Category Archives: Analysis

Hurricane Harvey and public and private disaster in Houston

Jia Tolentino writes: When Houston floods, it turns into a locked circular labyrinth. The city, my home town, is laid out like a wagon wheel: downtown sits at the center, surrounded by three concentric circles, which are bisected by highways in every direction. The first loop, Interstate 610, is thirty-eight miles long, and corrals the Inner Loop neighborhoods. Another round of suburban neighborhoods surrounds the Loop, and is bounded by the eighty-eight-mile-long Beltway 8. Then, the truly sprawling suburbs (Spring, Sugar Land, the Woodlands) surround the Beltway. All told, the Greater Houston Area is gargantuan—at over ten thousand square miles, it’s bigger than New Jersey—and, with upward of six million residents, it’s far more populous and diverse than outsiders tend to guess. Houston is also, famously, largely unregulated: zoning laws are minimal, and the unceasing outward development has, with official permission, drastically inhibited drainage. The freeway system holds the city together, keeping a huge, dispersed population connected. But in a storm this lifeline becomes a trap. Houston is flat, and it sits just fifty feet above sea level; after the bayous overflow, the rain collects on the roads. When a flood hits, driving in Houston feels like a video game turned real and deadly. There are sudden impasses everywhere; ingenuity can’t save you; once the spokes of the wheel go under, there’s nowhere to go.

Houston is the fourth-largest city in America, and right now much of it is underwater. Things will get worse this week. Tropical Storm Harvey, which made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane, is sluggishly lingering, and will continue to pummel the flooded city. Forecasts say that Houston may get fifty inches of rain from this storm—which is the city’s average annual rainfall. Five people have died; many more will be injured. Houston’s safety-net hospital started evacuations on Sunday. The Texas Medical Center, the largest medical complex in the world, closed its submarine doors, designed, after Tropical Storm Allison, to protect the facility from flooding. Local news crews have struggled heroically to report out the disaster; one newscaster saved a truck driver’s life on air. The National Guard saved between twenty and twenty-five nursing-home residents in Dickinson after a harrowing photo went viral. My dad, who got stuck in high water on Saturday night, is one of thousands who have been rescued by Houston police. Harris County has been calling for citizens to help conduct rescues. All over the city, the roads have turned into rivers. Much of what’s visible looks like a nightmare; what makes me even sicker is imagining all the fear that we’ll never see. [Continue reading…]

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Trump unusually silent after aides challenge him

Politico reports: President Donald Trump is not happy with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council, for publicly criticizing his response to violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. But it appears there is little he is planning to do about it, according to people who have spoken to him.

The unusually direct challenges from a Cabinet secretary and senior administration official seemed to make little more than a surface ripple in the swirling melodrama of the Trump White House, even as the president fumed privately about it.

Tillerson, when asked over the weekend whether Trump represented American values with his comments, gave a succinct response: “The president speaks for himself.” When asked whether he was separating himself from the president’s comments, Tillerson noted that he gave a speech to the State Department denouncing hate.

Cohn’s comments last week, saying the president could do better, came after several days of weighing whether to leave his position, including writing draft resignation letters.

The repudiations by Tillerson and Cohn were not nearly as sharp as some other criticisms of the president, who publicly waffled for days on how to respond to neo-Nazis and white supremacists who marched in the streets of Charlottesville and clashed with opposition protesters.

Still, said Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, “In the normal course of things, a secretary of state would be fired an hour after saying such a thing on national TV.” [Continue reading…]

Aaron David Miller and Richard Sokolsky write: In a combined 50-plus years of working for Secretaries of State of both parties, we’ve never heard the nation’s top diplomat so economically and frontally distance himself from his boss. And rarely on such a critical issue of basic American values.

Secretaries of State just don’t do this, largely because a seamless interaction with the President is critically important to the success of the nation’s top diplomat.

