Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 227

“The Lost Tapes: Patty Hearst” shines a jaundiced light on celebrity culture

"The Lost Tapes: Patty Hearst" (Credit: Smithsonian Channel)

So, I just watched “The Lost Tapes: Patty Hearst,” a new documentary which debuted last night on the Smithsonian Channel as part of the network’s Lost Tapes franchise. In its promotional material, the producers promised to air images and audio recordings that had not been seen or heard by the general public since the 1970s. Presumably, this is to shed new light into the dramatic story behind the Hearst kidnapping.

Does it succeed in doing this? Yes, to such a degree that it sets the standard by which all future attempts to depict the ’70s era irresponsible super-rich must be judged.

It makes sense that this particular topic continues to fascinate us. The 1970s was a decade of tremendous political upheaval — you had the Vietnam War, Watergate, the energy crisis, economic stagflation — and, like our own time, it was one in which the rich seemed to get away with everything. Within the past decade or so, we’ve seen Wall Street bankers torpedo the economy and leave taxpayers holding the bag, a con artist like Donald Trump get caught lying over and over again (including most recently denying that he boasted about committing sexual assault) while still being elected president and powerful men from all walks of life successfully cover up their sex crimes.

By these standards, the offenses of heiress Patricia Hearst seem almost tame by comparison. After being kidnapped by a radical left-wing terrorist group called the Symbionese Liberation Army, Hearst soon became a passionate member of the group, sharing in their cause and denouncing her family, fiance and former way of life. In a streamlined and efficient way, the new Smithsonian documentary lays out the chain of events from Hearst’s kidnapping through her trial, conviction, commutation and eventual pardon. The documentary devotes particular detail to showcasing the tapes she left for authorities that demonstrated the extent of her indoctrination.

Of course, unlike the vast majority of individuals in the Rich People Who Get Away With Awful Things canon, Hearst does have a plausible argument for her own victimhood. Because she started out as a kidnapping victim, it is entirely possible that her conversion to far left-wing politics was as much the result of Stockholm Syndrome as a genuine shift in her belief system — indeed, perhaps even more so. Wisely, the Smithsonian documentary touches on these possibilities without trying to definitely answer these questions on its own.

To be fair, I don’t think the Patty Hearst case is being revisited because of new information. If I had to guess, I would say that Americans are regaining an interest in a number of 1970s-era crimes because so many of them played out the class and racial tensions that have risen to the fore in our own decade.

This was the case even before Charles Manson’s death, although the timing there was eerily apropos, considering the current zeitgeist. It explains why there are not one but two projects in the works about the kidnapping of John Paul Getty III — the upcoming Ridley Scott film “All the Money in the World” and the Danny Boyle television series “Trust.” On that occasion, the kidnapping had much less idealistic motives; Getty’s kidnappers straight up demanded ransom money for the heir’s safe return.

Nevertheless, there was still an intrinsic fascination in seeing the super-rich dragged down to everyone else’s level. The same, no doubt, inspired the fascination with Manson, which was revived earlier this year when initial reports came out that he was having medical issues. Based on the man’s infamy, you would think that his notorious Manson Family had killed hundreds. Yet Manson himself was only found guilty of either murdering or conspiring to murder seven people — but seven rich and famous people, most notably the rising star Sharon Tate. Had Manson committed his heinous crimes against ordinary civilians, it is highly questionable whether he would have become a cult figure today.

Which brings us back to the latest Hearst documentary. It’s a story that hinges around understanding the mind of an heiress who, ultimately, feels more like a pawn in other people’s games than an active player of her own. Without Hearst’s wealth — which, it must be emphasized, she did not earn on her own — her tale would have been long ago forgotten, with Hearst herself rotting away in a jail cell for crimes that she indisputably committed and for which she was rightfully convicted.

The mere fact that we’re still following her story, and treating her experience as if it’s something special, reveals that the super-rich managed to “win” here, even if one of their own did experience a harrowing ordeal for more than a year. Even then, the fame that came with her name gave her a cushion when her dramatic tale was over — yes, she served several months in prison, but her sentence was soon commuted by President Jimmy Carter, and eventually she was outright pardoned by President Bill Clinton.

If “The Lost Tapes: Patty Hearst” had made the extra effort to shed light into the mind of the kidnapped heiress, it could have informed what is otherwise a lame, if hardwired, obsession with the rich and famous in American culture. As it is, this narrative is just one more in a series of sensational stories that criticizes our class system but which, by virtue of their very existence, also celebrates it.

“Word-for-word:” Alex Jones boasts that Donald Trump repeats things the host tells him

(Credit: Infowars)

Conspiracy radio talker Alex Jones boasted on Sunday that he has regular, private conversations with Donald Trump and that the president routinely parrots things that Jones tells him.

The Infowars founder claimed that he has “personally witnessed” Trump repeat “word-for-word” information that Jones has shared with him in private conversations “at least five or six times.” Trump loves listening to things that random people tell him, Jones said. The president writes down the hot scoops and then asks close aides to verify the information via methods Jones did not specify.

“They call that easily influence or he believes the last thing he heard,” Jones said dismissively.”When he gets told about a Harvard study showing that millions of illegals voted, he goes and looks into it and finds out it’s true. I mean that’s what Trump does.”

Despite Jones’ claim, the evidence that millions of non-citizens voted in 2016 is essentially non-existent.

According to Jones, Trump also likes to take advice from people he meets while campaigning, even though in political circles, rally attendees are notorious for promoting conspiracy theories and nonsense.

“You notice he’ll be on the campaign trail people are handing him stuff or he’ll start writing things down,” Jones said.

He then compared such political statements to customer feedback that Trump collected while operating his real estate empire.

“He’s obsessed with what people tell him,” Jones said. “At his hotels and his condos, Trump routinely will just walk around for hours and just write down what people think and what they say and then blow up at people.”

“It’s not like something special that I’ve told Trump stuff, he’s gone and looked into it and then when he found out it was true, responded,” the fake news impresario said.

Trump carries around numerous yellow pads on which he writes political tidbits and conspiracy theories and then dumps them off on assistants to verify them for him, according to Jones. “He’ll just have pockets full of it,” Jones said. “He gets on his jet and then pulls them out and starts looking at it. And then talks to an aide and has them go look it up for him and bring it back to him.”

According to Jones, Trump pursues such random theories late into the night most evenings. “Until 2 in the morning most nights, he’s in there checking stuff,” the host claimed.

