Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 186

Court sentences Larry Nassar to 175 years ��� it’s just a beginning

Larry Nassar listens to victim impact statements during his sentencing hearing. (Credit: Getty/Scott Olson)

On Wednesday, after seven days of often painful victim testimony against former USA Gymnastics physical therapist Larry Nassar, a��Michigan court sentenced him to 40 to 175 years in prison after he pled guilty to seven counts of criminal sexual conduct�������including molestation. His victims included some of America’s top Olympic gymnasts. In total, it is estimated that Nassar physically abused no less than 150 of his patients in a series of assaults that date back to the mid 1990s.

“I just signed your death warrant,” presiding judge��Rosemarie Aquilina said during sentencing. “It is my honor and privilege to sentence you. You do not deserve to walk outside a prison ever again. You have done nothing to control those urges and anywhere you walk, destruction will occur to those most vulnerable.”

Nassar, who pled guilty to molesting only seven of his many alleged victims, made a brief statement to the court, saying that “no words” could convey how sorry he��was for his actions.��The convicted said the testimonies of the over 150 women who testified against him in the sentencing phase, the convicted had “shaken me to my core.”��He added, “I will carry your words with me for the rest of my days.”

 

This is in contract to a��letter from the convicted written after he accepted a plea deal and read by Judge��Aquilina in court Wednesday. In it, Nassar wrote, “I was a good doctor, because my treatments worked and those patients that are now speaking out were the same ones that praised and came back over and over. The media convinced them that it was wrong and bad.”

As Time reported, there were tears in the courtroom during sentencing and Nassar’s statements, though applause as well when the judge delivered a term of 25 to 40 years at minimum, 175 years at maximum. In his mid 50s and already sentenced to 60 years in connection with the possession of 37,000 child-pornography images, many of them of his victims, it is highly, highly probable��that Nassar will die in state custody.

But this is far from the end of this case. Yes, there may be further charges against Nassar, but attention has already turned to the many organizations and individuals that may have enabled his decades of abusive behavior.

Already, there are many loud calls for a thorough and unsparing investigation of Michigan State University, the institution where Nassar worked and where administrators reportedly knew of allegations against him but appear to have done little or nothing about it. Earlier this week, a victim of Nassar testifying at the trial alleged MSU is still billing her family for therapy sessions during which he molested her. Currently, MSU seems to be circling the wagons around its upper management and president.

Elsewhere, the U.S. Olympic Committee has released a letter demanding that the entire governing board of USA Gymnastics ��� the official governing organization for the U.S. Olympic gymnastics team that employed Nassar for years ��� resign to its apparent inaction in the face of mounting allegations against Nassar and, at times, seemingly obfuscating the sharing of or investigation into them.

The letter read in part:

Since October of last year, we have been engaged in direct talks with USAG leadership on this fundamental point. New leadership at the board level is critical and you recently saw three USAG board resignations. Further changes are necessary to help create a culture that fosters safe sport practice, offers athletes strong resources in education and reporting, and ensures the healing of the victims and survivors.��This includes a full turnover of leadership from the past, which means that all current USAG directors must resign.

The remaining text of the letter is just as direct and condemning. Already, several members of USA Gymnastics leadership have tenured their resignations.

There is and will be additional fallout tied to the many ways in which leaders in the gymnastic community ��� leaders both young athletes and parents of young athletes trusted to protect them ��� enabled Nassar for the sake of collecting championships and gold medals. That will be reported and litigated out over the coming months and years. And there will be other stories of abuse involving other abusers. (Already Texas authorities are investigating reports of misconduct at the Karyoli Ranch training facility ��� that may not all involve Nassar).

But, as the many testimonies and statements by Nassar’s victims show, the most important and difficult work in coping with and processing his crimes and those like him will not come in the courts or newsrooms.��It will happen in homes and minds of the people he assaulted and the��those who love them.

There’s good news for Trump after the government shutdown

(Credit: Getty/Andrew Harrer)

A new poll reveals that there were no winners in the recent debacle over a government shutdown ��� only losers. And there was no disincentive to prevent another one from coming in a few weeks.

Thirty-nine percent of Americans blame Democrats in Congress for the government shutdown, compared to 38 percent who blame Trump and 18 percent who blame Republicans in Congress, according to a poll by NBC News/SurveyMonkey. Although partisan politics played a major role in determining who blamed which side ��� Republicans were more likely to blame Democrats in Congress, while Democrats were more likely to blame either Trump or Republicans in Congress ��� independents were not inclined to let��anyone��off the hook. Thirty-one percent blamed Democrats in Congress, compared to 48 percent who blamed Trump and 16 percent who blamed Republicans.

Despite controlling all three branches of government, Republicans may have found that there’s not much downside in another shutdown. Trump portrayed Democrats as obstructionists ��� and it worked. A Quinnipiac poll found that 32 percent held Democrats responsible, while 31 percent blamed Trump; only 18 percent blamed congressional Republicans.

“But that shutdown��. . . It’s on the Democrats and President Donald Trump,”��said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, in a press release. “And it was a big waste of time. ”

There was some good news for Democrats in the polls. When blame for Trump and congressional Republicans was combined, 56 percent wound up blaming the GOP in one form or another while only 39 percent blamed Democrats in Congress. Similarly, 60 percent of Americans thought Trump had failed to show strong leadership during the shutdown (including 68 percent of independents), while only 37 percent felt Trump had displayed strong leadership qualities (including 29 percent of independents).

A��poll by Hart Research Associates taken last week had only 31 percent of Americans blaming Democrats for a possible government shutdown, with 42 percent blaming Trump and congressional Republicans. This means that they took a hit along with Trump and the GOP in general as a result of the shutdown shenanigans ��� an especially shameful fact given that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer seemed to be on the wrong end of the deal and that��the GOP’s own behavior was a major cause of the debacle itself.