Former Secretary of State James Baker used to describe himself as the White House’s man at the State Department, not State’s man at the White House, for precisely this reason. The easiest way to hang a closed-for-the-season sign on the State Department — at home and abroad — is to lose the President’s confidence. Tillerson wasn’t Trump’s first choice or probably second choice for the job; and in the odd bureaucratic landscape Trump has created on foreign policy, it’s doubtful he ever had the confidence of his boss.

One can argue that Tillerson should be applauded for standing up for his principles in the Fox interview. But clearly in doing so and implicitly criticizing the President on the values issue, the Secretary of State essentially relegates himself to the margins at the same time. [Continue reading…]

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James Mattis tells the troops that their president is failing them

Fred Kaplan writes: President Trump has left us so numbed by his deceit and dishonor that it’s hard for anything said by or about him to shock us. Even so, the remarks this past weekend by two of his top Cabinet officers should sound the alarm bells louder than usual.

On Fox News on Sunday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was asked about a U.N. committee’s recent warning about racism in America, which criticized Trump’s wavering attitude toward the neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia. Tillerson replied, “I don’t think anyone doubts the American people’s values,” including those touting “equal treatment of people the world over.” But when asked whether Trump shared those values, he replied, “The president speaks for himself.”

Around the same time, a recent video emerged on Facebook of Secretary of Defense James Mattis telling a small group of American troops, “You’re a great example of our country right now.” He went on, “Our country, right now, it’s got problems that we don’t have in the military. You just hold the line until our country gets back to understanding and respecting each other and showing it.” [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s long history of seeking a politically inconvenient business deal in Russia

Philip Bump writes: On Sunday night, The Washington Post reported that President Trump’s private business was actively pursuing a real estate deal in Russia in late 2015, only to abandon it shortly before the 2016 presidential primaries. The revelation adds a new layer of context to Trump’s repeated insistence over the past year that he has no business ties to the country, suggesting that his avowed indifference toward making money in Russia was a function less of resolve than of circumstance.

Broadly, Trump’s attitude toward business in Russia mirrors his behavior when it comes to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Before he was a political candidate, Trump repeatedly said that he had a relationship with the Russian president. (Among the examples he cited as evidence he knew Putin? They were both on the same episode of “60 Minutes” — though Trump was filmed in the United States and Putin in Russia.) After that relationship became politically inconvenient, his tune changed sharply. In the third presidential debate, he preemptively responded to a question about Russian interference in the election by saying, “I don’t know Putin.”

As we did with Trump’s claims about knowing Putin, in light of the most recent Post reporting, it’s worth reviewing Trump’s long history of seeking a business deal in Russia — and his change in tune once such a deal would no longer be personally helpful. [Continue reading…]

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Iran, Turkey move to re-establish role as regional backbone

Ali Hashem writes: Iran and Turkey are among the oldest rivals in the Middle East. This rivalry between the former Ottoman and Persian empires has calmed in recent decades, yet, with the spark of the Arab Spring, the two nations with opposing alliances revived their bitter race for influence and power in the region.

It was clear that the 1823 and 1847 Treaties of Erzurum still have an effect on today’s Turkey and Iran. Therefore, despite all the tension, blood and proxy collision, Ankara and Tehran remained resilient and have always looked for ways to reach compromises. Political relations between the two preserved a level of warmth. Now that the wars in Iraq and Syria, from an Iranian point of view, are coming closer to an end, a common threat in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region is prompting both sides to put aside differences and unify efforts to prevent a domino effect that might harm their national security — namely the Kurdish dream of an independent state.

On Aug. 15, Iran’s Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri made a rare official visit to Turkey to meet his counterpart, Gen. Hulusi Akar, and senior Turkish officials, including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. According to Bagheri, the visit was “necessary to exchange views and more cooperation on the military subjects and different regional issues, issues related to the two countries’ security, security of borders and fighting against terrorism.” [Continue reading…]

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How the Folsom point became an archaeological icon

Stephen E. Nash writes: The Folsom spear point, which was excavated in 1927 near the small town of Folsom, New Mexico, is one of the most famous artifacts in North American archaeology, and for good reason: It was found in direct association with the bones of an extinct form of Ice Age bison. The Folsom point therefore demonstrated conclusively, and for the first time, that human beings were in North America during the last Ice Age—thousands of years earlier than previously thought.