Jones’ description of Trump’s late-night activities tracks well with what has been observed of the president’s Twitter habits. It also tracks with what several mainstream media sources, whom Trump frequently derides as “fake news,” have reported about his nights.

“Once he goes upstairs, there’s no managing him,” one anonymous Trump adviser told the Washington Post in April.

The Trump-Infowars nexus is multi-directional.

In May, Jones boasted that Infowars contributor Mike Cernovich — with whom he recently discussed a wide-ranging conspiracy driven by an unknown artificial intelligence to promote Islam — was in close contact with Trump’s sons, Donald Junior and Eric. Cernovich has also boasted that White House chief of staff John Kelly would be unable to stop the president from receiving conspiracy material because the younger Trumps give it to him first-hand.

“If it’s good enough, Don Jr. will give it to him,” Mike Cernovich, an Infowars contributor and chief promulgator of the Pizzagate conspiracy, boasted to BuzzFeed in August.

Right-wing plant tries, fails to dupe the Washington Post with a false Roy Moore story

James O'Keefe , founder of Project Veritas (Credit: Getty/Chip Somodevilla)

A woman who made up a false story about her relationship with disgraced Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, then relayed it to the Washington Post in an attempt to discredit the newspaper, found herself the target of a media firestorm after her plan backfired and Post reporters revealed her deception as part of a plot orchestrated by a right-wing  organization.

The woman, Jaime T. Phillips, claimed that Moore impregnated her at 15 and then urged her to get an abortion, the reported. In interviews with Post reporters, she reportedly sought assurance from journalists that Moore would be defeated if she spoke out, which they could not provide.

After Post reporters spotted the woman entering the Project Veritas offices in New York, speculation arose that she may work for that organization. Project Veritas is a conservative group that tries to undermine the mainstream media through undercover stings. The founder, James O’Keefe, would not respond to the Post’s requests for comment.

The woman, Jaime T. Phillips, first contacted the Post via an email to Post reporter Beth Reinhard, who was targeted because she co-wrote a November 9 story exposing Leigh Corfman’s allegations against Moore. In that email, Phillips said she had information to share about Moore, but seemed hesitant to share immediately.

“I need to be confident that you can protect me before I will tell all,” read one email in part.

The emails came in the wake of several rumors swirling around the Washington Post. One conservative website claimed Post reporters were seeking out Moore accusers and paying them, and a man impersonating a Post reporter left a voicemail for an Alabama minister, asking for accusations against Moore in exchange for money.

“The Post, like many other news organizations, has a strict policy against paying people for information and did not do so in its coverage of Moore,” the Post wrote.

After several email exchanges with Phillips, Reinhard agreed to conduct an interview at a shopping mall in Virginia. Reinhard’s exchanges with Phillips were originally off-the-record, but after learning that the story was a scam, the Post published the details of those off-the-record comments.

“We always honor ‘off-the-record’ agreements when they’re entered into in good faith,” Post executive editor Martin Baron said. “But this so-called off-the-record conversation was the essence of a scheme to deceive and embarrass us. The intent by Project Veritas clearly was to publicize the conversation if we fell for the trap. Because of our customary journalistic rigor, we weren’t fooled, and we can’t honor an ‘off-the-record’ agreement that was solicited in maliciously bad faith.”

After their interview, Reinhard noticed discrepancies in Phillips’ story. Phillips also had not been responding well to the need for fact-checking, background research, and the reporters’ unwillingness to openly describe the exposé as a means of discrediting Moore, The Post said.

Phillips’ story unraveled when, during routine background research, reporters found a public crowdfunding solicitation page on the website GoFundMe, for someone with the same first and last name as Phillips. The GoFundMe page, dated to May 2017, announced that Phillips she was moving to New York “to work in the conservative media movement to combat the lies and deceipt [sic] of the liberal MSM.”

The Post reported that Project Veritas had posted openings for “undercover journalists” to Facebook back in March 2017.

The Washington Post was able to confirm that the page was indeed for the same Jaime Phillips that they had been speaking to by virtue of the fact that Phillips’ daughter had donated to the GoFundMe effort.

In a second interview, Phillips reportedly lied about a potential job with the Daily Caller falling through after being asked about the GoFundMe page.

O’Keefe seems to believe that the Post’s exposé is a response to his video series about the Post, in which he supposedly used hidden cameras in their newsroom to document the newspaper’s “hidden agenda.”

However, in an op-ed, Washington Post writer Callum Borchers described O’Keefe’s failed scam as an attempt to frame liberal media outlets as perpetrators of fake news, which had the unintended effect of verifying the thorough journalistic practices of prominent news outlets.

“Instead of discrediting prior reporting,” wrote Borchers, “the botched sting showcased the journalistic rigor that news outlets such as The Post exercise before publishing accusations like those against Moore, the Republican Senate candidate from Alabama.”

Breitbart editor uses Ringo Starr song to defend Roy Moore from sex-abuse allegations

Ringo Starr (Credit: Getty/Chris J. Ratcliffe)

On CNN’s “New Day with Chris Cuomo” on Monday, Breitbart’s senior-editor-at-large Joel Pollak defended embattled Republican Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore by citing the Ringo Starr song “You’re Sixteen You’re Beautiful (And You’re Mine).” The song was originally written by the Sherman Brothers and performed by Johnny Burnette in 1960.

Pollak tried to argue that Starr, who was 33 at the time he first recorded the cover, is comparable to Moore because he once released a song professing love for a fictional teenage girl. Moore, on the other hand, is accused of making unwanted sexual advances on actual teenage girls, which is somewhat different.

“In 1973, Ringo Starr hit number one in the Billboard charts with a song ‘You’re Sixteen You’re Beautiful (And You’re Mine),’” said Pollak. He went on to say that Ringo “was 30-something at the time, singing about a 16-year-old.”

Chris Cuomo stopped Pollak at this point. “You think that Ringo Starr’s song is supposed to be a nod towards allowing 30-year-old men to prey on teenagers?” he asked. “You don’t believe that, Joel.”

Pollak then attempted to defend Roy Moore by noting that sometimes, allegations of sexual abuse are false, even though he acknowledged that they’re usually true.

“Can you think of another case where you had more than five women coming forward, who don’t know each other, with allegations of this nature — and they were found to be false?” Cuomo asked. When Pollak struggled to come up with a response and instead tried to pivot to scandals involving Democrats, Cuomo said “You can’t come up with a single case where women in this volume have been exposed as part of some conspiracy to undermine a man running for office.”

Pollak responded, “You started this segment by saying allegations of child molestation, right? No, there’s only one single allegation of a woman who was under legal age.” Volume, for Pollak, seems to be key.