“The government shutdown is a sign of just how broken the Republican Party is. Why are we on the verge of a government shutdown?” David Frum, senior editor of The Atlantic, told Salon Talks last week. “Well because there’s certain, everyone just understands that there’s a certain percentage of the Republican Party that will never vote for the financing to raise the debt ceiling to allow the government to continue to operate.”

This federal bureau wants to slaughter tens of thousands of wild horses

(Credit: Getty/JGalione)

Thousands of wild horses’ lives are at stake as the government considers ways to control their population and limit their impact on public lands.

Already, many��animal rights activists have taken issue with��U.S.��Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) tactic of herding wild horses with helicopters and sometimes confining them permanently to expensive holding facilities. Now that same federal agency is petitioning for new regulations and budget allowances that would enable the slaughtering of��those animals.

“The BLM, the very agency in charge of protecting them, is asking Congress for permission to kill them,”��Simone Netherlands, an animal rights activist and a spokesperson for the American Wild Horse Campaign, told ABC News.

The idea is disturbing, yes, but the issue is not so simple.��According to ABC News, there are approximately 75,000 wild horses living on public lands, most of them located in government-controlled territory in the American West.��Without natural predators, their numbers have greatly expanded in the last half century, putting them in conflict with others who use the natural resources on that federal property.

At this time, the BLM leases 60 percent of its��land to ranchers, who count on the grasses the wild horses eat to feed their livestock. Naturally, these small (and sometimes large) business owners want the��horses moved off the land completely in order to keep their often thin financial margins stable and, one might guess, keep prices for domestic beef down, at the consumer level.

Already,��some captured wild horses are placed into what’s called the “adoption circuit,” a system that allows ranchers and enthusiasts to either house or domesticate the animals on private land. But that serves to help a thin fraction of the total number of horses. The majority��are herded into holding facilities.

“There are over 45,000 wild horses currently in holding areas, costing taxpayers about $50 million annually,” ABC reported. “It’s an expense that the U.S. Department of Interior sought to address in its 2018 budget by lifting regulations that prevent slaughtering wild horses.”

Beyond being horrified by the idea of slaughtering wild horses, activists worry that the practice could cause the animals, sometimes called mustangs, to go extinct.

“They’ve stockpiled wild horses in holding pens,” Netherlands told ABC, “and so now what are they going to do with all the horses that they’ve stockpiled? The adoption rates are not high enough so they can’t adopt them all out. So now we have a bunch of wild horses that the taxpayers are paying for and holding facilities and their solution is kill them.”

BLM counters that the natural resources on the land under BLM management isn’t sufficient to support��the lives��of all the wild horses roaming free in the West.��“There’s three things that wild horses need: food, water and obviously space,” Lisa Reid, a BLM spokesperson, told ABC. “As you can see we do have millions of acres out here, but not every acre is producing viable forage for the horses. So you know just as with any type of species they have to be managed just so that they don’t become�� . . .�� overpopulated and diseased.”

Reid added that��“The Bureau of Land Management is a public agency. We have to answer to all groups . . . So we have to try and find that balance to make sure that we can do what’s best for the horses.” She says, according to BLM, wild horses “are overpopulated by sometimes 300 percent on most of our herd management areas.”

It’s notable that the Department of the Interior is now under the control of the ardently pro-business, anti-environmental��Ryan Zinke, an appointee of President Donald Trump, who often seems to value what industry can derive from publicly protected natural resources above those natural resources themselves. Acting BLM chief Brian Steed also seems to lean in that direction. That said, there is no evidence that either forced this initiative.

Now Congress has to decide��if��the proposed regulations��and��allocations that would allow for the cull will pass as��part of the Department of the Interior’s budget.

Ellen Price, who owns a ranch in California that takes in and trains some of the wild horses, tells ABC that she hopes people will understand that these horses “have value.” The big picture, she said, is that “wild horses need to stay in the wild on public lands.”

This brewing��battle in Washington points to many things: Humanity’s inability to operate in sustainable ways, the problems eating meat causes the world and our misunderstanding of ecologies (after all, it was humans who first brought horses to this continent and then mismanaged them).

More than anything else, though, it points to an ongoing��war of priorities, one��in which the current government seems to��favor business over more universal concerns and in which bureaucracy constantly fails almost all living things ��� humans being the most tragic and important examples.

Kimberly-Clark celebrates the Trump tax cuts with massive layoffs, share buybacks

Kleenex tissues, a Kimberly Clark brand (Credit: AP/Jeff Chiu)

As President Donald Trump continues to praise himself for record-high stock market gains and job growth as a result of the GOP tax plan, Kimberly-Clark is the latest corporation to announce thousands of layoffs and closings worldwide.

The maker of Huggies and Kleenex, Kimberly-Clark announced Tuesday that it would slash between 5,000 and 5,500 jobs ��� about 13 percent of its workforce ��� and will close or sell 10 manufacturing plants, according to NPR. In its 2017 year-end report, the company announced the operating profit was $812 million, which was less than its 2016 profit of $839 million.

Chief executive and chairman,��Thomas J. Falk, said the company “delivered bottom-line growth in a challenging environment,” and vowed to “expand production capacity at several” other locations.

Falk added that the company restructuring would make it “leaner, stronger and faster.”

But in the same announcement of plans to restructure the company, it announced that the Kimberly-Clark Board of Directors “approved a 3.1 percent increase in the company’s quarterly dividend for 2018, which it says is the 46th consecutive annual dividend increase for shareholders,” NPR reported. Falk also noted that Kimberly-Clark stated, “we returned��$2.3 billion��to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases.”

How does the GOP tax plan play a role in all of this? The company stands to “net benefit” from the newly passed tax cuts, so much so that it will be able to pay for its “restructuring” plan, as Nathan Bomey of USA Today noted. To recap, last year’s profits dipped, Trump and the GOP put forth a tax plan that provided relief to the company and now Kimberly-Clark is��using that money to restructure.

