Tag: Premium

Hoping They Choose The Right Path, Ctd

James Fallon, author of The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain and star of the TED Talk seen above, explores the diversity of psychopathy:

As far as public perception goes, I’d say that the best, most badass, sadistic, ultimate example of a psychopath would be the original Hannibal Lecter. That’s who we think a psychopath is. But I’d argue that Will Graham, the FBI agent who tracks Hannibal, is the version of a psychopath we see more often in reality: he’s the pro-social psychopath, the guy in the office who seems a little off but who doesn’t engage in really ugly, egregious criminal behavior. And that’s where I would put myself. I might have a lot of weird, disturbed thoughts, but I don’t act on those thoughts. The Hannibal guys are a small subset, but they’re certainly overrepresented in the media.

He explains why some psychopaths become killers and others successful CEOs:

[Early in my research], I looked around and knew a lot of great poor people and a lot of really rich jerks, so I said “Hey, if the environment is key to all of this, it really isn’t doing the job we think it is.” Instead, I became convinced that we were born and not raised – and I spent my career studying exactly how the brain influences who we become.

But I didn’t fit my own theory. I had similar brain scans to full-blown, psychopathic killers. I had the genetic profile of a psychopath too. So why didn’t I fall into that kind of behavior? Well, I’d say it’s because I had a very fortunate, very warm upbringing with a wonderful family. And a lot of those who have my same genetic makeup and go onto violence endured awful abuse or trauma.

So you need to give environment more credit than I used to, but that doesn’t mean I’ve thrown out biology: around the time this was all happening to me, the field of epigenetics started to explode. Maybe it isn’t that biology doesn’t determine who you are, but that your environment can play a role in which genes are turned on or off.

Previous Dish on nonviolent psychopaths here, here and here.

Why Hasn’t AA Caught On In Russia?

Leon Neyfakh addresses the question:

[I]n Russia, despite the passionate efforts of its proponents, [Alcoholics Anonymous] has struggled for acceptance as a legitimate treatment method and has largely failed to catch on. Since 1987, when an Episcopal priest from New York convened some of Russia’s very first AA meetings, only about 400 groups have formed in the entire country – a tiny number, when you consider that there are about 1,600 such groups in the Boston metropolitan area alone.

Why has Russia proven so inhospitable to AA’s ideas? Certainly, the history of distrust between our two countries hasn’t helped. But there have been other obstacles as well – some religious, some medical, some cultural.

At a basic level, its premise of sobriety through mutual support just doesn’t make sense to a lot of Russians. In the past, this has taken the form of anti-Western suspicion – “What are the Americans trying to get out of this?” is a question Moseeva used to hear regularly. But more fundamentally, the group-therapy dynamic collides with a skepticism about the possibility of ordinary people curing each other of anything. “The idea that another drunk can help you is asinine to most Russians,” said Alexandre Laudet, a social psychologist who has researched Russian alcoholism.

Then there’s the problem of opening up to strangers. The AA method works in part through trust in people you’ve never met before, and coming clean to them about one’s most shameful secrets. “It is much harder for a Russian person to talk about himself than it is for an American,” said a Russian AA member named Mikhail. “And there are a lot of reasons why, including that the generation of my parents – and my own, I’m 55 – couldn’t speak the truth at all, because it was possible to get arrested for it.”

Pachyderm PTSD

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Childhood trauma scars elephants, not just people:

African elephants that have lived through the trauma of a cull – or selected killing of their kin –may look normal enough to the casual observer, but socially they are a mess. That’s the conclusion of a new study, the first to show that human activities can disrupt the social skills of large-brained mammals that live in complex societies for decades. The finding, experts say, has implications for conservation management, which often solely focuses on the number of animals in a population, and may extend to chimpanzees, dolphins, whales, and other species.

Wildlife officials often used culling as a conservation tool in South Africa from the 1960s to the 1990s. (It is still reserved as a management tool there.) At the time, wildlife managers worried that if there were too many elephants in a fenced reserve, like the famed Kruger National Park, the behemoths would ultimately destroy the habitat, eating or trampling all the vegetation and uprooting the trees. During a cull, a helicopter pilot herds an elephant family into a tight bunch. Professional hunters on the ground then shoot the animals as quickly as possible. Only young elephants ranging from about 4 to 10 years old are saved. Park officials typically shipped them to other parks that lacked elephants or had smaller populations to increase the herds, because elephants are popular with tourists.