Cuomo went on to point out that, in addition to the girl who was 14 at the time of Moore’s alleged assault, another woman who accused the former judge was barely of legal age at the time of the incident, arguably too young to have a man in his 30s making advances on her with or without consent.

“She was very young to have somebody who’s that age come on her, let alone if it was an unwanted touching, known as an assault,” Cuomo said. Indeed, without consent, unwanted physical touching, which is what is alleged in these cases, is often a legal matter.

Pollack went on to note with a bit of terror the increasing number of women who feel empowered enough to speak out against their alleged assailants after years, sometimes decades, of feeling silenced by a titled justice system. Men now face the risk of being “exposed to accusations that may or may not be true,” Pollack said, “and that’s a new thing.”

It is indeed a new thing that the public is less and less prone to calling women liars or telling them that they are remembering an incident incorrectly when they make allegations of sexual abuse. Of course, not all men accused are guilty (some are victims themselves). Though accusations perhaps shouldn’t always be taken at face value, they are now at least being listened to, something that appears to have disturbed Pollack — enough so that he’s dragged poor Ringo Starr into the mess the GOP has created for itself.

HIV drugs control disease – for those who can afford them

(Credit: AP Photo/Chris Post)

In the past few decades, HIV has gone from being a fatal diagnosis to a manageable disease. Although no known cure exists, researchers have developed antiretroviral therapies (ARTs) that stop the HIV virus’ ability to make copies of itself in the body. Effectively, this means that individuals with HIV who consistently comply with the regimen can keep their infection under control and live a long life.

ART takes a multi-pronged approach to combating HIV – patients often have to take at least three different drugs daily to suppress their infection. With that regime comes a host of challenges, like lifelong adherence to daily medication, the cost of drugs and regular checkups, and drug resistance, to name a few.

In a paper published this year, ViiV Healthcare, a pharmaceutical company specializing in HIV therapy development, showed that another, more streamlined treatment method might be on the horizon. The LATTE-2 study combined two drugs into an injectable therapy that could be delivered to patients every eight weeks – and found it to be as effective as a daily oral treatment.

A long-acting therapy would be an exciting and momentous shift in the landscape of HIV treatment. Compared to daily oral treatments, it could improve medication adherence and ease the psychological burden of taking HIV drugs and disclosing HIV status. But getting the therapy from exciting idea to viable product is likely to be pricey, so it’s crucial to work in the meantime toward improving HIV diagnosis rates and overall treatment accessibility.

In 2016, the World Health Organization released a report highlighting that over 40 percent of people living with HIV do not know they are infected. This is thanks to a long-term latent stage of HIV infection, during which the virus slowly multiplies and individuals can display very mild symptoms, or none at all. If people are unaware of their positive status, they can continue to transmit the virus to others; between 2010 and 2015, the number of new HIV infections per year dropped, but only from 2.2 million to 2.1 million. To overcome these statistics, more resources need to be invested into creating affordable and accessible HIV detection strategies, particularly for individuals facing financial and/or access-related barriers to testing and treatment.

It’s recommended that HIV-positive individuals begin treatment right away, but the reality of ART-related costs can be an insurmountable barrier. Because of the variety in medical coverage and insurance plans, many patients are unable to cover the cost of ART, which can range from several hundred to several thousand dollars per month. This high cost of treatment disproportionately burdens low-income patients and drives the disparity in rates of HIV that puts certain minority groups at a greater risk of infection.

Where does the LATTE-2′s drug combination fit into this complex picture? Currently, the study is in phase two of a three-phase clinical trial. It enlisted adults with HIV who, for 20 weeks, followed a current standard-of-care: a three-drug combination taken daily to prevent the HIV virus from multiplying. After 20 weeks, patients were split into three cohorts: one continued the oral therapy regime, while the other two were given an injectable combination of drugs every four weeks or eight weeks. For two years, each patient’s HIV levels were regularly measured and they were monitored for any adverse effects associated with the treatment. Incredibly, over 80 percent of patients in each group had low levels of HIV by the end of the study, with no significant differences between any of the treatments.

If the new regimen continues to demonstrate effectiveness, it can be put on the market as a branded drug to be used in patients with HIV. Along with other branded ART drugs, it’s likely to cost hundreds to thousands of dollars per year. Like many new drugs, this is done intentionally to offset the costs of years of research and production that brought the drug to market. But as a consequence, this fuels the divide between HIV treatments that exist and HIV treatments that are affordable. Until patents run out, allowing for generic drugs and resulting price reductions, it’s unlikely that the reality of actually accessing and affording HIV treatment will substantially change.

In the meantime, we are continuing to learn more about how HIV functions, how it infects the body, and how it can be treated. Ultimately, a better understanding of the disease will drive us towards an accessible and sustainable solution for people living with HIV all over the world.

Until that happens, more work needs to be done to prevent HIV, increase the ease of testing, and interface with policymakers on how to lower the cost of treatment. We have taken a step forward in developing HIV therapies, but are several steps behind in making sure they get to the individuals they intend to treat.

Democrats be warned: Your corporate education reform isn’t enough

Betsy DeVos (Credit: AP/Alex Brandon)

When Democrats win big like they did in the early November elections, Republicans understandably get nervous. But there’s another political faction that has something to fret about: folks who’ve aligned themselves with what’s come to be called “education reform”: the embrace of school privatization, standardized testing and tough-on-teacher measures. Although the reform campaign has long been marketed as a bipartisan cause, it’s increasingly apparent that the better Democrats do at the polls, the worse the education reform agenda does.

Mile High Warning

Results from the Denver, Colorado school board contest could be especially worrying for Democrats who’ve drunk the corporate education reform Kool-Aid. In the Mile High City, the dominant power structure lost in a contest it’s used to winning.

As I reported last year, Denver has become the darling of the education policy establishment. Its “portfolio model” of urban school governance relies heavily on charter schools, standardized testing, and undermining collective bargaining agreements teachers’ unions have negotiated with the district.

The Denver approach is a product of bipartisanship, conceived by business-minded organizations connected to Wall Street and Silicon Valley, financed by wealthy private foundations and philanthropists like the Walton Family Foundation, and implemented by center-left politicians like Democratic Colorado Senator Michael Bennet who once led the Denver school district. Its biggest cheerleader currently is David Osborne of the Progressive Policy Institute, the Clinton-era “ideas shop” that has been pushing the privatization of public services for more than 30 years.

