Month: August 2014

Conspiracy Theorists All Around You

by Dish Staff

foil hat

Jesse Walker examines the scope of conspiracy theories:

Enemy Above stories tend to be overrepresented [in the scholarship]. And that in turn can skew the results. When researchers draw conclusions about people who are especially prone to seeing conspiracies, they might actually be telling us about people prone to seeing a particular kind of conspiracy.

Sometimes this bias is stated baldly. In 2010, for example, the Rutgers sociologist Ted Goertzel wrote an article for EMBO Reports, a journal of molecular biology, that said conspiracy logic tends to “question everything the ‘establishment’—be it government or scientists—says or does.” He backed this up on the rather thin grounds that a recent pop text, The Rough Guide to Conspiracy Theories, mostly discusses theories about “political, religious, military, diplomatic or economic elites.”

But that “establishment” has conspiracy theories of its own, even if the Rough Guide overlooked them.

At moments of moral panic, it is common for the government and the mainstream media to blame a folk devil—frequently cast in conspiratorial terms—for a real or alleged crisis. Examples range from the white slavery panic of a century ago, when a vast international syndicate was believed to be conscripting thousands of girls into sexual service, to the Satanism scare of the 1980s and early ’90s, when politicians, prosecutors, juries, and the press were persuaded that devil-worshipping cabals were molesting and killing children. Often the conspiracy stories believed by relatively powerless people are mirrored by conspiracy stories believed by elites. At the same time that American slaves were afraid that white doctors were plotting to kidnap and dissect them, the planter class was periodically seized by fears of slaves secretly plotting revolution. While the Populist Party was denouncing East Coast banking cabals, many wealthy Easterners were wondering whether a conspiracy was behind Populism.

Alfred Moore, Joseph Parent and Joseph Uscinski bust another misconception about conspiracy theories – that only conservatives are prone to them:

So are all Americans created equal when it comes to fearing collusion and conspiracies? Our recent research suggests that they are. As part of a 2012 national survey, we asked respondents about the likelihood of voter fraud as an explanation if their preferred presidential candidate did not win. Fifty percent of Republicans said it would be very or somewhat likely, compared to 44 percent of Democrats. This contradicts claims byJonathan Chait that Republicans believe in electoral conspiracy theories far more than Democrats do.

Another 2012 national poll asked about fraud in specific presidential elections. Thirty-seven percent of Democrats believed that “President Bush’s supporters committed significant voter fraud in order to win Ohio in 2004,” compared to 36 percent of Republicans who believe that “President Obama’s supporters committed significant voter fraud in the 2012 presidential election.” Again, not much difference. This dovetails with Brendan Nyhan’s findings about “birther” and “truther” conspiracy theories. He found that Republicans were just as likely to believe that President Obama was born abroad as Democrats were likely to believe that 9/11 was an inside job.

(Photo by Jonathan Abolins)

Prenatal Complexity

by Dish Staff

Ananda Rose presents real-life examples of the two opposite ends of the abortion debate. First, she tells the story of a woman, whom she calls Julie Smith (name changed), who carried a fetus with severe abnormalities:

Her first choice, she says, was to give birth at a hospital but not to offer medical interventions such as feeding tubes, ventilators, or resuscitative measures, and to let nature take its course; without such intervention, Alice would likely die shortly after birth, if she was not stillborn, which was also a possibility. But, as Smith explains, the law requires feeding tubes for non-responsive infants, which would have kept Alice alive, but in a way that seemed “wreckless and cruel.” She could not imagine watching her daughter suffer in that way. The only other option that she and her husband considered “was going off the grid,” because, Smith says, even with a home birth state workers would most likely have intervened. But Smith feared that if they “just disappeared” to have the baby somewhere in peace and quiet, and if Alice died as predicted, they could be charged with homicide.

Given these realities, Smith chose what she believed was the most compassionate option: to terminate the pregnancy. “I am a mother, and I would do anything in my power to save my child,” she wrote on her blog. “That’s how the most difficult situation I’ve ever faced, the hardest thing I’ve ever done, was also the clearest choice.”

Rose then turns to evangelical Christian Maria Lancaster, and to the world of embryo adoption, “which is when unused embryos from a couple’s fertility treatments are donated to another couple”:

After four years of being frozen at -200 degrees, the two embryos, which Lancaster marveled at through a microscope, were implanted into her uterus. While one of the embryos did not make it, the other grew into what Lancaster calls her “child of destiny.”  … Lancaster also co-founded her own embryo adoption agency along with Dr. Joseph Fuiten, senior pastor of Cedar Park Church in Issaquah. For several years now she has been connecting families who have remaining embryos after fertility treatments with those unable to conceive. Lancaster says that she “prays over the files” that come to her, trying to create the best match. She pairs couples in terms of race, religion, and ethnicity, “like God does it,” so that the child “will feel a real part of the pack,” adding that her efforts have only confirmed her belief that “rescuing these unseen lives from the freezer” is her moral duty.

