Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 977

Journalism is too hard for Hollywood: Dan Rather, George W. Bush & the misunderstood media scandal of the century

It's no surprise that "Truth," the new movie about the journalistic firestorm that took down Dan Rather, has caused so much controversy. In its retelling of the scandal that engulfed Rather, his producer Mary Mapes and CBS News after their botched story about George W. Bush's time in the Texas Air National Guard blew up in their faces, "Truth" touches on one of the most politically and personally charged moments in recent media history. CBS is incensed enough about the film that it has refused to air any ads for it on its network. The people behind "Truth" have defended it as a movie that seeks to go beyond the particulars of the saga and raise broader questions about reporting and corporate America.

The reality is that neither side has covered itself in glory. CBS is guilty of, at the very least, massive corporate overreach, but "Truth" is so conspicuously one-sided that it was bound to provoke a heated reaction.

The outline of the story "Truth" tells is familiar enough to anybody who was around in 2004. Mapes, a star producer for Rather at CBS, got her hands on memos that seemingly confirmed rumors about the special treatment Bush had received during his military days, and built a "60 Minutes" report for Rather around them. The memos, however, were torn to shreds almost instantly, with both conservative bloggers and experts disputing their authenticity. CBS ultimately retracted the story, apologized, fired Mapes, made three other producers resign, and forced Rather out of his anchor chair at the "CBS Evening News."

Ever since then, the toxicity of the scandal has lingered. Rather and Mapes insist to this day that the central contention of their story--that Bush shirked his military duties and got away with it because of his connections--is true, and that they were railroaded by a panicked team of corporate suits. Mapes recently said the errors fell within the range of "normal journalistic bungle."

That, of course, is a quite generous reading of events. When you mess up on a highly damaging story about the president of the United States two months before an election, you're out of the realm of normalcy, no matter how much you did or didn't bungle. But that's the story "Truth," which was based on Mapes's memoir, wants to tell. And that's the biggest flaw in the movie.

Delve even slightly into the "Rathergate" scandal and you will tumble down several simultaneous rabbit holes. The story of Bush's military service is decidedly murky. There's a boatload of evidence to suggest that he received preferential treatment for years, but that evidence is tied up with so much history, hearsay and rumor that it's a far cry from the tidy report that "60 Minutes" presented to the world.

"Truth" does not exactly shy away from detailing the mistakes Mapes and her team made in pursuing the Bush story, but it definitely soft-pedals them. There's a central problem that, despite the film's best efforts, it can't overcome: The "60 Minutes" report was partially centered around documents that the producers couldn't reasonably authenticate. It's all well and good for Rather and Mapes to complain, as they have done for over a decade, that the focus on the memos obliterated any consideration of the rest of their story, which included on-camera interviews with people who said they had intervened to help Bush out during his time in the military. But that is a problem entirely of their own making. All these years later, it remains a wonder that so much caution was abandoned on such a sensitive story.

The report that CBS commissioned after the scandal has itself proven contentious, but it makes clear that the producing team barreled past a series of red flags about the documents in its rush to get the story on air. "Truth" somewhat acknowledges this, but moves past it in its effort to cast Mapes and Rather as noble victims of a corporate purge. In doing so, it weakens its own cause.

It's hard for us to take the very pertinent questions the film raises about the connections between CBS and the Bush administration--as well as its broader points about the sanitizing of TV news--when the nagging problem of its hagiographic storytelling keeps intervening.

In a way, the biggest letdown of "Truth" is that it fails to grapple with some of the more mundane issues that the Rathergate mess illuminates. Apart from anything else, the scandal should remind us of the inherent limitations of broadcast news. Television demands dramatic revelations and firm conclusions. A news interview has to point conclusively in one direction. It is not enough to merely raise questions. Mapes and her team did not just err because their journalistic eyes were too big for their stomachs. They were also trying to stuff an unwieldy, muddy story into a neat 13-minute package, because that's exactly what "60 Minutes" is supposed to do.

Content aside, "Truth" holds few shockers as a piece of filmmaking. It's an almost old-fashioned piece, sturdy, formally conservative and unsubtle. It's never boring—though it's about 25 minutes too long—but it never reaches past any of the familiar tropes of this kind of movie. Writer/director James Vanderbilt lets his actors, especially Cate Blanchett, who plays Mapes, and Robert Redford, who plays Rather, shoulder the burden of the work. The results are a mixed bag. As Mapes, Blanchett is typically electric, a wounded bird of prey whose life spirals out of control as her report unravels. Blanchett is never the most relaxed of performers, and her intensity is a natural fit for the hard-charging Mapes.

Redford is, well, Redford, so Rather comes off as the saintliest of saints—an almost amusingly worshipful take on one of the more controversial and psychologically complex icons of journalism. The film only hints at Rather's almost total lack of involvement in the architecture of the doomed report, turning him into a reassuring father figure who honorably goes down with the ship. It's no wonder Rather and Redford have been doing interviews together.

Despite its title, "Truth" does little to get at the truth of what happened at CBS News—or, for that matter, during George W. Bush's wayward youth. It was probably impossible for anything to really do that, of course. There are too many disputed stories, too much bad blood for that. But it's quite disappointing that something better wasn't made out of a such a compelling story.

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America enabled radical Islam: How the CIA, George W. Bush and many others helped create ISIS