Denver’s bipartisan powerbrokers have used huge infusions of political donations coming from outside the community to engineer a controlling majority on the city’s school board. But this well-oiled political machine hit a pothole in November. Of the four races up for contention, two went to the establishment and two went to newcomers who want to take Denver schools in a totally different direction.

When Big Money Doesn’t Dictate

Of the two upset candidates, Jennifer Bacon and Carrie Olson, Olson is the far bigger surprise. Olson’s victory was “really extraordinary,” writes former Denver school board member Jeannie Kaplan on her personal blog. “Big money won in 3 out of 4 contests,” she says, referring to both contributions to Bacon from the teachers’ unions and money from outside pressure groups such as Democrats for Education Reform that went to two candidates who lost. “They didn’t win in all four for the first time in several election cycles in Denver,” she observes.

While both candidates were endorsed by the local teachers’ union, Bacon was the only one to receive much in the way of financial backing from the union. According to a local campaign watchdog, Bacon received nearly $139,000 from the union-backed PAC, Brighter Futures for Denver—far and away the most of any other candidate. Olson, on the other hand, had late in the race shown no funding from the union and only a small donation from Our Denver Our Schools, a grassroots progressive group in the district.

In other words, Olson was outspent by her opponent by nearly five to one. She won anyway.

What Changed?

An eight-year veteran of the Denver school board, Jeannie Kaplan has lived in Denver for over 40 years and raised children in the local public schools. She first ran for school board in 2005 in an open seat contest and won but was term-limited out in 2013. She is co-founder of Our Denver Our Schools.

“What was different this time?” I asked her during a phone call.

“There was an enormous groundswell of volunteers” in support of Olson, she explained, “the highest levels I’ve ever seen.”

What also was different was the level of disenchantment among voters with what Kaplan called “the Bennet machine,” referring to the Democratic senator and ex-superintendent. After years of grassroots effort by the opposition to this machine, “people are paying more attention,” she believes, “and they’re better informed.”

Denver school teacher Hayley Breden agrees. Breden teaches high school social studies and is a member of the Caucus of Today’s Teachers, a progressive, social-justice-minded faction within the local teacher’s union and another group that supported Olson.

“People were shocked to learn the Denver school board didn’t have a sitting member who was a teacher,” Breden told me in a phone conversation. Olson is a 33-year veteran teacher.

There’s also a “growing resentment” among voters over the current board’s policies, Breden believes. Parents are increasingly frustrated with the district’s “school choice” enrollment process that often leaves parent bereft of the choice of enrolling their children in schools that are a walkable distance from home. Parents also often don’t agree with how the district’s school rating system, that relies mostly on test scores, labels their schools. And they’re increasingly resentful when the district co-locates a charter school in their children’s school building without any input from parents and teachers in the school. Breden works in one of only three high schools in the district that does not have a charter co-located in the same building.

To Breden and others in her grassroots movement, Denver’s school governance increasingly looks like an effort by those who are “out to destroy public schools.”

She sees the results of the Denver board election as a sign of people becoming more engaged in local politics. “Maybe even the beginning of the pendulum swing,” says Kaplan.

A Raging Debate

Denver is far from the only place where a raging debate over the future of public education is playing out. As Education Week reports in its post-election analysis, in states where Democrats prevailed—including New Jersey, Virginia, and Washington—”long-simmering” battles over charter schools, funding, and testing will likely heat up as a result.

The reporter notes, “political maneuvers used by education policy advocates” in those contests, particularly the tactics used by teachers’ unions and opponents of standardized testing and charter schools, seemed to be an effective way to “animate moderate voters.” Once animated, these voters may be more likely to press for real action.

In the Virginia governors’ contest, Democratic candidate Ralph Northam criticized education policies that had become “too reliant on test scores” and presented himself as a “fierce charter school opponent.” While Trumpism may have doomed Ed Gillespie, he also ran as the school choice candidate. Ads on Gillespie’s behalf, paid for by Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, even featured the testimony of a charter school principal.

In New Jersey, Democrat Phil Murphy also won the governor’s race in part by pledging to pull the state’s current standardized testing contract, to increase funding for schools, and to veer sharply away from education policies advocated by outgoing Republican Governor Chris Christie who strongly championed charter schools and quarreled with the state’s teachers’ union.

In New Jersey and Washington, Democrats took full control of the state’s legislature, while the fate of Virginia’s House of Delegates awaits recounts.

So in all these states, where charter schools and education funding have been near-constant battles, Democrats will increasingly have the burden of leading those battles rather than just going along for the ride.

End of the Washington Consensus?

For decades, Beltway education policy shops run by Democrats and Republicans have united in a “Washington Consensus” on common goals for public schools, including, closing schools based on results of standardized tests, using students’ test scores to evaluate teachers, expanding competition from charter schools, and advocating for alternative pathways to the teaching profession such as Teach for America.

For those Democrats who’ve been generally aligned with education policies promoted by Fordham and other Beltway influencers, it may be startling for them to learn that victories for their party at the ballot box could be interpreted as defeats for the very ideas they’ve long promoted. And Democrats who’ve used their minority status as an excuse for reaching “across the aisle” to Republicans on education, now face the prospect in some states of being called out for undermining a Democratic majority if they continue to collude with Republicans on education.

November’s results “should be a warning light,” declared Mike Petrilli, president of the right-leaning Fordham Institute. If the defeats the education establishment endured in this year’s election are indeed a sign of a swing, the pendulum will be a punch in the gut to school policy leaders in both parties.

Behind America’s silent occupation of the Amazon

(Credit: AP Photo/Felipe Dana)

Brazil, Colombia and Peru share a triple borderland separating north from south on the South American continent. Located deep in the Amazon forest, this is the theater of operations in which more than 30 military companies test their services and merchandise. The multinational military exercise known as AmazonLog2017, is organized by the Armed Forces of Brazil. More than 1,500 members of the Brazilian military and military members from invited countries participated with high-caliber weapons and munitions, boats, aircraft, helicopters, information technologies, nautical and energy intelligent equipment, radars and sensors. The Southern Command of the United States — the Unified Combatant Command of the United States Department of Defense with influence in the Caribbean, Central and South America — is also an AmazonLog2017 participant.

Activists and researchers are alarmed about this military exercise. According to Mexican economist and geopolitical specialist Ana Esther Ceceña, AmazonLog2017 allows “the placement of troops that facilitate specific territorial incursions and rapid response operations, both of which imply the use of special forces, whether those be US forces, local or private on the triple borderland.”