The Folsom discovery marked the end of a long series of sometimes serendipitous, sometimes deliberate actions by an intriguing cast of characters. As such, it helps us understand that archaeology—like most fields of study—has very few “Eureka!” moments in which a brilliant sage comes upon an insight that suddenly changes the world. Instead, archaeology is cumulative, often slow, and painstaking. And while an individual artifact can indeed be important, it’s context (where it was found) and association (what it was found with) are often more important than the object itself.

The story begins in 1908. In the late afternoon heat of August 27, an unusually strong summer thunderstorm dropped 13 inches of rain—75 percent of the yearly average—on Johnson Mesa, northwest of Folsom. The resulting flash flood swept through the town and the usually dry drainages in the vicinity. In so doing, it exposed buried features and artifacts that hadn’t seen the light of day in thousands of years. [Continue reading…]

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Climate change magnified the effects of Harvey

Michael E Mann writes: What can we say about the role of climate change in the unprecedented disaster that is unfolding in Houston with Hurricane #Harvey?

There are certain climate change-related factors that we can, with great confidence, say worsened the flooding.

Sea level rise attributable to climate change (some is due to coastal subsidence due to human disturbance e.g. oil drilling) is more than half a foot over the past few decades (see http://www.insurancejournal.com/…/sou…/2017/05/31/452704.htm for a decent discussion).

That means that the storm surge was a half foot higher than it would have been just decades ago, meaning far more flooding and destruction. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: The worst fears of flooding have been realized with Harvey. Close to three feet of rain has already fallen in Southeast Texas, and there’s still more to come. It’s the most extreme rainfall the region has ever witnessed.

On Sunday evening, brand new bands of torrential rain were forming southwest of Houston and appeared on track to strike the city overnight. Rainfall rates will almost certainly exceed three inches per hour over the already-submerged city. That threat prompted the National Weather Service to reissue the flash flood emergency — the strongest flood warning it can issue — in effect through around 1 a.m. Central Time.

Two-day rainfall totals have reached or exceeded 20 inches across the entire Houston metro area. Some locations are approaching 30 inches. The swift inundation of water has turned rivers, bayous and streams into lakes — including those that run through the city of Houston itself.

“Catastrophic flooding in the Houston metropolitan area is expected to worsen,” the National Weather Service said Sunday. It added: “This event is unprecedented and all impacts are unknown and beyond anything experienced.” [Continue reading…]

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America’s getting more tolerant and haters hate it

Albert Hunt writes: Sure, there were a lot of haters in Charlottesville. That shouldn’t obscure some better news, which is that the U.S. is becoming a more accepting and tolerant nation. Unlike President Donald Trump, most citizens don’t equivocate when asked their opinion of the hate groups that descended on Virginia two weeks ago.

One of the most interesting changes over the years is in attitudes toward interracial marriage. In 1968, a year after interracial marriage was given constitutional protection, 73 percent of the public opposed these unions, including one-third of African-Americans. Only 20 percent approved of them. By 2013, the last year Gallup’s pollsters asked the question, attitudes had dramatically reversed: 87 percent of poll respondents approved of interracial marriage and only 11 were opposed.

According to the Pew Research Center, 7 percent of Americans consider themselves multi-racial. This is an accelerating trend embraced by young people.

While most multi-racial people say they’ve been targets of racial slurs or jokes, almost none think their status is a liability. One in five, the Pew survey finds, say it’s an advantage, while three-quarters say it has made no difference in their daily lives or career.

The Pew Center’s conclusion: Multi-racial Americans “are at the cutting edge of social and demographic changes in the U.S. — young, proud, tolerant and growing at a rate three times as fast as the population as a whole.” [Continue reading…]

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Robert E Lee, George Washington and the trouble with the American pantheon

By Erik Mathisen, Queen Mary University of London

When the US president, Donald Trump, was asked to clarify his position on the violence that unfolded in Charlottesville, Virginia during a press conference at Trump Tower in New York, he poured gasoline on a raging fire.