The CFO of Kimberly-Clark just said on a conference call that the tax cuts "provides us the flexibility" to pay for the "restructuring" plan. In other words, the tax cut is funding the job cuts.

— Nathan Bomey (@NathanBomey) January 23, 2018

It’s also not the only company doing so, as Walmart recently proudly announced $1,000 bonuses for employees, only to quietly close several of its Sam’s Club store locations and lay off hundreds and up to thousands of employees, as Salon has previously reported.

Wells Fargo can also be added to the list, as it announced “a quarterly common stock dividend of $0.39 per share” that was approved by the company’s board of directors on Tuesday. The announcement continued, “Wells Fargo has approximately 4.9 billion shares outstanding. The Wells Fargo board of directors also increased the company���s authority to repurchase common stock by an additional 350 million shares.”

Of course, this outcome was so predictable that CEOs even once��admitted it themselves by refusing to show hands when Trump’s top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, asked if they would pledge to create jobs with their money from tax cuts.

“Stranger Things 2″ relies on nostalgic race politics

"Stranger Things" (Credit: Netflix/Jackson Davis)

David K. Harbour, who plays Sheriff Hopper on the Netflix series “Stranger Things,” brought the house down when he accepted the Screen Actors’ Guild award for best television show a year ago.

He alluded to the 45th U.S. president in a fever pitch, speaking of “the violence of certain individuals and institutions.” Then he shouted: “Great acting can change the world!” The crowd of actors in the audience applauded wildly.

Likewise, the second season of “Stranger Things” ostentatiously invokes politics — without naming names.

This season’s antagonist is the Shadow Monster, a Lovecraftian concoction of fury, tendril and tornado. The Shadow Monster possesses Will, one of of the show’s six young protagonists, and connects him to a network of subterranean vines that overwhelm him with hateful images and urges.

The heart of the Shadow Monster, when it is finally revealed, is oddly hairy and incandescently orange.

With the didacticism of a kid’s show that teaches while it entertains, “Stranger Things 2″ even models an interpretation of the Shadow Monster for its audience. Another protagonist, Lucas, tells us to understand the Shadow Monster through “analogy,” and compares it to the Mind Flayer, a beast the boys know from the Dungeons & Dragons universe.

Another lead character, Dustin, explains further, with yet another analogy: “[The Mind Flayer] views other races like us as inferior to itself.” It’s like the Nazis “if the Nazis were from another dimension.”

Just as the boys use fiction and history to understand their real world monsters, so should we, the show suggests.

Clearly, “Stranger Things 2″ stands against prejudice and racism in principle, but what is its fuller political vision? This is a fair question to ask of one of the most popular shows on television, especially since the show’s creators invite a political reading.

The Lost Sister: “A very special episode”

The much talked about Episode Seven, “The Lost Sister,” provides some answers.

In this episode, Eleven, a young woman with telekinetic powers, visits Chicago. Audiences had a unique distaste for this anomalous installment of the series which removes us from the main plot, familiar setting and beloved characters of Hawkins, Indiana.

Defending their creative choices, the Duffer brothers explained that “The Lost Sister” was important for Eleven’s character development but admitted that it was an “experiment.”

If it was an experiment, it’s another from the Duffers’ lab of 1980s revivalism. In this case, it’s “a very special episode.” Good or bad, very special episodes are memorable for their abandonment of familiar tone, theme and story for the sake of serious messages about alcoholism, parental abuse or — as in one “very special episode” of Punky Brewster — the dangers of climbing inside abandoned refrigerators. In “Stranger Things 2,” the “very special episode” happens to be about radical politics.

In Chicago, Eleven (or El as she is called), who is white, meets Kali, a young South Asian woman. Despite their differences, the two recognize each other as sisters since they both have supernatural powers and lived in the same lab where they were brutally experimented upon.

Kali is the leader of a diverse group of misfits who are guided by a desire for revenge. As Kali explains it, her gang murders and steals from people who have hurt them. They squat in an abandoned building and spend much of their onscreen time fleeing the police.

If you doubt that El, Kali and her group are a “rainbow coalition,” cover your head before you are hit on it: In the episode’s first 30 seconds, the word “rainbow” is uttered four times, the image of a rainbow flashed 10 times, interspersed with flashbacks to the young El and Kali in the lab.

A short history of rainbow coalitions

Fred Hampton, the charismatic young leader of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers, coined the term rainbow coalition in 1968. History Prof. Jakobi E. Winters explains:

“The original Rainbow Coalition embodied the intersectionality of the critical issues of race, class, gender, anti-war, student, labor, and sexuality. It fused these various forms of identity politics into one group with one ideal form of identity — an identity that transcends differences and focuses on commonalities. The most common unifier was poverty.”

This diverse, class-based coalition was a political innovation considered especially dangerous by law enforcement. In 1969, Fred Hampton, who was 21 years old, was murdered by Chicago police while asleep at his home.

In 1984, the year “Stranger Things 2″ is set, rainbows were very much in the air, especially in Chicago.

Harold Washington had been recently elected the city’s first Black mayor and had installed a “Rainbow Cabinet.”

Jesse Jackson, in his run for the Democratic presidential nomination, also drew on the support of the Rainbow Coalition. The phrase would become predominately associated with him. In a sign of the co-opting to come, Jackson even copyrighted the phrase.

By the time Jackson ran his second presidential campaign in 1988, his Rainbow Coalition had already moved somewhat to the centre.

A generation later, Barack Obama’s historic 2008 election victory was guided by a veteran of rainbow coalition campaigns, David Axelrod, who drew on rainbow coalition politics — even though in office, many of Obama’s economic policies turned out to be moderately conservative.

By 2016, the electorate proved less receptive to Hillary Clinton’s invocation of a rainbow coalition theme for her campaign, partly because she was not seen as progressive.