While the exercise involves temporary military drills, many fear that it welcomes larger future operations. According to Ceceña, AmazonLog2017 creates the conditions to allow future military operations of US troops, specifically in two strategic areas: the lower part of Venezuela and along the Atlantic coast, where Brazil will allow the US access to the Alcȃntara military base.

The AmazonLog2017 military actions were planned in three phases. The first, the industry’s commercial phase, occurred between August 28 and September 1, 2017, in Manaus, the capital of the state of Amazonas. Two thousand personnel participated in this event, which was comprised of military, government agencies and arms industry corporations.

Between September 26-28, the second phase took place, focusing on ground operations organization. This phase consisted of the Humanitarian Logistics Symposium in conjunction with the Military Employee Materials Exposition and preparatory activities for the triple borderland military drills.

In the third, most important phase, the businesses will exhibit and test their products in jungle-based tactical humanitarian and war drills along the triple borderland with the Multinational Logistics Drill. This phase is scheduled for November 6-13, 2017. More than 1,500 people are expected to participate, including military personnel and arms industry agencies from Brazil, the US and other countries.

“This exercise will bring a series of improvements in the logistics of the western Amazon [. . .] we are developing a humanitarian aid doctrine of exchange between neighboring countries of interoperability between armed forces and civil agencies,” said Theophilo Gaspar de Oliveira, general of the Brazilian Army. He is responsible for the logistical command of AmazonLog2017 and recently headed the negotiations between Brazil and the United States for the acquisition of four C-23 Sherpa aircraft in July 2017.

In order to concentrate the logistical teams, the Brazilian government created conditions for mounting a provisional logistical base in the Tabatinga Municipality in the Amazon State. There, armed forces were concentrated from 16 countries, including Germany, Canada, Chile, the United Kingdom, Japan and Israel, as well as observers from the Inter-American Defense Board, the Conference of American Armies and the Council of South American Defense.

Authorities tout aid while laying groundwork for exploitation

Despite its military nature and origins, much of the publicity around the AmazonLog2017 exercises has centered on hypothetical benefits for civilians. In a press conference, General Racine Lima, the coordinator of AmazonLog2017, argued that the army would be focused principally on training to support peace operations and humanitarian aid. Lima mentioned that the upcoming exercises would also support the creation of the Tabatinga Integrated Multinational Logistics Base, which will serve as the provisional base during the military exercises.

AmazonLog2017 organizers took advantage of the military exercise to make infrastructure improvements that permit massive troop movements in remote Amazon locations. Smart energy grids, communication, water purification systems have been installed as well. For example, as part of these drill preparations, $15.8 million was invested in the micro-region of Río Alto Solimões, in the Brazilian state of Amazonas, to create docking terminals.

Behind the humanitarian discourse, it appears that the organizers of AmazonLog2017 chose the theater of operations for this multinational military exercise very strategically, to pursue natural resource extraction that threatens the territories of more than 300 Indigenous communities.

“As Pueblos of the Colombian Amazon, we do not have information about this exercise,” said Álvaro Piranga Cruz, a communication adviser for the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia. “But we do know that there are vested interests in all of the Amazon. Interests of petroleum, mining and carbon-trading-based megaprojects. They come to deceive our Pueblos with environmental conservation projects, and we do not know [what] this implies. For example, there are mining agencies that are conducting seismic studies in our territories without anyone’s consent.”

According to a 2012 report from the Amazonian Network of Georeferenced Socio-Environmental Information, within the larger Amazon region, there are more than 327 plots of land designated for petroleum extraction, comprising 14 percent of the land in the Amazon.

The report notes that the Amazon countries most affected by petroleum extraction are Peru, Colombia, Brazil and Ecuador and further notes that “The mining zones occupy, today, 15% of Natural Protected Areas and 19% of indigenous territories in the Amazon.”

“To the Colombian national government, the reality that the Indigenous Pueblos of Colombia live . . . is completely unknown,” said Piranga Cruz. “There is a law about the Indigenous Pueblos, but in practice, it does not work. For example, Indigenous Pueblos in the Northern Amazon are demanding that these territories be titled as Indigenous territory and the government is not responding to these needs, but it is responding to the needs of megaprojects and smashing our rights.”

In February 2017 the Peruvian government announced the Peru-Petro reform based on the three pillars of new contracting models, incentive structures and a national hydrocarbon plan. “This triple strategy seeks to attract investment in both the exploration and exploitation phases of petroleum developments,” said Alvaro Ríos, the managing partner of the consulting firm Gas Energy Latin America. “The principal corporate investors are Shell, Chevron, Total and the China National Petroleum Corporation,” noted Ríos.

But not everyone in Peru is seeing the benefits promised by the industry. “Petroleum activity has not brought us development; on the contrary, our lands and territory are contaminated and our subsistence resources are as well,” argue the Peruvian Quechua, Achuar and Kichwa Pueblos in an October 2017 press release made by Pueblo traditional leaders. These groups have indicated their intent to maintain resistance against oil-based extractivism in the region.

Indigenous territories in danger

The Amazon region is composed of 7.4 million square kilometers and inhabited by 33 million people, including 385 Indigenous Pueblos of diverse ethnic backgrounds. Some of these groups have been living in isolation, meaning that for generations, they have maintained themselves deep within the Amazon forest without any outside contact. These areas have been considered inaccessible until now and are of great interest to the Brazilian military.

The Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI, from its Portuguese acronym) documented the murder of at least 118 Indigenous persons in 2016 and 137 in 2015.

According to data from a 2016 CIMI report, the greatest number of victims lived in the Brazilian Amazon state of Roraima, where there were more than 100 murders of primarily Yanomami Indigenous persons between 2015 through the beginning of 2017.

The governmental organization representing the rights of Indigenous peoples in Brazil, the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI, from its Portuguese acronym), has been a participant in the events of AmazonLog2017. This may seem odd; however, it is less odd when one considers that Franklimberg Ribeiro de Freitas, the current head of FUNAI, previously served as the adviser on institutional relations in the Amazon Military Command.

Truthout reached out to FUNAI to clarify its role within AmazonLog2017 and the vulnerability of Indigenous peoples in the region, but FUNAI did not respond to comment at the time of publication.

The Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources and the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation participated in the events of AmazonLog2017, serving as mediators between the government and corporations in order to foster the development and incursion of megaprojects in Indigenous territories.

Military agreement with the United States

As Brazilian society is experiencing economic and political crises, the international military industry is taking advantage of the context of upheaval to test its equipment. Amazonlog2017 is a product of the arms industry and of powerful governments beyond Brazil, particularly the United States.