The Obamacare Bump

by Dish Staff

Obamacare Elections

Sam Wang argues that Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion has become a political plus for Republican governors who support it:

According to these data points, Republican governors who bucked their party’s stance and accepted the policy are faring better with voters—in these races, an average of 8.5 percentage points better. Considering that crusading against Obamacare has been a core part of the G.O.P. playbook, this 8.5-point difference may come as a surprise. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that voters’ sentiments are driven entirely by health-care policy. Think of the Medicaid expansion as a “proxy variable,” one that is predictive of stands on many other issues.

Drum adds:

In other words, refusing the Medicaid expansion is the mark of a true-believing wingnut, and that’s not such a great place to be right now. Conversely, accepting the Medicaid expansion is the mark of a pragmatic conservative, and those folks have remained relatively popular.

Will The ISIS War Come To A Vote?

by Dish Staff

If Obama wants to secure the public’s backing for the fight against ISIS, Jack Goldsmith recommends that he bring it to Congress for a vote:

The President must eventually educate the nation about why the United States is going to be deploying significant treasure and possibly some blood in Iraq and probably Syria to defeat IS.  As noted above, the case in theory is not hard to make.  But a mere speech from the Oval Office will not do the trick if the President wants the nation to understand the stakes and risks, and wants to get the American People truly behind the effort.  Only an extended and informed and serious national debate can do that, and such a debate can only occur if the President asks for Congress’s support.

Will Inboden also believes it’s time for a new, ISIS-specific Congressional authorization for the use of force:

Even before the Islamic State’s resurgence, some national security legal scholars were arguing that the Obama administration ‘s campaign against al Qaeda and its proliferating franchises was skating on increasingly thin legal ice. … Substantively, a new AUMF, especially focused on IS and its affiliates, could take into account the evolution and adaptation of militant jihadist groups in the 13 years since the Sept. 11 attacks, as well as the shifts and drawdowns of American ground force deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Islamic State’s nihilistic wickedness may be generating the headlines now, but over time even more danger may be posed by its magnetism towards other al Qaeda franchises and its potential leadership of militant jihadist groups spanning the broader Middle East and points beyond in Africa and South Asia.

Ashley Deeks, meanwhile, explores the various ways in which the administration might kosherize an intervention in Syria under international law:

A UN Security Council Resolution would provide the clearest basis for action. This option was a dead letter back in July 2012, when Russia and China refused even to approve economic sanctions against Assad, let alone the use of military force. One question would be whether the politics on this have changed: there might be some reason to think that Assad is coming under pressure from his own supporters to take on ISIS. It seems unlikely that Assad would affirmatively embrace a UNSCR authorizing a coalition of the willing to target ISIS in Syria, but if Russia senses that Assad might tolerate such action, the Security Council dynamics could change. Then again, the U.S.-Russia relationship is so toxic right now that this option seems remote. …

Second, Assad could secretly give consent to foreign governments (including the United States) to use force against ISIS in Syria. This, too, seems improbable, given the longstanding animosities between Assad and various Western governments. But having one government give secret and reluctant consent to another to conduct strikes in its territory is not without precedent.

Cutting Hours Cuts Profits

by Dish Staff

Over-reliance on part-time workers isn’t good for anyone:

Since 2006, the retail and wholesale sector has cut more than a million full-time jobs and added half a million part-time positions.

A study of one large retail chain, conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, found that scheduling the optimal mix of temporary and part-time workers could increase the profitability of the average store by nearly one-third. But cheaper wasn’t always better. Part-time workers often are not as productive as full-timers, because they tend to be less skilled and less experienced. To maximize sales, the researchers found, the typical store should have four or five part-time employees for every ten full-time employees. “It is possible to have too much of a good thing,” they concluded.

We may already have passed that threshold. Last week, researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago reported that a slack job market continues to limit the paychecks of U.S. workers. An important factor, they said, is the number of part-time employees who would rather have full-time work.

Gas Attack?

by Bill McKibben

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A new study in Nature describes a new possible climate threat. We’ve known for some time that there is lots of methane stored in frozen form in the world’s oceans. The best known of these clathrate formations are in the Arctic, but today’s study finds them across the Atlantic, and by implication around the rest of the seafloor. Methane appears to be bubbling up out of these vents–which is bad news, since methane is a potent greenhouse gas, molecule for molecule much stronger than carbon dioxide:

The seeps were discovered in a stretch of ocean waters from Cape Hatteras, N.C., to Georges Bank, Mass. The majority are located at a depth of about 1,640 feet, which is at the upper level of stability for gas hydrate.