Since 1980, the United States has intervened in the affairs of fourteen Muslim countries, at worst invading or bombing them. They are (in chronological order) Iran, Libya, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Kosovo, Yemen, Pakistan, and now Syria. Latterly these efforts have been in the name of the War on Terror and the attempt to curb Islamic extremism. Yet for centuries Western countries have sought to harness the power of radical Islam to serve the interests of their own foreign policy. In the case of Britain, this dates back to the days of the Ottoman Empire; in more recent times, the US/UK alliance first courted, then turned against, Islamists in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. In my view, the policies of the United States and Britain—which see them supporting and arming a variety of groups for short-term military, political, or diplomatic advantage—have directly contributed to the rise of IS. Supporting the Caliphate The Turkish Ottoman Empire was, for centuries, the largest Muslim political entity the world has ever known, encompassing much of North Africa, southeastern Europe, and the Middle East. From the sixteenth century onwards, Britain not only championed the Ottoman Empire but also supported and endorsed the institution of the caliphate and the Sultan’s claim to be the caliph and leader of the ummah (the Muslim world). Britain’s support for the Ottoman Caliph—a policy known as the Eastern Question—was entirely motivated by self-interest. Initially this was so the Ottoman lands would act as a buffer against its regional imperial rivals, France and Russia; subsequently, following the colonization of India, the Ottoman territories acted to protect Britain’s eastward trade routes. This support was not merely diplomatic; it translated into military action. In the Crimean War (1854–56), Britain fought with the Ottoman Empire against Russia and won. It was only with the onset of the First World War in 1914 that this 400-year-old regional paradigm unraveled. When Mehmed V sided with the Germans, Britain was reluctantly excluded from dealing with the caliphate’s catchment of over 15 million Muslims, reasoning that “whoever controlled the person of the Caliph, controlled Sunni Islam.” London decided that an Arab uprising to unseat Mehmed would enable them to reassign the role of caliph to a trusted and more malleable ally: Hussein bin Ali Hussein, the sherif of Mecca and a direct descendant, it is claimed, of the Prophet Muhammad. The British employed racism to garner support for the uprising, appealing to the Arabs’ sense of ownership over Islam, which had originated in Mecca and Medina, not among the Turks of Constantinople. A 1914 British proclamation declared, “There is no nation among the Muslims which is now capable of upholding the Islamic Caliphate except the Arab nation.” A letter was dispatched to Sherif Hussein, fomenting his ambition and suggesting, “It may be that an Arab of true race will assume the Caliphate at Mecca or Medina” (Medina being the seat of the first caliphate after the death of the Prophet). Again, the British were prepared to defend the caliphate with the sword, promising to “guarantee the Holy Places against all external aggression.” It is a strange thought that, just 100 years ago, the prosecutors of today’s War on Terror were promising to restore the Islamic caliphate to the Arab world and defend it militarily. The Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, fomented by the British, got underway in 1916, the same year that the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement was made in secret, carving up between the British and French the very lands Sherif Hussein had been promised. Betrayal, manipulation, and self-interest were, and remain, the name of the game when it comes to Western meddling in the Middle East. The revolt would last two years and was a major factor in the fall of the Ottoman Empire. At the same time, the British Army and allied forces, including the Arab Irregulars, were fighting the Ottomans on the battlefields of the First World War. A key figure in these battles was T. E. Lawrence, who became known as Lawrence of Arabia because of the loyalty he engendered in the hearts of Sherif Hussein and his son, Emir Faisal. He was given the status of honorary son by the former, and he fought under the command of the latter in many battles, later becoming Faisal’s advisor. When the Ottomans put a £15,000 reward on Lawrence’s head, no Arab was tempted to betray him. Sadly this honorable behavior and respect were not reciprocated. In a memo to British intelligence in 1916, Lawrence described the hidden agenda behind the Arab uprising: “The Arabs are even less stable than the Turks. If properly handled they would remain in a state of political mosaic, a tissue of small jealous principalities, incapable of cohesion . . . incapable of co-ordinated action against us.” In a subsequent missive he explained, “When war broke out, an urgent need to divide Islam was added. . . . Hussein was ultimately chosen because of the rift he would create in Islam. In other words, divide and rule.” Oil Security and Western Foreign Policy Let us fast-forward to the 1950s and ’60s, by which time oil had become a major factor in the West’s foreign policy agenda. Again, the principle of “divide and rule” was put to work: a 1958 British cabinet memo noted, “Our interest lies . . . in keeping the four principal oil-producing areas [Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, and Iraq] under separate political control.” The results of this policy saw the West arming both sides in the Iran-Iraq war—which brought both powers to the brink of total destruction in the 1980s—and then intervening militarily with a force of almost 700,000 men in the First Gulf War (to prevent Iraq annexing Kuwait) in 1990–91. The United States, UK, and European powers were also deeply troubled by the cohesive potential of Arab Nationalism, a hugely popular movement led by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and his (at that time) mighty allies in Iraq and Syria. The idea of these three huge, left-leaning regional powers becoming politically and militarily united was unacceptable in the Cold War context and remained so after the fall of the Soviet Empire because of the regional threat to Israel. To counteract the rise of pan-Arabism, the West began to support Islamist tendencies within each country—mostly branches of the Muslim Brotherhood—and also worked hard in the diplomatic field to create strong and binding relationships with Islamic, pro-Western monarchies in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and Jordan. These relationships endure to this day. The most extreme manifestation of radical Sunni Islam was Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabism, which it had started to disseminate via a string of international organizations and its self-designated Global Islamic Mission. In 1962, Saudi Arabia oversaw the establishment of The Muslim World League, which was largely staffed by exiled members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood’s relationship with the West (and with the Gulf monarchies) has always been inconsistent and entirely selfish. In the run-up to, during, and after, the 2011 “Arab Spring” revolution against Hosni Mubarak, the United States and UK were actively supporting the Muslim Brotherhood as the most credible (or only) experienced political entity. In 2014, both countries came under pressure from the Saudis to declare the Muslim Brotherhood a terror group: though neither has yet gone that far, the UK duly launched an official investigation into the group, headed by UK Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Sir John Jenkins, while in the United States a bill was introduced in Congress, the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act of 2014. The House of Saud itself feared an “Arab Spring” revolution and encouraged and applauded the June 2013 coup that deposed the Brotherhood’s legitimately elected President Morsi; Saudi King Abdullah phoned coup leader al-Sisi (now the Egyptian president) within hours to congratulate him on his success. Egypt under al-Sisi would prove a better friend to Israel and, like Saudi Arabia, would brutally extinguish any new uprisings, giving the kingdom moral support in its own battle for survival. Saudi political pragmatism (or, as some might frame it, hypocrisy) has been progressively informed by its close relationship with the United States and UK— and is now one of the most significant drivers of the Middle East’s present chaos, including the emergence of ISIS. Communism: The First Public Enemy Number One From the 1950s on, the Muslim Brotherhood was supported and funded by the CIA. When Nasser decided to stamp out the movement in Egypt, the CIA helped its leaders migrate to Saudi Arabia, where they were assimilated into the Wahhabi kingdom’s own particular brand of fundamentalism, many rising to positions of great influence. While Saudi Arabia actively prevented the formation of a home-grown branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, it encouraged and financed the movement abroad in other Arab countries. One of the most prominent leaders of the Western-backed Afghan Jihad (1979–89) was a Cairo-educated Muslim Brotherhood member: Burhanuddin Rabbani, head of Jamaat-i-Islami ( JI). America and, to a lesser extent, Britain fretted about the rise of communism, which was perceived and portrayed as the “enemy of freedom”—a term that would later be applied to the Islamic extremists. In geopolitical terms, by the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union comprised one-sixth of the world’s land mass and was a superpower capable of mounting a devastating challenge to the United States. The White House was also concerned about the future alignment of China, where the Chinese Communist Party had seized power in 1949. Communism was enthusiastically embraced by millions of idealistic post-war Americans and Europeans, posing a perceived domestic political threat. Meanwhile the West observed with horror the increasing popularity of communism and socialism in the Middle East; revolutionary, pro-Soviet, Arab regimes would create an enormous strategic disadvantage and threaten oil security. For the West, radical Islam represented the best way to counter the encroachment of Arab nationalism communism. Following the Six-Day War in 1967, US and UK governmental planners noted with satisfaction that Arab unity and sense of a shared cause were finding expression in a revival of Islamic fundamentalism and widespread calls for the implementation of Sharia law. This revival continued through the 1970s and, by the end of the decade, produced the pan-Arab mujahideen that would battle the Soviet armies in Afghanistan for the next ten years. As in Syria and Iraq, the Sunni jihadists were not alone in the insurgency. There were seven major Sunni groups, armed and funded (to the tune of $6 billion) by the United States and Saudi Arabia, as well as the UK, Pakistan, and China. Abdullah Azzam’s Maktab al-Khidamat (the Services Office), which included bin Laden and from which al Qaeda would emerge, was at this point only a sub-group of one of these, the Gulbuddin faction (founded in 1977 by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar). Often overlooked in retelling the story of this particular Afghan war is the fact that the insurgency was pan-Islamic: there were eight Shi‘i groups, trained and funded by Iran. Of the Sunni entities it was backing, the CIA preferred the Afghan-Arabs (as the foreign fighters from Arab countries came to be known) because they found them “easier to read” than their indigenous counterparts. In 2003, Australian-British journalist John Pilger conducted research and concluded, “More than 100,000 Islamic militants were trained in Pakistan between 1986 and 1992, in camps overseen by the CIA and MI6, with the SAS training future al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in bomb-making and other black arts. Their leaders were trained at a CIA camp in Virginia.” That Western interference in Afghanistan actually precedes the Soviet invasion by several months is rarely acknowledged. In the context of this book it is worth tracing the motives and methods employed by foreign powers to further their own ends in that territory, as these have been repeated and modified in Iraq and Syria. Afghanistan’s location and long borders with Iran and Pakistan make it a strategic prize, and rival powers have often fought to control it. A coup in 1978 (the third in five years) brought the pro-Soviet Muhammad Taraki to power, setting off alarm bells in Islamabad, Washington, London, and Riyadh. The Pakistani ISI first tried to foment an Islamist uprising, but this failed owing to lack of popular support. Next, five months before the Soviet invasion, President Jimmy Carter sent covert aid to Islamist opposition groups with the help of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, wrote in a memo to his boss that if the Islamists rose up it would “induce a Soviet military intervention, likely to fail, and give the USSR its own Vietnam.” Another coup in September 1979 brought Deputy Prime Minister Hafizullah Amin to power; Moscow invaded in December, killing Amin and replacing him with its own man, Babrak Karmal. Brzezinski then sent Carter a memo outlining his advised strategy: “We should concert with Islamic countries both a propaganda campaign and a covert action campaign to help the rebels.” On December 18, 1979, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher enthusiastically endorsed Washington’s approach at a meeting of the Foreign Policy Association in New York, even praising the Iranian Revolution and concluding, “The Middle East is an area where we have much at stake. . . . It is in our own interest that they build on their own deep, religious traditions. We do not wish to see them succumb to the fraudulent appeal of imported Marxism.” Because IS is a product of Western interference in Iraq and Syria, none of the powers that backed the Afghan mujahideen anticipated the emergence of alQaeda, with its vehemently anti-Western agenda and ambition to re-establish the caliphate. Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf wrote in his autobiography, “Neither Pakistan nor the US realized what Osama bin Laden would do with the organization we had all allowed him to establish.” Defining Extremism: The Western Dilemma In the course of the 1990s, radical political Islam became more extremist—a shift that was encouraged and funded by Saudi Arabia. The star of the Muslim Brotherhood began to wane as its leaders were castigated for being too “moderate” and for participating in the democratic process in Egypt; standing as “independents” (since the Muslim Brotherhood was banned), its candidates fared well, becoming the main opposition force to President Hosni Mubarak. There was another reason for the Muslim Brotherhood falling out of favor with Riyadh—it had supported Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The House of Saud now linked its survival with the rise of the Salafi-jihadist tendency, which was consistent with its own custom-fit Wahhabi ideology. The West viewed this shift into a more radical gear with some alarm as the Salafists’ battle became international: Arab jihadists traveled to Eastern Europe to fight with the Bosnian Muslims from 1992; New York’s World Trade Center was first bombed by radical Islamists in 1993; and in 1995, North African jihadists from the al Qaeda–linked GIA (Armed Islamic Group, Algeria) planted bombs on the Paris Metro, killing 8 and injuring more than 100. The United States and UK adopted a remarkably laid-back approach to this new wave of radical Islam. The UK government and security services did not consider that the extremists presented a real danger, allowing the establishment of what the media labeled “Londonistan” through the 1990s. It could be argued that this was a successful arrangement in that, in return for being allowed to live in the British capital and go about their business in peace, the jihadists did not commit any act of violence on British streets. The Syrian jihadist Abu Musab al-Suri (aka Setmariam Nasar) was a leading light among the Londonistan jihadist community, which also included Osama bin Laden’s so-called ambassador to London, Khalid al-Fawwaz. Al-Suri confirmed to me that a tacit covenant was in place between M16 and the extremists. Saudi entities and individuals funded al Qaeda and other violent Salafist groups to the tune of $300 million through the 1990s, and the United States and UK remained stalwartly supportive. A year after Margaret Thatcher left parliament for good, she told a 1993 meeting of the Chatham House international affairs think tank, “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a strong force for moderation and stability on the world stage.” When challenged on Riyadh’s appalling human rights record—which included (and still includes) public executions, floggings, stonings, oppression of women, the incarceration of peaceful dissidents, and violent dispersal of any kind of demonstration—she retorted, “I have no intention of meddling in its internal affairs.” Later, Tony Blair would talk of the Middle East’s Axis of Moderation, meaning Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Turkey, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel. The First Gulf War brought two changes into play. The first was that Saudi Arabia now became completely dependent, militarily, on the United States for its survival. The second was that, in an attempt to weaken Saddam Hussein, the CIA encouraged Shi‘i groups in southern Iraq to rebel, resulting in thousands of Shi‘a being slaughtered by regime helicopter fire. George H. W. Bush spent $40 million on clandestine operations in Iraq, flying Shi‘i and Kurdish leaders to Saudi Arabia for training, and creating and funding two opposition groups: the Iraqi National Accord, led by Iyad Alawi (who would collaborate in a failed coup plotted by the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group in 1996) and the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmad Chalabi (who was close to Dick Cheney when he was Defense Secretary). And yet, for the next twelve years, Saddam Hussein remained in power despite the punitive sanctions regime. Washington and London continued to believe that an alliance with “moderate” Islam was key to defeating the extremists. A 2004 Whitehall paper by former UK Ambassador to Damascus Basil Eastwood and Richard Murphy, who had been assistant secretary of state under Reagan, noted: “In the Arab Middle East, the awkward truth is that the most significant movements which enjoy popular support are those associated with political Islam.” For the first time, they identified two distinct groups within the political Islamists: those “who seek change but do not advocate violence to overthrow regimes, and the Jihadists . . . who do.” This new paradigm gained traction. In 2006, Tony Blair made it clear that the coming fight in the Middle East would be between the moderate Islamists and the extremists. The West, he told an audience in the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles, should seek to “empower” the moderates. “We want moderate, mainstream Islam to triumph over reactionary Islam.” Blair enlarged on the economic benefits this would accrue to the large transnational enterprises and organizations he championed: “A victory for the moderates means an Islam that is open: open to globalization.” The West continues to behave as if Saudi Arabia can deliver the world from the menace of extremism. Yet the kingdom has spent $50 billion promoting Wahhabism around the world, and most of the funding for al Qaeda—amounting to billions of dollars—still comes from private individuals and organizations in Saudi Arabia. The Sinjar Records (documents captured in Iraq by coalition forces in 2007) provided a clear picture of where foreign jihadists were coming from: Saudi nationals accounted for 45 percent of foreign fighters in Iraq. They swell the ranks of IS today. The Arab revolutions muddied the waters even more, particularly in Libya and Syria, making it almost impossible to distinguish between moderates and extremists. In Libya the West’s intervention strengthened the radicals and liberated stockpiles of Gaddafi’s sophisticated weapons, which were immediately spirited away by the truckload to jihadist strongholds. In the light of that error, President Obama dithered in Syria, much to the fury of his Saudi allies, allowing the most radical of the extremists to prevail: Islamic State. Excerpted from "Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate" by Abdel Bari Atwan. Published by the University of California Press. Copyright © 2015 by Abdel Bari Atwan. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

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Bernie Sanders to Larry David: Come join on me campaign trail!

Bernie Sanders has a pretty good sense of humor. He responded to Larry David's "Saturday Night Live" impression of him by telling George Stephanopoulos on "This Week" that he'd like to take him out campaigning with him. “I think we'll use Larry at our next rally. He does better than I do,” Sanders said. "He seems to have nailed you!" Stephanopoulos marvels. Watch "SNL's" brilliant parody of the first Democratic debate here. And watch Sanders on "This Week" here.

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Margaret Atwood on our real-life dystopia: “What really worries me is creeping dictatorship”