In 2016, the Brazilian Army signed an exchange agreement with the United States military. This agreement involves cooperation between US ground troops in joint maneuvers in 2017 and 2020. The two armies will end their activities in the United States at the Joint Readiness Training Center in Fort Polk, Louisiana.

Lieutenant Colonel Alexandre Amorim de Andrade, head of the training division at the Jungle Warfare Training Center, affirmed that the US military had begun to train in the Amazon. “Beginning in 2016, there was a specific training focused exclusively on foreigners: The International Practice in Jungle Operations. Now this practice is called the International Seminar of Jungle Operations, and the United States and Peru have confirmed the participation of their military,” said Amorim de Andrade.

Although Brazil has not declared war with another country for the last 100 years, its military has participated in UN peacekeeping operations. The current modernization program of the Brazilian Army is geared toward “non-conventional” warfare, including operations against “terrorism.”

“Humanitarian Aid” in the South

In 2010, after 30 years without an established military agreement, the US and Brazilian governments signed a military cooperation agreement, but the agreement did not authorize the use of bases or cession of rights of passage for US personnel. However, since President Michel Temer took office in 2016, the US has been given a wider berth in Brazil. The US Southern Command received the green light for more activities in Brazilian territory with the AmazonLog2017 exchange agreements and military exercises.

Before Temer took office, the groundwork was being laid for the Southern Command’s presence in the region. In 2013, representatives from the US Embassy and the regional government of Tacna, Peru, inaugurated the Regional Emergency Operations Center. The US government provided $600,000 “to support the Center as part of the Department of Defense Southern Command Humanitarian Assistance Program,” according to a press release from the US Embassy in Peru.

The US embassy noted that the Center was just one of the 15 Regional Emergency Operations Centers projected for Peru. The seven already-finished centers are located in Arequipa, Lambayeque, Pucallpa, Junín, Tacna, Tumbes and San Martín. Construction is also planned in Puno, Cuzco, de Huancavelica, La Libertad, Apurímac, Loreto, Ancash and Moquegua. In all, the US will provide more than $20 million for these projects, all part of the Southern Command Humanitarian Assistance Program.

“These Centers respond during times of natural disasters,” according to the embassy’s press release, and “they allow the integration of a complete range of public services required during an emergency, services like medical and public health services, police, firefighters, and military personnel.” However, member organizations of the Campaña Continental América Latina y el Caribe, which promotes regional peace, declared in a press release that “behind these compounds financed by the Southern Command exists a process of regional occupation.”

On February 20, 2013, the Southern Command announced it would be opening another Emergency Operations Center, this one in Santa Rosa del Aguaray, in the state of San Pedro, Paraguay. The announcement was made by the director of planning for the Southern Command, George Ballance, after a meeting with Bernardino Soto Estigarribia, Paraguay’s defense minister,. These zones created by the Southern Command are in addition to the eight military bases already installed in Colombia.

For Marcelo Cero, a Brazilian sociologist and specialist in international relations, the objective of AmazonLog2017 is not simply to train troops to lead during humanitarian crises; it is to insert the Brazilian Armed Forces in the strategic orbit of the US, which has already taken steps to cooperate with Peru and Colombia. Furthermore, according to Cero, “The participating armies, without a doubt, will put pressure on Venezuela, a regime that opposes US interests in South America.”

Meanwhile, in Ana Esther Ceceña’s opinion, this military exercise enforces the US military’s dominant presence in South America.

“It is Chevron’s war, a war of coltan, of uranium, of thorium, of gas, and of gold,” Ceceña said. “It is a US war to bolster their material conditions and hegemonic position.”

Copyright, Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

Toilet training 101 for parents who need to relax

(Credit: Devin_Pavel via Shutterstock)

Are two-year-olds too young to start toilet training?

For many children, yes. Especially boys. At least, that’s what American pediatricians would likely say. Nowadays, only around half of children in the U.S. are fully toilet-trained by age three.

Chinese grandmothers would be appalled. They’d likely point out that with “split pants,” most kids are trained by age two. This traditional wardrobe item features an opening along the crotch seam, allowing children to urinate and defecate freely without soiling their clothes. These garments remain the pants style of choice for toddlers living in the Chinese countryside.

Parenting advice about divergent toilet-training methods (not to mention plenty of other child-rearing questions) is typically dished out as if it were the only reasonable, reliable option. Nowadays, parents are confronted with guidance claimed to be scientifically founded, and presented as relevant to all children, even when different strategies are in direct conflict with each other. With over 2,000 parenting advice books in print in English – and, along with so many parenting blogs, there’s even a parody of the genre – it’s easy to see why many modern parents feel confused about how to raise their children.

As an anthropologist, I’ve been studying child-rearing practices around the world for 25 years. Living with my husband (writer Philip Graham) in small villages in the rainforest of West Africa for extended periods convinced me that we humans are a resilient species, able to thrive in so many distinctive settings. Discovering the incredible diversity of ways to raise children inspired us to rethink and change some of our own family’s child-rearing practices (around bed-sharing, independence and household tasks, for instance).

There’s no one-size-fits-all model of child-rearing advice for all the world’s parents. To spread this message, my colleagues and I collaborated on the book “A World of Babies: Imagined Childcare Guides for Eight Societies,” based on our own and others’ long-term ethnographic fieldwork in places ranging from Israel and the Palestinian territories to China, Portugal, Peru, Denmark, Côte d’Ivoire and a Somali-American community in Minneapolis. By presenting multiple solutions to the commonest challenges facing parents, we hope to provide a bit of a tonic for parents, to assure them that there’s more than one path to raising a well-adjusted child.

Toilet training from birth?

So, why do parents choose a given child-rearing practice? Often, it comes down to money and availability. Let’s revisit that question about toilet training.

In Côte d’Ivoire, Beng mothers begin training their infants’ bowels a few days after birth. They administer enemas twice daily, beginning the day a newborn’s dried-out umbilical cord stump drops off. By the time the little one is a few months old, caregivers shouldn’t have to worry about him pooping during the day at all.

What could account for such a seemingly extreme practice? For one thing, disposable diapers are unavailable in Beng villages – and throughout much of the global south. Moreover, even if they were sold in local markets, few subsistence-farming families could afford them. (And the planet can’t afford them, either. Environmentalists calculate that “disposable” diapers constitute the third-largest single consumer item in landfills, and their production requires some 7 billion gallons of oil each year.)

