Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 282

I wasn’t born a drug dealer. I became one

(Credit: Shutterstock/science photo)

The two kids and their crew were making millions of dollars . . . illegally moving OxyContin and Roxicodone pills to a network of dealers spread out across the country—Tennessee, Alaska, South Carolina, New York.

—Rolling Stone

It was Saturday night at the Round Up, a popular country dance club located just outside Tampa’s city limits. The place was packed with blue-collar workers and drunken southern belles line dancing underneath the disco balls to Blake Shelton’s “Redneck Girl” and “Trashy Women” by Confederate Railroad. There were sleeved-out dirty southern boys doing shots at the bar while watching half-naked strippers in Stetsons seductively slow riding the mechanical bull; your typical Florida honky-tonk. My high school buddies and I had been drinking rum and Coke and snorting oxys most of the night. I was seventeen years old and more than buzzed, dancing with a twenty-something raven-haired beauty, sporting a tramp stamp and silicon implants. That might have been why I didn’t notice the hulking bouncers pulling my friends off the dance floor until one of the country boys tapped on my shoulder. “You!” yelled the bouncer over the music. I reeled around to see this massive Hulk-like guy in a black T-shirt that read Security on it. “You’re outta here!”

He escorted me outside with my friends, and asked for my ID. “Not a problem,” I said, and handed him twenty-three-year-old Alejandro James Diaz’s Florida drivers license.

The bouncers held the license up and his eyes darted between Diaz’s photograph and myself—Douglas Chantz Dodd. We were both thin and roughly five foot eight inches tall with green eyes and dirty-blond spiked hair. Regardless, we weren’t twins. “Nah,” grunted the Hulk, “this isn’t you.”

“You’re crazy,” I replied, as a Pinellas County Sheriff’s cruiser pulled up to the club’s entrance just behind me.

“We’ll see,” chuckled the bouncer, motioning to the deputy exiting the patrol vehicle.

Between me, my best friend Lance Barabas, his brothers Landon and Larry, and our buddy Richard Sullivan, our group—which prosecutors would ultimately dub “the Barabas criminal enterprise”—was making millions, shipping hundreds of thousands of oxycodone pills throughout the country. Federal prosecutors would later call us one of the largest suppliers of the ever-­increasing oxycodone epidemic. And I had roughly one hundred of the powerful painkillers in a metal vial hanging from the chain around my neck, barely covered by my shirt—a fifteen-year mandatory minimum sentence in the state of Florida.

“Shit,” I hissed under my breath. Fifteen years in Florida state prison was not a part of my plans. I slowly glanced toward the group of massive bouncers surrounding my friends and then to the deputy closing in on my right.

The officer noticed my shifting eyes and growled, “Don’t even think about it.” My fight-or-flight instinct kicked in and my adrenaline spiked. I bolted past my friends and across the parking lot, with the deputy and two of the bouncers on my heels. The pounding of their feet and screams faded into the background as I shot into four lanes of traffic on Hillsborough Avenue, causing a dozen vehicles to swerve and lock up their brakes. I could hear screeching tires, crunching steel, and cracking taillights. But I didn’t look back, I just kept running. I raced behind a building, yanked off my necklace, and stashed it in a tree. My heart was pounding, adrenaline surging through my veins as I scaled the chain-link fence of the Oldsmar Flea Market and hid in a maze of rusted storage units.

Within seconds, the sheriff was looking for me in the alley behind the building. “I need a coupla dogs ASAP,” he said into his shoulder microphone. The K-9 unit’s German shepherds arrived minutes later. They quickly found my vial of oxycodone hanging from a tree branch, and tracked my scent to the flea market. “I’ve got around a hundred oxycodone,” he said into his shoulder mic. More than enough for a trafficking charge. “Get me a helicopter up here, now!”

I had just caught my breath when I heard the K-9s barking and snapping on the other side of the fence—less than a hundred yards away. Then I saw the blue lights of several cruisers at the entrance of the open-air market. They were closing in. So I jumped the back fence and crawled through a muddy field as sheriff’s deputies swarmed the market.

That’s when I heard the helicopter and saw the spotlight converging on my location. Drenched in mud and sweat, I sprang to my feet and ran into a nearby shopping plaza where over a dozen tractor-trailers were parked. I quickly crawled underneath one and laid between its massive tires.

I called Lance and told him where I was as the beam of the helicopter’s spotlight passed over the trailer. “Bro,” I whispered while two deputies walked by, haphazardly shining their Maglites underneath the trailers, “you’ve gotta come get me.”

“Sit tight,” said Lance; one of his brothers and a friend had been arrested. Another buddy had backed Lance’s Dodge truck into a Mercedes and the remaining friends were screaming at one another. It was complete chaos. “But we’re coming to get you.” He ended the call and told everyone they needed to pick me up immediately. Most of them wanted to get out of the area before they were arrested for trespassing or underage drinking. “Well, we’re not leaving him!”

At roughly the same time, several sheriff’s deputies spotted Lance on the side of the highway. Due to my and Lance’s physical similarities they encircled him with their patrol vehicles, jumped out of the cruisers, and drew their weapons. “Get on the ground!” they yelled. “Get on the ground!”

Lance dropped to his belly as multiple K-9 unit officers approached the area with their German shepherds. A portly deputy jammed his knee into Lance’s back and snapped a pair of cuffs on his wrists. “What were you doing in the flea market?” barked one of the K-9 unit officers, while two of the dogs growled and snapped their razor-sharp teeth inches from Lance’s face. He could feel the dogs’ breath and saliva on his cheeks.

“I wasn’t at the flea market!” replied Lance. “I’ve been here—”

“What’re you doing with all them pills?!” snapped the deputy, as he yanked Lance off the asphalt. But the teen didn’t respond. “Boy, you’re fucking with the wrong officer!” then he shoved him in the back of the cruiser.

Over the course of the next hour—while I waited for Lance to pick me up—I went from sweating and dry heaving to shivering in the cold night air.

As two patrol vehicles pulled into the parking lot across the street, I slyly began to work my way down the shopping plaza, ducking behind bushes and blending into the dark areas, until I made it to a 7-Eleven. I scouted the area and then called Lance’s cell for an update. “Who am I speaking with?” asked an official voice on the other end of the line.

“Doug,” I replied. “Where’s Lance?”

“I’ve got ’im in the back of my patrol car. But I need to release him to someone. Where are you at?”

“Sir, I’m seventeen years old. How are you going to release him to me?”

“Listen kid,” growled the officer, “if you don’t tell me where you’re at, I’m gonna book your little pal here. What do you have to say to that, smartass?”

“Tell Lance I love him,” I chuckled, “and I’ll bail him out in the morning.” I disconnected and walked into the convenience store covered in dirt and grass, and grabbed a soda out of the beverage cooler. The clerk gawked at me—I was filthy from head to toe—as I tossed some cash on the counter and exited the store. It was after two o’clock in the morning when I called my cousin and said, “Come get me. They arrested Lance.” Then I popped the top and gulped down my ice-cold Orange Crush. You know, I wasn’t born a drug dealer. I became one.

* * *

Painkiller overdoses . . . exceed the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and the black tar heroin epidemic of the 1970s combined.

—The Guardian

I was born in 1988—just after Ronald Reagan declared “the war on drugs”—in New Port Richey, Florida, not far from the Tampa Bay/Clearwater Beach area; it’s a small coastal town on the way to nowhere with a stagnant population of around fourteen thousand Floridians struggling to stay lower-middle class. Downtown is peppered with dated strip malls and pawn shops. Lots of fishing boats and packing warehouses. There’s no shortage of bars and strip clubs.

I spent most of my childhood running around the playgrounds and trailer parks, barefoot and dirty. Despite how it sounds, I never considered myself poor white trash, although what you’re about to read might have you think otherwise.

My mother, Sylvia Drupe, is a functioning alcoholic; a career waitress who loves Budweiser and marijuana brownies. I love her, but she’s never exactly been the nurturing, motherly type.