In a comment about the historical monument to Confederate general Robert E Lee, which had become a flashpoint in the protests, Trump remarked:

This week it’s Robert E Lee … I wonder is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?

For years, a debate about Confederate monuments has been growing in intensity, setting protesters and city counsellors around the country against activists who see the monuments to southern civil war heroes as a part of the region’s heritage – even though the majority of them were erected long after the war. Indeed, most were put up around the beginning of the 20th century, as African-American disfranchisement began to well and truly bite across the country and in the 1950s and 1960s, largely in reaction to the civil rights movement and desegregation. Though they might hold a civil war figure aloft, monuments to the Confederacy commemorate white supremacy in marble. This is the message. The rest is historical window dressing.

A few of these statues make this fact plain. Most do not. All of them trade in a historical bait and switch. The statues memorialising the Confederacy gave segregationists the historical justification they needed to act, while at the same time allowing them to cast their efforts in a regional history of lost causes rather than white supremacy and the perpetuation of slavery.

But Trump’s stance also raise questions about not so much whether monuments ought to be taken down, but the company that Robert E Lee keeps in the pantheon of the republic’s most important civic icons. Here too there are problems, but not only the ones you might think.

On the surface, the president’s remarks make no sense to anyone who has read in any depth about American history. Thomas Jefferson wrote the document that set the American colonies down the road to independence. He was a president, as was George Washington. Lee was a decorated soldier – but a founding father he was not. He renounced his citizenship, joined a cause to break up the Union and stood at the head of the Army of Northern Virginia which inflicted incredible damage on the United States and killed tens of thousands of American soldiers. Washington and Jefferson helped to build the republic. Lee was out to destroy it.

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Texas flood disaster: Harvey has unloaded 9 trillion gallons of water

The Washington Post reports: Words cannot describe the catastrophic situation unfolding in Houston and Southeast Texas. As daylight dawned this morning, the scope of the devastation began to come into clearer focus, and it will probably take months, if not years, to fully recover from damage of this magnitude.

The total rainfall from the storm is likely to tally up to a widespread 15 to 30 inches, with a few localized spots picking up 50 inches or more. Many textbooks have the 60-inch mark as a once-in-a-million-year recurrence interval, meaning that if any spots had that amount of rainfall, they would essentially be dealing with a once-in-a-million-year event.

Regardless of whether we reach that 60-inch benchmark, “it’s fair to say it will produce more rain than we have ever seen before in the U.S. from a tropical system and over the fourth-largest city in the country,” said Eric Fisher, chief meteorologist at WBZ-TV in Boston. “Looking at those two factors, it will likely be an unprecedented flooding disaster affecting a massive number of people. It’s hard, if not impossible, to compare this to any other storm. It may stand alone when all is said and done in terms of rainfall.”

Putting this much rainfall into perspective is challenging; after all, the sheer volume of water is incredibly tough to visualize. Fortunately, we crunched the numbers — here’s how they stack up.

So far, just the rain that has already fallen across the greater Houston area and Southeast Texas tallies to 9 trillion gallons. That’s only what has already come down, and keep in mind that 5 trillion to 10 trillion additional gallons could fall before things wrap up midweek.

The 9 trillion gallons of water dispensed so far is enough to fill the entire Great Salt Lake in Salt Lake City — twice! It would take nine days straight for the Mississippi River to drain into Houston and equal the amount of water already there. [Continue reading…]

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Mexican troops saved American lives after Katrina. Would Trump let them do it after Harvey?

Max Bearak writes: The devastation wrought by Hurricane Harvey is already apparent, even though forecasters say the storm may be only half done dumping rainfall totals measured in feet over the Texas and Louisiana coasts. In possibly the most starkly worded National Weather Service announcement imaginable, the agency said Sunday that “this event is unprecedented” and “beyond anything experienced.”

For many Americans, Harvey is bringing back memories of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Nearly 2,000 people died in the aftermath of that storm. The U.S. government and Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to Katrina was widely criticized, but Americans came together to offer housing, clothing, meals and monetary help to the affected. President George W. Bush even accepted a huge offer of aid from Mexico.