But availability and affordability tell only part of the story. The structure of labor plus deep-seated values also shape parents’ choices.

In Côte d’Ivoire (as elsewhere across sub-Saharan Africa), Beng babies spend most of their days attached to someone’s back. Often, that someone is not the mother – who is working in her fields, producing crops to feed her large family. Beng society (unlike traditional Chinese society) also rates all feces (including those of babies) as disgusting, and the thought of a baby pooping on someone’s back produces revulsion.

Given the local attitude toward feces, no potential babysitter would take care of a child likely to poop on her back while being carried. Hence, starting potty-training from birth aims to help a mother get her farmwork done. In that sense, early toilet-training promotes an adequate food supply for a mother’s family.

A Western observer might shrink in horror from this practice, imagining long-lasting emotional maladjustments from early trauma. But, discounting the ravages of poverty that challenge health and deny educational and economic opportunity, these very early toilet-trained babies appear to grow into just as happy and well-adjusted adults as diaper-wearing children might become.

Context counts for what works

In motivation, this practice may not even be as exotic as it might appear to a non-Beng reader. In the U.S., women’s labor needs may also dictate potty-training schedules, albeit with a later timeline. Many daycare centers accept only children who are fully potty-trained. If a working mother lacks both in-home daycare options and babysitting relatives, she may work frantically to potty-train her toddler as soon as possible, so she may return to full-time paid work.

For stay-at-home moms, or working moms who have nearby relatives to care for their child, different life situations may dictate toilet-training decisions. In the Palestinian territories, for instance, many women start toilet-training around 14 or 15 months. They’re able to start early because they aren’t working outside the home, so they have the time. On the other hand, a Palestininan working woman may start toilet-training later, maybe around age two. In this case, women in the extended family (“hamula”) would care for the child while the mother worked, so no daycare rule compels early toilet-training.

Once we explore the local context of people’s daily lives, seemingly exotic or even abusive practices – split pants, infant enemas – suddenly seem far less so. Opening the minds of worried new parents to “other” ways of raising children may assuage fears that if they fail to “do the right thing,” their children will be doomed. Through exploring comparative commode customs, along with many other parenting practices, it’s clear there are many “right ways” to raise a child.

12 therapeutic house plants that can boost physical health, emotional well-being and brain power

(Credit: AP Photo/Julio Cortez, File)

A growing body of research proves that simply being around nature can improve human health and happiness. A month-long 2016 study conducted in the United Kingdom by the University of Derby and the Wildlife Trusts found that connecting to nature resulted in a “scientifically significant increase” in health and happiness, the BBC reports.

“Nature isn’t a miracle cure for diseases,” says Lucy McRobert, Nature Matters campaigns manager for the Wildlife Trusts. “But by interacting with it, spending time in it, experiencing it and appreciating it we can reap the benefits of feeling happier and healthier as a result.”

But you don’t necessarily need to go outdoors to connect with nature: houseplants can help you can bring nature indoors. Keeping plants at home or at work is a simple and effective way to improve your personal environment. Many plants are so easy to maintain that they make great gifts, even for those who don’t have green thumbs.

One area in which we can all probably use a little boost is brain power, and in this regard, plants can be powerful stimulants. “Studies show that tasks performed while under the calming influence of nature are performed better and with greater accuracy, yielding a higher quality result,” writes Charlie Hall, Ellison Chair in International Floriculture at Texas A&M University.

“Keeping ornamental plants in the home and in the workplace increases memory retention and concentration,” he adds. “The calming influence of natural environments is conducive to positive work environments by increasing a person’s ability to concentrate on the task at hand.”

Flowers, in particular, can generate a feeling of happiness, triggering the release of dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin — neurotransmitters that are connected to the brain’s systems related to reward, emotional bonding and mood stabilization.

“Adding flowers to your home or work environment,” Hall says, “reduces your perceived stress levels and makes you feel more relaxed, secure, and happy.”

Being around flora can also help improve our interpersonal relationships. “Research shows that people who spend extended lengths of time around plants tend to have better relationships with others,” Hall points out. “This is due to measurable increases in feelings of compassion; another effect of exposure to ornamental plants.”

Plus, some houseplants aren’t simply ornamental; they can be harvested for medicinal purposes. Keep an aloe vera plant handy and you’ve got a great addition to your juice drinks to help alleviate upset stomachs. Or if you’ve got a small amount of outdoor space, keep a camelliasinensis plant and you can produce your own green tea for a home-grown daily dose of caffeine.

Check out the infographic below to learn more about 12 plants that have the power to heal. Do you have any recommendations for plants that can help improve health and wellbeing? Share them in the comments.

Infographic courtesy Flymo. h/t Sophie Bell-Rhone.

Editor’s note: If you have pets, check before bringing a plant into your home that it’s safe for them first. In particular, be careful not to mix lilies and cats or dogs and aloe vera.

The new hobby of the super-rich: Hunting aliens

Arecibo Observatory (Credit: Getty/IsaacRuiz)

In the robber-baron era, the pinnacle status symbol for the super-rich was having one’s name on a library or a university, à la Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller or Andrew W. Mellon. Nowadays, that status symbol — at least for a certain segment of the Silicon Valley elite — is a radio telescope. The SETI Institute, SETI being an acronym for “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,” is the premier international organization tasked with scouring the skies for potential signals from alien civilizations. Currently, the SETI Institute is funded largely by individual donors — and the list of major donors reads like a who’s who of tech wealth. Among the SETI Institute’s biggest contributors: billionaire luminaries like the late William Hewlett and David Packard, namesakes for the Hewlett-Packard Corporation; Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel; Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder; and Yuri Milner, the Russian-born venture capitalist with his fingers in many of Silicon Valley’s pies. Aside from all being billionaires, all of the aforementioned work or worked in tech in some capacity.

The search for E.T. wasn’t always a private venture. When astronomers first realized that radio waves could be used for interstellar communication, many governments and academic researchers became interested in the prospect of looking for alien signals. After all, searching for radio waves is a relatively inexpensive and easy process; you just aim your radio telescopes at the sky and listen. Frank Drake, now a professor emeritus of astronomy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, initiated the first SETI search when, in 1960, he aimed an antenna at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at two nearby stars.

For a while, the federal government, via NASA, was funding efforts to listen for potential signals from extraterrestrials. Yet in 1993, Nevada Senator Richard Bryan slipped an amendment into a NASA appropriations bill that stripped NASA’s SETI efforts of any funding, despite their minuscule costs compared to NASA’s budget overall. The most extensive search for extraterrestrial intelligence efforts moved to a privately funded, donation-based model; thus, the nonprofit SETI Institute was born.