My dad, Douglas Dodd, is everything my mother isn’t: mild mannered, conservative, and nonconfrontational. Unfortunately, he’s got a thing for waitresses, and as a restaurant manager, it eventually became an issue.

In 1993, I was a skinny little five-year-old kid, oblivious to how fragile my parents’ marriage was, when a man approached my mother during her night shift at Chili’s. “Ma’am,” he said, “you don’t know me, but my wife’s a waitress at Bob Evans [the restaurant where my father worked], and your husband’s fucking her. They’re at your house, right now.”

My mother caught the two of them parked in our driveway. My dad was nailing Brandy, my future stepmother, in the back seat of our family’s Pontiac Trans Am, when my mom yanked open the passenger-side door. “You fucking whore!” screamed my mother, as my dad and Brandy struggled to shimmy into their clothes. “This is the last time, you cheating shit!” she screamed at my father, “we’re through!”

Between my father’s affinity for waitresses and my mother’s addiction to Bud Light, their marriage was doomed. They divorced in early 1993. I’ll never forget standing at the front door, barefoot and shirtless in my gym shorts, as the movers loaded the last of our furniture into my mother’s U-Haul truck. From the television to the couch, she took it all. We had nothing left. “Dad,” I remember saying, “she took the TV!”

“I know, buddy. I know.”

Just after the divorce was final, my mother told me, “Dougie, your cheating father only married me because I got pregnant.” I was five! Then she clenched her jaw tight and growled, “I could’ve taken him for everything. Full custody and child support. But I’m not that kind of woman.” As far as I could tell, she had already taken everything she could. The truth is she didn’t want, nor could she handle, the responsibility of a five-year-old. My father was awarded custody during the week and my mother got me on the weekends. She could barely handle that. Neither of them seemed to be able to afford me.

I went from being a symbol of their loving union to a painful memory of it. They bickered and fought over every dime it took to feed and clothe me. By the time I entered Calousa Elementary School, I had outgrown most of my clothes and all of my tennis shoes. I ended up attending the fifth grade in cowboy boots. They were only an issue during recess. When we played soccer, the boots caused me blisters, and I ended up bruising several of the other kids’ shins. My homeroom teacher made several calls to my parents in an attempt to get them to buy me a pair of tennis shoes. My mother told her clothes were my “cheating” father’s responsibility—they weren’t, but she always said that. My dad turned around and requested my mom split the cost with him, which she refused to do. After getting the runaround for a couple weeks my teacher broke down and bought me a pair of Wilson tennis shoes. My parents should’ve been humiliated, but they didn’t even notice. They were too wrapped up in their new lives.

After the divorce, my mother became a regular barfly for about a year.

She dragged home a succession of losers, but eventually married Gary Park, an alcoholic warehouse laborer. I dreaded the weekends with them. They fought constantly. I remember sitting in my room and crying, listening to them scream late into the night as they threw beer cans at one another. I was eight years old and didn’t know what else to do.

In 1998, one of their arguments turned violent. They had been drinking most of the night, arguing about money—they were always arguing about money. My stepfather slapped my mother or she slapped him—depending on who you ask. Regardless, my mother grabbed the phone and dialed 911. When they asked her, what’s your emergency, she screamed, “Help, he’s going to—”

Gary snatched the receiver out of her hand and told the emergency operator, “Don’t bother sending anyone, she’ll be dead by the time they get here.” Then he yanked the phone out of the wall and started throwing her around, slamming her into the walls and knocking over furniture. The entire double-wide was shaking when I was jolted awake by my mother screaming for help.

By the time I came out of my room they had moved to the front yard; lit by the motion-sensitive floodlights, red-faced and drunk, pushing each other. I exited the trailer just in time to see Gary slap my mom to the ground and kick her in the head with his steel-toed boots. At nine years old, I grabbed a Rubbermaid garbage can and hurled it at my stepfather. The can hit him in the upper back and burst open, sending garbage everywhere.

“Dougie!” screamed my mother while struggling to stand, “get the neighbor!” I ran next door and told them to call 911. When the police arrived, my stepfather was arrested for domestic violence and served with a one thousand–foot restraining order. My mother ended up divorcing Gary and marrying another abusive prick named John Tripper, her third husband, a handyman who grew hydroponic marijuana on the side. My mom’s arms were constantly bruised. I remember showing up one weekend and she had stitches running through her eyebrow, along with an implausible story about hitting her face on the bathroom sink. I’m not sure where she found these guys, but she never seemed to run out of them.

I was ten years old when my seventeen-year-old cousin, Eric Dodd, moved in with me and my dad. Dad was working sixty hours a week at Leverock’s Seafood Restaurant, and my cousin was selling pot out of the house. One day after school, Eric and I were sitting in the living room playing PlayStation’s Street Fighter when he asked, “You wanna get stoned?”

“Sure,” I replied. I had smoked pot once before, with a girlfriend and her older brother when I was in fourth grade. But this time was different, there was something about lighting up the bowl and sucking in the smoke; the sensation of the THC rushing to my head. The artificial sense of serenity. It didn’t take long before I was getting stoned with my buddies before and after school.

On the weekends my mother worked, I would stay with my Aunt Maria. She had recently been arrested in late December of 2000 for selling over a dozen ecstasy pills to a confidential informant and was currently awaiting sentencing. When Aunt Maria wasn’t watching me, I would hang out with my sixteen-year-old cousin Roberta. We would go to Dimensions, a popular teen club, and get high, or play on their trampoline and ride dune buggies through the woods.

But once my aunt was sentenced to a year in Florida state prison, and my uncle started working double shifts driving trucks, all semblance of parental supervision disappeared. That house turned into a straight cannabis club with a dozen neighborhood kids hanging around smoking at any given moment.

That’s when I first spoke to Kathy Fisher, a beautiful, curvy five-foot brunette cheerleader with a hard body and amazing legs. She had caught my eye at Dimensions weeks earlier. We had shared a couple flirtatious glances, and I got this strange feeling in my stomach. But she was sixteen years old and dating a senior on the football team. I didn’t have the guts to talk to her.

My cousin Roberta and her boyfriend knew I was crushing on Kathy hard, so they invited her over one weekend. We were all sitting around the sectional, smoking and grinning at one another. It took me half a dozen hits to build up the courage to talk to her. I wasn’t exactly a thirteen-year-old Don Juan, but after about an hour of smoking weed and flirting, we were French kissing and grinding away at each other. Eventually someone suggested the four of us relocate to my aunt and uncle’s Airstream in the back yard and “get naked.”

Kathy gave me a shy half grin and asked, “You want to?”

I had never wanted anything more in my life. Five minutes later, we were lying in the sleeping area tugging at each other’s clothes. I had seen some Internet porn and a couple of Playboy magazines, so I felt I had the situation under control. But when Kathy shimmied out of her blue jeans and slipped off her tank top, revealing two perfect breasts, I thought, I’m totally unprepared for this.

By the time I was fumbling with the condom and Kathy’s panties, my cousin’s boyfriend had Roberta completely naked and they were going at it right next to us.

Kathy, who was obviously more experienced than I was, was doing all the right things. Within minutes we were dripping with sweat from the sauna-like condition inside the camper. At one point she pulled her nails across my back and whispered, “It hurts sooo good.” I may not have known what I was doing, but Kathy damn sure did. It was everything I had hoped sex would be. But I’m certain my performance isn’t among her top ten sexual experiences. Whose first time is?

It wasn’t long before we were doing it every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I would call Kathy up and say, “I’m gonna be at Roberta’s this weekend.” I could feel her smiling through the phone when she giggled, “I’ll be there.”

I wouldn’t refer to it as dating—she had a boyfriend. We were more like fuck buddies on those weekends her beau was at football practice or off fishing with his friends. I was a thirteen-year-old stoner getting laid on the regular by a hard-bodied cheerleader with zero inhibitions—life was good. My biggest fear was that my newest abusive stepfather would figure out I was stealing Trojans out of his dresser and hydroponic weed out of the Igloo he kept in the freezer.