The down-on-their-luck protagonists of Margaret Atwood’s new novel "The Heart Goes Last" become fed up with living out of their car, so they move to a for-profit prison. It’s the near future, shortly after a new financial collapse, and Positron/Consilience — a gated community and a jail all in one — offers Charmaine and Stan the security of a comfortable middle-class existence, every other month; the inhabitants take turns being jailers living in houses and prisoners in cells. This being a Margaret Atwood novel, things don’t work out quite the way poor Stan and Charmaine hope, but the author of the dystopias "The Handmaid’s Tale" and the Maddaddam trilogy ("Oryx and Crake," "The Year of the Flood" and 2013’s "Maddaddam") insists she has just tweaked what’s already happening in the world, including forced labor in prisons and the erosion of civil liberties — what she sees as the “creeping dictatorship” at home in Canada under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who’s up for election on Monday. On the phone from a Brooklyn hotel, the ever-outspoken Atwood spoke with Salon about dystopias, robot sex and beer — in fiction and reality. You’re on the road at the moment — I guess there are limits to the use of the LongPen. I’ve hardly touched ground in Toronto for a month. The LongPen [a remote autograph device which Atwood invented in 2004, in part to relieve authors from heavy touring] has gone over into business and banking … There was a period when people were saying everything was going to be digital, but apparently it isn’t. Another of your ventures, Noobroo, the fundraising beer inspired by the brewing in Maddaddam, is on shelves now in Ontario. Were you involved in the beer’s creative process? Yeah, [the brewers, Beau’s] came over to our house with little bottles of powdered stuff, and then they had made a tea out of each of them, and then a blend. One of those ingredients tasted like old running shoes, but funnily enough, the blend that they made tasted better with the old running shoe thing than without it — it gave it a solidity.  In the ‘70s when we [Atwood and her partner, Graeme Gibson] lived on a farm, we made all different kinds of wine; we made beer. I think the biggest failure was the ginger beer. We let it go a little too long, and then we took the top off; the entire contents shot out like fireworks! Having written dystopias before, it seems you’ve outdone yourself with "The Heart Goes Last": It features a dystopia within a dystopia. It’s true — the outer dystopia is the thugs and living in your car; the inner dystopia is the Consilience/Positron project, so there are layers of utopianism and dystopianism, sort of like an Easter egg. Despite the darkness, there’s a lot of humour in the book. It is one of those kinds of literary constructions like "A Midsummer Night’s Dream" in which it’s funny for those watching but not for those to whom it’s actually happening, and indeed when you come to think of comedy itself, that is very often true. We laugh at others’ misfortunes. We do to a certain extent. If a person slips on a banana peel, it’s funny. If they slip on the banana peel and break their neck, then it isn’t. In the Maddaddam books, a pandemic wipes out so much of humanity; you carefully set out the details, whereas in "The Heart Goes Last," the reason for society’s collapse is rather vague. I think we pretty much do know what it was — it’s the same thing that happened in 2008, so it’s a financial collapse rather than a physical [one]. People did end up on their front lawns and living in their cars, and that is apparently ongoing. Do you see Positron/Consilience as a logical extension of current for-profit prisons? The problem with for-profit prisons is that you need an endless supply of prisoners to make it profitable, so there’s no incentive to make it such that criminality is actually reduced. Ultimately you want more criminality; at the very least, you want to be able to define criminality in such a way that enough people get put in prison so you can make a profit out of them. There’s also a clause in the U.S. constitution that says you can’t use slave labor — except when convicted criminals are involved. So all of that is going on right now; [the book offers] just a little twist on it. You write about people who have the power to change others’ lives by wiping out and changing data, which seems a relatively new development in literature — Forgery is very old. Think of it as a new form of forgery. What you’re doing is altering perceived reality and substituting a false version of it, and that can have good uses. For instance, a lot of people wouldn’t have escaped Nazi Germany if there hadn’t been good forgers. So a world in which nothing like this could ever happen would be really claustrophobic. It’s like any human tool: there’s potential good uses and bad uses. It depends on who’s got the power and what you think of those people. Recently, a political column you wrote for the National Post disappeared from the website and then reappeared, minus some cutting comments about Stephen Harper. What happened? Beats me! [laughs.] I can only suppose that someone at a higher level wanted it gone, and they were very foolish because they evidently didn’t understand how the internet works and how quickly people would notice [the disappearance]. And then, of course, people started parsing the missing pieces. The very things that they had wanted to conceal got a lot more attention than the other ones would have done. If they’d left [the piece] alone, it would have just blown by on the breeze. It wasn’t exactly a deep, dark, heavy, important piece of commentary. It was about [politicians’] hair. [Laughs.] On one hand, I felt that I was in an Orwell novel, but on the other hand, I felt I was in some kind of zany comedy. On Twitter, you’ve been promoting electing “Anyone but Harper” in the Canadian election. At this point, do you feel any degree of confidence? I don’t know. … Having been born in ’39, what really worries me is creeping dictatorship. Bill C51 [the Antiterrorism Act, which legitimizes some forms of torture] + C24 [which allows for the revocation of Canadian citizenship] is just a recipe for that. Harper has been speaking out against the wearing of the niqab – We’re about to be inundated by a horde of face-covering, dangerous females. Like, as if. And he’s positioning himself as the one candidate who can stop this. [laughs.] Yeah, well, if people are stupid enough to let themselves be manipulated that way, then they deserve everything they get. … Harper kicked off years ago on the Sikh turban issue: he was all upset about Mounties wearing turbans. What is it about stuff on people’s heads? Turbans, niqabs, [Harper’s political opponent] Justin Trudeau’s hair … It sounds as if you view another Harper win as a dystopia waiting to happen. Well you know, once you start releasing big buckets of hate on one group, it means open season on anyone, really, so the question to ask is, who’s next? At one point in "The Heart Goes Last," Stan works at a warehouse that makes sex robots. Did you write about robots out of an interest in the technology, or as a means to explore the concept of free will? I think they’re connected. If you follow the artificial intelligence debate, and in fact dating back to the original "R.U.R." or Isaac Asimov’s "I, Robot," it always comes into the picture: At what point does an artificially created thing have free will? Or to flip it around, at what edge does our own free will cease to be plausible? I don’t know whether you’ve got up with Pepper robot: Pepper has apparently got the ability to read your emotions. Do we want that? I’m not sure. They’ve deployed Pepper in the East as a greeter, so he greets you as you come into the bank or whatever. And then they put some Peppers on sale for private use, and they put on a notification saying, “You shouldn’t have sex with Pepper.” Perhaps there could be a dangerous malfunction during sex, such as you describe in the novel — Well, if you look at Pepper, you’ll see it’s practically impossible: Pepper looks like a chess pawn on a rolling stand. It might depend on the dimensions of the chess pawn. No, the chess pawn is quite large. One of the epigraphs to the book is a Gizmodo review of sex toys. Well, it was a sofa. Who got that into their heads that would be a good idea? It was part of the research [for the book]. I was a bit surprised — I wasn’t expecting to find a sofa. So many modern-day literary dystopias, such as "The Hunger Games," offer us protagonists who are heroic, or at least represent humanity’s resourceful potential to overcome tyranny. "The Heart Goes Last" doesn’t do this … They’re romances. ["The Heart Goes Last"] is a comedy. In a romance, good is good; bad is bad. In comedy, people make mistakes, but it comes out OK anyway. In tragedy, people make mistakes, and it doesn’t. … In Shakespeare’s late plays, he takes all of the motifs he was using in tragedy earlier and makes them come out all right. You are in fact rewriting "The Tempest," are you not? Yes, that’s up next. That is one of those very plays in which he does that. It’s interesting how that island is a paradise for some and a hellhole to others. I’m not setting that in the future. Breathe a sigh of relief.The down-on-their-luck protagonists of Margaret Atwood’s new novel "The Heart Goes Last" become fed up with living out of their car, so they move to a for-profit prison. It’s the near future, shortly after a new financial collapse, and Positron/Consilience — a gated community and a jail all in one — offers Charmaine and Stan the security of a comfortable middle-class existence, every other month; the inhabitants take turns being jailers living in houses and prisoners in cells. This being a Margaret Atwood novel, things don’t work out quite the way poor Stan and Charmaine hope, but the author of the dystopias "The Handmaid’s Tale" and the Maddaddam trilogy ("Oryx and Crake," "The Year of the Flood" and 2013’s "Maddaddam") insists she has just tweaked what’s already happening in the world, including forced labor in prisons and the erosion of civil liberties — what she sees as the “creeping dictatorship” at home in Canada under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who’s up for election on Monday. On the phone from a Brooklyn hotel, the ever-outspoken Atwood spoke with Salon about dystopias, robot sex and beer — in fiction and reality. You’re on the road at the moment — I guess there are limits to the use of the LongPen. I’ve hardly touched ground in Toronto for a month. The LongPen [a remote autograph device which Atwood invented in 2004, in part to relieve authors from heavy touring] has gone over into business and banking … There was a period when people were saying everything was going to be digital, but apparently it isn’t. Another of your ventures, Noobroo, the fundraising beer inspired by the brewing in Maddaddam, is on shelves now in Ontario. Were you involved in the beer’s creative process? Yeah, [the brewers, Beau’s] came over to our house with little bottles of powdered stuff, and then they had made a tea out of each of them, and then a blend. One of those ingredients tasted like old running shoes, but funnily enough, the blend that they made tasted better with the old running shoe thing than without it — it gave it a solidity.  In the ‘70s when we [Atwood and her partner, Graeme Gibson] lived on a farm, we made all different kinds of wine; we made beer. I think the biggest failure was the ginger beer. We let it go a little too long, and then we took the top off; the entire contents shot out like fireworks! Having written dystopias before, it seems you’ve outdone yourself with "The Heart Goes Last": It features a dystopia within a dystopia. It’s true — the outer dystopia is the thugs and living in your car; the inner dystopia is the Consilience/Positron project, so there are layers of utopianism and dystopianism, sort of like an Easter egg. Despite the darkness, there’s a lot of humour in the book. It is one of those kinds of literary constructions like "A Midsummer Night’s Dream" in which it’s funny for those watching but not for those to whom it’s actually happening, and indeed when you come to think of comedy itself, that is very often true. We laugh at others’ misfortunes. We do to a certain extent. If a person slips on a banana peel, it’s funny. If they slip on the banana peel and break their neck, then it isn’t. In the Maddaddam books, a pandemic wipes out so much of humanity; you carefully set out the details, whereas in "The Heart Goes Last," the reason for society’s collapse is rather vague. I think we pretty much do know what it was — it’s the same thing that happened in 2008, so it’s a financial collapse rather than a physical [one]. People did end up on their front lawns and living in their cars, and that is apparently ongoing. Do you see Positron/Consilience as a logical extension of current for-profit prisons? The problem with for-profit prisons is that you need an endless supply of prisoners to make it profitable, so there’s no incentive to make it such that criminality is actually reduced. Ultimately you want more criminality; at the very least, you want to be able to define criminality in such a way that enough people get put in prison so you can make a profit out of them. There’s also a clause in the U.S. constitution that says you can’t use slave labor — except when convicted criminals are involved. So all of that is going on right now; [the book offers] just a little twist on it. You write about people who have the power to change others’ lives by wiping out and changing data, which seems a relatively new development in literature — Forgery is very old. Think of it as a new form of forgery. What you’re doing is altering perceived reality and substituting a false version of it, and that can have good uses. For instance, a lot of people wouldn’t have escaped Nazi Germany if there hadn’t been good forgers. So a world in which nothing like this could ever happen would be really claustrophobic. It’s like any human tool: there’s potential good uses and bad uses. It depends on who’s got the power and what you think of those people. Recently, a political column you wrote for the National Post disappeared from the website and then reappeared, minus some cutting comments about Stephen Harper. What happened? Beats me! [laughs.] I can only suppose that someone at a higher level wanted it gone, and they were very foolish because they evidently didn’t understand how the internet works and how quickly people would notice [the disappearance]. And then, of course, people started parsing the missing pieces. The very things that they had wanted to conceal got a lot more attention than the other ones would have done. If they’d left [the piece] alone, it would have just blown by on the breeze. It wasn’t exactly a deep, dark, heavy, important piece of commentary. It was about [politicians’] hair. [Laughs.] On one hand, I felt that I was in an Orwell novel, but on the other hand, I felt I was in some kind of zany comedy. On Twitter, you’ve been promoting electing “Anyone but Harper” in the Canadian election. At this point, do you feel any degree of confidence? I don’t know. … Having been born in ’39, what really worries me is creeping dictatorship. Bill C51 [the Antiterrorism Act, which legitimizes some forms of torture] + C24 [which allows for the revocation of Canadian citizenship] is just a recipe for that. Harper has been speaking out against the wearing of the niqab – We’re about to be inundated by a horde of face-covering, dangerous females. Like, as if. And he’s positioning himself as the one candidate who can stop this. [laughs.] Yeah, well, if people are stupid enough to let themselves be manipulated that way, then they deserve everything they get. … Harper kicked off years ago on the Sikh turban issue: he was all upset about Mounties wearing turbans. What is it about stuff on people’s heads? Turbans, niqabs, [Harper’s political opponent] Justin Trudeau’s hair … It sounds as if you view another Harper win as a dystopia waiting to happen. Well you know, once you start releasing big buckets of hate on one group, it means open season on anyone, really, so the question to ask is, who’s next? At one point in "The Heart Goes Last," Stan works at a warehouse that makes sex robots. Did you write about robots out of an interest in the technology, or as a means to explore the concept of free will? I think they’re connected. If you follow the artificial intelligence debate, and in fact dating back to the original "R.U.R." or Isaac Asimov’s "I, Robot," it always comes into the picture: At what point does an artificially created thing have free will? Or to flip it around, at what edge does our own free will cease to be plausible? I don’t know whether you’ve got up with Pepper robot: Pepper has apparently got the ability to read your emotions. Do we want that? I’m not sure. They’ve deployed Pepper in the East as a greeter, so he greets you as you come into the bank or whatever. And then they put some Peppers on sale for private use, and they put on a notification saying, “You shouldn’t have sex with Pepper.” Perhaps there could be a dangerous malfunction during sex, such as you describe in the novel — Well, if you look at Pepper, you’ll see it’s practically impossible: Pepper looks like a chess pawn on a rolling stand. It might depend on the dimensions of the chess pawn. No, the chess pawn is quite large. One of the epigraphs to the book is a Gizmodo review of sex toys. Well, it was a sofa. Who got that into their heads that would be a good idea? It was part of the research [for the book]. I was a bit surprised — I wasn’t expecting to find a sofa. So many modern-day literary dystopias, such as "The Hunger Games," offer us protagonists who are heroic, or at least represent humanity’s resourceful potential to overcome tyranny. "The Heart Goes Last" doesn’t do this … They’re romances. ["The Heart Goes Last"] is a comedy. In a romance, good is good; bad is bad. In comedy, people make mistakes, but it comes out OK anyway. In tragedy, people make mistakes, and it doesn’t. … In Shakespeare’s late plays, he takes all of the motifs he was using in tragedy earlier and makes them come out all right. You are in fact rewriting "The Tempest," are you not? Yes, that’s up next. That is one of those very plays in which he does that. It’s interesting how that island is a paradise for some and a hellhole to others. I’m not setting that in the future. Breathe a sigh of relief.The down-on-their-luck protagonists of Margaret Atwood’s new novel "The Heart Goes Last" become fed up with living out of their car, so they move to a for-profit prison. It’s the near future, shortly after a new financial collapse, and Positron/Consilience — a gated community and a jail all in one — offers Charmaine and Stan the security of a comfortable middle-class existence, every other month; the inhabitants take turns being jailers living in houses and prisoners in cells. This being a Margaret Atwood novel, things don’t work out quite the way poor Stan and Charmaine hope, but the author of the dystopias "The Handmaid’s Tale" and the Maddaddam trilogy ("Oryx and Crake," "The Year of the Flood" and 2013’s "Maddaddam") insists she has just tweaked what’s already happening in the world, including forced labor in prisons and the erosion of civil liberties — what she sees as the “creeping dictatorship” at home in Canada under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who’s up for election on Monday. On the phone from a Brooklyn hotel, the ever-outspoken Atwood spoke with Salon about dystopias, robot sex and beer — in fiction and reality. You’re on the road at the moment — I guess there are limits to the use of the LongPen. I’ve hardly touched ground in Toronto for a month. The LongPen [a remote autograph device which Atwood invented in 2004, in part to relieve authors from heavy touring] has gone over into business and banking … There was a period when people were saying everything was going to be digital, but apparently it isn’t. Another of your ventures, Noobroo, the fundraising beer inspired by the brewing in Maddaddam, is on shelves now in Ontario. Were you involved in the beer’s creative process? Yeah, [the brewers, Beau’s] came over to our house with little bottles of powdered stuff, and then they had made a tea out of each of them, and then a blend. One of those ingredients tasted like old running shoes, but funnily enough, the blend that they made tasted better with the old running shoe thing than without it — it gave it a solidity.  In the ‘70s when we [Atwood and her partner, Graeme Gibson] lived on a farm, we made all different kinds of wine; we made beer. I think the biggest failure was the ginger beer. We let it go a little too long, and then we took the top off; the entire contents shot out like fireworks! Having written dystopias before, it seems you’ve outdone yourself with "The Heart Goes Last": It features a dystopia within a dystopia. It’s true — the outer dystopia is the thugs and living in your car; the inner dystopia is the Consilience/Positron project, so there are layers of utopianism and dystopianism, sort of like an Easter egg. Despite the darkness, there’s a lot of humour in the book. It is one of those kinds of literary constructions like "A Midsummer Night’s Dream" in which it’s funny for those watching but not for those to whom it’s actually happening, and indeed when you come to think of comedy itself, that is very often true. We laugh at others’ misfortunes. We do to a certain extent. If a person slips on a banana peel, it’s funny. If they slip on the banana peel and break their neck, then it isn’t. In the Maddaddam books, a pandemic wipes out so much of humanity; you carefully set out the details, whereas in "The Heart Goes Last," the reason for society’s collapse is rather vague. I think we pretty much do know what it was — it’s the same thing that happened in 2008, so it’s a financial collapse rather than a physical [one]. People did end up on their front lawns and living in their cars, and that is apparently ongoing. Do you see Positron/Consilience as a logical extension of current for-profit prisons? The problem with for-profit prisons is that you need an endless supply of prisoners to make it profitable, so there’s no incentive to make it such that criminality is actually reduced. Ultimately you want more criminality; at the very least, you want to be able to define criminality in such a way that enough people get put in prison so you can make a profit out of them. There’s also a clause in the U.S. constitution that says you can’t use slave labor — except when convicted criminals are involved. So all of that is going on right now; [the book offers] just a little twist on it. You write about people who have the power to change others’ lives by wiping out and changing data, which seems a relatively new development in literature — Forgery is very old. Think of it as a new form of forgery. What you’re doing is altering perceived reality and substituting a false version of it, and that can have good uses. For instance, a lot of people wouldn’t have escaped Nazi Germany if there hadn’t been good forgers. So a world in which nothing like this could ever happen would be really claustrophobic. It’s like any human tool: there’s potential good uses and bad uses. It depends on who’s got the power and what you think of those people. Recently, a political column you wrote for the National Post disappeared from the website and then reappeared, minus some cutting comments about Stephen Harper. What happened? Beats me! [laughs.] I can only suppose that someone at a higher level wanted it gone, and they were very foolish because they evidently didn’t understand how the internet works and how quickly people would notice [the disappearance]. And then, of course, people started parsing the missing pieces. The very things that they had wanted to conceal got a lot more attention than the other ones would have done. If they’d left [the piece] alone, it would have just blown by on the breeze. It wasn’t exactly a deep, dark, heavy, important piece of commentary. It was about [politicians’] hair. [Laughs.] On one hand, I felt that I was in an Orwell novel, but on the other hand, I felt I was in some kind of zany comedy. On Twitter, you’ve been promoting electing “Anyone but Harper” in the Canadian election. At this point, do you feel any degree of confidence? I don’t know. … Having been born in ’39, what really worries me is creeping dictatorship. Bill C51 [the Antiterrorism Act, which legitimizes some forms of torture] + C24 [which allows for the revocation of Canadian citizenship] is just a recipe for that. Harper has been speaking out against the wearing of the niqab – We’re about to be inundated by a horde of face-covering, dangerous females. Like, as if. And he’s positioning himself as the one candidate who can stop this. [laughs.] Yeah, well, if people are stupid enough to let themselves be manipulated that way, then they deserve everything they get. … Harper kicked off years ago on the Sikh turban issue: he was all upset about Mounties wearing turbans. What is it about stuff on people’s heads? Turbans, niqabs, [Harper’s political opponent] Justin Trudeau’s hair … It sounds as if you view another Harper win as a dystopia waiting to happen. Well you know, once you start releasing big buckets of hate on one group, it means open season on anyone, really, so the question to ask is, who’s next? At one point in "The Heart Goes Last," Stan works at a warehouse that makes sex robots. Did you write about robots out of an interest in the technology, or as a means to explore the concept of free will? I think they’re connected. If you follow the artificial intelligence debate, and in fact dating back to the original "R.U.R." or Isaac Asimov’s "I, Robot," it always comes into the picture: At what point does an artificially created thing have free will? Or to flip it around, at what edge does our own free will cease to be plausible? I don’t know whether you’ve got up with Pepper robot: Pepper has apparently got the ability to read your emotions. Do we want that? I’m not sure. They’ve deployed Pepper in the East as a greeter, so he greets you as you come into the bank or whatever. And then they put some Peppers on sale for private use, and they put on a notification saying, “You shouldn’t have sex with Pepper.” Perhaps there could be a dangerous malfunction during sex, such as you describe in the novel — Well, if you look at Pepper, you’ll see it’s practically impossible: Pepper looks like a chess pawn on a rolling stand. It might depend on the dimensions of the chess pawn. No, the chess pawn is quite large. One of the epigraphs to the book is a Gizmodo review of sex toys. Well, it was a sofa. Who got that into their heads that would be a good idea? It was part of the research [for the book]. I was a bit surprised — I wasn’t expecting to find a sofa. So many modern-day literary dystopias, such as "The Hunger Games," offer us protagonists who are heroic, or at least represent humanity’s resourceful potential to overcome tyranny. "The Heart Goes Last" doesn’t do this … They’re romances. ["The Heart Goes Last"] is a comedy. In a romance, good is good; bad is bad. In comedy, people make mistakes, but it comes out OK anyway. In tragedy, people make mistakes, and it doesn’t. … In Shakespeare’s late plays, he takes all of the motifs he was using in tragedy earlier and makes them come out all right. You are in fact rewriting "The Tempest," are you not? Yes, that’s up next. That is one of those very plays in which he does that. It’s interesting how that island is a paradise for some and a hellhole to others. I’m not setting that in the future. Breathe a sigh of relief.

