Category Archives: Entities

I’m a scientist who has gotten death threats. I fear what may happen under Trump

Michael E. Mann writes: My Penn State colleagues looked with horror at the police tape across my office door.

I had been opening mail at my desk that afternoon in August 2010 when a dusting of white powder fell from the folds of a letter. I dropped the letter, held my breath and slipped out the door as swiftly as I could, shutting it behind me. First I went to the bathroom to scrub my hands. Then I called the police.

It turned out to be cornstarch, not anthrax. And it was just one in a long series of threats I’ve received since the late 1990s, when my research illustrated the unprecedented nature of global warming, producing an upward-trending temperature curve whose shape has been likened to a hockey stick.

I’ve faced hostile investigations by politicians, demands for me to be fired from my job, threats against my life and even threats against my family. Those threats have diminished in recent years, as man-made climate change has become recognized as the overwhelming scientific consensus and as climate science has received the support of the federal government. But with the coming Trump administration, my colleagues and I are steeling ourselves for a renewed onslaught of intimidation, from inside and outside government. It would be bad for our work and bad for our planet. [Continue reading…]

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The American leader in ISIS

Graeme Wood writes: One of the first hits on Google for John Georgelas was an August 15, 2006, press release from the Department of Justice. “Supporter of Pro-Jihad Website Sentenced to 34 Months,” it crowed. At the time of his conviction, he lived in North Texas, near Plano, 20 minutes’ drive from the house where I grew up.

Plano is a short drive from downtown Dallas, toward the Oklahoma border, a flatland sprouting subdivisions watered by money from the region’s burgeoning tech sector. Shortly after his probation expired, John Georgelas had posted a résumé online listing as his address an elegant brick house with white Doric columns, a small portico, and a circular driveway. In August 2015, when I first drove up, I could hear the happiness of children. I saw a boy, who looked about 10, bouncing a basketball in the driveway and two others playing nearby; they were the same ages as the kids in the Facebook photos. As I approached the front door, I spied a yellow-ribbon decal (“We support our troops”) in the window, and behind it a foyer, tidy and richly decorated, and a piano festooned with family photos.

The man who answered the door was Timothy Georgelas, John’s father and the owner (with his wife, John’s mother, Martha) of the house. Both parents are Americans of Greek ancestry.

Tim is a West Point graduate and a physician. He has a full head of gray hair and soft features that betray no sign of the stress of having raised an Islamic State terrorist. He has, however, no illusions about the life his son has chosen. “He and John are enemies,” I was told by someone who knows them both — “until the Day of Judgment.”

Tim wore shorts and a T-shirt, and a crisp draft of air conditioning escaped as he said good morning. When I told him I had come to ask about John, he stepped outside and shut the door as if to seal off the house from his son’s name. He slumped in a white wicker chair by the front door, and with a reluctant gesture, he invited me to sit across from him.

He stared at the magnolia tree in the front yard and said nothing. I told him what I knew — that his son, John, was Yahya [Abu Hassan — his nom de guerre]. Tim sat, lips pursed, and with a shake of his head began to speak. “Every step of his life he’s made the wrong decisions, from high school onward,” Tim told me. “It is beyond me to understand why he threw what he had away.” Yahya’s two sisters have both earned advanced degrees, he added, as if to demonstrate that it wasn’t failed parenting that led his only son to drop out of school, wage holy war, and plot mass murder. [Continue reading…]

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Barack Obama’s presidency will be defined by his failure to face down Assad

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: In an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic magazine earlier this year, President Obama said he was “very proud” of the moment in 2013 when, against the “overwhelming weight of conventional wisdom”, he decided not to honour his own “red line”, allowing Assad to escape accountability for a chemical attack that had killed more than 1,400 civilians.

Obama may be alone in this judgment. A year earlier, seemingly on a whim, he had set a red line on the use of chemical weapons at a time when none were being used. The red line was, in effect, a green light to conventional killing. But the regime called Obama’s bluff – and, predictably, he backed down. No longer fearing punishment, the regime escalated its tactics.

Nearly four times as many people were killed in the two years after the chemical attack as had died in the two years before. Obama’s abandonment discredited Syria’s nationalist opposition and empowered the Islamists. It helped Isis emerge from the shadows to establish itself as a major force. Together, these developments triggered a mass exodus that would displace over half the country’s population. And as the overflow from this deluge started trickling into Europe, it sparked a xenophobic backlash that has empowered the far right across the west.