Keep in mind that virtually everyone I knew was selling drugs or doing them. Aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, parents, and stepparents. On my mother’s side, Uncle Tony was serving an eight-year federal sentence for trafficking marijuana. So, when John’s Igloo eventually ran dry, I asked my Mexican buddies Alejandro and Joseph Diaz, “Do you guys have any pot?”

They glanced at one another and laughed. “Yeah,” said Alejandro, “we’ve got some.” They walked me out to a detached two-car garage behind their house and pulled back a weather-resistant tarp. The Diaz brothers’ stepfather was one of the largest suppliers of marijuana in the Hudson/New Port Richey, Florida area. There, lying on the concrete floor was a large rectangular fifty-pound bale of Mexican brick weed. I had never seen anything so exhilarating in my entire life. “Scrape as much off as you want.” Score, I thought as I filled up an entire sandwich bag.

Around a month later, on May 9, 2002, several friends and I got stoned on the bus, on our way home from Gulf Middle School. I thought I was so cool pulling out my pipe and weed. It never occurred to me that one of my fellow students might turn me in.

The following day, I was in history class listening to the teacher describe the effects of the Opium Wars.

“The opium epidemic continued virtually unchecked until the 1950s,” said the teacher, “when the Chinese Communist Party of Mao Zedong ceased all opium production, forced ten million addicts into compulsory treatment, and publicly executed tens of thousands of dealers.”

That’s when I noticed our lanky principal walk in and scan the room student by student. I never imagined he was looking for me. “Dodd!” he barked, and pointed down the hallway to the administrative wing. “My office now!”

There was a Pasco County Sheriff’s Deputy waiting for me in the principal’s gray and tan office. He searched my bag, sifting through my textbooks and notepads, until he found a small amount of marijuana in a Ziploc bag along with a glass pipe. When the deputy pulled the baggie out of my backpack, I thought, My mom’s gonna kill me.

The principal made me listen to a lengthy lecture on how drugs would ruin my life, while the deputy glared at me. “Marijuana’s a gateway drug. You keep it up, you’ll be doing heroin before long,” he said, sitting behind his desk, pointing a bony finger at me. “It’s poisoning your mind; imagine how much better you’d be doing in school if you weren’t smoking this crap.”

“How much better could I be doing?” I asked with a shrug. “I’ve got straight As.”

The principal gave me a skeptical smirk and pulled up my record on his desktop computer, revealing my 4.0 GPA. “I’ll be damned,” he grunted underneath his breath. Then he turned to the officer and said, “I’m finished with ’im.”

The deputy grabbed me by the wrists and snapped a pair of handcuffs on me, then walked me down the hallway filled with several hundred of my fellow middle schoolers, all gawking and whispering. It was all I could do to hold back the tears. I felt so humiliated and embarrassed. My stomach was turning, and I was a little frightened of what the outcome would be. I knew I messed up and was in for a serious whooping when I got home.

The Pasco County Juvenile Holding Facility was a utilitarian dump with adult-style cinder block prison cells. Once I was fingerprinted and photographed, a deputy asked, “Who do you want me to call, your mother or your—”

“Dad!” I snapped. “Call my dad, please.” I knew they would both be angry with me, but I was one hundred percent sure that if my mother didn’t kill me, she would thoroughly embarrass me.

My father was more disappointed than angry. On our way home he kept saying, “You’ve gotta start making better choices, Dougie.” But, by this point my stepmother, Brandy, had caught my dad sleeping with another waitress, Debbie—future stepmother number two—so it was kind of hard to take any advice he gave me seriously.

When my mom found out about my arrest, she bitched a little, but what could she really say? My stepfather was growing hydroponic marijuana inside their house.

I was expelled from Gulf Middle School and sent to Schwettmen Alternative School for troubled juvenile offenders. Roughly a month later, the juvenile court judge barked something like, “A straight-A student getting high. That was a pretty dumb thing for you to do, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, sir,” I mumbled, while staring at the carpet. Then he sentenced me to an intervention program and drug treatment. I had to meet with a social worker twice a week for six months. Plus, I had an after-school curfew and an old-school pager. But it was more about peeing in a cup and keeping my grades up than drug counseling.

My father and stepmother’s fights were getting more and more vicious all the time. “You never even loved me,” I remember Brandy saying during one of their many arguments. “You only married me ’cause you needed me to take care of Dougie, but I guess he’s old enough to take care of himself now,” she spat, “so now you’re ready to trade me in for a newer model. Is that it, asshole?!”

“I wouldn’t say a new model,” my dad shot back, “I’d say a better model.” Brandy went absolutely ballistic. She moved out shortly after that and took all the furniture. Loaded it into a Ryder truck and drove away with everything. “She took the TV,” I griped. “You lost another TV.”

“Don’t worry,” he said, “Debbie’s got one.” She moved in shortly after, along with her daughters.

Just after my intervention program ended, my father and new stepmother decided to move to upstate New York. Debbie’s grandmother had passed away, presenting the opportunity to fulfill Debbie’s childhood dream of buying her grandmother’s house. She and my father knew it would be a great area to open a bed and breakfast. So, they sold their house in Hudson, packed everything, and moved thirteen hundred miles away. But I refused to go. All my family and friends lived in Florida.

“I can’t believe your father’s making you choose between your family and friends and him!” spat my mother when she found out about the move. “We both swore we’d never leave Florida. Typical!” She never missed an opportunity to bash my dad. My mother had just kicked out my latest stepfather, and she wanted me to stay with her. At the time, it seemed like a good idea, but it didn’t take long before cracks started to appear. After a couple of beers my mother became a pretty mean drunk; she would start complaining about my curfew, my chores, and my music—typical teenager-­parent stuff. The truth is, she just liked to get drunk and argue. Hence, the three husbands and multiple restraining orders.

As time went on, the living situation became more and more stressful. On occasion, it was unbearable. In a way, it seemed like my mother’s lack of control in her own life manifested itself in her desire to dominate my life. Nothing ever seemed good enough for her.

GOP Senator John Thune to shooting victims: To survive, “get small”

John Thune (Credit: AP/Kevin Wolf)

Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., had some strange advice to those who may be faced with an active shooter situation: “Get small.”

Following the country’s largest mass shooting in modern history, Thune was faced with questions on gun control measures, and whether or not Republicans will take action.

“It sounds like [the shooter] used conversion kits and other things, you know, to make the weapons more lethal,” Thune reportedly told MSNBC’s Hallie Jackson. “We’ll look at the facts when we get them all in here. I think a lot of us want to do everything we can to prevent tragedies like that from happening again.”

It’s been confirmed that shooter Stephen Paddock was in possession of two bump-stocks, which enhance a semi-automatic gun to make it behave more akin to a full automatic — though despite possessing bump-stocks, it is still unclear if the devices were actually used during Paddock’s attack. Bump-stocks are legal to possess.

In his interview, Thune wouldn’t directly address efforts to increase gun control. “It’s an open society and it’s hard to prevent anything,” he said.

 

Thune to @HallieJackson:”I think people are going to have to take steps in their own lives to take precautions..As somebody said, get small” pic.twitter.com/KtP2BXJ6fM

— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) October 3, 2017

He instead talked about how potential victims should act if faced with a similar situation. “I think people are going to have to take steps in their own lives to take precautions,” he said. “To protect themselves. And in situations like that, you know, try to stay safe. As somebody said — get small.”

Not-so ironically, Thune is quite friendly with the National Rifle Association and has raked in at least $852,000 from the organization in donations.

Thune also voted “no” on a bill to ban high-capacity magazines of over 10 bullets, and voted “yes” on allowing firearms in checked baggage on Amtrak trains. Interestingly, in 1999, Thune voted “no” on a bill to decrease gun waiting periods from three days to one. This seems an exception, however, as Thune’s voting record shows he is generally interested in making guns more accessible. Indeed, the NRA gave him an “A+” rating in 2012, indicating friendliness to the gun lobby’s interest.

But it’s not as if Thune has failed to act on issues regarding homeland security. On his website, Thune makes it clear that he is more than willing to stand up to terrorism — so long as it stems from an international organization.