The rainbow coalition had lost its radical content as its rhetoric was co-opted by centrist politics. In turn, it became less convincing to the electorate. “Stranger Things 2″ replays this appropriation in its own rainbow coalition, incorrectly endorsing it as the way to win.

Centrism without race or class critiques

Kali teaches El to weaponize her Jedi-style, telekinetic rage, which Eleven will eventually use to defeat the Trumpian Shadow Monster. Kali even gives El a feminist makeover: A boxy-shouldered blazer and slicked-back hair.

But after learning Kali’s power and adopting her style, El rejects Kali herself, put off by her propensity to violence. She foils Kali’s attempt to kill their former prison guard, and soon returns to Hawkins to reunite with Sheriff Hopper.

It’s hard not to read this as the rejection of what the show considers the unreasonable violence of people of color.

What’s more, by invoking the issue of policing, Stranger Things 2 alludes to Black Lives Matter, but manages only to repudiate that movement.

Kali tries to recruit El to her gang by criticizing El’s father figure, Sheriff Hopper. “Let me guess,” Kali says. “Your police man tries to stop you from using your gifts.” El nods, but ultimately chooses the side of law enforcement anyway.

Even as the Chicago police chase Kali and her friends, the police are shown to be essentially in the right. Kali’s gang always shoots first. Sheriff Hopper himself is gruff, but morally impeccable.

This uncomplicated validation of law enforcement, while common in popular culture, is disturbing given the violent fate of Fred Hampton, the man who first uttered the phrase “rainbow coalition.” His death at the hands of the police is exactly the kind of brutality that motivates Black Lives Matter today.

If we take its political analogies seriously, “Stranger Things 2″ advocates for a return to rainbow coalition politics — but the kind of coalition that has been emptied of its substantial race and class critiques.

A famously nostalgic show,”Stranger Things 2″ is nostalgic for 2008, a time before Black Lives Matter and Bernie Sanders. Like much of Hollywood,”Stranger Things 2″ aligns itself with a centrist liberalism that hopes for a return to politics as usual after Trump.

Meanwhile, the progressive left has a longer memory, recognizing that politics as usual was a problem before the Shadow Monster arrived. If there is to be a return, it should be to a grassroots more like the original rainbow coalition.

Aaron Giovannone, Adjunct Professor, Department of General Education, Mount Royal University

This year’s flu is more dangerous and deadly in California, report says

(Credit: Getty/sturti)

If you live in California and it seems like every single person you know has a terrible case of the flu, that’s because there’s a vicious strain going around.

Emergency rooms are crowded, pharmacies are running out of medicine, and the death toll is rising, the LA Times reports. As of Friday, Jan. 5, 27 people younger than the age of 65 have died from the flu in California since October—only three died last year within the same timeframe, according to the report.

Dr. Wally Ghurabi, the ER director of UCLA’s Medical Center in Santa Monica, told the LA Times that on a typical day the medical center treats 140 patients. However last week, hospital staff treated over 200 patients in one day.

“The Northridge earthquake was the last time we saw over 200 patients,” Ghurabi told the LA Times.

Some officials note it’s still tough to say if this year is worse than last year’s flu season. In 2017, the flu had taken 68 lives by the end of February. According to the report, it’s possible that this year’s flu season is “outpacing” last year’s because it may have started earlier.

In early December, health officials anticipated this season would be particularly bad nationwide since it was picking up earlier than in previous years.

“Flu is picking up and picking up early,” Daniel Jernigan, director of the influenza division at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the Washington Post. “A lot of people are getting together in the next few days and weeks. All of those folks who are traveling, some of them will be traveling with their influenza.”

Whatever the case is, this year’s strain— H3N2— is one of the nastier ones, officials say.

“Of the viruses we hate, we hate H3N2 more than the other ones,” Jernigan told The Post.

Dr. Jeffrey Gunzenhauser, L.A. County’s interim health officer, also told the LA Times this strain “tends to cause more deaths and more hospitalizations than the other strains.”

This is the same strain that has reportedly affected Australia and England, also causing deaths and in an increase in hospitalizations.

Mapping a world from hell

A U.S. Army soldier takes cover as a Black Hawk chopper takes off from a U.S. military base in Arghandab valley near Kandahar.

He left Air Force Two behind and, unannounced, “shrouded in secrecy,” flew on an unmarked C-17 transport plane into Bagram Air Base, the largest American garrison in Afghanistan. All news of his visit was embargoed until an hour before he was to depart the country.

More than 16 years after an American invasion “liberated” Afghanistan, he was there to offer some good news to a U.S. troop contingent once again on the rise. Before a 40-foot American flag, addressing 500 American troops, Vice President Mike Pence praised them as “the world’s greatest force for good,” boasted that American air strikes had recently been “dramatically increased,” swore that their country was “here to stay,” and insisted that “victory is closer than ever before.” As an observer noted, however, the response of his audience was “subdued.”  (“Several troops stood with their arms crossed or their hands folded behind their backs and listened, but did not applaud.”)

Think of this as but the latest episode in an upside down geopolitical fairy tale, a grim, rather than Grimm, story for our age that might begin: Once upon a time — in October 2001, to be exact — Washington launched its war on terror.  There was then just one country targeted, the very one where, a little more than a decade earlier, the U.S. had ended a long proxy waragainst the Soviet Union during which it had financed, armed, or backed an extreme set of Islamic fundamentalist groups, including a rich young Saudi by the name of Osama bin Laden.

By 2001, in the wake of that war, which helped send the Soviet Union down the path to implosion, Afghanistan was largely (but not completely) ruled by the Taliban.  Osama bin Laden was there, too, with a relatively modest crew of cohorts.  By early 2002, he had fled to Pakistan, leaving many of his companions dead and his organization, al-Qaeda, in a state of disarray.  The Taliban, defeated, were pleading to be allowed to put down their arms and go back to their villages, an abortive process that Anand Gopal vividly described in his book, “No Good Men Among the Living.”