These, however, weren’t the only consequences of Obama’s retreat. The inaction also created a vacuum that was filled by Iran and Russia. Emboldened by his unopposed advances into Ukraine and Syria, Putin has been probing weaknesses in the west’s military and political resolve – from provocative flights by Bear bombers along the Cornwall coast to direct interference in the US elections. [Continue reading…]

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Are the United States and China destined for war?

Ali Wyne writes: Concern about an armed confrontation between the United States and China is growing.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has stated that the United States should not be bound by the “One China” policy unless as part of a grand bargain of sorts, whereby China reduces taxes on U.S. exports, stops construction in the South China Sea, and cooperates more closely to counter North Korea’s nuclear and missile threats. Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Geng Shuang has warned that if that policy “is compromised or disrupted, the sound and steady growth of the China-U.S. relationship as well as bilateral cooperation in major fields would be out of the question.” China recently flew a conventional bomber over the South China Sea to reinforce its claim to the “nine-dash line,” a demarcation that the United States claims is in violation of international maritime law
Growing strategic tensions offer a useful occasion to revisit well-trodden terrain: are the United States and China fated to repeat the mistakes Britain and Germany made a century earlier? Given that the two countries account for roughly a third of the world’s output, a fifth of its trade, and a quarter of its people, observers cannot pose the question enough.

No matter how forcefully the United States and China may avow that they will devise an enlightened model of interaction, they, too, are subject to structural dynamics dating back to ancient Greece. Political scientist Graham Allison has encapsulated those dynamics with his famous term “Thucydides’s trap,” which journalist David Sanger defines as “that deadly combination of calculation and emotion that…can turn healthy rivalry into antagonism or worse.” [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump raises the specter of treason

John Shattuck, a former assistant secretary of state for democracy, writes: A specter of treason hovers over Donald Trump. He has brought it on himself by dismissing a bipartisan call for an investigation of Russia’s hacking of the Democratic National Committee as a “ridiculous” political attack on the legitimacy of his election as president.

Seventeen US national intelligence agencies have unanimously concluded that Russia engaged in cyberwarfare against the US presidential campaign. The lead agency, the CIA, has reached the further conclusion that Russia’s hacking was intended to influence the election in favor of Trump.

Admiral Michael Rogers, director of the National Security Agency and commander of the US Cyber Command, has stated, “This was not something that was done casually, this was not something that was done by chance. This was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily. This was a conscious effort by a nation state to attempt to achieve a specific effect.” On Thursday, a senior intelligence official disclosed that there is substantial evidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin himself authorized the cyberattack.

Why does Trump publicly reject these intelligence agency conclusions and the bipartisan proposal for a congressional investigation? As president-elect, he should have a strong interest in presenting a united front against Russia’s interference with the electoral process at the core of American democracy. [Continue reading…]

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How a Putin fan overseas pushed pro-Trump propaganda to Americans

The New York Times reports: The Patriot News Agency website popped up in July, soon after it became clear that Donald J. Trump would win the Republican presidential nomination, bearing a logo of a red, white and blue eagle and the motto “Built by patriots, for patriots.”

Tucked away on a corner of the site, next to links for Twitter and YouTube, is a link to another social media platform that most Americans have never heard of: VKontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook. It is a clue that Patriot News, like many sites that appeared out of nowhere and pumped out pro-Trump hoaxes tying his opponent Hillary Clinton to Satanism, pedophilia and other conspiracies, is actually run by foreigners based overseas.

But while most of those others seem be the work of young, apolitical opportunists cashing in on a conservative appetite for viral nonsense, operators of Patriot News had an explicitly partisan motivation: getting Mr. Trump elected. [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel opens a world of unknowns

Karl Vick writes: Don’t even try thinking of Donald Trump’s choice for ambassador to Israel as a diplomat. David M. Friedman is far from that. But he serves very well as a reply in kind, an answer in human form.

It’s like this: For the last three years Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the man who leads Israel, has sent signal after signal that he’s done with peace talks, or ever pulling Israeli troops out of the West Bank. Sometimes these signals were verbal — in the 2015 election campaign, Netanyahu declared flat out that there would be no Palestinian state. More recently the signals arrived in the form of diplomats — men who, like Friedman, had no prior experience in the subtle arts of statecraft, but whose biographies and attitudes said a great deal. In August, Dani Dayan became Israel’s Consul General in New York. To get his stuff, the moving van had to leave Israel and drive across the Green Line into Palestinian territory, where Dayan lived. He is a settler, a Jewish Israeli who moved to the West Bank in order to stake a claim to rocky hills that are also home to some two million Palestinians. In fact, for six years, Dayan headed the settlers’ primary organization, the Yesha Council. Earlier in the year, Brazil rejected his appointment as Israel’s ambassador to Brasilia, citing his settler background.