“Warming of the ocean waters could cause this ice to melt and release gas,”Adam Skarke, a geoscientist at Mississippi State University and the study’s lead author, told NBC News. “So there may be some connection here to intermediate ocean warming, though we need to carry out further investigations to confirm if that is the case,” he added.

The theory is, much of the heat from global warming is currently going into the ocean, not the air.  In fact, there was a study just yesterday–Justin Worland summarizes :

Temperatures have risen more slowly in the past decade than in the previous 50 years and will continue to rise at a somewhat slower rate in the next decade, according to a new study, even as climate change continues to raise temperatures to unprecedented levels worldwide.

The study, published in the journal Science, explained the temporary slowdown in rising temperatures as a potential consequence of the end of a 30-year current cycle in the Atlantic Ocean that pushes heat into the ocean.

The Economist looks at how the study credits the oceans for the pause:

Dr Chen and Dr Tung have shown where exactly in the sea the missing heat is lurking. … [O]ver the past decade and a bit the ocean depths have been warming faster than the surface. This period corresponds perfectly with the pause, and contrasts with the last two decades of the 20th century, when the surface was warming faster than the deep. The authors calculate that, between 1999 and 2012, 69 zettajoules of heat (that is, 69 x 1021 joules—a huge amount of energy) have been sequestered in the oceans between 300 metres and 1,500 metres down. If it had not been so sequestered, they think, there would have been no pause in warming at the surface.

Some of that heat may well be causing these methane formations to melt, in what would be yet another vicious feedback loop. But even if this turns out to (and oh one hopes) a red herring, the basic news that the oceans are heating quickly is quite bad enough. In part because we don’t notice it as much as we do heating of the air, which slows down our response.

As Jane Lee puts it:

It’s important to note that a pause in rising temperatures doesn’t mean global warming isn’t happening, writes Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at NCAR, in an email. “Global warming hasn’t stopped, it has temporarily shifted to the subsurface ocean,” says Meehl, who first proposed that the Atlantic Ocean was storing some of the missing heat.

Indeed, it’s just a matter of time before this heat is reflected in atmospheric temperatures, says Tung. If this 30-year cycle holds, we’re starting to climb out of the current pause, he explains.

“The frightening part,” Tung says, is “it’s going to warm just as fast as the last three decades of the 20th century, which was the fastest warming we’ve seen.” Only now, we’ll be starting from a higher average surface temperature than before.

Oh, and by the way, to return to this problem with methane: it’s why scientists increasingly worry that fracking is a bad idea not just for local water supplies, but for the climate. As Naomi Oreskes pointed out recently, if more than a couple of percent of methane leaks, it’s possible that the Obama adminstration’s turn to natural gas hasn’t really cut our greenhouse gas emissions at all:

But how do we know what our emissions actually are? Most people would assume that we measure them, but they would be wrong.  Emissions are instead calculated based on energy data — how much coal, oil, and gas was bought and sold in the U.S. that year — multiplied by assumed rates of greenhouse gas production by those fuels. Here’s the rub: the gas calculation depends on the assumed leakage rate.  If we’ve been underestimating leakage, then we’ve underestimated the emissions.

A Sand Wedge Issue

by Jonah Shepp

Obama has come in for a lot of criticism for remaining on “vacation” in Martha’s Vineyard and proceeding with his regularly scheduled golf outings despite mounting crises in Iraq, Ukraine, and Missouri. Ezra Klein identifies what’s right and wrong about that critique:

This is politics at its dumbest. The country is not well served by a burnt-out president. If there’s a problem with presidential vacations it’s that they’re not restful enough. The way to do this right would be for the vice president to take over for a week or two — and for the president to get a call if something really goes wrong. Instead, the president takes working vacations, and the White House brags about how much work he gets done when he’s supposed to be resting.

But so long as the president is still the president when he’s on vacation, he still carries the symbolic weight of the role. He can’t go directly from leading the nation in grieving to hitting a drive. … Obama, of course, would say that this isn’t his problem. The get-caught-trying thing is Washington’s problem. The idea that politician should go around pretending to get things done even when they’re not getting anything done is exactly why the American people hate Washington, and exactly why they elected to Barack Obama to change it. And he is, in many ways, right about that. But there are days when it’s bad to get caught not trying.

