoned on the White House (and a hoteljust down Pennsylvania Avenue that no diplomat or lobbyist with any sense would dare not patronize); the police have been militarized; borders have been further fortified; spy drones have been dispatched to American skies; and the surveillance of the citizenry and its communications have been made the order of the day.  Meanwhile, the latest disturbed teen, armed with a military-style AR-15 semi-automatic, has just perpetrated another in a growing list of slaughters in American schools. In response, the president, Republican politicians, and the National Rifle Association have all plugged the arming of teachers and administrators, as well as the “hardening” of schools (including the use of surveillance systems and other militarized methods of “defense”), and so have given phrases like “citadel of learning” or “bastion of education” new meaning. In these same years, various unnamed terrors and the weaponization of the most psychically distraught parts of the citizenry under the rubric of the Second Amendment and the sponsorship of the NRA, the Republican Party, and most recently Donald Trump have transformed this country into something like an armed camp.

It seems, in other words, that in setting out to take the world, in some surprising fashion this country both terrorized and conquered itself.  For that, Osama bin Laden should certainly be congratulated but so should George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and all their neoconservative pals, not to speak of David Petraeus, James Mattis, John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, and a host of other generals of America’s losing wars.

Think of it this way: at what looked like the height of American power, Washington managed to give imperial overstretch a historically new meaning.  Even on a planet without other great power rivals, a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East, no less the full-scale garrisoning and policing of significant parts of the rest of the globe proved far too much for the sole superpower, no matter how technologically advanced its military or powerful and transnational its economy.  As it turned out, that urge to take everything would prove the perfect launching pad for this country’s decline.

Someday (if there is such a day), this record will prove a goldmine for historians of imperial power and blowback.  And yet all of this, even the fate of this country, should be considered relatively minor matters, given the ultimate blowback to come.

Humanity nailed to a cross of coal

There was, in fact, another kind of blowback underway and the American empire was clearly a player in it, too, even a major one, but hardly the only one.  Every place using fossil fuels was involved.  This form of blowback threatens not just the decline of a single great imperial power but of humanity itself, of the very environment that nurtured generation after generation of us over these thousands of years.  By definition, that makes it the worst form of blowback imaginable.

What I have in mind, of course, is climate change or global warming.  In a way, you could think of it as the story of another kind of superpower and how it launched the decline of us all.  On a planetary scale, the giant corporations (and national fuel companies) that make up global Big Energy have long been on the hunt for every imaginable reserve of fossil fuels and for ways to control and exploit them.  The oil, natural gas, and coal such outfits extracted fueled industrial society, still-spreading car cultures, and consumerism as we know it.

Over most of the years such companies were powering human development, the men who ran them and their employees had no idea that the greenhouse gasses released by the burning of fossil fuels were heating the atmosphere and the planet’s waters in potentially disastrous ways.  By the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, like scientists elsewhere, those employed by ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company, had become aware of the phenomenon (as would those of other energy companies).  That meant the men who ran Exxon and other major firms recognized in advance of most of the rest of us just what kind of blowback the long-term burning of oil, natural gas, and coal was going to deliver: a planet ever less fit for human habitation.

They just didn’t think those of us in the non-scientific community should know about it and so, by the 1990s, they were already doing their damnedest to hide it from us.  However, when scientists not in their employ started to publicize the new reality in a significant way, as the heads of some of the most influential and wealthiest corporations on Earth they began to invest striking sums in the fostering of a universe of think tanks, lobbyists, and politicians devoted to what became known as climate-change denial.  Between 1998 and 2014, for instance, Exxon would pump $30 million into just such think tanks and similar groups, while donating $1.87 million directly to congressional climate-change deniers.

It doesn’t take a lot of thought to realize that, from its inception, this was the functional definition of the worst crime in history.  In the name of record profits and the comfortable life (as well as corporate sustainability in an unendingly fossil-fuelized world), their CEOs had no hesitation about potentially dooming the human future to a hell on Earth of rising temperatures, rising sea levels, and ever more extreme weather; they gave, that is, a new, all-encompassing meaning to the term genocide.  They were prepared, if necessary, to take out the human species.

