Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 686
August 17, 2016
Deadly floods in southern Louisiana: What we know so far
Motorists on Highway 190 drive through deep water through Holden, La., Sunday, Aug. 14, 2016. (Credit: AP Photo/Max Becherer)
Between 20 and 30 parishes in southern Louisiana remain in a state of emergency on Wednesday, five days after severe flooding ravaged large portions of the region.
Six of the hardest hit areas last week recorded more than two feet of rainfall. Experts estimate that from Aug. 12 to Aug. 14, the equivalent of 4 trillion gallons of water — enough to fill more than 6 million Olympic-size pools — fell on southern Louisiana.
Officials estimate the flooding damaged 40,000 homes and displaced more than 30,000 people. As of this writing, 11 people have died, though that number is expected to rise as rescue efforts continue.
Several roadways were also affected by overflowing waterways. According to a New York Times report, “Parts of major roadways became islands, including a stretch of interstate where hundreds of drivers had been stranded for over 24 hours.”
As of Monday, the Weather Channel reported that 125 vehicles were “still stranded on Interstate 12 between Tangipahoa Parish and Baton Rouge, according to Maj. Doug Cain from the Louisiana State Police.”
President Obama on Sunday declared that “a major disaster exists” in four of the hardest hit parishes — East Baton Rouge, Livingston, St. Helena, and Tangipahoa — allocating federal funds to “grants for temporary housing and home repairs, low-cost loans to cover uninsured property losses, and other programs to help individuals and business owners recover from the effects of the disaster.”
Livingston Parish — where “unearthed coffins floated down main streets” — is said to have suffered some of the heaviest damage, with 75 percent of homes estimated to be “a total loss.”
Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards announced on Tuesday that “nearly 8,100 people had slept in shelters on Monday night.”
Alongside 1,700 state National Guard soldiers, vigilante squads have played an invaluable role in rescue efforts.
CNN called the “Cajun Navy” — a vigilante search-and-rescue team — “possibly the nation’s most important neighborhood watch.”
These “Cajun Navy” volunteers patrol “in jon boats, motorboats and even canoes through south Louisiana’s new, flood-made waterways, saving cats, dogs and people.”
The Chicago Tribune noted that, to make matters worse, “Many of the homeowners in inundated areas have no flood insurance, leaving them prone to draining savings accounts”:
Insurance Commissioner Jim Donelon said in hard-hit Baton Rouge only 12 percent of residences are covered by flood insurance and 14 percent in Lafayette — what he called “shocking.”
The disaster has even drawn the attention of deep-pocketed celebrities.
“The fact that so many people in Louisiana have been forced out of their own homes this week is heartbreaking,” said musician Taylor Swift, who told the Associated Press she’s donating $1 million to relief efforts. “I encourage those who can to help out and send your love and prayers their way during this devastating time.”
August 16, 2016
Bros in the heart of darkness: Jonah Hill and Miles Teller’s “War Dogs” is a scathing indictment of Dick Cheney’s America
Miles Teller and Jonah Hill in "War Dogs" (Credit: Warner Bros.)
“War Dogs” kind of sneaks up on the viewer, which is a weird thing to say about a movie that stars Jonah Hill and Miles Teller as the slimiest characters of their entire careers and was directed by Todd Phillips, the guy who made the “Hangover” trilogy. Not only is “War Dogs” a surprisingly well-told tale in the classic American rags-to-riches-to-rags mode. It’s also a mordant morality fable with a genuine heart of darkness. (Plus, it has one hell of a soundtrack, matching its moods to an array of classic rock and hip-hop tunes in the Martin Scorsese vein.) The film may lure in its audience by promising a bro-tastic comedy about two ordinary dudes livin’ the dream, but under its obnoxious Porsche hood it’s got a lot more in common with “The Big Short” and “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “American Hustle.”
“War Dogs” takes place in the last decade, when the ill-fated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, coupled with the piecemeal privatization of the military procurement process, produced a level of waste and corruption that was extraordinary even by Pentagon standards. But it’s not at all a stretch to view this mostly true story about a couple of middle-class washouts from Miami Beach who became international arms dealers as a tale about the creation of Donald Trump’s America and an economy of graft, greed and cynicism that hasn’t made anything useful for 35 years.