It was, it seemed, all over but the cheering and, of course, the planning for yet greater exploits across the region.  The top officials in the administration of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were geopolitical dreamers of the first order who couldn’t have had more expansive ideas about how to extend such success to — as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld indicated only days after the 9/11 attacks — terror or insurgent groups in more than 60 countries.  It was a point President Bush would reemphasize nine months later in a triumphalist graduation speech at West Point.  At that moment, the struggle they had quickly, if immodestly, dubbed the Global War on Terror was still a one-country affair.  They were, however, already deep into preparations to extend it in ways more radical and devastating than they could ever have imagined with the invasion and occupation of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the domination of the oil heartlands of the planet that they were sure would follow.  (In a comment that caught the moment exactly, Newsweek quoted a British official “close to the Bush team” as saying, “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.”)

So many years later, perhaps it won’t surprise you — as it probably wouldn’t have surprised the hundreds of thousands of protesters who turned out in the streets of American cities and towns in early 2003 to oppose the invasion of Iraq — that this was one of those stories to which the adage “be careful what you wish for” applies.

Seeing war

And it’s a tale that’s not over yet.  Not by a long shot.  As a start, in the Trump era, the longest war in American history, the one in Afghanistan, is only getting longer.  There are those U.S. troop levels on the rise; those air strikes ramping up; the Taliban in control of significant sections of the country; an Islamic State-branded terror group spreading ever more successfully in its eastern regions; and, according to the latest report from the Pentagon, “more than 20 terrorist or insurgent groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Think about that: 20 groups.  In other words, so many years later, the war on terror should be seen as an endless exercise in the use of multiplication tables — and not just in Afghanistan either.  More than a decade and a half after an American president spoke of 60 or more countries as potential targets, thanks to the invaluable work of a single dedicated group, the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, we finally have a visual representation of the true extent of the war on terror.  That we’ve had to wait so long should tell us something about the nature of this era of permanent war.

The Costs of War Project has produced not just a map of the war on terror, 2015-2017 (released at TomDispatch with this article), but the first map of its kind ever.  It offers an astounding vision of Washington’s counterterror wars across the globe: their spread, the deployment of U.S. forces, the expanding missions to train foreign counterterror forces, the American bases that make them possible, the drone and other air strikes that are essential to them, and the U.S. combat troops helping to fight them.  (Terror groups have, of course, morphed and expanded riotously as part and parcel of the same process.)

A glance at the map tells you that the war on terror, an increasingly complex set of intertwined conflicts, is now a remarkably global phenomenon.  It stretches from the Philippines (with its own ISIS-branded group that just fought an almost five-month-long campaign that devastated Marawi, a city of 300,000) through South Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and deep into West Africa where, only recently, four Green Berets died in an ambush in Niger.

No less stunning are the number of countries Washington’s war on terror has touched in some fashion.  Once, of course, there was only one (or, if you want to include the United States, two).  Now, the Costs of War Project identifies no less than 76 countries, 39% of those on the planet, as involved in that global conflict.  That means places like Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya where U.S. drone or other air strikes are the norm and U.S. ground troops (often Special Operations forces) have been either directly or indirectly engaged in combat.  It also means countries where U.S. advisers are training local militaries or even militias in counterterror tactics and those with bases crucial to this expanding set of conflicts.  As the map makes clear, these categories often overlap.

Who could be surprised that such a “war” has been eating American taxpayer dollars at a rate that should stagger the imagination in a country whose infrastructure is now visibly crumbling?  In a separate study, released in November, the Costs of War Project estimated that the price tag on the war on terror (with some future expenses included) had already reached an astronomical $5.6 trillion.  Only recently, however, President Trump, now escalating those conflicts, tweeted an even more staggering figure: “After having foolishly spent $7 trillion in the Middle East, it is time to start rebuilding our country!” (This figure, too, seems to have come in some fashion from the Costs of War estimate that “future interest payments on borrowing for the wars will likely add more than $7.9 trillion to the national debt” by mid-century.)

It couldn’t have been a rarer comment from an American politician, as in these years assessments of both the monetary and human costs of war have largely been left to small groups of scholars and activists.  The war on terror has, in fact, spread in the fashion today’s map lays out with almost no serious debate in this country about its costs or results.  If the document produced by the Costs of War project is, in fact, a map from hell, it is also, I believe, the first full-scale map of this war ever produced.

Think about that for a moment.  For the last 16 years, we, the American people, funding this complex set of conflicts to the tune of trillions of dollars, have lacked a single map of the war Washington has been fighting.  Not one. Yes, parts of that morphing, spreading set of conflicts have been somewhere in the news regularly, though seldom (except when there were “lone wolf” terror attacks in the United States or Western Europe) in the headlines.  In all those years, however, no American could see an image of this strange, perpetual conflict whose end is nowhere in sight.

Part of this can be explained by the nature of that “war.”  There are no fronts, no armies advancing on Berlin, no armadas bearing down on the Japanese homeland.  There hasn’t been, as in Korea in the early 1950s, even a parallel to cross or fight your way back to.  In this war, there have been no obvious retreats and, after the triumphal entry into Baghdad in 2003, few advances either.

It was hard even to map its component parts and when you did — as in an August New York Times map of territories controlled by the Taliban in Afghanistan — the imagery was complex and of limited impact.  Generally, however, we, the people, have been demobilized in almost every imaginable way in these years, even when it comes to simply following the endless set of wars and conflicts that go under the rubric of the war on terror.

Mapping 2018 and beyond

Let me repeat this mantra: once, almost seventeen years ago, there was one; now, the count is 76 and rising.  Meanwhile, great cities have been turned into rubble; tens of millions of human beings have been displaced from their homes; refugees by the millions continue to cross borders, unsettling ever more lands; terror groups have become brand names across significant parts of the planet; and our American world continues to be militarized.