The aid Mexico sent was no small thing — it was an extraordinary gesture, and it may have saved many lives. Marking the first time that Mexican troops had set foot on U.S. soil since the Mexican-American War in 1846, President Vicente Fox sent an army convoy and a naval vessel laden with food, water and medicine. By the end of their three-week operation in Louisiana and Mississippi, the Mexicans had served 170,000 meals, helped distribute more than 184,000 tons of supplies and conducted more than 500 medical consultations. [Continue reading…]

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President Trump and the baby-sitters club

Elizabeth Williamson writes: Why does Mr. Trump’s team treat him like a kid? He is the president of the United States and, as he says, “you’re not.” He lives in the White House, where he gets two scoops of ice cream instead of one for dessert. He is commander in chief, eating “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake” with the Chinese president while he fires missiles at Syria. As he told the Russians, “people brief me on great intel every day,” with lots of pictures and “tweet-length sentences.” He has a “beautiful Twitter account.” Uh-oh!

Mr. Trump’s staff can’t control him, so they coddle him. They make sure he starts his day with a packet of good news about himself, compiled by Republicans who get up early to search for positive stories, headlines, tweets or, failing those, flattering photos. “Maybe it’s good for the country that the president is in a good mood in the morning,” one of the Republicans said.

Mr. Trump likes “unstructured time” to watch TV. His favorite station is Fox News Channel but he’ll watch any show where they talk about him. If they say something bad about him, he tweets. That makes everyone nervous. His staffers try to limit his screen time during the day and keep him from “calling old friends and then tweeting about it.” But then it’s off to bed with his phone, and “once he goes upstairs, there’s no managing him.” Uh-oh! [Continue reading…]

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UK: As Labour becomes party of soft Brexit, hard battles lie ahead

The Guardian reports: After a summer during which arguments over Brexit have raged inside both the Tory and Labour parties, and Brussels and London have conspicuously failed to find any substantial common ground, formal talks on Britain’s departure from the EU in March 2019 resume in the Belgian capital on Monday.

The Brexit secretary, David Davis, will no doubt bounce into the meeting with his characteristic grin and the body language of a pent-up boxer itching to land the first blow. But the context for the latest round of discussions with his EU counterpart, Michel Barnier, could hardly be less propitious.

In an attempt to convey an impression of clarity where little exists, Davis’s Whitehall department has spent the past fortnight issuing a series of position papers spelling out Britain’s latest negotiating stances on key issues – including this country’s future relationship with the customs union and the European court of justice (ECJ), and its plans for the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, after the UK strikes out on its own.

With some justification Labour’s Brexit spokesman, Keir Starmer describes the papers as “bland and non-committal”. Many politicians, independent experts and lawyers in London, Brussels and other EU capitals have dismissed them as a “wish list” that says more about irreconcilable divisions in the Tory party over Brexit than it does about realistic options for progress.

The message that rings out from the papers is that the government wants to leave the customs union and single market from March 2019, end pretty much all jurisdiction of the ECJ from that time on, no longer have to accept free movement of people and workers, and pay no further annual financial contribution to Brussels. That is the part the hardline Tory Brexiters want to hear. The part about a clean break.

But to appease “soft-Brexit” Tories and much of the business community, who traditionally support the Conservatives, the documents also spell out how Britain wants a transition period of around two years after Brexit, with maximum access to the single market – and arrangements that in effect mirror those of the customs union. In essence Davis will go into the critical next phase of talks in Brussels seeking to retain all the benefits of European economic union while insisting the UK cannot accept any of the rules that underpin it, or pay a single euro for doing so. [Continue reading…]

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How much responsibility does the media have for creating Trump?

Matt Taibbi writes: Trump’s monstrousness is ironic, since the image of Trump as the media’s very own Frankenstein’s monster has been used and re-used in the last years. Many in the business are of the opinion that, having created Trump and let him loose in the village, we in the press now have a responsibility to hunt him down with aggressive investigative reporting, to make the world safe again.