Phillips and his co-writers (Stephen Chin and Jason Smilovic) have taken some liberties with the real-life story of David Packouz (Teller) and Efraim Diveroli (Hill). But the craziest part of the movie is pretty much true. A pair of South Florida Jewish buddies in their mid-20s with no particular qualifications stumbled upon an open secret around the year 2005: The United States military would buy arms from anybody — as in literally anybody. Packouz and Diveroli made millions by bidding on various small-scale contracts that big defense firms didn’t notice or want and then filled them by buying outdated weapons equipment from Asia or Eastern Europe on the internet and shipping it to U.S. forces in the Middle East. Most of their transactions were not technically illegal, but their process definitely wasn’t ethical or efficient. It was a stupid method for supplying a stupid war.
I’m not sure how much the fictionalized details matter. I can find no evidence, for example, that Packouz and Diveroli personally drove a truckload of handguns 500 miles across Jordan and Iraq. On the other hand, they really did win a $300 million contract to arm the Afghan military and tried to fill it by repackaging millions of rounds of AK-47 ammunition from China, which had been stored for decades in warehouses in Albania. (American companies cannot legally import or sell Chinese-made arms.)
As is the case in the other three films I mentioned above, the underlying story about the fundamental dysfunction of American society and the U.S. economy is the bedrock, but the characters and episodes used to illustrate that story have been juiced up somewhat. Among other things, Teller’s character in the film is a composite of the real David Packouz and a third partner in the arms business, Alex Podrizki. Diveroli’s financial backer wasn’t a devout Jewish dry-cleaning entrepreneur (Kevin Pollak in the movie) but a Mormon businessman from Utah.
As a Miami New Times article makes clear, “War Dogs” is itself an instrument in the ongoing feud between Diveroli — the unquestioned mastermind behind the entire scheme — and his former partners, who allege he defrauded them. (Officially, the film is based on a Rolling Stone article by Guy Lawson, who later wrote a book about the case.) None of that matters to the audience; what viewers see is Jonah Hill playing Diveroli as a rotund, coke-snorting Mephistopheles with a genuinely disturbing laugh. On the surface, Teller’s Packouz is a likable if rootless innocent seduced by a charismatic old pal who returns to town with a flashy wardrobe, a fast car and wads of cash. But it’s not that simple: As is the case for every story of a con man and his mark — including the tale of America and capitalism — people believe what they want to believe.
Any normal and decent person would immediately perceive that Diveroli was a sleazebag and that his ingenious plans to sell outdated Cold War weaponry to his government was not likely to end well. But “War Dogs” is a story about a place and a time where all values of decency and moral judgment have been subordinated to the market. Even though Teller’s character is presented as the movie’s protagonist, a well-meaning guy anchored by his adoring Latina wife (Ana de Armas) and their infant daughter, Packouz surrenders to mendacity and corruption far too easily. He’s a young American indoctrinated to believe that entrepreneurial success requires vicious amorality. And who can say he’s wrong? Where most movies of this kind would show the hero redeemed, humbled and domesticated at the end, Phillips leaves Packouz dangling from a moral precipice at the final fadeout.
“God bless Dick Cheney’s America!” shouts Diveroli during one especially implausible adventure, and that feels like the topic sentence of “War Dogs.” Specifically, this refers to the dynamics of the second term of George W. Bush’s presidency when the grossly inflated no-bid military contracts engineered by Vice President Dick Cheney and his cronies had become controversial. That produced the bizarre reverse-eBay marketplace that Diveroli exploited — one where anyone with a computer and a few operable brain cells could bid on military contracts.
But the Cheney-ness of America goes well beyond the grotesque levels of corruption enabled by his political party (Republican) that claimed to represent fiscal restraint. If the process of political nihilism that led from the right-wing backlash in the late 1960s to the arrival of candidate Donald Trump in 2016 was well underway by the Bush-Cheney administration, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan nonetheless marked a crucial turning point. Maybe the real Efraim Diveroli is a sociopath and maybe the real David Packouz is a sucker. But whoever they are, they were shaped by a nation where reality no longer exists or at any rate no longer matters. These two guys get someone killed in this movie, and that probably happened in the real world, too. Did they care about that? I’m not sure; it depends what’s meant. But probably they didn’t care nearly enough.