“The attacks of September 11, 2001, forced us to change the way we think about national security and how we protect our country here at home. Unfortunately, there have been numerous reminders in the United States and abroad that the threat of another terrorist attack is still very real,” the website reads.

He also pledges to “strive to make sure our armed forces and law enforcement officials are provided with the tools they need,” but only when fighting the war on terror.

“As long as there are forces in this world who oppose the democratic ideals on which our country was founded, we must remain vigilant as a nation in striving to preserve liberty and stand up to aggression,” the website reads.  Apparently those principles don’t apply to those who fall victim to random, senseless acts of gun violence at the hands of someone who doesn’t fit Thune’s vision of a “terrorist.”

Scientists behind the discovery of gravitational waves win the 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics

Ranier Weiss, Kip Thorne (Credit: AP/Andrew Harnik)

The Swedish Academy of Sciences has announced that the 2017 Nobel prize in Physics goes to three scientists for their foundational work leading to the discovery of ripples in the fabric of space and time known as gravitational waves.

Half of the £825,000 prize sum will go to Rainer Weiss of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the other half will be be shared by Kip Thorne of Caltech and Barry C Barish, also at Caltech. The scientists, all from the LIGO/VIRGO collaboration, conceived and played major roles in realising the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, which first detected the waves in September 2015. I’m pleased to see this achievement recognised on behalf of the thousands of scientists who work on LIGO, including the University of Sheffield group. I also know the recipients personally, in particular Weiss, who is a friend as well as a colleague.

Gravitational waves, predicted by Einstein in 1916, travel across our universe at the speed of light – stretching space in one direction and shrinking it in the direction that is at right angles. LIGO measures these fluctuations by monitoring two light beams travelling between pairs of mirrors down pipes running in different directions.

The source of the first detected signals was a pair of black holes, each being about 30 times the mass of the sun. These bodies once collided and converted in to one large spinning black hole – emitting three sun masses worth of pure energy in about a tenth of a second. For that short time, the source outshines the rest of the energy sources in the observable universe – combined! It’s quite something to try and imagine. Despite being such a violent event, it is so far away that the effects on our local fabric of space and time here on Earth are very subtle – which is why a sophisticated detector like LIGO was needed to make the first detection.

Several more binary black hole signals have been detected by the LIGO detectors since, and one announced just days ago was detected by the Virgo detector in Italy as well. Now that we know these signals exist and can be detected, a new field of gravitational wave astronomy will grow up, enabling us to probe the dark and puzzling universe – phenomena in the cosmos that don’t emit much light but have a lot of mass. It’s an exciting time.

Unconventional, sharp and fun

Those of us at LIGO who know Weiss will agree he is an unconventional fellow in the best sense of that description who has inspired a generation of experimental physicists, myself included.

The first time I met Weiss properly was when he interviewed me for my first postdoc, at MIT. I was in my only smart suit, he walked in wearing a woolly hat, baggy sweater and jeans. I had to reassure him that this was the last time he’d see me dressed up that way. He looked relieved.

Weiss has a refreshingly informal approach to physics, which is particularly helpful in encouraging others in their work, especially the young. But this informality and enthusiasm only just conceals his razor-sharp instinct for physics, particularly for sources of background noise and for electronics.

And, because he is what I would call “scientifically sociable”, Weiss naturally tends to learn things quickly by talking to people. When I was working at the LIGO lab at Livingston, I did an early systematic comparison of seismic noise between the two LIGO sites in a key frequency range. The tough thing back then was just gathering enough data from the seismometers to be able to make a meaningful comparison between the noise levels.

I’d just made a graph of the results, and I was in the control room staring at it when Weiss walked in. He walked out a few minutes later with a copy of that plot, and the next thing I knew, he was using it in talks to the National Science Foundation when arguing for an upgrade to LIGO Livingston’s seismic isolation system. That’s Weiss in a nutshell. He’s quick on the uptake, good at spotting the key points and problems, and authoritative enough to get others – physicists, engineers and funders on his side.

We also share a love of music. Once when I was invited to dinner at his house, I was asked to bring my cello and had to sight-read several cello sonata movements (rather shakily) with Weiss at the piano. He also showed up to a particularly memorable “hoodoo party night” at a club called Tabby’s blues box in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where I was playing in a band. He brought along Gaby Gonzalez, who until recently was chairperson of the LIGO scientific collaboration and Peter Saulson, a professor of physics and thermal noise pioneer from Syracuse. A more unlikely crowd on the dance floor at Tabby’s has probably not been seen before or since. They had a great time.

The future of gravitational wave physics is now intimately tied up with the future of astronomy. The field is set to expand rapidly, with more sensitive instruments needed to sense smaller signals and larger scale instruments needed to probe lower frequencies where many of the astronomical signals lie. We also need observers of the heavens, both to interpret the signals we measure, and to make the link between gravitational waves and other sources of information, such as gamma ray and neutrino bursts, and visible transients. We are hoping to continue to play an important role in the research here at Sheffield.

But, for now, it’s time to enjoy the moment of a very well deserved Nobel prize for a great group of physicists. They have played a long game; the project started in 1972, and I didn’t even join until 1997. It’s a lesson to us all to keep both eyes on the science, to be prepared for a protracted struggle with Mother Nature, but ready in the end to step back and admire the edifice we have constructed, and go on to apply the tools we have created to achieving an ever expanding knowledge of our universe.

Ed Daw, Reader in Physics, University of Sheffield

Young Mars may have had water lakes and methane bursts

(Credit: Getty/rajeshbac)

Could Mars have once hosted life, and could those lifeforms have gone for a swim at the local lake? Possibly. Today, Mars is a frigid place, but a new study from Nature Geoscience says that billions of years ago — 3 to 3.6, to be more precise —the planet underwent bouts of global warming due to the atmospheric release of methane, which resulted in the formation and flowing of liquid water lakes. What does this all mean? That Mars was once “warmish and wettish,” according to a NASA scientist independent of the study.

The theory begins with Mars’ unpredictable, “wildly” wobbly axis. Just as Earth experiences seasons due to its axial tilt, which periodically exposes more of the northern or southern hemisphere to the sun, scientists hypothesize that Mars’ tilt affected its temperatures, albeit in a more extreme manner. The biggest difference between our planet and Mars? It’s all about the moons — where Earth’s moon is substantial and orbitally stable, Mars’ moons are “small and misshapen” — essentially, glorified asteroids likely captured by Mars — thus giving them less of a stabilizing effect on Mars’ orbit. As a result, when its axis was especially tilted, the Sun thawed reservoirs of methane at Mars’ subsurface, the gas from which was released and then mixed with carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere. Robin Wordsworth’s research suggests this caused several hundreds of thousands of years of incredibly intense warming climates as a result of these greenhouse gases. Sound familiar?

There are other possibilities for what could have warmed the red planet: perhaps volcanic explosions that emitted greenhouse gases, or perhaps an asteroid impact. But according to the Nature Geosciences paper, neither of these scenarios could have produced a global warming intense enough to last several hundred thousand years.

There exists, then, a “decades-old debate” on the presence of methane on Mars: as is the case on Earth, living beings produce methane as they die and decay. Could life on Mars have done the same? Perhaps. But authors of the study at hand point to a more likely possibility: a chemical reaction between rocks and water near the planet’s core that produced the volatile hydrocarbon. That methane then made its way towards the surface of Mars and found itself trapped in ice, only to eventually melt, thus creating the reservoirs.

Either way, the likelihood of liquid water points to the possibility that Mars could in fact harbor life, at least in the past. The existence of water lakes on Mars is neither an outrageous claim, nor a new one. The Curiosity rover and other Mars orbiters have found “eroded ancient deposits of transported sediment long since hardened into interweaving, curved ridges of layered rock,” according to NASA. “Scientists interpret some of the curves as traces of ancient ‘meanders’ made in a sedimentary fan as flowing water changed its course over time.” Essentially, these space explorers have spotted valleys of river deltas most likely carved by water.

Let’s not get carried away though, Edwin Kite, an author of the study, reminded The Verge — “habitable doesn’t mean inhabited!”