That might indeed be a good idea. But that take also implies that slaying the monster will fix the problem. Are we sure that’s true?

Reporters seem to think so, and keep trying to find the magic formula. Just this week, staffers at the Wall Street Journal rebelled against editor-in-chief Gerard Baker. Baker, who has long been accused of being too soft on Trump, blasted his people for going too negative on the president in their coverage of the Arizona speech. He sent around a letter asking staff to “stick to reporting what [Trump] said,” rather than “packaging it in exegesis and selective criticism.”

Reporters fought back by (apparently) leaking the memo to the rival New York Times. This followed an incident in which a transcript of Baker’s recent interview with Trump was leaked to Politico earlier this month. In it, Baker mentions being glad to have seen Ivanka Trump in Southampton, and small-talks with Trump about travel and golf. The implication here is that it’s improper or unseemly for a newspaper editor to have a chummy relationship with this kind of a president.

And it is, sometimes. Reporters who should be challenging presidents and candidates are pretty much always cheating the public when they turn interviews into mutual back rub sessions.

But these intramural ethical wars within our business may just be deflections that keep us from facing bigger problems – like, for instance, the fact that we have been systematically making the entire country more stupid for decades.

We learned long ago in this business that dumber and more alarmist always beats complex and nuanced. Big headlines, cartoonish morality, scary criminals at home and foreign menaces abroad, they all sell. We decimated attention spans, rewarded hot-takers over thinkers, and created in audiences powerful addictions to conflict, vitriol, fear, self-righteousness, and race and gender resentment. [Continue reading…]

While there is a measure of truth in Taibbi’s observations, an irony that he must be acutely aware of is that his own commentary comes with a click-bait headline and lots of hyperbolic overstatement. In other words, while assuming the posture of a mainstream media critic, he nevertheless makes use of the same tools that the rest of the media employs as intellectual honesty gets trampled on in the pursuit of profit.

“The Media Is the Villain – for Creating a World Dumb Enough for Trump.” With the pretext that it’s legitimate to echo Trump’s claim that the media is the enemy of the people when the writer’s intent is to engage in a cogent critique of media complicity in Trump’s rise, Taibbi is nevertheless trying to hook readers in the competitive sport of grabbing attention. No doubt, like countless others, he feels like the end justifies the means.

More importantly, the villainization of the media treats journalists as America’s preeminent educators, yet there are many other lead characters in the cast that keeps Americans dumb: teachers, preachers, politicians, celebrities, and others.

At the same time, a current of anti-intellectualism has long infected American culture, privileging sensationalism above thoughtfulness, and twisting ignorance and small-mindedness into folksy virtues in a country built by the toil of humble settlers.

Before getting too indignant about the idea that Trump is essentially a mainstream media creation, it’s also worth reflecting on the role played by those who have for years been demonizing the mainstream media and fueling hostility and fear of government, and recognizing that these trends in shaping public opinion have also played a huge role in facilitating the rise of Trump.

So, when it comes to attributing blame for Trump’s ascent to power, there’s plenty of blame to go around.

That said, ultimate responsibility for this mess still falls into the hands of a single man: Donald Trump.

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Why Trump’s pardon of Joe Arpaio isn’t like most presidential pardons

Andrew Rudalevige writes: Last month, as President Trump made broad claims about his power to pardon, I noted that he “may find out that something can be both legal and, simultaneously, an impeachable offense.” Last night, as the president issued a pardon to former Maricopa County, Ariz., sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of criminal contempt of court, some commentators argued that this was exactly the case.

Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman, for example, wrote after Trump’s belligerent Phoenix rally speech that such a pardon would represent an “assault on the federal judiciary, the Constitution and the rule of law itself” for which the “remedy is impeachment.”

It is hard to gauge the political fallout of the president’s decision — announced as it was late on a Friday night during an impending hurricane. Normally, though, as political scientist Jeffrey Crouch’s book on the pardon power makes clear, pardons are granted for two reasons: either to provide mercy or correct a miscarriage of justice, in an individual case; or on more general grounds based on public policy.