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White pols still don’t get it: What Hillary and Bernie still need to understand about #Blacklivesmatter

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Since when is Ronda Rousey a role model?

“Rowdy” Ronda Rousey is an incredible fighter, an Olympian, a movie star, maybe even a burgeoning fashonista and — if you go by countless Internet headlines about the UFC women’s bantamweight champion — an icon and a role model. Rousey started fighting in 2011 and quickly captured the attention of MMA fans. She joined the UFC in 2013, but didn’t ascend to international superstardom until recently, in part thanks to roles in "The Expendables 3," "Entourage" and "Furious 7." When she finally did become a crossover hit, it was massive. Not many MMA fighters receive coverage in The New Yorker and The New York Times, nor do they get shoutouts from celebrities like Beyoncé, Chris Pratt, Shaq and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. And the people of Brazil don’t start crying upon the sight of other celebrities and sports stars like they did with Rousey. While Rousey is all people say she is (and more) athletically, outside of martial feats, her role model status is questionable. First, Rousey has a history of highly transphobic remarks and flat-out ignorance when it comes to trans athletes. In 2013, when UFC fighter Matt Mitrione made offensive comments about transgender MMA fighter Fallon Fox, calling her a “lying, sick, sociopathic, disgusting freak,” the New York Post asked Rousey for her thoughts on Mitrione’s words. Rousey said he expressed himself “extremely poorly” and that she could “understand the UFC doesn’t want to be associated with views like that.” But in that same interview, Rousey didn’t exactly demonstrate a predilection for sensitivity. “She can try hormones, chop her pecker off, but it’s still the same bone structure a man has,” Rousey said about Fox. “What if she became UFC champion and we had a transgender women’s champion? It’s a very socially difficult situation.” It’s only a “socially difficult” situation thanks to people like Rousey. Earlier this year, Rousey tried softening her words — though not changing her opinion — in an interview with the Huffington Post. “From what I’ve read, it seems if like you’ve already gone through puberty as a man, even if you really want to rid yourself of those physical advantages, I just don’t think science is there yet.” Rousey studied the wrong “science,” because claims of supposed transgender superiority in athletics are categorically false and have zero scientific backing. But her insensitive musings go beyond transmisogyny and transphobia. This summer, Rousey decried what she called a “do-nothing bitch”:

"I have this one term for the kind of woman that my mother raised me to not be and I call it a 'do-nothing bitch.' The kind of chick that just, like, tries to be pretty and be taken care of by somebody else. That's why I think it's hilarious, like, that people like say that my body looks masculine or something like that. I’m just like, listen, just because my body was developed for a purpose other than fucking millionaires doesn’t mean it’s masculine. I think it’s femininely badass as fuck. Because there’s not a single muscle on my body that isn’t for a purpose. Because I’m not a do-nothing bitch."

Being proud of your body is great. Burying other women because they have a different body than yours is not. As Alanna Vagianos noted in the Huffington Post, Rousey’s DNB speech is “certainly not empowering, and it certainly does nothing to combat the large issues that create a society where athletic bodies like Rousey’s are judged as less than.” Despite tone deaf and responsive commentary, Rousey became the darling of the Internet media after the ESPYs. She won the “Best Fighter of the Year” award and called out Floyd Mayweather for his history of domestic violence. “I wonder how Floyd feels being beat by a woman for once,” she said. Rousey didn’t quit her verbal blitz, claiming she made more money per second than Mayweather. The feud spawned billions of “who wins in a fight between Ronda Rousey and Floyd Mayweather???” clickbait takes. Domestic violence is abhorrent. Yet Rousey is currently dating UFC fighter Travis Browne — a man accused of domestic abuse in his previous relationship. In August, his wife Jenna Renee Webb said she’d be pressing charges against Browne. Though a third-party investigation done at the behest of the UFC found “inconclusive evidence” of these claims. It gets worse. In her book “My Fight/Your Fight,” Rousey wrote that her then-boyfriend (she used the pseudonym “Snappers McCreepy”) was taking nude pictures of her without her permission. Her reaction follows:

"I deleted the photos. Then I erased the hard drive. Then I waited for Snappers McCreepy to come home from work. I stood frozen like a statue in his kitchen, getting angrier and angrier. I started cracking my knuckles and clenched my teeth. The longer I waited, the madder I got. Forty-five minutes later, he walked in the door. He saw my face and froze. He asked what was wrong and when I didn’t say anything, he started to cry. I slapped him across the face so hard my hand hurt."

Rousey then wrote that “Snappers McCreepy” begged her to let him explain. She refused. He was blocking the door and wouldn’t move out of the way. So she “punched him in the face with a straight right, then a left hook.” She slapped him again. He still didn’t move, so she “grabbed him by the neck of his hoodie, kneed him in the face, and tossed him aside on the kitchen floor.” Rousey had a right to make Mr. McCreepy move out of her way, and what he did to her was extremely wrong, but the incident seems a bit excessive nonetheless. Personal interactions aside, after the Newtown massacre, Rousey raised eyebrows on Twitter when she retweeted a Sandy Hook truther video. When criticized, she tweeted: “asking questions is more patriotic than blindly accepting what you’re told.” Her manager issued a pathetic non-apology and UFC president Dana White said there was no issue and the real problem was “people are fucking pussies.” Why do we tolerate this from Rousey when other celebrities were sacrificed on the altar of public outrage for much less? It’s an easy answer for the MMA media. They’re largely subservient to the UFC since the UFC issues press credentials. Write the wrong article and you’ll find your website on the outside looking in. The dissident MMA site CagePotato (disclosure: I worked for CagePotato in the past) ran an entire series on the undue influence the UFC has over the MMA media. Two years ago, Deadspin published a leaked memo from Bleacher Report (I worked for Bleacher Report in the past, too) detailing “things you don’t do” when writing about the UFC. This summer, UFC president Dana White suggested on Twitter that he paid USA Today for coverage. But that’s the MMA media – a horde of fanboys and UFC bootlickers. What about the mainstream entertainment  media? What’s their excuse? Maybe the answer is MMA — a sport rife with misogyny and other twisted views — expects less than perfect behavior from its stars; supremacy inside the cage and sordidness outside of it are accepted. And perhaps the mainstream media finds the narrative of an unstoppable, badass warrior woman (who happens to be conventionally attractive and white, because if she wasn’t, they’d probably be writing horrific, offensive articles about her) destroying everything in her path irresistible at a time when feminism is at the forefront of the cultural zeitgeist.