When Diveroli lays out his business plan for Packouz in a Miami diner, the latter protests that he and his wife have marched in anti-war protests. “Dude, I’m against the war, too. I fucking hate Bush!” Diveroli tells him. He doesn’t put it this way, but this is the “postmodern condition,” where reality is just a story people tell themselves, with no objective external coefficient. Climate change or the Middle East wars or immigration or “radical Islamic terrorism” are just idea balloons floating across the landscape; people hitch themselves to the ones they like and pop the others. Selling people in distant countries the means to kill one another is a sketchy thing to do perhaps, but so is downloading a hack for Angry Birds.
This is the second week in a row when a mainstream Hollywood comedy channels philosophical debates of the 20th century. (Last week it was “Sausage Party,” in some respects an existentialist inquiry into the nature of morality without religion, featuring horny hot dogs.) Maybe that reflects the nature of liberal-arts education in the ’80s and ’90s. And maybe it reflects the extent to which darker thinkers of yesteryear, from Sartre and Adorno to Foucault, foresaw the construction of today’s world. As for Todd Phillips, who made two blissfully brilliant dude comedies in the early 2000s (“Old School” and “Road Trip”) — well, I genuinely don’t know what to make of the guy. Is “War Dogs” his mea culpa for the satanic bargain that produced three “Hangover” movies and made him wealthier than a couple of internet arms dealers could ever dream of being?
Caught in a bad bromance? We should be encouraging man hugs, not mocking them
China's Cao Yuan and Qin Kai; Britain's Jack Laugher and Chris Mears hug after the men's synchronized 3-meter springboard diving final at the 2016 Summer Olympics, Aug. 10, 2016. (Credit: AP/Wong Maye-E)
What’s the matter with a hug? Nothing, unless it’s between two men.
Last week, the U.K.’s Daily Mail raised its proverbial eyebrow at an embrace between Chris Mears and Jack Laugher, a pair of British Olympians who had just won the gold medal for the 3-meter synchronized dive. In a photo of the two, Laugher appears to pounce on his diving partner, wrapping his arms around Mears’ neck. The moment is sweet and a bit silly, the kind of rapturous gesture that doesn’t seem out of the question when someone has earned the highest possible honor in his sport.
But to the Daily Mail, there was something questionable — even girly — about their prolonged cuddle, contrasting their elation with a more subdued exchange from the Chinese team. “Britain’s victorious synchronised divers hug for joy after winning gold,” the Mail wrote, “while China’s bronze medalists settle for a manly pat on the back.”
Twitter users decried the gaffe as distasteful, but the Mail is hardly the only outlet to express discomfort at a display of affection between two men, even heterosexual ones.
President Barack Obama’s farewell hug to Jay Carney, his former press secretary, became an instant meme in 2014. BuzzFeed dubbed it “the most awkward hug in White House history.” But what made the moment an object of fascination is its seeming novelty. Most Western men do not exchange hugs as a social custom, and they especially do not exchange prolonged ones. Kory Floyd, a researcher at Arizona State University, suggests that the maximum length for a male-on-male embrace is one second, and anything longer is coded as being romantic or sexual in nature.
To put it bluntly, men shy away from hugging one another not because it’s “unmanly” but because they’re worried about being perceived as gay. Following last week’s controversy, Laugher’s girlfriend went so far as to make a public statement about her boyfriend’s sexuality. (After all, the Olympic partners do share an apartment together.)
The stigma surrounding male-to-male intimacy is a relatively recent phenomenon, a product of the lavender scare of the 1950s. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who some speculate was a closet homosexual himself, led a purge of gay employees from government offices, as it was believed that queer people were inherently communist sympathizers. In McCarthy’s America, gay people became a pathologized class of individuals, with homosexuality classified as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association until 1973. (In many countries, being transgender is still defined as such.)
Before the postwar era, homosexuality was on the minds of few Americans; many might have associated being gay as the effect of a biblical plague, the curse of Sodom. Gay people weren’t a real-world threat. When France decriminalized sodomy in 1791, homosexuality as a lived identity wasn’t thought of. Homosexuality was defined as a behavior not a discrete way of being. Openly gay writer Marcel Proust didn’t introduce the concept into French literature — in his expansive “In Search of Lost Time” series — until 1913.
Without the cloud of anti-gay suspicion around male friendships, same-sex intimacy was extremely common in the 19th century, when it was customary for men to walk around holding hands and even sleep in one another’s beds.