Scientists have known since the late 1990s that many of these elephants were psychologically affected by their experiences during the culling. Other studies have described these effects as akin to post-traumatic stress disorder. For instance, the orphaned male elephants at Pilanesberg and another reserve made headlines for attacking and killing 107 rhinoceroses over a 10-year period, something that elephants had never been reported to do. … Because the Pilanesberg elephants grew up without the social knowledge of their original families, they will likely never properly respond to social threats and may even pass on their inappropriate behaviors to the next generation, the team concludes in the current issue of Frontiers in Zoology.

(Photo: Elephants at South Africa’s Pilanesberg National Park. By Robert Nyman)

High Times A-Changin’

A profile of the magazine offers insight into how cannabis culture has changed over four decades:

Danny Danko (senior cultivation editor): Tons of companies are coming in to dish_hightimescover1 advertise. A lot of the vapor-pen companies, a lot of the hydroponics companies that sort of shied away from us years ago because they didn’t want that connection to marijuana, have come around because they’re just not afraid of the stigma anymore. That’s one of the things I think High Times has done a good job of—just removing the stigma of the “lazy stoner.” Instead, we try to show that whether it’s in the entertainment business or sports or wherever, we are everywhere. We are doctors and lawyers; we are throughout society and in every part of it. …

Bobby Black (senior editor): It used to be, back in the day, it was always rock—psychedelic rock in the ’60s and ’70s—that was the music associated with pot. Then hip-hop came out—well, and reggae, of course, because of the Rasta culture—and they embraced pot in a big way. The thing that’s changed now is that I’m noticing pop stars like Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber really embracing pot. And it’s not that pop stars never smoked weed before; it’s just that now they’re out about it and don’t really care. It’s become so accepted that the new generation is just like, “So what?”

Dan Skye (executive editor): Jennifer Aniston!

I think she would sell, because we know that she smokes pot—we’ve heard about it for years. We tried; we got no response. And Miley Cyrus is great. We did a poll a few months back: “What celebrity would you most like to smoke with?” And she scored higher than Bill Maher, which we thought was really kind of funny.

Bobby Black: When the magazine started, all throughout the ’70s, sex was an integral part of it. We had beautiful women on the cover. We walk a fine line with it, because we don’t want to be exploiting women. On the other hand, those covers were sexy—and there is nothing wrong with sex. I’ve always stressed this: High Times is about hedonism. But it isn’t about irresponsible, over-the-top hedonism—it’s about enjoying everything life has to offer, and sex is part of that.

But the reason we don’t put [former porn star] Jenna Jameson in her bathing suit on the cover anymore is because the sales just weren’t there. Our readers would rather stare at centerfolds of plants—and that’s just the facts we have learned over the years.

Try not to drool at your desk, stoners:

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(Image: Cover of the June 1980 issue via High Times)

Christie’s Weaknesses

Ambers lists them. A big one:

Overconfidence, and an overage of self-piety, will lead Christie to insist that certain potential problems are simply not. (There’s no way that, I, Chris Christie, would allow myself to make that mistake.) To admit otherwise is to introduce cognitive dissonance. But as the Romney vet of Christieshowed, there are potentially significant questions about his judgment that will dog Christie until he answers them without being defensive. This blindness will serve Christie poorly when it comes to choosing advisers, too. (Rudy Giuliani had his Bernie Kerik. And what was galling about it was how Giuliani simply could not contemplate the idea that Kerik was not up to snuff. Giuliani, after all, had picked him to be part of his inner circle.)

Bouie wonders how the midterms will impact Christie’s chances:

 Insofar that his message of electability has any chance of resonating with Republican primary voters, it will be because they have given up the quest for purity, and are desperate to win. which means that, for Christie, the best thing that could happen is for Republicans to have a terrible 2014. If the GOP continues down its path of extremism, and loses its shot at capturing the Senate as a result, Christie has perfect ground for making his pitch.