This should be thought of as an entirely new kind of perpetual global war.  So take one more look at that map.  Click on it and then enlarge it to consider the map in full-screen mode.  It’s important to try to imagine what’s been happening visually, since we’re facing a new kind of disaster, a planetary militarization of a sort we’ve never truly seen before.  No matter the “successes” in Washington’s war, ranging from that invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 to the taking of Baghdad in 2003 to the recent destruction of the Islamic State’s “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq (or most of it anyway, since at this moment American planes are still droppingbombs and firing missiles in parts of Syria), the conflicts only seem to morph and tumble on.

We are now in an era in which the U.S. military is the leading edge — often the only edge — of what used to be called American “foreign policy” and the State Department is being radically downsized.  American Special Operations forces were deployed to 149 countries in 2017 alone and the U.S. has so many troops on so many bases in so many places on Earth that the Pentagon can’t even account for the whereabouts of 44,000 of them. There may, in fact, be no way to truly map all of this, though the Costs of War Project’s illustration is a triumph of what can be seen.

Looking into the future, let’s pray for one thing: that the folks at that project have plenty of stamina, since it’s a given that, in the Trump years (and possibly well beyond), the costs of war will only rise.  The first Pentagon budget of the Trump era, passed with bipartisan unanimity by Congress and signed by the president, is a staggering $700 billion.  Meanwhile, America’s leading military men and the president, while escalating the country’s conflicts from Niger to Yemen, Somalia to Afghanistan, seem eternally in search of yet more wars to launch.

Pointing to Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, for instance, Marine Corps Commandant General Robert Neller recently told U.S. troops in Norway to expect a “bigass fight” in the future, adding, “I hope I’m wrong, but there’s a war coming.”  In December, National Security Adviser Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster similarly suggested that the possibility of a war (conceivably nuclear in nature) with Kim Jong-un’s North Korea was “increasing every day.”  Meanwhile, in an administration packed with Iranophobes, President Trump seems to be preparing to tear up the Iran nuclear deal, possibly as early as this month.

In other words, in 2018 and beyond, maps of many creative kinds may be needed simply to begin to take in the latest in America’s wars.  Consider, for instance, a recent report in the New York Times that about 2,000 employees of the Department of Homeland Security are already “deployed to more than 70 countries around the world,” largely to prevent terror attacks.  And so it goes in the twenty-first century.

So welcome to 2018, another year of unending war, and while we’re on the subject, a small warning to our leaders: given the last 16 years, be careful what you wish for.

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Research on how self-control works could help you stick with New Year’s resolutions

(Credit: AP Photo/Julio Cortez, File)

Many of us have already decided that things will be different in 2018. We’ll eat better, get more exercise, save more money or finally get around to decluttering those closets.

But by the time February rolls around, most of us — perhaps as many as 80 percent of the Americans who make New Year’s resolutions — will have already given up.

Why does our self-control falter, so often leaving us to revert to our old ways? The answer to this question has consequences beyond our waistlines and bank balances.

Psychologists and economists have traditionally fallen into two seemingly contradictory camps about how self-control works. But recent research conducted by my colleagues and me suggests the two sides of self-control might both be at play in each of us.

Self-control: A battery or a snowball?

A well-known series of experiments conducted at Stanford University in the 1960s and ’70s asked children to choose between getting one marshmallow right away or waiting a few minutes and getting two marshmallows. Researchers found that the children who waited patiently, able to resist eating that first marshmallow even when no one else was around, tended to do better throughout life in terms of SAT scores and educational attainment, employment, health and other major measures of success.

For those kids, self-control — not how intelligent, wealthy or educated their families were, or any other identified factor — was the main driver of their later success. In other words, the ability to delay gratification helps in virtually all aspects of life.

But researchers have had trouble nailing down where self-control comes from and how it works. For decades, studies of self-control in short-term decision-making have led to two clear, but seemingly contradictory, results.

One model suggested that self-control is a finite resource that can get used up if you lean on it too heavily, like a battery that loses its charge over time. Someone who resists the urge to eat a doughnut for breakfast, for example, might give in to the temptation of a cookie later in the afternoon. Each little demonstration of self-control throughout the day ends up exhausting the limited reserves.

The alternative model suggested that exercising self-control can help you build up the skill. Not eating the doughnut might increase your motivation and confidence to stick with a healthy diet — like a snowball that gets bigger as it builds momentum rolling downhill.

So is self-control something you run out of when it’s overtaxed? Or is it something that you get better at the more you “practice”? The debate continued as different research groups investigated the question in various ways — and came up with contradictory evidence for which model best explains the inner workings of self-control.

Using biometrics to tell the whole story

Part of the problem has been how hard it is to conduct behavioral research. Traditional methods assume that test subjects fully understand the questions they’re asked and give honest answers. Unfortunately, researchers had no practical way of knowing whether this was the case, or whether they actually measured what they intended to.

But here at the nation’s largest biometrics lab, my Texas A&M colleagues and I figured out a new way to investigate the question that didn’t rely on just what volunteers report to us.

We designed a two-part experiment. First, we asked subjects to focus on a red bull’s-eye at the bottom of a computer screen for either six or 30 minutes. This task requires volunteers to exert self-control – it’s tempting to look away from the boring, unchanging bull’s-eye to the animated video playing elsewhere on the screen.

Then subjects participated in a second laboratory task meant to measure impulsive buying: They could conserve a real US$5 cash endowment or purchase several household items on-site they hadn’t been looking to obtain. The task is analogous to going to the store and buying products that aren’t on your list. The idea is that self-control helps individuals reign in these impulse purchases.

Our innovation was that we did not have to assume people fully complied with the video-watching task – we were actually able to measure it via their physiological responses. By tracking eye movements, we could quantify very precisely when participants stuck to staring at the bull’s-eye – that is, when their self-control was keeping them on task. We also measured facial expression and brain activity for a clearer understanding of what was going on with each subject.