But I suspect even they couldn’t have imagined quite how successful they would be when it came to bringing the sole superpower of the post-9/11 world on board.  In a sense, the two leading forms of blowback of the twenty-first — the imperial and fossil-fuelized ones — came to be focused in a single figure.  After all, it’s hard to imagine the rise to power of Donald Trump in a world in which the Bush administration had decided not to invade either Afghanistan or Iraq but to treat its “Global War on Terror” as a localized set of police actions against one international criminal and his scattered group of followers.

As it happened, one form of blowback from the disastrous wars that were meant to create the basis for a Pax Americana planet helped to produce the conditions and fears at home that put Donald Trump in the White House.

Or put another way, in the face of the evidence produced by essentially every knowledgeable scientist on Earth, on a planet already feeling the early and increasingly extreme results of a warming atmosphere, millions of Americans elected a man who claimed it was all a “hoax,” who was unabashedly dedicated above anything else (except perhaps his “big, fat, beautiful wall” on the Mexican border) to a fossil-fuelized American planet, and who insisted that he would run an administration that would make this country “energy dominant” again.  They elected, in other words, a representative of the very set of lobbyists, climate deniers, and politicians who had, in essence, been created by Big Energy.  Or put another way, they voted for a man who pledged to bring back the dying American coal industry and was prepared to green-light oil and natural gas pipelines of whatever sort, open the nation’s coastal waters to drilling, and lift restrictions of every kind on energy companies, while impeding the development of alternative sources of energy and other attempts to mitigate climate change.  As the ultimate President Blowback, Donald Trump promptly filled every last faintly relevant post in his administration with climate-change deniers and allies of Big Energy, while abandoning the Paris climate accord.

In other words, President Donald Trump has dedicated himself to nailing humanity to a cross of coal.

Where’s Chalmers Johnson now that we really need him?

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A flirter’s dilemma: subtlety vs. success

(Credit: Wallenrock via Shutterstock)

Flirting comes in many forms: a casual gaze that lingers a half second longer than necessary, a light touch, an amorous expression, an overenthusiastic laugh during conversation, or even some playful or overtly sexual banter.

Regardless of the technique employed, flirting aims to fulfill one purpose: stimulate sexual interest. To be clear, though, flirting may not have the explicit goal of having sex or even physical intimacy of any kind. A person may flirt simply to pass the time, to feel close, to see if they’ve still got it or because it’s fun. Flirting motivations differ by gender. Big surprise: men’s flirting is more motivated by sex, while women’s flirting is more motivated by having fun or becoming closer to another person.

Self-esteem and flirting

When done well, flirting is not overt or obvious and always leaves open the possibility that flirting wasn’t occurring at all. This ambiguity allows people to put themselves out there with less fear of embarrassment, rejection or damaged self-esteem.

It isn’t surprising that a person’s self-esteem may affect how she or he approaches flirting. When the risk of being rejected is high, men with high self-esteem use more direct techniques than those with low self-esteem, perhaps because they’re less concerned with how being shot down may affect them. However, men with low self-esteem are bolder and use more obvious approaches than men with high self-esteem when the target is clearly interested and rejection risk is low. This may be because encountering a sure thing is one of the only contexts in which a guy with low self-esteem feels safe making advances, so he has to make it count.

When rejection risk is low for women, they’re more direct regardless of their self-esteem. Women traditionally initiate relationships less often than men, so when the chance arises perhaps women decide to throw caution to the wind and just go for it. Of course it is also possible that women are using the technique that they know works better when men try to flirt with them.

Subtle vs. direct

Much like a tree falling in a forest, if a flirting attempt occurs and the intended receiver doesn’t realize it, did flirting ever really happen?

When it comes to flirting technique the research is pretty clear: while subtlety is more likely to protect the flirter’s self-esteem, if you really want to get your message across, direct is best. A study asked college students about the most effective ways to show interest in someone. Both men and women agreed that subtle flirting was less likely to get the job done, and that the best approach would be a direct “Do you want to go to dinner with me?”

A key benefit to direct flirting approaches, especially for the person on the receiving end, is that they are clear and easier to interpret. Protect your ego too carefully by maintaining complete deniability and you run the risk of no one receiving your too-subtle signals.

Now you see it, or maybe you don’t

To see how easy it is to accurately perceive flirting, researchers gave more than 100 heterosexual strangers the opportunity to interact for ten minutes. Afterwards, each participant indicated whether they were flirting or not and whether they thought their partner was flirting.