Unfortunately for him, the more likely outcome is that Republicans do pretty well. The combination of a sluggish economy and voter discontent will hurt incumbents, which threatens the Democratic majority in the Senate and precludes the party from making real gains in the House. And a GOP base that does well—or even okay—in next year’s midterms is one that doesn’t have much interest in Christie’s message.

Finally, First Read notes that “inevitable” candidates often lose:

[E]mbracing being front-runner — three years out, mind you — has its own risks. After all, at this point in the 2008 cycle, neither of the front-runners (Hillary Clinton or Rudy Giuliani) won their party’s nomination. And the early presidential birds (think John Edwards, Tim Pawlenty) usually don’t get the worm. Just something to chew on.

This Extraordinary Pope, Ctd

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Last week the Vatican released a document laying the groundwork for next year’s Synod of Bishops on the Family, a gathering of bishops from around the world focusing on pastoral challenges related to modern family life. As well as laying out the essentials of relevant Church teachings, the document poses 39 questions to the bishops about the actual families living and working in their communities, and how the Church can best minister to them. Here are the questions under the heading, “On Unions of Persons of the Same Sex”:

a) Is there a law in your country recognizing civil unions for people of the same-sex and equating it in some way to marriage?

b) What is the attitude of the local and particular Churches towards both the State as the promoter of civil unions between persons of the same sex and the people involved in this type of union?

c) What pastoral attention can be given to people who have chosen to live in these types of union?

d) In the case of unions of persons of the same sex who have adopted children, what can be done pastorally in light of transmitting the faith?

The meaning of all this is as vague as the questions are conspicuously neutral. The Vatican has given some conflicting signals as to whether this is something new or something habitual, whether it is a consultation directly between the faithful and the Vatican, or whether the various bodies of national bishops will be the intermediary. In England and Wales, the bishops have put the questionnaire online.  In the US, where the bishops are still dominated by reactionaries, no such direct input outside the bishops’ control looks likely. That effectively means, I fear, that the US hierarchy – think Cardinal Dolan – may not convey the real sensus fidelium on these matters:

In the letter he sent to the bishops’ conferences in October, Archbishop Lorenzo Baldisseri, the secretary general of the Vatican’s Synod of Bishops, directed the prelates to distribute the questionnaire “immediately as widely as possible to deaneries and parishes so that input from local sources can be received.”

One question is whether the archbishop and the Vatican meant for the world’s bishops to conduct a survey of their populations using the questionnaire. The U.S. bishops’ conference did not request the U.S. episcopate to undertake that wide of a consultation, telling the bishops in an Oct. 30 memo sent with Baldisseri’s letter only to provide their own observations.

I think American lay Catholics should download the English questionnaire and send their views in directly, if the bishops still insist on controlling the data. And in any case, we already know what American Catholics think on many of these questions. Sophisticated polling outfits have provided the data for a long time. Either this initiative will echo those views or it will skew toward what the bishops want to hear.

But my sense of this Pope – especially in his direct interaction with ordinary people – is that this is a chance for real democratic input, of not democracy itself (which would not be appropriate). Amy Davidson gives them a close read, and comes away thinking that this could be where the Francis revolution begins to move beyond rhetoric:

What Francis seems to be looking for is not a doctrinal or political response to same-sex unions but a pastoral one: taking modern families as they are and live, and seeing how the Catholic Church can be part of their lives. (There is not a question about how best to lobby legislatures.) The synod, according to the document, is meant to address “concerns which were unheard of until a few years ago.” Its summary of these concerns is not in all respects liberal; it mentions “forms of feminism hostile to the Church,” and emphasizes the indissolubility of marriage. And certain situations that it calls novel, like that of single parents and of dowries “understood as the purchase price of the woman,” have been less unheard of than unheeded.

But there are the seeds of something radical here.

There is, for one thing, an attempt to get past pretense. It asks how many people “in your particular church” are remarried, or separated, or are children whose families aren’t the kind in church picture books, and how to reach and include them. In terms of abortion, it asks how people could be persuaded to accept the Church’s teachings—but also how good a job churches are doing at teaching them about “natural” means of family planning, like the rhythm method. Mercy was also a word that came up, with regard to families living “irregular” lives.

It’s not too early to wonder if that synod could be a landmark moment for Francis’s papacy, and his Church.