In New York, Dayan joined a man with a similar name — Danny Danon, the new Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. Danon was Netanyahu’s remarkable choice for the international body where the topic of Israel’s 50-year occupation of Palestinian territory is a chronic one. The new ambassador had written wrote a book suggesting that Israel simply annex the West Bank, perhaps leaving the Palestinians some urban areas. His rhetoric is famously scalding; after Israeli Defense Forces commandos killed nine Turks on a relief boat headed to the Gaza Strip, Danon wrote to Turkey’s prime minister saying “We are sorry that due to the IDF’s over-cautious behavior, only nine terrorists were killed…” Danon’s appointment to Israel’s premiere diplomatic post — like Dayan’s as envoy to the largest concentration of American Jews — was as far as you can get from business as usual in Israeli diplomacy. For more than a generation, it at least nodded to the idea of a Palestinian state. That’s no longer the case. Not even from the next U.S. ambassador — a bankruptcy lawyer who has represented Trump’s casinos.

“There has never been a two-state solution,” Friedman wrote in August, “only a two-state narrative.” And if it was that was a narrative in which moderate Palestinians invested pretty much everything, a story in which almost the entire world continues to believe, the crystalline signal from both Trump Tower and Jerusalem is that it’s all over now. [Continue reading…]

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To combat Trump, Democrats ready a GOP tactic: lawsuits

The New York Times reports: One attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, is already investigating Donald J. Trump over possible violations of New York State law at his charity foundation.

Another, Maura Healey of Massachusetts, has joined Mr. Schneiderman in an investigation into whether Exxon Mobil — whose chief executive, Rex W. Tillerson, is Mr. Trump’s choice for secretary of state — lied to investors and the public about the threat of climate change.

Ms. Healey also has a new fund-raising pitch: “I won’t hesitate to take Donald Trump to court if he carries out his unconstitutional campaign promises,” she recently wrote to supporters.

A third, Representative Xavier Becerra, who was chosen this month to become California’s attorney general, has dared the Trump administration to “come at us” over issues including immigration, climate change and health care.

As Democrats steel themselves for the day next month when the White House door will slam on their backs, some of the country’s more liberal state attorneys general have vowed to use their power to check and balance Mr. Trump’s Washington. [Continue reading…]

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Nine ways to oppose Donald Trump

John Cassidy writes: er the past few weeks, a number of anguished friends and acquaintances, and even some strangers, have got in touch with me to ask what they might do to oppose Donald Trump. Being a fellow sufferer from OATS — Obsessing About Trump Syndrome — my first instinct has been to tell people to get off social media and take a long walk. It won’t do anybody much good, except possibly Trump, if large numbers of people who voted against him send themselves mad by constantly reading about him, cursing him, and recirculating his latest outrages.

But, of course, taking a mental-health break is only a first step toward preserving the Republic. As a daily columnist, I see my role as trying to analyze and critique the Trump program, while also trying to understand some of the phenomena that allowed him to blag his way to the verge of the White House. But for those who want to take a more direct approach, here are some suggestions, starting with something you can do immediately:

1. Go to change.org and join the 4.9 million people who have signed a petition calling on members of the Electoral College to reject Trump. Then contact the electors for your state directly and tell them your concerns. On Monday, the five hundred and thirty eight electors will choose a new President. According to the Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, between twenty and thirty Republican electors are ready to vote against Trump. To deny him a majority, the number would need to reach thirty-seven. Most observers think that won’t happen, and, even if it did, the task of electing a President would pass to the Republican-dominated House of Representatives, which would almost certainly vote for Trump. But a big protest vote in the Electoral College could still have great deal of symbolic importance. [Continue reading…]

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China says U.S. is ‘appropriately handling’ seizure of marine research robot — a lesson for Trump?

Reuters reports: China and the United States are using military channels to “appropriately handle” the seizure by the Chinese navy of a U.S. underwater drone in the South China Sea, China said on Saturday, and a Chinese state-run newspaper said it expected a smooth resolution.