Overall, almost a quarter of the participants flirted during their interaction. But participants accurately perceived that flirting only 28% of the time, with males more accurate at detecting female flirting (36%) than females were at detecting male flirting (18%). Those numbers are all fairly low, but people were much better at knowing when their partner was not flirting, accurately characterizing lack of flirting 84% of the time. Of course, this could be because most of the time participants weren’t flirting, making it easier to correctly guess that a participant wasn’t making eyes.

Are outside observers any better at detecting flirting than participants are? Researchers had more than 250 people view one-minute video clips from the earlier interactions to see if they could accurately identify flirting in strangers. Observers who simply watched the interaction were even less accurate at identifying flirting than those who were actually involved. Once again, males were more accurate at recognizing when women flirted, but men generally tend to overestimate women’s interest, giving them more of a chance to be correct when women actually were flirting.

Across both studies, the ability to detect flirting was probably lower than any flirty person would like. But as lead researcher Jeffrey Hall explains:

Behavior that is flirtatious is hard to see, and there are several reasons for that. People aren’t going to do it in obvious ways because they don’t want to be embarrassed, flirting looks a lot like being friendly and we are not accustomed to having our flirting validated so we can get better at seeing it.

The science of flirting suggests that when you want to create sexual interest in another person and really want to get your message across, don’t mess around. Direct methods are best. An ambiguous approach is less threatening, but ultimately not very effective. People just aren’t very good at perceiving flirting.

Gary W. Lewandowski Jr., Chair and Professor of Psychology, Monmouth University

Bernie Sanders and bipartisan colleagues demand U.S. cease funding for brutal Yemen War

The site of an air raid that hit a funeral reception in the Arhab district, 40 kilometres north of the capital Sanaa, on February 16, 2017. (Credit: Getty/Mohammed Huwais)

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, called out the administration of President Donald Trump Wednesday for its continued participation in the brutal war being waged in Yemen. The conflict has killed at least 10,000 civilians, wounded at least 40,000 and displaced 3 million people, the senator said.

“Every 10 minutes, a child under the age of five dies of preventable causes in Yemen,” Sanders noted on Twitter. “What few Americans know, however, is that the U.S. military is making the crisis worse by helping one side in the conflict bomb innocent civilians.”

The U.S. became involved in the war by supporting Saudi Arabia’s attacks against Yemen, providing intelligence and aerial refueling, under President Barack Obama. The conflict has functioned as something of a proxy war, with Iran backing the Yemeni side against the U.S.-backed Saudis.

The United Nations has warned that the war could cause the “largest famine the world has seen for many decades with millions of victims.”

Sanders, along with Connecticut Democrat Sen. Chris Murphy and Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee, held a press conference Wednesday calling on the administration to end its support for the Saudis. Given that war-making powers belong to Congress, they argued that U.S. activities in the conflict are unconstitutional.

“Without congressional authorization, our engagement in the war in Yemen should be restricted to providing desperately needed humanitarian aid, and diplomatic efforts to resolve it,” said Sanders.

However, Pentagon officials say that since U.S. forces are not directly involved in hostilities, nothing the administration has done falls outside the powers of the president.

Whether Congress or the administration has the ultimate authority in these matters, it remains clear that this devastating conflict has been supported in the name of the United States with far too little public debate.

The bipartisan group of senators is working to make sure Americans understand the atrocities being done in their name.

In 3-way deal, ICE is paying Arizona town to hold detainees in Texas

A wall along the border between the United States and Mexico (Credit: Getty/Omar Martinez)

In the middle of 2014, a year in which nearly 70,000 young people arrived at the U.S. border fleeing violence in Central America, immigration officials realized they had nowhere near enough room to detain so many children and their mothers.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement needed a quick fix, and the agency found it in an unconventional three-way deal among the South Texas town of Dilley, the private prison company Corrections Corporation of America (since renamed CoreCivic) and the Arizona town of Eloy.

From the beginning, the hurried deal drew critics, not only because it let the government detain so many more migrant children, but also because of its lack of transparency and its huge cost – $1 billion over four years.

The deal also was crafted improperly under ICE’s own guidelines, according to a new internal report. The audit, from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, said the unconventional arrangement shielded the private prison company from accountability.

Auditors said the Dilley contract points to broader problems with ICE’s detention contracting, too.