The most famous example of this is President Abraham Lincoln, who shared a bunk with his best friend, Joshua Speed. Carl Sandburg, the revered American poet, was the first to suggest that there had been anything sexual between the two men. He wrote euphemistically in “Abraham Lincoln: The War Years,” a 1926 biography of the 16th president, that their kinship was defined by “a streak of lavender and spots soft as May violets.” (Their possible love nest was re-created by artist Skylar Fein as a potential moment of gay history.)
Lincoln’s sexuality remains an open question, but expressions of affection that break with modern notions of homosociality were many and varied. Daniel Webster, who served as the secretary of state under Presidents William Henry Harrison and John Tyler, was known to refer to some of his male friends as “my lovely boy” in correspondence.
The best illustration of changing gender mores is in “Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography,” a book by John Ibson, a California State University, Fullerton professor. His book is a treasure trove of portraits of 19th-century American masculinity, in which male subjects are pictured with their arms draped over one another, hands clasped and sitting on each other’s laps.
Men in the 19th century were, for lack of a better way to put it, all over one another — without the faintest whiff of irony.
Reviewing Ibson’s collection, Alecia Simmonds of Australia’s Daily Life wrote that the lack of similar patterns in relationships today is not merely a product of homophobia but the emergence of women in public life. “The photos in Ibson’s collection were taken during a time when life was incredibly gender segregated,” she said. “Your primary emotional identification was with people of your own gender.”
Women have taken the place of other men as the objects of that affection, as outlets for the male need for human touch and intimacy. A 1997 study from Purdue University showed that 75 percent of men relied primarily on women — particularly their wives or girlfriends — as their sole source of close companionship. While relationships between women were often confessional, based around conversation and disclosure, the study showed that male friendships were less intimate and more driven by activity.
That kind of distancing can be seen today when two men go to the movies together. They leave an open seat between them.
These findings correlate with the overall reality of male friendships: A 2006 survey in American Sociological Review showed that adult heterosexual men have fewer friends than any other population in U.S. society. As Salon’s Lisa Wade has previously suggested, it’s not that straight men don’t want more friends. They do. “Men desire the same level and type of intimacy in their friendships as women, but they aren’t getting it,” Wade wrote.
Not having those desires met can have a deeply detrimental impact on heterosexual males. In a 2013 essay for The Good Men Project, writer Mark Greene called it “touch isolation.”
“American men can go for days or weeks at a time without touching another human being,” Greene wrote. “The implications of touch isolation for men’s health and happiness are huge.”
Gentle platonic touch is key to the early development of infants, Greene noted, adding that it continues to play an important role throughout men’s and women’s lives for their “health and emotional well being, right into old age.”
Men’s desire for intimacy from companions of the same sex is repressed at a young age, Greene said, but this is reinforced throughout their lives through stigma — the suggestion that there’s something less than masculine or abnormal about male-to-male intimacy. When two Russian men filmed themselves walking the streets of Moscow holding hands, they were repeatedly harassed by passersby — called “bitches” and “faggots” and even told to leave the country. Another man forcibly ran into them, hoping to start a fight.
Things are changing, however, along with the advent of a new generation that views homosexuality in a more positive light, thus lessening the shame around potentially being seen as gay.
In a 2014 study published in Men and Masculinities, British researchers Mark McCormack and Eric Anderson found that 98 percent of college-aged men surveyed in the U.K. had slept in the same bed with another man. And 93 percent of those surveyed said they had cuddled a male classmate. “They don’t realize this is something that older men would find shocking,” McCormack, a professor at Durham University, told The Huffington Post. “It’s older generations that think men cuddling is taboo.”
The shifting tides are evident in the embrace of friendships that skirt the line between what might have been considered outré even just a decade ago.
Real-life best friends Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart went on an extremely affectionate tour of New York after finishing their 2014 run in Broadway’s “Waiting for Godot” in a honeymoon that inspired a million BuzzFeed lists. Members of the former One Direction boy band were often known to affectionately kiss one another or slip their hands into each other’s butt pockets. Those public displays of affection weren’t jeered. They made the band’s female fanbase go apeshit.
It might seem like The Daily Mail’s homophobic flap is a reflection of the current cultural era, but this lingering distrust of close male friendships is increasingly behind the times. Hugging it out doesn’t just feel good. Embracing the bromance makes the world a better, cuddlier place.
John McLaughlin, veteran TV host, dies at 89
For the fist time in 34 years, seven months and one week, John McLaughin, the creator, host and executive producer of the long-running Sunday political panel show “The McLaughlin Group,” was absent from his long-running political show. On Tuesday, the host of the weekly round-table discussion passed away at the age of 89.