Nevertheless, Kite says there is, of course, an element of uncertainty to the study. Because it is currently impossible to prove the existence of methane reservoirs, “all our evidence is indirect,” Kite said. “That is probably the biggest weakness of our model.”

This theory will be put to the test in 2018, when the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter dips near enough to the planet’s surface in its orbit to sniff out any trace of methane. Only then will there be a way to formally disprove the theory.

The National Rifle Association’s mass shooting hypocrisy

(Credit: Reuters/Lucy Nicholson)

After a gunman killed nine people in a historically African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17, gun safety advocates responded with calls to expand the national background check system. Just as quickly, the National Rifle Association (NRA) reacted to those calls, slamming gun safety groups for “exploiting” the tragedy for “political purposes.”

One month later, another gunman killed five members of the military at a naval facility in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The NRA was again quick to respond, but this time claimed the incident provided proof that firearm policies on military bases must be changed to loosen the rules about service members carrying guns.

So which is it? The NRA apparently thinks it is exploitative to discuss gun violence following mass shootings — unless, of course, the discussion is about why we should loosen gun laws. Their stance on the issue changes based on how to best advance the organization’s interests.

Following the mass murder at Mother Emanuel AME in Charleston, the NRA went into its post-mass shooting standard operating procedure — shutting down its social media accounts and refusing to speak to the press. Two days later, the NRA’s media arm addressed the shooting, with NRA News host Cam Edwards opining that it was “completely inappropriate” to discuss gun policies the day after the incident, adding, “I did not receive a single email communication chastising me or complaining that we should have been talking about policy and politics as opposed to remembering the victims in Charleston.”

Soon, though, the NRA was forced to issue an official statement after one of its board members created controversy by blaming the shooting on the church’s slain pastor, who was a supporter of gun safety policies.

While distancing itself from the board member’s comments, the NRA claimed on June 20 that out of “respect” for the victims, “we do not feel that this is [a] appropriate time for a political debate,” adding, “We will have no further comment until all the facts are known.”

Three weeks later, the NRA did offer an additional comment on the Charleston shooting, following a push by gun safety advocates for expanded background checks. (It would later be revealed that the gunman was able to purchase a weapon despite being legally prohibited because of an NRA-backed loophole in federal law.) In a July 8 statement attacking gun safety groups, the NRA said, “gun control advocates are offering a solution that won’t solve the problem. Even they admit that the legislation they are pushing wouldn’t have prevented the tragic crimes they are exploiting for political purposes.”

The NRA has continued to advance this narrative on the Charleston shooting and proposed gun law reforms. In a July 17 post on the website of its lobbying arm, the NRA lashed out at Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., after the South Carolina congressman proposed eliminating the NRA-backed loophole that helped arm the Charleston gunman.

Clyburn was “exploiting a recent tragedy” according to the NRA, which also said, “Gun control advocates are shameless in their willingness to exploit tragedy to achieve their agenda.” The NRA re-published its attack on Clyburn at the conservative news website Daily Caller on July 19.

The very next day, the NRA’s top lobbyist used the July 16 Chattanooga mass shooting to call for changes to gun laws, telling Military Times, “It’s outrageous that members of our armed services have lost their lives because the government has forced them to be disarmed in the workplace. Congress should pursue a legislative fix to ensure that our service men and women are allowed to defend themselves on U.S. soil.”

So when the NRA called for a policy change it claimed was justified by the Chattanooga shooting, was it exploiting those victims?

The fact is that after pretty much any high-profile national event, mass shooting or otherwise, policy debates are often triggered. In the NRA’s hypocritical world view, however, calls for stronger gun laws are disrespectful, exploitative, and shameless — while calls for less restrictions are sensible, timely, and relevant. Even worse, the gun group’s post-shooting strategy operates from behind a façade of “respect” for the victims.

The NRA’s doublespeak on Charleston and Chattanooga, however, reveals that its real concern is its own agenda.

Americans rate their worst fears in new national survey

This photo taken on Monday, May 26, 2014 and provided by Jill Helmuth, shows a tornado touching down on a reach before heading towards Watford City, N.D. Authorities say several were injured and more than a dozen trailers were damaged or destroyed Monday evening when the twister tore through a camp where oil field workers stay. (AP Photo/Jill Helmuth) (Credit: AP)

What do Americans really fear? Are their fears exaggerated compared to their real lives? Do fears vary with gender?

It turns out, according to a fascinating national survey by Casino.org, The Odds of Being Afraid: What Do 1,000 Americans Fear Most, that people—with slight gender variations—fear sudden changes with potentially dire consequences the most. This starts with cancer and other deadly diseases, then turns to violent incidents from car crashes to other mayhem, and then societal breakdowns, such as losing access to clean water.

“Odds aside, the No. 1 fear among Americans were developing cancer, which averaged a score of 4.8,” reported Casino.org, which asked respondents to rate dozens of fears on a one-to-seven scale (with seven being most dire). “The subsequent top two fears included getting in a car accident (4.6) and developing heart disease (4.3).”

These most-cited fears were followed by, in descending order: having a stroke, being a victim of identity theft, experiencing nuclear war, being murdered, being shot, being in a plane crash, drowning, colliding with a deer while driving, being a victim of terrorism, getting food poisoning, being bitten by a venomous snake, not having access to clean water, becoming deathly ill from the flu, being bitten by a dog, losing one’s job to an automated system, being bitten by a shark, experiencing an allergic reaction to a new food, being killed by law enforcement, dying in an elevator, being struck by lightning, experiencing complications during childbirth, being in a skydiving accident, being seriously injured by fireworks, being crushed by furniture, and an increase in U.S. border patrol.

That’s quite a list. Needless to say, readers will surely cite other worries. But among that catalog of possible nightmares, there’s a counterpoint: the reality of what actually occurs and its prevalence, which Casino.org explored.

“As we’re interested in odds/probabilities, we were curious of people’s perceptions of fearful events as compared to the realistic chance of their happening,” Karina Tissnes, Casino.org project manager, said.

As you might expect, some fears are properly placed, while others are unduly paranoid.

“The top four fears regardless of gender were developing cancer, getting in a car accident, developing heart disease, and having a stroke. How do these fears stack up with reality?” they said. “According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, heart disease is the No. 1 cause of death for men and women. In America, 1 in 4 deaths are attributed to it. Cancer is a substantiated fear, with almost half of men and a little over a third of women having some form of it during their lifetime.”

So a general fear of deadly illness is well founded, even if the particular fates are a bit jumbled. But then fears and reality start to diverge.

“Both men and women listed getting into a car accident as their second greatest fear (tied with heart disease for men),” Casino.org reported. “In reality, you are more likely to die from a stroke (which was listed as No. 4 for both genders). The odds of dying in a motor vehicle accident are 1 in 114, whereas stroke causes 1 in 20 deaths in the U.S.”

Not surprisingly, gender differences also come into play.

“In fact, women are more likely than men to experience a stroke because of longer life spans and reproductive factors,” they reported. “On the other hand, more men are killed in car accidents each year because they spend more time behind the wheel and are more likely to engage in risky driving behaviors.”

“Where did our participants disagree?” they continued. “Women rated nuclear war as their No. 5 top fear, whereas men said identity theft was among their biggest concerns. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, identity theft affects about a million more women than men each year.”

Misperceptions and misplaced fears is where the report gets really interesting.

Fears Real or Imagined?

“Facts aside, we all have reasons for why we choose to fear one thing over another,” they wrote. “For example, according to our survey, people are about equally afraid of dying in a plane crash as they are of being shot or murdered. The facts tell us that over 33,500 people are killed; with a firearm in the United States each year, while 271 people died worldwide in aircraft incidents in 2016. So what do Americans believe is the likelihood of facing the things that terrify them most?”

The study doesn’t explain why people have such a great fear of plane crashes, compared to being shot or murdered. A pop psychological explanation might begin with noting that air passengers have no control over the planes they fly in, while a sizeable percent of people think they’re in control of their daily lives and don’t expect gun violence.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, underrated fears, was food poisoning.