There’s “problematic fave” and then there’s flat-out bad person. The Mary Sue’s Teresa Jusino nailed it when she wrote “Rousey is a hypocrite who flouts gender norms when it suits her, but throws women under the bus when it doesn’t.”

She’s also a transphobe, a body-shamer, and a Sandy Hook truther. A winning combination inside the Octagon, perhaps, but certainly not outside of it. Ronda Rousey isn’t a hero. Ronda Rousey isn’t a role model. Ronda Rousey beats people up in a cage. Let’s not pretend she does more than that.

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“Game of Thrones” wouldn’t be the same without him: Meet the man who made the Dothraki speak

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It’s far worse than it sounds: Climate change is making our winters shorter

If winter comes… spring’s going to be closer-than-usual behind. New research shows that as a result of rising temperatures caused by global climate change, the first leaves and buds of spring will begin arriving at least three weeks ahead of time in the United States. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison examined the variations and trends in the onset of spring across the Northern Hemisphere’s temperate regions and calculated that the onset of spring plant growth will shift by a median of three weeks earlier over the next century. Their findings were published in the journal Environmental Research Letters yesterday. The prospect of shorter winters probably seem like great news for those who have suffered through several long and freezing cold spells recently, but it’s definitely bad tidings for many spring season plants and for animals that rely on them for sustenance. The change will have far-reaching impact on the growing season of plants and could, as a result, affect for our food security as well. In the natural world, plants and animas life cycles are adapted to the seasons and resource availability. For instance, some migratory birds cope with winter conditions, when food is scarce, by migrating to a warmer climate. Others, like bears and squirrels, do the same by hibernating. Both migration and hibernation are sensitive to seasonal changes. So when the climate goes out of whack — or as scientists would say, when there’s a “phonological mismatch”  — it means trouble. (There have already been reports about warmer weather driving bears out of hibernation early this year.) “Our projections show that winter will be shorter — which sound great for those of us in Wisconsin,” Andrew Allstadt, one of the authors of the study, said in a statement. “But long distance migratory birds, for example, time their migration based on day length in their winter range. They may arrive in their breeding ground to find that the plant resources that they require are already gone.” The researchers observed that the Pacific Northwest and Mountainous regions of the western US would see the biggest shift — they estimate spring will arrive nearly a month early in these regions by 2100. The shift will be the smallest in the southern regions, where spring already arrives early, The researchers also predicted that there would be fewer “false springs” — when freezing temperatures return unexpectedly after spring plant growth has begun — across most of the country, except in certain parts of the western Great Plains, which is projected to see an increase this particular weather phenomena. "This is important as false springs can damage plant production cycles in natural and agricultural systems" Allstadt said. “In some cases, an entire crop can be lost.” The researchers now plant to expand their inquiry to extreme weather events such as droughts and heat waves. "We are particularly interested in how these affect bird populations in wildlife refuges," Allstadt said.If winter comes… spring’s going to be closer-than-usual behind. New research shows that as a result of rising temperatures caused by global climate change, the first leaves and buds of spring will begin arriving at least three weeks ahead of time in the United States. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison examined the variations and trends in the onset of spring across the Northern Hemisphere’s temperate regions and calculated that the onset of spring plant growth will shift by a median of three weeks earlier over the next century. Their findings were published in the journal Environmental Research Letters yesterday. The prospect of shorter winters probably seem like great news for those who have suffered through several long and freezing cold spells recently, but it’s definitely bad tidings for many spring season plants and for animals that rely on them for sustenance. The change will have far-reaching impact on the growing season of plants and could, as a result, affect for our food security as well. In the natural world, plants and animas life cycles are adapted to the seasons and resource availability. For instance, some migratory birds cope with winter conditions, when food is scarce, by migrating to a warmer climate. Others, like bears and squirrels, do the same by hibernating. Both migration and hibernation are sensitive to seasonal changes. So when the climate goes out of whack — or as scientists would say, when there’s a “phonological mismatch”  — it means trouble. (There have already been reports about warmer weather driving bears out of hibernation early this year.) “Our projections show that winter will be shorter — which sound great for those of us in Wisconsin,” Andrew Allstadt, one of the authors of the study, said in a statement. “But long distance migratory birds, for example, time their migration based on day length in their winter range. They may arrive in their breeding ground to find that the plant resources that they require are already gone.” The researchers observed that the Pacific Northwest and Mountainous regions of the western US would see the biggest shift — they estimate spring will arrive nearly a month early in these regions by 2100. The shift will be the smallest in the southern regions, where spring already arrives early, The researchers also predicted that there would be fewer “false springs” — when freezing temperatures return unexpectedly after spring plant growth has begun — across most of the country, except in certain parts of the western Great Plains, which is projected to see an increase this particular weather phenomena. "This is important as false springs can damage plant production cycles in natural and agricultural systems" Allstadt said. “In some cases, an entire crop can be lost.” The researchers now plant to expand their inquiry to extreme weather events such as droughts and heat waves. "We are particularly interested in how these affect bird populations in wildlife refuges," Allstadt said.If winter comes… spring’s going to be closer-than-usual behind. New research shows that as a result of rising temperatures caused by global climate change, the first leaves and buds of spring will begin arriving at least three weeks ahead of time in the United States. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison examined the variations and trends in the onset of spring across the Northern Hemisphere’s temperate regions and calculated that the onset of spring plant growth will shift by a median of three weeks earlier over the next century. Their findings were published in the journal Environmental Research Letters yesterday. The prospect of shorter winters probably seem like great news for those who have suffered through several long and freezing cold spells recently, but it’s definitely bad tidings for many spring season plants and for animals that rely on them for sustenance. The change will have far-reaching impact on the growing season of plants and could, as a result, affect for our food security as well. In the natural world, plants and animas life cycles are adapted to the seasons and resource availability. For instance, some migratory birds cope with winter conditions, when food is scarce, by migrating to a warmer climate. Others, like bears and squirrels, do the same by hibernating. Both migration and hibernation are sensitive to seasonal changes. So when the climate goes out of whack — or as scientists would say, when there’s a “phonological mismatch”  — it means trouble. (There have already been reports about warmer weather driving bears out of hibernation early this year.) “Our projections show that winter will be shorter — which sound great for those of us in Wisconsin,” Andrew Allstadt, one of the authors of the study, said in a statement. “But long distance migratory birds, for example, time their migration based on day length in their winter range. They may arrive in their breeding ground to find that the plant resources that they require are already gone.” The researchers observed that the Pacific Northwest and Mountainous regions of the western US would see the biggest shift — they estimate spring will arrive nearly a month early in these regions by 2100. The shift will be the smallest in the southern regions, where spring already arrives early, The researchers also predicted that there would be fewer “false springs” — when freezing temperatures return unexpectedly after spring plant growth has begun — across most of the country, except in certain parts of the western Great Plains, which is projected to see an increase this particular weather phenomena. "This is important as false springs can damage plant production cycles in natural and agricultural systems" Allstadt said. “In some cases, an entire crop can be lost.” The researchers now plant to expand their inquiry to extreme weather events such as droughts and heat waves. "We are particularly interested in how these affect bird populations in wildlife refuges," Allstadt said.

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The Pope wanted Hitler dead: The secret story of the Vatican’s war to kill the Nazi despot