“ICE has no assurance that it executed detention center contracts in the best interest of the Federal Government, taxpayers, or detainees,” the report says.

The deal was a massive win for CCA, which made a record profit in 2015, according to The Washington Post. The Dilley contract accounted for 14 percent of its profit that year.

The 2,400-bed Texas facility is ICE’s largest family detention center. One reason the contract was so lucrative is that ICE paid the company as though the center were at capacity, even when half the beds were empty.

Homeland security auditors pointed first to a more basic flaw in the deal. Believing it would take too long to negotiate a new deal with city officials in Dilley, ICE thought it would be quicker to stitch the deal onto a contract it already had worked out with the city of Eloy, 900 miles away.

ICE’s own lawyers warned against the shortcut, auditors found, but the agency went ahead anyway.

“Eloy’s sole function under the modification is to act as the middleman between ICE and CCA,” according to the audit. “Eloy collects about $438,000 in annual fees for this service.”

In response to the audit, ICE said it already had developed new safeguards for negotiating its detention contracts but said it believed the Dilley contract was “reasonable.”

ICE did not respond to auditors’ recommendation that ICE end its arrangement with Eloy and work directly with officials in Dilley. In 2016, the agency extended its contract with Eloy and CCA for another five years.

Patrick Michels can be reached at pmichels@revealnews.org. Follow him on Twitter: @patrickmichels.

This story was originally published by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more at revealnews.org and subscribe to the Reveal podcast, produced with PRX, at revealnews.org/podcast.

Jimmy Kimmel delivered with Oscars opening monologue

Jimmy Kimmel participates in the "90th Oscars" panel (Credit: AP/Richard Shotwell)

Returning Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel promised he’d address #MeToo and the tidal wave of sexual misconduct coming from Hollywood, and he didn’t disappoint. He mentioned disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein by name, who, he said was only the second person to be expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The other, Kimmel said, shared screening links with friends. Kimmel mocked that such disparate crimes should receive the same punishment.

Also, Kimmel spoke of ending sexual harassment in the workplace, with a quip that then women would just experience it in every other aspect of life — an important clarification. He retold the of Mark Wahlberg and Michelle Williams during reshoots for “All the Money in the World,” after Kevin Spacey was replaced amid sexual misconduct allegations. Kimmel didn’t paint #MeToo and the fight in Hollywood and beyond as one-dimensional, or even sweeping, but with many moving components, causes and experiences, a reckoning he called “long overdue.”

As second-time host for the 90th Academy Awards, Kimmel was in control, but bold, reminding the audience that this was a special year. He cheered the trailblazers of the past year in film, from the record-breaking “Black Panther,” to Jordan Peele, to Greta Gerwig. The message was that history had been made, both on screen and with the mobilization of women fighting against systematic sexual harassment. Here, he highlighted Time’s Up.

Yet the jokes, too, were plentiful. “Here’s how clueless Hollywood is about women: We made a movie called ‘What Women Want’ and it starred Mel Gibson,” Kimmel said. He asked winners to not get up from their seat right away, in case of a repeat of the “Lala Land”/”Moonlight” fiasco for Best Picture. And he enticed winners of the night to keep their speeches as short as possible, awarding the winner with a jet ski.

How to talk to kids about difficult subjects

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One of the toughest jobs of parenting is talking to your kids about difficult subjects. It’s hard enough to explain when Mr. Teddy Bear gets eaten by the washing machine. Or how their bike got stolen at school. It feels impossible to put into words the really big issues, such as violence, racism, drugs, and other weighty topics. But in the age of cell phone notifications, streaming video, and 24-hour news coverage — when even little kids are exposed to really serious stories — it’s important to face this challenge head-on. Addressing the tough stuff makes your kids feel safer, strengthens your bond, and teaches them about the world. And when you show them how to gather and interpret information, ask questions, and cross-check sources, they become critical thinkers. It’s always sad to confront the issues the world hasn’t been able to solve. But by investing our kids with knowledge, compassion, and strong character, we can give them all the tools they need to make things better.