“The only scenario Americans feared less than its perceived likelihood was food poisoning,” they found. “On a scale of 1 to 7, with 7 being extremely fearful, food poisoning was only rated a 3.0, while the odds of it happening were rated a 3.5. While there are about 48 million cases of foodborne illnesses in the U.S. each year, approximately 3,000 people will perish after eating contaminated food.”

There were, of course, examples where the perception of fears matched their real-life occurrence. “The closest was being bit by a dog,” the report said. Going a bit deeper, Casino.org also noted where men and women expressed different fears.

Starting with cancer, “men felt it was less likely to occur (a 3.6 versus 4.3 for women) despite the fact that more men than women are likely to develop cancer,” they said. “The second largest discrepancy in what people feared the most versus what they expected to happen was associated with being murdered. Women reported a greater fear (3.9) of being slain than men (3.4) and had a greater expectation of it occurring. In reality overall, your chances of being a victim of gun violence are similar to that of a car accident in the United States. When broken down by gender, men die more often from firearms.”

The research also found stark fears can sometimes change behavior, which also differs with gender. “The majority of men said the fear of losing their job to automation forced them to change their behavior (69 percent), while the fear of experiencing complications during childbirth caused the majority of women (82 percent) to make behavioral changes,” they said.

When it comes to politics, “the most politically charged fears had to do with nuclear war, climate change, health care, freedom of speech and press, education, gun control, abortion, and LGBTQ rights,” they reported. “The top three fears were nuclear war (56 percent), climate change (56 percent), and a lack of health care coverage for pre-existing conditions (55 percent). Further, 24 percent of Americans feared LGBTQ rights regressing, and 28 percent feared anti-abortion legislation tightening.”

And Now to Political Fears

Where does this leave Americans and their fellow countrymen and women?

We seem to be a society whose instincts are not that far out of sync with each other, even if some fears are unduly paranoid. Sudden life changes, starting with personal health crises, and then risks associated with our lifestyles — starting with driving — prevail, even if more information fine-tunes the real-life order of threats (i.e., heart disease before cancer).

You might say, fine, but then how did America elect its current president?

“Unfortunately, health care isn’t the only thing troubling Americans,” Tissnes said. “The uncertainty surrounding the Trump administration has instilled fear in many Americans,” she continued citing the fears surrounding nuclear war and the climate crisis.

Intriguingly, new polling data suggest Americans weren’t exactly well enough informed by last November’s vote. But that too, is changing as the gap between perceptions and realities close — a gap Casino.org’s survey highlighted.

As the Washington Post’s Jennifer Ruben wrote Thursday about a new Quinnipiac University poll, the more real-life information about President Trump people have, the firmer their conclusions tend to be—with the exception of hardcore GOP partisans.

She writes, “Americans it turns out: Are not bamboozled by his [Trump’s] NFL and flag histrionics; do not think it’s all the media’s fault; know he is not making America great (stressed and anxious maybe, but not great); have figured out he’s botching most policy matters — and is a bad person to boot; and don’t buy into his race-baiting act.”

“Americans are neither brain-dead nor moral vagrants,” Rubin writes. “In voting for him many probably hated Hillary Clinton more, engaged in wishful thinking about Trump and/or figured incorrectly a rich guy and his friends must know how to do things. But they do not like him now, and that speaks very well of the American people.”

Rubin suggests that the more people know, the more reality-based they become. The survey by Casino.org also points in that direction, even if it shows that, people being people, many will have outsized fears and misplaced beliefs. But it’s reassuring that information and facts can still matter greatly, from personal health to politics.

A Supreme Court case could make partisan gerrymandering illegal

(Credit: Shutterstock/Wikimedia/Salon)

When the worst blizzard in 130 years pummeled Madison, Wisconsin in February 2011, something impossible happened: It stranded Green Bay Packers fans trying to travel to Texas for the Super Bowl.

But even a storm powerful enough to deter hardy crazies known for cheering shirtless in sub-zero temperatures could not stop one thing: Partisan gerrymandering.

That job now rests with one man: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Kennedy will now scrutinize the constitutionality of the Wisconsin state assembly districts that the Republican operatives worked through a blizzard to craft. They delivered exactly as intended. In 2012, the first election held on these maps, Democratic candidates won 174,000 more votes. Republicans, nevertheless, won 60 of 99 seats.

That tilted outcome, however, launched the litigation that now provides the best hope in more than a decade of defeating gerrymandering — the toxic art of manipulating maps for partisan advantage — once and for all.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Gill v. Whitford. The stakes could not be higher, or the court more closely divided. Kennedy, long alarmed by partisan gerrymandering but never convinced that there’s a fair way to determine when it has gone too far, looks like the deciding vote.

It’s a position he asked to be in, and a case he practically invited before the court. “Now we will see if Kennedy was being truthful,” said Norm Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “He asked for a standard. The Wisconsin case provides a very clear example.”

When the Supreme Court last addressed partisan gerrymandering, in the 2004 case Vieth v. Jubelirer, Kennedy sided with a 5-4 conservative majority that rejected an argument from Pennsylvania voters who claimed an aggressive GOP gerrymander interfered with their constitutional right to equal protection.

But while Justice Scalia and three other conservatives wanted to call partisan gerrymandering non-justiciable and slam the door on the court’s involvement in future challenges, Kennedy kept it cracked, unprepared to declare that a fair standard could not someday emerge. Then he dropped breadcrumbs along the path reformers would need to follow to earn his backing next time.

It must be a “limited and precise rationale,” based on a “clear, manageable and politically neutral standard” that shows partisanship was “applied in an invidious manner” or in such a way “unrelated to any legitimate legislative objective.” Kennedy observed that while sophisticated new mapmaking software represented a potential threat to democracy, “these new technologies may produce new methods of analysis that make more evident the precise nature of the burdens gerrymanders impose on the representational rights of voters and parties.” If so, he concluded, “courts should be prepared to order relief.”

“The thing that I took away from the concurring opinion was that he believes that extreme partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional, so long as we can come up with a standard,” said Gerry Hebert, who argued and won the lower court cases in Whitford, and the executive director of the Campaign Legal Center. “Secondly, he expressed, the hope that there wouldsomeday be a standard.”

The Wisconsin case hinges on a three-part test that convinced a lower court last year to declare the GOP maps unconstitutional. First, they presented evidence of discriminatory partisan intent, including dramatic emails between strategists declaring plans to “wildly gerrymander” and dozens of draft maps with titles like “aggressive” and “assertive.”

Then they developed a new standard called the “efficiency gap,” which measures a partisan gerrymander by counting the number of votes on both sides that do not contribute to victory. It helps demonstrate whether a party held an unfair advantage in converting votes into seats. When compared across states and over five decades, the Wisconsin gerrymander was one of the 18 worst in modern history.

“What I think we have here, for the first time, is a standard that can be applied by judges,” said Hebert. “It’s not difficult math. This is 6th grade math we’re talking about here.”

 

The final part of the standard considers whether there is a compelling justification for the districts being drawn in such a way — such as compliance with the Voting Rights Act, or holding communities of interest together.

While some of the faces have changed since Vieth, none of the four conservative justices, or the four liberals, seem likely to be moved. So what about Kennedy? Will the efficiency gap and these other measures be enough to bring about the first constitutional standard on partisan gerrymandering in our history, right on the eve of the 2020 midterms and the next round of redistricting? Longtime watchers are struggling to read his mind.

“It’s not clear to me that the standards that are proposed are different in kind from what was already addressed in Vieth,” said Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine. “But there are two differences from then. One is that there now seems to be a scholarly near-consensus that it’s possible to do a partisan gerrymander that lasts an entire decade, thanks to improvements in data and computer technology. That might weigh on Justice Kennedy. It imposed more of a hardship on voters.”

The other difference: Kennedy’s retirement appears close at hand. “This is set up as potentially the last big opportunity for him to do something about partisan gerrymandering. He’s much more likely to do something than someone else that Trump might nominate. He has to know that.”