Trump’s pardon of Arpaio does not fit either category very well.

As regards mercy: Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist that pardons were needed; otherwise, “justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel.” Presidents have sometimes pardoned elderly convicts, for instance, rather than see them die in prison.

Arpaio is 85, but he had not even yet been sentenced; that hearing was set for October. As a procedural matter, the guidelines of the Justice Department’s office of the pardon attorney — not binding on the president, of course, and not consulted in this instance — state that petitions for clemency are normally considered only after five years have passed after a conviction. (Further, in considering such petitions, “The extent to which a petitioner has accepted responsibility for his or her criminal conduct and made restitution to its victims are important considerations.”)

Pardons also serve as a check against the judicial branch, when the president feels a grave miscarriage of justice has occurred. At his Phoenix rally, Trump seemed to make this claim, saying that “Sheriff Joe was convicted for doing his job.”

The problem with that, though, is that Arpaio was convicted for doing the opposite of his job. [Continue reading…]

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The alt-left is real, and it’s helping fascists

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: When Donald Trump used the term “alt-left” to deride the anti-fascists in Charlottesville last week, he was adopting a usage that has gained currency among far right ideologues on Fox News. It was Trump’s attempt to draw moral equivalence between the neo-Nazis and the protestors confronting them.
But the protestors in Charlottesville were traditional anti-fascists with a proud history and defined identity – there is nothing “alt” about them. If the label was being misapplied to them, maybe “alt-left” is nothing more than a right-wing media trope to smear progressive activists.

Not quite. Before the right hijacked it, the “alt-left” label was used mainly by progressives to refer to a strain of leftism that sees liberalism rather than fascism as the main enemy. It is distinguished mainly by a reactionary contrarianism, a seething ressentiment, and a conspiracist worldview.

In its preoccupations it is closer to the right: More alarmed by Hillary Clinton winning the primary than by Donald Trump winning the presidency; more concerned with imagined “deep state” conspiracies than with actual Russian subversion of US democracy; eager to prevent a global war no one is contemplating but supportive of a US alliance with Russia for a new “war on terror”.

Like the right it disdains “globalists”, it sees internationalism as liberal frivolity, and its solidarity is confined to repressive regimes overseas.

Though these tendencies have always been a feature of the far left, they were turned into a powerful obstructive force after the last Democratic primary as the “never Hillary” fringe of Bernie Sanders supporters defected to the Green Party (in its worst incarnation under Jill Stein) or chose to sit out the election. Loath to admit mistake, the enablers of Trump now spend their time minimising what he has unleashed. [Continue reading…]

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Introducing ‘dark DNA’ – the phenomenon that could change how we think about evolution

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By Adam Hargreaves, University of Oxford

DNA sequencing technology is helping scientists unravel questions that humans have been asking about animals for centuries. By mapping out animal genomes, we now have a better idea of how the giraffe got its huge neck and why snakes are so long. Genome sequencing allows us to compare and contrast the DNA of different animals and work out how they evolved in their own unique ways.

But in some cases we’re faced with a mystery. Some animal genomes seem to be missing certain genes, ones that appear in other similar species and must be present to keep the animals alive. These apparently missing genes have been dubbed “dark DNA”. And its existence could change the way we think about evolution.

My colleagues and I first encountered this phenomenon when sequencing the genome of the sand rat (Psammomys obesus), a species of gerbil that lives in deserts. In particular we wanted to study the gerbil’s genes related to the production of insulin, to understand why this animal is particularly susceptible to type 2 diabetes.

But when we looked for a gene called Pdx1 that controls the secretion of insulin, we found it was missing, as were 87 other genes surrounding it. Some of these missing genes, including Pdx1, are essential and without them an animal cannot survive. So where are they?

The first clue was that, in several of the sand rat’s body tissues, we found the chemical products that the instructions from the “missing” genes would create. This would only be possible if the genes were present somewhere in the genome, indicating that they weren’t really missing but just hidden.

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