The drone was taken on Thursday, the first seizure of its kind in recent memory, about 50 nautical miles northwest of Subic Bay off the Philippines, just as the USNS Bowditch was about to retrieve the unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV), U.S. officials said.

“It is understood that China and the United States are using military channels to appropriately handle this issue,” China’s Foreign Ministry said in a brief statement sent to Reuters, without elaborating. [Continue reading…]

Given Donald Trump’s focus on attending victory rallies and his lack of interest in receiving intelligence briefings, it’s possible that this brief diplomatic incident escaped his attention. At least we can surmise at this point that the president-elect did not deem this matter tweet-worthy.

Nevertheless, I have to wonder whether the Chinese had the intention of providing Trump with a teachable moment so that he can understand that it’s possible to deal with a small provocation without starting World War III.

Let’s hope this isn’t the last time we hear a foreign power saying that the U.S. is appropriately handling an unexpected situation.

But given that even before Trump has entered office he has rocked U.S.-Chinese relations, his destabilizing influence on global affairs seems much more likely to grow before or if it can be held in check.

I spoke too soon!

Literally as I was writing this, Trump tweeted this:


I don’t know if Trump corrects his tweets, so just in case, here’s a screenshot:

Unpresidented?

I guess Trump could be coining an expression that means an action unworthy of a president. Much more likely, it just means that early on a Saturday morning he doesn’t have any staff nearby to tell him how to spell unprecedented.

As for the substance, Trump is incorrect in claiming that China’s action is unprecedented. Moreover, from China’s point of view it is the U.S. surveillance operations which are the provocation as it has previously made clear.

In 2002, the same U.S. ship was involved in a flare of tensions between the U.S. and China. As the Associated Press reported at the time:

Chinese patrol planes buzzed an unarmed U.S. Navy ship several times while it was conducting what the Pentagon called routine military surveys in the Yellow Sea, and Beijing demanded that it cease “illegal operations” inside China’s 200-mile economic exclusion zone.

The incidents happened over a period of weeks starting in early September. After Chinese officials lodged private protests at least twice, the United States responded Thursday with a note that asserted its right to conduct such activities inside any nation’s economic exclusion zone.

In Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue said, “We think it violates the international maritime law, and we have made several representations to the U.S. side.”

The report also said:

This was not the first time the Bowditch’s work has rankled the Chinese. On March 23, 2001, just nine days before the EP-3 collision, a Chinese warship chased the Bowditch out of the Yellow Sea.

That collision being between a Chinese fighter plane and a U.S. Navy surveillance aircraft over the South China Sea — an incident that caused much of the world to hold its breath as it waited to see whether an inexperienced and brash American president, George W. Bush, would over-react.

Who could imagine that 16 years later, Bush would, in retrospect, look like a seasoned statesman compared to the man who is about to enter the White House!?

Of course, Bush’s test with China was a prelude to a much greater test six months later whose consequences still reverberate around the world.

The prospect of Trump facing a similar test are too horrific to imagine.

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Trump’s swaggering sparks war talk from China

Newsweek reports: In mid-summer 2015, the Pentagon deployed a vast fleet to the Western Pacific with an invasion force of 33,000 troops. The little reported exercise was supported by warplanes and attack helicopters, along with 21 ships, including the aircraft carrier George Washington and three nuclear missile-bearing submarines.

It was only a game, the Navy said. But it looked very much like practice for the real thing on or near Chinese shores. On the night of July 4 — Independence Day in the U.S. — Operation Talisman Saber kicked off with U.S. high-altitude paratroopers dropping from the sky near Fog Bay, in Australia’s Northern Territory. Naval artillery boomed. Tanks rolled ashore. The invasion was on.

A U.S. Navy press release made it sound routine, an “exercise [that] illustrates the closeness of the Australian and U.S. alliance…” But Military Times, a close observer of the Defense Department, put its finger on what it was really about: “Talisman Sabre: Trying to Deter China,” its headline said. [Continue reading…]

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Russia’s fear of Hillary Clinton eclipsed any affection for Donald Trump

Max Fisher writes: Russia’s unprecedented intervention in the United States election came amid more than United States-Russia tension and Donald J. Trump’s praise of Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president. It also coincided with a growing belief, in Moscow, that Russia faced an imminent threat in Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.

Mrs. Clinton is viewed in Moscow as innately hostile to Russia. Widely held conspiracy theories portray her as seeking to foment unrest that will return Russia to the chaos and depression of the 1990s. Even many government technocrats view her with suspicion that at times verges on paranoia.