Other scholars express some skepticism about whether the efficiency gap is actually the game-changing standard that some have suggested.

“This case looks pretty much like Bandemer and Vieth,” said Bradley A. Smith, the former chairman of the Federal Election Commission and chairman of the conservative Center for Competitive Politics. “The efficiency gap doesn’t add much to the analysis. Note that the lower court merely saw the ‘gap’ as evidence, not some new, killer theory.”

Smith argues that Kennedy’s position in Vieth remains about right: It’s not wise to close the door on the possibility that a gerrymander could be unconstitutional, “but as a practical matter, that would be a rare case and very difficult to prove,” he said. “There’s no right to win political races, so unless a gerrymander really boxes out voters over time, it’s not a constitutional problem. I don’t think [Whitford] gets there. But what Kennedy thinks, I don’t know. I don’t see clues in his other writings.”

Michael McDonald, however, a professor at the University of Florida and one of the nation’s leading redistricting experts, pointed to Kennedy’s decision in Cooper v. Harris as one potential signpost. In May, when the Court overturned two North Carolina congressional districts last month as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, Kennedy disagreed and signed onto a dissent by Justice Samuel Alito that expressed concern about whether the Supreme Court ought to arbitrate partisan gerrymandering at all.

McDonald is also unconvinced that the efficiency gap necessarily meets Kennedy’s call for a clear and manageable standard.

“The efficiency gap is fundamentally the same as every other measure that has been put before the court. Fundamentally it’s about translating votes into seats and how well the system does that,” he said. “Kennedy himself has been skeptical of these methods that have been put before him in amicus briefs.

“I just don’t see it. There’s no bright-line standard in the efficiency gap as to say when a redistricting plan is unconstitutional,” he said, arguing that because election conditions and redistricting processes are variable across states, it’s impossible to draw meaningful comparisons.

If the Whitford plaintiffs carry the day, McDonald said, it’s could be because there have been multiple elections in Wisconsin with anti-majoritarian outcomes.

“By multiple measures — not just the efficiency gap — there’s ample evidence to say ‘this is a stacked system,’” he said. “I would hope that Kennedy would take a similar approach that is used in racial gerrymandering cases, look at all the evidence together, and let the courts come to a decision. I hope he will movie in that direction and articulate something in that way. But the efficiency gap alone, I fear, is not going to do it.”

Hebert, however, maintains that the efficiency gap need not be a silver-bullet democracy theorem to carry the day, that Kennedy could simply view it as one useful tool among others. He also knows that time is running out, and that the replacement of Kennedy or any of the four liberal justices by President Trump could provide the fifth vote to make any future partisan gerrymandering cases non-justiciable for good.

“If we don’t win this case, I don’t have much hope that it will happen in my lifetime, if at all,” Hebert said. “Kennedy would really be giving America the greatest gift. We’ve lost a lot of our democracy, and he would give it back to us. That would be an awesome thing to leave as a legacy for his time on his court.”

Study shows black, white football fans have divergent views of the game

(Credit: Getty/Thearon W. Henderson)

A significant portion of the NFL’s fan base has reacted negatively to the national anthem protests of the past year. The responses tend to follow a pattern:

The stadium is no place for political protest. The game is a color-blind meritocracy. To protest football is to protest America.

But according to a study we published last year, white football fans and black football fans hold very different views about the relationship between football and national pride. And it might explain why there have been such divergent, emotional responses to the protests.

Black Americans love football, but . . . 

Social scientists who study sports have long argued that sports are a powerful political stage. Popular wisdom, on the other hand, tends to maintain that sports are inherently apolitical, and should remain that way.

It’s true that until recently, visible black protests in American sports were rare. Yes, Muhammad Ali and became a symbol of black protest in the 1960s. And there’s the famous instance of Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their fists in the 1968 Olympic Games. But generally, athletes have not waded into politics, no doubt in part because of the influence of corporate interests and sponsors. (Michael Jordan, when asked why he wouldn’t endorse a black Democratic candidate for Senate in 1990, famously said, “Republicans buy shoes too.”)

So for many white fans, the racial issues addressed by the protests upend what they see as the innocent, colorless patriotism of football.

But for black fans, feelings of alienation toward the imposed patriotism in NFL games have been stewing for a while. And it may be that black athletes finally decided to respond to the attitudes of their black fans.

In our study, we aggregated 75 opinion polls between 1981 and 2014, and compared the relationship between national pride and football fandom among white and black Americans.

We found that since the early 1980s, national pride has been in decline among American men and women of all races. But among black men, this decline has been especially sharp. At the same time, it’s also been accompanied by a marked increase in their interest in the NFL.

We suspect that this inverse relationship isn’t coincidental.

Which Americans do patriotic displays speak to?

For decades, the league and broadcasting networks have conflated football with patriotism. Massive American flags get spread across the field before the game, celebrities sing highly produced renditions of the national anthem, military jets streak across the skies and teams routinely honor veterans and active service members.

Networks air segments about the players’ lives and team histories that emphasize racial integration and national unity. They also promote the narrative that hard work and following the rules lead to success on the field — the crux of the American Dream.

Many football fans might embrace these displays, which reinforce their beliefs and reflect their view of the country as a colorblind meritocracy.

Indeed, our study did show that enthusiasm for football and national pride are interrelated.

But the nature of this relationship depends on your race.

Only among white Americans did we find a positive association between football fandom and national pride: Football fans were much more likely to express high levels of national pride than white Americans who weren’t football fans. Among African-Americans, on the other hand, there was a negative association. This suggests that when black fans watch their favorite team play, it’s a very different type of experience.

And this was happening long before Colin Kaepernick decided to take a knee.

Black identity and American identity

W.E.B Du Bois once observed that for black Americans, a fundamental tension exists between their American identities and their black identities. We now know from other studies that African-Americans tend to see themselves as less “typically American” than other races. Meanwhile, among white Americans there’s a common tendency to link American national identity with whiteness.

It could be that the symbols of American national pride — so visible during football games — give white fans the chance to unite their national pride with their fandom. To them, the fact that African-Americans make up between 65 and 69 percent of all NFL players is simply part of the country’s ethos of “inclusion.”

But for black fans, the overrepresentation of African-American athletes might mean something else. Football broadcasts can create highly visible opportunities to express black prowess, pride and resistance. At the same time, watching wildly successful black players on the football field might sharpen the contrast of racial injustice off the field.

Meanwhile, studies have shown that the more black Americans emphasize their blackness, the less likely they are to have patriotic feelings.

Together, this could create a situation where black fans are prone to reject the popular national narrative that links football to a wider, ethnically blind meritocratic order. To many of them, football isn’t connected to any sort of national identity in a positive way, so it’s easier for black fans to press successful black athletes to protest the status quo and use their platforms to address issues of discrimination and inequality.

In other words, even before black athletes started taking an explicit stand, their presence and success on the field created the conditions to question the dominant ideology of a meritocratic, colorblind society. National debates about inequality, police brutality and incarceration clearly resonate with many players, and they’ve been pushed to respond.

Looking at it this way, these protests were only a matter a time.

Tamir Sorek, Professor of Sociology, University of Florida and Robert G. White, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Florida

Want to fail at online dating? Be a grammar snob

“You know the difference between ‘your’ and ‘you’re.'”

That line shows up in a JDate profile, from the section where you tell prospective partners what you’re looking for in a match. The sentence that comes before it is, “You love to dance.” The one after is, “You keep up with the news.” If someone’s profile had included that, she’d definitely have aroused my attention. And since you insist on dragging it out of me, the profile I’m quoting is (or was) mine.

What reminded me of that snarky line was a recent email from a friend, who at one point wrote “it’s” instead of “its.” When I came across his error, my heart gave a little sigh.

It was an involuntary, embarrassing and ridiculous sadness. The rules of grammar and usage, of punctuation and pronunciation, had been thoroughly drubbed into me by the time I graduated from high school (not, of course, “graduated high school”). I was grateful for that instruction. Everyone knew that learning to write and speak educated English was a prerequisite for an elite higher education and a successful career. Ever since, when I see “your” where “you’re” should be, a phantom arm of mine reaches for a red pencil to circle it; when I hear “primer” pronounced “primmer,” or “off-ten” instead of “off-en,” an interior voice corrects it, whether I want it to or not.