At six in the morning on Sunday, 12 March, a procession snaked toward the bronze doors of St. Peter’s. Swiss Guards led the line, followed by barefoot friars with belts of rope. Pius took his place at the end, borne on a portable throne. Ostrich plumes stirred silently to either side, like quotation marks. Pius entered the basilica to a blare of silver trumpets and a burst of applause. Through pillars of incense he blessed the faces. At the High Altar, attendants placed on his shoulders a wool strip interwoven with black crosses. Outside, police pushed back the crowds. People climbed onto ledges and balanced on chimneys, straining to see the palace balcony. At noon Pius emerged. The cardinal deacon stood alongside him. Onto Pacelli’s dark head he lowered a crown of pearls, shaped like a beehive. “Receive this Tiara,” he said, “and know that you are the father of kings, the ruler of the world.” Germany’s ambassador to the Holy See, Diego von Bergen, reportedly said of the ceremony: “Very moving and beautiful, but it will be the last.” * As Pacelli was crowned, Hitler at tended a state ceremony in Berlin. In a Memorial Day speech at the State Opera House, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder said, “Wherever we gain a foothold, we will maintain it! Wherever a gap appears, we will bridge it! . . . Germany strikes swiftly and strongly!” Hitler reviewed honor guards, then placed a wreath at a memorial to the Unknown Soldier. That same day, he issued orders for his soldiers to occupy Czechoslovakia. On 15 March the German army entered Prague. Through snow and mist, on ice-bound roads, Hitler followed in his three-axel Mercedes, its bulletproof windows up. Himmler’s gang of 800 SS officers hunted undesirables. A papal agent cabled Rome, with “details obtained confidentially,” reporting the arrests of all who “had spoken and written against the Third Reich and its Führer.” Soon 487 Czech and Slovak Jesuits landed in prison camps, where it was “a common sight,” one witness said, “to see a priest dressed in rags, exhausted, pulling a car and behind him a youth in SA [Storm Troop] uniform, whip in hand.” Hitler’s seizure of Czechoslovakia put Europe in crisis. He had scrapped his pledge to respect Czech integrity, made at Munich six months before, which British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said guaranteed “peace in our time.” Now London condemned “Germany’s attempt to obtain world domination, which it was in the interest of all countries to resist.” Poland’s government, facing a German ultimatum over the disputed Danzig corridor, mobilized its troops. On 18 March, the papal agent in Warsaw reported “a state of tension” between the Reich and Poland “which could have the most serious consequences.” Another intelligence report reaching the Vatican called the situation “desperately grave.” Perhaps no pope in nearly a millennium had taken power amid such general fear. The scene paralleled that in 1073, when Charlemagne’s old empire imploded, and Europe needed only a spark to burn. “Even the election of the pope stood in the shadow of the Swastika,” Nazi labor leader Robert Ley boasted. “I am sure they spoke of nothing else than how to find a candidate for the chair of St. Peter who was more or less up to dealing with Adolf Hitler.” * The political crisis had in fact produced a political pope. Amid the gathering storm, the cardinals had elected the candidate most skilled in statecraft, in the quickest conclave in four centuries. His long career in the papal foreign service made Pacelli the dean of Church diplomats. He had hunted on horseback with Prussian generals, endured at dinner parties the rants of exiled kings, faced down armed revolutionaries with just his jeweled cross. As cardinal secretary of state, he had discreetly aligned with friendly states, and won Catholic rights from hostile ones. Useful to every government, a lackey to none, he impressed one German diplomat as “a politician to the high extreme.” Politics were in Pacelli’s blood. His grandfather had been interior minister of the Papal States, a belt of territories bigger than Denmark, which popes had ruled since the Dark Ages. Believing that these lands kept popes politically independent, the Pacellis fought to preserve them against Italian nationalists. The Pacellis lost. By 1870 the pope ruled only Vatican City, a diamond-shaped kingdom the size of a golf course. Born in Rome six years later, raised in the shadow of St. Peter’s, Eugenio Pacelli inherited a highly political sense of mission. As an altar boy, he prayed for the Papal States; in school essays, he protested secular claims; and as pope, he saw politics as religion by other means. Some thought his priestly mixing in politics a contradiction. Pacelli contained many contradictions. He visited more countries, and spoke more languages, than any previous pope—yet remained a homebody, who lived with his mother until he was forty-one. Eager to meet children, unafraid to deal with dictators, he was timid with bishops and priests. He led one of the planet’s most public lives, and one of its loneliest. He was familiar to billions, but his best friend was a goldfinch. He was open with strangers, pensive with friends. His aides could not see into his soul. To some he did not seem “a human being with impulses, emotions, passions”—but others recalled him weeping over the fate of the Jews. One observer found him “pathetic and tremendous,” another “despotic and insecure.” Half of him, it seemed, was always counteracting the other half. A dual devotion to piety and politics clove him deeply. No one could call him a mere Machiavellian, a Medici-pope: he said Mass daily, communed with God for hours, reported visions of Jesus and Mary. Visitors remarked on his saintly appearance; one called him “a man like a ray of light.” Yet those who thought Pius not of this world were mistaken. Hyperspirituality, a withdrawal into the sphere of the purely religious, found no favor with him. A US intelligence officer in Rome noted how much time Pius devoted to politics and how closely he supervised all aspects of the Vatican Foreign Office. While writing an encyclical on the Mystical Body of Christ, he was also assessing the likely strategic impact of atomic weapons. He judged them a “useful means of defense.” Even some who liked Pacelli disliked his concern with worldly power. “One is tempted to say that attention to the political is too much,” wrote Jacques Maritain, the French postwar ambassador to the Vatican, “considering the essential role of the Church.” The Church’s essential role, after all, was to save souls. But in practice, the spiritual purpose entailed a temporal one: the achievement of political conditions under which souls could be saved. Priests must baptize, say Mass, and consecrate marriages without interference from the state. A fear of state power structured Church thought: the Caesars had killed Peter and Paul, and Jesus. The pope therefore did not have one role, but two. He had to render to God what was God’s, and keep Caesar at bay. Every pope was in part a politician; some led armies. The papacy Pacelli inherited was as bipolar as he was. He merely encompassed, in compressed form, the existential problem of the Church: how to be a spiritual institution in a physical and highly political world. It was a problem that could not be solved, only managed. And if it was a dilemma which had caused twenty centuries of war between Church and state, climaxing just as Pacelli became pope, it was also a quandary that would, on his watch, put Catholicism in conflict with itself. For the tectonic pull of opposing tensions, of spiritual and temporal imperatives, opened a fissure in the foundations of the Church that could not be closed. Ideally, a pope’s spiritual function ought not clash with his political one. But if and when it did, which should take precedence? That was always a difficult question—but never more difficult than during the bloodiest years in history, when Pius the Twelfth would have to choose his answer. * On 1 September 1939, Pius awoke at around 6:00 a.m. at his summer residence, Castel Gandolfo, a medieval fortress straddling a dormant volcano. His housekeeper, Sister Pascalina, had just released his canaries from their cages when the bedside telephone rang. Answering in his usual manner, “E’qui Pacelli” (“Pacelli here”), he heard the trembling voice of Cardinal Luigi Maglione, relaying intelligence from the papal nuncio in Berlin: fifteen minutes earlier, the German Wehrmacht had surged into Poland. At first Pius carried on normally, papally. He shuffled to his private chapel and bent in prayer. Then, after a cold shower and an electric shave, he celebrated Mass, attended by Bavarian nuns. But at breakfast, Sister Pascalina recalled, he probed his rolls and coffee warily, “as if opening a stack of bills in the mail.” He ate little for the next six years. By war’s end, although he stood six feet tall, he would weigh only 125 pounds. His nerves frayed from moral and political burdens, he would remind Pascalina of a “famished robin or an overdriven horse.” With the sigh of a great sadness, his undersecretary of state, Domenico Tardini, reflected: “This man, who was peace-loving by temperament, education, and conviction, was to have what might be called a pontificate of war.” In war the Vatican tried to stay neutral. Because the pope represented Catholics in all nations, he had to appear unbiased. Taking sides would compel some Catholics to betray their country, and others their faith. But Poland was special. For centuries, the Poles had been a Catholic bulwark between Protestant Prussia and Orthodox Russia. Pius would recognize the exiled Polish government, not the Nazi protectorate. “Neutrality” described his official stance, not his real one. As he told France’s ambassador when Warsaw fell: “You know which side my sympathies lie. But I cannot say so.” As news of Poland’s agony spread, however, Pius felt compelled to speak. By October, the Vatican had received reports of Jews shot in synagogues and buried in ditches. The Nazis, moreover, were targeting Polish Catholics as well. They would eventually murder perhaps 2.4 million Catholic Poles in “nonmilitary killing operations.” The persecution of Polish Gentiles fell far short of the industrialized genocide visited on Europe’s Jews. But it had near-genocidal traits and prepared the way for what followed. On 20 October Pius issued a public statement. His encyclical Summi Pontificatus, known in English as Darkness over the Earth, began by denouncing attacks on Judaism. “Who among ‘the Soldiers of Christ’ does not feel himself incited to a more determined resistance, as he perceives Christ’s enemies wantonly break the Tables of God’s Commandments to substitute other tables and other standards stripped of the ethical content of the Revelation on Sinai?” Even at the cost of “torments or martyrdom,” he wrote, one “must confront such wickedness by saying: ‘Non licet; it is not allowed!’” Pius then stressed the “unity of the human race.” Underscoring that this unity refuted racism, he said he would consecrate bishops of twelve ethnicities in the Vatican crypt. He clinched the point by insisting that “the spirit, the teaching and the work of the Church can never be other than that which the Apostle of the Gentiles preached: ‘there is neither Gentile nor Jew.’” The world judged the work an attack on Nazi Germany. “Pope Condemns Dictators, Treaty Violators, Racism,” the New York Times announced in a front-page banner headline. “The unqualified condemnation which Pope Pius XII heaped on totalitarian, racist and materialistic theories of government in his encyclical Summi Pontificatus caused a profound stir,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported. “Although it had been expected that the Pope would attack ideologies hostile to the Catholic Church, few observers had expected so outspoken a document.” Pius even pledged to speak out again, if necessary. “We owe no greater debt to Our office and to Our time than to testify to the truth,” he wrote. “In the fulfillment of this, Our duty, we shall not let Ourselves be influenced by earthly considerations.” It was a valiant vow, and a vain one. He would not use the word “Jew” in public again until 1945. Allied and Jewish press agencies still hailed him as anti-Nazi during the war. But in time, his silence strained Catholic-Jewish relations, and reduced the moral credibility of the faith. Debated into the next century, the causes and meaning of that silence would become the principal enigma in both the biography of Pius and the history of the modern Church. Judging Pius by what he did not say, one could only damn him. With images of piles of skeletal corpses before his eyes; with women and young children compelled, by torture, to kill each other; with millions of innocents caged like criminals, butchered like cattle, and burned like trash—he should have spoken out. He had this duty, not only as pontiff, but as a person. After his first encyclical, he did reissue general distinctions between race-hatred and Christian love. Yet with the ethical coin of the Church, Pius proved frugal; toward what he privately termed “Satanic forces,” he showed public moderation; where no conscience could stay neutral, the Church seemed to be. During the world’s greatest moral crisis, its greatest moral leader seemed at a loss for words. But the Vatican did not work by words alone. By 20 October, when Pius put his name to Summi Pontficatus, he was enmeshed in a war behind the war. Those who later explored the maze of his policies, without a clue to his secret actions, wondered why he seemed so hostile toward Nazism, and then fell so silent. But when his secret acts are mapped, and made to overlay his public words, a stark correlation emerges. The last day during the war when Pius publicly said the word “Jew” is also, in fact, the first day history can document his choice to help kill Adolf Hitler. Excerpted from "Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler" by Mark Riebling. Published by Basic Books, a division of the Perseus Book Group. Copyright 2015 by Mark Riebling. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved. At six in the morning on Sunday, 12 March, a procession snaked toward the bronze doors of St. Peter’s. Swiss Guards led the line, followed by barefoot friars with belts of rope. Pius took his place at the end, borne on a portable throne. Ostrich plumes stirred silently to either side, like quotation marks. Pius entered the basilica to a blare of silver trumpets and a burst of applause. Through pillars of incense he blessed the faces. At the High Altar, attendants placed on his shoulders a wool strip interwoven with black crosses. Outside, police pushed back the crowds. People climbed onto ledges and balanced on chimneys, straining to see the palace balcony. At noon Pius emerged. The cardinal deacon stood alongside him. Onto Pacelli’s dark head he lowered a crown of pearls, shaped like a beehive. “Receive this Tiara,” he said, “and know that you are the father of kings, the ruler of the world.” Germany’s ambassador to the Holy See, Diego von Bergen, reportedly said of the ceremony: “Very moving and beautiful, but it will be the last.” * As Pacelli was crowned, Hitler at tended a state ceremony in Berlin. In a Memorial Day speech at the State Opera House, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder said, “Wherever we gain a foothold, we will maintain it! Wherever a gap appears, we will bridge it! . . . Germany strikes swiftly and strongly!” Hitler reviewed honor guards, then placed a wreath at a memorial to the Unknown Soldier. That same day, he issued orders for his soldiers to occupy Czechoslovakia. On 15 March the German army entered Prague. Through snow and mist, on ice-bound roads, Hitler followed in his three-axel Mercedes, its bulletproof windows up. Himmler’s gang of 800 SS officers hunted undesirables. A papal agent cabled Rome, with “details obtained confidentially,” reporting the arrests of all who “had spoken and written against the Third Reich and its Führer.” Soon 487 Czech and Slovak Jesuits landed in prison camps, where it was “a common sight,” one witness said, “to see a priest dressed in rags, exhausted, pulling a car and behind him a youth in SA [Storm Troop] uniform, whip in hand.” Hitler’s seizure of Czechoslovakia put Europe in crisis. He had scrapped his pledge to respect Czech integrity, made at Munich six months before, which British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said guaranteed “peace in our time.” Now London condemned “Germany’s attempt to obtain world domination, which it was in the interest of all countries to resist.” Poland’s government, facing a German ultimatum over the disputed Danzig corridor, mobilized its troops. On 18 March, the papal agent in Warsaw reported “a state of tension” between the Reich and Poland “which could have the most serious consequences.” Another intelligence report reaching the Vatican called the situation “desperately grave.” Perhaps no pope in nearly a millennium had taken power amid such general fear. The scene paralleled that in 1073, when Charlemagne’s old empire imploded, and Europe needed only a spark to burn. “Even the election of the pope stood in the shadow of the Swastika,” Nazi labor leader Robert Ley boasted. “I am sure they spoke of nothing else than how to find a candidate for the chair of St. Peter who was more or less up to dealing with Adolf Hitler.” * The political crisis had in fact produced a political pope. Amid the gathering storm, the cardinals had elected the candidate most skilled in statecraft, in the quickest conclave in four centuries. His long career in the papal foreign service made Pacelli the dean of Church diplomats. He had hunted on horseback with Prussian generals, endured at dinner parties the rants of exiled kings, faced down armed revolutionaries with just his jeweled cross. As cardinal secretary of state, he had discreetly aligned with friendly states, and won Catholic rights from hostile ones. Useful to every government, a lackey to none, he impressed one German diplomat as “a politician to the high extreme.” Politics were in Pacelli’s blood. His grandfather had been interior minister of the Papal States, a belt of territories bigger than Denmark, which popes had ruled since the Dark Ages. Believing that these lands kept popes politically independent, the Pacellis fought to preserve them against Italian nationalists. The Pacellis lost. By 1870 the pope ruled only Vatican City, a diamond-shaped kingdom the size of a golf course. Born in Rome six years later, raised in the shadow of St. Peter’s, Eugenio Pacelli inherited a highly political sense of mission. As an altar boy, he prayed for the Papal States; in school essays, he protested secular claims; and as pope, he saw politics as religion by other means. Some thought his priestly mixing in politics a contradiction. Pacelli contained many contradictions. He visited more countries, and spoke more languages, than any previous pope—yet remained a homebody, who lived with his mother until he was forty-one. Eager to meet children, unafraid to deal with dictators, he was timid with bishops and priests. He led one of the planet’s most public lives, and one of its loneliest. He was familiar to billions, but his best friend was a goldfinch. He was open with strangers, pensive with friends. His aides could not see into his soul. To some he did not seem “a human being with impulses, emotions, passions”—but others recalled him weeping over the fate of the Jews. One observer found him “pathetic and tremendous,” another “despotic and insecure.” Half of him, it seemed, was always counteracting the other half. A dual devotion to piety and politics clove him deeply. No one could call him a mere Machiavellian, a Medici-pope: he said Mass daily, communed with God for hours, reported visions of Jesus and Mary. Visitors remarked on his saintly appearance; one called him “a man like a ray of light.” Yet those who thought Pius not of this world were mistaken. Hyperspirituality, a withdrawal into the sphere of the purely religious, found no favor with him. A US intelligence officer in Rome noted how much time Pius devoted to politics and how closely he supervised all aspects of the Vatican Foreign Office. While writing an encyclical on the Mystical Body of Christ, he was also assessing the likely strategic impact of atomic weapons. He judged them a “useful means of defense.” Even some who liked Pacelli disliked his concern with worldly power. “One is tempted to say that attention to the political is too much,” wrote Jacques Maritain, the French postwar ambassador to the Vatican, “considering the essential role of the Church.” The Church’s essential role, after all, was to save souls. But in practice, the spiritual purpose entailed a temporal one: the achievement of political conditions under which souls could be saved. Priests must baptize, say Mass, and consecrate marriages without interference from the state. A fear of state power structured Church thought: the Caesars had killed Peter and Paul, and Jesus. The pope therefore did not have one role, but two. He had to render to God what was God’s, and keep Caesar at bay. Every pope was in part a politician; some led armies. The