“As a former jesuit priest, teacher, pundit and news host, John touched many lives,” a Facebook post on the show’s page read. “For 34 years, The McLaughlin Group informed millions of Americans. Now he has said bye bye for the last time, to rejoin his beloved dog, Oliver, in heaven. He will always be remembered.”
In recent months, McLaughlin would sometimes only make brief appearances on his program.
“I am under the weather,” McLaughlin said in a note at the beginning of this week’s episode. He added that his voice was “weaker than usual,” but “my spirit is strong and my dedication to the show remains absolute!”
Battle of the Trump surrogates: 5 times Rudy Giuliani out-crazied Katrina Pierson on the campaign trail
Rudy Giuliani speaks at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, July 18, 2016. (Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster)
In GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s clown car of campaign surrogates, Rudy Giuliani rides shotgun.
Katrina Pierson is, of course, behind the wheel. (There’s just no topping this.) But Giuliani has, on five distinct occasions during this election cycle, given the gaffe-queen a run for her money.
1. On Mexican rapists:
In July 2015, Giuliani seconded Trump’s infamous “Mexican rapists” claim, telling MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that the GOP candidate was right, but made his point “in reverse.”
“What he should have said is, most people come across the border for economic reasons,” Giuliani explained. Some, however, “murder people, kill people and are terrorists.”
2. On Beyoncé’s Super Bowl halftime show:
The morning after Beyoncé’s sociopolitically divisive Super Bowl 50 halftime show — in which her background dancers dressed as Black Panthers — Giuliani went on “Fox & Friends” to air his grievances with her “ridiculous” performance.
“I thought it was really outrageous,” he complained, “that she used it as a platform to attack police officers who are the people who protect her and protect us, and keep us alive.”
3. On Clinton founding ISIS:
In March — months before Trump adopted the claim — Giuliani said Hillary Clinton “could be considered a founding member” of ISIS because, “she was part of an administration that withdrew from Iraq and did not intervene in Syria at the proper time.”
4. On Black Lives Matter:
Back-to-back police shootings of unarmed black men in July in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Falcon Heights, Minnesota, brought increased media attention to Black Lives Matter protests around the country.
At one such protest, in Dallas, a heavily armed sniper unaffiliated with any protest group murdered five officers.
Reactionist as he is, Giuliani told “Fox & Friends” that BLM “puts a target on the back of police.”
“If they meant black lives matter,” he argued, “they would be doing something about the way in which the vast majority of blacks are killed in America, which is by other blacks.”
5. Rewriting history:
At a campaign stop in Youngstown, Ohio, on Monday, Giuliani seemed to think he was in Indiana and then claimed, “Under those eight years, before Obama came along, we didn’t have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack inside the United States,” apparently forgetting about the 9/11 attacks — a tentpole of his 2008 campaign for president.
Fox News shrugs off polls to promote app that predicts a Donald Trump win
With their presidential candidate going on the attack against Gold Star parents and decorated veterans, denouncing past U.S. military intervention in the Middle East and tanking in the polls, it’s no wonder many Republicans would rather bury their heads in the sand than deal with the impending likelihood that Democrats will win a third straight national election this fall. The GOP is in such a sorry state of affairs after a 17 person primary battle left a political neophyte and reality TV star as the titular head of the conservative movement that it is now relying on a tried and true tactic to cope — creating an alternate reality.
On Monday, right-wing website Breibart News released its inaugural poll meant to cut “the mainstream media filter” against Trump.
“It’s an open secret that polls are often manipulated and spun to create momentum for a particular candidate or issue,” Alex Marlow, the editor-in-chief of Breitbart News, said in a statement announcing the poll. According to Breitbart’s own poll, Clinton currently beats Trump nationally, 42 percent to 37 percent.
Tuesday morning, Fox News noted that “Hillary Clinton tops Donald Trump in the latest national polls,” before suggesting that “but if you ask voters anonymously who they like, the results are a lot different.”
Reporting on the Zip app during “Fox & Friends,” host Steve Doocy claimed that the anonymous forum allows voters to express their support for Trump without fear of repercussion.
“So if the election were held today, according to the Zip app, Donald Trump would win,” Doocy declared.
Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com
Debunking genetic sexual attraction: Incest by any other name is still incest
(Credit: Steve Lovegrove via Shutterstock)
Last week a minor eruption of media coverage surfaced about an incestuous couple in New Mexico who is fighting criminal prosecution and a court order keeping them apart since sex between a parent and child is illegal. Monica Mares gave up her son, Caleb Peterson, when she was 16 years old, and they reunited after he became a legal adult. The relationship swiftly became romantic, and the government intervened, forcing them to separate and charging them both with a crime.
But Mares and Peterson are defending themselves by claiming that it’s not incest, but something called “genetic sexual attraction.” This is a term that that surely sounds scientific. Certainly, much of the reporting on this case makes “genetic sexual attraction,” or GSA, sound like a scientific phenomenon, beyond the control of the people involved. Take, for instance, this reporting from Mic:
Their story fits the standard definition of GSA, which is when the child grows up separated from the parent, and then sexual attraction consumes both of them when they’re finally reunited as adults. There is not a ton of research on the topic, but a generous estimate reported by one GSA forum said it occurs in as many as half of all post-adoption reunions.
A “standard definition”? Offering statistics, even as an “estimate”? Other media coverage used words like “phenomenon” or “raising awareness” — language that implies that genetic sexual attraction is a measurable, demonstrable reality, as opposed to some half-baked pseudoscientific nonsense that people dreamed up to justify continuing unhealthy, abusive relationships.
“Signs of pseudoscience?” asked Carol Tavris, social psychologist and co-author of “Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me),” over email. “Look for biological buzz words — genetic, neuro- (attached to anything), hormonal, hardwired — that are used to make a claim about some complex activity, solely on the claimer’s personal experience (anecdote) but lack any scientific research to back up that claim.”
Added Tavris: “And attraction and sexual behavior are about as complex as you get.”
It didn’t take much digging for me to discover that genetic sexual attraction is not the scientifically determined phenomenon that its proponents portray it as, starting with the fact that the vast majority of these stories have been percolating out of tabloid publications like the Daily Mail and not from legitimate news sources.
Nicolas DiDomizio at Mic admitted “not a ton of research” exists to back up claims of genetic sexual attraction, but that is an understatement. A better way to put it is that there is no real research supporting the notion that sharing genes with someone makes you more likely to want to have sex with them.
I couldn’t find any studies or mentions of this supposed phenomenon in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or scientific articles with an in-depth look at it. The “generous estimate” came not from a scientist or any other kind of expert but from a random website that claims to have obtained the number from “some studies” but declines to point out who conducted them or where they were published. While I haven’t read every paper published throughout time, even the most ardent proponents of genetic sexual attraction have not produced a shred of evidence that some people who are biological relatives are are more likely to be sexually attracted to one another than to those they are not related to.
For a couple of decades now, stories like Mares and Peterson’s have cropped up in the news periodically and followed the same basic pattern: a defensive couple, pseudoscientific posturing, poorly sourced statistics and no actual evidence that any of this is due to genetic sexual attraction and not unhealthy choices and abusive behavior.
Some searching around revealed that the term “genetic sexual attraction” can be traced not to a biologist or a psychologist but a woman named Barbara Gonyo, who coined the term in the 1980s. She is not a scientist or a doctor but simply a woman who met her son whom she had given up for adoption when he was in his 20s and she in her 40s.
By her own account, Gonyo sexually desired her son.
“I wanted to hold him,” she told ABC News in 2007. “I just wanted to touch him. I wanted to hold him. It’s the same physical feeling anybody would have when they feel like they’re falling in love.”
Gonyo told the Guardian in a similar story, “I was flirtatious, coquettish and playful.”
She added, “When getting ready to see him, I primped and primed, becoming like a 16-year-old in mind and body. I was trying to win him over, like someone I wanted to date or marry.”
But despite Gonyo’s insistence that a genetic link somehow draws two people into sexual attraction, she admits her son wanted no part of this supposedly irresistible passion.
Rather than accept that her feelings might simply be an unhealthy reaction to an unusual situation, she simply made up a biological-sounding term to describe them. It’s an understandable urge because it lessens the personal responsibility for these feelings, making it seem like they are being caused by something out of one’s control. But journalists should be careful to not be suckered into believing that something is scientific just because of science-y-sounding terms.
Further digging around on the subject of genetic sexual attraction reinforces how flimsy the evidence for it really is. One major site purporting to “educate” on the subject has a books section, but a click on the recommendations leads not to psychological research but to a series of incest-based romance novels with names like “Love’s Forbidden Flowers.” The Kinsey Reports this is not.