Basically, we found that both sides of the self-control debate were right.

For a while, most people could focus on the boring bull’s-eye. But they’d hit a fatigue point. After that, if subjects hung in there and still stuck with the task, they ended up exhausting their self-control “battery.” We could see this by looking at how many impulse buys they made in the second half of the study. If they’d pushed past the fatigue threshold in the previous task, they showed less self-control and ended up making more impulsive purchases. This pattern was shown in both what they “bought” in our experiment and also in the brain: The prefrontal cortex showed patterns indicative of impulse-buying behavior.

On the other hand, subjects who eased off once they’d reached the fatigue threshold had a different experience. They remained in the “snowball” stage of self-control – they practiced the skill a bit, but didn’t overdo it to the point of exhaustion. In the next task, their brains didn’t exhibit the typical impulse-buying activity patterns. Exercising self-control on the bull’s-eye task, but not overdoing it, led to more self-control in our second task. These subjects did better at controlling impulse purchases than the other group of subjects who didn’t have the initial bull’s-eye-watching session that turned out to rev up self-control.

Our study suggests that self-control has the qualities of both snowball and battery: Exhibiting self-control once makes it easier to do so again a short time later, but overdoing it initially makes us more likely to give up altogether.

How to make it past February 1

Our new understanding of self-control provides lessons for sticking with those New Year’s resolutions.

First, remember that slow and steady is best. If you want to get fit, start by walking around the block, not running five miles. Achieve enough to stay motivated, but don’t overdo it to the point of frustration. Don’t burn out your self-control battery.

Second, remember that small acts of self-control build over time. Instead of drastically cutting all carbs or sugar out of your diet, consider giving up just one piece of bread or one can of soda per day. Over time, consuming fewer calories per day will result in gradual weight loss.

And finally, realize that little acts of self-control in one area will improve your self-control in other areas. Getting traction with a healthier diet, for example, will increase your confidence and motivation to achieve another goal. As the self-control snowball gains some momentum, you’ll get better and better at sticking to your objectives.

A more apt metaphor for our new understanding of self control is that it’s like a muscle. You can overdo it and exhaust it if you overexert yourself beyond your capabilities. But with consistent training it can get stronger and stronger.

Marco A. Palma, Associate Professor of Agricultural Economics and Director Human Behavior Laboratory, Texas A&M University

“Phantom Thread” and the truth about men at work

Vicky Krieps and Daniel Day-Lewis in "Phantom Thread" (Credit: Focus Features/Laurie Sparham)

Note: This essay contains some spoilers for the film “Phantom Thread.”

I like to do my writing in the morning. I get up around 7, letting my wife and our five dogs sleep in, and tiptoe to the kitchen with my laptop in hand. These are precious moments. My thoughts are clearer in the morning, and the silence is an empty space my creativity can fill. Then my family wakes up. Sometimes, I try to keep writing, but as the activity and noise level rises around me, my concentration is eventually broken. Sometimes a dog barks, and, moments later, they have all joined in, creating an unstoppable cacophony of disruptive sounds. Sometimes, my wife asks me a question about our schedules that day, or she simply tries to engage me in light conversation. How dare she? Can’t she see that I am doing important things? And how could my dogs keep barking like that when they know I’m trying to work?

“Are you here to ruin my evening, or possibly my entire life?” asks Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis), a dressmaker for the rich and famous, of his lover Alma (Vicky Krieps) in Paul Thomas Anderson’s magnificent “Phantom Thread.” What is Alma’s crime? She cooked him a lovely dinner and expected him to eat with her. She wanted them to be a normal couple for one night, not just a mad genius and his muse. What really disturbs Woodcock, however, is the assumption of intimacy, the threat that being cared for by another person poses to his walled-off lifestyle. He lives, works and screws in an elegant but sparse townhouse. He is responsible to no one but himself. Those are the walls that his art demand, and any crack might make the whole thing crumble.

I’m not Reynolds Woodcock, but if I had his success and power, I’m afraid that I would be. There is an irrefutable maleness in Woodcock’s plight (hence, um, the name). His life is emblematic of a society that allows men to value their work above all else and neglect their own emotional vulnerability (not to mention, you know, the needs of the people around them). Men like to complain about their work, and wield the burden of their breadwinning as a weapon, but we secretly revel in the freedom we have in our offices. For many men, work is a vacation from home, a space where they can indulge in their selfish, animalistic side. Even we nerds who sit behind laptops all day view our work that way. We may not be masters of the universe, but we wrestle complicated thoughts into existence and force them down onto the page. It requires skill and concentration, and most of all isolation. That’s what we love about it.

On the outside, I am a vocal feminist, but somewhere on the inside, I expect my wife to appear and disappear at my command, to show up when I need support and disappear when I need to write. This is how I always believed artists were supposed to (or at least allowed to) behave. On the surface, “Phantom Thread” looks a lot like the other films about creative male geniuses whose abusive personal lives are redeemed by their work. From “Ray” and “Walk the Line” to “Mr. Turner” and “Pollack,” these films depict tortured men who demean their supportive partners and ask the audience to agree that the trade was worth it. In a sense, having their lives canonized through film is the final, most persuasive argument in that debate. Putting their genius and abusive behavior into one film that ultimately celebrates creativity suggests that we must accept both if we are to continue to have great art.

That’s the trade-off abusive male artists have been relying on for years. Weinstein, Spacey, Hoffman, Louis C.K., Singer and others have all relied on our deference to their genius, and they have used it to justify behavior that would not otherwise be tolerated. Woodcock is one such creative genius, revered in his own way just as much as any of today’s entertainers, and “Phantom Thread” would be cathartic art if it simply ruined him for his crimes. He could end up on the street, having lost both his career and his one true love, and we would feel order has been restored, but Anderson aims for more than simple catharsis. “Phantom Thread” is more interested in tamed, not ruined.