papacy Pacelli inherited was as bipolar as he was. He merely encompassed, in compressed form, the existential problem of the Church: how to be a spiritual institution in a physical and highly political world. It was a problem that could not be solved, only managed. And if it was a dilemma which had caused twenty centuries of war between Church and state, climaxing just as Pacelli became pope, it was also a quandary that would, on his watch, put Catholicism in conflict with itself. For the tectonic pull of opposing tensions, of spiritual and temporal imperatives, opened a fissure in the foundations of the Church that could not be closed. Ideally, a pope’s spiritual function ought not clash with his political one. But if and when it did, which should take precedence? That was always a difficult question—but never more difficult than during the bloodiest years in history, when Pius the Twelfth would have to choose his answer. * On 1 September 1939, Pius awoke at around 6:00 a.m. at his summer residence, Castel Gandolfo, a medieval fortress straddling a dormant volcano. His housekeeper, Sister Pascalina, had just released his canaries from their cages when the bedside telephone rang. Answering in his usual manner, “E’qui Pacelli” (“Pacelli here”), he heard the trembling voice of Cardinal Luigi Maglione, relaying intelligence from the papal nuncio in Berlin: fifteen minutes earlier, the German Wehrmacht had surged into Poland. At first Pius carried on normally, papally. He shuffled to his private chapel and bent in prayer. Then, after a cold shower and an electric shave, he celebrated Mass, attended by Bavarian nuns. But at breakfast, Sister Pascalina recalled, he probed his rolls and coffee warily, “as if opening a stack of bills in the mail.” He ate little for the next six years. By war’s end, although he stood six feet tall, he would weigh only 125 pounds. His nerves frayed from moral and political burdens, he would remind Pascalina of a “famished robin or an overdriven horse.” With the sigh of a great sadness, his undersecretary of state, Domenico Tardini, reflected: “This man, who was peace-loving by temperament, education, and conviction, was to have what might be called a pontificate of war.” In war the Vatican tried to stay neutral. Because the pope represented Catholics in all nations, he had to appear unbiased. Taking sides would compel some Catholics to betray their country, and others their faith. But Poland was special. For centuries, the Poles had been a Catholic bulwark between Protestant Prussia and Orthodox Russia. Pius would recognize the exiled Polish government, not the Nazi protectorate. “Neutrality” described his official stance, not his real one. As he told France’s ambassador when Warsaw fell: “You know which side my sympathies lie. But I cannot say so.” As news of Poland’s agony spread, however, Pius felt compelled to speak. By October, the Vatican had received reports of Jews shot in synagogues and buried in ditches. The Nazis, moreover, were targeting Polish Catholics as well. They would eventually murder perhaps 2.4 million Catholic Poles in “nonmilitary killing operations.” The persecution of Polish Gentiles fell far short of the industrialized genocide visited on Europe’s Jews. But it had near-genocidal traits and prepared the way for what followed. On 20 October Pius issued a public statement. His encyclical Summi Pontificatus, known in English as Darkness over the Earth, began by denouncing attacks on Judaism. “Who among ‘the Soldiers of Christ’ does not feel himself incited to a more determined resistance, as he perceives Christ’s enemies wantonly break the Tables of God’s Commandments to substitute other tables and other standards stripped of the ethical content of the Revelation on Sinai?” Even at the cost of “torments or martyrdom,” he wrote, one “must confront such wickedness by saying: ‘Non licet; it is not allowed!’” Pius then stressed the “unity of the human race.” Underscoring that this unity refuted racism, he said he would consecrate bishops of twelve ethnicities in the Vatican crypt. He clinched the point by insisting that “the spirit, the teaching and the work of the Church can never be other than that which the Apostle of the Gentiles preached: ‘there is neither Gentile nor Jew.’” The world judged the work an attack on Nazi Germany. “Pope Condemns Dictators, Treaty Violators, Racism,” the New York Times announced in a front-page banner headline. “The unqualified condemnation which Pope Pius XII heaped on totalitarian, racist and materialistic theories of government in his encyclical Summi Pontificatus caused a profound stir,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported. “Although it had been expected that the Pope would attack ideologies hostile to the Catholic Church, few observers had expected so outspoken a document.” Pius even pledged to speak out again, if necessary. “We owe no greater debt to Our office and to Our time than to testify to the truth,” he wrote. “In the fulfillment of this, Our duty, we shall not let Ourselves be influenced by earthly considerations.” It was a valiant vow, and a vain one. He would not use the word “Jew” in public again until 1945. Allied and Jewish press agencies still hailed him as anti-Nazi during the war. But in time, his silence strained Catholic-Jewish relations, and reduced the moral credibility of the faith. Debated into the next century, the causes and meaning of that silence would become the principal enigma in both the biography of Pius and the history of the modern Church. Judging Pius by what he did not say, one could only damn him. With images of piles of skeletal corpses before his eyes; with women and young children compelled, by torture, to kill each other; with millions of innocents caged like criminals, butchered like cattle, and burned like trash—he should have spoken out. He had this duty, not only as pontiff, but as a person. After his first encyclical, he did reissue general distinctions between race-hatred and Christian love. Yet with the ethical coin of the Church, Pius proved frugal; toward what he privately termed “Satanic forces,” he showed public moderation; where no conscience could stay neutral, the Church seemed to be. During the world’s greatest moral crisis, its greatest moral leader seemed at a loss for words. But the Vatican did not work by words alone. By 20 October, when Pius put his name to Summi Pontficatus, he was enmeshed in a war behind the war. Those who later explored the maze of his policies, without a clue to his secret actions, wondered why he seemed so hostile toward Nazism, and then fell so silent. But when his secret acts are mapped, and made to overlay his public words, a stark correlation emerges. The last day during the war when Pius publicly said the word “Jew” is also, in fact, the first day history can document his choice to help kill Adolf Hitler. Excerpted from "Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler" by Mark Riebling. Published by Basic Books, a division of the Perseus Book Group. Copyright 2015 by Mark Riebling. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved. At six in the morning on Sunday, 12 March, a procession snaked toward the bronze doors of St. Peter’s. Swiss Guards led the line, followed by barefoot friars with belts of rope. Pius took his place at the end, borne on a portable throne. Ostrich plumes stirred silently to either side, like quotation marks. Pius entered the basilica to a blare of silver trumpets and a burst of applause. Through pillars of incense he blessed the faces. At the High Altar, attendants placed on his shoulders a wool strip interwoven with black crosses. Outside, police pushed back the crowds. People climbed onto ledges and balanced on chimneys, straining to see the palace balcony. At noon Pius emerged. The cardinal deacon stood alongside him. Onto Pacelli’s dark head he lowered a crown of pearls, shaped like a beehive. “Receive this Tiara,” he said, “and know that you are the father of kings, the ruler of the world.” Germany’s ambassador to the Holy See, Diego von Bergen, reportedly said of the ceremony: “Very moving and beautiful, but it will be the last.” * As Pacelli was crowned, Hitler at tended a state ceremony in Berlin. In a Memorial Day speech at the State Opera House, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder said, “Wherever we gain a foothold, we will maintain it! Wherever a gap appears, we will bridge it! . . . Germany strikes swiftly and strongly!” Hitler reviewed honor guards, then placed a wreath at a memorial to the Unknown Soldier. That same day, he issued orders for his soldiers to occupy Czechoslovakia. On 15 March the German army entered Prague. Through snow and mist, on ice-bound roads, Hitler followed in his three-axel Mercedes, its bulletproof windows up. Himmler’s gang of 800 SS officers hunted undesirables. A papal agent cabled Rome, with “details obtained confidentially,” reporting the arrests of all who “had spoken and written against the Third Reich and its Führer.” Soon 487 Czech and Slovak Jesuits landed in prison camps, where it was “a common sight,” one witness said, “to see a priest dressed in rags, exhausted, pulling a car and behind him a youth in SA [Storm Troop] uniform, whip in hand.” Hitler’s seizure of Czechoslovakia put Europe in crisis. He had scrapped his pledge to respect Czech integrity, made at Munich six months before, which British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said guaranteed “peace in our time.” Now London condemned “Germany’s attempt to obtain world domination, which it was in the interest of all countries to resist.” Poland’s government, facing a German ultimatum over the disputed Danzig corridor, mobilized its troops. On 18 March, the papal agent in Warsaw reported “a state of tension” between the Reich and Poland “which could have the most serious consequences.” Another intelligence report reaching the Vatican called the situation “desperately grave.” Perhaps no pope in nearly a millennium had taken power amid such general fear. The scene paralleled that in 1073, when Charlemagne’s old empire imploded, and Europe needed only a spark to burn. “Even the election of the pope stood in the shadow of the Swastika,” Nazi labor leader Robert Ley boasted. “I am sure they spoke of nothing else than how to find a candidate for the chair of St. Peter who was more or less up to dealing with Adolf Hitler.” * The political crisis had in fact produced a political pope. Amid the gathering storm, the cardinals had elected the candidate most skilled in statecraft, in the quickest conclave in four centuries. His long career in the papal foreign service made Pacelli the dean of Church diplomats. He had hunted on horseback with Prussian generals, endured at dinner parties the rants of exiled kings, faced down armed revolutionaries with just his jeweled cross. As cardinal secretary of state, he had discreetly aligned with friendly states, and won Catholic rights from hostile ones. Useful to every government, a lackey to none, he impressed one German diplomat as “a politician to the high extreme.” Politics were in Pacelli’s blood. His grandfather had been interior minister of the Papal States, a belt of territories bigger than Denmark, which popes had ruled since the Dark Ages. Believing that these lands kept popes politically independent, the Pacellis fought to preserve them against Italian nationalists. The Pacellis lost. By 1870 the pope ruled only Vatican City, a diamond-shaped kingdom the size of a golf course. Born in Rome six years later, raised in the shadow of St. Peter’s, Eugenio Pacelli inherited a highly political sense of mission. As an altar boy, he prayed for the Papal States; in school essays, he protested secular claims; and as pope, he saw politics as religion by other means. Some thought his priestly mixing in politics a contradiction. Pacelli contained many contradictions. He visited more countries, and spoke more languages, than any previous pope—yet remained a homebody, who lived with his mother until he was forty-one. Eager to meet children, unafraid to deal with dictators, he was timid with bishops and priests. He led one of the planet’s most public lives, and one of its loneliest. He was familiar to billions, but his best friend was a goldfinch. He was open with strangers, pensive with friends. His aides could not see into his soul. To some he did not seem “a human being with impulses, emotions, passions”—but others recalled him weeping over the fate of the Jews. One observer found him “pathetic and tremendous,” another “despotic and insecure.” Half of him, it seemed, was always counteracting the other half. A dual devotion to piety and politics clove him deeply. No one could call him a mere Machiavellian, a Medici-pope: he said Mass daily, communed with God for hours, reported visions of Jesus and Mary. Visitors remarked on his saintly appearance; one called him “a man like a ray of light.” Yet those who thought Pius not of this world were mistaken. Hyperspirituality, a withdrawal into the sphere of the purely religious, found no favor with him. A US intelligence officer in Rome noted how much time Pius devoted to politics and how closely he supervised all aspects of the Vatican Foreign Office. While writing an encyclical on the Mystical Body of Christ, he was also assessing the likely strategic impact of atomic weapons. He judged them a “useful means of defense.” Even some who liked Pacelli disliked his concern with worldly power. “One is tempted to say that attention to the political is too much,” wrote Jacques Maritain, the French postwar ambassador to the Vatican, “considering the essential role of the Church.” The Church’s essential role, after all, was to save souls. But in practice, the spiritual purpose entailed a temporal one: the achievement of political conditions under which souls could be saved. Priests must baptize, say Mass, and consecrate marriages without interference from the state. A fear of state power structured Church thought: the Caesars had killed Peter and Paul, and Jesus. The pope therefore did not have one role, but two. He had to render to God what was God’s, and keep Caesar at bay. Every pope was in part a politician; some led armies. The papacy Pacelli inherited was as bipolar as he was. He merely encompassed, in compressed form, the existential problem of the Church: how to be a spiritual institution in a physical and highly political world. It was a problem that could not be solved, only managed. And if it was a dilemma which had caused twenty centuries of war between Church and state, climaxing just as Pacelli became pope, it was also a quandary that would, on his watch, put Catholicism in conflict with itself. For the tectonic pull of opposing tensions, of spiritual and temporal imperatives, opened a fissure in the foundations of the Church that could not be closed. Ideally, a pope’s spiritual function ought not clash with his political one. But if and when it did, which should take precedence? That was always a difficult question—but never more difficult than during the bloodiest years in history, when Pius the Twelfth would have to choose his answer. * On 1 September 1939, Pius awoke at around 6:00 a.m. at his summer residence, Castel Gandolfo, a medieval fortress straddling a dormant volcano. His housekeeper, Sister Pascalina, had just released his canaries from their cages when the bedside telephone rang. Answering in his usual manner, “E’qui Pacelli” (“Pacelli here”), he heard the trembling voice of Cardinal Luigi Maglione, relaying intelligence from the papal nuncio in Berlin: fifteen minutes earlier, the German Wehrmacht had surged into Poland. At first Pius carried on normally, papally. He shuffled to his private chapel and bent in prayer. Then, after a cold shower and an electric shave, he celebrated Mass, attended by Bavarian nuns. But at breakfast, Sister Pascalina recalled, he probed his rolls and coffee warily, “as if opening a stack of bills in the mail.” He ate little for the next six years. By war’s end, although he stood six feet tall, he would weigh only 125 pounds. His nerves frayed from moral and political burdens, he would remind Pascalina of a “famished robin or an overdriven horse.” With the sigh of a great sadness, his undersecretary of state, Domenico Tardini, reflected: “This man, who was peace-loving by temperament, education, and conviction, was to have what might be called a pontificate of war.” In war the Vatican tried to stay neutral. Because the pope represented Catholics in all nations, he had to appear unbiased. Taking sides would compel some Catholics to betray their country, and others their faith. But Poland was special. For centuries, the Poles had been a Catholic bulwark between Protestant Prussia and Orthodox Russia. Pius would recognize the exiled Polish government, not the Nazi protectorate. “Neutrality” described his official stance, not his real one. As he told France’s ambassador when Warsaw fell: “You know which side my sympathies lie. But I cannot say so.” As news of Poland’s agony spread, however, Pius felt compelled to speak. By October, the Vatican had received reports of Jews shot in synagogues and buried in ditches. The Nazis, moreover, were targeting Polish Catholics as well. They would eventually murder perhaps 2.4 million Catholic Poles in “nonmilitary killing operations.” The persecution of Polish Gentiles fell far short of the industrialized genocide visited on Europe’s Jews. But it had near-genocidal traits and prepared the way for what followed. On 20 October Pius issued a public statement. His encyclical Summi Pontificatus, known in English as Darkness over the Earth, began by denouncing attacks on Judaism. “Who among ‘the Soldiers of Christ’ does not feel himself incited to a more determined resistance, as he perceives Christ’s enemies wantonly break the Tables of God’s Commandments to substitute other tables and other standards stripped of the ethical content of the Revelation on Sinai?” Even at the cost of “torments or martyrdom,” he wrote, one “must confront such wickedness by saying: ‘Non licet; it is not allowed!’” Pius then stressed the “unity of the human race.” Underscoring that this unity refuted racism, he said he would consecrate bishops of twelve ethnicities in the Vatican crypt. He clinched the point by insisting that “the spirit, the teaching and the work of the Church can never be other than that which the Apostle of the Gentiles preached: ‘there is neither Gentile nor Jew.’” The world judged the work an attack on Nazi Germany. “Pope Condemns Dictators, Treaty Violators, Racism,” the New York Times announced in a front-page banner headline. “The unqualified condemnation which Pope Pius XII heaped on totalitarian, racist and materialistic theories of government in his encyclical Summi Pontificatus caused a profound stir,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported. “Although it had been expected that the Pope would attack ideologies hostile to the Catholic Church, few observers had expected so outspoken a document.” Pius even pledged to speak out again, if necessary. “We owe no greater debt to Our office and to Our time than to testify to the truth,” he wrote. “In the fulfillment of this, Our duty, we shall not let Ourselves be influenced by earthly considerations.” It was a valiant vow, and a vain one. He would not use the word “Jew” in public again until 1945. Allied and Jewish press agencies still hailed him as anti-Nazi during the war. But in time, his silence strained Catholic-Jewish relations, and reduced the moral credibility of the faith. Debated into the next century, the causes and meaning of that silence would become the principal enigma in both the biography of Pius and the history of the modern Church. Judging Pius by what he did not say, one could only damn him. With images of piles of skeletal corpses before his eyes; with women and young children compelled, by torture, to kill each other; with millions of innocents caged like criminals, butchered like cattle, and burned like trash—he should have spoken out. He had this duty, not only as pontiff, but as a person. After his first encyclical, he did reissue general distinctions between race-hatred and Christian love. Yet with the ethical coin of the Church, Pius proved frugal; toward what he privately termed “Satanic forces,” he showed public moderation; where no conscience could stay neutral, the Church seemed to be. During the world’s greatest moral crisis, its greatest moral leader seemed at a loss for words. But the Vatican did not work by words alone. By 20 October, when Pius put his name to Summi Pontficatus, he was enmeshed in a war behind the war. Those who later explored the maze of his policies, without a clue to his secret actions, wondered why he seemed so hostile toward Nazism, and then fell so silent. But when his secret acts are mapped, and made to overlay his public words, a stark correlation emerges. The last day during the war when Pius publicly said the word “Jew” is also, in fact, the first day history can document his choice to help kill Adolf Hitler. Excerpted from "Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler" by Mark Riebling. Published by Basic Books, a division of the Perseus Book Group. Copyright 2015 by Mark Riebling. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