The divisions in the Vatican are real and obvious:

When Archbishop Lorenzo Baldisseri was asked at the Vatican press briefing Tuesday if that action was something other bishops’ conferences should emulate, he said the “question answers itself” and was “not worth considering.”

I suspect the Pope’s moving accretion of moral authority these past few months with Catholics and non-Catholics alike – along with his new structure of eight cardinals as a kind of cabinet outside the Vatican bureaucracy – will give him more lee-way for change than some might expect. Michael O’Loughlin is optimistic:

I could not have imagined that the church would recognize gays as human beings even a few months ago, never mind ask for ideas on how to serve them, and their children, better. It’s truly revolutionary. And what’s not there in those questions is just as amazing as what is. There’s no mention of sin. Nothing about intrinsically disordered desires. The children aren’t called illegitimate. Instead, there’s language that recognizes gay and lesbian Catholics as human beings, as people who long for lives of faith and meaning.

Update from a reader, who notes something O’Loughlin noted as well:

Regarding the Vatican Survey, there is now a survey that lay Catholics in the US can respond to. Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good has received over 2000 responses since last Friday, and they are incredibly moving. It’s an abbreviated survey, focusing on how folks experience things pastorally in the pews. There is also a Spanish version available to recognize the reality of our US Church.

They may put up the full survey, but the shorter survey is getting a wider range of folks to respond – a priest who printed off a copy and helped a homeless friend fill it in and scan and email it; a 97-year old woman who had waited her life for this. Both surveys have their place – as a person with a theology and a law degree, I’m happy to contribute my thoughts on natural law. But as a person with a sibling who has transitioned from male to female, whether my parish welcomes LGBT folks is a matter of much greater importance – the types of questions the survey asks. When I was struggling most with her transition, mixing up pronouns and so forth, not knowing how to refer to my sibling, not accepting her decision fully, my priest friend provided me with pretty direct fraternal correction: “She’s your sister. Period.” From a guy who is much more comfortable listening and not being too directive about anything, this was a great gift, to be challenged so directly to respect who my sister was created to be.

Please let your readers know about this opportunity. The survey coordinators do have a channel to ensure it gets to the Synod.

(Photo: Pope Francis salutes the crowd as he arrives for his general audience in St Peter’s square at the Vatican on November 6, 2013. By Vincenzo Pinto/AFP/Getty Images.)

Obama’s Crucial Six Months

President Obama Speaks On The Government Shutdown In The Rose Garden

In many ways, his entire term as president has been leading up to this winter and spring. This will be when his core advancements in domestic and foreign policy will be tested as never before. This will be when we see whether the Affordable Care Act can gain traction and legitimacy as a reform that is far better than the chaos and inefficiency of the past; and when we see if the West can bring the great nation of Iran back into the fold of the world economy, with clear restrictions on its nuclear program.

The ACA has gotten off to a really rocky start, with the debacle of the website and the chorus of complaints from those whose health insurance plans will experience disruption. But it’s worth recalling that this law has always had a rocky history. It nearly got swallowed up by the urgent need to wrest the country out of a potential Second Great Depression; it wallowed in Senate inertia for months, as Max Baucus hemmed and hawed; it was pummeled by the summer of Tea Party rage; it nearly came undone when Ted Kennedy’s seat was lost to a Republican; it caused a huge loss in the 2010 Congressional elections, which in turn, helped the GOP gerrymander the House even more to their advantage, and block much of the president’s agenda since. It was the casus belli of the government shutdown and the debt ceiling crisis of this fall. When you look back, you realize why every previous president who tried to get this done failed – from Nixon to Clinton.

And yet it’s still alive, even as it’s enduring severe labor pains as it makes its way into the world. As I noted yesterday, support for it has actually risen recently; and, because of the website’s malfunction, the winners are much less vocal now than the losers. But if the process grinds on, that balance may change. The president should not be let off the hook for his previous overly-broad promises or for the clusterfuck of the site. He may need to adjust again a little. But the odds of the core of this law surviving – particularly the principle of universal coverage and the end of denials of insurance for pre-existing conditions – are solid. It may well need further reform, but it has created a framework for both Republican reform (if they can get out of their ideological mania) and even, perhaps, a single-payer system, if the Democrats want to move left. It’s messy, its future could go in several directions, but it’s now entrenched. The president can take the hit for the problems in the next three years, and he should. Because he’s not up for re-election and can veto any attempts to destroy it.