When your kids learn about something scary or unsettling — say, a mass shooting, a suicide on a popular TV show, or graphic porn via an innocent Google search — most parents get that deer-in-the-headlights feeling. But it’s always a good idea to use your kid’s age and developmental stage as a guide to starting conversations, because kids absorb information differently as they grow from babies to teens. For example, young children are very literal. If you tell them a monster is under the bed, they’ll fly across the room to avoid getting their ankles munched. Try that with a teen, and they’ll tell you to take a flying leap. Understanding a bit about how kids perceive the world in each phase of their development helps you deliver information about it in the most age-appropriate way. Of course, every child brings his or her own sensitivities, temperament, experience, and other individual traits to any conversation. A talk about the Holocaust, for instance, can go in a million directions depending on the kid. So use your best judgment as to how your child tends to takes in information to determine how deep to go.

There are far too many difficult subjects in the world. But most of us wouldn’t want to give up our dynamic, information-rich culture. The trade-off is frank, yet compassionate conversation that helps us all make sense of things that seem senseless. The tips below are general guidelines for discussing any difficult subject with kids age 2 through teen based on childhood-development guidelines. Additionally, we offer guidance on explaining the news to kids and talking about sexual harassment to young kids and tweens and teens.

Age 2–6

Young children don’t have enough life experience to understand some of the elements involved in complex, difficult topics. They also don’t have a firm grasp on abstract concepts and cause and effect. Because they and their primary relationships (Mom, Dad, siblings, grandparents — even the family dog) are the center of their world, they focus on how things affect them. They’re very sensitive to parents’ emotional states and can worry that they did something to make you upset. All of this makes it challenging to explain big issues. On the other hand, you’re better able to manage their media exposure, and they can usually move on fairly quickly.

Keep the news at bay. Do what you can to limit small kids’ exposure to age-inappropriate subjects by turning off or muting the TV and choosing media that’s targeted to their age.
Reassure with both words and gestures. Say, “You’re safe. Mommy and Daddy are safe. And our family is safe.” Hugs and snuggling work wonders, too.
Address feelings — yours and theirs. Say, “It’s OK to feel scared, sad, or confused. Those feelings are natural and we all feel them.” Also: “I’m upset, but not with you.”
Find out what they know. Your kids might not understand the issue very well. Ask them what they think happened before giving them any imagery.
Break down issues to their simplest terms. For violent crime, say, “Someone used a gun to shoot people.” For hate crimes, say, “Some groups of people still aren’t treated equally or fairly.” For rape, “A man hurt a woman.”
Catch your own biases. We all have them. Say, “man,” “woman,” “girl,” and “boy,” not “fat guy,” “homeless lady,” “pretty little girl,” or “black boy.” Avoid describing a person’s ethnicity, sexual identity, weight, financial status, and so on unless it’s relevant to the issue.
Use vocabulary, ideas, and relationships that they’re familiar with. Recall a recent, similar situation from their lives that they can relate to. Say, “A man stole something. Remember when someone took your lunchbox?”
Use basic terms for feelings such as “mad,” “sad,” “afraid,” “happy,” and “surprised.” Young children understand emotions, but they don’t totally understand mental illness. You can say that someone was angry too much or confused too much and needed extra help. Avoid idiomatic expressions such as “blew a gasket” or “flew the coop.”
Communicate that someone’s in charge. Say, “Mommy and Daddy will make sure nothing bad happens to our family.” Or, “The police will catch the bad guy.”

Age 7–12

Because kids in this age group can read and write, they get exposed to age-inappropriate content more often — but younger kids in this range are still a little shaky on what’s real and pretend. As kids gain abstract-thinking skills, real-world experience, and the ability to express themselves, they can grapple with difficult subjects and understand different perspectives. Because tweens are separating from their parents, entering into puberty, and interacting with media more independently, they come into contact with violent video games, hard-core pornography, distressing news like mass shootings, and online hate speech. They need to be able to discuss things without feeling shame or embarrassment.