Woodcock’s relationship with Alma follows a predictable course for the film’s first half. After his sister and business partner Cyril (Lesley Manville) kicks his previous lover to the curb, he takes a holiday and meets his Alma, a waitress in a country inn. He brings her back to London, where she inspires and models for him. Soon, she wants to be more than his muse. She cooks him that fateful dinner, and in one of the film’s most absurdly funny sequences, she disrupts his morning creativity by committing the crime of buttering her toast too loudly. When Reynolds chides her for the transgression, we may laugh at this neurosis, but we silently cheer Alma on for the small space of freedom she has carved out. We are somehow on both of their sides at once.

This dynamic is emblematic of the mutual respect Anderson gives to both Reynolds and Alma, to man and woman. Eventually, Alma joins the list of women who want Reynolds to open up and to share her life with him, but just when he starts to push her out, Alma finds a brilliantly wicked way to humble him and keep him dependent on her. It is too much fun to spoil here, but Alma defends it simply by stating, “He just needs to take a step back.” Over the course of the film, we come to see this as a loving act, one which enables Reynolds to be his best self, a humble genius that he couldn’t be on his own. And Alma gets to continue to be his muse, albeit an empowered and perhaps equal one.

In this time of great uncertainty in the male-female paradigm, and with powerful male media figures crashing down all around us for their crimes against women, “Phantom Thread” both reinforces our new normal and yearns for a more utopian future. It’s easy to look at Reynolds as another powerful man who deserves a reckoning — and he certainly receives one — but Anderson imagines a paradigm in which abuse, if not erased entirely from the dynamic, is at least mutual. It’s as hopeful a message as we can manage right now, a humbling of the creative male genius that condenses into two hours what has taken Hollywood a century to even begin offscreen.

And please let it extend into our homes. Even as I’m writing this, my wife walks into the room on her cell phone, talking to her family about some trivial matter, nothing as important as this article. I try to be kind. “Honey, could you please take that conversation into another room? I’m working on a pivotal paragraph.” I’m a bad liar, though, and she senses the annoyance in my voice. She glares at me, humbling me even as she leaves the room, fulfilling my request while denying my delusions of grandeur. Now I’ll try to convince myself it’s just what I needed.

New book reveals toxic tech “bro” culture and sex parties in Silicon Valley

(Credit: AP)

While issues of sexual harassment and the gender pay gap are widely discussed in relation to Silicon Valley, a new article adapted from a forthcoming book is putting the spotlight on another side of gender and tech: sex parties. Emily Chang’s “Brotopia” details the exploits of the men in Silicon Valley, while also looking at the origins and impact of the sex-and-drug fueled culture.

For the book, Chang spoke with more than two-dozen people about the parties. While there were many differing opinions on how problematic they actually are, the double standard applied to women in Silicon Valley, who must decide whether or not to attend, is clear.

Here are a few of the ways this double standard operates, featuring excerpts from Chang’s adaptation in Vanity Fair.

Not attending the parties can shut women out of deal-making and business opportunities

As one female entrepreneur told Chang, not attending parties led to the perception that absence was abnormal, with the consequence of missing shop talk: “They talk business at these parties. They do business,” she said. “They decide things.” Ultimately, this person moved herself and her business to New York.

Chang writes of the “unfair power dynamic” this creates, interviewing one woman who said, “If you do participate in these sex parties, don’t ever think about starting a company or having someone invest in you. Those doors get shut. But if you don’t participate, you’re shut out. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

Attending the parties can bring women into the inner circle, but can lead to slut-shaming or damage to a career

While not attending can appear odd to men in tech, or leave women out of the loop, even if women do attend there’s no guarantee it will actually help their careers.

Chang spoke with one man, a married venture capitalist. Chang writes, “Married V.C. admits he might decline to hire or fund a woman he’s come across within his sex-partying tribe.” As he put it, “If it’s a friend of a friend or you’ve seen them half-naked at Burning Man, all these ties come into play.”

This also perpetuates a culture of one-sided anonymity. Chang spoke with a woman named Ava who used to work at Google, who “ran into her married boss at a bondage club in San Francisco.” Though they never talked about it, “A few months later, at a Google off-site event, another married male colleague approached her. ‘He hits on me, and I was like, What are you doing? Don’t touch me. Who are you again? He was like, I know who you are. The other guys said you like all this stuff.’”

Ava left Google and said, “The trust works one way.”

Attending these parties, or broader sex explorative events with overlapping social circles, can lead to later harassment

Chang writes, “The problem is that the culture of sexual adventurism now permeating Silicon Valley tends to be more consequential for women than for men, particularly as it relates to their careers in tech.”

This extends to the example shared by Esther Crawford, who “talks openly about her sexual experiments and open relationships.” However, Crawford described how at the end of a dinner with an investor, he gave her a check and then tried to kiss her. Chang added, “Crawford thinks it’s likely that this particular investor knew about her sexual openness and found it difficult to think of her simply as an entrepreneur rather than as a potential hookup.”

It perpetuates a culture of stereotyping women and heteronormative masculinity

From “founder hounders” to the fact that these parties often invert normal Silicon Valley gender ratios (usually having more women than men), the culture continues to perpetuate gender dynamics.

Chang also writes that “Women are often expected to be involved in threesomes that include other women; male gay and bisexual behavior is conspicuously absent.” The married venture capitalist told Chang, “Some guys will whip out their phones and show off the trophy gallery of girls they’ve hooked up with.”

Ultimately, Chang concludes that, “The problem is that weekend views of women as sex pawns and founder hounders can’t help but affect weekday views of women as colleagues, entrepreneurs, and peers.”

Chang talks to those who disagree about these parties, and the culture of Silicon Valley, but the issue of sex and power will continue to come up in that context. In the #MeToo moment, there are big questions at hand about the role of sex and power in the workplace, from celebrity essays, New York Times features and books like “Brotopia.”

Read the adaptation in Vanity Fair.