First of all, let’s dispense with the notion that Obama is “on vacation”. President is a job you can do from pretty much anywhere these days, and in August, I suspect I’d rather be doing it from Martha’s Vineyard than from Washington, DC, where it’s typically a breezy 86° in the shade, not counting the hot air emanating from Capitol Hill. And that’s exactly what the president is doing: his job, from somewhere other than his usual office. It’s not like he’s really unplugging and unwinding out there on the links—and as Klein points out, he’d probably be handling this hellscape of world affairs a bit better if he actually got to do so once in a while. This criticism also strikes me as somewhat hypocritical, when the same people who accuse the president of failing to think out his strategic choices clearly and act on them decisively also insist that he operate under conditions of maximum stress.

Should he have postponed those 18 holes he put in after the Foley speech? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it’s how he clears his head after delivering a grim address. It might not look especially sensitive, but then, those who are making political hay out of that can always be counted on to find their hay somewhere. And after all these years, Paul Waldman figures the president is past caring about “the optics”:

Obama could try to “win the morning” and be consumed with every up and down of the news cycle. But he plainly no longer cares. Playing golf might not make him look good, but he’s probably decided that it’s an important way for him to stay sane (as the Times article says, he has “perhaps the most stressful job on the planet”), and he’s willing to tolerate some bad press.

Back when he first ran for president, Obama and his team prided themselves on their ability to see beyond the fury of that day’s news cycle, avoid the distraction of whatever was in Politico that morning, and keep their focus on their long-term goals. That was a central part of the “No Drama Obama” ethos. What’s happening now is in some ways an extension of that perspective. It may be that Obama has decided that it’s no longer possible to affect how most Americans think about him — after nearly six years in office, there’s no clever press strategy that will revive his approval ratings. The only thing that will make a difference is results.

Meanwhile, John Cassidy’s defense of what he dubs Obama’s “golf addiction” is so snobbishly golf-happy it reads more like a brief for the prosecution. I came away from it much angrier at Obama—and anyone else who makes $250k+ a year—than I was going in. Read it only if you either love golf and want to feel like you have something in common with the president, or hold deep class-based resentments against the sport and enjoy getting angry about it.

Foley’s Impossible Ransom, Ctd

by Dish Staff

Bucking the pundit consensus, Leonid Bershidsky argues that the US should not dismiss out of hand the option of paying terrorist groups ransoms for civilian captives like James Foley and Steven Sotloff:

Not leaving the ransom option open fits the logic of war. Either the U.S. Marines will drop out of the sky and destroy the hostage takers — in the case of photojournalist James Foley that didn’t work out — or the terrorists will kill their infidel victim and distribute the fortifying video to their supporters. Yet this approach may not be smart for detective work. Keeping the ransom option open may create opportunities to track down kidnappers and free hostages — and a growing number of successful hostage liberations would be as powerful a deterrent to terrorists as declarations that no money will be paid out. So a policy of refusing to pay isn’t so obviously superior, after all. One thing is for sure, though: More deaths like Foley’s will just raise the savages’ morale.

Michael J. Totten wonders if there isn’t a middle way:

Washington can’t pay ransoms, but it could and probably should offer a large cash reward for intelligence that leads to a successful rescue. Kidnappers might try to collect the reward money themselves, which would make it a ransom by other means, but there’s an easy way around that—kill all the kidnappers. Do not arrest them and send them to Guantanamo. Kill them.

I have no doubt Washington is looking for Sotloff and the others right now. They’ll send men if they think they know where he is. They’ve already tried at least once. We can only hope they’ll succeed before it’s too late. In the meantime, to all of my colleagues: for God’s sake, stay the hell out of Syria.

And Sandy Levinson brings up the uncomfortable truth that a human life isn’t really as “priceless” as we like to think it is:

We know, when we decide to build skyscrapers or major bridges, etc., that people are going to die.  Ditto, incidentally, with regard to raising speed limits on automobiles or continuing to allow the sale of alcohol in bars, etc., etc.  To be sure, we don’t know exactly who is going to die, and that makes all the difference, just as Barack Obama doesn’t know exactly whom he is sentencing to death when deploying troops or allowing the use of drones that will generate “collateral damage.”  For many, that non-specificity makes all the difference. … There is absolutely no excuse for what was done to Mr. Foley, but perhaps we have to treat war journalilsts the way we treat soldiers:  i.e., they voluntarily enlisted in a very dangerous occupation, for a mixture of reasons, including patriotism and devotion to the public weal, but part of the deal is that their lives will be on the line, to be protected only at “acceptable” cost.

Even if it is true that most of us consider our own lives “priceless,” no society has ever operated on that basis, and none ever will.