Wait for the right moment. At this age, kids are still very likely to come to you if they’ve heard about something frightening. You can feel them out to decide if they want to discuss something, but if they don’t bring it up, don’t feel you have to broach difficult subjects until they ask.
Find out what they know. Ask your kids what they’ve heard, or if their friends at school are talking about something. Answer questions simply and directly — but try not to overexplain (because you could make them more scared).
Create a safe space for discussion. Say, “These topics are hard to discuss — even for adults. Let’s just talk. I won’t be mad, and I want you to feel free to ask anything you want.”
Provide context and perspective. Kids need to understand the circumstances around an issue to fully make sense of it. For a mass shooting, you can say, “The person who committed the killing had problems in his brain that confused his thoughts.” For race-based crimes, say, “Some people wrongly believe that light-skinned people are better than dark-skinned people. Without the correct information, they sometimes commit crimes they think are justified.”
Address their curiosity. If your kid stumbles across grown-up material online, it might be time to find content that will let them learn about more mature subjects age-appropriately. Say, “Online pornography is something that some grown-ups look at. But it’s not about love or romance and it can give you the wrong idea about sex. If you want to learn more about sex, I can give you some books to look at and we can talk more if you have questions.” Or if your kid wants to explore serious topics in more depth than you can provide, say, “Let’s find some news sources that offer current events written for kids.”
Be sensitive to kids’ emotions and temperament. You never know what may trigger your kid. Check in by sharing how you feel and ask them how they feel. Say, “I feel angry when I know that someone got hurt.” Or, “It makes me feel sad to hear that someone didn’t get a good education or the right treatment to help them.” And, “What are you feeling right now?”
Encourage critical thinking. Ask open-ended questions to get kids to think more deeply about serious topics. Ask, “What did you hear?,” “What did it make you think?,” and “Why do you think that?” For older kids, you can ask, “Do you think families from other backgrounds would view this the same way as us?” And, “The news media hypes up stories so more people will pay attention. Why do you think this story is getting so much play?”
Look for positives. There may not be a silver lining to every cloud, but try to be optimistic. Say, “A lot of people acted like heroes at the crime scene.” Or, “Let’s find ways that we can help.”

Teens

At this age, teens are engaged in media independently — reading it, interacting with it, and even making their own and sharing it in the form of comments, videos, and memes. They often hear about difficult subjects in the news or from other places, such as in video game chats or on social media, without your knowledge. They’re much more interested in what their friends or online folks think about an issue than in your opinion — often scrolling to the bottom of an article to read user responses before they even read the whole story. They bristle at lectures — because they think they know everything — so encourage them to find media that can enrich their knowledge and ask questions that prompt them to think through their arguments.

Encourage open dialogue. Teens need to know that they can ask questions, test their opinions, and speak freely without fear of consequences. Say, “We may not agree on everything, but I’m interested in what you have to say.”
Ask open-ended questions and ask them to support their ideas. Say, “What do you think about police brutality?,” “What do you know about it?,” “Who do you think is at fault?,” and “Why do you think that?”
Admit when you don’t know something. As kids move into the teen phase, it’s OK for them to see that their parents may not have all the answers. Say, “I don’t know. Let’s try to find out more.”
Get them to consider the complexities in difficult subjects. Forces including social issues, politics, tradition, and more all contribute to making some problems seem incurable. Ask, “What makes difficult issues, such as rape, violence, and crime, so hard to solve?,” “What key things would need to change to fix certain issues, such as poverty?,” “How do policymakers get to the bottom of an issue to correct tough problems?,” and “Should we accept tiny changes that help a problem little by little or insist on big changes?”
Share your values. Let your kids know where you stand on issues, and explain why you hold certain values. If you want your teens to be respectful of others’ differences, for example, explain why you value tolerance and acceptance.
Talk about “their” news. Prompt them to consider how different sources put their own spin on the issues and how that influences an audience’s opinion of an issue. Social media such as Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat tend to serve up content from friends — with stories that tend to confirm one point of view. How do these stories compare to supposedly objective news broadcasts on TV? How about sources designed for millennials such as Vice and Vox that feature reporters investigating stories in the trenches? Ask, “Does a reporter have to experience heroin dependency to be able to report a story on opiate addiction?”
Ask what they would do if they were in a really difficult situation? Teens are figuring out their own identities and can seek out risk. Considering how they would act if confronted with a terrible reality appeals to their own sense of adventure and is a way to get them to grapple with ethical dilemmas and see themselves making good choices. Say, “If you were caught in a political demonstration that turned violent and you saw people being mistreated, what would you do?”
Get them to consider solutions. Teens can be cynical, but they can also be idealistic. If anything is going to get better, it’s this generation who’s going to do it. Show them that you trust them for the job. Ask, “If you were in charge, what issue would you solve first and why — and how would you do it?”