She referred to these views at an event on Thursday, telling donors that Mr. Putin’s “personal beef” with her had driven Russia’s intervention in the American election.

Mark Galeotti, a Russia expert at the Institute of International Relations, based in Prague, said the Kremlin was consumed by something more urgent than petty revenge: self-preservation.

“It’s not just they didn’t like Clinton, but they actually thought that she represented a threat,” he said, describing Russia’s actions as a matter of “policy, not pique.”

No one factor can fully explain Russia’s decision to hack and pass on Democratic emails, analysts say, and intelligence agencies appear divided on assessing Russian motives. But, in Moscow, fear of Mrs. Clinton has loomed as large or larger than any warmth for Mr. Trump. [Continue reading…]

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Everyone connected with the abomination in Aleppo will pay a heavy price

Fred Hof writes: Some 70 months ago, unarmed, ordinary Syrians rose peacefully against a regime whose incompetence and corruption they had come grudgingly to accept. It was their rulers’ detention and beating of children that provided the tipping point. The same regime seeks now to capitalize on a bloody victory in Aleppo, where children again have been targeted. But the actual and prospective costs associated with the deliberate slaughter of civilians in Aleppo and elsewhere in Syria are steep, and everyone connected with this abomination will pay, especially those who have stood by and watched.

For Syrians hoping for a future free of the Assad family and entourage, the price of Aleppo is bitter. Prodded by a violent regime into armed resistance it did not want, undermined by regime-facilitated extremists and abandoned by pseudo-friends unwilling to match words with deeds, Syrian nationalists must now acknowledge that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s survival strategy is working.

That strategy is rooted in collective punishment. The regime, with the enthusiastic support of Russia and Iran, does not hesitate to kill, maim, terrorize and displace civilians in areas where rebel forces are present. Indeed, the Russian air force has demonstrated a special aptitude for destroying hospitals. For Assad and his allies, no atrocity is unthinkable.

Nationalists opposing Assad must ask and answer some hard questions. Has armed resistance run its course? Would it be more humane to lay down arms in the hope that fewer people will be killed, maimed, tortured, starved and displaced than is currently the case? Should ending industrial-strength terror from the skies and starvation sieges down below be the top priority? Given the carnage of Aleppo and all that has preceded it, there is no doubt about what the regime and its allies are willing to do. Neither can there be any doubt about the refusal of the West, notwithstanding its “Never Again” rhetoric, to offer a modicum of protection. [Continue reading…]

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FBI backs CIA view that Russia intervened to help Trump win election

The Washington Post reports: FBI Director James B. Comey and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. are in agreement with a CIA assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election in part to help Donald Trump win the presidency, according to U.S. officials.

Comey’s support for the CIA’s conclusion reflects the fact that the leaders of the three agencies have always been in agreement on Russian intentions, officals said, contrary to suggestions by some lawmakers that the FBI disagreed with the CIA.

“Earlier this week, I met separately with (Director) FBI James Comey and DNI Jim Clapper, and there is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election,” CIA Director John Brennan said in a message to the agency’s workforce, according to U.S. officials who have seen the message.

“The three of us also agree that our organizations, along with others, need to focus on completing the thorough review of this issue that has been directed by President Obama and which is being led by the DNI,” Brennan’s message read. [Continue reading…]

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Assad’s lesson from Aleppo: Force works, with few consequences

The New York Times reports: For months, the bodies have been piling up in eastern Aleppo as the buildings have come down, pulverized by Syrian and Russian jets, burying residents who could not flee in avalanches of bricks and mortar.

And now it is almost over, not because diplomats reached a deal in Geneva, but because President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and his foreign allies have won the city. Cold, hungry and scarred by the deaths of loved ones, tens of thousands of civilians and fighters are awaiting buses to take them from their homes to uncertain futures.

It is not the first victory that Mr. Assad has secured with overwhelming force in the Syrian conflict. But his subjugation of eastern Aleppo has echoed across the Middle East and beyond, rattling alliances, proving the effectiveness of violence and highlighting the reluctance of many countries, perhaps most notably the United States, to get involved.

President Obama, on Friday at his final news conference of the year, acknowledged that the nearly six-year-old war in Syria had been among the hardest issues he has faced, and that the world was “united in horror” at the butchery in Aleppo. But Mr. Obama — who came into office committed to reducing America’s military entanglements in the Middle East — also defended his decision not to intervene more forcefully.