But in some ways, the outreach to Iran is just as important and critical. Again, the policy arc has been long and brutal. We witnessed – and this blog will never forget – the Green Revolution that emerged only months after Obama’s first election, propelled by the same online, youthful hopes that brought this president to office. We then saw the hopes of Obama’s Cairo speech destroyed by the brutal repression of Ahmadinejad and Khamenei. The sanctions that were then imposed were everything a neocon could ask for – except for the war or regime change they still want. Again, it took four more years for the Iranian elites to fully digest how damaging the sanctions were, but in the last elections, Rouhani emerged as a pragmatic interlocutor. During all this, Obama managed to create a truly durable and powerful international coalition for sanctions, and prevent the Israelis from doing the unthinkable and starting a religious war in the Middle East that could have metastasized into a global terror wave, with all the collateral damage in human life and civil liberties that would have entailed.

Much could still go wrong. But there’s no doubt in my mind that both Rouhani and Obama want a deal.

Both have to keep their war factions – the AIPAC-dominated Congress and the Revolutionary Guards respectively – in check, while also using the threat of war or more sanctions from these groups to make the case for a deal in the center. For months now, the Iranian government and the Obama administration have been talking, slowly building trust, with Obama not removing but slightly loosening some of the financial restrictions on the country:

In the six weeks prior to the Iranian elections in June, the Treasury Department issued seven notices of designations of sanctions violators that included more than 100 new people, companies, aircraft, and sea vessels. Since June 14, however, when Rouhani was elected, the Treasury Department has only issued two designation notices that have identified six people and four companies as violating the Iran sanctions.

A six month freeze of nuclear activity would give the talks more time to succeed, without bringing the Iranians closer to the ability to make an actual bomb. It’s not done yet, but it looks close. If the result is a new detente or even a thaw in relations between the West and Iran, it would transform global politics in a way not seen since the end of the Cold War. Because this is the other Cold War that has been going on since 1979. Such a breakthrough would help us ease away from our dependence on the Saudis for oil (along with fracking and discoveries like the massive Australian shale field), and would also give us far more leverage over Israel in the pursuit of a two-state solution.

All this may come crashing down, which is why the next six months will indeed be the critical ones. But let us be clear what the stakes would be for the Obama presidency. It would mean that this president ended the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, devastated al Qaeda in the region 9/11 came from, killed bin Laden, and ended torture. At home, his legacy would be an avoidance of a second Great Depression, the revival of the US auto industry, a drastic reduction in the deficit, tough executive branch decisions to rein in carbon emissions, a civil rights revolution for gay people and universal healthcare. And as the establishment of the GOP slowly moves against the radicals and extremists that have run its brand into the ground, Obama will have done something else as well. By refusing to blink in the debt ceiling crisis, he may well have done what all truly transformative political leaders do: reform his opposition by making it more responsible in opposition and more pragmatic in government.

I once spoke of him as a potential liberal Reagan. For all the nay-sayers out there, it’s still possible.

(Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty.)

The Strongest Storm On Record?

 

Last night, Nate Cohn compared Super Typhoon Haiyan, which just mauled the Philippines, to Katrina:

So how strong is Haiyan? Based on satellite imagery, the Joint Typhoon Warning Center estimates that Haiyan is… perfect, therefore possessing maximum sustained winds of 195 mph. Those maximum sustained winds are 20 mph faster than Hurricane Katrina at its peak, 5 mph faster than any previous storm. Based on the satellite images, Haiyan may be the strongest in the satellite era.

I’ve been watching hurricanes and typhoons for 18 years, and I’ve never seen anything like Haiyan (with the possible exception of Super Typhoon Angela, but, that was 18 years ago and I don’t remember it well.) It makes Hurricane Katrina look like a typical storm.