A small, overlapping series of blogs and social media accounts are pushing this pseudoscientific theory, and it’s essentially the same story everywhere: a lot of links, but no real research. There are a lot of comparisons to being gay, without acknowledging that incest is not an orientation like homosexuality. Big, science-y sounding words are used, but the evidence is mostly self-reported and anecdotal, not collected scientifically by researchers.
The dangers of this pseudoscientific approach became evident last year, when New York’s Science of Us blog published an interview of a woman in an incestuous situation, with the title “What It’s Like To Date Your Dad.”
The article started off with the usual evidence-free pseudoscientific framing of genetic sexual attraction as being rooted in nature and practically instinctual. But after one reads the actual interview, a different picture emerges — of a young woman who sounds like she’s being manipulated by her father into a controlling incestuous relationship; the red flags are flying everywhere. (She’s only 18. He groomed her sexually by pretending he was just cuddling or playing. She was a virgin when they first had sex. His ex-girlfriend pretends she’s her mother, that sort of thing.)
It’s a good example of why journalists need to be cognizant of the difference between science and pseudoscience. Any fool — clearly — can throw a bunch of big, scientific-sounding words around to justify behavior that people would otherwise see clearly as ill-advised or immoral. But journalists don’t have to let them get away with it.
Liz Cheney’s non-profit nonsense: The strange case of the Alliance for a Stronger America
Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney (Credit: AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick, is running for Congress in Wyoming. She’s the favored candidate in today’s Republican primary for the state’s at-large congressional district, and assuming she wins, she’ll be a lock to replace retiring Rep. Cynthia Lummis. Winning the seat would be a measure of redemption for Cheney, who ran an ill-advised and hilariously shambolic campaign to unseat Wyoming Sen. Mike Enzi in 2014. As it stands, chances are excellent that January 2017 will mark the end of eight happy years of a Cheney-free federal government.
And Liz Cheney is very much her father’s daughter: neocon to the core and a vocal supporter of the disastrous foreign policy choices that were the defining failures of the Bush-Cheney administration. Dick and Liz even teamed up in June 2014 to launch their own national security non-profit, the Alliance for a Strong America, to “explain the indispensable role America and American power must play in the world in order to defeat the broad array of threats we face today.” Cheney and her father did the media rounds to promote their new group and explain the role they envisioned for it. “We really want to be a center of gravity,” Liz Cheney told Casper Star-Tribune in 2014, “a place where people can come to get information to help them make a case and help make sure people recognize at the end of the day, our security relies on American strength and power around the world.”
As a candidate for Congress, Cheney promotes her involvement with the Alliance as one of her achievements. Her campaign website boasts that “she is the co-founder of the Alliance for a Strong America, a non-profit organization based in Wyoming and focused on educating voters about the importance of American leadership and strength.”
That sounds pretty impressive. The only hitch in all this is that the Alliance for a Strong America doesn’t appear to do anything. At all.
The group’s website hasn’t been updated since March 2015, and even then its primary contribution to the national security debate was reposting anti-Obama (or pro-Cheney) articles written for other websites. The Alliance’s Facebook page hasn’t posted any new content for about ten months. Its Twitter account has been dormant for nearly two years, as has its YouTube page. There have been no significant mentions of the group in any press coverage for almost as long, except for a few stray articles noting that Liz Cheney founded the group with her father.
But the group still exists on paper, at least. It’s still filing annual reports with the Wyoming secretary of state – its most recent report, filed on March 31 of this year, lists Liz Cheney as the group’s director. (Cheney told the press in January that she’d resigned her position with the Alliance.)
Getting in touch with anyone involved with the group, however, is exceedingly difficult. The Alliance for a Strong America was founded as a 501 (c)4 advocacy group, so I figured I’d ask for its 990 disclosure forms to get a sense of what activities, if any, the group has been up to. Those forms aren’t available online, so I tried shooting an email to the Alliance’s press contact address, but no one answered. So I tried emailing the contact person listed on its most recent annual report only to have my message bounce back. I called the phone number listed, which belongs to a law firm in the Virginia suburbs of DC that provides legal counsel both to Cheney’s campaign and the Alliance, and was told they’d pass my questions along to the campaign staff (even though I was trying to get in touch with the non-profit).