To do otherwise, he said, would have required the United States to be “all in and willing to take over Syria.”

The message for autocratic leaders in the region and elsewhere is that force works — and brings few consequences, said Maha Yahya, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.

The lesson for the victims of that force is that they are on their own. [Continue reading…]

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Is Donald Trump a threat to democracy?

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write: Donald J. Trump’s election has raised a question that few Americans ever imagined asking: Is our democracy in danger? With the possible exception of the Civil War, American democracy has never collapsed; indeed, no democracy as rich or as established as America’s ever has. Yet past stability is no guarantee of democracy’s future survival.

We have spent two decades studying the emergence and breakdown of democracy in Europe and Latin America. Our research points to several warning signs.

The clearest warning sign is the ascent of anti-democratic politicians into mainstream politics. Drawing on a close study of democracy’s demise in 1930s Europe, the eminent political scientist Juan J. Linz designed a “litmus test” to identify anti-democratic politicians. His indicators include a failure to reject violence unambiguously, a readiness to curtail rivals’ civil liberties, and the denial of the legitimacy of elected governments.

Mr. Trump tests positive. In the campaign, he encouraged violence among supporters; pledged to prosecute Hillary Clinton; threatened legal action against unfriendly media; and suggested that he might not accept the election results.

This anti-democratic behavior has continued since the election. With the false claim that he lost the popular vote because of “millions of people who voted illegally,” Mr. Trump openly challenged the legitimacy of the electoral process. At the same time, he has been remarkably dismissive of United States intelligence agencies’ reports of Russian hacking to tilt the election in his favor. [Continue reading…]

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Chinese naval ship seizes U.S. underwater research robot in South China Sea

The Washington Post reports: A Chinese naval ship seized an underwater naval drone that was being used by the U.S. Navy to test water conditions in the South China Sea, the Pentagon said Friday.

Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said the incident occurred on Dec. 15 about 50 nautical miles northwest of Subic Bay, in international waters in the South China Sea.

The USNS Bowditch, an oceanographic survey vessel with a mostly civilian crew, was in the process of recovering two unmanned ocean gliders, which are used to collect information about water conditions that can help U.S. vessels operate. A Chinese ship, a Dalang-III class submarine rescue vessel, approached the area, coming within about 500 yards of the Bowditch before dropping a small boat in the water. It seized one of the gliders and brought it aboard, Davis said.

The Bowditch contacted the Chinese ship and asked for the glider to be returned. Officials aboard the Chinese ship acknowledged the radio communication, Davis said, but said they were returning to normal operations. The ship then left the area.

“We would like it back and we would like this not to happen again,” Davis said, referring to the underwater drone. The incident occurred around 1:45 p.m. local time, the Navy said. [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump’s war on science

Lawrence M. Krauss writes: Last week, the Space, Science, and Technology subcommittee of the House of Representatives tweeted a misleading story from Breitbart News: “Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists.” (There is always some drop in temperature when El Niño transitions into La Niña — but there has been no anomalous plunge.) Under normal circumstances, this tweet wouldn’t be so surprising: Lamar Smith, the chair of the committee since 2013, is a well-known climate-change denier. But these are not normal times. The tweet is best interpreted as something new: a warning shot. It’s a sign of things to come — a declaration of the Trump Administration’s intent to sideline science.

In a 1946 essay, George Orwell wrote that “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” It’s not just that we’re easily misled. It’s that, by “impudently twisting the facts,” we can convince ourselves of “things which we know to be untrue.” A whole society, he wrote, can deceive itself “for an indefinite time,” and the only check on that mass delusion is that “sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality.” Science is one source of that solid reality. The Trump Administration seems determined to keep it at bay, and the consequences for society and the environment will be profound.

The first sign of Trump’s intention to spread lies about empirical reality, “1984”-style, was, of course, the appointment of Steve Bannon, the former executive chairman of the Breitbart News Network, as Trump’s “senior counselor and strategist.” This year, Breitbart hosted stories with titles such as “1001 Reasons Why Global Warming Is So Totally Over in 2016,” despite the fact that 2016 is now overwhelmingly on track to be the hottest year on record, beating 2015, which beat 2014, which beat 2013. Such stories do more than spread disinformation. Their purpose is the creation of an alternative reality — one in which scientific evidence is a sham — so that hyperbole and fearmongering can divide and conquer the public. [Continue reading…]

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