Even weather-wonk Jeff Masters is amazed:

After spending 48 hours at Category 5 strength, the strongest landfalling tropical cyclone in world history, Super Typhoon Haiyan, has finally weakened to a Category 4 storm. With top sustained winds of 155 mph, Haiyan is still an incredibly powerful super typhoon, but has now finished its rampage through the Central Philippine Islands, and is headed across the South China Sea towards Vietnam. Satellite loops show that Haiyan no longer has a well-defined eye, but the typhoon still has a huge area of intense thunderstorms which are bringing heavy rains to the Central Philippines. I’ve never witnessed a Category 5 storm that made landfall and stayed at Category 5 strength after spending so many hours over land, and there are very few storms that have stayed at Category 5 strength for so long.

He later writes, “Wind damage on the south shore of Samar Island in Guiuan (population 47,000) must have been catastrophic, perhaps the greatest wind damage any place on Earth has endured from a tropical cyclone in the past century.” Even though no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change, John Vidal notes that the warming planet plays a role:

We don’t yet know the death toll or damage done, but we do know that the strength of tropical storms such as Haiyan or Bopha is linked to sea temperature. As the oceans warm with climate change, there is extra energy in the system. Storms may not be increasing in frequency but Pacific ocean waters are warming faster than expected, and there is a broad scientific consensus that typhoons are now increasing in strength.

The Betrayal Of Vets With PTSD

Take a moment, if you have one, to read this wrenching, deeply moving and enraging testimony from one Marine veteran with a Purple Heart who returned home and became immobilized by post-traumatic stress. You can read about his heroism – “Oh, so you want to use us as bait? Thanks a lot!” – from an embedded photographer here. Here is his suicide note:

“To the woman I love with my whole heart and soul: You are finally free of the terror I have caused in your life. I am sorry for everything I have done to you. I deserve every bit of sorrow I feel. Never forget how much I love you and cherish the times we spent together. I’ll hopefully see you on the other side.”

He swallowed a bottle of pills, and then somehow reached back to life and vomited them back up. What makes this story more than distressing is that part of what compounded his PTSD was the mockery and contempt of other service-members toward his condition. It was viewed as weakness not illness, even for a Purple Heart recipient:

I wondered if asking for help for my post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury was the smartest decision – after all, it had ended my career.

The way my leaders had treated me tore me up on the inside, and their words haunted me. They had convinced me that I was not a Marine in pain, but someone looking for free benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs. At work, at home, in bed, all I could think about was how my career in the corps had ended in such a terrible, tasteless fashion, with my peers and leaders turning their backs on me because I had enrolled in treatment.

When he checked himself in to a mental health facility – the VA turned him down because he had two days left before he retired! – he was treated horribly. I don’t know about you, but this kind of story rips my heart out. It must not happen to anyone. The military has to make much more of an effort to destigmatize those psychologically traumatized by a war so intense for so many it has understandably altered them for ever. There is hope. But not if there is stigma.

Reverence Beyond Religion

Moshe Halbertal reviews Ronald Dworkin’s final book, Religion Without God, which argues that a religious sense of objective order and morality does not require a belief in a deity:

In one of the most insightful sections of the book, Dworkin shows that the theological claim that the source of moral obligation rests in the fact of God’s will and revelation is conceptually incoherent. If God wills the good and the bad into being, why should we obey His will at all? If the answer is that we owe Him a sense of gratitude and dependence as our creator, this is again a value argument, and as such it cannot rest on God’s will because it is the basis for following His will. Unlike morality, religion is not an independent sphere; it rests on a prior value that serves as its premise.

The radical philosophical implication of the strict independence of morality is that all godly religions are based on a prior religion without God, the religion that asserts the inevitability and the independence of moral obligations. A rather subversive and justified claim is therefore established: if religion, in the name of God’s superior revelation, commands something immoral, it undermines its own authority and ground, which ultimately rest on morality.

Mark Movsesian squirms:

Dworkin’s definition of religion … seems tendentious, a way to dilute religion so as to minimize the potential for conflict with the progressive state. This is not surprising. Traditional religion opposes many of the left’s priorities; for the left to succeed, it must continue to marginalize traditional religion. And Dworkin’s argument that religion as such does not merit special protection is very much in the air today. Prominent law professors like Brian Leiter and Micah Schwartzman make versions of this argument, for example. In the Hosanna-Tabor case, the Obama Administration maintained that religious freedom, as such, had nothing to do with a church’s decision to fire its minister.