So as best as I can tell, this national security non-profit that congressional candidate Liz Cheney founded with her former vice president father, and boasts of on her campaign website, doesn’t actually do anything and hasn’t done anything of substance really ever.
That’s strange enough. What’s even weirder is that this has happened before with the Cheneys. In 2009, Liz Cheney buddied up with some of her neoconservative pals to launch Keep America Safe, a national security non-profit that was ostensibly geared towards promoting hawkish foreign policy views but, in practice, was more about “publicizing the activities of Liz Cheney.” The group lurched along until June 2013, when nearly every trace of Keep America Safe was expunged from the internet right as buzz for Cheney’s failed Senate bid started to mount.
Whatever is going on with the Alliance for a Stronger America, a Cheney victory in tonight’s primary will likely extinguish whatever life it still retains – when you have a seat in the House of Representatives, you don’t need to use a sham, dark-money group to get your message out.
Medical community clashes with CDC for recommending against flu vaccination
Eric Krex, 6, reacts as he is held by his mother, Margaret, while a nurse gives him a FluMist influenza vaccination (Credit: Photo/Chris Gardner)
In June, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shocked the medical community by recommending against the use of the live nasal flu vaccine for the upcoming flu season.
The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) based its decision on data from a study of 7,500 individuals who were either administered the live nasal vaccine or the inactivated flu shot. The inactivated flu shot demonstrated a 49 percent effectiveness rate, whereas the live nasal vaccine showed almost no effectiveness at all.
But Mark Loeb, lead author of a study just published on Monday in “Annals of Internal Medicine,” told NPR’s Tara Haelle that his team found the live nasal vaccine not only to be as effective as the inactivated shot — 5.3 percent infection rate for the nasal, 5.2 percent rate for the shot — but that his results align with those that led ACIP to recommend the mist for children as recently as 2015.
One possible explanation for the difference between the results is that the ACIP study was carried via survey on American citizens, whereas Loeb’s team performed a randomized controlled trial on 52 isolated Hutterite communities in Canada. In theory, that should make the Canadian study more accurate, especially given that it accords with other studies in the United Kingdom and Finland that establish approximately a 50 percent effectiveness rate for the live nasal vaccine.
Another potential reason could be that the vaccine used in the Canadian study only contained three live strains of the flu, whereas the nasal mist available in the United States contains four.
Although it seems superficially counterintuitive that being exposed to more strains would produce a weaker immune response, it could be that competition between multiple strains interferes with the body’s ability to produce a response to any particular one. Focusing on only three live strains instead of four could simply provide greater protection to all of the possible strains the body encounters in a given season.
“Simply” is, however, perhaps the wrong word. As Loeb told NPR, “sometimes the public wants a very simple message, and unfortunately life’s not like that. Things change as the evidence grows and we understand more. Unfortunately, that’s how science and clinical medicine work. The challenge is to be able to help the public understand the shades of gray here.”
Ex-Fox News chair Roger Ailes advising Trump ahead of fall debates, New York Times reports
Roger Ailes, Donald Trump (Credit: Reuters/Fred Prouser/AP/Gene J. Puskar/Photo montage by Salon)
Ex-Fox News chairman Roger Ailes — who resigned from his post last month amid sexual harassment allegations — will now be advising GOP nominee Donald Trump ahead of the presidential debates, according to The New York Times.
Ailes was brought on board specifically to prepare Trump for the first scheduled debate against Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton at Hofstra University on Sept. 26. However, two anonymous sources told the Times, “that Mr. Ailes’s role could extend beyond the debates, which Mr. Trump’s advisers see as crucial to vaulting him back into strong contention for the presidency after a series of self-inflicted wounds that have eroded his standing in public opinion polls.”
Pre-Fox News, Ailes has a strong résumé of advising successful Republican presidential candidates — Richard Nixon (in 1968), Ronald Reagan (in 1984), and George H.W. Bush (in 1988).
The Trump campaign, however, is distancing itself from Ailes, who received $40 million in a separation agreement with the media company he founded with Rupert Murdoch in 1996.
“They speak occasionally, which isn’t news,” Trump’s spokeswoman Hope Hicks told the Times.
Shortly after the story broke, Trump’s camp wholly denied the claims.
“This is not accurate,” Hicks said in a follow-up statement. “He is not advising Mr. Trump or helping with debate prep. They are longtime friends, but he has no formal or informal role in the campaign.”
Read the full story at The New York Times.