It is not a coincidence that the privatization of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence happened at the same Clintonian moment that Western economies were adopting neoliberal economic reforms — selling off wide swaths of the social welfare state to private interests, contracting out others, and relying on private foundations to fulfill duties that had previously been the domain of government: things like providing housing, food and shelter for citizens; grants for postsecondary education; funding the arts and sciences, and so on. “The era of big government is over,” President Clinton declared in his 1996 State of the Union address, borrowing a slur (“big government”) that the right had invented to try to poison the notion that any form of government might be anything but bloated and intractable.

“Neoliberalism is a global system of minority power, plunder of nations and despoilment of the environment… a hegemonic system of enhanced exploitation of the majority,” wrote Alfredo Saad-Filho and Deborah Johnston in “Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader.” To the extent that neoliberal policies grant “minority power” to a small group of elites, neoliberalism is essentially a soft form of authoritarianism, in that said policies take democratic state apparatuses and put them in private hands, or assign them to unassailable technocrats. This is perhaps why the tech industry, with its oft-satirized tendency to compress all social issues into oversimplified “problems” and “solutions,” fits so well with the neoliberal mindset: the whole Silicon Valley ethos is to let the techie experts apply their hacks and fixes to everyday life, on their own monetized terms.

What does all of this talk of neoliberalism have to do with aliens? As it turns out, the story of SETI and the SETI Institute is really a story of economics, specifically of neoliberalism. For not only is the search for E.T. in private hands, but those who believe in its mission, and those who seek aliens, have bestowed them with strange properties that reflect more the era we live in than they do reflect any “universal,” cosmic principles of sociology.

Take a look around Silicon Valley, and you’ll find all kinds technologists who are convinced they have a pretty good idea of what aliens will be like once we meet them. In 2015, a group of scientists and CEOs, including Elon Musk, signed a warning letter against theoretical attempts to message extraterrestrials; in it, they wrote of their worry that “because we have just recently (in cosmic terms) attained an interstellar communications capability, it is likely that other communicative civilizations we encounter will be millions of years more advanced than us.” Projections as to aliens’ intentions appear in the pages of prestigious scientific journals, too, including Nature, which published an editorial in 2006 regarding their fear that an alien receiving a human message might “reveal some peculiar flaw in our psychological make-up that alien ‘black-ops’ specialists might start working out ways to exploit.” Hey, that sounds kind of like the plot of “Half-Life.”

George Basalla, an historian who has written extensively about the history of SETI, believes that SETI’s die-hard believers are more akin to religious adherents than scientists. He cites the ways in which SETI scientists are unable to avoid transposing human civilization, culture and mores onto theoretical aliens, a sin that clouds their ability to search for E.T. in the first place. “Despite the efforts of SETI scientists to avoid the pitfalls of anthropomorphism, they duplicate terrestrial life and civilization on distant planets, creating a succession of alien worlds that mirror their own,” Basalla writes. He continues: “SETI investigators tend to transfer terrestrial life and culture to the rest of the universe because they operate beyond the limits of their knowledge and competence when they discuss the universality of science and mathematics, biological and cultural evolution, the idea of progress, the nature of technology, and the meaning of civilization.”

The transitive property of hubris

The hubris of the scientists who transpose human culture, civilization, beliefs and biology onto their search for extraterrestrial intelligence has a strange mirror in the Silicon Valley billionaires who donate to the effort. Anyone who has spent time in Silicon Valley is aware of the conceit of the elite technocracy that governs the valley, with their pseudo-authoritarian belief in creating a democracy-free society run, managed and operated by technocrats. And while the tech elites’ private foundations — from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative — speak to this goal to remake the world on their own, unaccountable terms, occasionally someone actually says this aloud, such as when venture capitalist and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel wrote, “I no longer think that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Let’s call it STEM chauvinism, perhaps. It’s a tendency that is quite perceptible in the business decisions of the tech world. Observe: Facebook’s transformation to a sort of pseudo-nation state, and its public assurances that it will do its best to keep the integrity of our democracies intact, which, as Max Read astutely noted, is terrifying to hear coming from a corporation. Or the dystopian-named Soylent, a food substitute powder designed to fix the “problem” of eating by eliminating the pleasures of food entirely; or in the desperate competition among the largest tech companies to automate cars and thus do away with all human drivers; or in the saga of the much-maligned “Bodega,” a startup attempting to automate and do away with human-run corner stores… I could go on. In any case, the bizarre cult of Silicon Valley believes deeply that they are the smartest guys in the room, and that the world should be run by their rules.

This kind of mindset trickles down to Silicon Valley’s philanthropy efforts, which are often informed by techno-utopian fantasies about how the world operates. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg once had the hubris to believe that he alone knew how to fix Newark’s public schools, despite having no education background; Zuckerberg donated $100 million to the effort with no results to show for it. So much for the rule of the technocrats.

So back to SETI and the SETI Institute. All billionaires eventually reach a point where their money no longer buys them power or happiness; many billionaires then turn to philanthropy to further cushion their legacy and ego — for while no one can achieve practical immortality, endowing a library, university, or building is about the closest we can come to having our name stick around for forever.

The next step for the super-rich technocrats, then, is to have one’s name on what may be the most important single event in human history: the quest to affirm that we’re not alone in the universe. Currently, much of the SETI Institute’s infrastructure is named for and by its donors: there’s the Allen Telescope Array, named for Paul Allen; and Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough Prize Foundation, his $100 million endowment toward SETI projects. If a signal is actually discovered by virtue of one of these efforts, the billionaire donor will undoubtedly become an icon of sorts for the next thousand years — all for having the privilege of spending money he made off others’ labor to pay other people to build a telescope (or fund a grant program) with his name on it.

In an era in which our culture obsesses over the lives and beliefs of CEOs and billionaires, and many look to them as our saviors, it seems unwise to further our adulation. After all, we got into our Trumpian political mess by believing that those who are rich are smart, and vice versa — yet the rich’s real talents tend to be avoiding taxation and lobbying politicians to do things to increase their profits.

Regardless of whether or not you think alien signals are around the corner or not, the privatization of the SETI Institute is a sad reflection of the tendency of institutions that act in the public interest to be brought to the realm of the private donor. For now, the SETI Institute lives on the intersection of a Venn diagram: one circle reads “the hubris of the technorati,” the other circle “our economic moment.” If there are aliens out there reading, I apologize in advance for the weirdos who run our strange planet.