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5 things that could change American minds about socialism

If Bernie Sanders were to win the Democratic presidential nomination, his chances of actually making it to the White House are somewhere between zero and nothing.

That, at least, is the view of some political observers. One of the reasons for their pessimism is Sanders’ political ideology: He’s a self-described "Democratic Socialist."

And the S-word frightens a lot of Americans.

A Pew Research Center survey conducted in December 2011, shortly after the Occupy Wall Street protests, which highlighted the growing wealth gap between the rich and the poor, found half of all Americans still had a positive view of capitalism, while 60 percent had a negative perception of socialism.

“Socialism is a far more divisive word (than capitalism), with wide differences of opinion along racial, generational, socioeconomic and political lines,” Pew said.

“Fully nine-in-ten conservative Republicans (90 percent) view socialism negatively, while nearly six-in-ten liberal Democrats (59 percent) react positively. Low-income Americans are twice as likely as higher-income Americans to offer a positive assessment of socialism (43 percent among those with incomes under $30,000, 22 percent among those earning $75,000 or more).”

A Gallup survey this summer found similar anti-socialist views among American voters, half of whom said they wouldn't vote for a socialist candidate.

It's not hard to see why this is. For many Americans the word "socialism" still carries the associations with authoritarianism that it acquired during the Cold War. That explains why some opponents of Obama's Affordable Care Act were calling it the same thing Ronald Reagan called Medicare in 1961: "socialized medicine." Combine those negative Cold War associations with the fact that a significant portion of the American electorate wants to shrink government, limit spending, and cut taxes, and you realize that Bernie Sanders has his work cut out for him if he's going to proudly wave the socialist flag.

One thing Sanders has on his side: social welfare policies enacted overseas in nations that consistently rank more highly than the United States in terms of happiness and prosperity. If Sanders can convince Americans voters that this is what he's talking about when he talks about "socialism," maybe he'll have a shot.

Here are five things other countries do that could change American minds about socialism.

Free baby stuff

Since the 1930s, the Finnish government has been issuing pregnant women with a cardboard box filled with the sort of stuff they will need when their baby is born: clothes, nappies, toys, sheets, blankets and a mattress. Babies often end up sleeping in the same box, which has been credited for the country's low infant mortality rate of two deaths per 1,000 live births in 2014 — one-third of the rate in the United States.

More than a year of paid parental leave

Sweden has, hands down, one of the best parental leave systems in the world. Parents are allowed to take 480 days, or 16 months, of paid leave to look after their children — biological or adopted. The leave only expires when the child is eight years old. If that wasn’t generous enough, the Swedish government wants to force new dads to take a minimum of three months paid leave.

Generous unemployment benefits

No job? No worries, at least if you are in Denmark and worked 52 weeks in the previous three years. Unemployed Danes are entitled to 90 percent of their average earnings. Despite the extremely generous allowance, the Danish unemployment rate was a seasonally adjusted 6.3 percent in August, one of the lowest in the European Union.

Free healthcare for everyone

Planning to have a baby? Go to France. The country’s universal health care system has long been lauded as one of the best in the world. It uses public and private funding to cover pretty much everyone, including the unemployed and undocumented immigrants applying for residency.

And it’s particularly generous to expecting mothers, as American Claire Lundberg found out when she got pregnant while living in Paris.

“From the sixth month of pregnancy to 11 days after a child’s birth, the government covers a woman’s medical expenses in full,” Lundberg wrote in Slate.

“… had I managed to book a bed in one of the public wards (of a hospital), my birth would have been completely free, paid for entirely by the government’s Assurance Maladie.”

Long holidays (that are paid)

Austrians get a lot of time off every year. A 2013 study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research found Austrians receive 38 statutory paid holiday and vacation days a year, topping a list of 21 rich countries that included 16 European nations, Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand and the United States, which ranked last with zero days. If Bernie Sanders were to win the Democratic presidential nomination, his chances of actually making it to the White House are somewhere between zero and nothing.

That, at least, is the view of some political observers. One of the reasons for their pessimism is Sanders’ political ideology: He’s a self-described "Democratic Socialist."

And the S-word frightens a lot of Americans.

A Pew Research Center survey conducted in December 2011, shortly after the Occupy Wall Street protests, which highlighted the growing wealth gap between the rich and the poor, found half of all Americans still had a positive view of capitalism, while 60 percent had a negative perception of socialism.

“Socialism is a far more divisive word (than capitalism), with wide differences of opinion along racial, generational, socioeconomic and political lines,” Pew said.

“Fully nine-in-ten conservative Republicans (90 percent) view socialism negatively, while nearly six-in-ten liberal Democrats (59 percent) react positively. Low-income Americans are twice as likely as higher-income Americans to offer a positive assessment of socialism (43 percent among those with incomes under $30,000, 22 percent among those earning $75,000 or more).”

A Gallup survey this summer found similar anti-socialist views among American voters, half of whom said they wouldn't vote for a socialist candidate.

It's not hard to see why this is. For many Americans the word "socialism" still carries the associations with authoritarianism that it acquired during the Cold War. That explains why some opponents of Obama's Affordable Care Act were calling it the same thing Ronald Reagan called Medicare in 1961: "socialized medicine." Combine those negative Cold War associations with the fact that a significant portion of the American electorate wants to shrink government, limit spending, and cut taxes, and you realize that Bernie Sanders has his work cut out for him if he's going to proudly wave the socialist flag.

One thing Sanders has on his side: social welfare policies enacted overseas in nations that consistently rank more highly than the United States in terms of happiness and prosperity. If Sanders can convince Americans voters that this is what he's talking about when he talks about "socialism," maybe he'll have a shot.

Here are five things other countries do that could change American minds about socialism.

Free baby stuff

Since the 1930s, the Finnish government has been issuing pregnant women with a cardboard box filled with the sort of stuff they will need when their baby is born: clothes, nappies, toys, sheets, blankets and a mattress. Babies often end up sleeping in the same box, which has been credited for the country's low infant mortality rate of two deaths per 1,000 live births in 2014 — one-third of the rate in the United States.

More than a year of paid parental leave

Sweden has, hands down, one of the best parental leave systems in the world. Parents are allowed to take 480 days, or 16 months, of paid leave to look after their children — biological or adopted. The leave only expires when the child is eight years old. If that wasn’t generous enough, the Swedish government wants to force new dads to take a minimum of three months paid leave.

Generous unemployment benefits

No job? No worries, at least if you are in Denmark and worked 52 weeks in the previous three years. Unemployed Danes are entitled to 90 percent of their average earnings. Despite the extremely generous allowance, the Danish unemployment rate was a seasonally adjusted 6.3 percent in August, one of the lowest in the European Union.

Free healthcare for everyone

Planning to have a baby? Go to France. The country’s universal health care system has long been lauded as one of the best in the world. It uses public and private funding to cover pretty much everyone, including the unemployed and undocumented immigrants applying for residency.

And it’s particularly generous to expecting mothers, as American Claire Lundberg found out when she got pregnant while living in Paris.

“From the sixth month of pregnancy to 11 days after a child’s birth, the government covers a woman’s medical expenses in full,” Lundberg wrote in Slate.

“… had I managed to book a bed in one of the public wards (of a hospital), my birth would have been completely free, paid for entirely by the government’s Assurance Maladie.”

Long holidays (that are paid)

Austrians get a lot of time off every year. A 2013 study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research found Austrians receive 38 statutory paid holiday and vacation days a year, topping a list of 21 rich countries that included 16 European nations, Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand and the United States, which ranked last with zero days.

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