A tangle of guilt and ambivalence, which amounts to embarrassment, accompanies that silent correction, especially if the mistake has been made by someone I think well of (yes, it’s okay to end a sentence with a preposition). I’m pained that he or she doesn’t realize that the error is a flashing signal of (at best) carelessness or (at worst) ignorance. I’m concerned that someone less forgiving than I am will think less of this lovely person the next time it happens. I often couple this with an excuse or dispensation. If the mistake is in an email, I tell myself it must be that damn auto-fill that got it wrong. If it’s in conversation, I swat it away as so widespread a mispronunciation that anyone might have been led astray.

Then I reproach myself for being such a condescending snot. Then I fault my self-reproach as cover for my caving on excellence. Then I remind myself that I write most of my own emails in lower case; punctuate my texts as if I were a drunken sailor; and use plenty of juvenile emojis and acronyms like rotflmfao (if you don’t know what that is, please don’t google it). Then I defend myself from that charge: It’s exactly because I know the rules that I can break them, with impunity, for effect. Then I’m back on the attack: Face it, bro, what you’re doing is lexicological slumming. By that point, I want to take a nap.

What makes my inner warfare over standards and class so ridiculous, and what stings when I think about the dude who wrote that JDate profile, is how little any of this yammering matters. It’s or its—who cares? The only threat to my understanding what you mean when you write “your right” or “ur rite” when “you’re right” is right is the tribally constructed black hole that sucks attention away from the meaning you obviously intend and sucks generosity from the act of communication.

I get the case for good grammar. Sloppy language makes for sloppy thinking. To think clearly, write clearly and speak carefully. Grammatical norms are guardrails that protect us from intellectual anarchy. Consensus rules aren’t tools of oppression; they’re the foundation of democratic culture. The discipline you exercise as you master those rules is a transferable skill, a mental muscularity that will benefit you for a lifetime, at home, at work and in society.

But I just can’t get myself to argue that universal competence in the use of apostrophes would have made it less likely that we’d now be living in a world where two madmen seem to be tweet-taunting each other, and the rest of us, into nuclear war. Orthographic fastidiousness seems kind of silly in the shadow of climate change. When an earthquake or hurricane, or a biopsy or drunk driver, can rob you of hope or life in an instant, that limits the upside of peerless pronunciation.

The best case I can make for impeccable language is the aesthetic punch it packs. Its power is not in the rules it follows, but in the infinite it reveals. Perfect prose contains multitudes, including imperfections, and is as beautiful as a perfect rose.

Measured by outcomes, my JDate profile was a bust. If I were to redo it, I’d drop the crack about contractions. I might not go so far as to write U ♥ 2 dance. But I’d definitely hang on to the stuff about lexicological slumming, at least until the second date.

Tax “reform” for the rich: Trump’s plan abandons his working-class supporters

(Credit: Getty/Drew Angerer)

President Donald Trump heralded his new tax plan as relief for the middle class, revenue-neutral and a “middle-class miracle.”

Yet the proposal, announced on Sept. 27, does none of these things. Instead, it is a scam not fit to become law of the land because it will enrich the rich, explode the deficit and hurt many middle-class Americans. This may sound like strong language, particularly for an economist, but I’m going to show you why this is no exaggeration.

While some details remain up in the air, three main changes to our tax code. He wants to repeal the estate tax, simplify the individual tax code and slash the rates corporations pay. Let’s consider each in turn.

Killing the ‘death tax’

The estate tax currently exempts the first US$5.5 million of wealth for individuals and $11 million for married couples. It is paid by only the wealthiest 0.2 percent of Americans, or fewer than 15,000 people in 2016.

While some dub it the “death tax” resulting in “double taxation,” about 55 percent of the wealth subject to it has never before been taxed. It is assets, like stocks and homes, that have appreciated in value but not sold.

While Trump falsely claimed its repeal will “protect millions of small businesses and the American farmer,” the reality is that these small firms do not have to pay the estate tax. Eliminating it would allow a small fraction of very wealthy Americans to accumulate even more wealth, widening the chasm between rich and poor.

Bernie Sanders is a strong opponent of repealing the estate tax, arguing too much wealth already goes to the top 0.01 percent.

AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta

‘Relief’ for the middle class

A second key element of the plan overhauls how individuals pay taxes by shrinking the number of tax brackets, doubling the standard deduction and eliminating personal exemptions. This is the part that is supposed to provide tax relief for the middle class.

Currently, the first $10,400 a single person earns goes tax-free (the standard deduction plus a personal exemption). For a married couple, it’s $20,800, plus $4,050 for each child.

By increasing the standard deduction and eliminating exemptions, Trump’s proposal would increase the earnings that escape taxation to $12,000 for single people and $24,000 for couples (with or without kids). After that the new tax brackets would kick in, starting at 12 percent (up from the current 10 percent).

But what Trump giveth with one hand, he taketh away with the other. That’s because any gains the middle class reaps from a higher standard deduction will be minuscule at best because of the loss of personal exemptions and the elimination of certain itemized deductions like state and local taxes and medical expenses. Many middle-class households will end up being worse off under this new tax regime.

With some details, like the mortgage deduction and charitable contributions, still unknown, we can’t be certain of all the winners and losers — except one: The rich will be much better off because the top tax rate will be cut from 39.6 percent to 35 percent.

Corporate cuts

The proposal’s third key component is a big tax cut for corporations to 20 percent from 35 percent. While Trump claims it primarily will benefit workers and create jobs, I see it as another bonanza for the wealthy.

Publicly traded companies don’t really pay income taxes. Their shareholders, consumers and workers do. And shareholders foot more than three-quarters of the bill. That means if taxes are reduced, companies will make more money and pass most of that along to shareholders, who will benefit from bigger dividends and higher share prices.

This will primarily enrich the richest 1 percent because they own half of all corporate stock. Senior executives — also among the 1 percent — will be big winners as well because their pay and bonuses are usually tied to the value of their company’s stock.

Trump has tried to sell this tax cut by claiming U.S. corporate rates are the highest in the world, making the U.S. less competitive. While it is true that the statutory rates on corporate profits are greater in the U.S. than in other G-20 nations, effective rates in the U.S. are not the highest and not that different from these other developed countries .

Paying for it

Estimates of the cost of the Trump tax cuts vary, but one reliable estimate puts it at $2.7 trillion over 10 years, or $270 billion a year.

Trump administration officials claim the tax cuts will pay for themselves by generating economic growth. Neither history nor math bears this out.

Historically, large tax cuts have failed to produce the needed and promised growth. This is true of individual states like Kansas, which rescinded several tax cuts after they failed to stimulate economic growth and created big deficits. It is also true of President Reagan’s 1981 tax cut, which, as one of its key architects noted, failed to spur faster economic growth than the U.S. experienced during the 1970s.

Furthermore, even if Trump’s tax cuts did manage to achieve the 3 percent growth his treasury secretary is currently touting, this would not nearly be enough to offset the cost of the tax cuts. By my calculations, growth would have to be double that to result in enough additional revenue to offset the Trump tax cuts.

Given that economic growth at its best sustained level over the past 75 years averaged only 4 percent (from the 1950s to the 1970s), getting to 6 percent (from the current 2 percent) is unlikely.

That leaves spending cuts and borrowing to pay for a large tax giveaway to the wealthy — both of which would come at the expense of the middle class, a group Trump promised to protect.

If Trump were to choose to cut spending to pay for some or all of it, he would inevitably have to take the money from programs like subsidized student loans and children’s health insurance programs that benefit middle-class Americans. And if he were to borrow the money, the increased debt levels would likely drive up borrowing costs on everything from car loans to mortgages, which would also hurt the middle class.

Just as a few brave Republicans prevented the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, will some say no to this reverse Robin Hood tax reform?

Steven Pressman, Professor of Economics, Colorado State University